by Cate Morgan
This was the way home.
The mist cleared and in each gate stood someone she knew—Jamie, her father, the Agent, Declan, friends and former lovers there and gone again. Not the old man, or Bobby, but mortal men. Not like her, with the power of the Otherworld in her blood, a power she’d never fully mastered in an effort to keep a stronger hold on her humanity.
The moon blinded her as the mist had done, stars piercing her eyes like diamonds in sunlight. She shielded her eyes and turned away from the light. The figures in the gates were blurred by it as she stepped back into the welcoming arms of shadow. Light and time were no longer hers to do with as she pleased.
“It is time.”
She turned away from the piercing steel in Declan’s impossible blue eyes. The woman was tall, tall as any man, with the regal bearing of one who has earned her place in men’s hearts and minds by dint of her struggle to become more than she was born. Her hair curled long and jumbled to her knees, neither blonde nor brunette nor red. Her eyes were equally indeterminate, shimmering from one shade to the next. And she knew this was no dream.
Aika took a deep breath, uncertain until now if the mist had left her a voice to speak of. “It’s coming.”
The woman folded her hands before her. “Not yet, but soon. The angels and demons that dwell in men’s hearts have begun to awaken since the new millennium, reached a boiling point in the Year of the New Sun and the wars that followed. Humanity has reached a crossroads where something must give or it will be destroyed. It is time for them to awaken, lest they die in their sleep.” She came forward and took Aika’s hands in hers. “It is time to choose.”
That rankled. “I’ve always fought for them. For us. Why should that change now?”
“Do you not see, child? Soon the true embodiment of good and evil will make the world its battlefield. Humanity, with the gift of free will, will choose sides and fight one another as they have always done. They are doomed for destruction if even one of us remains less than we are.”
Aika pulled away and pressed her hands into the altar stone, head hanging. She shut her eyes against the shaking and the truth. And realized neither was an option any longer. The moment she’d put off all these years, first because of Jamie’s love and then because to move forward would mean leaving it behind, had come at last.
Wind swirled around the stones, deafening her with its roar. It reached fever pitch as she remained anchored to the shadow between worlds, its touch coursing through her veins like ice water in an empty stomach. She took a shaking breath and said the words she’d avoided all this time. “I know what must be done.”
She came to with a start, chest tight with the breath that could not expel itself from her body, her muscles knotted and bones rigid. A warm hand covered her bare shoulder, startling her.
Declan looked down at her curiously, eyes bright in the tomb dark of the flat as they captured the faintest bit of late afternoon light that leaked between the slats of his dusty blinds. “What?”
She shook her head. “What do you mean?”
“You said you knew what must be done.”
“I do.” She threw the covers aside, swinging her legs over the side of the cot. Her head swam and she had to clutch the edge of the bed before she fell.
Confusion transmuted into concern on his sharp features. “When was the last time you ate?”
She honestly didn’t remember. “What night did we meet?”
“If you can call threatening my life with a potato peeler meeting.” He helped her stand and wrapped his black terrycloth robe around her nakedness.
“Are you claiming you weren’t asking for it?” she countered in a game imitation of normalcy while her mind whirled with lack of food and overabundance of thought. She stared at the food laid out on the wobbly card table that served as dining set. “What’s all this?”
“The old man can count better than you, apparently.” He pulled his desk chair forward and offered her a dented folding chair with a flourish.
Her mouth watered at the sight of succulent lamb chops and crisp garden peas, potatoes baked in their jackets with dollops of melted butter running down their sides. She sat and began to shovel food onto a chipped plate under Declan’s amused gaze. “The old man was here?” She took a chop in both hands and ripped into its fleshy juices.
Declan shook his head as he served himself with slightly less gusto. “Bobby.”
She swallowed. “No Carl then.”
“I rather think his credit with your lot has reached an all-time low.”
Carl’s actions saddened her, not because he had betrayed her, but because he had been desperate enough to betray them all. She held Dreamtech and conglomerates like it responsible, not Carl. She wondered where he was hiding out now he had no haven left, not even the Burnout Zone. “He’s an angel, you know.”
Declan stared at her. “Carl?”
“Bobby.”
He carried on staring. “A priest mechanic…who’s also an angel.”
She mashed a potato under her fork with relish. “It’s the funny thing about humanity, you know. They have all these ideas of what angels are, thanks to religion, but no one’s actually paying attention. Too busy looking to the sky for answers to see what’s happening right here on Earth.” She grinned at his discomfiture. “Jesus would have made a brilliant Buddhist, you know.”
It didn’t bear thinking about. The connotations were more than a little disturbing. “So…the wings and everything, huh?”
She chuckled, in good spirits now she had food in her stomach and her decision had been made. “See what I mean? Angels don’t have wings. Nor do demons. They come from right here on Earth, evolved from humanity.”
Declan had forgotten to eat altogether, buttered potato dripping from his fork. As she watched, a single pea rolled off the melting mound onto the floor in a last desperate bid for freedom. “Now you’re having a go.”
