by S. M. Reine
It was the agent that was talking to Cèsar. Agent Clausky. Except the russet hues of her flesh had faded in death, her lips rimmed with gray, her eyes sunken behind the lids. Her throat had been torn out by claws.
Agent Clausky was dead.
“Jesus,” whispered Lincoln, taking another step back. His heel caught another body. Another agent.
They were dead.
All of them were dead.
Lincoln had seen people killed in creative ways. He’d done it himself in Hell, where gratuitous murder was the only way to hold territory. But whatever had killed these people went beyond creativity. The bodies were drenched in mucus, overgrown with blossoms and vines. They looked like they’d been sneezed out of an oversized nostril.
Cèsar didn’t seem to notice Lincoln’s change in mood. He was still engaged with the person he believed to be Agent Clausky.
Now all Lincoln saw was a monster.
It was smaller than Clausky by several inches, and its limbs looked like a cluster of twigs grown tightly together and bound by twine. Mushrooms covered it instead of skin. Melted wax dripped from the hive of its skull.
A single long vine was stretching from its back over its shoulder like the tail of a scorpion prepared to strike, and the creature was aiming for the undersecretary.
“Hawke!” Lincoln roared.
Cèsar’s head snapped up from his conversation with the fake Agent Clausky. “What?” He moved barely an inch, but an inch was enough. It got his shoulder out of the line of fire.
Lincoln hurled the dagger.
He was a good shooter, but throwing knives was new to him. He was surprised when it struck the monster. Sure, Lincoln only hit it in the arm. But the fact he hit anything was this side of a miracle.
Lincoln dived onto the fake Agent Clausky to knock it into the seething flesh of the tree. He gripped its shoulders and his hands slid over sidhe blood.
There was a gash where a mouth could have been on the monster’s face. When it opened, Lincoln heard buzzing like angry wasps from within. “Are you insane?” The voice still sounded like Agent Clausky.
“You killed her,” Lincoln said. “You killed her and you took her face. What are you?”
The mouth-gash split into a smile. “What do you think? Am I pretty like this?”
Cèsar yanked Lincoln off of the creature. “What the fuck are you doing?” The undersecretary lifted Lincoln an inch off his feet, which was almost as scary as the sidhe revealing its face. Lincoln wasn’t used to swinging his limbs to no effect.
“Put me down! That’s not Agent Clausky!”
“What’s he talking about?” Cèsar asked.
The sidhe shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Cèsar dropped Lincoln. He plucked a wad of colorful mucus off of Lincoln’s shoulder, and it stretched between his fingers. “This is sidhe stuff.”
“Damn,” said Fake Clausky. “Oh well.”
Instantly, simultaneously, the sidhe dropped their pretense. They didn’t look any different to Lincoln, but he could tell they’d released their illusion because Cèsar suddenly gave a strangled shout.
The faeries swarmed. Lincoln leaped behind a tree, but it offered no protection; the stick-like whips of their limbs snaked around easily to seize him. He was dragged apart from Cèsar. They were taken to opposite sides of the clearing, far from where they could help each other.
Fake Clausky pinned Lincoln, wax dribbling from her cruel smile. The hands that wrapped around his arms were living vines. They pinched against his bony edges.
And then he felt the tiniest tendrils snaking into his pores.
“What are you doing? Get off me!” He twisted, thrashed. He couldn’t move hard enough to get free. He’d kick off one of her branches and another would take its place, slithering tight around the joint.
She opened her mouth and a bloom emerged, petals expanding, stamen tickling at his nose.
Lincoln twisted his chin away. “Don’t you even—”
The velvet flower closed over his face.
For an instant, there was no light, no oxygen. He felt a painful cramp in his throat as the inner tendrils of the flower dived deep. Their pollinated tips flattened against the soft tissue.
Lincoln felt something leave him. It was the sensation of deja vu, a copy-and-paste function performed on a computer.
It felt wrong.
Somehow, even more wrong than a giant flower sucking on his face.
Then it released him. Stomach acid dripped off its stamen. He gagged at the way the retraction squirmed, and he tasted vomit again.
