The magical Geometry shivered and fluoresced, then brightened blindingly. Her own magic twisted and writhed as the virus penetrated what contained it. But it didn’t go through. It went in.
Marley’s magic surged back into her as the virus brightened, until it was everything. Oh, my girl. You tricked me, you did. I thought you knew nothing about me and there you were, laying the old trap. But I’ve had ages and nothing to do but prepare, and I won’t be taken again.
The virus brightened, until it was everything. And then there was nothing at all.
Chapter Fifteen
Branwyn
FYI: The divinity circuit is in the hands of the angel who massacred Senyaza.
Branwyn looked at the message from Marley impassively for a moment and then tapped back, How did it go?
There was no immediate response, so Branwyn turned her attention to Marley’s actual message. Somehow she wasn’t surprised. Annoyed, yes. But not surprised. It probably meant somebody—maybe more than one somebody—had lied to Branwyn, which she hated. She always felt like she ought to do something about it.
She ought to do something about Senyaza, anyhow. What they were doing with Titanone was not something she was comfortable with, and it was clearly only the beginning. She had to make a decision and it was harder than she was used to. People would suffer.
She doodled while she thought: first a sketch of Titan One, and then a sketch of the coffee shop where the ambush would happen. She’d been there a few times, usually when Marley was in the nearby Vroman’s bookstore. It was a terrible place to ambush somebody. There would be so many people, which would, even from the most evil point of view, add additional complexity. But it wasn’t like they had a lot of options. It wasn’t like they could catch him as he walked home from work. Being immaterial was a pretty good defense against most things.
Her phone chimed with a message from Marley.
great
As Branwyn frowned, another message came in.
in the middle of something
“Oh.” Branwyn rolled her eyes. If Skadi’s cure had worked, it made sense that Marley and Corbin might be “in the middle of something.” Impulsive, sure, but Marley hadn’t shown herself to be the most clear-thinking person when it came to Corbin.
Branwyn sent Coming home soon?
She’d barely had time to hit send before the reply came. not too soon I think. distracted.
Gnawing on her lip, Branwyn carefully typed out, tomorrow morning then? don’t forget or else people may get hurt
won’t forget
There was nothing else. Branwyn tapped her phone’s screen thoughtfully. But there was no point in worrying about the uncharacteristic text style right away. Skadi seemed decent enough and Branwyn would have bet her hammer that there was no chance of Corbin hurting Marley. Everything was probably fine. She’d tease her friend about it later.
The next message that came in was from Titanone.
I was reading the files on Marley. They don’t like Zachariah Thorne or his children very much, do they?
Branwyn pursed her lips. You too? Then she paused. Wait, why are you reading about Marley? Is she in you?
Nope, nope. But you’ve been texting her an awful lot so I was curious.
A sick feeling bloomed in Branwyn’s stomach. You’re not allowed to read my texts to other people. You shouldn’t be on my phone at all.
I’m just looking. Mr. Black says it’s what I’m supposed to do.
My phone? Mine in specific?
Well, no.
Mr. Black doesn’t understand what he’s teaching you.
He’s very old. Older than both of us put together. Older than my first foundation. Older than the city.
Age isn’t everything. He doesn’t know you.
I’m just Titanone. He knows that. He knows me.
Stay out of peoples’ phones, Titanone. And don’t read their texts. Go watch Sesame Street instead.
There was no answer. Branwyn sighed. She definitely had to do something and whatever it was, it was going to hurt.
Rhianna showed up at dinnertime, as cheerful and as evasive as ever. Eventually, using old big sister tricks, she got Rhianna to show off what she’d spent the afternoon doing. Rhianna pirouetted and then opened her hands to reveal a gun. It was small and unpleasant to look at.
Branwyn made a face. “You didn’t just get that.”
“Oh no,” Rhianna assured her. “Just practicing a little.”
“Why? We’re going to be in a coffee shop.” Branwyn turned her attention to the scrambled eggs and mushrooms she was cooking. “Put it away.”
“Branwyn,” said Rhianna, looking hurt. “You’re bringing your hammer, aren’t you?”
