1THE BLOODBATH THAT AWAITS WAS YOUR CHOICE ALONE
It rains in the church attic, fat drops of warm water and thick shards of stained glass, while I take the Cyclone’s life and the Reaper takes a bullet meant to end mine.
There is screaming. It could be lifetimes away, as muddled as it is, reaching for me through the bands of time and space and magic as thick and black as tar. The quiet sound of Zephyr Beauregard’s last breath seems louder. Beneath my pressed knee, beneath the callous weight of my knife cracking through the eggshell of his rib cage to pierce the yolk of him, the rich boy gurgles and spits. In this moment, I know with certainty why they call it a death rattle.
Someone grabs my knife arm. They try to drag my shoulder back, try to wrench free the weapon buried in Zephyr’s chest. Do they think to save him? Do they not realize they’re too late? Too late for the Cyclone. Too late for any of us.
His blue eyes widen until they can’t anymore, until they aren’t blue at all anymore, color leaching away like oceans drying up, until I’m staring into ash that used to be a home. Around me, I know the world is moving, loudly and quickly, and I know it wants me to move with it. But I’m trapped here, suspended in a cocoon; my body, my knife, the skin and bones and blood that used to be a boy.
The electricity starts like a tingling in my fingertips. Like the pins and needles of sitting wrong for too long, like part of me falling asleep while the rest is awake. Am I awake? Have I not been sleeping for weeks, for years, for lifetimes? Am I not only just now beginning to open my eyes?
It starts like a tingling and it grows like a fire, a cold burning ripping its way up my arm. There is screaming, and maybe it’s mine.
Lightning touches my heart and my head tips toward my spine, eyes rolling back. The last thing I see is Christ on the Cross above me.
My last thought is that this god did not die for my sins. But others have. And more will yet.
* * *
In the Ether, I stand on the cliff’s edge overlooking the shoreside cityscape below, as it falls victim to the ravages of the Cyclone’s latest tantrum. The ocean swirls into hurricane gusts, and tornadoes of brine tear down whole houses, leveling generations of memories in seconds. Before this, the city was filled with screams of panic and disbelief as its people tried to escape what they knew was coming. Now those screams have fallen silent. There is nothing but the wailing of the wind and the cracking of wood as lumber falls.
The Cyclone is a fickle and merciless god, moving at random from one village to the next, demanding offerings from its people only to indulge in their destruction whether they sacrifice or not. There is no reasoning with him, no bargaining that may actually hold sway. He sets his course and cannot be moved from his path—unless, just as randomly, he decides to turn.
I’ve been following him for some time now. Something must be done, before he floods the whole of our world for his own entertainment.
“What about him?” I ask, waving my hand at the beach below. “You cannot look upon the Cyclone’s actions and tell me you truly see no purpose for my weapon.”
Who am I talking to? I’m alone on the cliff.
At least, I thought I was.
“The monstrousness of another does not excuse indulging in your own.”
The voice comes from behind me, though I don’t turn to face it. I must have known she was there, if I spoke to her, but … how? I don’t remember her being there, I don’t remember …
Who is she?
Some tangled consciousness, some part of me that is Gem Echols, desperately wants to turn around and face the voice. It’s beautiful. Sultry, raspy, deep, and melodic, the way I imagine a jazz singer might sound. But I have no idea who she is.
But I do. The Magician does, I do, I know her, I came here with her, I must have. Why can’t I remember who she is? If only I would turn around and look at her.
“It is not indulgence to create a safeguard,” I snap. My hands curl into fists so tight my nails dig into my palms. I get the impression we’ve had this argument many times, I just … don’t remember any of them. “I am the keeper of the scales. My place in this world is to keep the axis righted. How am I meant to do that if I cannot eradicate those who are bent on its collapse?”
“You are the keeper of the scales,” she agrees. I can feel her disappointment, and it makes my chest ache. I don’t know why, but I need her to understand me. I need her to forgive me. But more and more, I realize she isn’t going to. “That does not make you our warden. Nor our executioner. The bloodbath that awaits was your choice alone.”
“I don’t know why you seem to think so little of me.” I sniff, tilting my head back as a spray of salt water ghosts up from below, coating one side of my face in a wet shimmer. “After all we have meant to each other, I cannot accept that you would abandon me now. Not over this.”
A wash of seafoam begins to swirl, tumbling round and round itself like soapy suds overflowing in a bucket, until finally the swirls give way, the sea parting. From its dark depths, the Siren emerges, body rising from the abyss until she can plant her feet on the water’s surface. She tilts back her head and roars the Cyclone’s name.
Her roar is met with distant laughter, carried down on a boom of thunder.
“It is only because of what you mean to me that I see this act for what it truly is. I know your heart, Magician, even the parts of it you would like to hide. Even the parts that you keep secret from yourself.” Behind me, her voice cracks and I want to cry. “And I know the truth. It is you who has abandoned me.”
Lightning strikes me in the chest.
* * *
I don’t wake up so much as I realize my eyes are already open and I’m standing outside the First Church of Gracie. It’s not like I’m unconscious one minute and conscious the next; it’s like I’m stuck in some vivid daydream only to suddenly remember what I’m doing. Except I don’t remember, not really. I have no idea how I got here.
Here. I’m on the sidewalk. It’s no longer raining. There are cops, and parishioners, and crying parents, and old gods. Rory has an arm around my shoulders. Enzo is talking to an EMT, his parents in the back of their ambulance.
In another, my mom helps a first responder ease my dad onto a stretcher. The doors close behind them. I think I talked to her, but I can’t remember where they’re going.
