by Alexa Black
Sue ignored the bitterness in it and wrapped her arms around Kara. She splayed her fingers along Kara’s wing scars and dragged her fingertips over their edges.
Kara pressed a fingertip to Sue’s chest, tapping at the wound the Lightbringer’s claw had left. She traced the little line of blood that dripped from it. “You have someone else’s mark on you.”
Sue puckered her mouth in an impression of a kiss. “That’s all you’ve got to say about your lord? Your mightiest warrior? That he left his mark on me, and you don’t like it?”
Kara’s lopsided grin mimicked Sue’s. Except for the crack of fire between her lips, anyway. “My lord may do as he wills. As he always has, from the beginning.” Her claw curled inward, biting into the little wound the Lightbringer had left. “But you said you wanted to be mine.”
Sue hissed, but welcomed it all the same. She’d chosen to live among demons, and that meant choosing demons’ ways. Choosing claws and teeth and horns and the fierce pride of a warrior’s love.
She leaned closer and sucked in a breath. “Yes. I want to be yours.”
“And that matters most to me. I serve my lord and serve him gladly, but my life is my own.”
Sue grinned. “Yeah. I know. That’s the way you Outcasts are. I want someone who knows herself. Even if she’d pick fights with the Devil himself.”
Kara smiled back. She dragged the claw down, extending the tiny cut the Lightbringer had left. Sue breathed with it, but the sting didn’t really matter. Not anymore. Not now. Not when it meant Kara’s mark on her skin.
Kara drew her hand away. Her eyes fixed on the wound and flickered. Then she licked her fangs.
“Go ahead,” Sue said. “Bite me.”
Kara didn’t need any more encouragement. She leaned down and ran her rough lips against Sue’s neck, tracing kisses over Sue’s skin. Sue shuddered as Kara traced her way down to her chest. Her own skin was so much more fragile than the stony armor that held in Kara’s inner flame.
Kara opened her mouth and pressed the tips of her fangs into Sue’s skin, just above the breast the Lightbringer hadn’t pricked.
A pristine canvas for a warrior’s desire.
Kara’s inner flame curled up from her open throat.
Pinpricks and fire, and in the middle of it all, Sue’s own flesh, vulnerable and mortal.
Embraced and wanted.
“Do it,” Sue said.
The bite’s sting flooded her senses, a flare of sensation that coursed through her nerves. It hurt, but the intensity sharpened her need, and she welcomed the hot wet feeling of her blood beginning to flow. The Lightbringer had cut her, but he wasn’t Kara. Sue didn’t belong to him.
She hadn’t wanted to belong to Kara either. Not at first. Not when it meant she was lesser, smaller, a mere toy. A mere mortal, to be used by demons as they saw fit. A slave to them, even more than to the god they defied.
But this was Kara, and this was Kara’s world, and now she knew and understood both. The first time Kara had called her “pet,” she’d meant exactly what Sue was afraid of. But Kara knew Sue now, just like Sue knew her.
Here it made sense. Here, it was right.
Kara’s fangs withdrew. After the heat of Kara’s mouth, the air that hit Sue’s skin was cold.
But a moment later, Kara’s mouth was back, licking and sucking at Sue’s wound. Sue arched against her lips, felt the warmth against her skin, the wetness of—Kara’s saliva? Sue’s own blood? Sue wrapped her hands around the back of Kara’s head and pressed her closer.
Chapter Thirty-five
Kara drew her head away. The deep red of Sue’s blood stained her charcoal lips. The bite wound throbbed, a stinging twinge that made Sue’s sex pulse with anticipation. She slid her hands over the back of Kara’s head and touched her horns with one last suggestive caress.
Kara purred and Sue let go. In impulse, she grabbed Kara’s hand and laced her soft human fingers between the stone. A child’s gesture. Well, I’m supposed to be a pet.
“Come to bed,” she said. There was no need to hide now. Not from Kara, not from the Lightbringer. Not from bitter children like Dehek, and not from herself.
The doors slid open for Sue like they knew her. They always had, of course. But this apartment was a fortress, a warrior’s citadel. And its doors opened for her. She smiled.
