Now it was her turn to shiver a tad beneath memory’s lash, and Chess couldn’t claim it didn’t warm his heart to see it.
The blue Tezcatlipoca is Huitzilopochtli, that other voice told him, meanwhile, soft as shifting dust. He who was born from lightning in a ball of feathers, He Who Tore Apart the Moon. And his province . . . is war.
Ixchel drew herself up once more, pale and full, lambent as a lit corpse-lantern. Throwing back—You lie, brother-son-husband, always; I am not frightened. You scheme and trick. What you cannot lay claim to, you wilfully destroy.
Mmm, and I create, too. Nothing comes from nothing.
Then build, with me. Build it all up once more—the right way. The way things were, and should be once again.
The Enemy looked her full in the face then, with what almost seemed to be—sorrow? Amazement? An odd sort of affection, the kind which endures long after everything else—all the more violent emotions—is finally burnt away. Chess knew it to look at, having seen it often enough in the Goddamn mirror.
Our time came and went, sister, he said, gently. Let gone be gone.
She shook her head, hair falling to hide everything even vaguely human about her. Replying: No. This world will end, as all worlds do. What I have set in motion you cannot stop.
I do not propose to.
The fuck? Chess thought.
Something kicked him ’tween the ribs, hard as a horse, making him suddenly so dog-tired over this hopeless slog of a conversation he wanted to weep out loud. These savage deities with their stupid rules, their endless high-button shoe courtesies! What was the Enemy fixin’ to do, jaw the bitch to death?
Rook’d probably tell him asking a god’s favour was best done on bended knee—but Chess somewhat doubted it, given the god in question. So he rounded on him instead, hands sparking green, all pretence at politeness torn clean away.
“Why’d you even come, then?” he demanded. “Just t’have fun at our expense? What kind of damn god you call yourself, exactly?”
Not yours, obviously. So if you wish to interfere, that is on your head, not mine.
“I’m any part of you, means it’s on your head, too. Or don’t it work that way?”
It does, and yet . . . what you must understand is that I do not care what happens, overmuch, one way or the other.
“And I do?”
Now, yes.
Never was raised to . . . care for nobody, his own voice murmured from memory, God alone knew how long a span of time previous—a year? Two? History folding back on itself, spindled at its core; how long ago since the camp and its gallows, the twister? Since the War itself ended?
Standing naked in the desert with nothing but his scars for finery, smiling like a fool as he let Asher Rook draw him close; feeling his dick slap up ’til it left a hot smear of juice on both their bellies, biting into the bigger man’s lip like he wanted to make a hole large enough to fit himself inside, and knowing the days of lovelessness were over, for good or bad. For ever.
“No,” Chess said, shaking his head, fighting hard to not cast a glance Ed’s way—or Yancey’s, either, damn it all. And knowing, as he did, the only one he was fooling was himself.
Here came Rook himself, meanwhile, looming in deliberate, voice rumbling low: “Deific help set aside entirely, though, strikes me there might be a way out of the Sheriff’s clutches yet, for everyone. You need a hefty jolt of hex-shock in order to shake free from that back-and-forth the two of you got goin’, not these drips and drabs that Ed and his lady friend can afford to spare you. Something so big it’s impossible to stop—or take back.”
Chess crossed his arms. “And just what the fuck am I supposed to take away from all this yammer, ’sides from you really do dote on the sound of your own voice? ’Cause frankly, I knew that already.”
Rook flushed, aura snapping like a whip. “Now, listen here—”
For once, however, it was Ixchel who put in, helpfully: He means that it is blood alone which pays for blood, little god-king—true currency of all worlds, one which can never be devalued. Which is why you must let it to get it.
“Christ you ever stop t’hear yourself? You’re worse than a Goddamned fortune teacake.” To Rook: “What’s that s’posed to even mean?”
Rook shook his head, gently. “Darlin’,” he said, “. . . you know what it means.”
The answer seemed to pop out onto his tongue, sharp as any thrown stone, so painful-true it was almost like he didn’t even need that other voice to confirm his suspicions—though it sure enough did hasten to, all the same.
He means you must make sacrifice, red boy, as you were once sacrificed; choose someone you care for, to die in your stead. For only thus can this place be brought back to the way it once was, when your Sheriff Love was a man only . . . a man with a town, a wife, a son. A man who, because he was willing to die for them, might allow himself to be killed.
As though they both understood and approved Chess’s realization, Ixchel and the Enemy nodded, in unison. Their not-voices overlapping, the rise and fall of waves on some awful sea.