Host

Chapter 8

C heran left just like he came in, without a word, though he did drop a sheaf of lesson plans on the table. I’d sooner read books on demonology than anything he offered to teach me. Though the incantation to kill spawn at a distance would be handy. So would the one that put out fire. Temptation was a real pain in the butt.

I was no longer hungry but I forced myself to eat the cold oatmeal. My jeans were hanging on my hips and I needed protein to restore my depleted reserves and fluids to reduce the dehydration. After the oatmeal, I drank a quart of water and grilled a veggie patty, eating standing at the sink, staring at the wall, wishing I had a window there, overlooking a mountain view. Forcing myself, knowing protein would help me think better, I opened a jar of peanut butter, carrying the half-full jar and a spoon around the loft. I ate, I tidied, but mostly I thought, running through possible scenarios on how to save Ciana.

In a little running debate, I kept coming back to killing Cheran. I didn’t like it that part of me chose violence before alternative possibilities were exhausted. And it wasn’t like his dying was a clean and neat solution. There was that pesky GPS locator device he wore, and the visa. The seraphs would know the moment he died and would send someone to investigate, someone with wings and a sword and a bad temper, so if I gave in to this particular temptation, I would be blasted with holy fire when the seraphs caught me. Dead in a heartbeat.

The violent part of me noted that I was smart and fast. I could plan something and be long gone when he kicked the bucket. Wryly, I wondered how accurate seraph forensics were, or if God the Victorious would just tell his winged warriors who had killed Cheran and where the guilty culprit was hiding. The violent part shut up at that one. No wonder murder had all but vanished from the list of human sins. Having talked myself out of committing murder, I felt better about myself. I wasn’t a raving battle mage with a terminal case of bloodlust and an uncontrollable desire to kill. I wasn’t. And I was pretty sure I wasn’t becoming one either.

Mental conversation ended, I was back to—nothing. But I had twenty-four hours to figure something out, which made me feel better about it all. The entire world could change in a day. It had happened at the end of the world and the start of the plagues. Maybe Cheran would keel over twitching and bleeding and just die. That was a vision that made me grin happily.

“Who are you planning to kill and do you need any help?”

Peanut butter jar in one hand, spoon in the other, I whirled to face the door. Eli was leaning a shoulder against the doorjamb, booted feet crossed at the ankles, arms crossed over his chest, and his hat shading his brow. He looked as if he’d been there a while. “I knocked. Three times. Interesting choice of weapons.”

I looked from the jar to the spoon and back to him. He looked good standing there. Maybe too good. That new, violent part of me had additional novel visions, of a less bloody, but no less physical nature. I reined them in too. The last time I gave in to physical needs, I ended up in bed with my ex-husband and that had been a disaster. I had changed the locks since, but clearly I hadn’t secured them before my nap.

“You going to smother someone in peanut butter or scoop them to death? If you go for the smothering I’ll volunteer to be a test subject. Soft foods have all sorts of interesting possibilities”—his lips turned up at the corners—“especially if you add whipped cream and melted chocolate. And that saddle I’ve been wanting to try.”

“The mental picture is interesting but messy. And I just know the girl would have to clean up afterward. Why do you think I want to kill someone?”

Eli chuckled, all basso notes deep in his chest. It made things low in my belly do a little flutter and shimmy. “Better than interesting.” He pushed back the brim of his hat so I could see his remarkable eyes, warm amber and gold. “You can leave all the work to me, even the cleanup. All you have to do is wear red the color of your hair and moan. Real loud. Maybe scream a time or two.” His voice went up an octave. “Oh, Eli, enough, enough. Don’t. Stop. Don’t stop!”

Grinning, I dropped the spoon into the jar where it clattered in the empty bottom. I walked to the kitchen and put them in the sink.

“And,” he said, “I saw Cheran Jones leaving. From the look on his face and now yours, it looks like slaughter brewing.”

I turned from the sink and braced myself, both hands on the counter at my back. His eyes strayed from my face to my chest, but only for a moment. I gave him points for effort. “Who are you?” I asked. “EIH or AAS?”

He didn’t answer, and I felt, more than saw, him evaluating. “May I come in?”

