by eden Hudson
Rian hitched his thumbs into his thick cop utility-belt. “And since I killed him and got you the sword back, I figured—”
“You have the sword with you?” Kathan said.
Rian smiled. As he reached for the gun on his hip, the part of Kathan’s mind that I was shadowing switched from the human visual spectrum to a world of glowing black halos and laser pointers and ball lightning.
Greenish black strings reached out from Rian in every direction. According to Kathan’s memories, those belonged there. But there was also a bloody ball of thick-looking red light near his hip. That didn’t belong. It was uglier and more out of place there than I would’ve been in a church choir. Rian’s hand disappeared into the bloody ball and he winced. When he pulled his hand back out, he was holding Mikal’s flaming sword.
“You bet your ass I got it with me.” He held it out, offering it to Kathan.
Kathan backed up a step and shook his head. “You took it. You wield it.”
Rian’s smug grin twisted into something Desty probably would’ve called a leer. “Live by the sword, die by the sword.”
At first, Kathan wasn’t going to give a subordinate the satisfaction of responding to something so idiotic, but then he decided that to ignore the comment would give the appearance of weakness.
“Weapons belong in the hands of pawns,” he said. “In any case, I’ll be damned if I’m going to bring a flashy knife to a full-scale atomic war. I prefer to have my finger on the big red button.” He thought of Modesty in the hands of his foot soldiers, the few he commanded, the first of what would soon be an army of legions, and he smiled.
Furious passion overwhelmed the first piece of my mind. Back there, I was ripping his clothes off while he pressed me to the wall. His lips burned against mine.
Now, I begged him. Let me see what it’s like inside you while you make love to me.
He laughed, his breath hot against my cheek. You couldn’t handle it.
Please, Kathan. I arched my back and rubbed against him, trying to satisfy the ache for contact.
In the disconnected, all-business piece of him listening to Rian, Kathan was still thinking about Modesty, about what it would take to forge her into the other half of his Destroyer.
Not the Destroyer. His Destroyer.
All right, I’ll show you, he agreed in the first piece, then he pulled me into a third.
Sensation flooded my world. Sights, sounds, pleasure and anger so intense that some parts of me screamed and cringed away. It was too much. But the rush of sensations drowned out the thing I hated most in the world, made everything but Kathan so small and so distant. Parts of me died in him, reduced to cinders in his heat.
But one part of me stayed with Kathan in the sitting room of our suite and thought about all the things he would order his foot soldiers to do to my sister to make her the other half of his Destroyer.
I might not have been the smart twin, but I wasn’t brain dead, either. Not yet. I knew what it meant that Kathan wasn’t stopping me from shadowing his separate parts. He knew I was there, but he wasn’t trying to hide anything. He knew he didn’t need to. I was already his. I was already lost.
Tough
I paced the attic of Lonely’s Tattoo Parlor for the hundredth time, tossing a frag grenade back and forth between my hands, and avoiding the tiny slices of light that shined in through the window.
When I agreed to this, I thought I was agreeing to laying an ass-whupping of epic proportions on Kathan, and at some point, making Rian cry like a bitch. I didn’t think I was signing up to be a spectator in an all-day negotiation-a-thon.
I took another lap—past the rifles, the coyote, the crow, Scout, the crate stamped TBG-7, around the roll of razor wire, hang a right at the stack of ammo boxes, and then back to watching my step near the window. Outside the sun glared down like it was trying to burn Halo to the ground.
“Okay,” Scout said. “Then we’re all agreed that Lonely has sole command of the crows, with the chain of command remaining in the crows in the event of his death, and Clarion has sole command of the coyotes, with the chain of command remaining in the coyotes in the event of his death, and that both the crow and coyote forces will back up the human forces under Tough’s command—”
I stopped pacing and glared at her.
She rolled her eyes. “We covered this already, Tough. If you don’t head this, everything else all falls apart.”
