by S. W. Clarke
When had I begun to care about things like this? People like this?
He was evil, wasn’t he?
Mariana. These were Mariana’s feelings building inside me, and I was absorbing them into myself.
When the angel took that first brazen step toward the police, his arm still out as though in challenge and the greatsword gripped with such ease in his other hand as though it seemed like a one-handed weapon, a cold chill settled into my limbs.
I knew what would happen here. I knew, and I didn’t want it.
“You would order an angel to divest himself of his sacred weapon?” he said with low, lethal intent, taking another step toward the cops. “Do you know who I am?”
Yes, it would happen exactly that way.
The lead officer told him to stop. To freeze. Again and again, he ordered it.
The angel did not stop. He did not freeze. He did only what thousands of years of life had taught him he could—should, must—do.
He lifted his sword, braced himself and leapt hard and fast toward the officers.
That was when the carnage really began.
Chapter 31
They began shooting before he’d even left the ground, gunshots ringing like firecrackers around the clearing.
For as fast as the angel moved, we humans had managed to make ourselves faster. We were weak and helpless meatbags with finite lifespans, but we had big brains and technology that allowed us to shoot our weapons faster than the eye could track.
Which meant, even as the angel soared through the air toward them, they were already riddling him with bullets. His armor clanged with the impact, like basketball-sized hail on a car’s rooftop. BAM. BAM. BAM. I counted one, two, four, eight shots before I stopped thinking in numbers.
Instead, I thought in terms of where they hit.
His chest, mostly. By the time he touched the ground some ten feet from them, I couldn’t see the front of him. But I could see the exit wounds some had made—from his back, from his arms.
He should have fallen to the ground in a heap. He should have been dead on impact.
He wasn’t. The angel straightened as though he hadn’t been shot at all, and I sensed he was burning more time than ever before. He must have been burning it continuously, because they didn’t stop shooting.
Especially not when he raised his sword with a roar.
And most definitely not when he ran at them.
He shouldered an officer, sent him flying into a car. A windshield shattered. He swung at a second officer, who managed to duck behind a vehicle just in time.
The sword cleaved the car’s hood in two.
Somehow I managed to find my feet amidst the fight. Maybe it was because of Mariana’s feelings inside me, but everything about this scene seemed overwhelmingly sad.
“Stop!” I heard myself call out.
I didn’t know if I was calling out to the angel or the cops. But it didn’t matter; neither listened.
The angel was consumed by his righteousness, and the cops by their fight for life.
As he swung in among them, I was stunned by their fearlessness. They unloaded their guns on him even as he cleaved one officer down before he could move. They kept a precise aim at his chest, except for one—
One officer who aimed at the angel’s head.
When the bullet hit the hobbled angel in the forehead, that was when I knew the battle was over.
He may have been an Other, but once you hit the brain, all bets were off. That bullet might even have torn a path straight through the spot that processed the concept of burning time.
So Marut the angel jerked back, stumbling to his knees. Both hands went around the grip of his greatsword, his front more blood than skin. But even then, he remained on his time sprint.
It was a terrible thing to see—a OnceImmortal creature graying his own hair out as he tried to burn enough time to heal the wound to his brain. Desiccating his body as he tried to keep his consciousness intact.
He was aging himself to save himself.
I stumbled forward a step, my dislocated arm pressed to my body.
“Don’t, Tara,” a voice called out from my right. Nikolaj. “You’ll just get yourself killed.”
What could I say? How could I describe to Nikolaj the tragedy of the scene before us, and the feelings inside me?
In a way, I was the angel.
In a way, I was the police.
I was both of them—different parts of me, at different times in my life.
Like the police, once I had fought for my life against a clan of vampires. I had struggled with animal freneticism to survive. Like the angel, once I had been obsessed with justice. Revenge. The rightness of my cause, even to my own detriment.
I took another step forward, and no one noticed my approach. They were too concerned with one another—the cops with the angel, and the angel with the cops.
He’d been shot so many times I could practically see the afternoon light slanting through his body. And still he would not fall.
With a great roar, the angel lifted his sword and sliced in a horizontal swath around him in what felt like a last angry gasp to assert the injustice of what had been done to him.
He didn’t connect with anything except air. I didn’t even know if he properly saw what was around him anymore, this awful, arrogant old angel.
“She,” I thought I heard him say. “She will …”
She will what?
He didn’t say anything more.
When the second shot entered his skull, he finally slumped to both knees. Then he fell forward, rolling onto his side amidst the detritus of the teapot and his own lifeblood. His hair had gone fully gray.
I stopped, staring at the dead Other. The police surrounded him, guns still pointed. Noise ensued from every which way—the cops talking to one another, on their radios, the owner’s wife wailing about the broken teapot and the death.
And a voice beside me, too.
“Tara?”
I ripped my eyes away from the angel as an enormous hand fell on my shoulder. I found Grunt staring not at me, but at the scene. His breathing rattled a bit, and his other hand remained tight to his body, the palm over his ribs. A few were probably broken.