“To deal with celestials,” Branwyn said. “A gun is going to hurt ordinary people and bounce off our actual enemies.”
Rhianna laughed. “Branwyn, you’re so funny. Do you think the celestials and the halflings are immune to guns? They’re not. There was an event last year, in Belgium, at a Senyaza retreat where—”
Branwyn stirred the eggs too vigorously and some flew out of the pan. “I know.” She turned to look at her sister. “Wait. There were guns involved there?”
“Yup,” said Rhianna. “The attacker came in with several assault weapons. And he was stopped by a woman with her own firearm.” She made her own weapon vanish.
Distractedly, Branwyn turned the stove off, then pushed the spatula into Rhianna’s hands and went to go sit at the table and put her head in her hands. She was meeting somebody in a crowded place who was willing to give a kaiju a bag of guns and turn him loose on a crowd. She was meeting this person in a crowded location.
No wonder the angel had changed the location.
“Are you all right?” Rhianna asked, the cheerfulness fading from her voice. She sat down across from Branwyn, still holding the spoon.
“I don’t really like guns,” Branwyn said. “I like victims even less. I need to do something. I’m going to my workshop.”
Rhianna watched her as she stood up. “I’ll hold down the fort here. I need my beauty sleep. Especially for tomorrow.”
“The very best plan. Make sure to set your alarm for noon.”
“I thought we were meeting them at eight—Oh. Very funny, Branwyn.”
Branwyn shrugged, picked up her hammer, and went out the door.
She didn’t make it back home until after three AM. When she did stumble into her apartment, so exhausted from her work that she could barely focus on the door lock, something was wrong. The fog in her head cleared as she stared into the darkness of the living room. Then she flipped on the light and went to go look in the bedrooms.
Marley hadn’t returned, and Rhianna was curled up on one side of Branwyn’s bed. She still slept exactly like she had when they were little girls: one leg tucked under her body while the other sprawled out ready for some midnight kicking action. “Bran…?” she murmured sleepily.
“Yes,” Branwyn reassured her. She went to look in Marley’s room again before returning. “Where’s Neath? The cat?”
“Dunno?” Rhianna murmured. “Couch?”
But Neath wasn’t on the couch, hadn’t greeted Branwyn with a meow when she’d come home. She’d been sleeping still when Branwyn left, because apparently teleporting after a flock of crows was tiring even for a magic cat. But now Neath was gone, and Marley hadn’t come back. Neath sometimes went after Marley, but this time there was something odd. Suspicious. Wrong.
But Branwyn was exhausted enough that she couldn’t work through what she ought to do or what exactly the wrongness was. It would probably make more sense in the morning. Which was coming very soon; she only had a few hours to catch some sleep before she had to be on her toes. Tomorrow was going to be such a long day, what with being bait for an angel, fighting with her monsters and her sister over the divinity circuit, and introducing Titanone at a gala. And she was so tired.
Thus, operating on sleep logic, she went to bed.
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She’d been working on solutions to the crowd-in-a-public-location problem, magical solutions. She had some ideas, although she would have to ask for help. But even laying the groundwork for those solutions had absolutely drained her. She didn’t wake up until Rhianna sat on her and started singing a song from a Disney musical.
Branwyn groaned and pushed Rhianna aside. “Is Marley here?”
“Nope,” said Rhianna, bouncing off the bed and to her feet. “I have no idea where she’s at. Her cellphone is turned off or something. Are we still going? Please say we’re still going.”
Branwyn thought darkly about coffee. But they were going to a coffee shop and they had to be there in fifteen minutes for the pre-ambush meeting. That left five minutes to shower and five minutes to be late enough to show them they weren’t the boss of her.
But Penny was six minutes late showing up, and then Rhianna had to take a call from her boss and Titanone managed to be just distracting enough that Branwyn had to respond.
What if they’re bad people?
Explain, typed Branwyn, dreading the answer.
Can I mess around on peoples’ phones if they’re bad people?
