My fingers find the latch of The Broken Barrel. The click of metal is the only sound to challenge the dead quiet of the night. I slip inside, pulling it shut behind me. Chairs are tucked beneath tables, their surfaces wiped clean. The hearth contains only grey ash, cold for hours.

  Derrick is gone from the window. He was waiting, watching for me. Now, nothing. The stillness feels wrong, less like a closed tavern and more like a room holding its breath, waiting for a final guest.

  My eyes sweep the common room, hunting for a sign of him. Not the cellar. A man setting a trap doesn't hide in the basement. He waits for the prey to come to him.

  I spot something at the bar. A single mug sits on the counter, a half-inch of ale still pooled at the bottom. I touch the ceramic. Cool, but not cold. He was here minutes ago.

  The scrape of a chair draws my attention to his small, cramped office near the back stairs.

  I move toward the office, my steps silent on the floorboards. My hand doesn't hesitate. I press the door, and the wood protests with a low, drawn-out groan, as if warning the man inside.

  The air inside is stale, heavy with the scent of old paper and cheap ale. Beneath it, there is something else, something out of place. A faint, sickly sweetness with a metallic bite, like old blood mixed with rotting flowers.

  Derrick hunches over a white envelope. His knuckles, scarred from a lifetime of work, look clumsy and wrong next to its perfect edges. The envelope is sealed with jet-black wax, a stark contrast to the white paper. Pressed into it is an unfamiliar sigil.

  His head jerks up, a movement too sharp, too sudden.

  "Alistair?" His hand moves, sliding the envelope under a pile of loose parchments. He glances towards the office door, then back to me. His breath comes in short bursts. "Tell me it's done."

  I hold the silence, letting it become its own answer.

  "No."

  Across the desk, Derrick's posture doesn't change, but a muscle in his jaw begins to jump.

  "It's not done. And it's not going to be."

  With a sudden lurch, Derrick propels himself to his feet. His chair screeches against the wooden floor. "You talked to her!"

  His fist slams down on the desk. A stack of ledgers skitters across the desk from the force of his blow. "I told you what was at stake! Do you have any idea what they'll do now?"

  "You claim this is for the village," I say, my voice a low, cold counterpoint to his rage. "But you're killing one of us to protect their secrets. How does that help anyone?"

  A thought surfaces, sharp and cruel. "Does Belladonna know her father sends men to murder old women in the dark?"

  The look of a cornered animal enters Derrick's eyes, all pupil and blood-red veins. With a snarl of pure, cornered panic, he launches himself across the desk.

  I wrench my body aside, Derrick's thick fingers brushing the fabric of my sleeve. Close. Too close.

  A wordless cry of rage tears from his throat, his fist blurring past where my head had been. Alistair's instincts take over, throwing me into a sidestep. The cramped office offers little room to manoeuvre.

  Derrick blunders forward again, a wild swing meant to pulp flesh. I duck beneath the clumsy arc, his own momentum threatening to send him sprawling. The stack of ledgers tumble to the floor, their brittle pages scattering like panicked insects.

  Wood explodes as his boot connects with a table leg.

  Splinters fly.

  Alistair's training screams for distance, for angles, for a clean line of attack. Every parry is a desperate lurch. Every dodge is a collision with a wall.

  A low growl rumbles in Derrick's chest, the muscles in his face pulled so tight his lips have disappeared.

  Derrick lunges. Our bodies crash together, driving the air from me. We smash into the thin partition wall, cheap wood groaning as if the tavern itself protests the violence. His fist connects, a meaty thud against my ribs. Something gives. A snap. My vision whites out, blood seeping into the spaces between my teeth. My lungs seize, empty.

  Derrick smashes a crate of bottles, glass exploding. Shards slice my cheek. Alistair's training hijacks my broken body. I pivot on the shattered rib, forcing myself under his descending arm. His knuckles graze my scalp. Using the momentum of his miss, I drive my knee into the soft give of his belly.

  Air rushes from Derrick's lungs in a ragged gasp, his massive frame folding. Among the splintered chaos on the floor, a jagged tooth of green glass glints. I throw myself towards it.

