She took the parchment from him and unrolled it, though it did her no good. “What does it say?”
“It comes straight from Mabb’s hand. She requires the deaths of five Demons. It seems there has been some…encroaching of the Demon population on locations in the Lightworld, at the Southern borders where the Strip does not separate us from the Darkworld. She wants to send a message to the Demon king.” He paused. “If you’d rather not take the assignment…”
Not take the assignment! An assignment from Mabb’s own hand was a higher honor than Ayla had ever received.
“I’ll have a messenger bring over your things in the morning,” Garret continued. “We can sleep a bit late, perhaps visit Sanctuary. It would be appropriate, to begin our life together there.”
She forced herself not to cringe at his words. Instead she smiled. “I would not wish to keep Her Majesty waiting.”
He nodded. “Her Majesty. It is a post you might one day hold, Ayla. If you would accept me.”
“It would be far in the future, if the day even came. You know as well as I do that your sister is immortal. And to speak of her death, even in speculation, is treason.” Ayla looked furtively over her shoulder, as if one of the Queene’s spies would jump from the trunk at the foot of Garret’s bed and drag her to the dungeons.
Or perhaps Garret was one of Mabb’s spies, trying to trick her? No, that was ridiculous. Garret had never given her any cause to doubt his loyalty. Living at Court had allowed the seed of suspicion to grow into a sinister garden in her, and she cursed it.
Garret’s palm closed over the back of her neck, his tongue snaked over her earlobe. She pulled away. To distract herself from the throbbing in her veins, she congratulated herself on her foresight in bringing a weapon. She could start off for the Darkworld immediately.
“Ayla, I wish you would not go,” Garret tried, but he broke off, helplessly indulgent. It was a practiced expression, Ayla was sure, but it did not annoy her. So many at Court perfected their mannerisms in that way, and it was often difficult to drop them when outside of the Palace walls.
She pulled open the door and swung the strap of the scabbard over her chest, the weight of the weapon nearly knocking her over the threshold. “Demons are clumsy and easy to kill. I will not be away for long.”
“And when you return, you will give me your definite answer?” Garret’s voice took on a teasing edge. He’d already decided what her definite answer was.
Taking a deep breath, she swung out the door and opened her wings. Before descending to the ground below, she turned to him. “When I return, I will say yes.”
Nine
T he Strip. An assault on the senses. A feast of sin and vice. A haven for the lowest souls—and the lower soulless—in the Underground. Malachi surveyed it all with pronounced distaste. His companion shouted over the group of mortals clamoring before a covered stand. Keller’s voice was heard, his request fulfilled and he handed Malachi a fragile paper cup that looked as though it had been used—and perhaps washed, though Malachi would not have expected so much from the establishment—before.
“Drink up, buddy, drink up,” Keller urged, raising his cup before quickly gulping down the foul-smelling liquid inside.
The vapors off the potion stung Malachi’s nose. He would not drink it under any circumstance. “I thought you brought me to see the healer, not to become intoxicated.”
“She’s a healer,” Keller said with a shrug. “Might as well let her heal us of liver damage, too. Get our money’s worth.”
Trade! That other bizarre force that consumed the mortals. How could he have forgotten. “I have no money,” Malachi said bluntly, offering the cup back to Keller. “Not to pay for this drink, not to pay for healing.”
“Drink’s on me,” Keller said, eyeing the cup. “Unless you don’t want it?”
Malachi gave up the malodorous liquid and watched with disdain as the Human consumed it in one swallow. Keller made a guttural noise, eyes going wide before squeezing shut tight. Then his body shook, like a man dying of exposure, before he let out a satisfied “Ah.”
“The healer doesn’t work like that,” he assured Malachi with a voice that sounded damaged by the strong drink. “Well, she might for me, but she won’t ask you for money. She likes the strange ones, and I bet she’s never seen one of you.”
