Kiss of Angels

by C. E. Murphy

  Grace tilted over to kiss him, then curled her fingers in his hair and drew the kiss out, long enough that Emma made an impatient noise to break them up. "Are you tied to a place, Grace? Were you murdered? Are you unnecessarily violent? Can you fly? Do you haunt anyone? Do you know any other ghosts?"

  Grace sat back from Tony with a sigh. "In all my born days and all my long nights I've never met another ghost, no. Get to the point, witch's daughter."

  "I've gotten to it twice already! A witch can't hurt you, Grace. She couldn't curse you. She couldn't. Not if you held the Serpent's Tear."

  "I'd given it to her already, girl."

  "Daagh!" Emma stamped her feet in frustration, an action swifter and more mercurial than any mere human could manage. Jana, lazily, came to her feet and crossed the room to put an arm around her sister's waist. "You're not hearing Emma, Grace, or you don't know enough about what you did. You spoke with the Serpent at the heart of the world, and he gave you a gift."

  "I know more of the Serpent now than I did before Margrit's stunt with the gargoyle council," Grace allowed. "What's that to do with the price of tea?"

  "He is the Serpent," Emma said, speaking with urgent precision, like she was trying to impart something to a particularly obstinate child. "He's half the core of this world, Grace. He's half of what all magic is made of. And he liked you. Fúamnach didn't curse you to a half life. The Serpent gave you a tear, and with it granted you immortality."

  #

  Little enough in the world could render Grace speechless, but she sat wordless under the weight of Emma's declaration for nearly ever, turning it this way and that to see if sense could be made of it. It couldn't: she said, "I died," flatly.

  "And you rose up young again. Reset to when the Serpent had known you." Emma sounded unflappably certain of herself.

  "I walk through walls and turn iron to mist."

  "Because you believe yourself to be a ghost." Emma's voice softened suddenly. "The Serpent's Tear, Grace—I've read about them in Mother's grimoires. There have only ever been a handful of them, and they imbue their owner with power. Not mortal magic, either, not even such as ours, but a whisper of the Serpent's power. You can do—" She caught her breath. "You can do anything, with a Tear."

  "I gave the—Tear, if that's what you say it is, to Fúamnach centuries ago. Whatever power it might have is surely hers to command."

  "You traded it." Emma sank down into a bundle, her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them. Jana went with her as naturally as if they were twins, though they shared not a drop of common blood. "A trade and a gift are two very different things. Had you given it to her, its power would be lost to you, but it was one thing offered for another. In all of these centuries, the Tear will have strengthened Fúamnach's magic, just as the heat from the pipes warms Jana, but she can't command its magic herself. The most she can do is siphon some of it, and it may be that your ghosting is from that little drain of power over all these years."

  Grace closed her eyes, blocking out both Emma's earnest young face and the portents of what she said. She was cold, but she had been cold for centuries: ghosts were. Her heart, which had never stopped beating in all her living—or unliving—days, felt thick and slow and heavy in her chest, and knocked an ache into her lungs with each dull thump it made. That ache was almost a physical thing, which she needed: without it she thought sickness might rise and overwhelm her; the beads of sweat on her lip and hairline said it was all too possible.

  Tony Pulcella's warm arm went around her waist. He pulled her closer to him, silent as she turned her face against his shoulder and breathed, long shaking breaths that did little to quell the roiling of her stomach. He rarely used cologne, for which she was grateful: even the scent of his soap and skin was nearly too much for her. A tremor started somewhere in her gut and rattled out, and came again in waves. Tony's warmth was suddenly welcome. "Tell me," Grace finally said in a harsh tone. "Tell me from the start, so that I understand."

  Jana, into Emma's hair, said, "Mother would be better at this," and Emma murmured, "But Mother isn't here," before raising her voice and speaking to Grace. "A Serpent's Tear confers immortality to the one it is freely given to. In exchange, the Serpent…"

  "Watches," Grace said hoarsely. "I remember that part of the bargain well enough."

  "Watches," Emma agreed. "Barely, though. We're too small for him to really understand. But he watches, and sometimes bits of his knowledge slip through."

