THE Messenger returned almost fifteen minutes after I started talking, but she did not say a word. She set down bottles of chilled water from wherever she had fetched them, then sat a short distance away, sinking into a meditative pose and closing her eyes. I glimpsed movement on the edge of the oasis: the Mahati, walking gracefully in the night amongst the palms.
I told Jack everything, starting from the rose. He listened carefully, but his focus remained on the carved skull, which he placed a good distance away from him.
He gave no impression that he wanted to touch the thing. In fact, he seemed wary, a sentiment I shared. I was glad I didn’t have to look into those empty eyes. The rest of the skull was hypnotic enough, its smooth surface reflecting the fire so that it seemed flames burned deep inside the crystal.
“Those demon lords,” he murmured, almost to himself. “I never knew their names. When we broke their bond to the Reaper Kings, it disoriented the entire army, especially them. Just long enough for us to raise the prison walls.”
“You didn’t try to kill them?” Grant asked.
“We couldn’t,” he said with a faint look of surprise. “The bonds they share with their individual clans make them incredibly strong. Maybe not as strong as Zee and the others, but very nearly immortal. In hindsight, we should have struck those bonds, as well, but our focus was on the Reaper Kings.”
Jack met my gaze with discomfort—but some defiance, too.
“The boys are not innocent in this, my dear. No matter how much you care about them, don’t forget that. Their army killed billions, and destroyed civilizations that were . . . precious and remarkable. They would have killed more had we not stopped them.” He hesitated, looking down at his scarred, battered hands. “Not that the Aetar didn’t do the same, elsewhere. Perhaps it was justice. All of us, punished in different ways.”
Justice. Punishment.
Billions dead.
Another lifetime. Different hearts.
How much can be forgiven? How can the extinction of worlds be redeemed? Where is the redemption in mass murder? Is there such a thing when the crime is so immense?
And yet, I was contemplating killing an entire race of demons. Out of self-defense, yes. But still. It would be murder. It would be extinction.
I didn’t expect redemption for that. Just survival.
I drew in a deep breath. “Tell me about the crystal skulls.”
Jack hesitated, staring at the skull in front of him. I tried to imagine him with the same bone structure—sharp teeth, huge eyes—but it was too alien, and he was too human.
“Each of us involved in building the prison had one of these skulls, attuned to our particular identity. This was mine. I’m shocked to see it, though. I threw the damn thing into the Wasteland.”
That surprised me. “Nothing escapes the Wasteland.”
“
Almost
nothing,” he reminded me. “But this artifact? Found in a toolbox in a basement in Texas? That defies understanding.”
I thought about the other skulls the boys had destroyed. “Why would you have tried to get rid of it? Why,
any
of you?”
“Because they made us too powerful. Each skull, carved and polished from stones cut from the Labyrinth.” Jack stared at the skull, and, in a soft voice, said, “We thought we were strong before, but when we focused through them, when we focused on our desires . . . it was like being fed by a star. Frightening, and beautiful. Truly, we
did
feel like gods.”
The Messenger’s mouth tightened. I pressed my right hand against my leg. “You felt like gods and gave up that power? There must be more to that story.”
“You think?” he murmured.
“I know,” I said. “Who made the skulls? The Aetar?”
Jack stared into the fire, and the fall of flickering light cast shadows that made him look tired and thoughtful, and grim. “No. That is beyond our abilities. We only discovered the Labyrinth because the Lightbringers knew of it. Before that, we were nothing but drifters in space. We drifted so long until we found that home world, we forgot where we came from, or why we even left.”
Something told me that wasn’t entirely true. Grant’s gaze hardened. “How did the Lightbringers discover the Labyrinth?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said simply. “The Labyrinth is a crossroads between space and time, but it takes a particular manipulation of energy to open its door. Energy is what your kind does, lad.”
“And that?” I pointed at the skull. “If the Aetar didn’t make it, who did?”
Jack grimaced and said nothing. Grant glanced at the Messenger.
“He is called the Tinker,” she said, ignoring the older man when he gave her a stern look. “Even the Lightbringers knew of him.”
