by Reine, SM
Limited as Marion’s attention appeared to be, that strange statement made her turn. “What?”
Leliel shoved her.
Marion stumbled over the ring of stones that formed the angel trap, and because she was holding on to Nathaniel’s arm, he was dragged inside too.
Magic flared around the angel trap, bright enough to bathe all of Shamayim in artificial daylight.
“No!”
Marion leaped at Leliel, but she bounced off of an invisible barrier. It was an angel trap, after all, and Marion’s blood flowed silver.
She collapsed at the impact, landing on her knees, clutching her ribcage.
“Oh crap,” Benjamin breathed. He tried to touch her arm, but his hands went right through her.
Marion lifted a fist. She was probably trying to summon magic, but nothing happened. She was powerless within the circle—a woman as mundane as Benjamin. Well, as mundane as Benjamin had been before Nathaniel hijacked his body for a joy ride.
Nathaniel yanked free of Marion’s grip to stride toward the wall of stones. “Don’t!” Marion’s hand wrapped around his ankle to keep him from going through. She wasn’t a physically strong woman, but she made up for it with desperation. “You’ll get ripped in half!”
“Until this moment, you claimed that ripping him in half was what you wanted,” Leliel said serenely from outside the circle’s perimeter.
“You can’t tell me you’re surprised.”
Leliel certainly didn’t look surprised. “Even so, I hoped that you cared about our people more than your own motives.”
“I do care about our people,” Marion said, pushing onto her feet with a grimace. “But there are many other people I care about too. If you trust me, I will do what I can to save everyone.”
Leliel stepped backward toward the lake, backing up against the eggs. “You want me to trust you?” She flung her arms out wide. Magic erupted around her, and a dome formed over the eggs. “Nobody should trust you, mage girl. Even Death doesn’t trust you.”
The dome of light flared extra bright. Benjamin’s eyes were as ghostly as the rest of him, but they still ached at the sudden assault.
When the magic faded and Benjamin could see again, the lake was empty. Leliel had vanished from Shamayim and taken the nest with her.
“No,” Marion whispered.
She only had an instant to lament her failure. Nathaniel was moving toward her.
“Watch out, Em!” Benjamin shouted, to no avail.
Nathaniel wrapped his arm around Marion’s throat from behind, and he pressed the sharpened wooden stick underneath her jaw. “At last,” he said, “we’re alone.”
11
Ransom Falls was burning in balefire when Seth returned. Entire blocks had been erased. The guns and liquor store—gone. Luke Flynn’s old apartment too. It looked like someone had just cut it out of the town and left nothing in its place.
He phased to an intersection a safe distance from the balefire. The stoplight was blinking red and people were getting out of their vehicles to yell at each other.
Nobody seemed to notice Seth sweeping across the street, gathering his form around himself to seek out the Godslayer.
Marion wanted the Godslayer dead.
Help me, she’d said, because she couldn’t take care of this herself. She had a plan for every eventuality except a Godslayer.
And Seth said he’d kill for her.
It wasn’t his first murder. He’d killed a lot of werewolves as a mortal, and ever since Genesis, everyone who’d died had passed through his hands. It shouldn’t have even bothered him to be asked to do it.
But it did.
He focused on trying to feel the Godslayer nearby, but it was difficult to find the avatar’s energy amid the chaos. Death was a constant presence in any place where life existed, but the scent of it was strong here. Some people had initially doubted that the white light could be deadly and made the mistake of touching it. It had only taken a brush to snuff those lives from existence.
Those weren’t the only deaths, though. A handful of people had died in a traffic collision. Two parents, one of their children, and the driver of another car. There was also a house that had been half-devoured by balefire. The surviving half had collapsed on its elderly residents, killing them.
Those souls clung to Seth as he walked past them. It would be cruel to ignore them in this moment, when they so desperately needed a calm hand to guide them into the beyond.
