by S. M. Reine
“Enough,” he said.
“And how long have we been here, exactly?”
Stark’s brow crimped. “A week.”
A whole week since the inauguration.
Deirdre understood.
Now all those dreams made sense.
And she was terrified.
She hadn’t been hallucinating Stark shooting both of them full of lethe. He had been dosing them for days.
How much lethe would it take to kill a phoenix and a bear wolf?
Enough.
“Rylie,” Deirdre said. “What did you do to Rylie?”
“I told her to die,” he said.
“Did she?”
“Do you care?” Stark asked.
Deirdre cared so much more than she wanted to. Rylie had shown Deirdre limitless compassion, and she had been elected as leader by North America’s gaeans. She meant so much to so many people.
She couldn’t die.
“You didn’t help Rhiannon,” Deirdre said. “You let her walk into our trap without you.”
“I’d never forgive her for what she did. I don’t forgive anyone for anything. But I needed her to get my girls back safely.” Stark scratched at his arm. The veins were a sickly shade of blue, bulging under the papery surface of his skin. “The OPA will find us here soon. They’ve been tracking us. They want to arrest me.”
“And you’d rather die than go to an OPA detention center?”
“I’m not the one who’s going to die. The OPA aren’t the only ones looking for us.”
“The sluagh,” Deirdre said, and she began trembling in earnest. She hadn’t even thought she had the strength to shake. She could barely get up. “You’re waiting for the sluagh to find me.” She couldn’t wrap her mind around the reasoning. To have the OPA and the sluagh in the same place? To let that monster kill his enemies?
Or…to kill the phoenix?
“You asshole,” she said.
Her muscles felt like they were unknitting. The fibers were going to unwrap and shake themselves apart. Her bones were fragmenting, driving slivers deep into her body. Every ounce of weight she tried to rest on her limbs felt like a thousand agonizing pounds.
She dragged herself across the floor, digging her fingernails into the floor, pushing her knees underneath her body.
“You asshole,” Deirdre said again, and she wasn’t sure that the words had actually come out.
“I gave you a lot. You shouldn’t have woken up.” Stark still didn’t look at her as he said it.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
He lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug, then dropped it again. He was beyond the point of speaking. His blue-tinted lips were cracked around the edges, caked with blood. The whites of his eyes were shot with red. He was drying out, like the lethe had replaced his blood, and now his organs were failing without the proper oxygen.
“You took too much,” she said. “You’re going to die, too.”
“I’m waiting for the sluagh to take you.” Stark’s eyes were shut. “I didn’t want to…” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard.
He didn’t want to watch her die.
Stark didn’t want to be cognizant for that, so he had dosed himself as strongly as he dosed her.
But he was still going to let the sluagh kill her.
Tears welled up in her core. But she couldn’t cry. Her body had no resources left.
She finally reached him. Deirdre wanted to beat him, pound her fists against his face, punish him for everything that he’d forced her to suffer. But she didn’t have the strength for it. Her abs were squeezing again, and if there had been anything left in her stomach, she would have vomited.
Instead, Deirdre sagged against him. His flannel shirt felt abrasive. Like it could scrape the top layer of skin off of her hand.
She wasn’t strong enough to attack him physically, but she only needed words to hurt him.
“Weak,” Deirdre hissed. “You’re so fucking weak, Everton Stark.”
His eyes snapped open. He glared at her with hate—so much hate.
Hatred hurts us more than the people we hate.
“Your daughters will never love you.” She wasn’t sure that it came out, but she meant to say it. She hoped he heard it. “I will never love you.”
His expression shifted. His eyebrows creased.
Yeah, he’d heard her.
“It doesn’t matter, Tombs,” he said. “You’re dead.” His eyes slid shut again. “The sluagh’s here now.”
Once he said it, she could feel it.
The air was colder in the presence of the sluagh. Everything was a little bit darker. The asylum was spiraling into frosty night as the cruelest piece of the Winter Court came hunting.
