Harsh Gods (18 page)

“There is something special about this mortal child.” His voice wavered with uncertainty and he held his hand poised, not quite touching her hair.

“You have no fucking clue,” I said. Halley seemed innocuous enough, skinny limbs drawn close to her body as she rocked with her chin pressed against her knees. All her hair spilled forward, obscuring most of her face. The Rephaim regarded her as if expecting her to bite.

Terael shot me a doleful look and gingerly touched the top of her head. The instant he made contact, a glimmer of nebulous power leapt to life around her. Lavender flames licked up and down her skin.

With a startled yelp, he snatched his hand away.

“A trick, all this—a trick,” he wailed. “Such a child cannot exist. My brother, what have you brought to me?”

Swift and galvanizing, the feel of her tumbling mind returned as a full-body memory. I had watched her hurl a bolt of impossible power to drive Whisper Man from the vagrant sprawled on the floor.

And I recalled my instinctive reaction.

Kill her, kill her now.

Chasing the heels of that thought, a deep, subsonic boom resounded through the space, as if a giant hand sought to pound to pieces a massive, distant door. The whole projection trembled.

Terael’s wings stiffened as he froze.

That basso note resounded again, louder and somehow closer. Halley surged forward and hissed. Sharply, he recoiled.

“Shut it down,” he snapped.

On the bed, Halley flowed to her feet in a single, sinuous motion as if every inch of her body held a joint. She wore an expression I had never seen on her face—hard and cold and… wicked.

“Shut down the projection,” Terael shouted.

“What’s happening? Am I doing that?”

He seized the front of my shirt, shaking me till my teeth rattled.

“Break the image, Zaquiel. Break it now!”

Motion blurred. Halley’s limbs moved with the swift fluidity of a spider. Quick as a blink, the girl clambered from the hospital bed and skittered up the wall. She crab-walked across the ceiling, then clung to the blades of the overhead fan, her head twisting the wrong way around as she glared down.

“
I WILL REBUILD MYSELF, ANAKIM!
” she shrieked, and the voice pouring from her throat was the same that had invaded my thoughts outside of the cemetery.

Terael spread his wings in defiance.

“Few of our punishments were just, but some fell for a reason, Thunderer.” Power whirled about him with the sound of a dust devil, and golden sparks danced upon the air.

“
YOU WILL FALL BEFORE ME, GILDED ONE!
”

“Just an image,” I muttered in a rush. “Just an image in my head.”

“Not
just
an image, as well you know,” Terael snarled. “Cast him out!”

“I don’t even know how I brought him here!” I cried.

“
Liar.
”

Terael’s gilded features grew colder than any stone. Above us, Not-Halley’s head turned as if on a swivel. With distended jaws, she swallowed a blade of the ceiling fan in a single, gigantic gulp. The light fixture swung crazily, awakening shadows in every corner of the imagined room. Chewing messily, she stretched forward to gobble pieces of the plaster. Wherever she bit, blackness gaped.

“Seriously, Terael—I have no fucking clue what’s going on,” I hissed.

“
FEED ME. FEED ME ALL YOUR POWER.
”

The Rephaim wearing Halley’s skin leapt to the far wall, nightmare-quick and bending in all the wrong directions. She—
it
, for I could no longer think of it as Halley—clung to the curtains over the picture window. They billowed in a sudden gale. The bitter, freezing wind shrieked against the walls of my projection.

The Halley-Thing continued eating. Fragmented bits of the ceiling and walls rained upon the rug. Pain crackled sharp as lightning through my skull.

“A trap.” Terael cringed away from me. “He’s tied to you. You carried him in and trapped me here.” He wore a look of utter betrayal. “How deftly you drew me in with your protestations of ignorance, all the while hiding him in the scarred corners of your mind. We were allies, my sibling, even friends,” he quailed.

“This projection-thing was your idea,” I reminded him.

“
Then cast him out!
”

Terael’s command trebled the pain in my head. My vision blurred, then split, till I felt stretched intolerably between the physical space of the office and the imagined room. My nose started running. I had a bad feeling it was blood.

