Host

by Faith Hunter

  I had a theory on what the river of time was. I guessed it was a fourth dimension, with time being the fourth. Meaning that the river of time could give seraphic beings access to all of time throughout the history of the universe. It was here, not here. It was Earth, not Earth. It was heaven and not heaven. It was a reality all its own.

  Eli watched me. Could I trust him with what I had seen? “Assey or EIH?” I asked again. And subsequently, in one of those intuitive leaps that defied logic, my breath stopped in my chest. I asked, “Or both?”

  One hand reached for my arm, the other went for the weapon along his thigh. Faster than humans can follow, mage-fast, I ripped my arm from his fingers in a corkscrew break, leaped from the couch, and tumbled across the floor, thumbing on a shield. In mage-sight, it was thousands of interlocking, overlapping purple feathers of energy. Unlike most mage-shields, this one moved with me, the feathers rippling as I dove for my blades on the end of the kitchen table.

  His hand reached the holster and snapped it open. I whipped up the tanto and the kogatana, racing back to the couch, and flowed into the walking horse. Eli was still drawing the gun when his slow human eyes found me and he stopped cold. My blade was poised to cut through his liver. All it would take was a single thrust as I snapped off the shield.

  Cold chills danced along my arms, raising the tiny hairs there in delayed reaction. “You’re both, aren’t you?” I said. “You’re an assey, undercover, and you’ve infiltrated the EIH. Only you got sucked in with their blasphemy, their dogma, and you changed sides. You saw or heard something that made you believe them.”

  “Not quite,” he said, holding very, very still.

  Like a flower opening in time-lapse photography, it all fell together, all the things he had done and said and all the people he had spoken with. I understood. “You’re supposed to bring the two groups together.” He was a spy. And a freaking diplomat.

  “You want to save Ciana from the AAS and the mages?” he asked, speaking at a pitiless clip, his fingers gripping the hilt of his gun, knuckles white. “You want to keep her living here, with you and her father and her uncle? Or you want her turned over to them and experimented on, tested, kept in a cell until she dies and they cut her open to see what made her tick?”

  Shock flooded my system, trapping me in indecision. I wavered between flight or fight, pulled apart by opposing forces. My hands started sweating, my breathing sped.

  “That’s what the AAS will do, and you know it. If the neomages get her first, they’ll do the same thing, except they’ll kill her faster when they see what she can do. If you want Ciana alive and safe, you’ll keep me alive. And you’ll talk to me. You’ll tell me everything you know.”

  “Seduction as an interrogation technique,” I mocked, hating myself for having fallen for it even for a moment. Was I that lonely? “Get the sex-starved mage all hot and bothered and she’ll tell you everything. Nice work.”

  He had the grace to look abashed for an instant before his face hardened over whatever he was feeling. “That wasn’t the way it was supposed to go.”

  “Clarify,” I said, edging the steel a fraction closer to his throat. The tanto hummed softly at the nearness of the shield, the blade a fluctuating sky blue.

  The shield tickled over his flesh and he pressed back into the couch cushion, but he had nowhere else to go. “Mages need sex. We all know that. And I’m not saying seduction wasn’t attempted on mages in the past, but it never worked like anticipated.”

  “Go on.”

  “The human either ran like a bat out of hell or got snared and converted. Every time. Human version of mage-heat. Why do you think so few humans admitted to an Enclave ever leave?”

  I hadn’t thought about it. I had been transported out of Enclave before I was old enough to spend time with humans or experience a full, seraph-induced, mage-heat rut myself. There was a lot about my own race I didn’t know. I went for acerbic, hiding my thoughts. “I thought the rumor was that mages used them up sexually and then ate them.”

  “Tales to scare kids into obeying their parents and to keep teenage humans from experimenting. Like the boogeyman.” He watched my face. The clock ticked in the silence. “You don’t know about the relationship between mages and humans,” he said slowly. I said nothing, waiting, my blade and the shield so close they tickled his skin.

