Then, that night, the boys woke up.
And the dog, terrified by them, ran away.
I cried so hard. I looked for him like crazy. My heart broke over that dog. I worried about him for years. Sometimes I still worry, even though I know he must be dead. All I hope is that he found someone who loved him, that he didn’t go hungry. I hope soft hands touched him and made him a home.
Peace. For the dog.
And very little peace for me.
IT was hot under the trees, and the flies that grazed my tattooed arms stuttered as though electrocuted and dropped dead into the grass.
There were a lot of flies. No discrimination when it came to dead bodies. Demons, humans, were all the same. Meat. Blood. Bone. I stood beside a dead Mahati—old, wrinkled, wrapped in the braids of his hair. Bloody vomit covered his lower chin and chest, and his one remaining hand was caked in a viscous red slime that still glistened in the afternoon light. The stench was vile.
Four feet away lay another Mahati, this one still alive. A child, with whole limbs and smooth silver skin pulled taut over jutting ribs. Vomiting had already begun, splashed over the grass: a color of red that was sharp as a prick in my eyes.
His mother crouched beside him. She didn’t look well, either. Patches of skin around her throat and chest had darkened to the color of tarnished silver, and there was an unfocused roving quality to her gaze that couldn’t settle on her child—or Grant, who stood over the young demon, singing: a low reverberating om sound that slithered over my tattooed skin like a million little snakes.
I’d found him like this. No attempt at conversation, not even on my part, but I’d placed a bottle of water in his hands, along with a bag of pretzels; and he’d stopped just long enough to eat a bite, drink the bottle, then carry on. All the while, watching me with those dark eyes. I wanted to reach inside his brain and give it a good shake.
“It is not working,” said Lord Ha’an.
“Grant can manipulate energy on a cellular level to induce healing. Broken bones, cancer, gunshot wounds. But this is different.”
“Poison,” he murmured with disgust.
I wasn’t so sure we were still dealing with a poison; and that terrified me. Ha’an didn’t seem to be picking up on the same clues—maybe, because his people had never fallen ill before. “You’re sure none of them munched on those dead humans?”
“I am certain. They cannot lie to me.”
“And you? You ate the hearts of the Mahati who consumed them. How do you feel?”
He hesitated. “No different.”
I held his gaze. “Really.”
“I am not deceiving you,” he muttered. “But there is a . . . darkness . . . dimming the energy I share with my people. My strength comes from them. If this continues, it will affect me.”
I looked back at Grant. Deep shadows surrounded his eyes, and his tight white knuckles had cracked, bleeding. Other parts of him were cracking, too: I saw a blister forming on his lip, and parts of his arms and face were mottled red, as if capillaries were bursting beneath his skin.
You are being cannibalized.
A child in the womb is the ultimate cannibal. As a mother, I was more than happy to be consumed. But the demons were not unborn children—and Grant was being deconstructed before my very eyes.
He needed help. More than I could give him. It hit me, suddenly, who I could ask. But the fact that it had taken me this long to realize that possibility said everything about my reluctance to engage her.
First things first. I backed away, gesturing for Lord Ha’an to follow. “We need to see what Jack can tell us.”
“The murderer.” The demon lord’s voice dripped with disgust, and his long fingers made a violent, striking gesture that could have easily taken out my eyes if he’d been aiming his hands at me.
But it still seemed directed my way: all the frustration, anger, and humiliation I’d seen in him at rare moments over the last three months. Finally, now, reaching the tipping point.
We found Jack in the same spot where the human bodies had been discovered the previous night. The only difference now was the silence. No Mahati had remained in the vicinity—and that had everything to do with my grandfather.
Jack was crouched, scratching his beard—which was rustling with far more vigor than his fingers should have accounted for. He didn’t seem particularly disturbed by the rotting corpses surrounding him. Humans were just meat. Clothing his kind slipped on and off.
Mary stood behind my grandfather, fingering her dagger and staring at the back of his head. I half expected her to stab him. She didn’t seem particularly bothered, either, by the dead.
