Faith Hunter - Seraphs

At the shop entrance, Lucas waited as I found the key and opened the door. Night had fallen while we talked. It was after six and the town was shut up, the citizens safely inside their homes. Only fools and evil walked alone in the dark. The sleet was long gone and the temperatures had dropped, the cold so intense it was blistering. Overhead, the clouds were breaking up. A black velvet sky peered down at the town, the moon bright, throwing shadows on white snow. Lucas stepped outside.

I lifted a hand to tell him to wait. I would get my sword. I would walk him safely home. Instead, he mistook the gesture for something else and pulled me to him, arm hard around my waist. His mouth came down on mine.

Warmth and need rose so fast they shocked me. His lips were demanding, beguiling, and punishing all at once. I heard a moan and knew it was me. One arm slid low on my hips to support me. The other hand slid around my neck to cradle my head. My mouth opened. His kiss deepened, hardened. Distantly, I heard the bag drop. My arms went around him.

He smelled of soap and beer and roast duck. He tasted of something else entirely. Something new and unpolluted, an unknown seasoning that flooded my mouth, faintly reminiscent of anise and nutmeg, sweet as honey. I knew it hadn’t been part of our meal. Want rose in me like a primeval spring, splashing joyously, to puddle low in my belly. My fingers slid through his dark hair, against his scalp.

His palm was hot against my face. His tongue touched mine. I reeled deeper into the kiss, nearer to the taste of him. That strange taste. I could hear myself moaning, knees weak, the world spinning around me. My head lolling back, I remembered to breathe, and he kissed my throat, his lips hot on my flesh. Where he touched, cold followed, the air chilling. Lucas pulled me tighter, backing me against the doorjamb to keep me from falling. I clung to him as his mouth sucked the soft skin above my collarbone.

I ran my tongue over my bruised lips, tasting him. It was like the otherness, some part of me noted. The sensation I wasn’t able to name when I blended two mage-senses into a single scan. An otherness I had been afraid to practice, afraid to use because it left me dizzy and befuddled. Now Lucas produced the same effect in me.

Lightheaded, faint, I pushed at his shoulders. Lucas pulled back, his blue eyes black in the dim light of the moon. “Whas at—” I stopped and licked my lips; they felt tender, swollen. “What’s that taste?” I managed, only a little slurred. “On your mouth? Like anise?”

Lucas stepped away fast, horror on his face. I caught myself on the doorjamb with both hands. “You can taste it?” he whispered. When I nodded, he said, “I think… it’s manna. I think it’s manna.” With that he turned and walked away, his boots crunching on the hard-frozen snow. He didn’t look back.

Searing-cold mind-clearing air brushed me. Feeling abandoned, I eased inside and closed the door. Manna? I touched my mouth, which tingled slightly. Lucas had kissed me. I’d wanted him to. And he’d eaten the food of angels.

When the sense of inebriation passed, I found myself sitting in the dark on the stairs to my loft, chilled to the bone, shivering, Lucas’ bag in my frozen fingers. I didn’t know what to think, not about Lucas, his declarations of love, or his intent to marry me. Marry me? Once bitten, twice shy. An old aphorism that didn’t take a kiss like Lucas’ into consideration. What was I going to do? I traced the contours of my mouth. It was sensitive from his lips.

I remembered the name he’d spoken, the name of the Darkness trying to do an unspeakable evil. It wasn’t the beast’s true name, but it was a beginning, and research might provide me more. I pulled my fingers from my mouth and my mind from the kiss. What a kiss. I shivered in the cold. Forcas. Yeah. “I can’t do anything about you, Lucas Stanhope. But I can do something about that,” I said, my voice a whispered echo in the stairwell.

Well, maybe. Maybe not. But I stood and went to the computer to look up the evil called Forcas. For once, the computer in the little nook under the stairs worked at the same time as the Internet, though I had to leave my amulets hanging on the knob outside. Mage energies disagreed with sensitive electronics.

Online, I discovered that Forcas was not a nice little beastie. The occult lore didn’t indicate what rank Forcas once held in the angelic hierarchy, or to what order he belonged, but he was generally considered one of the minor seraphs before the fall. Since, however, he had become something far more powerful. When he lived on earth, he had been a teacher of rhetoric, logic, and mathematics. His gifts included being able to render people invisible and restoring lost property.

And according to Lucas, who had been a prisoner in the pit on the Trine, Forcas was the resident Darkness, a talented Fallen, and he had grown in power. He was practicing the Dark arts with Stanhope blood.

I closed down the computer. I was chilled through, and not just because it was cold outside. Because Stanhope blood wasn’t the only thing the master of the Trine was working with. If my guess was right, Forcas also had a few ounces of my blood, taken when I went underground to keep Ciana safe. I shuddered at the memory of the pit, the smell of sulfur and brimstone harsh in my mind. Never again, I promised myself. Never.

Before heading back upstairs, I walked into the stockroom and placed my palm on one of the metal boxes that contained the amethyst, the lavender stone I had thought was dead, yet which had generated the cobra. The first time I ever touched one of the metal boxes, I had been met with a frisson of heat, a whisper of power, and the touch of mage-perception. I had known that there was stone inside, stone imbued with power. That first time, sweat broke out on my arms and tingled down my spine. Not now. Straining, I lifted the metal box to the floor.

I touched the second box, which also contained stone. And behind it was another box, similar to the first two. I studied the boxes in the dim hallway light. They were an ugly green, painted with pale white pigments, words hidden under the crisscrossed security strips. A number six was clearly visible on one, the number two in a different place on another. They were Pre-Ap, US military ammunition boxes.

I sent a mind-skim into the box under my fingertips. The first time I had done this, the stone inside had swirled around me in an eddy, testing, toying. Something had touched my mind, recoiled a bare instant before it wrapped around me, seized me, and pulled me in. Something with unheard-of might. Such power. It beat into me, demanding.

Now there was nothing, not a whisper of power. I opened the box, its hinges twanging softly, and unexpected gloom settled across my shoulders at the sight of the once wondrous amethyst. Now it was pale, almost clear, like good-quality quartz, spotted with slightly darker inclusions in half curves and spots like eyelids and pupils. After the cobra, I had hoped it might be restored.

I lifted a fist-sized specimen and sent a tendril of thought into it. There was nothing there, no tremor of energy. I replaced the amethyst and closed the lid, feeling the chill of the unheated room through the soles of my feet. Fighting dejection, I turned off the light, went back upstairs, and found my bed. I was asleep almost instantly.

The lynx sat on my back porch railing, purring, body erect, stubby tail curled around its back feet. I placed my hand on the ice-rimmed window and leaned closer to the huge black cat. It was between sixty and eighty pounds, its waterproof outer coat of hair harsh and glossy over an inner coat that fluffed for warmth. Moonlight brightened white facial hair and its pale-haired belly, and white tufts sprouted from erect ears. It was prim and proper, until it opened its mouth and growled at me. Two-inch fangs caught the moonlight. My breath fogged the glass—and I woke, the echo of the growl reverberating in the apartment around me.