by SM Reine
Benjamin couldn’t imagine he had any outstanding tax issues with the Secretary of the Office of Preternatural Affairs, but there weren’t any other secretaries in his hijacked life. He’d only done one summer interning for Secretary Friederling. And that hadn’t been a paid internship.
“Check my email,” Benjamin said. “It’s the icon that looks like a swoopy thing.”
“That’s a waste of time,” Nathaniel said.
He was so dismissive, and Benjamin’s reaction was correspondingly infuriated. “Stop whining and check my email!” He tried to shove Nathaniel—a stupid gesture, since he was basically haunting his own body at this point.
But to his shock, Nathaniel slammed into the back of his chair. His eyes went wide.
“Whoa,” Benjamin said. He looked at his hands. They were still ghostly and see-through.
He tried to grab something off of the coffee table to no avail.
Benjamin was still a ghost, but he could touch his own body when he really wanted to.
“I finally figured it out,” Nathaniel said, glaring at Benjamin. “Sure took long enough.”
“I’m still in control of my body a little bit, aren’t I?”
Nathaniel moved to stand. Benjamin tossed his body back into the plush seat. It took an enormous amount of effort—it felt like pushing a dead car through an intersection—but Nathaniel did move.
“Now check my email,” Benjamin said.
“The plane’s landing soon.” Nathaniel tried to stand again, but Benjamin shoved a second time. “Fuck me.”
“Email,” he said.
Nathaniel pulled the tablet into his lap.
Benjamin orchestrated the familiar hand motions, encouraging his body to pick the right app for email, and then the right inbox.
“Good boy,” Benjamin said encouragingly.
Nathaniel shot a dirty look at him. “Where should I click now?”
“That one.” He pointed at the screen. It wasn’t an email from Secretary Friederling, but from Suzume Takeuchi—an angel that he’d met while visiting Dilmun.
The attachment was a picture of the angel in bed with a black-haired baby. She was flipping the middle finger at whoever was taking the picture, face screwed up with annoyance.
Behind her, Secretary Friederling was laughing with a delighted, dorky, exhausted smile. A couple of other adults sat on the edge of the bed, but Benjamin only had eyes for Suzume and her bundle. Suzume’s rude gesture made Benjamin grin as much as the sight of the baby.
He liked kids. He had to. He’d sure spent enough of his life helping raise his younger brothers and sisters.
This particular baby had bright-blue eyes. A half-angel.
“Holy shit,” Nathaniel said. He was interested in the email now. “It’s a Gray, isn’t it?”
His mood-killing disdain wasn’t going to blow Benjamin’s mood. “Scroll down so I can read the message.”
Nathaniel didn’t argue for once.
Hey stupid, Leliel didn’t find and kill me before the baby got out. Good job keeping the secret. I heard you’re a shitty intern but a good babysitter so drop me a line if you want another summer job. -S
“Summer job babysitting a half-angel? I would literally prefer to get stuck in the Garden of Eden for another few thousand years with Adam’s shriveled corpse,” Nathaniel said.
The plane’s intercom chimed. They were descending, and it was time to put on a seatbelt.
“I should tell Dad about the baby,” Benjamin said thoughtfully. He took the seat next to Nathaniel by habit, even though he couldn’t get buckled in. “He’d be tickled. He acts like he doesn’t care for babies, but Rylie practically has to fist-fight him for a chance to hold her own kids when they’re little.”
“I’m not going to tell him anything! If I’m smart, I won’t tell anyone about a half-angel Gray baby.”
“Would it be called a Grayby?” Benjamin laughed at his own wit.
Nathaniel stared at him in resentful hatred.
Benjamin cleared his throat. “Okay. Why does a Grayby—uh, half-angel baby have to be a secret?”
“Angels are obsessed with purity of species. Watering down the blood’s an enormous taboo. Why do you think angels ended up hating Metaraon so much?”
“Because he was a murderous jackass?”
“He bred with humans multiple times. That’s why. Angels saw it as introducing impurities weakening the species, so it’s like a species-wide insult. Otherwise Leliel wouldn’t bother going to such ends to protect the nest.”
“I’m part-angel,” Benjamin said. At least, the Son of God was. “Then why do I want to go through the Genesis warp? Why don’t I let Leliel protect the purity of the race by changing events?”
Nathaniel turned his glare out the window. The airplane bounced gently over turbulence as they descended through the clouds. “Because the gods don’t believe in purity, and I agree.”
“The gods? Meaning, like, my other parents?” The parents who had contributed Nathaniel’s soul, not Benjamin’s body.
“I don’t have to like them to agree with them.”
It wasn’t hatred that shifted over Nathaniel’s face while he was thinking about his parents, though.
If Benjamin weren’t mistaken, he thought that it might have been love. The same kind of resentful love that, say, Abel and his eldest son, Abram, had between them.
Nathaniel loved someone.
He wasn’t unreachable.
“Going through the Genesis warp can only hurt me,” Benjamin said.
“I know. It’s awful.”
“Then why am I trying to get there?”
“It’s not about me,” Nathaniel said. “Some things are bigger than me.” He glanced at Benjamin, and for a moment in the dimmed cabin lights, their faces looked exactly the same.
