by Gemma Files
Rook lifted one hand, stroked Chess’s jawline as if memorizing its feel. Then smiled, and murmured: “Skin off, darlin’.”
Without a second’s hesitation Chess flung away his hat, shrugged off his vest, blank face empty. His hands moved entirely of their own accord. But it wasn’t until the gunbelt hit the stone with a clatter — until Chess’s guns themselves went spinning away — that Morrow finally found the strength to protest. “You son of a bitch,” he choked out. “Just what the hell you fixin’ to do to him? He loves you.”
Rook didn’t look around, as Chess finished stripping down. His eyes seemed to shine in the murk — a tear, or just the gleam of power-lust? “Guess he really must, at that,” he said, wonderingly. “The Lady tells me this wouldn’t work, otherwise.”
The air was so thick with magic now that Morrow almost felt he could see the cord of Rook’s geas: a shimmering tension like a glass rod glimpsed in flowing water, running taut from Morrow’s head to a point inside Rook’s coat, the pocket where the mojo-bag rested. He sucked in the deepest breath he could and grabbed for the line of power — felt it quiver against his palm, a ghost-wire of air and static.
“No,” Morrow ground out — and pulled on the geas, hauling himself a step forward, into the circle. It hurt like yanking his own brain out through his eye sockets. But Rook winced too, and put one hand to his head as if pained by a too-bright light.
Slowly, Chess’s staring eyes blinked.
Lady Ixchel did not move, her rapturous gaze holding fast upon the gigantic overhanging moon. But a wavefront of fury struck the circle in a sandstorm, hot and stinging; the men cried out, dropped to their knees. Given that Morrow was already half-mad with pain, however, it didn’t make much never-mind to him: he hunkered down and pulled himself another step forward. Two more, and Chess would be within arm’s reach. . . .
Rook sighed, and brought his hand to the nexus of the mojo-bag, stroking his coat. Every nerve in Morrow’s body went dead in an instant. He crumpled — slack, but for just that moment so blissful with numb release he didn’t care at all, tears smearing over the cold black stone, as he gasped out sobbing breaths.
“Now that . . . is truly something special,” Rook said. “Never once occurred to me you could pull on a binding from either end. Never thought anyone wasn’t already a hex’d be fool enough to try.”
“Ash . . .” Chess turned his head slowly, drunken. “Ash, I can’t . . . can’t move, Ash. Whuthah . . . fuck . . .”
“Shhh.” Rook cupped Chess’s face in his hands, and cold-kissed his forehead. “’S’all gonna be all right, darlin’. I wouldn’t do nothin’ to cause you real harm. I love you.” Holding Chess’s eyes with his own: “You believe that, right?”
“. . . shouldn’t I?” Chess’s glance cut sideways, to the dark woman-thing nearby, and blazed with fury. “Oh, ’course I should. ’Cause you been so damn nice to me, lately — you, and her. . . .”
Rook smiled. “Hex can’t stay true to hex, Chess. You saw me with Songbird — I paid her price, fair as fair does, and she tried to kill me anyhow. Just ’cause she knew damn well just exactly how nice it’d feel, if she did.”
“The fuck’s that . . . got to do with . . . you and me? I ain’t no — ”
“You are, darlin’. Always have been. Not awake like me, not yet — but you been wakin’ slow and sure these past years, and once you came to full flower, wouldn’t be nothing left for us but to feed. On each other. ’Til one of us was dead.” Rook’s voice roughened with sorrow. “’Cause that’s what hexes do.”
“You been . . . feedin’ . . . on me?”
“Since always, darlin’. I’d have left you a long time back, it weren’t so — and even now, I still want to eat you. So damn bad.”
“No.” Chess’s eyes went wide, all fear and desperation and rage. “I won’t hear this. You’re better’n me, always have been — you’re a good man.”
“Flattering, darlin’ — but in this case, I’m afraid, you’re much mistaken. Because — on this whole wide earth, there’s nothin’ worse than a bad man who knows the Bible.”
“You . . . think . . . I’m scared?”
At that, the gleam in Rook’s eyes showed itself after all: tears, runnelling down. “Never, Chess Pargeter. That’s what I like about you the most. You ain’t afraid to kill, or to die; you ain’t even afraid of pain.”