She’d been waiting for us on the edge of the camp—an old human woman standing unafraid amongst demons who thought she smelled tasty. She didn’t need a bodyguard—the woman was the fastest decapitator this side of planet earth—but she’d had a dozen small demon children buzzing around her like she was their fairy godmother, and I couldn’t see any of the adults wanting to fuck with that.
Her secret, as far as I could tell, was that she’d been sneaking those little demon kids into my farmhouse kitchen for months, baking them cakes and cookies, and basically buttering up their homicidal little hearts with the two most potent human drugs ever: sugar and chocolate.
Sweets for sweets, she would say—totally nonplussed by the claws and tails and inhuman eyes.
Jack, on the other hand, always generated a very different response from her. No fucking treats for him. If he made it through the next hour with his heart still beating inside his chest, it would be a miracle.
“I do not like this,” Lord Ha’an murmured. “I am allowing one of the architects of our imprisonment to walk freely amongst us. He is Aetar. His kind committed genocide against mine. Against all the clans who were imprisoned.”
“Get in line,” I muttered. “We’ve got bigger problems.”
Lord Ha’an did not answer me, his long fingers continuing to twitch violently against his massive thighs. He stared at Jack, who had picked up one of the skulls, staring into its empty eyes as though a voice were speaking to him. He didn’t seem to notice the blood smearing his hands.
Mary knelt just behind him, poking the dark cavity of an empty eye socket with the edge of her machete. Her brow furrowed, and she went down on her knees, sniffing the remains. Her upper lip pulled back, baring her teeth in a snarl.
“Old Wolf,” she whispered. “Fool wolf.”
Jack frowned at her, then snapped his gaze back to the skull. He drew in a deep, quick breath. “Maxine.”
I started walking to him. He said, “Wait. Stay back.”
I paused midstep, watching a terrible stillness fall over my grandfather—as though his foot were pressing on a land mine.
“Don’t come any closer,” he said, and lowered the skull: slow, careful, as if it might explode. Mary stood, gliding sideways, keeping her body between the remains and me. “These people were engineered.”
“We know that,” I said sharply. “Tell me how.”
Jack didn’t answer me. I’d never seen him so shaken, like the foundation of his soul were being hacked at with a hammer. I could almost see the tremor of each blow—as though every time he breathed, some intolerable torment afflicted his chest. His hand pressed there, rigid fingers digging into his dirty T-shirt like claws.
I tried going to him. Mary stopped me with her sinewy arm: a rock-hard bar of bone and muscle. “Danger,” she whispered, her gaze flicking down to my stomach. That was enough to make me keep still.
Jack eased back from the remains and ran a trembling hand down his dirty, equally trembling, beard. “These humans were infected with a virus.”
I stared at him, a lifetime of terrible movies parading through my mind. I didn’t need my grandfather to confirm what I already suspected, but hearing it from him made it all very real, very terrible.
“A virus,” I repeated.
A small part of me still hoped my hot dread was mispla
ced, but Jack didn’t fuck around. He looked past me at Lord Ha’an. “If it works as it was meant to, the entire demon army will be dead within two weeks.”
ONCE upon a time, I would have been delighted.
A euphoric rapture, delirious and jubilant, would have showered me with righteous, ecstatic glee. Once upon a time, news like that would have been a miracle of riches.
But people change. Sometimes they change so much they become unrecognizable to themselves.
No delight. No euphoria. Not for me. There were some things I never wanted to hear. And there were things I never wanted to hear in front of a demon lord.
Lord Ha’an snarled and lunged at Jack.
I was standing between him and my grandfather. Mary stepped neatly out of the way. I didn’t move.
I didn’t even blink.
He slammed into me with all the force of a bomb, but instead of throwing me backward, I grabbed his smooth silver braids and held on like a rodeo rider, flying sideways with dizzying speed—only to find myself yanked around with neck-snapping force. He tried again to reach my grandfather, but I dragged him back, holding on with all my strength.
