At the northern edge of the battlefield, a few of the winged things had gathered. The rain avoided them.
They didn’t turn as Anya and I approached, Saul and Theron hanging back with perfect Were tact. A few other hunters—Dmitri Roslan, Jack Quint, a short, hard-faced woman I realized was Belle de Sud herself, with her long brown fingers flicking uneasily at her whip handle, four or five others—stood in a loose semicircle, watching. Dmitri flicked me a salute, his usual grin absent; I returned it without thinking.
I couldn’t help it. I stared at the wings. They were all white, some with flecks of brown. And huge, managing to look perfectly natural instead of a violation of biology. The clarity had faded to a slow gleam around them, no longer hurtfully bright. They faced something chained to the goalpost, glints of gold shifting as the blackened, charred thing moved slightly. A ripple of tension went through the winged, as if they expected him to break the thin golden bonds and start making trouble again.
Bitterness filled my mouth. Anya tapped at a gun butt, her face set.
The tallest of them half-turned as I halted next to him. It was Michael the Caretaker, and there was no shadow of scarring left on his face. His wings drooped a little, as if he was tired, too. His eyes were the same, though, bright and mild, that shadow of pain sending an answering twinge through me.
“You understand,” he said, quiet.
I don’t understand this at all. “Yes,” I heard myself say, dully, a good pupil aiming to please. “Sacrifice.”
Michael nodded. “You were willing, again, even when there was no hope. That creates a… new thing, you could say, in the Pattern.” He looked back at the charred form, and his shoulders dropped again. “His father is dead. He is utterly flesh now, as he wished to be.” A world of sadness in the words. “The choice is yours, to spare or to kill.”
I didn’t want to think about that yet. “Where’s Mikhail?” My hands were fists. “I saw him. He was here. Where is he?”
Michael shrugged. One wing flicked, delicately, sending a clean breeze over my filthy cheeks. “Only the ones present are here.”
“Well, no shit.” Sarcasm gave me fresh strength. The gem muttered, etheric force trickling back through me. I needed food, and rest, and maybe a couple pints of something eye-wateringly alcoholic before I’d be anything close to my mettle, but right at the moment I didn’t care. I was shaking.
But not with the weakness. No.
With rage.
He turned, this time facing me fully. “Love cannot be forced. Love is only given, freely.” A faint smile, but he didn’t look happy. Instead, it was that sorrow again. “Love is only proved, though it asks no proof in return. This is important, but it is not our task here. We are to witness your choice.” Again a wing dipped, indicating the blackened body, and I was forgetting I’d ever seen him without the snowy feathered expanses.
My fists ached. “What were you doing down there in the Hill’s boiler room all this time, huh? Just waiting for this?”
“Witnessing.” He nodded slightly, as if the question was expected, weighed his answer, and added more. “Serving the Pattern.”
“Your Pattern fucking blows.” It wasn’t up to my usual standards. I sounded more like Gilberto than myself. “It’s insane. It hurts good people. It’s not fair.”
“It is,” he said gravely, “all we have.”
He made a sudden movement, and another ripple went through the winged things. But he’d just unlimbered his sword from somewhere. It was a heavy broadsword piece of work, too tall for me, with wicked finials on the guard and a ruby the size of a fist at the end of the pommel. It looked razor sharp, and its bright blade smoked with dappled light.
It looked a little like the sunsword. Well, the sunsword was a toothpick compared to this, but still, you could see an echo.
He presented me with the hilt. Anya breathed an obscenity.
“It is your choice,” Michael repeated.
It was hard work to shake my right hand out. Even harder to touch the damn thing. Warm strength poured down my arm from the cool metal, and Michael nodded approvingly.
I probably looked ridiculous, stepping across the sludge-dying not-grass, gingerly and awkwardly holding a broadsword almost as long as I was tall away from me. The winged stepped back in unison, but the hunters moved forward, almost as if prearranged.
Is this part of his fucking Pattern too? The bitterness was all through me.
He’d been burned, terribly. Weeping cracks coated his charred flesh, but his eyes were still the same sterile blue. The dome of his skull without any hair to cover it was subtly wrong, and he seemed smaller. Of course, anyone’s going to look small covered in fourth-degree burns and chained to a goalpost, right?
Even a hellbreed.
His lips cracked. Thick colorless fluid wept from them. “Kissssssss.” Sighing, like a lover.
“Hyperion. Perry.” I swallowed hard. My palms might have been sweating, or it might have been the rain or the filth making the hilt slippery. The sword hummed, a thunderbolt contained. His own black blade lay in pieces around him, and Perry raised his burned-bared head and stared at me. “Or should I say, Argoth.”