“That old?”
“What is time in the Labyrinth?” she replied with a hint of disdain. “Time means nothing, there.”
“You make it sound as though he lives
inside
the Labyrinth.”
“He is the only one who does,” Jack finally said, still not looking at me. “You travel through the Labyrinth, but you don’t remain.”
“Why not?”
“It will not let you,” said the Messenger, as if that was the most ridiculous question she had ever heard. “If you do not open a door of your own choosing, the Labyrinth will choose for you.”
“So how do you know what door to open?” Grant asked.
The Messenger frowned. “You see its light.”
I closed my eyes, thinking of roses and starlight, and a man with silver skin. “Who is the Tinker, and why is he different?”
“We don’t know,” Jack said. “Neither did the Lightbringers. He’s a ghost. Few have seen him in the Labyrinth, and only from a distance. No one has ever spoken with him. Trust me, we tried. Some of us even hunted him, thinking . . .” He stopped, shaking his head. “Thinking to possess him.”
“Familiar story,” Grant said coldly.
I touched his hand. “If you don’t know how to find him, then how did you convince him to make those crystal skulls?”
Jack hesitated. “We . . . prayed.”
“You . . . what?”
“If you have a need, sometimes the Tinker answers, with gifts.” My grandfather looked profoundly uncomfortable. “He made seed rings for the Lightbringers. He made our crystal skulls and left them where they would be found. He made the armor that your ancestor discovered and that you now wear.”
“And you don’t know how he does it.”
“Some would call what we do magic,” he said in a subdued voice. “But to us, it is just an ability, another kind of science. What
he
does, though . . . is so far beyond our capabilities . . . that
we
call it magic.”
I had to soak that in. “You’ve never spoken of him.”
“He is an uncomfortable topic for my kind.”
“Because the Aetar can’t control him.”
Jack studied his old, gnarled hands. “Yes.”
I wondered what else my grandfather wasn’t saying. “He made the rose that broke my bond with the boys. I didn’t ask for that.”
“I know.”
“And you’re wrong. Someone
has
spoken with him. Someone did a lot more than that.”
Jack looked me dead in the eyes. “I know that, too.”
Silence fell around the fire. Grant and I watched him. He watched us back. All of us, so still, lost in the desert hush and the crackle of flames burning between us.
The Messenger stirred, losing some of the stiffness in her spine. “Who is this person who spoke with the Tinker?”
My grandfather closed his eyes, and his chest sank inward as though he were hollow and brittle. It was so him, all of his movements and gestures, that I found myself forgetting his was a new body. I could see only his spirit.
“Someone very special,” he murmured. “Someone very dear.”
My heart seized when he said those words, swallowed up in an ache that reached down into the pit of my stomach. My mother. My mother, so special and dear.
I’d never understand her, no matter how much I wanted to. That killed me, all those wasted years. I’d loved her, learned from her . . . but in the end, I’d resented her, too. I still couldn’t forgive myself for that.
But the ache in my chest deepened, and I realized suddenly that it wasn’t because of anything
I
was feeling.
It was the boys.
I hardly had time to react. A sharp stabbing pain lanced my ribs, making me gasp. It hit me again before I could recover, and I doubled over—breathless, in agony. I felt as though I were being cut open with a dull saw—and I expected to see blood when I checked my hand.
Nothing. Clean.
Grant grabbed me around the waist, hauling me back against his chest. “Maxine,” he said, voice throbbing with power. “Maxine, listen to me.”
“Something’s happening to the boys,” I managed to gasp out. “Jesus.”
Jack scrabbled across the sand, picking up the crystal skull. “We need to break the bond.”
The Messenger rose to her feet, staring past us into the desert. Her hand fell to the crystal chain looped around her waist, and it fell free into her hand like a whip. I twisted in Grant’s arms, panting with pain, and glimpsed movement in the night, at the edge of the oasis.
I didn’t know what I was looking at. An earthquake, maybe. The desert, rippling like the surface of a wild, heaving ocean. A violent hiss cut through the air, accompanied by an oddly sweet scent: vanilla and orchids.
