Anyway, Elise picked “Victoria” even though James had been pushing for “Rosalind,” so one concession to the man seemed fair enough.

  It wasn’t like he could complain about it.

  An hour later, Elise staggered into a campsite ravaged by an unexpected storm, clutching a newborn to her shoulder, wrinkled feet draped over her bare breast. It was cold. She was wet and miserable. Victoria, however, was limp in sleep. Still wheezing against Elise’s neck.

  Branches whipped cabins, most of which were occupied. All of them were dark. None had power. Elise moved from window to window, squinting through the glass to determine which were currently in use and which were empty. There was one with a broken lock, its door held shut with a chain, and that was where Elise took her newborn.

  Wind shrieked through the cracks in the walls. Rain pattered against the roof. It was wet, moldy, and drafty—far less comfortable than the hospital had been, even without power. But if one assassin had found Elise and Victoria in the hospital, then more would come, and she was exhausted from labor. She needed somewhere safe to rest for a few hours. Even Elise, who could have once run ultra marathons without pause, needed to recuperate after the drain of childbirth.

  She set the baby on the floor. The bed was bare, but there were sheets in the closet that were stiff with starch and smelled like mothballs. Elise wiped between her legs with one of them, cleaned most of the fluid off of the baby with the second, then tossed the remaining sheet onto the hard mattress. The baby seemed fine on the floor. Elise left her there as she crawled into bed.

  Shivers overtook her. Hormones spiked and dropped. She bled, clutched the hem of the sheet, and tried to rest.

  This wasn’t how it had been meant to happen.

  Elise had envisioned pushing that baby out of her body, handing it to James, and going about her business. He was the one who had wanted the child in the first place. He’d wanted a chance to be there for their offspring, to enjoy fatherhood, to have the family experience that they couldn’t have enjoyed in the great immortal nothingness where they’d dwelled outside of time and space.

  But he wasn’t there.

  She was in bed, alone and cold and tired, and there was a baby on the floor, and Elise couldn’t pass Victoria off to James because he wasn’t there.

  Typical.

  Elise had cut strips of skin off of the assassin’s body before leaving the hospital. They were branded. Demons used to be branded by their masters all the time. The marks were distinct, like a fingerprint, indicating who controlled them and the demon’s characteristics. Elise used to know the common marks like her alphabet. She didn’t recognize these ones.

  That was a mystery that she would need to solve, just like the mystery of how she had been found so quickly, after only twenty-five years on the Earth. Hardly even a wink in the grand scheme of things.

  “Betrayal,” she said, lips forming the word silently in the raging storm.

  Someone knew, someone had betrayed her, and someone was going to have to die.

  That someone was probably the same person who had abducted James while Elise was nine months pregnant.

  At another time, it would have been an easy fix. Elise was the Godslayer. She had murdered Adam and Lilith to enter the Origin. She had gone from slayer to God. She had remade the world in her image. Omnipotence meant she could snuff lives with a thought. But that had been before this body, before her new life, before diving headlong into mortality so she could procreate.

  Another problem with being human was that humans had needs. Humans could get cold and hungry. They could become tired. They couldn’t simply imagine themselves in another part of the universe and appear there. They needed a way to reach the places they intended to go, and they required money to make these things happen.

  Her eyes drifted closed. She was lulled to sleep by the storm, drifting on thoughts of vengeance.

  Before she could fall asleep, Victoria coughed and began crying.

  Elise’s eyes popped open. “Fuck me,” she said.

  It was a very long night.

  They had met in their current lives like this:

  James had been a young teacher’s assistant at Marut University. He had been twenty-one at the time, they’d decided. Elise had been an eighteen-year-old freshman. It felt more natural for him to be older than her, even a little bit.

  She called herself Danaë. He called himself Daniel.

  Both of them knew their real names, but they had been hiding. They never once uttered “Elise Kavanagh” or “James Faulkner.”

