“I’m sorry,” Grant whispered. “For everything.”
“I asked for it,” I said. “That night. Cake.”
He stilled, then said, very softly, “Maxine.”
“We could have gone out,” I told him, unable to stop. “Would have been a public place. But I wanted cake. Her cake.”
He was silent, again, for a long moment. “You didn’t know what would happen. It wouldn’t have stopped anything.”
“A day. One day more. Maybe two, three, a week. Anything would have been better. More time.”
Grant slid his hand around mine, his thumb stroking my wrist. Warm. Strong. Solid.
Familiar. I remembered him holding my hand that way, but other memories were distant, hanging by fingertips on the edges of my mind. I was afraid to touch them, that they would scatter.
“Are you hurt?” I asked him. “Did any of them—”
“No,” he interrupted. “You?”
I closed my eyes. “I don’t understand what just happened.”
“You stopped an army.”
“I almost lost myself.”
You found yourself,
said the voice.
I pulled away from Grant, intent on standing, running—but had to stop, nauseous. I leaned on my hands, trying not to vomit. My elbows shook. Grant placed his hand on my back.
“They can’t be the Reapers,” I whispered. “Not my boys. Not the thing inside me.”
“Would it matter?”
I gave him a wild look. “You can ask that?”
“I know the boys. I know you.”
“You saw inside me. Out there. I saw the way you looked at me, Grant, like I was a—”
“—stranger,” he finished gravely.
The word cut deep. Made me feel small. I looked away from him. “Good. That’s . . . good. You’re not safe around me anyway.”
“I’m safer than you are,” he replied, unmoving. “What I said wasn’t a mark against your character, Maxine. Not a rejection, either.”
I still couldn’t look at him. “I wanted to go with them. I wanted to . . . do things.”
“It wasn’t you.”
“Some of it felt like me.”
He shook his head. “I see you, Maxine. I see inside you, all the time, every day, when I watch you sleep, when you talk to me, when you just sit and read, or stare into space, and think no one sees you. But I see you. I see what sleeps inside you. I saw it more clearly, just now.”
I finally met his gaze. “What
did
you see?”
“Same thing I’ve always seen. You. Power.” Grant reached out and brushed his thumb over my mouth, tenderly. “Just . . . power. You told me once that the boys are only as good as the woman who leads them. Only as good as what’s in there.” He pointed at my heart. “What makes you think this is different?”
“It’s alive, hungry. Has a mind of its own. Took over my body during the fight. It could overwhelm me permanently.”
“But not the both of us.” Grant leaned close, peering into my eyes. “I’m not much, but I’m something. You’re not alone, Maxine, no matter what happens.”
I wanted to tell him he was wrong, but my heartbeat carried a second pulse that rode out of the light binding us together: that light, his light, as deep inside me as the darkness bathing in its glow.
Never alone,
said that dark spirit.
We are one. All of us, one.
I sucked in a deep breath. “I can hear it in my head.”
“So talk to it,” Grant said, like it was nothing. “Maybe what you think you know is wrong.”
“Wrong,” I echoed, incredulous. “Grant, if we assume for a moment that the demon was correct, and the boys, the thing inside me, are all somehow part of the Reaper Kings . . .” I stopped, shuddering, feeling like my guts were going to crawl up my throat.
“Maxine,” he said. “If they are, if you are—”
I held up my hand, stopping him—and then had to cover my mouth to keep from being sick. “You don’t understand. The Reaper Kings, if they get loose, are supposed to destroy
everything
. You heard that demon. He wanted me to lead his people to hunt
humans
. For food.”
“I heard him. I also heard you say no. Rather emphatically.” Grant grabbed my hand. “Some call me a Lightbringer. And an abomination. But I don’t feel like any of those things. I know who I am. I know who I was raised to be. So do you, Maxine.”
I wrenched my hand away. “You’re going to tell me you weren’t afraid.”
“I was terrified. If I were a weaker man, I’d need to change my pants right now.”
“That’s not funny. This thing inside me—”
“Saved us.” He rubbed his chest. “I think it . . . touched me.”
