I was only a little surprised to see Charles Lightman standing there, hands in pockets, polished shoe scuffing the chalky ground like he really was sorry. Mostly I felt this wash of horror that things were much, much worse than they looked. At this point, that was really saying something.
Run, Wolf growled in the back of my throat. My muscles tensed, getting ready to do just that. Not that it would help. I stared a challenge at Lightman. It was the only thing I could do, waiting for answers he wasn’t giving.
“Is this hell?” I croaked. My throat ached, swollen, as if I’d gone for a week without water. My eyes stung, I was so dried out, and my skin felt stretched. I could still feel that boiling sun roasting me.
“No,” he said. He seemed quite pleased with himself, giving a wry wink. “You’re in the Norris Geyser Basin, in Yellowstone National Park. It’s not quite open for tourist season, so we have the place to ourselves. I thought it would be fun—you can see everything up close when it blows. Should be exciting. A once-in-a-lifetime experience. Ha.”
My senses finally cleared enough for me to really look around.
I was on a pale, dusty plain cupped in a shallow valley, surrounded by a pine forest. The few scattered trees on the plain were stunted and bleached, and the plain itself was awash in stinking pools of water joined by wide streams of runoff. Steam rose everywhere, and geysers spit, sloshed, and hissed around me. In some spots the crust was broken, sinkholes dropping through, lined with the orange-tinged washes. Steam rose lazily from pools, other springs bubbled with heat, and water spit noisily from holes in the ground. Yeah, it kind of looked like hell. But I was just five hundred miles from home.
Which meant I could get out of here. After I killed the guy, before Ashtoreth came back. In daylight, though, Ashtoreth wouldn’t appear. Neither would Roman. I had time, I hoped, before Roman launched the Manus Herculei.
Lightman kept talking. “Regina Luporum. I hear that’s what they’re calling you. And you, an American, I thought you all were supposed to be against kings and queens and monarchs and all that. All democratic and egalitarian. But Queen of the Wolves—you’re okay with that?”
Who was this guy? “It’s just a metaphor. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Oh, but it does. Monarchy, authoritarianism, has been the dominant method of organizing people for most of human history. Everything else is an anomaly. A deviation.”
This area was ostensibly part of a forest in the Rocky Mountains, but it didn’t feel anything like home. None of the smells were familiar. Even the ground felt unstable, boiling just under the surface. Lightman seemed unconcerned by it all. He was just as casual and pointedly charming as he had been back in Denver.
“Who are you?” I asked softly.
“Kitty, tell me—where do vampires and werewolves come from?”
This was obviously a trick question. I took the bait. “Some kind of infectious retrovirus—”
He put up a hand, shook his head. “That’s a mechanism. I’m looking for why. How about I just tell you? Those stories about how vampires and lycanthropes, all the creatures of darkness, were made by Lucifer to pervert God’s greatest creation of humanity? About how Lucifer made monsters to stand against His righteousness at the end of time? Those stories that annoy you so much when people call into your show with them? Turns out, they’re true.
“But there’s one thing I couldn’t change. One part of His creation I couldn’t break: free will. No matter how monstrous I made you, the vampires and werewolves, my soldiers and my children, I couldn’t make you be monsters. You still had a choice, to follow me or not. And Katherine Norville. Kitty. You, all on your own, have been convincing a great many of my soldiers to choose the side of angels.”
He didn’t look like much. That was probably the point. Dux Bellorum was only the general, we’d realized. Who then was the Caesar holding his leash? Ah yes. Of course.
I always told my callers, you can choose. You can decide what to do. Don’t blame your homicidal urges or basic assholeness on being a monster, because you can choose. God help me.
God, help me.
“Are you saying,” I said, gasping a little. Wolf had gone strangely quiet—neither running nor fighting would likely do us much good here. I tried again. “Are you saying, that you, you, are afraid of me?” I tilted my head, narrowed my gaze, like a dog who’d heard a far-off noise. But there was just the hissing of geysers and bubbling of hot springs. I couldn’t even tell if this man, this being, was breathing, or if he had a heartbeat.
“That’s a strong word,” he said. “But you did get my attention. That’s something to be proud of, I’ll give you that.”
I could not stop glaring at him. One way or another, I suspected I was not going to get out of this. I could talk, I could fight, I could howl, I could run—and he was Lucifer. I might as well challenge him, because I didn’t have anything to lose.
“What now?” I breathed.
“I’ll kill you,” he said. “Kill all your friends. Smooth the way so Dux Bellorum can finish his work and end the world. That line about it being better to reign in hell? Yeah, not so much. But Earth? I can make myself a worthy hell right here.” He gazed around, as if contemplating a change of drapes in a suburban living room. Softer, he said, “Stick it to the Old Man, you know?”
I ran. Then I fell. The earth itself tripped me, with sudden cracks opening underfoot. My foot fell into already weakened crust, and when I tried to push myself back up, my hands fell through, and the earth held me there. I ripped free, spun onto my back—and again the crumbling earth trapped me, locking me in place, bands of soil folding tight over my arms and legs.
Lightman—Lucifer, though I was having trouble calling him that, it seemed so outrageous—strolled over to me. He had a sword in his right hand. I hadn’t seen him carrying one; he’d probably drawn it out of thin air. He held it up, looking it over, seeming pleased. Flicked a finger over the no-doubt razor-sharp edge. It was probably silver. Wouldn’t matter, because it was big enough he could chop my head off with it just by leaning a little.
“And Kitty—what is up with that? Please tell me that name’s an accident and that you didn’t decide to call yourself that to spite me.”
I struggled to break free because I couldn’t not, but my limbs were locked down tight. But maybe, maybe …
Let it go, let it wash over me. I imagined Wolf living behind the bars of a cage in my gut, and if those bars disappeared, I could summon her, and she would rise up, change my body, change me and we would run, escape, run all the way back home if we had to—
Nothing happened.