The Angel's Fire

by Holley Trent

  “Give them time for what?” she asked.

  “So they can die in a familiar place. Isn’t that what you want?”

  As unsettled as she was by his spear-straight aim, she had no intention of revealing her awe of him. The only power she had over him was her calmness and inaction. Those had always infuriated the other gods who’d tried to force her to yield to their ways.

  She would not bend for them, and she was not going to bend for the golden bird, either.

  “Give them time to go back to where they came from and then turn your back to the mess,” he said. “Certainly, that would be no hardship for you.”

  “You took away their lives. You give them back.”

  “If I thought doing so was important, and I could, I would.”

  “So, you cannot.” Triumphant, she lifted her chin, because she could do what he could not.

  She simply did not wish to. Interfering was not her way.

  He didn’t seem to care about her small victory. He placed his hand onto the face of the woman at her right and her eyes sprang open just like the other’s.

  “I can instill in them the will to fight their way home by any means necessary,” he said. “I cannot give them time in the way you can. They would not need so much, no? Two years to find a way, perhaps. That is all. Where they die will be up to them.”

  She didn’t believe him. Simple solutions far too often had consequences that could not be easily disentangled. But she didn’t like her choices. She could no longer turn her back and walk on to the next place. That stretch of beach would always carry a psychic taint because of what had happened there. México already had enough wailing ghosts.

  The young woman draped across her lap reached up and touched the nameless one’s face. Not breathing, because she wasn’t really alive anymore. Too weak to do much more than stare.

  The nameless one couldn’t remember the last time she let anyone get close enough to stare, much less touch.

  Touching was for people who still had some curiosity left about life and each other. The last time she’d been curious, she’d had a son and his human father had betrayed and humiliated her. Curiosity wasn’t for the likes of her anymore. She’d learned all she needed to, or so she’d thought.

  “What do you have to lose?” he asked.

  “What do you have to gain?” she returned.

  “Why do you assume I will profit?”

  “Because I would be foolish to think you wouldn’t.”

  “Such a hostile outlook.”

  “I will gladly demonstrate hostility to you given sufficient distance from these women.” And the water. The water would snuff her out if she let it.

  “Then by all means, give them their time. I will give them effort. Then, we can convene at the place of your choosing so that you may…” He snorted. “Demonstrate.”

  If there was a way to kill him, she was going to find it, simply so she wouldn’t have to be bothered with the insufferable charlatan again.

  She released the young woman from the cradle of her arms, and moved from one to the next, prodding that spark of animation, resetting the countdown clocks of their brains and hearts and bones. She gave them something else, as well—a means to protect themselves for the meantime. A way to use their bodies to survive instead of being stolen.

  No one would dare force a jaguar into submission—not without bleeding a little from the effort. She would have to show them how to draw on their new cat instincts, and that would be all.

  He sat them up, one by one, and whispered into their ears.

  She didn’t care what he told them. She still had important work to do.

  She lifted the one who was too far gone and carried her into the waves, carried her until her head was covered by the water, and then she dove.

  Deep, long, until she found a still place where the current was gentle. She left her precious delivery there amongst the pretty shells and swam back ashore.

  So tired. So drained, because she’d given up so much of what made her divine to give the women back their dignity.

  She didn’t regret the loss. She would regain it, eventually, but she would have to be careful not to give up too much more. If she did, she would be terminal in the exact same way as her visitors. She could not create life without borrowing the ingredients from somewhere else. Some gods liked sacrifices. She preferred to sacrifice parts of herself. That had always kept the wailing ghosts away.

  When she returned to the cluster, the bird man was gone, and the women all looked at her expectantly.

  Damn him.

  “You can go home,” she told them as she wrung water out of her hair and fetched her shawl. “Draw out that cat in you. Take its form and stay safe until you must travel on two legs again.”

  They looked at each other, confused.

  They didn’t understand.

  “Gather your strength so that we can go. I will show you this place and then I must leave you.” She’d interfered too much already.

  They didn’t go. They watched. Waited.

  The nameless one rubbed the saltwater from her eyes and growled quietly.

  They were looking at her with something akin to reverence, and she didn’t want that. She’d wanted her peace—her anonymity.

  She’d known he couldn’t be trusted, but neither could she anymore, and now she was angry.

  She’d tasted his energy. If she ever encountered him again, she would evict all the smugness from him. He’d think twice the next time he wanted to extort a woman’s value.

  He didn’t know that she had dangerous fangs, too.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Tarik estimated that the women would have four years, perhaps five.

  He’d lied about lacking the ability to revitalize them, of course, because that was what creatures like him did instead of wasting energy on things like breathing and eating. They lied and kept up with all of their past falsehoods.

  He could have given them more, since he was going through all the fuss of indulging the little goddess in the first place, but he’d needed to hold some energy in reserve. Fallen angels of his order collected enemies in every realm they visited, and he needed to be able to defend himself. He wouldn’t be able to if his power was in need of near complete renewal.

