by SM Reine
This time, his boot struck her in the face. It felt and sounded so satisfying that he did it three more times. He’d never found an outlet for his anger as good as the sound of her breaking bones, and he doubted he’d ever find anything else as satisfying.
Marion didn’t lift her head to speak again. She remained on the floor, hands over her face, eyes shut. A tall woman shrunken so that she would occupy as little space as physically possible.
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” he asked. “Funny how you can have so much magic, but in a physical fight, alone with me, you’re still just some tiny little girl. You don’t stand a chance against me.”
She mumbled something he couldn’t hear. Using his boot, he nudged her hands away from her face.
“Speak up, princess,” he said.
Marion repeated herself. “I’m never alone.”
Someone gasped. He turned to see that Heather was still in the hallway. She hadn’t left with the handmaidens, and the ring he’d intended to give her was still heavy in his pocket.
Heather’s expression was as unreadable as Marion’s. But Konig thought she looked pitying toward the queen, as though Heather had never seen anything as pathetic as a woman like her before.
Marion was bloody, but conscious, and shivering now that the ice had crept underneath her body. Her splattered blood had already frozen into thin, frosty wafers.
“Where is Jaycee Hardwick?” Konig asked. It was easier to speak calmly now.
Marion groaned quietly, feeling the bridge of her nose with her fingertips. “I don’t know.” Her voice was thick from the blood in her sinuses.
“How am I supposed to believe you about that? Or anything else?”
“I’ll summon Wintersong back. He can account for my whereabouts in recent hours. Just give me a chance to prove myself,” she said.
“It’s too late. You’ve already had your second chance a thousand times.”
Marion wavered on her hands and knees. A black ring was already forming around her eye. “One more, Konig. Please.”
The sight of her like this was better than getting a massage from the women of the court. Better than an entire barrel of honey mead. She was finally debased the way she should have been, and she was being respectful.
Had Marion been like this more reliably, Konig could have imagined a longer marriage for the both of them.
“Clean yourself up,” Konig said. “You’re still the queen for now. You have to be present when we claim Alfheimr and you can’t look like…this.”
He turned to leave with Heather, ready to summon the Raven Knights back from Earth.
But Heather had already left.
10
Leliel found Shamayim empty. Irohael wasn’t babysitting their captive, and there was no sign of Marion. Not that she expected to see the mage girl for a few hours. Seducing her way to power was busy work.
Irohael must have returned to Shamayim at some point, though. The statue of Metaraon had been relocated from Dilmun successfully. Metaraon was positioned near enough to Benjamin Flynn that it looked like the angel was glaring at him in perpetual disdain.
She took a moment to study his jagged features, so much like his daughter’s.
“I haven’t missed you,” Leliel said. She didn’t miss feeling like she was at constant odds with a brother she could never escape.
Perhaps once she took care of Marion, she would celebrate by shattering Metaraon’s statue and scattering its dust across every plane.
“I didn’t miss you either,” Benjamin grumbled. “No. Stop it. Stop it.”
Leliel almost pitied the poor creature.
She summoned Irohael with a stab of magic—one of the few spells that Marion had taught Leliel.
Irohael arrived immediately, landing lightly on the mossy ground with a blade tucked under his arm. It was one of the few flaming swords remaining from when the cherubim had protected Eden. “What is it this time?” He sized Leliel up, and then revised the question to, “What did the Queen Bee do this time?”
“Come speak with me,” Leliel said. “Away from the captive.”
He followed her down to the nest half submerged in the lake. Leliel had taken a few minutes to begin assembling a circle of power around the nest before summoning Irohael, but the work was too much to do on her own in a timely fashion.
“What’s this?” Irohael asked, helping her drag a few logs to create the circle’s perimeter.
“It’s a transportation spell.” It was gaean in origin, but Leliel was adapting it to ethereal magic on the fly. Marion had taught her enough to be able to accomplish that. “We need to secure the Genesis warp and relocate the nest.”