“Angels fall often,” Malachi said simply. What could possibly tempt his brethren to willingly give up their immortality? The flesh of the dirty women, Human and unHuman, who displayed themselves provocatively on their walks up and down the Strip? Could a creature have inspired such lust in him before his fall?
Yes, his conscience whispered to him. One could have. And his rage swelled anew at the thought of sodden red hair flashing above the water, strange eyes flaring to take in the sight of him.
“Mortal blood,” he cursed under his breath. Yes, he did lust for her. Desire, so fierce it froze the breath in his newly Human lungs, overcame him at the thought of gripping her pale neck with his big hands and squeezing, squeezing until the fragile bones and fibers within snapped and the life gurgled from her body. Immortal or not, she had mortal blood. He could kill her. Would kill her. He would find a way.
Keller led on through the crowded tunnel, though the way parted easily for them with Malachi in tow. Curious whispers followed them, as well as stares and brazen hands reaching out to touch the curiosity that was Malachi.
“Have they never seen a creature with wings before?” Malachi grumbled, slapping aside a scaly, blue hand that had curled around his biceps.
Unperturbed by the attention, Keller plowed on through a group of pale Humans. “None like yours. I set you up with a sweet patch job. Hey, watch out for these guys, they’re Vampires.”
The creatures in question opened their mouths, baring gleaming, pointed teeth. One of them, a female with severely short-cut hair and a tight, leather bodice that pushed her breasts up nearly to her neck, stepped forward and placed a palm on Malachi’s chest, her touch icy and dry.
“Want to play with me, pretty birdie?” She laughed, showing dangerous, yellowed teeth. She leaned closer, her open mouth inches from his throat. “Come on now, you know you want to.”
“I recognize the death on you, unholy one,” he snarled, and the Vampire pulled back with a hiss, as though burned.
“He’s a Death Angel, don’t touch him!” she shrieked to her companions, and they laughed at her.
One, a male with a bald head marked with a tattooist’s blue ink, shoved her away from the group. “He’s a mortal, you stupid bitch.” This brought another round of laughter from them. “What’s he going to do to you? Besides serve as a good meal?”
“I’ll be no meal for you,” Malachi warned, ignoring Keller’s tug at his elbow.
“Let’s not get into a fight now, not with opponents who have mouths full of weapons,” the Bio-mech urged, trying to pull him away. “There needs to be something of you left by the time we get to the healer, or else it’s a wasted trip.”
The bald Vampire chuckled. “Listen to your coward friend. He knows what he’s talking about.”
A tall, thin male with lanky black hair hissed at Keller, and he jumped, pulling Malachi nearly off his feet in an attempt to get away.
“Were I not mortal,” Malachi began, then realized his mistake. Were he not mortal, he would not have had the free will to do these soulless creatures harm.
The Vampire knew it, too. He laughed and grabbed the female by the wrist. Sneering at Malachi he spat, “But you are. And I’ll make sure you know it next time we run into each other.”
“Yes, thank you,” Keller said, practically bowing in his gratitude to the creature. “Thanks for the warning. Mac, let’s get out of here.”
Keller did not speak again until they were a good distance from the creatures. “Do you intentionally try to get yourself killed or is it just a natural talent?”
“I do not like the undead.” And why should he? Their souls were dest
royed the moment they chose the Earth over the promise of Heaven. Less a promise now than a far-off dream, but it was no excuse. Things without souls were unclean.
Keller turned and stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. The Human’s face, usually a wry mask, took on a look of frightened seriousness. “Like them or not, you’re not indestructible anymore, man, and I never was. Do me a favor, the way I’m doing you a favor, and don’t get our asses nailed to the wall.”
They plunged on through the teeming masses, the jostles and jabs getting sharper, a small cluster of curious onlookers wending their way after them. Malachi did not like having so many eyes on him. “I grow tired of this place. Where is the healer?”
“Just up ahead,” Keller called over his shoulder. “That’s the healer’s sign.”
Above the heads of the creatures on the ground, Malachi saw a mass of half-painted metal bars supporting raw, wooden planks stained by drips of water. A second row of stalls and shops were accessible from the scaffold, though foot traffic was less heavy on the upper level than below.
