He didn’t wait for her to find them.
A beat of his wings and he surged through the air with such force that she was melded to him more completely even than when they had embraced in the shower, and her face was not against his chest this time, nor her feet planted on the floor.
Her legs twined with his. She smoothed her hands up his neck and into his hair and held his head as she was swept away with him, spiraling.
Finally. Finally, they kissed.
Akiva’s mouth was hungry and sweet and rich and slow and hot, and the kiss was long and deep and every other measure of scope there was except for infinite. It wasn’t that. A kiss must end for another to begin, and it did, and did again.
Kiss gave way to kiss, and in the eyes-closed, all-consuming world of their embrace, Karou had the sensation that each kiss encompassed the last. It was hallucinatory: Kiss within kiss within kiss, going deeper and deeper and sweeter and hotter and headier, and she hoped that Akiva’s equilibrium was guiding them because she’d lost all sense of her own. There was no up or down; there were only mouths, and hips, and hands—
—and now she registered the heat and texture of him. The smoothness, the roughness, the realness.
A kiss while flying, invisible, above St. Peter’s Square. It sounded like a fantasy but felt so very, very real.
And then a shared smile was shaping their mouths, and laughter came between them. They were breathless with relief—and with simple oxygen deprivation, too, because who had time to inhale? They rested their foreheads together, and the tips of their noses, and paused to let it all sink in. The kiss, their breath, and all that they’d just done.
Human soldiers patrolled beneath them, wondering at a sudden gust of sparks, and Karou and Akiva spun there in the air, held aloft by magic and languid wingbeats, and held together by a pull they’d felt from the very moment of first meeting, on a battlefield long ago.
Karou touched Akiva’s heart again, reassuring herself. “How did you do that?” she asked quietly, her head still spinning from the kiss. “Back there.”
“I don’t know. I never know. It just comes.”
“The knife passed right through you. Did you feel it?” She wished she could see him, but since she couldn’t, she kept a hand on his face and her forehead to his.
She felt his nod, and his breath brushed her lips when he spoke. “I did and didn’t. I can’t explain it. I was there and not there. I saw it hit me and keep going.”
She was silent for a moment, processing this. “Is it true, then, what Jael said? That you’re… invisible to death? I don’t have to worry about you ever dying?”
“I don’t think that’s true.” He traced the contours of her face with his lips, as though he could see her like that. “But you would have resurrected me in any case.”
Is that what would have happened, if Akiva had died? Or would they have lost control of the situation and all been overpowered? Karou didn’t even want to think about it. “Sure,” she said with false lightness. “But let’s not be casual about this body, okay?” She nuzzled him back. “It may be your soul that I love, but I’m pretty keen on its vessel, too.”
Her voice had dropped lower as she spoke, and his response was low and husky in kind. “I can’t say I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, and brushed his face past hers to kiss a place beneath her ear, sending instant, electric frissons coursing through her body.
She gave a faint murmur of surprise that sounded like the Oh in Oh my, but without the my, and then she saw, over Akiva’s shoulder, the ascension of the first ranks of Dominion from the Papal Palace, as Jael’s army returned to the sky.
68
FALLEN
“It wasn’t our fault!” Razgut had screamed when the Faerers were sentenced, but this was a lie. It was their fault, and this knowledge made a dimension of grief and guilt in their bodies and minds that supplanted everything else they had ever been or contained.
Home to Meliz, mindless with panic. Raise the alarm. The Six were only four now. Iaoth and Dvira had turned back to fight the Cataclysm and been devoured.
Back to the capital and cry out: Beasts are coming! Flee! Beasts are coming!
Some made it out, through a back door, as it were. The worlds were layered, like a stack of pages. The Beasts came from one direction, laying waste to everything in their path. Those who could fled in the other direction, to the neighbor world the other side: Eretz. There was no time to organize an evacuation. Some thousands out of millions made it out. Not even ten thousand, not even as many as that. All the rest were left behind.
The many, the colors. The jewels shaken out on a tapestry. A world’s richest offering. Lost.
Many made it all the way to the portal only to be denied. It was small, the cut. Two or three at a time might squeeze through; it was slow, and the Beasts were coming. Screams from on the other side, they echoed in Razgut’s ears to this day as the scream of a whole dying world. He remembered how abruptly it had cut to silence, and how some of the last to make it through were still reaching back for loved ones trapped on the other side.
So the portal was closed, but this the Faerers had done dozens of times in their retreat, and it had never held the Beasts out yet. Once wounded, the skin between the worlds never fully healed. It would have failed again, and the Cataclysm would have taken Eretz, too, and then Earth, and every world after, through each portal cut by the second Six, however far they’d voyaged.
But the Stelians were among those who made it out of Meliz, and they were ready. They had always opposed the Faering, and in the years since the Faerers’ departure, they had prepared themselves to do what no one else could or would: mend the skin, the veil, the membrane, the energy, the layers of the great All. They closed the portal and kept it closed, and Eretz was saved, and Earth, and all the rest.
It was the Stelians who had saved them.
As for the Faerers: damnation, infamy. And obliteration.
They heard, from their prison cell, what was done to the memories of the survivors. The magi hadn’t learned not to meddle. They stole from each seraph the past, not just the Cataclysm but Meliz, too, so that their people could begin a new life. So that the people, Razgut understood, wouldn’t wake up one morning and realize where the blame truly lay: with the magi who had dreamt up the Faering in the first place, and had chosen the best of their young folk to see it through. They shared the blame. But not the punishment. Oh no, not they.
Iaoth and Dvira were the lucky ones: swiftly eaten, swiftly dead.