by S. M. Reine
It wasn’t fair to want her this much. Not for either of them.
“I’ll get an arm free and you can do it,” he said.
“No,” Elise said. “Cut my clothes off. Leave my gloves on.”
“Shit,” Lincoln said.
Maybe she did know what she was doing.
He carved through her shirt. She was only wearing short sleeves, but he separated enough of the web from her body by cutting off the shirt. She wore a black sports bra tight enough to press down her large breasts. Lincoln tried not to stare. He really tried. He focused as hard as he could on getting her shorts off without snagging her panties.
Once she was down to her underwear, most of the web came off. She was mobile.
“I don’t know you at all,” Elise abruptly said. “I don’t have any memory of what you tell me we’ve done. But I believe you.” She managed to sit up, grimacing as she picked at her arm with the opposite fingernails.
“Let me wash out the water and get it hot again,” he said.
She kept picking while he drained the tub and restarted the water. Web swirled down the drain in white clouds, and the new water was clearer.
“Is that too hot?” he asked.
Elise frowned. “Why are you so worried over me? Am I sick when we meet? Dying?”
“I was just asking if the temperature was okay,” Lincoln said.
“You chased a giant spider into the city to get me back.”
He shrugged. “I can’t let you get killed, and I’m not scared of spiders.”
“I don’t get how you can know I’m the—the Godslayer and still worry about anything,” Elise said. “I must be weaker when you meet me.”
“You’ve got your weaknesses, sure.” As a demon, Elise hadn’t been able to go into the sunlight. She’d thirsted for human flesh. Worst of all, she’d never gotten over James Faulkner. “But you’re not weak. You’re the most powerful, terrifying thing I’ve ever met. Someone that...” He’d been about to tell her about the armies she commanded, but that seemed a detail too far. Instead, he said, “You’re someone that I never needed to worry about.”
“Then I seem weak to you now,” Elise said. She looked just as affronted.
“Just human,” he said. “And young. I know I look young, but—”
“When the Traveler moves you within your life, you go back into your body of that time. I know.” She groaned as she ripped a strip of webbing off her knee. The skin underneath was red. “Fuck .”
“You know the Traveler pretty well.”
“I know that it’s not going to be okay with how much you’ve changed the timeline.”
“It’s not,” Lincoln said. “Sit forward. Let me get the webbing off your back.”
Elise hugged her knees, and he tried not to think about his fingers grazing over her freckled back while he cut more of the cocoon away. “Then this is all going to be unwritten,” Elise said. “You and Betty. The demon at the lake today. My worst enemy tracking me down.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“And the two of us meeting like this.”
When she looked over her shoulder, Lincoln was surprised to find their faces close. She had thick eyelashes and eyebrows. Strong features to go with everything else. “And meeting like this,” Lincoln said.
Her eyes flicked down to his mouth. She had a bruise on her lips, right on the corner. “I want you to fix the timeline. Undo every damage you’ve done. Don’t let God find me.”
“Okay,” Lincoln said.
It didn’t even occur to him that there might be another answer.
There would be no Elise for him to meet if she was taken now. Yet the idea of unwriting this version of Elise made him feel like his heart had been wrapped in spiderwebs, tightly enough that it couldn’t even beat.
“You know, nobody worries about me, like I need to be protected,” she said. “I’m the one who protects.”
“Everyone needs to be protected sometimes,” he said.
Like in this moment, Lincoln needed to be protected from himself. From the open hunger that had him skimming his knuckles along Elise’s nape underneath her curls and taking deep breaths so that he could inhale the steam coming off of her flesh.
Sophie would tell you that you’re breaking the timeline too much. She’d be so angry. But Sophie’s stern disapproval of All Things Lincoln couldn’t extend into the lightless reaches of Eloquent Blood, where sin paid the bills. The bathroom was barely bright enough that he could tell Elise’s white underwear was a different color than her flesh. He was drenched in blood from a spider demon. This was nowhere that Sophie should ever exist. She was something bright and pure and joyful.
What was between Elise and Lincoln had never been anything but burning blood.
“What are we, in the future?” Elise asked. “What do we call...this?” She pointed between them. His every sense was filled with her. The hair grazing over his knuckles, her breath over his jaw as she spoke from inches away.
“Sinful,” Lincoln said.
She rose halfway from the tub, gripped his sodden collar in both fists, and kissed him. She was not nearly as graceful in this as she was in fighting. There was nothing but raw challenge, and Lincoln gripped her shoulders reflexively. His reflexes told him that he was under attack even when other parts of his body welcomed it.
He didn’t belong here, with Elise’s half-naked body clutched against his chest. He shouldn’t have been bracing his arms on the edge of the tub to climb between her thighs, sinking along her length so that he could drink her taste like a vampire drank blood.
Her groans were more like snarls, like she was kind of furious at him.
Lincoln didn’t mind. He kissed her harder as water slopped over his hips, trapped between Elise’s wet knees. He fought to pin her wrists back, and she fought to keep control. Fingernails on his scalp, teeth on his chin. Elise had always liked teeth. He bit her back and her moan went straight to his balls.
