Labyrinth of Stars

by Marjorie M. Liu

  “We’re fucked,” she said, stopping ten feet away, an old pickup between us. “At least, you and the others are. The humans never did pay attention to us.”

  “Congrats,” I replied. “Once again, the rats survive.”

  “Despite your best efforts. How many thousands of years did you women slaughter us? And for what? We shall still inherit the earth.”

  “Now you sound like Blood Mama.”

  “Mother knows best.” The demon gave me a tight smile. “Are you going to kill me?”

  “I should.” I also smiled tightly. “But it seems a little useless now, doesn’t it?”

  “Poor Hunter Kiss. Being a Queen isn’t what you thought it would be, is it?” Her gaze flicked to Zee. “Not if you don’t have the stomach for the old ways.”

  Zee leapt over the truck bed. The demon staggered, bravado disappearing—and a soft cry escaped her throat as she disappeared from sight, dragged down to the concrete. I walked around the truck, found her sprawled flat on her stomach. Zee sat on her shoulders, claws gripping her hair—pulling her head so far back her breath wheezed. I knew he wouldn’t break her neck—hosts were innocent. But the demon wouldn’t be able to leave its human without Zee snatching it up. And the boys always liked a good snack.

  I crouched. “You didn’t come out here to chat. What message did Blood Mama pass on to you? I’ve already seen her once tonight, but I thought she was holding back.”

  The demon’s aura, wispy and black as smoke, shrank from me and Zee until it was nothing but a dense, tight ball. “She was only aware of the massacre at the cabin. She didn’t know about the humans who died on your land. Our sentinels didn’t see them until it was too late.”

  “I don’t care. And I’m sure that’s not all she wanted you to tell me.”

  Tears leaked from the demon’s eyes. “You’re the last, Hunter. You are the last of your line. That’s what she wanted me to tell you.”

  Cold splintered down my spine. Dek and Mal jerked from my hair, snapping their jaws at the possessed human’s face. She couldn’t even flinch—Zee’s grip was too tight.

  “Is that so?” I whispered.

  “The Aetar will never allow the child of a Lightbringer to live. Not a child who also holds your power. They’ll destroy this world first before that happens.”

  Zee and I shared a quick look. It was true. I knew it. The Aetar were made entirely of sentient energy, capable of possessing and manipulating human flesh with the ease of a thought. They could be anywhere. And yes, it was easy to kill their mortal shell. But it was impossible to kill them.

  Unless you were Grant. Or me. Which meant we had targets that could probably be seen from the moon painted on our backs.

  But our daughter would have the boys as her protectors and guardians. An entire Reaper Army at her feet. The same army that for millions of years had razed and destroyed Aetar-controlled worlds.

  And she would have the power of her father. A Lightbringer. The last of his kind. Born with the ability to heal, to harm, to twist and alter the very fabric of a soul, with nothing but his voice. His voice, which could manipulate the deepest, smallest, bonds of all the energy that consumed, and created, life. The same energy that gave the Aetar life.

  Our daughter. One strong girl. And very dangerous.

  But still . . . we had pretended that our secret was safe.

  In the distance, I heard police sirens. Zee tilted his head, listening to something else.

  “Cutter,” he said. “Mahati.”

  I let out my breath and stood. Zee released the possessed waitress, and she slumped into the concrete, breathing hard.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Save me some pie.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” she whispered. “All of you are going to die. The humans will find your . . . army. And if by some miracle they don’t . . . you know that the Aetar already have.”

  I needed a ginger ale, bad. My mouth tasted like shit. My heart felt worse.

  I didn’t look back as I walked across the parking lot, taking no precaution to hide in the shadows. I breathed in the grease-bitter exhaust pumping from the diner’s kitchen, along with the lingering scent of strong perfume—probably from one of the teenage girls eating pie. I wanted to go inside and sit down. Order some pecan, or lemon meringue. Maybe peach, which my mother loved. It was so normal in there. Another world.

  Behind the diner were two Dumpsters and a parked van with HOUSE OF PIES emblazoned on the side. No perfume here. Only the scent of rot. Dek licked the back of my ear. Mal slithered down my arm, winding around it like armor. I crossed between dried-out brown bushes, into the parking lot of a strip mall that looked like a bomb had hit it sometime back in the seventies. The police sirens got louder.

