Lonesome Paladin

by S. M. Reine

  Lincoln looked down at himself, expecting to see human leather.

  He was naked.

  His body was a woman’s, large-breasted with muscular quadriceps. His belly was soft. His feet were dirty. There were faint imprints upon his skin, as though he’d been wearing armor until recently. He turned his hands in front of him to see blood under the fingernails.

  Why wasn’t Lincoln surprised to see himself with a woman’s body?

  Where was he?

  He turned to look around. A stone pillar with a hole at the center stood at his back.

  The Lia Fáil.

  Except it was...here. Wherever “here” was. It was also four or five times taller than the one he’d seen before, with a hook at its top. There was something nightmarish to the way it was stretched out tall, gazing down at him with unspoken judgment.

  Opposite the Lia Fáil was a stone slab throne. Whatever sat upon the chair was halfway between man and snake. It had pectorals, an abdomen. Its body looked male. But from the hips down it was a long scaly rope of muscle. The hair draped over its shoulders was a tangled web of knots.

  “Who are you?” Lincoln asked.

  The flat-faced serpent glared at him with slitted eyes. “So it’s come to this.” It wasn’t speaking English. Its lips moved with harsh, complicated syllables that Lincoln didn’t recognize. Yet he understood the words perfectly.

  “Where are we? What’s happening?” Lincoln asked.

  It drew a long sword, longer than it was tall. The blade looked like a razor. Its other hand held a noose.

  The serpent rose. “After so long, we come face to face.”

  There was only one reason that Lincoln would be seeing such horrible visions. Only one reason that he might already know this demon he faced. One reason he kept seeing Elise.

  “I’m possessed by a demon again,” Lincoln said. “You’re possessing me.”

  The snake lifted the sword above its head, and it darted forward with cobra swiftness.

  Lincoln didn’t have any control of his body. He lifted his knife when he wanted to run. He leaned forward instead of leaping behind the Lia Fáil for protection. He plunged the dagger deep into the serpent’s eye socket, and he felt the knife as though it were entering his own brain.

  Screaming, Lincoln clapped his hand over his eyes. He was bleeding. Gushing blood. Blinded by it.

  He slammed into porcelain.

  Lincoln had fallen to his knees, and caught himself against the sink in the sidhe bathroom. It was cold against his throbbing cheek. He’d smacked his face into it on the way down. His hands slipped off the sink. He slumped to a floor of dark, swirling ceramic.

  He was in the Summer Court’s bathroom again.

  Someone knocked at the bedroom door.

  “Mr. Marshall?” That was Sophie’s voice.

  “Just a minute!” he barked.

  It took a few seconds to breathe and gather himself before he could get to his feet. The bathroom was empty as before. The only sound was the dribbling waterfall filling the basin in the corner.

  He looked into the mirror. It turned out the streak of blood wasn’t coming from his eyes, but from a fresh cut on his cheekbone, where he’d fallen against the sink. He looked otherwise normal. Lincoln was not a naked woman locked in battle against a serpent.

  Sophie knocked again. “Are you okay?”

  No. I’ll never be okay again.

  Lincoln flushed the toilet again, and he called, “Five fucking minutes, woman!” He soaked a towel, wiped up his face. He couldn’t make the cut disappear but it looked less severe once cleaned.

  Then he answered the door.

  Sophie had stripped down from her usual swallow-tailed jacket, wearing only a snug black turtleneck and denims. The boots must have come from someone in the Summer Court; the metal rivets sparkled like gemstones, and the sturdy leather looked ideal for traversing the wilderness. “Gods, what happened to your face? This was not from the falhófnir, was it?” Her hands were cool on the swollen wound, and felt about a thousand times better than an ice pack would have.

  “Yeah, I think that was the unicorns,” Lincoln said. He stepped back before she realized how feverish he was. How his skin was still hot with hellfire. “What did you visit me for?”

  She set her shoulders. “Ofelia recognizes the value of my uncommon knowledge and has asked me to accompany her. We’re going to find a way to rescue Cèsar without killing Dullahan. Are you ready to go?”

  “To the Lia Fáil?” Lincoln asked.

