Labyrinth of Stars(54)

Grant, I called, but there was no answer—perhaps, just the hint of a touch, the ghost of a man. His heart was in front of me: massive and quiet. No song. No drum. No beat.

And all over, slick and filthy, was that brown ooze of rot and disease. It was a wall between us, a wall between life and death—and a terrible fury filled me, an ache of revulsion so deep and profound, I felt the dying world around us tremble.

I reached out, hands tearing through the rot—

—and the world became fire.

It was a chthonic blast, straight out of hell: an inferno that ripped through me like I was rice paper fluttering instantly to ash. I had no defense against it. It pushed me out, and I found myself back where I started, on the edge of the rot, with lost time and a husband who was getting deader by the second.

For a moment, I remembered the vision in that crystal skull—my body, torn apart in fire.

Fuck that, I thought, throwing myself back into the rot: burning, again. I might as well have been flesh and bone—I could feel the crackling sizzle of my skin, the small internal explosions of my organs pop pop popping—the blistering of my life as it was scorched away.

I couldn’t hold on. I slipped a second time and fell from the rot. Barred from my husband’s still, quiet, heart. It stunned me. It was as if the disease were alive, something more than just a virus. Alive, with a purpose. Alive, with dreams.

I pushed my hands into the rot, threw myself into hell, again. I felt no fear. No space for it, past the fury, and the love. I focused on the love and pushed the rest aside. And when I stopped feeling love, I clung to Grant’s face. And when his face burned away, I thought of our daughter, our daughter who needed a father. And when even that was not enough, I fell back on my mother, my mother and the boys, then just the boys, until there was nothing left but something deeper than even them, something that swam on the other side of the fire, already inside me, safe and cool in its untouched darkness.

But I didn’t stop at the darkness, even though it reached for me, expectant. I moved past its grasp, past it to the other side, into another world.

I was weightless, without flesh, without anchor—less than a spirit, floating. Only this was not the void. Here, there was light: starlight, pricks of light, far away and scattered in a million billion gestures of burning life that I knew, I knew, would never sustain me. I could not eat light. It could not make me whole.

You are wrong, whispered a familiar masculine voice. Light is filled with many wonders.

A lean shimmer of silver flickered at the corner of my vision, but I could not turn to look at my father. “Right now I care about only one light. I want my husband,” I said, voice breaking. “I want Grant.”

A soft sigh rippled through me, filled with longing, sadness. The sound took away the pain from the burns and healed the fractures caused by those screams. It was cool and gentle, a balm to my soul. But it also made me afraid, in ways the fire had not.

I wanted your mother, came that whisper. But even I could not keep her.

I refused to hear that. I refused to think even a moment about what those words meant, but the meaning still sank into me, transforming into dread. I couldn’t stand it, not even a little. I pushed it away. I pushed away from it all and fell back into the fire. Hell was safer than a broken heart. Hell was gentler.

Heat seared through my cells, and so did those screams—but it was different this time. Maybe because I welcomed the pain. I embraced it, falling deep, deeper, burning to ash, with nothing left inside me but heartbreak.

Until I heard a voice.

It wasn’t a voice I knew—not Grant or the boys, not the darkness or that figure of light who had loved my mother, loved her so much she’d become pregnant with me. But it was a voice, and it was filled with power.

We are Gods, it whispered. What is flesh, is ours.

A shadow gathered in the fire, indistinct and immense. I pushed toward it, overwhelmed with the need to see its face. The fires parted. But instead of a man, all I saw was death.

Bodies, millions of them, as far as the eye could see—as if I stood on the edge of a great cliff, looking down. Except I wasn’t far away—I was right there, nearly on top of them, and the rot covered their flesh, the rot was eating away at them: brown and filthy, and ripe with poison.

You have done well, murmured that deep, resonant voice. The quiet, assured malevolence of it was as dangerous, and threatening, as any rot or bullet, or knife. More so, because that was a voice that sounded as if it took pleasure in its power, and I knew that type too well. Pleasure and pain and death, part of the same delight.

The illness is efficient, replied another: a much lighter voice, with a certain affable tone that might have belonged to a cheerful Nazi. But it must be altered. It must not be allowed to affect our flesh. Only the demons.