The Lillim Callina Chronicles: Volumes 1-3

by J. A. Cipriano

  “Are you being serious right now?” The Keeper sighed and shook his head. He turned, glancing up at me. With a flick of his wrist, the roses unfurled around me. The thorny press against my skin lessened as the roses set me down beside him. He put one massive hand on the top of my head and smiled. It was one of those sad smiles, one that told me he wished it didn’t have to be this way.

  A surge of heat exploded through my body, rushing over my skin like liquid hot magma. I swallowed, sucking in a breath that smelled like fall leaves and apple cider. The world around me swam, tumbling away until I was standing out beyond the gates again. I could see myself, collapsed on the silty ground that had once been Sobek’s lagoon. Was the Keeper showing me what had happened after I’d passed out?

  The Morrigan stood over me, one hand clutching Nemain. Drops of green liquid spilled from the tip, scalding the sand a few inches from my head. Her other hand was raised, palm outward in the universal sign for “stop.”

  “If you come any closer, I will end her,” the Morrigan said. Her voice was cold and strangely quiet.

  Warthor gritted his teeth. His hands curled into fists, but he made no movement forward. Kishi took a step back, her left hand edging toward an opening in the side of her armor where the hilt of a sword was tattooed on her flesh.

  “Why are you doing this?” Kishi’s voice was a mixture of confusion and anger. “She just saved you.”

  “That was very nice of her.” The Morrigan nodded toward me like I was a prom dress the night after the dance; still special and full of good memories but having no immediate use. Now I was something to be dealt with, to be put away. “But her task is over. Your task is now to begin. You must venture into the mound of Crom Cruach and destroy him. He is the one who summoned Sobek here. Now that he knows we cannot fight Egyptian magic it will not be long before he summons someone else to conquer Fairy.”

  “Which sounds great and all,” Kishi sneered, “but why are you threatening Lillim if we don’t go with you?”

  “She controls Apep, the great darkness that devours the sun. Crom Cruach has already shown his affinity for Egyptian Deities. If she went in there, he might be able to use Apep against us all,” the Morrigan said.

  “She won’t let us go without her,” Warthor finished. “So you would kill her to ensure she couldn’t come.”

  Warthor’s words made a chill clamber up my spine. He seemed so sure of everything he said, and the sad thing was I knew he was right. I would definitely have insisted on going.

  “I would. Or you can choose to go on your own. In which case, I won’t stop you.” The Morrigan shrugged her shoulders.

  Warthor sighed and screwed up his face with his hand. “So how do we get to the mound?” he asked.

  “I will take you there.” The Morrigan grinned, and it reminded me of the way a crow looks at a corpse just before it pecks out an eyeball.

  The Keeper lifted his hand from my hand and the scene melted away as I turned to glare at the twin Queens of Fairy with murder in my eyes.

  “So this whole party has been a charade to keep me busy while you send my friends off to their deaths?” I snarled, reaching down to where my swords should have been and realized I had no idea where Shirajirashii was.

  “Calm yourself, Dioscuri. If you use that tone again, we shall pluck out your tongue and use it to lick our feet,” the Queen of the Hot and Bright said with a casual, almost indifferent tone.

  “And before you get any bright ideas,” the Queen of the Cold and Dark glanced at her counterpart, “we were going easy on you before. How do you people say it? We weren’t even in our final form.”

  I shut my eyes and took a deep breath so I wouldn’t leap forward and strangle the Queen of the Cold and Dark with my bare hands. As I exhaled, I sent my power outward, searching for Shirajirashii. I felt the ping of its power buried so deeply underground that it was like the faintest echo in a huge canyon. I reached out toward that pinprick of recognition and curled my lips into a grin.

  “Come,” I said, and the command carried with it the power of fall maple trees and spring roses. The word thrummed through the air, impossibly loud and yet strangely silent at the same time. There was a rush far off in the distance, like a great beast letting loose a breath held for too long. My swords were coming.

