“I do,” he said, with a sudden, unexpected fierceness. “I’ve lived over a thousand years wanting some things. And now here you are.”
“See?” she whispered. “How can I live up to that? I can’t reach you a tenth as well as Skadi did with one remark, one kiss.”
There was silence on Zachariah’s end of the phone, and Marley paced across the room to the sliding door beyond the bed and back again. The bathroom door was closed.
“Skadi was unexpected,” said Zachariah. “I’m not used to being surprised. I do want things, Marley. That’s not going to change. You can trust that. You can trust that I’m not going anywhere, that I’m not going to change my mind. No matter what.”
“Okay,” Marley managed.
“All right. Can you tell me what Corbin’s doing?”
“I… I don’t think I can, actually. And I’m not sure I would. You’re not his friend, remember?”
“I’m not Senyaza’s friend, either,” he said. “We weren’t just fighting over you, Marley.”
“Oh,” said Marley, uncomfortable. “Oh, that’s interesting. Maybe we should talk about that later.”
“Yes,” agreed Zachariah. “Lissa wants to talk to you now.” And before Marley could protest, the phone was handed to the little girl.
“Hi, Marley! Did you get my text?” The sound of Lissa’s voice was like the summer solstice at the north pole, thawing the shards of Marley’s bad mood.
“I did, sweetheart. It really got my attention. Are you and Kari being good for your uncle?”
“Of course,” Lissa said impatiently. “But are you all right? We heard you crying last night. It was scary. Uncle said you were all better but then you didn’t come over today.”
“I’m fine but I have some things to take care of. A friend who needs help.”
“You’ve been gone so much,” Lissa said, a hint of accusation in her voice.
“Yes, that’s going to happen sometimes. You’re getting to be big girls now. But I will always be there when you need me.”
The bathroom door opened and Corbin leaned on the frame, watching her. He’d splashed water on his face and his damp hair stood up. She made a face at him, and tried to devote at least half of her attention to soothing Lissa.
“It’ll be really sad if you don’t come over anymore,” said Lissa, with a sniffle.
“You could come visit me, instead,” Marley found herself saying, without really thinking it through.
The sniffle stopped and then became a gasp of horror. “Marley, no! You’ve got to keep coming over. It’s family!”
Marley took a deep breath. “Lissa, you take care of your sister, right? And she takes care of you?”
“Yeah…?” Lissa sounded suspicious at this line of questioning.
“Sometimes I have to take care of other people the same way. And it’s best if you stay with Zachariah when that happens. He will never leave you again. Just ask him.”
Lissa was quiet. Kari grabbed the phone to carol, “I love you, Marley!”
There was wrestling and Lissa took the phone back while Kari screamed in fury in the background. “Okay. I understand. So will you be coming over later?”
Marley blew out her breath, feeling like a jerk. “Not today.”
“Oh.” Then, “Oh. Okay. Do you want to talk to Uncle Zach again?”
“No, that’s okay. Brave girl. Give your sister a kiss for me, all right?”
“All ri—” the phone hung up halfway through Lissa’s farewell.
Marley stared at her phone, bemused, then put it away and looked up to find herself pinned by Corbin’s dark eyes. Before he could say anything, she said quickly, “Sometimes I have to take care of me, all right? I wasn’t saying I have to take care of you, so you can just stop giving me that look.” Then she muttered, “Even if I do.”
Humor flared and faded in his eyes, and he shook his head, coming toward her. “Marley…”
“No.” Marley tapped her foot on the floor. It was definitely a tap, not a stomp. “We were talking about something else. We were talking about why you’re keeping secrets from me, even after carrying me off in a cloud of ravens.”
“I’m sorry about that,” he offered. “I really didn’t want to let go of you.”
Marley waved his apology aside. “I wanted to come. But—”
He eyed her, his thin mouth twisting wryly. “I’d break if I told you my secrets and you betrayed me, Marley. After everything else, everybody else, I’d break. And I can’t afford that yet.”
