by SM Reine
“I cannot give you a mortal life. I can show you how to gestate an avatar, but you wouldn’t be able to awaken it at any time you choose.”
“The Meta doesn’t allow return to earlier points in the timeline.” Onoskelis returned her attention to writing. “Your life before meeting Elise Kavanagh and James Faulkner has long since passed. You would not be able to take your avatar there under any circumstances.”
“But he could wake it up in 2032,” Charity said. “That’s where we left the mortal worlds. 2032. He should be able to put an avatar there if he wants.”
Onoskelis sized her up with those weird bulging goat eyes of hers. She had enviably thick eyelashes. “That amount of control is impossible due to the Laws of the New Gods. Avatars are the only way gods may interact, so being able to place them deliberately would be too much interference.”
“Who made that rule? That’s a terrible rule,” she asked.
“I suggested that one.” James looked amused, and not at all in the mood to smite a revenant. “In any case, Onoskelis’s so-called Meta—”
“It’s everyone’s Meta,” muttered the Librarian.
“—has already moved on from your last known date in 2032, and even if it had not, your avatar wouldn’t be mature enough to use instantly,” he finished.
“All right,” Seth said slowly.
He paced along the edge of the stone basin, glaring at the roots of the tree. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
“What happened to Marion in Shamayim?” he asked.
“I returned her memories, as promised,” Onoskelis said.
“And that’s it?”
“You say that as though it were insignificant to restore her memories,” James said. “When we stripped them from her, she was infantilized, the tabula rasa. A different person. She would have reset to normal. Why do you ask about this?”
Seth set a foot on the edge of the basin, but didn’t climb inside. “She’s acting erratically.”
“Marion is never erratic. Anything she has done—no matter how offensive, or out of character it seems—is in the service of whatever plan she’s currently executing.”
“Are you sure?” Charity asked. She couldn’t help but ask. She wanted some sliver of doubt for Seth’s sake, so that he could keep clinging to the veil of doubt about Marion’s behavior. That she was a puppet, not the puppeteer. “I mean, if she spent a while as a different person, then having her memories back doesn’t reset her. Now she’s basically two people.”
“I know Marion,” James said. “We are the same blood. I know what she’s capable of because I’m capable of just as much ill.”
Seth squared his many shoulders. Stepped down from the basin. “All right. Well. If you can’t give me mortality in 2032, then you can’t give me anything I want. There’s no way in hell I’m sticking around with you.”
James cleared his throat. “I didn’t say that I couldn’t get you to 2032. I said that avatars are limited. I can give you a little time on Earth in 2032 as you are now. A god. You’ll just have to accept a few limitations.” Starlight glinted on James’s hair as he brushed past Seth to approach the tree. “Otherwise a cosmic being in the mortal worlds could destroy everyone permanently.”
“I was doing fine before I came here,” Seth said.
“By accident, not design.”
“I’ll just go back.”
“No, as a matter of fact, you won’t,” James said. “I won’t let you leave this room in this condition. Don’t test me. Take it on faith. You’ll regret it otherwise.”
Seth glanced toward Charity—and toward the door out of the Conservatory. “You mean this is a trap.”
“I’m offering you to return to Earth. You’ll still be a cosmic being, but you won’t be omnipotent.” James stepped gracefully over the edge of the basin and around several roots. “The floor under your feet, and every wall and shelf, are built from ash that was harvested from this Tree. The fruit bears knowledge; the wood channels and blocks it.”
He snapped a branch off of the Tree’s trunk. The conservatory shivered as if it had been personally injured.
“The fruit bears knowledge?” When Charity looked hard enough, she could see hundreds of apples among the branches—millions if she kept looking. It was the briefest glance into omnipotence. She didn’t like it. “What kind of knowledge?”
“All of it,” James said.
Seth’s eyes narrowed. “Do you have Marion’s missing memories in there? Everything that was inside the Canope?”
“That apple was picked long ago,” James said. He offered the severed branch to Seth.
“What am I supposed to do with that?” Seth asked.
“The wood blocks knowledge,” he said patiently. “You will be able to return as a deity to Earth without omnipotence with this sliver. You won’t break any of the Laws. Only under these conditions—when I can rest easy with the confidence you won’t destroy the mortal worlds—will I allow you to leave the conservatory.”
Seth stepped forward, but Charity stopped him. “You get what James is saying, right?” she whispered. “He’s saying this is temporary. You’ll have to come back here forever. He won’t let you go again.”
“I know,” Seth said. “Something bad’s about to happen, Char. I’ve been feeling it. If there’s a way to go back and help…”
There was no preventing Seth from being helpful, even if it would martyr him.
“I’ve written a contract.” Onoskelis lifted the page she’d been writing, blowing on the ink to help it dry. “Death agrees to temporarily limit his cosmic power to return to the mortal worlds, after which he will return to the custody of Life and Time indefinitely.”
“And how long do I have in the mortal worlds?” Seth asked.
“It’s not a specific set time. There are natural limitations built into wood from the Tree,” James said. “The more that you exert cosmic influence, the faster the wood will break down. When the last of it vanishes you will return here. You can enjoy the most time on the mortal worlds if you pretend to be mortal.”
