Lonesome Paladin

by S. M. Reine

  Meaningless words in a meaningless place. Serpents stretched from the earth, yearning toward the sky, their mouths open so that their leaf-tipped fangs could spread into daylight. The soil was made of ants. It crawled over Cèsar’s nostrils, through his fur, between his toes. Every inch of him hissed.

  “Show yourself, Inanna,” Dullahan said again. It sounded like an order, and a serious one at that. Cèsar could hear nothing but the scraping of minuscule insect feet against his eardrums.

  Cèsar would have given Dullahan anything if it made the pain stop. When the dungeon had fallen apart around him, the iron chains had come free of the wall but not Cèsar’s flesh; he still wore them within his skin, garrotes burning toward bone.

  But Cèsar couldn’t come out of himself, much less present Inanna—whoever the fuck that was supposed to be.

  Without a response, Dullahan became agitated. “Is it that you don’t know who you are? Do you need a reminder?”

  His hand extended toward the cait sidhe.

  No. Please don’t.

  “You’ll see the truth,” Dullahan said.

  He pressed his thumb into Cèsar’s forehead, between his eyes.

  Darkness.

  Plummeting, endless darkness.

  Cèsar felt another pair of eyes open. Not the ones attached to his skull, but a second pair, somewhere in the past on someone else. He found himself sitting atop a mighty throne in an endless world of blue-black darkness. It was hot. Too hot. Cèsar’s blood was going to boil.

  “This is my memory,” Dullahan said, standing somewhere to Cèsar’s right. “You see in my eyes.”

  A naked woman stepped forward. She was a lovely thing with thick brown hair, gold-brown skin, and dark eyes. She was bruised all over. Her hands were empty, and she showed her palms to prove it. This must have been Inanna. Cèsar didn’t recognize her.

  “I’m here as a friend, Ereshkigal,” she said.

  “Would a friend have killed Nergal?” asked Dullahan. He turned to Cèsar and said, “Nergal was my husband.”

  “I had to kill Nergal,” said Inanna. “I didn’t have a choice after everything that he did, knowing that it would pain you, but knowing the pain Nergal inflicted upon the world was worse. I beg of you to forgive me. To see reason.”

  “You have broken my laws,” Dullahan said, “and for that you will face justice.”

  “Justice is not so simple,” she said, pleading, her hands clasped.

  Dullahan nodded slowly, grimly. “Then it has come to this.”

  He darted forward too swiftly for Inanna to react. He plunged a knife deep into her eye, and Cèsar flinched as the blood flowed forth.

  Inanna didn’t cry out.

  She grunted once, seized Dullahan’s wrist, and said, “This is not justice, Ereshkigal!”

  “You are not the sole arbiter of these things,” he said. “I am. My justice is absolute.”

  Dullahan was holding a noose in his other hand. Cèsar wanted to shout warnings to the woman. She was blinded in one eye, distracted by grappling. Inanna didn’t know she was about to be hanged until the noose jerked tight around her throat.

  The noose evoked more of a reaction than having an eye gouged out. She gasped and kicked, trying to put distance between them. It only served to tighten the rope.

  Calmly, so calmly, Dullahan dragged Inanna to the stone pillar, deaf to her grunts as the stone shredded the exposed skin of her back. She must have been human, or close to it; the blood streaks she left behind were crimson. Her dirty feet smudged them.

  He threw the end of the rope over the hook atop the stone. And he yanked on the end of the rope to hang her high, where her feet could find no purchase.

  She died like that, writhing and bleeding. Her tongue bulged from her mouth. She kicked for a long time—far beyond the length of time any human should have been capable of fighting against strangulation.

  Dullahan made Cèsar watch it all.

  He watched until her final, graceless whine squeezed out of her throat and her fingertips dangled loosely at her sides.

  The last thing he saw was the purple sausages of her lips.

  Then Cèsar came back into himself in the Summer Court, piece by piece, leaving the memory behind.

  The pain returned first. Cèsar almost wished it had never gone because it was doubly cruel to feel again, having remembered how it felt without iron in his body. Now it tore through him anew.

  The sun had vanished during the vision. It had been morning when Cèsar first gazed up from the forest floor—he was certain of it—but now the sun was directly overhead, beating down upon him with cruel heat.

