Queene of Light

by Jennifer Armintrout

  “You are tired.” Ayla managed to pull her gaze from the Darkling for a moment. “You should sleep. He will die if you are watching or not.”

  Keller shook his head, looking sad. How long could he have possibly known the Darkling, and he mourned him? Humans were odd creatures. “No, I don’t want him to go alone. It’s not fair.”

  “He will not be alone. I will be here.” Only if she stayed until the end would her conscience be clear.

  The Human waited a few moments, obviously torn between fatigue and loyalty to his new friend. “You won’t kill him?”

  “I will not have the chance.” Her relief shamed her. “I will merely wait to see him die.”

  The Human went away, muttering something that Ayla ignored. The Darkling was too large for the surface he lay on. His wings, strange objects patched with odd bits of metal, crushed against the rolled edges of the table and jutted over the sides. One of his arms hung nearly to the floor, twisted at his shoulder at what looked like an uncomfortable angle.

  Ayla contemplated the arm. His skin was darker than it had been when he’d been immortal. He’d been almost as pale as herself then, only more blue-tinged than translucent. Now, tawny-brown stretched over his muscles. Those were hideous, bunched and bulky like a Human’s. The Fae races were leaner, muscles stretched taut as lute strings across their bones. There was something about this ugly creature that compelled her, though.

  Why hadn’t he shrunk from the Succubus? If the creature had been wearing Ayla’s face, he had all the more reason to run from it. Hadn’t she made it clear before that she would kill him on sight?

  The memory of how she’d found him, ensnared in the arms of the Succubus, brought her blood to her face. She did not wish to acknowledge—but could not ignore—the other possibility: that he’d gone to the Succubus willingly, thinking it was Ayla’s arms around him.

  The Darkling moaned, the first sound he’d made in hours. His face tightened in agony, and his chest jerked, the skin drawing tight over his throat as he pulled in a shallow breath.

  Then it was done. His body relaxed with a sigh. He lay utterly still. A disappointing end to a long wait.

  Ayla pressed the heel of her hand to her chest, pushing hard to quell the ache that suddenly intensified there. As if her own breath had left her as his had, her throat squeezed closed and dark spots marred the sides of her vision.

  Get yourself under control, her mind commanded, but her body would not listen. Sudden wetness sprung to her eyes, which she attributed to fatigue after all this long time waiting. This is what you wanted!

  Taking a deep breath, she stood, fists pressed to the strangely hollow place beneath her ribs. She approached the Darkling’s motionless body, one hand reaching, trembling, toward the arm that fell over the side of the table.

  “I am sorry I did not have the courage to give you a good death,” she whispered, then felt silly for speaking to a dead thing. As if speaking had broken the spell over her, her fear and sadness fled. She gripped the arm and placed it over Malachi’s chest.

  The flesh seemed to come alive under her palm. Against her will, the Other Sight sprang into her vision. Bright red sparks of her life raced down her arm to the Darkling’s body, feeding him, healing him.

  She could not let go. At first, because her skin seemed fused to his. Then, because his hand gripped her wrist. She tore herself from the Other Sight, but she could not free herself from his grasp.

  The Darkling sat up, his expression murderous. Still, he held her. “What have you done to me?”

  She couldn’t find her voice. Assassin’s instinct screamed at her to reach for her dagger, but another instinct warned her not to move. Not because she was afraid of him. She was oddly unafraid. And that was, perhaps, something that should have frightened her.

  “I have not done anything to you,” she said, forming the ugly, Human words carefully. “You were hurt. Your friend, the Human, helped you.”

  “You hurt me!” he shoved her, and she let herself fall. It was a concession that put her far from his reach and seemed to appease him some.

  “I did not. It was another creature who fed off of you. It wore my face, but it was not me.” She stood slowly, hands in front of herself to ward off any further attack.

  For a moment, it seemed he would not believe her. His hands flexed to fists as he stared at her, unable or unwilling to comprehend the truth. “It was you.”

