Labyrinth of Stars (A Hunter Kiss Novel)

by Marjorie M. Liu

  The six-wheeler bumped and rattled us across the grassy, rut-scarred pasture that separated the farmhouse from the wooded area of my land. Birds scattered before us, and several rabbits darted away, startled. I was surprised the smell of predators hadn’t already motivated them to get clear of this place. Or that the Osul hadn’t hunted them all dead.

  A golden glow made the warm air shimmer; everywhere, a lush glint, a hush in the light itself as the day softened into that last evening gleam. My favorite time of day—though it was ruined by the feeling of something’s watching me. I glanced sideways at the Shurik on Grant’s shoulder. It didn’t have eyes, but its sharp little mole mouth was pointed in my direction. I stared past it at my husband’s strong, jagged profile.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, breaking the silence between us. “I shouldn’t have said those things. Earlier, I mean.”

  My hands tightened around the wheel. “How long have you felt this way?”

  “I don’t,” he said flatly. “I’ve never felt that way about you.”

  “That, I know.” I suddenly felt nauseous, warm. “What I meant is . . . how long have you felt like a killer?”

  Grant remained silent for the rest of the ride. It wasn’t until I had parked in front of the porch and was ready to slide out that he grabbed my wrist. It was my right wrist, and when his hand touched the armor, I felt a spark flash through me, followed by an oozing heat. He didn’t seem to feel it on his end—his hand remained where it was, and his fingers squeezed once, gently.

  “I didn’t notice it at first.” A faint sheen of sweat touched his brow; and the bright flush was back, like a fever. “It started in my dreams. Nightmares that I was hurting people, nightmares that were so real that I was half-convinced I’d done those things.”

  “Memories. Not yours.”

  “I started feeling that same hunger while I was awake. Not to eat anyone,” he added quickly. “But thinking about people as food isn’t much different from looking at them as something disposable, that can be controlled, manipulated. The impulse is the same.”

  I sat on that for a moment, unsurprised. “I feel like there’s more you’re not telling me.”

  Grant pulled his cane from the seat behind us. “I don’t know how to fix this, Maxine. Using my gift to hurt others has always been my nightmare. What happened with the demon in Taiwan . . . I didn’t even think. It felt natural.”

  He was still hiding something from me, but I played along. “It felt righteous.”

  “Yes,” he said quietly.

  “Have you spoken to the demons?”

  “The Shurik aren’t the problem,” he replied, as the fat little worm on his shoulder exhaled a rather pleased-sounding squeak and wriggled out of sight beneath his shirt. “They’re very . . . receptive. It’s the Yorana.”

  “They can go fuck themselves,” I muttered, feeling the sun begin to set behind me. “Come on. I need pie.”

  Mary was already in the kitchen when we walked inside. Television on, playing a Hallmark movie, one of those Westerns starring an unconvincingly grim and battle-hardened Kevin Sorbo.

  “Where’s Jack?” I asked her. The boys were tugging hard on my skin, ready to wake. Soon, any minute now.

  She made a face and dug into a little plastic bag of weed. Which had taken on a whole new meaning for me. When she offered some to Grant, he hesitated—and then took a pinch to chew. Made him grimace, but he didn’t spit it out. I wondered if his physiology was just different enough to keep him from getting high on the stuff.

  Mary also stuffed a pinch of that shit into her mouth. “Wolf is cutting off dirt.”

  So, he was finally taking a bath. Hallelujah.

  Grant sank into a chair with a sigh. I ruffled his hair as I walked to the fridge—then stopped, frowning, and came back to him. I felt his forehead again.

  “You have a fever,” I said, feeling dumb. Yes, his face had been red. But I’d thought it was some symptom of the strain the demons were putting him under. Maybe it still was. But his skin was hot.

  “I’m tired, that’s all,” he said, leaning his elbow on the table. Mary frowned, drawing close. She bent, peering at his face, and her hand darted out to grab his jaw. He tried to pull away, but she held him still, peering into his eyes.

  The Shurik nosed free of his shirt, the tip of its sharp mouth peeling back just slightly to reveal tiny, needlelike teeth covered in slime.

