by SM Reine
“How would you describe your role in this?”
“Loyal. He was my sister’s boyfriend, even then. I wasn’t going to ruin his life.”
“What of this child named Derek?”
“He got failed by justice.”
“Justice failed him? What a convenient stance. You are remarkably innocent in this.” She tilted her head to study him with judgmental eyes. “I think that you’re capable of better than you’re doing, Mr. Marshall, and that may be one of the most frustrating things I’ve discovered about you.”
Lincoln didn’t like where this was going. He pointed to his own chin. “You’ve got something there.”
“What?” She wiped at her face, looked at her fingers. “No, I most certainly do not.”
“Yeah, it’s ink,” he said. “You somehow got ink all over your chin.”
Sophie leaned in to check her face in the mirror and huffed when she saw that he was right. She pulled a wet wipe from one of her many backpacks to scrub it off. “Your familial baggage is neither here nor there. Nonetheless, you seem to misunderstand the source of my frustration, so I shall make this explicit: although I understand I’m an uninvited guest, I still expect that you will protect me, and you made no effort to do so today.”
“Protect you from…my family?” He laughed. “I can’t make you act nicer. What am I supposed to do if you can’t get along?”
She spun on him. “Protect me better than you protected Derek!”
Sophie’s shout seemed to ring off the eaves.
Lincoln froze, breath caught in his chest, listening for someone coming up the stairs. The kitchen had grown silent right when Sophie yelled.
No footsteps came upstairs.
“Look, Miss Keyes, I’m not fixing for a fight,” he said in a low voice. “I’m exhausted. I don’t know how you aren’t. I’m gonna just grab one of the pillows and sleep on the couch downstairs, right under you. I’ll know if you’re in trouble. The floorboards creak like crazy.” He whipped the best pillow off the bed, the one with the flowered cover.
“Then you have no intent of discussing this with me. Do you even understand why I’m so frustrated?” she asked.
Lincoln’s only answer was ‘because you’re being a silly girl,’ and like he’d said, he wasn’t fixing for a fight. “I’d throw myself in front of a gun for you, but I still owe loyalty to my family and my God. You don’t like how they act with you? Don’t call them racist because you’re feeling hurt. Don’t be a jackass. Give them a chance.”
Her mouth moved soundlessly.
“We ain’t talking more until we’ve both slept.” He grabbed a pair of shorts out of his drawer, branded with his alma mater’s logo, and tucked his pillow under his arm.
“But—”
“Sleep.” Lincoln stepped out, shutting the door behind him again. He didn’t even look at Sophie. He didn’t need to see the betrayal on her face again—it had already carved itself into the shadowy crevices of his breastbone, where it could never be scrubbed away.
Lincoln slept on the couch downstairs, right below his old bedroom. He was sprawled out the same way that he used to sprawl as a boy, with gravel-scraped knees sliding off the side and his too-big feet dangling from the sofa’s arm. The pillow under his head smelled like Grandma. The afghan was scratchy. The voices in the kitchen echoed through the house until long after midnight, when the cross-fade began silencing players one by one and total silence descended.
Everything was the way it used to be. The way it always had been.
Lincoln could almost imagine that Dad was upstairs, in the master bedroom with Mom. On most nights, the murmur of their voices had formed a tense soundtrack as they argued back and forth. Mom had always been someone who liked to pick fights, and Dad had never been someone to put up with it.
At some point, on one of the nights without an argument, Dad had gone out seeking female affection missing from his marriage. He’d found it somewhere in the community. He must have fallen in love and fathered a child.
The creaks and squeaks of the quiet house were as they’d always been. It was a sprawling house and the Marshalls always filled it.
Some of those creaks and squeaks tonight were coming from Sophie in Lincoln’s bedroom.
