by SM Reine
“Was this worth it?” she asked. After all of the close-range gunfire, it sounded like she was whispering. “Killing so many people to take the Haven?”
James closed his eyes so that he wouldn’t have to look at her. He thought that the sight of the dead kopides should have haunted him, but it was Elise’s face that flitted through his mind.
“Yes. It was.”
He almost sounded convincing.
“Maybe…maybe this will be good,” Hannah said. She tugged at the hem of her shirt and fidgeted with her sleeves. “I’ve been worried about Nathaniel. What he’s been doing with magic. At least this way he’ll be held back a little, and—and you can teach him how to handle whatever’s left.”
He rubbed a hand on the back of his neck. The skin was still sensitive from the spell that used to be there. “I’m not going with you.”
“What?”
“I can’t go with you into the Haven. There’s too much I have to do here.” James coughed into his hand. “Sorry. I assumed that you realized that.”
“You know what it means if Nathaniel and I go into the Haven without you,” Hannah said. “Didn’t you ever read Pamela’s papers on interdimensional temporal distortion?”
James used to use them as sleep aids. “I read them once or twice,” he said.
“Time runs at a different speed between Earth and the Haven. It only takes a minute here for an entire day to pass over there. Nathaniel and I will be dead within a month.” She paused, giving him an expectant look. He didn’t speak. “So…you’re saying that you’re okay with that?”
“You’ll live a full, happy life, safe from the perils of this world. Whatever amount of time lapses on this side is irrelevant.”
“Cut the bullshit, James.” Hannah jabbed a finger into his chest. “Irrelevant? What is that supposed to even mean? Your son will be dead. Dead. You won’t see him become an adult, or get married. You won’t see your own grandkids. It doesn’t matter if it takes fifty years for that to happen in the Haven—it will only be a few weeks over here.”
“My feelings in the matter aren’t nearly as important as your safety, Hannah. You can both have a good life in the Haven. That is what matters.”
Hannah made a disgusted noise, flinging her hands into the air. “I don’t know why I bother. You missed the first ten years. Why should you care about the rest of his life?”
“That’s not fair, and you know it,” James said. “If you had told me about him—”
Footsteps shuffled on the tunnel above them, and they both fell silent. Nathaniel jumped to the bottom again.
“Found it in the shed,” he said, handing the key to James.
Hannah gave him a thin smile. “Great.”
James turned the gun’s safety off and opened the door.
He was greeted by impenetrable darkness on the other side. James felt along the wall until he found a switch, and a bank of fluorescents buzzed to life.
He entered slowly, gun at the ready. The room looked like an office space that had been abandoned in a large, craggy cave. The banks of computers facing the back wall were strangely mundane—but the wall itself was not.
A sweeping arch of ancient petroglyphs marked the wall of the cave in the outline of a door. There were cavemen and animals, abstract swirls and loops. It was the physical representation of a very ancient form of magic, the kind of arcane power that had been lost to time. James had only seen such markings in books before.
He set the gun on the desk and ran his hands over the wall. The petroglyphs whispered with power.
They weren’t meant to look like a door. They were a door, just as surely as the gates that hovered over Reno were doors. But these weren’t of ethereal craftsmanship. It wasThe makers had been mortal—the work of the ancient mages that had preceded James and his forefathers.
Once he realized that the petroglyphs were a door, he could see other features of a temple. The wall looked like it had been flattened by hand tools. Faint circles on the floor had been rubbed away by time, but must have once signified ritual spaces.
“What is this?” Hannah asked in a hushed voice, as though she realized that they had entered holy ground.
“This is how we get into the Haven,” James said. When he ran his hands over the marks, they murmured promises of magic into his mind. “But I don’t think it’s meant to open from this side. The Union must brute force it with the computers.”
Nathaniel had sat down at one of the terminals. “They’ve run wires through the wall,” he said, typing on the keyboard. “They’ve got a program that opens the door. But…I don’t see how.”
“Be careful with that,” Hannah said.
Nathaniel smiled sheepishly.
The generator hummed to life, belching dust out of a vent near the floor. It didn’t just surge with electricity—James felt a surge of magic, too.
Gray light flared, temporarily blinding him. When it faded, the wall was simply gone, leaving a hole where the door had been. There was nothing on the other side but an empty cave.
James and Hannah stood shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the door, staring through the door.
“That’s it,” James said. “That’s the way into the Haven.” He found the strength to smile at Hannah. “Would you like to take a look?”
After a moment’s consideration, Hannah shook her head. “I’ll have plenty of time to look once I live there. I should go back for Ariane.” She glanced at Nathaniel, then lowered her voice to a whisper. “If you’ve made up your mind, then this will probably be your last chance to talk to him.”
Hannah kissed Nathaniel on the top of the head and left. He rolled his eyes.
The door didn’t stay open long. Five minutes passed before it shut again, silently and without warning. James prowled around the door, pretending to study the marks as though they were the most fascinating things in the world. And they sort of were—at any other time, he would have been utterly absorbed.
But being left alone with his estranged son was far too distracting. Especially when James had no clue what to say.
