A Crack in Everything

by Ruth Frances Long

  But Izzy didn’t move. Not even when Dylan tried to break free of her, Dylan who up to that moment had been apparently supporting her. Her hand locked onto his arm and she pulled him against her, locking her other hand around his throat. Silver gave an outraged cry.

  Light burst from the air around Izzy and Dylan, flames rained down on her and around her. Izzy smiled, her eyes blazing with an incandescent glow, and she raised one hand, her fingers splayed out like a shield.

  Angelic voices rose in song, in a war chant that assaulted Jinx’s ears and drove him to the ground, but Sorath – it had to be Sorath … No way Izzy could stand before it, holding Dylan and facing down a host the like of which Jinx had never heard of on this plane or any other.

  Not since the war in heaven. Not since the stories only the oldest fae told.

  ‘Go back?’ The angel’s voice made the ground shake. The paving stones shattered, cracks spreading out from her position like the fingers of her hand. ‘No. I shall go on. And they cannot stop me. No one can stop me. He shall be freed. He shall be freed and we shall be together again. A soul and a body is all I need.’ She shook Dylan like a rag doll. ‘And here it is. You have no power over me, not anymore.’

  The angels took a step forward, Zadkiel and Haniel at their fore. Their mouths opened and their song rose, worse than a banshee, more beautiful and terrible by far.

  Mistle dropped to the ground, little more than a yard from Izzy, grovelling and crying out Sorath’s name. ‘I did everything for you, my angel. Everything. Please, don’t leave me here!’

  The song swept over them. Dylan screamed, wilting in Sorath’s grip, her hostage, her failing shield. Silver cried out, stumbling forward to try to save him, but the song robbed her newly regained strength. The Cú Sídhe howled, whined, and dropped to the ground. All the Sídhe, no matter what their power or nobility of birth, were felled in a single stroke.

  But Sorath, in Izzy’s body, stood firm.

  ‘Would you have them all die for you?’ Zadkiel asked, breaking off his song. ‘Does your pride extend that far?’

  She cast her eyes around the square where fae and human alike toppled whether they could see the angels or not. ‘What are they but beasts that walk the horizontal? Lower plane creatures. They are nothing. You know the truth, Zadkiel. You know what we are. Feel this power. Revel in it. Come with me, share this.’ She stretched out her hand, the one she had previously used to threaten Dylan, and beckoned to the angel.

  To Jinx’s amazement, Zadkiel hesitated. He felt it too, the sheer desire to fall at her feet, to worship and love her. She gave off the imperative to everyone there and he saw them waver. The Dawn herself, most beloved, the angel who heralded the new day and the joy of morning, queen to the Morning Star … who could fail to love her, to want to please her?

  Zadkiel shook her off. An archangel, made for war and inured to such enchantments, he stood straighter than those around him who failed.

  ‘Give back the spark and accept your fate,’ he declared, his voice ringing out through the night. Across the square, the street lamps flared and exploded, bursting for a moment with power. ‘Sorath, you are fallen. You will burn. Accept it!’

  The spell she wove shattered. Jinx felt its tendrils slither off him, freeing him. Too long under the bonds of a desire to please, he welcomed the release, shook himself free with relief and joy, but others all around him wept with grief – human, fae, and even angel. Haniel dropped to his knees, burying his face in his hands, all his pride wiped away as he sobbed her name.

  ‘I accept nothing,’ Sorath snarled, her hatred transforming Izzy’s pretty face to something snide and detestable. ‘I will burn. That is what I do, you fool. That is my strength. You cannot take me. Not in this form. It is mine. She has agreed.’

  No! Jinx dragged himself up on his arms, his body shaking as he tried to fight off the massed powers of the heavens who strove to drive him down. How could Izzy have agreed to let Sorath possess her? Why?

  And he remembered the iron in his belly, the sense of drifting away to peace, to darkness, to another side of existence before he was drawn back, before the light. Light like the dawn.

  ‘Izzy,’ he breathed. ‘You didn’t.’