“Marion’s going to handle both of those,” Irohael said.
“We can’t trust her.”
“No shit.”
He didn’t understand. There was a difference between suspecting someone hated you, and knowing that they planned to kill you. It was a matter of degrees. “It’s worse than I thought. We can’t trust her with anything.”
“Including the kid?” Irohael asked, jerking a thumb in Benjamin’s direction.
“Possibly.”
With a flick of his wrist, Irohael’s blade caught fire. “Then I’ll kill him now.”
“Not yet.” The cogs of Leliel’s mind were turning, trying to decide the next potential moves in this big, complicated chess game. “No…not yet. There’s still a chance I can use him as I planned.” But only after she had used him as bait to ensure Marion returned to Shamayim. “Was she alone when you relocated the statue of Metaraon, aside from the legion?”
“I didn’t help her,” Irohael said. “She never got Dilmun secured.”
Ice washed down Leliel’s spine. If Irohael hadn’t helped Marion, then Marion must have let Seth into Shamayim. She’d brought an omnipotent demon with power over death into a holy place, where the soon-to-be-newborn angels were gestating.
Time was even shorter than Leliel had realized.
“So what do you want to do?” Irohael asked. “Can we kill the human boy?”
“Yes,” Leliel said softly. “Yes, I think we will.” That hadn’t been her plan when she’d returned to Shamayim, but she was a flexible creature, especially when she felt vengeful.
She completed the transportation spell. It was an ugly thing to look at—a circle with sinewy inorganic lines that didn’t look like a circle at all. It would only need a jolt of Leliel’s magic to activate, though. And then she could take the nest through the ley lines with her.
But first, she needed to know where to take them.
She needed Marion.
“You didn’t come to the meeting!” Speak of the devil’s girlfriend—Marion came striding through the trees, drenched in so much magic that she practically reeked of it.
Leliel opened her mind to Marion’s magic. She knew enough to tell that the Voice of God was coated in a complex lacework of glamours. Her flawless skin gleamed in a sidhe sort of way. But that was part of the glamour, not natural. Whatever Marion truly looked like at the moment, she didn’t want anyone to see it.
She was hiding something.
“Did you hear me?” Marion asked, storming down the hill toward the lake. “You missed our meeting at Niflheimr. I demand an explanation.”
“I was absorbed in caring for the nest,” Leliel said.
Marion pushed between Irohael and Leliel, emerging on the bank of the lake. The mage gazed out at the orbs without seeming to actually see them. She didn’t see the spell that Leliel had prepared, either. She was blinded by arrogance. Blinded by the idea that nobody was capable of executing secret plans except for her.
“You’ve picked a poor day to stand me up for our date,” Marion said. “I have had a terrible week. Very terrible. The time before the Genesis warp opens dwindles, and you waste these moments.”
“I’m wasting moments?” Leliel asked. “You’re the one who still hasn’t found the Genesis warp even though you guaranteed you would do it.”
She decided to prod Marion’s pride—a sure way to get the girl to react. “I’m beginning to think you can’t find it.”
“It will open in Ransom Falls.” Marion turned from the nest and strode up the slope toward Benjamin. “But the situation is unexpectedly complicated. An entity was placed near the warp, presumably to protect it, and she has been released. She’s an avatar—the Godslayer—and she will surely kill us if we don’t take precautions.”
No other words could have summoned such darkly vivid memories to Leliel’s mind.
The Godslayer was the reason that angels were on the brink of extinction, after all. Leliel could never forget how New Eden had smelled while it burned with the bodies of everyone she knew inside.
“Ransom Falls? In California?” Leliel asked. Her gaze cut to Irohael. He was already moving without needing to be told what to do, heading to Earth to prepare. He would find somewhere for the nest to wait. He would hold the warp for them.
Their race depended on it.
“Is the Godslayer guarding the Genesis warp right now?” Leliel asked.
“I don’t think so. She’s hunting me,” Marion said.
