A Wild Light (12 page)

I couldn’t even tell him it would be okay.

I slammed my armored fist into the ground, thinking of Byron, Jack—Grant.

And I was gone.

T
HERE was no such thing as magic.

Miracles, maybe. But not magic.

Arthur C. Clarke said it best, that any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic. Matches, mirrors, even the force of a magnet might be voodoo to a caveman, capable of being used, but without any understanding of what the object was or how it had come to be. Just a gift, maybe, from the gods—an invention of spirits and lightning, and the ghosts of bloodied ancestors.

I might as well have been a caveman, a Neanderthal, even a slug still crawling from the sea. The armor was that far ahead of me, a piece of another world where reality was shaped by possibilities, and dreams, and the force of free will. A key that not even time could bind.

But it was mine. Mine until I died.

God help us all.

WHEN I entered the world again, I found myself in the apartment. Books, brick walls, and my grandfather on the floor, covered in a blood-soaked sheet.

I was not alone.

I saw Mary first. She stood by the couch, clad in a housedress embroidered with sunflowers and butterflies, cinched tight at the waist with an old leather belt. Her legs and feet were bare, spidery with dark veins. Old track marks covered her sinewy arms. Thick gray hair stood out from her head, bristling, wild.

She clenched a butcher knife in each hand. Standing very still, watching the woman from the fire.

I watched, too. The woman knelt beside Jack’s covered body, her head bowed so low her brow nearly touched the blood-sticky floor. Her palms lay flat and still, her spine curved in a perfect arc of obeisance. If she was breathing, I couldn’t tell. If she was alive, then she’d had a lifetime of practice prostrating on floors.

I looked around but didn’t see Byron.

Mary’s gaze slid sideways when I joined her, silently assessing my face. No glimmer of surprise or shock, just a faint tightening of the wrinkles around her eyes. I touched my mouth and felt only skin. No lips. No nostrils. I could feel my tongue, though, locked inside my closed mouth, and it tasted like sulfur and blood.

Mary extended one of her knives to me. I shook my head.

Maybe our movements drew her attention—or maybe not at all—but the woman stirred and sat up slowly. She did not look at us, her gaze instead drifting upward toward the ceiling, eyelids fluttering, her mouth moving in some silent prayer.

Not human,
I thought, able to see her better. Not human, in so many little ways: the length of her neck, the small size of her eyes, the stark angle of her cheekbones. I called her a woman, but it was difficult to determine her gender with any certainty—when the light shifted, I could have just as easily identified her as a man.

She was not from this world, though. I knew it, just like I knew what water was, or fire. She had not been born on earth.

Those fluttering eyelids stilled, closed—and then blinked open slowly, like an owl’s.

She looked at me. I steadied myself, glad for the boys resting so heavily on my skin. I had dealt with crazies all my life, crazy and dangerous, but there was something in this woman’s eyes that made me feel small on the inside. Small and cold. I didn’t want her near anyone I cared about, not even the dead.

“Warden,” she said. “The skin of our Maker lies defiled, and yet you live. Explain this.”

I wished I could—though I had to wonder why she didn’t ask Mary, as she was the one standing around with the knives.

I walked toward the woman, silent except for the scuff of my smoking bootheels on the floor. The boys shifted across my face, just enough to give me back my mouth and nose. Cool air flooded my lungs. I wet my lips, and they tasted like iron. The woman watched me, small eyes narrowing, thin mouth tensing into a hard line.

“Answer me,” she snapped. I stopped, but only out of surprise. Her voice sounded so different, like she had plugged her vocal cords into a stereo and electric guitar, and hit the ON switch. Those two words spilled over me with all the force of a shock wave, pulsing with power.

Reminded me of Grant.

Mary muttered, “Slave. Baby born, cut and bred.”

I wanted Mary to stay silent, but the woman didn’t look at her. Just me, her gaze growing darker, even smaller.

“You
will
speak,” she said again, with that same voice: more tone than words, more melody than tone, rising and falling as though part of a lullaby to a baby hurricane. The boys lapped it up, rolling over my skin. Tickled.

I smiled. “Who are you? Why are you here?”

The woman blinked, staring. And then, slowly, rose to her feet. By the time she was fully standing, she resembled a man again in both body and face. She’d had no breasts to begin with, but her cheeks, and the line of her jaw, moved effortlessly from feminine to masculine, and back again.

I wasn’t sure she would answer me, but she whispered, “Praise be their will,” and placed her hand over the iron collar. “I am the Messenger. I have been sent for our Maker, our Aetar Master, praise be his light in the Divine Organic.”

Praise be his light. Our Maker. Our Aetar Master.
All of those, words to describe my grandfather. Jack Meddle. Old man. Immortal. Avatar.

She said it like she meant it. I touched my own throat, purposely mirroring her posture. “Why were you sent?”

“You must know.” The woman glided away from Jack’s body, her gaze never leaving mine, though I sensed she was taking in the apartment—the space of it, the books, the windows—perfectly and kinesthetically aware of herself in relation to everything around her. “Our Makers felt two of their own murdered on this world.
Impossible
murders. None have ever been so taken, not since the war with the Reaper Kings. But the veil”—she closed her eyes, tilting her head—“the veil still holds. And so something else has murdered our gods and Makers.”

The woman pointed at Jack’s remains. “One remains. I am to bring him to the others for questioning.”

“That will be difficult. He’s gone from his skin.”

“He will find another. I think, perhaps, he already has.” She tilted her head, still studying me. “Why did you allow his skin to be defiled?”

“Murdered, you mean.” I moved closer, holding her gaze. “I allowed nothing to happen. I found him. I’m looking for his killer.”

