Divinity Circuit (Senyaza Series Book 5)

by Chrysoula Tzavelas

  “No? Yet you seem more yourself than you were a moment ago.”

  Branwyn curled her fingers around her coffee cup. “I wish the boys would prioritize all of you. They’re not thinking long-term.”

  Aleth regarded her for a long moment, his liquid golden eyes unsettling. Then he said, “My brother claims he likes you because you’re honest, but you’re not.”

  Branwyn blinked. “I’m not sure which part of that sentence bothers me more. Penny, zap him.”

  “What?” squeaked Penny, her eyes widening. “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “Oh, you know you have a way.” Branwyn sipped her coffee.

  “It doesn’t work on them,” Penny insisted. “And I can’t ‘zap’ anybody.”

  Aleth laid a beautiful hand on the table’s surface. “Try. I’m curious.”

  “Is this really the time for experimentation in zapping?” Penny’s voice was increasingly strained, just like it always was when she doubted her own competence. Branwyn hid a small smile to share later. With Marley—but where was Marley? There had to be something very badly wrong—

  “If you are dangerous enough to banish me with a touch or a word, it would be useful to know that before our enemy appears,” Aleth assured her.

  Penny glanced at Branwyn for reassurance or possibly support and Branwyn said, “It’s always a good time to zap monsters.”

  Sighing, Penny reached over and touched the back of Aleth’s hand with one tentative finger. Nothing visible happened: no sparks, no vanishing in a poof of smoke, not even a flinch from Aleth. Branwyn was disappointed.

  But Penny didn’t withdraw her hand. Instead, after a minute, she pressed harder and the tip of her finger sunk into the back of his hand. Her dark skin and his darker skin blended together.

  “You’ll want to stop now,” said Aleth gently. “You’re not yet ready for the consequences of drinking down the sea.”

  Penny pulled her hand back and asked, too sadly for Branwyn’s tastes, “Will that always happen when I touch one of your kind?”

  “That’s probably up to you,” Aleth said. He turned his gaze to Branwyn. “When our guest arrives in a few minutes, once you’ve convinced it to fully manifest, you must keep it talking. Dolores will harden the veil, while Candy and Severin work on the tether. If all goes well, it will be over quickly, before Hadraniel has a chance to react and your bystanders have a chance to be frightened. Are you ready?”

  “Sure,” said Branwyn, tucking the alarm into her lap and brushing her fingers across the pocket containing the other thing she’d built the night before.

  “Good. Chat with me. We are acquaintances at coffee. Tell me about your work. What have you been doing at the Senyaza building?”

  “That’s classified,” said Branwyn. “But I’ll tell you about my hammer instead.” And she launched into a recital of the problems she’d encountered bonding the Machine fragment to the expensive hammer, and how her relationship with her grandmother had first hindered, then helped the process.

  “And someday I must meet your grandmother,” said Aleth, which made Branwyn’s nice coffee-and-reminiscing glow vanish.

  “Severin didn’t like her much,” she warned him.

  “I think we would find things in common,” Aleth went on, as if she hadn’t said anything. “Ah, Hadraniel. Join us.”

  And just like that, the angel was with them.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Branwyn

  Branwyn wouldn’t have known the angel wasn’t in a proper vessel. It looked like an androgynous platinum blond with golden skin, in a business suit cut with the slightest feminine flair. Its hair was wavy and shoulder-length, and it had perfect teeth and silver-blue eyes.

  “Greetings, Aleth,” it said, and its voice, too, was ambiguous. Branwyn found herself instinctively approving. Gender was a pain in the ass sometimes.

  As it moved past her to take the final chair, she could tell something was off. The air didn’t move; it had no scent. But from across the table the illusion was convincing. It made her wonder how many other people she’d looked at had been nothing more than inhabited light.

  Under the table, Branwyn squeezed Penny’s hand. That thought was pure stress, nothing else. She exhaled, trying to push away the feeling of being trapped. She hated feeling trapped. It made her want to burn buildings down.

  “Hi there,” she said cheerfully instead. “I’m Branwyn.”

  Aleth added, “Branwyn is the Artificer I told you about.”

