Mortal Sins (Conspiracy of Angels short story)

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Michelle Belanger

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  About the Author

  Also Available from Titan Books

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM MICHELLE BELANGER AND TITAN BOOKS

  Conspiracy of Angels

  Harsh Gods

  The Resurrection Game (August 2017)

  MORTAL SINS

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785654985

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First electronic edition: October 2016

  Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  © 2016 Michelle Belanger.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  This story takes place between

  Conspiracy of Angels and Harsh Gods.

  1

  “Come on, Zack. You’ve been putting this off for weeks.”

  Lil gestured toward the little earthenware jar that sat on the table between us, while the clock in my kitchen measured seconds in tortoise speed. I rubbed anxiously at my jaw, the light growth of stubble rasping against my palm.

  Faced with what was trapped inside, and what I was about to do, I hunched in my chair while seemingly endless worries rattled through my brain.

  “What if it doesn’t work?”

  The jar didn’t look like much. Fired terra cotta, it was a little bigger than my fist, with a wide mouth stoppered by a cork. Dark-red wax drizzled down, sealing it on all sides. An intricate sigil was stamped into the wax. It pulsed faintly with power.

  “You got the sigil-phrase, didn’t you?” she prodded.

  “Yeah,” I replied absently, only half-engaged in the conversation. The chaos in my head dredged up a rush of uncontrolled memories—dark waters, a crumbling labyrinth, and the maddened, poison-green eyes of my attacker. Dorimiel, decimus of the Nephilim. As leverage against me, he’d taken Lil’s sister.

  Lailah.

  I only knew her now from photographs and a few stray visions. All my other memories had been stripped away by the same power-hungry bastard who had sealed her in the jar. From evidence left around my apartment, we’d been seeing each other—clothes and lingerie in my bedroom, a toothbrush in the cup next to mine. I’d packed it all up, even the toothbrush. I couldn’t bring myself to throw any of it away.

  Lailah had spent nights here, maybe lived here for a while—and I couldn’t even recall the feel of her lips.

  “Get on with it already.” Lil smacked me none too gently on the shoulder, bringing me back to the here and now. She moved so fast, the stiff fabric of her low-cut navy dress strained in protest. “The worst that can happen is you fuck it up, and she stays stuck in there until the binding wears off.”

  Trust Lil to be a font of compassion. I pushed the troubled thoughts aside and focused on the jar again. The lines of the sigil twined in an interlocking series of geometric shapes. Each shape represented a letter, each letter a word. I’d sacrificed more than I was willing to admit to get the series of words that served as the key.

  “Here goes nothing,” I muttered.

  Then I spoke the phrase.

  A thread of virulent green power flared to life in the central convergence of lines. Like a spark following a trail of gunpowder, it traced through the interlocking pattern, line by line. It ended at the circle that circumscribed the full design. For an instant, the whole thing lit up so brightly, it left an afterimage burning against my retinas.

  Lil perched on the edge of her seat, her dark-red locks spilling onto my kitchen table. She held her breath.

  We both did.

  And then… nothing.

  What the fuck?

  But I knew I could make it work. I had a taste for it now—the shape and function of this particular power. So many memories had been stripped from me, but the deep gnosis that welled in my soul wasn’t stolen so easily. Binding was a power native to me. I just had to trust my instincts.

  I spoke the phrase again, the foreign words growing more comfortable on my tongue. The sigil flashed a second time, the outline igniting more swiftly. My vision drowned in sickly green energy until its glare eclipsed my awareness of Lil, the room, the ticking clock, even my own flesh—

  * * *

  Suddenly I was standing inside a labyrinth of crumbling black walls, the wet copper stench of blood thick in my nose.

  I faltered, choking on panic as visceral as the memories that tangled around it. I never thought I’d see this place again, certainly not locked away inside one of the demon jars. I knew distantly that I was still sitting in my kitchen—I could feel my ass in the chair, the bones of my elbows propped against the table—but my mind was wholly in the space of Dorimiel’s making.

  The thought was repulsive.

  Dorimiel was dead—as truly dead as any of our kind could be. Still this construct lived on, infused with an echo of his power. Threads of black and green energy pulsed in endless iterations of the pattern stamped into the sealing wax. The sigil wove a prison around the jar in more than physical space.

  Lil hadn’t warned me I was going to have to dismantle the damned thing by hand. Maybe she hadn’t known herself. Most likely, as far as she could see, nothing had changed—I was still bent over the thing, features rigid with concentration.

  I didn’t want to be here. Not again. Not ever.

  The black labyrinth responded to my surging anxiety. With sinuous undulations, the walls twisted around me, closing in. Then I thought I heard screaming—Lailah’s voice. I knew it instantly, despite my ransacked memories. The sound galvanized me to action.

  “Zaquiel!”

  Shouting my power, I lashed out at the lingering malevolence. The syllables of my Name rang deafeningly within the confined space and the whole otherworldly structure shuddered.

