Hearts of Chaos

by Kira Brady

  “Did you know Marduk designated the human race to work for us so that the gods might be in leisure?” Tiamat asked. She was resplendent in the morning sun. He’d lived in the Pacific Northwest his entire life, and he’d never seen so much damned sunshine. Tiamat had ordered the Kivati weather workers to blow the clouds away. Every day, he watched Theo stand facing the west and willing the clouds to part. Every day, as the sun tanned Theo’s skin, the effort of holding so much sustained concentration leeched the life from his body. When he died, Tiamat would send another to take his place. But none were as strong as Theo. Except Kai.

  Him, she had other plans for. But once his babe was in her belly?

  The thought turned his stomach, not just because he could become irrelevant to her, but because of the abomination she hoped to conceive. A half-Drekar, half-Kivati offspring was something that the gods should never let exist. Would the soullessness of the Drekar succumb to the dual divinity of the Kivati, blessed with a soul from birth as Constance claimed? Would it Change to Drekar or totem or both? What else could a child spawned by divine Chaos do? What terrible Aether powers would it wield? Tiamat wanted to take that child and rule both the Land of the Living and the Land of the Dead, and it filled him with fear.

  Divinely fucked up. He couldn’t begin to fathom the terror for the world. So far, the forced Drekar-Kivati matings that she was experimenting with had failed to produce offspring. If not for Constance’s claims, he would think it wasn’t possible to combine the two races. Even copulating with humans, Drekar had such low fertility rates that they were practically sterile, and not for want of trying. But who was she hiding? He found himself staring at every Kivati face, searching for a telltale slit iris. He found none.

  Tiamat drew near him and snuggled into the empty curve of his arms. “You will learn to crave Chaos’s beauty,” she whispered. “Never knowing where your next step will lead. Never living beyond the one beautiful moment that is in your grasp.” She pulled his hands around her to rub her still-flat belly. A little purr came from her throat. She was insatiable as a cat in heat, and his loathing couldn’t overcome his deep addiction to her body.

  He hated himself.

  “I will break you of this habit of planning for the future, so you too can be free,” she said.

  His stomach clenched. He tried to will his body to relax around her, but it was like cuddling a cobra. She was beautiful and vain and capricious, and the only thing he could count on was that she would always surprise him with increasingly creative brutality. “I’m free with you,” he forced himself to say with a smile.

  “But I know your secret fears,” she whispered. “From chaos comes life. So it was in the beginning. So shall it be again. Be free.” She held up one hand and coalesced a brilliant blue ball of Aether. He watched her turn her gaze toward the slaves laying stone stripped from the buildings in downtown Seattle. The rising sun glinted off their tools as they struggled to re-create Babylon for her.

  He knew in an instant what she planned. The moment dragged out as he watched her raise her arm and release the glowing ball toward the crumbling tower and the fifty or so slaves digging at its base. He could have knocked her arm and blown his cover. Or maybe he only tortured himself that he had that choice. The rebels and the Kivati still trapped on the hill depended on him to stay next to her. To distract her. To divine her plans and warn them in time.

  But she liked to watch him struggle as his mortality stripped slowly from his bones just like the muscle and flesh from her still-living, still-breathing, still-screaming victims.

  At the last moment he turned his head away. He heard the crash of Aether. Heard the roar of the toppling building. Heard the cries. The silence of death was loudest of all.

  To the west, Puget Sound glistened in peaceful waves. He felt the rising tide of Aether as fifty souls suddenly ripped from their bodies and flowed into the sparkling water, westward across the sky, and through the Gate. With his Aether senses, he forced himself to watch every last one cross the barrier between this world and the next.

  Three months, Corbette had been gone. Three months of blood as he searched in the Land of the Dead after some mythical instrument. If Tiamat hadn’t been so sure it existed, Kai would never believe Corbette was coming back. But he’d heard her talk about the Scepter enough that he knew it could be their only hope for killing her. What was the fucker doing while they suffered and died under Chaos’s wrath? He’d never been much of a religious man, but every day he prayed to the Lady that Corbette would succeed in his quest and save them all.