And here the Rev kissed him savagely, drawing power deep, so intense Morrow could see it swirl like inky water between them. “But don’t try to fight me, sweetheart,” he said, panting, when he broke off. “You ain’t strong enough for that, not yet.”
“Fuck off!” Chess writhed in his invisible bonds, unable to see his own aura surging black. “You’re a damn hex, you cheating motherfucker. I ain’t! I — ”
Rook, covering Chess’s mouth with his fingertips: “But . . . you will be.”
A blink, and the Lady was abruptly between them — pressing Chess down hard with both hands, all but grinding herself against him. Though Chess fought her, it did no damn good whatsoever, that Morrow could see.
She murmured, “My brother will ride you well, little warrior, once your flowers are brought to bloom. Husband of my husband, little light, little meat-thing.”
Chess spat. “Screw you, you hex-Mex hellbitch!”
Lady Ixchel simply crooned back at him, tutting slightly, stroking his fever-flushed cheek — and Chess melted under her touch, losing energy like she’d popped a spigot on his soul. Beside her, Rook had finally withdrawn the Bible from his inner pocket and stood flipping through it, searching (no doubt) for some relevant passage to soothe Chess with . . . but that was when the whole of it burst into flames in his hand, each page going up like flash-paper and vanishing, with not even ash — his namesake — left behind.
“You will need that no longer,” she told him. “We will write a new book together — a book in stone, and blood, and gold. A Book of Tongues.”
The phrase ran through Rook, Chess, even Morrow, in a silver skewer. They shivered and nodded, as one.
“Now . . . kill what you love.”
“Why?” Rook managed.
That is YOUR sacrifice.
Open your heart to me, darlin’. ’Cause there’s no more time, at all.
But it was Rook who opened Chess up, skin-first, blood spraying — and Chess who screamed at the feel of it, high and harsh and sounding far more in rage than pain, though Christ knew it had to hurt. His flesh went flying — and as Chess spilled his blood on the stone it began to shine, its image humping up by parts so each section peeled and tore itself free and added itself to Ixchel somehow, making her huge, terrible, inhuman. Rook plunged his axe-blade hand under his lover’s breast-bone, plucked out his beating heart like a dripping carnal jewel —
Jaguar Cactus Fruit, from which all of us will grow anew. . . . — and gave it over to Lady Ixchel, who chawed it down, ate it whole, smashing it against her mouth ’til her lips ran with his blood. Then kissed Rook right in front of Chess’s betrayed eyes — a kiss like clashing swords, like split skulls. A kiss with teeth.
“My little kings,” she said, beatific, fond as any other mother. “My . . . husbands.”
Screw all this for a game of Goddamn soldiers, Morrow thought, drawing his gun. And before Rook could maybe think to stop him — but would he even want to, seein’ what she’d made him do? — Morrow’d already fired directly into the back of that dark and bloody goddess’s head, blowing a gaping hole right where skull met spine.
But: The rest of her head spun ’round, a Satanic whipping-top, to roar full in his face, her mouth so wide, inside it a tangle of other tiny people screaming, rows on rows all red, and —
the earth quaked
the Moon Room walls rocked
the air went foul and full and stiff
darkness everywhere, all but where something blue sizzled, some awful coal-pot set atop a monster’s skull and
an irregular chopping noise infecting it all, a s
luggish wooden heart beating, getting
closercloserclosercloser
— but then it was four weeks later, and Morrow was already clawing his way back up, alone but for Chess Pargeter’s broken body clutched one-armed to him — reaching out in the dark by blindest drive alone and catching hold of somebody else’s hand, tiny and cold, its brass-hard nails curved and sharp as a harpy’s — screaming out loud as he was dragged inexorably upwards, out into the light.
Where a hearty Scots voice greeted him, burred and blessedly familiar: “Damnable good to see you again, Agent — even under these sad circumstances.”
Cries, screams, shrieks and Spanish oaths formed a howling, incomprehensible music around them, as mobs of panicked men, women and children rushed everywhere. Dust clouded the sky in a choking, shadowy veil. Amid broken brick, splintered wood and fractured stone, Pinkerton knelt over the disgusting ruin of what had once been Asher Rook’s lieutenant. Songbird, who’d plucked him from the hole, had taken up position on Pinkerton’s left hand, and was shielding her albino complexion with an incongruously dainty parasol of red-lacquered paper. And here came Asbury, toddling along in the rear, examining some sort of trail snaking — crack-like — up through the dirt.