  “Hello, Branwyn,” the angel said, placing both hands on the table and leaning forward. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. I am Hadraniel. You do excellent work.”

  “Yes, I know. I understand you’ve acquired a piece recently.”

  Hadraniel’s perfect nose wrinkled, but then it smiled wryly. “I suppose proper humility alongside such gifts is too much to ask.”

  “Well, you can have humble or you can have honest,” Branwyn explained. “And I understand that our mutual friend prefers honesty. Can I see the piece you have?”

  Aleth moved his hand and tilted his head, and somehow she knew—knew, with an uncanny certainty—it was a threat and a warning. He thought she was going too fast, being too brash.

  Well, tough luck to him.

  Hadraniel, smiling faintly, said, “Why?”

  “Because I didn’t create it to do what it does now, and I’d like to see how it was hacked.”

  “Ah.” Hadraniel moved one hand around another, and a necklace appeared dangling from two fingers. Her original studio key was woven through metal gears and glittering charms and the golden chain itself zigzagged through the accumulation several times. The entire construction was encased in a glass beaker pierced at two points by the chain. It made for a bulky pendant and it looked like something made by a committee. A committee with no sense of aesthetics.

  “Pretty,” said Penny, and Branwyn amended her thought to, a committee with no sense of aesthetics or certain high fashion designers.

  “This is Penny, my assistant.” She didn’t even need to reach for the necklace to add, “And that’s no more real than you are. I can’t learn anything by looking at an image. Do you even have it? I didn’t give the core piece to you, I know that.”

  “I do have it,” said the angel. “I acquired it with the aid of a raven’s insight. What you see is what it is.”

  Branwyn frowned. A raven’s insight. But she couldn’t afford to get distracted right now. “The treachery of images. Come on, bring out the real thing.”

  “Perhaps if we come to an arrangement, that will be possible. Alas, it is not right now.”

  Branwyn snorted. “What arrangement is that?”

  “I need more of these, Branwyn,” Hadraniel said gently. “The world quivers under restraints it was never meant to endure. So much has gone wrong since then. But we will set it right again.”

  “I do have some practice making things like that,” Branwyn said. “You may have heard. Or seen. But… the thing is…” She scratched her lower lip as if lost in thought.

  “Yes?” Hadraniel glanced at Aleth, who looked resigned, as if he saw which direction this was going already.

  “The thing is, I’m not really convinced that you’re the right person to give that power to. I’ve never been religious. What good are angels, really?”

  The angel’s eyes widened and it murmured, “How extraordinary.”

  “I mean, look at you. You’re just an image yourself. Kind of funny, when you think about it.”

  “But my power is real,” it said silkily.

  “Is it? Why don’t you show me? You’re proposing some kind of ‘arrangement’, where I work for you doing stuff a lot of my other clients would rather I didn’t. Now, I’m about to become a lot more picky about who I work for, anyhow. Worthy causes only. This could be good for you. But I’ve got no evidence yet you represent a worthy cause. So show me what you’ve got.”

  Aleth said, “She is talented, but a fool, Had
raniel. I had not expected she would speak to you in this way.”

  “It doesn’t surprise me. Mortals have become so arrogant without our guidance.”

  “Come on, come on.” Branwyn snapped her fingers. “Put me in my place, already.” She wrapped her fingers around the alarm. She hadn’t told the whole truth when she explained how to trigger it. All she had to do was touch it.

  Hadraniel regarded her serenely and then expanded its celestial aura into a field that was nearly a physical force. She recognized the action immediately; she’d faced celestial auras enough times. Severin’s was painful and terrifying; in comparison, Hadraniel’s was pleasant.

  Very pleasant. The scent of coffee was overwhelmed by citrus and vanilla, and the chiming of glass bells filled the air. Everything was warm and comfortable and Hadraniel was so very beautiful. At a different moment in time, Branwyn might have stretched like a cat and enjoyed the experience.

  Instead she clicked her tongue in disapproval. “Is that all? Nobody else is even noticing.” That wasn’t quite true; a barista had her brow wrinkled as she stared at them and an older man was looking at Hadraniel wistfully. But it didn’t matter.

