by SM Reine
Eggs, Eve had called them. Leliel didn’t like the word. Angels were not birds, winged though they were. Eggs were fragile. They were cheap. Birds laid whole clutches of eggs because it was inevitable that many would perish, leaving only the strongest to survive.
Every angel was strong.
They were not birds, they did not lay eggs.
Eve had been gone for a long time, and Leliel had the authority to call them what she wanted. “Orbs,” she mused aloud. “Spheres?”
“Balls,” Irohael suggested in that irritatingly snide tone of his.
The other angel was lounging on the shore. Far be it from Irohael to wade into the amniotic waters to help Leliel rebirth their species. He’d declared the lake unclean at first sight and hadn’t entered it once.
“Orbs,” Leliel said decisively. The title didn’t have a lot of gravity to it, but at least it was better than balls.
She rested her hand on the nearest orb. It was warm to the touch. It wouldn’t be long before that one was ready to be opened. They needed to start thinking of names.
“I’m gonna smash those balls when I get out of here,” said Leliel’s captive, Benjamin Flynn.
She couldn’t dignify him with even a glance. But she could correct him. “Orbs.”
He wouldn’t smash them either, because he would never get out of there.
Not intact.
Benjamin Flynn was tethered between two trees. He was brown-skinned, much darker than Leliel’s more olive tones. His hands and feet were so large relative to the rest of his body that she suspected he’d one day bear an impressive adult physique.
Assuming he lived that long.
Because she was steadfastly ignoring Benjamin, who was chained not far from the entrance to the plane, she didn’t notice when Marion entered Shamayim again. Leliel only realized they’d been joined when Irohael spat. A glob of mucus slapped Marion’s toe.
The mage stopped. Her glare was withering. “Apologize to me.”
“Stop being a filthy Gray,” Irohael said without pause.
She bent to put her face in his. “The fate of our entire race rests on the assistance of this filthy Gray—the only one with enough power to protect the nest. You will apologize to me. Or you won’t see the day your brethren are born.”
Irohael glared at her. But after a moment, he sullenly muttered, “Sorry.”
Even a disingenuous apology seemed to appease her. She straightened, and her expression was blank as she descended the mossy slope toward Leliel. The orbs reflected in her wide blue eyes. “How are they doing?”
“They’ve developed enormously since your last visit,” Leliel said. “That’s to be expected, since you haven’t been here in weeks.”
Marion had promised to be present while developing the embryonic angels, supplying her fair share of the magic to fuel them. But she’d been so absorbed in the happenings of the Middle Worlds that she’d barely visited monthly.
Benjamin was interested in no such subtlety. “Not that you’ve been here at all, Em. I’m starting to think you don’t care about us.”
Marion ignored him. “I found the last thing we need from Dilmun.” She extracted a piece of stone from her voluminous robes. “Does this look right to you?”
Leliel emerged from the lake to inspect it, damp dress heavy around her legs. Marion was holding a rock the size of her finger. It was white veined with black, like a cross between bone and marble.
Marion had indeed managed to find one of the pre-Genesis artifacts they kept in Dilmun. It wasn’t an easy feat. There was a lot of matter in the silent city, and most of it radiated with enough magic to obfuscate the location of its most powerful artifacts.
“I’m impressed,” Leliel said truthfully. It would have been hard not to be impressed by how strongly the stone vibrated against her fingertips with ancient ethereal magic.
“You shouldn’t be,” Marion said. “I only needed to follow the sense of my father, and there’s so little of him remaining.”
Metaraon had been the Voice of God before his daughter. Adam had ripped Metaraon’s head off with his bare hands in one of his final acts as God, and his body had burned along with the garden in Araboth. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving angel.
“I need only one more thing.” Marion tossed the stone fragment to Irohael. The other angel caught it out of the air. “The statue of Metaraon.” A bigger-than-life idol of the former Voice stood at the heart of Dilmun. It used to be part of the gateway to Eden.
