The stink of the Goad’s flesh and my burning dragonskin glove filled my nostrils. My heart-bound hand was in nerve-rending, fiery agony, but I knew I was no longer affected by the Goad’s magical suppression. No amount of physical pain could stop me now. I began to chant the ancient words to turn off the spells, one by one. The whole dimension wracked with tremors as it began to collapse.
Still chanting, I filtered the Goad’s power into Cooper. He sucked in his breath as the magical current coursed through him.
Figure it out, I thought, hoping that on some level he could hear me. Help your brothers. You can do it. You’ve lived your whole life needing to do this— don’t fail them now.
Cooper began to chant, a clear, powerful spell of life and love and forgiveness, a spell he could only have begun now that I was there to help and protect him. The brothers clustered close to him, drinking the power I fed him.
The goadlets suffocated and shriveled as the hell disintegrated around them. I dug my hand deeper into the flaming heart, simultaneously trying to crush it and suck the last of the power from the dying monster.
The vast bulk of the steaming Goad began to contract in on itself like a foul sun turning dwarf, growing hotter and hotter, the pain singing in my hand and arm more than I could imagine. It felt as if the devil’s heart was being crushed into my bones. I wasn’t sure I could draw my hand away even if I wanted to.
Cooper was drawing power fast, and so were the brothers, glowing children of light awakening and condensing into pale delicate flesh. He reached out to them, and they took hold of his arm.
I could see holes opening in the sky; the adult spirits wisped away to whatever lay beyond. Any moment now, the hell would collapse completely and we’d be crushed. Still gripping Cooper’s hand, I gave my trapped arm a mighty pull and finally jerked it free. I stuck my freed hand inside my dragonskin jacket and found one of the Warlock’s dirt-filled vials.
“Return!” I shouted as I snapped the glass.
chapter twenty-three
Palimpsest: Easy as Peanut Butter
My jaws closed on Deputy Wilson’s neck; I gave the man a hard shake and felt his spine break with a satisfying crunch. I tossed Wilson’s body aside and stared up at Rosko astride the irritable firedrake. Rosko shrugged, gave me an exaggerated salute, and reined the drake away across the sky.
The Warlock lay trussed on the grass beside Mother Karen, Jimmy, and Ginger. Out across the field in the ruined basement, Oakbrown, Paulie, and Manette were reading scrolls to permanently close the portal. Jordan’s other man Bruce was running toward a brown Jeep partially hidden in the trees. I wondered if Bruce was going to call for reinforcements, or if he was going to teleport away and set off the VHDN bomb he’d left in the Warlock’s vehicle.
I couldn’t risk the bomb going off, but I also couldn’t risk the Talents shutting Jessie’s portal. I searched Wilson’s pockets until I found the handcuff keys, then loped over to the Warlock. The others stepped back, looking scared as I approached and freed Cooper’s brother from his bonds.
The Warlock unbuckled the ball gag and tossed it into the bushes, working his jaw and spitting on the grass. “Man, I never thought I’d be this glad to see a face as ugly as yours.”
I jabbed a clawed finger toward the basement, then tapped my wrist as if I were wearing a watch.
“Yeah. I’ll go stop them,” the Warlock said, seeming to understand my pantomime. “Karen, Jimmy, come with me—Jessie and Cooper will probably need your help if they can get back at all.”
“What should I do?” Ginger was staring at me, her voice a nervous quaver.
“Go with Spiderboy; he might need your help if any more of Jordan’s goon squad shows up. Just… try to be useful, okay?” The Warlock turned away from her and hurried across the dead field, hollering “Knock it off, guys, stop the spell!”
I loped back to the Warlock’s Land Rover and pulled out the VFIDN explosive Bruce had planted. The black metal eyeball weighed about three pounds and fit in the palm of my hand. It had no obvious seams or any apparent fuse that could be separated from the rest of the device.
Ginger ran up beside me. “Is that a bomb?”
I nodded.
“Can you defuse it?”
I made my best approximation of a shrug. It’s difficult if you don’t really have shoulders.