  “Remember, Inanna?” asked Dullahan. “Are you ready to come out?”

  Cèsar couldn’t. It wasn’t as though he wanted to be this monster. Why would he still be suffering like this if he had any other choice?

  Although, to be fair, if he could turn into Inanna somehow, Cèsar suspected it wasn’t gonna end pretty.

  He could still hear the woman strangling to death.

  Dullahan accepted his silence as an answer. He set down the duffel bag, and it squished with surprising solidity at the base of the stone pillar. Dullahan’s bony fingers easily manipulated its zipper.

  The bag opened. His hands disappeared inside, then reappeared holding a head.

  Cèsar had always known it would be a head in there.

  This head had come from a woman’s shoulders. Her shriveled eyelids were stuck a half-inch open, exposing tacky yellowed sclera. Her lips were colorless. Her hair was pasted to her scalp and neck with blood, so it was impossible to tell the color, though Cèsar thought it might have once been red. He’d never been into redheads, personally.

  “Another of your Remnants, Inanna,” Dullahan said. “She wouldn’t give me what I wanted either. Will you?”

  He hurled the head at Cèsar. It splattered to the dirt in front of him. The eyes were pointed toward him without focusing.

  Cat Cèsar’s reflexes were appropriately feline, and he leaped about ten feet into the air. Screw the pain—someone was throwing severed heads at him. For once, Cat Cèsar and Human Cèsar were in agreement.

  They needed to kill this fucker yesterday.

  Did it hurt to stomp a foot on the end of the chain and pull Cèsar’s body away from it, peeling the iron against his bones?

  Yes. Yes it did.

  But the pain came out in a roar that felt powerful. The spray of his blood across the ground marked this as his territory—his battleground—and the chain could no longer hurt him once it was spooled on the grass. Cèsar bit at the other chains, tore them out with his stinging mouth.

  Exploding into a thrashing mess of fur and blood had made Dullahan draw back, more from disgust than fear. “Come out,” Dullahan commanded from outside the splash zone, the fucking coward.

  No, wait. He hadn’t been moving away from Cèsar. He’d been moving toward the stone.

  He reached a hand through the Destiny Stone’s hole.

  Strange magic pulsed over Cèsar. It was more primal than any magic he’d felt in his long history as a witch—something akin to gravity. An irresistible force that the universe was built upon.

  “Come out, Inanna.”

  The order was like a knife slicing Cèsar down the center, severing the two lobes of his brain. The halves of his personality.

  Instantly, the beast’s consciousness vanished.

  And just when Cèsar was finally free of the chains, building up his power to grow huge and eat this motherfucker, he felt himself began to turn human.

  Oh shit.

  Riding to the Destiny Stone behind Queen Ofelia felt like trying to ride the winds of winter. Her waist was tiny under Lincoln’s hands, her thighs pressed within his. He could even feel the chill through the canvas of his pants.

  He couldn’t help but have a physical reaction to the queen. The sidhe were sensuality, even at their most terrifying, and he had a volcano of icy power shaped like a curvaceous woman bouncing
against him. She must have known how his body was reacting, but Ofelia showed no interest. She never looked back. She just kept flicking the reins, urging the destrier to run faster.

  The forest darkened as they put distance between themselves and Falias. Crossing the river was nothing; the falhófnir didn’t even pause before racing across the water’s surface. They flew up the hillside where Sophie had tried to camp. They weaved between trees, hurtled effortlessly over logs, and entered familiar territory.

  “This way!” Sophie called, blowing through the thick bushes that should have concealed her cabin.

  It was the closest they could get to the Destiny Stone. Higher on the hill—closer to the ley line, as well as the Veil—the air was churning with dangerous darkness. The black fog was new. It killed the leaves to leave branches bared. It turned bark into ash. It was barely a dozen feet away from Sophie’s cabin.

  “What’s this Dullahan thing doing?” Ofelia asked, swinging out of her saddle. Lincoln jumped down after her.

  “I don’t know,” Sophie confessed. Her foot got stuck in the stirrup when she tried to dismount, and she’d have fallen a good eight feet down if Lincoln hadn’t caught her. “Oh, thank you, Mr. Marshall.”

