Host

Chapter 23

T wo champards were hacking at the succubus. The beast was on the floor of the old church, bleeding into a pool. Rupert was using his bastard sword to behead it. The others had raced for cover when the seraphs attacked, and I found them safe behind rubble, in a semicircle between me and the fight taking place.

Over us, Amethyst stared down at the fight, hate for me on her feline face. Swords flashing, the seraphs hemmed Azazel, lightning bursting from their hands, the energies shattering long before they harmed him. Their own shields took the brunt of dark lightning, bolts of black-light flashing into the air to strike at them. One Raven took a hit and fell, screaming, burning, to the church floor.

In mage-sight, I saw a conjure take shape. The flames on the burning Raven went out. Cheran ducked from cover to pull the seraph to safety. Nifty use for the fire-snuffing incantation I hadn’t bothered to learn. A second Raven fell. And so did Zadkiel, in a gout of flame that lit the church, rising in the night with his screams. Amethyst shrieked with him, a howl of grief.

In silhouette, I saw my champards shield their faces. The elders fell to the ground and scrambled for cover. The flames snuffed quickly, but I could see that the Raven and Zadkiel, the right hand of Michael the ArchSeraph, were badly wounded. Battle-lust shot through me in a burst of adrenaline and fear. We had to drain the Dragon. I needed the wheels.

Lights appeared in the wheels’ eyes at the front bow, near the golden navcone. Amethyst had fired up her weapons. She was going to help us! Triumph filled me and I stood, ax and tanto held in the air, my eyes full of tears. A single laserlike beam fired, a pencil-thin lavender light. It struck the beast. Azazel cringed, his fingers shifting as if to strengthen a shield. “Yes!” I shouted.

Amethyst stared down at me, raging, “No! The wheels are mine! You have no right!”

I lowered my weapons. She thought I had done that? “Not me,” I shouted back. Guessing, I yelled, “The wheels themselves! Do they act alone?”

Her human face turned to me in shock and disbelief. She brought down a fist on the side of the wheels, anger so strong the ship jolted. The weapon stopped firing. The wheels’ eyes closed. The gyroscopic rotors slowed. She had powered down her ship.

“Ask them!” I screamed. Amethyst glared at me, her demi-wings fluttering.

Desperate, I turned back to the fight. Azazel had a featherless score along one wing where the beam had hit, but no other sign of injury.

It looked bad, now three to one. Raziel had been burned by a glancing bolt of black energies. His battle armor on one side and one wing were scorched, the smell of burned feathers foul on the air. The third Raven knelt in a pool of blood. Cheriour was bleeding, one arm gone, amputated at the elbow, his teal plumage splattered with his own gore. The Dragon looked just dandy. We were going to lose this fight unless we could do something.

“Audric?” I shouted, spotting him kicking something, sending it flying. Jane’s head.

He whirled to me and screamed, “To war!” Bloodlust sparked through me like lightning.

My champards raced in, firing weapons and cutting at Azazel. I followed at the seraph’s side, weapons raised, the war ax whirling slowly. The Dragon laughed and took a single sweep with one wing. An arc of black energy sent us all flying. I caught the backlash and hit the floor, skidding, bowling into a pile of debris. Something jabbed me hard, slicing through my new dobok, and I pulled out a long sliver of wood tipped with my blood.

My ribs grated as I sat up, trying to find my breath through the pain. I smelled human blood, fresh and deadly. Dread filled me. They would die. All of them. Because of me.

I crawled across the heap of broken pews to Rose. “Do you have your prime or your visa?” I asked her.

“No. But I have this.” She held a cross she had formed from a bit of wire and two long splinters of ancient wood. We had been raised Christian. Rose had never wandered from the faith as I had. For her, the cross was an icon of great power. “I just have to fill it.”

The seraphs dashed in, wings sweeping. Thunder rocked the floor beneath my feet. Champards followed, moving as a team, holy oil, smoke, and ozone adding to the sensory miasma. But they were two short. Dread filled me. I swept the church with my eyes, spotting them in a shadow just as Audric shouted, “Thorn! Rupert’s hurt.”

“Rupert,” I whispered. His dream. His damn dream.

“Take me to Thorn,” Rupert said, his voice barely heard over the fighting.

Audric shouldered him, carrying him around the back wall of the church, as far from the battle as he could get, weaving through the detritus. I smelled bowel and blood. A lot of it.

Audric settled beside Rose and me, easing Rupert to the floor between us. An avulsion separated his entire left side, a slab of tissue hanging out. I saw intestines and something that had to be his liver. Rupert was nearly gone.

