by Marjorie Liu
She was not alone.
Three men sat slumped on the rocks, heads lolling, eyes half-closed. Not withered, but just out of it. They were dark-haired, bearded, lean, wearing loose shirts over long, checkered wraps tied around their waists. Rifles hung from their shoulders, but none of the men appeared in any shape to fire off a shot.
I walked to them. The Messenger did not stop me.
I checked pulses, and glanced at Grant. “Alive.”
“Bonded,” he said quietly, and looked at the woman. “Why did you do that?”
“There are no mules here,” she said simply. “No good human stock for me to draw upon. And I am not so eager to die as I was earlier.”
“Good,” he replied. “But I survived many years without . . . drawing from a bond. What you’re doing to these men is wrong.”
“Wrong,” she echoed. “And was it wrong what you did to me, inside my head?”
Grant hesitated. “Maybe. But I’m not sorry.”
I had been listening with only half an ear. I couldn’t see the bonds that the Messenger had made with the men, but I could taste them, as if they were steel bars on my tongue: cold, sterile.
Break them, if you like, said the darkness. You already hold the bonds in your mouth. Bite down. Bite. And you’ll free them.
I knew better than to listen—I knew so well—but the temptation was too great. I could do this. I could free them.
So I did. Like cutting a thread with my teeth. My jaw tightened, and I felt inside my mind three vibrating pops that sent a bitter taste flooding my mouth, like blood, raw liquid iron.
The three men jerked violently, eyes rolling back in their heads as they gasped and clawed at their throats. They took great heaving gasps of air, each one making them shudder until I thought their bones would break. I glanced over my shoulder, and found the Messenger clutching her chest like she was having a heart attack.
“Shit,” I said.
“Maxine,” Grant snapped, pointing. I turned, and found the men fully conscious, fully in control of themselves—staring at me with no small amount of horror and confusion. I had forgotten what I looked like. Even so, if these men didn’t remember how they had gotten here—
They fumbled for their guns. I shouted at them, but that only made them move faster, and they shouted back at me, and each other. I didn’t understand a word they were saying, but I got the drift. I slammed into the nearest of them, trying to wrench his weapon away. He was strong, wiry, teeth bared in anger and fear.
I head-butted him.
His hands loosened. I yanked the gun away and threw it over the cliff edge. But I was too slow to stop the others. They opened fire—on me—on Grant and the Messenger.
I didn’t look, didn’t think—I lunged at both men and took us all over the cliff.
I think I screamed. Maybe. The men did, slipping out of my grip almost instantly. I tried to hold on, but they flailed too much.
The world didn’t spin. I saw the ground, clear and sharp, every rock outlined in brilliant detail as I hurtled headfirst toward earth.
I could have used the armor to escape, but the men were out of reach. I tried so hard to grab them, but my hands kept slipping away—and I had only seconds. Hundreds of feet, lost in the span of heartbeats.
My head hit first. I felt like an arrow, and at the moment of the impact I had a terrible vision of me lodged in the earth with my feet stuck out.
Instead, I bounced, flipped, spun through the air like a rag doll. Landed hard on my back, skidding across rock and sand. I felt no pain, but I forgot to breathe, and my heart pounded so hard I thought I might have a stroke. Dizzy, lights in my eyes, and the blue sky swallowing me.
I heard my name, screamed. Distant, echoing. I twisted, just enough, and saw Grant—very far away, above me, at the edge of the cliff. I couldn’t see much of him, but I raised my hand to wave. It was more difficult than it should have been. Zee and the boys were throbbing against my skin.
I looked left, then right. The men were nearby, very still. I couldn’t see much of their heads, but only because their skulls had been crushed into their broken, mangled shoulders.
I’m sorry, I thought at them, tears burning my eyes. I’m sorry.
Air moved over me. Stone crunched. The Messenger moved into sight—and a moment later, so did Grant.
