by SM Reine
“Think about what you’re doing, Em,” Benjamin said. His voice was tiny because his chest had such a hard time expanding.
She turned a chilling gaze on him. For the first time, Benjamin realized that Marion’s face was bruised, and that there was a gash across her chest caked with blood. She looked like a walking cadaver. No glamours now. “I’ve given it plenty of thought.”
Marion slipped around the nest and walked right up to the Genesis warp.
It was so quiet there. It looked like something that big and vibrant should have been crackling, or throbbing, but it was…silent.
She stared into its depths with an unreadable expression and haunted eyes.
“Don’t go through,” Benjamin said.
“I’m not going to enter it,” she said. “Nobody is.” She lifted her hand, and she was holding a big piece of white rock veined with black—that piece of the Metaraon statue that Seth had destroyed with balefire.
Marion tossed the rock into the Genesis warp.
Instead of passing through the hole, the rock latched onto the middle of the gash of light.
The warp closed.
A few days later.
Charity and Arawn were hanging out in the nicest windowless basement she’d ever seen. It was supposed to be some kind of ballroom eventually—somewhere that they could host parties for out-of-town visitors to Shadowhold—but at the moment, it was just a big bare cavern with empty floors and naked, rough-hewn walls.
They were having dinner at a table in the corner. Despite the enormous room, they were occupying about one square meter of floor space.
Ever since the kissing thing, Charity had discovered that personal space was overrated. She much preferred to be on top of Arawn, or vice versa. She still got thrills up her spine every time she remembered she could rub up on him whenever she wanted.
He looked perfectly happy having his space invaded, their chairs side-by-side so that there was no room between them. He was slightly less happy about the terms they were negotiating on the notebook between them, but his mood was pretty good considering what Charity had been demanding.
“No killing for fun,” Charity said.
“Human trophy hunters kill for fun all the time,” Arawn countered.
“That’s true, but I don’t like trophy hunters either. No killing for fun.”
He rolled his eyes. “How about self-defense, or defending other people? Like what we did when we sent the Hounds to break shit up at the Genesis warp? That was great killing, right?” Killing from which none of the Hounds had returned. Someone had murdered every last one of them.
“Obviously that kind of killing is fine,” she said. “You can also kill for food, even when the meat isn’t…ethical.”
Arawn grinned. “I agree to that. In exchange, you never wear the glasses again. Ever.”
“Agreed.” That was an easy one. If she was committing to spend the rest of her un-life with Arawn, then she was also committing to spend the rest of her un-life in Shadowhold with a bunch of demons. She’d be more vulnerable around them looking human.
He held his hand out. “Can I break them?”
“Yes,” Charity said, but she didn’t hand him the glasses. She couldn’t seem to make herself move. “But…”
“Not ready?”
“They were expensive.” It was a pathetic excuse, and even Charity didn’t believe it. Arawn was right. She wasn’t ready to let go.
“We’ll break them later,” he said.
Tension drained from her shoulders. “Thanks.”
Arawn leaned toward her for a kiss, but they were interrupted by the ballroom door opening.
“Here you go,” grunted Gunner, one of Arawn’s few verbal gang members.
A human woman crept out from behind Gunner’s girth. She was short, curvy, and brown-haired. She clacked every time that she took a step because she wore so many wooden charms. And she looked wildly uncomfortable in Shadowhold. “Um, hi,” said Brianna Dimaria. “I don’t know if you remember me but—”
“How could I forget you?” Charity asked.
She slipped away from Arawn to fold Seth’s friend into a hug. Brianna stiffened, awkwardly patting Charity’s lower back. She couldn’t reach any higher than that. “Okay, that’s nice, yes.” Brianna’s lips were plastered with a pained smile. “That was a hug. Because we’re hugging-type friends now.”
“Why are you here?” Charity asked, holding her at arm’s reach. “Is it Seth? Is he okay? What did Marion do to him this time?”
Brianna lifted her hands in a defensive position against the barrage of questions. “Everything is fine with Seth, as far as I know. We’d probably know if something wasn’t fine with the gods.”
Okay, that was a good point. Charity took a couple of deep breaths. “I have to say I’m relieved to see you. If you’re alive, I assume that means things went okay in Ransom Falls?”
If they hadn’t gone at least a little bit okay, none of them would have existed.
But Charity had been worrying about everyone else too. Just because the world was alive didn’t mean that everyone she knew was fine too. It wasn’t like she could ask Seth for a body count.
“I don’t know about okay,” Brianna said. “I mean, it happened the way it was supposed to. Benjamin Wilder went through. Nobody on my team died, but angels are basically extinct, and the Middle Worlds are unstable as hell. So…mixed bag.”
“Don’t tell me,” Arawn said. “You need our help fixing things.”
“Yes, but not the way you think. I’ve got a couple of letters for you. Well, to be exact, I’ve got one letter for you, and one for him.” She brandished two envelopes—the second one at Arawn.
He lifted his goggles off his eyes to reveal a look of amusement. “For me?”
“Here.” Brianna gingerly handed both of them to Charity, as if afraid to touch her, or anything else in the undercity for that matter. “There you go. And now I have done it, I have done my job, and it is done. So I think I’m going to go.”
