by Jenn Stark
“Don’t be naïve,” she snapped. “It’s a child’s heart that fails due to the drug, but not a Revenant child’s heart. They could withstand the drug—take that another step, and you can see how reasonable it is to deduce that the Revenant children must have some cellular coding that could help us in another, more practical way. We must create a drug that people can withstand, Sara. Failing that, we must change the cellular structure of our future addicts so they can accept the drug into their systems. Surely you understand the importance of that.”
We, who? Gamon was cracking around the edges and she didn’t even realize it.
“The most critical organ of the human, at least when it comes to their godhood, is their hearts. Not the brain, not the glands, not the ever-elusive soul. The pure, beautiful, incredibly complex yet achingly simple organ that delivers life-sustaining energy to its hosts without any conscious or deliberate thought. It gives and gives and gives.”
Gamon’s voice grew hard, cutting. “And we’ve taken. Taken enough that we know we’re on to something. The heart is the key. The ancients knew it. We mocked them for their ignorance for centuries, but they knew…they knew. The Revenant children’s hearts were close, very close, but they weren’t…perfect. And we need perfect. We can recreate it once we have a sample, but we can’t generate that type of perfection out of whole cloth. We need a model.”
She gave another low hum of pleasure beside me as she drew the barrel of her gun over my hair. “For that, you were brought to us. For that, you were given.”
“I’m not a child.”
She chuckled. “Not in any normal sense, no. And yet…”
I twisted away from her gun, half turning to glare at her. I’d promised Kreios I’d keep my heart in my chest. I really wanted to deliver on that oath.
“Who did you kill to take over the House of Cups?” I demanded again, trying to distract her from the organ hammering wildly under my rib cage.
Gamon’s lips twisted. “Mercault should know better than to let such secrets spread to idle ears,” she murmured. “Another failure added to his name.”
“Who?” I pressed. “Because there’s no way you’ve had a House for long. You’re not equipped to run anything but your mouth.”
Whether it was the snideness of my statement or my tone, it seemed to penetrate Gamon’s fog of self-righteousness. She focused on me, and I got to see a glimpse of her soul through her dead black eyes. See it and know it had long since been eaten away. “You’re a Revenant, and you killed your own,” I accused her. “You’re a Connected, and you’ve killed your own. There’s no real worth in you.”
“Worth,” scoffed Gamon. “The Revenants abandoned me early on for not following their precious rules, for deserting my foster parents and ignoring the collective’s protocols. Really, as if we didn’t reach our majority in the first few years of our appreciably long lives. Their path is one of wastefulness.”
Her lips quirked. “But not anymore. Now we have used their hearts to create a newer, more vibrant version of the drug, and synthesized the resulting chemical compound to a near-perfect variant suitable for the masses. For the right buyers, of course, the organic option will always be preferred.”
Sick disbelief roiled in my stomach. “You’re a cannibal. And, worse, of your own kind. No matter how few of you are left on this earth, you’ll find them all to feed your sick fantasy.”
“I would, yes,” Gamon said. “Fortunately, I don’t have to. I prayed to the god of the Toltecs who created this beautiful altar, and was granted a boon above all others, in return for a price so trifling, it made me giddy.” She chuckled with manic surety. “That boon is you, Sara, if you haven’t already guessed, and you are also the price.”
“And you think your god gave me to you,” I sneered, refusing to cower despite being on my knees.
“Not think, know. Tezcatlipoca heard my cry. The god of sorcerers, essence of the jaguar, giver of gifts.” Her smile broadened. “How lucky that this gift proved so easy in the taking. I had merely to ask, and it was delivered.”
The pistol whip came so quickly that I had no time to brace for it, no time to prepare. I was kneeling one moment, then struck to the ground and dragged upright again only by the strength of the guards gripping my shoulders and arms. As Mercault had before her, Gamon reached into my jacket with her gloved hands and withdrew the long, impossibly sharp Gods’ Nails. Unlike Mercault, however, she didn’t hand them off to a minion. Instead, she kept them wrapped in her hands…hands that remained very close to me. Despite the swimming in my head, I thought…that was important.
