Within a few yards, the roar of water came to me faintly. I rounded a curve and the air grew wetter, the rumble a vibration beneath my paw-pads. The tunnel narrowed and twisted. It opened out into a bigger room, the floor littered with cracked and broken stone. A stalagmite had fallen and shattered and now blocked my path. An underground stream gushed from a hole in the rock wall just ahead and to my left. The cascade sent plumes of mist and water droplets into the air. Each was pristine and perfectly round.
I stepped over the broken stone and stopped at the edge of the underground river, the water a good ten-foot drop below me. Downstream, I saw the presence of future time in the water droplets. I saw war among the arcenciels, war with lightning, storms, eruptions of volcanoes, earthquakes. There was fighting in the heavens like angels and demons in battle. Human jets and bombers circled among them, firing weapons that did nothing to the rainbow dragons, passed through the demons without effect. Nuclear bombs detonated in the atmosphere. The droplets grew crimson and vanished. Instead of battle in the droplets, I now saw a dry and barren world. A war-ravaged world with craters and rents deep into the Earth’s crust. The crimson tint obscured the timeline. In its place, I saw droplets depicting a wet and dripping world covered with mold and slimes and colonies of bacteria the size of dinner plates. In the next spray human bones were piled high in desolate and broken cities, as if thousands of bodies had been shoved out of the way, to rot. In other droplets and sprays, I saw emptiness, no living humans, no mammals, no birds, no reptiles, no insects. Not anywhere. I understood that every single droplet vision was a variant of the world after arcenciel war. After human war. After destruction on a scale I never dreamed even in nightmares. I closed my eyes and forced the visions away.
When I opened them again, my gaze traced the passage of water from upstream, between the rocks, where the water roared from the chasm, above the waterfall, high into the past. My childhood came alive in the droplets.Edoda, my father, teaching me to throw an ax. His body, on the floor of our cabin. The sensation of cold as I painted my face in my father’s blood. My five-year-old hand clenching the knife that killed my first man,Edoda’s murderer.
I followed the trail of my life in the droplets back along the flow of the underground river, downstream into my own future. Seeing death and war, seeing hope and love. Seeing my future evil as I killed and ate humans, then my death as a liver-eater at the hand of an elderly Eli. His rage and sorrow and determination as I tried to kill him and Alex and three small children.
My entire life was death and destruction. And each droplet of my future was a world of even more horrors if I didn’t fix what was happening here and now. Or if I allowed the arcenciels to go back in time and destroy the vamps at conception. Or if I allowed the war in the heavens to start. But I didn’t know how to stop any of that.
I studied each potential world, each possibility as it rose and fell into the fast-moving river, upstream and down. A series of them showed torture. Disease. Destruction. War. Another series showed the vamps and the trail of bodies as they attacked and killed entire villages. Others displayed vamps hanging in storage lockers, their blood harvested. Most droplets of the underground stream were filled with fear and pain. The very few that led to peace and living humans and a healthy world were a narrow spray that started with me. But there was nothing that showed what I did to avert a war. Nothing that showed me how to get through to the narrow possibility of goodness.
A sound like a silver bell echoed in the chamber.
I turned around. The beautiful man stood in the tunnel behind me, no wings, no halo, but so beautiful that Michelangelo would have killed to carve his likeness.Hayyel smiled at me, an expression so sweet it broke my heart. “As your Alex might say, hatred is fear on illegal drugs, a passion that would defeat love. And so there is always war.”
“Hate is fear on steroids,” I corrected.
He tilted his head and walked closer to me in my vision. His smile faded. “More arcenciels work to find a way to go back two thousand years in the past. Soon there will be enough of them in agreement to make the leap.”
“To destroy the Sons of Darkness.” I hadn’t known it took a lot of them to time-jump so far, but it made sense. The vamps I knew who had been collecting them had all seemed to want more than one. “You want to use me to stop them. I’m a pawn on a chessboard to you, just like I was to Leo Pellissier.”
He frowned slightly and I felt my insides quiver in dismay. I didn’t want him unhappy.
I realized he was manipulating my emotions. “Stop it,” I said. “Do that again and I’ll walk away.”
He lifted his chin, scowling as if I had pointed out a flaw in his perfection. And maybe I had. Humans were supposed to have free will—but I wasn’t human. He could manipulate me any way he wanted. I wondered if his boss knew he was trying to alter the current reality on earth. And then I wondered, not for the first time, if he was one of the fallen. Had I been played by an angel of the dark posing as one of the good guys?
“I am not among the fallen,” he said, throwing back an arm as if sweeping back a wing in disgust. “I do my duty. No more.”
“No more? Uh-huh.”Liar, liar, pants burning in the fires of hell.There was more here than I was being told.
“You, however, have not done your duty. More than once you have held a trapped arcenciel in your hands and have not ridden it to correct the evils you have seen. I gave youpower.” He pointed to my middle. “You did not use it. Instead you play this game as half of a beast, hiding from the magic that is yours to use.”
I touched my belly, confused. He had to know. But...“All the magic, all the timewalking, gave me cancer. I’m dying in my human form.”
And I coulda sworn Hayyel was... surprised. “The power makes you stronger.”
“It tore my DNA into shreds. Last time I looked, it was four strands instead of two. I told God I was sick. I prayed. I shifted. I’m still sick. Timewalking and the weird magics in my middle are killing me.”
The door in the sweathouse opened. The vision dropped away. Frigid air swooshed in. The smell of vamp churned around me.
I whirled. Saw everything, backlit by the dim night against the snow. Two vampires stood in the open doorway. Strangers. Male and female. Vamped out. Armed to the teeth.
They went for weapons.
Beast shoved power into me. Speed. Tearing the blade from my belt, I attacked. Leaped. Dove into the snowy world, blade out to one side, claws out on the other. Whatever they expected, I wasn’t it. They didn’t move fast enough. The vamp-killer cut through the body of the one on the right, midline, at the waist. My arm and shoulder jerked with the impact. Left claws went higher, taking out the flesh below the collarbone, the left side of the throat, neck, up the back of the jaw and ear. One swipe. I landed off-balance. Tucked and rolled. Smelled Eli. I kept rolling. Three shots rang out. Three more. Three more. Three more. I came up behind a tree, stayed tucked. Located Eli in the dark. Sitting in a tree. Cold-suited. Headset with oculars and mic. Heard the faint clicks of a weapon mag being replaced with a fresh. I inspected the vamps. Both were still down on the snow. I took my first breath.
The vamps smelled strange. Acidic. Like boiling vinegar. I almost expected the snow beneath them to melt and boil, but nothing happened. The vamps stayed down. Eli dropped to the ground, silently moved through the trees and up to the bodies, his weapon out.
“Any more of them?” I asked.
Eli said softly, into a mic, “Activity?” To me, he said,“No. Alex found these two working their way in from the main road, through the trees. They startled a deer and it ran into the path of a laser monitor or we might have missed them. I’ll be installing more cameras in the morning.”
“Get Evan to help. He might be able to set some kind of far-ranging magical warning thingy in place.”
“I’ll be sure to ask for a magical warning thingy.” He sounded amused. I grinned at him in the dark, showing lots of fang and teeth. He snorted softly. “They skirted the house and the cottages, taking photos, then came here, as if they had notification you were inside.”
“Or someone told them about the sweathouse. Construction crew? Delivery help? How trustworthy are Kojo and Thema?”