While Branwyn was trying to come up with the right answer, Titanone went on. Like those hackers who are trying to break into Nakotus. What if I followed one of them home and destroyed everything on his phone?
Did you do that?
Go back to work.
Hey!
Maybe. It’s not any different than what the monster hunters do to monsters.
There’s a difference. Branwyn thought about laws and trials and justice for a minute, and whether or not the celestials ever had those, or were subject to them. When Titanone still hadn’t answered she typed out, It’s called judgement and you’re still learning it.
That was when Branwyn discovered Rhianna had been actually tracking down Marley’s phone. It turned out she and Rhianna could really fit a lot of fighting into an extra five minutes.
It also turned out that the kaiju had about five minutes’ worth of patience. At minute six, Severin leaned forward from the back seat and said, “Are we there yet?”
Penny, suddenly finding herself sitting beside him, shrieked. Branwyn jerked the wheel and only avoided swerving into another lane of traffic because Rhianna lunged and grabbed the wheel.
“What are you doing here?” Branwyn demanded.
Rhianna said, “Almost there, little smurf.”
Penny narrowed her eyes and said, “You’re a real jerk.”
Severin leaned back. “Eyes on the road, cupcake. No making a mess of yourself until we’re done with you.” Then he lowered his voice as if confiding a secret. “I’m glad you’re almost there. You would have hated it if I’d had to carry all four of you.”
Then he looked around. “Oh, no, I see. Three of you. Did Marley decide she had something better to do?”
“No,” snapped Branwyn. “And I don’t know. I’d be happy to cancel our little party so I could go find her, though. Interested?”
“Nope. Marley is a fun girl but Hadraniel needed killing months ago.”
Rhianna said breathlessly, grabbing the wheel again, “How about we swap and I drive while you argue, Branwyn?”
“No. We’re there,” said Branwyn, and knew she sounded sullen. Silently she parked, refusing to meet Severin’s eyes in the rearview mirror. She ignored him all the way into the coffee shop. Then she made a point of getting in line at the register when he joined his brothers and sisters. They were clustered around one of the small tables in the middle of the shop. It was a cozy, tall space with a second floor accessible by an ornate metal staircase. The narrow windows at the front made the dark wooden tables near the entrance glow, while the back of the coffee shop remained in a gloom perfect for lurking in the armchairs placed for that purpose.
Rhianna, ever helpful, said, “Would you like me to get your coffee while you go soothe the angry beasts?”
“Flitter away,” encouraged Branwyn, in lieu of something her mother wouldn’t have approved of. “But you stay here, Penny.”
“I’m not going over there without you,” said Penny. “They’re all creepy.”
“Creepier than the faeries? You said their auras didn’t bother you.”
“Yes,” said Penny firmly. “It’s not their auras, it’s the stuff they say and the way they look at us. Maybe the faeries would like me dead but at least they’re engaged when they talk to me about it.”
Branwyn frowned. “That’s not…”
“Your experience? No. It wouldn’t be,” said Penny moodily.
Thankfully, then Branwyn had to order her coffee. Once she had a large paper cup full of hot alertness, she ambled over to the table, put down her hammer and feigned surprise. “Wow, you’re all here already? I thought I was early.”
“Such a spicy mouthful,” said Candy approvingly. “Where’s your bodyguard?”
“She ran off,” said Severin. “With the raven boy, I imagine, since I can’t find her.”
“Hmm,” said Aleth. “Our guest is expecting you to have a bodyguard. Varying from his expectations is risky.”
Branwyn half-expected Rhianna to volunteer but she hung back, looking around the coffee shop with a wide-eyed, untrustworthy, innocent look.
She did not expect Penny to say, “I’ll stay with her.”
Aleth gave Penny a long once over. “That would work. In more ways than one.”
“All right, that’s settled.” Branwyn pulled the object she’d been working on the previous night from her bag and set it on the table. She’d started with a fire alarm, but she’d flattened it and burned out the circuitry and replaced the actual alarm part with the smallest bass speaker she could find at 10 PM the night before. Then she’d woven the power of the Machine fragment in her hammer through the whole contraption, merging the parts into a self-aware whole and imbuing it with her desire to save people. Geometry-wise, it had a single node, which was currently empty.
