Chương 40: Caspar

My love is gone. I will kill you all. I will spare none of this rotten world. For all the hurt you dealt my husband. For bringing him to me and taking him away. I will not stop until this civilization is scoured clean. The first dominion I pluck apart, limb by limb, until he's a screaming, exsanguinating trunk. One clawed foot lands on the thrashing tin-can torso and crumples it flat. Tracer fire from the second blasts chunks of black flesh from my hide. I barely feel it. I barely feel anything.

The tentacles burst from the floors, the walls, his eyes, his mouth, and he tears and pops and bursts and is gone, is a quivering inverted soup for the heartbeat it takes him to expire. I rage. I break. I stain the Father's house with the steaming effluvia of his children. It intermingles with the scraps of my warlock. The useless pieces of what used to be my husband. In Heaven, Eight has barely slowed down.

Her control over the dimension has slipped from her, but the goliaths and beasts of her horde are still enough to finish us on their own. My more analytical shoals flood as much urgency as they can into the mainframe—I have to get back to the fight. But it's all stopped up. It's finished now. I'm immobilized with grief. I don't even know the noises my Irene Cartwright manifestation is making where she's curled on the grass. Gut-wrenched and throat-cracked and full of wound. I was supposed to have him forever."

I caught him!" Salome is sprinting across the grass.

"Irene. I caught him."

"What." I rise to my knees.

"What?"

"I'm in Eight's mouth and I'm stretched out trying to hold on to her teeth and he was going in and he went past me and—" She gulps a breath.

"I caught him. I had to harpoon him, but I caught him."

"Who."

"Who the fuck do you think, girl? Look." All but one of Salome's spikes have hooked into Eight's maw. The last one is dangling further into her depth. A flickering soul clings to it, like a dying star.

"I'm holding on and so is he," Salome says.

"But I don't know how he hasn't been digested yet, and she's pulling so hard." I have five seconds left on Diamante. Caspar might have even less.

"The Key, Irene," Salome says.

"We need the fucking Key." Somewhere in the massacre, I killed Armos Pastornos. I don't even remember how. When the last Pastornist stops moving, I take one of my priceless seconds to realize. I only recognize him because of the Key hanging around the twisted gristle of his neck. A claw severs it from his remains. I flicker in a cloud of blood and sinuous tentacles to the pillar behind which Caspar's friends hide. Tilliam falls, babbling and weeping, to his knees. Peat Moss stares with fearful awe at my handiwork.

Adaire stands unsteadily.

"Lady Irene." She manages a bow. My gory fist slaps into her trembling hand and opens. The Key, smeared and sticky with the blood of its last holder. Adaire's eyes go wide. What color there is on her pale face drains.

"I hear her," she whispers.

"My God. I hear—" Like a bungee cord pulling taut, I ricochet out of reality. A clear, high tone, a perfect buzzing sine wave frequency, emerges from Salome's prime form. Heaven is hers. Her quicksilver exterior shivers. The gate spikes, the great blocks of cyclopean masonry, the broken pillars and pedestals. They spring forth and slam into our eldest sister. A tower block wedges into the maw constricting around Bina and Salome and scissors it open. Bina and Salome tumble from their toothy confinement.

Caspar Cartwright—or what's left of him—is catapulted from Eight's gullet. He goes arcing across Heaven's wreck and lands on its dusty surface. Another precious second of maddening exposure before I reach him and pull him desperately into my prime form. I ignore the war forms that break from Eight's horde and set upon me, swiping and gnawing. Only in retrospect am I grateful to Salome, as a dome of rubble and lumber spars builds itself around me, keeping my fragile body from being ripped asunder.

For all my vast and manifold mind, I can't think of anything else. Anything but Caspar. I drop him into Autumn, into my Irene Cartwright manifestation's shuddering arms. He's been exposed to the twin shocks of Eight's hunger and Heaven's madness for nearly a full minute. A broad shock of silver has slashed through his dark hair like a lightning bolt. His face is crusted with dried blood from his mouth, his nose, his eyes, his ears. He's red and raw, like he's been scoured by steel wool. How much of him is left?

