Free Labyrinth of Stars (A Hunter Kiss Novel) by Marjorie M. Liu Page B

holes in steel. I used them now to grip my husband’s shirt and hold him tight.
    Because immortality didn’t mean shit. Not when you still had a human heart.
    Grant gave me silence. He gave me himself. No questions. I was so grateful for that. I didn’t want to talk, or remember. I might start crying again, and there was nothing worse, nothing, not when I already felt cut, torn, clawed open. Tears had no place here. My baby was alive. Keeping her safe was all that mattered.
    But finally I talked. Everything that happened after I left him, even the conversation with the possessed waitress. Each word hurt.
    “The Mahati was dead, and the Aetar still possessed her body. When the attack came . . .” I stopped, and his arms tightened. “I didn’t even know until it was too late. The boys and I . . . we couldn’t do anything to stop it.”
    “I should have been there with you.”
    “Don’t. That’s an impossible regret.”
    He tapped my head with his hand. “Don’t tell me what I should regret. I’ve got enough emotions inside me that aren’t mine. What I feel . . . what matters to me . . . it’s the only way I’m holding on to my identity.”
    That was a new revelation. A hundred different responses pushed through me, most of them involving death to demons. I closed my eyes and swallowed them all. “The thing inside me . . .”
    “Yes,” he said heavily. “I know.”
    He didn’t ask what the price would be for saving our daughter. No use, no need to complicate that one simple acknowledgment. I’d made the bargain and sealed it on our baby’s life. What needed paying would be paid, with no regrets, no negotiation.
    “We’re sitting ducks,” he went on. “We have to fight, Maxine. Any minute, we could be attacked, from any direction, any
thing
.”
    “So we find the Aetar, and what then? There are too many, and they’re scattered across the universe. We kill the one who’s bothering us now, and another will come. And they’ll keep coming, and we’ll be in this same situation again and again.”
    “And if we run?”
    “Maybe,” I muttered. “But then we’ll always run. And even that might not save us.”
    Grant sighed. “Those six humans killed on our land were poisoned. Dead too long for me to get a strong read off them. I can’t tell you how they were altered, except the Mahati and Osul who ate parts of them died. Looked like something out of
The Exorcist
. But you know that.”
    I pulled at the collar of his shirt, examining his chest for any stowaway slugs. “I’m surprised the Shurik and Yorana didn’t take bites out of those humans.”
    “The Shurik burrow into the living. Corpses aren’t their thing. And the Yorana . . . prefer seduction before the hunt.” His jaw tightened; so did his hand on my back, fingers digging into my shoulder. “Zee was right. We need to leave, Maxine. We’ve known from the beginning. We waited too long to face it.”
    It was hard, hearing him say those words. Made it too real—and that choice was full of unknowns. It didn’t feel safe.
    But it could be safer,
I thought. Zee and the boys had never steered me wrong. They were family. All of us, together.
    Grant squeezed my hand. “Maxine.”
    “I’m scared,” I said, thinking about my mother.
    “Me, too.” He kissed the top of my head. “We’ll figure it out.”
    I placed his hand on my stomach and held it there. “We need help. We need it now.”
    No response. Grant was a former priest, and far too polite to say,
“No fucking way.”
But I could practically hear it in my head.
    “I need to find my grandfather,” I said.

    MEN have never existed in my family. No records of their names. No mention of fathers. You’d think we could clone ourselves—and given how closely all the women of my line resemble one another, that might be the case.
    At any rate, my ancestors, those who could read and write, kept journals—and while not many of those survived (most of them stored in