He drew his knife. Another sidhe struck him before he could stab, and they tumbled across the ground toward the trail. They smashed into a crate with Lincoln at the bottom. A wooden hand squeezed down on his skull. Its scorpion tail lashed over its shoulder, lifting to aim at his face.
Lincoln drove both his feet into its gut, sending it flying.
The sidhe hit the trail to Alfheimr.
When it struck, packed soil splashed up to consume the faerie more like a tumultuous river than a trail.
It had never been a trail. It was a trap.
Cèsar was grappling with the third sidhe only a few feet away, and he got splashed with soil. “Shit! Holy shit!” He scrambled away, panic drenching him in so much sweat that Lincoln caught the scent of salt.
Salt and...pollen?
Lincoln’s eyes watered as the world shimmered around Cèsar Hawke. Energy flowed off of Cèsar like a slow-motion waterfall from his hairline, his eyes, his throat. The runes on his jacket flared as they struggled to absorb his power. He flickered, a flashlight whose batteries were shaking loose.
Fake Clausky grabbed Lincoln again, tail swinging high, venom glistening in a foggy white bead at its sharpened tip. “Now that I’ve acquired your gorgeous features, there’s no need for the original. Is there?”
“Hawke! Help!” Lincoln shouted.
Cèsar was hyperventilating as his light flooded the clearing, chest expanding and contracting and sending the magic billowing on every breath. The other tree-thing wouldn’t go anywhere near him.
”Help!” Lincoln repeated.
Cèsar said, “I can’t.”
Someone else said, “Get away!” Lincoln didn’t recognize the woman striding into the clearing. She had dark-black skin and hair tied into braids. She wore a swallow-tailed opera coat over a vest.
The newcomer descended holding a wooden stake with a cage of brilliant emerald fire at its top.
“You heard me! Get off of them!” She swiped the torch at the sidhe.
“That won’t hold us long,” hissed the creature by Cèsar, baring the papery cells of its teeth. “Even the brightest burning fae-fire is brief in the hands of mundies!”
“I don’t need to hold it long if I jab this in your belly and let it burn wild,” she snarled back. She lunged, pushing the torch forward like she was fencing.
Fake Clausky bolted. “Run!” it shouted to its companion.
The other sidhe didn’t escape in time. The Black woman buried her torch in its back. Green flame burned within the depths of its wooden skeleton, spreading rapidly.
It fell in a thrashing mess of vines.
Lincoln kicked it away from Cèsar, and the sidhe rolled into the trail. The earth splashed closed around the faerie, devouring it instantly.
“Careful!” cried the Black woman, gripping Lincoln’s jacket to keep him from following the faerie in.
He shoved her back. “You be careful, lady.”
Lincoln swung around to face...Cèsar.
Or at least, whatever it was that Cèsar had become.
He looked like a shifter on the night of the full moon. Sweaty, red-faced, panting, ugly like a woman going into labor. But Cèsar wasn’t a shifter. He didn’t have golden or silver eyes. They had turned weeping garnet. His skin was bright and hard.
The Black woman leaped ahead of Lincoln and swung the torch again. “Stay behind me! I’ll burn this thing awa
y!”
She was talking about Cèsar.
“Wait,” Lincoln said, “wait, that’s not a thing. He’s a person.”
Cèsar didn’t look like a person. He fell to his knees, arms tight around himself like he was afraid his skin was going to whip back in the wind like a fleshy cloak.
“Are you sure?” The woman’s torch wavered.
“Mostly sure,” Lincoln said. The runes on Cèsar’s jacket blazed brighter than ever before. What would win: Cèsar’s sidhe magic or the OPA’s wards? “Focus, Undersecretary. Remember we’re here for a reason.”
“It burns,” Cèsar said. “It burns so much.”
“Yeah, and Secretary Friederling is dying on Earth,” Lincoln said.
The garnets of Cèsar’s eyes snapped up, focusing on Lincoln’s face. His magic collapsed on itself in slow motion. It was the leaves on a vine touched by moonlight, withdrawing to preserve energy until morning.
His eyes faded to normal brown.
Lincoln let out a breath. “Good man. Don’t let it ride you.”
