“I’ve the head for it.”
“No man does.”
“You don’t give me nearly enough credit,” Alex said, and then laughed again. The sound had barbed edges. “Besides, what would you do if I did repent? If I fell to my knees now and said that I’d been a bad boy? Would you forget dear Ellie or the valiant lieutenant? You’d make me pay in blood eventually, even if you claim otherwise now.”
“No. I—”
“You give me your word, I suppose. The word of a gentleman. Just as you’d take mine, if I promised that I’d never do such things again?”
“No.” It came out cold, and there was a raw place inside Simon that was all too glad to see Alex flinch. “You stopped being a gentleman a long time ago. I’m sorry. But there is a way—a geas—you could be better than this.”
Alex flicked his eyebrows upward, unconvinced but intrigued. “You’d take it on too, I suppose? Let the past be past, the dead bury their dead, and all that?”
“No,” Simon said a third time. “I couldn’t forgive you, and I couldn’t forget. But I’d rather have you live and hope you change. If I’d wanted to kill you, you’d have known that. A long time ago.”
“You’re very convinced—”
“You have this chance,” Simon said, interrupting Alex’s glib voice. He looked across the room and met the other man’s eyes squarely, remembering the friend of his youth and seeing his enemy now. “I don’t imagine you’ll get another.”
Alex fell silent. For a moment, he looked back at Simon, silent and thoughtful. Then he dropped his gaze, looking first to the fire and then down. He raised one hand to his face, rubbed his jaw, and the firelight flashed for a second on an emerald ring. “You’re right,” he said quietly.
“I—” It was Simon’s turn to be surprised. His hopes began to rise.
Then Alex looked up, and they shattered. Alex’s eyes were narrow, his mouth predatory, and his ring was starting to glow with a sick, greenish light. “You’re right,” he repeated, cool and amused. “This is my chance. Carpe diem, Grenville.”
Oh, hell.
The light grew brighter very quickly. Simon began muttering phrases for an invocation that would almost certainly be too late.
Alex stepped forward, raising his hand. The emerald flashed—and then Alex staggered backward, gurgling, with one hand clutching the knife hilt sticking out of his throat. He turned blindly toward the far wall, where the knife had come from, and Simon turned with him.
“You kiss,” said Joan, “like a goddamn squid.” She stood behind the sofa, one hand resting lightly on the wooden back.
“You,” said Alex. Blood poured out of his mouth as he spoke, and his voice was half choked.
The green light hadn’t faded, though. It was getting stronger.
“You stupid bitch,” said Alex.
Then he fell. But not for long.
***
The green glow spread into Alex’s hand and up his arm. Where it went, his flesh changed. The skin rippled and flexed, and the muscles beneath it bulged like tumors. Spurs of bone tore their way out past skin and muscle, sprouting like rose thorns up his legs and down his arms. A slit ripped its way down his chest and grew teeth. His neck stretched out like a snake, and his face distended, becoming a rippling thing with three eyes and a gaping shark’s maw.
The transformation took a few seconds. Then the thing that had been Alex was on its feet, looking around the room with red eyes.
“You stupid bitch,” it hissed. A yellow tongue like a nest of worms flicked out over its lips, and it took a step toward Joan.
Simon drew a deep breath and shouted seven words, with all his voice and all his will behind them. Power poured into him and then through him in a wide gold beam that hit the Thing in the chest, driving it backward. The smell of burnt honey rose in the small room, wafting with the smoke from its chest.
The Thing howled, but its voice was too strong to give Simon hope. It shook itself. Blood ran down its chest and dripped onto the floor; it squirmed where it hit, the blood itself alive for a few seconds. The creature turned toward Simon.
This time, he’d prepared. This time, the words of power hadn’t left him completely weakened. He had a little left. But not enough. Not nearly enough.
He started another invocation. It would hardly do anything to the monster, he knew, but maybe hardly anything would be enough. Maybe it would let someone else stop it; maybe Ellie and Joan could escape and find a way. If he was really very lucky, he’d at least get the spell done before the Thing ripped his head off.
There was the sound of ripping fabric.
“Hey!” Joan yelled. “Bastard. Over here!”
It didn’t look. It was too smart for that.
A blast of silvery light hit it in the shoulder. It howled again and spun around.
Joan was still behind the sofa, but the bodice of her dress was gaping open, and the flashgun was in her hands. The tubes were out, their ends buried in the bare white skin of her arm. It was as grisly a sight as it had ever been, but it was a children’s lullaby next to what she and Simon faced.
Simon kept chanting. He couldn’t do anything else.
Now the Thing did turn. Its one flaming eye focused on Joan, and it stepped forward—hurt, yes, but not badly. It moved with the same unearthly speed it had before, and if it favored one side or the other, Simon couldn’t see it. If they’d had more guns, he thought, or more people to feed energy to them—but they didn’t.
Joan caught the flashgun tubes with one hand and pulled. The ends came out easily. As Simon stared at her, baffled, she met his eyes. There was resignation in her gaze and a strange sort of exultation. Suddenly he knew what she was going to do.
There was no time to say anything. Besides, Simon’s breath caught halfway up his throat and he couldn’t make a sound.
