by S. M. Reine
“Maybe men shouldn’t let themselves get lured,” Lincoln said.
“Men always get lured. I’ve lured millions.” Yatam turned back to his mother. “What are you suggesting?”
Nügua took his chin in her hands, tipping his head from side to side. “You have grown into maturity as perfect as I dreamed, and I will immortalize these features. Let me show you what will come next.”
The room faded as Yatam’s memory shifted to a cellar. A large basin stood at the center of the room. Nügua settled herself on the edge, reaching in to run her fingers through the clay it held.
“This is how I made humanity with Adam, at first,” she said. “The special ones. The gifted ones. I had a hand in most of the gaeans that he now neglects. I wish I hadn’t wasted so much of my strength on someone disinterested in fatherhood.” She rubbed the clay between her fingers, letting it crumble. “I’ve already sculpted you a new body, my son. Look.”
A clay man stood in the shadows at the rear of the cellar. Lincoln could have mistaken him for real if not for how colorless he was. This was the Yatam that he’d met now, in modern day—the more perfect, more symmetric, more infernal version of human Khet.
“There is magic in this soil. It comes from the land where Adam and Eve built Eden, gathered before the blood of slain ethereal beasts drenched it in sin. I’ve carried it with me everywhere we’ve ever gone inside of my sarcophagus,” Nügua said. “I will put your blood upon my clay, then kill your mortal form. Your soul will return to this new body. There will be no limitations on the abilities you acquire. You’ll be immortal.”
“I wasn’t afraid of dying at her hands,” Yatam said. “To me, she was greater than God Himself. I only had one fear.” He gazed down at Nügua, and he said, “Anat is mortal, and I’ll be alone when she dies.”
“Don’t let your sister hear you say that,” Nügua said.
“I love my sister, and I will never leave her, but it is different.”
“I know that, but she won’t accept it. She’s as tempestuous as Ereshkigal.” The serpent goddess sighed. “There’s not enough clay remaining to remake Anat.”
“Find a way,” he said. “You promised Anat her favor—let it be this. Apologize for what you did to Inanna by giving her eternity with Utu.”
Nügua caught one of his hands in both of hers, gazing at him with the open adoration of a mother. “Oh, my love, but you are not merely Inanna and Utu. You are Anat and Yatam as well. Your sister will never accept Anat, not even after a thousand years. She holds no love for the mortals that Adam made, and least of all one who bears a Remnant of Inanna.”
Yatam took his hands from Nügua—who remained frozen, like a statue—and he cupped her cheeks as he spoke to Elise and Lincoln. “Inanna invaded Irkalla, which Ereshkigal ruled. She seized control of the realm and tried to slay the king.”
“Ereshkigal’s lover was murdering humanity,” Lincoln said, surprising himself with his intensity. “He had to be stopped. Inanna didn’t have a choice.”
“Where was Utu in the midst of all this?” Yatam mused. “Why didn’t he intercede when he could have kept Ereshkigal and Inanna from becoming foes that transcended death?” He dropped his hands back into Nügua’s, and the image of the god began to speak again.
“I won’t lift her the way that I lift you and your sister—I cannot—but there’s more than one way to assume immortality,” said Nügua. She peeled her lips back to expose long fangs.
“You’ll make her a vampire?” Yatam asked.
“She will not be infinite, but near enough to it, if you are careful,” Nügua said. “It’s a mercy. True immortality is naught but a curse.”
“A curse you wish to bestow upon my sister and me.”
“Would you rather die?” she asked.
Yatam said, “Yes.”
But it clearly wasn’t the answer he’d given back then in the nomarch’s resplendent manor.
“That’s the queerest thing about the curse of immortality,” Nügua said. “We can know it’s a curse and still choose it every time because the fear of dying is so much greater.”
“Let me die,” Yatam said. “Let me remain human, and Anat human, and let us live out the briefest mortal life spans together. Let us become old. Let us die.”