“So soon?” Charity asked.
“Not soon enough, honestly.”
Brianna must have been repulsed by either Charity in her revenant form or Arawn and his surroundings, and she probably wouldn’t have been fun company. But this was someone who had known Seth. The gris-gris didn’t work to summon him anymore now that he was back with the other gods. Charity was missing him a lot.
“All right, see you,” Arawn said. “Let the door hit you on the way out.”
He plucked the envelope from Charity’s hand.
“Be nice,” she whispered.
“Is that one of your requirements?” he whispered back. “Because that one might be a deal breaker.”
Charity caught herself smiling. “You’re nicer than you think. No, that was just a suggestion. Brianna, you don’t have to…oh.” By the time she’d turned her attention away from Arawn again, the door was falling shut. It didn’t hit Brianna on the way out. She was moving much too fast for that.
“Look at this pretty handwriting,” Arawn said, waving his envelope at her.
The way his name had been written on it wasn’t pretty at all. It was barely legible, in fact.
Doctor handwriting.
Charity’s heart pounded as she peeled her envelope open. There was a folded piece of heavy cardstock inside. She frowned. “It’s an invitation. They’re asking if I want to be a…some kind of Oracle?” Charity turned her letter around to show Arawn, but he wasn’t looking. He was staring at his paper. “What?”
Arawn sat back in his chair. If she hadn’t known any better, she would have thought he was pale.
“What?” she asked again.
He stood up and grabbed her hand. “Come with me.”
She didn’t have any other choice. He was holding her too tightly as he headed out into the city, with all its cute Barcelona-looking touches, and the hidden stairwell that led straight up to Earth’s surface.
Charity tried to dig her heels in so
that they wouldn’t climb the stairs.
“It’s daytime,” she protested.
“I know,” Arawn said.
“You can’t go out in sunlight. You’ll die.”
He yanked her up the steps anyway. “I know.”
“What the hell was in that letter? How do you go from happy couple planning to suicidal plans with one stupid letter? Is the idea of spending years and years with me really that bad?” She was kind of joking, but as they climbed the stairs higher, she felt herself starting to get hysterical.
“I had an invitation too,” he said. “Also to be an Oracle. And it said I’d have to go to the surface to perform job functions.”
“At night, right?”
They were at the door to the surface now. That particular door led to a park in downtown Barcelona. It was a convenient way for Charity to get in and out for shopping, not that she’d had much urge to go shopping lately.
Arawn put his hand on the knob, but paused before pushing it open. “Love you, Char.”
That sounded awfully final.
“Wait. Don’t!”
He pushed the door open. It was half-concealed behind a cluster of rocks. It was tucked away, but not hidden. The door to the undercity didn’t need to be hidden. It wasn’t like demons were illegal in Spain.
The fact that the door wasn’t hidden meant it wasn’t shaded, either.
Sunlight flooded into the stairs.
Charity’s cry caught in her throat at the sight of Arawn in sunlight. He was even paler than he looked in the darkness, his hair greasier, his eyes more sunken. But his whole face had gone beautiful with wonder as he looked up at a blue sky. The first blue sky he’d glimpsed since Genesis.
He held his bare hand out in the ray of sun. There was no blistering, no burning. No reaction at all.
She took the letter from Arawn to read it.
In addition to the invitation to become an Oracle—whatever that was—there was a personal, handwritten note from Seth himself. The idea that a god could hand-write a note was not as interesting as the contents of the note itself.
“I owe you big thanks for everything you’ve done,” Charity read aloud. “Take care of my friend. Don’t make me come down there.”
Seth had somehow pushed past James and Elise’s confinement to perform one final act of omnipotence. Or else he’d figured out how to cooperate with the other gods, and the three of them were now an actual, functioning triad.
Either way, he’d given Arawn the ability to walk in sunlight.
More than that, he’d given Charity the chance to live in sunlight without giving up Arawn.
It was better than she’d ever expected. So much better.
Charity slipped the glamour glasses out of her pocket, giving Arawn a nervous smile. “Do you think we can change the rules just a little bit? If we’re going to live on Earth like normal people? Maybe I should be able to masquerade as human.”
“For this, Char,” Arawn said, “I’ll give you any gods-damned thing you want. Anything at all.”
Marion delivered her resignation speech from her living room in Vancouver Island, sitting in front of a lone reporter, a camera, and a lot of uncomfortably bright lights. The only furniture in the living room was within the path of the camera. The rest of the room was in boxes, just like the contents of every other room in the entire house.
“For too long, there has been a single mortal soul between gods and man. This one point of failure is unacceptable. As such, my responsibilities as the Voice of God are being delegated to revenant Charity Ballard and sidhe envoy Wintersong beginning immediately,” Marion said. “They will hold these responsibilities while developing a new, transparent Fellowship of Oracles. This will make it easier for the New Gods to communicate with all their creatures.”
Normally this would have been the time for Marion to say something very diplomatic—most likely something a little flirtatious and cute too, in an attempt to curry favor.
