by Jory Strong
Torn human carcasses represented what was left of meals, not just in the werelion’s cage, but in those of tiger, leopard, and wolf shapeshifters.
Rebekka moved to the bars, working hard to establish rapport. Knowing all of their lives depended on her gift.
Tir’s machete was drawn, as was his knife. He’d kill any threat. Including the Weres. Rebekka knew it without it being said.
The werewolves calmed the fastest, and then the leopard and tiger shapeshifters.
For any of them to escape, they needed to work together, to leave together, to use their combined abilities to keep the pure animals in line after they’d been freed from their cages.
Sweat coated Rebekka’s skin as she joined Levi in front of his brother’s cage. Her head pounded as she concentrated on Cyrin, trying to reach him through remembered emotion, love and loyalty and trust, trying to fix the tears in his mind where human and animal instincts had fought one another.
She used her gift as well as her words, her voice joining Levi’s until finally the insanity slid from Cyrin’s eyes and was replaced by recognition.
Levi unlocked his brother’s cage then and the two of them embraced. Tears streamed down Rebekka’s cheeks. If the demon arrived moments from now and killed them, at least they’d had this shining moment of success.
ABIJAH cocked his head as they neared the end of the hallway. Adrenaline surged through Araña when she recognized the sounds coming from outside. The animals were free. She suspected the Weres were, too.
Tir would be coming for her.
She had only an instant at the doorway to access the room. The urn sat on a narrow table against the far wall, directly across from her. Next to it a red candle burned in a shallow blood-filled bowl attached to a platform where a carved deity served as a fetish carrying prayers to the being it represented.
If Anton’s worshipped god had truly been present, she doubted she would have heard the fire whispering its willingness to become her weapon. To kill as it had killed once before, on the day she’d called it to her as hot iron was pressed to her flesh.
She couldn’t see the maze owner, but from the light pouring into the room and the sounds still coming from the maze, she guessed he was standing at the window, watching whatever was taking place there. She couldn’t afford to allow him time to think, or order Abijah outside.
Araña entered the room fast, going straight for the urn.
“Stop her, Abijah! Stop her, Abijah! Stop her, Abijah!”
Three times in rapid succession. Without the conceit of archaic words.
It was a command Araña understood couldn’t be disobeyed, and yet not a thorough enough one to keep Anton safe from her.
Abijah’s talons curled around her arms, halting her before she’d gotten more than half a dozen steps into the room. He lifted her so she dangled above the floor, seemingly defenseless.
Anton laughed. “Clever, clever demon. Now I understand how you managed to avoid killing the intruders outside. What luck for both of us that your plaything returned.”
He glanced through the window. “I fear I’m going to have to let them die in the traps and settle for the woman as a prize. I can’t send you after them and risk touching her myself.”
The spider rested on her brand in a symbolic acknowledgment of the day ten years earlier that had ultimately led to this one. She’d once thought her ability to summon fire was further proof she was destined for Hell. Now she knew otherwise. It was a gift to one reborn, a thread connecting her to the birthplace of the Djinn.
Anton left the window, passing between her and the flame he’d lit to his deity, and the fire came to her call. It filled the room with his scream as it had once filled another room with the screams of the clergyman and the couple she’d believed to be her parents.
It destroyed Anton’s ability to command a Djinn first. Burning away his lips and tongue. Swallowing his throat and filling his lungs with its rage. But unlike before when the fire killed because of her summons, Araña felt no guilt, no remorse. He deserved no mercy.
Abijah disappeared with Anton’s final heartbeat, and Araña skirted the still burning body, going directly to the urn. It was a thing of temptation and horror, but she’d known as soon as she read the stolen journal pages that she would destroy it without trying to use it to force the incantation from Abijah. She grasped it, the blood from the wound painting its side as she brought it down on the edge of the table, willing it to break.
A boom sounded. A wash of power exploded through the room as the urn shattered.
The force of it knocked her to the ground and sent shards of glass from the windows to the yard below. It extinguished both candle flame and Anton’s burning corpse.
Abijah appeared next to her, standing over her as a man and wearing the robes of a desert dweller. When she would have risen, he put his foot on her chest and held her with an easy strength that warned against drawing her knives.
“He’s killed hundreds of our kind and enslaved even more. You risk his life if you free him and he resumes his war on us. I spared him the first time because The Prince demanded it of me. He won’t be spared again.”
“The time for vengeance is past,” Araña said, ignoring the tiny voice reminding her of Tir’s warning not to ask this of him.
