Lonesome Paladin

by S. M. Reine

  Trunk met neck.

  The bašmu cried out.

  So did Sophie. “No! You can’t defeat it like that!” She scrambled out of the bushes, gazing in horror at the beast as it thrashed.

  The bašmu was crushed between rocks and redwood, pinched off at the neck. The entire skull tumbled into the water to be rushed downstream.

  “Looks like I did good defeating it like that,” he said.

  “Look again,” Sophie said.

  He turned.

  As promised, the bašmu didn’t seem real bothered by losing one of its heads. The neck-stump and its healthy counterparts rose up again. The damaged neck trembled, gushed fluid from the severed vessels.

  And then it started growing three new heads out of the one stump. They rose like fists pushed through the tissue. The faceted eyes were foggy with blood, but they were dripping clear, and it wouldn’t be long before all five of those heads could focus their wrath on Lincoln and Sophie.

  Cèsar had nightmares of Genesis again. He stood on the deck of a yacht in a churning ocean, its sleek wooden planks pitching underneath him.

  Fritz grabbed him by the wrist. There were deep shadows under his eyes, lines carved on either side of his lips, his neck stretched into sinewy lines of tension. “Cèsar,” he said. Just that one name. His final word. Fritz said it as though Cèsar were, somehow, his only regret—the only thing left to reconcile before the moment of oblivion.

  There was more than shadow inside the Void. There was light and magic and screaming cellos tuned to sour notes.

  Shadow swept over them. Cèsar’s pounding heart reached a peak, and his skin caught fire within the darkness, and then—

  Nothing.

  Cèsar flew upright, clawing at his side for the man who’d once been his kopis. His fingers only met the canvas of his backpack. Cold steel buckles, textured leather straps.

  The campfire had burned out, leaving only smoldering coals to glow over Sophie Keyes’s abandoned backpack.

  Lincoln was gone too.

  “Aw, man,” Cèsar muttered.

  A distant shrieking echoed over the valley. His head snapped up, eyes searching the sky for something crazy, like an attacking dragon. It sounded like a dragon. Cèsar had read enough Tolkien to know what that blood-curdling sensation meant.

  He was shaking as he got up. The trees pitched around him like an ocean of leaves sucked into a hungry Void.

  Another loud shriek.

  It was punctuated by the triumphant roar of a human man.

  Lincoln Marshall.

  Scrambling to his feet, Cèsar scuffed sparkling golden dirt over the coals to smother them before leaping to the ridge.

  He was a few hundred feet above the river. So the fact that something in the water filled up half his vision meant it was big—really big.

  Those tiny pinpricks on the shore were Lincoln and Sophie.

  They were battling against something with five necks and five heads. Cèsar would have called it a hydra, like from Hercules, except his only familiarity with it was the old Kevin Sorbo TV show and this looked a hell of a lot scarier.

  His eyes wouldn’t quite focus on it. The harder he tried to look, the more the world brightened in places, dimmed in others. Colors swirled into each other. A watercolor with acetone splashed at its heart.

  The trees were growing, slithering. The soil under his feet churned in time with the ocean.

  Cèsar’s hands were glowing.

  He could see the specter of claws ghosting over his fingertips, as though he were haunting his own form. But whatever was coming out of Cèsar wasn’t shaped like a human.

  “Do I gotta? Really?” he asked nobody in particular. The forest, maybe. The entirety of the Middle Worlds. “We’ve gotta do this again?”

  At least Fritz wasn’t around.

  If anything deserved to get Cèsar’s enormous ghost-claws inside of it, that would be the hydra-thing.

  His magic swelled bigger and bigger, bulging at every side. The flaring of the OPA runes might win if Cèsar gave them time. But if he waited, then Sophie and Lincoln were gonna get eaten.

  One of those big heads was angling to eat them right now.

  “Run!” Sophie was crying, her tiny voice drowned out by roaring.

  “Fine,” Cèsar responded, even though she couldn’t hear him.

  Cèsar dropped his warded jacket.

  He exploded.

