In the End (28 page)

“
That's what you meant by Ríel disappearing?” Lalael nodded, studying her. “Wow.”

“
It was like they'd abandoned me all over again.  Did anyone notice I was gone? Did Shousán, omniscient and all-powerful,
know
I hadn't made it back? Did they care? Were they looking for me? I went back down and spent the night staring at the sky, just thinking. In the morning, I went up again, even though my wings hurt like hell for hovering that high up for so long. There was even more power up there, flying about loose, so I gathered as much as I could and I... I opened the sky.” Lalael looked back at the priestess with eerily shining eyes. “And there wasn't anything there. It was a black hole, and it was achingly dark and hungry, and it reached for me, so I closed it, and flew down, the whole time thinking that they must have misplaced Ríel.

“
I didn't know what to do with myself. Ríel's gone, suddenly I realized that I
really
didn't have any loyalties anymore.” Lalael got up and paced slowly. “It was one thing to say I renounced them, but I'm not sure... well, obviously I didn't completely renounce them or Jocelin wouldn't have been able to convince me to go back. I think I'd been hoping they would come back one day and say something like, 'We're so sorry, we just now realized what an awful mistake we made.' I didn't have to answer to anyone, and I was lost. There's always been someone telling me what to do, something I have to do in the here and now. Obligations, duties, what have you.

“
I didn't have anything to do, so I found an overhang that Lucien and I took shelter under the first night After. We'd had a fire – it was one of the first things we did with god-powers, accidentally, and it had burned for a whole day without fuel. There were still some embers. So I spent the next, what, three weeks, it's been? I spent them in my little hermitage,” Lalael laughed softly. “Thinking and drifting, until I noticed that I'd been gathering loose energy into myself.” The angel looked wonderingly at his hands. “I hadn't tried that before the day I opened the sky. I didn't even know I could. I felt powerful. The quietness around me, the mental drifting... It was like meditation, you see? Suddenly I could do things that I couldn't before.” Lalael looked at his priestess with sharp green eyes, and they sat there in silence – he glowed himself, soft but
intense,
and the firelight touched his skin and hair, and when Mara looked into his eyes, all the breath went out of her. Some base instinct in her recognized what he was
, and Mara found herself fearful. Of him. Lalael. Her god.  “I had the followers' belief before, but now I can control the power they give me. I can kill with it. I can heal. I could even make a falling apple rise,” he finished softly. “The laws stopped applying. I conjured. I created. I destroyed.”

“
My lord?” Mara said in a small voice.

“
And something about me changed. I became... more.  My hair turned bright, my wings...” He called them out, and they lit the room so bright that Mara threw up her hands to shield her eyes. “There are things I know,” Lalael said, and his voice had become inexpressibly
more –
more resonant, more compelling, more... He spoke and Mara wanted to fling herself flat on the floor before him and beg for her life. “I know them, but
I don't know what they are, just that they're there, waiting for a use.” Lalael put away his wings and held his hands a few inches apart, palms together. His fingertips glowed softly, then sparked across like a bolt of static electricity to a doorknob. Mara shivered.

“
My lord? Do you know where Lucien is?”

Lalael looked at her in surprise, as if he forgotten she was there. “No. But I know he'll be back eventually. Like I did, he'll return. I can't keep my mind on worrying about him,” he said excitedly, eyes flashing green. “I have new, rushing power that wants me to
use
it and let it loose. I'm free from Ríel, and I owe loyalty to
no one
.”

“
Why did you come back, then?” Mara asked quietly.

That gave Lalael pause. “I realized that the Higher Realm wasn't where I belonged anyway. Really knew it, for once in my life. I didn't have to even try to belong there. Even if I had opened a door to it instead of to the Void... I – This is where I'm supposed to be. It's home. I know now.” The angel sat next to her. When she flinched away, Lalael looked startled; after a moment the brightness subsided. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to overwhelm you.” He took a deep breath. “I'm tired,” he said, suddenly sounding as weary as he claimed. “Carry on as usual, bring me any urgent matters in the morning. I just want to sleep.”

