A Wild Light (25 page)

“You never told me any of this,” he murmured.

I wiped my nose on the back of my hand, but the tears still flowed. “I didn’t let myself think about it.”

He was silent a moment. “There’s nothing I can tell you to make it better, Maxine. Except that things change. You can’t . . . let what happened make you believe that what you want is wrong.”

I covered his hand, stroking his warm fingers. “You always have an answer for everything.”

“You love that about me.”

“Big ego, too.”

“Humble as pie. Sensibilities of a lamb.”

I grabbed his ear, dragging his head toward mine. Grant cupped my throat with his large hand.

“If you had forgotten
and
left me,” he began, but I stopped him with a deep kiss. Grant stretched on top of me. I loved the weight of him. I loved the heat of his hands cupping my face, then my hip, spanning my waist, and his thumb brushing the bottom of my breast. My eyes and cheeks felt sticky with tears, but he didn’t seem to mind.

He was kissing my breast—and I was enjoying it
very
much—when Zee appeared in the front seat, red eyes glowing with agitation.

I froze. So did Grant.

“Maxine,” Zee rasped. “Trouble.”

I
heard the shouts all the way to the barn. I ran, Grant behind me, with the boys racing like wolves through the shadows around us.

I burst through the front door and saw Jack first. Alive, seemingly unharmed.

And then I looked past him, at the Messenger.

She stood in the center of the room, tall and pale, all sharp angles that were male and female, and alien. Her cheeks were wet, splotchy—her eyes bloodshot. She had been crying. Tears still leaked from her eyes. Naked, piercing, grief.

She had lifted the raw hem of her silken shirt. Long white scars covered her torso, and a razor-thin cord was wrapped around her waist, its very tip locked inside a slim handle—which she touched, carefully. The tip slid free, and the cord fell away from her body with a hiss. It looked as though it was made from crystal, and resembled a very short whip—until she flicked her wrist and the cord snapped into a needle-thin blade. Happened in the blink of an eye.

I grabbed my grandfather, intent on pulling him away, but he dug in his heels—his gaze never leaving the Messenger.

“Little bird,” Jack pleaded, with utter heartbreak in his eyes. “Please, don’t.”

I thought she was going to attack him. I was certain of it, ready to tell the boys to kill her—but the Messenger bowed her head, steadied her grip on the weapon—and angled the blade over her own heart.

“No,” Grant snapped, behind me. The Messenger looked at him—then settled her stricken, miserable gaze on Jack.

“Praise be your light,” she whispered, and pushed the blade into her chest.

Unsuccessfully.

Her muscles strained. Everything about her, committed to running that blade through her body. But the tip pierced her clothing, and no farther.

Jack sighed. The woman shot him a desperate look.

“I must die,” she breathed.

“No,” Jack said, gently. “Your Maker built a command into your mind. You are incapable of suicide or self-harm.”

She made an anguished sound and tried again. I edged past my grandfather, feeling Zee and Raw in the shadows on my right. Aaz prowled to my left, while Dek and Mal were quiet on my shoulders. Ready. Waiting.

“Stop,” I said, feeling a disturbed sort of awe at the violent shift of her emotions. What I was seeing now ran closer to the woman I had first encountered in the loft—but a far cry from the robot who had stood earlier in this room, staring at walls. Something had snapped since then. All that self-reflection.

She looked at me—really looked—and hate flickered through her eyes, a loathing that saddened me more than it frightened. She raised the blade in her hands, trembling, looking ready to drive it through my chest. I held up my hands—but not at her. Just to the boys, waiting so close, red eyes burning.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked her.

Her hand trembled violently, the blade glinting like ice. “Nothing is as it should be. Not even me.”

I edged closer. “And how should things be?”

The Messenger made a strangled sound and swung the blade toward my face. Dek and Mal rose up like hissing cobras, shielding me—and the crystal shattered against their heads. Raw and Aaz swarmed around my feet, growling, and the woman gazed down at them and bared her teeth.

“Kill me,” she said. “You tried before. I will not save myself this time.”