Seth pushed the souls out of his mind and zeroed in on a sense of power within Ransom Falls.
It took only an instant for him to appear atop that source of power. But he didn’t reappear beside the Godslayer; he reappeared on the street outside of the hospital on the fringe of Ransom Falls.
“What the…?”
The generators were running and the lights were on. Through the open windows, Seth could see people moving.
“You can’t come this way!” A man rushed from the hospital to meet Seth. It was Father Witold Rolfe again. “Oh, sorry. It’s just you.”
“Why’s the town all jammed up? And why isn’t the hospital evacuating?” Seth asked.
“We can’t get to the hospital in the next county.” The neck and armpits of Father Rolfe’s jacket were soaked through with sweat. “The OPA secretary says the entire region needs to be under quarantine.”
Even if Seth found the OPA secretary and changed his mind, the process of an evacuation would be too slow now. But he also couldn’t fight the avatar of another god with this much potential collateral damage. Seth had promised Marion one death. Just one. The rest of them could be delayed. “If the hospital can’t evacuate of its own volition, I’ll just have to break the rules.”
“You can’t break the OPA’s rules,” Father Rolfe said. “They’ll stick you in a detention center. Nobody’ll ever see you again. And you deserve better than that, Dr. Flynn.”
“I’m not talking about OPA rules.” Seth put a hand over the wooden plate protecting his heart, feeling its edges. It was wearing down naturally over time. He’d been in the mortal worlds for a few days since its installation, and even good behavior couldn’t stop the march of time.
He hoped he had enough ash to save Ransom Falls.
Seth exhaled slowly, letting his human form fade away.
“What are you doing?” Father Rolfe asked, eyes widening as he backed away slowly. He may have been an exorcist, but he was also a man in the truest sense of the word.
He was not prepared for what he saw Seth becoming.
The exorcist fell to his knees. Tears streamed from his eyes. That was fear in his face, true fear, as a man could only experience when he realized that he was on the doorstep of oblivion.
“Dr. Flynn?” he asked.
“Don’t be afraid,” Seth said in a thousand voices that resonated throughout all of California. “I’m not here for you.” That much was certain. Assuming that the narrative of the world continued as it was meant to, Father Rolfe would certainly see the end of the day, at least.
Seth opened his arms to wrap up Ransom Falls in an embrace. He took hold of every single soul, and he willed them elsewhere.
The sick were willed to other hospitals, along with their caretakers.
The healthy were distributed among other cities.
He even released the animals into more distant forests.
Witold Rolfe was delivered to the OPA’s doorstep to have a chat with Secretary Friederling, which was a matter Seth had no further interest in.
When he was done, Ransom Falls stood empty except for the balefire.
He collapsed.
Jesus, it hurts.
Seth had thought that he’d suffered the worst pain possible in his life, but this felt like his bones trying to break themselves apart. He yanked the neck of his shirt down so that he could see what was happening.
Inches of ash were receding. He could see his heart beating inside his breast again.
“No,” he groaned.
>
But the ash stopped vanishing while half remained.
He’d just halved his time in the mortal worlds, and the Godslayer was still roaming.
Seth pulled his human form together. It was harder than when he’d first performed that cosmic act. With less ash on his body, and without a gris-gris nearby, he could feel the noise of omnipotence rattling within him. Distracting him. Luring him back to the Infinite.
He lifted his eyes to find one lone female figure at the far end of the street.
At that distance, with eyes that were shaped to emulate those of a mortal’s, he couldn’t make out details. He could only see a narrow waist and wide hips.
He steeled himself to face the Godslayer.
But when she came closer, he realized it wasn’t the Godslayer at all.
The angel Leliel extended her wings when she stopped in the center of the street. “Hello, Death,” she said. “It’s long past time for us to become acquainted.”
* * *
Leliel had never been cowed by gods. She’d gotten into more fights with Seth Wilder’s predecessors than she cared to count, and she’d walked away from them alive each time. The old gods had been far more formidable than this thing. Especially since she knew exactly which buttons of his to push.