He fell on his knees beside me, his eyes wild. Blood streamed down his arm, which hung useless at his side. Part of his sleeve had torn away, and the bullet wound was large and messy. I tried to sit up. He held me down, but moving that much made him grunt with pain, and sway.
I pushed his hand away, as gently as I could. “You need a doctor.”
Grant bowed his head, jaw tight. “Are you hurt?”
I ignored that. The Messenger crouched, graceful. “Lightbringer. Heal yourself.”
He gave her a hard, strained look. “I don’t know how.”
Disdain flickered. “All your power, and you cannot even save your own life.”
“So teach him,” I snapped.
“Why would I?” The Messenger stood, backing away. “He did something to me that cannot be undone. In my head, in my heart. He . . . twisted me.”
“I’m sorry,” Grant said through gritted teeth. “I was trying to help you. Truly. I didn’t mean to cause you pain.”
“That is what the wild ones do. Our powers are too much to go untamed. We cannot be trusted.”
“So you put your trust in others,” I told her accusingly. “You absolve yourself of responsibility because someone else knows best. Someone who gives you an order you don’t have to think about, just follow, without consequences.”
“You make me sound like a child.”
“I wasn’t the one who opened the prison veil.”
She gave me a hateful look. Grant snorted with pained, choked laughter, then squeezed shut his eyes.
“Ow,” he said.
“Come on,” I muttered, prepared to cut us away to a hospital. Except the Messenger grabbed my shoulder.
“How,” she asked quietly, “did you break my bonds with those humans?”
Guilt soared through me. “I just did.”
“You wasted three lives.”
“So you could use them up until they died?”
“Yes,” she said, and looked down at Grant. “I can heal you. But I will need a mule—a human—to bond with.”
“No. I won’t sacrifice someone else.”
“They are only human.”
“Like us.” He fixed his gaze on her. “Just like us.”
The Messenger hesitated. Staring at him, her gaze shifting from his face, the air around him, tracking all those strains of color and light that were invisible to my eyes.
Whatever she saw, though, made her shoulders sag.
“I will need to bond to you,” she said, quietly.
Hell, no, I thought. But Grant, without hesitation, extended his hand to her—and I was too slow to speak, to stop him—to stop her. She grabbed his wrist.
Grant gasped, squeezing shut his eyes. A terrible pain lanced through my heart, a hooking sensation that was alien and invasive—like a leech, sinking its mouth into me. The darkness stirred, rippling through me with a hiss. I pushed it down with all my strength. Against my skin, the boys shifted—Zee, especially, twisting in his dreams.
The Messenger threw back her head, breath rattling in her throat.
“Lightbringer,” she said, and there was a hint of wonder in her voice.
Grant made a strangled sound. My heart tugged—those hooks, pulling painfully outward, toward him. Toward him, through him, to the Messenger. No golden light. Her bond was all pain and taking. Nothing soft.
We could kill her, whispered the darkness. We do not like her touch.
Enough, I snapped to it. You’ve done enough.
It was not us who took the bite, it replied smoothly. Not us who killed.
The Messenger began to sing, her voice strong, steady—as was her hand as she touched Grant’s wounded ar
m. I watched, struck dumb, as his torn flesh knitted closed. Happened slowly, but steadily; and Grant paled, sweat pouring down his face. I held him up as tremors wracked him, down to the bone.
Until, finally, the wound closed. The Messenger stopped singing and leaned away, still graceful—but slow, careful, each movement measured and small. Sweat also glistened against her face, and her lips had lost all color, fading into her white skin.
No one spoke for a long time until she looked from Grant to me, and her gaze lingered on my face—studying me, but with a troubled thoughtfulness that I bore with my own unblinking stare.
“Your heart is odd,” said the Messenger.
“Yes,” I replied. “Break the link.”
I thought she would say no. Her hand touched her chest, and lingered there as though tasting something warm through her palm. Her gaze was still too thoughtful—and, I thought, a little hungry.