  "Grace knows more than she should," Grace whispered, and from the corner of her eye saw Emma nod. "And?"

  "The Tear—" Emma sighed. "Its ultimate power is to grant a wish, Grace. But if a wish isn't made by the one to whom it was gifted, then it…empowers her. The Serpent is…vast. What it understands…you died. You lived again. To you, that's a ghost. And so the Serpent's power…helped you become a ghost. You walk through walls. You turn iron to mist."

  "That," Tony breathed against Grace's shoulder, "is a story I want to hear someday."

  "Ask Stoneheart," Grace replied, while Emma went on, "Fúamnach knew what the Tear was. She knew what it would do to you, and I think she saw you didn't know. The curse was a trick, Grace. I'm sorry. She set you looking for the kiss of angels, knowing you'd never find it."

  Grace finally lifted her head. "Why not?"

  The child of a witch and a vampire, sister to a dragon, stared incredulously at the ghost. "There's no such thing as angels!"

  A weak laugh broke the cold weight in Grace's chest. "Sure and there's not. Of course there isn't. What madness would that be? Angels and devils and gods, oh my. Hah!" A shiver brought some of the cold back, but she straightened out of Tony's arms. He let her go, but a part of her thought there would be a reckoning for that, soon enough. Not for pulling away, but for the thing in her that made her determined to stand on her own. The thing that had made her the O'Malley, and had set her fighting a losing battle against the encroaching English, hundreds of years ago. The thing that kept her under the streets, in fact, trying to save runaways like Máire, to make up for having not quite saved the girl enough, in Ireland so many years past. All this time she had told herself it was being a ghost that kept her apart, but the truth of that was coming undone, and aye, there was a reckoning to come. "So I'm a ghost by my own design, tricked by a witch to wander the earth a lonely soul, and now you tell me that there's a wish to be made, witch's daughter? I could have my mortality back, if I made the Tear mine again?"

  "You could have whatever your heart desired," Emma said.

  Grace, without meaning to, cast a glance at Tony. His slow smile warmed her as much as his arms had, and she told herself that a ghost couldn't blush, never mind that it seemed she wasn't a ghost at all. Centuries of believing it had to count for something. She did return the smile, as soft and slow, for she might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, before saying to Emma, "How do I undo a trade with a witch?"

  Jana, the dragon's daughter, whose hoard was her own sister and mother, shrugged. "Offer her something she wants more, or kill her."

  Tony barked laughter. "I thought witches couldn't be killed. What's she going to want more than a wish-granting rock?"

  Emma fixed him with a thoughtful look. "Perhaps a handsome young man to make another daughter with."

  "She could find that herself," Grace said sourly, but laughed at the grimace that pulled Tony's face. "Don't worry, love. Grace won't trade you for a bit of shiny stone. You say the Tear is mine anyway," she added, to Emma. "Can't I just take it back?"

  "It would work if you did," Emma agreed. "Whether you'd—" She stopped abruptly, and Grace smiled.

  "Whether I'd survive it? I would, though, wouldn't I? Because I'm the Serpent's chosen." She pulled a face and got up to stretch, shaking leather-clad limbs and rubbing the numbness of sitting on concrete out of her bum. All three of the others watched, the girls idly and Tony with an appreciative tilt of his head. "She'll still be in Ireland," she said, mostly to herself, then
frowned at Tony. "Fuck. It takes a passport to travel overseas these days, doesn't it?"

  "I know a dragon who might bring you," Jana drawled. "For a price."

  "When was the last time you left America?" Tony asked.

  Grace shrugged at him and gave Jana a hard look all at the same time. "Grace has been here a long time, love. There was nothing for me in Ireland. I might have stayed and fought on against the English, but where? The clan had watched me die, so I'd have had to gone somewhere else, become someone new. I'd be no longer the O'Malley, and have to watch every day as the Ireland I'd known was eaten away by conquerors. I might have," she said, voice dropping low and seething. "Had I known I couldn't die? Oh, I might have fought on, and perhaps I'd have made a difference. But I had already been Grace O'Malley, whom the English called the pirate queen, and even as a queen I couldn't hold Umhaill, or treat with bloody Bess, or keep my country mine. And we fickle humans, we only love legends when they're safely dead and gone: had I stayed, immortal, among them, I'd have lost them sooner than later, and broken my heart all the more when I left." She fell silent, breathing through her teeth, then snarled, "Though it would have been worth it to walk unkillable through Cromwell's camp at Drogheda and rip the bastard's throat out with my hands. Damn!"

