Labyrinth of Stars(80)

“I suppose he tortured others.”

“It goes without saying. His craft was the delicate deconstruction, molecule by molecule, of the living. It amused him. He would take what he learned on himself and apply it to others.” Jack’s jaw tightened. “Including us.”

I couldn’t even imagine that kind of depravity. “If he’s so twisted, how come he’s the one with the cure to this disease, and you aren’t?”

“No one understood death better than he. Death, and its cures. It was his talent.” Exasperation dimmed his voice, and regret. “None of us are the same. And he was still one of us, no matter how much he had begun to change. We relied on him. We needed his . . . expertise . . . during the war with the demons. He was fascinated by their immunity to us. It became another obsession—the power that protected them.”

The power inside me, I thought. “But the Aetar imprisoned him.”

“He began to experiment on us too freely. Flesh became boring to him. He wanted new sensations.” Jack glanced at the Messenger, who had moved close to the porch, listening to him; her shaved head gleamed in the sunlight, her robes light in the breeze, and her eyes sharp. “We couldn’t trust him.”

“I need his knowledge,” I said.

Jack shook his head. “He won’t help. He’ll kill you, my dear. He’ll dissect you, your daughter—and the boys.”

“We could make him,” Grant said. “I could make him.”

A chill swept through me. Jack stood, slowly, from the stairs. “You’re a fool, lad. And you, my dear . . . for once, ignore your usual instincts. This time, be half as smart as I’d always wanted you to be. This time, listen to an old man and let it be.”

I stood, too. “If I let this be, my husband will die. So will the demons. The disease has already spread to humans. You mean to tell me that is preferable to—”

“Yes,” interrupted Jack. “That’s exactly what I mean to tell you. And even if you are foolish enough to make the attempt . . . if you enter the Labyrinth, you will be lost.”

“No,” I said.

“Listen to me.” Jack grabbed my arm “The Labyrinth is endless, and you do not know the way. You will wander, my dear. You will wander, without end. And this world . . . this world needs you.”

I cleared my throat. “Maybe you didn’t orchestrate this. Maybe you have been set up. But you still made the disease. You still lied. For whatever reason, you betrayed us.” I placed my hand on my stomach. “How can I trust anything you say?”

“Maxine,” he said, with that same cold frustration, “I could tell you how much I love you, or how profoundly I miss your mother and grandmother. I could make any number of melodramatic statements, defending myself. But in the end, all that matters is that you have no choice. You need me. Trust is irrelevant.”

“Like hell it is,” Grant said.

Jack gave him a withering look. But the Messenger, who had been standing just at the bottom of the stairs, said, “Hunter.”

I looked at her, dreading the note of surprise in her voice. “What now?”

She stared back at me, frowning. “The sun has set.”

I looked down at my arms, at the boys still sleeping on my skin—tugging now, but with no more strength than before.

“Shit,” I said.





CHAPTER 24




“SHIT,” my mother replied, the one and only time I asked her to tell me about God. Live with demons long enough, and the subject is bound to come up—even if we never talked much about religion. It might as well not have existed between my mother and me. We had rules, history—a mission—and that was our religion.

Still, God.

“Listen,” said my mother, placing her gun on the kitchen table and strapping on a flour-dusted apron. “I don’t know.”

I was peeling apples—ten years old and handy with a switchblade. My mother began scooping flour into the mixing bowl, her forearms a tangle of scales and muscular tattoos. “God is the first mystery. There’s no answer until we die.”

“Um,” I replied.

“But before that happens,” she added, forking in the butter, “you can always count on all the other higher powers to really fuck you up.”



FIFTEEN minutes later, the boys were still imprisoned on my skin.

The pain should have been crippling—and it was—but I was pretending like nothing was wrong even though it felt like I was being gnawed on by a thousand starving rats. Each bite of pain, each tug on my skin as the boys fought to wake, made me dizzy. Much more, and my pride would have to go, along with the contents of my stomach.