There were . . . roots or vines or something, growing into me. They wrapped around my wrists and penetrated the skin there, structures that were plantlike but pale and spongy-looking. I could barely make out some kind of fluid flowing through the tendrils and presumably into my body. I wanted to scream and thrash my arms, but it just seemed like too much work. A moment later, my leaden thoughts notified me that the vines looked something like . . . an intravenous fluid line. An IV.
What the hell kind of Hell was this supposed to be?
I realized that something rounded and unyielding was supporting my head. I twitched and moved myself enough to look up, and realized that my head was being held in someone’s lap.
“Ah,” whispered the voice. “Now you begin to understand.”
I looked up still farther . . . and found myself staring into the face of Mab, Queen of Air and Darkness, the veritable mother of wicked faeries herself.
Mab looked . . . not cadaverous. It wasn’t a word that applied. Her skin seemed stretched tight over her bones, her face distorted to inhuman proportions. Her emerald green eyes were inhumanly huge in that sunken face, her teeth unnaturally sharp. She brushed a hand over one of my cheeks, and her fingers looked too long, her nails grown out like claws. Her arms looked like nothing but bone and sinew with skin stretched over them, and her elbows were somehow too large, too swollen, to look even remotely human. Mab didn’t look like a cadaver. She looked like some kind of nearly starved insect, a praying mantis smiling down at its first meal in weeks.
“Oh,” I said, and if my speech was halting, at least it sounded almost human. “That kind of Hell.”
Mab tilted back her head and cackled. It was a dull, brittle sound, like the edge of a rusted knife. “No,” she said. “Alas, no, my knight. No, you have not escaped. I have far too much work for your hand to allow that. Not yet.”
I stared at her dully, which was probably the only way I was capable of staring at the moment. Then I croaked, “I’m . . . alive?”
Her smile widened even more. “And well, my dear knight.”
I grunted. It was all the enthusiasm I could summon. “Yay?”
“It makes me feel like singing,” Mab’s voice grated from between sharp teeth. “Welcome back, O my knight, to the green lands of the living.”
ENOUGH, said that enormous thought-voice, the same one from the graveyard, but less mind annihilating. THE FOOLISH GAMBLE IS CONCLUDED. HIS PHYSICAL NEEDS MUST BE MET.
“I know what I am doing,” Mab purred. Or it would have been a purr, if cats had been made from steel wool. “Fear not, ancient thing. Your custodian lives.”
I turned my head slowly the other way. After a subjective century, I was able to see the other figure in the cave.
It was enormous, a being that had to crouch not to bump its head on the ceiling. It was, more or less, human in form—but I could see little of that form. It was almost entirely concealed in a vast cloak of dark green, with shadows hiding whatever lay beneath it. The cloak’s hood covered its head, but I could see tiny green fires, like small, flickering clouds of fireflies, burning within the hood’s shadowed depth.
Demonreach. The genius loci of the intensely weird, unmapped island in the middle of Lake Michigan. We’d . . . sort of had an arrangement, made a couple of years back. And I was beginning to think that maybe I hadn’t fully understood the extent of that arrangement.
“I’m . . . on the island?” I rasped.
YOU ARE HERE.
“Long have this old thing and I labored to keep your form alive, my knight,” Mab said. “Long have we kept flesh and bone and blood knit together and stirring, waiting for your spirit’s return.”
MAB GAVE YOU BREATH. HERE PROVIDED NOURISHMENT. THE PARASITE MAINTAINED THE FLOW OF BLOOD.
Parasite? What?
I’d already had a really, really long day.
“But . . . I got shot,” I mumbled.
“My knight,” Mab hissed, the statement one of possession. “Your broken body fell from your ship into cold and darkness—and they are my domain.”
THE COLD QUEEN BROUGHT YOU TO HERE, Demonreach emitted. My head was starting to ache, hearing his psychic voice. YOUR PHSYICAL VESSEL WAS PRESERVED.
“And now here you are,” Mab murmured. “Oh, the Quiet One angered us, sending your essence out unprotected. Had he been incorrect, I would have been robbed of my knight, and the old monster of his custodian.”
OUR INTERESTS COINCIDED.
I blinked slowly, and again my lagging brain started catching up to me.
Mab had me.
I hadn’t escaped her. I hadn’t escaped what she could make me become.
Oh, God.
And all the people who’d gotten hurt, helping me . . . They’d done it for nothing.
“Told me . . . I was dead,” I muttered.
“Dead is a grey word,” Mab hissed. “Mortals fear it, and so they wish it to be black—and they have but few words to contain its reality. It escapes from such constraints. Death is a spectrum, not a line. And you, my knight, had not yet vanished into the utter darkness.”
I licked at my lips again. “Guess . . . you’re kind of upset with me. . . .”
“You attempted to cheat the Queen of Air and Darkness,” Mab hissed. “You practiced a vile, wicked deception upon me, my knight.” Her inhuman eyes glittered. “I expected no less of you. Were you not strong enough to cast such defiance into my teeth, you would be useless to my purposes.” Her smile widened. “To our purposes now.”
The very ground seemed to quiver, to let out an unthinkably low, deep, angry growl.
Mab’s eyes snapped to Demonreach. “I have his oath, ancient one. What he has given is mine by right, and you may not gainsay it. He is mine to shape as I please.”
“Dammit,” I said tiredly. “Dammit.”
And a voice—a very calm, very gentle, very rational voice whispered in my ear, “Lies. Mab cannot change who you are.”
I struggled and twitched my fingers. “Five,” I muttered, “Six. Seven. Heh.” I couldn’t help it. I laughed again. It hurt like hell and it felt wonderful. “Heh. Heh.”
Mab had gone very still. She stared at me with wide eyes, her alien face void of expression.
“No,” I said then, weakly. “No. Maybe I’m your knight. But I’m not yours.”
Emerald fire flickered in her eyes, cold and angry. “What?”
“You can’t make me your monster,” I slurred. “Doesn’t work. And you know it.”
Mab’s eyes grew colder, more distant. “Oh?”
“You can make me do things,” I said. “You can mess with my head. But all that makes me is a thug.” The effort of so many words cost me. I had to take a moment to rest before I continued. “You wanted a thug; you get that from anywhere. Lloyd Slate was a thug. Plenty where he came from.”
Demonreach’s burning eyes flickered, and a sense of something like cold satisfaction came from the cloaked giant.
“Said it yourself: need someone like me.” I met Mab’s eyes with mine and curled my upper lip into a sneer. “Go on. Try to change me. The second you do, the second I think you’ve played with my head or altered my memory, the first time you compel me to do something, I’ll do the one thing you can’t have in your new knight.” I lifted my head a little, and I knew that I must have looked a little crazy as I spoke. “I’ll do it. I’ll follow your command. And I will do nothing else. I’ll make every task you command one you must personally oversee. I’ll have the initiative of a garden statue. And do you know what that will give you, my queen?”
Her eyes burned. “What?”
I felt my own smile widen. “A mediocre knight,” I said. “And mediocrity, my queen, is a terrible, terrible fate.”