“I’m not.” Cèsar got up slowly, focusing on the Black woman. He was shaking. “Who were they and who are you?”
“They were doppelgängers,” she said. “And I’m...well, I’m Sophie Keyes.” She glanced between the men, her lips drooping with disappointment. “Do you mean you’re not here to save me?”
CHAPTER 8
Sophie Keyes took them to a cabin near the redoubt. The proximity was lucky. Every time Cèsar moved, he felt like a balloon about to pop.
If he broke, there would be no fixing him. He was certain of it.
The whole forest called to Cèsar as he stepped away from the redoubt, around that strange river-path that ate people, and delved into the shadowy trees. He could feel every insect buzzing silently around him—there were so many insects in the Middle Worlds—and he could feel the weight of dew within the sodden summer humidity.
Some part of him wanted to break so that he could melt into the world.
He hung tight to himself.
Fritz is dying. I have to get to the Winter Court.
Sophie Keyes had a nice cabin. It was a collection of logs held together by packed mud, and even though it had no windows, it managed to look quaint as hell. Dangling ivy did that to a place.
She was building a forge outside the cabin. A normal fire—smoldering red, not green—churned in its stone belly. So far, she seemed to have only produced a few charred and bent nails from the forge’s fledgling flames.
Cèsar stopped walking at the sight of the nails.
They were iron and he could feel it. His left arm stung so hard that he clapped a hand over the place a bullet wound had been. The healers had patched him together but it felt like it was going to burst open anew.
“How’d you end up here?” Lincoln was asking, following the mysterious woman to her front door.
“I’m not sure,” Sophie said. She opened her cabin and said, “Will you two join me?”
Lincoln moved forward.
Cèsar caught him. “Sure that’s a good idea? We don’t know anything about her.”
“She doesn’t know anything about us,” Lincoln pointed out. And it was true. They were two well-built adult men, and she was a petite young woman.
Cèsar shrugged. “All right.” He stepped inside. “You’re not sure how you got here, so what do you know?”
Sophie extinguished her torch in a barrel by the forge. She shooed Lincoln inside before shutting the door. “I was at home a couple of weeks ago, and everything seemed perfectly normal—which is to say, not normal at all, as things had been unusual in my region for months.”
“Sky torn open?” Cèsar hung by the door as he evaluated the cabin’s interior. There was one big room with her bed and kitchen stuff, and the curtained door in the back half-concealed a bucket. Probably a toilet. “Lots of smoke and gray clouds?”
“Why, yes! That’s exactly what happened. Were those conditions widely spread across the planet?”
Cèsar exchanged glances with Lincoln.
“You could say that.” Cèsar was too hot in his jacket, but he couldn’t take it off. He set his backpack on the ground and fanned himself with his hat. “How far were you living from civilization?”
“Admittedly, I was quite far from the nearest city. How did you guess?” Sophie asked.
“The Breaking wasn’t considered ‘unusual’ by folks who lived in civilization. It was considered apocalypse, and a lot of people died,” Cèsar said.
“Unfortunate. My sympathies.” She smiled suddenly. “I’ll make tea for the both of you, if you like!”
Cèsar was gonna say he didn’t drink tea if he could avoid it, but she’d just saved their asses, so... “Sure. Whatever you got.”
“Oh, you’ll be delighted with my selection. I’ve been gathering and testing herbs to make tinctures, and I’ve found some rather aromatic leaves with no perceptible effect on the human form, as well as distinctively Earth-like peppermint!” Sophie scurried to a stovetop—another iron fixture, which made Cèsar’s whole chest ache to look at—and produced a flint to light it. “What did you say the period of time with the clouds and ash was called? The Breaking? That’s an adequate descriptor for an event precipitating a genesis, I suppose.”
“A genesis?” Lincoln had backed against the door, as snug in the jam as though he wanted to be sure even an atom-sized faerie couldn’t sneak up behind him.
Sophie glanced over her shoulder. She had big eyes, and there was no hint of guile in her baby browns. She looked genuinely interested. “Yes, a genesis. Is the term unfamiliar? What do you call the moment of mass extinction?”
“The Void killed us, if that’s what you mean,” Cèsar said. “The Genesis Void.”
