Labyrinth of Stars

by Marjorie M. Liu

  I turned away, doubling over as I began puking into the grass. Nothing came up, but it left me shaken, dizzy. It didn’t feel right, either. In fact—

  “Maxine,” hissed Zee. “Door opened.”

  Door opened. I knew what that meant, and dread spread through me. The only door Zee ever talked about was the door to the Labyrinth—that quantum highway that connected countless worlds. The last two times it had opened, I’d felt it—just like this.

  Someone had come through. Or something.

  “Hurry.” I tried to stand, grabbing Grant’s arm, hauling him upright. He struggled with his cane, found his feet. But he didn’t run. He stood stock-still, head tilted as though listening. Raw and Aaz were doing the same, but looking in the opposite direction. Zee disappeared into the shadows.

  My right hand tingled: pins and needles. No flesh around my fingers, palm, and wrist—parts of my forearm, lost—covered in a living, sentient metal, an armor that was quicksilver, dreaming. I could feel it dreaming now, dreaming itself to awareness, and it was not a good sensation. It was a warning.

  Grant’s hand stretched out, slowly, as if to push me behind him. I took his hand, instead—squeezing it hard.

  A sudden lightness fell around my throat. Two demons are heavier than one—and in the space of a heartbeat, Mal dropped into the shadows of my hair and disappeared. I glimpsed, almost in the same moment, his reappearance on my husband’s shoulders—

  —just as a hail of darts whistled down upon us.

  CHAPTER 2

  I didn’t think. I turned to my husband, ready to throw him to the ground and cover his body. But for once, he was faster. I squeaked in surprise as he tossed me to the grass and dropped on top of me. It only took seconds. My heart thundered, and his breath rasped hot in my face.

  I heard the thud of darts in the grass. Grant flinched, whuffing out his breath—and not in a good, startled way. I knew what hurt sounded like.

  I tried rolling him off me. He protested through gritted teeth, but I just pushed harder. He weighed more than he should have, and I saw Raw peer around his shoulder to look at me.

  “Up,” I snapped, and the little demon disappeared. So did the extra weight. I shoved hard, squirming sideways. Grant couldn’t hold on to me.

  The ground around us looked like a porcupine had exploded. Slender slips of wood wavered upright in the grass, not as long as arrows or as thick, but just about the length of a small chopstick. I stared at them, stunned. An unfamiliar smell hung in the air, stinging and vinegary. Made me sneeze—

  —just as a spear the length of my mother’s station wagon slammed into my chest.

  Or tried to. Zee leapt into the air, taking the strike against his ribs. It was a thunderous weapon, and would have torn a hole in me the size of my fist—but the force of the impact didn’t even make the little demon fly sideways. The spear broke around him, showering us in splinters. I heard more whistles, more spears raining down—Raw grabbed one of them out of the air and threw it back into the darkness. Aaz blocked the other from hitting Grant and ate the tip of it—a jagged, barbed shaft of iron that looked better for hunting whales than people.

  Zee disappeared into the shadows. A moment later, I heard a deep-throated scream.

  I’d forgotten about the demons and their music, but the drums stopped as soon as that scream hit the air. The silence was abrupt, complete. My heartbeat, Grant’s ragged breathing—a faint hiss in my ear—were suddenly all that existed, more real, more substantial than flesh.

  But not as substantial as the severed head that rolled past me down the hill.

  It was the width of a tire, and I glimpsed a contorted open mouth, huge white eyes, and sloped skull that all together resembled the misshapen face of giant-sized clay Gumby doll. Even the skin looked green, but in this darkness I couldn’t tell for certain. If my vision hadn’t been as good at night as it was in the day, I would never have seen it at all.

  A bone-chilling howl rose from across my land—a cacophonic shriek of enraged demonic voices so discordant I wanted to cover my ears. But even that didn’t matter because I finally saw what was attacking us, and it was as terrible as I’d thought it would be.

