Much as Buckley was and would always be the true home and haven of my heart, this had to be my final stop, if only because this was where Naga and my tattoo artists were. Without them, my journey would be over. I dropped everything I was carrying onto the floor next to the bed, including my pack, and staggered out into the hall. Every step sent another wave of pain through me as the spikes in my legs shifted and tore, but I kept walking. It wasn’t like they could do any permanent damage.

  The hall outside my room was long and gently curved, and entirely undecorated, without even pictures on the walls or a rug on the floor. It used to be jarring, when I first started spending time here, the way they left all communal spaces as bare as possible. Now, it seemed only natural, and human-decorated residences, like my own, were almost unbearably cluttered. Only the fact that I hadn’t redecorated since Thomas disappeared kept me from getting rid of half the things in the house. But he might object, and I wanted him to be comfortable when I brought him home, assuming I got the chance.

  Walking was slower than normal, the spikes working their way deeper and deeper into my flesh and slowing me down still further, but I forced myself to keep going. The smell of snake grew stronger. My room was about as far as it was possible to get from Naga’s office without being in another building altogether. He found the smell of live mammal as disconcerting as I found the smell of live snake, and we both had to make allowances. Still, I was grateful. He’d been under no obligation to help me when I’d first come sobbing to his side, and he could easily have turned me away.

  Instead, he’d offered to do whatever he could to get me back to Thomas, arranged for my first set of tracking charms, and sent me on my way. Without him, even getting off Earth would have been the next best thing to impossible, given my lack of personal magic. Because he was willing to lend me his resources, I’d traveled farther, seen more, than any other human I knew. Maybe than any other human, ever. We’re not a species that encourages a lot of cross-dimensional exploration, and it’s not easy for us.

  I tried to focus on my gratitude as I limped down the hall, and not on the fact that I didn’t know how close we were to his dinner time. Naga has a long-standing policy, as befits a Professor of Extra-Dimensional Studies at the University of K’larth, of not eating anything or anyone to who he has been formally introduced. I accomplished that introduction myself when I was six years old and had been snatched by a group of snake cultists intent on sacrificing me to him as part of a ritual bid to seize control of what they mistakenly believed to be a snake god—it’s always snake gods with snake cultists, and somehow they believe that he who has the biggest snake will get to rule the world, not just have to clean up after the biggest snake.

  I’m sure Freud would have a few things to say about that, if he weren’t a dead hack who would probably also be happy to say that my fondness for knives stemmed from a bad case of penis envy. I do not have a bad case of penis envy. I have a bad case of wanting to own more knives, and those are not the same thing.

  Anyway, Naga and I have known each other a long time, and he wasn’t going to eat me, but that didn’t make it polite to tempt him. I stopped when I reached the door to his chambers, which was large and round to admit his not insubstantial bulk, and knocked as I leaned up against the hallway wall, trying not to whimper. The spines had worked themselves so deep by this point that I wasn’t sure I could have removed them on my own if I’d tried, and I wasn’t trying. If it had been unsafe before, it was potentially fatal now.

  When there was no answer, I knocked again, harder. If Naga wasn’t here, he was probably in his office, and if he was in his office, I was in trouble. There was no way I could walk that far in my current condition, and now that I’d stopped moving, I wasn’t actually sure I could start again. Even getting back to my room felt like an impossibility. I bit my lip to stop myself from whimpering and slumped against the wall, closing my eyes.

  I don’t know how long I stood there like that before there was a slithering sound behind me. I didn’t bother trying to turn. Either it was Naga, or it wasn’t. If it wasn’t, maybe it was one of his grad students who thought of me as an annoying pet and might try to eat me. That would be a lousy way to end my multi-decade quest, done in by a giant crawdad and a hungry scholar, but I was exhausted and injured and basically done.

  “Alice,” said Naga, sounding horrified. “What have you done to yourself this time?”

  Arms wrapped around my waist, lifting me easily, and I found myself tucked into a bridal carry against the smooth, scaled chest of my patron and benefactor. I managed to open my eyes and smile weakly up at him.

  Naga looked sternly back. He was well-equipped for looking stern, at least by human standards, what with his total lack of hair, yellow, slit-pupiled eyes, and finely scaled skin. The scales grew larger as they moved down his body; by the time they reached his waist, they were as large and hard as the scales on any snake his size, and since that size was fairly substantial, we were talking about a lot of scales, many of them larger than my palm.

  “Got myself jumped on that retrieval gig,” I said, and winced as he turned to slither down the hall. I knew he was heading for the infirmary. That, at least, was normal.

  “And that explains why you’re leaking on me how?”

  “Had to go back to . . . Earth to patch myself up after the initial fight . . . hurt worse then, if you can believe it.” I mustered a weak smile. From the look on his face, he didn’t believe it at all. Oh, well. It was the truth, and the truth was always worth trying. “Got back to business with one crossing left, had to finish with what I had on hand.” I closed my eyes again. “Did it. Got what I’d been sent to get. Got my own stuff back, too.”

  “Got a nasty case of what looks like some form of septic shock, too,” said Naga. “You’ve used all your crossings?”