One of his eyes was already almost shut with swelling, but he looked on with the other one.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“My arm’s dislocated.”
“We can fix that.”
My eyes flicked down and back up. “Did he break your ribs?”
Grunt grunted. “A couple. Can fix those, too.”
That feeling still hung over me. And something in Grunt’s voice suggested he understood that feeling, too. That maybe when he was asking me if I was all right, he wasn’t asking about my body.
He was asking about something else.
I turned back to the angel. No one was rushing to get him medical help. Us, sure—once they determined we weren’t a threat. But the angel? They let him lay there a while. Or at least, he still remained in the same spot when the four of us were taken out of the clearing.
Nikolaj was about as bad off as Grunt, but nothing debilitating. He was sullen and silent, and Grunt had no love for human authorities, so it was left to Frank and me to handle the aftermath.
He and I explained to the police that the angel had attacked me out of nowhere. That my friends and I were taking a cross-country road trip and didn’t know any angels or what vendetta he was raving about.
It didn’t take much. In this GoneGod World, local West Virginia police were inclined to believe whatever we humans had to say about a situation, particularly one that involved a rampaging Other.
We were offered medical help. We declined; I didn’t want to waste time in a hospital. We needed to be back on the road.
If I wasn’t moving toward Percy, it felt like I was moving away from him.
As we walked back to the bus, Frank dragged along the angel’s enormous sword, its tip ringing across th
e asphalt. I was surprised the cops had let him take it.
“What are you gonna do with that?” I asked him.
Frank paused, perspiration on his forehead. “It’s for Seleema—a gift for when I see her next. She loves swords.”
I nodded. “I’m sure she’ll love it.”
Nikolaj helped Frank lift the sword and carry it ahead of us toward the bus. Meanwhile, Grunt and I kept pace with one another.
My eyes lifted to the blue sky as we walked, clear from end to end. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to be an angel,” I said, “and have your ability to fly taken from you.”
A low rumble emanated from Grunt’s throat. “Let’s say you’ve broken your spine and all four of your limbs are now useless. Does that help your imagination?”
That did help, but … “But the angel still had all four limbs.”
Grunt shook his head. “Legs and arms are nothing next to an angel’s wings. By comparison, they’re as useful as the little finger on your non-dominant hand.”
Now I was beginning to understand.
The image of the angel, dead and splayed on the grass, kept reappearing in my mind as we walked through the parking lot. “Grunt, what’s a time sprint?” I asked.
“He was burning time continuously, years of it.”
“But why? Wouldn’t that kill him?”
“Yes. I don’t think he cared. Others feel emotions just like humans—sometimes we get wrathful. Imagine if you had the option to burn time to make all your wild, irrational desires come true. You could survive a hail of bullets, you could take down your enemies.”
That did sound mighty appealing, especially to the twisted, revenge-driven Tara of the past five years. And what did that say about her? How many times had I narrowly avoided an awful, needless death when I was the single-minded vigilante hunting Scarred?
And I never would have gotten to this point I was at now. Back when I’d first seen Grunt at the Singing Angel in New York, I’d perceived evil in his eyes. I’d known he was an unequivocal bad guy.
And now here I was, walking alongside him like a friend.
He had defended me, after all. He’d saved me.
So many times, I might have died before I’d really known anything about the world and its inhabitants. Like the fact that Grunt wasn’t evil. I’d just been looking at the world through a crimson-tinted lens.
“Grunt,” I said slowly, “I’ve seen a lot of things, but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything as sad as the death of that angel back there.”
He came to a stop, and I turned to look at him. His hand was still pressed to his side, and he was looking down at the asphalt some six feet in front of him with unfocused eyes.
“You all right?” I said.
He glanced up at me, and I could see it in his gaze. He felt the wrongness of that death, too. “No. For the same reason you aren’t all right.”
I nodded, a slow and sober incline of the head. I appreciated his honesty. He and Nikolaj and Frank were the only three people in my life who would really understand what this experience meant.
Death was horrific. I would never again underestimate what it meant to take a life.
↔
Back on the bus, Frank offered to drive; he was, after all, the only uninjured one among us.
Meanwhile, Grunt guided my arm back into its socket in an excruciating but necessary maneuver, then burnt a little time to mend his own ribs. He also treated Nikolaj, who hadn’t broken any bones, but who seemed to have a concussion, because he was quieter than ever before, and a little confused as to why Grunt was forcing him to sleep in the bottom bunk in the back.
With my arm in a makeshift sling, I went up to the copilot’s seat to sit down next to Frank, who had gotten us back onto the highway in silence.
I didn’t know what to say, so I dropped my head back against the seat and stared at the road. I was grateful that Frank didn’t try to make conversation, either; right now, we both needed the peace.
It also gave me time to contemplate a new problem.
