by Reine, SM
Her eyes lifted to his.
“What do you think, human?” Metaraon asked, but her lips remained sealed.
“They are dumb, of course,” Yatam said.
“As are all mortals,” the angel sighed. “Very well. We shall try it your way. But if it fails, and more plagues strike this earth, the blood of His victims will be on your hands.”
“And such a woe that would be to me.”
Metaraon took the arm of the slave and unfurled his wings. They appeared behind him with a shimmer of light, and he swept them wide, sending golden feathers showering over the dusty floor. Elise stepped back reflexively.
He vanished, taking the concubine with him. The room grew dark.
When Elise could see again, the women were all gone, and she was alone with Yatam.
She felt numb and empty. It took a long time for anger to come creeping to the surface, but when it did, it struck her like a burning fist. “So it’s your fault. You’re the reason I was sent to the garden. You goddamn bastard.”
Elise reached back for her swords, but she wasn’t wearing the sheath. She settled for clenching her fists.
“I never chose another wife,” Yatam said, unbothered by her glare as she stalked toward him. “The selection of a sacrifice was deferred to humans, whom you have to thank for your particular situation.”
Elise swung. Yatam disappeared before her fist could hit, and he reappeared by the throne.
With a roar, she dived for him and swung again.
He was too fast. Yatam flashed behind her, trapping her arms at her side and burying his face in her neck. She shouted, but his grip was iron. She couldn’t escape.
The skin of his cheek was warm and smooth on her neck. “You forget that I read your body as easily as a poem,” he murmured. “Your biochemical reactions are of fear, not anger. But you need not fear me. I have no interest in sending you back to His loving embrace—not yet.”
She drove her elbow into his gut. It was like striking a brick wall. He didn’t let go.
“That is not the last time I spoke to Metaraon,” Yatam went on. “Indeed, my plan was successful. Giving Him wives certainly created the desired fascination, and it allowed mortals two thousand years of respite. But it did nothing to His sanity.” He inclined his head. “As you know.”
“I barely remember it,” she said, her voice hoarse.
“How fortunate for you. To be able to forget your life must be… pleasant.” He sighed, breath hot on her skin. “Eventually, I became bored of playing with humans. As my sister lived on and her madness grew, I slept—and some centuries elapsed.”
Yatam waved a hand. The throne room dissolved around them, replaced by a narrow room built of gray stone. It was almost pitch black inside, aside from a single sliver of moonlight that fell through a narrow window set high in the wall.
A plain stone sarcophagus stood in the center of the room. Yatam released her and perched himself on it.
“Even in sleep, rumors drifted to me, carried in the minds and hearts of my children. I heard suggestions that they were going to attempt to kill Him after all. It didn’t take long for Metaraon to come again, after that.”
The door groaned open.
Metaraon’s face hadn’t changed over the long years; his nose was still hooked, his eyes still cold. But his hair was short, and he had no beard. He wore a plain t-shirt and jeans that fit him as though tailored. He was so…ordinary. “The conversation was long and boring, I’m afraid,” Yatam told her, ignoring the angel. “We’ll skip to the interesting part.” He addressed Metaraon. “Aren’t you happy? The wives have occupied His time. His influence on Earth wanes.”
Elise felt the strange disconcertion of stepping into a conversation halfway through. But the angel didn’t mind. He wasn’t aware that anything had been skipped at all.
Metaraon paced the room, obviously frustrated. “Yes. It’s worked fine. But the last child… well, she escaped. He’s unwedded.”
Yatam smiled at Elise, whose stomach churned.
“Is that so?”
“Try not to sound so satisfied. This is catastrophic! Our binding on the garden frays, the quarantine won’t last much longer, and He fights to free Himself. I don’t need to remind you of the unholy terrors He wreaked upon us all last time, and He is madder by a thousand-fold now.” Metaraon stopped pacing and faced Yatam. “And angry.”
“Then find the child and take her back.”
“That’s not the point.” Working up the ability to elaborate seemed to cause Metaraon physical pain. “She was meant to be an assassin.”
Yatam laughed. “An assassin! A human girl against a god? The idiots.” He winked at Elise again. “Angels have dominion over the mind. One would think that they would have the brains to match it.”
The angel went on without reacting to the mockery. “We couldn’t trust Him anymore. He’s unstable. So we forged a weapon and put her in the position to be taken as the next sacrifice. Everything seemed to go as planned, until her escape.”
“You want me to go find her for you.”
“Yes.”
“No,” Yatam said.
Metaraon flung his hands into the air. “If I can’t appeal to your absent good nature, then allow me to address your selfishness. We call her the Godslayer. She can kill anything—including you.”
The angel froze where he stood, like a movie put on pause.
“‘She can kill anything,’” Yatam mused, drawing a leg to his chest and resting his chin on his knee. “You were the first to escape, and you did it as a child, before becoming wedded and embedded in the fabric of the garden. When they planned for you, they did not anticipate that a weapon powerful enough to slay a god would likewise be powerful enough to elude him.”