“Is it?” Abijah asked. “We will soon see.”
In a blink he became the scorpion. His tail lashing out, stinging her hand—and then he was gone in a swirl of wind that tore paintings from the wall and sent papers and books to the floor.
Pain spread through her with venom not meant to kill. It was like the witch’s strike when she mindlessly attacked—only this agony was the price she paid to gain the incantation.
It flowed into her, segment by segment like a scorpion’s tail.
It burned into her—ancient words she would never have been able to remember or speak if they’d been delivered from his mouth to her ears.
Outside she heard destruction raging, the howl of an unnatural storm tearing down walls and flattening anything in its path. But she was held motionless on the floor, unable to do more than smile slightly when Tir burst into the room and knelt next to her, his face harsh with worry.
He put the machete and knife down to run his hands over her as if searching for the source of her agony. “I’m okay,” she said, the last of the pain fading when the final words of the incantation were in place.
Tir lifted her into his arms and stood. Through the open space of the window the funnel cloud that was Abijah dissipated, leaving utter calm and stark devastation in its wake—and such intense silence Araña’s heartbeat sounded like a bell tolling in her ears.
“Levi and Rebekka?” she asked, delaying her final task.
“Safe. I assume that was the demon making a grand exit. He cut a clear path for them to escape into the woods before circling back to attack the building next door.”
“Farold?”
“Dead.”
Tir glanced around at the chaos of the office, at the smoldering corpse. He set her on her feet, his expression hardening as he met her eyes. “You said the incantation was in Anton’s possession. Where is it?”
Did it occur to you that freeing him completely was never the goal in this game? You risk his life if you free him and he resumes his war on us. The incantation is in parts. Speak some of it and he gains strength and power—enough to believe you’ve done what you can for him.
Tir could live among the outcasts and criminals as she did. The tattoos on his arms would draw little attention, just as the brand on her hand rarely warranted a second glance in the settlements and floating boat cities that were her world.
She reached up, intending to touch the face she had already committed to memory.
He grabbed her wrist. Stopping her.
“Where is it?”
Trust me, she’d asked of him.
I trust you, he’d said.
“Abijah gave it to me before he left.”
She l
eaned forward until her mouth was only a breath away from his. “Remember I’m not your enemy. Remember I asked you to put aside your dreams of vengeance because the price for gaining it can be too high to pay.”
Tir didn’t stop her from pressing a kiss to his lips. “Remember I love you,” she said, then began speaking the words Abijah had given her.
Power surged into Tir with each syllable. It came with music, indescribable notes transcending reality and calling for his cells to break apart, to become the spectrum of light, part of a greater whole, to be everywhere and nowhere. Infinite. Without measure in form or time.
It was only when the collar fell away and memory descended that music and cold light were forged into individual purpose. Tir.
Black wings flowed out, tearing away the shirt as they solidified. Along his arms the marks put there by humans disappeared as if they’d never been.
Abijah. He remembered the name now.
It was the name of the Djinn he’d hunted for centuries. The name of the enemy who’d caught him in a trap and enslaved him with the collar.
The desire for vengeance rose up, pulsing through Tir with omnipotent fury until the rush of returned memory and power faded enough for him to become aware of Araña standing in front of him, her dark, dark eyes seemingly soulless, the spider on her cheek marking her as his enemy.
She met his gaze, neither cowering in his presence nor drawing her knives from their sheaths, neither pleading with him to turn aside the past nor cursing him for what he’d once been to her kind. An enemy. A killer.
The knowledge of it was there in her eyes as she stood waiting for him to make his choice, just as she’d made her choice when she spoke the incantation to free him.
“Araña,” he said, reaching for her, only to have her pushed away as others of his kind appeared in a burst of light, three of them, their wings ranging from snowy white to mottled gold—all of them beings he’d hunted alongside, first to slaughter and then to capture the Djinn so the creatures of mud could rule here.
“Brother,” the white-winged Addai said, stepping forward and embracing Tir. “I turned my attention away from this world and a thousand years passed before I knew you’d gone missing. By then it was too late to find you.”
Addai stepped away and, with a casual backhand, sent Araña sprawling to the ground at Tir’s feet. Without conscious thought, Tir formed a sword. It glowed like the sun but was the frigid ice of deep space.
“Slay her and let’s be done here,” Addai said. “The humans no longer remember the creatures we were once charged with making their familiars.”
“No,” Tir said, stepping in front of Araña, protecting her from the angels he’d once called brothers, knowing in that moment he would die with her rather than return to what he’d been. “It’s time for our war on the Djinn to be over.”