  Magic cascaded out of him, and down the hill. The Summer Court burned. Even in cool, shady nighttime, it was too hot, too hostile. Cèsar was a creature of ice within flame that couldn’t melt. He just grew colder and bigger—bigger and bigger and bigger—until his head broke over the tops of the trees, and his shoulders were twice the height of the hydra’s.

  His claws gouged into the cliff as he raced down to meet the hydra at its level. Trees flattened under his feet—which didn’t look like feet at all—and he opened a cavernous mouth to inflate the bellows of his chest with heated air so he could shout.

  Cèsar meant to say something incredibly witty like, “Hey prick!”

  What came out was a roar that blasted water away from him, flattening reeds to the marsh, spraying mud over the flank of the hydra.

  Five heads whipped around to face him. Cèsar couldn’t imagine why he’d thought it looked so big before. Now each of those heads was smaller than one of his big ol’ meat hooks.

  What a pathetic monster. If Cèsar’s sidhe form had pockets, he coulda carried the hydra in one like a pet.

  He didn’t think the hydra would much like that.

  So instead, Cèsar snapped his teeth over the hydra’s spine. His blazing teeth ripped through its body to puncture and instantly stop its heart.

  CHAPTER 11

  “Oh,” Sophie said.

  It was the only thing she had said for several minutes.

  He added a helpful, “Yeah.”

  Lincoln had seen a few things in Hell that would stick with him the rest of his mortal life, and that included gargantuan monsters battling to the death. Aquiel had been the size of a skyscraper. Bigger than the bašmu, even.

  Engulfed in a misty specter of a beast, the undersecretary of the OPA was still the biggest thing Lincoln had ever seen.

  Cèsar Hawke’s animal form towered over the trees. He mingled with the clouds above, and the too-close starlight peppered his hide, clustering along the ridge of his spine. The man himself was still suspended at the center of it. A plain silhouette crucified within himself.

  Stop staring. Take your prize.

  A disembodied female voice was whispering to him. Lincoln turned to look for Elise’s pale face and saw only Sophie, still gazing wonderstruck up at Cèsar.

  Take the bašmu’s venom.

  It almost sounded like the voice was coming from inside Lincoln now.

  He waded into the shallows again, approaching the most intact of the bašmu’s heads with his dagger drawn. He emptied the water from his canteen before climbing into the monster’s mouth again, embedding his dagger into the leathery flesh of the venom sacks. He angled the canteen to catch the fluid that sprayed out.

  “What are you doing?” Sophie asked.

  “We won,” Lincoln said. “The bašmu’s dead. I’m making use of it.” The words didn’t feel like they belonged to him. They were the words of an ancient warrior claiming her trophy after battle—proof that she’d conquered her enemy.

  The venom glowed as it slopped over his hand. Within seconds, his canteen was filled. He trudged back out, rejoining a horror-struck Sophie.

  “What’s with the face?” Lincoln asked. “You heard we won, right? Try smiling. Makes you prettier.”

  “Don’t celebrate yet,” Sophie said. She was backing away slowly.

  Lincoln followed her gaze up to the enormity of Cèsar Hawke’s magic. The undersecretary still hadn’t begun to dwindle back to human size.

  In fact, he was turning toward them.

  The fangs set in Cèsar’s jaw were mammalian,
corporeal, and glistening. A broad nose and muzzle expanded into a noble brow. The illusion of fur was created by the swaying flames of magic. He was distinctly more feline than lupine, and his claws extended into the riverbanks, gouging deep cones into the mud.

  He looked like he was bunching his haunches, preparing to leap at Sophie and Lincoln.

  “What about Friederling?” Lincoln shouted, waving his arms. “Think about Friederling!”

  Still no reaction.

  “His jacket,” Sophie breathed. “The runes he wore. He needs them again.”

  Her fingers caught Lincoln’s, and she dragged him up the hill. It was a good thing she’d kept her senses. Every one of Cèsar’s footfalls shook the ground like an earthquake.

  He was right on top of them.

  The trees buckled under the crash of his paws. One fell so close to Lincoln that it scraped down the back of his jacket, and he felt its point like the blunted edge of a blade. It knocked the wind from him. It took Sophie both hands to drag him out from under it, to pull him onward.