Is he even Caspar any longer? How long will it take to repair him, if I can repair him?

"No no no no." I cradle him. His eyes are wide and unfocused and leached of their color. The hazel is gone, replaced by a clouded slate. The ring of gold at the edge is tarnished and bloodshot. His hands have closed so tight his nails have cut bloody half-moons into his palm. I open one fist—its fingers part lifelessly—and lay my hand atop his.

"Cas. You're here, baby. You're here with me."

"Caspar. Oh, shit." Bina's manifestation is the first to reach us. She crouches by us.

"Is he gonna be okay?"

"Oh, my dear." Saoirse peers over my shoulder.

"I'm so very sorry."

"I don't know how much of him Eight took," Salome says.

"I don't know what he remembers. Whether there's anything left in there."

"He's still in there." I caress his chest.

"I'll fix him. I'll get him out. You hear that, Caspar? You're not off the hook, mister. I own your eternity, remember? I'm gonna collect. We're gonna live together in your little apartment and you're gonna take me to my first barn raising and we'll have a river out back and we'll have more of Salome's weird cake—" He twitches.

"Ch."

"What?" My eyes widen. I frantically put my ear-spiracle to his vacant mouth.

"What did you say, lover?"

"Chicken parm," he says. I scream and weep and rock back and forth with his head laying in my lap.

"You're okay," I sob.

"You're okay, you're okay."

"Holy crap." Bina crouches next to us on the grass.

"It took me weeks to get anything close to a word out of Mr. Darius." Caspar's voice is like a creaking hinge on an opening door.

"I'm good. Just uh." His breath whistles in through his nostrils.

"Chicken parm and. And some rooibos." Ganea stares uncomprehendingly.

"How did it not scour your sanity? How did your soul withstand it?" Caspar's cracked lips close and reopen as he tries to gather enough moisture into his mouth to speak again.

"Faith," he says. The Key isn't in Eight's possession any longer, but the countless souls she devoured, and the pieces of Milinoe and of Ganea she ate, still empower her. Even with Heaven itself arrayed against her, the eldest Sister of the Void is still a horrifying and mighty power; her war-forms still flood from the Kingdom gate, still seek to tear us apart. She is still hungry. She is hungrier than any being has ever been. Ganea's trunk thrashes with rage as Eight's horde flenses her.

Saoirse's destroyed so many that she's awash in a veritable ocean of rot and decay, but more keep coming, scoring weeping wounds in her with the seconds they have before they erupt with florid tumors and melt into the morass. I wish I could say it was my plan, what happens next, but I'm too busy crying and shaking Caspar's shoulders to think straight. This one's all Bina, who babbles it to Salome while, in Heaven, her arm's being pried off.

Any credit I can take is from my vociferous support for it and my efforts in convincing Salome, who really doesn't like it. But it's her warlock with the Key, and the shifting face. Twoscore templars breach the Suzerain's throne room. A dozen laser-sighted autoguns dance their dots across a scene of carnage. The Suzerain is stooped in the middle of a splatter-painting in shades of red, leaning on his cane.

"Out," he says.

"Get out and guard the door."

"Your Sacredness—"" Out," he screams.

"Prepare my address. Five minutes." The templars behold the gore. They behold Paul Tilliam, face pallid, curled by a column and holding his ears. They behold a fawn, stooped by a body turned into foul ribbons by some catastrophic trauma, crying its eyes out with the voice of a child.

"Sacredness, are you—" A templar takes a shaky step past a smear of gray matter.

"Are you hurt?"

"Your Suzerain adjures you." Armos Pastornos CDXXXI holds his Key aloft.

"Leave. All will be divulged. Prepare my fucking address." The moment the Templars are out, Adaire sheds her frailty and hurries to where Peat curls before the remnants of his surrogate father.

"Peat."

"He was gonna teach me to whittle," Peat sobs. She squeezes him.