How was he meant to say goodbye to a total stranger?
Hannah rushed back to the van, heart heavy with apprehension. Seizing the entrance to the Haven was meant to be some kind of victory, but she felt no relief. Not after seeing Nathaniel perform that kind of magic. And definitely not after watching James gun down a kopis.
That life—one of fighting, pain, and fear—was nothing that she had ever wanted in her son’s life.
But they were about to escape that. Permanently.
Hannah was so absorbed in her thoughts that she almost stumbled into the open air of the highway before realizing that Ariane was outside the van.
And she wasn’t alone.
Hannah jumped behind a tree, pressing her back flat against its trunk.
She had only glimpsed the man standing with Ariane for a half second, but it was more than enough to recognize Metaraon—the angel that had haunted her nightmares since she was a girl. His face was branded into her brain.
Her first instinct was to run, but Hannah couldn’t leave Ariane alone with an angel. Not in her current physical state.
“Tell me why you came here, Ariane Garin,” Metaraon said. His voice was low, meant only for Ariane, but the morning was even quieter. Hannah had no problems making out the words.
“Why do you think I’ve come here?” Ariane asked. She sounded teasing—almost flirtatious. Hannah wanted to jump out and shake the airheaded bitch.
“I think that you’re trying to leave Earth.”
“I am.”
“And you didn’t think to ask me of my thoughts on it?”
“You’ve never been one to talk of your thoughts with me,” Ariane said. “I am not your property. I will go where I want.”
The quiet that followed her declaration was long enough that Hannah thought that they must have left. She pushed aside a few branches so that she could see them standing beside the van.
Metaraon looked like an ordinary man. His brown hair was longer than Hannah remembered, tied back into a ponytail. He shouldn’t have been particularly imposing. Even though he was tall, he wasn’t extremely muscular, and there was something honest about his face. But Hannah knew that to be deception. There was absolutely nothing honest about the Voice of God.
“You’re fortunate that you didn’t reach the Haven before I located you. Very fortunate,” he said.
“Why? Because you would have missed me?” Ariane’s arms looped around his neck.
“Because I would have been forced to take drastic measures to bring you back.”
“You’re sweet.”
Metaraon pushed Ariane against the truck, seized her chin, and kissed her.
Hannah clapped her hands over her mouth to muffle her gasp.
She shouldn’t have been shocked. She had been there the day that Metaraon had picked Ariane from the coven’s adepts, like they were all on sale. He didn’t have any problems using human women for his machinations. Why would he have a problem using their bodies, too?
But if they were kissing—and if Isaac was dead—then what did that say about the pregnancy?
Hannah took shallow breaths to calm herself. She had to get James. Angels were normal to him—what she considered worthy of mortal terror, James considered to be a regular Tuesday afternoon.
When Hannah’s eyes opened again, she caught a glint of metal under the moonlight.
Metaraon was holding a knife.
He released Ariane, and even in the darkness, even at that distance, Hannah could see that she was shaking. Ariane knew the knife was there. She wasn’t that stupid.
“Won’t you let me keep one of my babies?” Ariane asked, her voice painfully soft. She wasn’t flirting anymore.
“Neither of them were ever yours,” Metaraon said.
He pressed the knife against her belly.
Hannah moved without thinking.
She jumped around the tree, heart pounding. She wasn’t a fighter—she had never thrown a punch in her life. But she couldn’t just stand there. She couldn’t watch Ariane be victimized again.
Hannah scooped a heavy branch off the ground and wielded it like a bat.
Ariane’s eyes focused on her over Metaraon’s shoulder. “Hannah, no!”
The angel turned, and Hannah swung.
He caught the branch. Jerked it out of her hands. Flung it into the trees.
Then he stepped forward and plunged the blade into Hannah’s heart.
XII
A half hour passed in the cave, and then an hour. James started to get restless. He stood in the open doorway leading to the tunnel, listening for any signs of Hannah and Ariane’s approach. Aside from the steady drip-drip of rain, everything was silent.
“Where are they?” he muttered.
Nathaniel shrugged. “I dunno.” The Union hadn’t taken Minesweeper off of their interdimensional control terminals, and he had played at least a dozen games.
James’s worry grew the longer he stood in the doorway. “Ariane’s probably having problems getting up the hill,” he finally said. “I’ll run down and help. Stay here.”
Nathaniel rolled his eyes and turned back to the computer.
When James climbed out of the tunnel, he found everything just the way he had left it: the body leaking blood onto the dirt, the damaged outbuilding, and Nathaniel’s magic splattered everywhere. A soft rain was already washing Hannah’s footprints away.
But the further he got from the horrors of the outpost, the more peaceful the forest became. The soft rain had driven all of the animals into hiding, so it was quiet, almost idyllic.
He didn’t even feel the angel until the highway came into sight.
James stopped on the trail, staring at the scene in front of him.
Shock blanked his mind, so that the images came to him in confused fragments: Blood underneath Hannah’s body. Her hands wrapped around a knife—a knife that jutted from her chest. And behind her, a crouched man with wings.
