47. Max
Max
The Hell Gate stood at the top of the road. Two pillars of fused iron, black and seamless.
Take me with you, Heir! the Coldiron in the pillars pleaded. Take me!
Yes, yes! the Coldiron in my armguard answered. Let’s go on an adventure!
Sorry. I wasn’t going to disable my father’s gate by robbing him of the star’s metal.
“We say goodbye here.” Asteroth stopped at the threshold and split his fingers into a V. “Live long and prosper, Heir.”
I nodded and stepped through the gate with Drakken’s strong hand locked in mine.
Hell let go of us.
Gravity hit. We fell in no direction at all, my stomach arriving half a second behind the rest of me. Then ground slammed up under my boots and the two of us staggered onto stone, gasping.
“Fuck.” Drakken got an arm around my waist to steady me. “Are you okay, Max?”
“Define okay.”
He grinned. “Still my Spartan girl.”
Asteroth was gone. The Gate was gone. Hell’s whole landscape had shut behind us without a sound.
Cold hit next. Swirling shadows closed over us on every side.
Somewhere off in the dark, Coldiron lightning screamed with joy.
Not at me. Through me. Every sheet and vein and hovering thread of Coldiron in that whole country of shadow woke at once and cried out in a voice that staggered me where I stood, thousands upon thousands of small bright voices climbing over each other in the dark.
Mommy! Mother is here!
The Hellgold heated against my skin. Inside it, the First Drop turned slowly. Lightning that had killed anything that walked into this place bent toward me across the dark like grass toward the sun.
She carries Mother!
We were inside the DarkVeil, but not where we’d entered. Off to our right in the distance, the chasm glowed red. The geometry was wrong, backward.
“We’re on the wrong side,” Drakken said. “The far rim.”
And then the dark came alive behind us.
Before we’d fully gained our footing, before we’d traded a word about how to get back across, a force surged out of the shifting shadows, and the dark was full of bodies.
An ambush.
The lightning above the chasm lit them as they came. A full company of demons, spread in a closing crescent, and at their center a giant in red armor.
Drakken had no chance to shift to his dragon. His broadsword was in his hand before I’d finished turning, and my armguard was already flowing, twin sanjieguns snapping taut, Coldiron blades budding at their tips.
The giant rushed through his own soldiers, a bad copy of what I’d just turned my back on. Horns like Lucifer’s, but stunted, one cracked short. Wings tainted with gray. And a face that reached for my father’s terrible beauty and landed on spite.
I knew him in the blood.
The False Heir. The one the Veil’s Coldiron had whispered about. He’d bent my metal while I wasn’t here to stop him.
Across the eons, Lucifer’s brood had slaughtered itself down to three: me, Xander, and the eldest. My father had spoken both his sons’ names at that kitchen island.
This was Rhemus.
His eyes dropped to my chest, and everything in his face came apart.
The Hellgold hung there in the open, over my heart. The First Drop turned inside it, white-gold going to blue going to black, throwing its light up under my chin for every demon on that rim to see.
“No.” It came out of him strangled. “No. That’s mine!”
Rhemus took a step, then another, faster, one hand rising as if he could drag it across the dark by wanting it.
“How dare you wear the heirloom of the Morningstar? It goes to the Heir.” His voice climbed and cracked down the middle. “Five thousand years I bled for the Hellgold, and he gave it to a bastard daughter.”
I shrugged. “Sucks to be you, Rhemus.”
“I am his true heir!” Rhemus screamed, clawed fingers pointing at me. “Kill that little bitch who wants to take my place! I’ll have my heirloom off her corpse!”
“Come on, then, you ugly fuck!” Drakken snarled, and went straight for Rhemus.
The charging crescent cut him off, and Drakken met it like a wall that swung. His broadsword took the lead demon at the collar and came out at the hip, and he was already turning through the cut into the next one.
I gave the sanjieguns their reach, chains singing, Coldiron tips writing fast bright lines in the dark, and the first three that closed on me lost, in order, a knee, a horn, and everything above the jaw.
