by C. V. Larkin
Auggie shrugged his shoulders. "We find it more sporting that way."
Tian balled her hands into fists at her sides. "Our lives, all of our lives, and safe passage out of the Slaugh kingdom and into the mortal coil in exchange for the return of your sacred space."
There was no sound and no movement in the dark. There was no response from the creatures clustered at the edges of the circle, but there had been an earnest shift. A profound sadness lingered in the night.
"It is a dead space," Auggie said looking away for the first time. Years of bitterness and regret filled each syllable. Tian walked forward and sank to her knees in front of the nightmare. She didn't touch it, didn't move or speak until it met her eyes.
"We are not what we once were," she said. A wealth of sorrow, and staggering breadth of love weighted the words.
Auggie's eyes took on a strange sheen as he reached a hand out to touch her face. The air thinned, flirting with a consistency that threatened asphyxiation. Sio choked as the oxygen flowed from his lungs and collected like lead shot in his cells, pulling them faster towards their inevitable resting place. The creature's hand moved to Tian's neck, gripping with enough force to bruise.
Maybe he intended to play hero. Maybe he needed to feel the electric connection of Tian's skin to make the world real again. Whatever it was that propelled him forward flared like an explosion in his soul as he dropped to the ground behind her. Sio twined his fingers with her own and reached around her with his other hand to grip Auggie's deceptively frail wrist.
The exquisite sense of clarity barreled back into his system and for the first time his attention hit a snag on the gnarled vines in the center of the circle. They were littered with bits of doll parts, hand carved toys, filthy scraps of material, and tattered ribbons. Something in his chest heaved, breaking itself on the tragedy of it all. Sio was intimately familiar with the heartbreak of loss; the ability of innocence and faith to slip away in quiet slivers until one day the realization dawned that they were gone, but not precisely when they had left.
We are not what we once were.
On the heels of those words came that honeyed fire. It flowed like syrup through his blood vessels, bringing a complex tide of emotion. The pressure was suffocating. It hit the limits of his skin and pushed harder. Tian gasped for breath in front of him. He released Auggie's wrist and the creature sank to its knees, crying thick black tears, and staring up at them as if beholding the face of God.
Sio didn't know what compelled him to remove the dagger from his waist band. He watched with an odd joy and a detached sense of growing horror as he brought Tian's hand to his mouth. The midnight world held its collective breath. He kissed her palm with the barest brush of his lips and felt the silken heat of her skin. The energy coursing through his body hummed. He was breathing hard by the time he brought the knife up, and panting as he slid it, in a sharp jolt of agony, through the center of their spooned palms.
Chapter 12
Blood of my Blood
The blood welled in thick lines, pouring from their hands as if it were backed by an insane amount of pressure. It glowed deep red like it was on fire, a liquid ruby night light flaring to life in the oily darkness. Loren watched, eyes riveted same as every other broken toy in the place, and tried to pinpoint exactly why, out of everything that had happened, this consensual stabbing incident freaked him the fuck out most. He cajoled his malfunctioning hardware to get a long lost flicker of rationale to drag him out of this acid trip, but his skull mud was tweaked and it wasn't happening.
Oh yeah tough guy, you know all about real terror and violence. Famous last words, asshat.
Whatever was happening was more real than the last ten years of his life and he preferred to assume that he hadn't slipped into some sort of whacked schitzo delusion. A small part of him hinted at the possibility that he'd taken a swan dive off the platform at the T-station, but he couldn't make the rest of his synapses buy into it.
What the lil bastards were buying into was the serious sex mojo rolling off the bleeding duo to his left. Watching them tripped every hard up voyeuristic cell in his body and even found a few new ones. They were fully clothed, standing so close together they practically overlapped. Sio eventually removed the dagger from their impaled palms, but instead of making pain noises they gasped like the guy was sliding out, doing something way more intimate than pesky metal removal. Tian bit her lip, eyes wide, pupils fully dilated until it was hard to tell what color her irises were. The big guy stashed the dagger and then leaned down to run his lower lip up the column of her throat.