  Barrel-chested, bullish. All around us, shaking the earth—hulking, towering shapes more than five times our height, whose feet slammed into the trembling earth like pistons. Only at the last second did I catch impressions of details: naked, bloated, torsos; thick legs jiggling with fat and muscle, those startling white frog-eyes missing lids. I couldn’t count them all, but their bodies blocked out the night, and their mouths were slick, wet pits. Big enough to chew on me.

  No chance of that. Raw and Aaz tore through them like their flesh was made of butter, plunging headfirst into pale chests that cracked open and poured out blood. Zee darted among them, flying from shadow to shadow, and each second he appeared it was to slash his claws across a throat, with such violence and strength their heads tore off, sometimes hanging from a ribbon of flesh as their bodies crashed.

  Grant shouted a single word. It sounded slightly slurred, but the power should have still been there. All the power he needed to possess these creatures and end this.

  Only, it didn’t work. The creatures, those giants, kept coming.

  Mal nipped my ear. I whipped around, heart pounding, and swung my right arm. A blaze of light burned back the night. The creature nearest us bellowed, shielding his eyes. I didn’t look at what my hand had become—I already knew. The armor had transformed into a sword: silver, serrated, growing out of my forearm with smooth perfection.

  I could feel my hand, somewhere beneath the armor—but the armor was alive, the armor was part of me, and in that moment I was furious, desperate. I’d never been much of a fighter. Left that to the boys. But what I lacked in martial arts skills, I made up for in sheer dumb luck—a little bit of courage—and a whole lot of stubbornness.

  I darted forward, dodging the whistling arc of a falling ax, then sidestepped again as the ax almost swung, blade first, onto my head. The creature was moving too fast to predict his movements—and while distance would have been safer, Grant was behind me, on the ground and still struggling to rise.

  Fast, but not strategic. Not even a little. The next time the ax came down, I lopped off the hand that held it. His wrist was thick as a tree trunk, but I felt no resistance in flesh or bone: I could have been tearing silk with my bare hands. The creature reared back, roaring in pain, and I slashed my sword across the only other parts of him I could reach: his knees.

  His lower legs toppled sideways from his body, and he toppled with them—Zee appearing at the last moment to knock him backward, so he didn’t fall on me and Grant. His screams were cut off seconds later.

  We were no longer alone. Mahati warriors swarmed the remaining three giants, slashing flesh with their razor-sharp fingers—and accompanying them were the Osul, who climbed those swinging bloated limbs like big cats wrestling with writhing trees. Some of the crimson-skinned Yorana had come, but they hung back like it was a spectator event, watching and smiling—smiling even more when they saw Grant still struggling to sit up. I wanted to kill them.

  Instead, I fell on my knees beside Grant. Sitting still made me dizzy, and my heart pounded too fast. I hadn’t fought anything in months, and battling the unfamiliar—being ambushed—was even worse. Although nothing was as bad as seeing my husband on the ground, grimacing in pain—his lower leg covered in blood.

  He had his hand up, trying weakly to fend off Mal, who was licking his face. An old human woman crouched over him, too: Mary, her white hair thick, wild, sticking out at electrocuted angles like some Einstein wig. No fat on her body, just leathery brown skin that covered more hard muscle than a starved wolf. She gripped a machete in her wrinkled, leathery right hand. In the other she held three darts, blood on their tips.

  “M’fine,” Grant told us, but he was having trouble keeping his eyes open. Mary sniffed the darts—and her lips peeled back in disgust.

 
“Poisoned?” I asked her.

  “Badder than,” she muttered, and threw the darts away. Rummaging around the big pocket of her housedress, she pulled out a clear plastic bag of fresh cannabis leaves, tore it open, and tried to stuff a handful into Grant’s mouth.

  “Come on,” he said, still slurring his words—but obviously not that out of it. “Mary.”

  “You gotta be kidding,” I said. “What are you doing, Mary?”

  She ignored me, finally stuffing the leaves into his mouth. “Chew. Swallow.”

  “Mary,” I said sharply.

  “Antidote.” Mary poked Grant hard in the chest. “Hurry.”

  I’d known the old woman for years, and while my opinion of her had transformed over time—from homeless, crazed, drug addict to a wiser-than-she-looked-even-when-she-sounded-crazy otherworldly assassin—she was never a fool.

