Lonesome Paladin

by S. M. Reine

  Within the cables of his muscles, Cèsar’s bones were changing. Popping. Shifting.

  Energy whipped out of him. He had formed ropes of magic, tipped by hooks—or were those claws?—and they were embedded in Fritz’s chest. It was impossible. Cèsar didn’t have magic anymore. He’d certainly never had magic like this.

  “Move away from Secretary Friederling!”

  Cèsar opened his mouth to say, “I can’t—”

  Bang! Bang!

  Cèsar looked down at his chest.

  Bullet holes.

  He splayed his hands over his pectorals and said, “Well, isn’t that a bitch?” Fluid surged up his throat on the last syllable, but it spurted out of one of the holes in his chest.

  The fluid was electric blue. It turned to ice on the grass.

  Is that blood?

  Blood only came in blue for one species.

  Unseelie sidhe. The dark fae folk.

  Cèsar lifted his gaze to the people surrounding him again, and he recognized Agent Idañez’s beauty. Smoke spiraled from the muzzle of his gun. He was one of the people who’d fired on Cèsar.

  “You need iron,” Cèsar said. Normal bullets wouldn’t save Fritz.

  Idañez fumbled at his jacket, looking for another magazine, and Cèsar tried to retract his power from Fritz. It didn’t work. The harder he pulled, the deeper his claws became embedded.

  Fritz wasn’t arched anymore, or kicking. His open eyes were unfocused.

  Bang.

  This time, the bullet wound hurt. Idañez had hit Cèsar in the shoulder.

  He didn’t have to hit center mass to take Cèsar down. The pain of the iron was more than enough to send him to the soil, opening his mouth in a scream that seemed to come from the mouth of a beast as alien to Earth as Dullahan Daith.

  The burning in Cèsar’s bones stopped, at least. The claws of magic vanished. His grip released.

  Fritz rolled over gasping for air.

  Cèsar stretched his fingers toward Fritz’s, unable to move. The pain consumed him. Fritz couldn’t close the distance either. He was still ashen. “Sorry, man,” Cèsar said as iron poison slithered through his muscles, liquefying him from the inside out. “You were right.”

  His eyes rolled back. The world vanished around him.

  There was no music or light.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Desire,” said a silken voice. “Desire is the magic of the fae folk.”

  Lincoln Marshall walked past the woman who was speaking, keeping his eyes on the cracked sidewalk.

  Her voice followed him. “Hey, boo. You can have anything you desire. Anything at all.”

  Lincoln made the mistake of glancing up at the busker on the corner. The blue-fleshed woman trailed her hands down her bare breasts, nipples black against the crystalline shine of her skin. She angled herself to catch the morning light on her clumpy hair, chopped above the shoulders. Her flesh sparkled like oil on water.

  “I can see the desire around you like a halo,” she said, walking backwards when he didn’t stop. “I can give you what you want.” Her finger drew a circle over Lincoln’s heart, touching the breast of his jacket.

  He shoved her shoulder, pushing her out of his way. “I don’t deal with whores.”

  “Don’t fucking touch me!” She spat at him. “Walk away, you stupid fuck!”

  “Learn a little respect before someone beats it into you,” Lincoln said, jamming his hands into his pockets.

  “Is that a threat?” She spun to take in the others on the street, arms wide as if to beg for agreement. “Did you people hear this asshole? He said he’s gonna beat me!”

  Lincoln wouldn’t deliver the beating. Didn’t have to. All it took was crossing an ill-tempered shifter to land herself in front of a healer, and there were a lot of shifters out this time of morning. They were easy to pick out. They were the people who looked like they hadn’t slept in a week.

  Of course, Lincoln didn’t look much better. As soon as he’d gotten got out of the OPA facility in midtown, Lincoln Marshall had looked for another bar to visit. Cassandra wasn’t going to let him wet his whistle at Blood anymore, but he didn’t know where else to go.

  So now he was wandering.

  Female voices drew his gaze over his shoulder. The blue faerie whore was talking to another woman—a golden-eyed shapeshifter. They seemed to be negotiating.

