His pain was undisguised, so raw it made her own pain sing straight to the surface, pure enough for tithing, but that wasn’t the worst part. If it was only pain, she might have found a way to go to him, to reach for his hand as she had on the other side of the portal, or even for his heart, as she had in the cave. We are the beginning.
But… the beginning ofwhat ?Karou wondered, desolate, because there was rage in Akiva’s eyes, too, and an implacability that was unmistakable. It was hatred, and it was vengeance. It was terrifying, and it froze her in place. When she had first lain eyes on him in the Jemaa in Marrakesh, he had been absolutely cold. Inhuman, merciless. What she had seen on him then was vengeance as habit, and fury cooled by years of numbness.
Later, in Prague, she had seen his humanity return to him, like a thaw releasing a heart from ice. She hadn’t been able to fully appreciate it at the time, because she hadn’t understood what it meant, or what he was coming back from, but now she did. He had resurrected himself—the Akiva she had known so long ago, so full of life and hope—or at least, he had begun to. She still hadn’t seen him smile the way he had back then, a smile so beautiful it had channeled sunlight and made her feel drunk with love, at once light-headed and firmly, perfectly, gratefully connected to the world—earth and sky and joy and him. Everything else had paled beside that feeling. Race was nothing, and treason just a word.
She had just begun to feel that smile was possible again, and the feeling of effortless rightness, too, but, looking at Akiva now, it felt very far away again, and so did he.
As she understood it, there had been several thousand Misbegotten soldiers as recently as last year, and the final berserk push of the war had reduced that number to those she knew from the Kirin caves. Akiva had endured that, survived it, and then he had endured and survived the death of Hazael, and now he was here, safe, while possibly—probably—he lost all the rest.
What Karou saw in him was vengeance still molten, and it was wrong, it wasn’t where they were supposed to be, but it felt… inevitable. Brimstone had told her, just before her execution, “To stay true in the face of evil is a feat of strength,” but maybe, thought Karou, sick at heart, it was just too much to expect. Maybe that strength was too much to ask of anyone.
The feeling of half death was with her still. She felt flattened out, or hollowed out. Again.
She turned to her friends and, with effort, spoke almost evenly. “Could you two go in and get a room? Maybe it’s best if the rest of us aren’t seen.”
She thought—hoped—Zuzana might make some sarcastic comment to that, or suggest riding right up to the gate on Virko-back or something, but she didn’t. She just nodded.
“Do you realize,” asked Mik, in a bald effort to jostle some Zuzana-ness back into Zuzana, “that our three wishes are about to come true? I don’t know if they’ll have chocolate cake here, but—”
Zuzana cut him off. “I’m changing my wishes anyway,” she said, and counted them off on her fingers. “One: for our friends to be safe. Two: for Jael to drop dead, and three…”
Whatever she meant to say next, she didn’t manage it. Karou had never seen her friend look so lost and fragile. She cut in. “If it doesn’t include food,” she reminded Zuzana gently, “it’s a lie. At least, so I’ve been told.”
“Fine.” Zuzana took a deep breath, centering herself. “Then I could really use some world peace for dinner.” She was all dark-eyed intensity. Something was lost in her. Karou saw it and mourned. War does that, nothing for it. Reality lays siege. Your framed portrait of life is smashed, and a new one thrust upon you. It’s ugly, and you don’t even want to look at it let alone hang it on the wall, but you have no choice, once you know. Once you really know.
And who was Zuzana going to be, now that this knowledge was hers?
“World peace for dinner,” mused Mik, scratching his beard stubble. “Does that come with fries?”
“It freaking better,” said Zuzana. “Or I will send it freaking back.”
The angel’s name was Elazael.
The church founded by her descendants—and they preferred the term churchto cult, naturally—was called the Handfast of Elazael, and every girl child born in the bloodline was christened Elazael. If, then, by puberty, she had not manifested “the gift,” she was rechristened by another name. Eliza had been the only one in the last seventy-five years to hold on to it, and she had often thought that the worst thing of all—the cherry on the cake of her awful upbringing—was the envy of the others.
Nothing glitters in the eyes like envy. Few could know this as profoundly as she did. It had to be something special to grow up knowing that any given member of your large extended family would probably kill and eat you if it meant they could have your “gift” for themselves, Renfield-style.
The Handfast was matriarchal, and Eliza’s mother was the current high priestess. Converts were called “cousins,” while those of the blood—venerated even if they didn’t have “the gift”—were “the Elioud.” It was the term, in ancient texts, for the offspring of the better-known “Nephilim,” who were the first fruit of angels’ congress with humans.
It was notable that in Nephilim scripture, both biblical and apocryphal, all the angels were male. The Book of Enoch—a text that was canon to no group except the Ethiopian Jews—tells of the leader of the fallen angels, Samyaza, ordering his hundred and ninety-nine fallen brethren to, essentially, get busy.
“Beget us children,” he commanded, and they complied, and no mention was made of how the human women felt about this. Unsurprising in writings of the era, the mothers had all the agency of petri dishes, and the progeny that sprang from their wombs—accompanied by, one surmised, extreme discomfort—were giants and “biters,” whatever that meant, whom God later bade the archangel Gabriel to destroy.
And maybe he did. Maybe they had existed, all of them: Gabriel and God, Samyaza and his crew and all their enormous biting babies. Who knows? The Elioud dismissed the Book of Enoch as absurd, which was kind of the pot calling the kettle black, Eliza had always thought, but wasn’t that what religions did? Squint at one another and declare, “My unprovable belief is better than your unprovable belief. Suck it.”
More or less.
The Handfast had its own book: the Book of Elazael, of course, according to which there weren’t two hundred fallen angels. There were four, two of whom were female, one of whom mattered. Victims of corruption in the highest rank of angels, they were maimed and cast unjustly out of Heaven a thousand years ago. What had become of the three other Fallen, or whether they did any begetting of their own, was unknown, but Elazael, for her part, by way of congress with a human husband, was fruitful and multiplied.
(As a side note, it said a lot about Eliza’s insular childhood and early education—or lack thereof—that she was a teenager before she learned that the governing body of the United States was called “Congress.” In her world, it meant the act that leads to “begetting.” Coupling. Loin fruit. Doing it.As a consequence, congressstill sounded sexual to her every time she heard it—which, living in Washington, D.C., was often.)
In the Book of Elazael, unlike in the patriarchal Book of Enoch, or Genesis for that matter, the angel wasn’t the giverof seed, but the receiver. The angel was mother, was womb, and, credit nature or nurture, her offspring weren’t monstrous.