“Look all you wish. You have failed already by allowing the desecration of your Maker. If you have honor”—she slid her finger across her throat—“you will kill yourself once his defiler is found. I will help you.”

Spoken simply, matter-of-factly and without malice. Her version of benevolence, maybe. My smile never slipped. “Too kind. And if our . . . Maker . . . doesn’t wish to leave with you?”

“I am the Messenger. I am the voice of our Aetar Masters. Their word is the will, and I am their hand through the Labyrinth. He
must
come.” The woman said it as though the idea of resistance was inconceivable, as though her words should mean something to me. Make me quake in my boots, maybe. Jump to, with a salute.

I wasn’t that smart. But I had a pretty good idea of where this was headed.

Until she looked at Mary.

I had assumed she’d already noticed the old woman, but there was a particular stillness that fell over the Messenger when she fixed her gaze on her. An ever-so-subtle widening of the eyes, a twitch in her mouth. A small but vital reaction. I didn’t like it.

“You are different,” said the woman to Mary. “You feel . . . old.”

I didn’t think she was referring to wrinkles and gray hair. She said
old
in the same way that myths were old, or mountains, or the pyramids. A deeper old, the kind that stories were made of.

Mary very deliberately ran her tongue over the flat side of the butcher knife. She did the same to the other blade. Her gaze, locked steady on the Messenger. It would have been a ridiculous gesture with anyone else, but not Mary.

“Old as sin,” she said, lips parting in a terrible smile. “Sins of your Makers. Skinners. Sluts.”

“Stop,” I said.

The Messenger drew back, ignoring me. “You will not say such things.”

Mary’s smile turned darker, fiercer. “No chains around
my
heart.”

And she attacked.

I was expecting it, knowing Mary as I did—though when she moved, I was surprised at her speed. I couldn’t have stopped her even had I wanted to. The old woman was made of muscle and adrenaline, and flew past me with those knives flashing. Dead silent.

The other woman leapt backward. Mary stayed close. Neither made a sound, both moving faster and faster, knives and fists entwined in a terrible dance of block and attack. Inhuman, between the two of them; nothing anyone of this world could have matched. But the woman, the Messenger, had the advantage.

She was young.

And she had claws.

I saw them in flashes. She hadn’t possessed claws earlier, but sometime during the fight, her fingernails had pushed outward, riding the backs of elongated fingertips that were sharp as needle points. I saw them most clearly when she finally managed to land a blow against Mary.

Mary jerked backward at the last moment, and the Messenger—instead of taking out her throat—raked her fingers down the old woman’s chest, snaring her dress and ripping it open. Long wrinkled breasts sagged like pears—and between them, embedded in her sternum, glittered a golden circle of coiled knotted lines—twisting, into a maze. A labyrinth.

I had seen the disc before, and the design. Seeing it again made me feel dizzy, lost, heart aching around that deep black hole of amnesia—which was beginning to take on the shape of one peculiar man.

Grant. For a moment, I thought I remembered him from before this morning—born in flashes: me, running toward him as a zombie pointed a gun in his face; his face buried in my hair as we stood on the ocean’s edge; his voice, singing.

Then, nothing.

Those memories slipped away, as if imagined.

The Messenger froze, staring at Mary and the golden disc embedded in her sternum. Blood dripped from the tips of her fingers.

“No,” she whispered.

Mary bared her teeth and jutted out her bleeding chest. I half expected her to thump it with her fists, which still clenched the butcher knives.

“We live yet,” she said, and lunged again. The woman did not jump back. She grabbed both knives in her hands, blades sinking into her flesh—and held on with little more than a grunt of pain.

“Impossible,” she gritted out, teeth clenched. “That bloodline was
culled
.”

Power, in that last word—a terrible sinking power that pushed through me. I was not affected by it; but Mary let out a rattling hiss and threw back her head as though in pain.

“How did you escape?” asked the woman. “Are there others?”

Others. I didn’t need my memories to know that there was one other.

Mary cried out. I grabbed the Messenger around the neck, wrenching backward and twisting with all my strength. Breaking necks was never as easy as it looked on television; but I heard the crack, and the woman went down.

So did Mary, her knives clattering across the floor. Her skin was ashen, hollow, as though the life had been drained right out of her. I checked her pulse. Found it rapid, weak.

I glanced over at the Messenger, expecting a corpse.

But she wasn’t dead. Just paralyzed. Her eyes blinked, mouth gaping, but that was all that moved. I knelt, breathing hard.

“Enough,” I said. “You’re not taking anyone from this world.”

She stared at me. I didn’t think I would ever forget the accusation in her eyes, the betrayal, as though I had violated some sacred promise between the two of us.

One “made” woman to another,
I realized. Like comrades in arms. She had expected me to be on her side. Assumed it.

“Defiler,” she breathed, and tears rolled from the corners of her eyes, across the bridge of her nose and cheek.

“No,” I said, hating myself. “There are things in this place you don’t understand.”

She closed her eyes. “I am the Messenger. I am the voice of our Aetar Masters. Their word is the will, and I am their hand through the Labyrinth. That is
all
I need to understand.”

“You’re wrong,” I told her, but refrained from saying more. I heard a clicking sound outside the apartment. A cane.

I didn’t remember Grant before this morning, but I recalled other things, strange things around the
periphery
of him—memories swelling in hits and waves. Enough, so that I had a growing sense of the larger picture. A crazy, profoundly disturbing, picture.

There was no way,
no way
, this woman should be allowed to see him. Not until I understood exactly what was going on. Not even after that.