The angel’s figure concealed what he was doing on the pavement, but James could just make out Ariane’s feet on the other side.
James couldn’t feel his extremities or his pounding heart.
No.
Metaraon straightened as if James had called to him. A gusting breeze sent a couple of golden feathers drifting into a trickle of runoff near his feet—water that ran red.
“What have you done?” James asked.
“I’m taking care of loose ends,” Metaraon said. “And you may be the loosest of them all.”
The angel swooped toward him, crossing the space in an instant. James didn’t even have time to react.
Metaraon reached for him.
His hand was huge—so much bigger than a hand had any right to be, as if the fingers stretched into endless eternity, and the palm grew to occupy the spaces between. Metaraon didn’t seem to grab James’s face as much as engulf it.
The highway, and the bodies, vanished. Darkness consumed him.
For an instant, James felt the rushing sensation of falling, tumbling, plummeting. The wind rushed in his ears. He couldn’t seem to draw breath into his lungs, because there was no air to breathe.
James had been severed from his body, leaving him floating in nothingness. But he wasn’t alone. Metaraon’s voice echoed from the void.
“We need to talk, Mr. Faulkner,” Metaraon said. “I have a problem.”
The garden appeared in the gray depths of the void, displayed behind James’s eyelids like a movie.
The Tree itself was a looming tombstone with twisted black branches, its roots wrapped around the world, and James realized with horror that it was dying. The moss on its bark had dried out. The river frothed over its banks, but it no longer bore water—it was as crimson as the mud underneath Metaraon’s feet.
And Elise was there.
She wasn’t the auburn-haired woman that most frequently occupied James’s memories. It was Elise as she was now: a demon, slender and fragile and pale-skinned. She was naked, entangled in the branches of the Tree. One branch had grown across her eyes, locked over her face like a blindfold.
She was trapped.
Metaraon’s voice murmured through James’s mind. “This is my problem. She’s miserable. Malfunctioning. The power is there, but the will is not. Tell me what I must do to spur her into motion.”
Miserable? Malfunctioning?
The vision of Elise tangled in the Tree seemed to grow until it consumed him. Her slack face, limp fingers, a chest rising and falling with shallow breaths. James had kissed her cold corpse, and yet she hadn’t looked so dead to him in the Union’s freezer as she did in that Tree.
Every fantasy he had indulged in—imagining her burning a path through the garden, locked in battle with cherubim and God Himself, on the verge of bloody victory—was shattered.
He had no body to feel, but his fear took hold like the roots of the Tree. “Let me go to her,” James said. “Take me there.”
The angel’s laugh was merciless. “I’m no fool, James Faulkner.”
The vision of the Tree faded, taking Elise with it.
“You don’t mind if I take a look through your mind, do you?” Metaraon asked. “Show me what makes her happy.”
It was a demand, not a request, and James couldn’t help but respond. Memories surged to the surface of his mind.
Suddenly, he was back in Reno.
James sat at the dining room table in his old apartment above Motion and Dance. The red glow of late evening flooded the room. James looked down to see a fork and steak knife in his hands. He could feel the weight of eyes on his back, as though Metaraon stood behind him, but he had no control over his body.
And Elise sat opposite him, looking totally normal and unaware. She was wearing a white t-shirt branded for the studio with her hair in a ponytail.
James remembered this moment. Elise had just finished teaching one of the interpretive ballet classes, inten
ded for children four to five years of age. It was just months after Motion and Dance had opened, and they were struggling for business—a very pleasant struggle, in comparison to what they had used to fight for.
He wanted to shout. To warn her.
He couldn’t move.
“I’m not a babysitter,” Elise said, cutting into her steak with the same viciousness that she used while skinning the bodies of demons. “I’m not even a dancer, for Christ’s sake, but I’m especially not a nanny, and if one more parent dumps their snot-faced kid off in class to spread norovirus to all of the other students—and without even having the right shoes!—I swear to you, I will cut her like a—”
“I’ll talk to Mrs. Ferguson,” James said, interrupting her tirade before it could gather steam. “I’ll make sure our policy is more explicit. No sick children in interpretive ballet.”
She glared at her steak as though it had Mrs. Ferguson’s face. “That bitch did this last year, too. The whole class will be barfing on Thursday. And then I’m going to be sick the day after.”
“You don’t have to teach the interpretive ballet class, Elise. I’ve told you that before. I’m happy to hire another instructor.”
“That’s not the point.” She rolled her eyes. “I’m trying to brood, James. Can I brood, please?”
“Sorry,” he said, hiding his smile behind his wine glass. It was a genuine smile. Elise was so young. He loved to see her fretting over stupid things, like irritating parents and ballet classes, rather than saving the world. “Go on.”
Elise opened her mouth, then closed it again. She gave a rueful smile. “I can’t remember what I was saying.”
“Something about snot-faced children?” James offered.
“I think I was about to threaten to kill one of your clients.”
“Oh, yes. I almost forgot.”
Despite the smiles, she still looked overwhelmed. Elise knew that she didn’t have to teach any of the dance classes, yet she did anyway, and James knew why.
