Chapter Nineteen #3
“You’re telling me there is no version of tomorrow where words work?” Prophet questions.
“I am telling you the chaplain stays home tomorrow.” He deserves it stated plainly, so I state it plainly.
“You will stand in the center of a circle, looking at one of the first beings Heaven ever loved. Something in you will want to offer him a door, because offering doors is what you are. Do not. The Devil offered him nothing, and the Devil is better at reading damnation than either of us.”
My hand finds his shoulder. Beneath my palm, his warmth meets mine, mortal and breakable now. “Grace, mercy, redemption. Every gift you carry, he has already priced for parts. You are not a brother to him and not a soul. You are inventory.”
Prophet holds my eyes for a long moment, while snow flicks down through the spruce behind him.
“When you all arrived...” he says, “... you told me you didn’t want to see me diminished.”
“I remember.”
“And now?”
“I was wrong,” I tell him. “Diminished was the wrong word.” I lift the axe back onto my shoulder. “Concentrated.”
His brows pull together.
“You’re less than you were in some ways, sure, but what survived got meaner.”
His mouth almost lifts into a smile. “Is that intended as reassurance?”
“From me? Absolutely.”
Something passes across his face, and neither of us ruins it by speaking further. He carries the split wood in, while I carry the story back down to where it lives, and the morning goes on being cold around a hellhound who has never once felt it.
Church convenes at noon with the entire table cleared except the map.
Blade builds the plan aloud, piece by piece, and it has the clean weight of something he and Vex have been assembling in the dark.
The clearing north of the cabin is the ground.
Open enough to set a seal, framed by the terrain we choose in advance.
Calix believes his forty-two gives him leverage, so he will walk into the open ground expecting surrender terms. We will give him a circle instead.
“Containment,” Blade says. “Eight of us on the boundary. Nobody duels with this thing. Nobody plays hero. The circle holds, or nothing else matters. Flint, Ranger, north.”
Ranger nods once.
“Fury south.”
“Already mine,” I reply.
“Vex, you’re mobile. Anything breaks, you get there first.”
Vex grins. “Usually do.”
“Scout and Rooster... air.”
Rooster raises a hand. “I’d like it noted that I’m much prettier from above.”
“Nobody has ever noted that,” Hollywood says.
Blade doesn’t even look at them. “Hollywood, you work the Devoted. Distract them, confuse them, make them forget why they’re here.”
Hollywood’s smile disappears. “Done.”
Blade’s eyes land on Prophet, and the room changes.
“You hold the center.”
Prophet nods. “And Calix?”
“Come through us first.”
Then Blade’s eyes find the seat by the lamp. “Lily.”
“I know my role.”
“No.”
Every head in the cabin turns toward Prophet.
Lily’s expression doesn’t change. “That wasn’t a question.”
“You will be connected to the seal.”
“Yes.”
“And if it fails—”
“Then you better make damn sure it doesn’t.”
Prophet’s jaw locks. “Lily.”
She closes the notebook. “You don’t get to decide I’m too fragile for this because we slept together.”
Rooser becomes intensely interested in the ceiling.
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“Good, because I am the tether, you are the living end of the rope, and we don’t have time for you to become stupid about me now.”
“Once you take hold...” Prophet says quietly, “... you cannot let go until the seal closes. No matter what you see. No matter what he says to you through it.”
She turns to a fresh page in the notebook. “Then I won’t let go.”
Forty-two souls standing outside in the snow, willing to die for a god who intends to use them up.
I look through the window at Lily.
Fuck.
I counted wrong.
There are forty-three willing souls on this mountain. The difference is that forty-two of them are willing to die because Calix lied to them. Lily knows exactly what waits for her, and she’s walking toward it anyway, not for Heaven, not for grace, not for salvation.
For Prophet.
Later, I find them at the table together. Lily is reading through her notes again, pen moving whenever she finds something she doesn’t like, while Prophet sits beside her, one hand resting on her thigh.
“You don’t have to do this,” he tells her.
Lily doesn’t stop writing. “We’ve covered this.”
“I would like to cover it again.”
“No.”
“Lily.”
Her pen finally stops, and she covers his hand on her thigh with hers. “I’m scared.” Prophet goes completely still. “Good,” she says. “Now you know I’m not being reckless. I’m terrified, I understand exactly what could happen, and I’m still doing it.”
He leans into her until his mouth is at her temple. “I know.”
“Then stop trying to save me from my own decisions.”
His eyes close. “I am trying.”
I leave them to it and head for the south line. Calix has forty-two people waiting in the snow and thinks that makes him powerful, but he’s made the same mistake monsters always make. He’s counted bodies and called them loyalty.
He hasn’t met ours yet.