Sinners' Kingdom #1: The Book of Lust (Complete)

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Mammon went one way and we went the other, but the monster never hesitated. Not only did it pursue Lust and me, it crashed across the boundary of the lake itself, cutting through the water with ferocious splashing to shorten the distance. The bank crumbled away, powerless under its massive weight, but the mud and broken earth that collapsed under its winding mass only slowed it down a little. Not enough to buy us the time Lust wanted, I knew—but he took it in stride as if this were all part of his plan from the start. The only sign that he wasn't as confident as he seemed with that faint smile on his lips was his tightening hold on me, so bruising now that it hurt to breathe as he crushed me into his chest. I said nothing. That didn't matter. The compression of my ribs for a few scant moments was better than being devoured again by a monster whose intentions were clear. Even if that thing was somehow the Prince, his real form, if that was why his visage emerged from the impossible head-jaw-formation that split what should have been its skull like unfurled lily petals, what could I do about it now? Happily let it catch up? Hope its intentions were only deceptively violent and that it would roll over like a puppy and show its belly when it finally caught us?

In a fairy tale, I could believe in destiny and throw all caution to the wind, naively putting faith in a happy ending. I could throw myself at the monster with my arms out, welcoming it, challenging it, telling it to reveal its true identity. I know you, I would scream. You had me, then you let me go. You wanted me to escape. You wanted me to live!

But instinct told me: I had it all wrong. There was something fundamental I was missing here.

This was not a fairy tale. This was not a misunderstanding. If that monster caught me, again, this time it would be all over.

At all costs, we must escape.

Lust knew. Mammon knew. Even I did, at the most primal level, when I had no idea what was going on anymore. The boy with the feathers was in the past. Right now, whether he was a prisoner who needed my help or if he was actually a ravenous predator that I should never have trusted, I had to survive. To help him, I had to keep myself alive first.

Even if it meant abandoning him now.

"How much time?" I croaked as I tore my gaze away from the monster tearing up the earth and crashing through the water after us. I leaned slightly back, my one seeing eye fixed on Lust's face. "How much time do we need to buy!"

"None. Mammon's responsibility. Let him carry his weight, love."

"Are you crazy! I'm not putting our lives in his hands! I mean, my life!"

Too late. My clumsy slip of the tongue put a smile on his face, as if this were the time to get caught up in stupid, minor mistakes. I didn't mean to include any concern for his safety. No, wait. There was nothing wrong with what I said. My survival hinged on Lust's, that was all. God damn it!

"Just run faster!" I shouted in his ear. Head pounding and arms shaking, I was at the mercy of the strength of his grip. The adrenaline wasn't enough to carry me any farther. This was the end for me. Oh, God. Please, a little faster, even if he must be falling apart under me with all of his brutal injuries. To add insult to injury, he was still as naked as ever, not that he seemed to care at all. "It's catching up! It's too close!"

"A little more, why isn't Mammon slowing him down?"

"Mammon can't do a thing to him, are you kidding me? Look at the size of—"

I spoke too soon. A streak of black sprinted up to its side, heedless of how close it was to being squashed under the monster's rampage. Then it leaped impossibly high, launching itself into a fierce assault that put it right on the side of the winding, serpentine body. Mammon! He was neither fully wolf nor man, back to that half-shapeshifted form that was bigger and more terrifying than any werewolf in Hollywood could ever be. With a single clawed hand, he tore into the monster's scaled body, ripping off strips of flesh and laying it open. Even as Lust continued to run away, full tilt, I saw all too clearly the shower of giant scales that fell away under Mammon's tearing strike, but he was far from done. He clung on, having dug the claws of his other hand deep into the body to anchor himself. His clawed feet also wedged in, shattering and detaching more scales that fell off in a scintillating shower. The curved, pale plates looked like giant petals as they landed on the ground and water, until they shattered into dust and debris under the monster's advance.

But Mammon's efforts weren't in vain. Though his assault seemed to accomplish nothing at first, not even slowing down the giant serpent that dwarfed him by so many times, when he gouged and clawed his way up to its neck at breakneck speed, it finally took notice. The triple-split jaws that blossomed at the end of its neck closed slightly, the long, fanged mandibles semi-huddling around the man's torso emerging from their center. Somehow fearsome even in their defensiveness, I could only imagine them opening wide to let Mammon in, then snapping shut around his body like a Venus flytrap catching its unwitting prey.

For all his dangerous qualities and especially his treachery, I still—

"Mammon! Don't! Don't do it!"

Too late. He might not have even heard me over the deafening crashing and splashing that drowned out my voice. He clawed his way up the monster's body, leaving bloody gouges in his wake and gashes that tore off entire swaths of scales as he climbed. He made it to the base of one mandible, looking as if he were about to slip into the juncture and attack the half-man hidden inside.

But before he could lunge inside and close his jaws around the defenseless, naked body, it reacted at last, moving for the first time other than the subtle movements it had barely betrayed until now. One bare arm, lean and slender but powerful, lashed out and grabbed Mammon by the throat. But Mammon was no helpless victim. Wolf or man, he was a monster still, and he twisted his head to the side so fast he might have been the one to move first. I couldn't tell. All I knew was that an instant later, blood flew in a fierce splatter, fountaining out and painting the entire front of Mammon's body as well as the fanged mandibles he had reached between to snap up his victim.

The giant winged serpent stopped in its tracks, water lapping at its thick coils that now thrashed in place in the shallows of the lake. Lust slowed, not to gawk at the sight of it writhing and crashing its tail into the water over and over, but to glide deeper into the lake now that we were no longer being pursued. In a flash, he was hip deep, then chest deep, and he lifted me higher so that the water was nowhere near my face.

This was his plan? His searching eyes were fixed on the surface as he carried me, but if he thought for a second that the disturbed water would calm enough to give up even a hint of a reflection, he was crazy. Although the rippling of the waves was weaker across the lake, there was still no chance of it with the monster thrashing like that all over the place and sending reverberations through and under the earth. Not to mention that the sky had seemed like it was finally lightening after the fierce storm, but it became dark again, clouds moving so swiftly despite the lack of wind that the shadows they cast on the ground practically flew about at impossible speed.

Wait. That wasn't it. It was too fast for that. The shadows weren't from the clouds at all, were they?

My heart wrenched as I looked up, the thud of it so heavy it almost dropped me on the spot. I knew what I was going to see long before my one eye made sense of the dark mass in the sky that roved slowly, a massive shroud of gray that swayed left and right, left and right, like waves against a shore. And faintly, but growing, taking over my senses like an insidious whisper, was a familiar web of tangled bird calls that called to me in a language I both could and couldn't understand.

Sirens!