Ha’an growled in frustration, twisting hard to slash at my face. In that split second before contact, the weight of the boys flowed upward, covering my head. His fingertips scraped harmlessly against my cheek and throat, but the strength behind that strike was so powerful I knew that without the boys protecting me, he would have taken off half my skull.
It didn’t make me angry, though—just barely annoyed, and not even entirely at Ha’an.
My fist struck his ribs. He didn’t flinch, trying again to slam me away from him. He wasn’t even looking at me—just past my shoulder, where my grandfather probably was. God only knew if Jack was making faces at him. I wouldn’t have been surprised. I tried again to stop him, but my blows bounced like I was made of foam. Ha’an was just too powerful, fueled by the strength of all his people—as well as his own rage.
My feet left the ground. He threw me into a tree, and I heard a crack that wasn’t my back, but instead the entire trunk snapping in half. I didn’t feel a thing, but the reverberation made my teeth rattle.
Enough, I thought, and the boys responded. I was still holding Ha’an’s thick braids in one hand, and his hair began smoking. I would have thought all my other blows would have hurt him more, but the moment his hair was singed, he let out a wounded cry that made me think it wasn’t exactly hair knotted around my fingers.
I was ready to stop. That was all I needed—for him to relent just enough to listen to me.
But when I tried to let go, my hand wouldn’t obey.
He must be taught, whispered a sinuous voice.
Not me, not my voice, nothing that belonged to my imagination. My trespasser, that very real and separate entity—existing, perhaps, in that seam between flesh and spirit, where just beyond the border of skin and bone, the soul was vast.
Shut up, I told that presence. Go back to sleep.
You made a promise, it murmured, and pushed right the fuck back.
Took me by surprise. I didn’t even have a heartbeat’s warning. I lost myself. I lost, and all I could do was stand there like a fool.
My vision flickered: static, a channel fading in and out. A smile touched my mouth, one that wasn’t mine, a smile that was wide and fat, and hungry. I would have bashed my face against a rock if I could have, cracked my head like an egg to make it stop. I fought, I fought—and the smile on my face only got wider.
Lord Ha’an’s growl of pain choked into silence. I was present enough in my own skin to see recognition flow into his eyes, and fear.
“See me,” I said, but those were not my words, not my voice, born instead from the oozing crawl of some thick, serpentine body uncoiling from my chest into my mouth. Nothing there, nothing physical, but the presence had weight, a spirit flesh just as real, and it filled me, and I could not stop it. I could not stop the hunger.
No matter how much I raged, I could not resist the biting jolt of pleasure and power.
“Now see your Queen,” I whispered.
Lord Ha’an shuddered, dropping his shoulders. I wanted to tell him to stop, to stand straight—he was too proud, too proud for this—but there were no words. I was as lost as he was.
“You are nothing,” murmured that voice, heavy on my tongue. “You will not even live in our dreams.”
The demon lord’s knees buckled. Veins bulged in his head and throat, and his green eyes protruded in one massive, repugnant, disfiguring pulse. He sounded like he was choking on his own tongue.
“You forgot your God,” I said, and the ground beneath me dropped away, and a great expanse yawned—soft with night, throbbing with stars—the darkness coiled and cool, and sweet. Above me, the sun, trees, a blue sky shining, vibrating with life. It all ran down my throat like water, and I tilted back my head, swallowing the light, feeling it pass through me into the dark.
“Maxine,” said a quiet voice, and heat blazed: golden, like sunlight breaking.
Just like that, the ground was solid beneath my feet, and in my throat there was only saliva, and a bitter taste, like blood. The presence, the thing inside me, smiled against my mouth. Close to laughter.
Soon, it whispered. Soon, we hunt.
Fuck you, I told it, as ineffectual as a mouse shaking its fist at a lion. Warm satisfaction—not mine—gathered around my heart, but that was just part of the slow retreat, the even slower relinquishment of my mouth, which felt like a bubble contracting in my throat; until, suddenly, I could breathe again.
