by SM Reine
“Every night we change, we make a decision to live as ourselves,” Rylie said. The sanctuary was so quiet that she barely had to yell. “The animal is a part of us. It’s a difficult, sometimes scary part, but it comes from inside of us. We yield to our animal. We choose to accept ourselves.”
Energy shivered through Abel, making his flesh dance over his muscle. A groan forced itself from his chest—almost more of a growl.
The wolf swelled inside of him.
But with the wolf, he also felt Rylie. She was cool energy tempering the fire of change.
She swept through them and brought the souls of the pack together.
Rylie lifted her hands, tipping her head back to take in the moon. The hair was already loosening from her scalp. It fell in fine golden locks on the stage behind her. “Change.” That one word vibrated throughout the valley.
And the pack began to change.
Chapter 29
Watching the werewolves transform was something straight out of a nightmare. There were too many people for Lincoln to focus upon just one, following the change from beginning to end. Instead, his senses were overwhelmed by the cacophony of screams and the chaos of their rocking bodies. The sum of the sounds was human at first, like the way an audience shouted at football games. But it quickly changed to the sounds of a slaughterhouse. Ripping muscles, fluids splattering against the dirt, snapping bones.
It lasted for almost fifteen minutes. Fifteen impossible, infinite minutes.
Abel Wilder changed fastest. He stood beside his mate, who remained human, and sheltered her with the body of a bus-sized wolf. His nose was wider than Lincoln’s palm. He had four shining silver claws on each of his paws. His tail was as sleek as the rest of him was bushy, his fur the gleaming black of a new Harley.
As the other shifters finished, they began to flow up the mountain, limping at first, then beginning to move faster. They left behind so much blood, hair, and bodily fluids that it seemed impossible anyone could have survived the transformation, much less all of them. But once the animals were done and had fled the square, there were no bodies left behind. Only pieces.
Abel nudged Rylie with his muzzle. She stroked his face, and he leaped into the trees as well.
“Follow them.” Inanna must have just appeared beside Lincoln, but he felt as though she had always been there.
Tonight, Inanna wore plates of leather punched with bronze. Her armor appeared more ornamental than functional, exposing her belly. A tattoo, blurred by age, encircled her navel. Lincoln couldn’t quite make out the image.
“I’m not hunting the wolf pack,” Lincoln said.
“You shouldn’t go to hunt them,” Inanna agreed. “But you belong with them. All creatures of the earth are mine. All people are mine. I ruled the hunt, and these are hunters. There is prey in these wilds tonight, and that’s where I should be.”
There was no point arguing. He wanted to be with the wolves. The eagles. The lions. The coyotes. He wanted to hunt beside them the way that he hunted beside Spencer—the falconer with his falcons, huntsman with his dogs.
Lincoln could feel that the prey would be good tonight.
Desperate need carried him off of the stage. It propelled him over the blood-slicked clearing, and he caught himself running to keep up with the stragglers in the back. They were the slower creatures, the scavengers and trappers.
He glimpsed a white-skinned woman standing at the edge of the road, watching the pack surge beyond her. Rylie had left the stage after Lincoln but still ran faster. There was pride to the tilt of her head, as if watching an entire class of children running to recess.
She looked happy at all this horror.
Rylie sniffed the air as Lincoln raced past. The faint smile slid off of her lips, and her eyes narrowed, as if trying to see Inanna beside him. The wolf knew something was going on.
Lincoln and Inanna plunged into the forest as one.
Hunting with the Marshalls was different than what Inanna did. He wasn’t waiting in a deer blind; he was trying to chase it down, wear it out, the way that his forebears had hunted ancient mammoths. He knew where to put his feet so that he was quiet—he merely stepped where Inanna stepped, and moved how she moved.
There was no meaning to the passage of time as he tore over grass and moss and rocks. Animals that didn’t belong in Lincoln’s childhood forest ghosted around him, wisps on a lilac-scented wind. He spotted the rounded shoulders of a lone hyena. The sleek bodies of gray foxes so huge he could have ridden them. The flit of owl wings.
