Free Harsh Gods by Michelle Belanger

Santa’s spilled plastic light across the pavement behind me as I turned east, heading up and out of Cleveland’s Little Italy. To my left, the first few sections of wall marked the southernmost boundary of Lake View Cemetery. I hugged the weathered concrete, keeping an eye out for patches of black ice.
    The eight-foot barrier of concrete gave way to staggered sections of overgrown masonry. Runnels of ice glittered amidst the patterned segments of quarried stone that dated back to the origins of the massive boneyard. The wall rose higher and higher the further I went on the steepening sidewalk, until it towered fifteen feet or more above my head. Clinging runners of ivy and denuded branches of trees dangled from on high, seeming to spill from a wild garden hidden behind the stone barrier.
    A single car climbed the hill toward Coventry, engine purring. It caught me in its headlights and slowed momentarily. I kept my head down, though it was unlikely the driver had any real interest in me. Whoever they were, they were probably just startled to see a scarecrow figure all in black wandering the streets at this hour.
    The vehicle ghosted past and I continued the chilly mile-and-a-half trek back to my apartment. My breath plumed against the night and I fell into the rhythm of walking, my thoughts clamoring with all the things I’d witnessed since Sanjeet had brought me to the Davis household. Whisper Man. Halley’s uncomfortably keen perceptions. Whatever the hell kind of history I had with Father Frank. The language scrawled on page after page, all of it unreadable.
    The quandary of the channeled symbols gnawed at me, because it was something I thought I should be able to solve. Even with my amnesia, I’d yet to encounter a language that didn’t strike
some
echo of comprehension deep within my mind. Halley’s sigils held a certain passing familiarity, but it was one I frustratingly couldn’t place. They reminded me a little of Hittite, enough for me to be certain they were a language—but if I’d encountered anything like these symbols before, it was never to read them. That was a new experience for me.
    More unsettling than the language was the enigma of Whisper Man.
    I’d watched cacodaimons riding around in both the living and the dead, so possession was nothing new to me, but cacodaimons were a one-person deal. It took them a lot of effort to go joyriding around in someone else’s skin, and you could see them doing it. Or at least I could. I could also reach across to their side of things and smack them for the audacity.
    Whisper Man was an entirely new quantity. From everything I’d seen with Halley and the hobo army, whatever he was, he could control multiple people while remaining all but invisible, even to my psychic perceptions. Just that one little tendril, and as soon as I’d noticed it, it had disappeared.
    I had no idea what I was dealing with, and that didn’t sit well.
    * * *
    The lofty wall of the cemetery on my left began shrinking to meet the sidewalk again. About thirty feet ahead, it gave way once more to an eight-foot fence of lichened concrete. In the distance, the traffic light across from the Mayfield entrance blinked lazily in the frigid night.
    I didn’t notice the people until they were right on top of me—literally. There was scrabbling from high above, and then a tattered figure jumped down from the cemetery wall. She hit the sidewalk and rolled to her feet directly in my path. She was followed by a man who dropped with his full weight onto my back. He draped himself over my shoulders, wrapping his arms around my throat. I stumbled beneath the sudden burden, but managed not to fall.
    “What the
fuck
?” I gasped. Power leapt to my fingers and I reached up to twist the guy off of me. The angle was wrong, and he clung with a strength that nearly matched my own—a strength that wasn’t properly human.
    “Choke him, kill him, make him bleed!” the woman sang in a ragged voice. She