A Wild Light (29 page)

“I hope you see a great deal,” Grant said.

I
never did learn the name of the village the men had been stolen from.

I made the Messenger take me there, with Grant. We took with us two corpses, and one man who was still alive but passed out. We left them by the road, beneath a palm tree on the outskirts of the village, which was filled with large square buildings made of a pale stone that blended with the cliff face rising behind them. A dog barked at us. I heard pop music sung in Arabic, somewhere distant.

Two little girls, dressed in simple green dresses, appeared around the bend in the road. They stopped when they saw us, and cried out.

The Messenger did not cut space. She watched the distraught children, then looked long and hard at the village.

“This reminds me of the place where I was born,” she said. “I was not permitted to see much beyond the walls. The desert was vast and stretched across the world.”

I stared. So did Grant. The Messenger glanced at us and tilted her head.

“The Labyrinth is vast, as well,” she said, and winked out of sight.

I grabbed Grant’s hand and followed her.

We fell into the apartment, in Seattle. It was still night. The boys ripped off my body. I gritted my teeth against the pain, squeezing Grant’s hand until it was over and the smoke that had been tattoos coalesced into small hard bodies that glinted like obsidian and mercury.

Jack still sat on the couch, but he held a mug in his hands instead of bone. He and Mary were watching the news. Something in their faces filled me with dread: bone-chilling, acidic. Raw and Aaz bounded close to stare at the television screen.

“. . . reports are only now coming in that a Greyhound bus traveling from Portland to Seattle was found overturned beside Interstate 5, just outside Astoria. First responders describe the scene as . . . horrific. Every passenger has been declared dead.”

I heard screams from the television, wails of grief and disbelief. I heard shouts, and a man saying, in a shaking voice, “Oh, God. Oh, my God.”

The sound cut off. Jack put down the remote.

“Dead,” he said, looking at me for the first time since my arrival. His haggard gaze skipped over Grant to the Messenger, then back to me. “But someone is lying about the rest.”

“Bus accidents happen,” I whispered, as Dek settled heavily on my shoulders. I looked for Mal, and found him with Grant, looped around the man’s neck.

“Mahati running hunts,” Zee rasped, closing his eyes as though listening to something, far away. “One party. Ha’an leads.”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “Jack, did you find what you were looking for?”

“Yes,” he said quietly.

I fumbled for Grant’s hand. “Start teaching them what they need to know.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Make it simple,” I snapped. “We’re out of time.”

Grant pulled me near, with Mal half-draped down his chest. “What are you doing?”

“Stalling.” I squeezed his hand, glancing at the Messenger. No words between us. Just those cool empty eyes, and that set mouth.

I stepped backward into the void, holding Lord Ha’an’s image in my mind—

—and found myself in a forest, not unlike the one where the veil had been opened. The air was cool, wet, and the ground was soft underfoot. I heard the roar of a river, but louder than that, singing: a deep voice, chanting words into melodies. Dek joined in, very softly, his voice high and sweet. All around me, the boys hunched close, red eyes glinting. With wistfulness, I realized. Memory.

I could have been in a cathedral, listening to a monk. Below my heart, the darkness stretched, coils rubbing with a spectral hiss that sank into the marrow of my bones. I searched for my bond with Grant and found it instantly, warm, sunlit. I focused on that. I held tight.

Remember there is much, elsewhere, you can have,
said the darkness in my mind.

I ignored that voice. Pushed through the trees and found the Mahati.

I counted eight, not including Lord Ha’an. The demons sat in a loose circle, relaxed, a jumble of human limbs piled in front of them. I smelled blood. I heard the crack of bones breaking. Wet, chewing sounds. My stomach rebelled, but I swallowed hard, kept it together.

Ha’an was the only demon not eating—the only one of them who sang—his voice a low rumble that crashed with the distant sounds of river white water. He knelt with his knees spread far apart, his tined fingers resting across muscular silver thighs.

He saw me before the others, but did not stop singing. His eyes tracked my movements and widened ever so slightly when he found the boys.

One by one, the other Mahati stopped eating and looked up. When they saw me, a collective ripple rolled through them. It tasted like fear, which sent a small frisson of pleasure through me.

Me—or the darkness—yawning with jaws that bloomed inside my mouth, that coiled spirit filling me up from my scalp to my toes. Made me feel as though my heart were riding the crest of a monstrous wave, carrying me higher, with power and grace.

Because we are,
it whispered.
We are power.

Power. Power was choice. Choice had consequences.

I repeated that to myself, again and again, as Raw and Aaz pressed close to my legs, growling softly. The spikes of Zee’s hair and spine stood on end. His claws dragged through the dirt.

“Ha’an,” he rasped. “Been long.”

The demon’s voice rumbled into silence, and he inclined his head. “Long enough for the strange to take root. You are diminished, as are your brothers. The old one no longer inhabits your skin.”

“Power, still,” Zee said. “Power enough to kill you.”

“Always,” he replied, but not with fear, or anger. “And the human vessel? You are bound to her. I felt that, before, but could not understand it.”

“Aetar,” Zee rasped.

Ha’an nodded thoughtfully. “We will hunt them again, I think. After we are done here.”

“You’re already done,” I said, stepping forward. “The lives you took tonight were too much.”

“I made my plea. I told you I would not let my people starve.”

I pointed at the mangled remains on the ground in front of him. “These were people, too. There are other things you can eat.”

“Livestock?” Ha’an said disdainfully. “I think not.”

“Better than your own arm.”

His eyes narrowed, and he glanced down at Zee. “How can she be the vessel and not know what we need?”

