At last the darkness lightened, and the tornado lifted into the roiling mass of cloud cover above. The rain began to fall, fat grimy drops of river mud and water. It quickened to warm sheets until faces became recognizable behind dirty masks and the mounds of muck washed through the streets and back to the river.
She turned her face up to the sky, hearing Aleifr’s laugh emerge from beneath a coating of muck. Thunder boomed in response, and he lifted his ax and blade, calling challenge.
The weaving stretched taut one final time with a snap that brought the city’s guardians back to their posts. Behind Aleifr, on the shadowed roof of the Municipal House, the last of the winged figures alighted, leaning casually on the hilt of his sword. He caught her eye and winked before he went still in a slouch as if he were suffering from a millennium of boredom. As the gold began to fade from the tapestry, the witch threads unraveled, withdrawing as they went.
At the sound of a gentle whuff, she looked back in time to see Tariq collapsing at her side. She grabbed for him as he went down, keeping his head from striking the stones. She dragged him onto her lap, wiped the mud from his face, and pressed her fingers to his throat. Dark lashes fluttered open to reveal dull topaz eyes as a soft gust of air like the desert at dusk caressed her cheek.
“Now that’s a sight to bring a man back to his strength,” he said groggily, eyebrows dancing as he dared to let his gaze drop to the rib cage heaving beside his cheek for a heartbeat before returning to her face.
“You swooned.” She rolled him onto the cobblestones.
He grunted on impact, but he was laughing when he climbed to his hands and knees. “Nothing a few years’ sleep won’t fix.”
The rain began to let up and the wind slacked off. Aleifr shook like a dog, spraying them all with water and dirt. Isela wrung out her hair and twisted it into a gritty bun at the back of her head. When she tried to stand, her slippers lost purchase in the mud and she landed on her butt hard enough to make her cry out. When she looked up, Dory stared down at her, laughter crinkling the corners of his eyes.
“Shut up,” she said before the giggles got the best of her.
Tariq wheezed, hands on his knees. He scooped up a handful of mud and plopped it on her head. She gasped and threw a mudball. Her throw went wild and hit Aleifr square in the face. He paused, surprised, and hurtled a lump that glanced off her shoulder. And then they were all laughing and sliding in the mud, pelting each other like children.
You know those are golem guts, right? Gold sniffed.
This must be the hysteria of victory. It seemed perfectly normal… and better than pillaging and burning things, she decided. When the laughter was spent, a hand entered her line of vision.
She met Tariq’s eyes. “Thank you.”
His fingers closed over hers, drawing her to her feet, and for a second there was no wall between them. His thumb brushed the back of her hand. She dropped her eyes at the naked emotion on his face. Gently, she withdrew her palm.
“It is my pleasure, consort of my master.” His words were cool and obedient. When he she met his eyes again, his gaze had shuttered.
Only it was as though with Gold’s sight—now that she knew what was behind it, she could not avoid seeing it.
“Anything from Azrael,” he asked.
“Not—” Isela began.
The earth jerked beneath them, leaving her grasping for Tariq to stay on her feet. The air crackled and snapped. The short hairs on her arms and neck rose to attention as a pungent sweetness stung her nostrils. She looked up, searching for the incoming storm, to see a roiling mass of gray streaked with lightning overhead, blotting out the moon where a moment before there had been only a gauzy winter sky.
Tariq put his shoulder between her and as much of the clouds as he could.
Isela. She had never before heard a note of panic in the god’s voice. She felt her body tensing as though at a distance, reserves of strength she didn’t know she had being called on. We have to go.
She tried as a great gale whipped up from the clouds. It pushed her back, driving against her straining body. Tariq reached for her, and the shouts of the guard surrounded her. But there was no one to fight. No attacker. Just this driving wind and the sudden lightness, as though gravity no longer applied. The ground fell away from her feet, or she was simply yanked upward. Lightning snapped and thunder roared in its wake. A second snap and a roar, and the stinging stink of ozone filled her nose. Tariq howled in pain, then silence. With the third, light blinded her and her senses fell away.
