A Wild Light (21 page)

“Truth cuts,” Zee muttered. “Truth cuts
us
. Scarred you, hurt you, burned your heart to knots. Ruined your life, with truth. Old mother felt the same. Laid you clues, riddles. To ease you. To save you.”

“To save me,” I echoed roughly. “From this?”

Zee laid his clawed hand on top of my chest, above my heart. “Worst part of us.”

Tears burned my throat and eyes, followed by a feeling of helplessness so vast, so terrible, I thought it would rip me apart. “How? How did she plan to save me?”

“Your heart,” he rasped. “Sweet heart. Sweet Maxine.”

My mother had been a good woman, but not sweet. Hard as nails. Never easy to laugh or smile. She had raised me to be good, too, and strong, but there had been no lessons in sweetness. Just the right thing. Always, the right thing, no matter what.

I covered Zee’s hand with mine. “What will happen when the veil falls?”

Zee laid his head upon my stomach. “Mystery. We become what we were, or you become . . . something other.”

“And if I die first?”

All the boys stiffened. Zee said, “No.”

“It’d be worth the sacrifice.”

“No,” he said again. “Better chance with you alive.”

“What chance?”

“Always chance. Always possibilities.” Zee closed his eyes. “Dwell there.”

I rubbed his head. “Why do you care? I’m your prison.
All of us
have been your prison.”

“No secret. Knew us captured.”

“But you’re not
just
demons. What you are—”

“Five hearts,” Zee rasped, tapping my chest five times. “Five hearts. Now six. Now seven. Will be eight, in time. All one. All strong.”

I wrapped my hand around his. “Mine is the sixth.”

“Lightbringer is seven. Baby, when she future blooms—”

“Eight.” I drew in a deep breath. “Why do you care, Zee?”

Raw and Aaz whispered to each other. Dek and Mal stopped humming. Zee murmured, “We raged. Over many lives we raged.”

I waited for more, but he said nothing else. I did not push. I wanted to, but I was afraid—as though I stood on the edge of a terrible precipice, a descent into a darkness that would never end, and if I breathed wrong, if I moved even a little in a bad direction—I would fall. Lost, forever.

The boys were the Reaper Kings. My boys. My dangerous little boys. I could not comprehend it.

I could not comprehend what that made
me
.

Zee patted my head, gently. “Rest, Maxine. We guard your dreams.”

“Guard Grant and Jack,” I told him, closing my eyes. “The Messenger is still with them. If she tries anything—”

“We kill her.”

I did not disagree, but the idea of more death made me sad, and sick. I had no right to take her life. Less right now than I’d had before. It wasn’t that I had something to prove. Just that, if everyone was correct, my capacity to do harm had become unthinkable. The way I felt, I might have to put down the sword and pull a Gandhi on someone’s ass.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said.

Zee didn’t answer me. I only meant to close my eyes for a moment. A little peace, with the boys. Maybe we were monsters, but not to each other.

Dek and Mal sang me to sleep.

I dreamed, and no one saved me.

I had been lost, before, in darkness. Lost, in the Wasteland—a place inside the Labyrinth beyond the road of worlds, where lives and dreams were thrown away to be forgotten. An oubliette for the soul.

I had escaped, when no one ever had. I lived there, when I shouldn’t have lived at all—but the boys had shared their strength with me, and finally their breath, and kept me alive.

If I died, they would die. That was how the story went. But I no longer knew if that was true.

Nothing was true.

Except your heart,
I heard my mother whisper.

She wasn’t in my dream. I was back in the Wasteland; only the maze I traveled was made of flesh instead of stone; and I was not in the Labyrinth, but instead the belly of a vast wyrm.

There were stars within the wyrm, glittering in the darkness of its stomach, and beyond the stars I saw the spinning tops of galaxies, churning lazily.

We are vast,
whispered a deep, soft voice.
We are the other side of light. Born from the first spark, of the first moment, of the first breath of the mouth that opened and never closed. And the mouth still opens and never closes, and from it springs worlds and dreams, and the fire of countless stars. We are vaster than the stars, for we are older than them, and we have sung at the cradles of new life, and tasted of that life.

The stars blinked out.

The galaxies disappeared.

The belly of the wyrm faded.

I had already begun to fall before that voice finished speaking, and the words chased me as I plummeted through darkness. I could not tell up from down—I spun, blind, listening to my heart pound.

Until, abruptly, I was elsewhere. And I was not alone.

I stood at the head of an army, vast as the night—a throbbing pulsing army shuddering with cries and hunger. At my side, wolves. Wolves, who resembled my boys. My laughing, ready boys.

Upon my head, a crown of thorns. And the stars above, bleeding light.

I wore no clothes. My skin, clad only in blood. And when I screamed, and raised the sword I held within my fist, my army screamed with me—

—and followed, as I charged.

