Chapter Twenty-One
Silas’s chest rose and fell in quick, struggling breaths. He lifted his hands, turning them over as if they were covered in blood. He looked like he was going to pass out.
“What happened?” Azrames was the first to speak.
“He’s been ripped from grace,” Caliban said, each word as tense as the last.
We’d had three days and change to prepare, and it hadn’t been enough. The shock of the fall still rattled me.
Silas took a stumbling step backward until he was planted against the side of the house. The dull thud of his shoulders on whitewashed brick mingled with a clang and slam around the corner. I knew it before I saw her. The French doors had been flung open.
With a swoosh of platinum hair and a huff, my mom stormed into view.
She stopped short, eyes wide in abject horror as she looked at the four of us. Her gaze darted between the fallen angels, the spiced stink of their radiant blood soaking into the grass. Wet blood drizzled from her nostrils, accompanying the early puffs of what would surely be two black eyes.
“Caliban, Azrames, meet the woman who spawned me: Lisbeth Goddamn Thorson.”
One hand flew to cover her nose. The other lifted an accusatory finger. “Don’t use the Lord’s name in vain.”
“She”—I spoke over her, looking at the men—“tried to have me killed. And if I’m not mistaken, she collaborated with Silas to do so.”
Azrames had Silas’s throat pinned against the house with his forearm in a second as Caliban strode toward my mother. He shoved his hands in his pockets.
“Congratulations,” he said smoothly as he eyed her.
She took an angled step backward, moving on unsteady footing back toward the French doors.
“It seems I misjudged you,” Caliban said to her. Every step he took forward, she matched with a step back. “Here I thought you were a pious, uptight woman of faith. But you know the lore, Lisbeth?”
She shuddered as if her name on his lips were poison.
“In the name of Jesus, I command you to get out of my house!” she hissed.
He gestured to the grass. “We’re not in your house.”
I watched his broad shoulders, the back of his neck, the easy gait of his stride as he took yet another step.
“Stay back, demon. You have no power here. I have the Lord.”
“Do you?” he asked smoothly. “Say it with me, Lisbeth. Christ was born from a virgin. The antichrist will be born from a whore. Which brings us to an interesting point… What, pray tell, were you up to before you brought Love into the world?”
My eyes were wider than they’ve ever been as I witnessed the exchange.
“What is it that you think you’re atoning for?” he pressed. One more step and he’d back her into the wall.
She clutched at the cross at her chest. She shot a frantic look to Silas, silently pleading with him to save her.
“Oh, him?” Caliban asked. “Yeah, he’s not an angel anymore. He picked your daughter. Just like I did. Just like hundreds of thousands will.”
My words stuck in my mouth. I looked at the fallen angel, unsure. My stomach curled, bile licking the back of my throat. I swallowed, battling a sickening wave of conflicting emotion as Caliban championed our cause.
I didn’t miss the way his hands twitched as if resisting the urge to spring to action.
He kept them in his pockets. “Personally, I don’t think you’re worth keeping alive.
” He turned with idle calm toward me. “Love? Do you have an opinion one way or the other? Because I’ve wanted to kill her for almost twenty-seven years. ”
Her throat bobbed as if she was struggling to swallow.
She took her final step back, misjudging the corner.
She would not be making it to the doors on the backside of the house anytime soon.
She and Silas were pinned to the side of the house, even if Caliban was doing little more than looking at her.
I got to my feet with slow deliberation, stepping out of my remaining heel so I could walk on even footing.
I strode on the frosty morning grass, goose bumps covering my bare neck, my arms, my chest as the adrenaline cooled.
I moved to Caliban’s side, savoring his formidable power as he towered above us both.
Maybe I was the bark rallying the realms, the one making powerful enemies, the one eyeing my mother in the backyard, but he was the bite.
“I don’t know, Mom,” I said, crossing my arms both for seriousness and for warmth. “If it were you in my shoes, you’d defer to the judgment of the angels. Wouldn’t it be fair if I deferred to the judgment of the demons you think I serve?”
“Don’t you?” she practically spat.
Caliban slid his hand over the center of my back, sending a pulse of power through me that warmed me to my core. He said, “I like to think we serve each other.”
I tightened my hold on my arms, but this time it was solely to contain my hum of energy. “Can she still contact Heaven?” I asked, looking up at him while the blood from her nose dripped on her shirt, blotting strange patterns in a gruesome Rorschach test.
His brows met as he considered the question. “I can’t take away her true sight, if that’s what you’re asking. Her fae blood gives her the ability. You’d need a Norde to do that. Do you happen to know any Nordes?”
I looked at the corpses decorating the yard. My eyes shot to Azrames, still holding a stunned Silas, who did nothing to struggle.
It was the hardest ten seconds of my life.
“Az.” I choked out his name quietly. “I…”
He slackened his hold ever so slightly as he waited for my nod.
I looked up at Silas but saw only pale terror. “He’s in shock, Az. I…I need you to call Fauna.”