“And you’ve only helped me because I can kill you?” Elise asked. It was absurd. Ridiculous. And yet…
Metaraon sprung to life once more and spoke. “But she’s not ready. As with all weapons, a blade must be honed. She can’t kill a god—not yet. If you find her, if you complete her, she will surely kill you.”
Yatam snapped. The angel vanished.
He hopped off of the sarcophagus and faced Elise, now utterly expressionless, but expectant.
“Complete me?” Elise asked.
“You are my death,” Yatam said, his voice heated, “if only I can discover how to hone and wield you, sword-woman. So tell me—how do you kill a god?”
“It’s not possible. They’re eternal.”
The mausoleum disappeared, leaving Elise surrounded by all-consuming darkness.
Yatam’s body was gone, too, but she could still feel him there. Waiting.
His voice echoed from the shadows. If you want to prevent Yatai from killing all that you know and love, that is a question you will need to answer. We are eternal, but we can be slain, if only you discover how.
“If you’re so bent on death, why not let Yatai succeed? It would kill you as surely as everyone else.”
A chuckle rose out of the darkness.
Fascination. I am fascinated with humanity, and the thousands of children I have spawned. I want them to live on. His breath sighed around her. I suppose even I am not willing to lose that vestige of immortality…
Elise woke up.
She lifted her head. She was kneeling beside the couch with her arms folded and her head resting on them—she could tell by the trail of drool connecting her lips to the back of her wrist. Her mouth felt sticky, and her eyelids were hard to open.
Yatam wasn’t on the couch anymore. It was empty.
She got to her feet, muscles stiff and sore. The clock said that no more than ten minutes had passed since she finished smoking outside, but it felt as though she had been on the floor for hours.
With a wince, she stretched and popped her back. The candle on the coffee table sputtered as the wick entered the puddle of wax, and went out.
Shadows fell. A breeze wafted through the room.
Sword-woman…
/> Elise shivered.
“How do you kill a god?” she asked the empty room. There was no reply.
XII
Elise and James departed with a quarter tank of gas, which would be more than enough to take them into town and back—but not enough to escape.
He plugged his cell phone into the cigarette lighter to charge it before setting out on empty streets. “Our priority should be evacuation,” James said, heading for Vista Boulevard. The headlights cut two bright circles into the night. “We should get our friends to safety and regroup. Considering what has appeared over downtown, I’m expecting hysteria. Even if Yatai hasn’t attacked again, it will be dangerous.”
“I need to get to Craven’s,” Elise said. “I have people there. They can help me control the panic.”
“People? You mean demons.”
She glared at him. “Loyal demons.”
His phone chimed.
James’s heart jumped. Before he could reach for it, Elise turned on the screen. “We’ve got a signal. Just barely.” She dialed a number and lifted the phone to her ear, but after a moment, she shook her head. “But it doesn’t matter if nobody in the city has a signal.”
“Too bad,” he said faintly. He had brought Hannah’s phone number with him.
They blew around a bend going seventy miles an hour. His headlights reflected on the back end of a stopped car, and James slammed on the brakes.
He squealed to a stop inches from the bumper.
Elise flung open her door and stepped out. “What the hell…?”
Cars had been stopped heading into town. Their windshields glimmered in the night for miles down the road. It looked like the worst traffic jams in Los Angeles, but the cars were empty. Nothing moved.
James stepped onto the street, leaving the engine running. There was an accident on the shoulder of the road, and vehicles were piled up all the way to the fences at the bottom of the hill. There was no way around.
Elise climbed onto the car in front of them for a better view. “I don’t see an end,” she said. “And they’re all turned off. I don’t see drivers or passengers. Whatever happened, it must have been hours ago.”
“Where could everybody have gone?”
“Home?” she guessed, hopping down. “It’s hard to tell with no power or lights. Guess we’re walking.”
She grabbed her jacket out of the front seat and pulled it over her spine scabbard.
They weaved in and out of the cars. James and Elise weren’t the only ones on the road—they glimpsed a woman trying the doors of several cars, and a young couple retrieving their belongings from the bed of a pickup.
“Excuse me,” James called, jogging toward the couple. They turned wide eyes on him, dropped a box on the bed of the truck, and fled into the night. “Damn. They’re scared.”
“Who is this?” Elise asked, her face illuminated by James’s cell phone. She must have pulled it out of the car when she got the jacket, and she had opened the attachment on his email so that the image filled the screen.
She didn’t fight him when he took the phone.
The world around him vanished as James drank in the details of the photo. Hannah was older than he remembered, but still so beautiful. There was a hint of a smile at the corners of her eyes, which were marked with crow’s feet.
But it wasn’t her face that he lingered over. It was that of the boy at her side.
His hair and eyes were dark brown. His jaw shared the same curve as Hannah’s, but his lips were the exact same bow curve as James’s favorite aunt. Thick-framed glasses sat on the bridge of his nose. He looked very serious, like he had never smiled in his life. James recognized that serious expression. He saw it in the mirror every morning.
“James?”
The boy would be roughly ten years old. Maybe eleven. Hannah had to have known she was pregnant when James left. Why hadn’t she told him?
Elise was speaking. “James,” she said again.