I saw stars when I awoke. It was still night. Not even close to dawn, or else I would have felt the sun rising on my skin.

I smelled pizza. Heard a stuffed animal squeak. I looked for the boys and found them less than an arm’s length away, sitting in the leaves amongst some of their favorite things. Dek and Mal purred in my ears. I rubbed their backs, wondering how, in any reality, it was possible that these two could lead an army.

“Are we setting up camp?” I asked. My voice sounded rusty.

Raw flinched, and stopped dribbling melted cheese on a chain-saw blade. Zee said, “Waiting.”

Dek and Mal hiccuped. Raw gave Zee a strained look, and shoved the chain-saw blade down his throat. The chewing sounds he made were like fingernails on a chalkboard. I didn’t see Aaz.

“Waiting for what?” I asked.

Raw made a mewling sound and hugged his stomach. I opened my arms to him and he crawled into my lap. I dragged over a teddy bear and put it in his claws. He began chewing the ear. The acid in his saliva made the fur smoke. I rubbed his tummy, and felt it rumble. Cheese and chain saws. Never a good combination.

“Zee,” I said again. “Answer me.”

But he didn’t need to. Moments later, the scar tingled, beneath my ear. Pins and needles.

I knew that sensation. I understood what it meant, and forgot to breathe.

“Maxine,” Zee rasped.

I hardly heard him. Sweat broke. Dek and Mal coiled tighter around my neck, their hums fading into silence. Raw rolled out of my lap, and Aaz loped from the shadows, dragging a hubcap behind him. He skidded to a stop and clutched the disc so tightly to his chest it tore in two, delicate as lace.

All of them stared at the sky.

I craned my neck. Glimpsed movement across the stars, darker than night—blocking out the stars like a comet, eating light. A dagger in the sky.

“For you,” said Zee. “We called him.”

Cold air blasted over my body, and the dagger slammed into the ground in front of us.

Earth cracked, the split of stone sharper than a gunshot. Raw grabbed my shoulders to steady me, as did Zee. I hardly felt them. I should have remembered, but I had forgotten. I had forgotten everything about the immense figure who stood before me, towering like a pillar of black flames: the barest semblance of a man.

I had never seen his eyes. A wide-brimmed hat swept low over a pale face, revealing only a sharp jaw and thin mouth. No arms. No wind, either, but long black hair moved wildly in all directions, the very tips writhing like snakes. His feet resembled steak knives: fistfuls of glittering blades as long as my forearm, digging point first into the earth as if performing a lethal pirouette.

I could not move. I could not blink. Cold raced through my blood—cold, then heat, a flush of fear and a small dangerous thrill—because here, here, was a dance: the only creature in the world whom the boys would allow to kill me. Without so much as a fight.

“Oturu,” I breathed.

“Our Lady Hunter,” whispered the demon. “We have missed your face.”

D
ESPITE everything, I’d lived a small life. A full life, but small. I’d been raised to believe one thing, and for the first twenty-five years of my life, I hadn’t questioned that. I’d questioned other parts of my life, but
not
that.

The boys didn’t count. Even my mother had been clear on that. The boys were family. The boys were only as good as the heart that led them, but that capacity for goodness went deeper than just orders and expectations. The boys knew right from wrong. The boys had compassion—when they chose to wield it.

But the rest . . . the rest had to be killed.

Then I’d come to Seattle. Met Grant. Started looking at demons differently. They still had to die. But I killed them now, knowing they were capable of choosing to change their natures.

That was a hard knowledge. It was easy to kill something when you thought it was a menace, like stamping out a flea, or a tick. Parasites had to die. But if Grant could modify the instincts of demons—if demons could even
desire
to be modified—then that choice, that ability to contemplate and accept such deep fundamental change away from the nature of one’s birth, created disturbing possibilities.

Which, if followed to their natural, logical conclusions, meant I had been wrong. That my
mother
had been wrong. All the women in my bloodline, mistaken.

Or maybe, just maybe, I was finally learning something they had known all along and chosen to ignore: that, like people, demons were not so easy to judge.

Like Oturu.

Like me.

Like the boys.

I watched the dagger tips of Oturu’s feet float upon the leaves. Starlight did not touch him; or perhaps the abyss of his cloak was too vast, his body a mystery of night. He was a creature so far beyond human understanding, that
demon
was the only name I could give him that made sense, the only definition that encompassed all that was strange and dangerous—and beautiful.

We had met only a handful of times. I had feared him in the beginning. Part of me still did. But each encounter had revealed a little more, more and more, until now it was a strange comfort seeing him. Oturu had never been caught in the prison veil. He had always been free. Devoted to my bloodline: to my deadly ancestor, who had found him in the Labyrinth and become his friend.