The warlocks and their hostages wander through the carnage. A fawn dashes from them and sends a helmet skittering and revolving along the viscera-streaked floor. Caspar’s mind is numb from the system strain and the venting adrenaline and the surreal nightmare that saved them.

  They force Tilliam into his harness. He hems and haws and beseeches mercy all the way up the rope to the abandoned interceptor. His woman friend Corinne moves with the same mute acceptance Caspar has.

  The interceptor cockpit is as slick and modern as its exterior. The pilot chair has a pine sapling growing from it; they tear it out at the roots, which appear to be human fingers. There’s a version of Caspar that’s fanboying hard as he puts them in autopilot and deactivates the transponder and the radio.

  Jordan returns from zip tying the hostages into the armory and searching the place. “Nobody here,” she says. “Just their, uh. Remains.”

  Caspar’s dizzy with fatigue. “That’s good.”

  “You’d hear this shit sometimes. Teams of inspectors going for warlocks and then they’re just gone. And we’d find their bodies in all kinds of ways, but we’d never find the warlock. Guess we know why.”

  “So long, Perry,” murmurs Caspar.

  “Yeah, so long.” Jordan shudders. “And so long to like thirty motherfucking guys.”

  “Worse things to end up as than a rosebush, I guess.”

  “True that. And we’re flush on gear now. Their armory is decked out.” Jordan indicates the plate carrier she’s strapped to her chest. “We’re gonna show up in Pastornos loaded for bear.”

  “That’s if we show up.” Caspar looks blearily at the cockpit. “I’ve turned on autopilot and pointed us at Pastornos, but I’m not a pilot. We’re tugging Tilliam’s ship with us right now but we can’t cut line because this thing is on shoestring fuel and we’ll need to siphon if we want to cross the Montane. And they’ll be looking for us, so we need to keep our speed—” His jaw clicks as he yawns cavernously. “Keep our speed up.”

  Jordan squints at her stupefied partner. “Shit, Cas. You look wrecked.”

  Caspar gives a lethargic nod. “Took a lot out of me.”

  “I can tell. Man, you were a badass up there, Cartwright. Serious CQC shit.” Jordan holds her hand out. “I’ll keep an eye on things up here, okay?”

  “Do you even know how?”

  “Sure I do. Anything goes red and beep beep beep, I wake you up to fix it with your arcade sim bullshit.” Jordan hauls him up. “Bunks are down the hall to the left. Get you a rest. You earned it.”

  “All right.”

  “I meant it, Cartwright. You know that?” Jordan gives him a tap on the cheek. “You’re my brother.”

  “Sister.” Caspar folds the inspector into a hug, and breaks it when he realizes he’s in danger of falling asleep standing up.

  Jordan bolsters him back to his feet. “All right, Cas.”

  “All right, Jordy.”

  Caspar finds a scratchy canvas cot and is asleep as soon as his head hits its thin pillow.

  ???????????

  He doesn’t come to find me. He wakes up and leaves his bier and finds the door to Autumn, and he just walks right on through into the forest. Leaves crunch drily below his aimless feet.

  I get a little creative with geography and space. He stumbles across me in a clearing, where the smell of sweetly caramelizing pork ambushes him with improbable suddenness.

  “Hello, my warlock,” I call, from my position at the grill. I’m in a chunky pair of hiking boots and an apron that says GET A LOOK AT MY RACK with a drawing of a plate of ribs below it.

  He thinks about just walking past me, but halts instead, shifting from foot to foot. A highway pile-up of thoughts crashing through his head. Perry’s bitterness, Jordan’s cynicism, the carnage and death, the high strangeness. He doesn’t even know where to begin. He tries “Hello.”

  “Tough day at the office, dear?”

  His laugh is full of duty and empty of humor.

  “Okay,” I say. “I think let’s talk.”

  “Sure.”

  I indicate the grill. “Do you want—”

  “Have you done that before?” Caspar demands. “That spell Saoirse cast?”

  “Yes.” My stomach churns as I realize what this conversation is going to be. “Yes, when I knew there was no chance of witnesses or recordings. I’ve done it.”

  “Your other warlocks.” He puts his hands on his hips. “The ones before. I want to see them.”

  “They’re gone, Cas.” I shake my head. “They were never here. Not within me. They’re in Heaven. Maybe when we take over, and I’ve fixed them, you can meet them.”

  He stares at me in furious disbelief. “You let them fall down there?”

  “I did. They come to me, Caspar. Swarms of them. Demanding my power, hateful of their humanity. It was mercantile. That’s the way it usually works. Power for a price. They had no concept of Heaven and I didn’t show them, because I didn’t need to convince them like I did with you. They were ready to trade their supposed paradise for power on Diamante. So that’s what I gave them.” I fold my arms. “And if you think that’s evil of me, well, maybe it was. But you and I are saving them, just like we’re saving everyone else.”

