Chapter 29
T he bowling alley was a surprise. Not the fact that Rhode would find Chrome there but that the facility in question wasn’t the one Tammy worked for as a marketing manager. That place was a frequent and familiar haunt for the angels, with the owner even going so far as to provide the guys with a private billiard room and a bartender whenever they attended.
But no, this place was . . . Well, he’d go with different .
Rhode ducked his head beneath the rusted bell dangling above him, careful to avoid the chipping paint along the door trim, and immediately understood why the bell was there.
The place wasn’t so much a bowling alley as it was a nearly abandoned relic of time. The lights were on, yes, but for the most part, signs of life stopped there. The dark green low-pile carpet blanketing the welcome area had worn down to the mesh in spots from decades of being trampled beneath scuffed soles. A small arcade sat in muted illumination off to the side and was the furthest cry from the joyful theming he’d delighted in showing Neela at the amusement park. The setup was as sad as they came, with crane games filled with stuffed animals that had sat in the same position so long the overhead lights had begun to mute their colors. Of the remaining games, one racing and one shooting, both sported a glowing orange coin slot that still demanded twenty-five cents, even though the change machine next to them sat caked in dust, with a hand-written yellowed out of order sign taped to it.
“Can I help you?” A young man with an alpaca’s worth of hair hanging over his eyes didn’t look up from his phone but sank onto his forearms above a front desk that had seen more chrome than customers. The only indication that the man had addressed Rhode at all came from the deliberate pause after the question. The beige name tag identified the boy as Trainee .
“You work here, I take it?”
The boy snorted. “For, like, another three days. Then my winter break’s over and I go back to school.”
A college student. Lovely. “I’m looking for someone.”
A quick eye flick was all Rhode got before the attendant’s attention settled back on his phone. “Yeah, I bet you are. Dude’s over there.” His mop of hair was flung wide and waved Rhode toward the far end of the bowling alley. “Friend or something?”
“Or something.”
The boy nodded, as if he was either used to noncommittal answers or didn’t care what the answers were in general. “When you go over there, just know that your boy’s grumpy as hell because I told him we weren’t allowed to serve beer at ten in the morning. Whatever.” The kid shook his head and finally looked at Rhode for more than a blink, though it was with the penetrating boredom of a generation forced to go through the motions rather than make waves. “You need shoes?”
“No. Thank you.”
“Cool.”
Rhode didn’t stick around to no doubt see the relief on the kid’s face at not having to perform a task he was hired for. Instead, the seraph made a beeline for the sole lane that was actively having bowling balls thunder down its ramp.
Chrome was by the ball return, staring down the conveyor’s chute as if he was expecting it to offer some sort of retribution in the form of polished resin. Rhode waited for Chrome to acknowledge him, for there was no question the angel knew he was there.
Knew he was there and still didn’t want anything to do with him.
Chrome’s hunter-green ball popped out of the conveyor, but the angel didn’t grab it. He just stood there, back to Rhode, with his head bent toward the ball.
Rhode shifted on his feet. “I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to throw that at me.”
It was as much of an icebreaker as he could muster, and mages, did it feel utterly ridiculous given the things the two of them had shared and lived through. How in the holy hell had he let it get to this? Theirs was a history that spanned whole existences. Worlds had literally come and gone during the stretch of their friendship, and now they stood there, in a dilapidated bowling alley, like strangers who cringed at sharing a parking lot, let alone lifetimes.
Not to put too fine a point on the rejection, but it fucking hurt , and after hurting for so long, Rhode never thought this would be the torture that truly unraveled him.
Chrome’s hatred was a powerful thing. Rhode saw that now and regretted every moment he’d let the fireball get that big. The sentinel’s loathing had turned into a living, breathing thing that raged with a life of its own. Most beings had the capability to be soothed. He had his Neela to help him realize that. This, on the other hand, had unraveled to the point of uncertainty, mistrust, and despair.