“You may not remember me,” Leliel said. “We have mutual friends.”
“You’re Nash’s ex-wife,” Seth said.
“Indeed.” Nashriel was an angel who’d lived at the werewolf sanctuary before Genesis. “You must be here to find the Godslayer. I imagine that Marion has asked for you to kill her.”
He eyed her warily, but fearlessly. “What about it?”
Leliel sauntered toward him, the weight of her magicked wings held effortlessly aloft. Let him see what she was, let him know that he was in the presence of a being whose soul far predated his own. Put the newborn god into his place. “What will you do when you find the Godslayer? Do you want to kill her?”
“Not right away,” Seth said. “Everyone deserves a chance to step back from a fight. If there’s a way to end it without death, that’s what I’ll choose.”
He turned to watch Leliel circling him. Cute to see him moving his form as though he was a tangible entity. Adam had done the same thing. Silly men were so attached to reality, even though they existed outside of it.
“If you don’t kill the Godslayer first, she will kill you, and she will kill Marion as well,” Leliel said bluntly. “She’s killed beings far better than you.”
“I know Elise. She won’t want to hurt me.”
“Is it Elise we’re discussing? As you should know by now, avatars are embodiments of ideas; this one has been shaped by the idea of killing a god. Surely you don’t think such an avatar would have been unleashed to make friends.”
“I know Elise,” Seth said again, more firmly than before.
“Be that as it may, you don’t know me,” Leliel said. “While you’re looking for an avatar that may or may not want to kill you, you can be certain of my intent.”
He billowed above her, looming shadow pressing against the ethereal glow of her wings. She tilted her head back to look right into the depths of him.
“What’s your intent?” he asked.
It felt like nighttime underneath the umbrella of his presence. The heavy, sulfurous dark of a Hell plane. Leliel’s magicked feathers curled under it. “I’m taking custody of the Genesis warp. I’ll pass through it myself and ensure Genesis happens in a manner that preserves angels.”
“You’ll break everything if you do that,” Seth said.
“Are you certain? Have you seen the Meta? Spoken to a Librarian?”
“I talked to a Librarian, yeah.”
“About changing Genesis?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m not going to risk shattering the world because you’re pissed that your species is going extinct.”
“For all you know, the way that things happened the first time around aren’t the way they’re meant to be forever,” Leliel said. “It’s an abomination, what your triad has done to angelkind. I’m rectifying it. For all we know, that’s what has always been intended to happen.”
She turned to walk away.
As she’d hoped, he moved in front of her, blocking her path. He filled the street.
There were bones inside the darkness. The fingers of ribs caging a beating heart that glowed with the core of the Pit.
“I’m not going to let you at the Genesis warp,” Seth said.
“I already have it. Irohael is situating an ethereal nest where the warp will open, and I will carry it through at first opportunity.”
“Thanks for the information,” he said.
He began to blur. He was going to phase away, probably to confront Irohael.
Leliel laughed. “You seem to have missed the point. You don’t know me, Death. You don’t know what I will do to accomplish my goals. I’m much more committed than you are.”
“You think so?” Seth asked.
For an instant, Leliel was falling into eternity. The ground seemed to have been torn away from under her feet. She was tumbling head over heels into brilliant light.
The Pit of Souls had opened out of nowhere, and it was sucking her into the nothingness at the bottom. No matter how hard she extended her wings and beat them against the pull of gravity, she couldn’t reverse the fall.
It was a threat, not reality. Seth was showing her what he could do to change her mind.
Leliel said, “I have Marion captive and she’s about to die,” and the falling stopped. Ransom Falls locked into place around her.
Seth was tiny on the street, the size of the average man.
Leliel couldn’t help but smile with self-satisfaction. “Yes, you heard me. She’s in her cage in Shamayim with Benjamin Wilder. And he seems very angry.”