The golden Rephaim swept his wings like a windstorm, till motes of gleaming dust whirled through every corner of the room. Not-Halley shouted incoherent defiance. Wherever the motes settled, an ugly cluster of three symbols lay exposed.

Terhuziel’s Name.

“No,” I gasped.

The letters throbbed on every surface, gaining strength as the Halley-Thing chewed.

“Lie to me some more, my sibling. Deny again your pact.” Terael’s normally lilting notes dropped to something subsonic, each word gritty with threat.

Too late I made the connection.

Fish-Knife Lady.
I hadn’t just taken his Name from her memories. I’d swallowed his connection to her whole. Now it snagged me like a fishhook, and I twisted on the line.

“Fuck me running,” I breathed.

Not-Halley gobbled another swath of plaster.

The edges of my vision frayed.

“
BOW AND SERVE ME AS YOUR MASTER
,” the Halley-Thing bellowed. “
I WILL BE WHOLE AGAIN!
”

Then I roared in fierce negation. Wind surged within the room. Blue-white power limned my fingers. Thrusting out with both my hands, I attacked the nearest instance of Terhuziel’s festering Name. The symbols hissed and shriveled. Not-Halley choked in wordless rage.

Battle lust consumed me. My hands shone with brilliant light. I danced and slashed and shouted, twin daggers glinting as I cut him from my mind.

I slammed back to full awareness of the office. I sprawled in a heap on the floor, and had nearly brought the whole bookshelf down on top of myself. The office chair tilted crazily a few feet away, its wheeled base still spinning.

Terael buzzed like a nest of angry hornets from every corner of the room.

Liar! Traitor!
he shouted.
You must kill her. Seek her out and kill her now. No other proof will I accept. You have conspired to bring me down.

“No one’s killing the girl,” I croaked, painfully aware that I’d had the same impulse myself. I swiped at my running nose. The back of my hand came away covered in blood.
Great.

You shall keep her for yourself, then? Or do you save her for our maddened sibling, to become sacrifice and vessel for his return?

I wouldn’t have dignified that with an answer, even if I’d understood everything he intended. Shakily, I dragged myself up along the edge of the desk. Someone had stolen my muscles and replaced them all with jelly—useless, quivering jelly. The empty ache of soul-hunger gnawed fiercely beneath my ribs. It hitched with every stunted breath. I’d burned a lot of power kicking Terhuziel out of my head—power I didn’t have in reserve.

You must have known
, he insisted.
How could you not have known? The memory of her touch—such an instant, bright connection. Power leaping mind to mind. You knew and yet you lied. A fool am I to trust you so.

Terael’s every thought spiderwebbed through accusations and increasingly paranoid delusions. My skull hammered, and I had no strength to fend him off.

When did he turn you to his cause? So long you stayed away—I should have known when you did not come once he had encroached upon my Domain. A pact you made to carry him in the scarred spaces of your mind. Deny it!
he railed.
I saw the proof of pact, stamped clearly once he no longer deigned to hide. Why betrayal now, my sibling—and for such a one as the Thunderer?

“Stop it,” I gasped. I could barely give breath to the words. Threads of light gnawed my vision.

The girl must die
, he persisted.
The Elder Blood. We cannot stand before that force. He claims her strength and we must fall. All will burn, as once before.
The Gatling gun fire of his thought-speak left me dizzy.

“Terael,
dammit
. Stop already,” I pleaded. “I didn’t know he was in there. I was attacked last night. He—”

I ran headlong into the binding oath.

Walls I didn’t even know I had slammed shut around the details of the fight. Terael took it for more proof of my betrayal, too panicked now to even match his thoughts to words. He roiled messily along the edges of our mental contact, his boundaries crumbling as fear robbed him of some essential level of control. I swayed before an assault of memories—all of them the Rephaim’s, punishingly swift and jagged.

Backdrops of mountains, deserts, green and rolling hills—all perceived from a weird three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view that wove through every stick and stone. Temples—a stupefaction of architectural styles. They flickered by with such speed that all their profiles blended into one.

Domain
.

My word or his, I couldn’t tell.

Then, people. Priests and priestesses—some of whom appeared neither male nor female, but some sacred mingling of the two. An endless march of faces. Painted skin in every shade.