I fell to my knees. Hands shaking, I ripped off every healing amulet I had, mine and Cheran’s, and dumped them into his wound. Gloves blood-slicked, I tried to force the huge slab of flesh back in place, trying to close the wound. I heard a shaky litany, “No, no, no, no, no, no”—my own voice, shocked and breathless. I held up the tanto, but the flame sizzled and I knew it hadn’t enough power to heal the fearful wound.

There was little bleeding; most had bled out. Audric was drenched in Rupert’s blood. More spread in a small pool at my knees.

Rupert was dying. Unless…Unless I could get a stasis shield, the shields that can keep a human alive long enough to be healed. Raziel had given one to Ciana in the pin she wore.

“Raziel,” I shouted, rising. “To me!” My seraph met my eyes, his alight with the joy of war. He saw Rose at my side and his eyes widened. He touched Cheriour and started to us.

Azazel swept once with his left wing, a long arc. The energies of a conjure fell away like black dust. The smell hit them. The scent of succubus. Everything went still.

Slowly, Zadkiel raised his burned head. The seared Ravens scrabbled, trying to rise, rattling charred arms and wing bones, metatarsals like long sticks against the floor. Raziel turned from me, hunger on his face. An icy wind blew straight down into the church, whipping the scent of succubus high.

Azazel chuckled, the sound like gongs and bells, angelic. Horrific.

“No. No!” I screamed.

To one side, the last Raven standing began to pant, his eyes bulging, his hands tearing at his clothes. An aqua light washed over him, a wave of bright mist that coated all the seraphs. Raziel stepped away from me as if I no longer existed.

“No,” I gasped, whipping my eyes to Rupert. His mouth opened, trying for breath, but only a whisper of air passed.

The visa, silent for so long, informed me what was happening. The seraphs are losing their heavenly bodies, not in transmogrification, but in a baser transfiguration. They acquire sublunary bodies, just as did the fallen Watchers when they joined with the daughters of men.

Sublunary bodies meant they were stripping themselves of power. “How do I stop it?” I asked. But the visa had no comment. “Answer me!” I shouted to it, my mouth dry, my skin hot with fear. In the nave, explosions went off, the small land mines planted by Audric triggered by converging snails. I covered my face against shrapnel, deafened by the sound.

The elders had started over on the psalm. They reached a verse that said, “He brought me forth also into a large place; he delivered me, because he delighted in me.”

God. They were talking about God the Victorious. About his willingness to deliver humans out of the hand of death. About his care and love. The love of God. The same God who was allowing this to happen.

Fury rose up in me, hotter than magma, the fury of years lost, of lives lost. I rose straight and shouted at the sky, “You claim you care! If you love, if you love at all, then fix Rupert! Fix him!” I raised the tanto and screamed at the sky, “Fix him!”

A hand brushed my boot. “Too late,” Rupert whispered, his voice rustling like paper. “Use me. Like Mole Man. To bind the Dragon. The dream. The pink quartz sword,” he coughed, blood bubbling up his throat. He was drowning in his own blood. His image wavered in my tears, his energies stuttering in mage-sight like a flickering candle.

“We will not sacrifice you,” Audric said fiercely. He shifted Rupert more upright, so he could inhale, and Rupert made an awful sound, wet and thick and tortured. “Help him,” he demanded of me.

“He’s dying,” Rose said, her voice dreamy, her eyes on the wound.

I felt all the blood drain from my limbs. Rose. She was an earth mage. The rarest, most generous, the best of healers. And, if not controlled, the most deadly of all mages. Earth mages could heal from the brink of death. And they could steal the life of another for the power it gave them. I remembered the prophecy at our birth. A Rose by any Other Name will still draw Blood. The prophecy that claimed Rose and I together would become a weapon. Or perhaps, if I let her use me, a killer.

A killer, like in Rupert’s dream. The sword tipped with a pink quartz nugget wasn’t Rupert’s prophesized murderer. Rose was. Rose, who had always been associated in my mind with rose quartz. I should have figured it out. I should have understood.

“I could have saved him if I had drawn power. But it’s too late. He’s…almost…” She smiled, breathing in his scent in a mind-skim, and finished, “…lost.”

“Take me,” Rupert said, his voice a breath. “Use me.” He lifted a finger as if to reach for her, a plea in his eyes.