Benjamin swallowed hard. The line between them was blurring. “I’m scared.”
Nathaniel looked away.
“Me too.”
Two hours later, there were three men in a car heading to Ransom Falls.
The car was a rented Mustang, which Abel, the oldest of the men, reported as inferior to his preferred Chevelle. (“But Chevys have always been better than Fords. Fuck Ford and their lemony shit.”) He was a pile of boulders behind the wheel, suited to the car’s aggressive lines with his one-handed grip and corded arm and hardened jaw.
At his side was a younger man. He appeared for all intents to be Abel’s son. Had either of them been smiling, the smile would have been the same. The eyes were different. Not just because Abel’s irises were gold, and the boy’s were brown, but because the person looking out from the boy’s eyes was someone else entirely.
Nathaniel was equally tense in the passenger’s seat. He was watching the forest, scanning it as though to search for any sign of the warp.
The third person looked identical to the second except he was in the back seat, and a ghost, and much more animated. Benjamin was shouting in Abel’s ear. “Stop driving the car! Stop it right here! I don’t want to go through the warp!”
It was no wonder that Nathaniel looked so miserable. He couldn’t tune out the shouting that Abel couldn’t hear.
Benjamin grew increasingly agitated as they got closer to the future location of the warp. He started trying to push Nathaniel, and as a result, his body was twitching.
“Stop it,” Nathaniel growled at Benjamin. “Stop it!”
“You okay?” Abel asked.
The answer was a resounding no, and it was due to get worse from there.
Elsewhere in the forest was a mismatched trio of vampire hunters.
They were on a ridge, laying belly down, watching a nest of angels through binoculars. They had been there for a couple of days now and their rumpled clothes, greasy hair, and muddy faces reflected that. Only Brianna looked miserable; Anthony had been drinking enough beer not to care, and Dana looked perfectly suited to the environment.
“Can I just hex her already?” Brianna asked. �
�It’s almost time, and…”
“Sure,” Dana said.
Brianna brightened. “Really?” She pulled a handful of wooden charms out from the neck of her sweat-stained shirt.
“No!” Anthony grabbed her hand. “Dana’s fucking with you. Stay cool.”
“But—”
“We wouldn’t survive against Leliel alone, and she’s got a friend,” he said. “Three humans against two angels is a really fast track to the slaughterhouse.”
Leliel and Irohael had gotten the angels’ nest situated directly alongside the point where the warp would soon open, down in the clearing between the trees. The vampire hunters had been speculating that the intended result would be that the eggs would be drawn into the warp as soon as it opened.
This was not a desirable result. The nest was not intended to be sent back to the past; chances were good that alone would result in damage to the timeline.
If Leliel followed them and began interfering, then damage would be guaranteed.
If Benjamin didn’t make it through, then it would only get worse.
Dana had twenty dollars on the idea that the world would melt around them into a few heart-pounding hours of chaos, suffering, and general madness.
Anthony believed that to be wishful thinking on Dana’s part. She would enjoy dying like that way too much. His twenty dollars had been placed on oblivion descending so instantly that they wouldn’t even realize their universe had blinked out of existence, although he’d bet that twenty with the grudging acknowledgment he’d never see it, no matter what.
Brianna had started crying too hard to take a bet.
“Then what do we do?” Brianna asked. She was starting to cry again, and this was also the third or fourth time she’d asked that exact question. “How do we stop Leliel if we can’t attack her without getting killed? Maybe we should just go kamikaze to take her down! Throw ourselves right at her!”
“Slow down there, Gepetto,” Anthony said.
Brianna rolled onto her side, covering her face with her hands. “But there’s only so much time left to wait!”
Dana had been largely silent until that time. Now she set her binoculars down and said, “She’s right.”
She sat up on her knees. Grabbed her enchanted stone gauntlets. Jammed her fists into them.
“We can’t attack her and win,” Anthony said.
While Dana latched on her gear, she checked the time. A pocket watch was bound to her thigh with a leather strap. “At this point if we don’t attack, we lose.”
“But she’s coming,” he said. “She’ll be back soon. We just have to have faith and wait.”
That was a third trigger point in the forest.
The Godslayer had reentered Earth shortly after following the seelie sidhe into the Summer Court. Her presence had not been a soothing one, but she hadn’t caused any harm; nobody had died as a result of her check-in on the refugees.
A lot of entities had died since she’d entered Earth.
Because she’d followed an unseelie legion into the forest. The unseelie had been sent by Konig at Marion’s request; they were moving in from the north in order to kill Leliel.
They had also been given instructions to kill the Godslayer if they came across her.
Unfortunately they did not come across her; she had come across them.
The Godslayer was a different kind of ghost than Benjamin, who was still breezing along the highway in a car unseen, unheard, untouchable. She was invisible because she moved in ways that she would not be seen. She followed the unseelie behind the trees, watching their every move. They could not sense her. She was not a thing of magic, but firmly human, albeit one that had been designed for a very special purpose.
She was not killing them. She was only following at the moment.
