Night Rises: The Awakened Magic Saga (Soul Forge Book 2)

by Leslie Claire Walker

  “Wow,” Red said. “When was the last time you did that?”

  “Laughed?”

  He shook his head. “Got silly.”

  I tried to remember. My forehead knotted with wrinkles.

  Red smoothed them out with his fingertips. He planted a kiss on my brow, then rolled onto his side. I curled into him, listening to his breathing deepen. I could sense that he was thinking, but I couldn’t read his thoughts. The joining of our magic had slipped.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You can’t recall, can you?”

  I shook my head.

  “That’s got to change,” he said. “You worry too much.”

  “I’m not tilting at windmills,” I said. “The stuff I worry about is real. And I wouldn’t call it that, exactly. It’s more like planning. Strategizing.”

  “It’s endless.”

  “No,” I said. But how could I be sure there would be an end when the forces arrayed against us were so many, and the hits kept on coming?

  “Can I ask you something, Night?”

  His tone had me pushing up on one elbow, resting my head in my hand. I wanted to see his face. I waited.

  “If you’re always planning, always fighting—what are you fighting for?” he asked.

  That was an easy ask, an easy answer. “To keep Faith safe. To keep all of us safe. And….” I trailed off, because I saw the rabbit hole open up in front of me.

  There was also to save the world.

  Which sounded arrogant and stupid. And something I had to do.

  Red followed my train of thought without my having to spell it out. Maybe because he knew me. Maybe because the combination of our magic hadn’t slipped as much as I thought.

  “You want to save everybody,” he said. “What are you saving them for? What kind of world do you want for them?”

  One where we didn’t have to look over our shoulder all the time. One where safety didn’t depend on constant vigilance. Where laughter wasn’t a rare occurrence, and joy wasn’t a foreign feeling.

  I’d never lived in a world like that, but it was the kind of world I wanted.

  “Jesus, Red.”

  “I know,” he said. “Just think about it. That’s all I’m asking.”

  I lowered my head to his chest. He pulled me close. I turned the questions over in my mind until exhaustion took me over and I slipped deep into sleep and dream.

  I expected something peaceful, something crafted from the sound of Red’s heartbeat and even breathing, from the solidness of him. Or something troubled, as I considered what he’d asked, and all the ways in which I walked in the world as an outcast, as a creature apart from normal human things.

  Magic. Training. Blood on my hands. The strange shape of my soul. The Angel of Death locked inside of me.

  I found myself in the living room of the house. I wasn’t sleepwalking; I still sensed my body tangled with Red’s in the back bedroom. I was definitely dreaming.

  The corner where the kids had watched their movie earlier was quiet now, occupied by Ben, who slept with his arms straight out and his legs thrown wide, taking up as much space as humanly possible, and Jess, curled into a ball and pressed into his side. Best friends, those two. And they had feelings for each other, clear as day.

  Faith and Corey had gone to bed properly, in the room full of air mattresses. I couldn’t see them from where my dreaming self stood, but I could feel them. They were in the house, and safe, and that was what mattered.

  The scent of grease and pepperoni still hung in the air, but the empty pans had been tossed into a white plastic trash bag that sat at the far end of the kitchen. The counters and floor had been wiped down. Sunday or Miguel had brewed a pot of drip coffee and drunk most of it. The rest had begun to congeal in the bottom of the glass carafe, but not yet to burn.

  Sunday sat in in a beanbag that she’d dragged in front of the fireplace, where the flames cracked and popped. She’d let her blond curls down and tucked the sides behind her ears. She worried at the scar on her lip the way a person might worry at a memory they couldn’t shake. She’d stretched her legs out in front of her, toes digging into the pile of the rug, and allowed the fire to mesmerize her—or she cultivated that appearance.

  But the fire in her halo burned bright. She watched Miguel from the corner of her eye.

  He stood over by the picture window near the front door. He’d pushed the curtains aside enough to peer outside. He scanned the front yard, head cocked, listening for trouble. The darker shades of his bruised, purple halo shifted and swirled.

  His hair had dried and set with the waves of his braid. It hung long, the ends brushing his belt. He’d removed his plaid over-shirt and hung it on the edge of the bar. He’d pushed up the sleeves of his black turtleneck sweater, the corded muscle in his forearms reminding me of the superhuman strength he’d once had. His bare toes poked from the wide hems of his black jeans.

  Sunday didn’t take any notice of me, of course, because I wasn’t a part of the waking world. But Miguel did.

  He turned to look directly at me. “’Bout time,” he said.

  I raised a brow.

  “I called a bit ago,” he said. “You were hard to get to. Your man did you well enough to really knock you out.”

  “Crude,” I said.

  “Could’ve been cruder. Not that y’all made that much noise, but the magic going off in there—a body would have to be dead not to feel it. You’ve got something special. It’s a shame, really.”

  I stared at him, disbelieving the nerve it took for anyone to say something like that, much less a stranger pretending to be a friend. I couldn’t resist the urge to look down at my body, to make sure I was clothed—or that my dreaming self was, at any rate.

  Shirt. Jeans. Same thing I’d pulled on this morning after Miguel had tried to kill me.

