I can take this. I
will
. Block off them valves, one by one — snap your connections so it all goes through you like water through a reed, a cracked flowerpot full of mud and shit. You’ll never see the height of hexation you got right now again, you traitor, and you
still
won’t die from it, not ’less I want you to. No, that’s just what you’ll have to live with from now ’til your own sorry end, the high price for what-all you done in her name, and mine.
The answer came back to him then, rippling faint as a sigh up from under, with Rook’s mouth and throat barely stirring around its passage.
Saying, simply, sadly — mere dimming snatches, trailing away into darkness —
Do it, then, darlin’. . . .
(
always knew I could count on
)
(
you
)
And hard on its heels, two far more complete ideas, fine-chewed over, as though Rook had been saving ’em a good long while. Like he’d rehearsed ’em many times in his head without ever really thinking he’d get the chance to speak either, aloud or otherwise.
For this will be my apology, the only one that could ever matter. The last and greatest gift I could possibly give you, here at the End of Days.
Chess’s eyes went wide. Thinking, in his turn:
Oh no, nonono. You tower of crap, you do
not
, on any account, get to
LET
me.
Too late, though. Because the very next heartbeat brought a rockslide of power, a fucking
avalanche
, pumping through him on a tide so high it set his hair standing straight. Rook’s weight was nothing, less than nothing; he shoved him aside, not even pausing to see where he dropped, and strode straight for Ixchel, grabbing her by her remaining mane’s thickest clump. Bent her back like a bow to holler, right in her rotting-meat face: “You give me up my heart, bitch,
right Goddamn now!
Come a heinous way, done a thousand bad deeds to get it, and
I AIN’T ABOUT TO ASK YOU TWICE!
”
For a split second, half a tick only, he almost felt her brace to spit his threats back at him, and take whatever come next.
But —
It is over, sister. You know it. I know it. So let it BE over.
Please.
With those words, more sad than mocking, Chess felt the will go out of what was left of Ixchel Moon-Lady in a miasma, fetid-cold with deep regret.
As she replied, sadly:
. . . yes.
Then added, to him —
So
take
it, you little monster. Take it all.
Kissed him again, then, before he could think to stop her: bear-trap fanged and spring-hard, with just enough arcane force behind it to cough the thing he’d believed he wanted most back up into him through their fused mouths. Thrust it excruciatingly back inside his chest, with his wound as entry point; reward as rape, searing everything shut again in its wake, making him spasm ’til Chess fell back jackknifed in the dirt, hugging himself so hard he raised welts. Listening, lodged halfway between disgust and delight, as — slowly, unevenly, clogged with old blood and foulness, his heart,
his
, gods damn it all, themselves very much included —
His heart began, once more, to beat.
Morrow was helping Yancey up when it happened: Chess’s fall, Ixchel’s rise. Her last desperate grab for Reverend Rook, still on his knees, as if in unconscious mimicry of the pose Chess himself had struck just before worm-turning their battle his way forever — remaining hand on his nape, the other’s denuded stump thrust ’tween his jaws, prying them open like she meant to pull everything he had inside out of him by the tongue. Desperate for some final jolt to make a last stand with, and all unknowing that he was already sucked dry, forever.
Bent over his back monkey-style and snarling, as she did:
You rose against me, husband, as you swore never to do. You know the punishment.
And the Rev, in return, plain as day:
Oh, I know, ma’am, believe me. I know.
Even as Tezcatlipoca rushed to stop her, Ixchel reached deeper — deep enough to find Rook empty and, worse yet, cursed. Then realized, worse even than that, that the curse in question was already beginning to translate to her . . . to everything around her. Tezcatlipoca, as he laid a spectral paw on her shoulder. The very ground beneath their feet, that unsure spot where the Crack’s seam had been left yet unpicked when Clo Killeen brought Grandma’s suture-spinning spider down. Beneath them, the earth shivered and gave way — a sheer drop straight down into nothing, dark and cold and drear, all the way back to the Ball-Court, to Mictlan-Xibalba itself.