Morrow glanced back at Chess, and immediately wished he hadn’t: the man lay there flayed and gutted, only recognizable because his jaunty earring was held on by a few threads still, tenaciously attached to that slack flap which had once been his earlobe.
“Well, he’s good and dead,” Pinkerton remarked, while Asbury looked disappointed.
But Songbird, whose pale eyes saw more than either of them, simply shook her head. “Perhaps . . . not.”
She put her hand almost in Chess’s grievous central wound, hovering right above his open rib-cage, only to have it close with a sticky Venus Flytrap snap, trying for the fingers themselves. Startled, she tried to yank back, but seemed unable to move — was caught, squirming, that same meat-to-fluid slide of hex-on-hex drawing hard at her, the way a five-year drunk inhales his night’s first jolt.
And all the while mould grew over Chess, flourishing with each wave of her stolen juice — a cocoon of green, a husk that turned gold, then brown. Then peeled away, in its turn to reveal a fresh new Chess, naked, re-skinned once again. Perfect as ever.
Perhaps more so, even . . . seeing how they all of them — even Pinkerton, even Songbird — gave out a collective hungry gasp at the sight of him, like it’d reached down into their privates and twisted.
“Aw, shit,” was all Morrow found he had left to say, on the subject, before slumping backwards into similar unconsciousness.
The sunlight had angled and deepened only to afternoon, but Morrow felt he could sleep for days. “And everything after that . . . you know.” He massaged at his forehead, fighting not to yawn.
Pinkerton stroked his beard. “You deserve a medal, Agent Morrow,” he said gravely. “And were there any way to cast you one this minute, I’d do so.” One side of his mouth lifted. “Though I’d dearly love to see the faces of the men, when we tell them how ’twas earned.”
Morrow stared at the table-top. “Thank you, sir,” he replied, in a mutter so low he could only hope Pinkerton would put its distinct lack of enthusiasm down to a state of impolite but understandable exhaustion. After all, he hadn’t found out until waking — in one of a convoy of stagecoaches thundering back to the Pinks’ unofficial headquarters in Tampico port — that the pile of rubble they’d dug him from had actually been a too-damn-large part of Mexico City itself. The quake he’d kicked off down in that dreadful world below had wreaked sympathetic damage on a monumentally destructive scale.
This sort of thing starts wars , Morrow thought. If anyone ever reckons just what exactly happened. . . .
Once out of the debriefing, however, the air smelled suddenly clearer. He’d forgotten just how bad the incense-and-gunpowder stink produced by Songbird’s opening ritual, when she’d stripped Rook’s mojo-bag geas from him, must have clung. Still, a bath might be in order, before he bedded down.
Upstairs, he came on Hosteen conferring with a Mexican sawbones in front of Chess’s chamber door — authority writ large in every limb of him, like he’d negotiated on the Agency’s behalf his entire life. “Pinkerton says he needs Mister Pargeter fit to travel, Doc.”
“Señor, he may not live out the night. That man is down in Mictlan again, I think. By tomorrow, he’ll either be better or dead.”
Hosteen clicked his tongue impatiently, and turned away — past Morrow, who he seemed intent on ignoring outright. But Morrow wasn’t having any.
“Good to see you made it here all right, Kees,” he said.
“Uh huh,” Hosteen flung back, over his shoulder. “Too bad Chess didn’t.”
Morrow shut the door of his room, leaned back against it and let himself hang there, boneless. Felt how every part of him ached with roughly the same intensity, an all-over throb.
Sleep, he thought. Sleep. Until —
He heard it rise, slowly, softly — that shuttery click-clack again, wooden-soft, hollow as a rotted log. Blue sparks appearing at the very edges of his vision, sizzling.
Aw, hell no, damn it. Just — NO.
