by S. M. Reine
He returned to her with the bundle tucked under his arm and a smile on his face.
“Is Khet really your name?” she asked. It was a Kemet name, and he spoke like he came from Kemet, but he said he had been brought from the steppes. There were no steppes here.
“Names are meaningless,” he said.
“My mother named me Anat. I love the name as I love her.” It hurt to admit it, since Anat hadn’t seen her mother in years. She had died when the village burned. Everyone had died when the village burned. Those who hadn’t likely suffered far worse than Anat—killed for the soldiers’ entertainment, enslaved by the Israelites, or left to die of thirst in the desert. “What did your mother name you?”
“If you mean the woman who made me first, then…” He hesitated at the street corner, watching the crowd without seeing them. “I don’t remember. Nor does Tiaa. But Nügua, when we are alone, she calls me Yatam.”
“Yatam,” Anat repeated. She preferred that name to Khet. It suited him.
He pulled her to a nearby cart. “Here. We should order new dresses for you. Seamstress! Over here!” He waved at a woman standing behind a wall of silks, and she began picking her way forward, a bolt of linen under one arm.
“This cannot go on forever,” Anat said, “even if I don’t fulfill Inanna’s wishes. You can’t keep buying me things. You can’t keep me as a pet.”
“I want to see you draped in silks as beautiful as your eyes.” Khet’s fingers touched hers. “I don’t think of you as my pet.”
Her heart skipped a beat at his voice. “I don’t see you as my captor,” Anat said to the ground, unable to meet his gaze.
He ordered so much silk using gold pieces shaped like animals. He had an entire bag of delicate little gold sheep, which he emptied at the seamstress’s cart. Khet saved one of the sheep for Anat. He slipped it into her fingers as they walked back to the nomarch’s house together, and she rolled it between first finger and thumb, remembering what life had been like when she’d only been a daughter of shepherds.
A few nights later, Khet took Anat to her room for sleep, and then he stayed. He presented her with the knife wrapped in linen.
“For you, lamb.” His hands lingered over hers as she parted the folds of cloth.
It was a small sword with a bronze sickle blade. Its hilt was made of bone. It must have cost as much on its own as her dresses had cost. “Why would you give me this?” He had just caught her trying to follow Nügua with a blade the other night.
“I trust you,” he said, “and I want for you to be safe.”
“I’ve done nothing to earn your trust. I may kill them tonight.”
“Not tonight , if you’ll have me.” He stepped through the door and shut it behind him.
Anat set the sword upon the edge of her bed. She was still facing away from him when she let her linen dress fall, exposing her body. He came to her back and bowed over her neck. His lips grazed her shoulder. She shivered at the contact, turned in his arms, and they sank against each other.
Khet never stopped gently touching her, not until the sun rose. They were sleepless under the moonlight. Like Nügua, they slept through daylight.
A few weeks later, Anat had new dresses, and Tiaa never stopped glaring.
It was quite a while afterward that Anat realized Inanna had stopped asking her to kill Khet, Tiaa, and Nügua. It wasn’t that Inanna had given up. She seemed to have accepted the obvious truth; knife or not, Anat did not have the craving to kill.
Eventually, one thing became obvious above all else.
Anat was in love with Khet, and he felt much the same.
V
Countdown
9
L incoln jolted awake staring up at cool, fog-drenched trees with bark that smelled faintly of cinnamon. The dirt under his back was damp.
He wasn’t in Ancient Egypt.
This was King’s Beach, just on the California side of the border in the Sierras.
The forest was darker than it should have been at this time of day. The sunlight should have been filtering through the trees, which were sparser than those that Lincoln had grown up among in the Appalachians. The thickness of the forest here was controlled by fire, as far as he could tell. Some of the underbrush was still charred from fires in years past. And yet it was dark enough to drain color from the trunks of trees, leaving them a gloomy gray that only allowed the pine needles to look green by comparison.
An enormous stone head appeared above him, peering down with a curious tilt to his jaw.