  Their campsite was not far when running with such purpose. Sophie’s direction was as flawless as her mental clarity.

  Elise waited in the darkened fire pit, ankle-deep in the ashes, arms folded.

  She stared judgment at Lincoln.

  “Whatever you’ve gotta say, I don’t want to fucking hear it!” He slung the canteen onto his belt again. “I followed you into this!”

  Sophie was scrambling around the edge of the camp, searching. “What are you talking about?”

  “Stay out of it,” Lincoln snapped.

  Elise’s eyebrow lifted. The corner of her mouth quirked.

  Sophie was too distracted to argue with him. She came up with Cèsar’s jacket bundled in both fists. “Here! I found it!” She faltered, clutching it to her chest. “Although I must say, I’m at a loss what to do now. Obviously the magical runes must be applied somehow, but—gods above!”

  The silvery ghost of Cèsar’s sidhe form rose over the ridge. A forepaw slammed into the soil beside the fire, sending emerald-furred rabbits darting for new cover.

  Cèsar’s human body was clearer from this angle. He hung within himself below the neck, where a heart should have been.

  Lincoln flung out a hand. “Give it to me!”

  Sophie tossed him the jacket.

  “I hope you’re not going to do anything stupid again,” she said, right before Lincoln rushed to the end of the cliff and hurled himself at the magical feline.

  He struck its hide at the top of its head.

  And he sank into Cèsar.

  The giant cat wasn’t really there. It felt like sinking into runny mud. Slippery, cold, and miserable, but not unnavigable. Not quite as wretched as the muscular throat of a bašmu, either.

  Lincoln swam through the feline, growing colder as he approached the core. Ice whipped his exposed flesh. Every one of his grunts was amplified a thousand times in his ears as the fog pressed tighter.

  Cèsar wept vivid garnet tears, pouring from his eyes and nose and mouth, his hair lifted as though under water. He snarled silently at the sight of Lincoln. Completely out of his mind.

  With a final push, Lincoln struck Cèsar’s human form, wrapping the OPA jacket around him.

  Runes flared.

  And then the runes failed.

  Lincoln fell past Cèsar. The jacket ripped out of his hands without having an effect, and Lincoln dropped out through the belly of the beast, tumbling feet over head, as the river yawned open to devour him once again.

  “Lincoln!” Sophie shrieked, racing to the edge of the cliff. It was far too late to keep him from jumping. He’d already vanished into the mass of a creature that had once been Cèsar Hawke.

  If Lincoln made an attempt to contain Cèsar’s form, it did not appear to be successful. Only briefly did the sidhe buck and seize, as if tangled by an internal battle; within minutes, he was lifting his head again, and Sophie was facing a sidhe of potentially greater danger than even the bašmu.

  Sophie scooped up her pack, slung it over her shoulder, and ran.

  One of those enormous paws slammed in front of her, snapping Sophie out of her thoughts. She failed to jump out of the way in time. The pads of the paw curved around her leg, trapping her between the toes. When the foot lifted, so did she.

  Sophie screamed as she dangled, head-down, over the river. She was swept through the air so quickly that the breath was sucked from her lungs.

  She had no choice but to fall silent, clinging to fistfuls of writhing mist-like fur, watching the night-blackened river slide underneath.

  Cèsar followed the flow downstream. The river thundered louder and louder. Boulders ridged the river a kilometer away, like teeth jutting from a bottom jaw, and there was nothing beyond those boulders except sky.

  A waterfall. They were approaching a damn waterfall.

  Somehow, Sophie found breath enough to scream again, yanking on Cèsar’s fur. “No! What are you doing? Release me this instant!”

  He lowered his paw to take a step. She swept near the reeds along the side of the river, and Sophie slapped her arms around a crooked tree, hugging it tightly.

  Her legs peeled free of the paw. She fell.

  Cèsar never broke stride. He didn’t seem to have realized that she was stuck to him. His urge to attack had passed, and his eyes were on the horizon now, reflecting fields of starlight.