“We don’t need it,” Leliel said.
“No, but I want it,” Marion said.
“Why?”
“Why not? He’s my father. This is my heritage.”
“He’s dead and Genesis was partially his fault,” Leliel said. “Is that the father you want to claim?”
“I don’t have another. I want the statue, and I’ll have it. Or else I’ll—”
“You’ll leave me alone in Shamayim to nourish these orbs with what little magic you taught me? What worse can you do?”
The way that Marion stared at Leliel made it clear she wasn’t seeing Leliel, not really, but some other imagined foe who was far more aggravating.
It was a deranged look that Leliel hadn’t seen in Marion before. Not before she’d had her memories stripped, and not after either. This was a new look. It was how a woman looked when she’d been pushed a little too close to the edge of the cliff.
“There is so much I will do,” Marion said in a low whisper.
“So much to do, and none of it saving your childhood friend,” Benjamin said.
Marion whirled with no warning. Her hand lashed out.
Electricity consumed him, and he spasmed in his chains, crying out. She maintained the lightning for several seconds, and her face was masked with calm the entire time.
When she finally clenched her fist, Benjamin slumped.
He wasn’t talking back anymore.
“Can we just kill him?” Irohael circled the boy to take the artifact fragment to its final resting place. They’d been building a circle of stones for weeks, and this was the last, most important piece.
“Unfortunately not,” Leliel said. “He’s a critical thread in the web of events that formed Genesis.”
“All the more reason he deserves to die. He should pay for what he did to all of us.”
“What he will do,” Marion corrected. “It hasn’t happened yet.”
“I don’t understand,” Irohael said.
“You see a human boy when you look at him, don’t you?” Marion trailed her fingers through Benjamin’s hair. His head was still hanging loose between his shoulders, eyes closed, a line of saliva slithering down his chin. “That is only the shell. His soul belongs to the Son of God.”
“Which one?”
“The current ethereal god,” Leliel said. Not Eve, who had been the mother of angels, but the man once known as James Faulkner.
Nathaniel Faulkner’s soul was riding around inside of Benjamin. It was Nathaniel, not Benjamin, who wanted to smash the angels’ orbs, and he was destined to go back in time and help trigger Genesis.
A warp allowing Benjamin to go back in time would open on October thirty-first. Once he passed through, along with the soul piggybacking in his mortal body, he would reappear in a year prior to 2015. And once he jumped through, Genesis was guaranteed. The death of the ethereal race was guaranteed.
“How much do you remember of New Eden?” Leliel asked Irohael.
“Very little,” he said. “I’ve made an effort to forget about it. Not that I played a big role in New Eden anyway. I just lived there.” Irohael was a nobody as far as pre-Genesis angels went, and he wouldn’t have been helping Leliel now if she’d had alternatives. There just weren’t many useful angels around since Jibril’s death.
“New Eden was built with Benjamin Flynn’s blood,” Leliel said. “If we don’t send him back, there will be no New Eden.”
“Is that bad?” Irohael asked.
New Eden hadn’t lasted long. Elise Kavanagh, formerly known as the Godslayer, had destroyed the city in a temper tantrum and murdered every angel along the way.
Then she’d gone on to become a god.
“If there’s no New Eden, these eggs will never open.” Marion brushed her fingernails along the biggest orb. It glowed to life at the contact and something thumped inside. There was never a reaction that strong when Leliel caressed them. “We need to avert the destruction of New Eden, not its creation. As long as New Eden remains, we’ll have somewhere to hatch these.”
“I thought that we were doing it here.” Irohael bent to place the last stone in the circle.
Once its perimeter was completed, it hummed with magic.
“That’s an angel trap,” Marion said.
Irohael jerked back. He’d been about to step over the line. “Angel trap?”
It would remove the Son of God from within Benjamin Flynn. He could go back in time so that New Eden would be born, but Genesis wouldn’t happen a second time.