Junior.
He jabbed Lincoln in the chest with a thick, heavy finger, and it hurt enough for Lincoln to realize he’d already been poked a few times. Lincoln sat up with a groan, shoving Junior’s hand away when he tried to poke him again. “I’m up, I’m fine,” he said.
Junior lifted him under the arms, putting him on his feet. It was so easy for the gargoyle to move him that Lincoln felt like he was a child.
The gargoyle rumbled a wordless question.
“Something weird’s going on, all right.” Lincoln rubbed his head. The dream—vision?—of the desert was rapidly retreating, but he was certain he’d dreamed of another Remnant of Inanna four thousand years ago. And she’d been hanging out with a guy who looked exactly like Thom Norrel. “You ever think about how much easier life used to be before all the magic and time travel?”
Junior didn’t grumble. His silence was distinctly annoyed.
“Guess life was never easy for you.” Lincoln glanced around at the empty forest. “Did you find Sophie? Where is she?”
Junior shook his head.
Lincoln’s heart sank and took his hopes along with it. “Then what are you doing back here?”
Lincoln couldn’t hear any reply, except for the grumbling in Junior’s chest.
For the first time, the frustration was strong enough to make him angry.
“You shouldn’t be back here without Sophie,” he said. “I know she looks like she can handle herself, but she’s probably terrified, wherever she is. She needs us to find her!”
Junior stepped back behind the rocks. His head was low. He almost looked like he was sulking.
Anger dissipated from Lincoln. “Aw, come on, Junior. Don’t be like that. I’m not mad at you. I’m just…mad.” Mad at fate, mad at the Traveler for fucking up, mad at the circumstances that had led him to communicate with his half-brother through little more than a game of charades.
Junior beckoned. He wasn’t trying to sulk. He wanted Lincoln to follow him.
Lincoln glanced over his shoulder, looking for the coven, but they were far enough from the cabins that he couldn’t see anyone. The strange darkness made sure of that. In the direction that Junior retreated, it was only getting darker, and the fog looked thick.
His half-brother was disappearing. He was a shadow, a silhouette among silhouettes.
Lincoln stepped deeper into the forest.
Once he was in the fog, he could see through the blanket of mist as well as steel wool. With the climate so dry, it seemed like it should have been impossible for moisture in the air to cling this close. Was this water evaporated from the lake, or rain that had forgotten to fall, or just a heavy dew lingering into the afternoon?
Junior kept looking over his shoulder and pausing to make sure that Lincoln could follow. Where Lincoln needed to climb sheer rocks by clutching crevices with his fingertips, Junior could simply step over the large obstacles. But no matter how dark the forest got, it was always darker further in, but Junior made sure that Lincoln couldn’t lose him. Premature nighttime sank over them, and Lincoln just kept following.
He heard the slosh of lake against its shore before he saw it. The trees parted over rocks, offering him a sliver of a view.
As a kid, he would’ve been attracted to this kind of shallows with the sheltered, natural harbor. It was the kind of place where crayfish tended to thrive. But there was nothing about the environment to make him feel hungry. Nothing looked or
sounded appetizing in this relentless grayness. Even Lake Tahoe, mirrored as its waters seemed to be back at the cabins, could only mirror darkness here.
Something wasn’t right. Something wasn’t right at all.
Junior stopped on rocks slimy with moss. Lincoln used Junior’s hand to pull himself up so that he could see.
Out in the water, just a few hundred feet away, stood a church.
The cathedral looked plain and gray at this distance, like the rest of the world. Lincoln knew that he’d see engraved runes if he got closer. Some of that had been carved by masons in the Summer Court. Lincoln didn’t know where the rest came from. He still didn’t know why the cathedral from Falias was following him everywhere—even here, to Lake Tahoe.