“Let me look,” she said, then blushed slightly. “I, um, made some of these in high school. Little ones, I mean. I had nothing to do with that nun who got blown up at the Catholic school across from my house—that was totally that Lautermilk kid’s fault. Uh. Sorry. I babble a little when I’m nervous. You’re, um, kinda big and scary and stuff.”
I put the bomb in her outstretched hands. Ginger bit her lip, frowning as she inspected the bomb’s smooth body. She ran her finger over one spot on the case that to me looked identical to every other spot on the case, and pressed. A fuse popped out of the pupil.
“See? Easy as peanut butter.” Ginger pulled the fuse out and tossed it into a nearby shrub.
Not sure how to thank her, I gave her a gentle pat on the head. I steeled myself to cross the dead field, and ran to join the Warlock and the others at the basement. Halfway across, I felt the ground ripple, the air turn icy. The door to Cooper’s hell was opening; I hoped that meant that Jessie was coming back.
chapter twenty-four
Jessie’s Return
The return through the portal was fast and brutal. One moment I was crushed against Cooper at the heart of a roaring cold vortex, and the next I was flung forward onto my hands and knees on the dirty concrete floor. For one brief, wonderful moment, I thought my left hand had been magically restored. Then dead leaves smoked and caught flame around my fingers, and in the same moment my hand and forearm burst into a bright lava glow, the glow of the slain devil’s heart.
I rocked back onto my knees. My left was looking less and less like a hand, the fingers subliming into twisting tongues of red and purple plasma. The arm of my dragonskin jacket had retreated to the scarred stump where my true flesh began, but the cuff was smoking, my flesh blackening. There wasn’t any pain, not really, but a strong buzzing heat was moving through me, and every heartbeat sent a dark tormented flash through my mind, an image of the evil the Goad had wrought upon its countless victims in the hundreds of hells it had nested in and sucked dry.
It took me a moment to realize that some of the noises I was hearing weren’t just inside my head. I looked behind me, and saw the naked forms of Cooper and three very-much-alive squalling infants lying beside the pit wall. Cooper wasn’t moving, wasn’t even obviously breathing. A blond, blue-eyed toddler stood beside him, the boy’s face impassive and curious.
I scrambled over to Cooper and yanked my surviving right glove off with my teeth—discovering too late that the glove and my dragonskins were spattered with the Goad’s foul, bitter black ichor—and checked the pulse at his neck. He took a ragged breath and moaned a little at my touch, but did not awaken. I brushed his curly hair away from his forehead and felt along his scalp and neck for injuries. Superficially, at least, he seemed unhurt.
“Jessie?” Pal’s voice was strangely distorted.
I looked up. Standing at the top of the cinder-block wall was a huge, shaggy monster with an eight-legged body vaguely like that of a spider. Valved spiracles ran in double rows on the underside of its black, chitinous abdomen. It had a four-eyed head that reminded me of a saber-toothed tiger by way of a mescaline hallucination. But its fur bore the rough coloring of a ferret.
I blinked hard several times, my stone eye shuttering through several unhelpful views, hoping that what I was seeing was a hallucination and it was all just a matter of getting my head clear of the Goad’s psychic poison. But the monster at the edge of the basement wall didn’t change tine tiny bit.
“Jesus,” I croaked, my throat aching like I hadn’t attempted speech in years. “Pal, is that you?”
The monster nodded. “I’m afraid so.”
“Oh my goodness,” exclaimed Mother Karen, hurrying down the steps toward the infants. “Who are these babies?”
“They’re … Cooper’s little brothers,” I replied, squinting up at the horizon as I realized I was hearing the distant flap of leathery wings.
A dozen armored dragons with human riders were flying toward the field. More enforcers from the governing circle. They were perhaps three or four minutes away.
An image burst through my attempts to keep it down: A dragon writhed, shrieking, impaled on huge stakes above a burning field. Goadlets gnawed on its flesh. I felt my knees go rubbery, and my left arm glowed hot. What had I absorbed from that monster?
“Are you okay?”
I realized I had doubled over, and Mother Karen was peering at me, concerned.