  Sophie dragged herself from the mud and slipped back into it. “Balls!” How would she ever catch up with Cèsar? Should she? Was this already the end of her ill-fated mission to escort two men to Alfheimr?

  The pounding of hoof beats filled the air. Sophie turned to see horses among the trees.

  Some kind of cavalry had arrived, and not a moment too late.

  “Over here!” she cried.

  The horses came down the hill, flying in formation as would migrating birds. At first Sophie thought that the needles thrusting from their brows were armor, but as they drew near she realized that those protrusions were bony.

  They were horns.

  These were not horses at all, but unicorns.

  Sophie had seen engravings of them and knew they could be fierce. She hadn’t known they could be such noble destriers with awe-inspiring musculature and sharpened hooves that shined in a full spectrum of color. They pounded toward her without ever seeming to touch the ground. She forgot to fear for her life.

  The cavalrymen were lifting spears of magic as they approached, and a man at the rear shouted orders to the others, commanding that they should flank Cèsar as he emerged from the river.

  She flung her arms out to either side as if she could somehow defend Cèsar from the arrows. In truth, she could protect little more than one of the toes on his forepaw, and that was only assuming that he didn’t choose to swipe at her first.

  “Wait! Please!” she cried. “He’s coming to you for help! He needs help!”

  The unicorns drew up short in front of her, skidding to a stop amid the reeds without leaving a single footprint.

  An enormous black destrier emerged from the rear. It was the only one with such dark fur, contrasted by a brilliant white mane. The man on its back held a long-poled fauchard at his side. “Move out of the way!”

  She glanced back. Cèsar had turned from the waterfall to investigate the approaching unicorns, and that meant she had to speak fast. “What you see behind you is a man without control of new sidhe powers. He’s coming to you for help, but he’s already lost control, and—”

  “You’re not sidhe,” he interrupted. “Get out of the way.”

  “Who are you to command me?” she asked, folding her arms. She would rather get crushed flat by Cèsar than obey an order coming from that tone of voice.

  “I’m Oberon. King of the Summer Court.” He tossed his head. The long russet locks that fell over the king’s face weren’t built into the crest of the galea, but were a flow of his own hair. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Sophie K
eyes,” she said.

  The name appeared to mean nothing to Oberon, but his expression softened at the edges as he looked over Sophie. “Take my arm,” he said, extending a hand toward her.

  She wrapped her fingers around the crook of his elbow. He effortlessly hefted her onto the back of his steed. Sophie gave a little gasp of surprise, clinging to the shoulders of his jacket with its fine brocade details.

  “Contain him!” he barked.

  The unicorns plowed into the river, churning the waters around them so that it sprayed in a fine stories-tall mist. One of Cèsar’s paws swiped—his claws gouged the air—but the unicorns were untouchable, flying nimbly through the spaces between paw and water.

  Magic like iron bands lashed around Cèsar, arcing gracefully over his back and snapping tight.

  His roar was the blast of hurricane winds. Oberon’s mount danced under them at the sound. It tossed its head, bounced on its forelegs. Sophie pressed her cheek to Oberon’s back and prayed she wouldn’t fall to her death. A far more ignominious end than being eaten by a monster, she thought.

  Neither falling nor consumption happened. Instead, the roars grew quieter—no less furious, but quieter. She peeked over Oberon’s shoulders.

  As the ropes tightened on Cèsar, he dwindled. He stumbled and shrank from the size of a castle into the size of a carriage, and then no bigger than the smallest of the unicorns as he stumbled into the reeds.

  The form of the man was no longer visible within the beast. He looked less like a ghost and more like a muscular white panther caught in a hunter’s trap.

  “There’s someone else in here!”

  A pair of sidhe came around the river’s knee grasping opposite ends of a body. Sophie had been frighteningly certain that Lincoln’s jump had been the last time she’d see him whole, yet his limbs were, if nothing else, intact enough to support his weight.

  Somehow, he had survived.

  “Is he with you?” asked the king.

  “Yes,” Sophie said. “That one’s mine.”

  “Get him to Alfheimr,” he called to his men. They engulfed Lincoln in gentler magic than they used on Cèsar, lifting him over the trail as they climbed to the top of the hill.