That was a sliver of sunshine amid all the other bad news. “Then we should still be able to do things as we planned, so long as we take care.” By which she meant that the Godslayer wouldn’t be a problem if Leliel got Marion out of the way.
But some small part of Leliel still wanted to believe Marion was on her side.
Leliel had loved Eve, and Eve had loved all of her children. She’d have loved Metaraon’s daughter best of all. Eve was long gone—but the memory lived on in Leliel’s heart.
She wanted to appease that memory.
“Perhaps we should dismantle the angel trap without using it,” Leliel suggested.
“What? Why?” Marion didn’t even look at her.
“The Godslayer could use it against us,” Leliel said. “We can find another way to change Genesis. If I were to go through the warp with the nest—”
“Don’t be ridiculous. We can’t go changing plans at the eleventh hour.” Marion massaged her cheek. The glamour flickered, and for the briefest moment, Leliel thought she saw a black eye. “I made that trap for a reason, so let’s use it.”
Resigned determination settled in Leliel’s belly. She thought a silent prayer to Eve’s departed soul. “Very well. Then it’s time to separate Benjamin Wilder from Nathaniel Faulkner.”
The creepiest thing about Shamayim was not, in fact, the way that Benjamin had been chained between two trees for so long that he no longer had sensation in his shoulders, nor even the lake filled with what appeared to be amniotic fluid and angel eggs.
It was the absence of sunlight. That was very creepy.
Something about that missing sunlight felt deeply familiar, as though this were something that Benjamin had suffered before. A recurring nightmare that he couldn’t remember dreaming.
Without sunlight, time was meaningless. With the embodiment of a belligerent god inhabiting Benjamin’s soul, that meaningless time was torture.
“I’m going to kill them,” Nathaniel said, like he’d said a hundred thousand other times. He appeared to be sitting cross-legged on the ground, unconstrained by the chains that stretched Benjamin’s arms to either side.
“Kill whom?” Benjamin asked, exhausted. “Elise and James? The gods that put me here? Or Marion, and Leliel, and…”
“Everyone,” Nathaniel said. “I’m going to kill everyone.”
“I’m not killing anyone. I couldn’t even if I wanted to.” He yanked against his chains. They rattled but did not give.
“They’ll undo my chains to take me there.” Nathaniel was suddenly standing beside the circle that Marion had crafted, gazing into its emptiness as if it were presents on Christmas morning. “That’ll be my chance. That’s when I’ll kill them.”
“To do what? I don’t have super powers, and they’re mages.”
“I should always have a knife,” Nathaniel said.
It was true. Benjamin did have a knife. His current knife had been whittled out of wood from the Wilds, and it was still tucked in his sock—not that he could reach it.
The reminder that Nathaniel knew about the knife was the new creepiest thing Benjamin had seen in Shamayim.
His need to “always” have a knife had been instilled upon him by his werewolf father, Abel. A father that Nathaniel hadn’t had.
But Nathaniel still knew about it.
There were no secrets between them.
“I’m going to kill them,” Nathaniel said again, pacing between the trees. “They want to keep me out of the Genesis warp, but I’ll kill them!”
He looked at Marion when he said that. Marion, who was walking up from the lake. Marion, who had once kissed him in the coldness of Niflheimr. Marion, who used to share her popsicles with Benjamin on hot summer days.
Nathaniel wanted to kill her.
“No,” Benjamin groaned. “No.”
“She won’t let me go through the warp.” Nathaniel’s eyes were wild. “She has to die!”
“But I don’t want to go through,” Benjamin said. He didn’t want to travel back in time to make Genesis happen. Genesis had been terrible. He hadn’t been born when it happened, but he’d spent his entire life seeing people suffer the aftereffects of it.
Marion was good people, in her way. If Nathaniel’s conspiracy theory was true—that she didn’t want either Benjamin or Nathaniel to go through the warp—then he trusted that she was trying to protect him.
Nathaniel dropped in front of him, clutching Benjamin’s face in both hands. “I have to. It’s my destiny.”
“Destiny’s a stupid concept.”
