Bloodring

by Faith Hunter

  And then he was leaving. I followed him down the steps to the outer door of Thorn's Gems and locked the shop behind him. Standing in the shadow, I watched as he moved through the snow across the sidewalk toward the town's only hotel.

  The last hour was a blur of nothingness in my mind, a fuzz of sound and need, and when he was gone, I made it back upstairs, where I fell against the closed door. A kylen! Had Lolo sent him ? Why hadn 't I been inside his mind? Was it his human genes? I had to stay away from him. But if mage-heat kicked in full force, I'd be hard-pressed not to take him in the streets.

  Dizziness and need rocked me. I stripped and pulled on flannel pajamas, but heat and cold, sexual attraction and fear, seemed to have invaded my body. I couldn't get warm, couldn't get comfortable. I pulled three more bath stones from the tub and huddled with them under the down duvet on my bed, drawing from their power. When I had myself under control, I listened to messages while sipping cooling tea, hitting the button until I heard the sound of Ciana's voice. She was crying, begging me to call.

  Knowing she wouldn't be able to sleep after learning her father was missing, I dialed her number. Of course, Maria answered and wouldn't let me talk to Ciana, though I could hear the child of my heart begging in the background. Instead, Maria called me a few names banned just after the start of the Last War and hung up on me. Frustrated, my last nerve thoroughly stomped on, I replaced the receiver and sipped my cold tea.

  Chapter 3

  I slept with the charged bath stones, still warm from the water and leaking power that I absorbed as I rested. The radiance healed the effect of two days of rigorous riding and of having been in a city surrounded by technology and strange people, of bathing in water collected from both sky and earth, pooled stream water augmented by snowmelt, which confused my senses and drained my neomage gifts. The stones restored energies spent hiding what I was under almost constant glamour, a glamour hard to maintain now that I no longer had my strongest prime amulet. When I woke, I felt healed, though my bath had been interrupted and snow was piled high beyond the windows. I'd have to sleep with charged stones more often. The princess and the pea, I wasn't.

  In the dull light of early morning, as roosters in the surrounding area crowed up a racket, I stretched before moving into the flowing exercises of savage-chi, the martial art created by the earliest neomages when they came under attack by frightened humans. The movements turned violent as I whirled and slashed, kicked and blocked, channeling and expending the leftover fear and sexual energy stirred by the kylen cop.

  After I worked up a sweat, I took up the swords. Holding the ebony walking-stick sheath, I slipped the longsword free with my right hand and fully extended the blade. In my left I took the twelve-inch kris and sweated another ten minutes, executing savage-blade, concentrating on prime moves, not graduating to secondary moves. Though calmer, I was too shaky, too heated, for more advanced forms. I might accidentally draw my own blood.

  Refreshed, I washed in cold springwater, made the bed, and dressed in teal, ocean green, and a turquoise scarf to accent green chrysocolla jewelry I would display in the shop. My outer clothing was layered against the cold, slim underleggings against my legs with wool-and-silk-blend trousers. Winter made it easier to blank the glow of neomage flesh, as there was so little of it exposed. I dulled the pearl sheen and the whiter glow of scar tissue with an amulet charged for that purpose. Every scar still showed, had, ever since I damaged the prime amulet, but I could still pass for an injured, long-healed human. I looped my necklace of amulets around my waist under my clothes.

  I had fallen asleep with my hair up and it still looked good, so I dropped it, ran my fingers through the strands, and smoothed my tumble of red curls back into a twisted mass, securing it with an oversized butterfly clip. I added a bit of makeup, which I seldom needed to use, letting the amulets do the work of expensive products. Today I added lipstick and blush.

  I didn't examine why I wanted to look my best today, but thoughts of Thaddeus Bartholomew fluttered deep in my belly. A kylen was in town, next best thing to a seraph—a winged warrior—also longed for but denied. Not that I'd ever even seen a seraph up close.

