Marley ground her teeth and moved toward the corner of the house. The tip of the horrible Sword seemed to follow her. “Stay,” commanded its wielder, in a voice like an arc of fire. She stayed, fear running down to her knees.
Then she shook herself and said to Corbin, “Do what you can. I know you can do something.” She cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted as loudly as she could, “Kari, Lissa, stop. I’m here now.”
The movement of the world’s Geometry slowed, the slow, grand dance of icebergs becoming the drifting of hulks. None of Severin’s kaiju moved toward Marley, to her surprise, but after a moment of stillness, the front door of the house opened and the angel she recognized from its benediction at the church looked out. It was dressed as a mortal now, but it had the same dazzling aura she’d felt at the church. Now that she knew what it was, it didn’t draw her in at all.
“Bring her inside,” it commanded, and the kaiju with the Sword stalked toward her. She backed up, wondering if she could lead it away, wondering if anybody would take that opportunity.
But the kaiju weren’t there as her allies. They were celestials, oppressed under the Hush just like the angels were. More; they had no pretensions to benevolence to limit them. Branwyn had said they wanted the divinity circuit and clearly she was right, because the only move any of them made was to block Corbin when he moved toward her.
X paced three steps toward her, then moved faster than her eyes could follow, catching her by her arm and dragging her like a sack as he darted back to the door. Neath hissed and leapt after him, but he was faster even than she. As he pushed Marley into the house, she saw Penny and Branwyn step out of thin air beside Corbin, Branwyn looking furious. The last thing she saw was Neath pivoting to race over to Branwyn. She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.
Then she was in the house, passed from the kaiju to the angel. “Aren’t you an interesting gift?” said the angel impassively, and escorted her to Zachariah’s living room with that pretension to benevolence the kaiju lacked.
There was another Sword on the coffee table, long and slim and casting green shadows around the room. Branwyn had mentioned something about Hadraniel stealing a second Sword from somewhere. She’d laughed, and Marley had thought it was a joke. Apparently not. She really needed to have a chat with Branwyn sometime about her inappropriate sense of humor.
Zachariah crouched on his heels before the blade, holding one hand to his chest. Hadraniel laughed upon seeing him. “I did warn you not to touch Raphael. Courage, mortal. You might heal. Please sit down, miss. Explain to the children you aren’t worried.”
The angel pushed Marley into an armchair and she didn’t resist, sinking down to sit on the edge of the chair. She still had that emergency blanket clutched in one hand, which was so incongruous she wanted to laugh. She didn’t. The angel’s long, cool hand remained on the back of her neck: a threat so gentle it didn’t need to be spoken.
Kari and Lissa sat on the small sofa, close together. They held an old, heavy book across both their laps, and neither of them looked particularly scared. Kari looked annoyed, while Lissa kept looking down at the book.
“Marley, why did you want us to stop?” demanded Kari. “It was just getting interesting. Things were opening up.”
Marley took a deep breath, conscious of the hand on her neck and then asked severely, “Girls, did this person introduce themselves to you as one of those bad guys behind your uncle’s kidnapping last year?”
The hand didn’t move, and Marley wondered if she’d said the wrong thing after all. If the angel hurt her in any obvious way, the girls would try to defend her; while she was with them, she could defend them. At least until she was unconscious… which wasn’t really that far away. Finn’s magic could only restore her so much. But until that happened, she and the girls should be a frightening team.
Kari drew her brows together. “No.”
“He isn’t hurting anybody now,” said Lissa absently. “He just has this mystery he wants to solve and he said we’re the only people in the world who can do it.” She glanced up. “Besides, Uncle Zach isn’t worried.” Then she really looked at Zachariah and her eyes dilated. “Uncle Zach, what’s wrong?”
“He made a mistake,” said Hadraniel impatiently. “The book, children. It waits for you. The whole world waits for you.”
“I can speak for myself, angel,” said Zachariah softly. “Hello, Marley. Did I hear Corbin outside?”
