Labyrinth of Stars (A Hunter Kiss Novel)

by Marjorie M. Liu

  Something else. Something I recognized. I knew that look. It didn’t matter that the flesh was Mahati. Some things transcended the physical. Some things could possess the physical. And only one race of creature, one race of alien, had that terrible, immortal gaze.

  Only one race of creature could tamper with a human and make its flesh poison. Or make a giant who killed. I thought of that demon waitress in Texas, everything she’d told me, and my blood got even colder.

  “We see you,” whispered the Mahati, and the voice was distinct, too: cultured, faintly crisp, like chipped ice. Her mouth contorted: a crazy, grotesque shape, dribbling blood and saliva. Took me a moment to realize it was a smile.

  “We see what you hide inside your belly, what it is, what it will become.”

  I lunged. Zee beat me, gripping that head between his claws. Raw and Aaz prowled close, baring their teeth. Dek and Mal loosened their coils, hovering away from me, smoke pouring from their nostrils.

  “Kill you,” Zee rasped. “Make war. Destroy your worlds, again.”

  That terrible gaze flicked again to mine. I did not flinch. But I couldn’t speak, either. My throat was too tight.

  “Your daughter is already dead,” she said, and a dull ache thudded hard inside my lower left side: a heartbeat, a pulse.

  I stopped breathing. That monstrous smile widened.

  Zee snarled. Bone splintered. Skin tore. Blood oozed as the little demon crushed the Mahati’s head. Light escaped, a haze that had all the shimmer of a borealis—the shadow of an Aetar. I watched, unable to move, drifting inside a chill that washed through me from heart to bone, settling so deep I didn’t think I would ever be warm again.

  The pain in my stomach worsened. I’d never felt anything like it, as though a hook were inside me, yanking. The sensation felt hot. Wet.

  I was wet.

  I reached between my legs, rubbing my jeans.

  My fingers came away bloody.

  CHAPTER 7

  MY knees buckled. Raw and Aaz caught me. I heard Zee speaking—a snapping snarl of words and growls—but his voice was far away. The entire world dimming to my stomach, and the heat, and the blood. I had read everything I could on pregnancies. I knew about miscarriages.

  By the time the bleeding started, the baby was almost always dead.

  “No,” I said, holding my stomach, panic rising thick and bitter in my throat. I tried to breathe, but my chest felt heavy, paralyzed. I pulled at Dek and Mal, still coiled around my neck, and their soft keens broke apart as they fell from me.

  But I still couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe.

  I slammed my right hand into the snow and fell into the void between.

  Between space. Between stitches of reality. Between dreams and sanity, and breath and death, a place of infinite, crushing emptiness, stripped of sight and sound and touch—anything that reminded me of being real. Nothing existed in the void. I wasn’t even sure that I did. Just a scattering of thoughts, held together by nothing more tenuous than my own will. I would fly apart if I stayed too long. Fly apart, lost in an endless scream.

  I could only enter this place because of the armor encasing my right hand—armor made from a metal mined in the heart of another impossible place: a network of quantum roads called the Labyrinth—a nexus outside time and space, linking countless different worlds. Cross the universe in a heartbeat. Bend time. Bend yourself, across time. Anything could happen there. The Labyrinth was made of possibilities.

  But the void was not the Labyrinth. And while the armor let me travel across earth in less than a heartbeat, I’d always been terrified that one day I would find myself trapped there, between.

  I was still terrified. But for the first time, something else scared me more—and there was a fantasy in my head, a split-second wild notion, that if I stayed in the void, if I didn’t leave it, my baby would be fine. That I could just float there forever, even if it meant losing my mind.

  We all think crazy things when we’re desperate.

  I fell from the void to a cracked linoleum floor.

  Daylight had arrived. As soon as I slipped free, the weight of the boys settled on my body like a fine black mist, a sheen of warmth that spread over every inch of me except my face: between my toes, fingers, legs; beneath my nails; against my scalp. I glanced down at my bare arms. In that dark, cold place, there had been pale skin. Now I was covered in tattoos: coils of mercury and shadow, fine lines of scales and claws. Red eyes stared, unblinking: Dek, stretching down my arm; and Mal, his face resting in the crook of my elbow.

