Into The Crooked Place

by Alexandra Christo

  “I can’t keep it at bay forever,” Wesley said.

  “I’m trying!” Tavia yelled.

  She closed her eyes again, body rocking from side to side as the reverie charm matted between her mind and the consort’s. But Saxony could feel the power, or the lack of it, barely circling the air.

  The consort was dazed, but conscious, and as hard as Tavia willed the magic to work some kind of a miracle, Saxony knew it wouldn’t.

  You couldn’t just break into someone’s mind with a charm.

  You couldn’t just break into someone’s mind without first breaking your soul.

  Tavia let go of the consort and looked at Saxony with eyes halfway between pleading and apologetic. Like she was sorry she couldn’t be the one to bear the burden.

  “Saxony.”

  Saxony held up a hand. “I know,” she said.

  So quiet. So unlike the warrior she needed to be.

  Saxony turned to the consort and her eyes flashed with fear.

  “Don’t,” the consort said, now fully alert. “Please don’t.”

  But Saxony couldn’t be bargained with. She didn’t want to do this; she needed to. They’d die otherwise. And if there was any chance of saving Zekia, then Saxony had to sacrifice whoever stood in her way.

  She straddled the consort and raised her hands to the woman’s temples.

  The consort trembled beneath her.

  When a tear slipped from her eyes and trailed onto Saxony’s hand, she readied herself.

  “Don’t,” the consort said again.

  But Saxony did.

  SAXONY’S MAGIC flooded between herself and the consort like a river, not bound by walls or banks or its own current. Their minds became estuaries, dragged and pulled into the wildness of the sea that thrashed between them. Tidal, drowning the air from their lungs.

  Saxony could hear the consort’s sobs inside her head, her tears on Saxony’s eyes and her moans on Saxony’s lips. She wanted to cry out alongside her, but her voice was dragged to the horizon, separated from her body, and whatever screams Saxony willed died quietly inside of her.

  Something ragged and snakelike wrapped inside her stomach, like it was navigating a maze.

  Then it began to tug.

  It tugged Saxony outward and inward, and she pressed harder into the consort’s mind until the tangled thing pulled with such might that Saxony broke through layers of consciousness like they were walls. One by one slamming against them until it felt like she might go on forever.

  Her head split.

  Saxony didn’t need to see the blood to know it was there. She could feel it crawl into her mouth.

  Then the pulling stopped.

  When Saxony opened her eyes, reality had shifted.

  The consort’s mind smelled of cigars and rainwater and the air was too solid to breathe. There was nothingness, endlessness, just tiny particles of reality drifting and floating in front of Saxony, until they formed long strings that dangled by the tip of her nose.

  Threads.

  Wesley had told her to pull on whatever ones she could. Saxony wondered if he’d meant it to be so literal.

  She reached out for one.

  The darkness jarred and from the nothing, a forest sprouted. Great trees crawled from emptiness and grew fingers that turned to branches, their trunks mottled gray and their leaves slicked in deep red that wept onto the ground.

  Saxony found herself on a bench, perched on the edge of a small path that whittled through the trees, like a chalk mark on the soil.

  She could feel the absence of her magic instantly. There was no room for miracles inside minds, it seemed.

  Beside her, the consort let out a breath.

  Eirini Dimitriou.

  Saxony knew her name now and, if she pressed hard enough, she sensed she could know so much more.

  “This was my favorite place as a child,” Eirini said.

  She was younger, with hair longer and blonder—longer than Karam’s, even—and the corners of her eyes not yet creased by the weariness of sin.

  She leaned back and her arms eagled over the bench so that the tips of her fingers sparked against Saxony’s shoulder. When Eirini met her gaze, her eyes were as red as the leaves of the forest.

  “It doesn’t look like a happy place,” Saxony said.

  “My mother died here. I suppose that sullied the memory.”

  Saxony swallowed. “This isn’t the memory I’m looking for.”

  “What you’re looking for isn’t a memory. It’s a map.”