“Yes. He’s feeling better,” said Marley.
“Interesting. We should talk about that public school plan again. Later. Maybe when they’re around nine.”
“Both of you be quiet.” The angel took its hand away from Marley’s neck and moved to caress the green Sword. The green sparkles cast around the room shimmered and danced.
Lissa chewed on her lip, looking critically at Hadraniel. “Marley’s right, Kari. It’s a good book but I don’t think this guy is all right.”
“We’re not supposed to make people go away,” said Kari sulkily. “It upsets Marley.”
“I wouldn’t be upset right now,” said Marley lightly.
Hadraniel picked up the Sword called Raphael. “Here we are already. Let me show you what will happen if you try, children.” A pulse of magic made the house shudder and the twins’ eyes widened.
Through her connection with them, Marley saw a little of what the angel showed them. Hadraniel’s undiluted strength battled against theirs and they could not simply overbear it. They just didn’t have both the precision and the power. The vision showed them how frustration and building wrath laid down a certain pathway to devastation. They saw intimately, as vividly as a nightmare, that they could only protect through destruction, and today it would require such destruction as to wipe everything they loved away.
It was a vision Marley had seen before, of small girls in a wasteland. She didn’t need to see it again, and she was enraged that they’d seen it even once. She surged to her feet, rushing wildly at Hadraniel, with no thought except breaking the angel’s concentration.
Zachariah moved at the same time, red and gold light flaring around him as he interposed himself between the angel and the children and reached for the angel’s Sword.
Green light flooded the room, as if the ghost of the deep sea had risen from a sandy grave. Zachariah grunted as if he’d been punched in the stomach, his face twisting in agony. The angel’s hand caught Marley across her face.
Then Kari screamed, high and thin, the sound promising months of nightmares ahead. She ran to Zachariah, hugging his leg. Lissa said, “Stop it! Why are you doing this?”
The angel caught Marley by her hair and twisted it painfully. “All I want is for you to read the book. We will work together, just as I said, and then you can take your pretend mommy and pretend daddy and navigate the new world.” Lissa looked skeptical and the angel added, “I take no pleasure in hurting anybody, child. All I want is for things to again be the way they’re supposed to be. You understand that.”
Lissa grabbed Kari’s hand. “Let Marley go, then.”
“Pick up the book,” countered Hadraniel.
Slowly, Lissa did so, and the two girls sat once again on the couch. The angel shoved Marley to the ground and put the Sword on the table. Marley could feel the weapon’s presence, a pristine shimmering sharpness that lacked any hint of the malice the angel pretended to avoid. It was a material rule given form and Marley wondered why Branwyn hadn’t talked about it more.
The twins started reading together again. They were silent, but Marley knew they were communicating all the same, not just with each other, but with the angel, through the same channel that the creature had sent its threats.
“I don’t care who he thinks he is,” Zachariah began softly, shifting closer to her on the floor. “He’s not going to tear down the Hush just by translating a book. We have time if we can get out of this.”
Marley stared at Zachariah’s handsome face and stiff, reddened hands. Just as quietly
, she said, “If you’re not worried why did you try to grab the Sword?”
“Because he’s frightening the girls,” Zachariah said flatly. “So I’m going to kill him.”
Looking at his distant gaze and cold face, Marley realized with a jolt that Zachariah was never going to be rational about Kari and Lissa. She was never going to be able to rationally convince him that they’d be safe, that time away was good for her, or that she ought to be her own person. He’d given everything he was to protecting and loving the little girls and he could no longer see clearly when it came to them. She wondered what he’d been like a decade ago, before they’d come along to steal his heart. She wondered if he’d recover himself as they grew, if he’d become as cold to them as Corbin’s family was to him.
No. Love was better, even if it made its own problems. She couldn’t say to Zachariah, be rational, couldn’t imagine hurting him or the girls that way.
That wasn’t going to be the way she kept her freedom, found her balance again. Had rationality ever done a damn thing for her own anxiety problems? Her desperate desire to see all the angles had just deluded her into thinking she could control what happened next.