“Ah, yes, that works,” Sophie said. “Here is my story adapted to utilize your vocabulary: I noted the Breaking, which had little impact on my life because I lived on a self-sustaining farm distant from civilization. At some point the Genesis Void approached and I jumped into it, and then I was reincarnated in here.”
Cèsar gawked. “You...you jumped into it?”
“Indeed. Only people who die by entering the Genesis Void are guaranteed to return if the gods regenerate the species,” Sophie said. “I’ll not pretend it was an easy matter. I only felt safer plunging into a death with guaranteed rebirth rather than taking my chances during sustained apocalypse. That Void was messier than usual. With everything that got torn up, I was as likely to die from debris before it arrived, and I am not a gambling woman. Most certainly not!”
“Uh...”
She poured water from the kettle into a cup. “I’m sorry. I’m talking too much, I think.” Sophie tilted her head toward Cèsar, taking on a conspiratorial tone. “I’m not good at talking to people. It’s ill-advised for me to share even this much information, but...well, I have been lonely, haven’t I? I entered the Void alone and nobody came back with me. It’s been a very overwhelming few weeks in this strange forest. I’d be curious to know the gods that conceived of this new world.”
“You’re not the only one,” Lincoln said.
“He does talk,” she said with obvious delight. “Good, good.” Her delight soon faded. By the time she put the teacups on a tray and brought them to her table, she was no longer smiling. “It’s too bad you’re not here to save me, though.”
“You don’t look like you much need saving from anyone,” Lincoln said.
Cèsar had to agree with that. “What was that green stuff?”
“They call it fae-fire,” Sophie said. “Sit! The tea won’t stay warm for long!”
Cèsar was a big guy—way too big for cozy cabins, no matter where they existed. Sitting on one of Sophie’s chairs made him feel like he was visiting an elementary school.
The peppermint in his cup smelled nice, though.
“I hope that flavor is good for you,” Sophie said, rubbing a thumb over her knuckles nervously. “Obviously you’re one of the sidhe, and
I’ve only tested the more exotic teas on my own human physiology. Peppermint seemed the safest option for sidhe. Do you like peppermint?”
He liked it about as much as he liked any weirdo leaves-in-hot-water tea. So no, not really. “It’s great.”
“Fae-fire,” Sophie said with a satisfied smile. “As I said. The green flame is fae-fire. I found it burning in a crevice near my cabin, and when I saw the reaction of the sidhe, I cultivated it for self-defense. I’ve got more where that came from.”
“Speaking of the cabin...” Cèsar didn’t have to finish the question. The OPA hadn’t been able to get more than a crappy tent and a couple of ill-protected agents to this side of the ley lines. If Sophie was resourceful enough to build entire cabins in the preternatural wilderness, then they were going to save her ass, whether she wanted it or not.
“This structure was waiting here for me,” Sophie said. “Very lucky, don’t you think? Though of course it is not luck at all. The gods saw fit to preserve me for this genesis, and they seem to have taken extra care to ensure that I would have a safe haven. For gods to deliberately preserve one such as me—why, they truly must be extraordinary things! And I get to witness the dawn of their reign! Now that is luck, gentlemen, let me tell you.”
Something about her laugh was so painfully awkward. It sounded like Sophie never heard other people laugh, and she didn’t know that the loud bray was weird.
“Is something wrong?” Sophie asked when nobody laughed with her. Lincoln hadn’t even sat down.
“Join us, Marshall,” Cèsar said. He put a finger on the table, jabbing it down. He gave Lincoln a Look inspired by his Abuelita. Abuelita would have risen from the dead, crossed geneses, and found her way into the Middle Worlds to kick his ass if they made Sophie cry from rudeness.
Abuelita’s expressions were never as effective from Cèsar—God rest her scary-as-fuck old-lady soul—but it was enough to get Lincoln nearer the table. He grabbed a teacup and lifted it without sitting. The steam wafted under his five o’clock shadow.
Sophie seemed appeased. “Now, what was I saying?” She took a sip as she thought. “Yes, the cabin was here when I woke. Perhaps they put me here to save you two! The will of gods is a murky thing open to so many potential interpretations, don’t you think?”
