Faith Hunter - Host

The thought was blasphemy, but the existence of the creator had been questioned by others, people a lot smarter than I. I had questioned it myself until today. But now I was beginning to have suspicions about my own doubt. Did the One True God exist? Had he created the universe and all that was in it? Did he give a flying flip that we were here? Did he bother with our paltry, petty lives? Had he really created the children of men—the mages, the kylen, the Stanhopes? And if so, what were we? The next evolutionary step of humankind?

It sounded so ludicrous, like a really bad Pre-Ap movie. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Or worse. The films about superheroes, Superman, or the X-Men.

The children of men are gathered. The old things are passed away. Seraph stones. I drew on my amulets to control my rising heat. If I was right, then Lolo’s quest for a soul had some merit. Maybe a lot of merit. If mages were indeed a branch of the children of men, those special, anticipated beings prophesied about for millennia, then God the Victorious owed us souls. Owed us the opportunity for immortality just like the humans had. Owed us….

Thadd’s breathing stuttered. Halted. Resumed at a faster rate.

He was awake.

Slowly he turned on the mattress, sheets swishing, and met my gaze across the room. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said, his voice a sleepy growl.

“Yes, I should.” I think.

He rolled from the bed, his big body lithe and muscled in the half-light. He was naked. Aroused. Reddish hair, penny-bright, covered his legs and arms, redder than the hair on his head, brighter than the scruff of beard that covered his jaw. Brighter still was the hair at his groin, his manhood rising in the middle of his body. I stared and licked my lips, hungry for him. Wanting to feel his touch.

“You should go,” he said as he crouched, a warrior’s stance. He was holding himself back, his control a fragile silken rein, easily broken. Violence and passion were intertwined for mages and kylen, twin desires, too often overlapping.

His hands rose, half reaching, half gesturing me away. His kylen ring was not on his finger—the ring that had hidden the truth of his genetic heritage even from himself—the reason why our heat was rising so fast. I glanced to his side and saw the ring on the table. He had been fighting the change ever since he discovered what he was. I wondered why he had taken it off now, allowing the transformation into pure kylen to proceed at the accelerated rate.

“Come here,” he demanded.

My body softened, need pooling in me like magma, hot and melting. Breath shallow and fast, I kept my place, feasting on the sight of his body.

Wings, feathered with the two-tone plumage of a kylen youth, stretched up behind his shoulders and along the length of him, to his knees. He half spread them, the lighter-than-air bones lifting to the sides, feathers rippling. The wings had achieved their full length, useless for flight, ornamental only, but with cardinal-crimson flight feathers, darkest at the tips, lightening to white down beneath the wings, speckling white and red at his shoulders.

Paeans of song darted through me, mage songs, about the wonders of mating with kylen, the unbearable heat, the taste and smell and touch of them. The feel of seraph-down tickling along a stomach…

I forced my gloved hand into my pocket and around the seraph stone there. In a single, fluid move, I pulled it from my battle cloak and tossed it to him. “Catch,” I said.

On instinct, faster than any human could have, Thadd reached out and caught the stone. And the heat flaring between us died. The need didn’t fade away. The instant he touched the stone with his bare hand, it was simply gone, as if ripped away, as if a spear point had been yanked out of flesh, leaving a gaping, empty wound. I closed my eyes hard against the loss and blinked away the tears that gathered.

“What—? What happened?” Thadd asked, looking around the room. Slowly his shoulders relaxed, wings folding tight against him, his bare feet long and lean on the floor. There was no doubt that his desire was gone, wilted away, so to speak. Grief and relief blended within me.

“What is it?” he asked, turning the stone over in his palm. Thadd was unconcerned at being naked in front of me, almost unaware of his state, of my regard, of the barren and aching space between us. I wanted to cry, and struggled for the nonchalance that seemed so very far away.

I fought to speak normally and pretty much succeeded, only a little waver giving me away. “It’s the seraph stone Zadkiel gave me,” I said. “I knew it had healed me, but I wasn’t sure what else it could do. Until now.”

“How does it work? Are there more of them?”

“I don’t know, except it requires the touch of skin to make it most effective. I wore it on my amulet necklace in the battle and when you showed up I went into mage-heat. With it in my pocket, I felt mage-heat. In your hand, nada. Nothing. No mage-heat at all.” Which hurt like plagues and death, but I was through whining.

“I was guessing it worked along the lines of battle dire and bloodlust. Both can reduce mage-heat to varying degrees. I thought the Host found a way, or was given a way, to bring it under control, maybe by stimulating the same chemicals that blank desire during near-death warfare. But now, after experiencing it—” I stopped myself and licked my lips again. They were full and swollen as if Thadd had kissed me. The sting of loss spread through me and I pushed it away, chasing my thread of thought until I found it. “The stone works too fast to be promoting a chemical reaction. I think it’s something else, a conjure, maybe.”

Thadd nodded and turned, picking up a pair of jeans, sliding into them, buttoning them on his hips, hiding his form beneath the conformity of clothes. I tried to ignore the sadness that settled into me at the loss of the vision of his naked body, like something Michelangelo would have carved, had he ever found such a magnificent model. Moving the stone from hand to hand as he worked, Thadd pulled a modified shirt over his wings and his arms with an efficiency that proved he had been practicing, and buttoned it in place.

“What do you think it means,” he asked, “that a seraph gave this to you?”

“‘The children of men are gathered. The old things are passed away,’” I quoted. “I think it means that all the humans alive now, the human remnant, and all the mages, and all the kylen, are the children of men, the final result, the ultimate genetic pool of the humans who survived the Last War. I think the mages were the first to demonstrate the changes that are coming to all humans. I think the Stanhopes are another phase of that change. If so, it means that the last days are drawing to a close. The end is near.”

He quirked a half smile at me, not concealing a gentle mockery. “That’s pretty melodramatic.”

I told him about the consulate meeting that was playing over and over again on SNN, creating a worldwide sensation. I quoted the entire prophecy. And then I told him about Rupert’s vision of the old church and the huge snail-like things that crawled up the walls. I told him about Rose, captured and drugged and lying on an altar in Rupert’s dream. About how I was supposed to murder Rupert, but that I had changed the tools available to fate, or to God the Victorious, to make the vision come to pass. I told him about the dreams I had been having, dreams that mirrored Rupert’s in so many ways.

As I talked, his amusement fell away, leaving him introspective, reflecting. He turned the stone again, his eyes searching mine. “We can change predictions,” Thadd said, repeating my own thoughts, “but we can’t change prophecy. Was I there? In Rupert’s dream?”