  I heard another noise, too: a low, chopping motor, coming from the sky. Helicopter.

  I walked faster.

  Raw and Aaz peered over the edge of the strip mall’s roof, waved their half-eaten bears, and gave me little thumbs-up signs. Seeing that didn’t cheer me up in the slightest. The sky above them was giving way to light, and the heavy, unrelenting pound of the helicopter rotor shook the air. I could see it coming, half a mile away and closing. Whoever was in there probably had binoculars with a long-range camera.

  The sirens were equally grinding. Maybe the possessed waitress had called the cops, but it seemed more likely that some human with sharp eyes had seen something. Right now, people were probably paranoid enough to take potshots at their own shadows.

  I glimpsed a flash of red and blue at the intersection, heard the squeal of tires as a squad car turned hard, speeding toward the strip mall. Maybe it had nothing to do with us—and maybe there weren’t two demons hanging off my neck, humming “Jive Talkin’” at the tops of their lungs.

  “You love this,” I muttered to Dek and Mal, and tapped Zee’s bony shoulder. “Are we being watched?”

  He was silent a moment, head tilted. “Only eyes us. But quick.”

  “Quick” meant we might only have seconds. I tapped my right hand against my thigh and slipped into the void.

  A heartbeat passed. A lifetime. When I reentered the world, it was almost in the same spot I’d left—except I was thirty feet higher, on the roof of the strip mall, and the sun was going to rise in less than ten minutes.

  My skull rattled with the helicopter’s approach; the churn of the rotors made my entire skeleton vibrate. The siren wail was just as earsplitting; the police car pulled into the parking lot beneath us.

  I started running across the roof. I didn’t know if I could be seen and didn’t care. My focus was on the demon kneeling in front of me: the Mahati, head bowed. I glimpsed breasts beneath those massive coils of silver chains; and a bloodstained dagger strapped to her arm.

  She looked up at the last moment. Her pale eyes were wet with tears.

  I slammed into her and carried us into darkness.

  CHAPTER 6

  MY mother once warned me about this sort of thing.

  I was seven. I’d just seen a man beaten into the ground, pulverized like a side of beef. He was sprawled at my feet, knees broken, out cold, bleeding from a head wound that had caved in half his skull. Regaining consciousness would require a miracle.

  My mother stood over him, a crowbar in her tattooed hand.

  “This is what happens to men who try to lure you from the car while I’m in the gas station,” she remarked, in a deceptively gentle voice. “As you can see, sweetheart, he wasn’t possessed by a demon. He was fully human and fully himself when he attempted to kidnap you. Therefore, I’m allowed to kill him.”

  My mother always got very formal, and incredibly polite, when it was time to murder, pummel, or otherwise terrorize “normal people.” As a small child, I found this . . . reassuring. Until I got old enough to realize that most mothers did not beat people to death like it was a hobby.

  Which it was, for her. In the most righteous way possible.

  We were parked at the end of a dirt road that had p
etered out in the middle of a dusty, dead cornfield. No one around. Not even a bird in the clear sky. We’d started out twenty miles away, at a small truck stop off the freeway. My mother was good at stuffing people into the trunk of the station wagon, and she had an instinct for remote, invisible places.

  She led me back to the car, leaving the unconscious man in the dirt. “Just because a demon isn’t involved doesn’t mean a person is safe. You have to watch for that, baby. You have to watch yourself, too.” She held up her hand. Zee’s crimson eyes stared at me from her palm, the rest of him distorted in a tangle of tattooed scales and claws, and lines of muscle.

  “We aren’t invulnerable. The boys protect our bodies, but it’s up to us to protect our hearts. We’re monsters enough without becoming the real thing.” She stood back and gave me a long, contemplative look. “But sometimes when the darkness calls, you have to answer. You have to become someone else to do what’s right.”

  Becoming someone else sounded scary to me. I was just a kid. I didn’t understand. But you don’t argue with the woman holding a bloodied crowbar. Especially when she’s your mother.