“I’m fine,” I lied through gritted teeth. “This… it’s all… long story. Dragons. Gotta take care of that.”
I forced myself to stand up straight. My arm was blazing now, flames crackling like a tree in a wildfire, and I was feeling real pain deep in the bones of my upper arm and shoulder. Part of the Goad’s lava heart had stuck to my flesh, and was devouring me. I didn’t know how much time I might have left.
Karen had picked up one of the infants and was rocking him in her arms, trying to quiet and comfort him. “These babies—”
“Take care of ‘em. Lots of love. Gotta leave now.” I marched myself up the stairs, and Pal stilted around to meet me.
“Are you okay?” he asked in that weird voice of his.
Oh Lord, I’m not even close to okay, I thought back, afraid I might start screaming if I tried to speak.
I think I’m dying. But Cooper’s alive. I got him out. Him and his brothers. Fucking Jordan left them there. He knew they were in there, but he just left them there.
“What happened to them all? What happened to Cooper? Where did those children come from?” Pal asked me.
Do you really want to know?
He paused, blinked, then nodded.
Trying to describe what had happened seemed impossible; there wasn’t time, and I simply didn’t have the words. The dark images were coming too hard and too fast to suppress. They crowded every edge of my consciousness like the goadlets crowding at the farmhouse window. I raised my blazing hand, whispered an old word for “relic,” and released a single memory the Goad had taken from Corvus. It emerged as a tiny curl of blue plasma that floated toward Pal, settled on his forehead, and disappeared.
Pal stumbled backward, flinching, shaking his fearsome head as if he’d been stung. He fell, retching. While part of me sympathized with his revulsion, the rest wished I could’ve passed off a larger memory, and with it greater relief from the hideous pressure in my mind.
It was an algophage, I thought to him. And I heart-jacked the fucker before I killed it so we could use its energy to free Cooper’s little brothers and give them the life they deserved.
The dragons were visible now, great red beasts with bronze armor, their hide-clad riders armed with magic staves, shotguns, and grenade launchers. Clearly they’d armed themselves to thoroughly annihilate any fell beasts and foul demons that the governing circle had supposed might have emerged from Cooper’s hell.
I took a deep breath, intending to shout up at them that there were children down here, dammit, they needed to back off and let me explain, but instead what came out was a long string of angry expletives. Unable to stop myself, I shouted hair-curling English curses that morphed into inhuman Goadspeak as the men on the dragons started taking aim with their weapons and before I knew it I’d raised the burning hand.
The words wouldn’t stop coming, and the diabolic energy I’d absorbed from the Goad was coming with them. Purple globes of plasma exploded from the palm of my distorted hand toward the men and burst around them like fireworks. Burning memories of torment showered down on them. The men and dragons at the periphery scattered, fleeing, and those hit worst vainly fought the empty air, shrieking with madness, their sophisticated weapons and mission forgotten.
I felt a brief bit of relief before more horrors swarmed up inside my mind to replace what I’d cast off. Was there no end to them?
A bright crack rent the sky above me, and a lightning-framed hole began to open. A crystalline Virtus as wide as an Olympic swimming pool began to descend.
“Sweet Goddess, can this get worse? We’ve got to get out of here,” Pal said, coming up behind me and tugging at my jacket.
“No. I don’t think I’m leaving,” I heard myself say, pulling away from his strong grip.
The Virtus’s cold diamond eyes fixed on me. “You have disobeyed our orders,” it boomed. “You have violated the prohibition against grand necromancy. You and all who emerged with you from the algophage dimension shall be expunged.”
“Wait,” I shouted. “Mr. Jordan—”
“Nothing you have to say is relevant.”
The cold dismissal shocked me to the soles of my feet. It took me a moment to find my voice. “But he’s been tricking you! He’s why this happened!”
“His past actions are of no present concern to us.”
“How can you fucking say that?” I screamed at the Virtus. The blood was humming in my ears.
The Virtus responded by hurling a bright plasma tentacle straight at my head, fast as a bullet. There was no time to duck. No time to run. I acted on instinct and raised my left hand.
