With one great gasp, she blurted it out. “Me. I choose me.”
Does that work?
The thought raced through her mind and was gone before the air had even cleared.
Zachary had stopped in his tracks and stood stock-still. For just a moment he did nothing but look stunned.
Then, with a speed that seemed to stun Allistair, too, he did something that looked like he was inhaling. Less than a moment later, all his anger burst out of him in one pulse, slicing through the air. It radiated out, like a shock wave. The roar of fury that emanated from him rattled her down to her core and would have knocked her over had Allistair not held on to her so tightly. He was as solid as Zachary. He could withstand what was thrown at them, and so she clung to him.
The force of what Zachary had unleashed passed through them, and the building seemed to shake beneath and around her while Allistair held her close and steadied her through the onslaught. Huddling into his arms, Katharine waited for cracks to form and the building to start to give way underneath them. Surely it couldn’t hold up against that kind of force. But she took two more breaths before she believed that they were still there and not buried under piles of rubble from the shaking.
Then Zachary stopped and stood still again, his anger a presence in the room, but no longer active. He seethed while she started to breathe just a little again.
Though her arms and face still stung just a bit, when she looked, the cuts had faded. With a tentative smile, Allistair rubbed his fingers over the blood there, smearing his fingers but revealing the healed skin underneath. “You’ll be okay now.”
With one last venomous look on his too-attractive face, Zachary turned to Allistair. His voice was somehow serene as he spoke just two words. “You’ll pay.”
Allistair set her aside like a doll he had been holding. Nodding at his enemy, he accepted what had been said. “I know.”
Then Zachary was gone.
He didn’t sink into the floor. There was no crackle of electricity, no change in the air, just a moment of nothing in the place where he had stood. Only a pile of soot on the floor gave evidence that he had been there.
Katharine sank back into Allistair’s arms, letting herself feel completely safe for the first time since the whole thing had started. As though she belonged there, even if she didn’t really know what he was, his arms curled around her, holding her tight against him. And for a few breaths and a handful of heartbeats she didn’t worry.
Then, just as she leaned all the way into him, fear wound around her heart. She had ended it, but she hadn’t …
Her eyes snapped up to his. “What about you?”
Allistair shook his head. “I’ll be fine.”
“But I thought I had to choose you. For you to win.”
“Don’t worry.” As he took her hands, the look on his face changed from one of contentment to one of acceptance. “You have what you need. You’ve seen what you are capable of.”
She cringed. He had shown her that: all the devastation, all the things she’d had a hand in funding, the evils that she hadn’t caused, but had helped along their way.
Though she hurt over the thought of the consequences she would have to deal with, he simply smiled at her. “No Katharine. All that you have caused is done and cannot be undone. Even Zachary and I cannot undo what is. And it was never my intention to make you feel guilty, just to make you see.”
She understood. Finally. “The TV, the night it was stuck …”
He nodded. “The animals. Just to wake you up. Make you look, make you see.”
“But what I’ve done–”
“Is done. You need now only look to what you are capable of. Think of all that you can do if you pay attention. Think of what you can do if you aim that focus the right way. The way you intend.”
Her heart tightened with shame at what she had been doing, at all that she’d unknowingly caused, but at the same time her burden lightened, and for the first time in her life she simultaneously felt both free and strong. He was right. She could do so much …
Allistair’s eyes flicked to the side, suddenly wary. His body tensed as he went on alert from something she didn’t sense. Katharine knew enough for his reaction to frighten her, and her muscles tightened to brace for what Allistair sensed. She didn’t get a chance to ask him about it, though.
As she opened her mouth, she began to hear the sound at the base of her brain–a wail from another world.
He stepped back, away from her, looking both afraid and resigned.
“Allistair!” She dove forward, reaching out for him, hoping to grab him and hold onto him in some way, but his hand came up, warning her off.
Something in his eyes made her stop, even though she wanted nothing more than to throw herself at him. So she stood, helpless, as he changed.
He didn’t want it. She could tell.
He seemed to know she was more comfortable with his human form. And he fought the metamorphosis, struggled to fend off what was happening against his will. But it was clearly a losing battle.
This, then, was what he really was.
And, though she watched the change and in her head knew it was Allistair in there, it scared the crap out of her. She was riveted to the spot, unable to move forward, to offer any help, even while she knew her help was of no consequence in his world. Although she knew that this was what he really was, that she had been seeing a façade, she still didn’t want to see the real him. But her eyes wouldn’t close and she couldn’t make herself look away.
His skin lost the texture of human cells, changing on the surface while his basic shape morphed as well.
“Katharine.” He beseeched her in a voice that altered and deepened even as he spoke the single word. He said it again, this time a pleading sound wound through her name, as if he begged her to look away.
But she couldn’t. Wouldn’t. He had faced Zachary’s wrath for her. She could look him in the eyes, whatever he turned out to be.
