Milo moved to follow, but Lore was faster. With Bastian farther away, Mortem was simple to call. It came easily, flowing from the stone walls, the trash piled in the corners, the cold steel of the dagger that was even now slicing through the air toward her.
It was stronger than it ever had been, a wave that should’ve overwhelmed her senses. But Lore took the power, and took it with ease.
Hands stretching out, vision graying as she held her breath and dropped into the place where death was visible, death was a tool. Lore channeled Mortem through her body, veins blackening and eyes going opaque, heart going still in her chest for one beat.
Almost without thinking, she took all that death and pushed it out toward Milo.
Weaving death felt like taking in air, like an intrinsic part of her that had just been waiting to bloom. Before, she’d done this without thinking, her born ability making such a careful thing easy. But now, she paid attention and reveled in just what she could do.
Lore spun the Mortem like thread, knitting it around the man like a shroud. Like the roses in the garden, merely cased in stone, merely frozen. Just enough for stasis, just enough to stop him, because she didn’t have any other choice.
See how easily you take to it, daughter of the dark?
The voice was faint, but it was enough to break Lore’s concentration. She shook her head and opened her eyes.
Milo was stone. The tip of the knife glinted mere inches from her throat. She expected his face to be frozen in a snarl, but instead, the expression he wore was open-mouthed terror.
“You…” Gabe gaped, his daze shaken off, hands opening and closing on empty air as he pushed himself up from the ground. “You shouldn’t have…”
“What else would you propose she have done, Remaut?” Bastian, striding up from the end of the alley. His shirt was bloodstained, but he didn’t clutch at it anymore, and he didn’t walk like a wounded man. “Waltz with him?”
Gabe didn’t respond. He leaned against the wall and stared at the statue Lore had made of a living, breathing human being.
Milo. He’d been a person, with a name and a job, even if that job was extorting bets on illegal boxing matches. A person she’d turned to stone. Was he still aware, somewhere in all that? Did it hurt?
She shook her head. She didn’t want to know.
Lore didn’t look at Gabe. She knew his expression now would be so much worse than it had been the day of the Mortem leak, and she couldn’t take it, couldn’t face it, not when there was so much else to do.
“How’s your gut?” she asked Bastian, her voice thin and shaking.
He glanced down like he’d forgotten, frowned at his bloody shirt. “Fine,” he said. “Must’ve just been a scratch.”
It’d been more than that. At least, Lore thought it had been. But when he raised his shirt, the skin was unblemished, marred only by a scrim of dried blood.
A hand on her shoulder—Bastian, gently moving her away from the outstretched knife in Milo’s stone hand. His fingers slid to the back of her neck, into her hair; his thumb brushed her cheek, then dropped, and he stepped away.
“Right,” he said, with a decisive nod. “Well. We can’t leave him here, and I assume you aren’t up to changing him back just yet?”
“If we can.” Gabe’s voice was quiet, hoarse. “If we can change him back.”
“Either way, we’ll have to move him.” A rickety cart slouched against the wall on the other end of the alley; Bastian went and tugged on one of the handles. The cart moved, though the squeaking was awful. “But to where, I have no idea.”
“I do,” Lore said. Her lips felt numb. “I know where we can take him.”
There was a moment of slight panic as Bastian and Gabe conferred on how to tip the stone man over into the cart—and whether the cart could even hold the weight, decrepit as it was; Milo wasn’t a small man even when he was flesh—but in the end, the Mortem-made statue was easier to move than it looked.
Gabe and Bastian heaved together on a count of three, and the man fell into the cart, the bottom of it cushioned with trash that Lore gathered from the alleyway. Bastian stood back, eyes wide. “That was much easier than I anticipated.”
“It’s not solid stone,” Gabe said. Then, with a shake of his head, “He isn’t, I mean.”
Not solid stone, just a living person knit into a shroud of death. Lore felt sick. Gabe didn’t look at her.
Gabe covered the stone figure with more trash, then he and Bastian manned the cart while Lore crept to the mouth of the alley, looking both ways. “Clear,” she murmured, “but we have to move fast.”