  My boys. Imprisoned on my body until sunfall. Protecting me with their flesh.

  Except, they couldn’t protect me from everything.

  Blood was still warm between my legs. I felt the heat and weight of it on my jeans, against my skin. I could smell it. I’d had a little bleeding in the last four months. That was normal in a pregnancy. This wasn’t.

  I shook so hard my teeth rattled. I couldn’t even lift my head. I heard a harsh intake of breath, a scrape of metal, and the creak of leather. I also smelled chocolate baking: a warm scent, the one anchor I needed. I clung to it. I inhaled as deeply as I could. It reminded me of my mother. Strength and comfort, and heartache. I should have gone to a hospital, but instead I’d come home. Home to the farmhouse in Texas.

  I rolled onto my side. I saw feet in front of me, bare and familiar. Odd, the body parts that you recognize. Stubby toes, the arch of a foot, even the delicate bones of an ankle. As distinct as a fingerprint. A cry of home.

  My gut lurched again, but this was heart-borne—followed by a wail in my throat that I swallowed down and kept swallowing.

  “Mom,” I whispered, and those feet suddenly became my mother, my crouching mother, my mother who was dead, my mother who had chocolate frosting on her tattooed fingertips and who knelt on the floor to look at me with shock and horror, and concern. Her hair was black and glossy, and fell past her pale face. Her eyes so blue. So beautiful.

  “Oh, hell,” she whispered, her gaze lingering on my gently protruding stomach—and the blood on my hands.

  Oh, hell, yes. I had traveled in time. Again.

  Wasn’t the first, wouldn’t be the last—but I had no control over how or why, or when. The armor always chose: that fragment of the Labyrinth, with its wiles and impulses, and utter disregard for all those silly human rules about time and space, and how we were stuck moving in one direction, forever. Because time didn’t work like that. Time was fluid, and we were fluid in time. If you only had the right key to unlock that particular door.

  And I did. Even though I never ever wanted to use it again. Nothing more dangerous than time. Nothing with more potential to fuck you up.

  But I was still happy to see my mother.

  “When?” she asked sharply, grabbing my hand. “Maxine, when did this happen?”

  I tried telling her, but all I could whisper was the month. I was fading. Or maybe the armor was taking me from her. I felt so far away, and I began to fall, fall backward into the floor, deeper and deeper, and my mother tried to hold me, screaming hold on hold on hold on but her hands slipped from my wrists and I called out or tried but my voice was gone—

  —then, so was I—

  —and I hit the floor again.

  Face-first, on my stomach, exactly as I’d arrived in the past only moments before. Except now, beneath me, was a bloodstain that I’d never quite been able to clean. Blood, from my mother’s murder.

  Home, again. Home, in my proper time. And I wanted to go back. Being with her, only for a moment—was I supposed to be grateful for that? It was torture, and I was a kid again, a little girl who needed her mother more than she needed air to breathe.

  I sensed movement around me, a frightened hush.

  “Grant.” My throat hurt, as if I’d been screaming. “Someone find my husband.”

  No one answered me. I rolled over on my back and stared through tear-blurred eyelashes at half a dozen young, inhuman faces; red and
silver, or covered in fur; staring at me with huge eyes and chocolate batter around their mouths.

  They were pushed roughly aside. Mary leaned close. She took one look at me and grabbed the nearest demon child by the throat, dragging him close. “Fetch the Lightbringer,” she hissed, releasing him with a shove. He stared at her with terror and ran.

  But Grant was already coming. I felt him, a bloom of warmth inside my chest: a golden thread of light, pulsing with frantic urgency. I could almost hear his thoughts, a wisp on the surface of my mind, but mine were too scrambled, panicked, to let him in. Nothing was getting in to me. I heard Mary giving other orders, but her voice faded into a muffled burr that suffocated beneath my pounding heart.

  Zee and the boys writhed over my stomach, down between my legs. Once, years in the past, they had sealed my mouth and nostrils with their flesh to keep me from drowning; I didn’t know what they were doing now, and I didn’t care. As long it kept my baby inside me. Inside me.

  A little corpse inside you, came the errant thought.