It was taller than it had been the last time Lincoln saw it, and it even looked taller despite being partially submerged in the water. The waves came up halfway on its double front doors. The church’s spire was a thorn yearning upward to prick God’s thumb, topping a bell tower with no bells. The roof was black, and it looked like slate, and Lincoln didn’t think that it had always looked like that. The church was still growing and changing. “Hell’s bells.” Lincoln sat beside Junior and peeled his shoes off. “Do you know what that is?”
Junior shook his head slowly. He had only seen Lincoln with the cathedral once before.
“That thing came out of the Middle Worlds originally,” Lincoln said. “I went inside to talk to God, and…” It sounded insane. Talking to God. He felt silly for even thinking it. “I don’t know, John Junior.”
The gargoyle shuddered beside him.
Lincoln frowned. “What’s wrong? Is it about God?”
A shake of the head.
“You don’t want to be called John Junior?”
Junior nodded.
Lincoln wouldn’t have wanted his father’s name either if their places were switched. It was bad enough that Lincoln’s last memories of his father involved the man’s swollen, purple face. He had other, better memories—like fixing cars together in the summer and tossing around the pigskin—that Junior couldn’t possess.
“Would you like it if I called you Wilson?” Lincoln asked. That was the name he’d gotten from his mother, one of the Northgate Dickersons.
Junior shook his head again.
“You seem all right with Junior,” Lincoln said. “Can I keep calling you Junior for now?” That finally earned a nod. “All right then. Just Junior for now.”
Lincoln rolled up his jeans. There were paint stains on the hem, down on the right. He was pretty sure he’d stained them repainting a college friend’s bedroom. These were really Lincoln’s pants, something that he had owned and worn in 2006. Just like how the scars on his hands were brighter than they would become in later years, marking the time that he had spent trying to learn woodworking, and failing, because his hands had never become too deft after all the head traumas he suffered playing football.
It stood to reason that Sophie was equipped however she’d been in 2006, too. She’d have gone right back into her old body like he did. He wasn’t sure how old she was, but he figured she was younger than him by a fair amount. “Junior, I need you to go back on the hunt for Sophie,” Lincoln said.
Junior had no real way to respond, but he patted Lincoln’s shoulders gently—which felt almost like being punched—and Lincoln took that to mean he was ready. As ready as anyone could be.
He took off. It seemed abrupt, but there was probably no point to sticking around when he couldn’t say a proper goodbye. Lincoln was left alone in that heavy gray forest, under the cover of what must have been an abrupt sunset, with his shoes beside him and a cathedral in the water. He stepped off the rocks into the surf.
Lake Tahoe was even colder than Betty’s shrieks had let on. It didn’t feel like snowmelt, but literal ice. Lincoln was confident his leg hairs were shivering. The closer the line of water got to his hips, the more frantically his testicles seem to climb inside his body for warmth.
He stopped before the water could reach his pocket. Every step he took toward the cathedral, the further away it seemed to get. When he first arrived, it had been at the edge of the shore, seemingly within easy reach. Now it looked like he would need to swim the English Channel to get to it.
The lake was so dark. His skin felt like it was going to crawl off of his muscles.
Whispers of a feminine voice made him turn.
A woman stood where he had been sitting with Junior just minutes earlier.
She had colorless skin and hair like inky darkness. Her weight was spread evenly across two booted feet. Snug leather painted her thighs, and a pair of studded belts were slung over her hips. She wore a black tank top that was just a little too small, rucked up to expose a couple inches of pale abdominal muscles. She had full breasts, strong shoulders, and a glove on just one hand.
“Elise,” Lincoln said. “How…?”
This wasn’t Elise in 2006, playing on the beach with Betty. It was Elise after killing God.
She tilted her head as she surveyed him. Those were absolutely Elise’s black eyes.
His forehead pinched as hard as though a knife point were jabbed between his eyebrows. He was surprised to reach up and feel that the skin was dry, with no hint of blood. “Elise,” she echoed, as if she’d cut the name out of his mind. “Do you mean…Elise Kavanagh?”
He glanced toward the cathedral one more time, but it was gone.