  Eirini blinked and from a nearby tree a creature emerged.

  It slithered from the trunk, pulling its feet from the roots and detaching like a severed limb. When it straightened to the height of a man, the forest drew in a breath and a thousand tiny monsters of light burst from the exhale and sped toward the creature in a protective shield.

  It opened its arms, wide and twisted and torn, like it was half bat and half man.

  The light monsters sank agreeably into its skin until the creature’s arms were alive and glowing, and it jerked them in a birdlike motion, levitating a few inches off the forest floor.

  Not a creature. Not just a creature.

  A king of monsters and magic.

  Saxony stood. “What is this?”

  “You wanted to find him,” Eirini said. “You wanted his map.”

  Saxony eyed the creature as it curled around the forest. Its magic was strong enough to make her feel like she was drowning all over again.

  Dante Ashwood.

  Saxony couldn’t see his face, but she once heard a group of buskers saying nobody ever had. Not even Wesley. She didn’t believe it then, but seeing this incarnation of the Kingpin, it seemed possible.

  It wasn’t that he never showed his face, but rather he no longer had a face to show.

  He was a man turned to nightmare, corrupted by the power of the Crafters he stole from their homes. Saxony’s people. People like her amja and Zekia. This was what a human became when they meddled in power that was not theirs. When they bought and sold magic like a commodity.

  He was magic made into madness.

  “I want to know where the Kingpin is in my reality,” Saxony said.

  “He’s here,” Eirini said. “Here, there, everywhere.”

  Saxony glared down at her. Her magic was no use in this place, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t beat Eirini to death if she didn’t give her a straight answer.

  Karam had really rubbed off on her.

  “I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me,” Saxony said.

  “I’m telling you to kill him.”

  “I will if you tell me where he is.”

  “No,” Eirini said. “Kill him now.”

  She pointed to the ghostly incarnation of the Kingpin, who had haunted Saxony’s thoughts as a faceless phantom for so long.

  “Kill him if you want to find him.”

  Saxony didn’t hesitate. She walked toward the Kingpin and reached for the knife Karam had gifted her, which was, unlike her magic, still there.

  She thought about where she should strike him first. She thought about all the times she had seen Karam pummel people at the Crook. She thought about how this would be good practice for when the real day approached and she would burn through Ashwood like he was parchment paper.

  She thought that would be a very good day.

  Saxony didn’t think about how this would be the first person she killed, because the Kingpin was not a person.

  He turned to Saxony. His hood was made of wind, rusted and decayed into tangibility, as though it had tried to breeze through his invisible face and gotten stuck there.

  Saxony tried to search for eyes, but the Kingpin had none. Everything from the neck up was a blur, or a memory that was being erased the moment she made it. She knew he had a face, he must have had one, but she couldn’t picture it, even as she was standing before him, staring straight into the spot where his eyes should have been.

&
nbsp; “I’m going to kill you,” Saxony said. “In this reality and the next.”

  The Kingpin didn’t speak, and though this could have been because he didn’t have a mouth, Saxony suspected it was because he simply did not speak to Wesley’s underlings, in any reality.

  In spite of herself and the knowing that this Kingpin was not the one she searched for, nor technically the one she hated, and most definitely not the one who had taken her sister, Saxony said, “Tell me what happened to Zekia.”

  The Kingpin laughed, mouthless and breathless, and loud enough that the trees heard and shook their branches to join him. He was either laughing at her stupidity, for trying to bargain with a dream and a dream creature, or her audacity for trying to bargain with a kingpin. Or maybe he was laughing because that was just what evil things did.

  Either way, Saxony stabbed him.

  There was a blissful moment, a half of a half of a second, where the tip of Saxony’s blade made contact with the place the Kingpin’s heart may have been. The metal pierced the sheath covering his torso. It was glorious and wonderful and Saxony’s pulse could be heard in her ears.

  And then the blade stopped.

  It didn’t pierce through the Kingpin’s skin. It didn’t draw blood or gasps from his mouthless face.