“Different times, different needs,” Zee answered simply. “She is our Queen.”

Ha’an flinched. “But you are still our Kings.”

Zee raked his claws through the dirt, spines flexing in agitation. “Yours. Hers. Together.”

The Mahati Lord leaned backward, fixing me with his glittering gaze. “I feel the old one breathing beneath her skin. I know, in my mind, she is the Vessel. But without you embracing her body . . . she is too human. The others will not accept her as a Queen.”

“Must,” Zee told him. “
You
must.”

Ha’an gave him a long, unreadable look. And then he did the same to me—his full regard, lifting his chin, challengingly. “You, with fat and meat on your bones. Do you know what it is like to suffer such hunger that you must eat your own flesh to survive?”

“Do you?” I asked coldly. “You look intact.”

A terrible stillness stole over him. I almost took a step back, but Raw leaned against my legs, holding me in place. Dek placed a reassuring claw on my ear.

“The hunt,” he whispered, “is not just for flesh. That might fill our bellies but not our souls.”

“You hunt for pain,” I said.

“Pain is a sharp force,” Ha’an replied, as though that should explain so much. “If livestock were enough, we would consume those slow beasts. But minds . . . dreaming minds . . . make power, have a taste, infuse every cell, every lick of blood, every crack of bone, with a force we
must
have to be strong.”

You have tasted it,
said the darkness.
You have ridden the edges of what he speaks. Imagine being bathed in the light of ten thousand minds, crashing to a final death at your feet. Last moments burn strongest in the feast.

I stared into Ha’an’s green eyes, trying not to tremble with the terrible, nameless hunger rising in my throat. “Take what you already found, and no more. Return to the veil.”

Ha’an fixed me with a hard, hollow gaze. “If I do not?”

I glanced down at Raw and Aaz, and they hit the nearest Mahati like bullets made of teeth and claws. I forced myself to watch with pure dispassion as Raw swallowed an entire arm, just stuffed it down his throat, before biting it off the screaming Mahati’s shoulder. Aaz burrowed through the other demon’s chest, nearly chewing him in two.

I didn’t move. I didn’t flinch. Screaming on the inside, but there was stone in my heart because there had to be. Ruthless, because it was the only way to keep the people I loved alive.

I looked at Ha’an. “Get the fuck back in the veil. Now.”

He held my gaze a moment longer than was smart, then flicked his long fingers at the other Mahati, who began hastily gathering up the remains of their hunt, and newly dead. I wanted to tell them to stop, leave the human bodies—but I had an instinct for how far I could push, and this was all for time. Time for Grant and Jack to make a miracle happen.

“This is not the end,” Ha’an said, looking from me to Zee. “Forgive me, but we
will
hunt. We will hunt to live.”

We will hunt with you,
murmured the darkness.
We will lead the armies of starlight into the horizon, into the war-fires, into the Labyrinth where the shadow rises—

I bit my tongue and tasted blood.

“We will hunt,” Ha’an said again, as though reassuring himself. “We will survive.”

“That remains to be seen,” I told him quietly. Ha’an was a giant, towering at least three feet above me, with muscles that made him several times as broad. But I felt larger than him in that moment, full with rippling power, and a certainty that my life was rooted deeper than a mountain, older than stone. I didn’t like what gave me that feeling, but it was there, and I used it to hold his gaze and make him back down.

“Queen,” Ha’an said, softly, with speculation.

He turned and leapt into the sky. The other Mahati followed him.

I remained very still, watching them until they were out of sight.

“Zee,” I breathed.

“Doing as you said,” he rasped, clutching my hand.

My knees trembled. I was going to fall.

So I fell backward, to home.

I tried to, anyway. The armor had other ideas.

I stepped from the void into moonlight. A river of moonlight, shining through clouds upon a dark plain.

I heard a woman screaming. I smelled smoke. Zee and the boys gathered close, gripping my hands and legs.

“No,” he said, his claws digging so deep into my skin I thought he would cut me. And then he did, and the touch of my blood made him flinch away from me, eyes large. I reached for him, but he stayed just out of my touch, shaking his head and scratching his arms, his face, his eyes.

I stared at him, helpless; but that woman screamed again, and something about her voice cut through me like a knife. Even the darkness stilled, hushed.

“No.” Zee grabbed for my hand when I turned to look for that woman, but this time it was me who slipped away, and I ran.

I ran with all my strength, urgency sweeping over me, and fear. My heart thundered in my throat, and the darkness rocked within me, small, smaller, as though hiding. My bond with Grant felt faint, pale, the thread holding us together so thin it might snap if I breathed wrong. I held my armored hand over my chest, as if that would hold us together.

But I didn’t stop running. Boys, chasing me like wolves, skipping through the shadows with their red eyes blazing.

I skidded to a stop at the crest of a small hill and looked down at the smoking remains of what had been a small village. I couldn’t tell what it had looked like before its destruction, but the fires had long burned out.

The woman had fallen silent, but I found her sitting in the moonlight, hunched over a limp, broken body.

Oturu stood beside them both. His cloak and hair drifted against the wind, graceful, soaking in the silver light. Head bowed, the brim of his black hat swept low.

He looked up and saw me. But did not say a word.

I was afraid to look at him. More afraid to look at the woman. She sat up for a brief moment. Stole my breath, made me ache.

My mother, I thought. She was pregnant, not hugely, but enough to strain the front of her clothing.

But then I looked closer, and I knew I was wrong. Not my mother. The face might be similar, the right age, but there was a subtle difference no one but me would have known. Like listening to the same song played by two masters and hearing the difference only in the tone.