A Wild Light (18 page)

Grant’s voice faltered.

All around him jaws snapped shut, and a collective twitch raced through those demons held by his rumbling song. I spun, burning on instinct, sword swinging—and hacked off the sharp hands and fingers that jerked down toward his vulnerable face.

I didn’t stop moving. I grabbed his arm and hauled him to his feet, tight against me. His breathing was harsh, his skin warm as fire. He pressed his lips against the back of my head, and his mouth stayed there.

And I started to laugh.

It was not my laughter. But it spilled out of me, triumphant and confident, and the sound had a physical shape inside my mouth, like a long tongue tasting the air; finding it delicious with blood, and death.

Hunger filled me. Aching, wild, hunger. Old, deep, and endless.

Grant stilled against me. The demons attacking us hesitated. I didn’t. I lunged forward and grabbed a one-armed, scarred demon whose black eyes were too human with confusion—and, for a moment, despair. The boys howled in my hand when I touched him, and my laughter deepened.

The demon gazed upon me with horror and screamed.

He was still screaming when he turned to ash. His arm dissolved first, blowing away like silver snow, then his shoulder crumbled and his feet, his legs, his torso falling, shattering on impact like soft glass, and his face was last—his jaw, his skull, his eyes staring at me as they faded, and formed lumps that scattered.

I tasted the echo of his screams, inside me, like wine: rolling each note on my tongue, tasting the layers of his terror, and finding them pure and good, and sweet. My fist was full of his ashes, and I lifted them and dribbled his remains into my mouth.

Part of me screamed, too—but the darkness rolled with pleasure, and when I mixed those ashes with my saliva and swallowed, it was not just my body anymore. I was a passenger. My mouth tasted like poison.

Every demon stood frozen, staring. I felt Grant behind me, but not his touch.

I looked for the giant, and found him standing a head above the other demons. His green eyes glittered, and his gaze did not leave my face as he walked toward us. The demons parted for him, and those who moved too slowly were knocked aside. On the periphery of my vision, I saw the dead being surreptitiously pulled into the horde. I heard more bones crack and the soft whisper of flesh tearing.

The giant stopped in front of us. He didn’t talk. He got down on one knee, pressed his long, sharp hand to his chest, and bowed his head. The other demons dropped to the ground without hesitation, following his example. Kneeling to me. Heads lowered. Eyes closed.

I stared at them, stricken, but the darkness rose in my throat with a smile that tasted like death.

“Forgive me,” rumbled the demon. “Forgive us all. We did not recognize you.”

The sword glowed, runes rippling over its surface, down into the armor around my hand. I thought it spoke to me, but all I felt was a heartbeat in the metal, then five more on my skin. Hearts, burning, inside my chest. Burning like my bond with Grant, which seemed so far away—as though, beneath my skin, my soul stood on a dark plain, watching his light with miles between us, miles and miles.

The darkness clawed into my mouth and breathed words on my tongue.

“Ha’an,”
it whispered through me.
“How stand the other Lords?”

“I do not know,” he said, chancing a look at my face. “We were in the second ring, and the break only reached as far as us. I know nothing of Draean, K’ra’an, or the others—but the Lady Whore still stands, and her children will feed our bellies until we may hunt.” He hesitated. “You freed us. We thought . . . perhaps, you were gone forever.”

“We are forever,”
said the darkness.
“But this is the dreaming time.”

The demon’s expression was surprisingly human. He frowned, like any man would who was confused.

“The veil is open, my Kings. These are but a fraction of the Mahati who are ready to serve you, should you but ask. All we beg for is food. A good hunt.” He looked past me at Grant. “The humans still abide, it seems. They will suffice.”

“No,” I said, and this time it was all me. The darkness rested in my throat, but it seemed content to let me speak that word.

“No,” echoed the demon, and anger flickered in his green eyes. “We have suffered, and you deny us?”

“This is not your world.”

“And it is
yours
?” His words were challenging, full of bite, and the other demons stirred uneasily.

I straightened, flushed with an anger that might have been me, or the darkness, but that felt righteous, strong. I stared that demon dead in the eyes, and knew—knew, in my gut—that I could kill him. With just a touch. A kiss.

The power of that knowledge felt too good.

His mouth snapped shut, and he looked away. “Forgive me.”

I walked toward him, stopping only when I would have touched him. I circled his body, staring from him to the rest of the demons. I glimpsed Grant, but looking at him made something in me burn, and the darkness flinched away—as did I. It was enough, though, to see his eyes: dark, fathomless, watching me like I was a stranger.

“This world is mine,” I said, and the darkness consumed my tongue, and added,
“You are mine. All of you.”

“Forgive me,” he said again, shoulders rigid. “Of course, we are yours. The Mahati have always been loyal. But if the others go free, they will say what is already in my heart. We must hunt, or die.”

“Then you will die,” I said.

The demon—Ha’an—looked at me. And then Grant. Uncertainty filled his gaze, followed by hard defiance, and a determination so cold, so visceral, I felt it in my spine, in the pit of my stomach where all my fear huddled in a tiny, weeping lump.