A fist pounded against the door. Not the bathroom door—the one from the hallway.
He and Elise drew apart simultaneously. The tension was contagious, and their quiet was immediate. He drew the unicorn dagger from behind his back.
Neuma had said they’d be safe.
But she also sometimes got possessed by Yatam’s crazy bitch sister.
“I dropped my sword when the spider grabbed me,” Elise said quietly, under her breath. “Give me your dagger.”
“You’re still half-webbed,” Lincoln said. “I’ll do this. Get free if you can.” He slid out of the bathtub as the fist pounded against the door again. He dripped all the way to the peephole, peering through it sideways so that his body wouldn’t be centered in the door. When people shot through doors, they liked to do it right in the middle, chest level.
The hallway was as lightless as their room, making it hard to see anything at all. Dark gray swept across the peephole.
Lincoln let out a breath, opening his senses to more than just Elise.
Junior.
He opened the door. There didn’t seem to be any way that a gargoyle of Junior’s size could fit, but Lincoln stepped back to give him a chance. “Come on in, and be fast about it,” he said.
Junior didn’t bother trying. He reached his arm through the door and grabbed Lincoln’s. He could hear slopping water from the bathroom as Elise fought to get out of the tub.
“Are James and Betty okay?” Lincoln asked. Junior nodded—everyone was okay—but he was still trying to pull Lincoln out urgently. “Then what is it now? What could be so…”
And then he realized.
“Sophie?” he asked.
Junior nodded and tugged.
Elise limped out, her skin looking scorched where the spiderwebs had been plastered against her. She grabbed clothes off the hallway floor that Lincoln hadn’t noticed earlier. Neuma had delivered a pile of leather for the two of them to wear. “What did he say? I assume you can understand the gargoyle’s groaning better than I can.”
She handed an outfit to him. Her hand slid along his arm, briefly. The only sign of the moment they’d shared in the bathtub. “Then we better get dressed.”
They dressed hurriedly. As hurriedly as anyone dripping wet could dress in leather. Lincoln wasn’t sure why Neuma had looked at him and thought this guy will love biker leathers and a Black Death tee . Maybe it was all she had.
Lincoln had to help Elise get her boots on because she could still barely bend. “I’m not going to be able to move fast like this without help,” she said. She gave Junior a critical look as she pulled on the jacket. “Can you carry me?” Junior lifted her easily. She clambered over his shoulder onto his back, staying tight between his wings. She looked like one of the demons riding fell beasts through the flames of Hell. “Now let’s go save your friend.”
16
T raveling between two locations within the same short time period was wildly different than traveling between years. When Sophie and the Traveler jumped away from the farm, landing on a city street, Sophie felt sick. “Oh no.” On the last syllable, her open mouth became a conduit for bile, and breakfast spilled across sidewalk. “Oh no . That didn’t—ooh.” She suppressed a burp as her stomach tried to seize again. “That didn’t happen last time.”
“I pulled you between planes and a five-minute period simultaneously.” The Traveler was always akin to a colorless ghost, but it was paler than ever. The darkness at its roots had leeched out. It no longer had pupils.
“What do you mean, planes?”
“The farm is in a bubble universe. It’s physically, temporally, and dimensionally separate from the rest of this gaean plane—which is to say, the Earth that you know.” It grabbed teenaged Sophie by the elbow and marched her along the sidewalk. A fence bordered a pasture on the right, where cows rested in clusters. There was a dairy building on the far end of the field labeled with the University of Nevada’s name.
To the left ran the freeway, soaring overhead in the silent night. Sophie heard no wheels, no engines, no honking. None of the symphony of civilization that she’d found so charming in Lincoln’s company. She wondered if the freeway was in the same condition as the ground-level road beside her. It was packed with abandoned cars. There was a collision in the intersection, but no signs of the people who had been driving in the crash.
“What happened here?” Sophie asked.
“Lincoln Marshall happened here,” the Traveler said grimly. “I knew I shouldn’t have listened to him. I should have done this the right way the first time.”
“This is because of Lincoln?”
“Don’t fuck with the timeline, I said,” muttered the Traveler. “The universe is already at risk of falling apart, and you’ll speed it up if you fuck with the timeline. That’s exactly what I told him.”
Sophie opened her mouth to argue. After all, Lincoln was many terrible things, but he was competent and heroic when at his best. Surely Lincoln could not be responsible for so many empty cars.
Yet when she inhaled deeply, a foul scent rolled up her nose and down her throat. Instead of speaking, she gagged, hand clapped over her mouth. “Blood,” she rasped.
“Yes, it’s blood,” the Traveler said impatiently.
Sophie couldn’t make out the source of the odor, but it struck her that none of the cows in the field were moving. And there were many small bodies on the road between the cars.
She stepped over a dead pigeon, gagging again.
“This is what happens when you poke the sleeping dragon,” the Traveler said. “No. Worse. This is what happens when I waver in my gods-damned job!” It yanked Sophie along harder, faster, until she could barely keep up.
“Can we fix the timeline?” Sophie asked.
