by SM Reine
Seth popped off a few shots. The bullets he’d summoned were real enough to shred Leliel’s dress when they impacted her torso, but she twisted aside nimbly enough that they barely drew blood.
A battle cry signaled Anthony’s entry into the clearing.
It was a cool hand on Seth’s shoulder that signaled Brianna’s. “This way,” she hissed, yanking him back from the angels.
“But Dana and—”
“You can’t help them,” Brianna said. “Not like this.” Infinity was pouring between Seth’s fingers where they clutched his injury. “What happened to you?”
“I’m almost out of time.” He yanked his shirt up.
Her eyes widened at the sight of his chest. “Ooh-kay. That looks bad.”
Seth glanced down. The skin was deteriorating, and so was the bone. There was nothing inside of him except endless nothing.
Come back to us, James said. He was beckoning. Waving Onoskelis’s contract in his face.
But there was still too much to do.
It was midnight.
“The warp’s opening tonight,” Seth said.
“Tonight? It’s opening right now,” Brianna said.
White bars of balefire blasted higher in the sky, bowing to form interlocking arches on the other side of the angel nest. There was lightning inside the arches. That lightning was carving a hole in time that Seth felt in his godly senses like a razor drawing lines down the center of his tongue.
Marion had said there were days left until it opened. She had been very specific: the warp would open on midnight November fifth, and Seth needed to protect Benjamin’s life until then to make sure he got through. Presumably he was meant to have hidden Benjamin away to make sure that nobody found him.
If he hadn’t had that dream, and instead followed her instructions, then Benjamin wouldn’t have been in Ransom Falls that night. But the unseelie would have. There was a whole legion getting slaughtered by the Godslayer and the OPA right at that moment that would have reached the warp in time to keep the angels away from it.
A familiar roar shook the forest. Seth’s gaze lifted over Brianna’s shoulder to see that Anthony and Dana had company in their fight against the angels now—a werewolf that was both bigger and angrier than five bulls glued into a ball. Abel had entered the battle.
No sign of Benjamin. But he needed to enter the warp then—right then, in the next few minutes, or the world was going to end.
“Find somewhere safe to hide,” Seth said, limping into the trees.
Brianna shouted after him. “But where are you going?”
“I’m going to find a way to stop Marion,” he muttered.
Benjamin imagined that fighting against himself must have looked ridiculous from the outside. Nobody else would have been able to see the fact that he’d wrapped his arms around Nathaniel’s waist, dug his heels in, and was trying to haul him away from the growing Genesis warp. The only thing anybody would have been able to see was Benjamin’s human form, inhabited by Nathaniel, flopping around in place without going anywhere.
“Let me go! We have to get into the warp!” Nathaniel roared. His arms stretched to their limits, fingertips yearning toward the white light through the trees.
Even though he had possession of the body, Benjamin was still winning. “I’m not going through, you crazy colostomy bag of a half-angel!”
They thrashed against each other. It was a much more pathetic fight than what was happening on the other side of the trees, and Benjamin felt all the more pathetic for it when he glimpsed what his dad was doing.
He’d never seen his dad in combat like this before. Abel was scary. Not to Benjamin—never to Benjamin. But there was something indisputably terrifying about a black-furred werewolf the size of a school bus that moved faster than a racecar battling angels who were just as fast.
Magic splattered everywhere. Dana’s magic, angel magic. And all the while, balefire was burning.
“Look, dummy, the warp’s only going to be open for a few minutes!” Nathaniel was trying to pry Benjamin’s arms off of him, but of course he couldn’t. Benjamin was barely a thought. “If I don’t go…” Desperation filled his eyes. Were they really pale blue now, or was that just the reflection from the balefire? “This is all I’m meant to do. This is the only thing I can do.”
“I need some Paxil, dude,” Benjamin said.
“What?”
“If I think that sacrificing myself to a burning hole is the only thing to do, then I’m obviously depressed.”