"Peat, he's all right. I hear Salome. It's the Key. Caspar's safe." Peat draws in a sharp breath.

"What? What? How?" Adaire steps past the bewildered little fawn and gives Tilliam a nudge with her toe. She gestures to her own ears and mouths Evoke." What?" Tilliam bellows.

"Evoke, Tilly. Fix your ears, dammit. I need you." Adaire tries her best to straighten the crumpled brim of the Suzerain's cap.

"We have a television debut to make." You'll remember, later, where you were when Armos Pastornos delivered the final Suzerain's liturgy. Most people who are alive at the time do. Maybe you're in the daily crowd outside the balcony, cheering when the golden banner was draped from basilica and the distant figure appeared on the balustrade. Or maybe your radio is playing it, or the loudspeaker atop your village's temple.

Maybe you see it on television, where (if you have a colored set) you realize, before anyone else, that something is different about this one. First: Armos Pastornos CDXXXI is early. He's barely ever early. Often he's late. Second: Archbishop Paul Tilliam of Chamchek is sharing the platform with the Suzerain. It's likely you recognize him, if you're well-informed. It's possible you know there have been perhaps a dozen liturgies where a Suzerain has shared the platform.

And those have been great heroes, or tyrants, or the authors of pivotal moments in Pastornist history. Paul's all three. Third: Hundreds of Suzerains have preached hundreds of thousands of liturgies across the history of Pastornism. Nobody's ever delivered one covered— covered —in blood. The Suzerain's robe, more red now than white. The blood dripping from the key around his neck.

"Brothers. Sisters. Children of the Father. I bring glad tidings. Tidings of change. I bring you word of a new era. For you, your friends, your neighbors. For the world.

"I bring you word the Father is dead." Silence in the crowd. Every station that wasn't playing the liturgy now is.

"He is dead." The Suzerain's arms rise.

"Paul?"

"That—uh—that's right, folks." Tilliam's television grin has never been quite this sickly, but the man is a professional.

"Seen it myself. Dead and gone."

"Be full of joy. Know that you have a new God. A Goddess. A Goddess who is listening, even now, to your prayers and vexation. A Goddess to whom you all must pray, starting now. Right now. A Goddess whose name you already know." Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon. His smile gleams through the crimson mask on his face.

"A Goddess whose name you can count to on your fingers." My prime form speaks the black tongue, then, to my eldest sister. A sentence of rage and its abatement, of enmity and charity, of contempt and compassion. A sentence encompassing all she and I were and are, and all I wish we will be again. Let me humanize it for you: It's all for you, Eight. The mindless hunger was the coal firing Eight's engine. The terrible need for more.

Billions of you are too stunned or confused or horrified to let a prayer to her pass your lips. But millions of you, at least, obey your Suzerain. The sudden warmth of worship, that craving light, flows through you and into her. She falters. She shrinks back. Her war-forms are stilled. I like to think that, maybe, she'd have spoken to us, then, given up on her own terms. Sorry, Eight. Jordan Darius taught me about the risks you take on when you leave things to chance and compassion.

We spring upon her, my sisters and I. Heaven turns against her. We rip her open and unspool her entrails across the kingdom we've taken from her. We rend and smash and amputate until we know beyond doubt she can't hurt us. Now, then. Do me a favor, reader, and pray to your maimed Goddess. Sate her, if you can. She'll need your faith if she's going to recover from the mythic asskicking her pissed-off family has just dealt her. We collapse, all of us, in the massacre we've made.

Broken open, spilled and smeared across miles. The Sisters of the Void bleed together. Our lesser manifestations gather atop my autumnal hill.

"The Key is mine." There's a scabbard-sound scrape as Salome crosses her arms.

"I believe it's time to reopen negotiations on the future of Heaven." The bottom drops from my stomach.

"Sal—""I'm kidding." Bina lets out a pinched sigh.

"Salome, come on."

"Fuck you," Ganea says.

"I'm kidding! It's a joke!" Salome throws her hands in the air.

