Hell's Hinges

by S. M. Reine

“Everyone’s actions have consequences, Mr. Marshall,” Sophie said quietly. “Even mine.”

  But it wasn’t fair. Sophie couldn’t have ever done anything so wrong to have deserved this.

  “I’m coming with you,” Lincoln said.

  Her startled eyes lifted to his. “Mr. Marshall—”

  “Infinite is a whole lotta possibilities. If you’re looking for changes in time you can live with, you need help. Me and the gargoyles will come along.”

  “Why? This isn’t a problem you can punch.”

  “There’s always something to punch,” Lincoln said. “Where’d these Precepts come from, anyway? Who decided the rules of the universe? I’ll go punch that guy.”

  “Precepts aren’t established, per se.” The Traveler was keeping a wary eye on him as it moved around the circle, sweeping the long tails of its jacket back so that it could kneel without toppling a candle. “They’re discovered. Certain things are simply found to leave the universe vulnerable to dissolution.”

  “Vulnerable,” Lincoln said. “But it’s not inevitable.”

  The witch’s eyes narrowed. “I have spent my existence putting out the biggest fires I can to protect the universe. There are still so many more Precepts broken that I can never correct. Even Nügua, a god of the last genesis, broke several Precepts when she restructured the world.”

  “Oh, you’re in the same school of thought as Sophie? The whole multiple gods, multiple geneses thing?” he asked.

  “Reality isn’t a ‘school of thought,’” said the Traveler.

  “I hate to agree with Lincoln on anything in this regard, but reality is highly subjective, and you should know that,” Sophie said.

  “I’ve met the gods. There is nothing subjective about it.”

  Frisson prickled down the back of Lincoln’s neck. “Prove it,” he said. “Let’s go further back. Before Sophie made a ‘mistake.’ Let’s go back to when this Noo-gooer thing broke one of its biggest Precepts and prevent that .”

  “Nügua,” the Traveler said. It still sounded more or less like Noo-gooer to Lincoln. “Don’t you think I would have fixed her errors if I’d been capable?”

  “You’re not a god, and that means you’re not infallible,” he said.

  “The gods aren’t infallible either.”

  “That’s just arguing my point,” Lincoln said. “I’ve seen some crazy things happen. You’re one of the crazier things I’ve ever seen, but you’re still just one guy. There’s no reason to punish Sophie to protect the world when there’s a boatload of others who should be accounting for their sins. If you think these other gods are real, then let’s go after them.”

  Sophie had stopped crying. “Is he suggesting something possible?”

  “The risks are too great to mess around,” the Traveler said. “You’re low-hanging fruit compared to Nügua. Another genesis—that’s thousands of years to travel, and uncountable possibilities to navigate. When I see through time, it’s like looking down a road. I haven’t gone so far down that road. I don’t belong there.”

  “But you can do it?” asked Sophie.

  After a moment, the Traveler nodded.

  Lincoln’s heart was starting to beat fast. “Don’t punish Sophie because it’s easy. She doesn’t deserve it, and we both know that.”

  The Traveler’s eyes went distant. Lincoln felt as though, for a moment, it was looking at something that he couldn’t see—something that nobody could see. Its figure grew blurry around the edges. For a moment, it had a thousand arms, and a thousand heads, and a thousand facial expressions. It existed at the epicenter of a hurricane of possibility.

  Then it became a whole, semi-normal person again.

  “We can speak to the last pantheon at the moment of genesis,” the Traveler finally said. “But for a trip that far back in the timeline with so many people, we’ll need a sacrifice.”

  The gargoyles were only ever a quick shout away. Lincoln brought the clutch of them down the stairs and into the basement, this time without destroying the floor in order to leave the Traveler’s circle intact. “I must say, I’m surprised,” Sophie murmured to Lincoln. They stood in the heart of the circle, waiting for the ritual to be cast. Her skin was highlighted in warm violets and crimsons by candle flame. Gargoyles towered behind her from outside the circle, and their immobile gray bulks made her look all the tinier. “You aren’t willing to believe in a pantheon or multiple geneses, and yet you’re leaping into time-travel with barely a thought. The risk to you…”

  “I don’t see another way to get the Traveler to leave you alone,” Lincoln said.