  Tiamat turned in his arms. The glint in her eye was fierce. He knew that look. After her little display, he had to work to get hard for her.

  Tiamat cupped his groin and whispered in his ear, “Come, love, rule the world with me.”

  Power, sex, and a beautiful woman. He might be tempted, if she wasn’t a psychotic mass murderer. He imagined Zetian and that one time they’d fucked up against an alley wall. Enemy against enemy in one moment of madness. He tried to pretend she was still there somewhere trapped inside her own body, and when his dick got hard, it was all for her.

  Chapter Eleven

  Corbette asked his father’s ghost for help, and the knot of anger in his chest released like the snapping of a rubber band. He hadn’t realized how much resentment he’d carried over from boyhood. He’d told himself for so long that nothing his father did or said could affect him anymore, but calling for Halian in his hour of need showed him for a liar. Would his father come? Could his ghost do anything to save them from the fury of the Lady’s beast?

  He waited a long breath, the hope that his father would come a welcome change from the anger that had rusted over his heart.

  The Behemoth roared again. The discordant notes of the sound twanged and then melded together into a chorus of bells. The monster charged. As Corbette watched death streak toward him, one last image floated in his mind: Lucia on the balcony with the rain beading on her coral lips and plastering her white gown to her skin. He should have kissed her then, should have licked the water from her lips, warmed the chill autumn from her arms, and twirled her across the veranda while the rain beat out a waltz.

  The heat of the Behemoth sizzled the air around them. Lucia moved to step in front of him, but he grabbed the sheet of water out of her hands. As soon as he touched it, it turned back into a cloak. It was almost comical. He tried to pinpoint the moment when everything started to go so wrong as he watched the Lady’s judgment barrel down on him.

  He should have forgiven Halian when he had the chance. “Please, Father.” The name tumbled from his lips.

  And then in the space between him and death, a Raven appeared. His father, coal black with a rainbow sheen on his feathers like an oil slick. He was man-sized, but much smaller than the great Behemoth. The blue-white fire from the creature outlined the black of the Raven in a blinding silhouette. The Raven hovered in front of Corbette, protecting him. The Behemoth lowered its head and hooked the Raven with its two razor horns. They tore through and out of the Raven’s back, and then took Corbette in the face. He was consumed with fire. Blue, blue, blue, and pain. His eyes burned.

  Slowly the pain faded. He lay in the smoking sand, the grit of the desert in his mouth and beneath his palms, but he was alive. His father had saved him. He could smell scorched glass, but he didn’t hear the Behemoth. He didn’t hear anything for a long moment, until a soft, female cry, and then small hands caressed his face. A few drops of water hit his cheek. He turned his head away from the sand to see if the sky was raining, but there was only that eerie blue above and below. No Behemoth. No Raven. No sand or sky.

  “Lucia?”

  “I’m here.”

  But he couldn’t see her face. He was Raven. Sight was his strongest sense, and he was blind.

  Lucia held Corbette’s head in her hands. The Behemoth had vanished. She’d watched it gore Corbette in slow, agonizing motion, but she couldn’t find a single mark on him. There were no
wounds. No torn flesh or holes the size of an elephant’s tusk. She smoothed her hands over him twice, thrice, ten times just to be sure. Still, something was wrong. He didn’t get up. He didn’t look at her with his usual arrogance and brush off her concern. He stared blankly over her left shoulder. Blinked. Moved his head slowly side to side, still staring. His hands crept up to cover his eyes. “What’s wrong? Corbette, answer me. Where do you hurt?”

  He took his hand away, and she was shocked to see a milky haze had appeared over his pupils. His eyes swirled with phantom stars just like the eyes of the Behemoth. He’d been touched by the gods. Marked, and she didn’t think it had been in blessing.