“Don’t,” I told the boys, and looked the Messenger dead in the eyes. “I’m a contrary woman. Tend to do the opposite of what people want. You say death, I may just force you to live.”

The Messenger stared at me with a look on her face that reminded me of the woman at the gas station—the woman with the pink sweater—who had looked so miserable, like someone had ground her down, destroyed her world. Uncanny, how much the two reminded me of each other.

“I opened the prison veil,” she whispered. “I was careless, and misused the power given me by my Aetar Masters. That alone is a crime. But what I feel here”—she stopped, and touched her head—“is equally terrible. I have been compromised by doubt. I am worthless, now.”

“No,” Grant said, but I held up my hand and walked to the woman, so close I had to tilt back my head to look into her eyes.

“You
should
be compromised by doubt,” I said. “You should be afraid, and sick, and shaking with the enormity of the uncertainties in your world. But you should also be burning up with a desire to learn what is true. Because that’s why you were sent here, isn’t it?
To learn the truth.
And the truth, lady, is that a war is coming, the war is here.”

The hunt,
said that voice inside my head.
The hunt is at hand.

I swallowed hard. “If you’re so loyal to your Aetar Masters, then you’ll stop being a coward who wants to die, and you’ll suck it up and fight. Because those demons in the veil, after they’re done with this world, they’ll go looking for the ones who locked them up. And you
don’t
want to know what they do to the Aetar you love so much.”

The Messenger trembled. “You are one of them. You are worse. There are stories about you. I did not believe you could be the same woman, but it must be so. Covered in the bodies of our enemies. Wearing the key. You, who traveled the crossroads—yesterday on some worlds, and a million years ago on others. Time passes so oddly in the quantum rose. But she
also
killed the Aetar.”

She gazed past me at Grant. “And you. I have hunted the wild ones, and watched the Makers steal their mouths and throw their skins in chains. But you . . . you are different. I saw the emblem on the old woman, and if you came from the Labyrinth with her, and others . . .”

She stopped, looking like she was going to be sick. “Your bloodline is tainted with the lives of many Aetar. Your family led
armies
against the gods.”

She swung around, staring at me. “So, who is the real enemy? Who should I fight?”

I smiled. “Fight me, I’ll kill you—and you’ll save no one. Fight the demons, those demons in the veil, and you’ll save billions, maybe more.
And
you might die. Since you’re so eager for it.”

I turned my back on her and walked to Grant and Jack, both of whom stared at me. I made a face at them. Dek and Mal began humming Elton John’s “The Bitch is Back.” I reached up and thwacked them gently on the heads.

Air moved against my scalp, gentle and soft. I glanced over my shoulder.

The Messenger was gone.

I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding, but the tension only tightened in my shoulders. Grant leaned hard on his cane.

“I could have lived without that,” Jack said, very softly.

“Do we need to go after her?”

“Not yet. She feels lost, and just
slightly
homicidal. But only toward the both of us.” Grant raised his brow at me. “What was that, anyway? Tough-love therapy from hell?”

“Did
you
want to stand around all night trying to make her feel better?” I poked his chest. “Mr. ‘I-opened-hereyes’ to a brave new world?”

Grant scowled. Jack rubbed his face. “It was my fault. She wanted to know why I was here, why I tolerated the both of you. When I tried to tell her the truth, that I was not a god, she . . .”

“Reacted badly,” Grant finished. “You know, Jack, I’m all for truth. But for a man of your extremely advanced years, you show incredibly poor judgment sometimes.

“Or maybe,” he added thoughtfully, studying Jack with an intensity that meant he was looking deep, very deep, “it’s personal with you and her.”

Unease flickered in Jack’s eyes. Zee scratched his claws over his arms, then the floor, making new gouge marks beside the old ones that covered the wooden boards.

“Guilt rots, Meddling Man,” he rasped. “How many hearts did you squeeze?”

Jack gave Zee a sharp look. “How many did you?”

Zee bared his teeth in a terrible smile. “Call
us
World Reapers, but you did same, with chains.”