Those-Who-Serve
.

I knew them as he knew them. Not merely as anchors. Precious assets. Heart and life-blood of the temple. Voices roared in a cacophony of forgotten languages, songs of supplication, ringing chants of praise. Sistrums, drums, and ankle bells struck fervent, rolling rhythms. All danced in
ekstasis
as they screamed the Name.

Then one—
the
One. The lamb slaughtered so other life could be renewed. A maiden. Pure. Unpledged. Child of the gods, filled to bursting with sacred power for the rebirth of the temple lord.

Always the most precious must be given up to serve.

All of this in an eyeblink, with nuances so complex that they would take me weeks to sort out. Crushed beneath the weight of revelation, I fought to regain some sense of self—of where his mind ended and mine began. Still Terael’s thoughts unspooled, rife with anxiety and bitter reproof.

You have led him to this. A pure one with strength enough to carry him even from the edge of his doom. He will heal and spread domain throughout this city. War will come again.

“No!” I cried in fierce denial. That I even spoke a word at all felt like a triumph. I barely had a sense of my own lips. But it didn’t break his suffocating contact. More scenes tumbled through my head, blood-drenched and thick with the acrid bite of smoke. Terhuziel’s ambition. Conflicts, proclamations, and the jealous call to war. The mouthpiece of the god—high priest and holy warrior—at the head of sweeping armies, eyes aglow as his very will tore lightning from the sky.

Conquest
, Terael intoned. Then, with a note of soul-sick horror that made the breath stop in my throat, he added,
Reprisal.

A sea of shattered statues, gemstone eyes gouged from blinded sockets. Arms and heads and hands severed in the wake of war. The mortal dead discarded, cut down in defense of their gods. Soot-stained figures working a vast and belching forge. Golden idols melted down and screaming as they died. Stone images smashed to pieces with massive, iron mauls. Some of the broken, twisted, yet alive—imprisoned by gleaming disks of power pressed against their brows.

I lay in Hinome Valley throughout that awful time. Still I hear the sounds of the shattered—and the dreadful silence of those confined.
His thoughts pummeled accusingly, fixating on images of a seal, fashioned from clay or carved from stone. Coiling runes covered its surface, locking in some spell.

A disk like that—I’d seen one recently, casually flipped across the knuckles of David Garrett. Before I could speak, however, the force of Terael’s ire yanked me under like a riptide.

I will not endure it again
, he insisted.
Not ever again. Kill the girl.

He thrashed as if he was drowning—we both were—only the sea was the entangled boundary of our two minds. I tried to drag him out, deposit him on his own shore, but again and again, he pulled me under with him. Madness chewed around the edges—of thoughts, of self, of everything.

Then something rose up inside of me. Impassable. Unyielding. I thought perhaps it was the oath again, it had something of its flavor, but this ran deeper, spiraling down to some internal past which I could not perceive. Clinging to it like the last shred of solid ground in all of existence, I made it my axis.

Together, we used the point of reference to rebuild the walls where I ended and Terael began.

* * *

The final aftershocks of mental collision rocked me, raw and bleak and bitter.

A lone woman, escaping. A darkened grotto with a hidden shrine. The woman pressing a blade to her chest as she knelt at the foot of a statue. Blood and power flooding forth until she collapsed, an emptied husk. A swirl of golden motes and the sound of dusty wings. Her body reeking as he rebuilt himself from the substance of her death, healing within the new stone skin.

I knew that face of dark basalt.

Terael’s idol in the museum.

“She killed herself for you.” I wasn’t even certain that I said the words out loud.

As our mothers always must.

His aching note of sorrow lingered long after he sealed the floodgates of his mind.

“For the last damned time, I didn’t betray you. As thoroughly as you got yourself lost on the wrong side of my skull, how could you not see that?”

Terael pretended not to hear me. He did the Rephaim equivalent of pacing around the room, which meant he ended up brooding like a storm front. The last thing I wanted from him was the silent treatment. That shit wasn’t going to help me or Halley—I still had a ton of questions, not the least of which involved how I was supposed to go toe-to-toe with a storm god.

Still the mental quiet was a welcome respite.