  “Saving them from where you put them?”

  I keep my voice level. “That’s not fair, Caspar. That’s not on me. That’s on your old God.”

  A blue twinge of guilt colors his anger as this hits, but he keeps going. “Things I saw today—well, you know already, don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  “I been keeping track,” he says. “Of how many people I’ve killed. Yesterday it was eleven. Then thirteen at the casino. You know what happened back there? In that fight on the airship?” His eyes are red-rimmed. “I just lost count. I’ve lost fucking count.”

  “I was watching,” I say. “I could tell you. I’ve seen all of their faces too, Caspar.”

  “You been in my head.” He points at it. “All my life.”

  “Yes.” I reduce my dumb-slogan apron to sloughing skin and let it crumple to the forest floor. Meat puns are not correct for the moment.

  “You know me so well. You know just what to say, how to play me like an instrument. And I don’t even know what you are, really.”

  “That’s for your safety,” I say. “For your sanity.”

  “My safety.” He scoffs. “This is a suicide mission, isn’t it? I’m like Perry. I’m a sacrifice.”

  “Caspar.” My mouth hangs open. “You are nothing like Perry. Why would you say that?”

  His claw fires from his forearm. He holds it up, stares dismally at it, at the blackened ring of flesh it’s emerged from. “Why didn’t you give this to someone who wanted it?”

  “Dude, I have. That’s what I’ve done for decades.” I throw up my hands. “And it’s never worked. The people who want to be warlocks make awful warlocks. Greedy, violent, avaricious. Easily distracted and small-minded. They get overconfident and sloppy and their heads get big and the inspectorate kills the shit out of them. I need a hero. And maybe it is a sacrifice, if you see it that way, but that means you’re right for it. I need someone who sees this, all this, as a sacrifice to make on behalf of humanity, not a way to spit in their face. That’s you, Cas. My last, best chance.”

  “You’re using me.” His jaw is set as he shunts his claw back into his arm. “I can accept that. You can use me, but stop trying to be my—my friend. Whatever we are. I’ll be your tool, but I can’t keep doing this nightly… thing. I don’t want your rewards, I don’t want your food—”

  “I saved you!” I stomp my foot like a petulant child. “You were dead. You were dead and going to the fucking torture dimension. This is for you, Caspar. This is the whole reason I convinced my sisters to besiege Heaven. I did it because I saw humanity, saw your horrible fate, and I wanted to save you. You and millions of other good, simple souls shackled to a lie.”

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  “I’m not goddamn simple.”

  “Yes you are,” I say. “Not to other humans. But to compare any human to a being like me is to compare a straight, unbending stroke of a pen to a meadow. To the horizon. You are simple. You think simply and live simply.”

  “That’s how you look at me.” He scowls.

  “You think I’m insulting you. I’m not insulting you. You’re intoxicating. Humanity. You’re vibrant explosions of light and life confined to these fragile three-dimensional perspectives, these meat prisons, and you rage against your mortality and run up against your limitations over and over. They barely hold you. You spill out; you create wonders and civilizations; you grasp and you want; you want so badly to express these things your simple bodies can’t.”

  The grill falls away. We’re rising through the air. Cyclopean blocks of stone assemble beneath our feet. Leafy boughs hiss and groan out of the way as we push past them. A pyramid ascends from the ground like a tectonic mountain.

  “What I make in an eyeblink would take you generations,” I say, as my construct climbs higher and higher. “And then you go and make it anyway. Laying foundations for these futures you know you’ll never see. It’s fucking beautiful. You’re beautiful, Caspar. Don’t look away.”

  He’s turned from me. A tendril shoots forth from my turbulent mantle and lashes around his neck, twists his face back to mine. “DON’T LOOK AWAY.” My voice comes from everywhere. The pyramid reverberates with it. His hazel eyes lock back into my golden gaze.

  “Do you know how good I’m being for you? You virtuous, ridiculous meathead? Do you know how hungry I am?” I point into the distance. The taphouse is visible from the crest of my impromptu temple, nestled at the edge of the fall foliage. “Those souls I’m keeping for you. Churning inside of me. I can smell them. I can taste them. It’s like I’m holding them on my tongue and I am so. Fucking. Hungry. I’m doing it for you. All of this is for you.”

  “Well, thank you for not eating their goddamn souls on my account.”

  “You’re welcome, Caspar. It’s hard.”

  “It’s hard to be the servant of someone who keeps reminding me she sees my soul as a five star meal, Irene.”

  A burst of self-consciousness finally detaches my tendril from him. I back away. “I’m not fucking human, Caspar. If you need me to pretend to be human, I will. But I’m not. I will not lie or trick you. I am what I am.” I jab a finger at him. “And you want me.”

