Armor of Roses and The Silver Voice

by Marjorie M. Liu

  “That is your first true lie,” says his wife, sitting on the edge of the bed. “In all your life, that must be your first, I think.”

  On a world where lies can be seen, there is no use for untruths. Lies are told as jokes are told, because they are ridiculous. Everyone sees through them. But he knows what he just said was no jest—instead, an expression of fear. A true lie. A true deceit, said to deceive himself, to make himself feel less afraid.

  Impossible.

  “We both know there is no choice,” he says. “I am the last of the Lightbringers. All the others are dead, or captured. I must stay and fight. I cannot abandon those who are still dying. I cannot . . . run from them.”

  The bond between them pulses, her heartbeat quickening inside his as her mouth tightens with anger, and her eyes grow hard. He steels himself for the old fight, but it does not come. Instead, she rests her hands on the enormous swell of her belly—a deliberate, calculated move—and that is as cruel, as devastating, as anything she could say to him.

  Her stomach shimmers with a light that is strong and calm, and healthy. Inside, life. Inside, his life.

  My son, he thinks, and has to lean against the wall because he is dying—he will be dead before the end of the day—and his heart cannot stand, cannot bear, cannot abide the fear and despair he feels at not being able to hold and protect that child, his only child, and the woman who is carrying him.

  He would give anything. Anything.

  A knock at the door. It is Maritine, dressed in her leathers, weapons strapped to her sinewy body. The house sigil gleams from her exposed breastbone. She is the best of his assassins and the most devoted.

  “Lightbringer,” she says, bowing her head. “Now, or we are dead.”

  His wife struggles to stand, and he goes to help her. Her fingers close around his hand, squeezing.

  “I would rather die with you,” she whispers.

  “I would much rather you live,” he replies, trying to smile for her, though it falters when he touches her stomach and feels the heat of life burning against his palm. “Both of you must live. I will not have you killed. I will not have our son cut from you and remade into a slave. It cannot happen.”

  “It may anyway,” she says, grim. “You do not know what will befall us in the Labyrinth.”

  It is always the risk. A terrible risk. But it is a chance. A better chance than what will await them here.

  He holds her close. “Others have escaped. You will find them.”

  “Grantin,” she murmurs, but he kisses her hard, grunting when she bites his lip. He pushes her away, wiping blood from his mouth—and smiles at the defiant look she gives him.

  “My heart,” he says. “My brave, beautiful heart.”

  “Yours, forever,” she says, voice breaking.

  This will kill him. Not the final battle. Grief, alone.

  He reaches beneath his robe and pulls the amulet over his head. His last gift. This, passed down from father to son. One seed ring, holding the most important memories of five men, five generations, five Lightbringers.

  His son will be the sixth. His son. A Lightbringer. The last. Or the first of more. One final hope, anyway, that their world will be resurrected, and their people freed from the Aetar.

  Hope is stronger than fear, he thinks. Hope is the silver thread, knotted on the silver tongue. The silver voice, the silver dream of an endless, burning light.

  The stone is warm, shimmering, absorbing this moment for as long as he holds it in his hand, in his heart. Keyed to his bloodline, it will one day absorb the memories of his son.

  His son. Who will live.

  “Wife,” he says, and presses the amulet into—

  His hands. His hands still ached.

  Worse, even, than his knee, as though Grant had shattered all twenty-seven bones in each hand and now had pins stuck in his flesh to hold them together. Bending his fingers was agony. He did not know why. He didn’t think he’d held the seed ring that tight.

  It lay on the table in front of him. Maxine sat very still and quiet, head tilted forward as Dek groomed a spot behind her ear. Zee perched on the porch rail, studying his claws; while Raw and Aaz rested on their stomachs beneath him, eating razor blades dipped in guacamole, occasionally tossing one into Mal’s open mouth.