  “Neomages can be…” He groped for words, his mouth opening and closing once before he started over. “They cause weird reactions in humans. Some humans feel anger or revulsion in the presence of mages. In others, it’s this…this…weird kind of joy, maybe. They call it mage bliss. A kind of contentment just being around you. And for the humans who feel bliss, sex intensifies it. Once you’re with a mage sexually for any length of time”—he stopped and swallowed, glanced down at the sword edge before continuing—“you’re hooked. Not addicted exactly, but you don’t want to leave.”

  “And for the ones who feel the negative things?” I asked, remembering people pulling away from me when I was growing up, people I wanted to be my friends, who just seemed to draw away. Remembering the recent revulsion on the faces of so many of the orthodox.

  “Sex for them is always”—he groped again for words and I wondered what he hadn’t said—“forceful. The AAS attracts a lot of that kind.”

  I remembered a comment made to me by an investigator for the Administration of the ArchSeraph when I was under arrest for a short time as an unlicensed mage. He had offered to take me for a ride as part of my intake interview. I had known what he meant. And every mage knew rape was likely to be a part of the torture if asseys ever held us prisoner. Saints’ balls. It all fit. “So when they have a mage in their custody those are the ones who resort to rape,” I said. Eli nodded, bumping his chin on the shield with a little sizzle of power, bringing it dangerously close to the blade. The Flame-augmented tanto’s hum changed tone with the shift, almost as if it was reacting to Eli’s movement. “And the ones who feel the good things are addicted. No wonder humans hate mages.”

  “It’s not a true addiction,” he said. “You won’t die if you leave them, but you kind of…grieve. I’ve seen a guy grieving. After. It’s said that when a human actually falls in love with a mage, they never leave.”

  Something sharp and cutting twisted inside. “Lucas did.” The statement was out before I could stop it; I could have bitten off my tongue. The two little words exposed all the hurt I still kept inside, trapped like a tiger in a cage.

  Eli’s expression softened, and I stiffened at the emotion there. I didn’t want his pity. “Ciana isn’t human,” he said. “Not anymore. Lucas may not be either. It may not work quite the same with them, whatever they are.”

  It wasn’t a complete answer but it felt like the truth, or truth as he knew it, a truth that was a weighted shroud around me. Careful to keep my inflections neutral, I asked my second-biggest question. “How do you know that? That Ciana isn’t human?”

  “There’s a little black box in my jacket. A device reverse engineered by the R and D Department of the Administration of the ArchSeraph. It’s based on the sigils provided by the Realms of Light to the agency when they instituted us back in early Post-Ap times.”

  I didn’t miss the us pronoun, but I stayed focused on his story. I had seen an assey’s sigil up close and personal when I first met Captain Durbarge. Etched into clear crystal, glittering with seraph energies, were wings and a halo. Such sigils had been known to sparkle or glisten when mage-conjures were used nearby.

  “The black box is used by the AAS to detect energy use, mage energies and seraph energies. Durbarge gave me his when we were on the Trine and he knew he wasn’t coming back. I was supposed to watch you and the Stanhopes and the local EIH group and report back. But the EIH had one too, and they approached me. They wanted a parley. I set it up. My superiors met with their emissary in Asheville five days ago.”

  Okay, he was a spy first, a spy turned diplomat. “And Ciana?”

  “With the bo
x, I can see that thing on her chest. I saw what she did during the battle. She’s manipulating seraphic energies. It’s interactive with her. No human can do that.”

  “Mages can’t either.”

  I saw the speculation on his face and knew I had corroborated some intel for the AAS. Me and my big mouth. Thinking abut Lolo and the decades-long plan to put me in Mineral City and to free the trapped Watcher, Barak, I asked, “Your superiors in general or your superiors in a splinter group of the AAS?”

  When Eli didn’t answer, I said, “Hands behind your head, fingers laced together.” He almost argued with me. I saw it flit through his thoughts before it was replaced with something else. Grinning that insouciant grin, daring me to watch him stretch, Eli extended his arms up, following my directions.