Most of the pack were wolves, of course. Most shifters changed in Genesis seemed to have become wolves. They lurked near enough that he could smell their scat.
The falhófnir dagger had found its way to his grasp, but he felt no urge to use it. Not yet.
This pack was not his prey.
Lincoln scrambled up a stony ridge, kicking his way against the crumbling wall. He had an eye on the peak of Mount Bain. The same majestic vee that overlooked Cassidy Farms. And he was so focused on climbing to the top of the mountain that he didn’t realize there was a bear amid the trees until he stumbled into it.
He fell on his ass with a gasp of surprise.
The bear rose onto its hind legs, head sweeping through the canopy. Bright-gold eyes fell upon him. Its jowls shivered as it breathed in and out, pebbled nose twitching.
The musculature of this bear was slight, despite its stature. It was young. Once grown, the bear would be even bigger.
For now this young shifter was almost the same size as the black bear that Lincoln had hunted with his father. He hadn’t been so near a bear since. This one didn’t have the arrow in its head, the blood matting its eye. Its claws were long and silver like Abel’s. But Lincoln only saw the prey that had brought him into adulthood, and his father handing him the hunting knife to slit its throat.
The bear barked out a snarl, then dropped to his forelegs and melted into the trees.
“Jesus,” Lincoln murmured.
His legs burned with exhaustion, and his feet burned within his boots. He must have been hiking amid the shifters for hours longer than it had felt. The ground was soft nearer the trees, so he rolled over to rest momentarily, flinging an arm over his forehead.
When the earthquake rolled over the mountain, Lincoln was barely even jarred.
He’d become as relaxed about the tremors as anyone else in Grove County, though the idea that Genesis might have broken something under the mountains was disturbing. It didn’t seem like an urgent concern while he stretched out on the rolling rock, watching the trees sway and sigh above him.
It was happenstance that he was looking at the night sky at the moment that a flurry of dark shapes soared overhead. He thought at first that they were bats—they had those kinds of ribbed wings—but they were too large, too slow. They flew in formation like migratory birds.
They seemed to be coming from the peak of Mount Bain and heading toward Northgate.
Inanna was sitting beside him, her arms braced on the ground behind her so that she could lean back and watch the shadows pass. “There,” she said quietly. “There is our hunt.”
They were already gone.
“Demons?” Lincoln asked.
She shook her head. “They are mine too.” She meant gaean. Something like a shapeshifter or sidhe.
“What are they? Did they kill the people at the hospice?”
“If all things are mine, then the prey are as much a piece of me as the predators,” Inanna said, as if she hadn’t heard him. She was fading again. Distracted. “You are the knife and the blood.”
He was going to have to get his own answers.
She had disappeared by the time that he got to his feet again, and Lincoln crossed the forested space below Mount Bain’s peak alone, in silence. Even the shifters remained nearer the valley. The mountain fell away around him, leaving an unobstructed view of the sky and watchful moon. It was so bright that it felt almost like daytime had taken on silvery
blue hues.
Mount Bain was a dormant volcano and he had reached its caldera—an expanse of dusty gray stone. He had done this hike before, so he knew that the caldera’s innermost curve should have been inaccessible; before Genesis, the slopes had been too extreme to walk, and the rocks had been too crumbly for a safe climb. That slope was smoother now, terraced in places, as though someone had built stairs.
Lincoln stepped down the terracing. His feet crunched against gravel.
The terracing wasn’t the only thing that had changed about the caldera. Pockets had been dug into the ground, as though a large animal had been digging. Lincoln crouched beside the nearest of the craters to study it.
Deep gashes sliced through the hole’s border. He spanned his hand over it. These cuts were the same size as the scratches that he had found outside the window at the hospice.
This was some kind of nest for the murderers. The creatures that flew in formation.