  “Nothing lasts forever.” He sighed. “That’s not why I called, though.”

  “Wait,” I said. “How did you—”

  “Call?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “We’re connected, you and me. Since you entered my mind back at your apartment this morning. You were worried using your magic on me gave the Order a line on you, but it was never them you needed to worry about like that.”

  “Because the chameleons operate separately from the Order,” I said.

  “In the ways that matter, yeah.”

  “So,” I said, “what are you planning to do with your line on me?”

  “Not much,” he said. “We have that truce going.”

  It didn’t feel that way, with him tapping into my mind. For all that I’d fallen asleep as unguarded as I’d been in a damn long time, all that was over in an instant. I looked at him like the threat he was, my mind turning over every angle I could use against him and every angle he might use against me.

  “Did the oldest Watcher tell you something about having angel blood in you?” he asked.

  “He did.” I hadn’t passed that information on to anyone yet. There hadn’t been time or privacy. God, I hadn’t even told Red when we’d had time and privacy. It hadn’t been foremost on my mind. Maybe it should’ve been.

  Miguel shoved his hands in his back pockets. “He’s a douchebag, that guy, but he’s not wrong.”

  “You know him?” I asked.

  “From before today, you mean? Our paths have crossed.” Miguel’s tone turned derisive. “He wants the Angel, and he’s willing to do anything to get him. Only with Shadow, it’s that he wants something from the Angel. He’ll do anything the Angel asks if the Angel will give him what he wants.”

  “And what’s that?” I asked.

  “No idea,” he said. “That’s the one thing I haven’t been able to figure.”

  “Convenient,” I said.

  “No, not really.”

  “And you want to use the Angel,” I said. “According to Shadow, that’s what you’re after. Taking the Angel from me. Taking my place as the Angel’s vessel.”
/>   Miguel shrugged.

  “What do you want him for, exactly?” I asked.

  “Why would you believe anything I told you?” he countered.

  I glared at him.

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s cultural.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  He took a slow breath, longer on the exhale than the inhale, slowing his heartbeat. The Order taught that technique early and often. When you had a bunch of frazzled, anxious, freaked-out kids and not enough places for that energy to go, calming tech was a necessary part of training.

  “It means that if you thought the Order in general was full of gunners ready to eat you alive and take your place at the top of the food chain, the chameleons are worse.”

  “I know,” I said. “Only the strong survive, and other Darwinian bullshit.”

  He shook his head. “Only the strong who have the most angel blood in them survive.”

  Now we’d arrived at the heart of the matter. “Tell me.”

  He took a step toward me. “The Watchers are descendants of fallen angels, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Most of us with magic are descended from the Watchers.”

  Most. “Shadow said it was all angels, not just the Watchers.”

  Miguel took another step toward me.

  I looked at his feet, then at his face again, my message clear. Not one more.

  “There have been…infusions…of angel blood as the millennia wore on,” he said.

  “Angels mating with humans, you mean?”

  “I guess that’s possible,” he said. “More like joining souls with them, becoming a part of them. Then the angel’s power enters their blood. Their DNA. And they have kids, and so on.”

  “Sounds far-fetched.”

  “It’s all far-fetched, Night,” he said. “So are we when you get right down to it.”

  “So what’s your connection with the Angel of Death, really? You—the other chameleons—did the Order use his blood to create you?”

  He whistled. The dark patches in his halo stopped their shifting and flowed toward his body, hugging the edges of his skin like metal shavings clinging to a magnet. In this case, the effect was protective, and seemed utterly unconscious.

  I’d hit his magical heritage on the nose.

  “And me?” I asked. “What’s so special about me that I can hold him?”

  “There are angels, and there are angels,” Miguel said.

  They all seemed the same to me, especially when we were talking about apocalypse-level angelhood. I’d known a bit about all of that before I’d come to the Order because of my upbringing. When your parents thought you were evil, you looked for anything and everything to prove them wrong.

  Once I’d become part of the Order, I’d learned a little more. Angels and demons and fairies were real, film at eleven. We had to know the basics in order to deal with any of those classes of beings if we ran into them during a mission. There were a lot of levels of angels. If we were talking about the ones up there in the hierarchy above the Angel of Death, we were in territory I’d prefer not to even think about, much less encounter.

  “The angels supposedly closest to God?” I asked.

  Miguel nodded. “Which of the angels closest to God might have enough juice to imprison the Angel of Death?”

  “No idea,” I said.

  “There’s one at the right hand,” he said. “And there used to be one at the left, before he was cast down into the pit.”

  “Michael. Or Lucifer.”

  “One of those,” he said.

  “Which?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t tell—can’t read that deep into your blood.”

  “I’m not that special,” I said. But then I thought about the chain of people who’d had a hand in putting out the hit on me when I’d been a child. The Watchers. The Angel himself. Which I now knew also meant the chameleons. That was a lot of power arrayed against one little girl.

  If Michael’s blood ran in my veins, what did that mean? What I knew about him flashed through my mind. Fiery sword of protection. Leader of God’s armies. Defeated Lucifer and cast him down. Did possessing Michael’s blood make me like him?