Earth Invasion Heretics were, in their own way, as dangerous to nonhumans as the AAS. As likely to be enemies. But there was something about Eli Walker that I liked. I gestured to the kitchen table and poured water into a teakettle, setting it on the stove to heat. Once, I would have used a match, but today I drew on a fire amulet and the flame ignited with a little puff of sound and the smell of gas.

“Nice trick. You pull rabbits out of a hat too? Because if you do, we need a rabbit big enough to kill and eat a Dragon.”

Shaking my head, fighting a smile that was at all odds with my mood, I set out teacups and offered him a choice of teas. “Whatever you’re having,” he said. “I’m more of a beer man.” From the fridge I pulled a bottle of Black Bear Brew, twisted off the top, and held it out. The Bear Brewery near Asheville had a short list of offerings but they were all good, and I kept a varied supply handy. Unlike hard liquor, beer wasn’t proscribed by seraphs or kirk.

Eli took the beer, one hand wrapping around my wrist, the other around my hand on the bottle. With a gentle tug, he pulled me and the bottle to him. Human muscle mass beat mage any day, but his grip was loose enough to give me a choice. I let myself be dragged to him. Gaze locked with mine, he drank, his encircling fingers warm, the cold bottle condensing and wet in my grip. When the bottle was half drained, he eased it away, but kept one hand curled on mine. The other he slid around my hips and pulled me close. It was a graceful dancer’s move, all controlled power, fluid and lissome. His arms went around me.

I was left holding the bottle as his mouth came down on mine, our eyes still fastened together. The little things doing somersaults in my belly began to do backflips and handsprings when his mouth touched, lips wet and chilled from the beer, searching and yeasty and delicious. He melded my body to his, and my free hand went to his shoulder. His tongue touched mine and I heard myself sigh. He chuckled again, that purely masculine sound that could make a woman’s nether regions stand up and beg, and deepened the kiss.

I was evil, foolish, heartless, and uncaring. My stepdaughter had been threatened, yet I was standing only a few feet from her, kissing a man who might be an enemy.

Eli was only a little taller than I, maybe five and half feet, and we fit together perfectly, his yin to my yang. Or maybe it was the other way around. But his hardness fit into my softness in just the right places.

Guiding me, he drifted us into motion, and I let him lead, dance steps that brought our hips together, apart, together, my belly just brushing his. Tension gathered in my flesh, my knees weakened, and I sighed into his mouth, not thinking at all.

When we came up for air minutes later, the beer was on the counter and we were stretched out on the couch, his body beneath mine. “I like a woman who wants to be on top,” he said with a laugh that vibrated through me. I really liked that laugh. Then he spoiled it totally. “Let’s get naked and party,” he said.

I dropped my forehead to his chest. “You really need to work on your pitch. And I don’t think so. I don’t know anything about you. Except you have amber eyes and really soft hair.”

He nudged my head back up and nuzzled my nose with his smiling lips. “What? You want roses and declarations of love? All that romantic stuff? I have really soft hair all over. You know that too, if I remember that incident in the street in the middle of the fight last night.”

I blushed hotly and he laughed again, the rumble vaguely catlike, like a lion’s purr. It seemed to rub against all the warm things deep inside me that were aching to be touched. Okay. I really really liked his laugh. With me pressing against him, it was a rumble deep in his chest, a growl of desire and humor, and I had no doubt that he wanted me in the worst way. Or maybe the best way. To combat the need growing within me, I asked, “So. EIH or AAS?”

The laugh eased away but his smile didn’t. At some point, he had loosened my hair, and it covered us in a tumbled snarl. He took a single strand and stroked it, curling it around his finger, the vibrant scarlet contrasting on his winter-white skin. “You want to talk about work when things are going so well? Wouldn’t you rather—” I rolled away from him and he finished with, “Guess not.”

I wriggled my bottom between his thigh and the couch back, my legs across his, feeling the hard shape of a gun strapped on his thigh, like a wild west gunslinger’s. There was something about hard steel jabbing me that was strangely exciting, but I kept my reaction off my face. Getting turned on by close contact with guns was downright disturbing. “I don’t sleep with men I don’t know.” I could have added that I had only slept with one man, and had married him, and that I didn’t intend to sleep with another human, not ever, but that sounded a bit like a challenge and I had a feeling that Eli didn’t turn away from a challenge. “EIH or AAS?” I repeated.