Slick and shiny, his skin turned to something more like mercury than anything else she could compare it to. His muscles moved and flowed under his skin with an unearthly grace. The claws that grew from his fingers didn’t frighten her as much as they once had, and not as much as the fact that he was changing.
He was so tall her head tipped back to look up at him.
His wide, deep, black eyes revealed eternity–all that he had seen and all that he had been.
His origins were there–endless fields full of food, an embrace of the cycle and rhythms of nature, deep seas in constant motion, and something far beyond all of it. Peace.
Though it was there in his eyes, their blackness revealed sadness, too, and Katharine began to wonder what it was.
“Me paenitet. Me paenitet et te amo.”
His mouth moved with the sounds, but the voice came from far away. “Allistair?”
He shook his head. “Cav$$.”
His English was gone with his human form, it seemed. The fear that had wrapped around her heart squeezed tighter, cutting off her air. Her hands reached out but got no closer to him. “Allistair?” But this time he didn’t respond.
The wailing she had heard before grew louder and he looked around, up, back over his shoulder, beyond where she stood.
At last he looked at her. Towering over where she stood watching, helpless.
“Eras incolumis.”
The voice was deep. Afraid. Resigned.
“Allistair!” She screamed it. But it was too late to worry about the consequences of her actions, and too late, period. She might have accomplished something had she done this just a moment ago. If she had touched him when he was changing. If she had understood and not let his desire to keep her within her human comforts of his familiar form dictate her actions.
She ran across the few steps separating them and threw herself into his arms, not knowing what she would find, not knowing whether he would be solid, soft, cold, welcoming. But she knew that he was still Allistair, and so sh
e hurtled herself at him, knowing that whatever she found would be him.
But just before she would have touched his new skin, something yanked him backward with a speed she could not have foreseen.
He was ripped from the air with a blast of cold wind and a noise like fabric rending a thousand times over. She barely caught the expression on his face as the space around him crackled and glowed with electrons popping and altering in that glimmer of a second. Then he was gone.
She landed all alone on her own carpet in the space where he had stood a fraction of a moment before. Slivers of wispy silver ash floated down around her, the only thing left of his passing.
Katharine gasped in the now frigid air.
She fought against her own sobs, her shock the only thing holding them at bay. But her lungs expanded, and her body fought for life, for oxygen, even though she was left with nothing. Where had he gone? What had happened?
The wailing had stopped, leaving the air with a stillness more unearthly than anything she had seen or felt so far.
But Allistair had looked resigned to something right before he was pulled away.
She wanted to cry, but was still too stunned to do even that.
Eventually, she looked up at the clock and watched as the second hand swept around again, still not cueing the tick of the minutes. The whitish pieces of ash drifted slowly down around her.
She was beginning to gather pieces of thoughts into something mildly coherent when she heard the footsteps and saw the sizzle of the air in front of her. Small currents arced as something started to push through the space in front of her, and Katharine’s heart and hope leapt into her throat as she watched.
The smell and a surge of desolation washed over her as surely as a wave when Zachary pushed through the rip he had created. He waited while she looked him up and down, his human self just as she had always seen it. His beauty was colder and farther away than it had seemed before, obvious to her now that it was nothing other than the shape of his eyes, the line of his nose, the curl of his mouth. He stood still under her unflattering assessment until he caught her eye, and then he laughed.
Fear traced through her heart, followed by weariness. What had he come back for? What could he do to her now?
Was he here to break the rules and take her now that Allistair was gone?
Somehow she found air, even though breathing meant she breathed in the feel of him, sick and rotted and crawling with the knowledge of what he was. In her knowledge, she found her voice. “You lost.”
He nodded. But it didn’t faze him. He kept walking toward her.
She spoke again, hoping to stop him. Knowing she wouldn’t. “You both lost.”
Again, he nodded.
Finally, he stopped of his own accord, his feet a few inches away from where she had fallen on the floor. He knelt down and put his blue, blue eyes level with hers.
Though he looked completely human, his voice was his own, a deep gravel of horrible thoughts rubbing against each other as he spoke. “I have lost time, but time is nothing. I have lost face, but I will get it back. I have lost status, but I’ll climb up again.”
He stopped.
She waited.
He blinked.
His eyes changed to the color of an oil slick, they swirled with things she’d rather not see, but this time it wasn’t her choice; she was horribly unable to look away.
When his mouth opened this time, his teeth were longer, a thousand pointed razors that threatened her just by their very existence. “I have lost. But he is dead.”
“What?” His words froze her completely.
He curved his mouth into a gruesome imitation of a smile. “No matter what I am, I cannot lie. I could have given you the Kingdom. You could have helped us.”
In that moment, she made the mistake of looking right at him. Somewhere in the depths of his eyes, of what he was, she saw that he was what had ripped Mary Wayne to pieces. But she didn’t have time to worry over that.
He spoke again. “This was his last chance. He failed. If you had chosen him, you could have saved him, or at least bought him another chance, more time. Instead, you killed him.”
