Lonesome Paladin

by S. M. Reine

  The king’s remaining men looped a noose around Cèsar’s jaw, cinched it tight, and dragged him after Lincoln.

  CHAPTER 12

  Dreams were more vivid in the Middle Worlds. This Lincoln knew.

  He wasn’t stepping into Poppy’s Diner, sheltered from the drizzle by a wide-brimmed leather hat, even though he smelled her signature cherry pie baking. He was not surrounded by the faces of people he’d grown up alongside—faces of people who were now dead. And this was not the day that Lincoln Marshall was deputized, though it felt that way.

  Sheriff Fickerson had been planning on doing the ceremony outside, right by the statue of Bain Marshall, but the rain meant changing plans. Poppy’s got volunteered and nobody argued. Poppy’s had the best cherry pie on this side of the country. Lincoln reckoned that there was nothing better than Poppy’s on the other side of the country either, but he’d never wandered far enough from home to find out. Not at that point.

  He never should have left Northgate.

  Sheriff Fickerson’s grip was reassuringly strong. “It’s a pleasure to have you working with us at the department.”

  “It’s a pleasure to serve.” Lincoln was reflected in the shiny metal backsplash behind the coffee maker, so he could see that his shirt was tucked into his pants just right. When he looked down, he saw toes shinier than the sidearm in his holster.

  “You’re going to do great things for the community,” Fickerson said. “I get a sense of these things sometimes. Like God coming down to gimme a good hard jab.” To illustrate, he shoved a finger into Lincoln’s chest. “You ever feel that?”

  “All the time, sir,” Lincoln said. “All the time.”

  He’d spent his life guided by those jabs.

  Those jabs had sent him to college out of town on a football scholarship. Those jabs had brought him back home once he was done, even though he’d been scouted by recruiters who wanted him to go pro.

  Lincoln had heard God calling him away from a thousand careers that would take him to remote places.

  He’d come home for this.

  There was another familiar face among the residents of Northgate. Someone who hadn’t been there when he was deputized. The sight of Elise Kavanagh was a harbinger of bad times, and Lincoln still wanted to take the red leather barstool beside her, grab the second fork, and get himself a bite of the pie she was eating.

  Except Elise had never liked Poppy’s pie.

  And whatever was glistening red within that crust was not cherries.

  Even his ex-girlfriend’s presence couldn’t ruin the dream. Approval from the others swaddled him in warmth. Father Davidek was there, and the eponymous Poppy, and about half the town.

  This was where he belonged.

  This was where Lincoln Marshall should have done great things.

  You can’t stay there. It’s not yours anymore.

  Sheriff Fickerson gave a shout of surprise, echoed by Father Davidek, and by Poppy. Only Elise Kavanagh sat in silence as everyone began to scream.

  “What’s wrong?” Lincoln asked.

  The sheriff turned toward him. Fickerson’s face had been replaced by pustules. He was vomiting out his eyeballs, bleeding from his ears. When he tried to take a step, his foot disconnected at the ankle.

  He was melting.

  They were all melting.

  “No!” Lincoln cried, catching his childhood priest when he fell. Father Davidek’s cassock felt like it contained rotten hamburger. His head rolled off his shoulders, splattering to Poppy’s glistening linoleum.

  Lincoln screamed.

  This hadn’t happened in reality, but it felt just as vivid as the rest of the memory, as though it were something he’d lived. This rapid rotting. This writhing. This pain.

  Everyone he loved was dying.

  The priest melted out of his arms.

  Northgate receded. His world grew bigger and he grew smaller.

  Lincoln Marshall stood alone under an apocalyptic sky. The screaming of his friends had faded away to a lower pitch—a familiar roar. A city sat where the stars should have been. Someone had taken an ax to the sky and hewed it open to bare something wickedly dark.

  Lincoln was being chased by something even darker.

  His legs moved fast. They’d always moved fast. Lincoln used to be the fastest guy on the field, the fastest deputy in Northgate. But no matter how fast he went, the Void was faster.

  It roared like a train, and Lincoln was a speck on its tracks.