The pressure in the circle skyrocketed and a feather light caress throbbed its way up Loren's neck. He freaked out; jumped like one of those little demons had goosed him. This whole situation was out of his comfort zone, not that he'd had a big case of the warm cuddly before. Thing was, he had years' worth of hetero instincts geared up to appreciate the female he'd almost gotten shanked in the face over, because he couldn't keep his mouth shut. He'd also been lusting after Sio, though, and that was new. As he watched them together, the fact that he wasn't sure which one he was paying more attention to sent wild twinges of what the crap straight to the epicenter of his brain.
Thoughts ricocheted around his skull with an intensity that made him light headed. He stared hard at one of the stones at the edge of the circle and swallowed down the fear-fueled bile as everything he'd been failing to process hovered around his head like a swarm of angry gnats. Why was it that this insane amount of unreal translated into not unreal at all? The panicked flutter in his gut reminded him he wasn't dead yet, which was cool, but the idea that it might not be far off wasn't.
The bad things that were attached to mutilated hands created ripples in his peripheral vision, disappearing as he tried to look at them. The creepy fucking lighting grew brighter, pulsing in a soft rhythm like a heartbeat and try as he may, Loren couldn't keep his eyes off the couple next to him for a prolonged period of time.
It was the kind of pull anyone in their right mind would pay to have and kill to get next to. The air was saturated in pheromones that made him want to retire to a quiet corner and get real personal with an economy sized box of Kleenex. Feeling the heat of an uncharacteristic blush creeping up his collar, Loren stared at the ground.
Neon bright blood ran in tiny rivers channeled by the grooves in between unearthly bright bones. Those rivers spilled into the pit in the center of the circle and there was a moment of pressurized quiet as the tension in his body began to build. As his anxiety reached a crescendo the dark world warped and bent, shimmering like an illusion in his field of vision before imploding.
A mind bending sound barreled outward with the resonance of a gong. It shook the ground beneath him, threw his heart up into his throat, and made him half deaf to hear it. Gouts of fire erupted from the pit and spread to a crazy tangle of vines he hadn't noticed. It raced upward, shooting off burning sparks as if those vines had been soaked in gasoline and laced with gunpowder. The flames were blinding now that his eyes had adjusted to all the night shade lighting and it took every scrap of will power he had not to shield them and lower his gun. Tian had said the thing would be ineffectual. He knew that now, he even agreed with her, but he couldn't talk himself into lowering the muzzle. Without the damn thing he'd probably just curl into a ball and sob like a baby.
Loren cringed away from the solar flare in time to catch a collective hiss from the peanut gallery that made his stomach crawl in a sickly bubble of panic through his esophagus. An ice cold breeze stirred itself from nothing, winding its way around the circle. It brought the electric tang of fall and the promise of a long inevitable winter in its wake.
The retina killing brightness dimmed, the vines phosphoresced, rising from the aftermath. It took time to readjust to the new lighting scheme, but when he did, what he saw made him wish he were blind. There was a reason dark things lurked in dark places.
A reason.
The slu
ggish churning in Loren's skull indicated that the mud was trying to make sense of things, to understand, to survive what he was looking at without a full on neurological breakdown. It didn't work. He'd scratched his record and his brain was repeating only one moment in time. Too bad it was the wrong one. For a second he wondered if he had ringside seats to the end of the world, or if this was what the beginning had looked like.
All he knew for certain was that he was drenched in a cold sweat he couldn't control, and that the gun in his hand was laughable in the face of all of the terrible beauty that would ruin him forever. He peeled his eyes from the vast crystal ocean above and realized with a desperate terror that the circle was no longer empty. The glass was more than half full and not in a good way.
