Chapter 35
Gunnar raced north, the angel’s scent tracking in pace with Audrey’s, but the pair didn’t mingle, Audrey’s at a clear run while Kushiel followed in less of a rush. He hadn’t grabbed her. He couldn’t imagine, after all the angel’s big, angry talk, Kushiel had his sights set on a casual conversation with Audrey about the Accords.
As far as the angel knew, she’d died in that apartment fire, and Innocence said it had shocked him when she walked in. All Kushiel’s focus, despite the lies on his scent, had been on Gunnar. If the angel knew him and Audrey had been together all this time, why not use the lever from the gate, exactly what Gunnar feared right now. Kushiel’s disgust for Audrey had always been clear, her actions anathema to everything he stood for. In the ESC, they’d declared Audrey dead, and Theo never gave the heads up that changed.
Gunnar didn’t want to consider how well an angry, avenging angel might take Audrey being alive.
He kept his pace reasonable but quick. Audrey might not have had much time to react, just ran, but he wasn’t sure why she’d headed toward their cabin. She certainly wouldn’t put the chuchuna family in danger. That she was running away from everyone meant she was trying to spare them from Kushiel’s wrath, which meant he scared her, whatever he’d said or done when he saw her, enough that she didn’t come into the tavern.
Fuck, she’d probably run to protect him.
But she also had to know he’d come for her, so if Audrey expected this to end in a fight, she was running Kushiel onto Gunnar’s home turf, giving him the slim advantage terrain would offer.
Gunnar tried to ignore his strangling pulse. He’d go with the fucker, he’d already decided, but if he hurt her . . .
If it came to blows, Gunnar was going to die in this fucking forest, which really wasn’t how he’d seen this day going. He huffed; he would find the end of his rope the day Audrey told him she loved him. And she was nuts, but he found he really wanted to be around to talk some sense into the woman.
Maybe he should have waited when everyone was shouting at him, yelling questions at him, but he couldn’t. He had to move, had to go after her, there was no other option. Getting Innocence help had taken all the willpower he could muster.
She hadn’t stopped at the cabin; by the look of Audrey’s tracks, she hadn’t even broken her pace as she skirted their home and fled deeper into the taiga, so into the snow-capped woods of his hunting parcel he went.
It was eerily still, as if anything alive had fled as soon as the angel crossed into the forest proper. Yeah, an angry Aperien had that way about it, making even the air itself reconsider breathing. Gunnar followed the trails he had worn in the terrain in the past months, both Audrey’s and the angel’s scents growing stronger with each step, the heavier snowfall blocked by the bowers. Audrey had only been out this deep a few times, but he’d made a point of showing her the lay of the land when they moved up here, just in case. It was how she’d found her way to the leshy so easily. And now his smart girl kept to the terrain she knew, trusting him to follow.
Voices echoed through the trees, Gunnar’s skin prickling with so much laden power saturating what should have been cold air, but as he closed in, the snow turned to slush under his heels, the temperature rising unnaturally, faster. It made it harder to hide his approach, but he was downwind, at least.
“How you cannot see your folly, even now, baffles me.” Kushiel, of course, because why would an angel do anything without giving a fucking lecture first?
Gunnar’s heart stuttered a bit when Audrey replied, her voice breathless from running, but otherwise she seemed unharmed. “I don’t know what is so hard for you to understand. I love him.”
Gunnar gritted his teeth, not seeing what the hells good that argument would do her, winding his way through the shadowed trees, trying to get a good look before he dove into this mess.
“You love the creature created specifically to bring about the demise of your species.” Kushiel mocked her, the tsk accenting his words.
“No, because that’s not what he is, and you know that. You’re just too angry, or hurt, or stubborn to face the truth. The Vilestars were created to wipe out humanity, but all of them are dead and gone, along with their creators. The vilebloods who remain are not the ones you fought that war against.”
“Naivety is the prevailing trait of humanity. The vilebloods are the intended sum of the equation, the continuation of the war in the absence of the progenitors. They are the legacy left behind to perpetuate suffering, and yet you, a human, champion them.” The disgust from Kushiel was white hot, snow and ice sloughing from the trees and raining down on the clearing.
Audrey leaned against a tree on the far side, cheeks flushed but holding herself tall. “That might have been Lucifer and Lamashtu’s intention, but that intention failed. Gunnar is not the monster they tried to create; he’s the man who saved my life, who went willingly to prison for a life sentence so a girl he didn”t know could live.”
Kushiel laughed, the humidity climbing, his beautiful white wings trembling with barely controlled rage. Gunnar smelled it now; he was beyond furious, beyond frustration. He smelled like brimstone, like avenging angels sent in mythos to punish and burn. Retribution, in his mind unequivocally justified.
“Yes, please, tout how saving one life grants absolution from all his other crimes? From all the dead in his wake?”
“Isn’t that the foundation of your entire mythos? Forgiveness?”
Kushiel went silent for an excruciating breath, then chuckled, the sound a low rumble in the landscape. “Perhaps it was, at some point in humanity’s fabrication and imagination. To cling to the idea wishing washed away all sins, but that, well, that was before every other product of humanity’s twisted minds came forth into existence in parallel.” Another huff, another tsk. “But that concept was never for the angels, gods or monsters. Humans didn’t see fit in their imaginings to extend such grace to anyone but themselves.”
“That’s what this is about?” Gunnar said as he stepped from the tree line. “Shit’s not fair?”
Audrey’s eyes widened when she saw him, her relief as clear as her fear for him. Him, not herself, because that’s just who she was, wasn’t it?