  Two other things that had never changed: her devotion to Grant—and her devotion to marijuana, in all its forms. In fact, I’d pretty much decided she needed weed for some biological function given that I never saw her when she wasn’t eating it, sniffing it, or cooking with it. Now I wondered if there was another reason why she was so paranoid about keeping it close.

  Grant grimaced as he chewed, but when he finally swallowed the bundle of leaves, Mary shoved more into his mouth. He didn’t protest. In fact, he looked stronger.

  I let myself breathe again and looked around. We were surrounded by giant corpses, all of them covered in blood, leaking blood, in some cases still spurting. The air smelled rotten. The dead stank, no matter what species they were.

  Mahati warriors perched gracefully on top of bloated stomachs, examining bodies, poking at the heads. The Osul were sniffing the remains, tasting blood with the tips of their tongues and growling with satisfaction. The Yorana had already disappeared.

  The sword still covered my right hand, absorbing the blood covering its blade like roots soaking up water. Time to sleep, I told the armor. I could almost hear its resistance in my head—just one presence out of many floating inside me—but the metal receded, shimmering in a soft light that revealed my hand. Mary watched the transformation and grunted with approval.

  Zee and the boys pressed close. Raw and Aaz were grinning, each dragging a bloodied baseball bat behind them. I didn’t think they’d had this much fun in months. Zee, on the other hand, looked troubled.

  I was terrified.

  Too late to run, I thought. We’ve already been found.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE thing about demons is that they never lie.

  They’ll hunt you, torture you, eat you—but that’s nature and habit, a particular need to consume the pain of others. Biology, really.

  Also, they’re just assholes.

  But they do have rules, a code of honor, and even though I should have slaughtered every single one of them when I had the chance (Zee and the boys being the exception—because it’s like that, with family), it was their honor that kept me from making that final, destructive decision.

  Honor means dignity. And dignity is that common dream that seems to unite our disparate species.

  Blame sentience, Grant once said. Blame hearts, blame the possibility that the universe, no matter how vast, doesn’t allow for a true separation of spirit.

  All of us, one, in some way.

  Which is a real pain in the ass.

  “SO,” Grant said, staring up at the night sky, “this is awkward.”

  “You’re my hero,” I told him, in total seriousness. “Now, can you stand?”

  He could, and he did, picking up a dart in the process and smelling the tip. I took a whiff, too. Same stinging, vinegary scent—only ten times stronger. I sneezed again.

  “You recognized this,” Grant said to Mary, holding up the dart to Mal, who ate it.

  “Old weapon. Old, but effective. Doesn’t kill. Just scrambles mind.” The old woman tapped his head with a gnarled finger. “Keeps you from focusing. Makes you normal, with normal voice.”

  “Permanently?” I asked, trying not to show my horror that something like this could exist.

  “Maybe, sometimes.” Mary kicked at some of the darts with disgust. “Poisoned many Lightbringers before we knew what happened. Poisoned them, stole them, studied them. Aetar could not have won war without it.”

  I risked a glance at Grant, who had reached inside his shirt to touch a pendant that had belonged to his mother—and his father. His father, whom he had never known. His father, who was not of this world, just as Grant’s mother wasn’t—or even Mary. Their world, gone, destroyed in a war with the same immortal creatures who had made my bloodline and fought the demons.

  Grant’s world had been the first world, the only world, where humans had ever existed. Same world on which humanity lost its freedom, to become the slaves and playthings for the Aetar—who then proceeded to seed countless worlds, including earth, with human DNA.

  We weren’t alone in the universe. Not by a long shot. We were the stuff that Aetar dreams were made of. The giants dead around us had been grown from the same genetic material. Countless other creatures in the universe could claim a similar ancestry, even if they didn’t know it. Only demons weren’t related. Something else had made them, even if it was just nature and an accident.

  Grant said, in a strained voice, “So. They want me alive.”

  “Alive, harmless, so you cannot kill them. Last of the free Lightbringers,” Mary said, running her thumb over the tip of her machete. “New flesh to play with.”