Thought you could escape?
Chapter Twenty-Five
Azrael balanced his weight, ready for a fight, but Vanka remained in her reclined position, her cat eyes narrowed and a small smile teasing her mouth, as oblivious to the chair rotting beneath her as the battle being waged nearby.
Vanka waited, the fingers of her right hand sketching a symbol in the air at the end of the chair’s arm. Nails the shade of a freshly opened artery danced through the air in quick, effective repetition. He deciphered the glyph before his eyes flickered to the ballroom to confirm what he suspected. He extended his awareness to feel the edges of the geas. The bubble was small—just enough to contain the two of them and make the battle appear to slow to a crawl around them. Time manipulation was a rare skill among necromancers.
“How easily you send your pawns into slaughter,” he said, banking the bloodthirsty rage that coated his teeth and tongue in heat.
She gave Gus a long, speculative stare. “You are so sure of your training.”
“I’m sure of my progeny,” he said. “There’s a difference.”
She sniffed. If he knew Vanka, anything approaching power like Gus’s would have been perceived as a threat. Had Róisín been any different in that regard? They’d spent almost two hundred years as mentor and pupil. When he’d ascended and betrayed his lack of interest in the highest echelon of necromancers, the relief in her face, mixed with wary consideration, stuck in his mind. He’d come when she found him again and obediently lent his strength to creating the wall that protected humans from the gods they wielded against one another. She hadn’t trusted him even then.
Eventually you will try to take what is mine, goat boy. She’d smirked the final time he saw her fully sane. They all do. But you will fail. Never forget a god is mine to command, and no progeny of mine, even one so great as you, can stand against that.
By then he’d been seasoned with age and had progeny of his own, and he recognized the emotion behind the triumph in her face for what it was. Fear. She’d never stopped being afraid that someone would topple her from the throne she occupied in her own mind. She would never understand why he craved no power, but it was that lack of craving that eliminated the fear he held.
Of all the Allegiance, Vanka’s rise had been the most swift, driven by a necromancer as cruel as he was powerful. They had that in common.
He said I would ascend or die, she mused once. He forgot to consider what would happen to him if I survived.
Azrael doubted he’d forgotten. More like he’d overestimated the effect centuries of terror and dominance had on her. He expected to retain control because she had feared him once. It was a lesson Azrael refused to ignore when he gathered his own progeny. But Vanka seemed to embrace her mentor’s teaching even as she declared her own power. None of the progeny that she’d claimed had survived her tutelage.
He gestured to the second chair, curious now by her lack of hurry. Vanka nodded.
“Often they surprise you,” he said, and the smile that rose with the words had barbs. “But you’d have to let them live long enough to find that out.”
Vanka frowned. “Only the strongest survive, Azrael. Once, I would not have had to remind you of that. You’ve changed so much. I would have never had to go through so much effort just to get your attention.”
She leaned against the arm of the chair, fingers of her far hand continuing their endless repetition. “You can stop this all now.” Her
voice was a tease, a siren lure lurking beneath the words. “Why should we be at war, Azrael?”
Azrael took in the dancer dangling in midair and the fighters. His eyes settled on Paolo and Gus, frozen in this plane. This time the rage came from a righteous heat. All this destruction. “I made you a promise.”
“Your vow to anyone who threatens your precious pet?” Her brows rose as the end of her question tilted toward a laugh. “You deserve a consort worthy of your strength, not causing your weakness.”
He paused, and she mistook his hesitation for him actually considering the offer. Her smile grew, and this time as she leaned in, her weight shifted, plumping her breasts beneath the cable-knit sweater.
“And who says we cannot master her together?” Judging by her blown pupils and the slight flush at the tip of her nose, the sexual nature of the thought and the accompanying arousal was genuine.