Something rested within the shadows of the crater. Lincoln climbed inside carefully, half expecting to feel magma’s heat radiating over him, although Mount Bain had shown no activity for centuries.
It was cool and surprisingly soft inside, the gravel fine as sand. Its softness made the presence of jagged-edged bones all the more jarring. Lincoln picked up something that looked like a hip, and then realized it was a hip—about the right size for one of Sissy Cassidy’s goats. The tooth marks were dull-edged like human molars rather than a dog’s canines. Every atom of meat had been scraped away. The marrow looked to have been sucked out.
Lincoln tossed the hip atop the other bones. If there were such piles in other craters, then they’d been eating more than Sissy Cassidy’s goats.
A collection of garbage was piled in the far corner. At least, it looked like garbage at first glance. There was a plastic sandwich bag and some little trinkets, like a novelty magnet and a flyer for a rodeo. Nothing remarkable.
Lincoln climbed out of that crater into the next. This one had similar junk in it, but he also found a child’s teddy bear with its fur painted in ash. He turned it over to find loose stitches on its back. A corner of paper stuck out. Lincoln tugged a photograph out of its stuffing: two teenage boys smiling at the camera. One was fair, the other dark. Friends rather than brothers.
He flipped it over. Two names were written on the back: Tripp and Wilson. Neither name meant anything to Lincoln, but when he took a second look at the photograph, he realized that they were standing in front of Poppy’s.
“Damn,” Lincoln whispered.
Those hadn’t been random beasts flying over the forest. They were citizens of Grove County transformed by Genesis.
A wind blasted over Lincoln’s back.
He turned around and came face-to-face with the monster itself.
It was a towering thing—maybe twice as tall as Lincoln’s six feet, if it stood upright rather than leaning on its knuckles. Its body was wide, square, and pebbled gray. A heavy brow slanted over tiny eyes. And it had wings. Enormous, arching wings that could have engulfed his body the way that a bat’s did when it slept. The ribs of its wings were tipped by claws longer and sharper than those on its feet.
There was probably a name for this thing. Sophie would know it. She knew everything.
Lincoln could only think to call it a gargoyle.
“Is this you?” Lincoln asked, showing the photo to it.
Its stance changed when it saw the picture. Chest puffing out, shoulders squaring, wings stretching wide. An aggressive stance.
Inanna shouted: “Jump!”
Lincoln jumped without looking, without thinking. A big boned hand slammed into the ground where he’d been standing. The entire caldera shook with the force of the blow.
There was no time to consider his next move; Inanna shouted at him again, and even her warning didn’t come in time for Lincoln to dodge.
The gargoyle’s swinging fist smashed into him.
His feet left the ground. His stomach surged into the back of his throat.
Lincoln slammed into the side of the caldera.
Even as he gasped for the air that had been shocked out of his lungs, he was climbing onto the ridge again. Lincoln couldn’t take time to catch his breath.
His only chance was to escape.
If he could just find someone in the pack to help him, he might live.
But the gargoyle lifted from the ground with an effortless sweep of wings. It yanked him off the terracing, and Lincoln tumbled back to the ground.
His unicorn dagger skittered away from his hand.
“Roll!” Inanna cried.
He threw himself to the right without looking, and gargoyle feet slammed into the ground beside him. The impact made the ground crack. Ash plumed over him.
Lincoln scrambled for the dagger.
The ebony handle was smooth in his fingers. Darkness sucked the color out of Lincoln’s fist, and he almost looked as gray as the gargoyle. They were the same. Not monster versus man, but man versus man.
He swung around and lifted the falhófnir dagger to strike, but the gargoyle’s expression stayed his hand. The sadness in its eyes mirrored the sadness in the photograph that Lincoln had found.
Before Genesis, this might have been a normal person. Had its changing shape given it uncontrollable urges to kill, like the kelpie had claimed?
And was Lincoln imagining things, or did the gargoyle seem to recognize him?