“I saved as many as I could,” Jack whispered, and rubbed his brow. But his hands lingered, and he stood like that, shoulders hunched, not breathing, hiding his face.

“We run, and we run,” he murmured, “but never far enough.”

Zee closed his eyes. “The Labyrinth remembers.”

Jack shuddered. I moved closer to Grant, and he moved closer to me, and our arms brushed, and though our hands did not touch, I felt like he was holding me up as much as I was holding him. It was good to have someone at my side. It was good.

“I remember
her
,” Jack said, still hiding his face. “Our army had come to fight the Lightbringers, for no reason more than that they could kill us. They could kill us and keep us from the human population we so desperately wanted.

“So we threw made-men at them, waves and waves of men who had no hearts, no brains, nothing for the Lightbringers to grasp with their powers—and we did this for months, for years, until those poor guardians had drained the lives of their bondmates, then their own people, until there was no one left . . . and so they used their own lives to stand against us, and died for their efforts. I remember how black the skies were, how thick the mud, and how their voices raged in symphonies that burned the air. It was beautiful and awful, and we killed them. And then we stole their children.”

Jack swayed. “Some I saved. There were nurses, soldiers. I gave them babies and sent them into the Labyrinth. I covered their trails. But I was watched. All of us watched each other. In one of the last battles, a baby girl was captured. The Messenger is her descendent.”

I watched him, listening to everything he wasn’t saying. “You were the one who had to turn that baby over.”

He finally removed his hands from his face and looked at Grant, not me. His eyes were red- rimmed, his skin mottled.

“Yes,” he said.

Grant stood very still, but there was a coiled quality to his posture even though he leaned hard on his cane. Gaze dark, cold, assessing. This couldn’t be a surprise—we’d heard the watered-down version before—but it was one subject I always stayed away from. Partially for my own sake.

But Grant didn’t say a word. Not to Jack. He released his breath and gave me a long, hard look.

“We need to close the hole in the veil.”

Jack’s mouth thinned into a grim line. “Lad—”

“You didn’t say it was impossible,” Grant interrupted sharply; then he took a breath, and, with strained calm, added: “We don’t have a choice. Unless you want Maxine to turn into some . . . Reaper Queen.”

“Sounds like a band,” I said, trying not to let on how much it rattled me that he used that name. “I could start one with the boys. Like Jem and the Holograms, only better.”

Raw and Aaz strummed some air guitar. Grant shook his head, rubbing his jaw. “Jack. It was done before, it can be done again. You manipulated energy, didn’t you? That must be what the veil is made of, or else the Messenger wouldn’t have been able to tear it open.” Grant leaned close: focused, intense. “You can teach me. You can teach
her
. The Messenger. “

“Even if I could,” said my grandfather hoarsely, “even if you understood the complexities . . . the power you would need is tremendous. Beyond anyone’s reckoning.”

Grant flexed his jaw, expression severe. And then, very deliberately, he looked at me. I knew what he was thinking and shook my head.

“Too dangerous,” I said. “No, you can’t.”

“What are the alternatives?” He grabbed my arm, not hard enough to hurt—but I felt his desperation, and anger. “You want to lead any army? You think you can
fight
one? If that’s what you want, Maxine, I’ll be there. But I’d rather find another way.”

Another way to light,
murmured the voice inside my mind.
Paths we have never traveled.

I wanted to punch myself, as if that would stop the voice in my head. But instead I opened my eyes and found Grant watching me, so grim.

“We’ll have to make a stand,” he said, quietly. “Now or later. Pick your poison.”

“No,” Jack said.

I pressed my hand against my chest, feeling the weight inside, the coil. “You’ll have what you need, Grant. Even if you don’t, you’re right. We have to try.”

Jack clenched his fingers together, twisting them. “This has risks.”

Grant placed his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll take my chances with Maxine.”

My grandfather pinched the bridge of his nose. “Fine. But I’ll need something before we can start.”

“Anything,” I said.

“One of my bones,” Jack replied.