Kara let go of Sue’s hand first. Sue sighed and settled on the bed and watched Kara lean over her. Still wanting the contact, she wrapped her hands around Kara’s back and pulled her in closer.
“Sing to me,” Sue whispered.
Kara’s eyes flickered with a frantic flame. “Sing to you?”
“The things you were. The things you miss. Show them to me.”
Kara looked down.
Sue wrapped her arms tighter around Kara’s back and ran her fingertips over the jagged edges of Kara’s scars. “It’s okay. I know you. The real you.”
“You do.”
“I chose you. In front of the Devil himself.”
Kara grinned. Her mouth looked beautiful with Sue’s blood on it, like lipstick. Or war paint.
“We would never call him that,” Kara said.
“We do.” Sue smiled again. “Sing to me.”
Kara let out a breath. Maybe in preparation. Or maybe she was just sighing, tired of her little human’s games. Sue was fine with it either way.
Kara’s song began with a rolling hum. Sue lost herself in the softness of it. She closed her eyes, even though she’d asked for the visions and images that came with Kara’s singing. Even without the pictures in Sue’s mind, the song soothed her. And she didn’t have to stare at images the whole time. Not if she opened her eyes eventually.
“Yes,” she whispered.
But the song didn’t just create visions. The stone beneath Sue’s hands softened as Kara sang. It smoothed, and the jagged bursts of heat under Sue’s fingertips spread out, becoming a light and calming warmth.
Sue moved her hand over Kara’s strange new skin and opened her eyes.
Light played on Kara’s skin, a ripple of iridescence. A corona of light glowed behind her head, and her eyes glowed bright. The brilliance of her wings hung down from her back. Even folded there, Sue couldn’t stare directly at them.
That had happened before. She hadn’t thought about it then. It just made sense that an angel’s wings would glow. But now she wondered why even a vision stung her eyes. I’m only human. Again.
There was something else, too, a strange pressure on her back. Like when she woke up with an arm twisted under her. It felt uncomfortable. But how could anything hurt in the middle of a song like this? Even Kara’s bite was gone now, hidden by the song.
Whatever was bothering Sue, Kara noticed it and pulled away. Sue sighed and propped herself up on her elbows. The pressure eased and she stretched—something. Something that wasn’t supposed to move like it just had. What was Kara doing?
But the sky behind Kara, an impossible bright blue, drew her attention. She did the weird stretch thing again and looked around.
She’d never seen anything so bright. She’d seen blue skies, once her spacebus flew up past the smog that choked most cities. She’d seen green plants, grasses fierce enough to grow in the cracks in pavement and sidewalks, in the grooves between metal tile. She’d seen trees, too. If they were hardy enough, they could help keep the air in the colony good.
This was something else.
This was bluer than blue, down on the ground, and the white streaks of clouds in a wide expanse of sky. And the trees nearby had branches and branches, like many-fingered hands. Their leaves caught the light, a blaze of brilliant green.
It was all too much, like one of those shows for children where they made the colors too vivid on purpose. Sue felt almost like a child. She stood up, wanting to see more, feel more, become a part of this new world.
She remembered the other song. The first song. The musicians who had first showed her what heaven looked like. Sue had seen
mountains then. She didn’t now. Did Kara not remember them? Or maybe she had lived somewhere else before she fell. Or maybe Kara had seen more than the other singers. She’d been a warrior, right? The Lightbringer liked her.
Who were you?
Even as Sue watched, the landscape shifted. The tree branches moved aside, revealing a brilliant blue sky. A cloud moved in it, white enough to sting Sue’s eyes, and then darkened to a rich, deep gray.
The sky dimmed too, but in front of her, Kara blazed as bright as ever.
A drop of rain fell to trickle on the ground and became a rushing stream, its burble filling Sue’s ears, a wordless melody laid over Kara’s song. A moment later, ocean waves foamed at Sue’s feet. The trees came back: new trees, with leaves in different shapes. They rose to the sky in moments, their high branches lacing together.
