Free A Rope of Thorns by Gemma Files

at the teat, desperate to bury ’emselves once more
inside
him.
    “Jesus!” Chess cursed, his voice skewing frighteningly high, scrabbling them away with both fists while they leaped and snapped in successive waves, quotidian, inexplicable. “You filthy little bastards—Goddamn fucking
magic
! Motherfuck damn Hell shit-ass
Christ
!”
    Without thinking, Morrow caught one of Chess’s flailing hands between his palms; he hauled ’til his shoulder popped, bracing his boot against the fire pit’s rock-set rim. At last Chess came slithering free with a juicy rip, right into Morrow’s embrace. The vine-bone mélange turned, seeking eyelessly, and swarmed its way after; when Morrow stomped a few of the tendrils into muck, the others hissed at him, spitting acid that made his boot-tips smoke.
    Now upright, Chess had already slipped behind him, using the bigger man’s bulk as a shield. “
Do
something!” he demanded, as Morrow whirled and swore.
    “Hell,
you
do something!” Morrow swung his duster off his shoulders and used it to lash at the Weed, whipping it back. “Make it go away, like before—”
    “‘Begone’? That’s exactly what I
been
telling it! It just don’t damn well listen!”
    And this, an amused voice said, inside both their skulls at once, is what your priest-king spoke of, little brother, when he warned you that you must learn a better way to deal with such matters or suffer the consequences . . . along with everyone else.
    Who said that?
Morrow thought. But Chess’s eyes had already flicked straight to the left, and Morrow followed them, automatically. To see something looming there in the dark beyond, born from it, birthing it—something grinning, bigger than a house, a pitch-smeared hulk whose brow leaked fire and mouth leaked smoke. Whose teeth, like the interior of the Rainbow Lady’s perforated head when Morrow’d shot her in the Moon Room, were a wailing forest of tiny red faces, generation on generation of those killed to keep her all-fired Blood Engine going.
    Oh, this creature said, admiringly, so you can think. Then he does well to keep you by him after all, soldier.
    Under its gaze, the Weed had pulled back, finally, and now lay cowering in a lop-shaped circle, all a-tremble like pilgrims at the Rock. Morrow swallowed, mouth suddenly so dry he could barely taste his own tongue.
    “You . . . you’d be that Enemy the Rev was talkin’ ’bout, wouldn’t you?”
    I would.
    “Same one we call Satan, that it? Or is that somebody else entirely?”
    The hulk shook its grinning, smoking head, just once, with surprising dignity.
    I do not know this name, it told him. But you and I have met before, albeit only briefly; certainly, you have heard my progress through the dark, if nothing else. Remember? Like this .
    It straightened, spreading great columnar arms and more, as the thing’s ribs swung back as well, charcoal-hued glass doors gaping wide into nothingness: the hole, the crack, a wound between reality and Hell. For a second it yawned, then clapped shut, a club smacking home against bone, hard enough to fracture.
    Unfolded, in a gust of freezing wind; clapped shut:
whoosh-crack! Whoosh-craaack!
    He
had
heard this before: in a Tampico hotel room, heralding Rook’s appearance in the mirror before Morrow went in to face Chess. But no, even further back still—that shuttery pounding, a massive wood-slat heartbeat keeping time all the way up from Mictlan-Xibalba, dragging what he’d thought was Chess’s denuded corpse up through that endless tunnel, the cold, wet, impossible dark.
    Aghast, Morrow suddenly realized why the feel of the power boiling off this thing was so familiar. He twisted to stare back at Chess. “Rook wanted to make you into . . . into
that?
”
    Partly only, little meat-thing, to both your benefits. The Enemy gestured at Chess. For this is the aspect of mine which loves to breed, to grow, to make things rise out of life and death alike. It loves, as well as