Lonely and that old one-eyed coyote, Clarion, shot each other a look. Probably thinking I was going to make one sorry excuse for a leader, even just a figurehead one. Well, no shit. I wouldn’t have picked me, either.
“Anyway,” Scout said, “Out of all the humans willing to fight, you’re the only one who’s actually been in a war.”
I snorted. Yeah, and we lost.
“So where were we?” Scout said.
“Chains of command remaining within the individual forces,” Clarion said.
“Right.” She checked her notes. “While taking primary orders from the human chain of command. And in the event that back up is unnecessary or tactically impossible, you each retain the right to issue contrary secondary orders to your pack or murder as you see fit. In the event that you find our methods or orders unconscionable, you may pull out, but neither crows nor coyotes may pull out due to interracial disputes without first consulting a human intermediary…”
I started to make another lap, popping the grenade up and catching it. I stopped by the window. It looked off to the east, in the general direction of the Dark Mansion.
I didn’t want to be in some stupid attic, arguing about chains of command. I wanted to be carving Kathan and the rest of his foot soldiers up piece by piece. Hell, I’d take blowing them to bits with a bunch of plastic explosive. I wanted to be knee-deep in fallen angel blood with clumps of tar-covered feathers smacking the ground around me. I wasn’t too picky about how I got there.
Lonely had sworn that Colt wouldn’t get resurrected this time. He’d said Colt was dead for good. Maybe that was true, but dead or not, Kathan still had Colt’s body. That fucker would probably hang him up out in front of the Dark Mansion for the maggots to eat and the tourists to take pictures with.
The window pane exploded. It took me a second to realize I’d thrown the frag grenade through it. The vamp speed had done it before I could think about it.
“Tough?” Scout said.
Clarion’s good eye went from the broken window to me. “You pull the pin?”
I checked. Nothing in my hands. No boom on the street. I shook my head.
“I’ll send somebody after it,” he said, standing up. He stopped next to me and looked me in the eye, lowering his voice like he was getting after a little kid in public. “This might look like a lot of firepower to you, but we’ve got a limited supply here and a legion of unkillable creatures to send to Hell. Maybe you should keep your hands in your pockets until you’ve got a little more control over those crowspawn instincts.”
Sure, I’d keep my hands off the ordnance. Until it got dark out, anyway. Then I was going after Kathan whether everybody else was done arguing about NP rules or not.
Lonely was staring at me. If being a vampire now really did make it possible for him to hear my brain, then he should be able to tell what I was thinking. I stared back and waited for him to rat me out, but he just grinned his creepy crow-grin and twisted one of his lip-rings with his split tongue.
Downstairs, the wind chimes over the tattoo parlor’s front door jangled. More new heartbeats, smells, and padding footsteps that clicked with toenails. Small squads of coyotes had been joining the party all morning.
I looked out the window. One more dusty truck parked out front, so they’d been human when they pulled up. Shifting back to four legs as soon as they walked in must be some kind of up-yours to the crows.
“So many packs,” Lonely said. “Must get tiresome, keeping them all in line.”
“I offered to help if you wanted to unite the murd
ers,” Clarion said.
“Mm.” Lonely crossed his thick arms over his gut. “Syndicate? No. It’s not our way. Didn’t used to be your way, either.”
Clarion raised his head, and for a minute, it was like I could see him looking down a snout instead of that scarred-up human nose. “The old ways are broken.”
Lonely flapped a hand at me. “The old ways are why the crows are here. We follow the shiny ones.”
“Great work,” Clarion said. “You geniuses followed the shiny ones right to the end of the world.”
“Keep yipping, puppy. I say the word and this building vaporizes.”
“—birds didn’t even want Halo territory until the fallen angels moved in on—”
“—then we’ll find out just how fast coyote healing really—”
A whistle like a whip-crack rattled my eardrums. Lonely and Clarion both cringed.
Scout took her pinkies out of her mouth.
