He’d killed plenty since becoming a Son.It was inevitable, an act performed several times each night, and it was just a job.
But today, in the bowels of a sanctuary, he’d committedmurder.Even if he’d had no choice, even if it was a cleaner death than these things would grant her—if the Flame chose this one time to not answer alirai’s need, it was unspeakable, inexcusable, and he was doomed.
He always had been.The paper-whisper laughter in his head was proof.The Mad God was pleased, and now it only remained to take slow, painful vengeance upon an errant Son.
More hounds crowded behind the dying leash-holder, scuttling and keening.Erik spat defiance, ignoring the blood coursing down his thigh and the burning of hound venom.The slices on his shoulders and cheeks—barely missing his eyes because he had time to snap counter-curses—bled freely as well, and the smell of claret would madden them.The last hound died as he wrenched the knife back and forth in an eyesocket, grinding against bone, and he knew that theleng-spider crouching above the screechinglun’nyiewould spring and he would have to take the hit.
He was going to go down, and they were going to feast on his guts.
His left knee buckled; he folded just as the thing leapt and when it reached apogee, its eyes glowing with hellfire and the dying leash-holder hissing yet another curse, Erik’s shoulder hit stone wall with bruising force and his eyes stung.
Stung?No, they were scoured, a nuclear flash burrowing inward through tender, bleeding holes, and at first he thought one of the unclean filling the stairs’ throat had managed to spit acid at him, a rugose horror like thetaikflowers or a wingéd ghoul-cat.
But those were creatures of deep darkness and thetaikweren’t ambulatory enough to chase; they simply lay in musty corners, waiting.
Erik staggered, almost going down in a graceless heap, but a vast painless wind was at his back, holding him upright.The sensation was welcome, warm, and familiar, for all he’d rarely felt it before receiving his posting and arriving at a frontline temple with Ignatius in the lead and Jake in tow, both Elder and Younger nervous at being sent to an inactive temple and hoping the assignment wouldn’t last long.
But it had.It had lastedforever, and he’d never asked Ignatius if he, like his boys, longed for a chance at something else.
What the hell?
It poured through him, a delicate, immensely powerful touch closing the worst of the wounds as it filled him from toe to scalp with brimming pleasure.A soft inhalation drew him back from the doorway he was supposed to die guarding, but he couldn’t struggle.He couldn’t even twitch; the invisible force dragged him free of the aperture before surging through him and away, stone creaking as it sought to contain a more-than-physical immensity.
The sharp, evil laughter inside his skull cut off with the feedback scratch of a needle dragging across a record’s valleys, gouging and splintering.Erik’s arms jerked wide, dripping knives running with brilliance, and that was the pain in his eyes.
It waslight.
Rainbow coruscations edged with dappled gold flooded the stairs, rising inexorably, and a mad god’s hunters died under its lash.Erik was held ruthlessly in place, a lens focusing the laser to killing intensity and paradoxically spreading its force wide enough to catch every beetle in a killing jar.A low thrum, every church organ in the world all giving out the same chord at once, passed through him and receded like a tide along a rocky shore.
He dropped, a discarded doll.Knives clattered on stone, a sweet metallic chiming.Blood crackled, dried on his skin by an immense warm draft smelling of golden spice, warm bread, and everything good in the world.
Erik’s eyelids fluttered.Illumination flicker-strobed, clean glorious golden light reaching into his brain and shutting the basement door with a bang, leaving the Mad God howling outside.The mark on his wrist gave a painless twitch; he spilled onto his side and lay, exhausted.
And behind him, light as a leaf, he heard a pair of sneakers kiss stone.
Off-Key Lullabies
Her knees weren’t quitereliable; Liv staggered drunkenly away from the hole with her head full of an endless ringing, echoing chord.
Gramma Poe had taken little Liv to the orchestra a few times, and if the great swell of tuning, instruments suddenly becoming part of a chorus instead of a babble of disparate voices was ever dropped into a bathtub full of champagne it might have felt like this.A deep wash of incredible warm wellbeing she hadn’t felt even in childhood tingled in her arms and legs, filled her head, and made each swaying footstep a joy.
Still, she didn’t ever want to do that again.
Erik lay on his side, curled up like a snail.His fallen knives glittered sharply; there were shapeless mounds of scented ash clogging the doorway.
It was dead silent, and she could see him because the necklace was glowing.So were her hands, gold-edged rainbow light like a living glove moving between her fingers, pooling in her palms, dappling her knuckles and casting strange underwater reflections against the ribbed walls and dome of this stupid, hellish vault.
She suspected the rest of her skin was glowing under her clothes, too, and dropped to her knees next to Erik with a jolt.“Hey.”Her voice sounded thin and piping after all that deep immensity.“Oh, God.Please don’t be dead.”
It was a ridiculous thing to say, but what else was there when you’d just been thrown in a deep hole, and somehow…
…what exactly the hell had happened?She couldn’t quite remember beyond a sudden burst of golden light and that deep, inescapable feeling that everything was going to be all right, as if Mom had come in her room again after a bad dream bringing warm milk and a soft voice, stroking little Livvie’s fevered forehead and singing a soft maternal off-key lullaby.
How do I know I’m not already dead?Well, it was simple—Liv was breathing, she was glowing like a light bulb at a drugged-out rave, and she still had to pee.
Badly.
“Hey.”She touched his shoulder with two fingers, then clutched at his shredded jacket.“Hey.Erik.Come on.Don’t…”Don’t be dead,she was going to repeat, but it wasn’t necessary.