Not as important, however, as me being lifted bodily and carried forward to the altar. In some remote corner of my mind, I knew what was happening. Knew it and recognized it as bad. And yet in other corners of my mind, I saw the actions of Gamon as if through a prism. She was a usurper to the House of Cups, but who had she overthrown? How had she done it? She was having the man wrapped in jaguar skins tie me to the altar, but why hadn’t she destroyed the Gods’ Nails or removed them from my presence? Surely she knew their power. Surely she knew and understood their connection to me. Surely there was some rhyme or reason to her madness.
Right?
I sucked in a sharp breath as my zipties were snapped. Then my arms were stretched wide, rack-like, across the still wet and sticky surface of the sacrificial Sun Stone. I could feel the grooves and indentations of its carvings against my back. The face at the center with its lolling tongues, the mystical cats at its cardinal points. The believers who’d carved these images had been dead for centuries by the time the Aztecs had stumbled onto this site and co-opted it for their own, but that didn’t change the level of the ancients’ power. Their power or their sickness, in this case. Now, lying atop the stone, I could practically hear the whispers of those long-ago priests, feel the profane power of their magic.
“You’re not going to get what you want,” I warned Gamon.
“But you see, I already have.” She laughed, looking down at me trussed up on the altar of the ancients like the Thanksgiving meal. I still felt curiously removed from the dire circumstances I found myself in, and not because I expected rescue either. I didn’t. There simply hadn’t been enough time. Yet I welcomed the pain at my wrists and ankles as I lay spread-eagled, mired in the blood of innocents. This was right, this was good. This was as it should be.
I shook my head, finally understanding my sluggishness. “You’ve drugged me.”
“You’re breathing it in, in this space,” Gamon said. She turned, gesturing toward the murky red-black pools. “We found quickly enough that those who are truly gifted can endure extraordinary limits of distress, if they believed that it was part of the natural order of the world. Creating a compound to facilitate that belief was not difficult. We have already synthesized it. There will never be a lack of demand for such a drug, I assure you.”
My lip curled. I could only imagine the torturers Gamon was in league with for a drug such as this. Those who cared less about the information they collected and more about what the human body and the psyche could endure. There’d always been those kind of monsters—the Connected had been subjected to some of the worst that humanity could dish out. Now, it seemed we were on the cusp of an entirely new level of brutality: the worst of the worst leveled on our community by our own.
Was this what magic had come to?
I fought through the fog as Gamon leaned over me.
“You disappoint me, Sara, in all truth. When Tezcatlipoca gave me the charge to find you, to find you and bind you and lock you in place, I expected a mighty battle and the death of thousands. But no one has died except those who were already slated for slaughter, and you are here.” A flicker of satisfaction danced across her face, rendering her harsh features almost attractive. “Better still, you’ve brought me an elegant set of knives to begin the work upon you.”
She handed the nails to the jaguar-dressed man, and he took them silently, fitting them into hilts
at the base of his wrists—not bone and flesh at all, but thick gray metal, locked tight against his forearms. I watched with a detachment I couldn’t explain, still mired in the irony of it all.
All these millennia of spirits reaching for greater truths, greater enlightenment, greater abilities, and the Connected community was on the brink of being undone…by our own kind. Did we hate ourselves so much, then, recognizing the monster within as the greatest threat? Was the war on magic not a question of us versus them at all, but us versus ourselves?
Again, was this what magic had come to?
“I envy you,” Gamon said, her eyes burning with a feral intensity. “You are about to know what it is like to spill your life’s essence on the altar of a god. To give the ultimate gift and receive the ultimate prize in return.”
Something in her voice, the hunger in it, finally broke through.
“You’re welcome to change places,” I said, stretching my hands farther than she’d bound them to grasp the ropes. They weren’t traditionally woven rope at all, I noted with dismay, but flexible metal strips wrapped in some high-tech fabric, probably rip proof, pound proof, and fire proof. My ankles were bound with similar straps. So much for rocking it old-school, ancient rituals or no.
Gamon straightened, waving to an unseen attendant. A bell was struck, the high-pitched, achingly beautiful tone ringing through the air.