“But if I do something like, I don’t know, will someone dead? Or will a lot of people dead?”
“Yes, that would be an excellent way to send yourself back here immediately.” James held the staff out.
Seth stared. Thoughtful.
Charity wouldn’t have had to think about it. Marion had told Seth to leave her alone or else she’d consider it an act of war. And then she’d stuck her tongue so far down Konig’s throat that she could have licked his butt. Charity was pretty friendly, as far as vampires went, but she wasn’t forgiving. One of Charity’s college boyfriends had cheated on her and she’d put a dead skunk in his car.
When Seth took too long to respond, Onoskelis cleared her throat. “The Meta’s moving onward. Seconds pass here, and hours elapse in the mortal worlds. The irrevocable future is progressing.”
“Would I have at least a few days?” Seth asked. He was faltering.
“Weeks, if you’re careful,” James said.
Seth reached for the staff. Onoskelis rose to stick a pen in Seth’s hand. “Contract first,” she said.
He signed.
“Noooo,” Charity whispered under her breath, brittle fingers over her mouth.
James licked the nib of his quill. A dot of ink remained on his bottom lip as he signed the second line, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Excellent. Here you go.”
He gave Seth the staff.
With a groan, Seth collapsed. The fragment of the Tree spread out to grip his chest.
Charity cried out. “What are you doing to him?” Before she could step forward, James set a heavy hand on her shoulder—so heavy that her legs immediately stopped functioning.
Seth roared with pain as the wood burrowed into his chest.
“It’s always amazed me, this effect Seth has on people.” James smiled fondly at Charity, even while he held her in place. “He wins loyalty without guile or cruelty. He even won Elise over
, which is no small feat. Now he has you to worry about him. I trust that you are as wonderful as anyone else Seth has attracted, so his pain surely pains you.” He patted her back. “Let me assure you: he is fine.”
In fact, Seth had already stopped shouting and clawing at himself.
He sat up to look down at his chest.
Seth’s semi-visible ribcage was nothing alarming. After all the time Charity had been spending around Arawn—the Lord of Sheol—the exposed bones weren’t even mildly surprising.
The fact that Seth’s sternum now looked to be ash from the Tree was new.
“Consider the ash to be an hourglass for your available time in the mortal worlds,” James said. “Be careful with your godly powers if you want, or drain your influence instantly. Either way I will see you soon.”
“Very soon.” Onoskelis sat back down at the desk, pulling a book into her small lap.
Charity’s heart was pounding, like she was the one who’d just gotten wood merged with her skeleton. Every fiber of her being screamed out against this. James might have been an angel, but it looked a lot like Seth had made a deal with the devil. “Let’s go,” she urged. Before the sand in his hourglass ran out.
Seth turned to leave. Charity clung close to him. They probably didn’t need the gris-gris anymore, but she was irrationally afraid for her all-powerful former doctor friend.
“Seth?” James said.
He turned. “What?”
The look in James’s pale eyes was painfully knowing. “Say hello to Marion for me, will you? Before you say goodbye. Don’t waste time in regards to the people you love.”
Seth jolted at Charity’s side. “We’re not—”
“Omnipotence,” James said, tapping his temple with a quill. “I’m not always absorbed in my books. Lonely gods are dangerous, Seth. Loneliness drove Adam to madness.” His pale eyes glowed. “A broken heart might put us in a position to replace you. I’d rather not do that.”
“If you’re trying to avoid broken hearts, you picked the wrong guy for Death,” he said.
Charity hugged his arm tighter. “Don’t antagonize him,” she whispered.
“We picked correctly,” James said. “I’m confident of it. But tread carefully around anyone who holds such sway over you.” He sank to the chair beside Onoskelis, unfolding the arms of reading glasses. He shot Seth a hard look through the spectacles. “I told you that you’d one day meet someone worth shattering universes over, didn’t I?”
Gods. Charity didn’t even know exactly what they were talking about, and she still wanted to slap the smug self-righteousness off of James’s insanely symmetric face.
That would probably be a good way to get unborn.
“I hate you,” Seth said matter-of-factly.
“I’ve earned it a few thousand times over,” James said. “Still, we’ve an eternity ahead of us. You’d best start considering ways to forgive me. It should be relatively easy once you discover everything Marion has done.”
2
Seattle, Washington—October 2032
Jaycee Hardwick was scrying throughout the Middle Worlds, and she was not happy about it. For one thing, her search was yielding no results. A task she’d blocked out an hour to take was instead consuming her entire morning.
For another thing, the hours she spent scrying meant that her damn tea was getting cold while she was zoned out. And now she needed to brew another pot.
“This is just ridiculous.” She pushed back from the palantír, which she had mounted upon a platinum stand in order to match the rest of her office’s furnishings.
Jaycee stood and smoothed her skirt over her hips as she walked toward the wall of windows. Seattle looked the way she felt—which was to say, buried under fog. It was raining again—it always rained at this time of year—and the moisture clung to the streets, the trees, the rooftops.