“The shop with the blue hand. That’s her,” Keller said, grabbing the rail of the ladder leading to the second level. He shouldered his way onto the steep steps and didn’t wait for Malachi. There would have been no way to, without being crushed by the other creatures climbing to the top. Though the crowd was thinner above, it was squeezed into a smaller space and moved far too fast for anyone to pause.
Grasping the rail, Malachi rose a step at a time on shaking legs. Climbing was not like flying. It unnerved him, being so high up without the reassuring resistance of the wind beneath him. But that had all been an illusion, hadn’t it? He’d never sailed on the wind. His physical body had never been for him but an illusion for the souls he collected. He had moved through the air because he was meant to. He wondered if this mortal body could even fly.
The healer’s sign was a configuration of glowing blue, bent into the shape of hand. In the center, more radiant tubes, pink and yellow, formed an open eye that flickered as they approached. The door was a flimsy, black woven screen stretched across a metal frame with a wooden slat across the center. The smell of pungent smoke drifted out. Keller pulled the door open and ushered Malachi inside.
The room was dark, lit only by more glowing tubes, these black, giving off an eerie blue light. The walls were painted in blue, yellow, pink, the colors glowing as if illuminated like the sign outside. A row of chairs lined one wall, stopping at the mouth of a short hallway. There were doors, all closed, painted with the same strange symbols that decorated the entryway. In the center of the main room sat a wooden platform. An elderly woman with short white hair, dressed in a loose white garment, sat in the center of a glowing circle, her eyes closed. She did not acknowledge them as they entered.
“What do we do now?” Malachi asked, his voice seemingly too large for the room. It rang off the painted stone walls and echoed in the high-ceilinged space.
“Would you just—” Keller shushed him and flapped a hand. In a much quieter tone, he said, “Take a seat. When she’s ready for us, then she’ll say something.”
The chairs were empty. Malachi took the one nearest the door, staring impatiently at the woman. She did not appear to know anyone was in her presence, but maintained her serene pose, legs crossed loosely at the ankles as she sat, face lifted to the sky.
It was a long wait. Malachi shifted on the chair, trying to learn the most comfortable way to arrange his wings, yelping, startled when he bent them. It was easier, he found, to pull his feet up and perch on the edge of the seat, flaring his wings slightly behind him.
“Would you watch those things,” Keller whispered fiercely. “Just settle down, okay?”
“Your friend does not possess that grace known as patience,” a light, feminine voice observed, and Malachi turned to the woman on the dais. Though her eyes were still closed, she reached one arm to beckon him.
“Go,” Keller urged, pushing on his shoulder, and Malachi climbed down from the chair.
Cushions were scattered around the base of the platform. Malachi knelt on one, wondering if it would be a sin to bow his head in deference to her, if it would be idol worship.
“You’re making powerful enemies, though you do not know it yet,” she said without preamble. “Tread carefully now.”
“I have already been warned about the Vampires.” Malachi did not care for cryptic speeches.
“I do not speak of the Vampires. Others, more powerful. Winged warriors who seek to destroy you.”
The Angels who had torn his wings and cast him out. Truly, she had a gift for telling him what had already passed. “I do not want your false predictions. I came here for healing.”
She opened her eyes then. “You wish to be healed.”
He nodded. “You are a healer, are you not?”
“I can heal, but not in the way you wish. I cannot restore you to your former self. I cannot make you that creature you wish to be.” She closed her eyes again, as if to indicate that their interlude was finished. “You are healed, in as much as I can help you.”
Keller did not speak until they stood once more on the crowded, swaying scaffold. They stayed as close to the wall as possible, the river of unwashed bodies flowing around them with loud complaints.
Keller scratched the metal plate behind his ear and asked, “What did she mean? People want to destroy you? What people?”