  “You could walk away from this untouched,” she said. “Why go on a dangerous mission that has nothing to do with you?”

  He let out a breath, and the gargoyles shifted, their wings groaning. The candles nearest them flickered. He could feel the weight of their thoughts against his nape, wordless but firm. They didn’t need to use words to get the message across.

  Tell her the truth.

  Lincoln wanted to tell Sophie the truth. That he didn’t think there was anyone in this world left for him, except maybe Sophie. That the people who shared his blood were unprincipled and unholy. That his father had gasped his last breaths days before, dying by suicide rather than facing the consequences of his abuse. That the werewolf Alpha had warned him Elise Kavanagh was no longer on this Earth, and Lincoln had no chance of finding her.

  There was nothing left.

  Except for Sophie.

  And she’d been about to leave because she didn’t really want anything to do with him.

  “You’re too smart to act this clueless, shortcake,” Lincoln said.

  The Traveler began speaking as it worked. “There are rules about time travel, as with anything else. We’re going far enough back that we will have to be careful. Small actions can have huge consequences. You don’t do anything without checking in first.”

  “It sounds too risky,” Sophie said.

  “It is. I wouldn’t do it if he wasn’t coming.” It was looking at Lincoln again. He didn’t like the way the witch looked at him, and not just because its colorless eyes matched its colorless hair and skin. It looked like it came from a deep-sea place without light, like those creepy shrimp.

  That freak looked at Lincoln like it knew him.

  “Why me?” he asked.

  “The rules don’t apply to you,” the Traveler said. “You’re something different, and I wonder if that difference is because you’re meant to change time.”

  “Is it because he’s a Remnant of Inanna?” Sophie asked.

  “I never met a Remnant like him,” the Traveler said.

  It hadn’t occurred to Lincoln that this weird pale thing might know more about what he was. “But you have met Remnants?”

  “You can’t travel in the generations after a genesis without tripping over them,” the Traveler said. “After a couple of centuries, souls get rebirthed and reassembled enough that nobody has enough god in them to make a difference. But right after a genesis, a god’s soul gets split into maybe a dozen people, and they make waves in the timeline. Every time.”

  “How’d you come across other Remnants? You said you’ve never been as far back as the last genesis,” Lincoln said.

  “I did say that,” the Traveler said. “Strong Remnants have a way of lasting through millennia, and they’re always setting fires for me to fix.” It clapped its hands. The candle flames leaped so high that they tickled the ceiling. The fire didn’t catch or spread.

  The gargoyles watched from outside the circle, faces blank as ever.

  “I won’t need all of them to sacrifice,” the Traveler said. “Five, I think.”

  “It won’t hurt them?” Lincoln asked again.

  The Traveler shook its head. “I’ll draw the power out of five of them to fuel my circle. To them, it will only seem to last a moment. I’ll return us to this timeline, in this circle, a heartbeat after we leave. Assuming we finish our mission without destro
ying the world.”

  “Don’t take Junior,” said Inanna. She was standing beside ‘her’ gargoyle—the one that she followed everywhere now, so close to him that she could have touched his shoulder if she got up on her toes. Inanna was still armored, still wary. “Don’t take him. Don’t take me .”

  “Why not?” Lincoln asked.

  Sophie followed his gaze to Junior. “Are you talking with him?”

  “With her ,” he said, knowing Sophie would understand.

  Recognition lit her eyes, still puffy from crying.

  “Don’t take me,” Inanna said again. “Don’t go. Stay in this genesis.”

  “But then I can’t save her,” Lincoln said.

  “She doesn’t want you to save her,” said the god. “You’ll do no good here.”

  “Shut up.” That dark feeling was rising inside of him again, like he was in an airless, lightless hospice room, trying to make out the silhouette of a man hanging from a pipe by his belt. “You’re wrong.”

  “What’s she saying?” Sophie asked.