  He worked his tongue around in his mouth, and he spit on the ground too. He wasn’t spitting blood anymore. Instead of relief, he felt frustration.

  “You’re going the wrong way.”

  That voice was too close to have come from the faerie.

  Lincoln’s head snapped up, and he looked around the street, forehead throbbing, eyes blurring. Shifters lurched up the opposite sidewalk, but that voice hadn’t come from them either.

  The intonation was dry and flat, the voice a little deeper than the average woman’s. Throaty. Raspy too, like she’d just been smoking.

  “Elise?” Lincoln asked aloud, turning.

  And she was behind him.

  His ex-girlfriend looked the same as the day they’d met in the desert north of Las Vegas. Leather molded against every line of muscle. The carved ridges of her abs were exposed between her belt and tank top. She wore a glove on only one of her hands, which she extended toward him.

  “Christ, Elise,” Lincoln said. He took a reflexive step toward her. He was buoyed by relief that he hadn’t felt in months.

  If Elise Kavanagh was around, everything was gonna be okay.

  Except that when he tried to walk closer, Elise remained just as far away. It was like chasing a rainbow. A rainbow wearing leather. “Keep coming,” Elise said, beckoning.

  “You’re not here.” He hadn’t expected to feel so disappointed. Elise had brought plague and death into his life. She’d shattered his faith, his heart, his entire fucking world. But he’d still been excited to see her because he was a huge moron who never learned a damn lesson. “I’ve snapped. I’ve gone crazy.”

  “Come on,” Elise said with uncharacteristic patience. “This way.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” He dropped his tone to a mutter. Shifters were already steering clear of him, but he didn’t want to look like the town crazy, talking to himself.

  “Why not? It’s not like you’re busy, Deputy.”

  “I haven’t been a deputy in ages,” Lincoln said. “You made sure of that.” The quirk of her mouth could have been a smile, but he doubted it. He managed to turn. He walked away, toward the river.

  Behind him, Elise said, “You’re going the wrong way.”

  “Where should I go?” Lincoln asked. He could feel Elise at his back, but she cast no shadow. “Should I go back to Northgate, where nobody I loved is still alive? Off to an OPA facility? Down into the City of Dis?”

  She appeared in front of him again, sexy and perfect and deadly as ever. “Follow me to absolution,” Elise said.

  There was no absolution for Lincoln. God was dead. Nobody could forgive the sins he’d committed.

  He shoved past Elise...and stumbled against stairs.

  While arguing with a hallucination of his ex, he’d somehow walked a half-dozen blocks. The sidewalk outside Pho 777 was gone.

  Now he stood in front of a church.

  He tipped his head back to look up at the sign posted above the towering brass door with a bas-relief of religious figures. St. Thomas of Aquinas Cathedral, the sign said. It was near enough the Truckee that the river’s roar mingled with traffic’s whisper, and the crucifix atop its tower seemed to pierce the rising heat of Reno summer.

  “Absolution in a Catholic church,” Lincoln said. “That’s funny coming from you.” He glanced over his shoulder to throw the jab directly at Elise.

  But she was gone. He was alone on the street.

  He also had nowhere else to be.

  Lincoln put his shoulder into opening the door. The church was quiet and spacious inside. The signs were all bilingual, English
and Spanish. The lights weren’t turned on, and nothing happened when Lincoln flipped a light switch.

  It was weird that the building was open, unlocked, but nobody was squatting in it. Maybe a few things were sacred in this godless world after all.

  “Anyone here?” he asked, raising his voice as he eased into the back rows of pews. “A priest?”

  There was no reply.

  Lincoln shed his jacket, set it on a pew before sliding in.

  He settled onto the kneeling pad, folding his hands over Javi’s cross in prayer.

  Lincoln looked up at the stained glass windows. They depicted familiar scenes he’d seen a thousand times at other churches. If there were still some kind of real God—someone like NKF—then God would be able to hear him here for sure.

  “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name,” he murmured. “I need a sign. I need to know what to believe.”

  Leather softly creaked as another pair of knees settled beside him. “Believe in me.” Elise was twisted to face him, her black eyes steady on his face. Her hair dripped over her shoulders. A belt of golden chains dangled at her waist, charms jingling softly with every motion.