  She put me in the station wagon and closed the door. The windows were rolled up, but I still heard bones snapping, and the hard, wracking thuds of metal meeting flesh. I read a book while she finished the man off.

  We drove away.

  And I remembered what she said.

  BUT I was still afraid.

  We spilled into cold air. I hadn’t had a destination in mind—just, away—and the armor obeyed. We were far from the strip mall in Houston, so very distant there was snow beneath us. The sky was crowded with stars, no hint of light on the horizon. I fell away from the Mahati, arms pinwheeling in a fight to stay upright as my feet broke through the ice-encrusted surface, sinking me to my knees. My skin froze, my breath hitched in my lungs.

  The Mahati was more graceful, but Raw knocked her sideways, pinning her in the snow. Both demons disappeared in a tangle of limbs and ice. I crawled to them, Zee and Aaz pulling on my arms to help me stand. It was so cold. I saw the black edge of mountains in the distance, and all around us the tall, jagged teeth of trees.

  I had good night vision. The Mahati sat in the snow, covered to her waist, with clumps and drifts hanging from her needlelike hair and bare shoulders. In another world, another life, someone might have called her a snow queen; covered in ice and night and starlight, she had a look of some snow-blooded creature who would exist in a fairy tale.

  She was still weeping. No sniveling or hysterics, just the grief of a statue, with the same still, stoic, façade. Her hands betrayed the rest of her emotions: razor-sharp fingers clenched tight together, knuckles glistening silver, and her forearms trembling. Scar tissue covered her body: long strips on her thighs and biceps cut away; deep canyons in her flesh, cannibalized. Young warrior, or else she would have been missing limbs.

  All the fight had burned out. She stayed sitting as I slogged close, her head tilted down. Long fingers kept trembling, and that tiniest movement made the silver chains dangling from her ears, across her chest, chime. I knelt in the snow in front of her, while Raw and Aaz draped themselves against my arms and chest to keep me warm. It didn’t work. The chill settled through my legs, up into my stomach.

  Zee crouched close, quiet and ready. I wished he’d tell me what to do. I’d made this speech before, when two other Mahati had broken my rules and gone hunting for humans—but this time was different, somehow worse.

  “They are not cattle,” I said, though the words sounded hollow, like I was some right-wing fundamentalist preaching fire, brimstone. “The humans are not meat.”

  The Mahati’s gaze flicked toward mine, then down to her scarred thighs.

  “I was meat,” she murmured, each word delicate as floating ash.

  I closed my eyes. Zee brushed his claws over my hand. I hated myself in that moment. I hated the Mahati, too—for not being alien enough that I could pretend this one was a parasite, something beneath me, that lacked humanity, or even a soul. A year ago it would have been easier. Five years ago, I wouldn’t have hesitated.

  Except too much had changed.

  We are all meat, I thought. And in my heart, a shadow moved: a twisting rope of power, gathering itself with hunger.

  Hunter, it whispered. Will you kill one of your own for following her nature? When you yourself hunger for death?

  I shook my head, shook it like I was trying to knock away a cloud of flies. “Tell me about the six humans you killed on my land.”

  The Mahati flinched. I said, “Those humans weren’t with the young ones you murdered.”

  She trembled, maybe with the cold. “No, my Queen.”

  “Where did you find them?

  “We . . . did not.” Her gaze flicked to mine, then away. “They were waiting for us when we returned from the hunt.”

  “Waiting.” I drew that word out, staring at her. “On my land.”

  Her trembling grew more violent. “Like tribute. As it used to be, for the armies of the demon lords and Kings. That is what the others said.”

  “And did these . . . tributes . . . say anything to you?”

  She shook her head, shivering. “They knelt and bared their throats, and did not cry out as we killed them.”

  I sat back in the snow, feeling every grind of ice in my bones. Dek and Mal slithered across my shoulders, resting their heads on Raw and Aaz, who had gone very still. It was so quiet in this place, the thud of my heartbeat the only drum in the world, throbbing, pulsing in my chest, and ears. My pulse, too quick. My pulse, aching with fear.