  I managed a minute nod. He sighed.

  “It’s soon, but I think it’s time for another session,” he said. “You’ve used so many of your tattoos it looks like you’ve been shedding, and this damage . . . I don’t know if the thing that left those needles in your body was poisonous to humans, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Are you ready?”

  No. I was never ready. That didn’t mean it wasn’t necessary, or that I didn’t understand the reasons; I’d been going through this process for fifty years, and any good reasons I might have had to put it off had long since fallen by the wayside. I sighed.

  “As long as it gets them out, I don’t care.”

  “It gets everything out,” he said, and slithered on.

  * * *

  I didn’t open my eyes once during the trip. I didn’t need to. This was a familiar journey, one that I’d made in both better and worse shape than I was in now. Naga carried me down the hall to one of the courtyards that dotted his estate, then turned to head into a narrower hall, one he wouldn’t be able to fit down for too many more years. Lamia like Naga keep growing throughout their lives, which can span almost a thousand years when all is said and done, and they get steadily larger the whole time. He’d been twenty feet long when we first met, and I’d been a child. Now, I was an adult holding herself frozen in time, and he was almost fifty feet from the top of his head to the tip of his tail.

  Hopefully, I wasn’t going to need him to take care of me by the time he was too big for this estate and had to move to one of the larger ones. I’ve never been sure how lamia society handles that transition, and I wasn’t overly interested in finding out firsthand. I huddled in his arms, a feeling of rotten wrongness radiating out from the puncture wounds on my legs, and tried not to shiver. He was probably right about the poison. If he wasn’t, it could still be a slow allergic reaction or just a response to the filth that had been on those spikes when they went into me. They were there now, and probably killing me. The mechanism didn’t make that much of a difference.

  He ducked as he carried me through a door, and I heard other people for the first time. He said something in the rough sibilants of his own language, and they responded in kind. Most of the medical staff had never taken the time to learn English, which their mouths could handle, while mine couldn’t handle their language. I’d tried. It just sounded like so much hissing to my ears. According to Naga, I couldn’t even hear the upper registers of his language.

  At least my tattoo artists spoke English. I could tell them what I needed to stay safe and do my best work, and they could help me choose the right designs. They were good about steering me away from things that might take too much out of me, pulling too much power and depleting my reserves to the point where a little electrolyte replacement powder wouldn’t help.

  “Can you stand?” asked Naga.

  I consulted silently with my body and sighed. “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “I’ll have to undress you if you can’t stand.”

  “That doesn’t make my legs hurt any less,” I said. “No, I can’t stand.”

  “All right.” He sucked air through his teeth, a sharp, tight sound. “Alice, the injuries on your upper legs are severe enough that I’m not sure I can remove your shorts in one piece.”

  “Nothing special about them,” I said. Waves of exhaustion were starting to wash over me, alternating with the waves of pain. The recovery I’d managed at the Red Angel was long gone at this point, and I was done. “Cut ’em off.”

  “Good girl.”

  He slithered forward, setting me down on the hard metal surface of an operating table, and a moment later, I heard the snick of scissors being opened. A few quick cuts and I was naked, still too tired to move or cover myself. Not that I needed to. Lamia aren’t attracted to mammals, and unlike many of the humanoid reptiles on Earth, they never developed mammalian mimicry. No breasts for these serpents. No hair, either. And while I’d met quite a few of them by this point, I had yet to encounter a single one who saw a naked human as anything other than a novelty, or, on a few unpleasant occasions, as something easier to eat.

  One of the medics hissed above me. I tensed. A hand brushed my shoulder, accompanied by a hissed interrogative, which Naga answered before sighing, and saying, in English, “They want to know how many dimensions you touched. I told them you began with fifteen crossings, but they need to position the blades appropriately.”

  “Right . . .” It was getting hard to think. I took a few deep breaths, trying to buy myself time, before I said, “Here to Ithaca, Ithaca to Xxyres, Xxyres to a series of sub-dimensions whose names I don’t know . . .” On and on the list went, ending with, “Helos to Earth, Earth back to Helos, Helos to here. How many is that? I can’t count.”

  “Thirteen,” he said, with some satisfaction. “You touched thirteen dimensions, including this one and your own.”

  “Not . . . quite . . . a record, then.” Each word felt like an effort, and when the last of them was out, I sighed and relaxed into the table. Tension wouldn’t do me any good anyway, and I knew it. I’d been here before.

  “No, but close enough.” He reached down and smoothed my hair away from my forehead. “How deep shall they go?”

  “Shallow,” I said. “Don’t want to get . . . any younger.”

  I was already functionally, physically in my early twenties, and it had been a fight to get that much ground back, after the time they’d gone too deep and left me effectively seventeen again, still growing, still a little gangly. Naga had scolded them roundly after that incident, reminding them I couldn’t do my job or hunt for my husband if my hands were too small to hold my gun, but it had meant several seasons of slower work, never going too far from either Earth or Empusa, for fear that I’d get hurt enough to need another session.

  Naga chuckled. “And here when your snake cults call on us, eternal youth is one of the most common requests,” he said.