  It didn’t kill him.

  The blade stilled against his chest and then folded in on itself, crumpling to the hilt.

  Saxony staggered back.

  “Not with that,” Eirini called. “Try something else.”

  “I have nothing else!” Saxony yelled. “There’s no magic in your mind.”

  She could almost feel Eirini shrugging.

  “The Kingpin seems to have some,” Eirini said. “But I suppose you could also try brute force.”

  Saxony let out a breath. “That was what stabbing him was supposed to be.”

  “Maybe use your head this time,” Eirini advised.

  Saxony swung her fist. She aimed for the Kingpin’s face and met air. He moved like the tree branches. She tried to pull her hand back, but the Kingpin caught it in his crow-like fingers and squeezed until her wrist popped like the cork of a wine bottle.

  Saxony’s skin turned ashen. Brown to gray and gray to nothing. Her staves stung.

  Memories flashed across her mind—of her mother and brother screaming as they were engulfed in flames. Of her father and her amja. Of Zekia when she was still just a child.

  Karam’s face came next. Eyes like caverns and a gold chain looping from her nostril and a smile pulling her dark lips into submission.

  The Kingpin’s grip tightened and one by one the images dissolved inside Saxony. Karam’s smile vanished and no matter how hard Saxony tried to recall it, she couldn’t. She couldn’t remember the way her father smelled or the prayer song Amja used to sing to get Saxony to sleep after her mother and brother died.

  Saxony writhed against the Kingpin.

  Even here, even now, he was taking everything from her. Not just her blood, or her magic, or even her life. He wanted her memories. He wanted her dreams.

  That was when it struck her.

  This thing in front of Saxony wasn’t the Kingpin. He was an illusion. An imagined monster. But Saxony wasn’t. She was real and that meant she wasn’t bound to whatever rules Eirini’s mind set.

  If she needed Ashwood dead, all she had to do was want it.

  Saxony closed her eyes.

  Use your head, Eirini had told her.

  She pictured the Kingpin’s skin and the creatures that crawled beneath it. She imagined them flying from his arms, taking not only their light, but his skin, too. She thought of it peeling like a bandage, flaking from his bones and fluttering upward with the light creatures.

  The image replayed over in her mind a hundred times, with the Kingpin screaming and thrashing and his facelessness morphing into a smudge of pain.

  It looped so many times that it took Saxony a while to realize that the screaming had stopped being imagined.

  Her eyes drifted open and the Kingpin of Uskhanya was on his knees.

  His bones were black with decaying magic and his skin curled away like singed paper. Around him, the light creatures swarmed. Saxony could feel their charge electrify as they tried to launch at her, but it took hardly any focus to hold them in place. To make them watch as their Kingpin withered into the soil.

  Eirini’s hand slipped into Saxony’s.

  “Good,” she said. “Now you’re ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  Eirini’s fingers pressed harder into her knuckles.

  “War.”

  The forest bent around them, shivering until the rustling of the leaves sounded like cries. Like the Kingpin’s skin, pieces from the trees began to peel away, the soil turning to pale sand. Green bloomed back and the veins of the leaves stretched to long needles.

  Out of the forest, an island was born.

  Saxony staggered back. Around them, the sea thrashed for miles into the air, but was stopped just short of the island by an invisible wall that turned it into a curtain of water.

  “Where are we?” Saxony asked.

  “The last place I will ever see. I imagine it looks something like this, though I’ve never been. When you leave, the map will go from my mind to yours.” Eirini swallowed, the sound louder than the sea. “You can take it when you take my sanity.”

  “This is Ashwood’s hideout,” Saxony said in a gasp. “It’s where he’s keeping the Crafters.”

  Eirini cracked her knuckles rhythmically, the pops like tiny heartbeats.

  “When you come to this place, your regrets will too,” she said. “Don’t let them trap you.”

  “Our regrets,” Saxony repeated. “You mean we’ll be tested?”