  “Zee,” I said, and my voice was strained, barely louder than a whisper.

  He raked his claws across his arms, creating a trail of sparks. “Flesh, free and given. Old ritual. Dead ritual. Meant to appease. Stall our hungers.”

  And it was familiar. Someone had known and used it to lure in the Mahati, those to whom the rules were still the same, no matter how many thousands of years had passed.

  Zee swayed into the Mahati’s face, and she went very still, like a rabbit trying to become invisible. He grabbed her chin, claws digging into her gaunt cheeks.

  “I was born inside the prison,” she rasped, as if he’d asked a question I couldn’t hear. “I had never eaten human flesh. The older warriors said I must, I must, before I was fit to fight.”

  “Fight we had,” he rasped. “Tonight. Your Queen, attacked, and you did not come. Too busy eating unfit meat.”

  Tears rolled down her cheeks. “Yes, my King.”

  “Open,” he commanded, and she opened her mouth wide. Zee leaned in, nostrils flaring. I couldn’t ask him why he smelled her breath, but the spikes of his hair jerked once, twice, and muscles rippled across his back. I watched, imagining this demon—this trembling, ashamed demon—dying at my command. And it hurt, made me feel ashamed. I wasn’t sure I had the stomach to kill her. There had to be mercy, sometimes. Second chances, every now and then. The world wouldn’t fall apart, would it?

  Just one mercy.

  “Zee,” I said, ready to call him away from the demon. He glanced back at me, just as the Mahati made a strange sound: a cough, a gag.

  He jerked away as she vomited.

  Raw and Aaz hauled me back. I let them drag me, stunned. It wasn’t the vomit, but the violence, as though someone was stabbing the demon from the inside.

  What poured from her mouth was dark as blood, the scent the same as rotting meat and shit. She covered her mouth with such desperation, she gouged her face, blood streaming down her cheeks. Her chest heaved, her entire body rising from the snow as she tried to stop.

  The Mahati toppled sideways, hands falling limp as she began convulsing. Vomit trickled from her mouth. Or maybe it was blood. Zee and the boys held me so tightly their tiny hands burned, but I didn’t say a word. I wanted to feel the pain. It grounded me, and I needed that as I watched the Mahati go still, and die.

  I turned away, holding my stomach, breathing throug
h gritted teeth. Dek and Mal licked the backs of my ears. Quiet, so quiet. In the distance, there was a glow: morning rising, slow.

  “Sweet Maxine,” Zee murmured.

  I was going to be vomiting next. “Seen anything like that before?”

  He shook his head, expression troubled. “Smelled sick. Poisoned. Tasted it on her breath.”

  “Fuck. It was those humans. That’s what the Aetar did.” I tried to stand. Raw and Aaz clung to my legs, ears flat against their sharp little heads.

  “Maxine,” Zee said again.

  “Hide her,” I said, focused only on getting home, warning Grant. “No one can find her body.”

  “Maxine,” Zee said, and this time the urgency in his voice made me look at him—and follow his gaze to the dead Mahati.

  Her head was half-buried in the snow, but her eyes were wide open. I stared, confused, because I’d just seen her die. I could feel her death, knew with a certainty that her life was over.

  But those eyes were very much alive.

  A whisper floated on the air, a slow exhalation that went on and on, becoming a sigh, a hiss. My skin rippled with that sound.

  “Hunter,” breathed the Mahati, sprawled so still, still as death in the snow.

  Nothing of the demon moved, not even those bloodstained lips. I thought it might be my imagination, except Raw and Aaz were stiff with tension, and Zee had planted himself in front of me: crouched, quivering. Dek and Mal wrapped themselves so tight around my throat it was hard to breathe.

  Her eyes convinced me. Though the rest of her body was still as death, her eyes were filled with a different kind of life: a burning, calculated focus that was ruthless, cold, and utterly, magnificently ancient. Not the eyes of the young demon who had knelt before me and lost her life. Not her eyes.

  Something else. Something I recognized. I knew that look. It didn’t matter that the flesh was Mahati. Some things transcended the physical. Some things could possess the physical. And only one race of creature, one race of alien, had that terrible, immortal gaze.