  “If it was me, I would have killed you, not…” She couldn’t think of the word in Human, and the Fae word was too vulgar, made it too real. This Darkling thought he had shared intimacies with her that she’d never experienced with anyone, even of her own kind. The thought brought flames to her face. “It was a creature of your world that did this.”

  He stood, then slumped down, crouching so the tips of his wings barely touched the floor. Everything about him seemed heavy, as if invisible roots held him to the floor. “This is not my world.”

  Though the Human language was limited, simple, the pain in his words filled the air. Ayla knelt down, trying to see his face behind the hair that had fallen in front of it. He did not look sad. Grim and angry, but not sad.

  “I am sorry for you.” The urge to comfort him with her touch was almost unbearable. But if she touched him, she would not have the courage to kill him later.

  No. She would never have the courage. She hadn’t killed him before. She wouldn’t do it now.

  Her failure shocked her to the core. She stood, backing toward the door on numb legs. This was the Human half of her, certainly, that could not overcome the weakness of emotion to finish what she had begun. The pity and fear that Garret, in his capacity as her mentor, had banished from her life, beaten from her when it had been necessary, ravaged her tired brain. If she did not leave now, she might kill this Darkling who had somehow broken down every one of her defenses. If she did not leave now, she might not kill him.

  Her hand was on the door when he spoke again, his voice soft and pained in the quiet. “Stay.”

  Her fingers tightened on the door handle, desperation to be away from here clawing in her chest like a wounded animal. “I cannot.”

  That was what she’d meant to say. The word that came out was “Why?”

  “I do not know,” he told her, honest and raw. “I wanted to kill you.”

  “If you will kill me, I will not stay.” She couldn’t stop the smile that twitched the corners of her mouth. Strange. She hadn’t smiled in so long.

  The Darkling made a frustrated sound, low in his throat. The hair stood up on Ayla’s neck. “I will not kill you.”

  For a moment, all Ayla could remember was her first glimpse of his eyes, solid, glassy-black in the darkness, taking her by surprise. But the image fled before his new, mortal face, lined with pain, his eyes Human and tortured.

  Slowly she went to him. Trembling, she reached toward him. This time, when she laid her hand on his skin, his body was not hungry for her life. The only shock was the unpleasant heat of him, nearly burning her palm, and the strange urge to touch more of him. It was enough to make her pull away.

  “You spared me. In that tunnel,” he spoke slowly, his voice rough. “Why?”

  “If I could answer your question…” She paused, collected herself so that her voice did not sound so childlike and unsure. “If I knew the reason, I would have killed you.”

  He stood slowly, his body shaking. He had still not recovered fully from the attack.

  Ayla stepped back. At his full height, the Darkling towered over her. Without thinking, she opened her wings and bent her spine, a primitive instinct to make herself larger, threatening.

  He laughed.

  Her first instinct, to be angry with him, fled at the sound. Genuine laughter was rarely heard in the Lightworld. Laughter was to mock, belittle, prove superiority. He laughed at her, and she did not feel she needed to defend herself against it. It was silly to fear him when she could so easily kill him.

  “Why did you heal m
e, if you wish me dead?” the Darkling asked, his face suddenly serious again. “Did you want me whole, so that it would be fair?”

  It was Ayla’s turn to laugh, though she did not. “I am an Assassin. We do not concern ourselves with fighting fairly.”

  “That does not sound honorable,” he sniffed.

  “Honor does not imply fairness, just as fairness does not imply honor.” She moved to the other side of the room. The Human kept such strange objects in this workshop, and she could not resist touching a few. “How do you know that my touch healed you? Because I touched you, and you awoke? You look at things through a mortal’s eyes.”

  Before she could sense the attack coming, he had her pinned, bent backward across the sharp edge of the workbench with her hands trapped behind her. “I am not a mortal!”