Ixchel fell, fast and hard: gone out of sight instantaneously, without last words of any sort. The cause of all their troubles removed forever in one swoop, with nothing — not a shadow, a rag or a bone or a hank of creepishly animate hair — left behind, to show she’d ever been there.
“Get back!” Morrow yelled as the schism widened, poised to yank Yancey’s arm, but she — as ever — was already three steps ahead, pulling him with
her
. Carver scrambled backward as well, just as speedily, hoisting Berta Schemerhorne over his shoulder like a sack; they made the nearest ridge and turned to see Chess still teetering at the abyss’s edge while the Enemy, poised at the pit’s edge likewise and watching what little purchase he had crumble away, turned to him with one final eerie grin, a tip of his metaphorical hissing blue-flame “hat.”
Well played, little brother, my sister’s husband’s husband!
it said, with what truly did seem like genuine appreciation.
Oh,
how
I have enjoyed you — enjoyed
being
you, in fact. Though I know, sadly, that you do not feel the same.
“Too Goddamn right, I don’t,” Chess managed, raising himself just a bit further into the air, Songbird-style; with a kick, he drove himself back from the pit’s lip as though he was afraid it’d exert some sort of gravity on him, an invisible quicksand suck. One dangling boot-heel brushed against Reverend Rook’s sleeve where he’d once more risen to waver at the very edge of the hole, bent in pain but doing nothing to assuage it, exhausted far beyond any concerns for his own welfare.
Yes. But now it is time to make an end to us at last, all three.
“The fuck you mean by that? Hey,
answer
me, you tricksy son of a — ”
Chess was yelling at the air, however, by this time. Since, before he was halfway done, the god of Night and Blood and Magic had already jumped in, too . . . disappeared out of sight with a similar lack of protest, a weird sort of panache, as befitted a creature naturally bent on foxing the whole world around it.
Now only the hole remained. The hole, and Chess.
And Rook.
Chess crossed his arms, heaved a sigh and half-turned, still aloft — studying Rook at an angle, obliquely, as though to distance himself until he felt able, at length, to offer up a begrudging hand.
“Long walk back to Bewelcome from here, if you ain’t got the juice to open doors between places,” he observed. “But I could get you there easy enough now, I guess, if I had to. And they’d probably have honest work to offer even
you
, considering the sorry state I hear you and yours left that crap-hole in.”
Though nothing else changed in his stance, bowed as he was ’round that hot spear of pain in his back — Carver’s bullet had probably bisected his shoulder blade, seeing his arm hung useless — Rook’s eyes shifted to Chess’s hovering figure, travelling sidelong and upward; gave him a look almost equally as long, as assessing. If Morrow could see them from this distance, he thought, he would probably find their quality strangely softened, now that the fierce halo of otherness that’d clung ’round the Rev from the moment they’d met was gone, never to return.
Certainly, in its wake, Rook himself could feel himself becoming nothing but a sad shadow of the man Chess had once known, back during the War . . . same one he’d taken a shine to, flirted with, killed over. Though God knew, he might well’ve done that last part anyhow, considering.
Chess, hung up from the heavens with his red hair a-glisten and his purple coat new-brushed, like it’d come right off the tailor’s dummy; Chess, green eyes narrowed against a light they seemed to share. And Asher Rook in his comparative shabbiness, his remade
ordinariness
— merely human again, after so long a time as priest, king, consort to two gods at once.
What could there possibly be for him now that would ever compare to this hole at his feet, the one he had helped rip in the world, especially when that was closed over for good?
“No,” Rook said, at length. “Not much call for a faithless preacher in a town that Word-ridden, even with their own minister laid up from havin’ his hand blown off. I believe I’ll have to decline.”
Chess’s brows lowered, brow wrinkling. “Don’t be foolish.”
A hoarse scratch of a laugh, the rope’s passage yet worn rough along every note. “Oh, I’m long gone way past simple
folly
, darlin’ — wouldn’t you say? Still, I did save your soul from Hell, after all, like I promised . . . and you got to keep your hexation, to boot. Told you so.”
“You didn’t do a thing to get me out of Hell, you great ass, ’cept for puttin’ me there in the first damn place. That was all me, with Yancey Kloves leading in front and my Ma kickin’ my ass from behind. And now look at you!”
