Legion's Arc

Chapter 4 of 22

Legion watched from the moss-draped pines. Below, the brothers built a trap. Diana sat alone on a fallen log in the clearing. James, Seth, and Brandon crouched behind trees, guns ready. They had staked her out like meat on a hook. The swarm smelled her fear. It wanted to run to her. Legion held it still. If it came, the three men would cut it apart. Diana had not agreed to this. She sat straight, hands closed on the checked shirt in her lap. She was Mark's wife, and the shirt was all she had left of him. She did not know it was the one thing Legion needed to be a man again. James whispered from the trees. "Hold your fire till it's close." He was the leader, the one who read the woods. His rifle rested on a root. "When it circles back for her, we take it." Legion understood the trap. To reach Diana was to die. To stay away was to lose the shirt forever. The man's part of it thought hard. It could not go to her. But maybe it could make her come to it. Legion sent one rat down. The fat one, round and slow, with small black eyes. It waddled into the open, away from the guns, toward the tree line at Diana's back. It stopped where only she could see it. It looked at her the way it had looked before. Diana's breath caught. Her eyes moved to the little creature. She knew that stare now. She knew what it meant. Slowly, she turned her head toward the brothers. They watched the far side of the clearing, guns aimed away from her. The fat rat crept backward into the ferns. Diana rose. She held the shirt against her chest and stepped after it, quiet, one boot at a time. "Diana?" Seth hissed. "Sit down." She did not stop. She walked into the trees where the little creature had gone. Legion pulled it deeper, drawing her with it, away from the line of fire. "She's moving!" Brandon stood. He swung his pistol toward the ferns. James grabbed his brother's arm and forced the barrel down. "You'll hit her," he snapped. The three men broke cover and ran after her, shouting, boots crashing through moss. But Diana was already inside the dark pines. She reached a hollow between two trunks and stopped. The swarm flowed down around her feet, thousands of small bodies, silent, not biting. She stared into the mass and found the human face inside it. The black eyes. Mark's eyes. "It's you," she whispered. She held out the shirt. Behind her the brothers crashed closer. Legion had broken their trap. Diana had come, and the shirt was near again. But the guns were coming too, and now Diana stood in the middle, between the hunters and the thing that used to be her husband.