The girls suddenly stopped crying.
Stark didn’t even react. His eyes were closed again.
“Stark,” she said, shaking him. “Where are they? Are they somewhere safe from the sluagh?”
He was limp.
Deirdre pushed against the wall to get to her feet. It hurt. Everything hurt.
But the sluagh was there to kill her, and it was traveling through the rest of the asylum first.
She had to find the girls before it did.
Deirdre had made promises to Melchior, and she intended on keeping them, no matter how difficult.
The asylum pitched around her as she dived for the door. It was cold, so impossibly cold, and she wouldn’t have been able to move in it even if she hadn’t had more lethe than blood running through her veins.
Hallucinations swirled past her. They must have been hallucinations from the lethe, because Gage wasn’t really there. He wasn’t really standing in the doorway, trying to block her exit, his shirt hanging open and sweat dripping down his pectoral muscles.
“Don’t,” he said. “It will kill you.”
“I killed you,” Deirdre gasped.
She pushed through him. He evaporated.
Deirdre slammed into the wall opposite the cell door. Gage was standing there too, watching her stumble. She couldn’t even see his face. She didn’t remember it now. There was nothing but a swirling blankness where his tortured eyes should have been.
His voice sounded like Stark’s.
“You’re going to die.”
When she lifted her head from the wall, she faced the blackness of the Genesis void. It had consumed that entire half of the asylum. Beyond two doors down, there was nothing but black.
“No,” she whispered.
It wasn’t the Genesis void. It was the sluagh, and it had ripped through one of the asylum walls, tearing a cell open.
That was where the girls were.
Deirdre stepped into the cell beside that one. There were no walls between the cells anymore. They had been shredded by the sluagh’s entrance, creating one large room with the naiad girls cowering in the corner and the monster filling the rest of the space.
When the older of them—Alona?—looked to Deirdre, it was with fear in her eyes, but no plea for help. She was furious. Every inch her father’s daughter.
“Hey!” Deirdre shouted. “You came here for me!”
She must not have said it aloud. The sluagh didn’t react to her. It had seen two new souls to consume, brilliant and shining with seelie power, and it wanted to take them.
It wasn’t right to say that the sluagh “wanted” anything, though. It wanted nothing. It was urge, cold and flowing and raw.
Right now, those urges were drawing it toward Stark’s daughters.
Calla and Alona, so afraid.
Nothing would have been a bigger “screw you” to Stark than letting them die.
“Come on, Deirdre.” Gage was there again, standing beside her. “Who are you?”
Her stomach clenched. She leaned against the wall, letting her temple rest on cool cement. “You said my name. You know who I am.”
“Who are you?”
Gage lifted a mirror that he hadn’t been holding a mome
nt before. Deirdre looked into it, and she saw Stark reflected back at her. An angry man, a lonely man, alone in a dank cell with enough lethe to keep him higher than an OPA dirigible.
Stark would have killed Deirdre’s daughters to make her suffer.
“Who are you?” Gage asked.
His voice had become higher, more feminine.
Niamh was cradling the mirror, crimson curls tumbling down her chest, blood smeared across her shoulders.
“Hatred only hurts you, Dee,” she said. “I forgave you. Will you forgive everyone else?”
She dropped the mirror.
It shattered on the ground at Deirdre’s feet, stinging her with shards, filling her with cold. She took a step back, but she reacted too slowly. Niamh had dropped it right on her.
No, that wasn’t a mirror. It was lighter. Papery.
A photograph.
Deirdre bent, swimming through sludgy air. She picked up the photograph.
It was a young Everton Stark sitting on his horse. They were at a dressage competition.
Had hate made him better? Had it ever made anyone better?
The sluagh slithered toward Calla and Alona.
Deirdre could have let them die. They didn’t deserve it, but their father did. He deserved every damn thing that came to him.
But she didn’t hate Stark that much.
