Their tiny shadow-moths grew larger as they dropped down to meet them, and they set themselves down in the shade of the palms and released their glamours. Karou took in the sight of her friends first. Zuzana and Mik looked weak and dehydrated, sweaty and showing signs of sunburn—Note to self: You can sunburn while invisible—but the worst was the strain etched into their expressions, and a disturbing laxness about their eyes that made them look unfixed, not fully present. Shell-shocked.
What had she done, bringing them into war?
She looked to Virko next, still afraid of what she would see in Akiva’s eyes. Virko, who had been a lieutenant of the Wolf, and one of those to leave her alone at the pit with him. The only one to look back, true, but he had left all the same. He had also saved Mik’s and Zuzana’s lives. He was stalwart and weathered, well accustomed to the rigors of flight and battle—no sunburn for him or fatigue, but the strain was there in his face, and the shock. And still the shame, Karou saw. It had been there since the pit, in every glance.
She gave him a look that she hoped was focused and clear, and she nodded. Forgiveness? Gratitude? Fellowship? She didn’t quite know. He returned the nod, though, with a solemnity that was like ceremony, and then, finally, Karou turned to Akiva.
She hadn’t really looked at him since the portal. She had seen him, in brief moments unglamoured, and she had been, every second, attuned to his presence, but she hadn’t looked, not at his face, not into his eyes. She was afraid, and… she was right to be afraid.
His pain was undisguised, so raw it made her own pain sing straight to the surface, pure enough for tithing, but that wasn’t the worst part. If it was only pain, she might have found a way to go to him, to reach for his hand as she had on the other side of the portal, or even for his heart, as she had in the cave. We are the beginning.
But… the beginning of what? Karou wondered, desolate, because there was rage in Akiva’s eyes, too, and an implacability that was unmistakable. It was hatred, and it was vengeance. It was terrifying, and it froze her in place. When she had first lain eyes on him in the Jemaa in Marrakesh, he had been absolutely cold. Inhuman, merciless. What she had seen on him then was vengeance as habit, and fury cooled by years of numbness.
Later, in Prague, she had seen his humanity return to him, like a thaw releasing a heart from ice. She hadn’t been able to fully appreciate it at the time, because she hadn’t understood what it meant, or what he was coming back from, but now she did. He had resurrected himself—the Akiva she had known so long ago, so full of life and hope—or at least, he had begun to. She still hadn’t seen him smile the way he had back then, a smile so beautiful it had channeled sunlight and made her feel drunk with love, at once light-headed and firmly, perfectly, gratefully connected to the world—earth and sky and joy and him. Everything else had paled beside that feeling. Race was nothing, and treason just a word.
She had just begun to feel that smile was possible again, and the feeling of effortless rightness, too, but, looking at Akiva now, it felt very far away again, and so did he.
As she understood it, there had been several thousand Misbegotten soldiers as recently as last year, and the final berserk push of the war had reduced that number to those she knew from the Kirin caves. Akiva had endured that, survived it, and then he had endured and survived the death of Hazael, and now he was here, safe, while possibly—probably—he lost all the rest.
What Karou saw in him was vengeance still molten, and it was wrong, it wasn’t where they were supposed to be, but it felt… inevitable. Brimstone had told her, just before her execution, “To stay true in the face of evil is a feat of strength,” but maybe, thought Karou, sick at heart, it was just too much to expect. Maybe that strength was too much to ask of anyone.
The feeling of half death was with her still. She felt flattened out, or hollowed out. Again.
She turned to her friends and, with effort, spoke almost evenly. “Could you two go in and get a room? Maybe it’s best if the rest of us aren’t seen.”
She thought—hoped—Zuzana might make some sarcastic comment to that, or suggest riding right up to the gate on Virko-back or something, but she didn’t. She just nodded.
“Do you realize,” asked Mik, in a bald effort to jostle some Zuzana-ness back into Zuzana, “that our three wishes are about to come true? I don’t know if they’ll have chocolate cake here, but—”
Zuzana cut him off. “I’m changing my wishes anyway,” she said, and counted them off on her fingers. “One: for our friends to be safe. Two: for Jael to drop dead, and three…”
Whatever she meant to say next, she didn’t manage it. Karou had never seen her friend look so lost and fragile. She cut in. “If it doesn’t include food,” she reminded Zuzana gently, “it’s a lie. At least, so I’ve been told.”
“Fine.” Zuzana took a deep breath, centering herself. “Then I could really use some world peace for dinner.” She was all dark-eyed intensity. Something was lost in her. Karou saw it and mourned. War does that, nothing for it. Reality lays siege. Your framed portrait of life is smashed, and a new one thrust upon you. It’s ugly, and you don’t even want to look at it let alone hang it on the wall, but you have no choice, once you know. Once you really know.
And who was Zuzana going to be, now that this knowledge was hers?
“World peace for dinner,” mused Mik, scratching his beard stubble. “Does that come with fries?”
“It freaking better,” said Zuzana. “Or I will send it freaking back.”
The angel’s name was Elazael.
The church founded by her descendants—and they preferred the term church to cult, naturally—was called the Handfast of Elazael, and every girl child born in the bloodline was christened Elazael. If, then, by puberty, she had not manifested “the gift,” she was rechristened by another name. Eliza had been the only one in the last seventy-five years to hold on to it, and she had often thought that the worst thing of all—the cherry on the cake of her awful upbringing—was the envy of the others.
Nothing glitters in the eyes like envy. Few could know this as profoundly as she did. It had to be something special to grow up knowing that any given member of your large extended family would probably kill and eat you if it meant they could have your “gift” for themselves, Renfield-style.
The Handfast was matriarchal, and Eliza’s mother was the current high priestess. Converts were called “cousins,” while those of the blood—venerated even if they didn’t have “the gift”—were “the Elioud.” It was the term, in ancient texts, for the offspring of the better-known “Nephilim,” who were the first fruit of angels’ congress with humans.