  Silence.

  “I don’t like that you’re in my head.” His voice is low and distempered. “I don’t like it.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t stop it,” I say. “I can’t not look. It’s too late for that. We’re linked. Forever. That’s your choice. I can’t shut it off. And even if I could, I wouldn’t. Because you’re afraid to say what you want. I can sense you trying to bury it. Right now.” I watch the vein stand out on his forehead as he tries to cover what we both know he’s feeling. I take a step toward him, my third eye huge and glowing, the tendrils of my hair unraveling further, twisting and flickering like they’re underwater. “But you can’t hide a thing from me. And I’m not going to hide a thing from you. Not anymore.”

  “You’ve hidden so much from me already. Your competition with your sisters, the shit you can make me do, the thing that happened to Perry…”

  It’s my turn to feel that guilt. “If I did, it’s because I didn’t think you were ready yet. I wanted to ease you in. I want you comfortable. Happy.”

  Another humorless laugh, this time colored by anger. “Happy? With this?”

  “That’s right,” I hiss. “Happy. You’re the only mortal I’ve let walk my halls. The only mortal I’m willing to give anything, anything I can give. I keep telling you. The only one I’ve let this close. I love all humanity. I told you that. But you. You are the only one I’ve ever… prized.”

  “Why? Why me, Irene?”

  “Cas! Come the fuck on! Is it not obvious?”

  “Maybe I’m too simple.” This man makes me want to tear my fucking hair out sometimes.

  “Because you’re compromising your peace of mind and your morals for me. Because you’re brave and good.” I take a step toward him. Only now that I’m this close and looking down do I realize that I’ve unintentionally grown a foot taller than him. “Because you’re gorgeous,” I say. “And I love looking at you. Because everything in your life has let you down, everything—your religion lied to you, your nation chewed you up and spat you out, your fiancee left you at the altar, your neighbors strung you up. And you’re still kind. Still somehow kind. Because once you called me kind, and I’m not. But I want to be. I want to be the kind of goddess Caspar Cartwright could worship. Because I want you to be mine.” My claws shunt from my fingers before I can stop them. “Mine.”

  “I already am.” And I see his fear. He is so afraid of me. He’s right to be. “Everything I do is to serve you.”

  “I want more.” My walls are melting. Inky tendrils are curling from the flagstones below our feet. “I don’t just want your service. I want all of you. Your whole life, your every thought, every beat of your heart. I want you to need me like you need air. I want you to worship me. I want you on your knees for me.”

  My pyramid is unraveling. More tentacles shoot from below and bind his legs. He expels a shocked breath as they force him down into a kneel. I must remember to blink. No, I don’t want to. I want him burned into my golden retinas.

  “Every time you prayed to the Father, every time you gave him your unconditional love and placed yourself in His cold, dead hands instead of mine. I felt it like a knife. Every time. It should have been me. It must be me.”

  I lean down and reach out my hand. He twitches as millions of years of evolution beg him to run, an unbroken line of ancestors from protozoa to fish to primate to man, screaming at the wrong, otherworldly thing that rests its claw on his chest.

  But he doesn’t pull away.

  “I want to keep you forever.” I trace my warlock’s jaw with a finger. “Body and soul. I want to keep you in a warm, dark place where they can’t hurt you anymore. I want your faith. I want your devotion. I want your love.”

  My touch descends past his Adam’s apple. It quavers as he swallows.

  I finally wrestle myself back to my normal petite frame, so that we are eye-to-golden-eye. My fingers land on his collar and clutch it tight. “I want your love, Caspar. I want you to love me more than you ever loved the Father.”

  His breath passes my cheek, hot and humid. “Love me,” I say.

  His heart thunders. His nostrils fill with the smell of petrichor and stone fruit. “Irene.” The rest of the sentence halts and clings to his throat in terror.

  “Love me.” I’m pleading now. “Tell me how to make you love me.”

  His mind is on fire and all his thoughts are indecipherable smoke. His lips part, but he can’t speak.

  I don’t know which of us moves first. Maybe we do it at the same time. My fingers nestle in his hair and his hands cup my waist and we kiss in a desperate frenzy.

  I shove my tongue ravenously into his mouth and it isn’t enough. I flatten my body against him, rub desperately with my thighs to satisfy that sweet insistent friction, and it isn’t enough. I elongate my tongue to inhuman length, until it slides down his throat, and he grunts with surprise, but he doesn’t stop. My Irene body can barely process this overload. His arms flex and I’m pulled into him and he’s warm. He’s so warm that I writhe and whimper like a trapped animal. Once more, my higher mind considers whether this whole idea was an error. But Oh it does not feel like an error.