“There’s a difference between depression and realism.”
“That’s exactly what a depressed person would say,” Benjamin said. “There’s so much more than that—jumping into the warp. My family loves me. Summer would be heartbroken if I vanished. Little Luc would completely forget about me. My friends—okay, I don’t have a lot of those, but Sinead would miss me for at least a week, and she shouldn’t have to deal with that. I can’t leave my family just because of destiny!”
Nathaniel stopped fighting. He stopped trying to run. He stared down at Benjamin, and a tear tracked down his cheek. “I won’t have a family if the whole universe collapses.”
And Benjamin knew that. He’d always known that.
This wasn’t a choice—not really.
He had to sacrifice himself for everybody whether he wanted to or not. Because he couldn’t have his family anymore. He couldn’t have his burly dad, or his overbearing mom, or his sisters and brothers, or the sanctuary.
Benjamin had to go back in time and face destiny.
He’d spent his whole life half wishing that he wasn’t so mundane. But he’d also spent his whole life enjoying that he got to do whatever he wanted. He wasn’t his mom, facing the destiny of an Alpha as a teenager, and he wasn’t like Summer, who had married an angel and founded the Academy. He wasn’t a Godslayer. He wasn’t even an ordinary shifter. Benjamin could have spent his life flipping burgers if he wanted to.
Or so he’d hoped.
“How am I going to live without my family?” Benjamin whispered, letting his grip drop from Nathaniel’s waist.
“I’ve never had family. I’ve always been alone.”
“But I don’t want to be alone.”
Neither of them was moving now. And Nathaniel had stopped looking so angry, too. “I’ll never be alone again. It’s not possible because…” He opened his arms, inviting Benjamin into an embrace. “I’ve got myself.”
That was the only thing that Benjamin could have, and it would be enough.
It had to be.
He stepped into Nathaniel’s arms.
They hugged tightly, and the world flipped around Benjamin. He was the one being hugged while simultaneously doing the hugging. He was in his body, outside his body. He was willing to enter the Genesis warp and unwilling.
But these weren’t the whims of two separate entities.
Benjamin wasn’t possessed by Nathaniel. He was Nathaniel—the son of James Faulkner, who had grown up not knowing his father, a god-child alone in the garden—just as much as he was Benjamin—the son of loving Abel, taught to survive and never treated differently from his preternatural siblings.
His fight to escape the warp wasn’t because he thought he could avoid it. It was the protesting cry of a guy dragged against his will to meet a dark destiny that would hurt. It was going to hurt so much, and it was so unfair that he had to do this, but he still didn’t have a choice.
When he opened his eyes, there was only one person. One body.
There had only ever been one person.
Benjamin lifted his hands to look at them, turning them back and forth to see both palms and knuckles painted in the bright-blue hues of the developing Genesis warp.
He turned to face the glow directly, and he felt sad. “I have to go,” Benjamin said, walking toward the battling angels.
He should have said a proper goodbye to his mom.
“Not so fast,” said a voice behind him.
&nbs
p; He turned to see a woman—and for an instant, he was terrified, because he thought it was another angel ally of Leliel who had found him.
But then he realized who it was, and he was even more terrified.
Marion pointed at him.
“You’re not going through that warp,” she said.
Electricity consumed him, and Benjamin lost consciousness.
25
To find the Godslayer, Seth only had to follow the sense of death.
He couldn’t phase to her. He had to enter the forest on foot, staggering as carefully as possible through the trees, both of his hands closed over his heart so that the ash wouldn’t beat itself out of existence.
There was so far to go, and so little time left.
But the death made it easy to find her. First because all the dying souls were calling to him, just as they had on Alfheimr’s battlefields, and then because he started to see the bodies. They appeared within a half-kilometer of the Office of Preternatural Affairs’s perimeter. Something had exploded—something most likely magical—and the agents had been blown clear of it.