  “None of those are inside you, right?” I asked warily.

  Grant, still held in place by Mary, gave me an exasperated look. I shrugged at him, totally not sorry for asking.

  “Not right,” Mary muttered, and tore her gaze from him to give me the same hard stare.

  “What?” I asked, always a bit unnerved when she looked at me like that. Mary’s scrutiny was usually just a prelude to extreme amounts of violence.

  She didn’t get a chance to answer. My phone started ringing. Made me jump. Even Grant flinched.

  I didn’t recognize the number. Almost didn’t answer. But my instincts tickled.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “Fucking Hunter,” replied a woman on the other end. I didn’t recognize the voice, but the anger was familiar. Definitely some human possessed by a demon.

  I stayed silent, waiting. The woman let out a ragged sigh. “You tackled me last night. I’m the waitress from Houston.”

  “You have my number?”

  She made a wet, hacking noise that sounded like she was gargling wet fur. “Forget that. I’m sick, you bitch.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you understand?” Her voice broke. I heard another wretched cough, and I realized she was vomiting.

  I didn’t understand at first. I was in denial. All I could think was that she hadn’t been anywhere near those dead bodies. It took me a long, confused moment before the truth hit: It wasn’t her, it was me. The boys had been tramping all over those dead humans, touching them—then touching me. So had Zee.

  Me, me, me. And I had touched her.

  “Wait,” I said, almost stuttering. “Which part of you is sick? Your host?”

  “What the fuck do you think?” she snarled weakly. “Yes, my host. My host, who I feed from.”

  I looked at Grant, and his fever suddenly meant something totally different to me.

  Jack had said this thing couldn’t infect humans. But what if he was wrong? If I had infected the demon-possessed waitress in Houston, then perhaps she’d gone back into her restaurant and infected her customers. If they’d gone out and infected others . . .

  I touched that possessed old woman in Taiwan.

  “Damn,” I said. “Oh, damn.”

  Grant had been watching me the entire time, his expression becoming ever more grave. But something else passed over his face—a tightening of his throat, his lips pressing so hard together they turned white.

  That was the only warning we got. He stood so fast his chair fell over, and he lurched toward the kitchen sink. He was in such a rush, he didn’t grab his cane. Mary caught him before he toppled over, but that happened anyway—he fell against the sink and started puking.

  I stared, horrified. I heard the demon-possessed woman saying something to me, but I hung up on her and was next to Grant in moments. He had stopped vomiting, but was still spitting, coughing. I looked down into the sink and all I saw was normal puke—a swimmy goop of food fragments and bile. Relief sank through me.

  “It’s ok—” I began, just as a violent shudder rolled him up on his toes, and he bent over, again. The sound he made was terrible, like someone had shoved a barbed hook down his throat into his guts and was yanking up, yanking and tearing him inside out.

  What rushed from his mouth was a blur, but I saw the glint of darkness, a splash of red in the sink—and parts of my vision blacked out.

  The sun set, and the boys woke up.

  CHAPTER 13

  GROWING up, the plan was always this: I’d get pregnant one day, with a stranger. And then I’d die. Youn
g.

  As far as I knew, that was how it had worked for most of my ancestors. No one ever lived to see old age. No one ever got married. Maybe there was love, but no happily ever after. Just mothers and daughters, and demons. Wandering together, alone, down a road as old and dark as blood.

  But I was married. I was in love. Which, when you think about it, is almost as rare as carrying five demons on your skin.

  And much more precious.

  FIFTEEN minutes later, the only light in the farmhouse living room came from the television, and it cast a flickering blue glow on razor-sharp spines of flexing hair and scaled, muscular chests. Raw and Aaz lounged on the floor in front of me, chewing on coils of barbed wire. The spikes jutting from their backs quivered with each breath.

  Aaz reached over his shoulder, yanked one free with a wet crunch, and used it to pick between his jagged teeth. Bits of barbed wire hit the rug. Dek—coiled against his leg, gnawing a teddy bear—gave him a disapproving look and licked up the scraps with his long black tongue.