  So there they were, Danaë and Daniel, on the first day of the fall semester, in some lecture about archaeology. He was very handsome. She was probably best described as handsome, too. Her features were too square to be beautiful. But she was very striking, with that Aquiline nose and prominent lips, and he’d noticed her immediately among the other students.

  James’s smile had betrayed their history together. It hadn’t been the smile of a twenty-one-year-old teacher’s assistant noticing a particularly attractive student. It was the smile of a husband to a wife, the smile of partners who had shared a life together, a thousand lives, a million years.

  After class, Elise had pulled him aside to ask for more details about something boring the professor had said. James asked for her email so that he could send extra notes, which he did. And then she emailed him with questions that grew increasingly personal. They had smiled at each other in class, pretending to flirt, as though that were something they needed to do with one another. They had even kept their growing relationship a secret so that James wouldn’t get in trouble with the university. An added dose of taboo they’d found amusing.

  He asked her for coffee once the semester ended.

  Things progressed from there in as natural and boring a fashion as one could imagine.

  That was seven years earlier.

  These things may or may not have occurred in reality, but those were the vague memories that Elise had, and that was the version of events they had agreed upon.

  Elise was caught stealing food from a neighboring campsite the next morning. The mundane humans in their RV with its generator and functioning toilet had heard Victoria squalling. The wrinkly little thing hadn’t shut up all night, so they caught Elise stealing some unattended breakfast rolls. The humans came out of their RV to find her juggling a screaming infant and a cinnamon bun.

  “Oh my,” the matriarch of the family said.

  Her husband pushed her back inside. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Elise had forgotten the iron knife in the cabin. She was prepared to kill him bare-handed if he attempted to hurt her. But the man was kind. “Are you okay?” he asked, stepping toward her slowly, hands extended, as though trying to soothe a bird of prey with a broken wing. “I haven’t seen you around here before.”

  She didn’t reply.

  He continued. “We have more food inside. You can take whatever you need.” Elise could barely hear him over Victoria.

  She tensed as he approached, but there was no need to defend against this person. Elise was as fluent in the language of aggression as in English, and there was nothing aggressive in the old man’s posture. He moved with a slight limp. Probably scoliosis. He wouldn’t have been a danger even if he did attack.

  He offered a loaf of bread off of the table. “Take it.”

  She snatched it from his hand. Victoria arched against Elise and complained loudly about the coldness of the air.

  “My wife had three children,” he said. “Two of them were mine. I raised all of them from tiny babies.” He came closer and stroked his finger down Victoria’s cheek, eyes filled with the remembered love of new fatherhood. She had no idea how he could look so adoring while that newborn was making such noise. “You’ll miss these moments.”

  Elise highly doubted that.

  “I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but I think she’s hungry.” His tone was gentle, that of a man who thought she was stupid from trauma, or stupid from drugs, and needed to have things spelled out to her very carefully. “Have you put her on the breast yet?”

  Put her on the breast. The words made her lip curl.

  Her nipples were dripping something yellow, and the baby was slamming her face into the breast. Those uncoordinated motions looked like a baby who was enjoying a Black Death concert—or, likelier, a baby who wanted to eat.

  “I can get you formula from the general store,” he offered. “But it’s a few hours away and little ones need to eat a lot. Growing is a big job. You should feed her now, just in case.”

  “I don’t know how,” Elise said stiffly.

  “Here,” the man said, pulling a folding chair out of the cargo hold on his RV.

  Grudgingly, Elise sat. She supported the baby’s butt one-handed while he pushed Victoria’s shoulders toward her breast, guiding the baby with the patient hands of a man who had helped his wife a hundred times. Victoria did the rest; she closed her mouth around the nipple and began to suck.

  It hurt. Elise frowned.

  “Three babies,” the man said fondly, thumb stroking over the soft spots on the back of the baby’s skull. “You really will miss this.”

  She still doubted that.