  “Is it gone?” he asked, voice gruff.

  “Yes.”

  He adjusted his head in the direction of her voice, and now he was staring at her left eyebrow. By the Lady. Her heart dropped into her shoes. “You can’t see me?”

  “My”—he cleared his throat—“my father?”

  She looked over to where the Raven had fallen. He’d Changed back to man. “He’s moving.”

  “Go see to him.” Corbette shut his eyelids. “Please.”

  She was afraid to leave his side, in case he died before she got back. Halian was already dead, so what did it matter if she saw to him? But she did as he asked. Gently lowering his head back to the sand, she went to find Halian. Halian’s eyes were still the black void of death. She put her hand on his forehead, and he surged to a standing position. She saw the lines of pain in his handsome face had melted away. What had the Behemoth done to him?

  “It wasn’t the Behemoth,” he said. “Change happens in the heart.”

  Had she spoken out loud?

  He walked to his son and knelt. Carefully cradling Corbette’s head in his lap, he bent to give his forehead a kiss.

  “Father,” Corbette murmured.

  She was intruding on a private moment, but she couldn’t turn away.

  “Thank you, Emory,” Halian said. His dead eyes glistened. “I have been waiting for this moment for a long, long time.”

  “I’m sorry,” Corbette said.

  “I’m sorry too.” They sat like that for a long breath.

  “Where will you go now?”

  “To join your mother. My soul passed on long ago. I am merely a projection of Halian Corbette’s last ties to the Living World.”

  “So you’re free now.”

  “We both are.”

  Lucia wrapped her arms around herself. There was a rawness in Halian’s face that made her eyes itch. “I thought you were going to guide us,” she said. The day had run her down, and there was no sign of the Lady of Death and her stupid Scepter. “Is the palace close? I don’t know the way. How will we—”

  Halian turned to her with that charming smile that made him look unrelated to Corbette. “A last gift. Over that far dune you will find a boat.”

  “A boat.”

  He winked and the edges of his form began to twinkle. His body faded in a ripple of light as the Aether Changed him back to Raven. He hovered in the air for two long wing beats, then rose and flew in the direction he had pointed, west, finally slipping out of sight over the horizon. The wind blew sand from the nearby dunes, the fall of granules a soft shushing across the glass lanes. They looked like luges for angels. In a day or two, no one would be able to tell what had happened here.

  Corbette pushed himself to his feet. He wobbled, his balance terrible without his primary sense. He staggered away from her.

  “Over here,” she called, words echoing in the stillness. “We need to go west. Do you hurt?”

  “No.” His voice was sharp. The sand shifted under his feet, and he stumbled. She ran to him and took his arm. He stiffened for a moment, and then allowed her to turn him west and lead him toward the far dune.

  His shirt hung open. Sand clung to the sculpted plane of his chest and the hard pack of abs. She looked. She could look all she wanted, and he would never know. There was only a thread of guilt, but mostly she felt possessive. He was blind and helpless and half naked, completely and utterly at her mercy.

  The tables had turned.

  Corbette clutched Lucia’s elbow as the ground gave way beneath his feet. There were no lights and darks, no sky or horizon. He tried to keep his head up, back straight, but he barely knew which way was up. The world felt small. He was trapped in a box. A coffin. The only thing that was real was the soft woman at his side.

  “We’re at the top of a dune,” she said. He adjusted his idea of her position based on her voice. She was taller than he remembered. Stronger. Unfailingly patient with him. Inside, shame curled around his spine and slipped through the cracks between his bones. He’d never been so helpless. As they slid down the sand, he had no sense of the length of the dune or what horrors waited at the dark bottom, but he could hear the rhythmic lap of waves against a rocky shore. “We’ve reached a sea,” Lucia said. Her voice was too cheerful. “We might be in the Caribbean—turquoise waters, warm golden sand, and a pretty little boat painted white with green trim. This will be a piece of cake.”