  “I’m faster than you,” I said. “You try to draw your gun again and I’ll spit you like a frog on a gig.” Backing slowly away from him, I let the shield slide over the hat and jacket on the floor. Blue light glimmered from the cloth when the shield energies encompassed it. With a toe I nudged the jacket open to expose a black box, three or four inches long, maybe two wide, and an inch thick. The blue light emanated from a screen on it. There were buttons and what might be an eyepiece.

  Had he been around Thadd? Did he also know about the kylen or did the seraph ring Thadd wore protect him from detection? I didn’t know how to ask without giving away the cop’s secret so I abandoned that one for now. I sheathed the smaller blade and reached down to the coat, half expecting Eli to try to shoot me. I pocketed the device and his eye brows went up. “Yeah, I’m stealing your little toy. Sue me.” Of course if he wanted me to steal it, hoping to use it to listen to my conversations or to booby-trap me or something, then I was falling into his little assey trap. Am I a conspiracy theorist or what? But when you’ve been a pawn in a real conspiracy, you tend to anticipate more of them.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ve made some progress. Not much but some.” I clicked off the shield before it went off by itself. I had to recharge my amulets or they were all going to go blank. “I still don’t know where you stand, with or against the seraphs, with or against mages, with or against the heretics, or somewhere in the middle of all of them.”

  Eli lowered his hands and levered himself upright, moving slowly, intent on my blades, careful to keep his hand away from his gun. He watched me for a long moment and seemed to make up his mind. “I’m gonna give you my weapon. I’m gonna use my left hand to reach across and pull the gun with two fingers. Then I’ll put it on the floor and kick it to you. Okay?”

  Not sure where he was going with this, I inclined my head. Carefully, he did just as he’d said, placing the gun on the floor and toeing it toward me. Just as slowly, he leaned back into the couch and slouched, legs splayed. “I’m with the seraphs,” he said folding his fingers together in his lap, “at least until we help them defeat the Darkness. Like the Dark, they’re invaders, but unlike them, the seraphs aren’t currently killing us off, and they don’t eat us. Other than that, there ain’t that much to choose between them. Once their war is won, all bets are off.

  “I’m neutral regarding the EIH, at least until I see the evidence they have to support the blasphemy. They think the seraphs will leave Earth if the Darkness is defeated. If they’re right, and can prove it, and if they have a plan to defeat the Dark and make the Light leave Earth forever, then I’m on their side. And to answer your earlier accusation, no, I didn’t go over to them. I was in communication with them and we’ve joined forces a couple times, worked together in the street fight. That’s it.”

  I didn’t believe that was the whole truth but I didn’t say so. Big mouth staying shut now. When I didn’t reply, Eli went on.

  “And just so you know, I’m for little girls who have funky gifts and powers, and against anyone who might want to steal them away from their families or hurt them. I’m against the mages until I know what they want, but I’m for you. I think. Unless and until I learn you have an agenda against humanity. If I discover that, I’ll kill you, bliss or no bliss, even if I give in to temptation first, jump your bones, and get obsessed with you. And by the way, that idiot man you married? He’s hooked. Not like a human man, but he’s”—Eli paused again as if searching for the exact word—“besotted. Yeah. He’s besotted. You want him, you can have him.”

  “He had an affair when we were married,” I said, this time keeping my emotions in tight check.

  “He was lured by a succubus. He was stupid and weak, but not many men could refuse one-a them fine mamas when they come calling. You may not be able to forgive him, but forgiveness is your choice, not something forced on you.”

  One-a them fine mamas? Forgiveness is your choice? If he wanted to disarm me with candor and his impressions of Lucas he had succeeded. I set the tanto aside, but I didn’t sit down. I stood over him, watching him, feeling there was more he wanted to say.

  “But there’s one thing you might keep in mind. Lucas had you when he didn’t know you were a mage. He had you when you didn’t know you were binding him to you, if I’m reading you right. He’s affected, to some extent, by mage bliss.”

  He didn’t have to say it. I would never know if Lucas loved me for me or because of mage bliss. Because no matter what they called it, bliss sounded like addiction to me. Inexorably, as if he didn’t know he was tearing my heart out, Eli went on.