  She spun away from the listening trio and slapped a palm against the wall, angry enough—but not fool enough—to hit it harder. She heard Tony's indrawn breath, an answering murmur from one of the girls, and knew that her lust for revenge over injustices three centuries and more in the past bordered on incomprehensible. Not one of them had even a third her years, much less the sudden, bitter insight that she might have done more, then, than she had known.

  Tony, though, rose and came to her side. Folded his arms and leaned his shoulder on the wall she'd hit, his head lowered but his gaze cast upward, so he watched her through his eyelashes. In a woman—in another man, even—she might have called the gaze coquettish, but she had led men for too long to think Tony had come to flirt her into calmer waters. His was the look of a man ready to do as his officer required, but it was love, not mere loyalty, that drove the look in his eyes. Despite herself, Grace chuckled, and the hint of a smile played at the detective's mouth. "You all right?"

  "No. Yes." Grace gave a loose-shouldered shrug. "I don't like finding out I've been a prisoner of my own mind for nearly half a millennia, but there's no taking it back, not any more than I could go back and tear Cromwell's throat from his miserable body. And if the witch holds no power over me…" She sighed. "Well, that's a better thing than learning my every breath is at her whim."

  "Would you really want to give it up? Your immortality?"

  Grace shook her head. "Ten minutes ago Grace didn't know she had a choice, love. Now? I don't know. But I'm none too keen on Fúamnach draining power that should be mine, either. And yet the bargain was made." She looked past Tony's shoulder, finding a middle distance in the chamber.

  "Máire died young, though."

  "I traded the Tear for the girl, not for her long life. How do I come calling four hundred years later, to say the deal's done and the stone is my own to take?"

  "You were tricked when you made the deal to begin with."

  "That's nothing to do with the price of tea." Grace sighed, bringing her focus back to Tony. "I suppose I ought to get that lawyer involved."

  Tony laughed. "Margrit? Well, she'll give you her two cents on the moral and righteous thing to do, whether it's the legally acceptable one or not."

  A smile pulled at the corner of Grace's mouth. "Will you never forgive her, then?"

  "Aaaah…" Tony waved a hand. "We could never really forgive each other for what we were. It's most of why we didn't work out. Even before all of this came along." He waved again, but this time encompassed the sisters, whose heads were ducked together as they murmured to one another. "So, sure, I forgive her. But that doesn't stop her from being sanctimonious." He paused, then, with a pull of his face, admitted, "Or me, either."

  "And there, now, mo chroí, that's why I'm so fond of you. You admit the truth about yourself to yourself, which is rare enough. Take it from a woman who's been lying to herself for centuries."

  "You didn't know you were." Tony stepped into Grace's space, sliding his hands around her waist and tugging her against him. "'My pulse', huh?"

  "Did you not know what it meant?" Grace smiled against his pulse, pressing her lips against his throat.

  "We call each other 'rigatoni' as an endearment in my family, not 'my heart'." Tony tipped his head back, sighing as she kissed his throat again, then chuckled, a tingling vibration against her lips. "This isn't talking to Margrit."

  "Fúamnach has waited four hundred years," Grace murmured. "She can wait another night."

  A moment later, Emma said, "Ew," with perfunctory sincerity, dragged Jana to her feet, and left the O'Malley and her lover to their business.

  Part II

  Margrit Knight stood five foot three in her bare feet on a good day, and made it a habit to never be caught flat-footed if she could avoid it. Grace O'Malley, though, excelled at catching people off-guard, and grinned lazily down at the petite lawyer, who sighed and left her apartment door open, invitation to come in. "Normal people don't show up at three in the morning without warning, Grace."