Because things weren’t like they’d always been—not really. He wasn’t a boy sleeping on the couch to give space for his family’s visitors. He was a disgraced deputy followed by a one-of-a-kind Historian. His parents weren’t bickering upstairs. Susannah barely spoke to him. His dad hadn’t been conscious since Lincoln touched down in Knoxville. Lincoln had a half-brother somewhere, raised by some other family.
Something sighed outside the open window beyond that huge CRT television—same one that his dad once used to watch football playoffs while Lincoln played at his feet.
Lincoln sat up, blanket tumbling into his lap. His heart thudded in his ears.
There was no more sighing. No rustles or murmuring. The house even felt like it had stopped shifting in the wind.
Inanna sat up beside him, as if she’d been lying on the floor. She was already in a crouch. Her hair fell around her shoulders in an inky fog, sharp gaze locked upon the open window.
She heard it too.
When Lincoln rose, Inanna rose with him. They slid toward the windows together.
He’d seen the view outside this window a thousand times. There should have been a sliver of pond visible by the left frame. On the right, he should have had a view of the Salter family house, in the form of a red brick wall peeking through the trees.
Instead, Lincoln only saw gray stone.
There was a wall just a few inches outside the window.
“Again,” Inanna breathed, her eyes sparked with excitement.
Lincoln had to use the kitchen door to get out on the stoop and round the house.
The cathedral from Falias was standing beside his family home.
It had mutated since its last visit. Much the way that Grandpa Marshall had stuck together all the Frankenstein parts of catalog homes, this cathedral had grown a wing off its rear, and its bell tower stretched taller than ever before. The magical symbols engraved in the stone by the foremost steps seemed to have spread like a fungus. It was impossible that those had been carved into its face by seelie masons—according to Ofelia, the cathedral hadn’t visited the Summer Court since Lincoln left it.
Somehow, by force of magic or something worse, the cathedral was growing.
Lincoln and Inanna faced its entrance, shoulder-to-shoulder. They both saw when the tall bronze double doors swung open. They saw the inviting spill of mist from its belly over the driveway.
He was supposed to go inside.
If Lincoln hadn’t spent his whole life in this house, he might have believed it had always been there. It even looked like the trees were growing around it. Except that church had been following him everywhere, and he’d seen it no less than six different places around Reno. He’d seen it in Carson City twice.
At first, he’d been thrilled by it. He’d gone inside eagerly.
But every time he did, nothing was waiting for him in there.
He’d hoped it wouldn’t find him across the country.
“Let us hunt,” Inanna said.
God, but it would have been easy for Lincoln to walk up those stairs with Inanna. She wanted to do it. So did he.
Whatever he’d experienced inside the cathedral before, it had been overwhelming and confusing, but pleasant. Almost amniotic in its warmth. As if he were being carried within the belly of an enormous beast, sheltered as he grew into something…else.
Growth wasn’t always good, and sometimes evil felt great.
Lincoln took a painful, deliberate step back.
“No,” he said.
Inanna mounted the steps one by one. “The usurper lives beyond. She will eventually come for what we cannot surrender.”
“Are you the one doing this? Making that thing appear wherever I go?”
“Each generation supplants the predecessor. That’s how the cycle has always been,” Inanna said. “It is the natural way of things.”
“Talk like a normal person, dammit!”
“It hunts you,” she said. “It hunts me.”
“It’s a fucking building,” he said. “There’s nothing in there but more questions.”
“How do you know without looking?”
He stuffed a hand in his pocket, closing his fist around Ofelia’s die. “I don’t gotta tango with the Devil to know I’ll get burned if I do.”
Inanna seldom appeared as Elise anymore, but the annoyance on her face was completely Godslayer. It was exactly how Elise had looked whenever Lincoln brought up the Devil. Like he was some puny-brained idiot hanging tight to fairy tales.
“At some point, you won’t be able to resist the call of the hunt,” Inanna said, “and when that point arrives, I will be waiting for you. I won’t have a choice.” She slipped between the doors. She disappeared into fog.
There wasn’t a single cicada buzzing outside the Marshall house.