Eli had lost the hat and his coat somewhere and, wearing only two layered shirts, stretched up an arm, tucking his hand behind his neck. The position stretched out his chest, giving him a long, lean line. He grinned lazily when he saw the direction of my gaze, but I shook my head. “No way. Answer the question.”

His amusement evaporated and he considered me, sitting beside him, my legs draping him, our thighs in intimate contact. “What do you know about the heretics’ organization and the asseys? Do you know the difference?”

“Between the EIH and the AAS?” It sounded like a school question, a compare and contrast assignment. I crossed my arms over my chest. “I’ll bite. One is an antigovernment, antiseraph organization at odds with every religious group on the planet, composed of poor, disenfranchised members of society, who advocate anarchy. The other is government to the core, working hand-in-hand with the Realms of Light, doing whatever the seraphs want, including tracking down and killing any unlicensed witchy-women, turning over EIH operatives to the local kirks, fighting demons and Darkness wherever they can, providing covert intelligence about the movements of Darkness to the military, and coordinating military action during conflict. And the biggest difference—asseys’ salaries are paid by tax money.”

“Well, there is that,” he said.

I rolled my eyes. Only a little, but it got the point across.

“That’s been the standard line for decades,” he conceded. “But what if the EIH had evidence, real evidence, that the seraphs and demons, Light and Darkness, were really aliens from another planet, who, when their own solar system or galaxy or whatever was decimated by war, brought that conflict here.”

“Solar system or galaxy. Far, far away,” I quoted a Pre-Ap Star Wars movie line. It reminded me suddenly of the reference Eli had made about my tanto, the blade stretched with blue light. The minisword had reminded him of Luke Skywalker. How weird was that.

“Make fun if you want. Maybe they come from another dimension. But it isn’t heaven or hell. Have you ever heard of the river of time?” I don’t know what he saw in my expression, but his face went hard. “Talk to me,” he said. “You’ve heard of it.”

Actually, I had seen it. Had been there, sort of. In a series of out-of-body encounters that were more surreal than reality, experiences that kept slipping from my conscious memory like dreams. I had gone there during a kind of warfare that seemed to be fought in two places at once, on the earth as I knew it, and in another place that was all spiritual energy centered around this stream of lava-energy that the seraphs called the river of time. They talked about it a lot but they weren’t exactly forthcoming on what it really was, or where it was, or what it did. All I knew for sure was that when I stood on its bank and joined with a seraph spiritually, in a mind-altering mystical mating, it changed the course of a battle. Because of it, Forcas had been drained and the Dragon was stopped in its tracks. I nearly died there too. I still wasn’t sure why I hadn’t.

I had a theory on what the river of time was. I guessed it was a fourth dimension, with time being the fourth. Meaning that the river of time could give seraphic beings access to all of time throughout the history of the universe. It was here, not here. It was Earth, not Earth. It was heaven and not heaven. It was a reality all its own.

Eli watched me. Could I trust him with what I had seen? “Assey or EIH?” I asked again. And subsequently, in one of those intuitive leaps that defied logic, my breath stopped in my chest. I asked, “Or both?”

One hand reached for my arm, the other went for the weapon along his thigh. Faster than humans can follow, mage-fast, I ripped my arm from his fingers in a corkscrew break, leaped from the couch, and tumbled across the floor, thumbing on a shield. In mage-sight, it was thousands of interlocking, overlapping purple feathers of energy. Unlike most mage-shields, this one moved with me, the feathers rippling as I dove for my blades on the end of the kitchen table.

His hand reached the holster and snapped it open. I whipped up the tanto and the kogatana, racing back to the couch, and flowed into the walking horse. Eli was still drawing the gun when his slow human eyes found me and he stopped cold. My blade was poised to cut through his liver. All it would take was a single thrust as I snapped off the shield.

Cold chills danced along my arms, raising the tiny hairs there in delayed reaction. “You’re both, aren’t you?” I said. “You’re an assey, undercover, and you’ve infiltrated the EIH. Only you got sucked in with their blasphemy, their dogma, and you changed sides. You saw or heard something that made you believe them.”

“Not quite,” he said, holding very, very still.