“What?” Her breath sawed in and out of her. Regardless of the source, she felt the truth in what Zachary had said. It had been there in the wail all around Allistair those last minutes. It was in the forced change, when he would have rather stayed human. In the way he had been ripped from her, from here.
He was gone.
Her eyes betrayed her in front of Zachary. Pain pushed at the back of them, pulled at the edges of her jaw and the back of her throat. It shot through the core of her in cold sharp spikes. Emptiness set into her bones, a hard frigid weight that kept her pinned where she sat.
Zachary’s smile nearly finished her as he said the words again. “You killed him.”
With that final stroke, he stood.
As she watched, he stepped back and again disappeared beyond the air. Only this time she watched as it happened. She was looking directly at him as he passed through, and for a moment she saw through the veil. She saw the black beast, the oily skin, the power and the teeth and the claws and the intent.
And then he was gone.
The air settled around her as she sat, unmoving, in the middle of the silver ash that was the only evidence that Allistair had been there. That he had saved her.
Her eyes went wide, glazed over with the pain that shot through her, continuing to get worse each moment even though she was certain she could not bear it. The room became a photo before her, flat and unmoving, something to look at, but of no consequence. She watched it, waiting to for the pain to cause something physical to happen to her. The minute hand moved on the clock with an audible tick.
CHAPTER 27
Katharine was still sitting on the floor in shock when Margot found her.
Her friend was breathing quickly as she came through the door, her words coming out in breathy gasps. “Thank God you’re okay! Your building looks good. I didn’t see any cracks, but I was rushing up here to get to you.”
Katharine looked up, confused, but couldn’t move from her spot on the floor.
According to the clock it had been about three hours since Allistair had disappeared and Zachary had left. The air in her home had a different quality than it had had for the past few weeks. She breathed in a mechanical fashion, not really wanting to go on, but her biology made it inevitable.
“Katharine?” Margot got down on the floor on her hands and knees, waving her open hand in front of Katharine’s thousand-yard stare. “Are you okay? Did you feel the earthquake? Katharine?”
Margot must have realized that something had happened. She just sat down next to her and hugged her friend.
Sometime later, though her pain had made it impossible to tell time, Katharine found her voice. “I chose.”
She could feel the change in tension in Margot’s arms, but was grateful that she didn’t waver.
Margot’s voice was monotone, but that didn’t disguise the fear in it. “Who did you choose? Are you okay?”
“Me. Allistair told me that I didn’t have to choose one of them. That I could just choose to be me. To live my own life. I’ll deal with my own consequences and belong only to me.”
“Good for him.” Margot’s breath whooshed out of her as she seemed to realize that maybe it was over.
Margot’s presence and the small conversation forced Katherine into herself, and she began seeping back into reality. “You knew it was him, didn’t you? You figured it out?”
Margot nodded. “I found a reference that said when they come in, they darken as they change levels, as they move through earth, toward the demons. They lighten as they go in the other direction.”
Yes, of course. After the fact, when it was far too late, it all made sense.
Margot kept talking, as though simply putting sound waves into the air would help anything. But maybe it did hold some of her sadness at bay for just a few more minutes. �
��So your angels will naturally incorporate darker. The further they have to come to get here, the darker their skin and hair and eyes will appear.”
Zachary, with his beautiful light blue eyes and pale skin had come the other way to get here. He was from somewhere far below.
Katharine leaned her head against Margot’s shoulder. She was so tired that all she could do was breathe and listen.
Margot’s hands stroked her hair, like she was a child. “I was coming here to tell you that when the earthquake hit.”
“There was an earthquake?” Her own voice coming out was still a shock. How could she sit here and speak relatively calmly with her friend after what had just happened?
With a glance up at the clock, Margot answered. “Three hours ago. It was big. I’m surprised you don’t remember it. But then again, maybe I’m not surprised … There’s a lot of damage.”
Margot sucked in a breath before she continued. “It took me the entire three hours to get here. I was on my way when the quake hit. My car jumped over a whole lane. I was ready to make an exit and suddenly we were all slammed over about ten feet.”
Katharine scrambled, turning to face her friend. “Are you okay?”
Margot nodded rapidly. “But it clogged the roads. Trees fell. There’s debris everywhere. That’s why it took so long to get here. And I couldn’t call, the cell towers were all jammed, so I was listening to the radio. A lot of the buildings have some bad damage, but one completely collapsed …”
What wasn’t Margot telling her?
Her friend looked at her, watching Katharine’s face as she delivered the news. “According to the radio it was the Light & Geryon building.”
Katharine felt her breath suck in as her lungs hollowed out. “How many … were there people inside?” Katharine grappled with her thoughts, trying to make sense of yet another incomprehensible thing on this horrid day.
Margot shook her head. “There were some inside. A lot got out. Apparently it took a few minutes for the foundation to give way after it had been cracked. The radio said they are waiting for better reports from there and from a few houses where trees fell, too. There’s an apartment building that’s in bad shape. They’re checking the residents.”
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