Endless Knight (Darkling Mage 9)

Herald’s mouth formed into a perfect O, his eyes widening. “Oh. Ohhh. Yeah, I’m with you.” He nodded eagerly, clearly restraining the grin forming on his mouth. “But you’re going to have to take a shower first. Several showers. Weirdly, you don’t actually smell like a dumpster fire, but it’s the principle of it.”

I lifted my arm and sniffed. Nothing. Huh. All that time and I hadn’t noticed. Maybe it was another perk of godhood. But a warm shower sounded fantastic. No running water in the Dark Room and everything.

“Okay,” I said, “but we’ll have to make it quick. The Dark Room will want me back soon enough. I’m sure it’ll rubber-band me home even if I don’t want to go. I’m not exactly sure how long I’ll last.”

Herald frogmarched me to the shower just as soon as I finished talking. Spoiler alert: I lasted long enough, in every sense of the phrase.

Chapter 35

Sterling draped himself along m

y shoulders, the smell of his body spray attacking my senses. “So that’s what you are now, huh? A demigod. A tiny little fledgling infant demigod.”

I shrugged and tried to shake him off, but no use. Sterling had always been way stronger. “I mean, I wouldn’t use those terms, exactly.”

He took a swig of his beer, then carried on. “Puny little toddler godling man-baby.”

“Okay, okay,” I grumbled. “That’s enough.”

He tipped back another mouthful of beer. “Serves you right for making us worry,” he said. “Here’s hoping you can actually stick around long enough this time.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s not my call. I’m still new to all this god stuff, but here’s hoping.”

I looked around at our gathered friends. We were on the outskirts of Valero, having ourselves a nice little picnic, like the good old times, and I was being a good little godling and staying within the confines of my summoning circle. But just having Team Borica nearby, seeing the world and breathing the air outside of the Dark Room, that was worth so much. I heaved a longing but contented little sigh.

In all honesty, I felt incredibly weak when I returned to the Dark Room from Herald’s apartment that first time, and not just because I was, um, worn out from various unmentionable activities. My shades had to drag me bodily to our designated nexus, which was markedly uncomfortable until one of them had the idea of constructing a makeshift stretcher out of pure shadow. I distinctly remembered being so exhausted, but being so curious about what the shadow had done before I passed out.

When I came to, I wondered if other entities had had to deal with this sort of thing in the infancy of their power, except that I realized that pretty much all of the ones I knew had come into the world as gods and demons already. There was no grace period, no gestation, so to speak. I had to slowly grow into my own demigodhood, grope and claw in the darkness until I hit upon my own divinity. Though I had a feeling that I wouldn’t have to grope for very long.

For one thing, the stretcher that the shade created never faded away. It was still there when I woke up, serving as a decent substitute for an actual bed. That was when everything came together. That little stunt that one of the shades had pulled with conjuring a disintegrating sheet of black tissue paper had been a hint all along. The Dark Room was featureless and blank for a reason. I was the lord of my own domain, wasn’t I? I had to build my kingdom from scratch.

And so I did, with every given opportunity, calling on the familiar old feeling of producing darkness from the very tips of my fingers, of generating shapes and sculptures out of solid midnight. Here and there I burned little globes of magical firelight, just like the ones that lit the alcoves of the Boneyard. A taste of home.

The boys – the shades, that is – were very supportive in that respect, pitching in their own stocks of material darkness where they could, and it helped that they were all linked to my brain, just like a hive mind, the way that Agatha Black’s thirteen copies all operated along the same wavelength. Yeah, we’ll get to her in just a bit.

So over time, I managed to transform the Dark Room’s nexus into a decent little bachelor pad of my own, albeit one with no real luxuries or entertainment apart from things I could make out of shadow. I mean, I was a demigod, you know? Not a magician. Okay, so I technically am as well, but making a decently comfortable sofa out of solid darkness is far less complicated than, say, crafting a working television, or a computer, for that matter.