  He yanked the unicorn horn out of her belt and set her on her feet. “This is mine.”

  “I know,” Sophie said.

  “Feels like you stole it to get me tagging along with you. Almost makes a guy think he’s being manipulated.”

  “Almost,” she said. “And I’m glad to have you, because that fog looks dreadful. I can only imagine what power a Remnant of Ereshkigal might manifest.”

  “Let’s find out,” Ofelia said. She lifted her arms as she had when releasing the falhófnir mares. Lincoln fully expected a similar surge of magic, and he wasn’t disappointed.

  The force of sidhe power wiped out Storm’s safeguards for an endless minute. Lincoln was left bare and prickling, exposed in a forest of dead trees.

  The entire forest was screaming. It had burned within the black fog, severed from the heart of magic in the Middle Worlds, and every atom felt the separation. The screams were so loud that Lincoln could see them shivering in the dirt underneath his feet.

  Ofelia let go of her spell, and Lincoln’s wards slammed back into place.

  The queen sagged against the wall of the cabin, panting. “I can’t clear the fog,” she snarled. “It’s always harder to do magic in the seelie worlds, since I’m unseelie. I’m sure Titania could fix this if she wasn’t a giant asshole!” Ofelia shouted the last words back the way they’d come.

  Sophie lashed the destriers to her makeshift forge. “Then let’s get closer.”

  “We can’t get closer without getting in that fog,” Lincoln said.

  “I know,” she said.

  Cèsar’s familiar roar broke over the Summer Court. The falhófnir shrieked and reared.

  Ofelia paled. “Ceez.”

  She lifted her arms again. Magic buoyed her off the ground. She blasted through the trees and vanished into fog.

  “Ofelia!” cried Sophie. The Historian followed without a moment’s pause.

  That left only Lincoln behind.

  “What are you waiting for?” asked Elise. She had a shoulder leaned against the cabin door as she cleaned under her fingernails with a knife. “Do you need an invitation to go deal with Dullahan?”

  “If I want to hear your opinion, I’ll ask for it,” Lincoln said. “I’m not going for you. I’m going for her.” He jerked his head toward Sophie—pure, brilliant Sophie, who had just vanished into the fog too.

  Elise’s mouth lifted in an unfriendly smile. “Remember to take off your armor,” she said, and now it was easy for Lincoln to hear that the voice wasn’t hers. It must have belonged to the demon. It was part of his torment.

  He was still going to obey.

  Lincoln made an obscene gesture and followed Sophie.

  The fog engulfed him.

  It was silent inside. Even Lincoln’s movements were muffled, as though he were drowning in the river outside Falias again. It was so dark that he could only see the nearest of the dead trees. The ash coating the ground looked like snow. Everything that wasn’t black was tinged a hostile neon blue—just like the vision with the serpent.

  Lincoln’s foot slipped over the edge of a cliff that shouldn’t have been there. “Shit!” He stumbled back, arms windmilling.

  Sophie’s grabbed his arm to steady him. “Watch out for the crater,” she said.

  “What crater?” he started to ask, but he trailed off when he turned to Ofelia.

  The queen stood on the edge of the cliff. It was like someone had taken a giant ice cream scoop to the Summer Court, carving out a space around the Lia Fáil the circumference of a pit mine. Ofelia shined so brightly that her glow illuminated the center of the crater. There was a single column of dirt remaining, perhaps a dozen feet across, with the Destiny Stone in the very middle.

  “When he stops moving, everything dies,” Sophie said softly.

  Dullahan stood by the stone, stripped of his sweater to expose his scaly flesh and headless neck. There was a big white cat writhing on the ground at his feet. Dying. Just like the forest.

  “Cèsar!” Ofelia cried.

  There was no way that Dullahan didn’t hear her. He just didn’t seem to care.

  Lincoln’s fist was tight on the bony spear, but it offered no comfort now. The nearest thing he’d had to a plan to kill Dullahan was “stab him.” But there were a couple hundred feet between his edge of the crater and the center. He couldn’t get near enough to stab.

  Worse, Lincoln didn’t want to.

  A strange calm suffused him—a feeling of familiarity, and even fondness.

  “What’s Dullahan doing?” Ofelia asked.