“Tricks and lies to make herself appear otherworldly.” If he hadn’t already known the answers to the Human’s questions, Malachi might have been less irritated by them. He pushed his way into the pattern of foot traffic, then down the stairs, hoping he traveled in the direction they had arrived from.
“Hey, wait up!” Keller was trapped behind a particularly slow-moving Ogress who turned and hissed at him, the bony spikes down her back lifting in a menacing display. Malachi left the Human, eager to be away from the Strip, longing for the familiar dankness and isolation of the Darkworld.
Malachi found, to his frustration, that he could not read the signs posted at the entrances to the tunnels leading away from the neutral city. He recognized the looks of the creatures, however, and he followed, at a great distance, a group of Human vagabonds into one of the tunnels.
It was good to be alone, to have time to think. The Human, having shown him the ways of mortal creatures, was no longer useful, and this was as practical a way as any other Malachi could think of to be rid of him. Now, with all the knowledge he required to survive, he could concentrate on finding the Faery and killing her.
And after that task is finished, what then? a voice he’d never heard before, a voice that sounded startlingly like his own mortal voice, chided him. Even after she is dead, you will still be mortal.
The voice was infuriatingly right. What would be left to him, once he’d killed the Faery who’d damned him? He could not return to the Host. He would never see another of his kind until the day his mortal body withered and released his soul. And then, all that was left was to return to the Aether Globe and wait with the other trapped souls until the Almighty was found.
The Aether Globe illuminated in his mind, brilliant blue and green swirling behind a polished surface like glass. Truly there was no surface, and the souls, milky and seemingly liquid as they slid over and wound around each other, were not contained by anything more than the desire in each mortal being to return to the divine. Every day, the number in the globe grew, every day the slick, cool mortal will that kept them in stretched thinner, until, Malachi imagined, it would burst as a soap bubble might.
As an Angel, he had known all things to be possible, the universe limitless. And now, to his great dismay, he could not imagine the Aether Globe surviving such relentless expansion. His mind was enslaved by the physical laws of the mortal world.
Disgusted, he stared down at his feet, ugly and square, with oddly hairy toes, as he walked. The sounds of the Humans ahead of him grew fainter as they traveled farther ahead, and he listened to the
dripping of dirty water as his path wound deeper into the Darkworld.
At a divergence in the tunnel, he found a new sound that intrigued him. Steel against steel, perishable creatures in combat. Though his body had become mortal, his instincts urged him closer at his own peril. He saw the mouth of a dark tunnel, lit with flickering, sickly green, the way the Humans would have gone. And the other path, radiant with a warmer kind of light and the sure, clear sounds of excitement that beckoned him.
He crept closer, cautious, toward the source of the battle sounds.
This way was dry and uphill, and none of those undulating water shadows showed on the walls ahead. Golden circles of harsh, electric light burned around their tiny glass sources, hanging at intervals on strings that swayed them out of Malachi’s way as he ducked past. The sting of blood was on the air. I might attract those Vampiric creatures the Human had warned him of, but it would not call other Death Angels to the scene. The scent was soulless, inHuman. He sneered at the thought of all the pitiful creatures, little more than animals, really, and their inane fight for the world above.
A haughty expression felt good on his face. He might wear one more often.
As he came closer and the sounds became louder, shadows began to flicker on the walls. A long, lithe shadow, seemingly dancing between clumsy, solid ones. It dipped, spun, ducked, almost playful. What new creature was this, that had grace and skill and beauty in combat in this festering and unlovely Darkworld?
Around another bend, he saw the creature, and rage boiled through his new veins. The light above her head threw a caul of gold over her flame-colored hair that beat behind her as if suspended in water as she whipped through her fighting dance. Her body was impossibly small; standing beside him her head would have come only to his chest, and her arms, though muscular and straining as she wielded a huge blade, seemed thin and fragile compared to his own. Her skin was so white as to be nearly translucent, and two luminous strips stood out against her hair, twitched with a life of their own. Grotesque, leathery wings folded at her back, and his hands itched to grab them, to rip them from her body, the way she had taken his from him.
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