She speared another chop. It was amazing what good food could accomplish. “Human beings have the gift of free will for a reason. Anyone is capable of great good or great evil. Most remain more or less balanced, some running hotter or colder as actions beget consequences. But there are those whose thermostats run to one extreme or the other.”
Declan thought she knew what she meant. “Serial killers.”
“Or the fireman who dies saving a child from a burning building. Even the everyday citizen who, after leading an unremarkable life, shoves another person out of the way of a bus or bullet.”
“Angels and demons—all unknowing.” He released a gusty sigh, not aware he had been holding his breath.
“And becoming more aware every moment. But why?”
“Why?”
Aika emptied her fork and waved it around as though to snatch her runaway thoughts from the air. “Why now? What’s so special about this time in history?”
Declan ticked the points off on long fingers. “Upswing in natural disasters. Increase in violence. Technology on a meteoric rise as the turn of the century approached, then passed.” He tried to put it all together. “Humanity is evolving?”
She scraped her plate clean with an air of finality. “Yes, but into what?”
“You tell me.”
“Take natural disasters. Or not-so-natural ones, even. Such events have a way of stripping the façade from the carefully wrought human preoccupation of getting on with daily business and showing the truth, pushing people to their natural extremes. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, die.”
He sucked in a breath. “Angels and demons.”
“Well done. But the really frightening bit comes when you understand it’s not so much about religion as it is about numbers.”
Incomprehension rearranged his face into sharp angles for a moment. Then it dawned on him, and he was frightened. “Armies. We’re still at war, aren’t we?”
“And the apocalypse is only a breath away.”
He scrubbed his face with both hands as though to wash the knowledge fro
m his brain. “What does this have to do with you going after the Agent?”
It was Aika’s turn to stare. “What?”
“You said you knew what to do. That means you’re ready to confront him.”
She cursed his perception. “I need to storm the Bastille. Can you get that virus of yours to work?”
His eyebrows crept toward his hairline. “It does work. It’ll just stay in a holding pattern in the Dreamtech security system until a high-level clearance code releases it into the mainframe.”
She pushed away from the table and stood. “But you have a way to get it that far?”
“Any number.”
Her smile was feral. “Leave obtaining the security code to me. You release your hounds.”
“Which one?”
“All of them.”
Aika ignored the stares as she passed through the black market, the whispers that rumbled behind her like an incoming wave on a beach. They’d never seen her that way before, the familiar figure behind the bar, serving food and drink and a compassionate ear. They were comfortable with the quiet side of her, the side like them, even if they suspected she stood truly apart. As long as there was regular food and shelter, and one day echoed the sameness of the last, they were able to pretend that other part of her didn’t exist.
But now they’d seen the warrior side of her, the dangerous side that revealed her as something other than human. And even though she’d done it to protect them, it still had the power to terrify. She couldn’t blame them.
Bobby saw her coming. He must have seen it in her face, or suspected it since the Agent and his demons had come for her in the market. He left his counter and pulled her into a tight embrace, something he hadn’t done since the first time she’d sought shelter from him, as broken and bloodied as any amount of torture the Agent’s demons could mete out.
Bobby pulled away and took a good look at her. “You don’t appear any the worse for wear.”
She shook her head. “Brighid came to me.”
He cocked his head. “Well, she is the patron saint of healers.”
“And warriors.” She clenched his hands tightly in hers. “I’m afraid,” she whispered, soft as a secret.
He tilted her head up. “Find the kernel of peace within the fear, the knowledge that it will soon be over and let its light fill you.”
“If only I knew it was going to work—”
“It would take the power from the act of sacrifice, and well you know it.” He took her hand and drew her into his workshop. “Come with me.”
The double-vaulted chamber was surprisingly airy, brick and stone and mortar giving it an aura of timeless shelter. Only one shrouded form sat tilted in the echoing space where once the stabled vehicles had lined up in orderly columns. This, if nothing else, brought home the fact time was not so much as running short as out altogether.
Bobby swept the tarp from her father’s restored Triumph. She’d inherited it when he left the mortal world for that of her mother’s people in the Other. They’d come a long way together. He started the motorbike up with a vibrant roar.
She shielded her eyes from the headlamp, stepped away from its unnaturally bright column of light.
Bobby smiled. “So you can take the light into dark places.”
Aika’s room was in the back of the Tree and Flame, a narrow, windowless attic home to a bed lodged in a cranny between the wood paneled wall and steep angle of the low ceiling. A footlocker hunched against the far wall, a neglected dog that wanted nothing to do with her. She sat on the bed with her hands clasped between her knees, her back hunched as she stared unseeing at the floorboards. It was peaceful here, the way she liked it.
Eventually she undressed and washed herself in the basin and ewer, taking care of the shiny pink crosshatchings of newly healed wounds. Then she unlocked the footlocker and removed the necessary items from its unfriendly depths and placed them neatly on the bed.