  The serpent had thrust his fist through the hole in the Destiny Stone. Cèsar arched and screamed again. He was bleeding a lot. Looked like someone had whipped the poor guy.

  “I think he’s trying to separate the Remnant of Inanna from Cèsar,” Sophie said. “We have to help him!”

  “Come out,” Dullahan said. His voice boomed across the open space. He wasn’t muffled by the fog.

  Come out. Come out. Come out.

  The echoes were louder than the voice itself, as though Dullahan spoke from within Lincoln’s very soul.

  He looked down at his body.

  Lincoln saw large, bare breasts. The nipples were brown in tone—the brown of a woman who’d recently borne children—and his belly was soft below the navel. His hips were wide, his thighs muscled, his feet bare.

  It shouldn’t have been possible. He was awake—not dreaming or hallucinating.

  “Gods,” whispered Sophie, staring at him.

  “What’s wrong?” Lincoln asked. His voice came out twinned: male and female, deep and high.

  “You’re the Remnant of Inanna,” Sophie said.

  “You mean, you can see her?” Lincoln asked, stepping back. The woman didn’t follow. His masculine form separated easily from the feminine form, and for the first time, Lincoln got to see the woman who’d been tormenting him from within. Straight chestnut hair was chopped unevenly to her shoulders. Her skin was tanned and light-brown. Her eyes were fringed with heavy eyelashes, her nose was upturned, her jawline heart-shaped.

  One of her eyes was missing but healed. It was gouged out, black on the inside.

  Both Sophie and Ofelia were staring now, so they could obviously see everything. The visions were real. Lincoln wasn’t possessed by a demon.

  He should have been relieved, but he only felt numbed. There was no time to wrap his mind around the implications of this woman being real.

  Was she a god? Was he a god?

  By the Destiny Stone, Cèsar screamed again. His voice came out human this time.

  A human hand emerged from the breast of the feline, his knuckles slick with sapphire blood. Bone cracked as he fought his way out of his body’s cage. Cèsar emerged drenched in his own fluids, bir
thed from the carcass of his animal form, and he shored up near Dullahan’s feet. The undersecretary was shaking.

  “Holy fucking shit, that sucked so bad,” Cèsar gasped. His voice was quiet compared to the angry boom of Dullahan’s.

  “You are not Inanna.” Dullahan’s hand grew, his fingers stretching to surround Cèsar.

  Lincoln felt a good hard jab. Sorta like Elise poking him hard in the chest.

  What are you waiting for?

  He stepped forward, and Inanna stepped forward to join him. They moved in tandem. Right foot inside right, heart against heart.

  Sophie grabbed his arm. “Wait!” Her fingers were inside the vision of Inanna, but Sophie’s eyes were only for Lincoln himself. “Please, Lincoln. Don’t kill Ereshkigal’s Remnant.”

  “I’m gonna do what I’ve gotta do,” Lincoln said.

  “You never have to choose the path of violence,” Sophie said.

  He shook free of her. “It’s not violence if it’s justice.”

  Then he stepped out into the crater. His feet settled upon nothing. He walked across air.

  Lincoln and Inanna.

  The world swirled around him, faster and faster on each step. He was at the fairgrounds in Northgate again. Trying to sit up on the tilt-a-whirl, getting all queasy. Blood roared through his skull.

  The Summer Court vanished.

  Lincoln vanished. His body, his soul. Only a spark remained.

  A Remnant.

  Take off a piece of your armor, said a creature.

  It was Inanna who looked up. “Why should I take off my armor?”

  She stood at the first gate outside Irkalla. There were nine of these gates, each built in a spiral surrounding the throne room where Ereshkigal would be waiting, and even Inanna doubted her ability to fight through them. Victory would have been devastating for the innocent dead of Irkalla. Thus, she stopped here where she stopped nowhere else.

  The Ninth Gatekeeper was fifty feet tall. It had spindle legs and short arms, an arched back, a painted face in the center of its columnar body. It had been Inanna’s friend, once. The Ninth Gatekeeper’s sense of humor was pleasantly wry and ordinarily unrelenting.

  At the moment, it was serious. Take off a piece of your armor, it repeated. Ereshkigal has ordered it.