  He stood in the shadows in his less obtrusive, un-glowing form, watching the sodden, angry waif corral the shivering women and guide them away from the shore.

  They’d be disrupters, because that was what he was, and he’d seeded them with his essence—flaws and all. His entire existence since falling from grace was about disruption, and he reveled in it, much to the ire of those he made complicit in his schemes.

  The Novo Mundo was the third ship in a year he’d landed on. While he derived no pleasure from inflicting chaos and death on innocents, he often had to decide for them how best to minimize their victimhood. Not all shame was created equally.

  He could watch. Wait. See how long it took for the women to get angry enough to reap their retribution. In the meantime, he’d leave ships alone.

  The little goddess had looked at him with such scorn. Of course she’d suspected him of causing the explosion. She was right to. He wouldn’t have lied if she’d asked him directly if he’d destroyed the ship. He doubted she would have given him the satisfaction of having an avenue to speak and explain himself upfront.

  Perhaps she was wise for that. Too many of the gods and goddesses like her he’d encountered had plenty of power but no intelligence.

  Humans evolved. Petty gods rarely did.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1662

  A Franciscan Mission in Nueva Vizcaya, New Spain

  She moved into the procession of converters, sending out tiny tendrils of energy as she cut a diagonal through the wide queue.

  The nameless one obviously had no interest in baptism but found no fault in those who sought to join the Spaniards’ church. People took comfort from wherever they could find it. They wanted to understand the worl
d in any way that the human mind would allow them to. If the friars could give them what she and her ilk no longer could, she would graciously accede defeat. Unlike many of her kind, being forgotten did not send her into piques of panic. In fact, she often wondered what that final release from obligations would feel like.

  But she still cared too much to leave the mortal plane. There was her roaming son to see to, and she was still haunted by the gift she’d given to the Jaguars over a century ago. And now she felt compelled to search for what was hers. She wasn’t looking for Mexica people—those surrounded her in droves, their eyes all on the cross ahead. She was looking for her Cougars. She’d created them long before the Jaguars were even a rustle in her imagination, and she had tried to distance herself from their care. They didn’t need her to meddle. Sometimes, though, when they were in motion, migrating en masse, she had to go to them. She needed to know what place they were establishing themselves in. She needed to plant her feet there at least once so that her body would know how to find them later.

  One of the Cougars was nearby. She could not discern which Cougar, but she could sense his hostility. His dread.

  He needed to be stronger than that.

  He was supposed to be a leader. He’d been the best of all the options, for better or for worse.

  Ah.

  She glided unobtrusively through the group, buffering herself with illusory magic so they wouldn’t look, wouldn’t be disturbed. They didn’t need to remember her.

  She caught the edge of Tochtlea’s form nearly at the mission door and hooked his arm.

  He turned and looked.

  She tugged him out of the way of the crowd before he could summon up enough arrogance to demand an answer for why she’d touched him.

  “Do not speak a word,” she said when he opened his mouth. She clenched her fingers around his wide wrist and pressed up onto her toes. “Where are your Cats?”

  He tried to flinch away, but she had ways of making men obey. They didn’t like that gripping pain between their legs or when the contents of their bellies suddenly went greasy.

  If she’d allowed herself to have a normal appetite, perhaps she would have felt the same way.

  “I would not have chosen you,” she murmured to him. “There are others who could have led, but you grabbed the mantle. Not them.” Once again, she squeezed his wrist. More gently, but the warning was still there. If he’d pondered who she was at first, he didn’t anymore. His clarity was certain in her mind. Touching him, she could read him like carvings on a temple wall.

  She moved him more away from the stream of bodies. Her cloud of protection wouldn’t extend to him. Even if she wasn’t being watched, he was, and he was nervous as his namesake, the rabbit.

  Good.

  His job was to be nervous. He was supposed to guide his Cougars, not run away toward the first offer of comfort.

  “Where are they?” she asked.

  He swallowed thickly and rubbed the wrist she’d released.

  “Do they know you are here? Or have they already gone through this line and I can no longer know them because they are barred from acknowledging me?”

  She didn’t care if they did as long as the choice had been theirs—not his. She’d held her Cougars at arms’ length since soon after she’d sparked the creation of the shifter race because they made her emotional, and she didn’t trust emotions. They rarely made sense.

  They rarely served any useful purpose for her, unless her goal was to destroy things. She didn’t need any additional impetus for that. All she needed for that was to look around her. She could find plenty of things to incense her.

  He cleared his throat. “Some…went ahead. Ten. Maybe twenty.”

  Twenty unhindered out of a group of sixty Cougars.

  There weren’t so many groups. The large one had split into three. One had gone south and disbanded soon after. One remained too long near Tenochtitlan and were suppressed by the Spaniards. Tochtlea’s group had been gradually moving north for the past three hundred years. Her son was in there somewhere. She needed to see him for no urgent reason except that he was hers and their last embrace had been too long ago.