  “Don’t talk to me here,” he said. “Anywhere, but not here.”

  “God hadn’t been in one of these churches for hundreds of years before your pasty baby feet touched the Earth.”

  “Just because you killed Him doesn’t mean you’re the expert,” Lincoln said.

  That was how Elise had become the greatest demon hunter in the world, after all.

  She’d started out by murdering God.

  Lincoln hadn’t seen it happen, but he’d pieced the story together. She was a weapon designed by Metaraon to perform one assassination. She’d succeeded. Ripping God out of the fabric of the universe had begun the events that led to Genesis. He’d seen Elise do wonderful, horrible, terrifying things.

  Hell, he’d helped her.

  Elise stroked a hand down his jaw, her fingernails lingering under the yellow scruff of his chin. The scratch felt real. She smelled the way she always had, like blood and tobacco. That was real too. “I’ve got a mission for you, and you’re going to do it.”

  “Listening to the voices in your head’s the way you end up on a psychiatric hold,” Lincoln said.

  Her fingers went tight on his chin. Her eyes filled his vision. There was nothing but inky blackness. No iris, no whites. Elise’s gaze wasn’t the stuff of space, but like the Genesis Void. An endless destructive force.

  “You want a sign from God? You’ve found it.” Her voice was deep, but it dropped deeper, sliding down octaves by the syllable. The world slowed with it. Lincoln’s body weighed a thousand pounds as the church spun around him, and still, there was nothing but Elise’s eyes.

  The roof exploded open.

  “Holy shit!”

  Lincoln leaped to his feet, staring where the ceiling beams had been a moment before. Now the wood had fractured and shot straight up.

  Debris fell into the sky, which was no longer a sky at all. Lincoln looked up to see Reno mirroring itself. Or else St. Thomas of Aquinas had floated into the clouds like a hot air balloon.

  Either way, he was a long way up.

  As soon as Lincoln realized gravity had gone wrong, he felt his shoes lifting from the floor.

  “No!”

  He grabbed the kneeling pad, and his fingers slipped; it was only luck that let him catch the back of a pew. His arm nearly ripped out of the socket when it jerked to its full length. His feet dangled over the broken roof and Reno below.

  It wasn’t a nightmare. He was really hanging upside down. His jacket was really tumbling away from him, yanked on the wind.

  Elise still kneeled normally, untouched except for her hair. Her hair defied physics. It floated, spread into shadow, whispered around Lincoln as if the blackest depths of the sea were rising to engulf him.

  She didn’t look like Elise anymore.

  This woman had the same white skin and ink-black hair, but her facial features had changed. Aquiline nose had turned to a dainty nub. The jaw had more of a heart shape. “What are you doing?” Lincoln shouted at this woman—this vision who was Elise, but not Elise at all.

  “Remember,” she said in that infinitely deep voice that penetrated his eardrums to drive needles through the meat of his brain. “Remember me. You know who I am. You know what I need to do.”

  His fingers slipped.

  “Fuck!”

  Lincoln fell.

  He tumbled knees over shoulders, battered by wind, blinded by the rushing blood in his head.

  There was only enough time to swear once.

  Then he hit.

  Lincoln smacked into packed-dirt floor, and it hurt like the goddamn dickens. But he didn’t die. It was only enough to knock the wind out of him, and he gasped against the ground, writhing as he attempted to stand.

  A pair of legs crossed into his vision.

  His eyes tracked up a pair of feet wrapped in pink leather sandals to a skirt made of soft brown hair. The yellow-and-white teeth on the belt clacked softly.

  The vendor stood beside her cart, stoking a fire within the wrought-iron cage of its belly. Her gnarled fingers gripped a poker. Her crimson skin was smudged with ash. “There, just about cooked,” she said, nodding in satisfaction. “What are you doing down there? Are you hungry or not?”

  Lincoln caught his breath. “Am I...what?”

  He pushed back on his knees. There was no world beyond the ring of dark-red soil upon which he knelt. The cart stood at one edge, and he was at the other.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t charge you for this one,” she said, piercing meat with a rusty metal skewer. “I’d never charge someone as important as you. You’re the only thing keeping the city running these days.”

