On Midnight Wings

36 A MOTHER’S GRIEF GEHENNA

A MOIST, BRINE-SCENTED WIND whipped through Lucien’s hair, pushed at his folded wings. He studied the night-darkened sea crashing around the weathered rocks far below, ghostly spume spraying into the air. Beneath his feet, he felt the booming vibration as the sea crashed into a cave hollowed below into the cliff face.

“How much longer?” he asked.

“He’ll be here soon,” Hekate’s soft voice answered from beside him.

Lucien said nothing, a muscle ticking in his jaw. Leave it to the Morningstar to take his own sweet time even while the trumpets blew and the stars fell from the skies.

Enough time had already been wasted presenting himself to Gabriel and assuring the royal pretender that everything was fine with Dante, that his visit to Gehenna had been prompted merely by a desire to see, once more, a certain silver-haired enchantress.

But engrossed in directing the cleaning of the creawdwr’s receiving chamber, a room unused since Yahweh’s death more than two thousand years, Gabriel had barely paid any attention to Lucien’s presence, let alone the reason for his visit.

Finally waving Lucien away like an annoying summer fly, Gabriel had said only, “Why should I care? She’s no longer my hostage. She may do as she pleases. And if that includes becoming entangled with her mother’s former lover, the murderer of our previous creawdwr, then so be it. I have better things to worry about.”

Hekate’s silver bell of a voice pulled Lucien away from his thoughts. He looked at her, certain she’d asked him a question, one he hadn’t heard. Pale moonlight rippled along her looped and coiled—and now salt-spray-beaded—tresses. Night hollowed her cheeks, pooled deep in her hyacinth eyes. Drew him in.

“Forgive me,” he murmured. “I’m afraid I didn’t—”

Hekate shook her head. “Nothing to forgive. I know you have a lot on your mind—including whether you can trust my father to do the right thing.”

“There is that. But I believe he will. It’s in his own best interests.”

“For now.”

“What did you ask me while I was woolgathering?”

Hekate hesitated, then turned her gaze to the restless sea. “If you knew why Dante refused to restore my mother. She was helping you, after all. Trying to protect him from the others. It makes no sense.”

Lucien shook his head regretfully. “I don’t know the answer to that. I haven’t had time or opportunity to discuss the matter with Dante. But I will, I promise, once he’s home and safe.”

“Thank you.” Hekate flashed Lucien a quick, grateful smile before giving her attention back to the sea. “So restless,” she murmured. “When I was a child, my mother told me that Yahweh’s mother, Leviathan, lived in the ocean and that when it stormed and the sea was wild and restless, it was just Leviathan grieving her only child.”

Leviathan. A chill touched the base of Lucien’s spine. “Do you still believe that?”

“When I was young, yes. But now, of course not. For the longest time though, storms like this made me think of death and loss and a mother’s tears.”

Watching the white-capped waves, Lucien nodded. “I can understand that.”

“I’ve only heard stories about her—Yahweh’s mother. She left Gehenna for the mortal world centuries before I was born.”

“To hunt her son’s killer.”

“You.” Hekate’s voice was soft, absent of accusation, simply stating a fact.

“Me,” Lucien agreed. He drew in a deep breath of chilled, briny air. Underneath, he caught Hekate’s sweet scent—apple blossoms and cool, shaded water.

“How have you managed to elude Leviathan all this time?”

“I haven’t,” Lucien replied, shifting his attention from the sea back to Hekate’s lovely face. “She found me once, nearly ten years ago. After I summoned her.”

“By all that’s holy, why would you do such a thing?”

“Desperation. Fifteen years imprisoned within an aingeal trap will do that to you.”

Hekate stared at him. “Imprisoned? Where? How?”

Lucien shook his head and shifted his gaze back to the heaving dark waters below. “How? My own foolishness. Where? A tattoo shop on the Oregon coast. As to the question you didn’t ask—why—as Nightbringer, I often forced mortals to face the consequences of their own selfish actions and greed.”

“I take it that you were those consequences?”