A thousand jigsaw rugrat nightmares were packed in like sardines. Their wide obsidian sockets brimmed to overflowing with inky tears that streamed down each and every face. Several small heads tilted back as their mouths elongated in inhuman ways. Bronze clouds erupted from upturned faces expanding at a freakish rate until they hung massive, writhing, and weightless in the air. Bright flashes lit them up from the inside, revealing the brain bending horrors inside. Loren could feel himself hyperventilating. Telltale gray spots appeared in his field of vision, blessedly blocking out large sections of the clouds.
He barely felt the jolt of pain that licked up his thighs as his patellas made contact with the scattered femurs in the floor. He railed against the involuntary ascent of his eyes as they made their way toward the back of his skull. And like that, the whole dark fairyland winked out and he was down for the count.
****
Her hand should hurt. Tian focused on the thought despite the languid metallic haze of possession that had bloomed under her skin. Her damned hand should hurt. But it didn't. It wasn't that she couldn't feel it; wasn't as if she was numb, or in shock, or simply unaware of the amount of damage that occurred when a piece of metal went through a sensitive area. Except, even knowing that it didn't hurt.
Worse, what was happening with it felt too much like sex for comfort. Sio's blood fountained in hot jets from his body and into her own. She gritted her teeth against the searing sparks that thrust their way up her arm and into the overworked organ in her chest. She couldn't remember the last time anything had felt so good and didn't think it had. Ever.
She panted against the sensory overload. Dark forms reminded her of raven's wings as they fluttered inside the skin of her already super-heated torso, fanning the metallic bonfire of the goddess in her body. Sio put that velvet soft pout against her skin and dragged it in an electric caress up her neck. Her legs buckled and her vision fogged like glass. Tian's bloody hand spasmed in his own as she clutched at him hard enough to break bone.
She heard the sharp exhalation of his stifled groan as he slid his right hand around her torso, pulling her in tighter against him. An unmistakable hardness ground against her lower back. Sio's hand slid up her ribcage, coming to rest on the bare skin over her heart at the neck line of her shirt.
Her body shredded itself. The brightness that flowed in caused the whole world to go white as a snowstorm. She was blind to everything, but the furious glare spun with golden tracers. Tian opened her mouth to scream, but it wasn't her voice that expanded outward. The Goddess's divine response spilled from her throat, tearing the skin asunder and battering the fabric of Tir Na Nog. It swallowed the eternity, reverberating in haunting, ethereal, deafening, unrivaled, perfection. The magic swelled and burst like a surfacing bubble, pouring out in a rush of cold fire. The remains of the dead rumbled under foot, trembling, grinding together as her vision began to reassert itself. Tian saw and found no words.
She watched in silent awe as the goddess' presence blazed beneath her ribs. Molten incandescence devoured the vines, burning away the decay and the centuries of heartbreak. The divine spark extended upward and plunged, steaming, into a vast body of clear water. Light fractured in the dazzling prismatic array of a hundred vivid colors that showed in startling contrast to the rich velvet background. It was like standing at the center of a new born star. Shining fun house mirror droplets floated from the abyss below. They met the hovering body of water with the fat happy splashes of a long sought reunion and assimilated into the depths as giant twirling plumes of smoky quicksilver.
Fae creatures, long lost to the world of man, greeted the surface in the hovering ocean, magnified by the way the light reflected through the water. The liquid mass boiled with the commotion spilling from its hidden depths. Jarringly bright salt water colors presented themselves in a dazzling array and the rapturous expressions on so many inhuman faces beamed with triumph and hope.
A cold wind spun its way through the circle, tingling against her skin and raising the hair on her neck. Tian remembered the electric eager thrill of being a child and wanted to laugh or cry with manic excitement. She wasn't sure which, and at the moment the two didn't seem that different. She couldn't remember the last time Tir Na Nog had felt...magical.
She couldn't remember the last time she found even the best of Faerie beautiful either and truly, the dark horde was beautiful. Beautiful and terrible; filled with such a keen edged wild grace that it brought pain to look at them. Her skin was searing hot, too tight on her frame, and humming with the blood magic afterglow and latent desire radiating from the points where Sio's body still connected with her own.