“Look at me,” Rook agreed, smiling slightly, as if the idea of Chess being his destruction just warmed him through and through. “And look at
you
, too, Chess — oh, you are
something
, all right. Always were.”
That’s why I love you yet, darlin’, in spite of everything — always will.
He saw Chess’s gaze widen, then, like some sense of what Rook was contemplating had jolted itself through this hex-blind shell he now stood stranded in, encased away from the magic that should have lit his veins. As though they still knew each other so well, so intimately, they barely had to
speak
at all.
“You’re the only thing here I’ll miss, and that forever,” Rook told him, stepping backward.
Chess grabbed for Rook’s hand, quick-draw fast; snatched the air so shy of his fingertips that he could feel their warmth. But Rook opened his wide, the span of it wider than all ten of Chess’s neat pistoleer’s fingers put together, and was gone. By the time Chess dived for the Crack as well, already folding itself shut over the whoosh of Rook’s passage, he found himself caught fast in Ed Morrow’s bear-hug grip with Yancey holding on almost as tight from the other side, as he kicked and flailed and screamed.
“Let go of me, fuckers! I could still — ”
“Chess, you
can’t
. It’s too narrow, see? You’d never make it back up.”
“I could blast it open, catch him ’fore he reaches where they’re bound; Christ, I
know
the way, or close as!
Let me GO!
”
“Not gonna happen,” said Morrow, hugging all the harder.
Yancey nodded. “’Sides which, you pop it again, what d’you think’ll happen to the rest of us, given how much we already paid to get this thing closed? You really prepared to make everybody else suffer, in order to get your last chance at Rook?”
Chess cast her a glance full of all the venom he could muster, but she didn’t shrink an inch.
It’s like you don’t even
know
me
, he thought, grinding his teeth — but nothing came out, no smart words, not even a San Fran gutter insult. Just an inarticulate groan ratcheting up to some sort of howl that dinned so bad in his own ears, he found himself trying to bash his head outright against the scar-rucked ground.
“Was the whole world you just stopped from ending, Chess. That was a good thing, wasn’t it?” No reply,
no reply
. Simply Ed’s voice continuing in his ear, gentler and far more understanding than he deserved: “Well,
wasn’t
it?”
Followed by another voice still, faint and growing fainter, seeping up through the ground, into Chess’s aching temples. Which whispered, in a tone so full of affection he truly believed he’d someday surely want to take comfort in its memory, during the awful moment of his own eventual death.
Impressed
me
, all right,
that one said.
But then, I always knew you had it in you.
“You fuckin’ liar,” Chess whispered back, rolling his tear-stained face in the dust.
Not on this, Chess Pargeter. I told you . . . if one of us has to be damned, let it be me.
“
Liar
,” Chess repeated, to no one, as Yancey and Morrow exchanged a pair of similarly baffled glances. “Bastard, fool, fucking stupid
idjit
— I would’ve
took
damnation, always, if I knew you’d’ve been there with me!”
Ah, but darlin’, I
wouldn’t
be, since that’s the institution’s whole point, as I think you probably know. Hell’s a prison fitted with nothin’ but solitary cells, where each prisoner makes his way back to God alone, for however long and hard a time it takes.
He saw himself as if from a great height, and wondered at the ridiculousness of it: heartless, restless, wicked Chess Pargeter, left behind yet one more time with the heart he’d so long sought — at such terrible cost — finally regained, finally able to feel it
all
once more, only to lose what made feeling matter. Chess brought low, furious in his prideful anger, with nothing to do about it but roll in the dirt and shriek. Lost, bereft, utterly alone.
“I give it up!” He roared, in desperation — unsure who he might be talking to, exactly, if not the God he’d never quite believed in, for all he’d seen small-g gods aplenty. “
All
of it,
all
this happy horseshit! I give it up, I give it
back, CHRIST —
”
Too late by far, Chess; you can’t. This is what you are. Wouldn’t make any difference anyhow, even if you could.
“God damn you, Ash Rook! God DAMN YOU!”
Oh, I’m pretty sure He already has.