  I opened my eyes and stared at the Fairy Queens. Blue and gold flames smoldered in their eye sockets as they reached toward me in unison. The press of summer and winter fell over me like a pair of blankets, smothering me under a press of heat while cold burrowed into my bones.

  I stumbled and fell to my knees, and the scent of roses filled my nostrils. The rose vines were swaying in the sky, thorny branches edging ever closer to me. Without thinking, I threw my left hand outward, blood from the pinpricks on my flesh flew through the air, spattering the Queens’ feet.

  The roses descended in an instant, sweeping down around the twin Queens of Fairy and hoisting them high into the air, wrapping them in a thorny embrace of blooming gold and silver flowers.

  “What are you doing?” the Queen of the Hot and Bright screamed as the sea of writhing vines swallowed her like a bug being wrapped up by a spider. “You can’t let her go after Crom Cruach. If you do, darkness will reign for a thousand years.”

  22

  “Whatever,” I said, a grin spreading across my face like warm butter over hot bread. “I do what I want.”

  I was done, just done. I wasn’t sure what kind of weird magic they were weaving over me to distract me, but I wasn’t having it anymore. It was time to go back to the basics. Punching things in the face.

  Beside me, the Keeper of the Wild Hunt let out a belly laugh that resounded in the ballroom like a struck gong. He turned toward me and wiped away a tear with one long finger. “The wild magic has found a good host in you. Let it do what it wants and the blessings it gives will be as boundless as the sand.” His expression darkened. “But try to control it, try to make it do something it does not wish to do and it will be like trying to make a hurricane change course.”

  I smirked because my mother had actually done that before. Then again she was practically a storm god. My expression faded. I was much less a storm god. Hell, I wasn’t even a storm ant. I glanced at the tall frame of the Keeper and shook my head. “Hopefully, we both want the same thing.”

  “Hopefully, you are correct.” He nodded toward me. “Now take your ghost and your swords and go save your friends from Crom Cruach.” He held out one large hand to me and both blades of Shirajirashii lay across his palm. They looked impossibly tiny in his garbage can lid of a hand.

  I was about to ask how he got them but thought better of it. I was pretty sure that he was some kind of wild magic incarnation. Trying to ask why it did something was like trying to ask a flower why only some of its blossoms bloomed. I’m sure there was a very good technical reason, but to me it might as well have been magic. Since he was magic, I wasn’t inclined to try and figure it out.

  I snatched the blades from him. They hummed with power, vibrating so hard that it was all I could do to keep them from shaking free of my grip. The snakes that wrapped around the hilts writhed beneath my hands like living serpents, and the sun and moon shaped pommels glowed with ethereal light.

  “I’m going with you,” Caleb said, trying to take a step toward me. As he did bits of blue fire burst from his flesh, dancing lightly along his skin. They didn’t seem to be hurting him, but he narrowed his eyes when he saw them.

  “The Prince doesn’t want you to come, does he?” Mattoc asked from across the room. He was strolling toward us, his once pristine white suit now marred by thorns and rose-colored smears. Had the roses released him when I took back my swords?

  It took a long time for Caleb to say anything as he shut his eyes and gritted his teeth. It was like watching him have a conversation with himself because I could see his eyes darting back and forward beneath his eyelids. When he finally opened his eyes, his expression settled into his blank, neutral fa
ce that he always had when he was about to lie.

  “Whatever you are about to say, don’t make it a lie, Caleb. Mattoc is right, isn’t he?” I asked, taking a step toward him.

  “Yes,” he said, and the sound he made was half-strangled.

  “You’ll burn up if you go against The Prince’s wishes—”

  “You’ll die if you go after Crom Cruach alone,” Caleb said, cutting me off mid-sentence. “He can kill you with only a glance. What do you think he’s going to do when you try to stab him?”

  “What do you mean kill me with a glance?” I asked, turning a worried glance to the Keeper.

  “Crom Cruach has the power to tear a soul from its body with a thought.” The Keeper’s voice was strangely neutral, as though it was a concern, but not an entirely valid one.

  “So how do we fight something like that?” I asked, glancing back at Caleb, hoping somewhere in that godly head of his there would be a way to kill another god in time to save Kishi and Warthor.