She reached over and squeezed Zachariah’s foot. “Everything will be all right. You’re not doing this alone. I did come to help, see? And I’m not alone either.”
He snorted and looked away, but not before she saw the lines at his eyes ease.
Well. That was something. She was pretty sure he was wrong about the Hush, despite her reassurance. The angel wasn’t acting like this was the first step in a long research trail. The angel seemed to think it was accomplishing something right now. And she agreed with Zachariah: reverse engineering the most complicated magical ritual ever performed required a lot more than just reading it backward.
She narrowed her eyes, concentrating on the deep Geometry that she could feel moving with the same sense that felt onrushing catastrophes. Something was definitely happening…
The penny dropped. “Oh my God,” she said, caught between horror and a strange derisive scorn. “You are such a liar. You’re not trying to remove the Hush. You’re trying to cast it again, on mortals.”
* * *
Branwyn
Branwyn arrived just in time to see Marley being pushed inside the house by the kaiju called X. Neath twined around her ankles, complaining angrily. Penny picked the big cat up and asked, “It’s good that Marley’s in with the kids, right?”
“Sure,” growled Corbin. “Didn’t anybody else come with you?”
“I got here faster,” said Branwyn shortly, scanning the other kaiju as they clustered in front of the garage. “It was easy. I could feel—ah! You bastard!” Her burst of rage constricted her vision. She stalked toward Severin, who had one hand behind his back. “Give it back, right now.”
He revealed her hammer. “This? Why should I? It was mine before it was yours.”
“It was not,” snarled Branwyn. “You had a rock you could barely use. I made it a tool. It’s mine.” She paused then added, “Just ask it.” Silently she called the hammer.
It listened, but could not come. And it wasn’t the only thing listening. The shard of nightmare the kaiju X held paid attention, and so did Penny’s soul. With that realization, the wave of tiredness beating against her mind retreated. Now was not the time to be playing around. The angel was doing something bad in the house. The angel had something of hers as well, and it was more important that she get that back than she show Severin her powers.
Still holding Neath, Penny approached the house with a friendly smile. “I’m going to go inside too, all right?” Branwyn knew a cue when she saw one and started strolling down the street, hoping to double back around to the other side of the house. She passed Corbin unrolling some kind of vast magic.
Severin shrugged. “It’s your skin.”
“Stay put,” said X harshly. “All of you just stay put. Especially you, Branwyn Lennox.”
Branwyn thought about running. If she ran, he’d have to chase her, right? If he chased her, maybe somebody else could do something. But that would leave the divinity circuit in the hands of whoever could grab it.
Besides, he’d probably just throw the Sword. That seemed like the sort of thing that would happen around now. So she stopped and slowly turned back to the front of Zachariah’s house.
Penny put Neath down and placed her hands on her hips. “That’s a really big sword you have there, mister. Who made it for you?”
“Shut up,” said X. He glanced at the other kaiju, then back at Penny.
“My friend makes stuff like that,” Penny went on. “Could I see it?” She reached for the Sword.
“Penny!” said Branwyn sharply. There was no way she should be going around touching other Machines right now, not after what her soul had been through recently.
“What?” asked Penny innocently. “We’ve all got things to accomplish here, Branwyn.”
Branwyn walked over to her, eyeing the Machine Sword.
“They’ve started again,” said Corbin, his voice hollow.
“Well, that just means your girlfriend is being smart and staying healthy,” said Severin. “Because if she wasn’t, the little darlings would flatten the place, now wouldn’t they?”
Aleth said, “Not that smart.”
Severin tilted his head as if listening. A smile cracked across his face and Branwyn longed to seize her hammer from him and smash it across his face. But there was a time and a place, and now was not quite it.
“She’ll get herself gutted yet. What a girl. Nah, let’s see what happens. We’ve got plenty of time.” And he grinned at Branwyn and spun her hammer like a baton.