  Sorath cast a glance his way and she smiled. Not Izzy’s smile. There was no joy, no innocence, no love in that smile. His heart stuttered to see it and he shied back. She couldn’t have done it for him. She wouldn’t have. She wasn’t that much of a fool, surely. No one was. Even Izzy wouldn’t have given that much for another, for someone who had hurt her, betrayed her and let her enemy take her. She couldn’t be such a naïve child.

  But she could. He knew she could. And it wasn’t naivety. It was part of the reason he loved her.

  Sorath raised her hand a third time and fire billowed forth from the gate. Without a moment’s hesitation, she stepped back into it, pulling Dylan with her.

  And the fallen angel, the young man and the girl who had given herself to save him were gone.

  Without hesitation Jinx dived after them.

  She had twisted the Sídhe-way beyond the gate. He felt it the moment he passed through its burning embrace. Her fire had scorched the Sídhe-way, making it writhe from its intended course and twist to a new destination. Nature shrieked at such an offence and travelling along this new, unnatural path, even Jinx’s body rebelled. His mind squeezed on all sides within a migraine-inducing vice, his teeth aching from pressure, his lungs straining to breathe air that should not be there at all.

  But he forced himself onwards, following Sorath and her path cloven through reality using her power combined with Izzy’s fae and Grigori blood. He should have known, or at least have guessed that Izzy herself was the goal. All planes met in the girl; Grigori blood was demon and human. Add to that Brí as her mother, and she became as potent a blend as might be found. Sorath – and Holly for that matter – had called her a vessel, and so she was, one designed to hold an angel. One designed to survive as a human. A creature of magic with a soul, possessed of the divine spark. Sorath may have fallen, but she herself admitted she chose the time and the place so Izzy would be there.

  She’d even put Mistle in place to ensure the girl touched the after-image so the transference could take place. She was cunning and she’d had millennia to plan this. The thought sent a tremor of fear through him.

  What else had she done? Izzy’s father’s accident – Mistle had all but admitted causing that. It was too convenient to be an accident. Jinx didn’t believe in coincidences. And the rest of them? Lives ruined, lives changed forever, lives lost, lives so readily dispensable. What did it matter when you were older than the stones, older than the stars? What did it matter when all that you thought of was heaven and hell, with humans and fae just an irritating infestation of the horizontal plane?

  Angels and demons never saw the whole. Sometimes he thought the Creator had made them blind to it deliberately.

  It had worked. Until now.

  So why did he still live? Why save him? Unless it was the only way to ensure Izzy’s cooperation. She had saved him once, healed him using the spark. Now that Holly had bound them together, Sorath needed Izzy’s cooperation. Had that been the angel’s plan all along? Or had she simply played Holly when the opportunity arose? A dangerous game. Holly loved nothing in the world so much as to kill, and nothing to kill so much as angels. She’d tied Izzy and Sorath together so Sorath would die when Izzy did. But if that was Sorath’s plan, so they could not be parted … Izzy would be hers – heart, body and soul.

  But why?

  He sensed the break in the Sídhe-way and reached for it. It was a ragged tear, with no grace or elegance in its formation. The angel had simply ripped her way through, the opening malformed and higher, it turned out, than the ground on the other side.

  He fell.

  The earth, grassy and damp from the late-night rain slammed into his body. He rolled onto his back, unable to stop the groan that the impact wrenched out of him. No way of
knowing how much time had passed, how much redirecting the Sídhe-way had disrupted the world around it. It was dark, cold and he’d have to deal with it. The time was of no importance. Now was all that mattered.

  Another body lay a little way off, at the foot of the slope where the ground flattened out before falling away to gorse and rocky cliffs. The dark expanse of the sea beyond reflected the low moon. Jinx knew this place.

  The body stirred and gave a similar groan of pain. It was Dylan, Jinx realised, the music he made silent now. He lay very still and pale, his chest moving only a fraction of an inch to betray the fact he still lived. Such a waste. Such a senseless waste of a life of talent and promise. He’d heard Silver’s music, followed her call. And look where it had led him.

  Beyond Dylan, a stone structure rose from the ground, man-made, modern, especially by Sídhe standards, but shaped like something older and alien to these shores. A stepped pyramid, topped with a single square block. It was a folly, out of place and out of time, locally beloved. They called it the Wishing Stone.

