He couldn’t listen anymore to the moans escaping Lily’s lips—they sounded too much like his own mother’s in the day before she passed. She was heaving. Each breath was a struggle. Make it end, Claude thought, clasping his hands over his head. Please, God, make it end. Her parents’ bodies were in the back room. He’d brought them there after they passed from the plague. He’d wrapped them in sheets and tried to fix their hair, as he’d done for his own parents. But now the stench filled the sealed house. Claude kept his nose covered, choking every now and then on the smell. Outside, the chanting grew louder. The surviving pagans had surrounded the stone house and were urging him on. “Kill, kill, kill,” they said in their pagan tongue. “Appease our god.”Claude looked at the three marks he’d carved into the wall. One slash for every sunrise he saw through the thin break in the back window. Three sunrises, four days. He couldn’t sleep here, couldn’t eat.