But the unseelie were about to attempt to broach a perimeter set up by agents of the Office of Preternatural Affairs. The area was under quarantine. Nobody was meant to go in or out.
Theoretically, the sidhe magic would allow them to easily overwhelm the OPA.
Except that these OPA had been prepared by Rylie Gresham to fight against unseelie. They had special wards. They had special weapons.
The OPA was equipped with iron.
All three of these separate groups were in the forest outside Ransom Falls on that night, at the same time, moving toward the same point.
They collided an hour before midnight.
Seth witnessed it all because he was Death. In every moment that people were dying, his omnipotence persisted.
Dana attacked Leliel first.
She leaped down into the clearing with enchanted stone body armor, a leather skirt like a gladiator, and a shotgun loaded with phosphorous. She was not a four-armed no-faced Godslayer, but she was almost as good.
Leliel turned on her, surprised. She had been so absorbed in fussing with the eggs that she genuinely hadn’t realized she was being watched. Had she known that Dana was there, she wouldn’t have expected such a direct attack; something like that was suicide.
Irohael met Dana with his flaming sword.
They clashed only briefly.
She plugged his stomach full of phosphorous, and he burned. She backhanded him with a gauntlet to send him to the ground. Stomping one heavy boot on his back was enough to keep him down at that point, and she plugged the base of his wings with additional shells while her other hand raised to blast energy at Leliel.
The maneuver was one she had used against vampires many times. Dana’s lack of subtlety had a way of defeating most enemies, just because they thought she’d never be that stupid. She could clear entire murders of vampires like that.
It was enough to take one angel down.
Leliel had enough warning to avoid the attack. She didn’t need to fight with flaming swords. She had magecraft as taught to her by Marion.
A jolt of electricity to Dana’s heart sent her to her knees.
She snapped Dana’s neck before the hunter could get to her feet.
Brianna’s reaction was neither measured nor rational; she ran down into the clearing to try to hex Leliel, and her soul was the next to be excised from its body.
Anthony had no choice but to follow her.
He was an old hunter, and he had fought a lot of angels before. He knew to swing wide. He knew to go for the wings, and this was indeed the weak point even on an angel such as Leliel, whose wings were enchanted. He managed to shoot in between them. He blasted apart her artificial wings and her heart right before she gutted him.
That was how that trigger point ended.
Less than half a mile east, where the road ended, Benjamin finally took control of his body. He had only enough strength to reach over and wrench the wheel out of his dad’s hand.
Abel had reaction time as good as Leliel’s, though his instincts failed him in this moment. The car careened off the road. It tipped onto two wheels. Abel turned the wrong way.
They flipped.
The car’s roof collapsed.
As it turned out, Nathaniel’s seatbelt wasn’t buckled. He went flying. His neck snapped.
And the unseelie were realizing that the OPA had iron, and they were drawing their swords.
The Godslayer was too.
These moments of death were not simultaneous, nor did one cause the other, but they flowed from one into the next without interruption. Handfuls of OPA agents died as dozens of unseelie fell under the Godslayer’s many blades.
She didn’t get a chance to finish killing them.
Less than five minutes later, the Genesis warp opened. Blossoms of balefire spread wide as a fissure opened. And then…
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
Benjamin Wilder did not enter the fissure, and there was nothing.
Seth sat upright with a gasp.
He was still in the bedroom in Alfheimr. He wasn’t in Ransom Falls, but curled up underneath a down comforter with delicate gold lanterns hanging overhead. Marion was asleep
on her back beside him, the back of one hand draped over her forehead in an unintentional dramatic gesture. Her pinky finger twitched as she dreamed.
They had somehow fallen asleep.
And Seth had been dreaming.
No—not dreaming. He’d been experiencing an hour of such enormous death that he’d been carried through events from the point where the Wilder men entered Ransom Falls to the moment where Genesis made him lose sight of everything because Benjamin didn’t go through the warp.
This was one of his persisting abilities as Death. He was only omnipotent when people were dying.
A lot of people were about to die.
His brother and nephew were among them.
This was going to happen on the night of the Genesis warp opening—midnight on November fifth, still a handful of days away.
Even knowing that, Seth didn’t get out of bed. He caught himself staring at Marion while immobilized by indecision.
If he’d seen his family’s deaths, then they were already set in the Meta. In a way, they had already happened, and there would be consequences if he circumvented them. But that was already where his thoughts were moving. He was trying to orient their travel on that night-drenched road to the current time in the Middle Worlds, and figuring out where he could sweep them out of the timeline.
There would be a way to get Benjamin to the warp without facing Leliel. There had to be.
So why wasn’t he moving?
Why was he leaning back on an elbow to watch Marion’s bare chest rising and falling with the deep breaths of sleep?
James had once told Seth that he would one day love a woman worth shattering universes over.
And that was what James had done. Genesis had been largely his fault in the first place, from the rifts that had torn the world apart, to the magicks that had violated every law set by the Old Gods, and the human blood spilled by the thousands.
All James’s fault. All in pursuit of Elise’s love.
It made sense that James would feel validated in those decisions. He’d won. He was in the Infinite with the woman he loved.