  Eirini nodded and a drop of blood slipped from her eye like a tear. “Can you take me with you when you leave?” she asked. “I don’t like it here anymore.”

  “You know that’s not how this works,” Saxony said.

  The change in Eirini was sudden.

  She tilted her neck, assessing Saxony, and it cracked, causing her head to tremble back and forth until her ear finally rested on her shoulder. A bruise swelled up suddenly on her arm.

  Two.

  Three.

  Four.

  They were fingerprints.

  Saxony was breaking her.

  With every moment she was in Eirini’s mind, the consort fractured.

  She was the monster here, feeding on things that were not to be fed on.

  “You can’t leave me.” Eirini popped her knuckles again and when her hand broke apart, one of her fingers snapped the wrong way.

  “Give me the passphrase for the security system,” Saxony said. “I don’t have much time.”

  “Time is all you have. It’s all you’ll need. Carry it with you if you want your war to succeed.”

  Saxony gritted her teeth. “Stop talking in riddles.”

  Eirini smiled and a line of her teeth dropped to the floor.

  Fire struck the earth between them.

  Saxony jumped back. By the shore, the sea’s mighty waves stretched over the invisible wall and dribbled onto the sand.

  She couldn’t stay. Eirini’s mind was unraveling and if the pain didn’t make her body give out, then her insanity would trap Saxony here forever.

  “The passphrase,” Saxony demanded.

  “I already told you. You have to kill for answers in this place.”

  Behind them, the tree trunks rocked in the soil and the crystal sky began to quake.

  There wasn’t time to hesitate or weigh up her conscience.

  Saxony knew what had to be done.

  She let a hand rest on Eirini’s newly skeletal shoulder, while the other reached for her blade. The one that had broken against the Kingpin’s skin and was now miraculously whole again.

  “The realms make monsters of us all,” Eirini said.

  “It’s not the realms.” The blade felt too light in Saxony’s hands. “I
t’s the people in them.”

  She gave herself a moment to breathe before she plunged the knife into Eirini’s stomach.

  The consort fell to the sand and the blood crawled from her like insects.

  It was black under Saxony’s fingernails.

  “May the Many Gods guide you,” she whispered.

  Eirini tugged on her arm, dragging Saxony down to her knees.

  “Beware of your past,” she said. “Deft es gurs.”

  With a series of bangs that sounded like gunshots, the sea burst through like a broken dam.

  And then the island exploded.

  It splintered down the middle, dragging the trees from their roots and pulling the sand so voraciously that it whipped and cut across Saxony’s face.

  Then the tug came in her body again, pushing her backward until she was stumbling and crawling toward the tear with no control.

  Eirini’s body lay broken on the ground, unmoving against the strong winds.

  Saxony stared at the knife in her stomach and had just enough time to wish it back into her hand, clean, bloodstains long forgotten, before she fell through the crack and into reality.

  TAVIA KNEW WELL ENOUGH that Crafters had more power in their pinkies than she did in her whole arsenal, but seeing that power in the flesh, in Saxony’s hands, was a little different.

  Saxony spoke three words, just three, and the room stopped closing in.

  “Deft es gurs.”

  The walls retreated and the iron bars that blockaded around them squealed upward.

  The air thinned out.

  Tavia panted on the floor, tasting the alcohol wafting over from the consort’s half-empty glass. The one that was right beside her fully dead hand.

  The walls trembled in fear and then slammed back on themselves, shattering a hole through the side of the building like a gaping mouth.

  Saxony walked toward the edge and let out a low whistle.

  “Did you mean to do that?” Tavia asked.

  “At least I blasted a hole in the building and not our faces.”

  “Tell me you have Ashwood’s location,” Wesley said.

  Saxony nodded. “I’ve got the way to his island inside my mind like a map.”

  “I guess I was right to put my faith in you.”

  Wesley took out his gun and checked the bullets. He turned to face the doorway, which solidified into a mirror that reflected back at them the horror of what they had done.