  Except twice a decade, seraphs and neomages aren't permitted to be in close proximity. Once every five years, a dozen seraphs chosen by the Seraphic High Host, the ruling council of seraphs, fly over each of the Enclaves and hover long enough to stimulate mage-heat. As soon as mage-heat comes on the Enclaves, signaling that mage females have ovulated and are capable of breeding, the seraphs chosen for the duty are forced to depart, their own desires unsatisfied. Mages and seraphs can't resist each other, and physical interspecies relations between them had long been disallowed by the ArchSeraph Michael. The flyover concession was allowed by the council so that mages could breed.

  Neomages had never been prophesied, but our extinction seemingly wasn't in the plans of God the Victorious. Clipping on my jewelry, I took the stairs to Thorn's Gems, the jewelry shop I owned with my two best friends.

  We had started as a poor and struggling jewelry store, producing stone, metal, and glass items for retail shops across the East Coast. Because Mineral City was fairly remote, we concentrated on the Internet, with a complete online catalogue, but we barely made enough to survive the first few years. When Chamuel, the seraph called "God's pure love in winged manifestation," wore one of our necklaces on television, our star rose fast. Because of the seraph, Thorn's Gems was thriving, our designs sought after by the rich and famous, as well as by seraph chasers, the groupies who followed seraphic updates as if they were scripture.

  Downstairs, I lit the gas fire, put on water for tea and ground beans for coffee. The winter-month minutia of the shop eased me. I had no time for dark fantasies, only to prepare for customers.

  The scent of fresh hazelnut coffee drifted from the tin percolator. The Mr. Coffee had died last year, and this time the town's handyman had been unable to revive it. I still missed the ease of its use. The last twenty-five years had seen a resurgence of technology, but household items hadn't yet reappeared.

  Water sizzled in a copper kettle resting on the cast-iron top of the gas fireplace. I poured cream into a tiny pitcher and scooped carefully hoarded honey-sugar into a crystal bowl, then stacked china cups and saucers. Ancient silver spoons Audric had dead-mined from his abandoned town under the aegis of the Salvage Laws were stacked on folded napkins. As I worked, my desire faded to a dull thump deep in my bones.

  "Dearie, you look… diff-er-rent," a voice said. "My, my, my. Who is he? Give papa details."

  "Can it, Rupert," I said, bending over the huntboard we used for refreshments. I hadn't heard him enter and kept my back to him, pouring a cup of the rich brew as an excuse not to lookup. "I heard about Lucas," I added as a distraction.

  "Have you seen it? He made the morning news."

  I looked up as Rupert turned on the television mounted high in the corner. The connection buzzed, warming.

  "And of course, Gramma called, all in a dither, demanding that I do something, that I ride to her favorite's rescue, that I come stay with her until all this 'unpleasantness is resolved,' as she put it." Rupert shivered delicately. "That is sooooo not going to happen."

  Rupert, who had fallen in love with Pre-Ap musicals, claimed he had been born in the wrong century, believing he was made for the stage. Today he was in a dramatic, full-blown theatrical mode, wearing indigo blue in an Arabic cut, flowing robes and silky textures that complemented his pale skin. Navy liner and a heavy coat of mascara circled his black eyes. Dangerous if the kirk elders came around, though his Pre-Apocalyptic thespian style brought in many of our big-paying clients.

  The picture cleared and he tuned the TV to SNN. Three digital video feeds ran simultaneously, two stacked rectangles on the left with the events of the day, and a long, narrow one on the right of a reporter dressed in purple robes made fashionable by the seraph Uriel last year in his appearance at the White House. Three text messages raced across the bottom of the
screen. Everything in threes.

  The television blinked and brightened. With the first instant of video feed, I was reminded of the holiday. This was the hundred and fifth anniversary of the start of the Last War, and the eighty-seventh anniversary of the last great battle.

  "This date marks the commemoration of both the first and the final battles, the date when all mankind celebrates the end of the world," the announcer intoned. I snorted. Only humans could celebrate the death of six billion people. "Here, the modern world first saw the death seraph Azrael as he lifted his sword over the city of Paris at the start of the first of the three great plagues—"

  Rupert muted the sound and placed a hand on my shoulder. On the screen, the ancient handheld video camera captured the first ray of scintillating light, the bursting prism of power as a seraph of death appeared in a cloud of fire, alighting on the very tip of the Eiffel Tower, golden wings outspread, sword held aloft. Azrael, the harbinger of the end of the world.

