by SM Reine
But even though she was every inch the monster, the expression on her face was embarrassment.
She would never pass for human. She was too tall to blend into the crowd. It was worse when she moved, because her skin faded into transparence, as though she were little more than a ghost.
Now Marion could imagine how Charity could serve as a distraction.
“I’ll count to thirty and head down,” Charity said. Her voice was a low hiss, the whisper of wind through cadavers dangling at the gallows. “I’ll keep them busy as long as possible, but…don’t take your time crossing the street.”
“We won’t,” Nori said.
She grabbed Marion and ran.
18
A cyclone of snow whipped around Marion and Nori as they crossed the street, huddled together for warmth. The blizzard was thick enough to blind Marion to the world more than a block away. The city was turned to little more than ghostly shapes in the night.
They couldn’t reach the barricade surrounding the United Nations. There was too much of a crowd hoping to see politicians on their way into the summit. Not a single one of them realized that the keynote speaker was among them, hidden behind thick-framed glasses and a glamour that made her look like a mousy healthcare professional.
Marion’s nerves jolted when the guards glanced at her, even though they didn’t react. Her face was plastered on every newspaper, every television, and more than a few billboards. But now Marion’s face wasn’t Marion’s face.
She squinted up at the office building where Luke waited with the sniper rifle. At that distance, she couldn’t even see the roof. It was unlikely that he’d be able to see her, either.
It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t be able to protect her once she ran inside with Nori.
“Take a few deep breaths,” Nori whispered.
Had Marion looked that afraid? She forced herself to smile. “Thank you.”
Apparently she wasn’t very convincing. Nori squeezed her hand tightly. “Believe it or not, you’re in your element. You thrive in danger and politics. That hasn’t gone anywhere, even if your memories have.”
“I’m sorry, do I know you?” Marion asked.
Nori’s smile wavered. “You told me once that I was your only friend in the Autumn Court.”
Secretary Friederling appeared on the screens hanging on each side of the United Nations building.
Cheers spread through the crowds as bodies shifted for a better view.
“Mr. President, Madame Alpha, fellow delegates, ladies and gentlemen,” he began. He spoke in the same clipped tones that he’d used to write the preface for Rylie Gresham’s autobiography. “Nearly fifteen years after Genesis, it’s worth reflecting on how far the world has come, together, and how much more we can accomplish in the future.”
“Let’s try cutting through over here,” Nori muttered to Marion, tugging her toward the barrier on the right.
The OPA secretary went on. “Out of the ashes of Genesis…”
People began to scream, drowning his voice out.
Charity had descended down the street.
The revenant was far enough away that Marion could only see the shape of her in the light of the street lamp. Her silhouette was extending, stretching, twisting. She was at least twelve feet tall.
The crowd buffeted against Marion, running and screaming. Only Nori’s hand anchored her.
“Stay close,” Nori said. “We’re almost there.”
The black-clad security guards ran in the opposite direction of the crowd. They were heading toward Charity, not away.
Nori and Marion were the only ones who moved perpendicular to the flow of traffic, straight across the courtyard. Nori lifted the chain. Marion ducked under it and entered a restricted area, unseen.
The courtyard was paved with white stones that had been textured so they wouldn’t be slick in the snow. Marion couldn’t tell where the base of the building was, given that it was made all of white stone too. For a few dizzying moments, heading into the United Nations, she felt like she was running straight up the side of the building.
A glass door appeared in the swirling snow. Secretary Friederling’s voice continued to thunder from the speakers as Marion ran for it.
“…the ideal that this body must pursue, even when we are imperfect, and so often fall short of our ideals…”
Then they reached the door. It was shut.
Nori slammed her snow boots into the glass hard enough that it shattered. She elbowed the cruelest shards out of the frame, and then they plunged inside.
There was only one path into the lobby, which was demarcated with ropes, and ended with a metal detector. The room beyond was massive. Its walls were entirely glass, shimmering with enchanted magic. A crescent-shaped desk stood at the center to block the elevators, though it was currently unstaffed.
The entire lobby was empty, in fact.
“Where is everyone?” Marion asked. Her voice had changed to sound like Charity’s when the glamour had taken over. That was the most unsettling part.
“The auditorium,” she said.
Marion’s pulse stuttered. “How do we get there?”
“Well, the main entrance to the auditorium is that way.” Nori pointed to a wide hallway to the right of the elevators. The hall was curved so that Marion couldn’t see into the auditorium, but the doors must have been open. Secretary Friederling’s authoritative voice resonated through the whole bottom floor of the United Nations building. He would be preparing to introduce Marion, oblivious to the fight outside.
“Let’s go,” Marion said.
“Wait, we have to get you backstage. You’ll never make it through the audience. Let’s go around the other way.” Nori broke into a jog, heading to a door marked for staff only. She pushed it open. “Come on,” she said to Marion over her shoulder.
There was a guard on the other side. Nori didn’t see him in time, and he came up on her quickly.
“Look out!” Marion said.
Nori didn’t turn quickly enough. The guard brought his baton down on Nori’s skull. The instant it made contact, her eyes went blank, and she crumbled into a puddle.