  Grant lay on the couch, a cool wet rag on his forehead. A bucket was on the floor beside him. He hadn’t puked again, but he had this sour, grim twist to his mouth that made me think he was fighting hard not to hurl. Zee crouched on the back of the couch, leaning down to sniff at him.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Grant muttered between clenched teeth.

  “I feel fine,” I said, even though I didn’t, really. I’d never been sick a day in my life, but something in my body felt . . . off. The skin along my legs hurt, like the fibers of my jeans had suddenly contracted some spiky substance that was pricking me. My muscles ached. I felt warm.

  Zee gave me a quick, concerned look when I told Grant I was fine—but he didn’t blow my cover. Instead, he leapt over us to the floor, prowling around Jack and Mary. The old woman was pacing. My grandfather stood against the wall, arms folded over his chest. He was wearing Grant’s clothes, and they looked odd on him. Grant dressed like one of the models from an Eddie Bauer catalogue: rough-hewn, an upscale lumberjack. Jack still looked like he’d be more comfortable in his old dirty sweatpants and T-shirt filled with holes.

  He wasn’t even looking at us. Instead, he seemed engrossed in a rerun of Magnum P.I. that Raw and Aaz were watching, sound on mute. The little demons had been skipping off to Hawaii some nights, bringing home tropical shirts and surfboards, and fragrant leis that they always dropped over my head.

  My husband was dying while Tom Selleck flirted with a girl in a string bikini. Life could be horrible sometimes.

  Zee pointed his long black claw at Mary. “Sick.”

  She didn’t stop pacing. Zee looked at Jack. “You sick, too.”

  He didn’t look away from the show. “I know. I felt the virus begin to work on me before I entered my bath.”

  “You sure were quiet about that,” I snapped.

  My grandfather finally tore his gaze from the television. “And what would I have accomplished with hysterics, or even a warning?” Fury blasted through his expression, a terrible desperate rage that made me feel, for a moment, afraid. I’d never seen him so angry, and it reminded me again that he was not human, no matter what he looked like—because no human, nothing mortal, was capable of the luminous, godlike savagery that lit his eyes.

  “You said humans wouldn’t be affected. You were sure.”

  “I was wrong.” Jack closed his eyes. “The virus had been modified. I didn’t see it.”

  “You see everything else.”

  “I made a mistake.”

  “You won’t die from that mistake,” I said simply. “But we will.”

  “Not you,” Grant said, so quietly I barely heard him. But that had to be wishful thinking on his part. I hadn’t said a word about not feeling well, but Grant had to know, just from looking at me. Jack, too. When he turned away from me, jaw tense, I had no doubt at all.

  I’m sick, I thought, filled with dread. All I could think about was that Mahati who had died in the snow; and Grant, puking in the sink. I’m sick, too.

  But for how long, really? Had the thing that lived inside me saved my daughter just to let me die, too? That wasn’t part of the bargain.

  I could make other bargains.

  You have nothing left, whispered that sibilant voice, floating through me like a flake of drifting ash. And a Queen does not beggar herself for nothing.

  I closed my eyes. Grant’s hand found mine and squeezed.

  “How long do I have?” he asked Jack.

  My grandfather tugged hard on his beard; I heard a muffled squeak from inside that tangle of hair. “I don’t know, lad. It works fast on demons, we’ve seen that. But you’re still alive. Mary is still strong. Maybe it will burn itself out.”

  “I infected a demon-possessed waitress in Texas,” I told them, glancing at my phone, which was on the couch beside me. “Another of her possessed friends texted me five minutes ago. Her host was just taken to the hospital. The parasite itself already fled.”

  I hadn’t wanted to share that information. The room got very quiet. Grant said, “It doesn’t benefit the Aetar to make something that destroys humans. You need their bodies, too.”

  Jack shook his head, all that rage leaving him, deflating his entire body until he sagged like a sock puppet against the wall. “We have billions of humans on other worlds. Worlds upon worlds upon worlds that we control. Earth is nothing to us but a historical footnote in an otherwise tedious existence. And it is easy to quarantine a world. They have no fear that this will spread.”