Morrow half-ran to the wash-basin, splashed his face and shook his head, as though he could throw the last three-days-that-were-thirty off just by willing it. Kept his eyes shut throughout, black shading to red, ’til the sound receded and there was nothing but his own pulse to hammer at the world’s edges, his own breath to hiss in his ears like the sea.
But when he opened them once more, it was no dice: Rook’s face hung inside the mirror, staring right into his own. Like they were contemplating each other through a damn window.
Ed.
“Reverend.”
I see you got that spell of mine took off you, in the interim — she’s a good one ’bout her business, that Miss Songbird. Ain’t she?
“Sure is, yeah,” Morrow agreed.
And you’ve told your tale by now, I’m certain — must’ve gotten quite the reaction from your boss. But you didn’t tell them the absolute whole of it, though, did you?
“No, Reverend. I did not.”
And now it was Rook’s turn to smile, finally, awful as ever. Awfuller.
Good man, he “said.”
Hardly, Morrow thought. And bowed his painful head against the cool tin surface, eyes shutting once more, to await further instructions.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
In the room next door, meanwhile, Chess Pargeter’s body lay in bed, while his lost soul loped nameless against the Sunken Ball-Court’s sluggish currents headlong, black water breaking in stagnant waves to his knees — stinking of old death, no part left of him that didn’t hurt. Off in the distance, he saw a blue and smoking light sizzling beneath that constant rain of knives which fell, blade-first, all around him: a torch, maybe? Lantern? Something to anchor him in the endless darkness’s midst, anyhow. Something maybe worth the following.
Skinless, he stumbled on, thanking the God he didn’t believe in there were no mirrors handy. Because even without one, he knew himself horrific: nose’s bone gleaming cuttlefish-white from a red mess of face, exposed eyes clicking dryer with every useless blink. And the pain, Jesus, pain everywhere, so much it faded to nothing whenever he tried to concentrate on reckoning it exactly. Like flies buzzing on exposed nerve.
At least he had his guns yet, as the belt’s further torment proved, tenderizing the laid-open meat of his waist with every step. He didn’t even want to think about what must hang, nude and knocking, beneath it.
At his chest’s centre a gaping hole sat open, mouthing the awful wind.
The tunnels narrowed as he went, closing ’til all he could see was skulls, flowers, skulls. Eventually, he turned a sharp corner, and fetched up against a skeleton twenty feet high, leaning quizzical over the wall of bony brainpans, which set up a great wailing. Ixchel, this said, inexplicably. You . . . are hers.
No, I damn well ain�
�t, the dreamer snapped back, fast enough — though he couldn’t quite recall, himself, why he was so insulted by the implication.
At that very moment, though, another figure leapt up out of nowhere, squatted atop the wall, leering down at him. Wrapped in a mantle of feathers worked with skulls and crossed bones, this new phantom had a small disk set where its foot should be — pitch-black, yet still shiny enough to reflect the dreamer’s current haggard lack of face, in horrid detail: all nude eyes, his scalp askew ’round his shoulders with the rest of his head-hide split wide in two rotten peels, turned inside-out.
Ah, this figure said, undressing him further with its awful gaze. So you are not sweet Sister Ixchel’s ixiptla, after all. Who does that make you, then, little king? Little sweetmeat?
And oh, he should be able to answer that one, he thought, cursing himself for straining after what was once so uncommon clear. But there was only the pain, worse than ever, everywhere at once. A white-hot eraser. A salt-lick scrape.
Then a chorus of voices entered his head, in fragment.
Reverend Rook . . . everyone knows you’re his bitch.
You Engarish Oo-nah’s boy, wei?
So there you are, at long last. Such a big man, wiv your guns. . . .
With the most important voice of all saved for last, rumbling low as thought up through hot flesh, gentle and terrible all at once: What wouldn’t I do, for you? Damn my own soul, gladly.
And . . . that was it, right there. That was enough.
“Name’s Chess Pargeter, you skinny motherfucker,” he managed, at last, through lipless teeth. “I mean, seein’ how you’re prob’ly the Devil himself . . . you really ought t’ve heard of me.”
And before the spooky bastard could tell him any different, he gave him both barrels, right in his damn fleshless skull.
Then he woke, but didn’t. Saw himself on the hotel-room bed, gyved at wrist and ankle — hung above his own empty body and watched it glow, a flesh candle.