  The edge of his mouth curled. “There is no boat, is there?”

  He felt the muscles in her arm tense.

  “Yes, there is.”

  “And yet you lie so beautifully.”

  “Well, there is a boat.” A small breath of air fanned his face as if she was waving her hand in front of his unseeing eyes.

  “Are we alone?”

  “Yup. No one else on the beach.” A thread of worry undercut her cheerfulness. There might be a boat, but there was no boatman to ferry them across.

  “Can you see the other side? The place we’re meant to row to?”

  “Sure. Maybe. If I squint, I can see a sort of island.”

  At that moment, he could see the attractiveness of faith. His words to his father came back to him: I make my own fate. But the gods had left him with almost nothing. “I can row.”

  “You can’t see.”

  “You can navigate.” The helplessness of it sent his blood pressure skyrocketing. If he were whole, he’d Change to Raven and fly out over the ocean until he burned off this restless energy. But he couldn’t Change. He couldn’t even row a gods-be-damned boat without help. His body was too tight in his skin.

  She tugged his elbow. As he moved to follow, he stumbled and took them both down. He couldn’t roll to soften her landing, and so landed on top of her like a whale, pushing her down into the giving sand. The ground vibrated beneath his face with the pound of the surf. He tasted salt and seaweed and rotting fish. “White sand beach, huh?”

  “Yeah,” she said, but she sounded winded. Her mouth hovered near his cheekbone, her breath soft on his face, her curves yielding beneath him. There was no light but touch and this woman whose siren voice called him.

  Just as he’d decided to roll off her, she closed the distance. Her mouth coaxed his, tentative, inviting, and all of a sudden the world righted itself again. He might be blind, but he didn’t need sight for this. The night was the kingdom of lovers. He knew Lucia’s face by memory. He found her tongue and tasted her hunger.

  The kiss was full of quiet desperation. Unlike the kiss in the tunnels beneath the city, this one wasn’t a good-bye. Corbette’s possessive hands marked her. His mouth anchored her, sweet and insistent. She could taste his fear, and was only too happy to comfort him. Blind, but not injured, she didn’t feel the least guilt about taking advantage of him.

  But he pulled away before things got too heated. “Lucia—”

  “Let me guess: Time’s a-wastin’?” She gave a wry laugh. “The Scepter, Tiamat, your eyesight . . . the list just gets longer.”

  Corbette sat up and turned his face into the wind. His eyes seemed to stare out to sea, body still. A sheen of sweat clung to his sculpted chest and arms. She wanted to lick off the salt. “We’re not alone.”

  She looked up. Birds filled the skies. They perched on the beached logs lining the shore. Some wheeled overhead, chattering l
ike old biddies. A heron flapped across the beach and landed on the boat. It gave a long, throaty caw.

  “Who is that?” Corbette asked.

  “A heron,” she said. “He wants us to get into the boat.”

  “Spirits of the dead sometimes play tricks.”

  She studied him. The mask had descended again. The Raven Lord: cold and calculating. But she’d seen him vulnerable, and she’d never look at him without seeing the pain on his face at the Behemoth’s punishment, or the pleasure of the kiss. “I’ve taken advantage of you,” she said.

  His eyebrows jumped. “Of me?”

  “Yeah. Here you are stripped of your weapons and defenses, your very eyesight, and you’re dependent on me to protect you,” she said. His lips thinned. “And the first thing I do is kiss you like I want to tear off your clothes.”

  He gave a dark laugh. “Well, when you put it that way . . .”

  “You really ought to know . . .” She touched his lower back, and he jumped, not knowing she’d slipped up behind him. Standing on her tiptoes, she brought her mouth to the sensitive skin right below his ear. “. . . I plan to do it again.” His breathing sped up. He turned to catch her, but she darted out of reach, laughing.

  His reaching hand curled into a fist, and he turned back out to sea. “What will I do with you, fair lady? Every time I try to cast you as a damsel in distress, you turn my world on its head.”