unmistakably mine.
“Pop?”
I allow myself the tiniest of smiles, a mere tug of my lips as I’m lit from the inside by a flare of hope I haven’t felt since Reverend Hill’s corpse hit the floor. Things will never be the same; they can’t be, but if I die or go wherever I’d bound for with the knowledge that my son knew I loved him, it will be enough.
“Welcome back,” I tell him, and he lowers his head, a gesture of defeat. For the moment I’m uncertain why, or what it is he’s mourning. Perhaps he’s finally letting go of the fire. Perhaps he came here hoping to find me dead. I don’t know and it doesn’t matter.
“Kyle. I’m sorry.”
It takes him a while to look at me, and when finally he does, there are tears in his eyes. “Why?”
“You know why, and if you don’t, it’ll come to you eventually. Right now we—”
I trail off.
Lian Su is no longer by the wall, but my frantic search for her is a short one.
She’s standing right behind Kyle, and before I have a chance to call out a warning, her hands are slithering over his shoulders, clamping onto the sides of his face. Fear fills his eyes. “Give your mother a kiss,” Lian hisses. Blue veins begin to spread across my son’s face. Fog fills his eyes. He shudders. “What’s—?” is all he manages to say before his lips turn blue. He begins to sag.
“No!” I step forward, reaching for them both.
With little effort, and a sound like glass crunching beneath a boot heel, Lian Su wrenches his head around to face her.
Chapter Twenty Four
It doesn’t matter whether you’re God, or the devil, or an agent of one or the other, you always know the consequences of your actions. Even I did, though I chose to ignore them. Lian Su knows too what she has set in motion, and calls upon every trick in her book to evade my fury. She’s smoke through my fingers, fire on my skin, ice in my bones; she’s a legion of exotic bugs crawling over my flesh; blades cutting me to pieces, but I can’t die. All I can do is flail wildly at whatever form she chooses to take.
In the end it’s Kyle she becomes, a last-ditch effort to play on my grief, just as she distracted my son by becoming his mother. But I know her. I have stood idly by and watched everyone die and everything burn. I have heard from her own mouth and seen with my own eyes the soulless evil thing she is behind the succession of masks and costumes. And this costume is my son.
With a cry of rage I should not have the strength to unleash, I tear that costume apart, snap its bones, sunder its face, all the while shutting out his voice lest it shatters me like her hands shattered Blue Moon.
“You won’t win; you can’t,” Lian tells me in Kyle’s voice.
Once more, Eddie’s is in flames. Smoke fills the bar. The deer at the door have moved away.
I drag Lian to the floor, shove her face into the fire.
She laughs.
I grab fistfuls of charred wooden arrows from Red Cloud’s quiver and bury them in her chest.
She taunts me.
I slash her throat with a shard of obsidian.
She grins.
Exhausted, but driven by rage that is almost enough for me to erupt into flames of my own, I grab her hair. She turns to black tar to escape me, spins her limbs into threads that shoot out in all directions, latching onto unstable wood, the floor, the crumbling roof, anything to keep her inside this place. But the place won’t hold, and neither will she, not under the opposing weight of my anger.
Head lowered, I run through the flames. Joints and muscles protest in screaming agony. I ignore them, make claws of my hands.
Lian Su turns to stone.
I barrel into her, breaking my nose, my jaw, my fingers, cracking open my skull.
I feel none of it as I force her into the air.
And over the threshold.
“I’ll set you free.”
Outside, their faces made a rusty red by the roaring flames, stand the deer. One of them, its antlers more viciously intricate than those of its brethren, moves a little closer, eyes me with caution, inspects the writhing woman at my feet who is a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of colors and forms. Blood and fluids of every shade leak from the gaping hole in her belly. Threats in an alien tongue slither from her mouth.
“And what do you want in return?” the deer whispers, turning its head sharply to silence the sibilant dissension from the herd. “We didn’t come here for her.”
“Blue Moon and Red Cloud are dead. This…woman…has caused many people great pain, and in killing your quarry, has denied you justice, condemned you to search for something you’ll never find. There is no place I can think of to keep her that will stop her from returning. If you take her; if you keep her with you, I’ll set you free of the hunt.”
“What makes you think the land of the dead can hold her?”
“Because for a long time, this tavern was enough.”
Maybe Lian Su will come back, and maybe she won’t, but what I’m asking of this creature now is all I can think of and it’s better than nothing.
After a moment, the deer takes a step forward and slowly lowers its head, cocks it, and prods Lian Su’s wound with one curved tip of its antler. She convulses and shrieks as dark blue light flares, lighting up every nerve and blood vessel in her body.
The deer turns away. The rest of the herd follow suit. They have taken only a few steps when the wind rises and they become dust in its arms, whirling away in eddies. They leave a curious emptiness behind them.
I look down at Lian. The blue light is eating her away. She fights it, screeching, baleful eyes trying to will a slow and painful death on me as she spasms and struggles. White-knuckled hands claw at the earth; her legs kick. Then the struggling subsides. A faint sigh escapes her twisted lips as her hair turns to water and seeps into the ground. A single shiver, then the eyes are gone, draining back into the hollows that held them. Her fingers become trickles, the nails dewdrops, and in what seems like only a couple of seconds, Lian Su is gone, turned to water that quenches the thirst of the earth at my feet.
Behind me, Eddie’s collapses.
The fire rages on.
Iris is waiting at the foot of the hill, shivering in the cold breeze, her eyes focused on the blaze. When I reach her she says nothing, just shakes her head and gets into the car. I expect her to leave, to haul ass out of here and never look back, but she waits. Goes right on waiting until I come around to the passenger side and slide in beside her. We sit there in silence, watching the tavern burn for the second time.
At length, she turns to me and studies my face, tentatively touches the already healing wounds. “Did you tell him?”
“Yes.” I take a deep breath that feels like sand going down my throat, and wait a moment, debating whether or not the question needs to be asked, then I ask it before I can decide. “Why didn’t you?”
“It wouldn’t have mattered.”
“You don’t know that.”