All that remained of the dead were a few scraps of flesh, splatters of blood, and eternally silenced souls waiting to be walked to the other side.
Seth couldn’t do it. Not if he planned to come back.
He limped to the perimeter, following the sound of clashing metal.
At first he could only see unseelie alive.
The OPA had been slaughtered, iron aside. They’d taken a few unseelie down. But most of the legion was still alive, and condensed around a single point in the forest that flashed with faefire and the occasional spray of gem-colored blood. There were still dozens of them, yet they didn’t move forward—they didn’t get nearer to the Genesis warp.
That was because the Godslayer was fighting in the midst of the unseelie. She was a whirl of blasting gunpowder and flashing blades.
Seth cupped his hands on either side of his mouth. “Elise!”
The avatar didn’t react to Seth’s shout, but he knew that she was aware of him. There was no way that she couldn’t have been. But there was also no way to modify her fighting behaviors to get to Seth sooner—she was already killing as efficiently as possible.
As efficient as possible didn’t seem to be enough.
Sure, the unseelie were falling under her. But the OPA must have been attacking her too. They hadn’t known who was on their side. They’d only known that they were under assault from the preternatural, and there was a faceless creature with a lot of weapons doing a lot of killing.
She wasn’t susceptible to iron as much as sidhe, but bullets were bullets. One of them had punched into her left thigh, which was thick as a tree trunk and so strong that the curves of muscle showed clearly through her jeans. Another had left a hole in the lower left quadrant of her abdomen, from which blood was still spreading.
“Shit,” Seth muttered.
He couldn’t extract the Godslayer without omnipotence. He didn’t have any iron bullets of his own. Yet if he used omnipotence, he would vanish—and then have to trust that the Godslayer alone could handle Marion without killing her.
There were too many options to weigh, too many choices to make, not enough time.
But before he could act, he smelled brimstone on the air.
Infernal magic whip-cracked through the air.
All light vanished from the forest for a heartbeat. In that heartbeat, shadows that were blacker than black contrasted against balefire that was whiter than white.
Once Seth could see again, the Godslayer was no longer fighting the unseelie alone.
She was surrounded by Hounds. Dozens of them.
And they all looked like they were starving.
These were not the docile, well-trained Hounds that Charity had taken alone onto Alfheimr’s battlefield. These were skeletal creatures with hollow stomachs and massive mouths that didn’t seem to have been fed in years.
The white dogs swarmed the unseelie.
And one attacked Seth.
It wasn’t the first time he’d fallen underneath such creatures. When he’d still been wearing Luke Flynn’s flesh, he’d gotten eaten by them too. He hadn’t died at the time. It had taken a while for their teeth to shred into his mortal body, possibly because he hadn’t tasted dead enough for their preferences.
He tasted dead now. He was the deadest thing around.
His back struck the ground, and a mouth opened wide, wider, so wide that it could have taken his whole body with one gulp.
Seth threw his arms over his face. Not much protection against getting swallowed whole, but nothing was.
Except the sword that exploded through the roof of the Hound’s mouth.
The blade yanked sideways and then down.
The Hound was ripped into two pieces that sprayed ichor over Seth. Its death was as sweet as any other, and its soul would linger on the battlefield like any other.
When its appendages hit the ground, the Godslayer was standing on the other side. She cut an impressive silhouette over him. For all that Seth was meant to be the embodiment of Death, she looked like Death. She was the blood-drenched soul of brutal war. Faceless, soulless, armed to the teeth that she didn’t really have. Hounds and unseelie met like two fronts of a storm behind her.
A Godslayer standing over a god.
Seth went still.
She didn’t attack, but he hadn’t thought that she would.
“Elise,” he said with too much hesitation, “I think I know why you’re here. I need your help. It’s the Genesis warp—and Marion—”
One of four hands interrupted him by shooting down to seize Seth by the collar. She lifted him to his feet.
“Promise you won’t kill her,” Seth said.