"Are gods not allowed to joke?" ₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪ My husband's eyes have turned gold. The hazel never came back. The rings around the edges just leached in to fill the irises.

"I hope you don't miss it too much," he says, when I bring it up to him.

"Maybe there's a way to get it back."

"I think it's dope," Jordan says.

"Like a cat-man."

"You have a fetish for anthropomorphic animals," Ganea says.

"What the hell?" Jordan gesticulates with her beer, which suds over.

"Defend me, giant wolf girlfriend."

"I'm gonna fight you, Ganea," Bina says.

"My prime form has no arms or legs," Ganea says.

"They are lovely, Mr. Cartwright. No matter the color." I kick my other heel off the rest of the way as my legs dangle from his lap.

"My only reservation is that people might think we're related." His tawny hand nests under my inky claw.

"Always a risk, Mrs. Cartwright."

"The hair is quite dashing, though." He scratches his new silver stripe.

"I was thinking maybe dye it."

"No way, Mr. Cartwright. You look like a sexy skunk." I lay my forehead against his.

"And I want it there to remember the sacrifice. What you did for all of us." His lips start to close around mine. I flick his ear." Augh." He pulls back and cups it.

"Baby."

"And I want it there to remember to yell at you," I say, "for scaring the shit out of me."

"I'm sorry." He cups my waist and pulls me further into his lap.

"But I got a long time to make it up to you."

"Mmhmm." I trace his jaw up to his chin with a claw, and tug him back into that interrupted kiss.

"Get a rooooom." This from Jordan, who's seated next to us at the bonfire drinking a stout. She's wearing a shorter, racier version of the maroon dress she had on at Tilliam's soiree. The dancing flames, and their twins dotting the night, illuminate the banner that the citizens of Little Paradise never bothered to take down from the End of the World party. Someone just painted CANCELED across it. I flick my wrist and a brick wall shoves up from the ground between us and her. Jordan gasps.

"You got dirt in my beer."

"It chafes me that Eight is getting so much of the worship," Salome says." I'm God, you know."

"We're all gods. We're a pantheon." I bubble more wine into her glass.

"As the religion settles itself, it'll spread out. We'll naturally wean her off, I hope. But it looks like she's going to be the head of the pantheon. Publically, anyway."

"That is so unfair." Salome blows a tinkling raspberry.

"Maybe you can be Goddess of Justice or something," I say.

"You're joking," Salome says.

"But I'm honestly considering it."

"I would be honored to be warlock of the Goddess of Justice, mistress." Adaire has brought a small doggy bag full of charcuterie and shrimp. She is not touching the hot dogs. Caspar leans past my wall. I zip it back into the ground for him.

"How's it going on Diamante, Adaire?" Adaire nibbles some summer sausage.

"Everything's on fire, naturally. As I told you, it would be."

"Can't help but notice, though," he says.

"You're out here acting like the suzerain. Trying to put it out."

"Don't read too far into it, Mr. Cartwright," Adaire says.

"I'm still an agent of destruction. But, oh. I don't know. I suppose you moved me. Enough to see what I can get finished."

"Everyone has their warlock to have and to hold," Salome mutters.

"And mine is still frolicking around half the time, playing realpolitik. I blame Caspar." Caspar takes a sheepish sip of his beer.

"You're strictly an employer of hers, Salami," I say.

"Well, yes. Of course. But now you have your little toys around all the time and I'm sitting here doing the crossword."

"They're not toys, Sal," Bina says.

"Don't be gross. Caspar is Irene's husband."

"I'm down to be a little toy." Jordan sips her Jungle Bird. Bina flushes furiously.

"Don't worry, Mistress." Adaire tastes another coconut shrimp.

"With the reforms I intend to tout, I daresay I'll only have a few weeks before someone assassinates me. I shall destroy the Key on my way out."

"Who'll have power over Heaven, then?" Caspar asks.

"Nobody," Salome says.

"So: everybody."

"I'm still calling myself a God." Bina takes a bite of Jordan's hot dog.