The tentacle connected with my fiery palm in a shower of sparks, slipped off, lancing toward my heart. I grabbed the Virtus’s sting and whipped it around my forearm. The sparks were a bright blue fountain, hot and cold at the same time, and I had to shield my face with my right arm to keep from being blinded. My dragonskin jacket was smoking under the cascade. Not knowing what else to do, I yanked the tentacle as hard as I could.
The Virtus jerked me high into the air. I held on for dear life.
“What happened here matters!” I screamed as it tried to fling me off onto the ground. “Jordan was supposed to help—”
“Jordan has kept order.” The Virtus’s booming voice seemed to be all around me. “Or he did until you interfered. You are disorder. And I shall expunge you. That is all that should matter to you now.”
No. I’d make this cold-blooded spirit of the air acknowledge the injustice Jordan had perpetuated on his own family if it was the last thing I ever did. I chanced a glance upward—the Virtus’s pulsing magma heart loomed above me, big as my car.
A part of me was chilled to realize the core similarity between our supposed guardian spirits and the Goad I’d killed. The rest of me had no time to wonder. I began to chant. Released my grip on the tentacle and began to pound the worst of the memories straight into the spirit’s core.
I was falling back, straight toward the ground, but I kept hammering the Virtus with the vile energy I was desperate to be rid of. The spirit was too pitiless to feel the primal horror any human would feel, but I could see it stilled, shuddering. Too bad I was about to hit the ground and get splattered all across the field—I was sure I was close to making a real impression on the imperious bastard.
Somewhere below me, a creaky, out-of-tune organ started playing a weird melody.
The tiny hairs on my skin rose at the touch of friendly magic. My fall slowed, stopped, and then I began to rise back toward the Virtus, buoyed on the calliope charm.
“What worked on the Goad might work on a Virtus,” Pal told me. “Don’t hesitate, or we’re all dead.”
I rose to meet its heart and plunged my left hand inside. The jolt threatened to knock my teeth right out of their sockets, and the Virtus made a noise like two freight trains colliding at full speed.
My head was flooded with alien mathematics, cold equations it might take me a hundred years to comprehend, the technomancy of true future divination and probability. I could grasp just a tiny drop of the fire-
hose blast of image and information. It was baffling and exhilarating, awful and wonderful.
So many worlds, so many futures, and humankind lay close to the center, Talented primitives the Virtii feared as much as they were capable of fearing anything. But the Virtii had been given a holy task as shepherds, so they’d reluctantly resisted wiping out Talented humanity. All the restrictions, all the interference—the Virtii were managing their own risk while adhering to the letter of their ancient duty to help the naked apes rise past the squalor of their origins.
But who ruled the Virtii? I still couldn’t see.
And in there was a different kind of fear. A fear specifically concerning me, a fear they’d held long before Cooper had ever been sucked back into the family hell.
I tried to explore further, but the mortally wounded Virtus twisted away from me. It tumbled Earthward, threatening to yank me down in its wake.
Pal’s tune strengthened, pulled me safely away.
I watched as the giant living orrery crashed onto the field, its diamond eyes cracking, its punctured heart steaming on the dry ground. Its power still tingled inside my flames, a live current connecting me to the last of the life inside its body. I concentrated, raised my hand, twitched my fingers. The remains of the Virtus rose a few feet from the ground, reassembled into disjointed orbitals, danced in response to my movements.
Then I lost my concentration, and the Virtus’s corpse collapsed again, dissolving into glowing mathematical mist that evaporated into the sunset sky.
“Did you just do what I think you just did?” Pal asked as he sang me down to stand beside him on the grass. “Did you just make the Virtus your… your puppet?”
“Well… yeah. I guess I did.”
The flood of logic from the Virtus had illuminated every dark corner of my mind in an icy perspective. The horrors the Goad had left behind were scorpions trapped in amber, twisted specimens preserved in jars. I could hold them up to the light to examine them, or push them to the back of my brain and ignore them. They’d been rendered inert, but I knew they’d come alive if I broke them from their cold shells. They were my weapons now.
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