And that he couldn’t allow, even if it meant Chrome chose to sever him from the sentinel’s life entirely. Permanently.
He would deserve no less.
“You’re not worth marring the resin. Just had this polished.” Chrome leaned down, ran a gentle hand over the gleaming bowling ball, and took his next shot. The ball careened down the lane with a force Rhode suspected was more of a challenge for Chrome to temper than triangulate. It hit slightly off-center, knocking the bulk of the middle pins down but left two lone soldiers standing on each side.
Chrome cursed. “If you came here to fuck up my game, you’re doing a bang-up job.”
“I came here to explain.”
“Nah, no need.” Chrome waved a dismissive hand at Rhode and looked up at the hanging television—tube, not flat screen—to check his score. The beard painting the angel’s square chin was new and wouldn’t have looked half bad if Chrome hadn’t let it consume half his neck and cheeks. “Damn splits.”
“Chrome—”
“Iron and Tung already talked to me. No, correction. Tung talked to me while Iron, I’m pretty sure, was just asked to be there as a blocker in case I lost my damn mind again and decided to break more shit that wasn’t mine.”
“You had every reason to react the way you did.”
“I know.” The statement was the period at the end of a lifetime’s worth of resentment. “Tell that to Molly, though.”
“She’ll forgive you.”
Chrome shrugged and let the topic die.
“What did Tung tell you?”
Charcoal eyes flashed the molten silver of Chrome’s fire but seemed to be fueled by melancholy rather than malice. “What do you think he told me?”
Rhode took a deep breath. “That I wanted to see you.”
“Well, you found me. Congratu-fucking-lations.” Chrome grabbed his ball from the ball return and sent it sailing toward the pins again. That time, he hit the left pin just right, and the thing careened to the side, taking the other pin with it.
Mages, this would be so much easier if?—
In a race to lose as much patience as Chrome had already lost, apparently, Rhode rounded the corner of the ball return and ignored the sticky wood floor as he squared his shoulders in front of the lane, pins to his back and Chrome to his front.
The sentinel narrowed his eyes. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to get your attention.”
“Looks to me like you’re trying to get your head taken off by a bowling ball.”
Rhode leveled his chin but didn’t move. “If that’s what it takes.”
They stood like that for a long moment, letting the tension charge whatever stage Rhode was about to willingly step onto. He wasn’t one for pretty speeches or motivational pep talks. He’d not done a single one when commanding Chrome’s spy legions, instead preferring to stick to the hard truths of what they would face and the tactics that would see them through the mission.
This was different, though, and uniquely painful, even for someone like him, who’d known endless pain. One never quite got immune to the stuff.
“I didn’t tell you what happened to me because I wanted to protect you.”
“Oh, bullshit.” Chrome waved him off and moved to get his ball. “If you came here to insult me, you wasted your time.”
“Wait!”
“Yeah, that’s the wrong fucking thing to say to me. Word of advice: don’t tell someone whose very existence has been defined by waiting to, you know, keep on trucking.”
“Goddammit, Chrome, I didn’t tell you about my wings or my power because you’re the reason I have them in the first place!”
Chrome’s hand stilled above the bowling ball. “What?”
Rhode ran a hand through his hair, tugging at the roots. “When I was shot down, Cyro was going to take my wings, and I was prepared for that. I was prepared for any type of physical torture that bastard could have dreamed up. My soul’s spark would have returned to the Eternal Flame, and I would have died happily knowing my purpose as an Empyrean warrior had been fulfilled. But when he laid your well-being across the path of my final salvation and gave me a choice of either giving you up or turning myself into what I have become, believe me, brother, when I tell you it was no choice at all.”
Chrome straightened. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that there is nothing I would not give up in this world, in the previous one or the next, if it meant losing you for good.”
