“Lovely to see you as well, brother,” I comment dryly.
“What is it? I’m in the middle of eating breakfast.”
Behind his head through the video feed, I see Raven flying around the room. She seems to be making circles on the ceiling over the breakfast table. It’s a favorite activity of hers.
“I only saw her last week, but I swear Raven’s gotten bigger already.”
“She’s a growing little menace,” Abaddon says, but I can hear the unmistakable pride in his surly voice.
“Anyway, I just wanted to let you in on what’s happening here.”
“That’s new,” he mutters under his breath.
I ignore the jab and only half roll my eyes. “It seems like we might have torn a hole in the continuum between the planes when we let the Devourer through last month.”
“What?” he barks loudly enough that I pull the phone away from my ear.
Here it comes. The blame. Then he’ll tell me how terrible I am at everything I attempt. I sigh heavily. “Look, we only know of one spirit who made it through the breach right now. Her name is Ammit. She’s a succubus goddess who kills men after she seduces them. We’ve got leads on her and are actively tracking her as we speak. But there might be more spirits who slipped through that we don’t know about yet.”
Abaddon rubs his lion-like chin with his clawed hand while thinking. “But you’ve got the one under control? This Am—whatever her name is?”
“Ammit. Yes. Phoenix and I have the situation under control. We’re tracking her movements and will take her down when we find her.”
He narrows his eyes at me through the screen. “You have an actual plan for that?”
“Of course we have a plan,” I lie smoothly. We’ll figure out a plan when the time comes.
“One that won’t open up a rip in even more realms?”
“Yes,” I snap at him. There’s no one like my oldest brother to make me feel like an incompetent fool. “You don’t have to worry about it. I hope you and the family are settling into your new place. I just wanted to keep you in the loop about what’s happening.”
He nods slowly. The line is still creased between his eyebrows as if he’s not entirely sure whether he has faith in me. But finally, he says, “All right, then. I’ll trust you with this situation.”
It’s stupid how his words make something clench painfully and then unfurl in my chest. Not having a father worth thename, my oldest brother has always been the one I looked up to. It was one of the reasons it hurt so badly when he stood there and watched our father slice off my wings without doing a damn thing to stop it.
I only learned after I reunited with my brothers that when they all thought our father had murdered me, Abaddon killed our Creator-Father in a rage. Or thought he had killed him permanently.
We all learned a hard lesson that our kind can’t actually be killed when both I and our Father returned from death. Very much not dead after all. I sent dear old Dad back to the Great Hall, where I hope the angels have shackled him in a deep, dark dungeon somewhere for eternity.
On-screen, Raven flies down and lands heavily on her father’s shoulders. She grabs his horns as if to ride him like a horse. Except she’s much bigger now than she was only a month ago at the wedding. Abaddon is thrown forward by her weight and momentum, tipping into the phone. Raven’s black wings flutter wildly as she giggles like it’s the best game in the world. She thinks he’s a bucking bronco.
“I’ll talk to you later,” I say while smiling into the mass of wings blocking out the entire screen.
“You need any help with this, just let us know, baby brother,” is the last thing I hear him say before the line cuts off abruptly.
The call ends, leaving me staring at my phone. Kids. A month ago, I would have balked even at the idea of having children. Way too much responsibility for someone like me, I would’ve said.
And I understand why Phoenix isn’t eager to give Vlad what he wants by getting pregnant. But if this marriage were real and she was at all open to the possibility, the thought of having children together... The image of Raven growing bigger by the day and my other brother Kharon’s daughter Luna both beingsuch handfuls, especially given their angel-monster heritage, makes me wonder.
The weeks before the wedding, Kharon and his wife Ksenia did everything they could to keep baby Luna calm and safe. Kharon is the Horseman of Death who carries human souls to the deathly plane after they die. But it turns out that’s not the only realm he can travel to anymore. Not that he knew about this ability until the Devourer visited on the day Luna was born. We learned she’d inherited his ability to jump between planes. Now Kharon’s practicing his own jumps to different realms so he knows he can control it. He wants to be ready to chase after her in case she accidentally disappears to somewhere dangerous someday.
It’s wild to think that what Sabra always spent so much energy and mage-work trying to accomplish with her circles, my baby niece can do as easily as breathing.
I step out of my room to head toward the computer lab across the hall. I didn’t get any notification pings on my phone saying the bots found anything overnight. But I can’t stand sitting around doing nothing anymore while Ammit is out there somewhere.
Speaking of Sabra and her magical abilities, I realize something important. I told Abaddon confidently that we had Ammit handled, but what exactly do Phoenix and I plan to do even if we catch this goddess? We need Sabra if we’re going to send Ammit back to where she came from. My baby niece isn’t exactly up to the job of controlled inter-planar travel yet. Kharon still can’t control where he jumps to when he does it.
But Sabra has the knowledge and skill we need. Back in the day, Sabra and I finally learned how to connect spirit energy back to the specific plane a spirit originally came from. It took a lot of trial and error over many months, but we discovered a system that involved all three of us working together. Phoenix,Sabra, and me. Together, we provide the fuel, the framework, and the fine-tuning, respectively. Without one of us, the entire system falls apart.