  The Void dilated around him like the pupil of an angry God. He heard it approaching from the back, from the sides. It chewed through the city and shattered the sky so that fragments of Heaven rained down around him in hot flakes that turned his skin gray.

  Lincoln reached the end of the road. Literally. He’d hit a dead end, and the surrounding windows shivered so that his reflection pulsed as he stared at himself, catching his own shocked gaze. His shirt wasn’t tucked in just right. His shoes weren’t shiny.

  The wind picked up and snapped a branch off of a tree. It hit him in the chest harder than a linebacker.

  Lincoln hit the crumbled road. He looked up to see the curve of the infinite black wall as it devoured buildings, blotted out the city in the sky, and tore the street.

  He could taste blood on his tongue.

  Jesus, Lincoln hoped that was his blood.

  The Void closed in around him. It took his legs, his stomach, his heart. It didn’t hurt. Lincoln exhaled when it took his face.

  Lincoln died, and that was real too.

  Elise was waiting for him in death, just as she’d been waiting for him at the bar in Poppy’s Diner. She was sitting in midair, the plate steadily hovering beside her, as she used the fork’s side to cut off another piece of pie. It dribbled red along the heel of her palm.

  “Take a bite,” she said, offering it to him. “It’s your inheritance.”

  I get a sense of these sometimes. Like God coming down to give me a good hard jab. You ever feel that?

  “I don’t want it,” Lincoln said.

  Elise’s smile was the way the serpent had bared her teeth before Eve took a bite of the apple. “I don’t give a fuck what you want, Lincoln. I need you. Good men are hard to come by.”

  “I’m not that good,” he said.

  Elise was in front of him. The fork was uplifted, her bicep coiled.

  And she said, “Good enough.”

  She punched the fork’s tines into his eye.

  Lincoln awoke feeling like he’d slept for a week, and the bed was so comfortable he could have slept another week if he hadn’t been drenched in sweat.

  He was still in the Middle Worlds.

  Lincoln sat up. He was wearing clean gray Calvin Klein pajamas, which someone must have put onto his body while he was wracked by nightmares. The only sidhe he’d known aside from Cèsar was the hooker in Reno. He wasn’t comfortable with the idea that either kind of faerie could have touched his unconscious body.

  He didn’t appear to be in trouble at the moment. Lincoln rested in a huge four-post bed with gauzy white canopies. The window looked out at a saffron-and-sapphire ocean without bars to trap him inside, so this was no prison.

  A mural of endless forests was painted on the wall. A chandelier poised over the foot of the bed looked unsettlingly like the roots of the tree, its bulbs golden apples clutched at its core.

  Lincoln’s heart skipped a beat at the thought of apples and trees.

  Good enough, whispered Elise’s voice.

  His right eye was hurting awful bad. His fingers crept over the brow, and he wasn’t surprised to find it undamaged.

  Lincoln used to have nightmares a lot like these, back when he lived in Northgate. He’d been the unwilling benefactor of visions from Hell. In those dreams, he had merged with a demon—the demon—and he’d wake up every morning feeling as though he’d spent his night roiling in flame, though he’d never been hurt.

  Nowadays, the demon didn’t need to give him visions o
f a distant, exotic Hell. It only needed to show him the Hells he’d already lived through in Northgate, in Genesis.

  He’d never forget what it felt like to hold Father Davidek’s rotting body.

  “I can’t be possessed again,” he whispered, as if saying the words might make it true. His blood didn’t burn with infernal fire anymore. He’d been pure for months.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  Lincoln had no clothes, no weapons. The room was unbearably tidy aside from a few flower petals that seemed to have blown in through the window. They scattered across the floor with a sigh of a breeze.

  “Come in,” he said reluctantly.

  Heavy mahogany swung open, and Sophie Keyes stuck her head around the corner, a hand over her eyes. “Are you decent, Mr. Marshall?”

  There wasn’t much decent about Lincoln these days. “Near enough.”

  Sophie peeked over her hand before letting it fall away. “You’re sitting up! That’s fortunate. The healing runes must have taken hold, which is what the sidhe said would happen, but I confess their display of power was too aggressive for me to extract much comfort from such reassurances.”