Sue had never seen anything like it. She knew what trees were, of course. She’d even seen a few forests, preserved in tiny parks, cared for by people who spoke of lost worlds of green with longing in their voices. But most of the plants that grew in the colonies were scraggly things that fought for life and space in the cracks between old pavement.
Those plants she knew. Those plants she loved, just because they came from home. This was beautiful, but Sue had never seen so many plants. So much green. So much color in the skies. She looked back at Kara, trying not to drown.
But the leaves faded to yellow and orange. By the time they fell, they covered Sue and Kara in a riot of crimson. They darkened still more, to vivid purple-black, and faded away.
Sue reached down and touched the ground beneath her. She sifted sand through her fingers and watched it become soil, dark, rich, and damp as it fell to earth. Grass sprouted up where it fell, and flowers bloomed in shifting colors. They faded and the soil hardened to rock. Sue remembered Kara’s skin—her real skin—and looked up again.
The angel in front of her was beautiful but foreign. Sue reached out to touch her.
And found herself staring at her own hand. Like Kara’s, it rippled with light. And skin that should have been tough, chapped and marked by years of hard living on the colonies, looked smooth as a child’s now.
“You made me just like you,” Sue whispered. She felt warmth—warmth she’d expected, all those long days ago, when she’d wondered what an angel felt like, without scars and without cracks in her skin.
“Yes.” Kara sang the answer. The illusory world flared with color and light. An affirmation, Sue guessed. Yes in the song meant yes to this vision, yes to this world, yes to this universe Kara had woven around them.
“Why?”
“You wanted to see what might have been.” Kara was still singing, but the vision wavered. The sky dimmed, graying like the dim lights in Kara’s apartment.
Sue could guess why. Might have been.
“That’s not what I mean,” Sue said. “It’s not about the song. I asked for the song.”
Kara didn’t stop singing, but Sue could hear the question in her chant.
“I wanted to see what it was like before you fell. I wanted to see your world. Your home. You didn’t have to give me this to do that. You didn’t have to make me into this to show me that.”
Kara’s song became a hum, and the illusion around them wove itself tightly again.
Okay. So this is what you wanted.
Sue looked around.
Kara put a hand on her face. Her touch wasn’t quite human even now. It felt featherlight, nothing like the warrior Kara’s granite touch.
I wanted to see this. To feel this. To know what might have been. And Kara invited me into her memories. Sue wrapped a hand around Kara’s and wondered how her touch felt to Kara. Did it feel better, more natural, more right than rough human skin? Or was this strange to Kara too? Sue let her hand linger over Kara’s for a moment. Then she lowered it and looked down at herself.
She gleamed, every blemish wiped away. The scar on her leg was gone too, shimmering new skin replacing the old gnarled tissue. It shone iridescent, catching the light and splintering it into patterns.
That felt strange too. Her scar might have been ugly, but it was hers.
I wanted to see this.
And Kara’s song had shifted more than her skin.
“My back,” she whispered. She stretched out limbs she shouldn’t have had in the first place. Felt them flare out behind her.
Felt the brush of her own feathers against her back.
Feathers?
But if I have feathers, then—
“You gave me wings,” she whispered.
Chapter Thirty-six
“Yes,” Kara sang, and the sky became rich midnight velvet, spangled with more stars than spacebus driver Sue had ever seen. “I gave you wings.”
Sue could feel them behind her, an unfamiliar weight of muscle and bone rising from her back. But they were light, impossibly light. She’d never thought of her arms and legs as heavy, but compared to her wings, they felt leaden.
She flexed the joints again, experimenting. The wings flared out behind her back, full and proud.
She turned her head, wanting to look at them splayed out behind her. It would burn, she thought, burn like looking at Kara’s wings, at the musicians’.
It didn’t matter. These wings were hers. She looked.
Feathers cascaded from her shoulders, so bright her vision filled with stinging light. She closed her eyes against it, and afterimages glowed against the black of her closed eyes.
“You gave me wings,” she said again.
Kara hummed louder, like she didn’t want to lose her place in the song.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Sue said. “I’m just your human.”