  If it was the other one, what did that mean? Lucifer had been the light bringer, giver of forbidden knowledge. He’d refused to elevate humans above all other creations, to love them as God demanded. For his rebellion, he’d been damned.

  I’d been a devil. I’d been a protector. One made the other possible.

  “I can see the wheels turning,” Miguel said.

  I narrowed my eyes. “Stay out of my head.”

  “I don’t have to be in your head to see what’s playing across your face. Just think about it. That’s all I ask.”

  I didn’t like the mirroring of his words with Red’s. I wanted it to be a coincidence, but like Red, I didn’t believe in them.

  “What did you overhear between Red and me?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “It’s like…echoes. When I sent my call through the line between my mind and yours, I caught an echo of what had been on your mind as you fell asleep.”

  I didn’t know whether I believed that. “Like I said.”

  He held up his hands.

  “Why are you telling me all of this?” I asked.

  “I’ve been trying to decide something,” he said. “The chameleons sent me on this mission to find a way into your mind, to figure you out, learn your plans. I’m three for three there. But that wasn’t all they wanted me to do.”

  “Shadow was right on, then,” I said.

  “Not quite.” Miguel took another slow breath. “The original plan was to take over as the Angel of Death’s vessel. That’s what I was created to do. That’s what I was sent to do. But once I got here—once I got a glimpse into you—I realized I can’t do it. I can’t take him in because I can’t contain him the way you do. You’ve got the archangel blood and I don’t. So, I revised the plan. I was gonna take you over instead.”

  I wanted to be pissed, but here he was telling me, giving up any advantage of surprise. I wanted to poke holes, too, but this plan made more sense than the one Shadow had floated. A finger of fear touched my heart at the prospect, at the odds of Miguel succeeding, at what it would be like to be trapped inside my body with Miguel and the Angel in the driver’s seat.

  “Now that I’m here, and I’ve got you right where I want you, I’m finding I don’t want to twist the knife,” Miguel said.

  Right where he wanted me? With a line between his mind and mine, and him having drawn my dreaming self to him. Everyone else in the house either asleep or unaware, emotional and physical reserves down to zero. Now was the perfect time for him to execute his plan.

  “You don’t want to,” I said. “And why’s that?”

  “You and Sunday,” he said.

  I raised both brows. “We tortured you.”

  “Sunday tortured me.”

  “With my go-ahead,” I said.

  His voice softened. “I understand why you did it.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Faith,” he said.

  It wasn’t a difficult guess. I folded my arms across my chest.

  “I could be useful to you and Sunday,” he said.

  “You think we want you to be useful?”

  He chuffed. After a moment, he bent forward, hands on his thighs. “I knew you when you were little. You knew me, too.”

  “That was a long time ago,” I said. “Too long.”

  “Not what you’re thinking. Not after we became part of the Order. Before.”

  I cocked my head. “Before then, I lived with my parents in hell. You weren’t there.”

  “Not with your parents,” he said. “I knew your abuela.”

  “How?” I asked. “I barely remember her.”

  “She was my abuela, too. She wasn’t related to either of us by blood, but by magic. She was a beauty.” He closed his eyes. I could practically see the mem
ories he drew up around him, they were so thick for him. “Hair as dark as midnight, with fine silver hairs all through it like spider-spun silk reflecting the moonlight. She never put it up—always wore it long, sweeping down to her waist. Her eyes were kind. Nothing got by her. She liked trousers. Her favorite pair was stormy-sky gray. She wore short cowboy boots with little heels, black with colored flowers embroidered on them. She liked button-down shirts, especially—”

  “Blue,” I whispered. “Powder blue.”

  I hadn’t recalled any of that until he said it. But as he’d spoken, I could not only see her, I could smell her rosewater perfume.

  “Her name was Dream,” he said.

  Which wasn’t a name at all. Like the Watcher Shadow’s name, it was a title.

  I stared at Miguel. “She was, what—forty?”

  He nodded. “She looked about that old, but she felt a lot older. As old as Shadow. She was just like him, Night. Ancient. Powerful.”

  I wanted to believe that he remembered her, that he hadn’t gleaned her from my mind. “Can you take an image from someone’s mind if they don’t remember it in the first place?”

  “No,” he said. “The goal is to know enough about a target to impersonate them. If it’s deep cover we’re after, to know them so completely that you can become them. Forgotten events are usually buried so deeply that they don’t affect a person’s self-awareness or other people’s knowledge or opinions of them, even if they do hold a subtle sway over behavior. In other words, they’re not worth spending the time to uncover.”

  “What else do you know about our grandmother?” I asked.

  “The taste of the posole verde she liked to cook. The stargazer lilies she cut from the garden, and the bright green vase she put them in on the wide sill of her kitchen window. Otherwise, nothing normal. She kept a collection of jars in her pantry. Some of them looked like canned stuff—jam, veg, fruit, pickles. But some of those jars, they looked like they held stars inside of them. Others held rocks so old, I could feel the weight of centuries when I held them. And then there’s this.”

  He rolled up his left sleeve to show me a half-moon mark just south of his elbow. It looked like a regular scar, maybe from a fall or a run-in as a child.