Buck and Rhett are gone. Or maybe they’re still inside the church. How long have I been standing here without being in my own body?
The sidewalk quiets when someone rolls a gurney through the crowd. There’s a black sheet pulled over the corpse. I don’t know if it’s Poppy or Zephyr.
Rory’s arm tightens around me. The ambulance takes Enzo’s parents away. He walks back to us, his fingers threading with mine. None of us speak.
A cop snaps his fingers in Marian’s face. He’s trying to get her attention, but he catches mine instead. She stares beyond him, following the flashing lights as the ambulances careen away from us and toward Gracie’s tiny hospital. Is her girlfriend in one of them?
How many people survive gunshots to the head every year? More than can call themselves gods of death, probably. If the odds were in anyone’s favor, it would be Poppy’s.
The cop raises his voice. Rory tenses. Enzo releases my hand.
Marian doesn’t need us. She turns her cloudy eyes on the officer. She doesn’t speak. I don’t know that she can. But a Black woman in a pinstripe suit touches a hand to her shoulder and speaks for her. I don’t know who she is, and I don’t know what she says. But the cop rolls his eyes and leaves.
The woman steers Marian away from the crowd. Toward a car parked on the street. Murphy’s in the back seat, staring straight ahead, unblinking. Is this woman Murphy’s mom? She helps Marian into the back seat. It strikes me like rotten food in the pit of my stomach that the god of battle has never looked more like a scared little girl.
Indy meets my eye from across the road, where he’s standing next to his own truck. His expression is stone, eyes cold and harsh like black ice about to send us off the road. There is a world where the god of art paints murals with the blood of those he’s massacred. I’ve never seen my friend look as much like that god as he does now.
Everything has turned upside down. Everything has gone tipped out of whack, out of order, out of balance …
Balance. My head hurts. I am was the keeper of the scales.
Buck’s warning is as clear now as the day he spoke it. “And the scales will tip … tip … tip … until they fall from existence.”
What does a world out of balance look like?
I don’t realize I asked the question out loud until Enzo says, “We’ll see. Soon enough.”
Rory kisses the side of my face. “Let’s go home.”
Home. I don’t know what that means anymore, either.
2THE BEGINNING AND END
Home, at least for tonight, means the log house where Rory’s grandparents live. They don’t come outside to greet us, the way I’ve gotten used to. I can’t say I’m not relieved. On the list of things my fractured—still-fracturing?—brain can handle right now, they aren’t present.
Rory turns off the ignition, their grandfather’s ancient sports car going still and quiet. I miss the Jeep. I wonder if it’ll ever be drivable again. How many bullet holes can a car survive? More or less than a god in the body of a teenage girl?
I don’t know if I feel guilty, and I don’t know if I should. It wasn’t my finger on the trigger. I wasn’t the one who ordered it pulled. I’m not the one who shot Poppy.
All I did was survive.
It’s only when the silence stretches on for a beat too long that I realize Rory’s staring at me. Enzo, too, bent over the center console, head tilted to face me. I can’t read either of their expressions. Or maybe I don’t want to. Something electric and heavy pulses in my temple, the beginnings of a terrible headache. Or maybe the end of one.
“What?” I don’t mean it to sound angry. I’m not angry with them. I’m just tired.
Or am I even tired at all? Maybe I’m too awake, hanging in that space where exhaustion has gotten so bad that sleep is impossible. I don’t know anymore. Upside down. Out of balance. Tip, tip, tip.
“How do you feel?” Rory finally asks. I get the impression they don’t really want the answer.
“Fine.”
“Fine?” Enzo repeats the word back to me, like he must have misheard.
I clear my throat and rub one fist over my eye. There’s a vein twitching in the lid, like the flicker of lightning over and over. “Yeah. Fine.”
It isn’t not true. Fine is not healthy or happy or stable or sane. Fine is also not dead or dying or broken or gone. Fine is somewhere between. And I am, I guess, somewhere between, if that somewhere is that I don’t know where I am, and I don’t know how I am, but I think I’m fine. I’m pretty sure I’m fine.
“Gem—” Rory begins, and I don’t realize they’ve raised their hand until their fingertips touch my cheek.
The unexpected contact makes me jump. I don’t let them say whatever was meant to come next. “What happens now?”
Rory and Enzo exchange a look. That can’t mean anything good.
Enzo looks back to me and touches his hand against the back of my wrist. “We go inside. We get some food in you. And then maybe we call the Evergod.”
The Evergod. Buck Wheeler. The god of time.
“Why him?”
“Gem,” Rory repeats, taking a deep breath. “Taking the life of another god with the Ouroboros has been your greatest fear for as long as the weapon has existed. You said it yourself, over and over again. You were never supposed to be the one to wield that knife the way you did today. The balance … you warned us the balance would be thrown out of order if you ever did.”
“Right. Yeah.” I look at my hands. I can still feel the pressure of Zephyr’s rib cage cracking underneath them.
“But do you have any idea what that means in practice?” They hesitate, tapping one fingertip against my knee. “Do you know what’s going to happen to you?”
“I…” Heartburn crawls up the back of my throat, but the acid tastes more like burnt plastic. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
Ever since Buck pulled down the wall between lives, giving the pantheon back all of our memories, things have been clearer than ever before. I’ve seen more of myself, in my every iteration, finally beginning to understand who I am and how I got here. But there’s still a shroud of fog between me and … something. There are still memories I can’t grasp, no matter how desperately I reach for them.
Copyright © 2024 by H.E. Edgmon
