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Tilly’s mouth is a shattered cavity from which blood has sheeted in torrents. Her nose is a pulped ruin, her cheekbones smashed and sunken. Her eyes are like the slivers of wet flesh glimpsed inside a wound.
In Tilly’s hands Joseph sees the crossbow. She’s pointing it not at Gabriel Roth, but at him. In her eyes is a fury murderous in its intensity.
And then he can look at her no longer because Gabriel Roth blocks his view, closing on him with the knife.
Joseph worms backwards on his elbows. He opens his mouth, tries to speak, realizes his voice has abandoned him. Gabriel walks him down.
Under the tree, Max starts to strangle.
Joseph moans, elbows faster. When his shoulder knocks against Erin’s chair, he gets a foot under him, two.
Gabriel continues to stalk him.
Joseph pushes out of his crouch, feels something godawful happen inside his knee, as if bone and cartilage and flesh have twisted together to form something diabolical before immediately tearing apart.
Even with adrenalin flooding his system, the pain is crippling, nauseating, but he hardly cares about that, because as he rises he draws Erin’s knife from the sheath still attached to her belt – and now he has the means to cut down his boy from that tree, even though it’s likely the last thing he’ll do. He circles Erin’s chair, using it to put a little distance between him and Gabriel, hears his son continue to choke.
As Gabriel steps around the chair towards him, Tilly slides back into view. And then Joseph hears it: thesnap-thud!of the crossbow as it releases.
Except thethud!isn’t the sound of the string as it transfers its energy to the arrow, but the arrow transferring its energy into living meat.
Joseph doesn’t feel the impact straight away. He stagger-hops across the grass, Gabriel following close behind
He sees his son, so close. Sees Tilly crank the crossbow’s stock. Hears another arrow drop into position.
The air collapses from his lungs.
Snap-thud!
Joseph cringes, clenches his teeth, stumbles. His legs nearly buckle beneath him. The pain is overwhelming, everywhere all at one, his knee its white-hot source.
‘Oh my God, no,’ Erin sobs, and Joseph cannot work out if her words are for him, for Max, or the human wreckage that’s her daughter.
Tilly reloads, looses off another arrow.
Joseph grunts, takes another faltering step towards his son, but he knows he’ll never manage to climb up on that chair. Changing direction, he inches towards the tree trunk, where the other end of Max’s rope is tied.
Gabriel Roth changes direction, too, twisting towards Tilly as she pumps the stock and reloads. As he does, Joseph sees the black fletchings of two arrows protruding from Gabriel’s back – and a bloodied hole in his shirt where a third arrow has passed clean through him.
Joseph swings with his knife. He severs the rope binding Max to the tree, hears his son crash to the grass from his chair, sees him scrabble at the noose around his neck and take a gasping lungful of air.
Their eyes meet, just briefly. A thousand things pass between them in that moment.
Gabriel looks down at himself, at the blood coursing from his abdomen, at the broadhead tips of two arrows glistening with lumps of shredded meat.
He frowns, switches his gaze to Tilly. His eyes flare in recognition of what she’s done. ‘You’ll never—’ he begins.
Her fourth arrow takes him in the neck. He drops his knife, goes down on his knees.
Tilly cranks the stock. Her fifth arrow disappears inside Gabriel’s chest. He remains on his knees a while longer. Then he keels over on to the grass.
Joseph drops his knife. He sees his stepdaughter reload and swing the barrel of the crossbow towards him. Tears streak her face, mixing with the blood. ‘I thought you were dead,’ he whispers.
Tilly shakes her head.
‘You did the right thing.’
She stares at him.