Sio.
She tilted her head back, craning her neck so she could see his face without breaking contact. His unguarded expression was one of awe and tender amazement. A gift that bore witness to a thousand prayers answered. It was the diametric opposite of what she'd seen when she'd walked in on him in the bathroom. The marked change healed a stray piece in her soul. It healed something she hadn't known was broken or had existed at all.
The breeze of wild magic whipped around them, caressing overheated skin and manipulating the delicate tendrils of steam it had coaxed from their flesh. Tian realized with a start that there was moisture on her face that had nothing to do with condensation. She would have looked elsewhere, broken contact to wipe the tears away, but the goddess' soul was so effervescent she could do little else but accept the unexpected pleasure of release.
Her eyes drifted to the Slaugh Lord Augustine where he'd fallen to the ground. The tears slid steadily down his face as he focused on an object shrouded in black fire at the center of the circle. The thing pulsed with meaty rhythmic contractions that matched the call from her own organ. Tian clenched Sio's hand, sliding through the blood slick points of contact that saw his fingers laced through her own. He tore his gaze from the oceans above and made an attempt to return to her, getting caught halfway. Another jolt flowed through their physical connection.
The Slaugh that had once hovered at the periphery of the Nemed now swarmed it. Thousands of misshapen forms congregated in a space that shouldn't have been able to contain them. Yet it did, because they belonged to it. Not all of them stood, some had fallen to their knees, and others had abased themselves as close to the bones as they could get.
The red caps hovered several feet from the ground. Their disfigured mouths were thrown open with jaws unhinged to make room for the wild bronze clouds that billowed out. The clouds expanded to proportions that dwarfed the bodies they'd come from. A clap of thunder sounded from the building specters and Tian swallowed the litany of profanity that stacked against her teeth. The thunderheads lit up, spotlighting the bloody phantasm of nightmares within. A cold wave of dread pissed its way through her veins. Her hand began to bleed again, accompanied by all the pain she'd missed in the first go round.
There was downward movement in her periphery. Sio must have registered more of the fall than she had, because his hand left her breast bone and shot out, grabbing hold of Loren's bicep on the descent. Another clap of thunder hit. The healed scratches from the succubus burned as they unzipped themselves. Sio swore and disengaged, grabbing Loren with both hands and hoisting the unconsciou
s man onto a wide shoulder. Tian dropped to her knees in front of Augustine and waved a hand in his face.
"Your Nemed is silent no longer, but they will die if we stay here. Do you understand?" she said.
"It would be a most unforgivable breech of hospitality to slaughter those responsible for the gifts that have been bestowed within our boundaries," Augustine said. He ogled the crackling bronze clouds rising into the atmosphere.
Another round of thunder and lightning battered them. The center of her chest screamed pain through all available receptors as the clouds opened up and poured blood from both sides.
"We need a safe place that is not here....now."
It was the Nemed that responded to her plea. Bones shifted and twisted, clacking against one another until Tian was left staring at a dark hole cut out of the ground. She could hardly see through the bloody downpour as she stumbled over to where Sio was kneeling with the human. She took shallow breaths, trying not to wretch or pass out from gamey death smell. Fucking red caps.
She reached out to help Sio up, but he jerked away from her.
"Do. Not. Touch me right now," he said. She recoiled.
"How's about you have your tantrum when death isn't a likelihood."
Her throat was starting to bleed. She grabbed the front of Sio's shirt, making damn sure their skin didn't come into contact, and dragged them all into the abyss.
Chapter 13
The Waiting Game
If the aerial acrobatics of his internal organs were any sort of barometer, they'd been falling for a good clip. It was black as pitch, so it wasn't as if he had anything else to go by. Sio let out a breath and tried to rein back the dread spilling into his jaw. Too far. He'd gone way too goddamn far.
Think of something else, prick. Anything else.