“Since I’m the only human handy, I’ll go ahead and mediate this dispute,” she said, looking back and forth between them. “When the last battle is over, you’re welcome to go back to killing each other over whatever petty bull you’d like to kill each other over. But for now, if you want to run, walk, or fly away from the last battle alive, then I’m going to need both of you to grow the hell up and work together for as long as it takes to end this.”
Clarion leaned forward in his seat. Lonely adjusted the collar of his open Hawaiian shirt. They didn’t look at each other. Just like that.
It hit me that this was Scout, the real Scout. Not the whiny little brat or the jailbait whose too-short skirt this version of Scout was still wearing. The seventeen-and-three-quarters-year-old negotiating the integration of two warring armies while recruiting and organizing her own army and herding the dumbass figurehead into place.
“We need to talk strategy,” Clarion said. “How many of your recruits are armed?”
“None,” Scout said. “I had Cash—Lonely’s cousin—do a flyover of Colt’s place to see if there was anything we could salvage, but the foot soldiers have cleaned out the arsenal and burned the cabin to the ground.”
Colt would’ve had a cache somewhere else, just in case, I thought at Lonely. Maybe a couple of them.
“Where?” Lonely asked.
I know where they were when I moved out. No way he kept them there, though. He used to make us rotate them into new spots every six months.
Clarion’s good eye jumped back and forth from my throat to the crow. He must’ve been able to tell that I was talking, maybe the way I breathed out while I thought the words, even though I didn’t need to anymore.
“Give me all the places you remember,” Lonely said. “We’ll send someone to see what they find.”
It’d be easier if I went and checked them out myself once it got dark.
Lonely grinned. “Best know what we’ve got now. Concentrate on the places. I’ll see them.”
Yeah, he definitely knew about my plan to make a break for the Dark Mansion.
I pictured the huge burl walnut stump out by where the creek turns back, the ancient falling down chicken coop southwest of the cabin, the natural lee of a fall of cedars near the highway, and old tires in the wet sand of the creek about twenty yards upstream from an overhang of tree roots. Because fuck him. I could wait.
Lonely went to go tell his crow buddies.
Scout was staring at me.
I crossed my arms and stared right back. You might boss those NPs around, kiddo, but you don’t scare me. I used to help Mom change your diapers.
Probably the worst thing anybody’s ever thought about someone that they’d had sex with. But what was one more worst thing ever? With my record, people probably expected it by now.
Scout opened her mouth. “Tough, if you need to drink off me…”
I shook my head.
“It’s not like you can just do a line of shots now,” she said. “And with the way you are, you know a random groupie isn’t going to be enough.”
No. The spell or binding or whatever it was that she’d done with the sex-magic-feeding had worn off a while back, so she couldn’t hear me anymore, but I hoped she could see the absolutely fucking not on my face. Having sex with her and drinking off of her had been some rock-bottom shit. We weren’t doing it again.
My hands picked that second to start shaking. I jammed them down into my pockets.
I’m not touching her again. Not happening.
Sure you’re not. Until you get to jonesing for real.
Clarion cleared his throat. “So, uh, you two together?”
I glared at Scout. Don’t you dare say yes.
“It’s complicated,” she said, smoothing out her skirt.
My ass.
“Huh,” was all the coyote said.
Lonely came back and plopped down on the crate he’d been on earlier. “Should know pretty soon whether or not the white knight’s weapon caches are still out there. In the meantime, we’ve got what’s here at our disposal.”
Scout nodded. “Clarion, can you get a report of everything the coyotes brought?”
“I’ll have them start an inventory,” he said. “Six packs are still unaccounted for, but we’ll add their weapons as they come in.”
“Awesome.” Scout turned back to me. “So, Tough, how many vamps do you think you can make in a day?”
Colt
A knee plowed into my gut. A head-butt cracked my cheekbone, sealing shut an eye that was already half-closed.