“Heretic,” Addai said. “We have encountered others holding that same idea, and they have all met with the fate you have only recently escaped.”
With a sweep of Addai’s arm, sigil-inscribed shackles appeared next to the collar on the floor between them. Swords to match Tir’s came to his brothers’ hands and they spread out, flanking him.
Pride flashed through Tir when Araña pulled her knives from their sheaths and prepared to spring to her feet. “Don’t,” he told her, fashioning a second sword from his memory, remembering its hunger for passing judgment and naming it death.
Music swelled inside him. The notes of a warrior who’d accepted a cause.
Addai said, “I will give you the benefit of the doubt and a chance to throw off the last of whatever spell she cast on you when you were at her mercy. Slay her, brother. Don’t make us bind you and return you to the mercy of humans.”
Tir’s gaze went to Araña’s, and he felt her horror for him, her willingness to sacrifice herself rather than see him enslaved again. “No,” he said, “that spell is love and its loss is too high a price to pay.”
“Well said, brother.”
The swords around Tir blinked out as if they’d never been drawn. The shackles and collar disappeared as though there’d never been a threat of them.
Tir freed the power forming one of his blades and offered his hand to Araña. When she took it, he pulled her to her feet and against his chest, his arm going around her waist to keep her pressed to him.
His brothers made no move to attack. Instead they gathered again in front of him.
“This is no trick,” Addai said, “but a test. There are those of us who want to live openly here, to take mates and reshape this world. To that end, new alliances are forming. Between angel and Djinn as well as with gifted humans and shapeshifters.”
He looked at Araña and bowed slightly. “My apologies for striking a daughter belonging to the House of the Spider. Had you died by my brother’s hand, your mother would have you know a Raven waited to guide your spirit back to the Djinn.”
“I understand,” Araña said, and though Tir couldn’t discern her thoughts, he felt her peace and knew Addai’s words hadn’t surprised her.
“She is mortal,” Addai said. “There is only one way you can assure her safety and keep her with you.”
Tir closed his eyes. A part of him wept in sorrow. To speak the words Addai alluded to was to cut himself off from the glorious whole of the light that both defined his form and absorbed it. But to do less was to risk Araña and to one day lose her.
For all that she was Djinn, she was also human, mortal, fragile in this harsh world mankind had created from the paradise they’d been given. Her flesh was a prison her soul would flee at the slightest dropping of his guard against it.
Tir turned her in his arms. “Do you want this? There is no going back.”
Not that there had ever been a chance of willingly parting from her. She had enslaved him from the moment she entered his dreams then knelt at his feet and freed him from the shackles he wore.
“I want this,” she said. “I love you.”
“I feel the same for you.”
He touched his lips to hers and spoke the forbidden incantation. Separating himself.
Limiting himself to this world.
She deepened the kiss, and like a pattern made whole, he felt her spirit weave with his, felt the spider twin itself and become a part of him, taking up residence on his chest, above the heart that beat only for her.
Slowly he became aware that his brothers were no longer there, but humans were converging on what remained of the maze. “Where do you want to go?”
“Home.”
The word formed an image in his mind. Echoed and became his.
Home. Not the Constellation, but a cabin where laughter and love had saved a young girl’s life. Where childish drawings slowly morphed into the beautiful recapturing of the world around her, where books lay on tables alongside knives and guns.
He folded his wings around her and by will alone took her to the bedroom that was hers.
Her joyous laugh filled him with song.
The love shining in her eyes and flowing between them threatened to take him to his knees.
“Araña,” he said in a voice that had once sent armies of men to their deaths and made humans prostrate themselves before him.
Don’t think I’ll allow anyone else to worship you but me, she spoke into his mind, shocking him, replacing images of his remembered past with erotic ones, demonstrating to him how thoroughly their souls were bound.
Dark eyes challenged him, absorbed him as her hands went to his wings, the touch sending liquid ecstasy through the both of them. “I want you,” she whispered, opening the floodgate to need and the rush to get rid of clothing.
When nothing remained to separate them, they fell naked onto the bed. His body covered hers and Araña moaned at the erotic feel of his wings against her splayed thighs, at the contrast of soft feathers and hardened warrior.
She wrapped her arms around his neck, buried her fingers in his hair.
She welcomed him into her body
as thoroughly as she’d welcomed him into her heart and soul.
And as his mouth took hers in a shared breath, the twin spiders touched, joined as one. Djinn and angel. Fire and ice melting away the past to form a new future.
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