“Don’t resist destiny without even knowing what’s coming in the future. There are things I’ll do, people I’ll love—”
“People I’ll kill,” Benjamin said.
Nathaniel pressed his forehead against Benjamin’s, and he felt so tangible, so real. “I’m going to kill them all,” he said again. “It’s my destiny.”
Benjamin felt the conviction in it. And Nathaniel was imagining it so vividly that Benjamin couldn’t help but see it—the way that he would drive the knife into Marion’s carotid, leaving her to gush silver angel-blood onto the moss. After that, Nathaniel would plunge through the shining gash of the Genesis warp, and he’d kill everyone else on the planet too.
“Don’t,” Benjamin said. “Don’t kill them.”
“I can’t stop. Nobody can stop me.” Nathaniel’s pale eyes went hot with anger. “Not even myself.”
Nathaniel kissed Benjamin.
It turned out that being kissed by the godly ghost of himself was a thousand times more awkward than being kissed by Marion.
Especially when Nathaniel started melting into him.
His lips went through Benjamin’s.
Benjamin cried out, but it made no sound because his mouth no longer belonged to him, nor did his lungs, his muscles, his vocal cords.
Nathaniel merged with Benjamin. Soul sank into flesh.
The forest was screaming.
Benjamin was screaming.
He’d been carrying Nathaniel dormant inside of himself his entire life, but it had never felt like this before. It hadn’t felt like someone was invading his house with a gun to his head, shoving him into the basement so that the robber could take over his life.
There was no amount of twisting, fighting, or running that could stop Nathaniel.
By the time Marion arrived, it was over.
Benjamin took two steps toward Marion to warn her about Nathaniel—before realizing that he was no longer chained. He lifted his hands in front of his face. Benjamin could see through his unrestrained arms to the mossy ground beyond.
“What the…?”
The guy who was chained between the trees looked up at Benjamin. It was Benjamin’s head that moved, and his mouth that smirked, but it was Nathaniel operating the body. Benjamin’s body was possessed by the Son of
God, leaving his consciousness as a ghost.
“Oh man,” Benjamin said. “I really don’t like myself.”
“I’d be saying thanks if I realized that I’m going to save the world.” Nathaniel looked like brown-skinned, curly-haired Benjamin. But he spoke like an ethereal douchebag. And his posture was completely different too—he had Marion’s arrogant, calculated slouch.
Marion emerged from the trees with that same arrogant slouch and Leliel at her back. “Untie him,” Marion commanded. She wasn’t even looking directly at Nathaniel when she said it. Her eyes were fogged by distraction, a hand pressed against her ribcage. Maybe she wasn’t slouching. Maybe she was injured.
“No, wait, don’t let him out,” Benjamin said. She didn’t react to the sound of his voice. Nobody could see him.
Leliel moved to release the chains from one of Nathaniel’s arms.
Benjamin waved his hands in front of her face, knowing it was futile. “Hey! Can’t you hear me? Leliel? Marion? Em? Don’t let that guy out!”
“They can’t hear me,” Nathaniel said with a dark smile. “They’re going to let me go.”
Marion touched his cheek gently. “Please be quiet and relax, Ben. We’re almost done here.”
Leliel took off the last of the chains. Marion led Nathaniel toward the ring of stones.
“You’re doing exactly what he wants!” Benjamin yelled.
Nathaniel pretended to stumble over a tree root. And when he straightened, he was holding the wooden blade tucked against his side, where neither Marion nor Leliel could see it. He’d managed to get it out of his sock.
Benjamin flapped his arms in the air, jumping up and down in front of Marion. “Nathaniel has a freaking knife! He’s going to freaking stab you!”
She passed through him. Benjamin couldn’t even feel it.
“I will say one thing,” Leliel said, following Marion and Nathaniel around the feet of the Metaraon statue. “There were times when it was pleasant to work with you. I never expected that.”
Limited as Marion’s attention appeared to be, that strange statement made her turn. “What?”