  The glass finds my hand, and a killer's certainty closes my fingers around it. They lock around the broken neck, sharp edges sinking into my flesh, drawing blood.

  Derrick staggers back up, voice booming as he charges. I fling my body sideways, my shoulder cracking against the rough planks.

  From my sprawled position, I twist, the broken bottle gripped tight in my bloody hand. His blind charge will be his undoing. An opening. My opening.

  I bring the crude weapon upwards in a vicious arc, aiming for the vulnerable side of his neck as he thunders past.

  It connects.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  There is no thud. Only a wet, tearing rip. Deeper. More final.

  He stumbles, his forward momentum cut short, a hand clamping to his throat. Blood, almost black in the guttering light, erupts between his fingers.

  He sways, the rage in his eyes going blank. The look of a man who just realised he's dead. He tries to speak, but only a choked gurgle escapes, more blood bubbling from his lips.

  His huge hands, slick with the hot gush of his blood, claw at me, fingers digging into my tunic like talons, yanking me down as his legs give out. We hit the floor in a brutal collision of bone and wood.

  "Protect…" Derrick wheezes, his voice already fading to nothing. "B-Bella... d-don..."

  His head slumps, lifeless, against my shoulder. The warmth of him, the obscene stillness of his flesh against mine, is a sudden and terrible mass.

  Derrick's crushing mass pins me. We lie in the wreckage, his blood a sticky, spreading pool seeping into my tunic.

  The path is lost. The Echo of Alistair frays.

  It descends to Steady, its grasping light shrinking to a guttering spark.

  |

  The Blight, once a dull throb, is now a wet, sickening squirm.

  ~~

  Lost.

  A quaint word for it.

  The path isn't lost. It's here. Its blood is soaking through my shirt, its mass crushing the air from my lungs.

  I didn't lose the path. I murdered it.

  The floorboards are slick beneath me. My tunic is darkening, growing heavy. Dawn is coming. The tavern has windows.

  Get him off. Get him off me.

  My hands push against his chest, trying to shove him off. And then, something cuts through the panic.

  Meat. Wasted.

  My hand, the one still gripping the broken bottle, trembles. This killing is a mockery of everything Alistair died for, of every principle he held. Derrick was a man Alistair would have fought beside.

  I failed you, brother.

  The thought is his. A final, dying ember of a promise.

  A jagged shape burns behind my eyes. ?. The concept hits me. Acquisition. Upgrade. A better tool.

  The words my mind finds for this biological drive are simple. Primitive.

  Skin. Strong. A leader.

  "No," I say, the word a dry rasp in my throat.

  But the alternative. The approaching dawn. And the certainty I will be found.

  My body moves before my mind can stop it.

  Derrick is gone. His Resistance, Greyhollow's fragile shield against the Collectors, dies with him. Unless. A new thought, cold and sudden. Unless I take his place.

  My fingers, which had been pushing his body away in revulsion, stop. They uncurl. They close on Derrick's cooling arm.

  I must.

  My own form, still Alistair's lean frame, begins to stretch and distort, crawling over Derrick's much larger, heavier corpse like some grotesque, devouring slime. My slighter bones groan and expand to accommodate Derrick's thicker, heavier skeleton. I feel them splintering outwards before his dense shoulders and ribcage fuse with mine with a series of crunches. His older, scarred muscles, heavy and twisted with years of a barkeeper's heavy lifting, writhe into my own. My jaw shatters and reforms around his ale-stained teeth. A dull, throbbing ache explodes behind my eyes as they are reshaped, clouding with Derrick's weary, more world-worn vision.

  Alistair's will was a striking viper. Derrick's will is a boulder. A stubborn mass of stone that simply endures. My own nature grinds against it, a fraying thread trying to hold a mountain. When it ends, there is only the taste of honey left out too long, a sweetness that coats the tongue right before it sours into decay.

  My new body convulses. My eyelids stretch, pushed outward by something that needs to escape. And then it does. A thick, greyish ooze, the colour of brain matter, carrying with it wet, stinking ropes of what's left of Alistair. A fleck of his iris, a shard of bone from his cheek. It oozes down my new, wider face. A pair of hideous, biological tears.

