by Cate Corvin
“You’re still here,” I agreed, forcing out all my anxiety in a rush of breath. “But if you’d picked it up entirely…”
Tascius reached out and rubbed my shoulder reassuringly. “Live and learn, eh?” I scowled up at him and he laughed. “I’ll leave the rest of the dirty work to you, then.”
“Good. That’s exactly the way I like it.” I knelt back down and dropped several more shards into my bag, handling each piece carefully. The edges were still razor sharp.
There was no way of accounting for every single piece without laying them out down here, but at least I could rest assured that nobody else would be able to touch them. If I brought it all to Wayland and he told me one was missing, I could probably just follow the scorched bodies to the locations of the missing fragments.
Finally, only the hilt was left. I balked for a second, the memories of scars and pain still fresh in my mind, but I forced myself to pick it up.
But nothing happened; there was no agony, no searing heat across my palm. I had the faintest sense of regret and relief, almost like an echo of a feeling, as I wrapped my fingers around the comfortable leather-wrapped hilt.
It felt wrong for it to be so light, separated from its greater whole.
On a whim, I pressed a kiss to the pommel. “We’ll put you back together again. If anyone can work magic with metal, it's Wayland.” I settled it in the bag and pulled the drawstrings tightly shut. “I think that was all of them.”
We walked the Pit one last time, making sure none of the shards had fallen behind one of the dark towers and gotten lost in a shadowy crevice, but I was confident the hilt of the Sword would’ve told me somehow if I’d missed an essential part of it.
Even with it broken, I felt better just having it on me. At the very least, if an assassin came for me again, I would shove a fragment into their eye and watch them burn alive from the inside.
The thought was strangely satisfying.
I looped my arms around Tascius’s neck, and he launched us from the floor, beating the air to gain lift. As soon as we passed the pale fire, the sensation of dread and being watched faded like a bad dream.
He looked down at me as we rocketed upwards, his brow still furrowed, eyes a metallic shade that were so different, and yet the same as before. No matter what he became, he would always be my Nephilim.
“Melisande, I’ve been thinking…” he started to say, his words almost carried away in the wind.
We rose above the edge of the Pit and settled lightly on the edge. Grit crunched underfoot as I regained my balance, silently cursing my broken wing. “About what?”
He hesitated, giving me a sidelong glance I didn’t like. “About… other eventualities. If things don’t go according to plan.”
I knew I was just like a child, slapping my hands over my ears and saying I can’t hear you. Anything to tune out the idea that anything could go wrong at all.
I knew it, and yet I couldn’t help myself.
“Nothing will go wrong,” I said, my voice rasping despite myself. “How much have we gone through together? I know everyone thinks there’s a chance everything will fall apart, but I can’t let go of the Oracle’s words. She told me everything would be fine if we made a leap of faith, but maybe she meant more than one. And even if we have to take a thousand leaps of faith, I’ll happily jump every single time.”
Tascius nodded slowly, his eyes dark.
“Every. Single. Time,” I added, pushing my index finger into his chest to make my point. “For every single one of you. I would do the exact same thing if you were gone, Tascius.”
For good measure, I flipped my hand over, displaying the mate mark on my wrist that looked like a halo with spears of light emanating from it. The thin moonlight chain ran straight from me to Tascius. “Can you see this?” I demanded.
“The mark? Yes,” he said, looking nonplussed.
I shook my head. “Not just the mark. There’s a chain coming from it, linking me to you. I see them for Azazel, Belial, and Lucifer, too. As long as I can follow that chain, everything will be fine.”
Tascius leaned down to kiss me, his lips soft, warm, and reassuring against mine. For a moment I forgot we were standing in the Ninth Circle, that danger lurked all around…
Then a raven shrieked overhead, sounding more like a chorus of birds than a single one. Azazel wasn’t happy with us lingering here.
Tascius broke away with a rueful smile. “Let’s take this home.”