Nügua didn’t hear him. Those weren’t words he had ever spoken. “Come rest against me. Give me your mortal blood.” She lowered herself to the packed dirt floor and opened her arms like a mother waiting to receive an infant. Her hair spilled around her, black threads of silk that no dust could lighten.
Yatam dropped to his knees beside her. “Should we not wait for Yatai?”
“She’s already changed,” Nügua said.
“Only then did I decide,” Yatam said, bracing himself on his arms over the serpent god. “Only when I realized Yatai had become eternal did I truly relent. No matter how much I feared being without Anat, I feared Yatai being alone even more.”
He bowed against Nügua. She cradled him, stroked the hair away from his neck, and bit.
Blood must have poured from him. In the memory, Nügua’s skin became slick with it. The floor was soaked, and fingers of his blood touched the clay man.
A wind whipped through the room.
The lanterns went out.
The room swirled.
Lincoln reflexively reached out—and he found Elise’s shoulder this time. She was steady in the center of the maelstrom, watching memories shift around them.
The world fell back into place.
“When Anat’s turn came to die, it was just after sunset on a hot night in Itjtawy,” Yatam said. They stood on the rooftop of the nomarch’s manor again. Nügua was coiled upon a wide stool, robes spread to hide her tail as she threaded beads onto a long string.
A woman ascended the stairs cautiously. Anat was a teenager with the haunted eyes of someone who had lived through war. She was lovely, though, even with her thick hair pulled back into a single coarse rope and her body hidden by straight-draping linens. Her face was guarded, yet expressive. Her brow was thoughtful. Lincoln wasn’t sure if she was black or Middle Eastern or what. He hadn’t seen anyone with the dark red-brown skin that she had.
She was familiar to him, the way that a cousin he’d never met might be familiar. Except Anat didn’t share genetics or physical features with Lincoln. She shared a scrap of soul.
“You’re trembling,” said Nügua.
Indeed, Anat was shaking at Yatam’s side. The Father of All Demons gazed at her with such pain in his face, holding her hand as tightly as though it were the real thing. “I’ve been brought here to die,” said Anat. “Should I face it fearlessly?”
“Does Inanna fear death?” Nügua asked.
Both Anat and Lincoln reflexively turned—seeking the spirit of the old god. Lincoln couldn’t see her in this memory. “She laments it,” Anat said. “She still blames it on you.”
“You will both have more life after this death,” Nügua said, setting the string of beads aside. She opened her arms. “Come, Anat. My son loves you, and so you too are my daughter. You need not fear my kiss.”
Anat cautiously settled across Nügua’s lap, cradled in her arms. Only once Yatam knelt beside them did Anat allow her head to fall back. It exposed her throat, softer than the skin on her arms and face.
“Making vampires,” Elise said, tense with revulsion. “Changing people into monsters.”
“A kopis would see it that way,” Yatam said. He drank in the sight of Anat’s face, stroking the hair back from her forehead, as Nügua’s mouth lowered to her throat.
Everything vanished.
Yatam stood. No emotion on his face, no hesitation in his movements. He was deader than any vampire now, millennia later. “My mother died in the riots the next night. She was burned to death. Yatai was furious when she learned Anat had been changed—she tried to kill my new wife. We fled Itjtawy to hide in Kush, and I still cannot tell you for certain why Yatai didn’t pursue us. But it was a
temporary escape. Yatai never forgot what we did.”
For a moment, they stood in a city built into the walls of a cliff. Towering pillars and statues seemed to emerge directly from starlight-bathed sandstone. There were smaller huts of sticks and mud, and a few guards in the otherwise empty streets. Yatam only had eyes for a woman standing in an arched doorway. She had the same thick hair as Anat, but her dark skin had lost the red tones so that she looked grayish. The ashen skin made her crimson eyes so much brighter.
She was adorned with jewelry at her throat and hanging from her ears, and she gazed at the starlight as if she had never seen anything so beautiful. Anat had made a good vampire. Best vampire Lincoln had ever seen, anyway.
“How long did you guys stay together?” Lincoln asked. There was no question in his mind that Anat must have been dead. Yatam wouldn’t have been here if she was still walking the Earth.