Marion muffled a cry and wheeled backward.
The guard came at her swinging.
She dodged and the baton smashed into her shoulder. White hot pain bloomed over her collarbone.
A gunshot.
Glass shattered.
The guard’s baton dropped out of his grip. Blood dribbled from his wrist.
Marion looked from his bleeding wrist to the neat hole in the lobby window. It was angled perfectly for the shot to have come from above. High above. As in the rooftop across the street.
Luke was protecting her, just as he’d said he would.
More guards would be coming, though.
She leaped over the man Luke had shot and plunged into the employees-only hallway.
The hallway behind it was plainer than the lobby, with cement floors and tan walls. An area never meant to be seen by visitors. Pain pulsed through her shoulder with every strike of her feet against the carpet.
Marion yanked Charity’s glasses off of her face and shoved them into her pocket. The glamour dropped away, revealing her true face. Anyone who saw her would know who she was. And there could be assassins anywhere.
She turned a corner, following the sound of Secretary Friederling’s voice blindly.
Leliel stood at the end of the hall. The angel was watching the speech through a window, giving Marion only a profile view of her beautiful face. The auditorium’s light tinted her nose and lips and rimmed her auburn hair with gold.
Marion skidded to a halt, heart pounding and lungs heaving. “Leliel. Oh, thank the gods.”
“Marion.” Surprise crossed Leliel’s features. “I heard you’d been abducted from Myrkheimr.”
“I wasn’t abducted. I ran away. The Autumn Court is trying to kill me.”
“Is that so?” Leliel asked.
The sound of bodies mo
ving at the end of the hall echoed toward Marion. There were more pounding footsteps, more people muttering. Reinforcements were heading toward Marion and Leliel. Once she heard them coming, she sensed the magic. Sidhe magic.
She stretched out her mind, feeling the specific fingerprint of the energy. Marion couldn’t tell if it was unseelie or seelie yet. But she knew that it was powerful, and that it reminded her of being kissed under fountains of honey.
“Konig,” she whispered. Her gut exploded with frenzied butterflies. She wanted to see her boyfriend, look into his eyes, know if he was complicit in her assassination.
Leliel’s mild surprise shifted into alarm. “We need to get you on stage.”
“I want to see Konig,” she said.
“If the Autumn Court wants to hurt you, then you can’t,” Leliel said. “We should move. This way.” She peered around the corner before striding down the hallway, the folds of her peach skirt fluttering behind her.
“Wait,” Marion said. How did she know that Leliel wasn’t going to hurt her, too? She thrust the enchanted silver bracelet toward the angel. “Put this on. Promise me that you’re on my side, that you’re going to help me.”
Leliel slipped it on. “I have no intent of harming you, dear girl. Now let’s go!”
Marion followed, and it felt like her heart was shredding to know she was moving away from Konig.
Leliel turned another corner, and another. Her legs were so long that Marion had to take three steps for every one that Leliel took, and Marion was hardly short. “Are you ready to give your speech?” the angel asked, twisting the silver cuff on her wrist.
“Not at all,” Marion said. “I’m hoping it will magically come to me when I get on stage.” She wasn’t joking about the “magically” thing.
Displeasure darkened Leliel’s eyes. “What of the speech we wrote for you?”
“I’m not going to use it. The Autumn Court helped write it. I can’t trust their speechwriters if they want me dead,” Marion said.
“Are you sure you won’t use that speech?” Leliel asked. “Absolutely certain? Because I helped write it, too.”
“I’ll still help you as speaker,” Marion said. “I just can’t give the speech.”
“Shame. We’re almost there,” Leliel said. She pushed a pair of double doors open.
There was an empty ballroom on the other side. It was even bigger than the lobby had been, with balconies overlooking the glossy wooden floor and tapestries hanging from every wall. There was also a small stage and an orchestra pit in front of it.
Marion stepped in behind Leliel, confused. She didn’t hear Secretary Friederling’s voice anymore. “This leads to the summit?”
“No,” Leliel said.
Pain bloomed in Marion’s midsection.
She looked down to find a knife embedded left of her navel, still clutched by Leliel. The enchanted honesty bracelet glowed.
“So,” Leliel said, “you do bleed red. You’re not as much an angel as they say.”
Marion’s pulse throbbed in her skull. She gripped Leliel’s wrist in both hands, trying to push her away. The angel was so strong. “What are you doing?” Marion stuttered over the question, slick fingers sliding on the angel’s arm.
“I’ll assume that question isn’t because you’re stupid, but because of the shock,” Leliel said. “Obviously I’m killing you.”
She yanked the knife free. It actually hurt worse being removed, probably because of the serrated edge that tore Marion’s skin.
Marion touched the wound. Blood dribbled between her fingers.
“You made me speaker,” she whispered. “The bracelet…”
“It doesn’t work on me,” Leliel said, “thanks to the same magecraft that gives me the ability to fly. Should I have mentioned that?”
The reality of the scenario caught up with Marion.
Obviously I’m killing you.
Leliel drove the knife toward Marion again. Marion flung herself away, scrambling across the floor. She slipped on her own blood. It was so slick, puddled on the floor of the ballroom.