Kushiel faced him, the crisp control he expected on the angel frayed at the edges. His hair was tousled, the gilded curls sweat-damp against his forehead. His wings twitched with each movement, agitation saturating every inch of his near eight-foot frame. Mud saturated his white dress shoes, the damp climbing his ivory slacks, the suit jacket open and the top button of his shirt undone. The air cloyed around him, the faint outline of a halo ghosting the mist as he shifted.
The angel’s smile. Well. Gunnar seen few things quite as monstrous.
“Perhaps,” Kushiel mused, his eye color the gilded sky between sun beams, a blue so rich it defied the color spectrum. They shone, glowed, looked like they’d bleed if he didn’t blink. “Perhaps it is all so simple for mortal minds. I’ve already lived longer with grief than the human lifespan. When this girl who undermined the Accords that protect humanity is dust and memory, her love for you dead and buried and forgotten, I will live on, forced to remember those who died so she had the chance to exist at all. Are you human enough to be so na?ve, Gunnar?”
He canted his head, tsking again. “Or are you monster enough, like me, that the years will stretch and you’ll spend them remembering how she died, all because she believed you to be something you’re not?”
No, Gunnar damn well fucking wouldn’t. “You came all the way out here for me. Here I am. Put me back in that hole you like so fucking much. I won’t even fight you.”
“Jonathan!” Audrey raced forward, stalling when he held up a hand, her expression frantic, the panic in her scent reaching him over the melting loamy earth and Kushiel’s searing fury.
“The Accord changed, damage done,” Gunnar added with a shrug, but he focused on Audrey as he spoke. “But you can have me with some bullshit broken parole. She’s got nothing, esquire or not. And if she really thinks she loves me, she wouldn’t throw her life away a second time.”
“I didn’t throw away my life!” Audrey yelled. “I regret nothing! The Accord was wrong, and not just because of Jonathan and what he did or didn’t do!” Her anger turned on Kushiel. Gunnar cursed under his breath, trying to get there first, but there she was, five-foot-nothing, grabbing at the angel’s arm so he turned toward her instead of Gunnar. “Your grief, whatever you lost, does not justify this!”
Gunnar’s entire body twitched when Kushiel lashed out and caught her face, his fingers wrapped around her jaw in a vice. Audrey didn’t flinch, didn’t blink.
“You know nothing of loss, little girl.”
“Jonathan didn’t kill the people you loved. Making him suffer won’t bring them back,” she said, her expression and voice gentle. “I’m sorry for what you lost. I’m sorry for what the Vilestars War cost the world, to stop something so horrible.”
And she reached with those delicate little fingers of hers to touch the angel’s chest. Kushiel blinked down at her hand.
“But you are among the best of what humanity imagined,” Audrey said, so soft, barely a whisper. “And you’re right; your mythos demanded but didn’t give, not to your kind. And even if you wanted, your God is among many, many dead Aperiens. You can’t ask him for forgiveness, but you can forgive yourself.”
The heat wavered, a heartbeat, maybe less, before the rage that poured off Kushiel felt like sunburn on every inch of Gunnar’s exposed skin.
“You,” Kushiel said with a hiss, then a low laugh. “You dare to presume? You’re a menace, and you should have burned in that hellfire for your sins. I don’t seek forgiveness.” He shoved Audrey away hard enough that she stumbled to the dirt, and when Gunnar advanced with a snarl, Kushiel turned on him, that specific Heaven burning at the fringes of his existence. “I want suffering returned in full. And as the dead cannot deliver, I will take from the living instead.”
“You burned my apartment building,” Audrey said, anger in her voice now. Gunnar almost laughed; he really needed to work with her on her survival instincts if they both didn’t end up dead in the next five fucking minutes. “You killed hundreds of people!”
“And not the one I wished. Though it simplifies things now, doesn’t it?” Kushiel reached between his shoulder blades, pulling a sword from nothing, the blade sliver-white and radiating holy energy—until he ran his fingers over the enchanted metal, wreathing it in winding, living hellfire.
“Why so surprised, vileblood?” Kushiel mused, cutting the blade once the through air, moisture sputtering and hissing, afterimage burning the mist, the smell of hells and hunger chewing at Gunnar’s senses. “You think an angel spends a thousand tales and centuries of myth overseeing perdition and doesn’t learn to wield the instruments of eternal punishment?”
Then he laughed again, his smile nothing but cruelty.
“It hardly matters, any of it. Even faced with a town of the shunned who would speak truth to truth seekers? Mere complications of which I’ve grown tired. Laws and justice are manmade fabrications, the Accords created in good faith to protect those who would eschew their silver-plated salvation. I will deliver my own justice, for myself, by my hand, here. Now.”
He pointed the blade at Audrey, the hellfire rippling at the tip, and she shrieked, backing away in the mud, her fear reminiscent of the night she’d nearly died. Kushiel didn’t advance further yet, his gaze never leaving Gunnar’s, the halo of sunlight and purity an open, ever-burning volcanic pit.
“I will put Esquire Audrey Doe to the sword for endangering humanity with her misguided crusading. Do you intend to interfere? A crime which will certainly violate your parole, vileblood?”
“Jonathan, wait—”
“Yeah, I really fucking do,” Gunnar bit out, pulling his hunting knife, Audrey’s gift, free from its sheath.
Kushiel smiled, the angel’s satisfaction a living, breathing abomination.
Then his gaze flicked over Gunnar’s shoulder.
“So do we,” Rina called.