by S. M. Reine
“Only one?” asked Inanna. “Which one?”
You may choose.
She unlaced the sides of her breastplate and allowed them to fall at her feet. She wore a cotton tunic underneath to protect her skin from the straps. It was a relief to drop the armor, in truth. She had broken a rib in her last battle. Breathing was easier without it.
The Ninth Gatekeeper stepped aside.
Go on.
Inanna approached the Destiny Stone. She pushed her arm through the hole, and the gateway opened.
Irkalla sprawled before her. Inanna had been in the fertile heart of her city-state’s farmlands before, but in Irkalla, there were no abandoned plows, starving cattle, or fields of unharvested wheat. It didn’t have farmlands at all. It was a labyrinth of grave stone structures, gloomy and dark. An eternal home for the dead who had yet to pass on to the next life.
Inanna stepped through the rift, leaving behind sunlight, a wind that smelled like disease, the human worlds. She was cloaked in black fog.
“Hello, Irkalla,” she said with a soft smile. A sad smile. She stroked her skin where the fog caressed, greeting the alien presence with fondness.
She passed nothing but hovels on her way to the eighth gate, and the faces that peered at her from within those hovels were mercifully unfamiliar. The Eighth Gatekeeper was a frowning thing—a dead spirit that had never passed on, not since the world was new. He had only become increasingly embittered by the passing centuries.
“Remove a piece of your armor,” he said.
Inanna only had so many pieces. “I already left one behind.”
“Ereshkigal has ordered it.” His tone was as dull as the colors in Irkalla.
She drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly. She wasn’t really afraid. Ereshkigal was her friend, only becoming esoteric in his demands since marrying Nergal. This was another of those strange demands. Nothing more.
Inanna needed to talk to Ereshkigal more than she needed her armor.
She removed a pauldron, dropping it at the Eighth Gatekeeper’s feet.
One by one, Inanna progressed through the gates, leaving behind pieces of her armor until she was scaling the mountain at Irkalla’s heart wearing only her cotton shift.
At the final gate, she was stripped of that too.
Inanna entered the throne room naked as the day she was born, wearing the wounds of battle.
And that was where Ereshkigal waited. Where Dullahan waited.
Inanna’s naked feet met the stone floor of the innermost chamber, and Lincoln stepped onto the pillar at the center of the Lia Fáil’s crater. He was the naked woman. He was himself, clutching a unicorn horn. He was many thousands of years in the past. He was in the present, after Genesis. The duality ached.
Dullahan turned to him, just as naked, and he said, “Inanna. It is you.”
“That’s right,” Lincoln said, his heart pounding against the inside of his breastbone. “It’s me.”
Cèsar lifted his head weakly, trying to focus on Lincoln through eyes that were caked in blood. “Run, Marshall. Run.”
“I can’t,” Lincoln said. Inanna stepped away from Lincoln, looking as tired as the day she had entered Irkalla. Lincoln couldn’t run from her. Wherever he went, she would be with him, and Dullahan would find them both.
“You wanted to talk to me, Ereshkigal?” she asked. “Come out to talk to me.”
“Very well,” said Dullahan.
The snake shivered. He shook.
A man stepped out of him, head and all. It was the powerful serpent that Lincoln had seen in his vision. Ereshkigal looked too beastly for a human woman like Inanna to face directly. There was no way that she could survive against him.
Dullahan collapsed to his knees, weak without the Remnant.
Lincoln tightened his grip on the horn.
“You killed my husband,” said Ereshkigal.
“You killed me,” said Inanna. “Isn’t that the justice you desired?”
Ereshkigal grew angry. “Your apostles resurrected you so that you could take my city! It was what you wanted all along, and why you killed Nergal!”
“Nergal deserved to die!”
The argument was escalating to shouts. Neither Remnant noticed Lincoln creeping toward Dullahan, or the way he’d shifted his hand on the horn to hold it like a dagger. Even Dullahan didn’t notice.
Cèsar did. “Do it,” he mumbled, limp against the ground. His human body was covered in the same deep gashes as the animal skin had been. “Do it, Marshall.”