“
Of course, my lord,” Mara went to leave, but as she rose, Lalael caught her wrist. His eyes had faded to their normal gray, and his hair had dulled.

She felt inexplicably relieved.

“
Thank you, Mara.” Something in the angel's voice told her that he meant for more than just her acceptance of his request. The god leaned close and pressed a kiss to her cheek.

             
As the priestess walked down the dark hall, she brushed her fingertips across where he had kissed her.

His lips had burned.

***

“
We feel disappointed,” stated Jocelin. “We have lost interest in thee and thy pretty blood.”

Lucien rolled over, careful to keep his weight off the shallow cuts, mild burns, and moderate abrasions. “Well, that's it, then?” He panted, pressing his hand to the worst wound, a gash on his side and stomach that oozed sluggishly.

“
Yes,” Jocelin stated simply. “We have forgotten why we wanted thee. Thou art obviously too obstinate to be of use.”

“
Oh good. Can I go, then?” Limping severely, Lucien rose and collected the tattered remnants of his clothing, clutching the table with hands that were chafed to the wrist from the ropes.

“
No.”

The Fallen turned back slowly.

“
Thou art still a traitor and must do thy penance.”

“
But you aren't interested anymore,” Lucien gasped, his side aching sharply.  “And really, you weren't that good at the torture; thirteen hours and already I'm up and about? Bad form.” He braced himself against the table as a wave of dizziness, caused by notable blood loss, overtook him.

“
We care not. The Nightmares will help you do your penance.”

The angel disappeared into the darkness of the warehouse with a flutter of white and a flash of gold. Lucien stood in the darkness, silent and apprehensive as the shadows and wraiths moved in close to claim him. His final thoughts before the Nightmares darkened his consciousness were a wordless, frantic panic.

***

Lalael awoke with a gasp, struggling with the sheets that had twisted about his legs. Within moments, he had stripped the sheet off the bed, thrown it about his waist, armed himself, and was striding down the corridor of the temple, noticing vaguely that it was halfway through its shape-shifting. It hadn't been Jocelin, then, or at least not entirely. When he came to Mara's door, he pounded insistently until she cracked it open.

“
Mara, Lucien's in trouble,” he said urgently.

“
Wha-at?” she asked around a wide yawn.

“
He's afraid, he's panicking, he's hurting! Wake up and do something!”

“
Did you get a vision?” she asked, now more alert.

“
No, but I
know
.  I was asleep and suddenly I was hit with this wall of fear and pain so strong I could nearly smell it.”

“
Lalael, calm down. The temple isn't going to wake up and get right on it.”

“
Mara,” the god said, gritting his teeth, and a little brightness came back into his eyes. “Yes. They are. Get dressed, get Andrew, get him dressed, and meet me in Lucien's office, it's got the maps in it.” Lalael ran off, trailing light, leaving the priestess standing in the doorway, stunned.

If he divided the city into parts, and then the parts into more parts, and color-coded the streets for the – No. No, that was too complicated, why send all the followers out when he could simply use what he had available to him.

He stormed past the slit windows of the monastery and came upon the wide arching windows of whatever the temple was busy turning itself into. Swinging open the glass with a thought, he climbed onto the sill and launched himself into the dark. A few moments later, he landed softly on the highest roof of the temple, a minaret that loomed a dozen stories high. The grounds were shifting slowly as he watched, the orderly buildings merging together and the grass stretching and shifting and slotting into the rest, just so... The ruinous buildings on the edges of the temple's grounds had begun to be taken over too. Vines crawled up their sides, piles of building material surreptitiously rearranged themselves as trees and pillars and graceful arches as he watched. Slowly, Lalael thought, slowly they'd be taken in, and the shifting would creep over the ground and hills and beyond.

No sooner had he thought the word 'hill' than the ground boiled around the edges of the shifting and the castle-temple was raised higher onto one.

It was all very surreal.

Lalael fought with the power he had gathered in himself, bending it to his will, casting his mind wide over the city and searching for any whispers of the Fallen's presence.

He found nothing, but when he stopped searching, he looked down at his hands and saw that when he'd run out of his room, he'd armed himself not with his own weapons, like the Beretta he kept beneath his pillow, but Lucien's two daggers.

***

Night after night, the angel struggled with the rhythms of the world, forcing it into something he could understand, shaky though it was. Yet in the mornings, when the rosy-fingered dawn crept over the eastern horizon, he returned to the temple in disappointment.

He couldn't shake the conviction that if he was the light, then Lucien was hidden in shadow.

***

Jocelin took a final look at the Fallen before him. He was a shuddering, broken wreck, bleeding, frightened, and helpless.

“
We feel detestation for thee, Fallen Angel Lucien. However, thou hast done thy penance, and thou hast been cleansed. We shall set thee free.”

Lucien looked up at the dark angel, with a spark of hope and began again:
I am Lucien, and I am the light. Light banishes darkness and the darkness cannot touch me anymore, because I am the light.

Jocelin drew the knife from its sheath at the angel's waist. “We free thee, Lucien.” The angel laid a cold, golden hand on Lucien's straggled, bloody hair and – for the first time that Lucien had ever seen – smiled. “We free thee from everything. Rise, and look us in the eyes.” The Fallen found himself helpless to resist, the spark of hope igniting into a small flame, like a little candle. He looked into the angel's cold, ice-blue eyes, the angel's smiling face...

...And as the knife slipped like butter into his stomach, he let the small flame flicker and die out.

***

The day was as dark and ominous as it had been the day the world ended, and Lalael's heart was no lighter. The angel paced, a nervous wreck, imagining all sorts of terrifying and horrible things that could have happened to the demon.

When the jolt of fear-pain-terror had struck him, Lalael wasted no time. He flung himself towards the sky, scrambling through the air to the highest tower, and with a force of will stronger than any he had yet accomplished,
bound
the power to his will and then cast it out again like a huge net. And then he felt it; one of the threads of his net vibrated faintly. To the northeast. Lucien.

As he plummeted to the ground and landed on his feet, he was already shouting for Mara, for everyone to stop anything they were doing and go out looking right now.
Now
. N
OW
.

***

Six hours later: Result. “They found him!” A lookout came running back, and suddenly everyone around was screaming for Lalael. He flung open the door of the audience chamber and strode down the hall towards Mara, who came running to him.

“
Is he alright? Mara, answer!” he shouted when she hesitated. The priestess's mouth trembled. “Where is he, Mara?”

“
They found him,” she pointed one violently shaking hand towards the small crowd entering the temple and ran away.

Lalael cursed. The followers laid their burden gently on the floor and backed away, faces grim and ashen as Lalael charged through them and stopped.

When he saw the Fallen laid out, he froze and clapped a hand against his mouth to hold back a wave of nausea. “Where did you find him?” he breathed through his fingers. He felt like his heart had stopped in his chest.

“
Over by the other side of town,” Andrew answered, and then he too left as quickly as he could.

Lucien was drenched in blood and dark ichor, mostly naked, and what clothing he had left was ripped to shreds that stuck in his wounds. Dozens and dozens of wounds. His skin was scratched, gouged, abraded, torn. One arm was at an unnatural angle, the shoulder shattered, with two unclean breaks, both of which had shards of bone beginning to cut through the skin. His upper chest was a mesh of shallow cuts; across his stomach was a deep, ugly wound, running diagonally from the left side of his ribcage to his right hip. It had stopped bleeding. His right leg was relatively intact, but for a few places where the skin had been rubbed off. The left, however, was mangled beyond all recognition.