  “I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” Hadraniel said with faint frustration.

  “Maybe I long for what I’ve never had. Maybe I’d like to believe. From where I’m sitting it’s pretty hard to see Heaven.”

  “The old craftsmen had faith,” muttered Hadraniel. “Here, you wish to see how my device works? Witness and be awed by what has been kept from you by the selfishness of the nephilim.”

  There was no warning: no click, no hum, no music other than the chimes. The angel had been beautiful before in a glossy airbrushed way: inhumanly perfect but not unfamiliarly so. Now, though—

  Tears sprang to Branwyn’s eyes. Hadraniel was indeed light worked into a human shape. The light was glorious, spilled from Heaven to illuminate her befuddled mind. The angel was a conduit for that light, promising access to life beyond death and a place where there was nothing but that sublime wonder. It was the warmth of being perpetually loved and the comfort of being able to trust absolutely. She wasn’t, couldn’t be worthy of such light, but she didn’t have to be. It would gather her home. All she had to do was serve faithfully.

  It was nearly overwhelming. She wanted to burst into a hymn and thought if she stared into the light enough, she’d learn the words to the right one. For the first time Branwyn understood why the ancient celestial-suppressing spell was called the Hush. The normal aura of a celestial was a whisper compared to this shout of glory.

  After a long, dazed moment, Penny’s voice cut through Branwyn’s dizzy contemplation. “I don’t know. Are you maybe glittering a bit more? Is it a roll-on? That stuff wears unreliably, let me tell you.”

  That was enough for Branwyn to remember a little of what she had planned. She twitched her fingers against the alarm and thought, Fire. She couldn’t see if it had any effect on the other people in the coffee shop—could anything resist the call of that incredible light? But she could feel it thumping in her lap: not the high-pitched beeping the alarm had been manufactured with but deep subliminal thud.

  “You should know better,” said Hadraniel gently, and a woman, a stranger to Branwyn, threw herself at the angel’s feet, weeping.

  Not working well, then, Branwyn struggled to collect her thoughts. The angel wanted her to feel guilty and ashamed, but that was the wrong weapon to use against her. It reminded her of Severin, and thinking of Severin made her angry. Her hammer was leaning against the table—could she… But it was so transcendently perfect—

  Aleth caught up the woman weeping at Hadraniel’s feet, stroked her sleek brown hair once and pushed her away from them with a casual disregard that only fed the embers of Branwyn’s rage.

  “Oh, so a powder then? I’m so sorry. It just had that look, you know? Of something that wouldn’t be there when you most wanted it.”

  And that was Penny saying the most frivolous things. Branwyn blinked and came back to herself enough to wonder if Aleth could hear the steel buzzing under Penny’s voice. Hadraniel certainly couldn’t; it finally looked at Penny in surprise.

  She had a plan and it didn’t involve her hammer yet. Alas. Breathing shallowly, Branwyn moved her hand. The alarm fell on the floor, but she reached her pocket and slid out a pair of children’s scissors and a pair of tweezers. The scissors she’d had for a while: an early creation to assist her with getting in and out of the Backworld in places where the veil between worlds wasn’t already thin. But the tweezers were new, created, just for today.

  She snipped the scissors in the air under the table, cutting a small, temporary hole between her world and the world of concepts and ideals on the other side. The faeries had laid claim to some of the Backworld—but it was everywhere and all of the celestials used it to some extent. And Branwyn knew her creations. She knew, for example, that Hadraniel couldn’t possibly be using the divinity circuit unless it was nearby. It was a physical object; it couldn’t be carried by an illusion. But in the Backworld, ghosts and material objects were equally real.

  “Tell me,” Branwyn croaked at Hadraniel. “Teach me.” Under the table, she inserted the tweezers into the Backworld and activated their magic and hoped.

  “I will,” said Hadraniel with a sadness she found unreal. The angel was beautiful, glorious, nearly orgasmic to look at, but as familiar to her subconscious as the movements of her own hand.

  Something vibrated against the tweezers, pulled to it by a sympathetic attraction. Branwyn made us. We belong together. Branwyn made us.

