28. Max
Max
The Nightingale team trained on a drill field at the academy’s western edge, learning to move like one animal.
“Again,” Enna barked. “Thelxin, you’re not serenading some tavern virgin. Drop them faster. And don’t bat your lashes at me. It doesn’t work.”
“I’m not batting my lashes at you,” our siren said, and gave the charging squad three low notes. “If I wanted to seduce you, you’d know.”
Out past the fence a whole platoon slowed, wandered, and stopped, blinking like men who’d walked into a room and forgotten why.
“Spartan trains against siren.” Enna tapped her ear. “Look who’s winning.”
“Are you?”
Thelxin looked barely past his twenties, all sea-glass eyes and pretty bones, and he’d spent seventy years in Xander’s glass box because he wouldn’t sing for him.
The fourth note put Enna down on one knee. Thelxin smiled, all teeth now.
Across the field, the twins stood palm to palm, building a storm cloud overhead.
Rin and Ren finished each other’s weather the way other sisters finish sentences.
Apart, each of them rated a respectable seven in magic.
Together, wind braided into rain braided into thunder and lightning, and the first time they’d shown us, it hailed indoors.
Sable came out of the shadow under their cloud, tagged Frost between the shoulder blades, and was gone before he could turn. Give our shadow-walker two patches of connected dark and she’d cross the distance without traveling it.
“Do that on a battlefield,” Frost told the darkness, “and I’ll buy the first round.”
In the far corner, three volunteer swordsmen rushed Belmonte at once. Three blades hit the ground inside two seconds. He hadn’t moved his feet more than a stride.
“Slower,” he told them, amused. “So you can watch how you lose.”
Sir Belmonte was probably the finest blade on the continent, and the sword was only half of him. Between passes he laid a war mage’s sigils down the edge of the steel, and whatever he wrote there made the other weapons ring like struck glass when they met it.
He flipped a knife to Marco, hilt first. “You’re next, Commander.”
Micky worked the wall with a field kit, ink-stained to the second knuckle and jittery as a plucked wire, turning a fistful of gravel into something that smoked and thickened. Our potion-maker had nearly wept with professional despair the day I held a conversation with Coldiron in front of him.
And Quill sat on a stool doing the smallest work, and the most frightening.
A soldier’s foot slipped. A rapid-fire bow jammed at the wrong second, and the archer swore at it with feeling.
A thumb on fate’s scale, she called it. A blessing here, a hex there, and worth a battalion in the right minute.
Seven of the rescued supernaturals had stayed with me. Every one of them rare, which was why Xander had shelved them in the first place.
None of them were what they’d been. The stasis box and the collar had drained them, some for decades, some for centuries. Fed now, and free, and furious. They were coming back fast.
Marco, Frost, and Enna were on this field every morning, forging seven strange powers into one unit.
I wanted more from them than drills.
One of them might know something about the fallen archangel who held a domain in Hell. For thousands of years Lucifer had been a myth. Then his demons walked out of the DarkVeil.
For ten years, I’d steered clear of anything that deep, all to keep my inner demon at bay. But I could no longer afford ignorance.
So I asked.
“Tales only, Lady Morning.” Belmonte looked at me with the silver eye, then the black one. “Lucifer was Heaven’s brightest. First of the archangels. And he had an argument with his Maker.”
“About what?”
“Depends who’s telling. Pride, says one line. Love, says another.” He sheathed his favorite sword. “The oldest version I ever heard says it was a question he wouldn’t stop asking. It never said what the question was.”
“And the war?”
“Wars.” Quill cut her deck one-handed. “Two of them, an eon before anything we’d call our time.
Michael and Lucifer. Heaven’s new first, and the fallen one.
Earth was their floor. The sky burned for a generation.
Seas boiled off and came back down as poison.
The continents cracked like plates.” She turned a card, glanced at it, put it back.
“The world nearly ended. Twice. It only survived because Heaven’s army retreated.
Not lost. Retreated.” Her rings went still on the deck.
“No tale ever says why. That’s the part that frightens me. ”
“Nobody knows anything from before history,” Micky said. “We’re hearing the echo of an echo.”
“There’s a tale that isn’t old, though.” Quill set the deck down.
“Xander has been hunting Max since the day the Pallid Court lost her. The Collector doesn’t hunt the way other men do.
” Warmth went out of her voice. “He took children. Girls the age the lost heir would have been, year after year, wherever his agents could snatch them. Gifted ones above all. He woke the magic in them early, then tested them past what a body could take, hunting for the child bride who’d slipped away from him. Most didn’t survive the waking.”
“We heard them scream sometimes, in the Glass Tower.” One of the twins. The other shuddered. “And we celebrated that we were the wrong age. Both of us.”
I stood there with my fists closed until the knuckles ached. A whole generation of stolen girls, burned out in my name.
How many names did I have to put on the ledger? Wren and Bryn and Jace were already on it. Every line of it, Xander was going to answer for.
Then I went back to drills.
I ran the wall-and-strike pattern with Frost and Enna until my breathing came down. Between passes, I asked the question that had itched at me since Houston.
“Why do they call him the Saint?”
“He built himself a religion.” Thelxin’s voice went flat. “He took an old faith that worshipped older gods, stripped the parts that asked anything of him, and bolted on scripture from three dead creeds nobody was left to argue for. The rest he made up. The man isn’t original.”
“When the world went to shit, people needed something to hold on to. Even a false thing,” Quill said. “Clever people knelt fastest. Clever minds are the easiest to blind, because they’re so certain they can’t be.” She swallowed. “And he’s a mentalist, on top of everything.”
The ballroom came back. Xander’s hand closing over mine, his will sliding down my temple like oil through a keyhole. Pressing. Pressing. Without the demon in me holding that door, I’d have been enslaved on the dance floor, smiling the whole time.
My jaw locked. I put an extra six inches of snap into the next strike, and Marco grunted his approval.
“He promised us he was the light.” Ren said it, and her twin nodded along, both of them wearing the same scraped-clean expression.
“Follow the Saint and he’d walk you into the light.
Serve the Saint and you’d ascend. Half the Haven still believes it.
We believed it too, once. Until we found out what was waiting at the top of the climb. ”
She glanced up at a tower none of us could see anymore.
“There is a true God,” Rin said, catching rain in her cupped palms. “Most people only ever follow the doctrine. Paper and rules.”
Marco and Frost worked through the whole conversation and wouldn’t touch theology with a ten-foot spear. They had the Spartan creed, and that was enough.
“Believe whatever gets you through the night,” Marco said, walking the line, correcting Micky’s grip. “Gods come and go.”
“Right now, hold your formation,” Frost added.
We broke at midday, sweat-soaked and closer than we’d been at dawn, and I was reaching for the water jug when Quill went still.
Her hand had drifted to the deck without her looking at it. She turned one card, and everything easy in her face shut off.
“He’s coming for us. Every one of us.” She didn’t show us the card. “He doesn’t forgive being stolen from. And if he gets us back, we’ll pray for death and it won’t come.”
The cold got as far as my ribs before the rage came up under it and burned it out.
Seven faces turned to me, and it was in every one of them, under the sweat and the new hope.
The memory of a glass cage.
“Let that motherfucker come knocking,” I said. “He’s the one who won’t walk back out.”