Rose inched across the icy floor and took his hand. “As you will, so mote it be,” she said. Rupert took a breath, wet and sucking, his mouth working. Agonal. Dying. And Rose dipped the wooden cross she held into his wound.

“No.” Audric said, his grip tightening on his lover. But I could see the knowledge of death in Audric’s face, a desperate pain.

“No,” I repeated. But I was paralyzed. Watching.

Shrieks and pain-filled cries echoed off the stone church walls. Lightning threw the scene into sharp relief and dark shadows. Rupert’s blood glistened in a huge pool, reflecting the lightning. Thunder rumbled.

Power filled Rose fast, flowing from Rupert into the cross, into her hand, into her core. Her body began to glow with mage energies. She threw back her head and laughed, a reckless sound, full of glee and joy and power. Rupert’s mouth fell slack. His pupils widened. His life force being sucked away. On his last breath, he whispered, “Audric…”

My sister laughed, the sound echoing off the church walls, joyous and blissful. Laughed as she killed my best friend.

And Rupert died.

His spirit, his energy, filled Rose. And the cross became a weapon.

With a wordless cry, Audric fell across Rupert, fists bunched, his grief like a hot iron charring into my heart.

Rupert was gone. My tears fell, ignored, burning my face, dripping onto my dobok.

I looked up at the church, taking in the scene in a dazed sweep. The six seraphs were in the process of transfiguration into something less than seraphic. Light blasted from their eyes and from between their joints as power left them to swirl around Azazel in a rainbow hue of force. Their armor disappeared, leaving them clothed only in sharp, mottled energy patterns, not human energy patterns, not seraphic. Something between. In defiance of the edicts of the Most High, they were becoming the lesser, sublunary beings that were Watchers. Cursed.

Around us, the succubus larvae had abandoned the walls and were crawling closer. White pupae, the bloodless color of Rupert’s skin, hundreds of them. Another touched a land mine and exploded. I was so shaken, I didn’t even cringe.

Above us, Amethyst was screaming, a wail of horror. But she wasn’t fighting. She doesn’t know how, the visa informed me, the mental voice didactic and unemotional. In battle, a cherub depends upon her seraph-mate to direct the energy and weapons of her wheels. They are true mates, joined mentally and spiritually, much less powerful when separate.

Zadkiel wasn’t fused mind to mind with Amethyst. He had broken their merge. I sobbed, the sound desperate, frantic, full of the hoarse tones of fury and failure and wild grief.

Lucas was holding back Thadd, who was ripping off his clothes, shrieking to be let go, needing to mate, caught in rut like an animal. But he had been fighting. He had the seraph stone. Or…I put my hand on the pocket he had touched eons earlier. The seraph stone rested there, warm against my skin. He had given it back to me. So that if something attacked us with the rut, I would be spared. Stupid kylen. All my champards were giving up so much. Were giving up too much. For me.

Cheran was standing, his entire body quivering. I could read his need at a distance, his mind filled with desire, stimulated by the seraphs. When Azazel dropped the conjure, it had allowed all the scents to merge. Cheran turned, his face filled with lust, and focused on Rose and me. There was danger in his need. I didn’t want to have to kill him.

I looked at my twin, glowing and powerful, full of the force of life and death. I touched the pink quartz amulet carved into a rose that I carried on my necklace and jerked my fingers away when it burned.

From the pouchlike folds of my dobok, I pulled the spur of binding, the spur that could be used to make me a slave to Darkness. It had been a part of Darkness, part of a dragonet. It was composed of life, a tool for an earth mage. My cloak, lying forgotten in a torn and bloody heap at Rose’s feet, was splattered with Azazel’s blood and the slime of succubus larvae. I bent and wiped the spur across it, then smeared it into the pool of Rupert’s blood at my feet.

“Can you use this?” I asked her.

Rose, bright with the energies of sacrifice, took the spur and stood, bracing her feet, the cross in one hand, the spur in the other. She whispered to me, leashed power in her voice, her eyes shining of the might of death, “Are we the weapon? The two of us together?”

“Yes,” I said, my voice low, clogged with tears. Hating it. Hating it all. “We are.”

“No,” Audric said.

“You want his death to be for nothing?” Rose asked, her voice fierce. She threw back her head, glowing with death. “I have Rupert’s life force within me. I hold his spirit, if not his very soul. He wanted this. He wanted his death to mean something.” Her face took on a sly cant. “Would you take that away from him before he finds the Light? Would you waste his death, waste his life?”