  Well, sort of. Things hadn't quite worked out like the great prophets had expected.

  In the famous video, the shot tilted as the camera fell and bounced, landed, still running, but resting on the former photographer's body, the seraph framed as he lifted his sword. The photographer's hand appeared at the bottom of the field of view, twitching, changing color to ruby red, then bleeding as capillaries swelled and burst. The twitching stopped. The seraph turned and faced the camera, as if he knew it still recorded him. I didn't have to turn the sound up to remember the famous words as Azrael cursed the city in the name of the Most High. Only one thousand people in the whole of the city of Paris survived the first plague. One thousand.

  The screen changed, displaying the customary three shots of SNN. In the largest, I saw the mushroom clouds of the few nuclear explosions, the first detonating in what had been the Koreas and in China, followed by the three on the West Coast of the United States, eight in Russia, two in the former Holy Lands, and ten on the continent of Africa.

  In the stacked footage on the left of the screen were the twin seraphs, Mordad and Murdad, swords raised over Jerusalem and Mecca, respectively. The center screen mutated to the arrival of Metatron over Washington, D.C. Metatron, raven feathered, the seraph of death. Not one person in the most powerful city on the face of the planet had survived the first plague, all dead in less than twenty-four hours, though the president and his cabinet had escaped into a bunker somewhere and survived. Then shots of the Kremlin, St. Petersburg, Tokyo, Singapore, Bombay, Frankfurt, Geneva, and on and on as hundreds of thousands, as millions, died in the streets, all on the first day of the first plague.

  The second plague followed, wars, pestilence, death, all displayed on the three screens, fast-tracking the end of the world as it once was. Not once did the Most High appear. As always, the announcer would be careful not to voice the fact that God the Victorious had never been caught on film. The only time a reporter had commented on the fact, she had fallen dead on the set, suffering a massive pulmonary embolism and cardiac arrest. All quite natural, or so they'd said. No news analyst since had been brave enough to test the theory.

  Each of the three screens depicted storms, as the earth's climate underwent terrible change from mild global warming to ice age in months, the result of nuclear bombs, volcanoes, and earthquakes, just as scientists had long predicted. Not that there were many scientists around to gloat. Nine in ten had died, in proportion to the rest of humanity, the wrath of the Most High, God the Victorious, sparing no one in any socioeconomic, intellectual, or religious group.

  The screen shifted, showing rioting in the streets as fanatics from every major religion claimed the end of the world and the ascendancy of their own belief system. The seraphs reappeared, this time not glowing and beautiful, but dark, faces carved with anger. The third great plague had punished the rioters doing violence in the name of the Most High. Rioters dropped where they stood. Then the plague moved on to the rest of the human population, striking mostly rural areas. In this plague, called the Plague of Punishment, no children under the age of six had perished.

  To appease the seraphic host, governments appointed elders authorized to prohibit religious violence, to mete out punishment, to organize different believers in each locale, and to force them to cooperate. Many elders also had secular, political aspirations and ran for public office on county councils, in state legislatures, even for president. For a hundred years there had been little separation of church and state. Elders were cop, preacher, referee, judge, and hangman.

  As SNN chronicled the end of the world, the three screens showed the arrival of the Angel of Darkness in a cloud of hornets, locusts, hail, and fire. Devil-spawn poured up from the ground and devoured dead and dying humans in a scene so grisly, I always closed my eyes against the sight of blood, brimstone, and tearing teeth. Cold chills raced up my arms. Nausea rose. My hands were tingling, breath too fast. My nostrils flared, scent searching. My heart raced. I longed for my blades, needing the comforting warmth of the bloodstone hilt in my hand as my blood raged.