  But at least Victoria had shut up.

  Chapter Three

  Elise quickly realized that people were more trusting of a woman with a baby than a woman with a sword. She was no less deadly while carrying either. She could have killed them before they saw it coming. Yet they still invited her into their well-appointed RV, trusting that she presented no danger.

  She accepted the man’s offer for a ride into the next town.

  Victoria seemed satisfied by the few drops she had vacuumed out of Elise with her tiny, desperate mouth, and now her arms were loose at her sides, lips parted as she wheezed in sleep. The old woman—who said her name was Tina—held Victoria as she slept, occasionally cooing and petting the tufts of black hair on her forehead. Tina didn’t seem to mind that the baby’s bladder released tablespoons of urine every so often. Whenever Victoria pissed, Tina just laughed and shared another anecdote about her own babies.

  But Victoria was sleeping. That was all that mattered at the moment.

  The baby didn’t look much like her mother, although it was difficult to tell with those smashed features. Victoria was barely a day old. She was vaguely egg-shaped and wrinkled. Still, Elise could almost imagine that if James had been soaked in a vat of lye for nine months while jammed into a too-small sarcophagus, he might resemble the proto-human Tina held. There was something similar around the eyes.

  Elise hoped that the baby’s eyes wouldn’t turn out blue.

  While Tina held Victoria, Elise fitted her body into a borrowed outfit. She threaded her arms through three-quarters sleeves intended for a frail old woman rather than Elise’s well-developed biceps. She sucked in her loose stomach—which still looked three months pregnant—and tried to button khaki high waters over wide hips. The inseam strained at the musculature of her thighs.

  Once dressed, Elise did a few squats and stretches in the tiny RV bathroom, stretching the cloth enough to give her full mobility. Then she braided her curls over one shoulder, ensuring that her hair wouldn’t get in her eyes when she needed to fight again.

  Elise studied herself in the mirror. She looked younger than she should have. That was most likely some side-effect of substantiating into human shape. James had helped guide their bodies, so he might have thought it would be a kindness to give her smooth skin rather than the rough, scar-pocked freckles that she’d had as a human the first time around.

  But she basically looked like herself. A tired version of herself, with a weird figure from motherhood, but those were the same angry hazel eyes and hooked nose she used to have.

  Human. So very human.

  The baby started crying. The piercing shriek penetrated the thin walls of the RV.

  “Where are you, James?” Elise asked her reflection, which swayed as the old man steered the RV around a curve in the road. The shadows tracked across Elise’s angular features. “You’re supposed to be here.”

  Victoria was done crying by the time Elise emerged.

  “I’ve got her,” the old woman said cheerfully, bouncing the baby against her shoulder. “Babies like to be upright and close to our hearts. The sound is soothing. It reminds them of before they were born. What a big scary world to come into!”

  Elise’s lips pinched into a frown. The baby might have temporarily silenced, but Elise’s breasts indicated with a painful tingling that they were ready to breastfeed again. Victoria had only eaten three hours earlier. How much could one tiny human consume?

  “Where are we?” Elise asked. The view outside the RV was unfamiliar.

  “Port Angeles,” said the driver. The name didn’t ring a bell, nor did the rain-dampened trees resonate with her memories. Elise wasn’t sure she’d ever been there before. It wasn’t a big city, but it also wasn’t a particularly small town. There were stoplights. Hotels. It was populated.

  There would be assassins.

  “Keep driving,” she said.

  “We’ll stop to charge the RV and buy diapers,” he said. “Maybe a few little onesies for the baby!” He sounded gleeful at the idea.

  Elise was not. “Keep driving.”

  “Our batteries are almost empty. We can’t continue without charging,” the old woman said kindly. “I’m sorry.”

  There was little Elise could do to prevent them from halting at the Shell station. The man climbed out to plug a thick cable into a port near the bumper.