Like a flower opening in time-lapse photography, it all fell together, all the things he had done and said and all the people he had spoken with. I understood. “You’re supposed to bring the two groups together.” He was a spy. And a freaking diplomat.

“You want to save Ciana from the AAS and the mages?” he asked, speaking at a pitiless clip, his fingers gripping the hilt of his gun, knuckles white. “You want to keep her living here, with you and her father and her uncle? Or you want her turned over to them and experimented on, tested, kept in a cell until she dies and they cut her open to see what made her tick?”

Shock flooded my system, trapping me in indecision. I wavered between flight or fight, pulled apart by opposing forces. My hands started sweating, my breathing sped.

“That’s what the AAS will do, and you know it. If the neomages get her first, they’ll do the same thing, except they’ll kill her faster when they see what she can do. If you want Ciana alive and safe, you’ll keep me alive. And you’ll talk to me. You’ll tell me everything you know.”

“Seduction as an interrogation technique,” I mocked, hating myself for having fallen for it even for a moment. Was I that lonely? “Get the sex-starved mage all hot and bothered and she’ll tell you everything. Nice work.”

He had the grace to look abashed for an instant before his face hardened over whatever he was feeling. “That wasn’t the way it was supposed to go.”

“Clarify,” I said, edging the steel a fraction closer to his throat. The tanto hummed softly at the nearness of the shield, the blade a fluctuating sky blue.

The shield tickled over his flesh and he pressed back into the couch cushion, but he had nowhere else to go. “Mages need sex. We all know that. And I’m not saying seduction wasn’t attempted on mages in the past, but it never worked like anticipated.”

“Go on.”

“The human either ran like a bat out of hell or got snared and converted. Every time. Human version of mage-heat. Why do you think so few humans admitted to an Enclave ever leave?”

I hadn’t thought about it. I had been transported out of Enclave before I was old enough to spend time with humans or experience a full, seraph-induced, mage-heat rut myself. There was a lot about my own race I didn’t know. I went for acerbic, hiding my thoughts. “I thought the rumor was that mages used them up sexually and then ate them.”

“Tales to scare kids into obeying their parents and to keep teenage humans from experimenting. Like the boogeyman.” He watched my face. The clock ticked in the silence. “You don’t know about the relationship between mages and humans,” he said slowly. I said nothing, waiting, my blade and the shield so close they tickled his skin.

“Neomages can be…” He groped for words, his mouth opening and closing once before he started over. “They cause weird reactions in humans. Some humans feel anger or revulsion in the presence of mages. In others, it’s this…this…weird kind of joy, maybe. They call it mage bliss. A kind of contentment just being around you. And for the humans who feel bliss, sex intensifies it. Once you’re with a mage sexually for any length of time”—he stopped and swallowed, glanced down at the sword edge before continuing—“you’re hooked. Not addicted exactly, but you don’t want to leave.”

“And for the ones who feel the negative things?” I asked, remembering people pulling away from me when I was growing up, people I wanted to be my friends, who just seemed to draw away. Remembering the recent revulsion on the faces of so many of the orthodox.

“Sex for them is always”—he groped again for words and I wondered what he hadn’t said—“forceful. The AAS attracts a lot of that kind.”

I remembered a comment made to me by an investigator for the Administration of the ArchSeraph when I was under arrest for a short time as an unlicensed mage. He had offered to take me for a ride as part of my intake interview. I had known what he meant. And every mage knew rape was likely to be a part of the torture if asseys ever held us prisoner. Saints’ balls. It all fit. “So when they have a mage in their custody those are the ones who resort to rape,” I said. Eli nodded, bumping his chin on the shield with a little sizzle of power, bringing it dangerously close to the blade. The Flame-augmented tanto’s hum changed tone with the shift, almost as if it was reacting to Eli’s movement. “And the ones who feel the good things are addicted. No wonder humans hate mages.”

“It’s not a true addiction,” he said. “You won’t die if you leave them, but you kind of…grieve. I’ve seen a guy grieving. After. It’s said that when a human actually falls in love with a mage, they never leave.”

Something sharp and cutting twisted inside. “Lucas did.” The statement was out before I could stop it; I could have bitten off my tongue. The two little words exposed all the hurt I still kept inside, trapped like a tiger in a cage.