He glanced up at his bedroom window, half-expecting to see Sophie’s face. But she was asleep. The whole family was. Nobody was going to know what curse had decided to follow Lincoln around…yet.
“I’m not going back in there, and you can’t make me!” he shouted after Inanna.
On impulse, he swept a handful of dust off the ground and flung it at the doors of the cathedral, just as he used to throw rocks at Ashley.
Dirt peppered a pickup truck. Lincoln had blinked, and the cathedral was gone.
The world outside the Marshall house was empty.
Chapter 18
Lincoln jerked awake, shocked out of dreams of hellfire, the Devil with her legs spreading for him, a black void descending. He was already sitting upright. His head spun, shirt stuck to him with sweat.
He wasn’t in Hell with Elise again.
He wasn’t being strung up in a noose by Ereshkigal.
A warm smell sizzled from the kitchen, dragging his focus to reality. Cool morning light seemed to seep from the floorboards. That damn rooster was squawking, and he’d gotten the turkeys going; they were a sour-pitched harmony to the cascade of wrens, warblers, and mockingbirds hailing the dawn.
Somewhere on the upper stories, bodies shifted. Uncle Art was probably getting up. His back kept him awake. He’d be hours ahead of the women, hungover from Coors and cannabis.
If he’d heard the giggle of his nephews’ voices, he’d have expected one of his sisters to be cooking. But the house was too quiet for them to be up.
He grabbed his dagger as he rose. He’d slept with it under the pillow. Once he was on his feet he could see the pond outside, unobstructed by the sheer silver faces of the cathedral, long since vanished.
Lincoln shuffled to the doorway.
Sophie moved through the kitchen with expert ease, which was only surprising until he spotted her open notebook on the counter. She’d diagramed which cabinets held which utensils, and also inventoried the ingredients.
Her cooking was the source of the appealing sizzle. She’d gravitated wisely to Aunt Bee’s cast iron, leaving the cheap Teflon crap hanging on the hooks over the island. Lincoln was surprised to even see Teflon there in the first place. Grandpa would have had a heart-attack to know his kitchen had been so tainted.
Steam hissed from skillets on the range. Sophie lifted lids to peer underneath, then adjusted the temperature. She’d pulled one of her own blouses around her waist to serve as an apron. Her braids were twisted into a thick knot atop her head.
“Good morning, Mr. Marshall,” Sophie said. “Sit down.”
The table had been dressed up too, with plates and all. He tucked his dagger into the waistband of his sweats. “Looks like you’ve been real productive. Were you taking speed instead of sleeping last night?”
“I’ve no idea what ‘speed’ refers to, but I’ve never needed much sleep,” she said. “I perform with optimal mental clarity after four hours of rest, and don’t note any increase in acuity with additional time. As such, I’ve been awake long enough to not only hit another brick wall on my translation, but to plan and execute breakfast.”
“Smells good, even if you’re nuts,” Lincoln said, settling into one of the chairs. “Those grits over there?”
“It’s called krummelpap,” she said, transferring skillets from range to table. “It’s a corn-based porridge I’m serving with honey, cream, and cinnamon. Quite filling. If you’ve yet to experience it, I believe you’ll be pleased with how effectively it provides energy for sustained investigative efforts. Further, it warms the belly when one feels sad.”
“Who’s sad?” he asked, scooping the corn-stuff into the bowl she’d set out for him. It looked a hell of a lot like grits.
She gave a tiny huff. “I’ve also boiled water for tea.” Sophie set Grandma’s favorite teapot on a cozy in front of him. It sighed steam from its spout. “They only offered one type of tea at the general store, so whatever this Lipton is better be satisfactory.”
“How’d you get money for the general store?” It looked like she’d bought the cream as well as the tea. Even without having to shell out for the luxury of honey—the Marshalls had hives on the property, so their cellar was stuffed with jars aplenty—Sophie must have gotten her hands on a fair chunk of cash.