Every little detail of this operation had been planned to perfection by Leliel and Marion. Like the girl or not, they were a formidable pair of minds. They may not have been gods, but they would control the way the world was remade nonetheless.
Marion inspected the stone circle as completed by Irohael. Benjamin was still limp. He could have kicked her because she passed so near, to the point that her dress’s train slipped over his feet, but he gave no reaction.
“Well?” Leliel asked.
“It will work.” Marion folded her arms. “I want the statue of Metaraon in Niflheimr.”
“I still fail to see how it’s relevant.”
“I’ve already tried to remove it, but I can’t. It’s embedded too deeply in Dilmun’s wards. I need your help to remove it.”
“We can’t return to Dilmun. Arawn’s demons will attack us, just like they attacked our allies at the Veil,” Leliel said.
“A legion of sidhe will protect you. They’re already situated there.”
Leliel planted her hands on her hips. “I know for a fact that isn’t true. There have been no sidhe within Dilmun—the wards that affix Metaraon’s statue in place would have alerted me to intruders.”
Marion frowned. “I sent the legion this morning.”
“They aren’t there.”
Of course Marion couldn’t simply accept this information. She took a thumb-sized statuette from a hidden pocket within her dress and closed her hands around it.
A mixture of ethereal and gaean magic sparkled between her fingers. Marion’s eyes unfocused. “They’re not there,” Marion agreed reluctantly. She clenched her teeth—doubtless to hold back a slew of French-language curses. The girl was every bit as nasty as Irohael, and then some. “But they will be. I will make sure my legion is in place immediately.”
“Fine. Do that, and Irohael can help you,” Leliel said impatiently. “But is the circle done? Will it serve its purpose and hold the Son of God?”
“Yes,” Marion said. “It could hold any angel to isolate them entirely from the outside world.”
Now that was an interesting piece of information. “It can trap any angel? Against any invading force?”
“Yes,” she said again without looking at Leliel. Marion had gotten that distant, faintly deranged look in her eyes again. Mentioning one of the unseelie legions had taken her mind back to the petty trivialities of the Middle Worlds.
She didn’t consider Leliel enough of a threat to earn her attention. And why should she? Marion had handily beaten Leliel multiple times already, making it clear which of them was stronger. Marion’s magic was far superior. She was resourceful, too.
But an angel’s true strength did not rest in power. It rested in her wits.
At the moment, Marion’s wits were so distracted that she didn’t even recognize how pointedly Leliel was asking about her circle.
Amazing how such a smart girl could be so stupid.
Jaycee Hardwick’s words haunted Konig as he searched through Niflheimr—for once, a king with no advisors or generals or Raven Knights to witness him. A refreshing change.
He could never be completely alone in his kingdom, though. The very walls whispered at him as he passed. “Where is the darknet?” he would ask, and the walls would speak of chills, of shadows, of places that flowed with electricity riding within veins of magic.
Konig followed these hints by opening one secret passage after another. But none of them led into the darknet chamber.
He was certain that it was somewhere deep in Niflheimr’s underbelly. Others had found it before. He’d spoken to witnesses. Yet when he continued opening halls, both preexisting and new ones, he never found himself within the darknet chamber.
Konig opened a new door. A black ice hallway opened, sloping upward toward his bedroom.
At the end stood a woman.
Marion had an expression of practiced serenity that didn’t match her magic’s vibrancy. She floated to him and leaned against his chest with all her lanky, supple warmth. “My king,” she murmured.
She kissed him softly, and he kissed her harder. His fingers dug into the back of her neck. Unseelie power against ethereal fragility. He caught the faint scent of caramelized apples off of her. Whatever she’d been doing, she’d been in the company of other angels.
A visit to Dilmun?
To Leliel, their enemy?
His fingers tightened on her curls. He yanked hard enough that the roots must have hurt. “Where is the darknet chamber?” Konig asked.