“What about her guards? Where are they?”
“She didn’t bring any,” Leliel said. “I’m sure Marion was confident that she didn’t need help.”
“She promised she’d be safe,” Seth said.
Leliel brushed past him to walk along Ransom Falls’s empty street again. This time, Seth didn’t jump in front of her. “Marion makes a lot of promises. Breaking this one will mean her death at Benjamin’s hands. Did I mention he’s gone crazy and has a knife?”
When Leliel glanced over her shoulder to measure his reaction, she found that Seth was already gone.
* * *
Watching Nathaniel fight Marion, and being unable to intervene, was the stuff that nightmares were made from.
All three of them were locked in a cage of Marion’s making, and it was exactly as strong as Marion had claimed it would be. She wasn’t even going within a foot of its perimeter. That was how much she feared its ability to contain ethereal material.
Benjamin’s body wasn’t the only thing that could get ripped in half if only the gaean parts passed through the barrier.
“Calm down, Ben.” Marion had managed to slip Nathaniel’s grip, but not without earning a deep slash under the line of her jaw. Whittled wood left ragged wounds. She was bleeding. “Please listen to me.”
“Ben,” Nathaniel said. “Ben, you call me, like we’re friends.”
“We grew up together,” she said softly.
“You tied me to a fucking tree!” Nathaniel said.
“Two of them,” Benjamin said, “not that the differentiation matters. Don’t you get it, nimrod? Marion was going to let me escape. She was planning to use this cage for Leliel.”
“I was planning to use this cage for Leliel,” Marion said, unaware that she was echoing him.
“Am I seriously supposed to believe that?” Nathaniel asked. “You’re like James—or like Metaraon. You’re attracted to power and you’ll never be happy as second best. The Origin is waiting on the other side of the Genesis warp, and you want it for yourself.”
Marion wavered, hand pressed to her wounded throat. “Benjamin…”
“Tell me I�
��m wrong,” he said.
She didn’t reply.
He lunged for her.
It seemed that Nathaniel wasn’t yet comfortable with Benjamin’s body. He stumbled over the lanky limbs, the big feet. He swung clumsily at Marion.
She gracefully dodged away, loose fists lifted.
“Oh, come on,” Benjamin said to Marion. “I showed you how to throw a punch before. Just give it a try. Pop me in the eyeball as hard as you can.”
“She knows she can’t survive in direct combat against me,” Nathaniel said.
Pain flashed in Marion’s eyes. She really thought Benjamin had gone completely crazy. “If you’ll just calm down—if you’ll give me time to figure out how to open the cage—”
“There is no way!” Nathaniel kicked dirt at the circle. “Look at what you did. It’s beautiful. I never even did any magecraft that nice!”
“You’re not a mage. Even if you’ve got Nathaniel inside of you, you’re still Benjamin Wilder. You’re the son of the Alphas who grew up with me in the werewolf sanctuary. You have a thousand brothers and sisters and—”
“You don’t have a clue who I am,” Nathaniel said.
Doubt made her eyebrows furrow. For the first time, Marion looked around as if searching for someone. “Benjamin?” she whispered.
While she was distracted, Nathaniel hurled himself at her again.
She didn’t side-step fast enough. He hit her like a linebacker, sending both of them to the ground.
If she’d had her magic, she could have zapped Benjamin into oblivion with a snap of her fingers. But there was no magic inside the circle. Marion was just a scrawny young woman who fought her best when there were a few hundred meters between herself and her target.
Nathaniel pinned her down and rose up on his knees, lifting the wooden knife. “Killing you would open the cage, wouldn’t it?”
His fist plunged toward her, and Marion caught his wrist. Her arms shook with the effort it took to push back. “Benjamin, stop!”
A dark shape appeared outside the circle.
Seth.
“Hey! Help!” Benjamin waved his arms over his head. If anyone could see him, it would be a god. Right?
