Labyrinth of Stars(18)

The Mahati toppled sideways, hands falling limp as she began convulsing. Vomit trickled from her mouth. Or maybe it was blood. Zee and the boys held me so tightly their tiny hands burned, but I didn’t say a word. I wanted to feel the pain. It grounded me, and I needed that as I watched the Mahati go still, and die.

I turned away, holding my stomach, breathing through gritted teeth. Dek and Mal licked the backs of my ears. Quiet, so quiet. In the distance, there was a glow: morning rising, slow.

“Sweet Maxine,” Zee murmured.

I was going to be vomiting next. “Seen anything like that before?”

He shook his head, expression troubled. “Smelled sick. Poisoned. Tasted it on her breath.”

“Fuck. It was those humans. That’s what the Aetar did.” I tried to stand. Raw and Aaz clung to my legs, ears flat against their sharp little heads.

“Maxine,” Zee said again.

“Hide her,” I said, focused only on getting home, warning Grant. “No one can find her body.”

“Maxine,” Zee said, and this time the urgency in his voice made me look at him—and follow his gaze to the dead Mahati.

Her head was half-buried in the snow, but her eyes were wide open. I stared, confused, because I’d just seen her die. I could feel her death, knew with a certainty that her life was over.

But those eyes were very much alive.

A whisper floated on the air, a slow exhalation that went on and on, becoming a sigh, a hiss. My skin rippled with that sound.

“Hunter,” breathed the Mahati, sprawled so still, still as death in the snow.

Nothing of the demon moved, not even those bloodstained lips. I thought it might be my imagination, except Raw and Aaz were stiff with tension, and Zee had planted himself in front of me: crouched, quivering. Dek and Mal wrapped themselves so tight around my throat it was hard to breathe.

Her eyes convinced me. Though the rest of her body was still as death, her eyes were filled with a different kind of life: a burning, calculated focus that was ruthless, cold, and utterly, magnificently ancient. Not the eyes of the young demon who had knelt before me and lost her life. Not her eyes.

Something else. Something I recognized. I knew that look. It didn’t matter that the flesh was Mahati. Some things transcended the physical. Some things could possess the physical. And only one race of creature, one race of alien, had that terrible, immortal gaze.

Only one race of creature could tamper with a human and make its flesh poison. Or make a giant who killed. I thought of that demon waitress in Texas, everything she’d told me, and my blood got even colder.

“We see you,” whispered the Mahati, and the voice was distinct, too: cultured, faintly crisp, like chipped ice. Her mouth contorted: a crazy, grotesque shape, dribbling blood and saliva. Took me a moment to realize it was a smile.

“We see what you hide inside your belly, what it is, what it will become.”

I lunged. Zee beat me, gripping that head between his claws. Raw and Aaz prowled close, baring their teeth. Dek and Mal loosened their coils, hovering away from me, smoke pouring from their nostrils.

“Kill you,” Zee rasped. “Make war. Destroy your worlds, again.”

That terrible gaze flicked again to mine. I did not flinch. But I couldn’t speak, either. My throat was too tight.

“Your daughter is already dead,” she said, and a dull ache thudded hard inside my lower left side: a heartbeat, a pulse.

I stopped breathing. That monstrous smile widened.

Zee snarled. Bone splintered. Skin tore. Blood oozed as the little demon crushed the Mahati’s head. Light escaped, a haze that had all the shimmer of a borealis—the shadow of an Aetar. I watched, unable to move, drifting inside a chill that washed through me from heart to bone, settling so deep I didn’t think I would ever be warm again.

The pain in my stomach worsened. I’d never felt anything like it, as though a hook were inside me, yanking. The sensation felt hot. Wet.

I was wet.

I reached between my legs, rubbing my jeans.

My fingers came away bloody.





CHAPTER 7




MY knees buckled. Raw and Aaz caught me. I heard Zee speaking—a snapping snarl of words and growls—but his voice was far away. The entire world dimming to my stomach, and the heat, and the blood. I had read everything I could on pregnancies. I knew about miscarriages.

By the time the bleeding started, the baby was almost always dead.

“No,” I said, holding my stomach, panic rising thick and bitter in my throat. I tried to breathe, but my chest felt heavy, paralyzed. I pulled at Dek and Mal, still coiled around my neck, and their soft keens broke apart as they fell from me.

But I still couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe.