Matchbox Girls (16 page)

“Give me the address,” ordered Branwyn.

Marley read off the address from a piece of stationary, and added the name. “Hotel Gigantes #3. But I don't know how long we'll be here. Maybe only a couple of hours.”

Branwyn blew her breath into the phone. “If Penny didn't need me, I'd be on my way there already. But at least this way I know where to start looking if you vanish.”

“Bran, I know I'm acting strange, but—”

“You're not, really,” Branwyn interrupted. “I thought you were at first. But you're acting just like you do whenever you aren't sure you're right. If it didn't seem so dangerous, I'd be delighted to see you acting so
normal.
But it
is
dangerous, and if you vanish, I will never, ever forgive you. I will hunt you down like a
dog
. In fact, what am I thinking? Penny's safe at home. I could call her mother to look after her—”

Marley imagined Penny given more excuse to act like an empty doll, as she so often did around her mother, and shuddered. “Penny really does need
you
, Branwyn. If you can stop her from getting pulled further into whatever’s got its hooks into her, that would help me, too. Probably. I’m hoping to find out as soon as I get off the phone with you.”

“See, I felt all warm and fuzzy at the ‘helping you’ part, but then you went on with the ‘probably’ and now I’m all ‘she’s not telling me stuff again,’ and pissed off. Should have stopped while you were ahead, Mar.”

But Marley could hear the affection in Branwyn’s voice. She said, “The more I hold out, the more you’ll believe me when I tell you the full story.”

“Or the more likely I’ll think it’s a huge prank.”

“A prank? I wish. Gotta go. I’ll check in later.”

She rang off, and spent a moment wiping moisture away from her eyes. Then she tucked the phone away before looking up at Corbin as he re-entered the room. “Hey. Everything okay with the birdies?”

“They’re going to get some information for me. And keep watch, of course.” He met her gaze, his dark eyes assaying her. Marley was suddenly conscious of how haggard she must look, and how on the edge she must seem.

She tried for a relaxed smile, to show her self-control was fine. “So that stuff you just said outside? It was all kinds of messed up. Can we start with that?”

He leaned against the wall, studying her face further. “Normally angels just mark people and then talk to them,” he finally said. “Ettoriel’s moving into Penny’s soul. Possessing her. They don’t usually do that because it eventually destroys the victim, mind and soul.”

“AT said that marks can be removed. Can this?” She asked the question, but she was already thinking about how AT’s repeated “I’m sorry” had sounded like condolences rather than an apology. Rage, cold and sluggish in an unfamiliar environment, began to stir.

“Exorcisms don’t work,” he said bluntly. “Once he has a foothold, the celestial controls the process.” Then he hesitated. “Mostly. I slowed it down some, earlier, by disrupting the numina flow. But I can’t stop it. Only Ettoriel can do that, and only in the early stages.”

“And it’s going to destroy her? How?” She wanted precise answers to focus her anger.

“I’ve heard the process likened to burning her soul away.” He shrugged. “As for her mind, there aren’t that many minds that can survive cohabitating directly with a celestial, especially without a soul to stitch to. The mind becomes fragmented, dominated, and eventually shattered.”

“So he’s got the equivalent of a supernatural gun to her head, not just her heart,” Marley said quietly. It was true; she knew it was. Hadn't she seen it? The rage grew, flowing into the little spaces in her mind where anxiety normally nested. She suddenly understood the appeal of revenge; it was control, applied retroactively.
Perhaps I cannot stop you from destroying my friend, but I can make you regret it.
And there was no room for worry about methods or power differentials, about how Ettoriel was an angel and she was a failed grad student. The rage scoured all those spaces, clean and pure.

Corbin blinked at her and muttered, “Wow.”

Lissa was suddenly standing on the bed, one hand on her shoulder. She peered closely into Marley’s eyes until Marley said, “What is it, kiddo?” Her voice came out thick and low.

Lissa touched Marley’s forehead. “You lit up.”

Corbin said, “You can see it?”

Lissa ignored the question to say, “Why doesn’t she see, Mr. Bird Man?”

Corbin studied Lissa. “I haven’t taught her how yet.”

“When are you going to do that?” the little girl demanded.

“In a little bit.”

