King Among the Dead - Lauren Gilley Page 0,53

unperturbed.

Kay rolled her eyes – but smiled again, another flash of real humor. “Jesus.” Her gaze softened. “No sense trying to warn you off, is there?”

“No.”

“Well. Has he explained the whole hell theory to you, yet?”

~*~

When she asked about it, Beck did something unusual: he hedged. “Hell theory?” He lifted his brows, poised with a finger halfway down a page of text.

Rose bit back the smile that threatened. “Kay’s words, not mine.”

“Ah. So the two of you are conspiring again.” He said it fondly, corner of his mouth twitching.

“No. But I think she’s done trying to convince me…” She trailed off, not wanting to finish and hurt his feelings.

His grin widened. “I see. Well. Yes.” Cleared his throat, settled back in his chair and laid the book out on the table. “The ‘hell theory.’ It’s a bit more complex than that.”

Wasn’t everything with Beck?

“Let’s suppose.” He turned the book to face her, and she found herself looking at an old painting depicting what could only be a battle of heaven versus hell. Beautiful, winged angels, and monstrous demons clashing with swords and tridents. Flames leapt, and clouds descended to earth, and caught between were humans, sobbing, and flailing, and fleeing, and dying. “That the conduits truly are possessed by beings that are…heavenly.” He didn’t say angel, and the omission stuck out to her. “Let’s suppose they came down from the heavens to herald the end of the world. My question, then” – she lifted her head, and met his gaze, got caught in the glittering intensity of it – “is: where was the other army? Where were hell’s forces on the battlefield? Because the way I understand it, an apocalypse takes a war between both sides.”

She glanced back at the painting; ran a careful fingertip along the edge of the page. Thought of Tabitha, of Tony Castor, of the men who’d kicked down their doors and died choking on their own blood. “Maybe hell’s already here,” she mused. “Maybe we’ve all gotten so used to it that it seems normal. Demons walking around in human skin.”

His eyes widened, briefly: a moment of true startlement. Then he smiled. “Very good.” He nodded, and sat back, fingers linking together over his flat stomach. “I’ve thought of that. Quite a lot. It makes sense. But.” He bit his lip, thinking. “The Rift was a cataclysmic event on a scale we’ve never seen before. The conduits I’ve seen…” He frowned to himself. “Mankind is exceptionally cruel. Our capacity for violence to one another, our technology – the war machines we’ve created over the centuries, from the rack, to nuclear bombs. How are we not influenced by evil?

“But I have a gut feeling.”

“That the Rift was really angels?”

He nodded. “And that it will happen again. The continued presence of conduits drives the point home.”

Rose took a steadying breath. “So you think…” It was almost too preposterous to say…but not more preposterous than anything else, she supposed. “When it does happen, we should get hell involved.”

He nodded, eyes sparking with approval. “What hope do we have against divine powers? So we open another Rift, and we unleash hell, and we let them fight heaven. Last time, there was no balance. Nothing can be all one-sided. Good needs evil, and vice versa.”

It made a horrible kind of sense. But…

“And you think that’s possible? Opening hell?”

“There are…” He hedged again, face screwing up in a rare show of doubt. Choosing his words, she thought. “Ways of opening portals. Ways of going. Ways of bringing something – or someone – back.”

“Someone?”

He stood and went back to the shelves; she recognized the row where he kept his collection of books about King Arthur. “Did you know,” he said, selecting a tome and paging through it, “that historians give great credence to there actually having been a real King Arthur? Not the medieval figure of myth, but a warlord. Very old. A British king who fought against the Saxon invasion.”

Rose didn’t ask if his interest in the topic stemmed from his own name; she had a feeling that was how it had started, and wasn’t going to reduce him to the trivial.

“One of his knights,” he continued, resuming his seat, “a warrior named Derfel, turned to the cloth afterward. He ended up being sainted.” He turned this book toward her, too, laid it atop the other, replacing her view of the final battle with several photos; one of a painted saint, one of a small, gray stone church in a grassy