The floodgates didn’t just open but were battering-rammed to splinters. Rhode held nothing back. Not how he had been shot down, what manner of torture they’d enacted, or even the bargain he’d struck that he would never bring himself to regret. For the first time since he’d been freed, he told Chrome about what he’d always remembered, which bits he chose to keep to himself, and fears he’d never shared to another soul, dead or alive. The minutes ticked on, and still, Rhode didn’t stop. Not when a screensaver covered the game’s scoreboard or when that pissant attendant was ordered to go check on the two of them and see whether they planned on finishing the game because maintenance would be arriving soon to service the lane.
As if oiling down a pinsetter was suddenly going to make the establishment’s long-lost customers reappear.
Rhode made it a point to keep going, though. He poured every bleeding second of his existence in captivity into Chrome’s eardrums, leaving nothing out. His fears, doubts, occasional hopes, and far more frequent disappointments. He spared nothing until every last memory was scooped out and delivered to the sentinel in whatever condition those memories happened to be in.
Perhaps it would have been a more cathartic experience if Rhode wasn’t standing in the middle of a bowling alley alongside bench seats that had seen more sweat than sanitizer and below a suspended ceiling with tiles so stained they sagged.
By the end of it, though, that damn bench seat, not his best friend, was the thing that caught Rhode when he finally needed something else to support himself besides determination and resolution.
Then Chrome grabbed a seat next to him and, in a similar show of mental exhaustion, leaned his forearms on his knees. “You can’t do that. You can’t come in here and say all that to me, telling me I was the reason you were in that fucking hell all that time. You don’t think I blame myself enough? I was the one who sent you out there in the first place!”
“No, I volunteered to go, and you know as well as I do that I didn’t give you a choice. There were no good choices, Chrome. Deep down, you know that.” Then Rhode gripped Chrome’s shoulder and dug in his emphasis. “And I wouldn’t have done a single thing differently. When I took my oath as seraphim commander, I didn’t just speak the words as a soldier. I spoke them as a friend.” His throat tightened. “As a brother. You were one of the seven sentinels, and there was no way I could have existed in a world where I would have led Cyro straight to you. Trust me when I say that I never blamed you once, never held any judgment or regret toward you. When you found me and I realized all that I had become, I was fucking terrified, not only at the new powers Cyro’s magic had manifested within me but at how you would look at me if you knew. And I thought that if you knew, I ran the risk of Cyro knowing as well, but I was so wrong. So much has changed since I’d last seen you or the others. I didn’t know about the battles you’d all waged with the charmers since my capture, nor did I know the powers the group of you had come to master.”
Chrome’s shoulder muscle jumped beneath Rhode’s hand, but the seraph wouldn’t relent. Not now. “I didn’t know what sort of place I could have within your family, among the sentinels. The parts of me that made me a seraph have been burned away and replaced with powers similar to yours but also very different. I had not shared your bond with the others, had not even lived life in the same world as you all had. And there you guys were, half of you soul bonded, for god’s sake! When you and Drea brought me to the surface, I thought I was as much an imposter as I was an Empyrean warrior. I could no more relate to you than my surroundings. The only thing I could rely on, could still understand and hold true to, was my ability to keep Cyro from you and the others. To do that, I had to keep you at arm’s length, and it hurt every fucking minute.”
Chrome’s gaze had turned somber, and Rhode could see the angel reliving those early days after the rescue in a play of mixed emotions that warred across his bold features.
“I never meant what I said, Chrome. I would have died without your compassion, without Drea’s care. Of course I knew you never expected anything in return.” Then the corner of Rhode’s lip lifted. “I suspect if I had tried to truly thank you in any real way, you’d have ordered Drea to shove an oxygen mask on my face and run screaming from the room in search of something to punch.”
The gruff chuckle lifted the sentinel’s shoulders, and Rhode released a breath. “In emergencies, gratitude is implied, you know,” Chrome added.
“Even among friends?”
Chrome ran a hand over his jaw. “But not always among brothers.”
Rhode sat there, still as stone, while he listened to Chrome.
