It was bad enough seeing it on the flickering screen. At least then there was some distance, some interference, and Bella to decisively end the threat of one— just one— of these monsters.

Grey and pink and grey and pink and white, bleach-white, white as sand. Grey the bark and pink the leaves, cherry-pink, pink like the soft places of the body, eaten away, long gone, blossoming out of eye sockets and between jaws and bursting through bullet holes in the backs of skulls. Grey the wood that wraps around grey skin and bones, white bones, slick with rain, grey the skin that peeks out from archaic coats and too-recent uniforms, and pink the flowers that tear through guts and ribs.

Death was a horror bad enough. Jas’o, lying in the mud. Hatchan, headless. But this? This is worse even than Hatchan’s guards. This is the worst thing she has ever seen in her life. It is wrong and even when she blinks, even when she crushes her lids shut to stop looking at them, her auspex, throbbing in her socket, the eye of a goddess, won’t stop telling her the exact numbers. Forty to one. Forty to one.

“Hold,” she groans. “Hold,” she screams. Her sword comes up, stiffly, so that she does not drop it. Her throat burns. “I’ve— I know how to kill them,” she says. Thank you, Bella. [i]Thank you.[/i] “Destroy the head. That’s… it comes apart when you do that. Through the neck, or up through the jaw. Nothing else. Losing an arm, being torn open— [i]nothing[/i] else works. For the head.”

Rain trickles down her back, and she shivers. This is all wrong. She could be a whirling dance of steel if she needed to, but Imperial duelists aren’t taught to go for the head. She’ll have to improvise, use strikes she’s never practiced. And if she gets it wrong, if her sword and its wicked edge still gets caught in fabric or wood, then…

[i]”’You have to be lucky every time,’” Bella said in her spookiest voice, reading from the book open in her lap, as Dany pulled the covers up to her chin and stared out at the vast room all around, shadowed and haunting. “The wolf said, pressing itself against the window. ‘I only have to be lucky once…’”[/i]