  Dragons, later identified as Major Powers, directed battles against seraphs, their centipede or spider or snake bodies, with human hands and serpent heads, crushing entire towns. The stuff of nightmares. Because the seraphs turned against this new evil with swords raised and voices booming, many humans fought with them against the common enemy.

  As the war progressed, the ice caps grew, Darkness became more bold, and bands of seraphs and humans took the war underground, where the Powers lived and bred. Finally, in the last great battle, seraphs, mages, and humans fought side by side against the Darkness, driving evil into the deeps, though announcers seldom mention neomage contributions.

  I looked away from the death of the old world and the violent, bloody birth of the new. The world that followed the end of the Last War had become a world of peace, of political and religious accord, at least on the surface. But mage priestesses had prophesied that war would come again soon; it wasn't over. Not that humans listened.

  The announcer appeared in the center screen, mouth moving. The footage of the hundred and fifth was done. The top screen went dark and a murky scene emerged, a jerky digital feed, distorted. A man was walking fast down a dark alley, a knapsack slung over his shoulder. The figure was lit for a moment in the edge of a security light, a peaceful aftermath to the historic videos, yet my heart thudded, stuttered once, and started again. I put a hand to my chest against the pain. It was Lucas, shadowed by a growth of beard, his deep-set eyes only dark holes until he lifted his head to reveal his face. My gut tightened. He was still beautiful. Far too beautiful.

  We have a report that Lucas was attacked in an alley and dragged off, Bartholomew had said. Not a report. A security-camera video.

  On the screen, boxes and a woodpile stood to one side, scooters and a tangle of bicycles half visible at the extremity of the circle of illumination. A shadow slithered in the dark, disjointed and stiff. A second shadow flitted, resolving into the shape of a man moving forward fast. A third shadow joined the rush and the two collided with Lucas. He went down to a knee and one hand.

  Arms reared back and slammed down, feet kicked viciously. Lucas fell, covering his head, shielding his face. Blows punched on the hazy screen, the silence adding to the horror as my mind waited for the sound of impacts, grunts, the echo of screams. There was only silence. The violence depicted in the anniversary video was far more bloody, but this was personal, intimate. Chills raced up the back of my neck. Lucas' face was covered in blood. I gripped my wrists, wishing I'd worn blades, feeling naked, vulnerable.

  The body on the ground was dragged away, leaving the ruptured knapsack pushed to the side, its contents scattered. A smear marked the path the assailants took as they pulled him out of the camera's view. Blood. Lucas' blood.

  Coffee was forgotten. Chills whispered down my arms, lifting the fine hairs. Horror danced along in the icy wake. Rupert raised the level of sound as the announcer spoke.

  "This vici
ous attack is similar to those shown on television in Pre-Apocalyptic times, a memory of violence the human race has put behind us, unsuccessfully, as we see all too often. This assault reminds us once again that the final judgment has not taken place and evil still lives in the hearts of humans—" Rupert muted the sound again on his falsely pious voice.

  "Violence we've put behind us?" Rupert mused. "There's a scene of a mob attacking a woman convicted of black magic in the lower screen. A mutilated body was found in the outskirts of Atlanta last week, a 'crime of passion,' they're calling it. The disappearance of a mule train outside Knoxville, evidence of bloody conflict buried in the snow. Might be human, might be spawn. Drained bodies near Linville. Violence is everywhere." Rupert braced himself on the huntboard. "And the media caters to the propaganda of the Administration of the ArchSeraph in hiding it all." It was a dangerous sentiment, should a kirk elder overhear. But there was worry in Rupert's voice. I could smell a trace of fear on the air. "The cops came to the door last night," he added. "They think I had Lucas kidnapped and killed to get at his part of the inheritance."

  I sat slowly on the worn heart-pine floor, my legs giving out, weakness rising through my bones, turning them to water. On the TV, the upper video feed began again. Lucas walking down the alley. I felt sick, the taste of toothpaste in my mouth replaced by a sour tang, my stomach burning. The pull of the snow outside was a weakness in my bones. Lucas looked up, eyes flashing. Shadows twisted and undulated in the dark.