  “Healing runes?” he asked.

  She pointed at the murals. “They are embedded within the paintings, along with wards that protect you from the illusory effects of sidhe magic. This room is for mundanes to recover peacefully.” Sophie shook her wrist at him. “They gave me this bracelet so that I can move freely without suffering mind distortion, and I took it without telling them I already had protective wards. I didn’t want to explain that the gods gave me a cabin replete with the charms required to maintain my sanity. I’ll appreciate you keeping my home’s protections in confidence.”

  Lincoln didn’t owe Sophie anything, but he couldn’t think of a reason he’d want to surrender her cabin to the sidhe, either. “Didn’t think there’d have been enough mundanes around for them to build a whole recovery room for people like me.”

  “Queen Titania grew it when we arrived.” Sophie padded nearer on bare feet, her leggings rolled to her knees. She wasn’t wearing the swallowtail jacket at the moment. Only a loose gray t-shirt like his.

  “Grew it,” Lincoln echoed.

  “She’s growing the entire palace and city.” Sophie’s eyes creased at the corners while she looked him over. “I’m pleased to see that your recklessness didn’t result in your death.”

  That sounded a lot like sarcasm. “You gonna accuse me of being suicidal?” he asked. “Because if you think I’m all fucked in the head after Genesis, if you think I’ve got some kind of problem, then you’re just one more of a million assholes who—”

  “What? No. I know why you did what you did.”

  Lincoln would have been lying if he said Sophie’s calm didn’t put him off. “You do?”

  “I know you’ve been touched,” she said. “I know that someone’s calling you. Perhaps you don’t see a face, perhaps you don’t know a name—”

  “I’m not touched by anything,” Lincoln snapped. He tasted something strange on his tongue, and it wasn’t cherry pie.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to frighten you.”

  “I’m not scared!”

  She didn’t respond to that. Sophie sat on the chest at the foot of his bed, one foot tucked underneath her, hands folded in her lap. The next brush of wind scattered fine golden sand across her toes, carried from the beaches below the window. “You’ll be happy to know we’ve reached Alfheimr, if nothing else.”

  Happy wasn’t a word Lincoln would ascribe to himself. “What happened after I jumped?”

  “Cèsar accidentally dragged me to the other bank of the river. There, a retinue led by King Oberon contained Cèsar’s bestial form, recovered you from the water, and escorted all of us to Falias. Here. The palace itself is Alfheimr, and we are positioned between Falias proper and the ocean that divides us from the Winter Court.”

  “I survived falling into the river?” Hot blood rushed to Lincoln’s head, and he clenched his hands on the bed sheets. “How?”

  “It’s as though someone wanted to keep you alive,” Sophie said. “Elsewise we may attribute it to sheer luck.”

  I need you, Lincoln. Good men are hard to come by.

  Elise’s voice was inside him now. His whole body was hurting as though he were starting to rot.

  “Where’s Cèsar?” Lincoln asked. “Is the mission done? Did he reach his sister?”

  “Sadly, they had to put him in the dungeons for public safety. They haven’t been able to change him back now that he’s fully manifested his abilities,” Sophie said. “Nobody dares to speculate that he’s permanently trapped, at least not aloud, but…”

  “Shit,” he said with gusto.

  “You must be good friends.”

  “We’re not. This trip wasn’t my choice. I just had to get him to his sister, and now that I failed at that…” He had no home left on Earth, but Lincoln didn’t want to be stranded in pretty magical faerie-land either. He had to finish the mission so Friederling wouldn’t arrest him. “We’ve gotta fix Cèsar. He can be fixed, right?”

  “Little is known,” Sophie said.

  “No. No, don’t start going on with the ambiguous crap.” Lincoln bit out every syllable. “Cèsar Hawke needs to get fixed. Lives depend on it, dammit! And not just the life of the OPA secretary!”

  “I understand, Mr. Marshall. I fear for Cèsar too,” she said softly. “He’s too kind to be lost inside of a beast like that.”