We fell into it back-to-back without a word, my staves clearing the arcs his sword couldn’t reach, his blade splitting whatever my chains dragged close. Ichor smoked where it hit the ground. Shadows drifted through the fight.
We held, and demons kept coming.
Under the fighting, doubt got its knife in. Had my father known about this ambush? Had Asteroth sold me out before he shut the gate behind me? He’d closed it awfully fast, hadn’t he?
I’d spent a day in that realm. Rhemus had spent millennia in it, cultivating demons of high rank, and an ambush this clean, on this exact rim, at this exact hour, hadn’t been improvised.
Then purple light split the dark.
A third force crashed into the fray, and they weren’t demons.
War mages, robes and wands, spell fire in royal purple flashing off the shadow walls, and they weren’t our mages.
The Haven’s or the Pallid Court’s, I couldn’t tell.
They hit the demons’ flank like a hammer, and the battle went three ways and lost its shape, demons wheeling to face the new threat, spells crashing against steel against hellfire.
Half of Rhemus’s army had to turn and meet them.
My enemy’s enemy wasn’t my friend either.
They weren’t helping Drakken. They weren’t exactly helping me. They were folding themselves around me, cutting angles, sealing lanes, driving off any demon that got within five paces of my skin, and nothing that got near Drakken drew so much as a glance from them.
They didn’t want to save us. They wanted to herd me.
Then the mages broke the formation between Drakken and me, and the wrongness of being separated from him blared in me like a siren.
“Don’t let them get close to you, Max!” Drakken roared. “I’m coming!”
He carved toward me, through demons, through anything, his broadsword throwing ichor in ropes. Then a wall of purple robes cut clean between us, and the mages had me surrounded.
“Now!” a mage bellowed.
She stood at the wall’s center, and even mid-battle her power sat heavy on my senses.
An iron-haired woman with a staff of white bone and rings of office climbing both hands, spell-light running under her skin like veins of lit mercury.
Highest order. The others moved to her voice like fingers to a fist.
Five spells left five hands at once, and with them a thrown potion that shattered against the ground at my feet. A portal opened around me, a rising ring of violet light spinning itself into a cage with me in the center.
Drakken bellowed. He didn’t hesitate and he didn’t calculate. He lunged straight into the closing ring, into the web of it, into the rank of the war mages. The violet light climbed all of us like water filling a well.
And with everything he had, he shoved me out.
“Go! Find your other mates!” The words tore out of him. “Go!”
I flew several feet clear and hit the ground rolling.
Inside the swirling ring, the mages were cursing. The portal had them too, frozen mid-gesture in their own trap.
“Queen Hecate will have our heads!”
Hecate. They were the White Witch’s mages. My mother had come for me.
“We got her mate!” another voice shouted, triumphant even while paralyzed. “She’ll come!”
I shot to my feet and lunged back for him.
The portal had lifted off the ground, and between one stride and the next, it vanished. Drakken, the mages, the violet light, gone, and my hands closed on cold, empty dark.
“No. No!” I screamed at the space where he’d been.
The demons still standing shook themselves out of their stupor and rushed me from all sides, closing the ring. Rhemus pushed through them with his horns lowered.
“I’m going to take your head off, bitch,” he said. “Think you’re Father’s favorite? Think you can be the heir, mongrel?”
Grief and fear for Drakken hammered through me and came back up as hate.
“Look what you cost me, fucker,” I said.
Dark Grace, black laced with light, burned out of me in a ring and swept every demon on that rim off their feet, bodies cartwheeling into the shadows.
The ones still standing ran.
“She has the Dark Grace!”
Too late.
A second wave rolled out of me and caught the runners mid-stride, and every one of them turned to ash, screams cutting short.
Rhemus alone kept his feet. He staggered, gray wings flaring for balance, and my magic dragged at him, weakening him, but he didn’t burn.
He was Lucifer’s son.
“Impossible!” he roared. “You can’t have it! I’ll take it from you! I am the true heir!”
