A Rope of Thorns (Hexslinger 2)

You who were the New Corn, now completed.

You who were Red, now made Blue.

You who are Lightning’s son, who sets One against Another.

Adorned with Hummingbirds, fashioned from Amaranth.

You who will Lead the Charge.

A smoke-finger pressed down on either lid, heavy as corpse-coins. The Enemy’s breath hot and foul against his face, a slaughterhouse baptism.

You who I name . . . Huitzilopochtli.

His province is war, grandson.

Bright, blinding: Chess coughed it out, but more welled up, shrinking what he’d always known as himself to a point, a speck, a tiny, vanishing seed. Something so small, it could only be made to be swallowed.

Don’t I ever get to be myself again? he wondered, despairing.

Teeth chattering in his mouth, abruptly sharp-filed as Ixchel’s own—but not green, not jade-flaked, he somehow knew. Black glass, a flock of itzapapalotl-wings flapped in unison, volcano-hardened, sharp enough to bite through sin.

Sharp enough to tear a whole city’s throat out, however hexacious.

The Enemy smiled back at him, its own teeth equal-razored. Told him, gently: Sleep, little king. Your part is done; I will speak for both of us, from now on. Rest well, in the deep places, ’til I call you forth again.

No way to fight it, not this far along. Nothing left to fight with—it’d seen to that, Goddamnit. But Chess tried anyhow, like it’d known he would.

“You said . . .” he got out, as his lips went numb, “yuh . . . didn’t care enough ’bout what she was plannin’ . . . to try ’n’ stop it.”

Mmm, even so.

Black and blue, lids stroked closed, the ground opening up, swallowing him down. Crushing him, and everything around him, silent.

All but the Enemy’s voice one last time, licking at his inner ear: Yet as you yourself have said . . . I lie. The same as every other god.

And worse.

Came a point, and quickly, when Ed Morrow just couldn’t fight his way any further toward what he suspected might be Chess’s body—too many Bewelcomers in between, jockeying to show the all-too-recent Widow Love they had her best interests at heart.

“Surrender your weapons!” one of ’em howled at Yancey, close enough to sluice a bit of Sheriff Love’s bright blood-spray off her cheek with his spit, where she stood holding a double-draw stance on what had to be fifty or more opponents. “C’mon, woman—we’ll make it quick! Can’t expect to just stroll into town, shoot down the man founded it and stroll on out the other”

“You shut your mouth!” she threw back, voice froze near to cracking. “A year or more you’ve been salt—maybe things ain’t all they seem, ever think of that? He knew what he’d done, and said so!”

Another shout, bristling with insult on the dead’s behalf. “Sheriff Love was a great man, you outlaw harlot—a man of God! ’Spect us t’believe that could ever change?”

“Why should I care what-all you think?”

“Because you claim to be a widow, wife to a murdered man, like me . . . and if the one means something, so should the other. Don’t

you think?”

Sophy Love stood there, dry eyes riveted to Yancey’s face. Hugging her boy to her with both arms as he fretted and wept, and gone so white-to-the-lips pale herself, she might as well have been rendered salt again.

“A pity we can’t ask him to confirm your tale, though, ma’am,” she pointed out. “Seeing how you were the only one close enough to hear this . . . confession of his, beforehand.”

Yancey swung a muzzle toward Missus Love’s face. “You calling me a liar?”

“I don’t know what to call you, frankly.”