  “You don’t,” Mattoc said with a grin as he clapped me on the shoulder. “I do.”

  23

  The mound spread out before us like a giant pustule of blood red dirt in a lake of tar. The sulfuric smell of rotten eggs made my eyes water and my stomach turn as one giant tarry bubble expanded and popped, peppering the red sand with bits of black goo.

  Giant rib bones poked up from the pit at odd angles as though they were discarded after the flesh had been stripped from them. The mound itself wasn’t very tall, standing maybe four and a half feet above the tar. There was a three foot hole in the center like a giant bloody donut. I couldn’t see into it from my vantage point, but something about it made a tremor run down my spine.

  “That doesn’t look very inviting,” I said in my toughest voice. I’ll admit, there was a huge difference between being brave back in the throne room and here. There, Crom Cruach had been abstract. Here he was very, very real.

  “I don’t think he really wants visitors,” Mattoc replied, reaching out to take my hand. I wasn’t sure why he did it, but the touch of his flesh, like a cool wind on a hot summer’s day, thrummed along my skin and calmed me. I glanced over at him, about to say something when he squeezed my hand a little tighter. My words caught in my throat.

  Mattoc was still staring toward the mound, a far off look in his eyes. His lips were set in a thin, hard line that made his high cheekbones appear chiseled and perfect. He ran his other hand through his short, black hair absently, as if thinking to himself.

  “I’m not sure what the plan is exactly,” Mattoc said after a moment. “I know it’s something like ‘go in there and kick ass,’ but, to be honest, I’m really more of a kill people from a thousand yards with a sniper rifle kind of guy.”

  “Why are you holding my hand?” The words tumbled out of my mouth before I realized I’d said them.

  Mattoc stiffened and then, very slowly, looked down to see my hand clutched tightly in his. A wash of color spread over his alabaster skin, and for a moment, his hand relaxed as if he was going to release me.

  His grip tightened, his fingers weaving between mine as he looked back up at me. His gray eyes were hard to read, holding something in them I’ve never quite seen before.

  “I’m scared, and I don’t want you to get hurt,” he whispered so softly that I had to move closer to him in order to hear the words.

  He started to say something else, so quietly, I couldn’t make it out. I leaned closer, and as I did so, he bent his head toward me. “Holding your hand is reassuring me.” His breath was cool on my cheek as he spoke, but he couldn’t keep the tremor out of his voice. It danced along my skin like a lick of frost.

  My ghost was afraid. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Part of me wanted to tell him we’d both be fine, but at the same time, well, he was dead. So why did he seem so worried about this confrontation? Was there something he wasn’t telling me? Was that why he was acting the way he was? Was that why he really wanted to hold my hand?

  I didn’t know for sure, but if he wanted to hold my hand to make himself feel better before we went into the pit of tar and death, I wasn’t sure I could really say no? Was it really so much to ask of me to hold his hand while he stood here and steeled himself, knowing he would be doing most of the fighting?

  But, what would Caleb think if he came upon us now? Would he feel jealous, betrayed? Would he understand that sometimes people just held hands to feel better? That the touch of someone else might give you strength to do something that filled your belly with a cloying, gnawing fear?

  I mean, Mattoc had been incorporeal for so long and now, now he could feel things… and he wanted to hold my hand. That wasn’t such a big thing to do for him in the grand scheme of things, was it? It was something Caleb would understand, and even if he didn’t, he could tap into the Blue Prince’s power over emotion to see it for what it really was. Besides, it wasn’t like we were kissing or anything.

  Mattoc’s lips were moving, and I realized I hadn’t heard a thing he said. I’d been so caught up in my own thoughts that I hadn’t been paying any attention to the words coming out of his mouth. Hopefully, they weren’t important words.

  I blushed and shook my head. “Sorry, I missed that last part,” I said.

  Mattoc smiled, just the barest twitch of his lips that, for some reason, made my heart beat just a little faster than normal. “I said that your touch is reminding me of what it’s like to be alive again. Reminding me that you’re still real and that I am still real. I want to enjoy it for just a little longer before I rush into the abyss, if you don’t mind?”