  I heard a cane tap—felt the vibration in my back—and tilted my head just enough to see Grant’s boots, that terrible shuffling limp that was almost a run. I tried to sit up. Mary held me down—or tried to. She jerked back, cradling her hands—burned. I felt the heat on my shoulders where she’d touched me. The boys weren’t letting anyone close.

  Except Grant. I heard the rumbling om of his voice, so strong it surged against my skin like thunder. A cold thrill of hope shuddered through me. Maybe, maybe, we could fix this.

  Dizziness hit. I shut my eyes and felt pressure against my skin; the boys, gripping me in their dreams, holding me close with their tattooed claws. I almost thought I could hear Zee’s voice, whispering to me in a language I didn’t understand: growls, against the surface of my thoughts, soft sighs. I clung to that. I clung to the click of the approaching cane—tap, tap—echoing my heartbeat until it stopped dead beside me, and a large, warm hand touched my head. Grant’s voice surged around me: wordless, full of power. I waited for the pain in my stomach to disappear, for the hot, trickling flow of blood to stop—but nothing happened.

  I knew why. But I wanted this time to be different.

  Grant’s voice broke—and then broke again. I could almost see the pieces falling like shards of light. He tried again to sing, but it didn’t last. His silence horrified me.

  “Don’t give up,” I whispered, unable to look at him. I was paralyzed, terrified of moving, as if that would harm my child more. His cane hit the floor, and he collapsed on his knees beside me, his breathing ragged and hoarse. Trying not to cry. Trying. I was trying, too.

  “She’s immune to me. Just like you,” he said.

  “No.” I dug my fingers into my stomach. “No, Grant.”

  “She’s dying,” he whispered. “I can see it.”

  Our baby. My girl. Dying.

  Dying inside me, and I could not stop it. I could destroy the world. I could unleash hell on this planet and a million others. But I could not save the one thing that mattered most to me. Funny, how that could happen. Funny, how someone you didn’t know, who wasn’t even fully formed, could matter more than life. Funny, how fast that could slip up on you.

  I closed my eyes. I could see the boys inside my head, as real as if they crouched before me. Zee, raking his claws over his arms; past him, Raw and Aaz, who hugged teddy bears to their chests, stabbing them with spikes torn from their backs; Dek and Mal, heavy on my shoulders, growling.

  I’ll do anything, I said to that imaginary Zee.

  A hush fell. Even my heartbeat slowed. Between my thighs, a sluggish drip: hot and inevitable.

  One way, he whispered, finally. One way. But, a price.

  “Maxine,” Grant croaked out, but my head and heart were already too far away to listen. All I could see was Zee. All I could feel in my blood was him and the boys, and ten thousand years of mothers and daughters burning through me, like love.

  And with that love, something else: an awakening, beneath my heart; a familiar alien presence that uncoiled in a surge of terrible, aching power. It slithered through me, pouring through my pulse, and I looked down at my arms and legs, half-expecting to see my muscles and bones displaced, shoved aside for a spirit ripped from the heart of night: darkness, alive and breathing, and trembling with impossible hunger.

  A monster. A God. Passed down from woman to woman—biding its time in dreams. Until me.

  I had resisted its presence for years. Fought its destructive possession with all my strength, and won. Again and again, I had won.

  Young Queen, whispered a soft, sibilant voice.

  Grant reached out but stopped a hairsbreadth from touching my hand. I was glad. So glad he didn’t touch me. It would make me remember him and think about consequences—and I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t.

  I closed my eyes, took a breath. Whatever you want. Just save her.

  A sigh passed through me, deep and hideous with pleasure, sliding like smoke into my throat. My mouth curved into a smile, but that wasn’t me. It wasn’t me at all.

  Yes, whispered the darkness. It is done.

  I didn’t ask the price. I already knew it would be horrible. No bargains with the devil ever turned out good.

  But the bleeding stopped. So did that tugging pain. Inside my belly, heat coiled around and around like a sun-warm snake making its nest, and the sensation only grew and strengthened, weighing me down until my back sank into the old linoleum, and the floorboards creaked. Sparks lit behind my eyes, sparks and stars, rushing at me: a torrent of light, as if my mind were traveling through space.