  My husband glanced at me and my stomach. No, he wasn’t the last. Our daughter would have his gift. But that just made the Aetar even more dangerous.

  “How did you know marijuana would be the antidote?” I asked Mary.

  A strange expression passed over her face, oddly guarded. I’d seen her fierce, delighted, crazed—but never secretive.

  “Recognized it,” she muttered, as if she was confessing something terrible. “Same plant was on our world.”

  I frowned, sharing a quick look with Grant.

  No chance to ask. Dek chirped at me, and I turned to see the demon lord of the Mahati clan striding toward us, his hands bloodied but with a glint in his eye that was quietly, deeply, satisfied.

  “Young Queen,” said Lord Ha’an in a soft voice; giving Zee a nod, as well. Raw and Aaz were prowling around the dead giants, poking them with their baseball bats.

  “Hey,” I said, craning my neck to look at him. He was so tall, his people had been forced to cut the low-lying branches of the trees so that he wouldn’t keep knocking his head. Ropes of silver hair fell into long, knotted braids, braids woven into silver chains of chiming hooks tied like armor around his bull-like broad chest—also the color of silver. His fingers were as long as pitchfork tines, longer than my forearm. Just as sharp.

  The polite reverence in the demon lord’s expression faded as soon as he looked at Grant. It wasn’t with hostility, but uncertainty—the kind reserved for those freaky unknowns: like my husband, who looked harmless but could kill Ha’an and his people with nothing but the sound of his voice.

  I could kill him just as easily, but I was more demon than human. Funny, how that could put some folks at ease.

  “Lord . . . Cooperon,” Ha’an greeted Grant, awkwardly. “I smell human blood. You are wounded?”

  “Nothing serious,” he said.

  A frown touched the demon lord’s mouth. “Show me where you are hurt.”

  Grant hesitated, then bent to pull up the ankle of his jeans. I did it for him. The darts had pierced his bad leg, and leaning on his cane made it awkward to reach down.

  Lord Ha’an crouched, licking his long fingers clean of blood. I hoped he wasn’t going to touch Grant, but he did, using his knuckles to gently press the skin around the three holes in my husband’s calf. No fresh blood oozed out, but he’d lost enough. Zee sniffed the wound.

  “Should I be worried about something else?” Grant asked.

  “I do not know,”
replied Lord Ha’an, rising gracefully to his full height. “As one who holds the bonds of the Shurik and Yorana, you should be healing faster. But you are also human. I cannot know if that affects the bond you have with your . . . clans.”

  “The bonds are hurting him,” I remarked, before Grant could say again that he was fine. I ignored the irritated look he gave me.

  Lord Ha’an’s frown deepened, but instead of pushing deeper, he said, “I do not recognize these creatures though I smell the Aetar in their flesh. Are we at war with them again, young Queen?”

  War. What a word. I wasn’t even sure I knew what it meant except that it would bring more death and fear, and uncertainty. Then again, if it was fight or die . . . fight, or lose my family . . .

  “If it can’t be avoided,” I told him, “then yes.”

  “War is coming,” rasped Zee, dragging his claws along his arms, striking sparks that floated against my skin. “Blood for blood.”

  “Can you track who made these creatures?” I asked him. “Do you know where they’re from?”

  “Track, yes,” he rasped, but wariness entered his gaze. “But follow back? Unwise, maybe.”

  It was stupid, that’s what it was. I just didn’t know if I’d have a choice.

  “Maxine,” Mary said, touching my arm. I turned, and what I saw made my stomach drop hard.

  Red and blue lights flickered in the distance. Two cars, roaring down the driveway. My vision blurred.

  “Shit,” I said.

  THE neighbors might not have cared about the music, but they sure knew what a killing field sounded like.

  My clothes were covered in blood. So were Grant’s. Raw and Aaz pulled new jeans and a fresh white T-shirt from the shadows, tossing them at my husband. For me it was a pair of shorts and a long-sleeved shirt that covered the dried blood on my arms. We made sure to pull off the tags.

  Doesn’t take much to look normal. Acting normal can be a little more problematic.