I made a mental note, then, to gradually sneak in some electronics on future trips, and maybe talk to Carver and even Amaterasu, if I could swing it, to ask about how to rig up electricity to a domicile. There had to be some interdimensional utility company out there. We had wifi in the Boneyard, for crying out loud. Surely I could hook something up for the Dark Room as well.

And speaking of trips, the very next one I took was once again the result of Herald’s communing. This time, though, I was summoned to a different, though no less familiar environment: the house of one Norman Graves.

Oh, he was pissed, for sure, and he made sure I knew it, too, for at least the first ten minutes. But we spent the rest of the time being Dad and Dustin again, catching up, and I mainly leaned on the “Thank God you’re alive, Dustin” angle to curry sympathy and avoid any further risk of fatherly castigation. The “Oh my God, you’re a demigod” angle was pretty cool, too. Dad was doing his best to hold it in, but he was definitely gushing a little bit.

The rest of the Borica were a little more restrained about it, to be sure. My third excursion out of the Dark Room involved a surprise. Herald had arranged for the communion circle to be placed on a hilltop, the very same one outside of Valero where we’d finally defeated Agatha Black and the Eldest. It was kind of fitting, in a way, plus they very well couldn’t perform a summoning in a super public place like Heinsite Park, so for a picnic, the hilltop would have to do. There was something cleansing about the idea of it, too, like we’d picked the spot specifically to celebrate, to wash away the taint of what had once happened there.

The kindest thing of all was how everyone, even Sterling, had acquiesced to Herald’s small request. He wanted to summon me just before dawn, all because I’d mentioned in passing that I hadn’t seen a sunrise in too long a time.

To be fair, I hadn’t seen much of anything in the world since the night I defeated Agatha Black. Defeated wasn’t the right word. Obliterated might have been more appropriate. Carver said that the hole in the sky sealed up completely once all the witches were destroyed. Royce was suspiciously cheerful when I saw him on the hilltop for the picnic, but Romira quietly whispered about how cleaning up the mess had been hell for his department, how the Mouths had to work overtime, and how they even needed extra help from the Hooded Council to wipe civilian minds of the events of the evening.

I’d expected Bastion to be especially affected, but he seemed more or less okay, sipping on a pre-dawn cocktail. “It’s Mother who’s having a bit of a hard time,” he said. “We both buried Grandmother in our hearts and thoughts ages ago, when she was first cursed by the Eldest. But I can’t imagine how much more it would hurt to see your own mother succumb to the darkness that way.” His lips twisted like he’d just tasted something bitter. “I couldn’t bear the thought of it.”

But at least everything was in order, the world mostly back on its feet again. I only wished that I could have parted with Mason on better terms. He was the only member of Team Borica who was missing. Asher said that he’d decided to leave the Boneyard. Mason said that it was to forge his own path, but Asher knew better. It was to protect the Boneyard from retribution, from all the entities who would no doubt come banging on its dimensional door to look for the swords that belonged to them.

The first problem was that the other swords had disappeared after the Apotheosis – scattered, I imagined, throughout the world, if not the universe. Carver’s theory was that it had something to do with the massive collision of arcane energies needed for me to ascend. The second problem, the one that Mason hadn’t mentioned to me when he summoned the fifth, flaming sword from the Vestments, was the matter of its ownership.

The damn thing belonged to an archangel. Knowing the celestials and their temperaments, that archangel was going to come looking for its blade, sooner or later. And I knew that Mason kept that to himself because he wanted it to become his burden, and no one else’s – that, and the question of owing Belphegor a demonic favor. Damn it. He really was Samyaza’s son. Too noble, and too selfless, martyrs to the bitter end.

Whatever the case, I had to admit that I felt more than a little responsible for what happened. The hilltop picnic was supposed to be about celebration, but I couldn’t ignore the pang of guilt in my stomach. Worse than that, though, was the lingering pang of loss. When I said that all the swords had disappeared, I meant all five. And that included Vanitas.