Ever since Mariana had taken over during the fight with the angel, I’d been feeling … weaker. Less me. I glanced down at my good hand, and lifting it, found I couldn’t stop the tremor in my fingers.
I clenched my hand, lowering it to my lap. It was still my hand, but the nerves in it felt less sensitive. Where a light touch on the back of my hand used to tickle, I sensed now I would only feel it dully.
Not yet. I’m not ready yet.
And I knew, soon, Mariana and I would come head to head on this. She needed to rescue Ariadne, and I needed to rescue Percy. We both needed to live.
A buzzing sounded nearby, yanking me back to awareness. I pointed at Frank. “Your pants are vibrating.”
He pulled a phone out of his pocket. It was mine. “Oh, I forgot to give this back to you after … well, everything.”
Someone was calling me? I took the phone from him and stared at the display. No caller ID. That wasn’t suspicious.
When I picked up, a deep voice spoke before I could even say hello.
“Tara, where are you?”
I straightened. “Erik?”
“Who else?”
“I have other people in my life, you know. Anyway, I thought you always knew where I was—I am wearing your watch.”
I heard a small laugh on the other end. “Yeah, you’re right. I was just respecting your privacy. I see you’re driving north on I-79 at about 50 miles per hour.”
“Woah, talk about a stalker boyfriend.”
“I’m going to deliver a package to you,” Erik went on. “But I need you to slow down. And open your sunroof.”
“A package? Erik, what’s this about?”
“Do you trust me?”
I paused. Then, “Yes.” I do. So I nodded over at Frank. “Slow it down a bit, will you? And open the sunroof.”
To his credit, Frank immediately did as I asked. The bus slowed by a good ten miles an hour until we were crawling next to the other cars on the highway. I could hear the sunroof slowly opening behind me.
I was about to tell Erik we were going to get pulled over for breaking the lower end of the speed limit when a flash appeared in the sky, and I saw something I could only describe as a UFO pass over the bus.
A thump sounded behind us, and I turned around and stood up to find an actual box rolling to a stop in the middle of the aisle. It was wrapped in brown paper and about a foot wide and tall.
I stared at it. “What was that above us?”
“A drone.”
“Ah.” I stepped closer to the box, kneeling beside it. When I picked it up, I had to use a little arm strength. “This has got some heft.”
“It’s all yours.”
I balanced the box on my knee. “Erik …”
“I’ve only got a minute, Tara. I’m sorry. What is it?”
I wanted to tell him about the angel. I wanted to tell him about my conversation with Grunt. It had been so long since I’d wanted to talk about things like this with another adult that I was surprised at myself.
But Erik was in a hurry, and this wasn’t the kind of topic you hurried with. So I said, “Any news about Lust?”
“I can’t really say much,” he said, which stung a little. Just yesterday I wasn’t on the outside of this. “But you should pay attention to the radio and the TV. She’s making rounds.”
“Frank and I heard her on the radio,” I said in a rush, as though I could see our time running down on a clock. “She promised to bring a smile to everyone’s face. Do you know what that means?”
“We heard it, too. We’re not sure yet.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“Tara …”
“You can’t divulge. I get it.” I stood up, pressing the box to my side. “Thanks for the present.”
“Hey, Tara.”
“Yeah?”
“There’s a little something extra for you in that box.”
I had no idea
what that “something extra” might be, but if I knew Erik even a little bit, I had a suspicion. “Thanks, Corporal.”
“Also, I’ve done some digging into this guy who runs the restaurant you’re going to.”
“And?”
He breathed into the phone. “I think you’re onto a good lead. Just be very, very careful.”
I smiled, even as I processed the ominousness of his warning. “Oh, you know me. I’m always careful.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Be seeing you, Erik.”
We hung up, and I set the box on the counter. When I opened it, two more boxes sat inside: one the size of a necklace box and gift-wrapped, and the other about the size of a baseball case.
I opened the gift-wrapped one first. When I pulled the lid off, I found Percy’s whistle laid inside. It had a new, shiny silver chain. I set it over my head, and it fell to the perfect spot on my chest.
I lifted the whistle and set it to my lips. When I blew air, no sound came out. GoneGodDamn, he really had fixed it. I didn’t know how, since this whistle had been made of dragon eggshell, but he had.
I picked the “something extra” box up and was about to jiggle it next to my ear when I stopped myself. If this was a present from a World Army soldier, maybe I didn’t want to be shaking his gifts.
And for good reason. When I opened the box, the pin of a grenade stared back at me. A note had been tucked in with it:
Patience—
What does a mortal sin call an anti-magic flash grenade? Well, I’m sure you’ll find out.
Send Lust my regards,
Erik
Chapter 32
Ten hours later, we were back in New York City. It had been only a week since I’d left … but back then, I’d had a dragon in tow. And I hadn’t appreciated that fact like I ought to have.
Now I’d give my kingdom for that dragon.
We spent an hour navigating the city before Frank pulled us into a pay-per-hour parking lot just a couple blocks from “the restaurant.”