Its fist connected with the side of Lincoln’s head. The world rang like a gong. A sheet of warm blood coated his cheek. He was grateful for the instinct that kept him hanging onto the unicorn dagger when he fell, but there was not enough time to use it. The gargoyle was looming over him.
Lincoln’s ribs felt cracked, his face was bleeding. He was going to die. The prey would conquer the predator.
Inanna stood behind the gargoyle. “Jump!”
Lincoln turned and jumped.
And as soon as he did, he wished that he’d looked before obeying her.
The caldera was suddenly occupied by the Falias cathedral, big and tall, built of stone whiter than the ash. Abstract windows were watching him lose the fight against the gargoyle. And its doors were open, like arms waiting to embrace him.
His heel caught on the stairs, and he stumbled into the cathedral.
The gargoyle swept its huge hands, slicing through the air inches from Lincoln’s face.
And then the doors of the church slammed shut, locking him inside.
Lincoln must have passed out for some length of time. There was a cognitive gap between jumping into the cathedral, away from the gargoyle, and when Lincoln opened his eyes again. It felt almost as though he had been asleep. Time passing while he was not conscious for it. Genesis had felt like that too.
When Lincoln awoke—if he did indeed awake—he turned to see that he was in the cathedral again. A place where he had sworn to never return.
As with the last times, the cathedral’s inner space was obscured by white fog. Lincoln could tell he stood in an aisle between pews, but he could only see the very ends of the nearest ones.
Light came from everywhere and nowhere; darkness filled in the gaps.
And Lincoln was not alone.
Just as when plunging into César Hawke’s cait sidhe form, it felt almost as though Lincoln were engulfed inside someone else. Through the connection they formed physically, he could feel the greater entity’s emotions too. Too many emotions. Wonder, anger, and most overwhelmingly, a strange kind of longing.
He wondered if this was what it felt like to be adjacent to omnipotence, watching it with his limited mortal mind but unable to participate.
“Stop toying with me!” Lincoln yelled into the fog.
He had never gotten a response before. Every time he’d tried to speak, his voice had fallen flat, as unto a vacuum, and the emotions had merely flexed around him. He’d felt acknowledged the way that a stomach must have acknowledged the food waiting to be digested.
Toda
y was different.
The fog began to clear.
The shapes of the pews became more distinct as the light dimmed, reducing to the glow of ordinary morning light shining through those abstract stained-glass windows. Lincoln was startled to realize that one of the windows was no longer abstract. There was a human shape on the pane, carved out in the shape of triangles and squares. It was indistinct, without facial features or clothing, but it was the first time that Lincoln had seen an image that meant anything.
A breeze blew past him, tossing his jacket and making his lapels flap. He squinted as he turned into the source of the wind, shielding his eyes against a new source of light.
His eyes adjusted to reveal the entire length of the church. He stood by the doors and could look all the way up the aisle between pews to the altar.
A woman stood there, wearing a wedding dress.
She was the last thing that Lincoln expected to see, so it took a minute to get past the dress itself. It was somewhere between a traditional Christian wedding gown and white leather armor. The fitted bodice had an armored breastplate, draped in a multitude of golden chains that dripped with religious iconography. She wore pauldrons and vambraces stitched with golden crosses. The skirt was short and split down the center, exposing gleaming golden shin guards underneath.
Finally, his eyes reached her face.
The bride had a strong, arched nose balanced by full lips and angular eyes glinting hazel in the dawn. Her eyebrows were dark, angry, and brown. Yet the mass of hair that spilled from underneath her golden helmet gleamed darkly red where the light touched it.
It was Elise Kavanagh. The Godslayer.
Lincoln was speechless at the sight of her, and not just because his ex-girlfriend looked to be waiting to get married inside of the church that had followed him from the faerie courts. Elise had been raven-haired when he knew her, and little more than cigarette smoke and shadow distilled into a fist of anger. Here, she was so human that she even had freckles kissing the bridge of her nose and her high cheekbones.