Marley drew herself up, and he put his fingers on her mouth and went on. “And you’d want to. You’re a good person. You’d think there was another way.”
For a moment Marley was distracted by his fingers on her lips, but then she shook her head. The black shadow within Corbin was looking at her, and she couldn’t tell if it had spoken or Corbin had.
She had to get away. She wasn’t going to be able to think about what she’d learned while being so close to him. She’d badger him with questions he wasn’t going to answer. Each time the black shadow looked at her, she wanted to hide, or attack it. Better to leave now, while he still wanted her around. Better to leave while she could come back again.
“I should go,” she whispered.
He nodded warily. “I know.”
She spread her hands. “Branwyn and Penny went to go meet some monsters today. I need to check on them.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “And the twins. And Zachariah. You’ve got a life, Marley. I’m glad.”
“Zachariah can take care of himself,” she said fiercely.
He smiled. “So can I.”
She hesitated. “I don’t want him, you know.”
“Don’t you?” He raised his eyebrows. “You weren’t sure, before.”
“I just keep thinking that if I can convince him that I’ll be there for the girls no matter what, he’ll stop pushing on me. But I’ve had six months of nothing but him and I’ve never stopped being confused. I got used to being confused. But… I’ve never felt with him like I feel with you.” This, this, I want this.
His eyes darkened and his breath hissed between his teeth. “You said you needed to go.”
Marley pushed her hands against his chest. “I’m going. But I’d like to come back. Don’t ignore my calls, all right?”
He caught her hands and kissed each one, without answering.
She tugged them away reluctantly and stepped backward to the door. With her hand on the knob, she asked, “Corbin, tell me one thing, at least. Are you planning to hurt someone?”
With a humorless laugh, he said, “Oh yes.”
She considered the question and the answer and Corbin’s original task of hunting down a murdering angel. “Are you doing something bad?”
His eyes met hers, grave and still. “Yes.”
“I’ll call you,” Marley whispered.
“I trust you,” he and the black shadow said. The black shadow grinned as if it was a clever joke.
She fled out the door. Neath sauntered through the door a moment later.
Marley was three steps into the parking lot before she realized she’d left her car—and her purse—in Arrowhead Squirrel Hollow Resort. All she had was her phone and her cat.
She looked at her phone and saw the drafts of text messages she’d been working on when she was sick. She considered another one.
Dear Mom,
Today I was carried off in a cloud of ravens. I think I love him. Can I get a ride?
No. She’d call a taxi instead.
Chapter Twelve
Branwyn
After Marley went off to meet Corbin, Branwyn lingered longer than usual over her wardrobe. She normally dressed for comfort and to please her color sense, without much regard to what other people saw. But today she thought hard about what to wear. More to the point, she found herself trying to decide what she wanted to cover up.
She had a mark on her collarbone, right where it was easy to see under a tank
top or a loose neckline. It was black, shaped like a stylized pair of black skeletal wings, and the unwelcome gift of Severin. He’d placed it on her when he’d saved her from a bad place and the vile intentions of another kaiju. She tried not to look at it too much, because remembering cost her time better spent doing other things.
She’d made vague plans to have it incorporated into a tattoo, but she’d always come up to the same dilemma that occupied her today: was hiding the mark reclaiming her skin, or refusing to accept herself? Because the mark reflected an experience: an experience she hadn’t wanted but had brought upon herself. She had been marked by the faerie Queen of Stone, too, less visibly but in otherwise much the same way. The different was, she considered the Queen of Stone’s mark fair and well-earned.
She hated wasting time worrying about this, so she gritted her teeth and picked out a blue and green t-shirt that would hide the mark. She wasn’t denying it was there, just preventing it from distracting anybody else today. And she brought her hammer. Thus armed, she went to go pick up her support team.