"I wanna be Goddess of the Hunt."

"Babe." Jordan scoots another chicken wing into her muzzle.

"Have you ever been hunting?"

"Uh-uh." Bina bites down; her canines crack the wing's bone. She swallows.

"But I like meat and day-drinking and hanging out. That's like seventy-five percent there." Jordan giggles. She's been giggling a lot more lately. Bina has been all over Milly since she came back. But she's also all over Jordan as usual, and the magnetic urge to never not be touching both of them has led to multiple overexcited Bina manifestations inadvertently knocking things over with their tails. Bina number 2 is shepherding Milinoe to the bonfire, Peat Moss and Saoirse at their heels.

"And then Saoirse came out of the stoner guy," she's saying.

"And oh it was just crazy."

"It was nice to get out and stretch my legs," Saoirse says.

"Lovely little constitutional. Irene can testify. We really ought to get down there more often."

"And that's how I was born," Peat Moss says.

"And now Caspar's gonna teach me to whittle." Caspar chuckles.

"I am?"

"Jordy says that the thing to do when you have hands is whittle, not shoot a gun. And I said can you teach me to whittle and she said no but Caspar can because he's a hayseed." Caspar gives his sister a look.

"You don't need to keep summarizing, Beany." Milinoe laughs behind her hand.

"Adrienne and I watched the whole thing." Bina blinks.

"Adrienne?"

"Like—Eight. Eightrienne." Milinoe points out into the sky.

"That's what she'd like to be called now. She knows it's a little ridiculous. And she can't show her face, just yet. She's rather ashamed. And disemboweled. But once she can. Adrienne."

"Adrienne." I take Milly's hand.

"I don't think it's ridiculous. I think it's a beautiful name."

"She wanted her sisters." Milly folds her delicate claws around mine.

"She didn't think there was another way back, after what she'd done."

"We're family." I rub her bony palm.

"There is always a way back." Her limpid eyes blink back a tear.

"Can you forgive her?"

"How about she spits the rest of you out," Salome interrupts my fond affirmation.

"And then we'll talk about forgiveness."

"I'm digging myself out, bit by bit." Milinoe rubs my arm.

"It's going to take time. But we have all the time in the world." She looks around the circle.

"Where's Alexandra? Her prime form's hovering around, I know." I point out into the darkened forest.

"In the trees, still. She's embarrassed, I think. I told her the door's still open, but I guess she needs time." Salome raises a chrome brow.

"If Adrienne can make an an appearance through Milly, she certainly can." Ganea stands from the bonfire and paces into the night.

"Where are you going, Gan?" I call.

"I am going to rip her manifestation in half," Ganea says over her shoulder.

"For the feathers." I get to my feet and give Caspar a kiss on the forehead.

"I should deal with that." He squeezes my upper arm, which is chilly from the late evening.

"Go on. I'll be right here." The party filters inevitably toward the dance hall, coaxed in by the new jukebox's tuneful strains. Caspar doesn't move with the rest of them, just looks out into the night. Jordan walks over and stands by him.

"You reckon when they write the history book, they're gonna put your name in it?" she asks.

"And everyone who comes in is gonna want to meet you? I bet they're gonna want to meet your wife."

"Lord, I hope not." Caspar's knuckle rubs the rim of his beer.

"I'm not a big spotlight fella."

"You are a hayseed, man." She chuckles.

"I bet you do know how to whittle." He grins.

"So what if I do."

"Hey." She nudges his arm.

"Brother. You fucking did it."" We did," he says.

"You were more of a warrior than I ever was. Just got my ass handed to me and tagged my wife in. I cede my page in the book to you."

"We gotta work on how humble you are, man. It's unbecoming of a world-savior. If I was you—" A fluffy tentacle wraps around Jordan's waist and pulls, like a crook yanking a hack comic. She spills into her girlfriend's arms; Bina turns it into a rakish dip.

"Let's dance, boo."

"Bean, c'mon." Another one of those femme giggles from Jordan.

