Book Of Tongues (Hexslinger 1)

Until him. Until . . .

ROOK.

It was a surge of fury mixed with helplessness and hurt, curdled milk boiling over — and something sick and dark beneath, violent and deathly. Chess hauled himself to his feet with the support of a convenient headstone. Breathing harsh and ragged, he snapped open first one gun, then the other, and touched his finger to each empty barrel, watching with grim intention: reloading, by God. Each touch filled the chamber with — Morrow couldn’t see what, exactly. A tiny, roiling mass of flame and shadow, nothing he could name. Fear crawled into his stomach and along his skin.

“Chess . . .” He didn’t even mean to speak, but the words forced their way out. “Down there, the Rev — he told me that none of this would’ve worked, you couldn’t’ve survived, if it hadn’t been real — true in your heart, even if it wasn’t in his.” No change in Chess’s look as he kept on loading, and Morrow’s stomach knotted. He pushed himself up. “Christ knows, we’ve seen how many sins each of us’s racked up — but you can’t make this one of them. You can’t. It’ll kill you.”

“Give me one good reason — ” Chess snapped one gun shut, “ — why I, you, anyone — ” click-clack: the other gun closed, “ — should give a tick’s ass-fuck whether I live or die.”

“’Cause when somebody’s as good in the sack as you are, they really do owe it to the rest of the world to keep themselves upright just as long as they can?”

Chess whirled, but Morrow — stunned at the words that had come all unsummoned out of his own mouth — saw it like he was looking through the wrong end of a telescope, plummeting far and back away as if tumbled off a cliff-high gallows. A thick black weight engulfed him, swathed him, deadening the sound in his ears. All avuncular malice and power and . . . concern?

Chess straightened, all expression falling away from his face. The guns dangled, but he didn’t holster them. As toneless as a sleep-talker, blurred and distant like he was underwater:

“Ash.”

“Darlin’.” The feel of Rook’s voice through Morrow’s throat made him want to gag. A burning ache spread through mouth and jaw as alien intonations and stresses overrode his own. The very weight of his body shifted as he stood, suddenly inflicted with a far heavier man’s sense of balance. “You want to kill me, and none alive could fault you for that. But try shootin’ me now, and . . .” Rook spread Morrow’s hands, shrugged his shoulders. “Won’t even inconvenience me. And for all his faults, I think you still might find Ed useful enough, in future, to not throw away so quickly.”

It was hard for Morrow to make much out, but he thought Chess might have tilted his head. “Maybe I don’t care any more ’bout what you call useful, Ash.”

Rook shook Morrow’s head, brought a laugh in his deepest register up from the gut, so low his throat felt sore. “Well, maybe not, at that. But I seem to recall you do take pride in payin’ your debts, Chess — bad and good. And can’t none of us deny without Ed’s help, you’d never have seen blue sky again.” The tides of feeling around Morrow shifted, washed toward true pain, regret, and . . . something else. “That’d’ve been an awful waste. Wouldn’t it?”

Rook stretched Morrow’s hand out to Chess’s face, stroked it as he had caressed it in the underworld, and Chess closed his eyes

. Mortified, Morrow fought to retreat deeper — but the response sizzled along his nerves anyway as Rook leaned him in close, used his mouth to kiss Chess, gently as any husband with a blushing virgin bride. The blackness smothering him flushed dark as wine, sweltering with sudden heat, while Chess’s mouth worked against his. Something wrenched at Morrow’s groin and stomach like a cable, pulling him in and down, vertigo and arousal spinning up together.

Until — a hard push threw him off balance, and he actually felt Rook’s presence slide sideways, halfway breaking free, before Morrow caught himself on a headstone.

Heaving in gasps, face red, Chess held out a hand palm-up before him, as if to brace a wall from falling. And snapped, “Not this time, you bastard — not now, and not like this. Not using someone else.” The hand clenched into a fist, which he shook in Morrow’s face — but at a careful distance, as if touching even Rook’s shadow in another man was too great a temptation. “You want me, you meet me face to face, where I can rip my answers outta your lyin’ fuckin’ brain-pan myself.”

Rook laughed. It racked Morrow’s guts. “Answers? Hell, sweetheart, those were yours for the askin’, each step of the way. All you ever had to do . . .” A sly, mocking note, “. . . was ask.”

Chess’s face went blank again. Morrow tried to find some shred of will inside to brace himself, expecting the guns to thunder any second. But Chess surprised him — surprised Rook, too. Morrow couldn’t mistake the startled mind-blink as Chess’s hands fell open.

“What was it you did to me?” Calm, quiet, almost despairing. “You even know, for sure? Everything I touch . . .” As he swept a helpless hand over the graveyard, Morrow deliberately made himself recall the hotel battle, and relished as best he could the astonishment in Rook’s mind as the images sank in. “I didn’t mean to do nothin’ that happened back there, any of it. And I don’t do nothin’ I don’t mean!”

Morrow felt Rook marshal his thoughts. “Had to, Chess,” the hexslinger used his lips to say. “Otherwise . . . you’d’ve gone to Hell. The real one, forever. unending agony, God’s last Judgement. That Hell.”

“Oh, do not turn preacher again on me now, you son-of-a — ”

Rook shook Morrow’s head. “None of that. Just — you’d’ve never given me up, doomed yourself, and called it fair. This way . . . well, I still might burn. But you won’t. That’s good enough, for me.”

Chess stared at him a long moment, uncomprehending. Morrow knew he could also feel Rook’s total certainty, the irrefutable “truth” lurking behind that claim, however insane it might seem to anyone else.

Confusion whirled into frustrated rage. Chess surged forward and grabbed Morrow’s shirt in both fists, twisted hard, so the cloth came up in bunches. “Just what the fuck are you even talkin’ about? You incredible goddamned dumbass!” He shook Morrow savagely. Wrapped in Rook’s presence, Morrow felt barely a twinge, but knew he’d be aching tomorrow. “Where the fuck you think I was, all that damn time? I’ve Christ-well been to Hell already, Ash. That’s where you put me!”

Morrow felt Rook’s grip slacken — confusion welled up, weakening the bond it bled through. And suddenly, for all his furious fear of the Rev’s supernatural trickery, Morrow found it ten times more terrifying to consider how Rook maybe might not really know the exact parameters of what he’d set in motion.

“You . . . remember that? But you weren’t supposed to — ”

“She tell you that, you stupid donkey?” Chess roared. “And you believed her? Well, look this over a spell!”

He slapped his palm to Morrow’s forehead, sent memories geysering into Rook’s mind through Morrow’s like superheated steam. Where far off, Rook’s mouth opened wide, opening Morrow’s with it.

(Mexico City, near a full fifth of it, levelled. Pinkerton’s voice echoing, from Morrow’s mind: This sort of thing starts bloody wars. . . .

(Oona Pargeter, gutted, metamorphosing into a black inhuman giant with obsidian ribs and a stone plaque for a foot: I’m your Enemy, son — yours, an’ every other’s . . .