  “And if it did, they would be highly motivated to develop a cure,” I said. “The Aetar don’t want to lose their toys.”

  He gave me a sharp look. “My dear girl—”

  “It was bad enough when it was the demons,” I interrupted him. “But I can’t take the risk that it’ll wipe out humans, too. Even if it just kills a fraction of the population, that’s too many.”

  Grant jerked and fumbled for the garbage bin. He barely reached it before he started vomiting. The little Shurik who had been hiding under his shirt—so quiet I had almost forgotten it was there—made a small, hissing sound. So did Dek and Mal, hugging my throat and quivering. Or maybe I was the one who was shaking.

  Raw and Aaz scrambled to Grant and the garbage bin. I was already leaning over him. Not touching but close enough to give what comfort I could.

  And that wasn’t much at all. I felt so helpless. There was nothing to fight here. Nothing I could threaten or destroy. Disease had no voice, except for the voice of the man I loved. Disease was the ultimate possessor. A demon, all its own.

  But I was good at fighting demons. Somehow, I’d fight this one. My daughter was going to have her father. I was going to have my husband. If I accomplished nothing else, it would be those two things.

  I stood up. Grant tensed, trying to sit up with me. Raw and Aaz made annoyed, clicking sounds with their tongues, and pushed him back down. Dek bit into the remains of his teddy bear and slithered into my husband’s lap with it.

  “Can you make a cure?” I asked Grant.

  He swallowed hard. Aaz dragged a bottle of Gatorade from beneath the couch and pushed it into his hand. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  I tried to smile. “Then try to rest. I won’t be far.”

  Grant gave me a wary look. “Whenever you say that . . . all hell breaks loose.”

  “I say a lot of things that precede bloodshed.” I bent to kiss him gently on the mouth. “But I always come home to you.”

  He caught the back of my head and held me close, turning so that his face was buried in my neck. His skin was hot—but then, so was I. Standing wasn’t as easy as it should have been.

  “Love you,” he whispered. “Sorry I haven’t been myself.”

  I ran my fingers through his hair. “I’ll beat you up when you’re better.”

  He snorted and fell back against the couch, too exhausted to touch me for even another moment. I pulled back his shirt and looked at the pale l
ittle Shurik clinging to his chest.

  “You,” I said, in a cold voice. “If you and your kind value this man, then you will get those Yorana in fucking line, do you hear me? Because if he dies, you die. They all die.”

  The Shurik bared its sharp little mouth and gurgled at me. Zee muttered, “It understands.”

  “Good.” I leaned close, battling a clammy surge of squeamish disgust. “Grant believes in you. I think he might even love you little turds. So you goddamn better deserve it. Protect him. Give him your strength. Give him what he needs. Or else I’ll kill you.”

  This time the Shurik reared up and hissed at me. Zee snapped his teeth, and it shrank back just a little—but there was still something defiant in the twist of its flesh.

  Zee snorted. “Tells you that honor and loyalty is Shurik heart.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t think that’s all it said.”

  “Also called you stupid.”

  “That’s better.” I looked at Grant, who laid a calming hand inside his shirt. The Shurik snuggled against his palm like a cat. Either I was getting brainwashed, or maybe I just didn’t give a shit anymore, but seeing that didn’t immediately make me want to vomit in my mouth. Probably a bad sign. “Did you understand what it was saying?”

  “Not the specifics,” said Grant, with the faintest of amused smiles. “But I could feel its intent. That was enough.”

  I kissed him again and backed away. “Jack, I need a word with you.”

  My grandfather looked at me like I was going to punch him in the nuts. But he followed me out of the farmhouse without a word, and the boys came with us, prowling the length of the porch and perching on the rail. Night hadn’t completely fallen. The horizon held the faintest light of dusk, bleeding into the dark sky, washing out the stars just now gracing the night.

  “What did you learn from that giant’s head? Who made it?”

  “The answer doesn’t do us any good. The creature was designed by the Erl-King. You and I both know he’s dead.”