"Throwing me around and shit."

"You like it." Bina's big pink tongue licks the side of Jordan's face.

"You coming, Caspar?"

"Eventually." He puts his beer in the grass and his hands in his pockets.

"Reckon I'll stay out here a while longer. Look for fireflies."

"All right, man." Jordan extricates herself from her handsy Old One long enough for a quick hug.

"You okay?" she murmurs into his ear.

"After the close call? And the spill into Heaven?" He nods.

"I'm here, now. I'm good."

"All right." She squeezes him.

"Make sure you party, yeah? We're gonna have to go back to work soon fixing the damn place. Bina's been telling me about some of the relicts we'll be hunting." He chuckles.

"What, you're trying to be a warlock up here, too?"

"Yeah, motherfucker. And you are, too. I know you are. Dutiful ass." She punches his shoulder.

"You better be. Need my brother." She lets a giddy Bina drag her away. Degmar and Alys dance laughing, drunk and dissolute. Sam and Kai dance uncertainly. Neither of them know the steps they're trying with one another. Florin is doing a significantly more chaste dance with his chortling mother, who picked just the perfect time to die, as far as party-planning is concerned. Peat Moss is dancing with Jordan, at Bina's grumpy agreement. She laughs as his little hooves click and slide on the hardwood.

"This sucks," he says.

"It don't suck. You're just not good at it yet. You suck." Paul Tilliam shuffles across the floor toward his wife, who's having an animated conversation with Saoirse. My sister's advanced state of fungal dessication seems not to bother her whatsoever.

"They are just so finicky," she says.

"I feel as though I have one for days and it starts rotting."

"The trick, darling, is not to give them a drop of water until the soil's dry," Saoirse says.

"Otherwise they rot."

"Well these are just lovely." Rebecca messes with the string-of-pearls vines that make up the manifestation's hair.

"I'm going to be relying on you, I think. Gardening was always the thing I thought, yes, and tried, and just fell on my face." Paul takes an adventurous step forward. A hand taps Rebecca's shoulder. Edgar has his hat in his hand.

"I don't want to cut anything short," he says.

"But perhaps you might like to dance with me, Miss Wallace?" Rebecca gives him an inquisitive smile.

"You know what?" She deposits her cup of punch onto the appetizer table.

"Why not?" She catches Paul's eye as the schoolteacher takes her hand and leads her to the dance floor. She gives him a little smile and a nod. He returns it, and pours himself some punch. The prologue is over. It's chapter one. Caspar sits in the grass. His beer's finished. He lets its glass roll down the hill. The fireflies have come out, after all. He watches them loop and corkscrew. Three steady lights appear among the flitting thicket at the edge of the forest, and steadily grow.

I walk barefoot across the grass and sit next to my husband. I rest my head on his shoulder. He puts his hand in my lap.

"That's that," he says.

"That was my life, I suppose. Shorter than I thought it would be, somehow. Despite the wars and the hedge magic and all the troubles." I lay one of his hands on my manifestation's heart. He's never paid close attention to my pulse; now he feels its strange, slow, two-part beat. I draw him down into the waving grass and curl into the crook his body forms between chin and knee. My thigh rests on his.

"Do you feel dead?" I whisper. I kiss his collarbone. My tendrils stray along his neck, cup his jaw, boop his nose. He chuckles and smooths them against my dusky head.

"No," he says.

"I feel…" He isn't a poet, my husband. The love and the peace and the benediction flow across his mind on their way to his heart, and his efforts to catch and hold them in a spoken word are like cupping a waterfall in his hands. The greater part escapes, undiminished, to a bottomless and fundamental joy.

"I feel good," he says. My smile is so big my face hurts.

"I feel good too." He caresses my spine. I arch it, trying to get closer.

"Let me see that mark." I rest my hand on his pectoral.

"I can get rid of this." He grasps my fingers and lowers them.

"No," he says.

"You're holding on to yours?" I slide the fabric of my dress up, until the golden initials peek from the hem.

"For all time."