The snap and rustle of wings never stopped. It was always there, just under the wailing of tortured souls, sometimes so close that I felt the brush of feathers against my skin just before the next blow landed.
The Gatekeepers of Hell. A whole host of them.
At first they had been too fast for me to stop every blow, but over the course of the fight I had slowed down so much that even a human would’ve been getting in hits on me. My arms were dead weight. I couldn’t have pried my fists open with a claw hammer. Blood and sweat rolled down my face in rivers.
I’d been fighting for God knew how long. The only measure of time or distance I had was my fatigue and the certainty that I was getting closer to the wailing. Before, I’d thought the mournful, keening cries were throatless, endless, and directionless. Now I realized they were coming from the Pit. I could feel the screaming resonating in my eardrums and chest. It was in front of me—for a second, anyway, then I took a hit that spun me around. Now the screaming was…at my six. Another hit. Three o’clock. Or was it at my nine? Another. This one rattled my brain so much that the noise from the Pit faded out to a whine.
They were letting me keep fighting. Any one of them could’ve stepped up and ended it at any second. I knew that the same way I’d known that Mikal was keeping me around, messing with my head, twisting things a little at a time because it more fun for her. Maybe that was what the Gatekeepers were doing. Hell, maybe this was the most fun they’d had in two millennia.
One kicked for my knee, and by some miracle, I saw it coming out of the corner of my good eye. My block was sloppy, but the blow glanced off anyway. My bicep rejoiced at the split-second of relaxation, then burned as I forced my arm back up. Cramps locked up my right shoulder just as an inhuman fist shot toward my face. I couldn’t block in time, so I ducked and took it on the top of the head.
I must’ve blacked out. When I came back around, I was on one knee. It felt like someone was taking swings at my ribs with a lead pipe. Bones cracked. Air whistled in my chest. I lunged for my feet, but I couldn’t stand. Hands grabbed me by the head and jerked downward. My nose crunched against a knee. Then I was on the ground.
I wasn’t going to make it.
Maybe that should’ve been obvious way before that very second, but I’d thought if I tried…if God had let me come down here…
I rolled onto my stomach. Stretched one arm out as far as I could manage in the direction of the wailing, then the other. I couldn’t force my fingers to unc
url, but I pushed with my feet and scraped with my forearms and fists. Probably gained less than an inch.
Shit. I really wasn’t going to make it.
Tiffani was going to spend the rest of eternity in Hell because I failed. Unending death. Pain and torture that went on and on forever. She had saved me, gone through hell for me, and after all that, I was going to fail her.
I opened my mouth, but all that came out was a spray of blood bubbles and spit. My lungs weren’t working right. I couldn’t even catch enough breath to say her name.
The muscle in my shoulder spasmed and my arm shot out again. My wrist rested on the lip of something metal set into the floor. Bars.
The screaming was louder than ever now. I hooked my clawed fingers around one of the bars and pulled myself closer. There was just enough heavenly glow left in my skin to illuminate a latch.
No lock. Not even a pin.
The beating had stopped. I pushed with one arm until I rolled onto my side, then looked up.
The Gatekeepers were all standing back from the grate, watching.
“The Pit,” their leader said. “You believe pain and struggle have meaning for you now, but therein lies true Hell.”
Either it was all the blows to the head I’d taken or the reality of what I was about to do that made it seem as if the leader’s inhuman face was showing something almost like concern, as if he was trying to change my mind for my own good.
I blinked to clear my vision, but the leader’s expression stayed the same.
Tiffani. Getting to Tiffani was all that mattered.
I let myself drop back onto my stomach and fumbled with the latch. Finally, it tripped. I fell into the Pit.
Tough
When I opened my eyes again, I was flat on my back staring at the gray points of nails coming in through Lonely’s roof. Teeth ripped at my throat and I heard growling. I swung my fist. Fur-covered ribs snapped against my knuckles, but the teeth didn’t loosen up.