  “Yes, because that is where Dullahan has taken Cèsar,” Sophie said.

  Lincoln felt dizzy, like he might collapse. He sat down on the edge of the bed. He’d seen the Destiny Stone in his vision just now. And Lincoln knew, beyond all doubt, that the serpent had somehow been Dullahan. Fate was pushing at him again. “I can’t go with you. Titania’s sending me to kill Dullahan in an hour,” Lincoln said.

  “You plan to obey her?” Sophie asked.

  “If I go out in the forest with that thing, I don’t think it’ll let me walk away,” he said.

  Sophie paled with horror. “Don’t you care about what will happen if a Remnant of Ereshkigal dies?”

  The serpent. Ereshkigal. That dark place.

  Lincoln choked on it. He burned with it.

  Go, Lincoln. Go to Dullahan.

  “You’ve got zero proof any of this Remnant bullshit is real,” Lincoln said.

  Sophie balled her hands in his lapels, face shining with determination. “Do you truly think that I’m lying?”

  He was damn sure that Sophie believed everything she said. Didn’t mean it was the truth. Just meant she was a fool with conviction. “Frankly, Miss Keyes,” he said, “I don’t think I know anything about you, your information, your motivations...”

  “So you’ll just give up and let the entire Summer Court die? When the gods have clearly brought us together to save these people from Dullahan?”

  “God is dead!”

  The words came roaring out of him, unexpectedly harsh. He hadn’t meant to yell. Even at Sophie. But the rising panic inside of him couldn’t be held any longer.

  She dropped her grip on his shirt. “I have seen you in the grip of God, out of your mind and out of this time. Do you deny what I have witnessed?”

  “These weird moods I get have nothing to do with God.” Lincoln’s head drooped into his palms. “I’ve felt like this before. When I was possessed by a demon.”

  He waited for a horrified reaction that never came. Guess he shouldn’t have been surprised Sophie seemed as interested in this as she was everything else. “You mean to say that a demon seized you, in much the same way that sidhe magic has seized Mr. Hawke?”

  “I’m not like him,” Lincoln said.

  “The similarities are admittedly minor, and thematically parallel rather than directly equated, but—”

  “There aren’t similarities,” he interrupted. “Not a one. I was possessed by a demon, but I got exorcised.” He surveyed Sophie, chewing around the words he needed to say next. There was patience in her dark eyes. “You told me that you’d listen when I wanted to talk about her. How did you know there’s a ‘her’?”

  “Limited as my experiences are, I do know what it looks like when a man’s losing his mind over a woman,” Sophie said.

  Losing his mind. Good choice of words. “When I’m out of it—when I’m talking to myself, wandering blind—it’s because I’m seeing the exorcist who saved me. Her name’s Elise. They called her the Godslayer.”

  “They?” Sophie asked, sitting beside him on the bed, a hands-breadth of mattress between them.

  “Everyone,” Lincoln said. “She was legendary. She moved Heaven and Earth to rip all the infernal pieces from my body and leave nothing behind but human.”

  “How marvelous! Truly a hero for the ages. Yet you don’t sound as though you’re as impressed by this as I am.”

  She wouldn’t have been impressed if she’d lived through it.
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  Lincoln hadn’t had a choice but to subject himself to the Godslayer’s cosmic powers. He’d been dying of a poison that only hurt demons, and her solution had been to rip the demon out of him. Like amputating the innermost core of his body without anesthesia. “Everything about that part of my life was worse than Hell.”

  “Perhaps not everything,” Sophie said. “I know how much power it must have taken to fundamentally alter your core programming, if you don’t mind the metaphor.”

  “What’s that gotta do with anything?”

  “Elise must have loved you very, very much to think your life worth saving in such a way,” Sophie said. “The sacrifice required to perform that magic… She must have thought you were worth it, Lincoln.”

  His throat had gone all hot, like the hellfire was burning inside him again. “Yeah, well, it didn’t do much good, did it? I’m seeing things, Sophie. I’m having dreams like I did when I was possessed.”

  Her hand rested on his arm, and this time, Lincoln didn’t mind so much. He didn’t even want to pull away.