  He kept trying to remember his mother’s face, but all he could recall was a pregnant young woman who bore only a faint resemblance. A woman who carried no lines around her mouth and eyes—lines that he remembered as a child and teenager, lines that had run deep in her face, lines that he had blamed on age.

  Grant knew better now. It was just grief, engraved.

  “Time moves differently in the Labyrinth,” he said, finally finding his voice, listening to it crack and break on each word. “When she found this world, millions of years had passed since the war. What did she think, seeing humans again? Did she think she’d found her people?”

  Maxine said nothing.

  Grant rubbed his aching hands. “She could have told me, but maybe she was afraid. Maybe she’d lost too much and wanted to pretend I wasn’t . . . like him. Not a Lightbringer. Maybe she thought the Aetar were here on Earth, and that if I used my powers . . .”

  He stopped. It was all just speculation, none of which he knew for certain was the truth. He was still lost.

  “I don’t know what happened to him,” Grant whispered, rubbing his aching hands, wishing he could do the same for his aching heart. “Maxine, it feels so strange. I was there, in my . . . my father’s head. His memories are as clear as mine, but it’s . . . unreal, like watching a movie. My life compared to his . . . compared to the life of the man who raised me . . .”

  He could not finish. His thoughts, too jumbled.

  She was silent a moment. “Does it help?”

  “No,” Grant said, meeting her gaze—devastated by that sudden, terrible insight. “Not even a little.”

  He pushed away with enough violence to send the table tilting on one leg. The seed ring slid. Maxine caught it, giving him a questioning look. He shook his head at her, snatching up his cane and limping away—off the porch, into the darkness, heading nowhere. Lost in the night.

  Demons filled the shadows around him: Raw and Aaz loping on either side, visible only through their auras and the occasional glint of red eyes. Zee appeared in front of him, then flickered out of sight.

  “I want to be alone,” Grant said.

  He heard a rasping voice behind him. “Pain, you think you have.”

  “I know it.”

  “No,” Zee snapped, with enough vehemence to stop Grant in his tracks. “No,” said the demon again, with the same hint of violence and anger. “No idea, pain. No idea, loss.”

  “I was in my father’s heart,” he shot back. “He was going to die. He was going to lose what he loves most. He was even going to lose his world. I felt that, Zee.”

  And it killed him. That, and all the terrible emptiness of his childhood, feeling like an outsider removed from his parents, a freak who could see light in every sound, a stranger to his oddly grieving mother. His inability to connect with the father who had raised him, the father who had been his in name and time, in every way but biology—all of it, slamming together. All of it, and just beyond, a swelling pressure in his throat, the need to sing, or say a word, or use the power burning inside him. The power of a Lightbringer. To kill, to change, to make light. Whatever that meant. He still had no clue.

  “Father’s pain, not your pain,” Zee said, in a softer—though no less, dangerous—voice. “All, past. All, done. You, be new.”

  Grant searched for the demon in the darkness. “You must have had a father. You were born. All of you.”

  Auras flickered. Grant watched them burn slow, then twist.

  “Long ago,” Zee whispered, v
oice drifting, disembodied. “Mine, strong. All fathers strong. But not strong enough. Still dead. Still dead while us five survive. By accident, survive. Only us. Rest of world, gone. Gone to dust. Gone to abyss. Gone to the mouth of the screaming tide.”

  Grant stayed very still as Zee crept close. “One day, you stop being son. One day, start being father. Then, know pain. Then, know fear.”

  He stared at him, letting those words sink in. “Zee. Did you ever have children?”

  The little demon’s aura twisted into a knot the color of blood, such a violent color, such a violent reaction, that Grant’s own gut twisted, and sank, and hurt.

  Never look back, never, at death. Grant heard those words again, and did not know if Zee had spoken out loud, or if it was just in his head.

  “Hey,” said a soft voice. Maxine, walking through the darkness. Grant wondered if she had heard them, but he thought not: She was still too far away. He looked for Zee and the boys, but did not find their auras, or their red eyes glinting. Gone, faded. Only Mal and Dek were still visible, perched on his wife’s shoulders.