She didn’t hate him at all, in fact.
Deirdre stepped forward, putting herself between the naiad girls and the beast—the one thing that could kill her. Forever.
If it didn’t, then it was going to kill the girls.
“Tombs!”
Deirdre turned to see Stark in the doorway, struggling to reach her though he was limping, weak with lethe, chest damp with bile. That was no hallucination. She wouldn’t have hallucinated Stark looking so awful. No matter how much they had fought, Stark would always be a strong, handsome, force of nature in her mind. Not this shriveled pathetic thing.
But Gage behind him—Gage and Niamh and Melchior, all watching Deirdre—that was a hallucination.
They wanted her to let go.
“I’ll never love you, Everton Stark,” she said. “But I forgive you.”
She spoke with Niamh’s voice. Rylie’s voice. Gage’s voice.
Deirdre wasn’t Stark anymore. She didn’t ever want to be that man.
With that, Deirdre began to change.
The phoenix form took her. It had felt strange both times that Melchior did it to her, but now it felt as natural as pulling off a bathrobe. Deirdre simply allowed her human form to fall away. She stepped into her feathers and wings.
Fire blossomed over her skin. Her clothes incinerated as she spread her arms, opening herself to embrace the sluagh.
It was frigid death, a devourer of souls, darker than the voids of space.
Deirdre was the fire that birthed new life.
The phoenix.
Day against night, sun against moonlight, the Alpha to an Omega.
For a brilliant, beautiful moment, Deirdre was infinite, filling the entirety of the asylum. She saw Alona and Calla, cowering just outside of the reach of the tentacles, where they would be safe. She saw the rain drizzling off the edge of the roof, and the incinerator where Gage’s body had burned. She saw the OPA’s black trucks pulling up outside to save her just a little bit too late.
It was good they were there. They would be able to arrest Stark, get the girls away from him, send them to Sascha at Everton Estates.
Everything was going to be okay.
She changed. Her wings spread. She flew into the depths of the sluagh, wrapped in its tentacles, her body shredded by the skeletal hands that waited within.
Deirdre burned the sluagh from the inside to keep it from killing Stark and his daughters.
And for the third time in her life, she died.
Deirdre opened her eyes on rolling green fields under a swollen, smoldering sun.
She had died.
Again.
Third time’s the charm, I guess.
The knowledge arrived along with a surprising calmness. She had died, and she was fine with that. There was nothing to change about it now. Death had come upon her, she was gone, and it was time to move on.
All of the fear that she had felt while plummeting into the depths of the sluagh—that was gone.
Her heartbreak over Stark—that was gone, too.
Everything was okay.
She turned to look around the grassy fields, and thorny brambles scraped her calves. Deirdre smelled blackberries rotting in the heat of summer. The bushes were a wall blocking her from the hills of the afterlife.
This time, Deirdre wasn’t going to let the bushes stop her from moving on.
“Get out of my way,” she said.
The bushes sighed, shivered, drew in on themselves. Their thorns retracted. They left no wounds on her bare skin.
A path opened to the grass.
Deirdre stepped away from the brambles, and her toes sank into the dew-kissed field.
She had arrived.
“Oh, baby,” a man said, and she knew before she saw him that it was her father, Alasdair Tombs.
The sight of him still took her breath away.
Gods, he hadn’t aged at all since she was a little girl. He was still a tall, handsome man with dark skin and an affable smile. And when he held his arms open, there was nothing to stop Deirdre from stepping into them, wrapping her arms around her father’s waist.
He smelled as good as she remembered, like that aftershave he’d always slapped on right before heading out the door to work. “Daddy,” she whispered, resting her cheek over his heart, shutting her eyes to savor the feeling of him.
Alasdair released her first, shifting Deirdre so that she was held tightly against his side. Another person was approaching them across the grass. It was hard to make out her features with the massive sun at her back, though it highlighted her brown curls as though she were a phoenix who had caught fire, just like Deirdre.