  “Not . . . worth it,” I replied.

  “No, I suppose it’s not.” He stroked my forehead again. “Here’s where I leave you. Try to keep the screaming to a minimum this time?”

  “No . . . promises.”

  He laughed outright as he slithered away, heading back to the door. I heard it open, then close, and then I was surrounded by the medics, their hands lifting me away from the metal table and the remains of my clothes. Fingers dug into one of the larger wounds, grasping the end of a spike and yanking it out.

  I did not keep the screaming to a minimum. Removing that spike hurt just as much as I’d been afraid it would, ripping through tissue with the fierce precision of something that had not evolved to be nice. If the medics had an issue with it, they could damn well cope.

  Judging by their aggravated hissing, they didn’t like the noise. That was fine. As long as they didn’t go too deep, it wasn’t like there was much they could do to me that they weren’t already going to do. And they didn’t drop me, which was the only thing I’d been particularly worried about.

  Still hissing to each other, they lowered me into a warm liquid and let me go. Whatever this stuff was, it was thicker than water, and I floated easily, at no danger of slipping under, even as I remained completely limp. The longer I could keep myself from tensing up, the less this was going to hurt.

  Not that anything could actually keep it from hurting—pain was inevitable in this process—but hurting less was something to hope for, no matter what the surrounding circumstances. One of them moved away, scales scraping on the floor, and I heard the rattle of metal. They were almost ready to begin.

  “Please,” I said, voice small. “Please, I can just take some antibiotics. You don’t have to do this. Please . . .”

  This was one of those moments when I was glad none of them had ever learned English. My begging wouldn’t stop them, and I trusted Naga. He wouldn’t do this to me if it wasn’t necessary. I would never have made it this far without him. This was just what had to happen, because I’d been careless enough to get jumped, to get hurt and use my only healing charm before getting hurt even worse. This was my fault, really.

  This was always my fault.

  Then the first blade was pressed into the skin just above my collarbone, biting into the flesh with very little pressure, and I found exactly how much screaming I had left inside me. As it turned out, I had a lot of screaming.

  I always did.

  Five

  “There is no price too great to pay to ensure the safety of the ones we love. To question that is to question your love for them.”

  —Jonathan Healy

  In the infirmary of Naga’s estate, being skinned alive, again, by people who are very, very good at their jobs

  Eventually, of course, the screaming stopped. There’s only so much pain the mind can process before it starts shutting things down, and while the liquid I hung suspended in was designed to keep me from slipping into shock and dying from the sheer intensity of it all, it was impossible for them to deaden my nerves enough to keep the removal of my skin from being the worst thing I had ever experienced. It didn’t matter how many times they put me through it, either. Every single time was the worst time. Cut shallow, cut deep, that didn’t matter once the knives were tracing along my body, as intimate as a lover’s hands, touching me in ways I had never allowed anyone to touch me, not since Thomas disappeared. And he had never touched me like this, not even when he’d needed to patch me up.

  They flensed me one inch at a time, and I was awake and aware for the entire process, unable to lose consciousness thanks to the drugs in the nutrient bath around me, unable to even find that much peace. Bit by bit, they cut me away, leaving my face, as always, for last, so that my eyes could stay shut until they ran their knives along the inside of my cheeks to sever skin from muscle and peeled it away, taking my eyelids in the process.

  They appeared above me, three smaller members of Naga’s species looking dispassionately down at me, all covered in blood to their elbows. One of them was holding a pale, boneless thing I knew I would recognize if I looked for too long, and so I didn’t look. My exposed nerves were on fire.

  Another of the medics produced a small ivory jar, and only the fact that I had screamed myself raw stopped me from demanding it right now. She opened the jar and sprinkled its contents, a pale ocher powder, into the liquid around me, and finally, mercifully, I lost consciousness. The pain went with it and was the greatest kindness I had ever experienced.

  It always was. Every single time.

  * * *

  I woke up naked, dry, and stretched out on that same metal table I had been placed on when Naga first brought me here. Nothing hurt. I lifted my right arm and held it up so I could see, and was greeted by the sight of smooth, unmarked skin. No tattoos, no scars, not even a single freckle. I’d asked Naga once, why they couldn’t give me painkillers; why they had to knock me out when they finished skinning me, and not before. He’d replied that it had something to do with the skin itself. If they wanted the procedure to function correctly, my nerve endings had to be active during the removal, and reasonably quiescent while my skin was regrown.

  It didn’t exactly make sense to me, but it had been working thus far, and it was keeping me moving, which was the important part. Maybe it would have been better if I could have understood what was being done to me. Probably not. I’d still have to go through the process, which cut away all the damage I’d done to myself since the last time I’d been skinned, doing it in a way that went all the way down to my bones—hence why I kept getting de-aged every time I went through it. It cut away distance and time in one fell swoop, leaving me purified.

  Best of all, once it was over, nothing hurt. No old aches, no unexplained sore spots. I got a clean slate every single time. And maybe that made up for the fact that it was literally torture and was slowly driving me out of my mind. I didn’t really know, and I absolutely didn’t have another option.