She strikes again and again with the bolt, one arm covering her face in desperation. In her mind, as if summoned, appears the body of young Jenny Brooks whose aunt had been the to first write the Guild regarding the strange and unnatural happenings here in Post Market Green. There is something terrible about the wet, rotted smell of the creature as it tears at her that reminds her of that dead girl, her talon mutilated and exsanguinated body strangely unable to fill her pin neat Sunday dress as she had lain quietly in her family's sitting room surrounded by garlands of wild spring flowers and ashen faced relations.
Something stinking and horribly warm pours out of the beast. It smells like metal and Fitcher is certain it is blood, she just can't say to whom it belongs. Belonged.
And then the great black shape ratchets backward. With a grotesque scream, it accordions unnaturally back on itself, collapsing into stranger and stranger angles of black feathers and black bones until it is nothing more than a shapeless thing pin-cushioned by a series of crossbow bolts. With a final pop of air filling emptied space, it disappears entirely. The bolts, blackened with gore, fall from where they'd been suspended and scatter like loose twigs on the ground about her.
Fitcher lies very still. She's curled into a tight ball, the white fletched bolt clenched in her fist. In the dark, with her mottled coat and the terrible splatter of blood in every direction, it would be entirely impossible to say much of anything about her condition if it weren't for the fact that - given a moment of silence -, she comes uncurled to lay on her back in the beaten grass. She tosses away the blessed bolt. As Ellis swims into view:
no subject
Something stinking and horribly warm pours out of the beast. It smells like metal and Fitcher is certain it is blood, she just can't say to whom it belongs. Belonged.
And then the great black shape ratchets backward. With a grotesque scream, it accordions unnaturally back on itself, collapsing into stranger and stranger angles of black feathers and black bones until it is nothing more than a shapeless thing pin-cushioned by a series of crossbow bolts. With a final pop of air filling emptied space, it disappears entirely. The bolts, blackened with gore, fall from where they'd been suspended and scatter like loose twigs on the ground about her.
Fitcher lies very still. She's curled into a tight ball, the white fletched bolt clenched in her fist. In the dark, with her mottled coat and the terrible splatter of blood in every direction, it would be entirely impossible to say much of anything about her condition if it weren't for the fact that - given a moment of silence -, she comes uncurled to lay on her back in the beaten grass. She tosses away the blessed bolt. As Ellis swims into view:
"All well, Mr Ginsberg?"