The kaiju had told Branwyn to bring Penny and her sister as backup and for once she wasn’t going to ignore him. Penny was a wildcard. As for her sister… Well, he’d probably meant Brynn, because supernatural folk noticed Brynn these days. Brynn had adventures of her own. But there was no way in hell Branwyn was introducing her fourteen-year-old sister to a kaiju and his friends.
Rhianna, on the other hand, needed an education. The people she worked for kept secrets from her, and it was Branwyn’s duty as her elder sister to remedy that.
At the large, grungy diner where the meeting had been arranged, Branwyn folded straw wrappers into different shapes and arranged them on the table. “Now, there are three ways to kill a celestial.”
Rhianna had her elbows on the table and her fists supporting her cheeks in her very best impression of an interested schoolgirl. Penny, who had heard it all before, kept looking around worriedly.
“First, you can kill their vessel. That’s the body they’re walking around in. They call it a construct sometimes.” Branwyn moved one of her paper figures to another one and enacted a tussle. “You kill their body and they’re pretty much out of the picture right away. But they store their minds and memories elsewhere so it’s only a short-term solution. They’ll be back again and they’ll remember what you did.”
Rhianna batted her eyelashes. “Oh teacher, you know so much.”
Branwyn threw a napkin at her. “That’s why the monster hunters usually go for method two. Which takes a lot longer. Basically—” she tore some strips off another napkin and laid them in a pattern around the two paper figures, “— they do a magical ritual called tethering that connects up the celestial’s vessel to the place where their mind lives. Then once they kill the vessel, the mind goes too. It’s tricky, though, because the celestial has to stay in one place while the ritual is set up. So they have to be restrained or distracted somehow.”
Frowning, Rhianna looked at the design Branwyn had made. “I thought you couldn’t kill celestials. Not really.”
“Well—and I’m getting this direct from the monster hunters—even a tether-killed celestial comes back again. They just lose their memories. All they come back with is their name and personality. The same interests, but they don’t remember anything of their previous lives.” Branwyn made a face. “This keeps the monster hunter business thriving.”
“Like a new copy made from the same pattern. Okay,” said Rhianna. “And what’s the third way?”
“Remember my hammer? It’s got a Machine fragment in it. So does Penny,”
“Oh yes, thank you for just dropping that in there,” Penny said.
“And Machines kill celestials so that they’re not even reborn as amnesiacs. They, uh, eat them.”
Penny’s mouth twisted sourly and she looked away.
“Hmm,” said Rhianna, straightening. “And how many have you killed, Branwyn?”
Branwyn crumpled all her paper trash and leaned back. “I don’t know. I don’t know if the faerie who stole Jaime counts or not. I haven’t seen her around since. Other than her, none.”
“Not our host?” Rhianna looked honestly puzzled. “I thought—”
Out of literally nowhere, a tall black man with dreads past his shoulders crouched beside their table. “Interesting discussion. I’d say that when Shatiel removed the names of those now called the faeries, he enacted the fourth form of death for our kind.” He wore a muscle shirt and loose shorts, and his eyes were golden.
“Sorry we’re late, cupcake,” said Severin right near Branwyn’s ear as he caught her unbalanced chair.
“You!” squeaked Rhianna, staring wide-eyed over Branwyn’s shoulder.
Branwyn yanked her chair away from Severin and stood, narrowing her eyes at the kaiju. Instead of saying the first thing that jumped into her head—a threat—she said, “Not a promising start, but since we’re both here let’s get this over with.”
The black man pulled two chairs over from another table, and another man behind Severin, bronzed and muscled with short sun-bleached hair grabbed a third for himself.
“We’ll just squeeze in,” said Severin, with his shark’s smile.
“Oh,” said Penny nervously. “There’s three of them. How nice. That means one for each of us.”
“There’s five of us, actually,” said the black man. “But the other two are observing from elsewhere in the building. I thought it might get crowded.”
“Sevvy, who are your friends?” Branwyn sat down again. “Do introduce us.”
The blond man had a Big Gulp in one hand, which he promptly choked on. “Sevvy?”
