Home, again. Home, in my proper time. And I wanted to go back. Being with her, only for a moment—was I supposed to be grateful for that? It was torture, and I was a kid again, a little girl who needed her mother more than she needed air to breathe.
I sensed movement around me, a frightened hush.
“Grant.” My throat hurt, as if I’d been screaming. “Someone find my husband.”
No one answered me. I rolled over on my back and stared through tear-blurred eyelashes at half a dozen young, inhuman faces; red and silver, or covered in fur; staring at me with huge eyes and chocolate batter around their mouths.
They were pushed roughly aside. Mary leaned close. She took one look at me and grabbed the nearest demon child by the throat, dragging him close. “Fetch the Lightbringer,” she hissed, releasing him with a shove. He stared at her with terror and ran.
But Grant was already coming. I felt him, a bloom of warmth inside my chest: a golden thread of light, pulsing with frantic urgency. I could almost hear his thoughts, a wisp on the surface of my mind, but mine were too scrambled, panicked, to let him in. Nothing was getting in to me. I heard Mary giving other orders, but her voice faded into a muffled burr that suffocated beneath my pounding heart.
Zee and the boys writhed over my stomach, down between my legs. Once, years in the past, they had sealed my mouth and nostrils with their flesh to keep me from drowning; I didn’t know what they were doing now, and I didn’t care. As long it kept my baby inside me. Inside me.
A little corpse inside you, came the errant thought.
I heard a cane tap—felt the vibration in my back—and tilted my head just enough to see Grant’s boots, that terrible shuffling limp that was almost a run. I tried to sit up. Mary held me down—or tried to. She jerked back, cradling her hands—burned. I felt the heat on my shoulders where she’d touched me. The boys weren’t letting anyone close.
Except Grant. I heard the rumbling om of his voice, so strong it surged against my skin like thunder. A cold thrill of hope shuddered through me. Maybe, maybe, we could fix this.
Dizziness hit. I shut my eyes and felt pressure against my skin; the boys, gripping me in their dreams, holding me close with their tattooed claws. I almost thought I could hear Zee’s voice, whispering to me in a language I didn’t understand: growls, against the surface of my thoughts, soft sighs. I clung to that. I clung to the click of the approaching cane—tap, tap—echoing my heartbeat until it stopped dead beside me, and a large, warm hand touched my head. Grant’s voice surged around me: wordless, full of power. I waited for the pain in my stomach to disappear, for the hot, trickling flow of blood to stop—but nothing happened.
I knew why. But I wanted this time to be different.
Grant’s voice broke—and then broke again. I could almost see the pieces falling like shards of light. He tried again to sing, but it didn’t last. His silence horrified me.
“Don’t give up,” I whispered, unable to look at him. I was paralyzed, terrified of moving, as if that would harm my child more. His cane hit the floor, and he collapsed on his knees beside me, his breathing ragged and hoarse. Trying not to cry. Trying. I was trying, too.
“She’s immune to me. Just like you,” he said.
“No.” I dug my fingers into my stomach. “No, Grant.”
“She’s dying,” he whispered. “I can see it.”
Our baby. My girl. Dying.
Dying inside me, and I could not stop it. I could destroy the world. I could unleash hell on this planet and a million others. But I could not save the one thing that mattered most to me. Funny, how that could happen. Funny, how someone you didn’t know, who wasn’t even fully formed, could matter more than life. Funny, how fast that could slip up on you.
I closed my eyes. I could see the boys inside my head, as real as if they crouched before me. Zee, raking his claws over his arms; past him, Raw and Aaz, who hugged teddy bears to their chests, stabbing them with spikes torn from their backs; Dek and Mal, heavy on my shoulders, growling.
I’ll do anything, I said to that imaginary Zee.
A hush fell. Even my heartbeat slowed. Between my thighs, a sluggish drip: hot and inevitable.
One way, he whispered, finally. One way. But, a price.
“Maxine,” Grant croaked out, but my head and heart were already too far away to listen. All I could see was Zee. All I could feel in my blood was him and the boys, and ten thousand years of mothers and daughters burning through me, like love.
And with that love, something else: an awakening, beneath my heart; a familiar alien presence that uncoiled in a surge of terrible, aching power. It slithered through me, pouring through my pulse, and I looked down at my arms and legs, half-expecting to see my muscles and bones displaced, shoved aside for a spirit ripped from the heart of night: darkness, alive and breathing, and trembling with impossible hunger.