by eden Hudson
Clarion leaned forward in his seat. Lonely adjusted the collar of his open Hawaiian shirt. They didn’t look at each other. Just like that.
It hit me that this was Scout, the real Scout. Not the whiny little brat or the jailbait whose too-short skirt this version of Scout was still wearing. The seventeen-and-three-quarters-year-old negotiating the integration of two warring armies while recruiting and organizing her own army and herding the dumbass figurehead into place.
“We need to talk strategy,” Clarion said. “How many of your recruits are armed?”
“None,” Scout said. “I had Cash—Lonely’s cousin—do a flyover of Colt’s place to see if there was anything we could salvage, but the foot soldiers have cleaned out the arsenal and burned the cabin to the ground.”
Colt would’ve had a cache somewhere else, just in case, I thought at Lonely. Maybe a couple of them.
“Where?” Lonely asked.
I know where they were when I moved out. No way he kept them there, though. He used to make us rotate them into new spots every six months.
Clarion’s good eye jumped back and forth from my throat to the crow. He must’ve been able to tell that I was talking, maybe the way I breathed out while I thought the words, even though I didn’t need to anymore.
“Give me all the places you remember,” Lonely said. “We’ll send someone to see what they find.”
It’d be easier if I went and checked them out myself once it got dark.
Lonely grinned. “Best know what we’ve got now. Concentrate on the places. I’ll see them.”
Yeah, he definitely knew about my plan to make a break for the Dark Mansion.
I pictured the huge burl walnut stump out by where the creek turns back, the ancient falling down chicken coop southwest of the cabin, the natural lee of a fall of cedars near the highway, and old tires in the wet sand of the creek about twenty yards upstream from an overhang of tree roots. Because fuck him. I could wait.
Lonely went to go tell his crow buddies.
Scout was staring at me.
I crossed my arms and stared right back. You might boss those NPs around, kiddo, but you don’t scare me. I used to help Mom change your diapers.
Probably the worst thing anybody’s ever thought about someone that they’d had sex with. But what was one more worst thing ever? With my record, people probably expected it by now.
Scout opened her mouth. “Tough, if you need to drink off me…”
I shook my head.
“It’s not like you can just do a line of shots now,” she said. “And with the way you are, you know a random groupie isn’t going to be enough.”
No. The spell or binding or whatever it was that she’d done with the sex-magic-feeding had worn off a while back, so she couldn’t hear me anymore, but I hoped she could see the absolutely fucking not on my face. Having sex with her and drinking off of her had been some rock-bottom shit. We weren’t doing it again.
My hands picked that second to start shaking. I jammed them down into my pockets.
Fuck you, self. I’m not touching her again. Not happening.
Sure you’re not. Until you get to jonesing for real.
Clarion cleared his throat. “So, uh, you two together?”
I glared at Scout. Don’t you dare say yes.
“It’s complicated,” she said, smoothing out her skirt.
My ass.
“Huh,” was all the coyote said.
Lonely came back and plopped down on the crate he’d been on earlier. “Should know pretty soon whether or not the white knight’s weapon caches are still out there. In the meantime, we’ve got what’s here at our disposal.”
Scout nodded. “Clarion, can you get a report of everything the coyotes brought?”
“I’ll have them start an inventory,” he said. “Six packs are still unaccounted for, but we’ll add their weapons as they come in.”
“Awesome.” Scout turned back to me. “So, Tough, how many vamps do you think you can make in a day?”
Colt
A knee plowed into my gut. A head-butt cracked my cheekbone, sealing shut an eye that was already half-closed.
The snap and rustle of wings never stopped. It was always there, just under the wailing of tortured souls, sometimes so close that I felt the brush of feathers against my skin just before the next blow landed.
The Gatekeepers of Hell. A whole host of them.
At first they had been too fast for me to stop every blow, but over the course of the fight I had slowed down so much that even a human would’ve been getting in hits on me. My arms were dead weight. I couldn’t have pried my fists open with a claw hammer. Blood and sweat rolled down my face in rivers.
I’d been fighting for God knew how long. The only measure of time or distance I had was my fatigue and the certainty that I was getting closer to the wailing. Before, I’d thought the mournful, keening cries were throatless, endless, and directionless. Now I realized they were coming from the Pit. I could feel the screaming resonating in my eardrums and chest. It was in front of me—for a second, anyway, then I took a hit that spun me around. Now the screaming was…at my six. Another hit. Three o’clock. Or was it at my nine? Another. This one rattled my brain so much that the noise from the Pit faded out to a whine.
They were letting me keep fighting. Any one of them could’ve stepped up and ended it at any second. I knew that the same way I’d known that Mikal was keeping me around, messing with my head, twisting things a little at a time because it more fun for her. Maybe that was what the Gatekeepers were doing. Hell, maybe this was the most fun they’d had in two millennia.
One kicked for my knee, and by some miracle, I saw it coming out of the corner of my good eye. My block was sloppy, but the blow glanced off anyway. My bicep rejoiced at the split-second of relaxation, then burned as I forced my arm back up. Cramps locked up my right shoulder just as an inhuman fist shot toward my face. I couldn’t block in time, so I ducked and took it on the top of the head.
I must’ve blacked out. When I came back around, I was on one knee. It felt like someone was taking swings at my ribs with a lead pipe. Bones cracked. Air whistled in my chest. I lunged for my feet, but I couldn’t stand. Hands grabbed me by the head and jerked downward. My nose crunched against a knee. Then I was on the ground.
I wasn’t going to make it.
Maybe that should’ve been obvious way before that very second, but I’d thought if I tried…if God had let me come down here…
I rolled onto my stomach. Stretched one arm out as far as I could manage in the direction of the wailing, then the other. I couldn’t force my fingers to uncurl, but I pushed with my feet and scraped with my forearms and fists. Probably gained less than an inch.
Shit. I really wasn’t going to make it.
Tiffani was going to spend the rest of eternity in Hell because I failed. Unending death. Pain and torture that went on and on forever. She had saved me, gone through hell for me, and after all that, I was going to fail her.
I opened my mouth, but all that came out was a spray of blood bubbles and spit. My lungs weren’t working right. I couldn’t even catch enough breath to say her name.
The muscle in my shoulder spasmed and my arm shot out again. My wrist rested on the lip of something metal set into the floor. Bars.
The screaming was louder than ever now. I hooked my clawed fingers around one of the bars and pulled myself closer. There was just enough heavenly glow left in my skin to illuminate a latch.
No lock. Not even a pin.
The beating had stopped. I pushed with one arm until I rolled onto my side, then looked up.
The Gatekeepers were all standing back from the grate, watching.
“The Pit,” their leader said. “You believe pain and struggle have meaning for you now, but therein lies true Hell.”
Either it was all the blows to the head I’d taken or the reality of what I was about to do that made it seem as if the leader’s inhuman face was showing
something almost like concern, as if he was trying to change my mind for my own good.
I blinked to clear my vision, but the leader’s expression stayed the same.
Tiffani. Getting to Tiffani was all that mattered.
I let myself drop back onto my stomach and fumbled with the latch. Finally, it tripped. I fell into the Pit.
Tough
When I opened my eyes again, I was flat on my back staring at the gray points of nails coming in through Lonely’s roof. Teeth ripped at my throat and I heard growling. I swung my fist. Fur-covered ribs snapped against my knuckles, but the teeth didn’t loosen up.
“Stop!” Scout’s ear-piercing whistle cracked through the attic again. “Stop it! Let go of him, Clarion. And stop struggling, Tough.”
The coyote crushing my windpipe unlocked his jaw, let go of my neck, and shifted back into human form so he could grab my throat.
Clarion growled, reddish-brown vamp venom smeared across his mouth and in his teeth. He turned his head and spit a wad of it on the floor.