With the slow movements of a soul marking time in purgatory, she dressed in clean undergarments, pulled worn motorcycle leathers across her still-tender skin, belted them with steady fingers. A plain black cotton shirt chosen indiscriminately from a pile of other plain cotton shirts came next, a pair of favorite worn socks stretched to the knee. For the first time in years she noticed the scar on her right knee, a childhood injury from some misadventure or other. Her thumb brushed it as she tried to remember where she’d acquired it.
Boots so accustomed to her feet they wore like slippers, laced to the knee and buckled in succession, one-two-three. The last buckle of the left boot gave her some trouble, as it always did, but eventually smoothed into place. She tugged her trousers to the ankle, straightened her belt so the buckle lay in the center, pulled on gloves, wiggling her fingers until the leather warmed to her touch.
Finally there was nothing left but to go downstairs to the taproom.
It was empty, and strangely quiet. It wasn’t the emptiness of a taproom about to fill, or of one closed for the night. It was the emptiness of a town run for the hills in face of an impending army.
Bobby was there, hand on the gleaming bar. The old man stood on the other side. They watched as she took her time navigating the columns of tables and benches, skirted around a low round table with two or three chairs pushed neatly in. The warm glow of the hearth shone over the dark wood, its friendly snap and crack bringing some modicum of comfort as though Brighid were among them. Perhaps she was.
She paused before them. “If this doesn’t work…” She faltered, started again. “He knows what you are, Bobby.”
He looked as though he expected it. “All of it?”
“Not all of it is mine to tell.” She fought to settle her hands, pressed them flat against the counter. “He’ll be here soon. Bobby, I want you to have Da’s bike. Bring the sword back for the next person who—whoever’s next. I don’t care what happens to the rest of it.”
“We’ll hold the Vigil,” The old man assured her. “The lad will be your book, for all that he’ll be wielding a computer. Knowledge is knowledge.”
“I’ll keep the candle burning,” Bobby lifted the bar gate as the old man took the bell from its high shelf.
Aika passed behind the bar and looked up at the sword mounted on the wall. She wondered if she really had the courage to lift it again. Then she told herself to stop being silly and removed it from its place. The wall looked strangely bare without it.
Book, candle, bell. Check.
Steed, armor, steel. Check.
Right. Time to face the dragon.
Chapter Five
Aika parked on a side street, beneath the branches of a tree that should have been billowing in the cool night air. It was a testament to Dreamtech’s power that no one had felt the wind and sun on their faces for years, and yet no one seemed to notice. She left the keys in the ignition. Bobby would know where to find it.
She considered leaving Declan a note but decided not to leave it. He would either understand or he wouldn’t.
She entered the park and walked along a curving gravel path lined with beech trees, hands clasping the baldric strapped across her chest. Her gaze never left the malevolent pyramid of blue steel and obsidian glass. Moonlight shone through the soap-bubble globe of the biosphere, while dark clouds moved in on its opalescent light behind the cacophony of advertisements. A storm was brewing.
Aika reached Dreamtech without incident. She spared a moment to gaze up the steep slope with a small smile. He wouldn’t be able to resist.
“Are you all right?” Velvet lion tones snapped and popped through the earpiece Declan insisted she take. So he still didn’t know he was sitting Vigil for her. Good.
“I’m at the belly of the beast. Hush and let me focus.”
“You’ll let me know when it’s time?”
“You’ll know.”
She adjusted her baldric strap into a more comfortable position on her shoulder and began her ascent. She knew the Agent watched her closely, his facile min
d trying to work it out. For once he was doomed to failure. This was a move of the heart, the soul—not the mind.
She caught sight of herself in one of the windows. Perhaps it was the way the faded light reflected in the glass, but she looked tired. Well, she would have more sleep than she could handle soon enough if this didn’t work. She resumed climbing.
The blood pumped through her veins as though to make every breath count. Aika half expected to trigger a trap with every foot of height she gained, but none came. Perhaps he knew they wouldn’t do any good. Perhaps he wanted her to reach the top.
She ascended with almost ritual repetition, right hand followed by left, pull, left foot then right foot. Repeat. Don’t think about what would happen when she reached her destination.
Was there some magical combination of words that might persuade him to do what was needed? Probably not.
When she reached the top maintenance balcony she spared a moment to appreciate the view. The storm had really come to a head now, like a crowd at the prospect of a promising bit of street theatre. She wished she could feel the rain one more time.
“I hope you’re ready,” she breathed.
“We’re ready.” His breath came through as static, popping in her ear. “How far are you going to take this?”
He was beginning to suspect all was not as it seemed. “As far as it has to.” She switched off her earpiece.
“Your friend is trying to pass a virus into my security system.” Aika turned. The Agent stood before her, serene as he watched Declan’s advances on his hand comp. “They are failing magnificently.”
“That would be a matter of opinion.” To her intense relief she sounded calmer than she felt.
“It is a matter of fact.” He smiled, pressing a button, scrolling with utter unconcern. “I must admit it is a lovely one, elegant and efficient given it is a woven hodgepodge of offensive maneuvers that don’t really belong together. How resourceful.”