  Tina indicated to Elise that she should come nearer. “Let me show you something. You’ve seen those Baby Bjorn carriers, right? They’re so expensive, and they’re not necessary. You can use any cotton cloth to fashion a sling to keep her near to your heart.” The woman demonstrated using a sheet from the bed, wrapping it around her body and arms in a complicated, origami-like fashion. Then she nestled Victoria inside. “See how comfortable she looks?”

  The baby started crying.

  “Well, she’d be comfortable if she weren’t hungry,” Tina said. She handed Victoria to Elise, who held the baby awkwardly under the arms. The baby’s knees were curled to her chest, head slumped to the side, fists smashed against her mouth.

  Elise attempted to hold the baby to her heart. That didn’t stop the crying. It just made Victoria start slobbering on her shirt.

  Hungry. Time for more breastfeeding.

  “I’m sure the gas station has diapers,” the old woman said. “I’ll see about formula, too.”

  She stepped out, leaving Elise to take the passenger’s seat with the baby. It was difficult to pull her breasts out of the too-tight shirt, but she managed somehow, and with much clumsy maneuvering got the baby to eat. Letdown felt like shivers of lightning down Elise’s swollen bosom. It hurt almost as much as her chapped nipples getting sucked into a tiny mouth.

  That was probably why she didn’t see the demons coming.

  Elise’s senses had always been so good, heightened by years on the run, that it never occurred to her that she might miss an incoming attack. Whether it was fatigue or hormones, she was too distracted by grimacing at Victoria to notice that Tina was yanked behind the Shell station by disembodied hands, and Elise certainly didn’t hear the muffled scream.

  She did, however, notice the blood splatter on the windshield of the RV.

  Elise stood to look over the dashboard. The old man, Chris, was dead by the charging station. His death had been fast and messy. A demon stood among his entrails. Elise catalogued the features of the demon: its muscled limbs, ashen skin, and bald pate. Some kind of evolved fiend. It skittered away, sniffing at the ground. Searching for her.

  Other fiends ripped open nearby cars, wrenching the doors off the hinges and dragging people out.

  One by one, the bodies dropped.

  Elise located a hunting rifle in a cabinet near the oven. Chris had put his gun in there before departing camp that morning. She broke the lock, loaded the ammunition, and prepared to fight the fiends.

  She hesitated in the doorway.

  A gun would be very loud near a baby’s ears, and Victoria had just fallen asleep.

  Elise set the baby on the bottom bunk. Victoria didn’t appreciate being put down. She started fussing. “Wait here,” Elise said, as though there were any alternative.

  Taking a moment to set her baby aside meant that the demons met her at the door to the RV. She flew through the opening feet first, slamming Tina’s borrowed shoes into the jaw of a fiend.

  By the time Elise landed on its supine body, she had raised the rifle to shoot a demon behind it. She aimed. She fired.

  Guns had never been her preferred weapon, but she was still surprised when the first shot pulled high and to the left. She blew off a fiend’s cheek when she had intended to discharge it into the center mass. Elise had the knowledge of a fighter, but not the muscle memory. That would be a problem.

  A fiend attempted to climb into the RV. She seized it by the throat and hurled it into another pair of fiends, bowling them over.

  At least Elise had thought to give herself supernatural strength when making her human form.

  Her speed was not quite what she expected, though. Strength could only make up for so much when the demons moved so quickly.

  They pulled at her hair. Shredded the too-tight shirt with stubby nails. Bit at her hands.

  Elise shot until the rifle ran out of ammunition. Then she smashed the butt into the gut of an attacking fiend, collapsing several ribs. She whirled with it in both hands like a baseball bat and sent another fiend flying.

  Slow or not, Elise slaughtered them all. She left none to report her location back to their master. And there would be a master: fiends were mindless creatures who only executed the commands given to them.

  When she was done, she stood in a pile of slick blood, puddled gasoline, and intestines.

  She didn’t hear Victoria crying anymore.