  Lincoln shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.” He turned to the Traveler. “I want to take Junior with me when we travel.”

  He expected Inanna to argue with him. She didn’t. She simply disappeared from the room without any lingering warnings, protests, or arguments.

  “Then we’re almost ready to go,” the Traveler said. It began painting sigils onto Junior’s arms using warm wax in a crystal bowl, even as it spoke quickly. “There are rules you need to know. First of all—”

  “Be careful, don’t fuck up the timeline,” Lincoln said. “I know.”

  “You don’t know how . Listen to me.” It smeared red wax over Junior’s wrist. “You don’t have a body to inhabit in the year we’re visiting, so you’ll look as you do now. Make sure you bring back everything you take. Don’t do anything without checking with me first. If you make a mistake, all three of us will need to be together to fix it.”

  “Fix it? In what way?” Sophie asked.

  “To travel again,” the Traveler said. “I’ll have you two temporally shielded, but it only works if you’re physically close.”

  “And if we do get split up by circumstance?”

  The Traveler’s pale gaze was like the white roar of blood through Lincoln’s skull after head trauma. “We get back together as fast as possible. Nobody gets back here unless we all do, at the same time.” The Traveler guided Junior into the circle. Magic pulsed around them, sparkling with crimson darkness. The ripples closed in. “Link with each other.”

  Lincoln took Junior’s wax-painted hand. His human fingers were tiny by comparison, lost within the broad granite palm of a gargoyle.

  With his other hand, he clutched Sophie. Her skin was soft and clammy.

  She leaned against him. “I’m sorry to do this to you—to pull you into my mess—”

  “Hey,” he interrupted. “I’ll follow you just about anywhere, shortcake. You’ve just got to let me follow.”

  That wasn’t exactly gratitude in her face. It was closer to relief. “I’m sorry,” she said again, quieter.

  “We need to focus,” the Traveler said. Encircled by gargoyles and candle flame, the space within the enormous circle felt tiny. It was getting hard to breathe. “All of us have to focus if we’re going to reach the previous genesis, when Inanna’s pantheon was toppled by the triad of Nügua, Eve, and Adam.”

  Shock rolled over Lincoln. “Wait, Adam and Eve?”

  “Two of the three gods in the last triad,” the Traveler said patiently.

  Lincoln hadn’t thought that far. He still hadn’t really believed that God wasn’t God, that the Bible teachings he’d grown up with might not be right. Elise always claimed that God—Adam—had died by her hand in the last genesis.

  By the time Lincoln had known Elise, Adam was said to be gone. But now they were going back to a time when Adam had been alive, and the God that Lincoln had learned about in the Bible might have still been some kind of real.

  It was dizzying—shocking. Lincoln’s dark places were consuming him. The circle was shrinking.

  “Think about Nügua,” the Traveler said. “Think of the seed in the darkness of soil.”

  Sophie’s eyes were closed. She was envisioning what the Traveler said.

  Lincoln was thinking of Adam.

  He used to think that God had a plan for him. He was a sinner upon Earth, and God had sent his son to save him. Jesus had saved them all. Faith had carried him through his entire damn life until Elise shattered Lincoln by telling him that God was dead.

  But now they were going back.

  The circle shrunk tighter. Lincoln tried to inhale, but there was no air to breathe.

  Everything was getting so dark.

  Don’t go back there , Inanna had said. He could see her standing between Junior’s bent knees, only inches away from Lincoln. Don’t be a fool .

  This is all your fault , said John Marshall, hanging between them by a belt wrapped around his throat. His face was purple. His tongue bulged out of his mouth, twitching as he spoke from the dark places. Ereshkigal writhed in those dark places too. He never stopped moving, never stopped hungering. He slithered toward Lincoln with a noose and a knife, and there was no way to stop him.

  “Focus,” the Traveler said.

  Lincoln couldn’t focus. He was stinging, burning, falling.

  The circle slammed shut around them.

  Time opened in front of him.

  With all the control of a kite blown by a hurricane, Lincoln traveled.

