Lilith Saintcrow - To Hell and Back

The explosion of dusty diamond grit blew my hair back, scouring my eyes and filling my mouth with dry sand. I coughed, choked, and stumbled back, my legs failing me.

Someone caught me, breaking the force of my fall. My sword clattered on the ground, my fingers spasming open. Power slid through the mark on my shoulder, detonated inside my bones, and Japhrimel folded himself over me, saying something I could not quite hear. It might have been my name. It could have been anything.

I convulsed. Footsteps sounded through the deafness of pain in my ears. My head tilted back, stars scoring the sky through veils of dust.

The ground tilted, desert shaking like liquid brushed with hoverwash. The pain was a diamond nail, driven through me from crown to soles. My body struggled against it, a fish on a hook.

Lucas said something, in a deadly-quiet whisper. Footsteps brushed a slope of wreckage, picking their way delicately down.

Japhrimel's arms tightened. He pulled me, once more, into the shelter of his body. My cheek burned, the emerald grafted into the bone red-hot. "The Prince is dead," he said quietly. "Long live the Prince."

Eve laughed, the sweet carefree giggle of a little girl. "It is the way of our kind, is it not?"

Demons drew close. I felt them against the raw edges of my broken shielding, Japhrimel's aura over mine smooth and seamless. Whispers and chittering, their voices tearing at the night. The smell of burning cinnamon turned cloying, dust-decay threading its sweet muskiness. Eve's smell-baking bread, vulnerability, pure sweetness — rose in my nose, slid down the back of my throat.

I gagged.

"Come any closer and I'll make you eat this thing." Lucas's tone was flat and utterly serious.

"Give me the Knife." Eve sounded like she was smiling. "It's what you were contracted for."

"Funny thing about that." Dust squealed under booted feet and a clicking sounded before the whine of an unholstered plasgun drilled the air. "I ain't never welshed on a contract before. All three of you tryin' to hire me away from each other, and all for a simple goddamn assassination."

I was just trying to stay alive, Lucas. The thought was clean, the shock of a god's touch falling away from my mind. The blank spot in my memory receded, Japhrimel murmured something into my hair.

"Lucas." Eve's voice held a warning now. "Give me the Knife."

"It ain't yours. Neither am I." The footsteps paused. Something nudged my shoulder. "Here, chica. You'd best hold this." Cold fingers touching mine. Something obscenely warm touched my palm, feverish energy jolting up my wrist, slamming into my elbow, and socking into my shoulder before spreading down through my healing bones. I tried to open my eyes. They obeyed, slowly. A slice of blurry light danced in front of me. What the hell just happened? Echoes of a god's touch drained away, swirling. Leaving me alone again inside my mind, the red ribbon of rage turned to ash, blowing away. Fine, cinnamon-scented ash, lifting on the confused wind.

My vision cleared. Lucas stood, threadbare and slump-shouldered, an unholstered 60-watt plasgun pointed at the ice-haired demon who stood, her emerald glowing. Dust danced as if the amphitheater was a hot griddle.

The Knife buzzed in my hand. Japhrimel kissed my forehead. "Merely breathe, hedaira. All is well."

"I hired you first," Eve said, silkily. "Don't make an enemy out of me, Deathless. You won't like the results. ' He leveled the plasgun, yellow eyes narrowed. "I think you'd better get the fuck out of here, Blue Eyes. I already killed one demon today, and I might take it in mind to kill another. Besides, ain't you got some trouble back home to take care of?"

She shrugged. The movement was so uncannily like Lucifer's my heart jolted in my chest. "It makes little difference, anyway."

"J-J-Japh-" My voice wouldn't work properly. I finally managed to wrap my lips around a single syllable. "Eve-"

Her eyes slid away from Lucas, traveled over acres of burning air to look at me. Around the rim of the rubble-bowl, the paired lamps of demon eyes were winking out, stealthy scrapes and clawings retreating. Show's over, folks. Nothing left to see here. Move along.

"Goodbye, Dante. Thank you for your help." Her smile was the plastic grimace of a child's doll. "Though you were wrong."

About what? Mythroat was stoppered with dry dust. I could only stare, accusingly, from the shelter of Japhrimel's arms. His fingers closed around mine, sliding under the Knife's finials, his lips against my filthy hair. Still murmuring something, over and over.

"Any Key will do in a lock, with enough coaxing." Eve's gaze lingered on the Knife for a few moments. A calculation crossed her face, and another.

I almost cringed. Was she thinking how easy it might be to set me barking up another tree?

I had been so blind.

Japhrimel raised his face from my hair. When he spoke, the entire pan of rubble rattled, little bits shifting and sliding. "This stays with me, Androgyne."

"One day, I might come to reclaim it." The gasflame glow of her eyes dimmed slightly, a new color blooming underneath the screen of light.

Green. Like sunlight through new leaves. Like a laser. Like Lucifer's gaze.

I shuddered. Japhrimel's hand was warm and steady, holding my fingers against a silken hilt of wood and grief.

"On that day, you will meet his fate. Rule Hell if you will; I care little. But us you will leave in peace." He sounded absolutely certain.

I found I could breathe again. Eve. I struggled to sit up, to shake free of Japhrimel's arms. What was happening to her?

My daughter tilted her head slightly as the last shades of blue died out of her eyes. She was unmistakably female, the sheerness of her beauty maturing in breathtaking leaps, her face thinning a little and the gold of her skin flushing warmly. Had it been another glamour?

No, this change was something else. Something deeper. Any pretense she might have made at humanity was now laid aside, and I found myself lying under the hard brilliant sky of the Vegas Waste and watching something inhuman settle into its newest form.

The Prince is dead. Long live the Prince.

She turned away, her supple back under the torn dust-smeared sweater shining with its own grace. "My thanks for your aid, my friends. But now I have a whole world to conquer."

"May it give you joy," Japhrimel said softly, like a curse. But she was already gone, vanishing between one breath and the next. A sound like ripping silk assaulted the air, died away.

My Fallen let out a long, shaking breath. For a few moments, he held me, while the dust settled, silence returning and filling the amphitheater like liquid in a cup.

It was over.

I was still alive. But I had failed in every way that ever counted.

There was another hover, a long sleek new craft with a battery of mag-and-deepscan shielding that resolved out of the desert sky, landing with a bump and opening its side hatch like a flower. I didn't question it, even when Tiens greeted us all with a cheery smile that showed the tips of his abnormally long canines. Anton Kgembe, his head bandaged, didn't even look up from strapping down cargo containers. Vann looked a little worse for wear, bruised and battered and moving slowly as he brought a blanket that Japh wrapped around me before handing me and the Knife over to McKinley.

I felt nothing except a numb wonder that they had all survived.

All except Leander, that is. Was he dead? The numbness even covered that with a sheet of plasticine wrap, insulating me from the bite of guilt.

It was McKinley, oddly enough, who brought me up to speed on the long twilight journey back from the Waste. Him, and the holonews, because Japhrimel wouldn't speak to me and neither would Lucas.