Lincoln stood behind Dullahan, watching Ereshkigal and Inanna argue things that made too little sense—and too much sense.
He remembered everything now.
Inanna may have been outside of him, arguing with a fragment of another God That Was, but he still had a lot of her memories. He remembered stripping to walk through Irkalla. He remembered the noose closing around his neck, and he remembered dying while dangling from that hook on the Destiny Stone.
He also remembered coming back to life for revenge.
The details surrounding that were hazy. Lincoln only recalled the feelings of nauseating anger, and how satisfied Inanna had been to bury her blade deep in Ereshkigal’s heart. She had been a godslayer, too. Just like Elise.
Now Lincoln was going to do it again.
He lifted the unicorn horn above Dullahan’s hunched back, unnoticed by Ereshkigal or Inanna.
Movement caught his eye.
Sophie stood on the far edge of the crater, wringing her hands.
What are you waiting for? Inanna’s voice spoke from within Lincoln. Kill him. Do it. As soon as you kill Dullahan, Ereshkigal too will be killed, and we will have our justice.
Lincoln’s hand wavered.
Inanna had also urged him to fight the bašmu and the falhófnir, as some crazy warrior-goddess was wont to do. She wasn’t a demon possessing him. She was a god. And she was wrong.
Lincoln’s hand fell to his side.
That movement was what made Ereshkigal’s Remnant turn. He saw Lincoln standing over Dullahan, and fury filled his serpentine features. “Betrayal again!” thundered Ereshkigal.
Lincoln dived for Cèsar. “Ofelia!” he shouted. “Do something! Now!” He barely got the words out before he struck the undersecretary, all slimy and cold with unseelie blood, and his momentum carried both of them over the edge of the platform.
They tumbled into the crater.
The slope from the center platform wasn’t as steep as it had looked from above. It was still steep enough that they rolled with frightening speed, bouncing and crashing into each other and finally slamming to a halt at the bottom.
Dullahan’s roar—Ereshkigal’s roar—shook the entire Summer Court.
He appeared beside the Destiny Stone looking down at them. He’d clearly merged with Ereshkigal again because he was shimmering, wavering, pulsing.
He was going to follow them down.
Except then blazing-white ice ripped across the air. It engulfed Dullahan, crystallizing him the way that Fritz Friederling had been crystallized. He was encased within instants. Just as instantly, the dirt began crumbling underneath his feet, and Lincoln felt his heart stop beating. He gasped but oxygen didn’t help.
“No!” Sophie cried. “He can’t stop moving!”
“He won’t,” Ofelia said.
A wind whirled through the basin, colder than the coldest winds of solstice. It formed a cyclone. It slammed into the crystalline structure enclosing Dullahan, and he launched into the sky, spinning head over feet at blazing speeds.
The crystal, and Dullahan, vanished beyond the stars of the Summer Court.
Lincoln’s heart resumed beating.
And at last the forest was silent.
Except for Cèsar. He was bleeding, shivering, whimpering, and the fall had only made him worse. His bloody wounds were scraped open, packed with dirt.
“You’re gonna be okay,” Lincoln said. He didn’t even think before gripping the man�
�s hand, holding it tight, offering him comfort. “You’re gonna be okay, Cèsar. You just gotta hang in there a few…more…”
His vision was blurring. It was hard to talk. Hard to think.
Lincoln collapsed against the dirt, passing out unconscious.
CHAPTER 21
Cèsar had been expecting to die at Dullahan’s enormous terrifying hand, so it was a real pleasant surprise to end up at the bottom of a crater, shaped like a human, and not dead.
Even more surprising was the fact that Lincoln Marshall, of all the homophobic assholes, had passed out while holding his hand. Cèsar didn’t really want to hold the guy’s hand, especially because the gashes meant having his arm stretched out hurt like hell. But Lincoln was still unconscious, and Cèsar was feeling uncommonly fuzzy toward the guy.
He held Lincoln’s hand firmly and rested against the dirt.
They were the only living things within the crater, but they weren’t really alone. The head that Dullahan had been carting around in the duffel bag had fallen near them too. It was all bloody and gross and staring at nothing.