“That I was.” A wry smile pulled at the corners of Lucien’s mouth. “Your mother used to accuse me of being judgmental and arrogant. She wasn’t wrong. Once I left Gehenna, I continued my work as Nightbringer. I continued very diligently, forcing the mortal world to face what I would not—God was dead. I left entire cities in ruin, the air choked with the ashes of the dead.”

“All to forget Yahweh,” Hekate said slowly. “To forget what you had done. What you had to do.”

“To escape,” Lucien corrected, old sorrow tightening his throat. “There was no forgetting.”

Not the whispered sound of Yahweh’s weary voice: Let them have me, my calon-cyfaill. Let them bind me, chain me to their will. Let it be done before it’s too late. Let it finally be over.

Nor the weight of Yahweh’s lifeless body in his arms.

“And did it work?” Hekate asked softly.

“It did. For centuries. Until I hunted down a woman who enjoyed scamming the bereaved out of their pensions and savings. She was to be the last before I began my new life in New Orleans.”

“New life?” Hekate’s voice dropped into a husky, knowing murmur. “Ah. Dante’s mother. So that’s who reawakened your heart.”

Lucien nodded. “Genevieve.” He studied the foam-tipped waves below. “My scammer turned out to be nephilim and not mortal. She’d also laid a trap for me—one I walked right into—and forced me to recount my own sins in detail for fifteen very long years.”

Fifteen years—unaware that Genevieve was pregnant, unaware that she had been murdered after their son’s birth, leaving the newborn in the hands of monsters. A son Lucien had no idea even existed.

“So you summoned Leviathan to free yourself.” Hekate’s voice was stunned. “Or was it atonement you sought, not freedom?”

“Both, perhaps,” Lucien replied. In truth, he was no longer certain. Behind his eyes, memory stirred.

Leviathan answers in a violent storm that shakes the cliff. She rises from the deep, a valley of endless folds and marine darkness and cascading water that never touches the sea or ground. Her wybrcathl, a furious subsonic bellow, shatters the tattoo shop’s windows and fractures the building itself.

As sea spray washes away the sigils and angelic script encircling him, Lucien is freed. He battles Paloma and both are injured, but before he can finish the fight, Leviathan envelops them both in an undulating dark tide that slides over them like a bowl.

Lucien realizes that he owes Leviathan the story that Paloma had demanded; the story of his murder of her only child—Yahweh. Standing in an oceanic night lit only by the phosphorescent flashes from bizarre creatures swimming within Leviathan, Lucien gives the transformed and fallen angel the last moments of her son’s life. And the reasons for his death.

At the end of it, she asks,

Leviathan pulls away, recedes, and returns to the seething sea, leaving Lucien untouched. Physically, at least.

After he’d discovered Dante’s existence, Lucien had often wondered at Leviathan’s silence, eventually coming to believe that, with her long search for her son’s killer finally over, Leviathan slept in lightless ocean depths, hibernating beneath tons of watery pressure, and beyond the reach—so far—of Dante’s anhrefncathl. Or so Lucien hoped with each beat of his heart.

A wind-chilled hand touched his shoulder, the fingers nearly cold as ice against his skin. He shivered.

“Lucien, tell me the story from the beginning.”

Turning his head to look at her, Lucien wrapped Hekate’s icy fingers in his, then lifted them to his lips. Kissed them. “It’s a long story, one for another time.”

“I like long stories,” she murmured, stepping closer. The wind molded her moss-green gown against her curves, coaxed rosy color from her cheeks.

“So do I,” a voice said from above them. “And I hear you have a good one.”

Lucien looked up to see the Morningstar kiting down from the night sky, moonlight gleaming along his alabaster wings as they slashed through the brine-laden air. Giving Hekate’s fingers one more kiss, Lucien released her hand. He swiveled to face her father.

“Good isn’t the word I’d use,” Lucien said. “Bad, with the potential for worse.”

The Morningstar landed with ease, despite the wind. He folded his wings behind him with a graceful flutter. He was dressed for the sea weather in black plaid trousers over sturdy black boots. Regarding Lucien with golden eyes, he said, “Let’s hear it, then.”

In a voice prickly with his own swallowed pride, Lucien obliged him.