  “It’s said that when Utu entered the world to seek Bunene’s help, he appeared as Bunene’s wife so that Utu would be known as a friend,” Sophie said. “Utu, of course, being a God Who Came Before, a man of justice and light, and Bunene being his charioteer and companion.”

  “Of course,” Lincoln echoed sarcastically.

  “My point is that the gods may not appear to you as gods when they ask for your help. If you witness Elise, a woman who loved you so much that she altered the fundamental rules of the universe to save your life, then it may be more reasonable to assume your visions are for good rather than ill.”

  “There’s no chance of that. I didn’t choose to leave Elise. She left me.” It was humiliating to have been so rejected. It shouldn’t have still hurt that much. “Besides, God’s right outside the front doors and He won’t talk to me. The only voices I’ve got in my head come from Hell.”

  Lincoln stood to put a safe amount of distance between himself and Sophie. A cool line trickled down his temple. The wound had started bleeding again. He pressed another towel to it.

  “Dullahan’s gotta die,” Lincoln said. “I’m going to kill him. Whatever demon’s possessing me, it wants him dead, and I’m not strong enough to fight it. You should run. Stay far, far away from all this.”

  Her eyebrows met in the center as she gazed at him sadly. “Perhaps I should. Regardless of what you do, it’s time we part ways.”

  She rose and embraced him.

  He was tense at first, prepared for the blow. It had been a long time since Lincoln had been touched by anyone who wasn’t trying to kill him.

  Sophie’s hug was only a hug. Her body was softer than the beds in the Summer Court, her arms warm around his waist, her cheek pressing against his pectoral just so. There was no violence to Sophie Keyes. There was only an unnerving degree of trust. What kind of woman could hear about Lincoln’s sins and want to hug him?

  But it was only a hug.

  He relaxed enough to pat her on the back, and he focused his eyes on the ceiling so they wouldn’t burn and blur, and he ignored the bitter clenching in his chest.

  “I know our paths will cross again soon,” Sophie said, cupping his injured cheek with one hand so he had to look at her. She was really pretty. Lincoln couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it before. “Safe travels, Mr. Marshall.”

  He swallowed down a jagged shard of emotions unfelt. “You too.”

  She left.

  Herne was the unlucky sidhe nominated to escort Lincoln outside Falias. “We’ll have to hurry getting out of here. We’re on total lockdown, so Oberon is only allowing the city gates to open for three minutes every six hours,” Herne said. “Need help with the gelding?”

  Lincoln surveyed the unicorn that the queen had loaned to him. It wore a typical Western-style saddle, which he’d often used while riding the trails as a kid. He mounted easily.

  “You guys gelded the unicorns?” Lincoln asked, adjusting in the saddle.

  “Some of them,” Herne said. “You wouldn’t believe how wild these guys get.” Lincoln was still bruised from fighting the wild mares. He knew exactly how wild they could get. “We leave the destriers intact so they’re more suitable for training. We couldn’t afford to give you one of the trained ones, though. Hence the gelding.”

  “Titania wants me to go into battle on a jacked-up lady-boy horse?” Lincoln snorted. “That’s real fucking nice of her.”

  Herne looked as if Lincoln had just taken a dump on the floor next to the horses. He was offended. Up until ten minutes ago, Lincoln thought he wouldn’t have cared about the disapproval. He wasn’t gonna dance around peoples’ feelings. Never had. But maybe Herne was the last semi-friendly face Lincoln was gonna see now that he was riding off to kill Dullahan, and Lincoln didn’t want that face to look so repulsed.

  “We better get going,” Herne said.

  “Yeah,” Lincoln said. This was as good as it got. A unicorn without balls, a couple charms so he remained sane in the Middle Worlds, and no plan as he rushed toward Dullahan.

  The serpent. Dullahan. Inanna.

  He urged his horse forward. They entered the broad halls of Alfheimr’s first floor, and the hoof-strikes echoed off the walls like clappers in bells. The magical gates were lifting, and Lincoln’s arm hair stood on end.

  The doors at the end of the foyer opened.

  “I hope you didn’t forget anything, because this is a one way trip,” Herne said.