"Then I'm keeping mine." I stand from the grass and wipe its stray blades from my sundress.

"Hey." I give him a gentle tug.

"C'mere." He gets to his feet. I shuffle into his arms and hug him around the waist, leaning forward into his chest. He inhales my scent, fills his head with rain and sweet stone fruit.

"Mine, now," I whisper.

"Yours, now." He runs his knuckles up and down my back.

"Forever." Mine forever. A warm breeze rustles my skirt and whirls the flame-colored leaves around us. I let it carry my steps, loosing myself from Caspar's arms until only our fingers connect us, interlaced, the metal of our engagement bands kissing.

"Dance with me, Caspar," I say.

"I'm not exactly—""My husband is home from the war," I say.

"And we won. And now I want to dance with him." He gives me a hangdog smile.

"As my mistress commands, I guess." We dance, slowly and uncertainly at first. Caspar kicks his shoes off.

"I'm nervous I'll step on your toe."

"When we first met," I say, "you bit my finger hard enough to hit bone."

"That was your idea." Music rises from the field around us. I grow bolder, throwing in some of the sly and weaving steps Rebecca taught me. Caspar's dusty laugh fizzes in my chest as he meets me, matches me. Caspar doesn't talk about this, much. And he hasn't had cause to use it in a long time. But he is an excellent dancer. We two-step and spin across the night, framed by the fireflies. I twirl into his sure grasp and let him dip me low.

I come up in another spin and this time, I stick to him, staying where I am, my arms crossed over my body and my hands in his. Slowly I move again to the music, but closer this time. Close enough to feel his kiss on my neck, and his heartbeat on my back, and his growing desire nestle against the curve of my butt (His COCK, reader. I'm talking about his cock). I reach my hand out, and suddenly we're in the forest, the lights of the dance hall a gleaming distance from us.

I plant my palms on a tree in front of us, and bend the graceful arch of my back low. I give him a playful swivel of my hips.

"You wanna fuck your wife in the woods, Mr. Cartwright?"

"Mrs. Cartwright." His thumb hooks into the band of my thong.

"I wanna fuck my wife everywhere." And as my husband opens me, and loves me, and holds me up and holds me down, and kisses me, and makes me sing his name, I see into the infinity that awaits us. I see spontaneous, passionate lovemaking on the kitchen counter. I see furtive, giddy fingerfucking in the car. I see elegant feasts and greasy takeout. I see tentacles binding arms and hands clutching necks. I see our wedding. All our friends, old and new.

I see us together with our family—the one we found and chose for ourselves. I see slow, sleepy mornings in bed, our skin kissed by the light of our repaired afterlife. I see the eternity I asked for, and Caspar brought to me. We're on the ground before it's done, breathless and giggling, the dirt and leaves in his hair and stuck to my shining skin, and when he comes in me I come with him, and the world breathes with us. And this is forever.

My back undulates as the lithe muscles inside me squeeze and slide and coax, and it's only moments before he's hard again.

"The hell?" he murmurs. I flex greedily.

"Welcome to my idea of Heaven, Cartwright. Refractory periods are for mortals."

"Let's agree that you only get to mutate me once a century," he says.

"That was the last one." I roll on top of him.

"I swear to Me." My mighty warrior. My eternal plaything. My master; my servant; my husband; my warlock. I am so small in his arms, and I am so vast all around him. The night time drifts away. The ground fades. A darkness deeper than any night any human has ever known envelops us, lit only by my eyes, three blazing stars bathing him in gold, tracing the faintest contour of my body, and it's as if he's being held by the abyss itself. By the infinite blackness. Caspar submerges.

Into a darkness so complete it would terrify any mortal who beheld it, but he's not mortal any longer. Into unfathomable eternity. Into his new death and his new life. Into the void. And the void holds him close, wraps him in a warm, shivering embrace, and as it draws another gasp from him, it whispers his name, and in this moment, and every moment thereafter, for the rest of time, it says: I love you, I love you, I love you. I love you.