I nodded and let him lift me into the sky again, resolving to pour more magic into my wings tonight. Maybe it would help, maybe it wouldn’t, but I’d go insane if I had to be carried everywhere.
A flash of white and gold caught my eye as we reached the Seventh Circle. Michael was lounging on the roof, taking in all of Dis with great interest.
Tascius and I touched down near him, and then I remembered- Tascius was supposed to be training with him again as soon as we’d returned. I felt a pang of annoyance that I had to share him with the archangel all the time, but, as I reminded myself, it’d been my idea in the first place.
I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I was losing him. That I was losing everything, and I just didn’t know it yet.
I pushed the feeling aside. Having faith in us was the priority, not dwelling on things that hadn’t happened yet.
But while looking at Michael’s golden wings, his Heaven-perfected flawless visage, a question sprang out of my mouth.
“Why was Gabriel able to hold the Sword?”
I didn’t understand. Gabriel had been full of rot and corruption, self-serving, evil… and still the Sword had allowed him to hold it. It could’ve chosen to incinerate him on the spot. It could’ve filled him with so much light he would’ve exploded from the intensity of it like a supernova.
Michael looked over at me, a vague sort of interest kindling in his eyes. “Who the Hell knows? Maybe it was one of God’s little jokes.”
“God’s… jokes?” I asked blankly. What about this could possibly be a joking matter?
“Yeah.” He shrugged, dislodging a lock of blond hair. “Like the platypus. Who else would come up with something like that?”
Was he capable of taking anything seriously? I was almost convinced steam was about to gush out of my ears when he laughed, taking a swig of whiskey as soon as the sound died out.
“I have no idea, sister. When I had moments of consciousness down there in that hellhole, I asked myself the same thing thousands of times. Why was Gabriel given something he wasn’t worthy of? Beats the fuck out of me. And for all the time I spent thinking on it, all I came up with was that maybe it was supposed to be here the entire time. He was just the messenger boy.”
My breath caught in my throat. The vision of the Chain and its web-like structure sprang back to my mind, everything connected above and below.
Maybe it was just another link in the Chain. The Sword was only here because Gabriel betrayed God and his own brothers, and because he raised me from death on a selfish whim, and because he pushed me out of Heaven when he couldn’t stand his own creation turning on him.
A thousand chains, a thousand links all leading to the same point in time. And Gabriel had carried the Sword of Light straight to me, the one person who linked together everyone who wanted Satan dead.
I shivered, thinking of how far the Chain extended and how much time it encompassed.
“Are you cold?” Tascius murmured in my ear, tightening his arm around me.
I shook my head. “No. You can go train. I’m going to lay this out before we bring it to Wayland tomorrow.” I rose up on my tiptoes and kissed his cheek, feeling oddly shy about displaying such open affection in front of Michael. There was a time when kissing someone in front of an archangel would’ve been a whipping with steel barbs.
But Michael just took a swig of whiskey and ambled off, jerking two fingers in a come-hither motion over his shoulder. “Let’s do this, kid.”
Maybe I’d made a terrible mist
ake in asking him to teach Tascius, but… my mate looked happy at the prospect.
I managed to smile despite all my worries. “Have fun, kid.”
“You’re younger than me, and shorter,” he said with a snort. “Small fry.”
“Whippersnapper.”
“Shrimp.”
I made a mock frown. “Low blow, friend. Low blow.”
He made as if to turn away, then reached out and grabbed me for one last, deep kiss. “We’ll come back to this later,” he said in my ear, his voice husky.
I nodded in agreement, wishing I could pull him away for just a little bit, but we’d have all night.
Besides, I needed to look over my broken Sword and fix it if I wanted to have something to ram down Satan’s throat.
The prospect made me smile with anticipation.
14
Tascius
“Your woman. Is she always so…” Michael made a face, searching for the right word. “Grumpy?”
Not the right word. Determined, maybe. Unstoppable, yes. Hellbent… absolutely.