  He stood up, stretching out his aching body. This was Killiney Hill, in the shadow of the white Obelisk, right above Brí’s hollow. Close to Izzy and Dylan’s homes.

  And a world away from help.

  Light blossomed out of the darkness, dawn breaking, or so he thought at first. But this light came not from the horizon, but from the Wishing Stone. Sorath walked around the base, took the first step up onto it.

  ‘I know what you’re doing,’ Jinx shouted.

  She didn’t respond, just kept walking on, circling the first level anticlockwise until it was complete and she stepped up to another.

  ‘I won’t let you take her,’ he marched towards the steps and felt the power imbued in the stones. Not magic, not angelic or demonic, but something else. Something he’d never felt before.

  Human?

  As he tried to step up, the power in the stones rose up, lashed out, flinging him backwards. He took a glancing blow off the boulders, gorse and brambles behind the pyramid and landed heavily.

  Sorath’s laughter, so like Izzy’s, and so unlike it too, rang out over the hilltop.

  ‘Jinx,’ Dylan whispered, struggling up from the ground. ‘Jinx, it’s the stone.’

  Jinx shook his head, trying to clear it of the high-pitched whine drilling into his brain, trying to force himself up. ‘It’s magic.’

  ‘It’s the Wishing Stone. Wishes. Human belief. Human dreams. That’s what she’s going to use. She has everything else already. You have to stop her.’

  He seized Dylan’s shoulders and shook him. ‘How, when it won’t let me set foot on it after her?’

  Dylan gasped for breath, breath he couldn’t quite draw. Jinx released him in shock. His ribs were cracked, a lung punctured. It would kill him, slowly and painfully, without help. ‘She made the same mistake at first.’ He wheezed out the words, each one an agony. ‘Made me tell her. You have to follow the rules, circle each level of the stone before climbing to the next. Then face the sea, the island, to make your wish. Did it a thousand times as kids, Izzy and I …’

  ‘Lie still. You’ll make it worse. Help will be here soon.’

  What help? Help was too far away.

  Dylan sank back onto the ground. He knew. He understood. ‘Tell Silver …’

  ‘I know. I will.’

  Jinx turned to the stone. Sorath was on the third level already, almost around to the steps. It was magic indeed. Human magic, and like all magic the rules were everything. He sprinted for the stone and this time, once he’d circled it, he could step up onto the first level.

  Wishes, human magic, like prayers, like faith, all the intangible things his kind could never really understand, so called by other names.

  ‘Sorath,’ he shouted, ‘don’t do this.’

  ‘It must be done, faeling. I swore it long ago, when I cast your ancestors out, when the Morning Star fell and I was parted from him. I swore it. I’ve planned for so long. Why would I stop now when I’ve given everything to be here in this time, this place, with this body?’

  ‘Let her go.’

  ‘Why when she’s mine? She wouldn’t exist without me. The blood of the Grigori, her family line, Brí’s obsession with her father, even Brí’s own expulsion from heaven for the sin of refusing a side … who else could have done all this? I designed her to be my vessel.’ She stopped, towering over him, the wind whipping Izzy’s bright hair back from her face, her eyes aglow with all the fire of the sun. ‘Is she not perfect? The fire is part of her, you see. Brí’s blood welcomes me, recognises me, as like knows like. Fire is an integral part of us both. You’ve felt drawn to her from the moment you first interfered. So come, follow us now and see it to the conclusion. Come, Jinx, and try to take her back.’

  He pushed on. Sorath reached the top ahead of him and stood there, arms outstretched, facing the waters. Light formed around her, a circle of light, a nimbus glow, and the hill quaked beneath them, nearly throwing Jinx off the steps altogether. He grabbed her, wrapped his arms around her waist and tried to topple her, but it was like trying to uproot a mountain.

  Sorath laughed. ‘I would have used Dylan as a host for my lover. But you’ll be so much better. So much more stable – Aes and Cú Sídhe combined. Holly prepared you so well as a vessel, with all her spells and charms.’