He realized he had stopped walking, and he pocketed his phone. “What?”
“Is there something you want to tell me?”
He gaped at her, trying to decide how she could have known about his son. But she wasn’t looking at him—she was looking beyond the stopped cars to a row of flashing lights and a barricade of orange barrels.
It was the Union. They had blocked off the road ahead using a line of SUVs that blended into the night.
Elise drew her sword. “You already knew they were here, didn’t you? That’s why you brought them up in the sewers. You’ve been talking with them.”
The change in focus was too fast for him to catch up. He stuttered. “Just the once, but—Elise!”
She stormed through the cars, jumping on the hood of an El Camino by the barrels.
A man with a gun on the other side of the barricade spotted her and shouted. He aimed the rifle at her. Elise didn’t seem to care. “What the hell have you people done?” she shouted.
James ran to the side of the vehicle. There were two guards now, and another was running from farther down the line. “Get down!” She shook his hand off her calf.
“Drop your sword and back away from the barricade,” the nearest man shouted.
“Is this Gary Zettel’s unit? Where is he?”
Three guns aimed at her chest.
James stepped in front of the bumper, holding his hands out in a gesture of peace. “Wait, please. Don’t shoot. Contact the commander. Tell him it’s James and Elise.” The man who yelled put a hand to his ear and spoke softly into the earpiece. The other two didn’t waver. “Now get down, Elise!”
“Do you see what they’ve done?”
She pointed over his head and beyond the SUVs. James couldn’t see from his position on the ground. He climbed onto the roof beside her—with the armed kopides tracking his motions very closely—and squinted past the bright lights.
The road was destroyed. They had blasted the pavement open, turning a hundred-foot swath into rubble. There was another barricade on the other side, and more stopped cars.
The Union had killed all traffic entering or exiting the city on that road.
“The commander is on his way,” the armed kopis said finally. He addressed the other two. “Drop your guns. We’re not allowed to shoot.”
Elise glared fire at James. “You have been in contact with them.”
“They approached me. I spoke to them once. Don’t look at me like that.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“When was I supposed to mention that, exactly? When the oldest demon in the world dragged us into another dimension? When we fell a few hundred feet and almost died? When you decided to become the first kopis in history to cast magic?”
“How about when you were taking all my cigarettes?” Elise snapped.
James clenched his jaw and dropped off the side of the car. The men let him climb onto the other side of the barricade.
“He’ll land down there,” one of them said, gesturing toward a cul-de-sac that was cordoned off at the bottom of the hill. “I’ll escort you.”
Elise stalked after them.
There were few signs of life in the neighborhood. People peeked through their windows. Some sat on their front lawns. A truck at the end of the street passed out bottles of fresh water to a line of civilians, many of whom wore pajamas, and its idling engine powered a single spotlight.
“Are you guys invading Reno? Seriously?” Elise asked.
“We’re helping,” the kopis replied.
She seemed to have more to say—a lot more—but she didn’t get the chance to speak. A helicopter roared overhead, flying low to hover over the cul-de-sac. Its propellers kicked up dust and blew James’s hair off his forehead.
It settled gently in the center of the street. The engine slowed, but didn’t stop.
The door opened. Malcolm hopped out.
“Darling,” he said, grinning at Elise’s shocked expression.
She punched him.
Eve
n though he had to be expecting it, he was still flattened on the pavement. The armed guard cried out and whirled to aim the rifle at her again, but James stepped between them before he could fire.
Elise stared at James. “This is who you’ve been talking to? Malcolm?” She didn’t give him the opportunity to respond. She shoved Malcolm in the chest as he tried to get to his feet. “What are you doing?”
“Elise—”
“What have you done to my territory?”
“I’m doing my job, that’s what,” he said. “Calm down; we’re on the same side!”
She moved to attack him again, but James grabbed her arm, holding her back. The look she shot him was pure venom. “The Union’s not welcome here. I’ve got a handle on the situation.”
“Oh really?” Malcolm asked. He didn’t have to say anything else to make his meaning clear. The snowing ash was more than enough.
“The agreement at the summit—”
“Totally circumvented us.” She lifted her fist again, and he stepped back quickly before she could strike. “I know, I know. But give me a chance. The Union’s a whole different company under my command.”
Elise barked a laugh. “You’re the commander? What happened to Zettel?”
“Demoted.”
“Then you have the authority to let me back into Reno.”
“I do, but—”
“I need to speak with you, Malcolm,” James said. He glanced at Elise. “Privately.”
He walked a few short feet away, and the commander sauntered after him. Malcolm dropped his voice low to speak under the thumping engine unheard by the others. “That’s not a woman prepared to surrender her territory to the Union right there, is it?” he asked with a frozen smile and clenched teeth.
“We haven’t had an opportunity to discuss it,” James said. “I’ve been somewhat distracted by the impending apocalypse.”
“I bet you have. And you’ve had plenty of reading material to keep you distracted.” His voice sharpened. “What did you think of the Prophecies? Good reading?”
“You want to kill my son.”
“You’re a smart guy, Jim, but you lack context. There are a lot of Union codes in there—you have no idea what any of that says.”