  “I’m not...” Lincoln looked down at his own body. Words left him.

  He was wearing tan leather cinched tight over his chest, his hips. He wore knives on his belt. None of it looked like it belonged on him, of all people—Lincoln Marshall, Northgate deputy—but he had worn clothes just like these for months on end, once.

  Back before Genesis.

  And once Lincoln realized where he was—when he was—the City of Dis filled in around him, illuminating in tones of dim red. It was the biggest of the infernal cities. Its architecture was cribbed off of styles from Earth, and block by block differed. Where he stood, the buildings were piles of old brick with boarded windows, like New England of yore.

  “Remember, the most nourishing food for human bodies is human flesh,” the vendor said. Her gnarled fingers lifted the skewer. The cubes speared upon it were squishy, fibrous, and such a deep red that they looked purple-black.

  Lincoln thought, No. I know what that is. I won’t eat it. I can’t do that again.

  He wanted to scream, run away.

  But he had no control of his body. He was locked in some little cage in the back of his own mind, and everything else was filled with the shadow.

  Lincoln was possessed by a demon.

  The church in Northgate had been run by nightmare-worshipping cultists. They’d used Lincoln as the human sacrifice and host. He’d been taken by a demon into Hell, forced to live as the demons did, and the worst part was that he remembered all of it.

  He didn’t want to reach for the skewer, but he did.

  The vendor pulled back.

  “Take off your armor first,” she said. “Just one piece.”

  Lincoln’s hands unlaced the leather breastplate. It fell to the ground.

  “Piece by piece, you’ll be exposed to justice,” said the vendor.

  His mouth said, “I’m ready for whatever happens.”

  The demon compelled Lincoln’s fingers to close around the skewer. But it was Lincoln’s canines that sank into the barely cooked human muscle. Lincoln’s molars that chewed. His throat that swallowed. Even in the back of his mind, where he had no control, he could taste the meat. Its texture was like pork. It reminded
him of barbecue.

  The Elise-who-was-not-Elise appeared beside him again. “Absolution for you, and true justice for me.” She yanked the steel skewer out of his hand, pulled her arm back, and then thrust with all her strength.

  The metal rod punctured Lincoln’s right eye.

  He sat upright with a strangled cry, clapping a hand over his eyeball.

  There was no blood.

  Lincoln had awoken from the nightmare stretched out in a pew at St. Thomas of Aquinas Cathedral. His jacket was folded underneath his head like a pillow. He’d sweated through his clothes, leaving them soaked and clinging to his chest.

  “I was asleep,” Lincoln said to nothing and nobody.

  He was alone. No weird visions of Elise, or of demons in Hell, or falling out of the church. The roof hadn’t even torn open, although it sounded like they were having a rare summer rainstorm. Water drizzled near the altar.

  Lincoln’s heart was still pounding.

  Absolution for you, and justice for me, whispered Elise’s voice. You don’t have to believe in me. You’ll still do what I need.

  The door to the cathedral banged open.

  “Freeze!”

  A half-dozen OPA agents wearing black suits stormed inside, spreading out to flank Lincoln with assault rifles. They wore ballistics jackets and enchanted ribbons twined around their belts, ready for a fight of any kind.

  “Whoa there,” Lincoln said, lifting his hands to his shoulders, fingers spread, to show that he wasn’t holding anything. “I didn’t break out of Wooster. I was let go. No harm, no foul. And it’s not curfew yet, so I’m not breaking the law again. I was just heading for shelter.”

  Nothing he said seemed to matter. One of the agents stepped forward, jerking a black hood off of his belt.

  “You’re under arrest,” said the agent. “Secretary Friederling wants to speak to you. If you resist, you’ll be shot.”

  “I’m not resisting, sir,” Lincoln said. “I just don’t—”

  He didn’t get a chance to finish. The hood yanked over his head, a rope cinched it around his neck, and someone handcuffed him.

  For the second time in the last twenty-four hours, Lincoln was arrested by the Office of Preternatural Affairs.