  “Then why did you nearly die?” She shoved herself forward, hard, and he flew across the room, throwing his wings open in a futile attempt to cushion the blow as he hit the chain fence that covered the concrete walls. The wings were still injured, though. He fell to the ground, groaning in pain, blood dripping from the tips of his black feathers.

  Ayla did not offer him her hand. Instead she watched patiently as he pulled himself to his feet. His features twisted in rage. If he’d had less intelligence and more strength, he would have tried to attack again.

  “I did not heal you by my own choosing. I think I healed you. I felt great sadness at the thought of your death, and some magic worked in my blood. It was not intentional.” The words pained her as they scraped from her throat. “There is something between us…something that is not natural. When I touch you, everything in me, my life force, my essence responds to you. It is not something I should ever like to feel again.”

  It was the truth, though she had not thought of it until the words came out. The raw, scorching tension that wound through her when she was near him made her unsteady and tense. The old healer’s words came to her as if through a fog: a man with wings.

  Of course this Darkling would destroy her. More frighteningly, when she was near him, she did not care.

  “You do not understand.” She shook her head, cursing herself as she went to the door.

  “I do!” His voice sent daggers of agony through her. “I understand what you feel. Since the moment you stole my immortality, I have felt it.”

  “Then I will not make you suffer my presence any longer.” She opened the door, though her instincts became confused, ordering her to stay at his side.

  “I do not suffer,” he whispered.

  She turned slowly. He looked at her shamelessly, the pain and pleading in his eyes bare and startling.

  Those disturbing feelings he claimed to feel climbed up in Ayla’s chest, into her throat, choking her. The memory of how she found him, the monster with its legs wrapped around his waist, threw the burning in her into sharper relief.

  “Then I leave for me. Goodbye, Darkling.”

  She let the door slam closed behind her and chased the echo of its hollow knell down the tunnel, toward the Lightworld.

  Malachi stood staring at the door, knowing she might still stand just on the other side. If he opened it, he might see her shadow flicker off of the walls, or see a ripple in the sewage where she’d disturbed the water.

  “Women.” Keller came out of his chained-off alcove. He had witnessed it all. That made the rejection burn more.

  “She is not a woman,” Malachi growled, knowing the anger in his voice sounded ridiculous. If she was not a woman, why did he want her the way mortal men wanted mortal women? Why did he no longer wish to kill her, but overpower her in another way?

  Something flashed through his mind. Mortal memory was a frustrating thing. Details were lost to the haze of a Human brain, but there, in his mind, he had her over the workbench, twisting in rage beneath him. His blood pounded toward the source of the excitement rising in him. He could almost smell her hair.

  “She’s not a woman, but she’s a female. They’re just about the same thing.” Keller gave a low whistle and went to touch the blood on the wall. “Thanks for keeping the place nice while I was away.”

  “You were here. In that room.” Malachi pointed in the direction of the alcove, wondering at the short memory span of Humans. Would his own be so easily lost? What if she never came again, and the memory of her was lost?

  Keller looked him over, as if trying to discern something important with his uncomfortable gaze. “We need to work on your sense of humor. Or, at least, get you to stop thinking so literally.”

  Malachi scowled and dropped to the floor. He wanted this man to go away, so that he could think more on his Faery. When he was stronger, when he was safe, he would go into the Lightworld and find her.

  “You’re never going to be that strong, friend,” Keller said quietly, shocking him to attention.

  Malachi flared his wings open, tried for the terrifying voice he’d always had as a Death Angel. “You know my thoughts! Witchcraft!”

  If he had still been a Death Angel, the Human would have feared him. But what he had been mattered not. Keller laughed, not a single, rumbling laugh that he seemed prone to. Great, whooping laughter that echoed around the room. Tears came to his eyes, and he wiped them away with the backs of his hands. “Are you going to burn me at the stake or something? ‘Witchcraft,’ he says!”

  “Do not laugh at me, soothsayer!”