  Lincoln hadn’t even given thought to Cèsar himself. How he must have felt. What he would lose if he never turned back to his human shape. The guy had a cute girlfriend back on Earth, and surely she was missing him.

  Something inside him crumbled a little. When had Lincoln stopped thinking about helping people?

  That wasn’t right. That wasn’t him.

  He pushed the sheets aside and stood easily. “Where’s my gear?” Lincoln’s job wasn’t done. There were at least four Courts in the Middle Worlds, and someone knew how to turn the monster back into the man.

  “I believe the queen put all of your belongings in the bathroom,” Sophie said.

  “You saying the queen changed my clothing after she grew this room?” He hadn’t even seen the woman who’d worked over his naked body. Lincoln supposed he should have been comforted by the fact it was a woman at all, and not some horny man-faerie.

  He didn’t feel comforted.

  Lincoln stepped into the bathroom to find his clothes on a woven shelf. The tub was bigger than the bed he’d woken up in, and the windows were a special kind of enormous too.

  He could see the town from there. Falias looked like Walt Disney’s idea of a medieval fairyland. The gabled roofs, bales of golden hay, and city walls looked as though they too belonged in a world much older than one month.

  Beyond the city walls—far beyond—the steep hillside turned to sheer cliffs. The serpentine river emptied into the ocean via waterfall, churning against a harbor under construction. It was a long way to fall. Lincoln wondered if the bašmu’s body would ever make it all the way down.

  He pulled on his canvas pants, his shirt. He stepped out with everything else piled over his arm.

  “You’re still here?” Lincoln asked, surprised to see Sophie pacing.

  She stopped. Folded her arms.

  “Why did you run from the camp last night?” Sophie asked.

  Lincoln thought back to Elise in the trees. He thought back to Poppy’s Diner, to cherry pie, to dreams of hellfire and forks in his eye socket and everyone he loved rotting where they stood.

  “I didn’t want to deal with you anymore,” Lincoln said. “I still don’t. Now get out of here.”

  Sophie should have been hurt. Maybe even cried, as girls did when they wanted men to give them something. She surveyed him with an unreadable expression, nodded slowly, and said, “I’ll be around when you’re ready to talk about her.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Sophie was on
ly moments gone when a sidhe guard arrived at Lincoln’s door.

  “The queen wants to see you,” she said.

  When Lincoln stepped out onto a patio overlooking the beach, he stopped well in advance of the throne and bowed. The whole world bent in deference beside Lincoln, and he felt music within his bones, as if pressing his hands to the top of a piano during a symphony.

  Queen Titania rewarded him by smiling. Her hair flowed over her shoulders and framed a full-cheeked face, rather like someone had given a peach sentience. The wings at her back were a monarch butterfly’s, orange and black with crystal-clear panels. Her skin was the most perfect shining white, hauntingly colorless in tone.

  “That was a good bow, Mr. Marshall,” she said. “It looks as though you’ve been practicing.”

  He used to bow to greater demons in Hell. “I appreciate the kind words, ma’am.” He couldn’t bring himself to look at Titania directly, but he felt no less dizzy keeping his gaze on his feet. The runes on the OPA’s jacket weren’t strong enough now that he was at the epicenter of sidhe civilization.

  “Storm?” Titania prompted.

  Lincoln was approached by a sidhe. If it weren’t for the flat chest and narrow hips, he might have thought it was a woman. The long hair, glittering tights, and sheer volume of makeup looked like they belonged on a female. But he had the faintest five o’clock shadow too. It was repulsive to see, this weird mix of girly and boyish.

  Storm reached out to touch Lincoln, and Lincoln recoiled.

  “What are you doing?” Lincoln asked.

  “Your wards can only do so much to protect your mind from the overwhelming power in the Middle Worlds,” Storm said. That was a deeper voice than he’d expected. “I can layer on extra protections so that you’re more functional. They’ll last at least a week.”

  Lincoln didn’t want this thing touching him. He didn’t want to be anywhere near it.

  But Storm was right about one thing: Lincoln’s wards could only do so much, and he was getting motion sick from the endless Starry Night-swirl of the ocean tossed by the waves.