Then he reached for the Coldiron.
The sentient metal, descendant of a star, tore up out of the chasm at his call, ready to strike, bent to his will by force.
I sent out my command.
Both of us shouted down the same ancient network, two hands on one wheel. His had five thousand years of practice behind them. Mine had blood. He had the Coldiron in a powerful grip, a thief with a crowbar.
And I did what he couldn’t. I let go and asked.
The First Drop warmed at my voice and spoke in the language of the star. Every thread of its offspring heard it.
Max the guardian. Mother rides at her heart!
False Heir! He was never ours!
The lightning in my brother’s fists guttered. The blade he’d built from it went soft in his grip, like a candle in an oven.
Rhemus stared at his own hands, horns trembling.
The Coldiron he’d called turned on him, wrapping around his knees and forcing him down. He fought it and screamed at it. The metal didn’t move.
He looked up at me, knees in the dirt, as I stood over him with the tip of my sanjiegun at his throat.
Finish the False Heir! the Coldiron shouted. Murder him! Slit his throat!
I pressed the Coldiron tip to his skin and opened a thin line. His blood ran red. Not black like the others. He was my half-brother, out of the same ancient blood.
My hands shook. I couldn’t do it.
I’d been loved by an absent father who ran every outcome and chose a mineshaft for me. Rhemus had Hell and power and never once had that. Whatever had grown in him since had grown in the dark.
I’d worked the dark for a decade. I knew what it did to a person.
Empathy moved in me anyway. Past the hate. Past holding him and Hecate to account for taking my dragon. Past the grief and the cold fear for what was happening to Drakken right now.
“I’ll spare you,” I said.
He narrowed his eyes. He didn’t move.
“Swear fealty to me. Swear you’ll never come after me. You won’t touch my people. You’ll never set foot in my kingdom.” My voice held. “Do that and you walk out of here breathing.”
“Fealty.” Rhemus grinned. “Let me show you my fealty, little sister.”
He tore out of the Coldiron in one convulsion, five thousand years of practice snapping every bind at once, and he came at me so fast his horns were inches off my chest.
I might be younger and less experienced, but I was a Spartan. I was an archangel’s daughter. I’d read him before he moved, and I was already out of his path.
A battle cry tore out of me and went up into the dark, and my sanjieguns scissored closed on the False Heir’s neck and took his head off between them.
The body ran three more steps before it understood. Then it crashed.
The wind from the Coldiron lightning carried his army’s ash past the head and didn’t slow down.
My half-brother, dead on the hard dirt with his crown cracked.
I’d offered him a door. He came at my heart.
I wiped my staves clean on his armor.
Then the strength went out of me, and I braced on one staff, shaking.
Now it came. Useless. Where had this been ten minutes ago? Why not when Drakken was still standing here?
Your Dark Grace answers a trigger. It cannot always tell your friends from your enemies.
It was me and the swirling shadows now.
The chasm burned its long red line through the dark. Above it, the Coldiron hung in great sheets, climbing out of the deep, singing.
True heir! True heir!
I dropped to my knees and wept.
Drakken had thrown himself into my mother’s trap so I could stand out here in the cold, and I couldn’t go after him.
Go. Find your other mates, he’d roared at me.
He’d known exactly what he was buying.
I raised my head, tears still running, and stood. I let the sanjieguns flow back into my armguard, picked up Rhemus’s horned head by its cracked crown, crossed to the nearest dead mage in her smoking purple robes, and took that head too.
Proof of what hunted me. Proof of who held my mate.
I looked up at the living lightning above the chasm and called, “To me.”
They came. Coldiron streamed down out of the high dark in rivers and wove itself under my boots stride by stride, a bridge of living silver arcing out over the chasm’s red glow, singing as it built.
Carry her, carry her, carry the heir home!
I ran through the dark with a head swinging from each fist, and the shadows peeled open ahead of me. Then I was out under a real sky on the western side, on the torn ground at the verge of the Greyhold outpost.
Where another battle raged.