“I see you brought one of your sisters, cupcake. Not the one I expected,” Severin said, and Branwyn didn’t let herself crack a smile.
“This is Aleth,” went on Severin, gesturing at the black man. “And this is Max.” The blond man nodded.
Rhianna was still staring at Max. “And they’re… like you.”
“Nobody is like me,” Severin said. “But if you’re asking if you should be frightened of them the same way your sister is frightened of me, the answer is ‘yes’.” He turned his dark gaze to Branwyn. “Consider them my brothers.”
“Hunter called you brother,” Branwyn pointed out, because that was better than letting her fear fan her fury into a conflagration. She had to at least hold off on that until she found out what they knew.
“We’re much more interesting than Hunter is,” said Max, with a dazzling smile. It was the sort of smile a man could make a lot of money off of. “We know how to party.” He glanced sideways. “Well, I do. These guys at least mean well, though.”
“I know you,” said Rhianna sharply. “But you didn’t have the same aura before.”
Max winked at Rhianna. “It wouldn’t be a very good disguise if even a cute young thing like you could see through it, would it?”
Rhianna’s fingers curled into fists on the table and she turned to Branwyn. “I’ve met Max here before. He was in my building. He said he was an intern. I gave him directions.”
“The building where—?” Branwyn began, and Rhianna nodded tightly.
Branwyn turned on Severin. “You do have the circuit, you bastard.”
“If they had the circuit, do you think they’d be sitting here talking to us?” asked Penny quietly, drawing circles with her finger on the diner table.
Aleth folded his hands. “Not a good tell in this case, I’m afraid.”
Severin cut in. “As it happens, we don’t have your little toy. But we know who does.”
“I found out,” added Max, grinning at Rhianna again. “Yeah, I’m some kind of super spy, it’s true.”
“A joint effort,” Aleth said.
Branwyn blinked, looking between Max and Aleth. Neither of them seemed anything like Hunter, who was the only other kaiju she’d met besides Severin. Severin was terrifying to interact with because of what he reflected in her.
Her su
bconscious added, especially combined with his tendency to stalk people, and his ability to violently murder a dozen men in a few heartbeats…
But Hunter had been nightmarish in an entirely different way. He’d treated her like property, and when she’d balked, he’d shown her she was property: his to break at will.
Severin’s new friends, on the other hand… Aleth seemed calm, interested and straightforward, while Max… it was hard to believe Max was celestial at all. Hesitantly, Branwyn activated her magical Sight to see what Rhianna was seeing.
She knew what to expect from Severin; she’d seen him before. It was never easy, but at least she was prepared: a black vortex over his head, decrepit, skeletal wings fanning out from his shoulders and eyes like pits.
Aleth’s halo blazed bright, bright enough that it hurt to look at and stung Branwyn’s face. She lowered her eyelashes, and caught a glimpse of the expanse of crystalline wings that stretched from Aleth’s shoulders. Then she could bear the brightness no more and turned her gaze to Max.
He was much easier on the mystical Sight. There was only a dull light over his head, the color of cooling ashes. Something sparkled silvery in the diffuse greyness, as if what had burned had once glittered— but that was all. Instead of wings he had crimson-streaked shreds at his shoulders.
Aleth had said there were others in the building. Branwyn couldn’t resist looking around for them. They weren’t hard to find. Two women sat at a table in the corner, both with numina of celestial energy around them that hit Branwyn’s overtaxed Sight like a hammer. Branwyn couldn’t make out details and didn’t try, but she caught a hint of water from the elder, and silk from the younger. Then she shut off the magic Sight before it turned into a real migraine.
The younger woman—a girl who looked maybe fourteen, really—waggled her fingers at Branwyn in greeting, grinning.
“You see,” said Severin. “We’re being very kind at the moment. Holding ourselves back. I know it would upset you if anything were to happen here.”
Divinity Circuit (Senyaza Series Book 5) Page 14