  "And when was the last time you were normal people?" Grace slunk in after Margrit, bumping the door closed behind her. The apartment wasn't much different from when she'd visited last: two bedrooms down the hall to the right, a bathroom nearly across the hall from the front door, a kitchen to the left, and a dining room, then a living room, wrapping around behind it. A fridge twice Margrit's age still dominated the kitchen, but the dining room table was no longer impossibly laden with papers, and the living room had a new couch. New cushions and strong springs were necessary, Grace guessed, when one member of the household weighed in at several hundred pounds in his natural form. "Was it after you met Stoneheart, or before? I'd think that would have been the end of normal people, never mind supping of a vampire's blood."

  Margrit gave her a scathing look that said she preferred not to be reminded of that incident. More fool she, Grace thought, when it was the two sips of blood that reduced her need for sleep and allowed her to live the double life she'd chosen with her gargoyle partner. Rather than address it, though, Margrit said, "You should talk," without particular heat. "I can still count the years since 'normal' on two hands. You, though…what do you want, Grace? You don't usually come knocking."

  "I never come knocking, lassie."

  "A point which I forbore to make, so thank you for making it for me." Margrit climbed onto a counter with the ease of a child and opened a cupboard, reaching for a bottle of whiskey that she withdrew half an inch before glancing at Grace for confirmation.

  "Far be it from me to refuse a dram," Grace drawled.

  Margrit rolled her eyes. "You do want something, if you're laying on the Irish." She still got the whiskey down, hopping off the counter as easily as she'd climbed up, and pulling out a couple of crystal tumblers from another cupboard. "On the rocks or straight?"

  "Straight. Most people would have a step-ladder, love."

  "Probably." Margrit poured the whiskey, handed one to Grace, and collected the bottle as she gestured toward the living room. "Come on and lay it on me. Last time you showed up here in the middle of the night it was to be dramatic and ghostly at me, so I'm braced for more of the same."

  "You're not wrong to be." Grace followed her into the living room and took the opposite corner of the couch to where Margrit sat. The whiskey bottle went on the coffee table, in easy reach. "Where's Stoneheart?"

  "Lurking over Janx's old territory. I've told him dozens of times that there won't be any trouble with the djinn and selkies, but he watches anyway." Margrit smiled into her whiskey, murmuring, "It's what he does."

  "And you," Grace said, "give advice."

  Margrit's eyebrows rose. "You need advice?"

  "I've a quandary.
"

  "This should be good." Margrit nursed her drink while Grace sketched the details of the deal she'd made with the witch, then she sat back, considering Grace's story. "So you're asking me if you have a legal standing to take the Tear back?"

  Grace drained her own whiskey, which she'd left untouched. "I am."

  "I'd say no. You both got what you wanted out of the trade, and like you said, it's not her fault that Máire died. At least, I assume it isn't, and it's centuries too late to tell. Now." Margrit lifted a finger along-side the tumbler, light bouncing off the gold liquid within and brightening the underside of her hand. "That's my legal interpretation of the matter, but legal code doesn't take serpents at the heart of the world into account. Have you asked him?"

  Grace, dryly, said, "I don't have his cell phone number."

  Margrit laughed. "I forgot to get it myself. But he's down there. There must be some way to commune with him, without…"

  "Drowning? I wouldn't count on it, love. And what would I ask him, whether trading away his Tear was legally binding? I don't think the question would mean much to him."

  "Didn't you say he watches through you, though? Which means you have a connection to him." Margrit moved her hand a little, pushing the question aside. "I don't know what you'd ask him. Whether he could recall the Tear, maybe. Or whether he knows—Foo-am-noch," she said carefully, then, with more confidence, "Fúamnach's secret. Something that would give you leverage over her."

  "You're a bit of a conniving bitch, aren't you, Margrit Knight?"

  "Says you," Margrit said in a half-offended tone, and then, with a twist of her mouth, "Bitches get shit done. You need leverage, Grace. Otherwise you're at a stalemate. Not that I'm condoning murder, but even if I was, neither of you can strike the other down, so you're going to have to find another way. Find something else she wants, or find her secret. Witches," she said under her breath. "Why do the Old Races seem easier to deal with than witches?"