“I never wanted you out of my life. I was beyond angry and equally as hurt. Ax, I’ve only ever wanted you back. It was a miracle of the prime mages that I found you, and when I couldn’t reach you up here,” he said, tapping his temple, “it fucking ate me up inside that I had somehow failed you again.”
“You didn’t fail.”
“Yeah, I did. Because I didn’t do a good enough job of letting you know that, short of not lying your ass off and telling Drea that her cooking’s the best you’ve ever had, there’s not a damn thing you could do that would ever take you out of this family.”
Rhode had to grin at that. “I would never say such a thing to her, but something tells me you may have learned that lesson the hard way.” He cocked a brow.
Chrome shook his head and smiled the smile of a thousand fools. “Why do you think I got her a new car?”
Rhode barked out a laugh loud enough to shake the already shaky foundations of the bowling alley. And when Chrome’s laugh joined his and rounded out the chorus, it wasn’t long before tears leaked from both their eyes.
Chrome was the first to wipe his away and regain his breath. “Oh, man, that felt good.”
“Yes. Yes it did.”
Then Chrome held out his hand, but when Rhode did the same, Chrome didn’t grab his palm. Instead, he rolled up Rhode’s silk shirt sleeve to reveal the mark of the seraphim commander, then inched up his own sleeve. When their forearms clasped, it was with an embrace that had first been forged in service of the Empyrean but had since been stoked in service of each other.
“Welcome back, asshole.”
Rhode rolled his eyes. “Thanks. It’s good to be back. Neela will be relieved to hear it. She, uh, was the one who made me realize I finally needed to speak to you.”
“Smart woman.”
“The smartest. You know,” Rhode said, leaning back against the bench and propping his arm up along the rim, “it’s taken me quite the journey to wrap my head around, but I think this partnership she and I have?—”
“Hold up.” Chrome raised his hand. “Partnership?”
“The bond.”
Chrome’s face twisted into pretzel proportions, and Rhode wondered whether the sweat smell was truly coming from him or the bench. “That’s not how this works.”
“She is my partner,” Rhode asserted.
“Nah. Oh, man, is that how you’re looking at your mate? As a partner?”
It was Rhode’s chance to turn on the confusion. “Neela is?—”
“Not a fucking lawyer who’s trying to get her name on the same bill as yours. She’s your mate . Your other half.” Then he leaned forward and held out his hands as if he were trying to explain trigonometry to a kindergartener. “Look, with Drea and me, when she breathes in, I breathe out. When she wakes up, I’m not letting her feet hit the floor without making sure she’s already got a smile on her face. And when she’s off with Molly or one of the other girls doing something, my trigger finger doesn’t stop twitching until I have her in my arms again, even though, logically, I know she’s fine and, though I still can’t conceive of it, probably having the time of her life without me.”
Chrome paused to let his words sink in, but Rhode couldn’t respond right away. All he could think about was every single interaction he and Neela had shared. How there wasn’t a single thing he’d done for her that he didn’t look on as part and parcel to their arrangement. He’d just assumed that what he’d felt for her hadn’t been his own feelings but had somehow been generated by the magic of the soul bond.
But if he took the bond away…
“If you took the bond away, would you still want her?” Chrome finished for him.
Rhode’s jaw tightened. “Don’t fucking ask me that question. Of course I would want her! I always want her. She’s . . . she’s . . .”
The reason he had a brother and a family again.
The reason he had lived through the experiments.
The reason he was more powerful than Cyro could imagine.
And he’d treated her like a coworker instead of the constant source of light and joy she had become.
Chrome leaned back against the bench and folded his arms across his chest. “Oh, man, you are so fucked.”
“I have to go.”
“Yeah, you do.”
Rhode bolted from his seat and was out the door before the pins fell down again. But as he took flight, the crashing sound chased him far into the sky, bolstering him in a way he’d never experienced before.
It was the sound of a perfect strike.