He helped. No more than he had to, but he did help her climb. Hawk wanted to ignore him, to reduce him to nothing more than that help. She couldn’t. She felt the warmth of his body against hers, his presence, even his scent; it had a touch of Alex in the strange mélange. She wanted to throw her arms around his neck and tell him it was all going to be fine. She wanted him to tell her the same thing. She wanted, and it was an ache that infected her bones.

All she had to do was whisper things to him, like the lover in a fairy tale. She could even throw her arms around his neck and whisper his True Name to him, awaken his memory with a kiss. Maybe love had not lingered; maybe it would fail. But she didn’t think so. She remembered the kiss in the clearing, how hungry and yet how tentative he had felt, as if he were aware of his theft…and aware of how welcome that stolen kiss was. She could unwind his protections with a gesture, if she tried.

But that was the nightmare scenario. Him, loving her as she ached to be loved. That would give far too many untrustworthy people their grip on him. She could not protect herself well enough to protect him, and she knew it. Oh, she could fight. She’d better hope she could, rather, because she knew what she was climbing towards. But there are other ways to imperil a person. Sure, his protections mattered, here, down in the Rift-world she’d named Holia. He could probably defeat her every enemy with brash words and light and claws. But could he protect her career? Could he keep her from being arrested on trumped up charges? She could be abducted in a moment of distraction. She could be shot through a window with no warning. She knew this, because she had imagined all these scenarios for him, too. She could be compelled by threat to him, so it stood to reason that if she risked the promise of that kiss, he could be so compelled too.

Better to have him angry. Better to court his rage and leave him firm in his hatred of her. She mustn’t even luxuriate in his grip; the danger was so great that even love was a betrayal.

She climbed, hand hold by foothold, every inch won through sweat and blood. Her knuckles were skinned almost from the start, and her arms ached with effort. And she did this Via Dolorosa with the thing she wanted most in the world right there, where she could touch it, and where she must keep it forever out of reach. It ached, now, because this was where Alex would step in with a joke or a Jovian word, and give her the mental fortitude, the soul-strength to find that next hand-hold, drive herself to the next ledge. The creature beside her climbed silently, pacing through her misery, clearly capable of more than this stuttering, painful pace she managed. She wanted his words. She wanted his scent. She climbed instead, pulling on her own reserves, her own well of strength. She reached deep to the bottom of her own resources and found herself at the bottom.

That was when the winds picked up.

They came with a stink of death, of rot. Like the wind off a bog, minus the promise of bracken and fiddleheads. Thick and cloying, it felt as if there were no oxygen left. She twisted to the left, gagging, as the winds continued to rise. Gusts ripped at her hair with poisoned fingers, yanking her braids into the flow. They wrapped her clothes around her arms and legs, making it harder to climb. She clung to the rocks, sobbing. The smell was overwhelming.

“Think of something nice,” the Shadow said, behind her. “Something you adore. Like a lover’s cologne.” He swung down over her, turning his wild and restless face to the wind. He’d never looked so much like Alex as he did, right now. This was her husband in his most essential, all the barriers of society boiled away—no, eaten, she thought. They’d taken his memory, most of his humanity. They’d taken his politeness, his ability to mask himself. But they’d left the heart of him, of Alex-ness, perhaps not even knowing that it could regenerate. They’d left his heroism. They’d left his gentleness. They’d left the parts that mattered, perhaps because it wasn’t to their taste. It wasn’t in their appetite to taste the depths of a good man.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

She turned her face to him, then buried it in his lapel and breathed in the scent of him. This was the last time, so let it count. Soon all that would be left to her was a house in Sedona, the Alex-smell already stale after a week of absence. She’d be curling up with bathrobes, weeping over polo shirts, sobbing on shoes while she polished them one last time. She was caught in his arms and could stay here, now and forever, as long as she didn’t pay attention to time.

The mask of hateful smells seemed to ebb.

“It’s one of Kali’s favorite games. Bring up every smell you could never stand, rot the air out completely. You can still breathe, but it’s hard. He makes the world feel like death.”

And he could kill with a thought if he took all the oxygen out of the air. He was a God, a fantastical magic-user, a manipulator of the very boundaries of physics, and he had the education of a high school science teacher. He could likely think up a thousand toxic ends for Hawk.

“What does he want with me?” She said.

A shake of the head. “It isn’t you. He wants the man he’s taken, and he wants you to leave off the trail. Anyone brave enough to follow, though, might be worth his time.”

She made her decision, then. She would have liked to say it was a widow’s fury, but it wasn’t. It was her own self-centered pride. Because she was sick of it. Having her value as a person be dictated by someone else’s opinions of it. She was only worth the time of this creature, this God-thing that had erected itself over her, Kali’mar, if she were pleasing to him. Well, fuck that noise in the ear. Wasn’t it time one of these gods proved to be pleasing to her? She’d earned their respect by existing through their toxicity and if they didn’t have the balls to admit it, she could start by ramming said appendages—theirs—down their collective throats.

“I want a sword,” She said.

The Shadowmaster stared at her, a small woman in the center of a wild, stinking, unmerciful hurricane, who looked unmerciful herself. At least, she hoped she did. Her Ragnarök was starting now; she hoped she looked better than a drowned kitten.

“You want a sword? What do you hope to do with it, woman?” the Shadowmaster asked, with Alex’s face.

“I intend to kill the God that’s fucking with me.”

“You will fail,” he said, sounding shocked. “I’ve fought them for centuries and failed. What can you hope to do?”

“Whatever I can. So you can either give me a sword or let me fail with my bare hands.”

And she waited in the wind-whipped silence for an answer to this prayer. The meek might inherit the earth, but they needed people like Hawk to beat the bad guys down.

“And what if killing this god makes things worse?”

“Then at least one thing happening to me will be something I caused,” She said.

He covered her entire body, protective but also threatening, simply because of what he was. She could have felt safer being covered by a tiger. He was close enough to touch, to kiss, to bite. She wondered how it would feel to lay claim to the pale white, mottled skin of his neck. Would it feel like velvet to the touch? Would she ever have a chance to explore those better, darker places? She wanted phallic secrets, and was going to settle for phyrric, given the time they had left.

His hand caressed a jutting spire of milk-colored crystal. She realized they must be close to the Nexus, close to the Temple, and therefore close to home. His fingers danced over its shape, pulling here, twisting there, and then there was a snapping sound and he held the very thing she’d asked for: A sword. It was no dazzling thing of carved flowers or flames, but was simple, true of line, and it sat in his grip like a sighed amen after a wrenching night of tears.

“It will strike true as the hand that welds it.” He whispered. “Now, climb.”

Footstep by footstep, up and up. She couldn’t see the burning hare, could only track it by Kaiser’s blood. And then that stopped, too, the moment she climbed out onto the large main yard of the Temple of Light. The moss-lawn glittered in the ruddy glow, and the true smoke had yet to reach here. There were only curls of it, whispers of choking darkness amidst the glowing white milk-crystal, the radiance of flowers. Mattias’s realm, his garden, was almost as beautiful as when she’d left it, those short few day-cycles ago. Except now it was not perfect. She could feel the whisper of it, like scales through Edenic grass. There was something here, now. A flaw. An enemy. A god.

And now, as she stepped out into the Temple’s verdant courtyard, she realized something: The shadow was gone.

She was now entirely alone.