  Dorimiel couldn’t hurt me anymore. I’d fed him to the darkness myself.

  Emboldened, I intoned the song of fury and defiance that weltered at my core—my Name, the essence of my magic. Blazes of blue-white energy crackled around me, leaping against the writhing walls.

  Again I heard screaming. Not Lailah this time. The space itself was shrieking—with anger, and with fear.

  Gathering myself, I focused. Twin blades forged of pure willpower flared to life, gripped in my hands, their curve and heft so familiar I didn’t have to think about where they ended and I began. I slashed at the lines of the sigil, shouting not my name but the string of words that unlocked the seal.

  Threads of the binding whipped like piano wire around my wrists, my throat, my wings. I snarled my defiance until power erupted in a brilliant nimbus around
me. The concussion shattered the nearest walls and reduced the clinging filaments to useless ash. I moved forward, blades alive with spirit-fire.

  Then I heard Lailah again, though I could not see her. I raced toward the sound of her voice, lashing at the sickly tendrils threaded through the walls. Through curves and intersections with incredibly sharp turns I pelted.

  The blades began to sputter, then faded, but I didn’t stop. Where the tendrils tried to halt me, I clawed with my fingers and lashed out with my fists. About halfway through, I realized I was barreling along a version of the sigil itself. The pattern was the labyrinth, endlessly echoed and re-echoed. I tore it to pieces as I ran.

  A massive door brought my breakneck journey abruptly to a halt. Red like the wax seal on the jar, it held an iteration of the sigil blazing in its center. Bellowing the notes of the pass-phrase, I raised both fists and with all of my strength brought them down against the barrier. The shattering impact became a cascade of light in the air, words reverberating in both color and sound.

  The explosion threw me back—

  * * *

  —and I sat in my apartment again.

  The jar lay in pieces upon the kitchen table. It had exploded with such force, little shards still spun halfway across the tiles of the floor. Only the cork remained, wearing the mouth of the jar in a jagged ring. The wax seal was melted, all the intertwining symbols puddling into mush.

  Lil slapped at me, trying to drag me from my daze. With most of my brain still caught in seek-and-destroy mode, I snapped a hand up without thinking and seized her wrist mid-strike. Her eyes widened. She tried pulling her hand back without success. As she strained, power fierce as a summer storm crackled between us. I could feel an answering light kindling in my eyes—the same white-blue fire I carried on my blades.

  “Where is she?” I demanded. My voice was thick and oddly resonant. I hardly recognized it as my own.

  “Let go, Zack.”

  I held on, grinding the bones of her wrist. Lil looked ready to smack me with her other hand. Then her expression flickered like cloud-shadows obscuring a distant, alien moon. She relaxed and simply waited.

  As soon as she stopped struggling, my fingers loosened of their own accord. Lil rubbed her wrist, looking more irritated than hurt—it would take more than that to injure someone like her. She didn’t give vent to her ire, which was a switch for her. Instead, she shoved her chair back so hard it scraped noisily against the tiles. Without saying a word, she began collecting the various pieces of the jar. Her movements were swift but meticulous, the muscles under her toned, bronze skin vibrating with spring-loaded strength.

  “It worked, didn’t it?” I was breathless—as if I’d really been running through the twisting halls of the labyrinth. I got up to help, but had to catch myself on the counter when I wobbled. My legs felt like water, and lines of exhaustion burned through my wings.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Lil said, swiping her hand in an impatient gesture. “These belong to me.”

  I backed off. Once I felt steadier, I peered across to the Shadowside, seeking some trace of Lailah.

  “Why can’t I see her?” I murmured.

  Lil’s head whipped up and she scowled at me.

  “What did you expect?” she snapped. “Did you think she’d pop out of the bottle, like some glorified genie?”

  “She’s the Lady of Shades,” I answered. “I thought I’d see her ghost, at least.”

  Lil made a disgusted noise, then bent to retrieve a shard that had made it all the way under my rarely used stove.

  “They tortured her, and then they killed her,” she growled. “It’s going to take her a while to come back from that.”

  I stopped looking for the stray spirit, unwilling to give voice to the hollow sensation her absence inspired. Instead, I started pacing, shaking the last of the adrenaline out of my limbs.

  “Are we done here?” I asked.

  Lil stood, reached into her little white purse, and pulled out a swatch of green cloth. She folded the shards into it, and then dropped them back into the purse. Small as it was, it didn’t change shape in the slightest.

  “I need to drop this off at my hotel room,” she said.

  “You brought your car,” I said. “So go.”

  “You’re coming with me, flyboy.”

  “Since when do you need an escort?” I demanded.

  Lil’s storm-gray eyes bored into my own. “I’ve dispatched three cacodaimons in Chicago since your showdown on the lake with Dorimiel. That’s three too many. We’re going to sit down and have a chat about what the hell is going on, but I need to put these someplace safe first.”

  Tucking the clutch purse protectively under one arm, Lil headed for the door. She didn’t wait to see if I followed.