The vamp reaction was to hiss at him. Or maybe it was my reaction. Somebody inside me had had it up to here with this asshole. Clarion didn’t know. Scout didn’t know. She didn’t fucking understand what she was asking. How many vamps could I make in one day? How many souls could I drag down to Hell with me?
“It’s the plan to make new crowspawn,” Lonely said.
“What about it?” Scout asked.
What do you think? I threw my hands up at her and the coyote’s grip on my throat tightened.
“The tarnished one’s not a fan,” Lonely said, smirking.
Clarion’s eye went from Lonely to me. His grip on my throat eased up.
“Then we’re on the same page. I was going to object to that method, too.” He stood up and held out his hand to help me up. “But you still need to get some control over yourself. You can’t attack everybody you disagree with.”
I reached for Clarion’s hand, then pulled up short at the last second and gave him the finger.
“Mature.” He rolled his eye. “Whatever. I still agree with Tough. This isn’t a war you can win by being faster or stronger or harder to kill. And you definitely can’t win it by willingly turning your own people over to their side. Holy wars aren’t won by numbers or strength; they’re won by faith.”
That almost made me laugh. I’d been in a holy war not that long ago and it damn sure seemed like the legion of unkillable badasses who outnumbered us ten to one got that win. Oh yeah, and my dad, the epitome of faith, got his head cut off by Kathan. So screw that theory.
But I still couldn’t do it. Even if we lost, even if every single human in this fight died screaming, I couldn’t make anyone a vampire. I couldn’t put anyone through that. I just…couldn’t. Not for anything.
My hands started shaking again and my heart pumped once, so hard it felt like the damn thing had tried to punch through my chest.
The coyote and the crow both looked at me, ears perked up. They quit gawking a second later when the vamp healing started, though. Maggots chewed through the shredded skin and cartilage of my throat so fresh tissue could replace it.
Even though he was the one who had tried to rip my throat out, Clarion winced and looked at the window. Lonely just looked like he felt bad for me. Whatever rapid healing they had must’ve been a shit-ton more awesome than mine. Me, I was getting used to it. I’d only been undead for about seventy-two hours, but I’d already been pinned to a wall with a set of wooden TV stand legs, stabbed with a broken piece of a porch swing, had my chest caved in and lung collapsed by my girlfriend’s twin, had my ass handed to me by the big bad boss man himself, been scratched up by Mitzi, had my skull cracked by a fucktard with a wooden baseball bat, and somewhere in there I’d caught on fire. Twice. It’d been a busy few days.
“So, what then?” Scout said. “If we can’t engage them on their own level—”
“Which you can’t,” Clarion interrupted. “Not even as vampires. Angels are the ultimate war machines, designed first as armies of Heaven, then—”
“Then what the hell do you suggest we do?” Scout snapped.
“We go back to basics Old Testament style,” Clarion said. “We pray, we wait for direction, then we follow that direction to the letter.”
No, we get the sword, I thought.
Up to then, Lonely had been watching Scout and Clarion go back and forth. When I thought that, though, Lonely craned his neck so he could look at me sideways. His expression creeped me out. Crows are so weird. They never just look straight at you.
“Mikal’s sword?” Lonely asked. Or maybe he was just saying it out loud so everyone would hear. It was hard to tell.
The Sword of Judgment, I told him. Cut somebody once with it and—boom—final destination time. It’s what Colt used to send Mikal to Hell.
Lonely relayed what I’d said to Scout and Clarion.
“I saw the sword once before,” the coyote said. “A long time ago. Sounds like that’s going to be the key. So, where is it now?”
Everybody looked at me.
How am I supposed to know? I rubbed the place where the back of my neck connected to my skull, trying to stop the dull, thudding headache. Somehow these psychos had dragged me into this talk-it-out fest with them. Next thing you knew, I was going to be arguing about chains of command and primal unit distribution and shit. You geniuses are supposed to be the brains here. If we’re down to relying on me, we’re fucked.