“We lived as merchants, rulers, and nomads for over a thousand years,” Yatam said.
“That’s a long damn time.”
“Not that long.” He reached for the memory of his wife—but she faded away, along with the city. “Not long enough.”
They were standing in rainy Reno, Nevada, in the year 2006. It was as much a place that Lincoln didn’t belong as Ancient Egypt. There was no electricity, no moon, no light. Even Yatam’s glow was dimming.
“Something’s not right,” Elise said. Lincoln could only barely make out the contrast between her hair and skin. She was a streak of gray against utter blackness.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
Yatam pushed Lincoln behind him, glaring into the shadow. “My sister is here.”
She materialized standing in the middle of the Truckee River. Blood surged and flowed up to her knees, yet somehow left no smears on her flawless skin. Yatai looked like herself for the first time. She had big breasts, perfect features, flowing black hair. Her face was halfway between Yatam’s and Nügua’s.
She shined so much brighter than her brother, and her pull was like a black hole. Lincoln dug his heels in, but it wasn’t enough. He was moving toward her, step by awful step through grass coated in the bodies of locusts, rain dripping down his spine.
Yatai emerged from the river. She was dripping.
“You tell them your side of the story?” Yatai’s nipples were redder than blood—the same color as the blossoming vulva underneath the sleek black hair of her pubis. “You tell them how I was angry because I disliked your bride?”
“Hello, sister,” Yatam said. “It’s been a long time.” He’d looked awe-inspiring until Lincoln saw him at the same time as Yatai. Yatam was painted on the world in grays like Kansas before a tornado. She was the tornado. She was the sun itself. She was so much more powerful than her twin.
“I didn’t have a choice. You’ve been sleeping.”
“And while I’ve slept, you’ve been rampaging, just like Ereshkigal and his lovers.”
“Just like Utu,” she said. “Milquetoast hero of the sun, determined to love everyone and stand for nothing. Yet the instant our mother died, you fled from us.”
“You attacked Anat,” Yatam said.
“Grief twists the mind. I needed love and support. You gave me the loneliness that rots inside of me. Every life I’ve taken, every sin I’ve committed, leaves its blood on your hands.” Her black eyes cut through the darkness to land on Lincoln and Junior. Hatred rippled over her like heat over the desert at high noon. “I wonder if I won’t resent you as much once I’ve truly eradicated Inanna’s ghost.”
“Are you the one who told Him where to find me?” Elise asked, stepping forward. “Because I beat you at the lake?”
“Yes, I told Him.” Yatai slithered around her, barely more than a wisp.
“You told Adam ,” Yatam said. “The man who killed Eve—”
“One of the men who killed her!” His sister’s form seemed to grow in the darkness as if she were magnified in her anger. “Eve was killed day by day, piece by piece, by all sorts of men in power. Men like you .”
“That is a poor rationalization for working with Him.” Yatam shifted subtly, and Lincoln realized that he was moving to stay between Lincoln and Yatai. Protecting him. “I won’t deny my responsibility in any of a trillion sins across a thousand worlds, but you’ve still allied yourself with the man who stopped Eve’s heart.”
The shadows around Yatai grew deeper. “I don’t see any hypocrisy in sending him Metaraon’s sword.” She stroked her fingers inches away from Elise’s stiffened shoulders, careful not to touch. “Adam wants the viper in his bed. It’s not my problem if he gets…bitten. Meanwhile, I get what I want too. Remnants of Inanna are resourceful. Dangerous, at times. I don’t have to get near enough to kill this one if I can send the madman-in-chief to do the job for me, Godslayer .”
Elise swung her sword. “Don’t call me that!”
The blade swiped through the pale form of Yatai, and she only briefly billowed like the fog in wind. “I have been especially thorough this time,” Yatai said as she coalesced into her body again. “I summoned the big guns for you, Inanna, and for your new friend. He’s on his way with a vessel now. If I’m not wrong, he should be arriving at…” She glanced at her naked wrist, as if to look at a watch. “Right now.”