But she closed her eyes, speaking a word that rumbled through me—and moments later the hook in my heart was gone. My relief was immediate and physical—I had to bend over, my fingers digging into my chest as my heart pounded harder than was healthy—harder than fear, harder than sickness.
Grant’s breathing was ragged. His face red, eyes squeezed shut. I held him tight against me, pressing my lips into his hair, then against his ear.
“I’m here,” I murmured.
The Messenger shifted, leaning toward him. “Why did you stop me?”
I looked at her, but she was focused entirely on Grant.
“Your leg,” she went on. “You stopped me from fixing the bone.”
“You can’t heal everything,” he whispered tightly, eyes still shut. “Some things have to stay the way they are.”
She frowned. “You are against nature.”
“Then what are you?”
“Made,” she said, straightening. “Created by the hand of my Maker.”
“As was I.”
“You were not Made. Not like me.”
“We each have our own way of being.”
“I am a Maker’s ward. I do not have my way.”
“But it is a way. Just like mine.” Grant cracked open one eye, peering at her. “No one owns you. But the same is true in reverse. You’re no better than anyone else, no matter what you can do.”
Her eyes narrowed, but she said nothing. Merely stood, backing away. I climbed to my feet and pulled Grant up beside me. He gritted his teeth the entire time, exhaling his breath as one long hiss when I pushed his cane into his hand and his other arm hugged my shoulders. I bore his weight.
I met the Messenger’s gaze. “Did you consider what we discussed?”
Her lips thinned into an unpleasant line. “You want me to fight alongside you.”
“We need your help closing the prison veil,” Grant said.
“The Maker said it cannot be done.”
“The Maker was too hasty. We are going to try.” Grant leaned forward. “You don’t know who you are anymore. You don’t know your own worth. But that’s only because you’ve never had a chance to be you. To make a decision that is yours. Whatever you decide here will be your choice. Your life.”
No power in his voice. No power in anything he’d told her, except for whatever strength lay in the meaning of his words.
Still a bit of a priest, I thought. Made of more than just magic in his voice. If he lost his gift, he would still be Grant Cooperon. Able to change lives with nothing more than his conviction, and faith.
I wondered who I would be, without demons and the darkness inside. Better or worse—or just a woman with a nine-to-five, doing her best to survive a different kind of life.
Never knowing the other side of light.
The Messenger watched him—then me.
“I will do this,” she said slowly. “And then we will see.”
“I hope you see a great deal,” Grant said.
CHAPTER 18
I never did learn the name of the village the men had been stolen from.
I made the Messenger take me there, with Grant. We took with us two corpses, and one man who was still alive but passed out. We left them by the road, beneath a palm tree on the outskirts of the village, which was filled with large square buildings made of a pale stone that blended with the cliff face rising behind them. A dog barked at us. I heard pop music sung in Arabic, somewhere distant.
Two little girls, dressed in simple green dresses, appeared around the bend in the road. They stopped when they saw us, and cried out.
The Messenger did not cut space. She watched the distraught children, then looked long and hard at the village.
“This reminds me of the place where I was born,” she said. “I was not permitted to see much beyond the walls. The desert was vast and stretched across the world.”
I stared. So did Grant. The Messenger glanced at us and tilted her head.
“The Labyrinth is vast, as well,” she said, and winked out of sight.
I grabbed Grant’s hand and followed her.
We fell into the apartment, in Seattle. It was still night. The boys ripped off my body. I gritted my teeth against the pain, squeezing Grant’s hand until it was over and the smoke that had been tattoos coalesced into small hard bodies that glinted like obsidian and mercury.
Jack still sat on the couch, but he held a mug in his hands instead of bone. He and Mary were watching the news. Something in their faces filled me with dread: bone-chilling, acidic. Raw and Aaz bounded close to stare at the television screen.
“. . . reports are only now coming in that a Greyhound bus traveling from Portland to Seattle was found overturned beside Interstate 5, just outside Astoria. First responders describe the scene as . . . horrific. Every passenger has been declared dead.”