  “I don’t have anything to forget.” Lincoln’s bag was on the saddle, his knives were on his belt, and the unicorn horn…

  Wait.

  He looked down at his holster.

  No horn.

  Lincoln wouldn’t have forgotten it. He’d had to trick two falhófnir into impaling each other to get that bastard, and he’d made sure it fit snugly in the loop less than an hour before leaving. He also didn’t have any other weapon he thought remotely capable of killing Dullahan Daith.

  A chime rang out through Alfheimr. The palace doors were open, and responding chimes throughout Falias confirmed that the inner and outer gates had opened as well. “Here we go,” Herne said, flicking his reins.

  The explosion of his horse’s footfalls was met by several more. Light flared behind Lincoln.

  Two stallions—ungelded and wilder than Lincoln’s mount—tore past them, tossing Herne and Lincoln aside. There was nothing to block the path of their escape.

  Ofelia led the way, cobwebs streaming behind her. She pressed herself low to the unicorn’s back as though they were joined. She was the night, and the destrier was the moon; together, they were untouchable.

  In comparison to her majesty, Sophie was laughably awkward, all elbows and knees. Lincoln and Sophie’s eyes briefly met as she passed. Her mouth was stretched into something halfway between grimace and smile.

  The unicorn horn was at her belt.

  That was why she’d hugged him. Not to be nice to a man about to die.

  She’d taken his damn horn.

  And then they were gone, flying past the white cathedral to escape Falias.

  Impulse seized Lincoln. He wasn’t sure if it was realizing Sophie had stolen the horn—his horn—or realizing that Sophie, a woman pure enough to tame a herd of unicorns with zero effort, was trying to get to Dullahan before Lincoln.

  Either way, he watched Sophie’s receding back and knew he could not let her go alone.

  Lincoln kicked his gelding in the sides. “Go! Go!”

  It leaped into motion. They bolted up the streets, leaving Herne in shock far behind.

  The streets of Falias blurred around him. Guards raced along the top of the outer city wall, trying to close the gates before anyone could escape.

  Ofelia blew through first. Sophie next.

  And then Lincoln escaped just yards behind them, so close that the magic slamming shut made his mount shriek and stumble.

  They hit the ground together.<
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  Lincoln got lucky. His head didn’t hit the road this time. Instead, his hip took the brunt of the impact—a superior option even though it numbed his entire left side. “Get off me,” he groaned, pushing at the unicorn. One of its rear legs was bent funny. It couldn’t seem to get up. The magic had closed on the unicorn, wounding it so grievously that it fell over again as soon as it tried to stand.

  He was pinned under one of the falhófnir.

  Again.

  “Sophie!” he shouted.

  It wasn’t the Historian who wheeled back around, but Ofelia. Her skirts were hitched high to expose long lengths of creamy thigh, shapely knee, delicate ankles, and bare toes. She’d painted herself for war: thick black lining her eyes, matte black on her lips, and ice in her eyes.

  She grabbed him by the arm, swung him off his feet. He landed in the saddle behind her.

  “Hold tight, handsome,” Ofelia said.

  Her stallion leapt after Sophie’s. The guards shouted behind them. And they vanished into the dense forests of the Summer Court.

  CHAPTER 20

  Cèsar wasn’t sure how he ended up in the forest. The world lost meaning in the distance that elapsed between the dungeon and the trees, caught in the impossibly vast fist of Dullahan Daith as it carried him over the Summer Court.

  Briefly, he rested upon mildewed leaves and mud softened by the blood of doppelgängers. The OPA redoubt was a graveyard now. A place of skeletons. A waypoint between here and there—a necessary stop before reaching the ley line.

  Cèsar did not end up at the ley line. He ended up in a shivering pile on the ground in front of a tall stone pillar, in some unrecognizable patch of forest, burning with a thousand-degree fever. The sunlight hurt his oversized unseelie eyes, anatomically suitable for lands of darkness and snow.

  Dullahan stood over Cèsar, ephemeral fear brought to multidimensional reality. Shadow billowed from him and the black fog consumed the trees one by one.

  “Show yourself,” Dullahan said. “Dullahan will see you, and Dullahan will know you. Show yourself, Inanna.”