“Ofelia gifted me with American dollars from the Winter Court’s reserve,” Sophie said. “I thought she may have given me an unnecessarily large amount, but she insisted upon making sure I was well-equipped to survive inflation. To tell you the truth, I believe she was very concerned about leaving me with you.”
“What’s an unnecessarily large amount of money?” Lincoln asked. She produced a weighty envelope from her nearby backpack and set it in front of him. He choked on his own tongue when he looked inside. “Wow. That is…”
“One of five envelopes,” Sophie said.
Since the time distortions had reset the kitchen events, preventing him from getting the gift envelope, Lincoln had been forced to sell the car to get another ticket for Sophie. She could have chartered a private jet. “Jesus, the unseelie queen is loaded. Put that envelope away. Don’t let anyone know what you’ve got, all right? Nobody. We oughta split all that up and hide some—or invest it, or… Just put it away, right this second.” He still couldn’t quite breathe when she zipped it back into her backpack. “You sure the assassin isn’t after you because you’re walking around with more money than Africa’s GDP?”
She dropped her makeshift apron on the back of her chair before sitting across from him. “The nations of Africa had a collective GDP in excess of a billion dollars prior to the Breaking. This is nowhere near one billion dollars, and you exaggerate unnecessarily.”
“I wasn’t exaggerating,” Lincoln said. “I’ve just got no idea what Africa’s GDP is. Just like I’ve got no idea why you’re being nice to me all of a sudden.”
Sophie served herself krummelpap as well. “In my home, when one of my guardians conflicted with another, we considered it family tradition to make peace by sharing a meal.”
“Did they often get in fights?”
“Isolation with a small number of people creates an environment ideal for breeding resentment. They were trained fighters who never went without arms. You can imagine how that went.”
“Lotsa testosterone, and lotsa stabbing,” he said.
“Something to that effect. In any case, I have prepared this to make peace with you.” She spread her hands to encompass the breakfast. She’d also soft-poached eggs and made something that looked like skillet-fried hash browns. When she picked up the skillet, she asked, “Would you like rösti as well?”
“Hell yeah,” Lincoln said. She served him, and he dug in. There were chives in the potato cake. He loved chives. “You can apologize to me with food all the time.”
“Don’t get too spoiled. Were I not driven to a standstill with the translation, I would have not cooked
a thing. I will always prioritize my academic pursuits. You should be prepared to typically cook for me so as not to disrupt my work.”
“You better be prepared to eat a lotta fast food.” Lincoln could cook, as all men should; one of the few favors his mom had done for him was ensuring he could get around a kitchen. But he was about as likely to cook for Sophie as for Noah at this rate.
“I’m not apologizing for feeling hurt by your family,” Sophie said. “My feelings are valid, and frankly, your reaction is repulsive. I should be better than this, though. I am the Historian, after all: an expert in humanity. Were I approaching your particular subculture as an impartial observer, I would not become so emotionally entangled.”
“You’re saying that you shouldn’t get mad because you’re better than us?” Lincoln asked. “And one breakfast is supposed to be enough apology for that?”
“Yes and no,” she said. “I said that I am making peace, not apologizing. We must get along. I still need you. Hopefully you feel similarly about me.”
Lincoln needed Sophie the way he needed a thorn between his big toe and the one next to it. “Fine, we’re at peace. Even if it’s just so you can talk to Inanna.”
Sophie looked startled. “I didn’t ‘just’ come to you for access to Inanna. You’re still the only person I’ve ever known brave enough to leap inside a cait sidhe to rescue the man at its heart, after all.”
It wasn’t really an apology, but he felt weirdly mollified. Even more so when he ate more of the corn mush. Eating it sweetened wasn’t bad—more like oatmeal than grits. This seemed like the kind of hearty food that would have fueled a woman like Sophie, equal parts smart and stubborn. He could imagine her as a nerdy little child reading books about the distant world as she shoveled it into her mouth.