  My cheeks got even hotter, and I knew the blush spread across the rest of my face and down my neck. “No,” I squeaked in that half-caught-in-my-throat sort of way. “I don’t mind. If it’s for you, this one time, I don’t mind.”

  He started to say something else, but before he could, the ground beneath our feet shook, rocking so violently that I had to windmill my other arm to keep my balance. The tar pit writhed, and the tentacles of some great beast broke the surface for a moment before disappearing back beneath the depths. A massive glowing cat’s eye of an orb rose from the center of the mound, casting us in an obscene amber light that made me think of sickly, yellowed flesh.

  “One be living and one be dead,

  But I’ll grind both your bones to make my bread.”

  The great sea of tar began to wriggle and thrash, throwing waves of sticky blackness onto the bloody sand. Monstrous purple tentacles reached from the pit like a great kraken stretching itself after a long rest. Huge suction cups the size of my head flexed and pulsed as the tentacles crashed back down.

  I took a step back. My heart beat so hard in my chest that I thought it would explode. The feeling of thousands of tiny bugs crawling over my skin overtook me, and I screamed, gripping Mattoc’s hand tighter.

  “It’s not real,” he said, and took a step forward, my hand still clasped in his. The giant cat’s eye blinked once, very slowly, as he approached.

  “You think you are safe because you are already dead? You are not. You are bound and chained and still living through the girl whose hand you squeeze so tightly. Your existence is as immaterial as the wind and not half as permanent.” The voice crashed into me like ice water on a winter’s day. I squeezed Mattoc’s hand and took a step after him, hustling to catch up so that we were shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the tar pit.

  “Maybe in the past people feared you, Crom Cruach, but that time is long gone,” Mattoc said with a smirk, his voice full of bravado laced with annoyance. “Why don’t you come up out of that hobbit hole and face us? Fallen god to man and woman?”

  “If I must, I will, but I don’t think I must. The last two came with the Queens’ blessing, and I smote them down. I made stew from their bones and jam from their blood.”

  I swallowed, my hand tightening on Mattoc’s as a huge pit opened in my stomach. Without thinking, I shut my eyes and reached out, throwing my power out like a
net to search for Warthor and Kishi.

  “No!” Crom Cruach said, and my power hit a brick wall. Impenetrable and unyielding.

  “Well, that’s answer enough,” I said. “You’d let me search for them if they were dead.”

  Instead of responding, a hand the size of a skyscraper burst from the hole. It gleamed like rubies cast in the light of a blazing fire. Images danced and played along its surface; never staying still long enough for me to pick out what they actually were but making my breath catch in my throat nonetheless.

  It crashed down onto the ground around us, fingers splayed so that we were left untouched between the two middle digits. I stumbled as the shockwave made the dirt beneath my feet writhe, and the only thing that kept me from falling against the chest-high fingers was Mattoc. His grip on my hand never loosened, never wavered. It gave me something to balance myself against.

  “Feh,” Mattoc snorted and kicked the hand contemptuously. “You were more impressive five minutes ago, and that wasn’t really a whole hell of a lot to begin with.”

  Mattoc glanced at me and something dark and angry swam through the gray of his eyes. My breath caught in my throat as he shook his head and turned back to the giant hand. Its fingers were beginning to close around the earth, drawing great gouts several feet deep in the ground.

  “Ready?” Mattoc leapt forward as he spoke, and I barely had time to leap with him. We landed on the wrist of the creature and my feet sank several inches into the flesh. As we walked forward, the flesh had that trampoline-like consistency that literally put a bounce in my step.

  “You dare walk on me?” Crom Cruach’s voice slashed down my skin like a poisoned straight razor, cutting into me with its venom.

  Beside me, Mattoc stumbled for a single step, and he shut his eyes for a split second. His hand tightened on mine, and when he opened his eyes again, he slowed his pace. We were halfway across the arm now, hovering above the bubbling pit of tar and tentacles.