A Tree of Bones (Hexslinger 3)

(you)

And hard on its heels, two far more complete ideas, fine-chewed over, as though Rook had been saving ’em a good long while. Like he’d rehearsed ’em many times in his head without ever really thinking he’d get the chance to speak either, aloud or otherwise.

For this will be my apology, the only one that could ever matter. The last and greatest gift I could possibly give you, here at the End of Days.

Chess’s eyes went wide. Thinking, in his turn: Oh no, nonono. You tower of crap, you do not, on any account, get to LET me.

Too late, though. Because the very next heartbeat brought a rockslide of power, a fucking avalanche, pumping through him on a tide so high it set his hair standing straight. Rook’s weight was nothing, less than nothing; he shoved him aside, not even pausing to see where he dropped, and strode straight for Ixchel, grabbing her by her remaining mane’s thickest clump. Bent her back like a bow to holler, right in her rotting-meat face: “You give me up my heart, bitch, right Goddamn now! Come a heinous way, done a thousand bad deeds to get it, and I AIN’T ABOUT TO ASK YOU TWICE!”

For a split second, half a tick only, he almost felt her brace to spit his threats back at him, and take whatever come next.

But — It is over, sister. You know it. I know it. So let it BE over.

Please.

With those words, more sad than mocking, Chess felt the will go out of what was left of Ixchel Moon-Lady in a miasma, fetid-cold with deep regret.

As she replied, sadly: . . . yes.

Then added, to him — So take it, you little monster. Take it all.

Kissed him again, then, before he could think to stop her: bear-trap fanged and spring-hard, with just enough arcane force behind it to cough the thing he’d believed he wanted most back up into him through their fused mouths. Thrust it excruciatingly back inside his chest, with his wound as entry po

int; reward as rape, searing everything shut again in its wake, making him spasm ’til Chess fell back jackknifed in the dirt, hugging himself so hard he raised welts. Listening, lodged halfway between disgust and delight, as — slowly, unevenly, clogged with old blood and foulness, his heart, his, gods damn it all, themselves very much included —

His heart began, once more, to beat.

Morrow was helping Yancey up when it happened: Chess’s fall, Ixchel’s rise. Her last desperate grab for Reverend Rook, still on his knees, as if in unconscious mimicry of the pose Chess himself had struck just before worm-turning their battle his way forever — remaining hand on his nape, the other’s denuded stump thrust ’tween his jaws, prying them open like she meant to pull everything he had inside out of him by the tongue. Desperate for some final jolt to make a last stand with, and all unknowing that he was already sucked dry, forever.

Bent over his back monkey-style and snarling, as she did: You rose against me, husband, as you swore never to do. You know the punishment.

And the Rev, in return, plain as day: Oh, I know, ma’am, believe me. I know.

Even as Tezcatlipoca rushed to stop her, Ixchel reached deeper — deep enough to find Rook empty and, worse yet, cursed. Then realized, worse even than that, that the curse in question was already beginning to translate to her . . . to everything around her. Tezcatlipoca, as he laid a spectral paw on her shoulder. The very ground beneath their feet, that unsure spot where the Crack’s seam had been left yet unpicked when Clo Killeen brought Grandma’s suture-spinning spider down. Beneath them, the earth shivered and gave way — a sheer drop straight down into nothing, dark and cold and drear, all the way back to the Ball-Court, to Mictlan-Xibalba itself.

Ixchel fell, fast and hard: gone out of sight instantaneously, without last words of any sort. The cause of all their troubles removed forever in one swoop, with nothing — not a shadow, a rag or a bone or a hank of creepishly animate hair — left behind, to show she’d ever been there.

“Get back!” Morrow yelled as the schism widened, poised to yank Yancey’s arm, but she — as ever — was already three steps ahead, pulling him with her. Carver scrambled backward as well, just as speedily, hoisting Berta Schemerhorne over his shoulder like a sack; they made the nearest ridge and turned to see Chess still teetering at the abyss’s edge while the Enemy, poised at the pit’s edge likewise and watching what little purchase he had crumble away, turned to him with one final eerie grin, a tip of his metaphorical hissing blue-flame “hat.”

Well played, little brother, my sister’s husband’s husband! it said, with what truly did seem like genuine appreciation. Oh, how I have enjoyed you — enjoyed being you, in fact. Though I know, sadly, that you do not feel the same.

“Too Goddamn right, I don’t,” Chess managed, raising himself just a bit further into the air, Songbird-style; with a kick, he drove himself back from the pit’s lip as though he was afraid it’d exert some sort of gravity on him, an invisible quicksand suck. One dangling boot-heel brushed against Reverend Rook’s sleeve where he’d once more risen to waver at the very edge of the hole, bent in pain but doing nothing to assuage it, exhausted far beyond any concerns for his own welfare.

Yes. But now it is time to make an end to us at last, all three.

“The fuck you mean by that? Hey, answer me, you tricksy son of a — ”

Chess was yelling at the air, however, by this time. Since, before he was halfway done, the god of Night and Blood and Magic had already jumped in, too . . . disappeared out of sight with a similar lack of protest, a weird sort of panache, as befitted a creature naturally bent on foxing the whole world around it.

Now only the hole remained. The hole, and Chess.

And Rook.

Chess crossed his arms, heaved a sigh and half-turned, still aloft — studying Rook at an angle, obliquely, as though to distance himself until he felt able, at length, to offer up a begrudging hand.

“Long walk back to Bewelcome from here, if you ain’t got the juice to open doors between places,” he observed. “But I could get you there easy enough now, I guess, if I had to. And they’d probably have honest work to offer even you, considering the sorry state I hear you and yours left that crap-hole in.”

Though nothing else changed in his stance, bowed as he was ’round that hot spear of pain in his back — Carver’s bullet had probably bisected his shoulder blade, seeing his arm hung useless — Rook’s eyes shifted to Chess’s hovering figure, travelling sidelong and upward; gave him a look almost equally as long, as assessing. If Morrow could see them from this distance, he thought, he would probably find their quality strangely softened, now that the fierce halo of otherness that’d clung ’round the Rev from the moment they’d met was gone, never to return.