I was going to be sick again. I bowed my head, closing my eyes, focusing on the dark spirit curled so tightly in the nooks of my soul. I could feel it, separate from me, like a cancer made of iron, heavy and dull, with a metallic taste like blood.
Or maybe that was my bitten tongue. It hurt. I bit it again.
Stay away from him,
I told the darkness inside me.
Stay the fuck away from him.
I felt the thing smile, and turned my head away from Grant, afraid my mouth would mirror its pleasure.
We are you, you are him, he is you. All of us are one, together,
whispered that supple voice.
You cannot break that bond, now that we have tasted it.
I won’t let you hurt him.
We would not hurt ourselves.
I believed that. But there were other ways to hurt someone, and this thing inside was operating on a different standard of right and wrong. I could still taste that ash in my mouth, and the ache of a nameless hunger that I did not think would ever be satisfied.
Hunt, and you will be satisfied,
said the voice.
Sip death, and your thirst will abate.
Fuck you,
I thought, and opened my eyes—finding that old bloodstain directly in front of me. I stared at it, then reached out and pressed my hand against the dull patch of linoleum. I didn’t feel anything; but Dek tugged, and Zee rolled in his sleep, all the boys restless.
“It touched you through our link,” I said. “If it does that again . . .”
I couldn’t finish. Grant gave me a sharp look. “How do you know about the link?”
I tilted my shoulder in a weary shrug. “Maybe there are some things I remember.”
Love. Friendship. Acceptance. Everything I couldn’t bear to lose. All reasons I needed to save him from me.
A floorboard creaked in the other room. We stiffened, staring out the door. I heard it again.
Old farmhouse. Almost every hinge and stair and board had a song—familiar to me, even after seven years. I could still hear my mother on those floors, or me, or the boys; and it was hard to breathe.
I stood, gesturing for Grant to stay down. I hopped over the noisy spots in the kitchen floor and peered into the living room.
The Messenger stood in the shadows.
She was alone, facing the kitchen. Seeing her in my mother’s home felt wrong. No one should have been here. Not even me.
I walked into plain view. The Messenger did not move, or acknowledge me. All she did was stare: blankly, as though her mind was very far away.
Grant’s cane clicked across the floor. It wasn’t until he appeared in her line of sight that she moved. Just a little. A blink, a tightening of her mouth. A tremble.
“You survived,” she whispered.
“You thought we wouldn’t?” I asked sharply. Grant touched the small of my back. Cautioning me. His touch sparked déjà vu, a riot of memories that I felt more than saw, and which instantly faded into the back of my head. I tried not to sway.
“I did not know what to think,” she said simply. “You ran?”
“We fought,” Grant told her. “Pushed them back.”
Her entire body twitched. I said, “Where’s Jack?”
“What is this place?” asked the Messenger, instead of answering me. Her voice sounded hollow, faint. “I feel things in the walls. Echoes. Someone strong lived here.” She fixed me with a hard look. “She was like you.”
I said nothing. I walked through the living room toward the front door. The boys, dreaming on my skin, tugged backward, ever so slightly, toward the kitchen. Remembering. I touched my chest, then studied my tattooed hands. Dek and Mal stared back, red eyes glinting. Against my legs, Raw and Aaz clung heavy and warm.
My boys.
I stood on the covered porch. It was late afternoon outside. Blue blinding skies, and a golden meadow that stretched as far as the eye could see. The gravel driveway was overgrown with weeds, and the paint was peeling—but nothing much had changed in seven years. Time had frozen on the night of my mother’s death, and only I was different.
Everything, inside me, was different.
I soaked in the fresh scent of wild grass and clean, hot winds. Early spring in Texas was comfortable, pleasing on the eye. I had forgotten what unremitting sunlight looked like.
Precious world,
I thought, shivering—and then, to the darkness inside me:
This is a precious, beautiful world. I won’t let you hurt it. I won’t let you use me to hurt it.
I received no response.
My hand still felt the weight of the sword. I heard screams inside my head. Blood, war, death. I gripped the rail, leaning hard, and glimpsed movement near the old oaks—some distance away, on a small hill near the creek. I stared for a long time, watching the figure sitting hunched in the grass, filled with dread and hunger. My own clean hunger, nothing born from darkness, which coiled now, as though asleep.