“Okay.” As swiftly as she’d come, Lissa returned to the pillow fort. Corbin watched the twins for a moment, fidgeting with something he’d pulled out of his pocket.

“What’s going on?” demanded Marley.

Corbin gave her a sideways look. “What happened to you just now?”

She narrowed her eyes. “You told me that Penny was going to have her soul eaten by a lunatic angel, and I got angry about it. Then, you said ‘Wow’.”

“I did? Damn it,” he said. “Well, for me, your halo just lost most of its tarnish.”

Shock flooded her, overwhelming even the rage. “M-my halo?” She sat down on the bed. “That’s probably a technical term, right?”

Corbin crouched down in front of her, taking her left wrist into both his hands gently. “Motherfucking Zachariah,” he muttered. “Yes, but it means about what you’d expect it to mean.”

She forced a brief little smile. “Tinkly golden ring over my head?”

“Not quite. Here.” He cupped one hand over his eyes and drew it away, then placed the cupped hand over Marley’s eyes. When he pulled his hand away, she could see...

more
...

Corbin caught her as she instinctively jerked backwards, trying to dodge the beams and strands and bars of light that filled the room. “It’s called the Geometric Sight. I designed it to appear like a heads-up display, overlaid on your actual vision. To deactivate it, imagine the outline of a circle, a triangle and a square, all on top of each other, and then separate them. Reverse that to reactivate it.”

Marley barely heard him. Many-colored light had transformed the world: Objects had auras, and faint lines connected the auras to other auras. Corbin himself was a mass of lines and blazing circular nodes, far more complex than any of the simple objects in the room. The hand near her face had a circle of white light on the palm, and inside the light was... complexity. Smaller lines and nodes of every shape, interlocking like the gears of a clock. She couldn’t understand it. Then Corbin drew his hand away and she focused on his face. There was a circular node on his forehead and another hovering near the top of his head, but her attention was immediately caught by the crown of light glowing about eight inches above him.

The silvery nimbus was only vaguely ring-shaped, and in the center it darkened until the core was a miasma of shadows. She gaped at it for a moment, reaching her fingers out to touch it. To her surprise, she felt a tingle when her fingers brushed where it appeared to be.

Corbin, still holding her left hand, smiled. “There’s another one down there,” he said, pointing. She looked down at the matching glow wreathing his feet. “They come in pairs. Some art gets it right.”

He continued after a moment. “If you see somebody with the halo and the chakra nodes, that means they’re nephilim. If someone only has the chakra nodes, they’re mortal. If they only have the halo, they’re the vessel or construct of a celestial creature.”

She turned her head to the twins, who were both watching curiously. They had both the halo and the circular nodes. But while Corbin’s nodes were each filled with gem-like colors, the children’s nodes were all empty.

“Okay,” she managed. “What about everything else?”

He stood up and pulled her to her feet as well. “We’ll get to that. But first...” He gently drew her over to the full-length mirror next to the bathroom door. She flinched as a line of light crossing from the door to the window passed painlessly through her head. “What do you see?”

She looked at her reflection. She had a series of circular nodes—chakras, she remembered Corbin calling them—running down her body in a line. Two of them were filled with tinted, complex light. And over her head and at her feet, glowing like the moon and its reflection, were a pair of halos. 

-eighteen-

“
I
’m... not mortal?”
Marley fought against the blankness in her mind. “Does this mean one of my biological parents was an angel?” Suddenly she remembered the not-Penny addressing her as
nephil.
It'd been convenient to ignore that at the time.

“Or one of your grandparents. Somewhere in your family tree, somebody attracted the attention of a celestial. I take it there are some missing branches?”

“All of them. I was adopted.” She shook her head wonderingly. “I always figured my mother was a...” She noticed the twins watching her in the mirror. “Somebody in a lot of trouble,” she finished.

“Hmm,” he said.

She flinched, imagining what lay under that noncommittal sound. Quickly, she said, “What did my, uh, halo look like before?” At the moment, it was tall and clean. While there was a shifting shadow at the heart of Corbin’s halo, hers seemed to have a whirling brightness that made her uncomfortable to study.

“The day before yesterday, it was suppressed almost entirely. Veiled, we call it. If I’d passed you on the street, I wouldn’t have noticed you. Yesterday afternoon and today, it was... blotched.” He sounded puzzled. “Dark, dull spots, with very little fire. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it before.”