  The Echo of Alistair is extinguished. The Echo of Derrick is kindled.

  It is Faint, its flame a cold ash.

  |

  A life consumed awakens the Blight, its pulse a jagged, tearing rhythm.

  ~~~

  For a long moment, I do not move. I stare at the wall, as the last physical evidence of Alistair's existence drips from my face onto the filthy floorboards. A clean, unbidden thought cuts through the biological chaos.

  He's gone now.

  I kneel. My new, thick fingers try to scrape the grey ooze from the wood. A futile attempt to gather the pieces, to put him back together. But my touch only smears the filth. I look at my hand, at the mess I've made of him. And then, I stop. The body is just a body.

  I rise, rolling my new shoulders. Where Alistair's frame had been wire and whip-quick reflexes, Derrick's is stone and steady strength. My hands, now broad and heavy, close into fists that could crush bone.

  Alistair's gifts are voided. In their place, Derrick's gifts are now yours.

  His perceptive mind.

  His stern face.

  His listening ear.

  A pressure builds behind my ribs, a sour knot of alien muscle tightening. The knot convulses, a jagged tear of movement that pulls something essential away from me. Then his memories slam into me.

  The crushing burden of Belladonna's smile.

  A circular dial under my fingertips. Three clicks right, nine left, six right.

  A shadowed room. Silver masks. My hand grasped by icy metal. A deal struck.

  I feel a sickening lurch, unrelated to the physical trauma of transformation.

  What have I done?

  This isn't a leader who risked everything for his village. This stinks of something else entirely.

  I can feel the ghost of that handshake, the cold of the Collector's grip, still lingering in these knuckles.

  The feeling drives me to my feet. I stagger upright, gasping, wiping bloody residue from my new, fuller lips. I stare at Derrick's hands, my hands, flexing them. Hands that knew the Collectors' touch intimately.

  He wasn't fighting the Collectors. He was one of their damn puppets.

  Alistair died for this man's lie. His friends died for it. Isaac's only hope died for it.

  The thought lands, and my new, heavy gut seizes. A void where Alistair's hope once burned.

  And where was the Voice in all this? It fell silent when I refused its simple, monstrous advice to consume an Elder. It left me to walk this harder path alone, a path that led to this bloody floor.

  Was this the plan all along? To let me fail on my own terms, to push me into a corner so deep I'd have no choice but to kill and consume Derrick?

  Did you know? I scream into the ringing silence of my own mind. Did you lead me to this traitor? Is this just another one of your sick games?

  For a long moment, only the frantic thud of Derrick's heart answers.

  Then the Voice cuts through the wreckage of my thoughts.

  His secrets are now yours. Useful.

  Useful.

  The word is a polished nail driven into the soft wood of my grief.

  I see the path forward now. The thought of walking it makes my stomach heave, but the alternative is to lie down and die in this bloody room.

  My eyes find the grey smear on the floorboards, where the last of Alistair wept out of my own skin. A hero's end, reduced to a stain. To die now would be to end the same way. Just another mess to be wiped up.

  Certainty finds me, sharp as the broken glass at my feet. I will wear this skin, this traitor's face. I will unearth the full, hideous truth of the Flesh Tax that Nora only glimpsed, and I will gut this rotten structure from within.

  This, for Alistair.

  Then, a darker thought sprouts.

  Alistair. He was chosen for the Flesh Tax. They expect a body.

  Derrick, the collaborator, this skin I now inhabit. Perhaps this is the offering Greyhollow deserves.

  It is the last coherent thought I have. The pressure behind my ribs is no longer just a pressure. It writhes, pushing against my ribs from the inside as if a new limb is trying to tear its way free.

  My hands press against the floorboards, slick with blood. I put my weight on them, trying to rise.

  Dawn is coming. I have to clean up. Before they find the blood.

  My new, heavy limbs refuse my commands. The edges of the ruined office blur and warp. The floorboards rush up to meet me.