  They’d fought. She’d moved past it.

  “Where are the rest?” she demanded.

  “I…do not know, goddess!”

  “Because you abandoned them? You left them to their own ways so you could embrace new ones?”

  He didn’t respond. He didn’t need to.

  She pointed to the door. “Go through it. Receive your baptism. I will not stop you.”

  He looked down on her with skepticism, but of course he did. Although she’d never seen fit to show herself to him, he would have heard all the stories about her. At the very least, he would have heard the oldest legends. He would have known that the first time a human man brazenly disrespected her, he’d ended up on four legs and was never able to change back. The only reason that people like Tochtlea could shift back and forth between man form and beast was because she’d shown mercy to the traitor’s peers. She’d allowed them to crawl home and court their women’s mercy to be cured of their goddess’s curse.

  “You…will curse us?” Tochtlea asked.

  “You are your own curse.”

  He flinched.

  “Where are they?” she asked.

  “They were speaking of moving north.”

  Useless man.

  She turned her back to him and walked away, quickly losing him in the crowd.

  She would not interfere, but speaking a blessing for whoever led the Cougars next would not be overstepping. A blessing was simply a hope that they would find what they needed, whether it be land or prosperity or courage.

  Once she knew better the way they went, she could move directly to them. For the time being, walking would suffice. She didn’t mind walking. Sometimes, the walking was all that kept her sane.

  She was barely a minute clear of the crowd when she sensed foreign energy at her back. Her initial worry was always that some other god had a quarrel with her, and so she readied herself for defense accordingly. The flavor of the heat brought her up short, though. It was foreign, but still somehow familiar.

  Pausing, she gasped and wondered if it could be after so many years—that frustrating golden bird who’d swindled her out of months of precious energy.

  He wouldn’t dare.

  She set her chin and kept walking. She’d learned her lesson with the bird man the hard way the first time and she wasn’t going to get connived by him again in spite of the promise of revenge she’d made to herself.

  “You always travel alone?” came the deep, silken voice. The sound seemed normal enough. It didn’t make her ears itch that time and she wondered why. Not enough to turn and look, though.

  She kept moving, wrapping her shawl tightly around her and hoping her son, Yaotl, was truly amongst those moving north. Keeping up with him was difficult when he did not wish not to be found. Their relationship was rarely a placid one, but she could not blame him for that. Perhaps one day, he’d understand. Everything she’d done for him—to him, he might have accused—was to prepare him for when things changed.

  They would change. She did not know the ways in which they would, but all she had to do was look around to know that those who weren’t ready would hurt most.

  “I imagine you have no concern for your safety,” the bird continued. “No one will harm you. Is that right?”

  “Find someone else with time for you to waste.”

  “I am merely being friendly.”

  “I have sharp memories of what you perceive friendly to look like. Pardon me if I am not so enamored of your ways.”

  She could feel him moving closer, and closer still as her feet ate up the ground beneath and the din of the converts dulled.

  “You left them?” he asked.

  For a second, she thought he was referring to the natives entering the church, but he was referring to a previous gathering. Her Jaguars. She’d done all she
could for them.

  “I always leave.” That was all he needed to know.

  “So you know nothing of what became of them?”

  “I gave them some of my own essence to keep their hearts beating. I gave them the ability to roam the land as jaguars for their comfort and safety. I showed them the foods in this land and taught them our words. There was nothing more I could do.”

  “Where did you last see them?

  “If that matters so much to you, you can go back to the place you last laid eyes on them and investigate every possible direction, including up, and especially down. I hope that you will explore one of those directions in particular with unfettered enthusiasm.”

  “You have a sharp tongue on you.”

  She huffed and moved to the side of the well-worn path to steer clear of a Spaniard on his horse. He didn’t seem to notice her, but the horse did. Beasts were always put off by her energy.

  Agitated, the steed sidestepped, causing his rider to grip his reins more forcefully.

  He stopped to speak in Spanish with the thing behind her. She’d learned that tongue, not because she’d wished to, but because what was one more in a land of so many? And the Cougars were beginning to speak it, so she’d learned it so she couldn’t ever say that she didn’t know about their suffering because it was in the wrong language.

  She slowed her steps, assessing the tones of the chatter. It seemed cordial enough—collegial, even. The Spaniard must not have seen the bird man for what he was.

  She glanced over her shoulder.

  There was no bird man there. No golden ore, but a tall olive-skinned man wearing the clothing of a Spaniard. There were more and more mixed ones every day as the colonists built their new Spain on the wrong edge of the world, but he was not mestizo. He was not native, nor were his people from the Spaniards’ boats.

  He was a being she didn’t understand, and she wondered if he’d blown up any boats recently.

  Furrowing her brow, she put her gaze back forward and kept walking.

  Her business was elsewhere, and she would not let him distract her from it ever again. If she were lucky, they’d never again cross paths. She had enough concerns already.