“The heart will be last,” she cried out. “A final gift to the god who brought you to me, your perfect blood that is in this world but not of it, the final ingredient to create the Fountain of eternal youth.”
The priest struck, driving the nails into me and yanking them out again, flaying open my shoulders, my abdomen, my hips—too fast, far too fast for me to heal, the heat of my wounds spreading through me with fantastic agony.
Then he pierced my wrists with the brutal tips of the nails, plunging them deep.
Mistake.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Fire exploded all around me as the spikes took hold of my wrists and buried themselves into the bone. I didn’t expect that, but it didn’t mean I couldn’t use it. Gripping the nails in my hands I yanked them out of the priest’s grasp and channeled their fire straight at him, throwing him back while the heat incinerated my clothes and danced along the coils that bound me.
The coils held, unfortunately—and, worse, they caught me up in a flash of pain and electrical fire.
The paroxysm of agony that gripped me was unlike anything I’d experienced before. Everything that was rent and broken within me was cauterized in an angry surge of power and heat, leaving nothing behind but fierce and oozing wounds and charred organs. My lungs filled with smoke, my eyes with fire. The red tinge of the room was supplanted now by a glowing fireball of energy that burst forth from me and shattered against the walls, pounding against them mercilessly as if to break free. This wasn’t my normal fireball either, but something almost primordial. I winced as glass broke and joists popped, and wondered for a moment what would happen if we all were buried under a pile of smoking rocks.
“No,” I groaned, surging up against my restraints. In my extremity, my third eye flashed open, and I thought of Chichiro in her mountain idyll, Chichiro’s house that I had exploded and brought back into one piece again simply by my strength of will. I forced my attention to the ropes around my hands, my feet, and imagined them unraveling—slowly at first, then with greater speed, each tiny filament remaining frayed as I fought and strained against the bindings.
I kept my visible eyes screwed shut as one—two ropes broke, one foot and one hand, then I flailed upward in an ungainly lurch, reaching down with my freed left hand to pierce through the cord with the fire jutting from the bone shard. My right wrist then broke free—first in my mind, and then in truth, and for a single, blessed moment, I felt as unbound as I ever had in this lifetime, suffused with power and energy—and, above all, hope.
I sat up in a rush, but despite my newfound strength, I still had lost a lot of blood. My head spun as I brought my hands around to sever the final ties on my legs, but I couldn’t move off the table.
Instead, nausea swamped me, my eyesight going in and out like a defective movie reel, and everything around me was now a kaleidoscope of bright yellow light. The moat of blood was on fire. How much of my own blood had poured through the chalice of the sacrificial altar to fill the bowls below? I leaned over, trying to force myself to slip off the table to the rock surface below. That wouldn’t be so difficult, if the floor would stop moving.
Was my blood still down there? Could I somehow dump it back inside me?
I closed my eyes, struggling for composure. Six of Cups. I’d drawn the Six of Cups and the Tower. A shock and tumult—well, that had certainly happened. But the Six was supposed to have come first, and the card still made no sense to me. It showed a charming scene of children playing in a courtyard, vases of flowers all around them, the dreamy peaceful nostalgia that memories of childhood were supposed to evoke.
There was nothing dreamy or peaceful about this place.
“Tezcatlipoca!” Gamon screamed behind me, which was the only way I could tell where she was in the midst of all the smoke and fire. I lurched around, nearly toppling off the altar, and aimed my spikes at her.
Another explosion rocked the space, the equivalent of a sonic boom, sending everything flying: me, Gamon, the priest, even the altar, its top detaching and rolling toward the blood-soaked water. My own bowls of precious blood spilled and splashed in a hideous, thick spatter, and I groaned as I crunched against the wall, feeling beyond drained.
Smoke billowed into the room, and I searched my brain for anything I could recall on Tezcatlipoca. God of sorcerers, as Gamon had said, god of both war and creation, bringer of good and evil and all that was conflict in the world. Sounded right up Gamon’s alley.