“If we found Lincoln, theoretically we could travel back to a day or two before we left and sever this alternate timeline he made.”
“Lincoln’s here. We can find him.”
“You wouldn’t be that confident if you were as old as I am,” the Traveler said. “Even if we find him, this might become too big a time loop to collapse. This is too distinct a difference from the original events. Might be safer to just make this timeline work.”
Sophie stumbled. “What do you mean, make it work? Thousands must be dead!”
“A lot more are gonna die if we leave retained products of a severed timeline to fester in a universe already halfway to collapse,” the Traveler snapped. “Now shut up. I’m looking for a ley line so I can planeswalk us to the hospital.”
“To the hospital?”
A knife appeared in the Traveler’s hand. It pressed the blade against Sophie’s belly and said, “To fix my mistake.”
The world tipped around them. It swirled.
Sophie blinked.
Her eyes reopened outside of a hospital.
This time, the Traveler was gripping Sophie so tightly that she couldn’t bend forward at all. The vomit dribbled down her shirt. But even through the sickness, Sophie understood exactly what was happening, and she spoke through gagging. “You’re not going to hurt my baby. You promised—”
“We had an agreement. Terms changed. The universe is more important than one life.”
That was the logically correct thing, but Sophie’s entire body screamed in fear of it. The Traveler locked its hand over her mouth, keeping the dagger pressed near her kidneys as it steered her into the hospital.
Sophie dug her heels in, but she couldn’t fight the Traveler’s force. It was too strong. And she was so much smaller than she used to be. Smaller, sickly, frightened—a cocktail that drove every last rational thought out of Sophie’s mind, leaving behind nothing but animal panic.
She tried to scream for help, but the words were muffled.
Someone will see us. There are so many people here.
The lobby was chaos. Cots filled one entire side of the room, and a patient moaned on every one, clawing at skin that was marked with swollen boils. It smelled like pus and urine. Most of the nurses had faces coming up red, too. It wouldn’t be long before they were also in too much pain to help.
Nobody cared about the Traveler passing through.
“Hey! Wait!”
The shout came just before the Traveler slammed through the doors to the ER. Sophie twisted to see someone in CNA scrubs marching toward them. He was a big man, tall and broad, and she had never been so happy to see a human being.
Sophie couldn’t cry for help, but the CNA must have seen it in her eyes.
He didn’t see the dagger.
As soon as he drew near, the Traveler’s hand flashed. Blood spread from the man’s heart. His face slackened as he fell.
Sophie wanted to scream and cry, but for this one instant, there was no dagger digging into her flank.
She tore away from the Traveler and bolted down the hallway. Sophie slipped on a smear of blood between two gurneys and stumbled, arms wrapped around her belly.
The Traveler was on her within five steps.
It grabbed a fistful of her twists and pressed the dagger hard enough under her ribs that Sophie felt it nip the skin.
“Fuck off!” the Traveler snapped at a patient who hollered. He’d seen them.
It kicked its white boot into the buttons for the elevators. The doors slid open. Sophie tried to brace her hands on the walls so she couldn’t be pulled inside, but the knife bit harder, and she felt warm blood flow down her hip.
“There needs to be one Historian,” the Traveler said, snapping the words out into Sophie’s ear. “I need to do this non-destructively. Don’t make me slip.”
The elevator doors opened again on a dark, empty floor. It was taped off. Signs marked that the area was about to be demolished and renovated, and there was absolutely no trespassing. The Traveler took its hand off of Sophie’s mouth to tear the tape down and push her down the hallw
ay.
“Help! Someone help!” Sophie screamed.
Her voice echoed off of the empty hospital ward.
“This area is uninhabited until 2010,” the Traveler said. “Nobody’s close enough to hear you.”
Sophie tried to run down the hall again.
The Traveler was so fast.
Its pale hand clamped onto Sophie’s wrist, and they traveled a short distance. Barely a flash of a trip. A ley line must have intersected the hospital. The hallway became an operating room fifty meters away.
Sophie was so busy getting sick that she could barely fight back. The Traveler slammed her to an operating table.
There were straps. So many straps. The Traveler cinched her arms down tightly, leaving her legs free, and Sophie screamed as loud as she could. “Morphine,” the Traveler muttered, pacing to the back of the room. “They still used morphine back then. Where is it?”
It returned with more than just a syringe. It also had a pair of latex gloves, a rubber tube, and a clear plastic speculum.
Sophie screamed so much harder. Hard enough that she feared she might black out.
“I’m not going to hurt you during this procedure. The world still needs a Historian, after all,” the Traveler said, not unkindly. “Try to think about how many lives you’re saving.”
“No!” Sophie kicked the Traveler when it came near, but it shoved her leg aside and drove a needle into her arm. The morphine burned hot through her body. Her throat soured, and her head throbbed.
The fight didn’t go out of her, but strength did.
Her vision blurred. She caught glimpses of the Traveler preparing itself—putting on the gloves, unlacing Sophie’s boots.
No. No!
“This won’t take long.” The Traveler’s words swam in and out of her ears. “Just sleep.”
And Sophie dropped into oblivion.