“But how can I be like you guys? I don’t have any superpowers. No dogs or ravens.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I’m not so sure about that.” He glanced down at the thing that had reappeared in his hand. It looked like an elaborate keychain ornament, all cubes and rods moving over each other. Flashes of light cast shadows onto his face.

“I’d know better than you, wouldn’t I?! What’s that you’re playing with?”

“This is a fragment of a celestial Machine. I borrowed it from the Senyaza Repository. I wanted to see what it could tell us about the kids, maybe give us a clue as to why the angel wants them in particular.” He turned it over in his hand, and there was a silken sound. “No idea what it was for originally, but it’s been... useful in the past when it comes to newly found nephilim and the trouble they cause. Item number 41, informally known as the Lullaby Plaything.” He held it out to her.

Marley didn’t take it, even though she longed to poke at the little toy. “Celestial Machine? Angels have machines? What for?”

“Heaven has Machines, anyhow. Huge, amazing things, or so I’ve read.” He glanced down at the Lullaby Plaything again, fidgeting absently with it. More little flashes of light, faster now. “What makes its way out isn’t as impressive. Possession of them is important to the angels. I think the Machines do all the real work, myself. But all we really know in general is that they exist, they’re powerful, and they’re the only things that can stop a celestial from reincarnating when they die. When celestials war among themselves, they use a few of them as weapons. This is just a tiny piece of one.”

Angels can die
. Marley filed that away and stared at the moving rods. “So somewhere up there, the celestial Machine in charge of spring threw a bolt and is now is going ‘clonk’?”

Corbin smiled. “Maybe. I mean, probably not. They’re not that obvious. But if anybody really knows, they’re not telling. This one, we’ve studied some. It has a calming, focusing effect on the nephilim who play with it, and the little laser show can suggest the nature of a nephil’s heritage, what domain their celestial forebear was associated with, and so on. Take it, it won’t hurt you. When you’re convinced of that, give it to one of the kids.”

Marley took a calming breath, and then picked up the Lullaby Plaything by one of the metal rods. A cube at the end of the rod rotated as if on a pivot, and another rod, connected to the first near the other end, slid down. It really did look like an engaging little toy, the sort of thing her father would have in his office. She prodded a third rod. Its cube started spinning, with a gentle clicking sound. Small colored lights bloomed on each of the cubes, and dotted the rods. They were pleasantly soothing and she gazed at them for a moment, until her breathing deepened.

Unobtrusively, her catastrophe vision activated. It was a peaceful device, without the intent to harm anybody. It certainly wouldn’t harm the twins, although its own fate in their hands was obscured somehow.

Her nose tickled. The campfire scent that had overhung everything for what felt like days now was replaced by the strong ozone tang of thunderstorms. She glanced at the window, but the sky was clear. She turned an inquiring look on Corbin, and recoiled. He was watching her closely, analytically, and his own personal array of catastrophes hung about him like a suffocating cloak. She yanked her gaze away, fumbling with the Lullaby Plaything as she rejected the vision. The lights on the celestial toy dimmed, and the clicking spin of the moving cube slowed.

Eyes on the carpet, she stalked past him to the twins’ blanket tent. “Hey, kids.” Corbin's Sight overlay showed her the lines of light blazing down their curved spines, and hollow circles of light, seven of them, dotting the central line. Their halos were identical radiant stars with sparkling motes mixing between them.

“Wait,” said Corbin. “I knew you had a gift. AT said you had a unique sight. What do you see with it?”

Corbin’s impersonal, diagnostic tone scraped against already sensitive nerves. “It’s a curse, not a gift,” she snapped. “I see the bad things that might happen to somebody.”

“Why did you suppress it? I’d like to see it in action more so I can integrate it into the Geometric Sight.”

“Why? I don’t want to use it. It’s deceptive. Useless. Mostly what it shows doesn't happen.” Before the Lullaby Plaything had activated it, she’d been pleased with how she’d kept it utterly suppressed since the encounter at Penny’s.

“Oh.” He stared at the ground. “Sometimes celestial powers have trouble manifesting properly within a human framework. It can feel like a curse. But if you—”