  3

  L incoln was standing in the desert. Nighttime had long since fallen, and the Pump Lounge was lightless on the edge of a dried lake bed. Dust swirled in the night, sparkling like starlight gone dancing.

  There was a silhouette on the edge of the lake.

  Lincoln.

  Elise Kavanagh stood with her weight balanced between her motorcycle boots. Hair flowed around her shoulders like ink, the way it had when they’d first met. She had pallid demon skin and the endlessly black demon eyes.

  “Elise?” he called.

  She didn’t reply.

  He glanced over his shoulder, looking for the reassuring presence of the Pump Lounge and his rental Toyota that would help him escape the desolation.

  Neither were there.

  “No,” he whispered.

  Elise was right behind him. A light flicked and flared, and the flame painted her colorless features orange.

  She lit a cigarette. Inhaled deep, exhaled black fog.

  “Join me,” Elise said.

  She was naked in the shower. Hot mist billowed around her, beading the spheres of her pale breasts and dripping down the valleys of her abdomen. She was waiting for Lincoln, looking at him expectantly, waiting for him to make the next move.

  He climbed into the tub with her. Magma poured hot down his shoulders, flowing opposite the rake of Elise’s nails against his skin. Her skin was soft and wet as she slid against him. Her thighs were hairless, slick. She inhaled as she nuzzled against his jaw.

  Her teeth sank into his throat—hard.

  Lincoln drove his dick between her legs. A punishing, merciless blow, like the times he had driven butcher knives into the human slaves of Hell. Elise was damp at the apex of her thighs. She flowed with amber. It tasted like maple and apples when Lincoln kissed her, when they burned together.

  It didn’t take more than a few strokes for him to reach his climax.

  “God,” he groaned into her ear as he spent himself.

  “Yes?” Elise whispered back.

  Her fingernails dug underneath his scapula. She pierced flesh. She flayed the muscle away with a single tear. The shoulder blades came free with a grinding crack.

  God, the pain of it.

  The room’s light was brighter now, hot and red. It cast his shadow on the shower stall behind Elise. His figure had gone from one of a man in the throes of passion to that of a broad-shouldered beast whose bat wings un
furled with a spray of granite dust.

  Elise coiled around him, tighter and tighter. He was trapped. It felt like too much pleasure—like he’d die of the climax.

  You’re not listening to me, Lincoln, she whispered.

  Don’t take me, Inanna whispered.

  Elise’s body kept spasming over his dick. He was still orgasming. Even as he bled, as he burned, as his organic form crumbled into stone, he was carried to a point of ecstasy that blinded him.

  There was nothing but white light.

  And then pavement.

  After traveling, Lincoln’s hearing came back quickly, and he wished it hadn’t. Because everyone was screaming.

  The voices took him back to Genesis—to the endless, futile minutes he’d spent running away from the Void as it consumed everything behind him. When there had been so many people screaming in terror for their lives, only to be silenced one by one.

  Nothing was stopping these screams. They just kept going.

  He pushed himself up, wavering with the effort it took to sit back on his heels. He had reappeared in the middle of a small crater in downtown Reno, not far from the remains of Eloquent Blood. He was right by a movie theater that overlooked the Truckee River. The Parking Gallery was across the street. The Episcopalian church didn’t belong there, though—it had never been replaced after Genesis.

  He was far from alone. Junior had left an even bigger crater one block down. He was picking himself up carefully, wiping asphalt off of his knees and keeping his wings tight to his back.

  Every pedestrian for blocks had stopped to take pictures, stare, or scream.

  One guy drew a gun from his holster, which he openly carried on his belt. He aimed at Junior.

  “Don’t shoot! He’s just a gargoyle!” Lincoln shouted, leaping toward Junior. “Not a demon!”

  People scattered.

  The streets were chaos.

  “He’s friendly, you hear?” Lincoln waved his arms, trying to make people look at him, understand him. Plenty of people glanced his way as they ran, but nobody stopped. It was like they’d never seen a preternatural before.

  At that thought, cold washed over him.