I didn’t turn to look at him. The archangel gave off light like the sun to my newly-sharpened eyes. It seemed that every day I woke up, my vision was brighter, clearer, and it was a Hell of a headache trying to adjust to seeing all the tiny details that had been invisible to me before.
“She’s not grumpy,” I said, determined to keep Melisande from false accusations of poor temperament. “She’s lost a mate, her best friend, and her wing is broken. Would you be cheerful after all that?”
Michael raised a mug and waggled his eyebrows. The bitter scent of beer wafted after him. “Cheer-juice.”
He was fucking incorrigible. This was the guy who could’ve saved humanity from the Apocalypse? The guy who was supposed to teach me how to be a ‘proper’ archangel, whatever the Hell that meant?
My own foul mood threatened to rise to the surface. No matter my bloodline, or that the primeval forces driving the universe had chosen me to take my father’s place, I felt that I would never be one of them: the archangels, the supposed divine lights of the cosmos… my Nephilim side was too strong. The darkness of Hell and Acheron were completely ingrained in me.
It was like being a fish that had suddenly found it had wings, and was expected to join the hawks.
And there was no way that was happening. For a moment I felt a touch of despair that spiraled through me, threatening to choke out any of the hope that Melisande had instilled in me- she was putting all her faith in the wrong person.
How could I, of all people, possibly be the one to bring the light down here? My whole history was checkered with nothing but blood and pain.
I was no archangel. The universe had chosen wrong. Melisande’s faith in me was unwarranted and undeserved.
“Are you coming, kid?”
Michael’s voice echoed down the hall. I looked up, realizing I had slowed to a halt halfway to the training rooms. The archangel disappeared into the room and I forced myself to walk after him.
Wallowing in self-pity wasn’t going to help, but it wasn’t really pity I was feeling. Just because I hadn’t completely snapped and lost myself to Nephilim rage since murdering Gabriel didn’t mean anything… that dark power could just be lying in wait for the wrong moment, and now that I was taking on the same sort of energy that imbued the Princes, it could be catastrophic.
It’d already been too close once. I couldn’t let it happen again.
Michael had left his beer on a table and was already sitting cross-legged on the cold stone floor, his wings neatly folded behind his back. He’d removed the razor blades from his wings, ensuring some poor Chainling wouldn’t take a faceful of them if he turned around too fast.
I sat down across from him, still feeling low, drowning in my darker thoughts. “Have you ever questioned if you were meant to be an archangel?”
His eyes opened again. They were such a brilliant gold they were almost painful to look at. “Every damn day.”
That wasn’t what I’d expected to hear. I frowned at him, expecting an explanation.
Michael rolled his shoulders, groaning as he stretched. “When we were created, we were made with one purpose: to bring glory and adoration to God. All the fighting, the war- that came a little later. Lucifer was out early. He got tired of the constant worship and decided to drop right out of Heaven, and then the infighting began, and that’s when God realized it couldn’t go on like that indefinitely. So, he gave us meaning.”
I nodded, shifting in place. “Training new angels?”
Michael’s jaw tensed. “No. Gabriel pulled the Sword of Light out of God’s coffers, and seeing as how he couldn’t take it back, God told him to go forth and defend Heaven’s mandates. I was assigned the protection of humanity on Earth. Lai- er, Raphael was sent out to defend the bridge between Heaven and Hell. Barachiel and Raguel were God’s right-hand guardians, and Selaphiel and Uriel became the guardians of Heaven itself, the keepers of the Gates.”
One of the things he said stuck out to me. “There’s a bridge between Heaven and Hell?” All this time, Melisande could’ve just taken a bridge back up and out of this mess?
“There was.” Michael looked away, unwilling to meet my eyes. “Not anymore. It was destroyed a long time ago.”
There was so much history locked inside his head, it was almost impossible to fathom.
He shifted and stretched, his eyes far away and looking so old against his young face. “Sometimes I wonder why he gave me to humanity. Did he know what he was condemning me to? It’s impossible to guard something with your life and not grow to love it.”