The Godslayer looked at him blankly. There wasn’t anything else she could do, since she didn’t have a face, but he still didn’t get a sense of assent from her.
“Whatever she’s done, I know it’s been for a noble reason. It might be stupid for me to think that, but goddammit, I do. She’s good, Elise. She’s better than anyone thinks. She’s fucked this up somehow but…don’t kill her.”
Still, a blank look.
“You’re here to stop her though, right?” Seth asked.
The Godslayer nodded. Finally, communication.
“Do you know how to stop her? How to make Genesis happen correctly?”
Another nod.
“Just tell me you won’t kill her,” he said. “Nod if you promise not to kill her.”
But the Godslayer started running for the Genesis warp.
Fortunately Benjamin was only unconscious for a few minutes. But those few minutes were more than enough time for everything to go very, very wrong.
Not that things had been going great before he’d passed out, exactly. Any day that Abel hulked out into a werewolf to rip faces off was a bad day. And the kind of day where Benjamin had to be yanked out of a flipping car by a demon-god was also bound to go badly.
But this was something else.
Benjamin was being held up in some kind of invisible fist of magic that clutched around his chest like a vise tight enough to make his ribs ache. It was hard to breathe. His toes couldn’t brush the ground.
The Genesis warp was only a handful of meters away.
All those big columns of balefire had formed into a single arch that swept over the trees. There was a gash bisecting the air within. It was just wide enough for a human body to pass through, but not wide enough to see what was generating that light from the other side.
Benjamin needed to get there, ready or not.
He had a knife in his sock again, but it wasn’t anything that he’d be able to use against the magic that was holding him in place. Not unless he could reach Marion.
Who was the source of the fist, beyond a doubt. She was crackling beside him. Aglow with magic. Eyes white, hair lifted around her shoulders by invisible wind. She looked a lot like she had when she’d been holding him
captive in Shamayim.
She was wasting her magic on him when she should have been clearing a path to the warp.
But she clearly had never meant for him to go there.
All those times that she’d hurt him in Shamayim… Benjamin had chalked it up to part of Marion’s elaborate ruse. In order to protect him, and build that angel trap for Leliel, she’d needed to look convincingly evil. Electrocuting him did that effectively. It had only hurt…kind of a lot. But it obviously hadn’t permanently damaged him, so he’d still chalked it up to a ruse.
Now he didn’t.
“Move aside, Leliel,” Marion was saying. She only spoke to the angel because nobody else was left standing in the clearing to speak to. “Clear a path for me to the Genesis warp.”
Leliel was standing over the bodies of Dana and Anthony, her wings extended rigidly to either side. Anthony was obviously breathing, so he was just unconscious. Benjamin couldn’t tell if Dana was okay because her stone armor meant that her chest looked motionless.
Even Abel was unconscious. The only sign of him was a big lump of black fur beyond the nest.
The combat skill of angels hadn’t been exaggerated. Even a werewolf hadn’t been able to take her down.
Fear clawed at Benjamin’s throat.
Leliel looked suspicious. “Clear a path for you? Or else you’ll do…what?”
The magical fist squeezed Benjamin harder.
He gurgled, struggling to breathe.
“You’re mistaken if you think that will serve to threaten me,” Leliel said. “If you kill him, I’ll still go into the Genesis warp alone. It may be better that way.”
“You believe that it will end the world if Benjamin doesn’t go through,” Marion said. “You’ve told me that a hundred times.”
And she squeezed him again.
Harder.
“Make a path,” Marion said.
“You don’t want the world to end either,” Leliel said.
“I don’t think it will,” Marion said. “In fact, I’m willing to bet it won’t.”
Leliel stepped back.
When Marion approached the Genesis warp, Benjamin bobbed along behind her like he was floating on the surface of the most uncomfortable water ever. He couldn’t stop looking at his dad. Abel’s wolf form was as familiar to him as his human form, and it was terrifying to see it unmoving.