  This brought more unexplainable laughter, until the Human was doubled over, hugging his midsection. After a long time, he managed to get control of himself and became upright, scrubbing at the tear tracks on his cheeks with the ends of his too-long sleeves. “It’s not…witchcraft. It’s just something I can do. And it’s one of the reasons I’m down here.”

  “You were rejected by the world above?” Malachi had seen many Humans in the Underworld, but he’d never given thought to why they were there. Could Humans be so cruel as to cast their own kind to their enemies?

  Keller shook his head. “I didn’t give them the chance. See, up there, they have these…Enforcers. Magic is illegal, even if it’s unintentional. You step out of line, you get taken away. And the people who get taken away don’t come back. Some people say they come down here. I’ve never met a Human who got thrown down here by the Enforcers, though, and I’ve met a lot of Humans.”

  “Your abilities are unintentional?” Another thought that never occurred to Malachi. Could someone really be so cursed?

  “Ever since I was a babe in swaddling clothes. Not a fun gift to have, by the way.” Keller went to one of his metal supply lockers and pulled out a half-empty bottle of something. He pulled a cork free and the acrid scent of alcohol filled the room. “I kept it mostly hidden. No one can really prove you can read minds, right? So, I just made extra sure to look surprised when I opened my birthday presents, even though I knew what I was getting, and to never mention to my grandma what my mom really thought of her.”

  Malachi did not know how to respond. Keller handed him the bottle and Malachi took it, reluctantly drinking some down. Whatever the potion was, it scalded his throat and brought water to his eyes. A pleasant warming began under his ribs, though, and he found his second swallow much more enjoyable.

  “Well, then I turned eighteen, and when you’re eighteen, you have to register with the Enforcers and take this test.” Keller took back the bottle and swallowed a huge gulp. “I’m thinking everything is going to be okay, but as I’m sitting in the waiting room, I hear the guys thinking in the next room. They’re thinking, ‘What if we just take the kid out and dump his body somewhere? No one’s going to miss him, and we won’t even have to prove he’s a mind reader.’ I start getting real nervous. These guys knew what I was, and they were having god-awful sadistic thoughts about how they were going to kill me. I kept looking at my watch, and then the receptionist—that’s a lady behind a desk who answers phones and stuff—the receptionist keeps looking at me funny every time I look at my watch.

  “Finally it’s time for my
appointment. I’m sitting in their uncomfortable waiting room chair, on the edge of my seat, bouncing my knees, sweating, I’m a wreck. And then the guy thinks, ‘might as well go get the poor bastard, see if we can wrap this up before lunchtime.’”

  “What did you do?” Malachi found he had leaned closer to the Human, that his knees bounced the way Keller’s had in the story. He took another drink from the bottle, warmth creeping into his face.

  Keller shrugged, as if the tale were boring. “I ran. And of course, that was the test all along. They wanted me to run, so they would know. I wasn’t out of the building a full five seconds and a group of fully armed Enforcers were busting down my path. I ran into an alley and found a sewer grate that was loose. I dropped down here to hide, and I never got around to going back up.”

  “Why not?” Why would any Human wish to stay down here, when the clean fresh air and water waited for them above?

  Keller gestured to his missing arm. “A woman. Bad choice, I know. But I stayed. And I like it here. I can be myself, don’t have to worry about hiding my ‘talent.’” He made a motion with his fingers, both the Human and mechanical ones, as he said the word. “I can live a ‘normal life.’”

  “You join parts of things to other living things,” Malachi pointed out, a laugh of his own coming to the surface.

  “There, I knew this would work on your sense of humor,” Keller said, lifting the bottle up to the light. “I’ve got to figure out a way to keep my bar stocked better.”

  An idea sparked in Malachi’s brain. An idea that brought a smile to his mouth so wide that it hurt. “You can read minds?”

  “Human minds, yeah,” Keller said, taking another drink from the bottle.

  The idea crumbled, leaving disappointment in its wake. Malachi no longer cared for the warmth in his stomach.

  “She’s part Human, you know,” Keller said, as if he weren’t interested in what he was saying at all. “I can read her.”