But breathing wasn’t enough. My legs felt strangely unattached to my body, and my skin tingled, burned. My jaw ached like I’d been chewing rock.
It took all my strength not to shudder, and I turned—very carefully. It was that, or fall.
“Maxine,” Grant said again. And finally, I saw what I’d done.
The earth had disappeared around me. No grass, barely even soil—nothing but black sand, smooth as the surface of still water. Trees were gone, erased from existence—not a branch or leaf, not a piece of bark. If there had been rocks, I couldn’t see them. If there were insects, they were gone. For twenty feet in every direction, a perfect circle of destruction.
Only Lord Ha’an had been left untouched. Mostly. His forehead had been burned with a single mark, a small hollow circle the size of my thumb—as though someone had taken a cigarette lighter to him. Except no one had. He was trembling, sweating, his eyes shut in pain or fear, or prayer—I didn’t know. I was afraid to know.
I heard movement: Grant.
“Don’t,” I choked out, afraid for him to touch that sand. But he didn’t hesitate, and nothing burned him.
He closed the distance between us, sliding his hand through mine. No trace of his earlier anger. Just that solid strength I knew so well.
“I felt you pull away from me,” he whispered. “I felt the darkness.”
I leaned against him, and it helped bring me back to myself. My body, my life, my soul. I did not belong to the thing inside me. I did not belong to anyone but me.
But that wasn’t the bargain I’d made, was it?
“I’m okay,” I said, trying to smile for him. I couldn’t do it. It felt crooked, grotesque. Reminded me too much of the darkness that had possessed me. Physical echoes, making me sick with myself.
Grant touched my face, brushed his thumb over my lips. Such shadows in his eyes, more than I’d ever seen before. I squeezed his hand. “How’s the baby?”
He glanced down at my stomach. “Unaffected. Her light’s still strong.”
I nodded, one of those automatic movements that meant nothing. I was too rattled to hold still, but pretending I was engaged made it easier to hide how upset I was.
Lord Ha’an was on his knees. I bent to help him, and he flinched from me. “My Queen.”
“Don’t. It’s me again. It’s me, Maxine.”
“No,” he murmured, with heartbreaking loss in his voi
ce. “It was never so. But for a time, we could pretend.”
I kept my hand extended, and finally, carefully, he brushed his palm against mine. He did not take my help, though. After that brief contact, he stood on his own, swaying ever so slightly, touching the mark on his forehead.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Do not be,” he replied. “Do not, young Queen. You were as helpless as I. A good lesson for us both, I think.” And then he lifted his head, but it wasn’t to look at me. He stared at Jack, and his eyes were rimmed in blood and hate, his face stone cold, stone hard.
“All we suffered,” he said softly. “And yet, there will never be peace for us.”
Jack didn’t seem to hear him. He was staring at me with both horrified dismay—and unabashed, unconcealed, fascination. It made me afraid all over again.
I tried to find my voice. Grant squeezed my hand. “Jack.”
My grandfather blinked, tearing his gaze from me just long enough to take in the black sand. “Yes.”
Grant glanced at Lord Ha’an. “What about a cure for this disease?”
Jack crouched, running his hands over the sand. “There won’t be one.”
Mary gave him a disgusted look. I felt my own dismay—partially at his answer, but also with the distracted way he said it. This was life or death, and he didn’t seem to care.
“Jack,” I snapped, and finally he looked up, alert and fully present. “You’re certain there’s no cure?”
“We don’t make cures. When we decide to take a life, we take it. And then we replace it with something else.”
“Of course you do,” Grant muttered. “But you must still be able to make a cure.”
Jack gave him an incredulous look. “You’d have more luck, lad. Killing is easier than curing, I promise you that. And creating viruses is not the same as modifying flesh. That’s not my strength.”
I thought about the Mahati who had vomited herself to death and the others lying sick not far from here. “Then whose is it? We have to do something.”
Jack said nothing. Lord Ha’an walked from the sand, but it was without his usual grace.
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