  “Any seraph or a mage would want you, in the right circumstances, and would take you in the street, a mass orgy you wouldn’t be able to resist or refuse. The two-edged sword of true compulsion. Me? I’m not under compulsion. I know what you are. I know what would happen if I slept with you. I know it’s likely that I’d give up everything I have and everything I am to be with you. I know all that and I want you anyway.” His amber eyes studied me as carefully as I did him. “I knew you were something different when I saw you at early thaw, at the sun-day dance. I watched you for weeks before I made contact with you. I knew what you were from day one. I made a conscious choice to get to know you. I knew what I was doing. Something to think about. And hey. That’s why no romance and roses and courting gestures. You want me, it’s for me, and not for what I make you feel with overtures.”

  “And what do you want from me? Other than wild hot monkey sex?”

  “I want you to ask your seraph what he’s doing here, what they want, and where they came from. I want you to work with me, with the AAS, and with the EIH to defeat the Dark, and then work with us to defeat the seraphs and get them to leave Earth. And the hot monkey sex sounds like a great deal too.”

  I couldn’t help my disbelieving chuckle. The man didn’t want much. No. Not much at all. “And if there really is a Most High, and if he is the creator of the universe, and if he really does love humans, and if he really did kill off six billion humans as part of a cleansing and rebirth of the earth and a new age and all that? If the apocalypse was the event prophesied in every religion in history and not a takeover attempt to seize the earth? Then what?”

  “If the Most High appears, or a messiah, or if evil is really defeated and paradise on earth results, then I’ll lay down all resistance. If he really is God almighty, I’ll bow down and worship him like the rest of humanity.

  “Now, I got a question for you. Why do you think the big bad uglies are always ugly? What if they looked and smelled just like seraphs? The biggest BBUs used to be seraphs, right? Did the seraphs put an incantation on their enemies to make ’em look that way?”

  I said nothing, just let the syllables flow over me. It wasn’t anything the EIH hadn’t been saying for years. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t thought before.

  “What if they were beautiful like the seraphs? Which side would we go for? The side that killed six bil’ of us right up front? Or the side that likes us for dinner? If one side decided to save us—really save our asses—would we care which side it was?”

  Heresy. Profane sacrilege.

  Truth? Finally, I looked away.

  Chapt
er 9

  And Azazel taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals and the working of them…and the use of antimony…and all kinds of costly stones…And there arose much godlessness…And again the Lord said to Raphael, ‘Bind Azazel hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness: make an opening in the desert…and cast him therein. And place upon him rough and jagged rocks, and cover him with darkness, and let him abide there forever. And on the Day of Judgment he shall be cast into the fire…To him ascribe all sin.

  Drinking cinnamon and vanilla tea, I reread the notes I had made not so long ago on the history of the one I now thought was the Dragon of the Trine, Azazel. I made additional notes on what I needed to ask Lolo, the priestess of the New Orleans Enclave. I had a lot of questions.

  My parents had died when Rose and I were children and the priestess had taken us under her wing. She hadn’t raised us, exactly, but she had overseen all aspects of our education. We had spent a lot of time in her house, being tutored by special teachers, listening to envoys from other Enclaves and to humans who came to barter or purchase services, and we hadn’t spent as much time with other mage children as we might have had our parents lived. Yet nothing I had learned as a child had prepared me for the horror of my gift when it came upon me.

  For mage children, the ability to see and manipulate leftover creation energies comes upon them at the onset of puberty. Like all mage girls, I started my menses and my gift descended, but for me it had an unintended, unexpected consequence. My mind opened to every mage in Enclave, all twelve hundred supernats. Every thought, hurt, fear, hope, petty jealousy, hatred, desire, love, and need descended on me at once. I nearly went mad. I was drugged and shipped to Mineral City. Rose remained in Enclave until she was eighteen, when she was licensed and went to work in the Atlanta consulate. Whatever we had been expected to become had been lost when I nearly lost my mind. A Rose by any Other Name will still draw Blood. Enigmatic to the point of uselessness. No one knew what the prophecy meant.