Yatam pushed Lincoln back again, more forcefully than the last time. “Run.”
“And leave you with her ?” Lincoln asked.
“Your friends are in danger. Go save them,” Yatam said. “I can handle my sister.”
Lincoln realized that Elise was already gone, racing toward Motion and Dance.
Your friends are in danger .
He wrenched himself away from Yatam and chased Elise.
14
J ames realized two things at once. He was going to get killed by a giant spider if he didn’t get inside Motion and Dance, and there was no way he could leave Betty out on the street. He kicked the chest inside, shut the door, and raced across the lawn. His feet slipped on the sodden grass. It was nearly impossible to dodge the legs as they pounded around him. Each one was thicker than his body’s circumference.
Four of the spider’s legs scraped down the roof of the studio, tearing off one of the rain gutters. The wards hadn’t had time to lock down again. There was nothing to protect the structure from physical attack. James stopped, swaying on the street as he watched. “No, no, no —”
A leg slammed into the eastern wall of the dance studio. It collapsed inward, sending dust pluming into the night.
“No!”
Another leg smashed against the sidewalk beside James.
Cement cracked under his feet.
James dived, rolling across the ground. One of the legs swung so close to his head that he felt the wind of its passing. The cables of its hair scraped his shirt. He came to a halt beside Betty. James bowed over her so that she would have some shelter from the rain, checking her throat for a pulse with shaking hands. “Betty?” There was fluttering under his fingers. Her head rolled side to side, brow crimping. She was dazed, but alive. “Thank God.”
Betty gave a dreamy chuckle in his lap. “I’m starting to think you don’t hate me.”
James’s feelings for Betty were quickly migrating far from hate. But at the moment, he had no room to feel for anything except his studio. His business, his home. The life that he had built with Elise.
Without one supporting wall, the roof was caving. The oversized spider scrabbled to keep its footing, and that just made the bricks crumble faster. Ridiculous thoughts flitted through James’s mind—thoughts of his insurance company, of how expensive real estate had gotten, what the neighbors would think—before finally settling on an internal, wordless scream of helpless horror.
The spider’s body hung between its legs high enough that a car could have driven underneath it. It had six-foot-long pincers tipped in glistening thorns. The energy radiating off of it reminded him of his aunt’s wood stove burning in winter. It reminded him of sharing burned mo
vie popcorn with Elise in New York City.
It reminded him of the garden.
“No,” James whispered.
Its pincers parted like a woman’s thighs, and a voice emerged from the echoing depths of its carapace. “Don’t I know you?”
It felt like fingernails snapped through his skull, digging their tips into the center line of his brain to pull the hemispheres apart. An invisible gaze raked through James’s fleshy core. He clutched his head, trying to stop the pain—trying to keep his skull from getting crunched into a kernel.
“Bishop,” said the voice. “I do know you. Where have you been?”
It was Him.
The spider crashed closer. Its pincers retracted, preparing to strike.
Elise hurtled over James’s head seemingly from nowhere. Her knees were tucked under her, the falchion was lifted high, and a war cry ripped from her chest. She drove the point of the blade into one of those thick pincers.
It screamed much louder than it spoke. Blood sprayed across the pavement, and Elise landed underneath its belly, drenched.
“Are you okay?” she asked, looking at him from between the spider’s thrashing legs.
He’d felt fine from the moment his eyes met Elise’s. This was so familiar—something that they had done together a thousand times, like the dance routines they rehearsed for competitions. James was with his kopis. She was still the greatest fighter he had ever known. He would be safe.
“I’ll get Betty out of the way,” he said. “Worry about that thing.” He gathered the blond into his arms, running across the street toward Motion and Dance.
The spider turned to watch him swinging wide beyond the reach of its legs. “Where are you going, bishop?” When its red eyes fell upon James again, his mind split open with fresh pain. He lost his footing. Betty tumbled from his arms as he fell, and they both landed in the gutter awash with red-streaked rain.
A huge foot swung toward them. James hurt too much to roll away.