“Demons,” she whispered.
CHAPTER 23
“T
HE unfamiliar will stun the eye,”
my mother once said.
“You’ll waste time trying to make sense of it, and that time might get you killed. So don’t think, baby. Don’t try to make sense of anything. Just react. Move.”
Move.
The demons were small and muscular, shaped like slugs, with no visible eyes and no heads except for open mouths filled with endless rows of razor-sharp teeth glistening wet with slime. Their bodies formed a massive wave that undulated toward us with breathtaking speed. Everywhere, surrounding us on all sides—hundreds, maybe thousands—spilling from the desert sands into the oasis.
The darkness had been quiet—but it stirred, deep inside, flowing into that new bond I shared with the boys. Heaving through us all with a cool, muscular pulse that felt like a worm sliding around my vital organs, straight into my throat. Sickening, and more than ever before, frightening. I had no control over it. Neither, I thought, did the boys.
Shurik,
whispered the darkness, in my mind.
A swarm has been primed.
I had no idea what that meant. All I could think about was Lord Draean and that golf ball–sized lump traveling beneath his skin, eating his host from the inside out.
That piece of shit was trying to kill me.
A cold, clenching anger hit, followed by disgust and indignity. I didn’t know if those were my emotions, and I didn’t care. Inside my head, I heard my voice, the darkness, the boys, all whispering,
How dare he, how dare he strike me, our Queen, me, our heart, how dare he swarm his filth and blood, we will have blood in death, his death, his—
“Oh, damn,” said Jack, voice trembling. “We need to run.”
“No,” I said, overcome with hungry, vicious fury. “Hell, no.”
“Maxine,” he protested, but I snarled at my grandfather, all the pain in my side fading beneath the pounding rage pouring into my heart. I burned with rage. I burned.
Yes,
whispered the darkness, and that old, hard smile crawled up my throat. Only this time, it was me—me, or something like me—and not the force living beneath my soul.
“Grant,” I snapped, and he let me go, his eyes glinting golden as he said one word—one endless word that was primal and throbbing with power. The Messenger had already begun singing, her voice melding with his, forming a wall of sound that made the hairs stand on my skin.
My right hand flexed, tingling all over, and the armor flashed with blinding light—transforming, answering my need.
Moments later, I held a silver whip. Light as air, delicate, etched with coiled lines shaped like roses. It shone with a soft glow that rippled each time I breathed—as though the whip breathed with me. A chain connected the grip to my armor, chiming like small bells.
I leapt toward the Shurik, sweeping the whip over that first wave. It flashed light, slicing through the small, fat bodies and spattering blood into the sand. Cries rattled, hisses breaking. All I felt was satisfaction. I wanted to kill them, more than anything. I wanted to taste their flesh, drink their blood. I wanted to hear them scream.
I had a baby inside me. My daughter. My husband behind me. My love. My grandfather. If I ran, if I didn’t fight now, there would be no hope.
And I had hope.
A tall figure glided from the shadows at a full, leaping run: the Mahati warrior, attacking the swarming Shurik with the sharp tines of his fingertips, stabbing and crushing, snarling as the demons encircled us. But there were too many, and as quickly as we killed, more took their places.
One of the Shurik leapt into the air and sank its teeth into the Mahati’s leg. Instead of biting and letting go, it swung its body hard for leverage and started burrowing directly into his calf. He screamed, and the Messenger’s voice broke. Without hesitation she lunged after him, slashing her own whip at the swarming Shurik.
Her weapon did not cut through the demons as mine could, but merely knocked them aside. Grant stepped closer to me, gaze cold and determined, all the muscles in his throat straining as his voice grew deeper, even more inhuman. Power rippled over my skin. Power shimmered in the air. His voice rolled through the night—twisting down with an incredible, surging strength that flowed over my skin like an exhale from a hurricane. Our bond pulsed with light. My bond with the boys pulsed with darkness.
The Shurik slowed, faltering. I didn’t know what my husband was doing to them, but those closest stopped completely—all the demons behind them bumping up against each other, milling as though confused.