The hum of the Geometry changed. Branwyn could feel Marley weaving her magic against whatever the angel was doing. She could feel Penny’s helplessness, see Corbin’s frustration with a glance. It was all going wrong and it certainly wasn’t going to go right just sitting here waiting.
And Severin had taken her hammer and now he was laughing at her, like somehow she’d played into his hands.
Branwyn’s breath hissed between her teeth. “You know what? I’m done. Corbin, let’s break things.” She shoved Penny away from her, opened wide the forge of her own soul and stepped forward to slap the blade of the Sword pointed at her.
The entity known as Belial twisted against her hand, parting flesh and howling into her blood. The name filled her mind: BELIAL BELIAL BELIAL. Her own name rose up in response: whispered in her great-grandmother’s voice, called by her father, sang by her youngest sister. She’d given tiny bits of her soul all her life and received other souls in return and now she wasn’t just the Branwyn in her own mind, she was the Branwyn others loved too. BELIAL rushed against that, pushing, trying to break through and consume her. But because she was mortal, because she was not alone, she could resist.
“No,” she scolded it. “Not me.” And maybe any mortal could have simply resisted BELIAL’s devouring, but Branwyn’s soul was trained. She knew what she was doing and what she was doing was more than enduring. She introduced the Sword to the forge in her soul. It screamed as she reversed it: the blade became the grip: safe, shielded, no longer screaming its name. And the grip became the blade.
X cried out and let go, leaping back away from the blade he’d been holding. “Finally!” said Severin, tossing the hammer aside. In the next instant, all of the other kaiju moved, appearing around their rogue brother. Branwyn couldn’t see quite what happened next, because her hand was bleeding profusely and tiny particles of Machine were lodged in the injury, which was really very painful. But there was thunder, and a great flock of blackbirds. Then Dolores was holding X by the arm, dragging him through a portal into the Backworld, while the other four spread out.
Belial slipped out of Branwyn’s gory hand, clattering on the ground. She had to pick it up, take it inside, maybe stab Hadraniel with it before she snatched her creation off his neck. Maybe the pain would save her from being overwhelmed by H
adraniel’s glory.
Penny stepped on the blade instead. “That’s a bad cut,” she said, and wrapped some white fabric torn from her dress around Branwyn’s hand. Branwyn tried to argue, tried to stop her, but she kept feeling the little sparkles of Machine particle move in her blood and it distracted her each time she opened her mouth.
“Come on, Corbin,” called Severin. “It’ll be faster with five. Might as well make yourself useful.” And much to Branwyn’s surprise, Corbin came. He and the kaiju made a large circle and the white lines of the tethering ritual unrolled from each of them, reaching into the house.
* * *
Marley
Hadraniel didn’t want to return things to how they’d been before. That would mean giving power back to Umbriel, whom it clearly had philosophical differences with. And maybe it would be giving power back to the kaiju, too, and the demons, and all the other celestials. Instead it wanted all the pre-Hush power for itself and its cabal, without leaving any ability for humans or nephilim to work against it.
Without moving her lips, without twitching her hands, Marley did her best to use her magic to resist what Hadraniel was pressing into the world. It wasn’t working. It wasn’t working and the angel knew what she was trying to do and didn’t care. Its own hands spread wide, a beatific expression on its face. Its mouth was open as if it was singing a hymn she couldn’t hear.
“That can’t be right,” said Zachariah quietly. “You’re mistaken, Marley.”
Marley gave Zachariah a puzzled, frustrated look, and realized he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the floor. All but hidden in the vast movements of the Geometry, tiny lines traced an old pattern around the living room. Somehow, those still outside had managed to get a tethering circle started. But it was only a circle. It could make a celestial’s death mean something, but they still had to be killed first.
A discordant howl echoed from without and the green Sword on the coffee table jerked to one side. Hadraniel’s eyes opened, narrowed, closed again. “Carry on, children. No one will harm you. Your babysitter is here to guarantee it.”
Divinity Circuit (Senyaza Series Book 5) Page 31