  ‘Izzy,’ Jinx shouted. ‘Izzy, listen to me. Whatever she’s promised, she’s not going to do it. Whatever she said to you, it’s all lies. She’s not going to save me, or your dad. She’s not going to help anyone. She’s going to destroy us all. She’s going to break the world apart!’

  ‘Of course I am. I’d tear the universe and all its realities apart to be with him again. And you’re going to help me, faeling.’

  She grabbed the back of his head in her hand, the grip impossibly strong, inescapable, and pulled his mouth towards hers. Jinx tried to shout, but his voice was snatched away as fire consumed him, fire the like of which he’d never seen or felt, brighter than magnesium, devouring more quickly than acid, acrid like brimstone.

  ‘Izzy,’ he managed to whisper. ‘Forgive me.’ He’d thought it so many times in his heart, wanted to say it, wanted to tell her. Time for her to actually hear the words the Sídhe couldn’t say. He forced them out, tumbling from his lips. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Swimming Upstream

  Deep within the fire, Izzy opened her eyes at the sound of his voice. Jinx, so lost, so far away, penitent. Desperate.

  He had to be, to ask her forgiveness.

  The fire surrounding her didn’t burn. It didn’t even hurt. She knew it intimately now, was as much a part of it as it was of her. It was easy to fall back into its eddies and flows, to forget and be at peace. It seemed so long since she had actually felt at peace. And yet, she burned.

  But why did Jinx need her forgiveness? After all that had happened, all he’d done, she would have thought he’d be grateful to be rid of her.

  But instead he called her name, held her, kissed her. Refused to let go.

  She could feel it. The first sensations to touch her for what felt like years. Sorath didn’t know desire, or love, or not on a level Izzy could comprehend. Everything burned so brightly within her. Love was obsession, desire was pure craving. But Jinx made her feel …

  Like a salmon swimming upstream, Izzy struggled back to herself as he spoke of lies, of her father, of betrayal.

  Where was she?

  A cool breeze touched her face, lifted her hair. Blissfully cool. She saw the sea, and the beam of the distant Kish lighthouse. Endless points of cold, manufactured brightness. Just for an instant, as if she saw them while she blinked her eyes, instead of the darkness she expected.

  Sorath’s fire reared up again, not a comfort now, but a wall of rage intent on pushing her back, quashing her.

  The salmon swims against the river, Izzy. She could almost hear Dad’s voice. It has to. No matter what. That’s part of
its destiny, to struggle, to overcome. That’s knowledge. It’s easy to give up, to be mundane and never try to rise above the flow. But that’s not our way. We study, learn and understand. We must know. We’re like the salmon. We’re stubborn.

  ‘I threw it away, Dad,’ she murmured. ‘I had to. To save us both.’

  The spell Sorath wove faltered and her wish … Izzy could feel it brewing within her, within the stone on which she stood, potent but not yet strong enough. It used the power imbued in this stone of more than a hundred and fifty years of hopes and dreams, tapped into desires and prayers. It fed on those wishes to serve Sorath’s will.

  In a glance, Izzy saw what the angel wanted to set free. It wasn’t real. She knew it wasn’t real – it was more like looking at a scene projected on the scenery around her, as if she was looking at the present and the future at the same time.

  A figure strode from the hill with Sorath at his side. Wings of smoke and fire spread out behind him, and the ground withered where he walked. She saw the scorched earth that would follow, the death and destruction as the angels went to war against this creature, fallen from their number so very long ago and trapped in stone, in nightmares. In hell. She saw the death of countless humans, demons and fae as they were used as cannon fodder in an impossible war. He looked like Jinx. But he wasn’t.

  And it wasn’t real.

  Stronger now, she tried to recall what had happened since they left the Market.

  Nothing.

  Where’s my father? she asked. You promised to heal him. Where is he?

  ‘In good time,’ Sorath replied, her voice just a touch too soft and cajoling to be believable. How could anything want its mate with such a passion and be prepared to consider anything else before it? Not even for a promise. Not with the controlling obsession for the Morning Star Izzy had seen in the angel.

  The Morning Star. She knew that name. Remembered it from Religious Education classes. From brief snatches of Milton and Paradise Lost. Lucifer. That was what she’d seen in Jinx’s form, wasn’t it?