I stared at him. He was obviously no longer seeing me as he reminisced, but the gruff tones had become authoritative, his devil-may-care attitude gone. This was the archangel God had given authority to, one of the original guardians, not a drunken angel with a chip on his shoulder.
“It killed me to be in that box. It really did. And the whole time I was in there, stuck with nothing but my thoughts and sitting on my ass, all those fragile little humans I’d come to love were being slaughtered.”
Brief lines of pain pulled at his face before he wiped the expression away, and I realized maybe the whiskey was more than just flouting convention. It numbed the pain of knowing he’d lost the one thing he’d sworn to defend.
“So yeah, kid. I do ask why the universe chose me when I wasn’t even there for the one thing that mattered. And in the end, it doesn’t matter.” Something ancient looked out behind his face when he finally looked back at me. “What matters is that the universe did choose, and you can either sit on a heaping pile of bullshit excuses for why you can’t do as it asks, or you can man up and shoulder the burdens, the good times and the bad.”
He’d seen right through my question to the underlying fears. Either I was more transparent than I thought, or Michael was good at playing the fast and loose, liquored-up fool.
I looked down at my lap and made a noncommittal noise.
Every time I questioned myself and my purpose here, I was just making excuses, shrugging the burden aside for someone else to handle. In the end, they were all my burdens, the tasks that the Chain had decided I was enough to handle.
I needed to get a grip on myself and focus on what I could do, instead of what I should be doing. A lifetime of ingrained beliefs meant nothing if I decided they meant nothing.
“Right. Let’s get on with it, then,” I said briskly, putting my hands on my knees. Meditation had been the warm-up practice since Michael took me under his wing; getting in touch with something inside me that wasn’t a snarled ball of darkness, but a feeling of pure light.
In a way, I hated that angelic light. It felt like it blasted right through me and exposed all the terrible aspects of myself I’d tried to hide away.
“You’re not gonna want to hear this, but I’m going to tell you anyways.” Michael rubbed his hands together. “You took Gabriel’s place in the cosmos, and you’re of his direct bloodline. Notice how
quickly you changed?”
I nodded, trepidation rising to the surface. He’d asked me how quickly it took for the transmutation to begin.
For me, it’d been less than a week. Almost the instant I ripped Gabriel’s head off I’d felt something crack and shift inside me; within days I’d noticed the tinier changes in the mirror and turned my back on them, determined not to see them.
“So that made you the perfect vessel to take his place. Instead of having to re-mold the raw material to suit the power, the raw material was already primed for it. Having his blood just made it easier for the grand plan of the universe to transfer it all over to you.”
I got what he was saying. “So I’m going to be exactly like him.”
Michael’s face was set, intense. “Not exactly. You don’t have to be like him, get me? But you’ll have the powers he did. I was made from the heat of the sun, Lucifer was made from the first rays of dawn and the death of the day, and Gabriel was woven from the light of the moon. When it rises, you’ll rise with it.”
It made sense. Every archangel, a primal power in themselves, was created from a different universal force. “Will I still be cursed with Nephilim rage?”
My teacher hesitated, just for a second. “I don’t know. I’m not going to lie to make you feel better about this. You could still have it and never know until it shows up again. But I feel pretty confident in saying that after giving the power a few centuries to settle in, it’ll vanish for good.”
Great. Just a few centuries to remain an inherent danger to my mate. No problem.
Michael reached up on the table, felt around with his fingertips until he found his tankard, and pulled it down. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand when he was finished, staring at me over the rim of the mug the entire time.
“Now let’s see what you can do with what you’ve got.” Michael slammed the empty tankard now. “Hold out your hands. It’d be easier if we were under the moon, but you should still be able to pull it right out of yourself.”
Unlike Melisande, Azazel, and Belial, I’d never had inherent magic. The Nephilim rage and placing the mate mark on Melisande were the closest I’d come to touching it, but one was innate, and the other a power that was brought about by sheer force of will.