Lonely laughed his crow-caw laugh. “Smarts. That’s what we need. Intelligence.”
Like research, I said.
Lonely tapped one of his nose piercings, then pointed at me and nodded.
Okay, so maybe I’m not completely useless after all, I told him. I know who we need to talk to.
Tempie
I kept the separate piece of me close beside Kathan’s all-business piece for the rest of the day, trying my hardest to avoid thinking that what I was doing amounted to spying on the only creature who could ever sincerely love something as disgusting and broken as me. Kathan knew I was there, but that didn’t change the fact that what I was doing was two-faced and wrong.
But I didn’t bring back that separate piece of me.
Sometime after Rian left, another foot soldier reported in. Relevant information flooded the all-business piece of Kathan like character specs from one of those role playing video games Leif and his friends used to be so into. This soldier went by the name of Mal these days, but in the old days he had been called Molech. He and his twin, Chemosh, had been given charge of Modesty. It wasn’t a job Kathan had been about to trust to Rian. Rian’s worth lay in the unquestioning following of orders, not imagination or creativity. Due to their brutal and bloodthirsty nature Chemosh and Molech had been two of Mikal’s favorite soldiers.
“Modesty?” Kathan asked.
Molech leered. “You were right. She doesn’t lose consciousness unless we drug her, and her pain tolerance is almost at the same level as ours. She’s got all the physiological signs of being the other half of Destroyer.”
Kathan nodded. He’d never doubted that my twin was the Destroyer, only whether or not he could control her. If he let the foot soldiers break her, then offered to end her suffering, she would jump at the chance. He was sure of that.
It was strange that Kathan could know me so intimately, but have no understanding at all of my twin. My power had been easy to unlock because my anger was always on the surface, a red-hot burner waiting for someone to lay their hand on it. Desty was different. She pushed the anger down, blocked it off, let it simmer and pressurize until something tripped her trigger, as our dad used to say. He had another saying for when that happened, too. He called it “when the shit hits the fan.”
I knew Desty. She was my other half. There were times when she seemed so soft, so vulnerable and naive that I could barely stand to think about her out walking around in this awful world as if she wasn’t this fragile, stupid thing. But underneath all that
, Desty had a core of steel surrounded by a layer of dynamite. You could only push her so far before she started to push back—and when she started to do that, there was no negotiating with her.
Kathan knew me literally inside and out, knew that he had me, that I would do anything he asked, but he didn’t realize that if Desty decided not to take his offer, she would die before she changed her mind.
“The child?” Kathan asked.
Molech’s eyebrows drew together and his mouth straightened into a thin, hard line. “It’s a resilient little shit.”
Kathan considered this with a certain black humor. It would be just like the spawn of a Whitney to cling to life like tongues of holy fire clung to his former brethren. But perhaps it was even more than that, he thought. If Modesty didn’t lose consciousness from beatings and torture, but drugs put her out like a light, then perhaps it was the same for the child. Perhaps her spawn couldn’t be killed by violence or physical assaults, but only by some form of poison.
Was it too late, though? Had conception changed her irrevocably? If he couldn’t return Modesty to “bred in the blood the same, borne in the flesh the same” as her twin…
Hell, can’t hurt to try poison first. He chuckled to himself at the thought, then turned to Molech. “I’ll deal with it. Let the rest of the soldiers know it won’t be much longer. If they want a shot at her, they need to get their licks in now.”
“Yes, sir.” Molech was grinning again as he left. Kathan recognized the look. He’d seen it on the foot soldier’s face before, at Mohenjo Daro.
Another piece of me broke off and spoke up. My conscience, maybe. You should be feeling something. He’s talking about torturing your sister and killing a baby.
Feelings won’t help right now. Anyway, I didn’t have the ability to feel things yet. That part of me was still caught up in a maelstrom of mind-blowing intensity that drug makers and angel-porn directors could only imagine in their gushiest wet dreams. I’m observing. Gathering research so I can make an informed decision. Like Desty would.