“I haven’t been able to find it since Dana did,” she said, lips teasing against his. Dana was Marion’s adoptive sister, and a mercenary who’d previously invited herself into the darknet.
“I guess it’s not fair to expect you to know anything about the Middle Worlds.” He tweaked her chin. “Tell me what you were doing in Dilmun, princess.”
Steel flashed in her colorless eyes. “Tell me why the seventh legion isn’t in Dilmun,” Marion said, her gloved fingers curling against his chest.
Konig didn’t have a good response to that. He had intended to let Marion have the seventh up until the moment that he’d spoken with Maddisyn; his withdrawal of the seventh legion had been such a last-minute maneuver that half of them had already been in Dilmun when he issued new orders.
“Why would you have even sent them there?” Konig asked. Questions answering questions.
“That’s of no consequence.” She took a deep breath, expanding her chest against his. And her body softened. “I was touched when you said that I could resolve old business on Earth, and my understanding was that I could use the seventh legion to do it.”
Marion was trying very hard not to answer his questions.
Konig slid his hands down her shoulders. They locked on her wrists. “What’s in Dilmun, princess?”
“Pieces of my father,” Marion said. “A statue.”
How sweet. How sentimental. “I diverted them to the borders of the Spring Court so that I could keep the Raven Knights in Myrkheimr.” He smiled as he brushed his lips across hers again. “That’s not a problem, is it?”
That flash of steel in her eyes turned to overt anger. “Isn’t the rest of your force enough? Why must you interfere with me for something as insignificant as the Summer Court?”
Konig’s fingers dug into her tendons. “Insignificant?”
Marion’s shoulders trembled, jaw lifted, eyes bright. “In the grand scale of things? Yes, the Middle Worlds is insignificant!”
He shoved, pushing her back against the wall. Bone cracked against ice. “You think your own kingdom doesn’t matter? What the hell could angels have that’s better than what I’ve given you?”
The wall behind them cracked. Ice fractured. It fell into pieces that scattered to the floor, creating a narrow fissure to Marion’s side.
“They’re my army,” Konig said. “Everything here is mine. At best, you get to borrow it. If I say the seventh will help lead the
final push to Alfheimr, then they will, and you don’t need a reason for it. Not one gods-damned reason.”
Salty air blew through the crack his anger had created. Konig took a short sniff of it and Hardwick magic rolled over him.
After one more moment of painful silence, Marion’s eyes dropped. “I’m sorry.”
He peeled his fingers from around her wrists. He’d left red imprints that would surely bruise, but Marion was good at hiding such things. Nobody would be able to see the evidence of this conversation. “You don’t need memories of your father. You don’t need anything from the angels. You’ve already taken the lead of the best nation, and the rest is flotsam.”
Konig thrust his palm toward the crack in the wall. It shattered again and grew wide as a doorway.
There was a six-foot length of ice tunnel beyond, so rough that it looked like Marion’s pet frost giant had punched through.
An open basin stood beyond.
He shackled Marion to his side with an arm as they walked through. “If I’m going to be honest, it worries me to hear you talking about your heritage with such squishy sentimentality, princess,” Konig said. “It might make a man think that you’re not being completely honest with him.”
“I’m as honest with you as I am with anyone else,” Marion said. “Think about it. The Middle Worlds are wonderful, but all of history is at our fingertips. Would you really rather have this kingdom than everything?”
“This is everything,” Konig said.
He tossed her up the icy path to the island at the center of the chamber. The darknet servers were half-magic, half-machine, and embedded in the walls of a cavern that was flooded almost to the top. When Marion sprawled to the ground by the one weirdly normal-looking computer, circuits illuminated underneath the surface of the water.
“My parents made these worlds,” Konig said. “My mother made them. Everything else can get eaten by balefire for all I care.” He surveyed Marion’s makeup. Her eyeliner was smudged the tiniest bit. On another woman, it would have been meaningless, but he thought she had been crying. “Don’t you want to share this with me?”
“I do,” Marion said. “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have married you.”