Now she only said, “It has been an honor to serve the gaean, infernal, and ethereal peoples.”
She shifted her focus beyond the camera.
“That’s it,” Marion said.
“Great.” January Lazar flipped through her notes. “Let’s see…I’ve got some other stuff here. Lots of questions for you. Could end up a really nice piece.”
Marion stood, shrugging off her blazer. She was wearing a scallop-necked camisole underneath along with a pair of white linen pants. “I said everything I want to say.”
“But there are a lot of other things to talk about,” January said. “Like you and the god of Death—”
“I don’t want to discuss anything else,” Marion said firmly.
She opened the door to her ethereal powers a smidge. Had she possessed wings, like her full-blooded brethren, they would have given the faintest glow.
January’s lights and camera turned off. She would have no extra footage of Marion dismissing her.
“Well.” January snapped her notebook shut. “In that case, I’ll be going.”
“Yes, very good,” Marion said.
She lifted her hands, and January’s belongings came together neatly. Cables wound together, bags unzipped and filled with equipment, everything piled by the door. Marion’s fastidious magic had always been her best, and it was even better when it helped push January out the door faster.
Marion’s statement was only a formality to make it easier to establish the Fellowship of Oracles. She’d already notified the appropriate international bodies of the gods’ changing preferences, but with the whole world directly apprised of the situation, they wouldn’t be able to fight what was to come.
An entire organization that would serve as Voice of God.
It was slightly less frightening than a single teenage girl having all that authority, but she doubted some would find it an upgrade.
That wasn’t her problem.
Nothing was Marion’s problem, at the moment, except for tying up all her loose ends and keeping her promise to Seth.
“This will air tonight?” Marion asked, ushering January to her bags by the door.
“At six o’clock eastern on our channels, and on all our affiliates during the evening news.” January lingered on the front step. The hunger in her eyes was something Marion knew well. That ambition was something that had bitten Marion in the ass, but it still served January Lazar all too well. “It wouldn’t take long for you to tell me about—”
“Goodbye.” Marion shut the door in her face.
It wasn’t diplomatic, but it didn’t have to be. She wasn’t a diplomat anymore.
There was a lightness in Marion’s step as she weaved through her messy living room. Messy by her standards, anyway—the boxes were not stacked into tidy, alphabetized aisles, and that was enough to get her prickling.
She might have rearranged, but she had a coronation to get to.
It was happening in her kitchen. That was the room with the highest ceiling in her house, and therefore the only room where Ymir could fit. He was hunched against the far wall by the windows. He brightened at the sight of her. “Marion!”
“Hello,” she said, patting his hand when he stretched it across the room to greet her. Ymir’s enthusiasm meant both Nikki and Heather had to stoop to avoid his hand. Neither of them looked amused.
Of course, they might have been irate because this was the least formal coronation possible. It would have been inappropriate to have a big ceremony when the entire Middle Worlds were mourning. But they did need some kind of ceremony other than a hurried rearranging of magic in a melting darknet chamber. Sidhe magic was completely reliant on such ceremonies.
As a result, it was much smaller than Marion and Konig’s coronation had been. Aside from the three people taking charge of the leaderless Middle Worlds, there were only Pierce and Jaycee Hardwick in the room. It was a private affair. A family affair.
For once, there was nothing to eat or drink. There were no orgies. No music.
&
nbsp; Marion stuck out her hand. “Go ahead.”
Jaycee slashed the knife across her palm. It healed almost as quickly as it cut—but not so quickly that it didn’t manage to release a few large drops of blood, which she smeared on three glimmering diamonds.
The work was quick from there. Pierce handed Marion a card with a few runes on it, and they cast them in tandem, untethering Marion from her stewardship of the Winter Court. Jaycee was waiting to transfer those runes—first to Heather Cobweb, and then to Nikki, and then finally Ymir.
The diamonds illuminated with magic.
Wind rose in the room, swirling around everyone once. Papers rustled. Hair tossed.
And then silence.
“Is that all, then?” Marion asked. She hadn’t seen any sidhe magic, and didn’t feel any different, but she’d always been distant from the power of the Middle Worlds.
“That’s all,” Pierce confirmed. “Anything more than that would be tacky.”
“I will organize a party on the anniversary of Konig’s death to mark our ascension and the end of a mourning period,” Nikki said in her usual clipped, almost robotic tones. She sounded no different now that she was the Queen of the Autumn Court. “The unseelie will take comfort in the normalcy.”
Heather folded her arms. “You? You’re gonna throw a party?”
“Hooch will take care of that which eludes me,” she said.
“King Hooch,” Jaycee said dryly. “Gods save us all. No offense intended, Marion.”
Marion rolled her eyes. Jaycee kept doing that—referring to the gods and then saying something to the effect of “sorry, not sorry.” The Hardwicks were having their fun. If it made them happy, fine. They’d be out of her life—along with every other indication of these two terrible years—soon enough.
“Hooch and I are not romantically or sexually involved,” Nikki said. “He is my partner.”
“More like your robot interpreter,” Jaycee said.
Pierce pinched Jaycee on the butt. “Go to the airship and compile the code, Frosty.”