“Bitch of a day, huh?” Cèsar asked the head.
Fortunately, it didn’t reply.
He was still gripping Lincoln’s hand when Ofelia descended, carrying Sophie Keyes in her arms.
“Holy shit,” Cèsar said at the sight of his sister. He hadn’t gotten to see her in full sidhe queen mode yet. When she’d visited him after Genesis, she’d looked like herself. Now she was a fucking goddess descending from the rim of the crater with a thousand layers of fine cobwebs fluttering behind her.
She set Sophie down gently before throwing herself at Cèsar. “Oh my God, Ceez!” Ofelia’s arms wrapped around his neck. He couldn’t breathe, and he didn’t care. “Are you okay? Talk to me, hermano!”
He couldn’t talk with her shoulder smashing his throat. He gurgled.
She squeezed him tighter.
“Shh, baby,” she said, apparently unconcerned with her self-contradiction. “Be quiet. Let me hold you.”
He gurgled again.
“Lincoln is okay, in case any of you are concerned,” Sophie piped up. She was helping the former deputy sit up now.
Cèsar actually had been concerned, and he was pleased to see Lincoln upright of his own volition. He was less pleased to see Lincoln pick up the head. The deputy stared blankly into the shriveled eyes of the dead woman.
“Dullahan said she was a Remnant of Inanna,” Cèsar said, peeling his sister off of him so that he could breathe again.
“Yes, there would be several,” Sophie said, “but we shouldn’t insult this poor soul by defining her based upon the fragment of her spirit that descended from an old god. She would have had a life. She would have been a normal person, with no strange powers, and no culpability for the sins of Inanna.” These last sentences were directed toward Lincoln, very pointedly.
The former deputy’s expression remained blank. Cèsar knew shell-shock when he saw it. He’d experienced it himself once or twice, and he’d never had a goddess come out of him.
“I can take the head back to Earth with me,” Cèsar offered. “I could identify her. Notify her family.”
“I’m keeping her,” Lincoln said, tucking the head under his arm.
Well, that was fair disgusting. But Cèsar wasn’t gonna argue. Talking about going back to Earth had just reminded him how he’d ended up in the Summer Court in the first place. “Fritz,” Cèsar said suddenly. “What did I do to Fritz?”
“You ate some of his soul,” Ofelia said. “You’re a cait sidhe, hermanito. That’s what you do. I don’t know if you can put his soul back, but…look, let me work on healing you. You’re a mess.” Ofelia lifted Cèsar’s arm so she could look at the gashes the iron chains had left on his lats.
He pulled away. “I’m not taking time to get healed until I see Fritz.”
“Fritz is suspended. He’s fine.” She hissed in sympathy as she probed his wounds. “You might not be if we leave all that iron in you. The chains rubbed off on your bones.”
Cèsar grabbed Ofelia by the shoulders, trying to make her focus on him. Trying to make her see how desperately he needed this. “I have to go to Fritz.”
This time, it seemed to click. She turned to the humans. “Choose right now: are you coming with us?”
Sophie looked to Lincoln.
He said, “I have business to finish here.”
“All right,” Ofelia said.
She locked her hands on Cèsar’s wrists, and they leaped through the ley lines together.
The crater turned into a mansion.
It was the main house at Esther Winery—Cèsar knew this in an instant just because he’d had to help carry that ugly claw-footed furniture into the room, and he’d never forget what an awful, sweaty, grunting chore that had been.
It was nighttime in the bedroom with all curtains closed, and only a single lamp on the bedside table switched on. Unplugged medical equipment clustered in one corner. The closet stood open, as if someone had been rearranging it.
On top of the bed, there was a human-sized crystal that looked just like Dullahan’s. Cèsar’s heart skipped a beat before he got close enough to see that there wasn’t a snake-man inside of it.
“I warned you that I had to suspend him,” Ofelia said. “I’m so sorry.”
Fritz was locked at the core of the crystal. His expression was frozen into a grimace. The curse of improved sidhe vision was that Cèsar could see, even through all that rock, that Fritz’s light was fading. That his heart hadn’t beat in too long. That there was almost no soul to him.
