What Will Burn by James Oswald (ebook reader web .txt) 📕

of blood on the breeze before it is overwhelmed by the stench of men. Where before they were loud coming through the trees, now they are silent. Not stealthy, but not speaking either. She doesn’t know how many of them there are, although it feels like a multitude. Fit, strong, young. Angry. They swarm into her small room like cockroaches, start smashing things before they’ve even realised she is there waiting for them. Perhaps they thought she’d be in her bed.

She doesn’t resist when they grab her; that would only encourage them. And besides, she is old and weak. Utterly at the mercy they so obviously lack. Her passivity only angers them more. She thought she was prepared, but nothing really prepares you for this. She hasn’t many of her own teeth left now, but they knock them out anyway. Arthritis has swollen her knuckles, and the pain when they break her fingers makes her scream. With the sound, their bloodlust grows, their animal instincts taking over. Except that no animal would do what they are doing. Not to one of their own. She folds in under their savage fury.

‘Don’t kill her, boys. We need her still breathing.’

There’s a familiar edge to that voice, but she’s not sure whether she recognises it or simply the obedience it demands. She can taste blood in her mouth, feel the broken bones in her hands, her legs, the slide of fractured ribs that threaten with every breath to puncture a lung. It’s nearly over now, but there is one last thing to do before the end.

‘With my dying breath I curse thee.’

The words come out as a mixture of whisper and bloody gurgle. She had meant to look up at her killers, but she is too old, too weak, too broken. A rough hand grabs her hair, pulls her head back in a yanking motion that sends a bolt of pain down her spine.

‘You say something, old crone?’

He is very young, the one who holds her. Not much more than a boy. Shaven head, tank top straining to contain his gym-and-steroid muscles. There’s scarcely a spark of anything in his eyes, certainly not intelligence.

‘With my dying breath.’ She gasps in a lungful of pain. ‘I curse thee.’

‘Aye, well yer right about one thing.’

The hand releases its grip on her hair, throwing her back as it does so. To some unspoken order, the men step away. Something wet splashes her arm, and for a moment she thinks they’re pissing on her. Then it hits her face, soaks into her clothes. Fumes reach the bloody broken mess of her nose, and she realises it is something far worse than piss.

She barely has the strength left to lift her head. Petrol stings her eyes as she blinks to see the blurred figure standing in front of her. The leader. He has something in his hands, although she can’t see what it is. No need to see; she knows well enough.

‘With my dying breath . . .’ As she wheezes out the words, something flares in the man’s hand. She traces its passage as he flicks it towards her, a tiny flame on the end of a matchstick, tumbling over and over in impossibly slow motion.

She always knew she would die like this.

After all, she’s done it many times before.

2

The stench hit her long before she reached the crime scene. At first it was a lingering unpleasant scent on the air, but as she climbed the steep path from the woods, so it developed into something worse. Burned carpets, chemical reek and the unmistakable aroma of overdone barbecue. And underneath it all, a fug of decay that didn’t sit with the bustle and activity around her. Detective Constable Janie Harrison had attended enough fires in her short career as a police officer to know the usual unpleasant smells, and this place had them all. The fact that she was even here at all meant at least one person had died, but the question she found herself asking was when, rather than who and how. She should really have been with a detective sergeant of course, but that wasn’t going to happen any time soon. Never enough detectives, always too much to do.

‘Is it far?’

The words were out before she could stop herself, and it left her with a feeling of having said ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ A false memory from a hundred or more dull car trips to the seaside or some boring ancient battlefield. Some kids might have reacted to that upbringing by taking to a sedentary life, and Janie had almost been one of them.

‘Not much further, no.’ The forensic technician who had met her at the roadside wasn’t one she’d met before. Or at least not one Janie could easily recognise from all that was visible of her face. Her overalls, hood tied tight, left little to go by. Harrison wore similar, although as yet she’d not pulled up the hood. The day was too warm for that, the air in the trees humid with the threat of yet more rain. Summer had been long and hot, but it was gone now, autumn making up for lost time.

The buzz of forest insects gave way to a hubbub of noise as they left the trees and entered a clearing straight out of a children’s fairy tale. It was hard to believe the city was only a few miles away, although if she concentrated, Janie thought she could hear the dull roar of the bypass. Her attention was dragged away from idle musings by the cottage that stood a dozen or so metres away.

Quite what such a building was doing up here in the hills she had no idea. Perhaps it had been a gamekeeper’s lodge or something, which would mean there was a huge mansion nearby, a great estate that would have built a tiny house out of well-cut stone and slate. She wasn’t sure of the area, so it might well have been that the mansion