It didn’t take long. She was very good. There was one swift motion, and then the tubes were stuck into her chest, just above her left breast. Right over her heart.
Simon took one jerky, useless step forward, his hands out and everything inside him screaming denial.
The gun began to glow.
The Thing screamed in a low clotted voice that shook the house, and it leapt forward. The remains of its lips peeled back as it went, giving it a red, wet grin. It lunged for Joan with everything, claws and teeth and snaky grasping tongue.
“Fuck you,” she said, and the gun exploded.
Silver fire blossomed in the Thing’s staring red eyes and spread like ripples in a pond, like the green light that had transformed Alex in the first place. Before the flame, strange flesh crumbled away to nothingness. The Thing’s body jerked, twitched, and then fell.
So did Joan.
***
Simon knew he must have run. He must have leapt over the couch at some point or run around it very quickly, because his hands were on Joan’s shoulders before she hit the ground. He remembered none of it. He saw Joan fall. Then she was in his arms. There was nothing in between.
She wasn’t a large woman. She’d been very light when they’d danced and made love. Now, bleeding in his arms, she felt very heavy. It was all Simon could do to lower her to the floor. He tried not to think the words dead weight.
There were things on the floor beside them. Some were shining silver, others corpse white, and Simon didn’t really see more than a glimpse of any of them. But the tubes were clearly visible, lying like dead snakes, their ends covered in blood. There wasn’t much blood on Joan herself, though, only a cluster of neat red circles over her heart. The wounds were almost bloodless, but they were very deep.
She was still breathing but not well. Shallow, spasmodic gulps of air shook her body. But she was breathing.
Simon had never needed spells for healing. He’d learned only a few, and those as an academic exercise. If he’d had time or energy for hatred, he would have hated himself for that ignorance. Instead, he made an arrow of his mind, focusing all his will on one purpose. He put his
right hand on Joan’s chest, above the awful holes, and started to chant.
She opened her eyes at the touch. They were clouded and her gaze was unsteady, but Simon could see awareness there and recognition. “Hey,” she breathed.
There was a little fleck of blood at the corner of her mouth. Simon tried not to see it or to feel how cool her flesh was under his hand. He couldn’t stop speaking, or the spell would fail. “Asclepius, Raphael, hear me. Blood and bone, do my will—”
Joan laid one of her hands on top of his and slowly smiled. “Don’t worry,” she said, moving her head very slightly from side to side. “It’s okay. Best way it could’ve gone. I thought about this…a lot.”
“Be now as you were before. Be whole.”
She reached up and laid one hand against his cheek. “Never thought of you, though. Never thought I’d fall in love here.”
Power flowed into him again, but it was sluggish this time. And where he wanted to shout, he could only manage a hoarse, desperate whisper. “I command it by all things made and unmade—”
“So I did okay,” Joan said. “We did.”
She closed her eyes again. Slowly, her hand fell from Simon’s face, back to her side. “Okay,” she breathed again.
“—by the secret names of the universe do I command—”
When the first dark spots appeared on Joan’s dress, Simon realized he was weeping.
Chapter 41
She floated, though she didn’t know through what, or even with what. Her body was elsewhere. And it was ruined. She’d drawn too much from it at the end, and too quickly. She’d shattered herself with that final act.
Once, that would’ve bothered her. Now she felt no panic, no fear, not even any disappointment.
There was only contentment. She was tired. It had been a long day. Now there was time to drift, to let go, to remember a calloused, gentle hand stroking her hair and to hear her mother’s voice singing: Will you carry the word of love?
It wasn’t like it had been before, when she’d come back across the gulf between years. There was nothing to fear in this place, if it was a place: no screaming, no shouts or explosions. No darkness either, she realized as her mind relaxed.
Light, instead. So much light: blue and green, red and gold. Vivid, ever changing, formless.
Alive.
The light spoke to her in something that wasn’t sound, in words that were only words because Joan was so recently human that she needed them.
The light said: Good job.
It said: You have served well. Faithfully. And the road has been hard for you.
“Yes,” Joan said, because it wouldn’t have been possible to lie to the light or whatever was beyond it. Not even out of kindness. She knew that, even as she felt its sorrow. She asked a child’s question: “Did we win?”
Look.
She looked, or whatever you did without eyes, into unending green light, which became blue and white and gold in front of her eyes. It became shapes: tall silver-and-white buildings, spiraling into a sky so blue it almost hurt. Green fields around them, shining wide rivers, and roads that wound around the buildings, rich and brown, or hard and black.
Some of the buildings were familiar or almost familiar, give or take a caved-in wall or three. Joan had seen the shapes before, but they’d never looked anything like this.
Without moving, she was closer, close enough to see as a person on the street would. There were many men on the street, and women too. Their bodies were whole, their faces soft and shining like those of the people she’d met in Simon’s time: people who could go their whole lives without worrying about mortal danger, who knew that, whatever might happen to them, the world would turn safely and beautifully in its orbit.