Cèsar knew exactly what to do.
He sat on the bed beside the crystal, spreading his hand over its faceted surface so that there were only a few inches of quartz between Cèsar and Fritz. “Drop the crystal,” Cèsar said.
“Get ready,” Ofelia said. “You’ll only have a moment once it’s down.”
A wind lifted, whipping through the room. It rattled the curtains. Made the door shake in the frame. The surface of the crystal rippled, then vanished.
Fritz gasped. He choked. His eyes didn’t even open.
Cèsar gripped his hand, wrapping fingers tinted an unnatural shade of blue so tightly around Fritz’s that he heard the crack of bone. His other hand turned to claws, surrounded by the ghost of a paw, and the form that he had only just lost.
He sank his claws into Fritz again.
Fritz’s soul melded with the body, and Cèsar felt it come out of him the way he’d felt the roots of his wisdom teeth prying free from his jaw. The pain lit his nerves. Burned through the canyons of his shredded skin.
They tore in half and were reformed into two men, separate and distinct. Sidhe and human.
Fritz stopped jerking. He collapsed against the bed, boneless.
Cèsar watched his chest to see if it moved. And it did. Slowly, smoothly, without the earlier coughing, Fritz was breathing.
But he was still fading. The soul had been restored, but it wasn’t enough somehow.
“Come on, man,” he said, voice shaking. “You don’t get to die like this. You’re not leaving me with this much work.”
Fritz’s soul had been fueling Cèsar through his rampage, his hours in the dungeon, and the fight against Dullahan. What if Cèsar had no longer carried the entirety of Fritz’s soul because he’d burned it away?
“Then I’ll give you some of mine, dammit,” Cèsar said.
Cèsar opened himself to the universe. And somehow, he managed to peel away the magic at his core, which made him the creature that he was. He took all that power—a piece of his own soul—and he pressed his lips against Fritz’s to breathe it into him.
Fritz’s eyes flew open as though he’d been struck by a sledgehammer. He looked up, focused on Cèsar, and neither of them moved for an eternity of time.
They were kissing. Cèsar hadn’t really thought Fritz would be awake for that part.
It took him an embarrassing length of time
to realize Fritz’s open eyes meant he was awake. He jerked upright, leaned back. “Fritz! You’re alive!”
“I hurt too much to be dead,” he groaned.
“Jesus Christ, you bastard, you had me scared!”
Fritz flung his arms around Cèsar’s shoulders, gripping him in a tight, painful hug. Cèsar clung just as hard. It was the only way that he didn’t feel empty. “Thank you, Cèsar,” whispered Fritz.
Lincoln announced his return to Falias by hurling the Remnant of Inanna’s head at the gates.
The guards responded with indistinct shouts as they broke into action. Lincoln felt like he waited an hour for them to let him inside, but he didn’t care. He’d just spent ages climbing out of the crater with Sophie. He’d had to get back on one of those destriers and ride all the way back with a woman’s severed head in his lap.
And that turned out to have been the easiest part of the day.
Once the gates opened, Lincoln limped into Falias, down the manicured street that looked like it belonged in an abnormally clean version of medieval France. He kicked the head along with him. Thump, thump, thump. It was a little more dented every time his foot connected. Started to look like a squeezed orange.
Lincoln didn’t get all the way to the inner walls. Titania and her entourage met him, forming an impassable boundary between library and baker. Instead of being flanked by handmaidens, as she often was, she was accompanied by the Riders: men who had suited up in preparation of defending Falias. They were armed and battle-ready.
He kicked the head one more time, harder than before. It rolled up to Titania’s feet. She made a little sound of disgust and stepped back so that someone could pick it up.
“Dullahan’s dead,” Lincoln announced. “I’m here to collect.”
Titania’s mouth opened, but no words came out. The Riders were looking at her but she didn’t make eye contact with them, even briefly. She looked like a woman lost.
She hadn’t expected Lincoln to come back.
They had collected a large audience. People were still emerging from the buildings to gather around, drawn by their queen’s presence but riveted by Lincoln’s battered appearance.
“Well? You gonna make good on the bounty?” Lincoln asked.