Audric looked at the body of his partner for a long moment. With a slow hand he reached out, hesitated, his fingers a hairsbreadth from Rupert’s face. I heard his breath hitch in his chest. I bent and placed my fingers over his. Together, we closed Rupert’s eyes. I sensed Audric’s mouth moving, his words silent, the warrior’s prayer for the dying. My tears fell on Rupert’s ashen face, mixing with the blood and gore there. And I knew what I had to do.

“Burn the larvae,” I whispered to Rose. “All of them.”

“As they die, their energies will fill me,” she said. “I can’t protect you.”

“Don’t worry about me,” I said. I reached out with my mind, with my hate, and touched the pile of stone near me. I had never lifted anything so massive, but I understood the physics of gravity and mass and my mind did the equations with an ease I’d never experienced before. Without a qualm, I summoned the purple snake. It slithered from beneath a pile of charred stone, as if it had been waiting for the call. It coiled around itself, hissing with glee and warning. I put my hand on the snake and spoke a single word. “Rise.” I felt the snake tense, taking weight and mass into itself, as we lifted the pile of stone. It was so easy. So simple.

The stone rose. Holding it five feet off the floor, I shouted, “Get under here!” When they were all in place, Rupert’s body pulled into the very center, cradled in Audric’s arms, Lucas holding his brother’s hand, Thadd and Cheran fighting, held down by Eli and Jasper and the elders, I opened a protective shield around the champards and elders, pulling the power to maintain it from the snake. Overhead, Amethyst shrieked as if she were dying. Her ship—my ship—had powered back up.

“Hurry,” Rose said, still standing outside the levitating stone. She laughed and closed her eyes. Instantly, heat gathered around her body in a tube of power, a ring of might, like a prime amulet, but large enough to encircle her. Her own shield, powered by Rupert’s death force.

My heart cold as stone, I glanced at the scene taking place on the church floor, the powerful Azazel, the changing seraphs. I focused on the snake, gazing into its myriad dark purple eyes, all watching me adoringly. The snake’s body and tail rippled, forming a perfect ring around me, and power surged through it, a charmed circle. If I’d not been dead inside, I might have laughed. I eased my hand away from the levitating stone.

The seraphs would destroy me after I saved them, and would attempt to kill all under my protection. I would do what I could to protect the ones still living. I had betrayed Rupert. I had failed him. I’d rather die than fail another. I drew on the gifts of omega mage, pulling in energies, sucking them through the snake.

Feeding.

The energies were a wild, almost feral mixture of stone from the church, magma from the center of the earth, and the might of the wheels. When I was glowing, my mage-attributes flaring like a torch, as bright as my twin’s, I pulled the Flame-blessed blade and held it, point down, over the wire amulet on my wrist. The amulet opened with a faint click and slid from my hand. I laid the tanto blade along the length of the snake’s neck, added Mole Man’s cross, and held them all together. With my other hand, I dropped the wire amulet over the snake’s head, sliding it over the tanto blade and cross. I secured the amulet to the snake, tanto, and cross, making a bizarre and deadly necklace. Flying by the seat of my pants. Becoming the prophecy that hung over my door. A Rose by any Other Name will still draw Blood.

“Hurry,” my twin whispered, her voice a full-throated rasp of desire. “Oh, God, hurry.”

The snake and the tanto began to hum, a strange disharmony at first that softened and smoothed and changed key until they were singing a minor-key variation of three notes. In mage-sight, they shared similar energy patterns, a soft violet aura of compatibility. They had merged, the Flame and the wheels, the amulet and its iron ore bomb in Alabama, into a single weapon. And the gold cross blazed with light. No…with Light.

From the Fallen, lightning shot into the night, black lightning, burning the sky with Darkness. Thunder boomed all about us, shaking the floor, the walls, sending rocks sliding, except where I had them levitated.

About Azazel, energies churned, swirls of Light, painfully bright, throwing out heat like a small star, and clouds of blackness, darker than the reaches of space, colder than the farthest reaches of hell. A storm of hot wind and icy currents built in the center of the old church.

I closed my human eyes and blended the mind-skim into mage-sight. I was too empty to feel the usual nausea. Too empty and too full of power. I reached out with my mind, into the otherness of light and heat and the glowing river of time.

Time slowed. My heart beat.

The flesh of my face burned, blistered, my eyes watering in a slow-motion flush of protective tears that scalded down my cheeks. And I heard the Waldroup brothers praying the Lord’s Prayer. “Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name….”