They weren’t from Simon’s time. Some of the men wore skirts, some of the women wore pants, and the vehicles that traveled the roads were like neither horse-drawn carriages nor the rusted hulks of cars from Joan’s time. Instead, they were small dragonfly-bright things that hovered above the pavement.
Some of the people hurried. Some of them looked angry or sad or concerned. But all of them walked along the streets easily without flinching. They didn’t look up at the sky every few moments, and they didn’t jump at sudden noises. There were children among them. Some pulled their parents along by the hands, while others lounged in clumps or dashed through the crowd seeking some new amusement.
Alive. Free.
Joan heard a girl’s laughter, high and careless.
Then she was somewhere else again, watching a man who stood in a lecture hall. He was laughing too, and she knew that laugh: quiet, self-conscious, like she’d heard it a thousand times growing up. She saw a woman getting out of some kind of plane and pulling off her goggles to show flashing hazel eyes. A young man walking into a building, talking earnestly with his friends.
All familiar, like the buildings had been. But like the buildings, they were made new again. Made whole.
It was stupid to be crying when she didn’t have eyes.
“They’re all right, then,” she said to the voice. “They’re all okay.”
Yes. Their lives are their own. It is for mortals to make themselves happy or not so, but their world is a fair one. Such threats as exist are not great. They are not the terror you knew. The people who live there have a chance at happiness.
Do you wish to join them?
“I’m dead,” Joan replied. “Or dying.”
Not so. The young magician has some knowledge of healing, even if it is imperfect, and what power he has may yet be augmented. The beings he calls on are more real, in some sense, than he knows, and it is not their way to leave such deeds as yours unrewarded. Nor is it mine.
So—
You may disappear there and reappear in the time you see—weak, yes, but alive and in no danger of being otherwise. You will heal well there, I think. And no, he will not think you dead. You will vanish, and he will know nothing more. But he will hope.
Joan looked back at the shining city, at the way the sun glinted off the buildings and at the people who walked along the street enjoying the light and the warmth. “Will they know me?” she asked. “The ones I knew—back then?”
No. Some part of them—the part that hasn’t changed—might recognize you, and they might feel more deeply toward you than one might expect between one stranger and another. But they are not really who they were. They have their own lives there, and you will still be very much yourself.
“It looks like a very gentle world,” she said.
It is. They are not used to war or to warriors. You will be as alien there, in some ways, as you have been to those around you for the past few months.
“Does that mean I won’t be happy?”
Happiness is always possible. And never guaranteed.
Joan withdrew a little, though she didn’t know how she did it, and thought. She might have done so for a minute; she might have spent a few days. The light didn’t seem impatient.
“This world—is it going to stay like that?” she asked, finally.
Perhaps. It’s likely, at least, that it will reach that state, without much chance of interference from the past. Afterward? Even I cannot say. It’s a peaceful world, but peace has two sides, and much of the old knowledge has been lost. For good or ill.
It was like crying without eyes. You couldn’t draw a deep breath if you didn’t have lungs, and you couldn’t square shoulders you didn’t have. Joan made the effort anyway.
“Then I’ll stay where I was, if I can,” she said. “I’ll train others. Someone should—someone who knows what’s waiting out there for Their chance. Who knows what the world could have been and what it might still become if there aren’t people who can defend it.
A horrible thought occurred to her then.
“Unless that would make it all go wrong again.”
The light laughed at her, spreading warm waves of mirth. No. No. It’s a good thought, and a noble one. But that’s not the only reason y
ou go back, is it?
“No. Not the only one. I’ve spent my whole life just knowing duty. It seems strange to be going somewhere for love too.”
When Joan looked directly at the light, it was a bright, cheerful red, the color of ripe cherries high in trees on a summer’s day.
Go back, then, it said. Go and be as happy as any determined young woman can make herself. The ones you saw will never know how much they owe to any three people so far in the past, but they will dream of you sometimes, and those dreams will be happy. Nobody is ever truly parted, not forever, and no deed is ever fully forgotten.
Joan didn’t say anything. She thought she should and then knew she didn’t need to.
The light turned gold and grew brighter, and then it was the gently glowing flame of a candle behind glass and she saw Simon’s head bent over her. He was chanting and crying at the same time. Eleanor was holding the candle, and it wasn’t quite steady because her hand was shaking.
If Joan had ever doubted her choice, that doubt would have vanished then. “We’re in a lot of trouble,” she said, and watched both of them turn to stare at her. She found the strength to grin. “How are we going to get out of this house before the police get here?”
Simon’s face was a study in a number of emotions, but Joan didn’t get to spot them all because she didn’t get to look at him long. Heedless of his sister, the police, or the fact that Joan was lying on the floor, he bent and kissed her.
Oh, what the hell, Joan thought, giddy with victory and blood loss. She pressed up into his arms, listening to the broken words he muttered whenever his mouth left hers—love you, couldn’t bear it, can’t lose you—and stopped worrying about the police. I don’t think there’s any law about killing demons.
Epilogue
Even in the country, August was too hot to do much during the day. Everyone said so.
The doctor who’d examined Joan had been pretty damn firm about it. He’d also said several things about the effect of heat on the “female constitution” that had made Joan roll her eyes.
No Proper Lady Page 26