  This is the path, I heard a quiet whisper. This is the promise for your child’s blood.

  Then, nothing. No stars. No presence. No heat in my stomach. Gone as if it never existed. I felt light as air, and my hand groped the floor, as if I could stop myself from floating away. Grant grabbed my wrist, held on tight. It didn’t help.

  What brought me back, what finally anchored me, was a new sensation. A tickle in my belly. A hum.

  “Grant,” I whispered, hoarse, my voice sounding far away. “What do you see?”

  It took him a moment. When he spoke, he sounded old and tired, and broken.

  “Light,” he breathed. “A strong light. She’s okay, Maxine.”

  I smiled.

  Little light, I thought, touching my stomach with a hand that felt heavy as death. I feel you, little light.

  I thought about my mother.

  And passed the fuck out.

  CHAPTER 8

  MAYBE there’s a God. I don’t know. What I’m certain of is there are plenty of pretenders. No bigger con in the universe. No stakes higher. Power is the measure by which they live or die. But even so, they aren’t that different from humans.

  Gods love. Gods kill.

  And then there’s me.

  WHEN I opened my eyes, I found an old woman sharpening her machete against my arm. Sparks popped, and the grind of the metal against those obsidian tattoos was soft and cold.

  “Mary,” I said, slowly.

  Her smile was lopsided, eyes a little too bright, too intense, to be completely, absolutely sane. “Teeth need sharper blades.”

  “Some other time.” I pushed myself up. It wasn’t hard. I was strong. If the memory of what had happened weren’t still horrifically real inside me, I would have thought it was nothing more harmless than a nightmare.

  I was on the couch, soft pillows piled under my knees. Naked beneath a light sheet. The front door of the farmhouse had been propped open, letting in a warm breeze that I felt only on my face. I heard chimes tinkling, and young, inhuman laughter, like a growl tickling the air.

  A strong, familiar hand appeared in front of me, holding a glass of water.

  “Glad you’re awake,” Grant said, quietly. “Mary, go outside.”

  The old woman tilted her head, studying him. She was wearing a housedress embroidered with poodles, a wide leather belt cinched tight around her
nonexistent waist. Weapons hung from it: knives, two hammers, and a second machete. The dress was too large; the neck gaped so much I could see her breastbone, and the flat, circular stone embedded there in her flesh.

  It was engraved: a knotted tangle of lines that had no beginning, no end. Same emblem as the pendant Grant wore around his neck: a mark of his family line.

  “Must be strong,” Mary murmured to him. “Lightbringer. Inheritor of blood.”

  Father, I thought. Still a father.

  Grant’s gaze met mine. He’d heard my thought, I was sure of it. And I was glad.

  Warmth crept into his eyes. He did not look away from me as Mary slid the machete one last time over my arm and stood. I didn’t look at her either as she walked from us on the tips of her toes, gliding gracefully through the open farmhouse door. Her voice hummed a tuneless, eerie melody.

  “Move over,” Grant said.

  It was an old couch, wide and deep enough for several families, and their demons. I scooted sideways, and my husband lay down heavily beside me, using both hands to pull his bad leg onto the couch. We lay together, me on my side, him on his back. My head rested on his warm chest. I could feel his ribs beneath his flannel shirt but pretended not to notice. My arms were bare against him, black with the bodies of the boys, who slept soft and heavy. I stared for a moment. I always stared because it was always new.

  My skin was not human. Not during the day. My skin was made of scales and muscle, and veins of organic silver that glittered and pulsed and threaded over me like rivers of deadly light. I was untouchable, like this. Not heat or cold, nor nuclear fire, could break me. Not a fall from a million miles. My fingernails were black, capable of cracking stone or tearing holes in steel. I used them now to grip my husband’s shirt and hold him tight.

  Because immortality didn’t mean shit. Not when you still had a human heart.

  Grant gave me silence. He gave me himself. No questions. I was so grateful for that. I didn’t want to talk, or remember. I might start crying again, and there was nothing worse, nothing, not when I already felt cut, torn, clawed open. Tears had no place here. My baby was alive. Keeping her safe was all that mattered.