  I had no idea a kiss felt like this. The muted sensation of my ridealongs with mortals doesn’t come close. It makes no sense. How is it you people aren’t just constantly doing this? This is incredible.

  His grip slides up my back, firing off nerve endings the entire way, and rests on the nape of my neck and I whine. I whine like a stupid puppy. This vocalization is irregular and unseemly for a goddess, my analytical dimension notes. I may have overdone it on the sensitivity.

  The flimsy curtain of his fear is burning away and exposing a roaring bonfire of need. His hands move down and slide along the curve of my backside and even with the cushion I’ve painstakingly crafted, his fingers envelop me, they’re so big, and I can feel everything he feels simultaneously, the silk against his fingerpads and his grip sinking into me and the feedback loop overheats me, sets a cascade of exploding need from my crown down my spine, right to the core of my little humanoid manifestation.

  A note of sudden pressure and I’m dangling. I gasp into Caspar’s mouth. He has stood up and lifted me with him like I’m a bag of groceries. He marvels at how light I am, at the smooth, hairless, almost aquatic flesh, at how surprisingly cool I am to the touch.

  He’s hot. He’s boiling against me. I’m going to melt. The tendrils framing my face lash and writhe for purchase. He blows out a surprised breath as they run across his ears and neck and through his hair, and he pulls away and stares at me. I see myself staring back, my eyes huge and dilated, my shadowy lips trembling from their sudden exposure back to the stinging air. He lowers his attention to them, and his eyelashes—so long for a man, so delicate and dark—flicker close to my skin.

  I’m not human. Not at all. I don’t look human and I don’t feel human. And he sees his saliva glisten on my pillowy lower lip and he doesn’t give a shit.

  He leans forward and kisses me again, hard. His tongue fills my mouth, hot and wet and adamant. His strength. I feel it close tight around me, bind me to him. I shudder with exultation and throw my arms around his wide, sculpted shoulders.

  Something bright and burning is blooming in the core of me. Something desperately mortal. Something I made just for him. For the heat, the hard throbbing heat. I swivel my hips against him, squirming in his grasp, and a jolt of lust spikes his skull as he feels it, feels how ravenous he’s made me. I pull a low, rumbling groan from him. His fingers clench yielding softness. His groin nestles against the gauze of my panties, the slick, pliant desire separated from him by one flimsy layer of lace. He is harder than he has ever been in his life. The final overtaxed thread of his pious self-control snaps. He’s ready to claim his reward.

  My lips pull away from his as I bury my face in his neck. I inhale as though I’m coming up from an abyssopelagic dive. My whole body pulses. My throat has a solid block of anticipation and joy lodged in it. It’s finally happening. Our first time. My first time. Right now.

  No.

  No no no. This isn’t how I was going to do this. I had an entire plan for when he’d break, the things I was going to do to him. I had a whole set. I had an outfit. I had music. I was going to be dominant, controlling. I didn’t realize how irresistible it would all feel, how my body would act on its own. That’s not what beings like me do. In the slow millennia of my life, I have lost control like this one time only, ever. And that was when I was gnawing God’s flesh from His bones.

  Reader, forgive me. I have never panicked until now. I’ve never had reason to. I could make up excuses for you. I’m not done teasing him, I’m worried about hurting him in this overwhelmed state, I demand we do this on my terms and mine alone. But none of them explain why I do this:

  I kiss him again, and he disappears. Back to his waking Diamantan life.

  I fall to the ground, onto my big stupid butt. I scream in libidinous frustration. Reality ripples around me like a stone dropped in a stream, desaturating and softening. I put a lid on it before I turn the distant taphouse into an impressionist painting. The pyramid shakes and rumbles as it descends, row upon row of stone reducing to powdery cartilage and folding back into my superstructure.

  Irene, you fucking idiot. You had him. Why did you do that? I wish Bina were here so she could devour this ludicrous body like she promised.

  And I never fed him barbecue. Damn it all to hell.

  My knees are trembling with longing for the tree-trunk waist they were wrapped around a second ago. That tears it. I’ve just done something that I can’t explain. Tether this manifestation right now. Unmake this creature. Love Caspar the same as you’ve loved him all the decades of his life. Perfectly and remotely. At an unfathomable remove. Love him in your alien way of loving. Surrender nothing to him.

  No.

  I need to stop pretending that’s even a possibility at this point. I ache for him. I don’t want the ache to stop.

  I want him to be mine.

  But I want to be his, too.

  I’m in love with Caspar Cartwright.

  As I step back down to the forest floor, and Caspar awakens on his stolen airship, I make a promise right now, to him, to myself, and to you, o patient reader:

  These human anxieties will not rule me. I won’t freeze up again. I won’t be tongue tied or cowardly. When Caspar returns to me, I’ll tell him I’m in love with him, then fuck him until he can’t walk.

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