Faith Hunter - Host

“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.”