  2

  Lil had rooms at the Renaissance Hotel downtown. The lobby thronged with people, the combined murmur of their voices and minds surging in a subsonic tide that battered against my psychic senses. My shields barely held against the weltering din.

  Sequestered as I’d been in my basement office beneath the Cleveland Museum of Art, I’d forgotten how close it was to the holiday. Now, standing under the vaulted arches of the grand Jazz Age hotel, there was no ignoring the frantic emotional buzz of valentines and their sweethearts, seeking to make the most of the weekend.

  Between the frenetic clientele of the nearby casino and the clusters of richly dressed couples each putting out their unique cocktails of excitement and agitation, the psychic space was suffocating. I put my back against a wall and silently willed Lil to hurry the fuck up.

  She’d offered to take me up to the room with her, but that would have been worse than enduring the mental cacophony. The last thing I needed was alone time on Valentine’s Day weekend in a posh hotel suite with the Lady of Beasts.

  Not that Lil wasn’t painfully desirable—that was actually the problem. Lil’s cloying seduction was just another weapon in her already potent arsenal, and she’d turned it on me more than a few times. Never mind that I’d been dating her dead sister. Never mind that in some distant incarnation she’d been married to my brother Remy. God help him.

  For the Lady of Beasts, those weren’t even moral speed bumps. She’d come on to me just to watch me squirm, and after fighting with Lailah’s binding, I didn’t have the patience for that shit.

  A boisterous couple threaded through the crowd, shifting toward the outskirts to avoid some of the crush of people. The woman stumbled—just tipsy enough to totter on her heels and nearly crash into me. Her husband, a guy who looked like one of his parents had been a bulldozer, caught her elbow, then glowered at me as if the lady’s misstep was my fault. A muscle ticked in his square jaw as his eyes locked on mine.

  I knew that look. On some level, he sensed my cowl—the cloak of woven will and power I used to hide my not-quite-human nature. Most mortals never noticed, but every once in a while, I encountered one with enough sight to realize there was something off about me.

  My height, the faded black jeans, and the leather biker jacket didn’t help matters any—especially not in this well-dressed scene.

  I dropped my own gaze—I’d learned from experience that eye contact only made it worse. I didn’t need a fight on my hands, and there was no way to explain to the guy that what he was feeling was simply instinct—bred into the mortals over half a dozen millennia to warn them that people like me were dangerous.

  He wouldn’t be wrong.

  I stared at my scuffed and muddied engineer boots, clamping down on the camouflaging veil of energy. I could feel my wings ghosting through the shimmering gold curtain behind me. I pulled them tight against my body and tried to be nothing more remarkable than an ordinary guy.

  Nothing to see here, move along.

  Mr. Bulldozer blinked several times rapidly, then put a protective arm around his lady’s shoulders. Helping her toward the elevators, he cast a final scowl at me before the doors closed. Once they slid shut, I tilted my head
back and loosed the breath I’d been holding. I still wasn’t used to all this shit. The incident with Dorimiel, not three months earlier, meant I was relearning practically everything. It sucked.

  Keeping my eyes away from the people, I tried concentrating on the subtle murmur of the fountain burbling in the lobby, just audible beneath the rhythm of the voices. Massive chandeliers glinted high above, their gilded accents echoed in all the baroque railings winding up the stairs. Between the gold, the soaring pillars, and the rich Italian marble, the Cleveland Renaissance felt more like a temple than a hotel, wearing its throwback splendor without apology.

  That sudden, sharp awareness of the timelessness of the space tipped the balance in my vision. All the lights went starry, and the layers of reality shuffled over themselves until different styles and eras all danced in a confusion of perceptions. I saw women in bustled skirts and men with fedoras, all mingling with the modern crowd in their holiday finery. Most of the specters were blurry, their faces indistinct as so often they were on the Shadowside. These weren’t ghosts, but echoes of the once living, stamped like fingerprints in time. I turned to face the windows, hoping to pull my perceptions back to the flesh-bound world.

  That just brought me face-to-face with her.

  She stood outside on the street, staring in at me. I might have taken her for a living person if not for her coat—she wore a light spring jacket that should have left her freezing in the harsh wind scouring the city.

  She glimmered in shades all faded to monochrome—a simple but elegant dress that looked hand-sewn. Fancy hat with a little veil. Prim cloth gloves. Corsage on her lapel. Her dark skin was smooth and clear, full lips struggling with a melancholy expression. I could imagine the color of her eyes—deep brown, startling against the whites. From the way she studied me, I could tell she didn’t quite understand what she was looking at. Our eyes met and she jumped a little as she realized I could see her.

  This was no mere echo of a life, stamped upon the Shadowside. Conscious and self-aware, this ghost remembered enough of herself to project a clear, unwavering image. Urgency creased her features and her lips parted on the verge of some message. When she opened her mouth, I heard nothing more than a faint whisper—as if the one thing the spirit couldn’t recall was her voice.