  He found it difficult to speak when she finally stood in front of him, surrounded in light, shimmering as though a star burned somewhere inside her. Her heartbeat thudded against his, and for a moment he was lost in memory, listening to the pound of war somewhere distant.

  He took a breath. “My mother didn’t like to hold my father’s hand. My human father. I never understood why.”

  “Her heart was somewhere else,” Maxine said, taking his hand.

  “She had empty eyes when she would look at him—at dinner, in the car. Even when she smiled, it didn’t warm her gaze. He knew it, but he loved her so much, he didn’t care.”

  Maxine looked at him with eyes that were so warm, so full, his heart ached.

  “She married him in order to survive on this world,” he said, cupping her face with one hand. “Just to survive. And when she looked at me, all she could see was her loss.”

  “She loved you.”

  “She loved me,” he agreed. “But that doesn’t mean I didn’t pain her and make her wish for something she couldn’t have.”

  Maxine pressed her lips against his shoulder and stayed there. Grant murmured, “All those secrets she carried. That huge burden.”

  “It was too big to tell.” His wife did pull away then, just far enough to push the seed ring into his hand. “Here’s your truth.”

  He felt the amulet’s familiar weight and heat, and listened to his heart, sinking into a memory not his own, recalling the desperate desire of a father, a stranger, who wanted only for his son to live.

  Just, to live.

  I am, he thought, looking back at Maxine, filled and connected with a flood of deep, overwhelming love. I am living.

  “It’s not my truth,” he said, and kissed her forehead. “This is. Right now. Not the past.”

  His wife gave him a long look, and the little demons on her shoulders hummed. “Grant.”

  He glimpsed Zee watching, and the demon nodded at him.

  “We’re something new,” he whispered. “We’re just the beginning.”

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  Read on for an exciting excerpt from the next Hunter Kiss novel

  The Mortal Bone

  by

  Marjorie M. Liu

  Coming December 27, 2011, from Ace Books!

  1

  WHAT happens in Texas, stays in Texas. Except when demons are involved.

  I was sitting on the sagging porch of the old farmhouse, sipping an ice-cold ginger ale, when a red pickup truck appeared around the last bend of the long, curving driveway. I stood, shielding my eyes against the late-afternoon sun—noticing, as had become my habit, the gold glimmer of my wedding ring standing out in stark relief against the obsidian, mercury-streaked tattoos that covered my entire left hand.

  Dust kicked up behind the truck, but not much. The driver was taking a slow approach.

  I hadn’t lived on this land in years. Maybe it was a nosy neighbor coming to visit. Or a social worker who had heard that a teenage boy was in residence and not attending school. Could be someone lost—but the driveway was almost three miles long and blocked by a heavy gate. A bit out of the way, just to ask directions.

  I felt a tug against my tattooed skin. A persistent ripple that traveled like a small shock wave from my toenails to the base of my neck, as though an electrical pulse was moving through Zee and the boys.

  I set down my drink. Against my neck, the tip of Dek’s tattooed tail thrummed, like the quiet warning of a rattlesnake. When I flexed my fingers, the organic silver armor covering my right hand tingled. Everything, coming alive as that red truck rolled and rumbled down the driveway.

  The driver parked in front of the barn, surrounded in a swirling cloud of pale, hot dust. I couldn’t see much behind the tinted windows, so I listened to the engine pop and groan as I stepped off the porch.

  The door opened, and a foot dangled out. Fortunately, it was attached to a leg. I wasn’t always that lucky.

  I saw a simple white sneaker with a thick sole, and an equally thick ankle that was so swollen the flesh seemed to sag over the top of the shoe. I walked sideways, peering into the truck to see what else that limb was attached to.

  What I found was a demon having a heart attack.