Kara laughed, a little break in her song that made the illusion shimmer just a little. Sue caught a glimpse of brighter gold from Kara’s eyes, saw a shadow of red stain Kara’s lips, felt a little welcome throb in her chest where Kara had bit her.
“You meant to do it,” Sue said. She flapped her wings, testing them. “You meant to give these to me.”
Kara sang louder. One long, pure note. One word to go with it. “Yes.”
Kara grinned, a fierce smirk that looked wrong on an angel’s face, and shook her head. Maybe it should have embarrassed Sue to know she hadn’t figured flying out, but it didn’t. Not when Kara was smiling at her like that.
Sue remembered Kara’s fangs, sharpened stone with flame behind them. She missed their bite, wanted Kara to lower her head and bite, wanted to feel the warm honey of an angel’s blood flow out to stain Kara’s mouth.
She looked up again at Kara. At the pristine thing Kara’s song had made her into. Her eyes looked almost human. But they glowed, golden flecks glittering amid the brown, a hint of the fires she carried within. And the ridges that would someday become horns rose from her forehead, and behind her head shone a bright sun of light.
Sue took a step closer hesitantly, like her new wing bones might shatter if she moved them too far too fast. But she knew what she wanted to do. And she needed to do it with the wings Kara had given her.
She bent forward just a little and hunched her shoulders down. Then she stretched her wings out in front of her. Still unsure how exactly her new wings worked, she wrapped them around Kara as best she could.
“I don’t know if angels hug each other like this,” she said. “But I wanted to thank you. You didn’t have to give this to me.”
Kara laughed. “We do hold each other like this.” She ended her sentence with a vibrating hum. “Or did. We comforted our children this way.” She threw back her head and opened her mouth in a swell of song.
The landscape had been empty, but now Sue could see figures far off, standing at the shoreline of a rocky beach. One was small, one large: a man and a child. Both had pale skin, and both were crowned with halos of light, like Sue’s and Kara’s. Feathery brilliance hung from the backs of both.
The child knelt among the rocks. Sue couldn’t see his face, but his drooping wings to
ld her he was worried or afraid. Sue thought of the boy in the riot and froze. Her hands shook. Even here in heaven, the kids can be afraid.
The man bent forward, like Sue had done, only much smoother. Sue wondered whether angels could blush.
The man wrapped his wings around the child, a curtain of light. Sue stared for as long as she could, even though it burned her eyes.
It was hard to look at him, but she saw the feathers at the edges of his wings.
Sue closed her eyes against the afterimages and turned back to Kara. “I didn’t mean to treat you like a child.”
Kara didn’t answer in words, but the tone of the chant said, that doesn’t matter. I understood.
Sue blinked. When did I learn to understand your singing?
“Besides,” Kara whispered, “we can’t do that any longer. Not without wings.”
Right. Sue reached out a hand to touch Kara’s forehead. She ran her fingers over the ridges that had been her horns. They felt good under her fingertips, a hint of the Kara she knew. Smoother than her granite skin. Sue traced them again with her fingers and took a deep breath.
A growl from Kara brought her back to herself. The noise was all wrong, pulled from an angel’s throat. But familiar all the same. Beloved.
“Careful,” Kara said, the word a rough breath amid the song. “I can’t concentrate if you keep doing that.”
Sue snickered and rubbed Kara’s horn stub again. It shifted under her touch. Like it wanted to change back.
“The song,” Kara rasped.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“What?”
“The song doesn’t matter. Not right now. I closed my eyes.”
Kara snarled. Sue slipped her hand away, not wanting a horn to sprout through it, and laughed again. Kara’s growl faded into thunder Sue hoped was a purr.
But through it all, Kara kept humming.
Sue pressed her lips to Kara’s. They parted, softness and stone beneath it, somewhere between the illusion and the real. Sue could taste her own blood on Kara’s lips, a faint coppery tang. She slipped her tongue into Kara’s mouth, wondering if she would taste Kara’s flame. Kara shivered, her chant breaking off in the middle of a note.