It left him cold. He blinked. He rose, moving slowly and hefting the labrys in his hand.
She sighed and sat back, drumming her free nails on the arm of the chair and twisting her mouth into a moue of disappointment. “No then? Well, it was worth a try.”
Still she was calm. Her gaze went over this shoulder. That was when he saw it. Fear. When he glanced back to see what had caught her attention, the human dancer collapsed to the floor. Closer, Paolo folded in on himself with a grunt. The look on Vanka’s face was his signal.
A second later, Rory confirmed the dancer was safe and away. He attacked.
Vanka rose unhurriedly, and he should have closed the distance between them, but it felt as if he were moving through water. His eyes caught on her fingers, still moving, even faster now. The bubble of altered time that once included him shrank, and she smiled slyly, edging around the striking ax. Her finger danced along the blade, but she pulled it away in surprise.
“First blood,” she granted, flicking it.
The droplets moved too fast until they crossed into normal time, landing with a wet sound on his cheek and brow.
“To be finished another time,” she said, backing toward the fireplace. Her other hand tripped a lever for a hidden door before she turned and vanished into the darkness of a secret passage.
By the time his ax came down, splintering her chair with the force of the blow, he knew there was no point in giving chase. She was already gone.
Gus came out of the In Between with a groan, staggering backward as Paolo sank to the ground. Azrael caught her, barely. Gregor was there in a heartbeat, sheathing his black blade.
Gus gasped, clutching ribs that split and bled before their eyes as the injuries she’d sustained in the In Between caught up to her physical body. She gagged on her own blood. “The body.”
Paolo bled from hundreds of wounds that still fought to heal, but the pool forming below him was from the thick artery in his thigh, pumping darkest heart blood into the leaf-cluttered rug beneath.
“May I do the honors?” Azrael said.
“Por favor.”
The fire came easily, white-hot and contained in a sphere around the body. When he released it, there was only a gray-black pile of flake and ashes. Gus hocked a bloody tooth into the pile. “Rot in hell, bastard.”
Gregor’s brows rose. “Fought dirty?”
“Did he know any other way?” She angled her chin, the blood in her mouth turning her smile fearsome. The geas no longer hid her irises, and in the dim light the metallic shine glowed from within. “Too bad I fight even dirtier.”
Gregor sniffed a laugh, and when her knees gave he was there, an arm around her waist to bear her weight. “Good.”
Her face shuttered, and Azrael knew there would be no more talk about what she’d survived. Of all his progeny, Gus’s past held the darkest shadows and the deepest wounds. He only hoped she found a way to release them before they bore her down.
Azrael surveyed the room. His Aegis was putting down the last of the undead. It was a mercy; without their masters, they would be trapped between the animated death and their afterlife. Robbed of the will of their maker, drooling and useless.
Most of Paolo’s guard was dead or surrendered, Vanka’s fled. Except Pietro. Her strongman was a barely recognizable pulp.
“The dancer?”
“Ito is securing a safe house for the ballerina,” Rory said, cleaning his machete. “If she survives. Your surgeon will provide care.”
With Vanka’s escape, Yana would not be safe. He contemplated sending a warning to her family in Prague but remembered Isela’s troubled face as she revealed they might have had a part in her capture. No, they would get what came to them.
Gregor surveyed the aftermath, and Azrael felt the itch of his judgment coming. “Master, this was wrong somehow.”
Azrael nodded, the words labeling the feeling he’d had since they arrived. It wasn’t just learning that Vanka been the pulling the strings.
“Where’s Vanka?” Gus looked around for the first time as her senses began to return.
“Gone.” Azrael shook his head distractedly, unable to connect the pieces.
“You let her—” Gus shouted, furious.
“Time.” Azrael cut her off. “She’s learned to manipulate time, at least close to her body.”
“Time manipulation? That’s—”
“Impossible?” Azrael met his progeny’s eyes. “And teleportation isn’t?”