This isn’t real.
Lincoln came to the conclusion swiftly and calmly. He had only ever seen Elise like this after Genesis because he was hallucinating. “I need to wake up.”
“You could wake up if you want,” Elise said. “But why would you want to, when you can be with me as you sleep?”
He didn’t feel how cold the water was anymore.
Elise stepped off the rocks and onto the water with boots buckled all the way from ankles to knees. The waves stilled where she placed her foot, which didn’t sink. She spread her arms wide as she approached Lincoln across the surface of Tahoe. Her hair streamed behind her in a cloak of nights with no stars.
She was still so beautiful.
“I can’t dream. Not right now.” He slapped himself across the face a few times, and the pain felt real enough. “Stop messing around, Inanna. Take off her face.”
Elise stopped a few feet away from him. “Inanna?” The way she pitched that name, as if spitting out a curse word, made him realize instantly that he had been wrong.
This wasn’t a dream.
She wasn’t the Godslayer.
And something was very, very wrong.
Finding his father dead by suicide had felt like rock bottom to Lincoln. Wherever this woman came from, it was deeper than rock bottom and older than the shadows on the dark side of the moon. “What is a Godslayer?” she asked. “And why do you think I look like her?”
She was reading his mind.
There was nowhere for Lincoln to back up, but he tried. The lake got a lot steeper behind him, and he nearly slipped. “Let me go.”
“No.” She sank down to one knee atop the water. She clutched his head in both hands before he could think to step out of reach, and she held him tight, bearing down until he was consumed by her infinitely black eyes. “How do you know Inanna?”
Lincoln’s forehand pinched again. Her nails bit his jawline. “Stop!” He tried to grab her by the wrists and pry her hands off, but her skin was ice, and they were engulfed in shadow creeping over the lake. It reminded him of Ereshkigal’s power, but it was also something so much worse—and Lincoln hadn’t realized that there could be anything worse than dying.
She pried the thoughts from his mind like peeling fingernails off the nail bed.
He could see it all happening again.
The moment where he could’ve killed Dullahan Daith, ending the Middle Worlds. He saw the blazing white light in the church, and the Traveler, and even Inanna herself. All of it in a breath.
Her lips hovered over his
as she inhaled.
“A Remnant,” she murmured. “Neuma was right.”
The feeling shocked back into Lincoln’s body, and he stumbled away from her, sloshing chest deep into frigid water. “You’re that thing,” he gasped. She was the faceless, hungry monster that had seized the bartender.
He scrambled for the shore, and she sauntered behind him. Her streaming hair blackened the mountains, the water. There was nothing behind Lincoln except evil. He shouldn’t have sent Junior away. He was going to die alone, in the wrong time. What would happen to the timeline? What would happen to Sophie?
“Where are you going, Inanna?” Her voice was growing deeper, louder, shaking into the depths of his marrow. “Don’t you care to catch up? Is there nothing you have to say to me after all of these thousands of years?”
Run. Run. Run!
He angled himself toward shallower waters, away from the rocks, and began climbing out.
“I obliterated you once for what you did to my family,” said the woman. “Sometimes I thought I obliterated you too quickly, since you never apologized for Irkalla. We have so much to discuss now that I’ve found the last of you.”
Lincoln blinked, and her boots appeared on the pine needles in front of him.
A thousand colorless hands clutched him, pinning his arms to his sides and lifting him from the waves. Water streamed off of his jeans. His clothes were so heavy. A lacework of ice spanned his flesh as he was drawn higher, brought to eye level with the thousand faces that glared at him.
All of them looked like Elise.
Inanna. Don’t you recognize me?
Another face rose above the rest, serpentine but masculine, with fangs as long as Lincoln’s hand. Lincoln had lived some of Inanna’s life, seen some of her memories. He knew this face. It had been the last face he saw before Inanna had been left to bleed to death in the infernal planes.
“Ereshkigal,” he gasped. “You’re—you’re a Remnant—”