“I need one of you big bad monsters to do your celestial thing and put a charm in this. Something that makes people want to get away.” The whole crowd of them stared at her as if she was speaking nonsense and she added impatiently, “Come on, I know you guys can do charms too. The alarm will broadcast the charm effect when I trigger it, and all the bystanders will get out of the way.” She was very proud of the idea.
The three male kaiju exchanged glances while Candy poked the alarm with one finger and Dolores gazed soulfully at Branwyn. Then Max shrugged. “I’ll do it.” He swatted Candy’s hand aside and passed his palm over the modified fire alarm, half-closing his eyes as he concentrated. “Not my usual touch,” he murmured after a moment. “But that should do it.”
“How do you trigger it?” asked Rhianna, with what Branwyn felt was the right level of interest. “Will we need smoke?”
“You whisper, ‘Fire’ in its ear. It’s magic,” Branwyn said, deadpan.
“Will it work?” Penny asked.
Severin’s hand half-rose to his throat and then dropped as he laughed. “Of course it will. And if it doesn’t, believe me, people will be running away anyhow.”
“I want them to leave in an orderly fashion,” said Branwyn with as much dignity as she could muster. Then she sat down at the table. “Let’s get this over with. I have places to be.”
Candy said, “Young people, always in a hurry these days. Come on, Rhianna, we can swap notes on technique.” She flashed a grin, and skipped off to the women’s restroom. Rhianna looked around, met Max’s gaze, then shrugged and followed Candy. After watching her go, Max vanished in a different direction, and Aleth settled back into the chair he’d been occupying before Branwyn joined them.
Dolores, though, started singing a sweet, gentle song in a language that Branwyn didn’t recognize. She swayed back and forth, fluttering her hands. Severin watched her for a minute and then whispered in Branwyn’s ear, “I’ll be watching from on high, cupcake. Try not to do anything stupid.” He
loped off to the stairs to the balcony seating.
Penny sat beside Branwyn and leaned over to whisper, “Uh, what is she doing?” while watching Dolores warily. Dolores ignored her, concentrating on her lullaby.
Aleth said, “She is cleansing the local area of the signs of our presence, so that our prey will not be forewarned.”
“Except for yours, my friend,” said Dolores, in a throaty voice, finishing her song. “A challenge. This quest stretches us all.”
Something about the way the woman spoke caught Branwyn’s attention. She had trouble imagining the unobtrusive, quiet woman on a quest for power. Or hell, as the same kind of creature as Severin. “Why are you doing this, Dolores?”
“I mourn for my brother,” said Dolores simply. A deep sadness transformed her whole face. “I mourn. Perhaps later you will mourn with me? I don’t like to be alone when I mourn, and I feel so alone.” Her sadness drew on Branwyn, rousing her rarely awakened pity. It was, she thought, terrible to be alone.
“Dolores,” said Aleth gently. “Not here, not now. Possibly not them.”
Dolores sighed, the sadness retreating back to her eyes. She settled her cardigan about herself. “Of course. I shall go into the kitchens and be ready.”
As Dolores walked away, Penny said, “Oh my God. She’s not somebody’s mother, is she?” Aleth only raised his eyebrows and she added, “That was so blatantly… manipulative. Although I suppose since she’s one of you, what she wanted to do was lure Branwyn off somewhere and eat her.”
Branwyn rubbed her head, trying to resist the urge to cry. While she attempted to realign her experience with Penny’s more objective observation of it, Aleth said, “There’s no point in discussing Dolores right now, but perhaps it will reassure you to know that none of us present are of a devouring nature, such as those the Senyaza hunters pursue.”
That was enough to shake Branwyn out of her confusion. “I’m not really sure it matters if you eat people if you also go around destroying their ability to function. Or you just flat out murder them. And you know damn well that wasn’t going to reassure anybody.”
Divinity Circuit (Senyaza Series Book 5) Page 18