  That’s what it seemed like at first. The unfortunate host was a woman well over three hundred pounds, who wore a sleeveless blue sundress that clung to her round stomach and heavy breasts. Her arms were thick and wide, as was her soft neck, which was almost lost in her sagging jaw. She had pale skin—around her hands—but the rest of her was pink and red as a lobster, and dripping with sweat.

  Soaked brown hair clung to her face, along with a thunderous aura that marked her as demon-possessed. Somewhere, deep inside, a human soul still resided . . . but it was impossible to tell just how long it had been buried beneath that seat of darkness. Some demons, the young ones, clung with only a light touch, a whisper. Others dug in, latching onto the flesh, sliding into lives, and pulling every string.

  Those clinging shadows rose and fell off the woman’s shoulders with each heaving breath, and she sat—half-in, half-out of her truck—with her eyes closed and mouth open, panting and clutching her chest.

  It would be easy for me to exorcise the demon. Even a year ago, I would not have hesitated. Those gutter rats who regularly escaped the prison veil had no business possessing humans and feeding off their pain. Nothing had changed my opinion about that.

  But I’d learned a thing or two about demons—and myself—that blurred the lines between good and evil. I could no longer cast stones. Not without asking questions first. Any demon looking for me was very desperate—or coerced—and that was bad news, in more ways than one.

  So I waited, silent. Wishing I had gum to chew. The aftertaste of that ginger ale had gone sour, right along with my stomach. I hated this so much. All the possibilities of all the bad things this demon might tell me, crowding my head, making my pulse thicken.

  The possessed woman finally caught her breath and opened her eyes to look at me.

  She didn’t seem to know where to settle her gaze, which flitted above and around, and on me, with such rapidness it made me dizzy. Finally, she settled on my eyes, then danced down to the tattoos covering my arms: an unbroken tangle of obsidian muscle and scales, knotted, curling, shimmering with veins of mercury that caught the light—though not nearly as much as the glinting crimson eyes that always remained open and staring.

  I’d found some of my mother’s old white tank tops in the closet and hadn’t seen much point to leaving them there—or hiding the boys. I had few, if any, secrets from the people in my life. Which was another dazzling departure from the way I had been raised.

 
; “Boo,” I said to the possessed woman, and felt sort of bad when she flinched from me, like I’d hit her.

  Silent, and with agonizing stiffness, she reached sideways into the passenger seat and dragged a red plastic bowling bag across her stomach. Her breathing roughened again, and sweat dripped off the ends of her thin hair.

  “Take it,” she whispered. “Hurry.”

  Licking a bad case of herpes sounded more appealing than taking a gift from a demon. Safer, too.

  I did not move. “Why are you here?”

  “Come on, it’s fragile.” Her demonic aura twitched and fluttered, tendrils of shadow flirting with escape. “Please. I was told to come.”

  “Who told you?”

  She flashed me a hard, frightened look. “A voice in a dream. I was ordered to give you something that belongs to my host.”

  I frowned. A voice in a dream? Really?

  Unfortunately, it sounded too strange to be a lie. And that demon was genuinely terrified.

  I reached for the bowling bag. I wasn’t worried about its being a bomb. I’d survive a nuclear blast—or bullets, knives, fire. Sending me to the bottom of the ocean wouldn’t kill me, either. Not while the sun shone, somewhere above me.

  The possessed woman snatched back her hand before I had a full grip on the oversized handle, and I almost dropped it—partially because it was unexpectedly heavy. The shape as it bumped my leg felt round and hard.

  “This better not be a human head,” I muttered.

  She shuddered. “Close.”

  I flashed her a hard look and unzipped the bowling bag.

  No hair or bone inside. No blood. The afternoon light gleamed off a round, smooth surface—clear as glass. I reached inside, bracing myself as the armor encasing much of my right hand and forearm began tingling again, like pins and needles.

  Nothing happened, though. The armor quieted. I slid my hand under the cool, hard object—and lifted it from the bowling bag.