I heard screams from the television, wails of grief and disbelief. I heard shouts, and a man saying, in a shaking voice, “Oh, God. Oh, my God.”
The sound cut off. Jack put down the remote.
“Dead,” he said, looking at me for the first time since my arrival. His haggard gaze skipped over Grant to the Messenger, then back to me. “But someone is lying about the rest.”
“Bus accidents happen,” I whispered, as Dek settled heavily on my shoulders. I looked for Mal, and found him with Grant, looped around the man’s neck.
“Mahati running hunts,” Zee rasped, closing his eyes as though listening to something, far away. “One party. Ha’an leads.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “Jack, did you find what you were looking for?”
“Yes,” he said quietly.
I fumbled for Grant’s hand. “Start teaching them what they need to know.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Make it simple,” I snapped. “We’re out of time.”
Grant pulled me near, with Mal half-draped down his chest. “What are you doing?”
“Stalling.” I squeezed his hand, glancing at the Messenger. No words between us. Just those cool empty eyes, and that set mouth.
I stepped backward into the void, holding Lord Ha’an’s image in my mind—
—and found myself in a forest, not unlike the one where the veil had been opened. The air was cool, wet, and the ground was soft underfoot. I heard the roar of a river, but louder than that, singing: a deep voice, chanting words into melodies. Dek joined in, very softly, his voice high and sweet. All around me, the boys hunched close, red eyes glinting. With wistfulness, I realized. Memory.
I could have been in a cathedral, listening to a monk. Below my heart, the darkness stretched, coils rubbing with a spectral hiss that sank into the marrow of my bones. I searched for my bond with Grant and found it instantly, warm, sunlit. I focused on that. I held tight.
Remember there is much, elsewhere, you can have, said the darkness in my mind.
I ignored that voice. Pushed through the trees and found the Mahati.
I counted eight, not including Lord Ha’an. The demons sat in a loose circle, relaxed, a jumble of human limb
s piled in front of them. I smelled blood. I heard the crack of bones breaking. Wet, chewing sounds. My stomach rebelled, but I swallowed hard, kept it together.
Ha’an was the only demon not eating—the only one of them who sang—his voice a low rumble that crashed with the distant sounds of river white water. He knelt with his knees spread far apart, his tined fingers resting across muscular silver thighs.
He saw me before the others, but did not stop singing. His eyes tracked my movements and widened ever so slightly when he found the boys.
One by one, the other Mahati stopped eating and looked up. When they saw me, a collective ripple rolled through them. It tasted like fear, which sent a small frisson of pleasure through me.
Me—or the darkness—yawning with jaws that bloomed inside my mouth, that coiled spirit filling me up from my scalp to my toes. Made me feel as though my heart were riding the crest of a monstrous wave, carrying me higher, with power and grace.
Because we are, it whispered. We are power.
Power. Power was choice. Choice had consequences.
I repeated that to myself, again and again, as Raw and Aaz pressed close to my legs, growling softly. The spikes of Zee’s hair and spine stood on end. His claws dragged through the dirt.
“Ha’an,” he rasped. “Been long.”
The demon’s voice rumbled into silence, and he inclined his head. “Long enough for the strange to take root. You are diminished, as are your brothers. The old one no longer inhabits your skin.”
“Power, still,” Zee said. “Power enough to kill you.”
“Always,” he replied, but not with fear, or anger. “And the human vessel? You are bound to her. I felt that, before, but could not understand it.”
“Aetar,” Zee rasped.
Ha’an nodded thoughtfully. “We will hunt them again, I think. After we are done here.”
“You’re already done,” I said, stepping forward. “The lives you took tonight were too much.”
“I made my plea. I told you I would not let my people starve.”
I pointed at the mangled remains on the ground in front of him. “These were people, too. There are other things you can eat.”
“Livestock?” Ha’an said disdainfully. “I think not.”