I took the snake into my hands, allowing it to wrap about me, undulating coils of muscle. Moving faster than the gathering energies that were Azazel, I slid Mole Man’s link, the link of binding, over the blade and followed it with my own prime, the four-inch stone ring. I held the snake’s head and the tanto toward the swirling maelstrom of energies that were Azazel.

The suggestions for Trapping Darkness in Stone came to mind, but I discarded the incantation for something more complex, and yet far more straightforward. Something that used the elements in my current possession. The math swirled through my mind, clicking into place with solid mental snaps.

I said simply, “Stone and iron, Flame and steel. Consume.”

Purple light raced at me through the earth, forging channels through rock and stone and earth and deep water, gathering power as it moved, ripping energy from the iron ore deposit in Alabama, from minerals and stone and unmined ores as it passed, faster than light. The snake’s and tanto’s hum rose in pitch, merged perfectly, a duet of death.

The energies slammed into me through the bottoms of my feet. Shot out from my palms where they gripped the snake and the tanto and the wire amulet. Blasted their way through my prime and the link that had once bound Azazel, the Fallen, Leviathan, the Dragon, who blazed in glory. Pure white Light ripped into the Dark seraph with concussive force, rocking me back.

Motes of black light detonated from him, shot out, whipped into the maelstrom. Azazel roared and turned to me. Fierce aqua eyes stabbed me. And he laughed, huge golden gongs of amusement and hatred mixed together in an unholy new emotion. He reached out a hand to me. I saw the black lightning gathering in his fingers, a ball of Darkness, a small black hole of chaos. But he moved slowly, outside of the singularity of time I had become. Rose turned to me, her eyes slowly focusing, her mouth opening in a time-lapse O of surprise.

“Wheels. Now,” I said to the snake.

Light stabbed down from the living ship. It hit Azazel with the destructive power of a Pre-Ap nuclear bomb. In a slow, sinuous movement of luxons, the Fallen caught fire.

Black motes shifted out from Azazel, realigning into slow-moving rivers of energies. With a thought, I slowed time again, into a honey-thick construct that I moved through with the ease of heated steel. My heart beat, a sluggish susurration, beginning to speed, but still so slow.

Faster than the explosion, I opened the charmed circle of coiled snake and backed toward the shield. Snapped it off and eased beneath the stone, pulling the snake with me. I reactivated the shield. The explosion hit. Time readjusted in a flash of changing energies.

Even beneath the shield protection, we were thrown to our knees as if a huge hand had swatted us down. Scuttling, my champards and the elders cringed together under the levitating pile of broken rock, fear turning their auras into spikes of green and red gold.

Azazel whirled like a dervish, flaming, burning, silent but for an electric hum that hurt my ears. Lightning flew, hitting the walls, exploding through them, sending some tumbling to the ground. Black-light motes sizzled and popped. The stench of burning seraph altered, tainted by the reek of brimstone. Azazel’s form was a black core, deeper than Darkness. More than night, Darker than eternity. Black-light swirling with chaotic energies older than time.

Rose turned away from me. Protected by her shield, she extended her arm, holding up the bare wood cross. Heat exploded from it in a ball of flame, expanding, rolling out from her, a conflagration. Fire rolled over the seraphs and into the larvae, a wave of destruction, scorching the bloodless succubi to ash as it moved. The new things, the creations of the Dragon, died. The flash of fire was so intense, nothing unprotected could survive it. The fire slammed, surging like a tsunami against the church walls.

The flame climbed the stone, cleansing it, heating the remaining walls red hot. Shattering the rock with the sudden heat transfer. Flames coiled up and over like a wave of fire. Recoiled. Reversed. Unbidden, time again thickened.

Rose looked at me, smiling, burning mage-bright, standing in a ring of power, a cross in her hand. In that instant, I hated my twin. Hated her. And I knew she saw it in my face. Her smile faltered. The flames rushed at us.

I released the pile of stones. With a roar, they fell over the shield, providing insulation from the heat that was ricocheting back. In the endless instant as they descended, I saw the seraphs.

Standing in the midst of the fire was Raziel, Rose’s death fire whipping away the spell of lust that had crippled him. Beside him knelt Cheriour and four other forms, each flaming, not with destructive fire, but with its own power. Transmogrifying. Wings spreading for flight.

And Azazel. In a single instant of time, his energies imploded like a black star, scintillating, dying. Surely dying….

Untouched by it all was my twin, her face full of shock and horror, perhaps realizing only in that instant of time-no-time what she had become, shining with death and sacrifice. The stone of the earth closed over us.