A shrug. More blackened skin broke, a brittle sugarglaze. How he was still alive? “Only a part of him. A fragment. Insurance, originally. A doppelgänger, meant to be a placeholder here, in case the masters needed hands in this world.”
It was my turn to nod slightly. “But you wanted more. Slipped the leash, made a deal with Jack Karma, and got the original locked away in Hell. Then you started planning how to get all of the original’s power, all the other pieces of him.” I coughed, tasted smoke. Thunder roiled in the distance, and the rain intensified. “But for that, you needed a hunter. Because you didn’t just want all of your father. You wanted to be real. Anything above an arkeus isn’t usually physical, it can be disrupted and once it is, goodbye and good night. The bargain with Karma and his line kept you here and gave you a simulacrum of flesh, and you could afford to settle down and wait for a hunter who could take on your poppa and keep you bolted to the physical world at the same time.” You followed Mikhail all the way from Europe. That’s almost why he drew on you in the Monde that first time I saw you. Did he think he was free of you? Not likely. So what was he thinking?
Would I ever know?
His tongue flickered, startling cherry-red. He studied me for a long time, and I let him. The sword quivered heavily, but my arm wasn’t tired. It was building in me, the knowledge of what I had to do.
“I am flesh now,” he finally hissed. “Flesh, my darling one. You made it possible. You killed the original, as you so quaintly call him. I am his heir, and we are linked. I am your other half. We’re the same coin, my love.”
Negation rose inside me. But I nodded again, slowly. He was at least partly right. I’d been mortgaging bits of myself to Perry for years, telling myself it didn’t make me a Trader. It gave me the strength to police the nightside more effectively, and his mark on me had been the punishment I deserved.
For everything.
No. I couldn’t afford to lie here. He was right. There was only a thread-thin edge between Perry and me. A coin’s edge. He had waited for me for a very long time. Waited for the hunter who was, at bottom, like him.
We are the ones crying in the dark, and on our backs they build golden cities.
God help me, I understood.
“So what is it to be?” More of his brittle skin cracking as he shifted. The thin golden chains sent up threads of steam, whisked away by the cold wet breeze. “Cut me loose, and take your place as my keeper? Think of what you can do, with me your willing slave. Think of the battles you can win.” Another wriggling motion.
He might eventually squirm free, I realized. But it didn’t seem important.
“Or strike me down with that avenging sword—overcompensating a bit, aren’t we? And damn yourself with murdering the helpless, whose only crime was to wait for you and love you?” Those white teeth were now grimed with thin pinkish fluid, darker lines accumulating between them. He writhed again. “I waited so, so long for you, my dove. Theirs is not the only Pattern.”
There. That’s what he’s after. “No,” I dimly heard myself say, through the roaring in my ears. “I suppose it isn’t.”
“We can make a new one,” he whispered. “Just you and me. A fair one. You can mete out justice, and I will make it total. Just let me loose.”
I stepped closer, boots squishing in the muck. “I suppose it isn’t the only pattern.” Louder now, clear and strong. “It’s not even the one that matters.”
Perry gazed up at me. “Let me free.” So soft, all the promise in the world. “You will never be lonely, Kiss. Not so long as I am able to comfort you.”
Oh, God. The problem wasn’t that he said it.
The problem was that it was true. There was only a hairs-breadth of difference between Perry… and me. Or at least, the part of me that made sure I survived. The stranger who lived inside me, strong and ruthless where I was weak. And with him dead, I would be—down in the secret place where the animal of survival crouches, the part of me that was coldly determined to do what had to be done—alone.
Utterly alone.
The sword rose, thrumming, its blade suddenly pouring with white radiance. Perry bared his teeth, more skin crackling, and the golden chain burst with a tinkle. My right wrist flamed with cramping pain, but I brought the blade down with a scream. It cut, the goalpost singing before it groaned and tipped, smashing into the wet ground with a plorch.
Lifted and flung, my right arm on fire, torn out by the roots, every nerve screaming… and I landed, hard, my fingers forced open and the sword clattering away. Rustling filled the broken bowl of the stadium, and they took wing, spiraling up with a grace and authority that forced a dry barking sob from my aching, parched throat.
The last one bent over me, blue eyes dark with sorrow. But he was smiling, and he laid one warm finger to my lips. Warmth broke over me in a wave, white light filling my head for one long glorious moment.
Well done, he whispered. Or maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe I just thought he did. Maybe I needed someone to say it.
In any case, there was a pop of collapsing air, and he vanished.
I lay there in the rain, fresh cold sludge working up through my hair and the tatters of my coat, with my right arm flung up as if to protect me.
My whole, naked, unmarked right arm.