She hurled herself into the orchestra pit. She didn’t fall nearly as gracefully as she had when leaping off the balcony in Myrkheimr with Luke. Marion thudded to her knees, and the shock of pain through her belly was so intense that she couldn’t get up again.
“What about everything you said before, about wanting my help to save the angels?” Marion asked. Her throat was thick with tears.
“Sure, if you’d just given my speech. But you won’t. I can’t trust you. Honestly, this is a far more satisfying result,” Leliel said. “Especially since it’s your father’s fault that so many angels are dead in the first place.” The angel stepped up to the edge of the orchestra pit, gazing down at Marion with unconcealed disdain. Marion’s red blood slid along the cutting edge of the knife.
Leliel’s magicked wings snapped wide. She leaped into the pit, knife uplifted, her face formed into a mask of determination.
Marion needed to access her magic to save her own life—without touching Luke.
If she was the Voice of God, then surely there were gods who cared about her. Deities who wouldn’t want her to die.
They might not have loved her enough to protect her from memory loss, but surely they wouldn’t want to replace her. Who else could speak for the gods? Who was as special as she was, the half-witch daughter of the angel who had last been the Voice of God?
Nobody.
The gods wouldn’t let her get killed—not like this, not now, when she was so close to delivering their message to the summit. Whatever that message was.
Marion prayed to powers she should have been acquainted with.
Give me my power.
Leliel landed inches from Marion. The knife descended toward Marion’s face.
“No!” Marion grabbed Leliel’s wrist.
Magic crashed through them on contact.
Scraps of a bond lingered from where they had shared memories in the Autumn Court. Marion seized upon that. She used it to punch directly into Leliel’s mind.
Leliel brimmed with thousands of years’ worth of memories—so many more memories than the brief scenes in Araboth and New Eden. Her experiences predated Genesis, stretching all the way back to the days when the old gods had still been thriving.
Marion ripped her mind open to expose ancient cities and oases, long stretches of empty desert, armies clashing in midday heat. Marion searched back as far as she could go, absorbing the enormity of Leliel’s experiences.
If she couldn’t have memories of her own, she could have this woman’s.
“Get out!” Leliel roared.
Their minds beat against each other. Marion had lost all sense of her body, the wound in her belly, the blood pouring out. She only felt magic against magic.
The harder Leliel fought to repel Marion, the deeper she sank into the angel’s memory.
She saw Leliel in the Ethereal Levant, at a modern palace with a thousand hollow rooms and only a dozen living occupants.
“They won’t want us in the Winter Court,” Jibril said. He was sitting primly at a table, frowning at a chessboard. He was in the middle of a game against Leliel. “There’s a reason that the demons were given the Nether Worlds in Genesis while we were banished to one small region on Earth.”
“I don’t care what the gods want for us.” Leliel had slid her pawn diagonally to take one of Jibril’s.
“The others at the summit will care. When Metaraon’s daughter tells everyone the will of the gods, the vote will follow her words.”
“We’ll buy the votes,” Leliel said.
Jibril moved his knight. “It won’t be enough.”
And in that moment, Leliel had decided that Marion needed to die. The decision had been emotionless and instantaneous.
Leliel shoved Marion out of that memory. Marion wheeled through the canyons of the angel’s mind.
Genesis was in there, repeated a thousand times over. The roar of a
black void consuming the world, sucking entire cities into nothingness, quenching billions of souls. That hadn’t traumatized Leliel as much as having her wings cut off. That memory was drenched in crimson, too wrought with emotion for Marion to interpret it.
Marion pushed back. She dived deeper.
Leliel screamed in an endless, wordless way that resonated through the memories. Marion’s magic was stronger, though. She was a mage, a bearer of old powers that Leliel couldn’t reach on her best of days.
The memories became more vibrant as Marion delved deeper. Leliel was fondest of her youth, when she had lived in a garden.
A garden?
Marion lingered over those parts of Leliel’s mind. It was the same place that Marion had remembered when drawing on her magic to fight the sirens: the place with moss underfoot and a canopy of trees high above.
Leliel gave the garden a name.
Eden.
Marion had lived in Eden when she was a child, and that was also where Leliel—and all angels—had been born many centuries earlier.
But the Eden that Leliel remembered was far more vibrant than the one in Marion’s memories. Eden hadn’t been an empty garden, but a booming metropolis filled with thousands of angels. A flourishing species at the peak of skill in art and magical science.
With the memory of Eden came memories of Marion’s father.
Metaraon had been an imposing man, even for an angel. He had been taller than his brethren, brighter-eyed and darker-skinned. Marion could see so much of herself in him. She had the more delicate version of his nose, the diluted version of his deep olive flesh, the thickness of his hair. The similarities ran deeper than the surface. The imperiousness in his stance was something Marion had seen in every mirror she passed. He was frightening, arrogant—powerful.
He was the real reason Leliel had decided Marion needed to die. In truth, Leliel had wanted Marion dead for years. Metaraon had been gone for a long time. There was no chance to get revenge against him now—only the last, lingering remnants of his blood on the Earth.