As she drew nearer, white skin and blue eyes became clearer. A pair of sword hilts jutted over either shoulder. One of the hilts was black, and the other was glossy white.
Deirdre had held that white sword before.
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but you only have a few minutes,” said Marion Garin. She was dressed in fluttering gauze that swayed in a wind Deirdre couldn’t feel. Marion didn’t seem to be connected to the surrounding world the way that Deirdre was. Marion looked like a ghost.
“Did you die too?” Deirdre asked.
The girl shook her head with a sad half-smile. “I’m visiting.”
“What about Rylie? Stark said that he told her to die.”
“She’s an Alpha,” Marion said. “She may have succumbed to his compulsion to lure you away, but she’s much harder to kill than that. She’ll pull through. It’s lucky for Stark that she will, because Abel would rip him to pieces if she didn’t.”
“She’s harder to kill than I am, apparently,” Deirdre said. “And I’m a phoenix.”
“Phoenixes are easier to kill than other shifters because they’re meant to die. Your strength comes in death. That’s the whole point. Unfortunately, you’ve gone ahead and killed yourself permanently this time.” Marion sighed. “It’s so strange how they always know that they’ve passed on here. They’re always so calm about it. It makes me uncomfortable.”
“Who are they?”
“Those who have died. This is the afterlife.”
“We’re in Heaven,” Deirdre said. “Oh my gods. I knew Daddy would go to Heaven, but I didn’t know—”
Marion interrupted her. “Not Heaven. Just the afterlife. This is the place in between being dead and being born again.” She lifted a finger to point at the overbearing sun. “That’s where everyone goes when they’re ready to start once more—everyone except phoenixes.”
Deirdre tipped her head back to look at Alasdair. “Is that why you’re hanging around here? Because you’re a phoenix, l
ike me?”
“He’s mundane,” Marion said. “He’s just stubborn.”
Alasdair’s arm tightened on Deirdre. “I couldn’t go until I knew you were going to be okay.”
“I died again. I think I’m about as far from okay as I get. But it’s fine—I’m here now with you.” She tried to fold herself against his chest again, but Alasdair didn’t let her.
“We don’t have much time,” he said gently.
The sun was getting brighter, hotter.
It was drawing nearer.
“What are you doing here? Who are you?” Deirdre asked Marion. She eyed the hilts of the swords. If one was the Ethereal Blade, then the other could have only been its missing twin: the Infernal Blade, a demon sword hewn from obsidian from the depths of the Nether Worlds.
Marion must have had it all along.
“You’re the Godslayer, aren’t you?” Deirdre asked.
Marion shook her head. “I only speak for her.”
“You’re the Voice.” That was what Rylie had called her.
“The Voice of God, yes,” Marion said. “The Godslayer killed Adam, Eve, and Lilith, the triad of gods who once ruled our world, and she brought about Genesis. By killing them, she assumed their role. The Godslayer became God. And I speak for her.”
“Why?” Deirdre asked.
“Because she asked very politely.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Alasdair rubbed Deirdre’s shoulder. “It’s the only answer we get, precious.”
Anger surged within Deirdre, clawing at her like a desperate animal. “Are you kidding me?” She clung to her daddy. “You’re dead because of this Godslayer. I had to live in the system because Genesis took you from me. It ruined our whole world. And now we’re here in the afterlife, and the Godslayer won’t even talk to us? Tell her to come on out!”
Marion kept smiling that faint, sad smile, grief lingering around her eyes.
“You wouldn’t be here at all if I hadn’t asked permission to bring you back. Anyone who enters the sluagh is meant to be gone. They don’t get to return to the cauldron where all death is remixed into life.” She gestured again to the sun. “But I like you, and you’ve been helpful, so I asked for a favor.”
“A favor? What kind of favor? Another chance?”
“Answers.” Marion smiled bashfully. “Ask whatever you want. She’s listening.”
