Love leaned in close, hissing: “Time to get ready, Pargeter. To die, at last—alone, forsaken, while my wife and son watch every last hurt play out, if only from Heaven’s gate. For where’s your beloved ‘Reverend,’ now he’s most needed?”
Like Songbird before him, Chess breathed in
salt and coughed out bile. Tried to say: Hex City, dumb-ass—where’d you damn well think?
But he couldn’t, and hadn’t really expected to. Everything got gun-barrel narrow, and he found he felt—not resigned, as such, nor exactly content . . . never had been yet, after all. Not even in far less onerous circumstances.
But he did find himself wishing Asher Rook was somewheres nearby, if only to see how dying twice wasn’t really so bad, when you didn’t give a good Goddamn. Or maybe just so he could spit blood his way one last time, hoping it went deep enough to sting.
Crazy thing was, though—he almost thought he could hear him. Saying, amused, Aw, c’mon now, darlin’. You don’t really think I’d let matters ’tween you and me close out like this, did you?
Look up, my husband’s husband. Rise.
And suddenly, crazily . . . he found he could do both.
The sun’s fire seemed to darken, filtered through smoked glass. The air felt molasses-thick, dragging on him as he turned to take stock: Songbird sat motionless, one white hand still over Asbury’s mouth, while the Professor’s blood sat unflowing on his gouged cheeks, filmy eyes saucer-wide. Though Love’s alien stillness seemed no different, at least, the space beneath his boot where Chess had lain was empty—and the boot itself still curved, like it rested on something mid-vanishment. Pinkerton was a wax sculpture stretched limp on the chalky ground, Ed and Yancey lying prone too, nearby—and how long had it been since he’d last seen either of them move, anyhow?
What time is it? Chess thought. Don’t know how long we’ve been—shit, this light, can’t hardly see no more. Salt’s eating it, like dust. It just—it looks so, damn—familiar.
He looked down, hazily, head swimming; looked up again. Saw the sun pop like a pinhole, bright white against grey. Saw it waver and blur, colours spectrum-skipping. Yellow sun in a black sky. Black sun in yellow.
Water lapping up at his heels, cold, gelid. The shadows of knives falling, like unclean rain.
As his left hand rose to wipe his brow, mouth painfully dry, he all at once saw something set down on it—narrow, bright, its head all eyes, both fixed and fragile wings glittering with speed, so fast they gave off a buzz. A dragonfly.
Of fuckin’ course.
For way off in the distance—but growing ever closer, like cream turns under a witch’s stink-eye—a whole hissing cloud made from more of the same was on the convergence: devil’s darning needles loud as locusts, swirling like faceted snow. Numberless wings dirtying the sky, the ground, thinning the skein between Above and Below ’til Mictlan-Xibalba itself peeked through. ’Til a shape like a massive seed-pod humped up from its very centre, far too large to hold only one occupant—first one hand out-thrust, then another, pulling the swarm aside like a pair of living curtains. Left hand slim and fine-fingered, burnt sienna-toned, with black-flushed nails and a spattering of tattoos ’cross its palm; right one square and manly with a reach put Pinkerton himself to shame, big enough to hold a fellow down by his throat while the other worked its will on him, probing hot and sweet and evil from head to Goddamn toe.
“Neatly done, darlin’,” the Rev observed. “Why, that was almost . . . strategic.”
The flush of seeing him enfleshed once more ran Chess’s length like ball-lightning, shameful-invigorating. But all he said was: “So it is you—late, like always. Somewhat wondered if you were even comin’.”
Rook smiled back down at him, like he was too happy to see him to trust himself to speak. While by his side, arm threaded possessive through his elbow’s crook, stood dread Rainbow Lady Ixchel with her long hair blowing and her snake-skirts a-ripple ’round her ripe hips, scales rattling dry as dead leaves. Blood ran from both bare teats, streaking her belly like war paint, to drip dark spots on Bewelcome’s salted ground.
The sheer raw force of her was dismaying, as ever—but now Chess could peer beyond that force, or into it; see how the mortal substance of the vessel she wore was eroding, slow but inexorable, Bewelcome’s thinness straining under her weight. And Rook looked little better, his long black coat dusty, collar frayed to a wisp, face both harsher-carved and looser at the jaw-points than Chess remembered it, with marks of worry, strain and weariness cut deep.
And to think how easily all that might’ve been avoided, Chess thought, if only . . .
Rook gave a tiny shrug, the movement hardly visible. “If only’s” a fruit lamentably easy to cultivate, darlin’, though it travels badly. I mean, it ain’t like you’d really accept any apology I tried to make, is it? However grovelling?
I might, at that—if you was to just go ’head and try me, you smug sumbitch.
At this, Rook looked taken aback, like he almost wanted to answer. But it was her voice spoke instead, making Chess’s muscles twitch in fury: lilting, mock-affectionate, each vowel etched in the stone knife-sharpening sounds of a long-dead world. A voice he mainly knew from nightmares of being rode hard and put away wet, without even what little pleasure he might’ve got from the process left behind, in recompense.
Then consider it said, she told him, smiling her sharp green smile. It is your time, after all, little year-king. You have seeded plentifully, marking a trail for others to follow, a net of power trawling New Aztectlan’s territories for due tribute. But your reign is done, and here we are, to collect. Now comes the time . . .of harvest.
“I wasn’t talkin’ to you,” Chess told her, knowing she’d ignore him. Switching over to Rook: “Hey, Reverend—what is this we’re in here, some sort’a time-hex? You slip us ’tween seconds on a watch-face so’s we’d have the chance to jaw our mutual complaints out, that it?”
“Something like that, yeah. For them, this’s an eye-blink—less than. For us—”
—an eternity, if need be. Until our matters are settled.
Chess laughed. “Hell, we could do that now, you pitiful damn rag-’n’-bone show object. I already spent the whole damn day so far fightin’—bit more won’t make no never-mind, unless you got something I never seen before hid up that skirt of yours.”
Her eyes narrowed. You truly believe it would be so easy?
“What, ’cause you’re a god? The hell you think you made of me, bitch?”