“This is not right,” he said softly. “This is not what was. You are different, my Kings. And not
just
in your choice of vessel.”

He rose, towering. “Kill me if that serves your pleasure, but
I
am the Mahati Lord, and we are the last survivors. I will not sacrifice our lives—our lives, that have already been sacrificed in dignity and flesh—when I do not know if you can still be trusted.”

I waited for the darkness to speak, but it said nothing. And so neither did I. All I did was stare into the eyes of Ha’an—and smile.

The demon lord didn’t quite flinch, but whatever he saw in my eyes was enough to make him sway backward.

“Lead us,” he said, almost begging. “Please. If you do not, if you give us up, the other Lords will not rest until they take power. And we are not as strong as them.”

I said nothing. Ha’an backed away, shaking his head. “Only you can bind us. You, our Reaper Kings.”

I froze at the sound of that name. Zee twisted on my skin, a lurch that felt like a sob.

Thankfully, Ha’an had already turned away. He looked at the demons surrounding him, and the darkness watched them, too—filled with a different kind of hunger, a sensation like the rise of a car on a roller coaster, inching toward the crest of that first wild fall. The darkness wanted to fall. It wanted to hunt.

Ha’an glanced over his shoulder at me. “Three days is all I can give you, my Kings. Three days . . . or however long time is judged on this world. Then you will kill us, or lead us.”

Ha’an leapt upward, straight into the sky toward the crack in the veil. I did not expect him to fly, but he did so as easily as walking.

The other demons followed, carrying the dead. None looked back. I watched, unable to move or breathe, growing ever more light- headed as those silver-bullet bodies disappeared into the red haze of the open prison veil.

The darkness wanted to follow—or maybe I did—my heart wound so tight around that entity, I couldn’t tell what was me anymore. All I knew was that I wanted to follow the Mahati. I wanted to enter the veil and see the army amassed, and breathe the air, and touch those bodies that were mine, mine,
mine to lead
—

Hands touched me. I flinched.

Grant’s chest moved against my back. Breathing. He was breathing—and then, so was I. Deep breaths. I had been suffocating that entire time, I realized. Afraid to act like I needed air in front of a demon.

Afraid of myself.

“Maxine,” Grant said. He was shaking, I realized. Trembling.

“Don’t talk yet,” I breathed, and lifted the sword to my lips. I kissed the blade, and it shimmered like a mirage, and faded into the armor. I kissed the armor, then, too.

“Jack,” I said.

And we fell.

T
HE women in my family kept journals. Not for self-reflection, but to teach from the grave.

My ancestor—an Englishwoman named Rebecca—wrote once about the Reaper Kings. No specific date, just a year—1857. She’d been in London, and was planning a move to Paris, followed by a journey to Africa. Ready to explore all those remote jungles where no white man could go.

She mentioned the Reaper Kings at the end, and only in passing.

IF I had known where the armor would take us, I would have been more specific. I would have said that Jack could wait. That my questions could wait. That the demons in the veil could wait and rot in their hell—while I did the same in mine. I would have said all those things if I had known.

Grant and I stepped from the void into a kitchen.

It was an old kitchen, with cream-colored cabinets, dusty green polka-dot curtains, and a checkered linoleum floor that, after almost seven years, carried a bloodstain not even the boys had been able to scrub out.

Home. In the room where my mother was murdered.

Sunlight poured through the windows. The air tasted hot, and smelled musty and tired. I didn’t have any strength. My brain and heart were somewhere else.

But when I saw the stain—when it sank in—the rest of me caught up.

My knees buckled. I sat down hard on the floor, swaying backward. I would have stretched out all the way if my shoulders hadn’t connected with the old Frigidaire. I leaned against it, overwhelmed, lost in cracked-eggshell walls and peeling-linoleum countertop. The kitchen table was still there, the heavy wooden chairs, just as I’d left them; and the board I had nailed over the north window, where the bullet had blasted through the glass and ripped apart my mother’s head.

I could still smell the cake. Chocolate.

“Maxine,” Grant said, falling down on the floor at my side. I held up my hand, wishing he would stay silent. Everything, too much. Demons. My mother. Me.

Us,
said the voice of the darkness, as it curled beneath my heart.
It is not complicated.

I was losing my mind. This was it. This was what Jack had been afraid of, what my ancestor had faced. Losing her mind to the thing resting so heavily inside—part of me, but not. Overwhelmed by voices, crawling with hunger, consuming demons . . .

I tasted that ash in my mouth, and leaned sideways, gagging.

Grant pulled me into his arms. I tried to push him away, but he was strong, and I wanted to be held. I needed an anchor. I balled his shirt up in my fist.

“I’m a monster,” I said.

He shook his head. “Never.”

“You saw, you heard—”

“Maxine,” he interrupted roughly, but said nothing else. I remembered that glimpse of his eyes, looking at me as though I were a stranger—and the shame, and grief, that roared after that memory were almost more than I could bear. Zee twisted, and the others did the same, rough—then gentle—tugging on my skin until I wanted to hit myself, hit them, and scream. I didn’t own my body. Not inside, not out.

I stared at the bloodstain on the floor. My mother.

No one owns you,
she would have said.
No one but you.