I didn’t need to worry about Tezcatlipoca now, however. The doors had been blasted off the room, and at the crest of the ramp, I could see where the far door into the state-of-the-art lab had been as well. I longed to fill that room with fire too, but I couldn’t—couldn’t! I still needed the antidote for this Fountain elixir, and there was no doubt in my mind that it was spinning away in that room along with Gamon’s vials of eternal youth.
Several white-coated people were approaching that door, however, carrying something in their arms, and my eyes flew wide.
This, at least, I could manage. This I could do.
I drew the nails together and snarled one word. “Bind!” And twin arcs of flame jetted out, blasting into the ceiling above the door and showering down sparks and smoke. I didn’t know how long that would hold, but it did the job for the moment. Nobody was leaving the lab alive until I found what I needed. Too many people were depending on me. I was depending on me.
Fire raged all around me. I rolled over, dragging myself through my own blood, which was not ever something I’d hoped to do, frankly. I squinted back into the depths of the sacrificial hall, trying to see more clearly, and something was definitely moving in the smoke. Was it Gamon? Her priest?
It was smoke, I realized, a smoking mirror. Had that been attributed to the god as well? The phrase came to me in a rush, and I blinked, seeing the scene before me more clearly now. The figure in front of me, swaying and twisting, wasn’t the priest. It was Gamon. Only, Gamon like I’d never seen her before. Her usual thick layers of robes had been stripped from her body, and her arms were bared. In between bursts of fire, I could see she was inscribed with tattoos in full sleeves on both arms, the sinuous art writhing and moving independent of her motions, like she was being swarmed by symbols and strange beasts.
I shook my head, desperate to understand, but my blood loss had been too great. I flopped forward, dragging myself toward her. I had—to stop her. With her out of commission, with the nails blasting fire, I could bluff my way past her people. But with Gamon still upright and me so incapacitated, there was simply no way I could fight all of them.
There was
also the energy suck of even using the nails—a suck I hadn’t noticed before, but which was now inexorably dragging me down. Scanning my body, I saw the worst of the rents in my skin looked like they’d been cauterized shut, but I was still leaking blood and goo from my legs and upper arms. That priest hadn’t been fooling around.
Gamon’s manic gibberish grated against my ears as I hauled myself forward. I didn’t need to get all the way to her, but there seemed to be some sort of barrier between us, the farthest trailing edge of smoke. If I could just get past that…
“Aigh!” Gamon cried. Suddenly she was there, dragging me forward and throwing me down on the same blood-soaked Sun Stone that had lain atop the sacrificial altar. The stone was now cracked down its near side, lying on the stone floor against the wall. Even with that, it had more than enough surface to support me. I couldn’t seem to get away from the damn thing. I pulled my hands around, waving them ineffectually in the air, like a bug with broken pincers. But the fire of the Gods’ Nails seemed momentarily banked.
Looking beyond me into the depths of the cavern, her face alight with purpose, Gamon laughed. “I bring the sacrifice to your very hands, Tezcatlipoca.”
I craned my neck, my foot gaining purchase on the rock wall beside me, and twisted around to see who Gamon was talking to, but there was nothing else in the shadows but spitting, burning fire. There was no one there, no matter how she stared with wild, frantic eyes.
Gamon had completely lost her mind.
Taking advantage of her distraction, I brought my hands together, hard, braining her with my fists on either side of her temples. When the spikes connected with her skull, another burst of flame erupted from their tips, the roar nearly shattering my eardrums. Gamon instantly crumpled, and something new and powerful surged in me, a strength that seemed to flow into me from the smoke itself—which was good, because there sure was a lot of smoke.
I staggered to my feet and thrust one hand in the downward slash that Armaeus had taught me, and to my surprise the spike slid out of my wrist and into my fingers, just as he’d said would happen. I was reeling with pain and queasiness, which he also had presaged, but there was nothing I could do about that. There was nowhere to stow the nail, with my clothes cut to ribbons, so I transferred it to my left hand and grabbed Gamon with my right, dragging her around the moat, up the ramp, and out the door of the sacrificial room. I crossed to the other door, and the sparking voltage stopped long enough for me to duck inside.