If Vanka was counting on defending the city to take a toll on him, she hadn’t seemed too concerned that he’d arrived at his full strength. Yet he’d seen fear on her face when the dancer collapsed.
They’d all assumed Vanka would use the summoned god against him. But what had Isela’s god said? If they come back, it will be for revenge.
Isela was no longer in control of her body. Just like the night in the tomb with Róisín, she was a passenger. Where are we?
Isela was no longer in control of her body. Just like the night in the tomb with Róisín, she was a passenger. Where are we?
“Remember the place I created to show you the wall?” Gold trembled. “This is something like that.”
It resembled a circular tent. Beyond the main room, she could see breaks in the other walls where curtains hung as dividers. The walls themselves were hung with colorful weavings, and the packed-earth floor was covered with thick rugs. In one corner, children’s toys clustered—simple carved figures and dolls made of stuffed cloth and tied leather thongs. Furniture was sparse but well made, carved wood low-slung chairs and a little table. The most impressive piece was a curule chair carved of dark wood and polished to a low shine with a seat of tanned hide. The arms were carved like running horses. Beside the chair was a wooden perch bearing the marks of a taloned bird.
The room looked well cared for but lived in, though it lacked any scent, which was a giveaway for Isela that something was wrong. Well, something besides the matter that a moment ago she had been standing in the middle of Prague.
“He’s coming,” Gold said, and their gaze swung wildly to the main flaps of the tent.
Let me drive, Isela insisted.
“What?”
Isela repeated herself, hoping her voice sounded as calm and certain as she felt. You’re terrified. Maybe I can negotiate—
“There is no negotiating with him.”
Then what harm is there in giving me a chance?
Isela abruptly felt the shape and weight of the form around her. It wasn’t a body exactly, but when she lifted her arm, she saw the fingers rise out of the corner of her eye. Okay. She could work with this. She stepped back, away from the door, and looked for a weapon. She reached the small of her back and felt a familiar hilt in her hand. Tariq’s blade. Of course. It would be with her everywhere. Even when she hadn’t had it in the physical world. That was its geas.
“Put that down, young lady.”
She took a step backward in surprise at the man who strode through the tent. She knew his face. Knew every line and angle down to the silver of his eyes. Azrael’s double paused, regi
stering her shock.
“Too disconcerting then?” He waved his hand. He aged before her eyes, growing leaner and grayer as Azrael never would. But his eyes flashed a liquid rainbow of power. “Better?” He paused in her silence, hands on hips as he stared around the room. “Please, have a seat.”
“What do you want?”
His canted smile gave her vertigo. “I won’t harm you. I have a certain affection for you.”
“Me?”
“It is because of you that his evolution has begun.”
“Who?” Isela knew, but she needed to hear it. Needed him to confirm everything Azrael had searched for, what it all meant.
“My son,” he said, obliging her generously. “He has all the keys; now he must figure out how to use them. I figured you would be suitable motivation.”
“This is a test?”
“Of his worthiness.” The man smiled, wide and predatory. “He has shown an indication that he will succeed where all others have failed. But that doesn’t mean I will make it easy for him. What’s the fun in that?”
His laugh, light and pleased without an ounce of the sinister warning his eyes held, made her stomach squeeze with dread.
“Now, godling,” he said, looking past Isela. “While we wait for her champion to arrive, let me you what will happen when your kind catch up to you.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Azrael materialized before the Municipal House in a rush of heat. The Aegis staggered back from the blast, their weapons and shoulders low.
Dory held Isela in his arms like an offering. Tariq was a broken heap on the cobblestones, full of a darkness that might as well have been death but crackled with crimson bursts and jagged streaks of light.
Rage spiraled seething energy up his body, seeking an outlet, a place to strike. This was the voice that whispered to him in the dark. Now, it screamed. It was all Azrael could do to keep himself from lashing out at anything—and everything—in his path. The howling rage battered his senses, demanding retribution.
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