Eli’s expression softened, and I stiffened at the emotion there. I didn’t want his pity. “Ciana isn’t human,” he said. “Not anymore. Lucas may not be either. It may not work quite the same with them, whatever they are.”

It wasn’t a complete answer but it felt like the truth, or truth as he knew it, a truth that was a weighted shroud around me. Careful to keep my inflections neutral, I asked my second-biggest question. “How do you know that? That Ciana isn’t human?”

“There’s a little black box in my jacket. A device reverse engineered by the R and D Department of the Administration of the ArchSeraph. It’s based on the sigils provided by the Realms of Light to the agency when they instituted us back in early Post-Ap times.”

I didn’t miss the us pronoun, but I stayed focused on his story. I had seen an assey’s sigil up close and personal when I first met Captain Durbarge. Etched into clear crystal, glittering with seraph energies, were wings and a halo. Such sigils had been known to sparkle or glisten when mage-conjures were used nearby.

“The black box is used by the AAS to detect energy use, mage energies and seraph energies. Durbarge gave me his when we were on the Trine and he knew he wasn’t coming back. I was supposed to watch you and the Stanhopes and the local EIH group and report back. But the EIH had one too, and they approached me. They wanted a parley. I set it up. My superiors met with their emissary in Asheville five days ago.”

Okay, he was a spy first, a spy turned diplomat. “And Ciana?”

“With the box, I can see that thing on her chest. I saw what she did during the battle. She’s manipulating seraphic energies. It’s interactive with her. No human can do that.”

“Mages can’t either.”

I saw the speculation on his face and knew I had corroborated some intel for the AAS. Me and my big mouth. Thinking abut Lolo and the decades-long plan to put me in Mineral City and to free the trapped Watcher, Barak, I asked, “Your superiors in general or your superiors in a splinter group of the AAS?”

When Eli didn’t answer, I said, “Hands behind your head, fingers laced together.” He almost argued with me. I saw it flit through his thoughts before it was replaced with something else. Grinning that insouciant grin, daring me to watch him stretch, Eli extended his arms up, following my directions.

“I’m faster than you,” I said. “You try to draw your gun again and I’ll spit you like a frog on a gig.” Backing slowly away from him, I let the shield slide over the hat and jacket on the floor. Blue light glimmered from the cloth when the shield energies encompassed it. With a toe I nudged the jacket open to expose a black box, three or four inches long, maybe two wide, and an inch thick. The blue light emanated from a screen on it. There were buttons and what might be an eyepiece.

Had he been around Thadd? Did he also know about the kylen or did the seraph ring Thadd wore protect him from detection? I didn’t know how to ask without giving away the cop’s secret so I abandoned that one for now. I sheathed the smaller blade and reached down to the coat, half expecting Eli to try to shoot me. I pocketed the device and his eye brows went up. “Yeah, I’m stealing your little toy. Sue me.” Of course if he wanted me to steal it, hoping to use it to listen to my conversations or to booby-trap me or something, then I was falling into his little assey trap. Am I a conspiracy theorist or what? But when you’ve been a pawn in a real conspiracy, you tend to anticipate more of them.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ve made some progress. Not much but some.” I clicked off the shield before it went off by itself. I had to recharge my amulets or they were all going to go blank. “I still don’t know where you stand, with or against the seraphs, with or against mages, with or against the heretics, or somewhere in the middle of all of them.”

Eli lowered his hands and levered himself upright, moving slowly, intent on my blades, careful to keep his hand away from his gun. He watched me for a long moment and seemed to make up his mind. “I’m gonna give you my weapon. I’m gonna use my left hand to reach across and pull the gun with two fingers. Then I’ll put it on the floor and kick it to you. Okay?”

Not sure where he was going with this, I inclined my head. Carefully, he did just as he’d said, placing the gun on the floor and toeing it toward me. Just as slowly, he leaned back into the couch and slouched, legs splayed. “I’m with the seraphs,” he said folding his fingers together in his lap, “at least until we help them defeat the Darkness. Like the Dark, they’re invaders, but unlike them, the seraphs aren’t currently killing us off, and they don’t eat us. Other than that, there ain’t that much to choose between them. Once their war is won, all bets are off.