The weather would have been perfect for quiet fireside time with her mate, had she any clue what had become of him. “Where are you, Pierce?” she muttered, digging her fingernails into her mug.
Pierce Hardwick had once been famous primarily for his role as founder of Hardwick Medical Research. That had been before Genesis, back when Pierce had been a mundane human.
Hardwick Medical Research was no more. It had cured lycanthropy shortly before the company was shattered into a thousand smaller companies and sold off. The skyscraper that Jaycee stood in now was Frost Tower. It was a beautiful building that housed thousands of offices, and only some of those offices did medical research, and absolutely none of them under the Hardwick name.
If humans discovered that this year’s flu shots had been designed by sidhe…
Paranoid little ants.
Jaycee sipped her cold tea, set it on her desk, and glared at the palantír again. It was no longer filled with fog. It only reflected the clouds outside her window.
“I didn’t want to look anyway,” she said with a haughty sniff. She tossed a silk cloth over it. “You don’t even know where anything has gone.”
Her assistant was buzzing. Jaycee was ten minutes late for a meeting with the Somali Health Council, and she was never late for meetings. In the days she’d been human, she had even shown up for meetings with a high fever and delirium, and she had been productive, dammit.
The fact that Pierce was missing was far more problematic than a flu bug. Especially because he’d most likely left of his own volition.
The day that Pierce went missing, Jaycee had woken up to find a note in his handwriting on her bedside table. It had said that he was safe and had not been abducted. Which was exactly what a note from an abductee would say.
Jaycee was not capable of verifying that claim, since wherever Pierce had gone, the palantír could not scry it.
She flung open her office door. Her assistant was mysteriously absent. A fresh vase of wildflowers stood next to the last week’s bouquet, both of which Pierce had sent as an apology.
Jaycee flicked the card on this week’s bouquet open with a fingernail. “‘To my beloved…’” she read aloud. She rolled her eyes and tossed the card into the trash. “My beloved, pathetic wife who is holding down the castle while I frolic through my midlife crisis.” She shoved the flowers into her assistant’s trash for good measure.
There. Take that, Pierce. A hollow gesture that you won’t even see.
Where was Jaycee’s assistant, anyway? She had just buzzed about the meeting. She should have been there.
Jaycee set a hand on the wall and pulsed magic through Frost Tower.
Her sidhe magic connected with the wards, which were embedded so deeply into the foundations that nobody knew they were there. Jaycee hadn’t filled out the proper paperwork with the proper authorities. They’d have never let her plant a magical building in the middle of Seattle without absurd regulatory nonsense.
Jaycee could set the entire thing on fire and turn it to ash within five minutes if she so chose. That was the beauty of below-board warding.
The wards were not catching fire at the moment. They were reporting to her.
And they reported…nothing.
Frost Tower was empty.
At this hour of day, that was impossible. People should have been trundling in from the parking garage for hours, and most employees were so mundane that they blared in Jaycee’s senses like stink lines on cartoon feces.
The wards detected nothing.
“Damn it all,” Jaycee said.
She took off her shoes—a pair of next season’s Manolos—and put them into her assistant’s drawer. The big one with the lock. Jaycee slipped her feet into sneakers instead. When something terrible is about to happen, fashion must be sacrificed for proper footwear.
The terrible thing started approximately ten seconds after Jaycee finished lacing the first shoe.
Her wards stopped being silent and started screaming.
Alert. Alert. Sidhe magic. Invasion. Alert.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Jaycee said, snapping he
r fingers to dismiss the alerts. Her wards strangled into silence.
Through the windows, Seattle had become foggier. She couldn’t even see the bay anymore, or the streets directly ringing her building, for that matter.
She gathered her power into her fists and blacked out the windows, obstructing the fog’s view into the building.
Jaycee returned to her office, shutting and locking the door behind her.
A second door was hidden behind her desk. It was a secret exit built into a water feature. The sound of the fountain running always made Jaycee feel like she needed to pee urgently, but it cloaked her escape route perfectly.
With a gesture, the water stopped, the wall opened, and a passage to her helicopter pad appeared.
Jaycee slung her purse over her shoulder and headed through.
She was barely two steps down the passage when she heard the thudding on her door.
Someone was trying to get in.
Jaycee lifted her watch toward her lips. “Remind me to call insurance about the extent of our coverage for magical battles tomorrow.” Her digital personal assistant blooped in serene acknowledgement.
The thumping grew louder.
She ran into her secret passage and the door shut. It was a small tunnel illuminated by only witchlights, urging Jaycee onward.
On the other side of the wall, she heard her office breaking open. My insurance better replace that door. It had been hand-carved by some Moroccan designer that Pierce liked. For all that Jaycee was annoyed by her husband’s mysterious absence, she still wanted him to have his stupid, beloved Moroccan doors intact.
The entire tower shook. Plaster dust showered around her.
“Good God, have they sent an entire army after me?” She hadn’t done anything worthy of being attacked by an army.
Well, at least not this week.
But if this was an army thumping around in her tower, ruining all her beautiful expensive furnishings, then they could have only come from one place. The new unseelie king was even more of a moody brat than Jaycee had anticipated.