  Branwyn manipulated the tweezers, took hold of what was waiting, and pulled it into the real world. As soon as she grasped the object, Hadraniel’s light dimmed, dimmed until it was just a beautiful man, or maybe a woman.

  “No!” said Hadraniel. “What—”

  Branwyn pulled the real divinity circuit up to the table and made a show of examining it. “Ah,” she said. “I see what they did.” Her heart thudded in her chest, adrenalin making her hands feel shaky. She could destroy it now, reduce it back to component parts, and all this would be over. The kaiju wouldn’t get it, the angels wouldn’t have it, everything would go back to the way it was. It was right there, humming in her hand, the thing that let the angels close the circuit interrupted by the Hush.

  Then she knew the truth: that Aleth was very concerned about what was going to happen next. Aleth, sitting next to Penny, was watching closely. On the heels of that she knew other things: less magically granted truths and more inferred ones. For example, without Marley along, Penny and Rhianna were little more than hostages. It had been a terrible mistake to bring them if she’d wanted to end this now.

  Hadraniel’s hand shot out. “Give it back!” It sounded like a petulant five-year-old.

  Branwyn had some experience teasing five-year-olds. She held it melodramatically to one side. “Come and get it. Oh wait, you can’t. You’re just an illusion. Are you sure you don’t want to show me how real you can be?” Then she added bait, based on what she’d seen at a glance. “You know, it will work better if you’re real. I’m not surprised you couldn’t see it, though. It takes a certain perspective.”

  The angel scowled, an expression that settled so naturally over the beautiful features that Branwyn expected any body the angel inhabited would develop lines. “The raven said that, too.’” Then those luminous eyes fluttered shut and the air began chiming again. Motes of dust spiraled around the table, converging on the angel.

  Branwyn shot a quick look at Aleth, but he didn’t seem any more alarmed. That probably meant he didn’t think Hadraniel was going to just smite her and grab his toy back. Next she checked out how the coffee shop was coping.

  Something had emptied the building, although she didn’t know if it was her alarm, the angel’s glory, or both. There was still a wild-eyed woman weeping in the corner, a man hiding behind a newspaper at the window and a trio of stunned-looking baristas.
One of them, more enterprising than the others, had a cellphone out and trained on Hadraniel. There was no sign of Rhianna, and Branwyn wondered if the impact of Hadraniel’s unHushed presence had gone through walls.

  Penny picked up the alarm along with the tweezers and the scissors, both of which had fallen off Branwyn’s lap when Branwyn shifted position to play keep away. She tucked them in her purse as she stood up. “Your coffee is cold, Bran and mine is empty. I’ll get us some more.”

  She walked to the counter and engaged the barista working the register in a conversation that seemed too loud. “Did I miss an announcement or something? Everybody suddenly lit out of here.” She laughed. “I keep wondering where the hidden cameras are. Yeah, two more lattes. And, poor dear, one for the lady in the corner, too.”

  Branwyn had no idea what Penny was doing; her oblivious act wasn’t going to convince anybody not to trust the evidence of their eyes, hearts and recording devices, especially not in a post-faerie world with the Extraworlder Conference opening just a few miles away.

  “Be patient,” said Hadraniel in an odd, dual voice. “Aleth, do not let her leave. Do not—”

  “All will be well,” said Aleth serenely, causing Branwyn to re-evaluate her entire estimation of Aleth’s preference for the truth. “She is whimsical but she knows what the path of wisdom is.”

  “It takes time,” said Hadraniel anxiously. “Vessels are temptation, and so hard to abandon. I do not keep one ready.”

  “No hurry,” said Branwyn. “I’ll just study the circuit some more.”

  “Yes, do that. See how it is made? It would be easy for you to make more with my help.”

  Penny sat down with her lattes. “Oh look, more glitter. You know, it’s possible to use that stuff too much. It kind of makes you look like a faerie fankid, to be honest. I don’t know if that’s the look you’re going for?”

  Hadraniel recoiled, goaded into finally responding to Penny. “It isn’t glitter. It’s numinous essence. I am not in any way a ‘fan’ of the exiles. And whatever was done to you was clearly a terrible mistake. It’s probably not too late to repair it….”