***
I looked away the moment I heard the decompression on the grass. The sound she made was somewhere between a strangled gasp and a restrained sigh, almost like a mouse caught in a trap. I turned my chin even further as she approached, doing my best to avoid looking her in the eye.
“Marlow.” She said my name quietly. It came out as a whimper.
Azrames cleared his throat. With an unsteady voice, he said, “We need you to deal with one of your citizens. Can you take away true sight?”
Fauna ignored Azrames as she reached for my arm. She bypassed Caliban, fingers sliding over the bare skin of my bicep as she tugged gently for my attention. “Mar…”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “I’m not ready to talk to you.”
I’d never heard her sound pitiful before.
My memories shot to thirty-seven missed calls from my ex, to a desperate string of voicemails, to the handwritten letters that had begged me to reconsider as she said, “Not ready? Does that mean you will be? Because I’ve waited, Mar.
I’ve sat tight. I’ve watched and been desperate to intervene, to be by your side.
I know you’re mad, but you have to know I love you.
You have to understand that I did what I thought—”
“Please, Fauna. You really, really hurt me.”
She grabbed me firmly with both hands.
My eyes flew open. Caliban released a low warning growl as my mother snapped, “Show some wisdom, Marlow. Don’t be deceived.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Fauna and I retorted in unison.
Under any other circumstance, it might have been charming.
I hated how much I missed her. I missed her sea-spray scent. I missed her curls. I missed her button nose, her green eyes, even her stupid hippie outfits. I wanted to hug her. To be held by her. To let her in.
But it was the same urge people got to call their toxic, cheating exes after two bottles of wine and tell them that they missed them.
Fauna—Angrboda—had used me to facilitate her prophecy.
That’s what we all were. Chess pieces in one goddamn prophecy after another, manipulated and shuffled around as a means to our respective pantheons’ ends.
It had worked.
The first golden lights of dawn appeared, catching on Fauna’s copper locks before disappearing behind a cloud.
She looked exactly as I remembered her. Voluminous hair in loose, ginger-and-white curls.
A smattering of freckles decorating her face like a galaxy of stars.
Free-spirited clothes looking like she grew her own Yerba Mate tea and led spiritual retreats.
She was braless as always, but unlike me, appeared impervious to the cold.
Incandescent beauty casting suburban mundanity to shame.
In the absence of Caliban’s touch, the morning chill overtook my near-naked state.
I was dressed for a concert in the desert, not the early hint of autumn in the northernmost Midwest. Fauna was unaffected, save for the intensity she focused on me.
In fact, I realized that she hadn’t even looked at the slain archangels.
She hadn’t greeted the Prince of Hell. She hadn’t shot Silas a glance.
She hadn’t even addressed Azrames, the love of her life.
“Marlow, I understand why you’re mad. I lied to you. From the bottom of my gods-damned heart, I know I did. But I thought I was doing the right thing. I loved you and chose you while still fighting for my cause. And if you can just—”
“Can you take away her true sight, or not?” I asked, looking her fully in the eye. “This is the one thing I need from you right now. Please tell me you’re not going to let me down again.”
Her hold on me slackened slightly. Her pupils contracted almost imperceptibly. After several strained beats, she nodded.
“Do it,” Azrames prompted.
Her hands fell limply to her sides. She looked beyond me to Caliban as she said, “It’ll affect Marlow’s blood.”
My heart skipped a single beat. I looked at him reflexively, anxious for his answer, though I regretted it a moment later. It shouldn’t have mattered. I was with Hell. I’d already washed my hands of the Nordes.
“Will her s?lje still work?” he asked.
I turned to watch her close her eyes, dipping her chin once.
Fauna said, “She’s circumvented all bonds between her tattoo and her broach. She doesn’t need citizenship.” She bit her lip, then took a hesitant half step toward me. “But you have it, Marlow. If I take the bloodline, you still have me. You can join the Nordes at any time.”
I didn’t look away as I said, “All I want from you is to take away my mother’s ability to scheme with the enemy. That should align with your master plan enough that you don’t bat an eyelash.”
Fauna looked at me for a long moment, hair tufting gently as northern winds moved the hair around her shoulders, her oversized pants and cropped shirt molding to her body as they flowed with the breeze. She didn’t fight me further as she stepped toward my mother.
Lisbeth winced as if to bolt. Caliban planted a hand on the corner of the house, freezing her in place without so much as touching her. My mother’s lips moved in silent prayer as she petitioned her god.
“Pray all you want. He isn’t coming,” Fauna said.
“We would have, though. We would have shown up in ways you’d never thought imaginable from your King of Heaven…
if you weren’t such a cunt.” She planted her hand on my mother’s forehead, forcing it back enough for her skull to thud dully against the brick as Fauna locked her arm in place.
I could have been imagining it, but I could have sworn my mother shimmered slightly, a luster leaching from her as it drained into Fauna’s arm.
All at once, I began to feel woozy.
Fauna shouted something just as the clouds parted, revealing a harsh beam of sunrise as I tumbled backward toward the earth.