Pretender,
I told it.
I walked off the porch, across the driveway, into the grass. I kept the oaks in sight, and the teen who sat there.
Jack had his back to me, but I wasn’t quiet in my approach. He knew I was coming. He sat with his chin resting on his knees, his hands digging into the ground beside him, gripping clumps of grass as he stared at my mother’s grave.
It was unmarked, except for a giant slab of limestone the boys had placed on top. Zee had carved her name into the rock with his claws. We’d done it all the same night she died. The boys dug the grave. I sat with her body. We buried her, and I did not leave the spot until the next night, when the sun set.
Seven years. Everything was the same, except the grass had grown.
“You’re safe,” Jack said, not looking at me.
“You knew I would be,” I replied. “Safe in body, anyway.”
“An important distinction.” Jack stared at his hands. “Grant?”
“Alive.” I sat beside him and touched my mother’s headstone. “They called themselves the Mahati.”
He shivered. “Scouts.”
“They wanted me to lead them.”
Jack finally met my gaze. “What did you say?”
“I’m sitting here. What do you think?”
“I think,” he said slowly, and stopped. “I don’t know what to think, my dear.”
My mother’s name looked raw on the stone, and had been cut so deep, my finger fit into the grooves.
Jolene Kiss. Daughter of Jean.
I pressed my forehead against the stone. “I wanted to say yes. I wanted to, Jack. I wanted to . . . feel that power.”
“The power over life and death,” he said. “Once tasted, you can never really let go.”
“Speaking from experience?”
He looked away, staring at my mother’s grave. I did the same, trying not to think of her burial. Trying to remember her face, her wry smile, that glint in her eyes.
I fixed her image in my mind, then lay down in the grass, listening to the wind and watching the blue sky. No rifts, anywhere to be seen. No hint of trouble. Just another day, another night, for six billion human beings.
“I don’t come here often enough,” he said. “It pains me.”
“Been seven years for me.” I closed my eyes, finding it difficult to breathe past the lump in my throat. “Jack. What am I? Tell me the truth. That’s all I want. No riddles.”
“No riddles,” he echoed, and I heard a shuffling sound in the grass. Pried open one eye, just enough to see Grant join us. He looked solemn, but a strong steady strength burned at the back of his eyes. I could have called it compassion, or faith, but it was something deeper than that, and I had no name to give it except that it felt like the sun was being compressed into my heart—a wild light bigger than my life, but so much a part of me, I thought I might just keep burning, even if I died.
He stayed with you. He fought at your back. He did not flinch.
My man,
I thought.
I held out my hand. He tickled my palm with his fingers as he sat heavily in the grass beside me, then took my hand fully, warm, in his. Jack watched us, regret in his eyes, something painfully wistful.
“I don’t know where Jeannie is buried,” he murmured.
“Neither do I,” I said. “Mom never told me.”
Jack bowed his head, running his hands—Byron’s hands—over his face. I couldn’t breathe, watching him. I couldn’t think, or move. Even Grant was still.
“We were losing the war,” Jack said.
I waited, but he didn’t speak again, not right away. Grant pulled me a little closer. I didn’t fight him, didn’t think about all the reasons that I should. I guess I’d been over that, again and again, for the last two years. We were still together. Some things in life were just stubborn, that way.
“Old Wolf,” I said.
“Maxine,” he replied, hoarse. “The armies of the demon lords could not be possessed by my kind, and they hunted humans—our humans—for food and slaves. We could have suffered that—there were so many worlds we inhabited—except for the existence of the Reaper Kings.”
Zee tugged against my skin, agitated. “They could kill your kind.”
“We couldn’t hide from them. It was as though they tasted us in the air. Five demons, sharing one mind. Possessing . . . unimaginable power. I cannot tell you, Maxine, the things I saw them do.”
“Don’t try,” I said. “Really, don’t.”
I wasn’t certain Jack heard me; his gaze was so distant. “No one thought it would work, but we were desperate. We needed something that would break them down, separate them from the bulk of their powers. So we found a human woman, modifying her just enough. And then we . . . we bound the Reapers to her. We bound them to mortal flesh, on a . . . a quantum . . . level.”