“I’m neutral regarding the EIH, at least until I see the evidence they have to support the blasphemy. They think the seraphs will leave Earth if the Darkness is defeated. If they’re right, and can prove it, and if they have a plan to defeat the Dark and make the Light leave Earth forever, then I’m on their side. And to answer your earlier accusation, no, I didn’t go over to them. I was in communication with them and we’ve joined forces a couple times, worked together in the street fight. That’s it.”

I didn’t believe that was the whole truth but I didn’t say so. Big mouth staying shut now. When I didn’t reply, Eli went on.

“And just so you know, I’m for little girls who have funky gifts and powers, and against anyone who might want to steal them away from their families or hurt them. I’m against the mages until I know what they want, but I’m for you. I think. Unless and until I learn you have an agenda against humanity. If I discover that, I’ll kill you, bliss or no bliss, even if I give in to temptation first, jump your bones, and get obsessed with you. And by the way, that idiot man you married? He’s hooked. Not like a human man, but he’s”—Eli paused again as if searching for the exact word—“besotted. Yeah. He’s besotted. You want him, you can have him.”

“He had an affair when we were married,” I said, this time keeping my emotions in tight check.

“He was lured by a succubus. He was stupid and weak, but not many men could refuse one-a them fine mamas when they come calling. You may not be able to forgive him, but forgiveness is your choice, not something forced on you.”

One-a them fine mamas? Forgiveness is your choice? If he wanted to disarm me with candor and his impressions of Lucas he had succeeded. I set the tanto aside, but I didn’t sit down. I stood over him, watching him, feeling there was more he wanted to say.

“But there’s one thing you might keep in mind. Lucas had you when he didn’t know you were a mage. He had you when you didn’t know you were binding him to you, if I’m reading you right. He’s affected, to some extent, by mage bliss.”

He didn’t have to say it. I would never know if Lucas loved me for me or because of mage bliss. Because no matter what they called it, bliss sounded like addiction to me. Inexorably, as if he didn’t know he was tearing my heart out, Eli went on.

“Any seraph or a mage would want you, in the right circumstances, and would take you in the street, a mass orgy you wouldn’t be able to resist or refuse. The two-edged sword of true compulsion. Me? I’m not under compulsion. I know what you are. I know what would happen if I slept with you. I know it’s likely that I’d give up everything I have and everything I am to be with you. I know all that and I want you anyway.” His amber eyes studied me as carefully as I did him. “I knew you were something different when I saw you at early thaw, at the sun-day dance. I watched you for weeks before I made contact with you. I knew what you were from day one. I made a conscious choice to get to know you. I knew what I was doing. Something to think about. And hey. That’s why no romance and roses and courting gestures. You want me, it’s for me, and not for what I make you feel with overtures.”

“And what do you want from me? Other than wild hot monkey sex?”

“I want you to ask your seraph what he’s doing here, what they want, and where they came from. I want you to work with me, with the AAS, and with the EIH to defeat the Dark, and then work with us to defeat the seraphs and get them to leave Earth. And the hot monkey sex sounds like a great deal too.”

I couldn’t help my disbelieving chuckle. The man didn’t want much. No. Not much at all. “And if there really is a Most High, and if he is the creator of the universe, and if he really does love humans, and if he really did kill off six billion humans as part of a cleansing and rebirth of the earth and a new age and all that? If the apocalypse was the event prophesied in every religion in history and not a takeover attempt to seize the earth? Then what?”

“If the Most High appears, or a messiah, or if evil is really defeated and paradise on earth results, then I’ll lay down all resistance. If he really is God almighty, I’ll bow down and worship him like the rest of humanity.

“Now, I got a question for you. Why do you think the big bad uglies are always ugly? What if they looked and smelled just like seraphs? The biggest BBUs used to be seraphs, right? Did the seraphs put an incantation on their enemies to make ’em look that way?”

I said nothing, just let the syllables flow over me. It wasn’t anything the EIH hadn’t been saying for years. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t thought before.

“What if they were beautiful like the seraphs? Which side would we go for? The side that killed six bil’ of us right up front? Or the side that likes us for dinner? If one side decided to save us—really save our asses—would we care which side it was?”

Heresy. Profane sacrilege.

Truth? Finally, I looked away.