anyone came looking for me you would get your parents to lock me in a closet and say that I had died of “brain malfunction,” which I now know isn’t a real disease, so I bet you feel stupid now?
You were furious. You said, It doesn’t matter who they are—they’re not important, and they’re not coming for you.
I used to sit by my mother’s niche and catch her up on everything. Things like: Aiglamene says I’ve fixed my hand placement when I block and pivot from the lower left. Things like: Harrowhark was a giant bitch today. (Told her that on the reg.) Things like: I can do ninety-six sit-ups in two minutes now. Absolute fourteen-year-old bullshit. Serious A-grade drivel.
It was worse when I was a kid. I remember the time you caught me telling her, I love you, and I can’t even remember what you said, but I remember that I had you on your back—I put you straight on the fucking ground. I was always so much bigger and so much stronger. I got on top of you and choked you till your eyes bugged out. I told you that my mother had probably loved me a lot more than yours loved you. You clawed my face so bad that my blood ran down your hands; my face was under your fucking fingernails. When I let you go you couldn’t even stand, you just crawled away and threw up. Were you ten, Harrow? Was I eleven?
Was that the day you decided you wanted to die?
You remember how the fuck-off great-aunts always used to say, Suffer and learn?
If they were right, Nonagesimus, how much more can we take until you and me achieve omniscience?
* * *
“And now we come to the heart of the matter,” said the Lyctor you called Mercymorn.
She had stood up next to us—and God looked at me, and at her, and at me, and held my gaze. It was this that pinned us in place. When those white rings hovered on someone else, the blood rushed back to your brain; when they flickered back to me, I went white and blank again, mute and stupid, a floating outline.
He looked at us, and he rubbed one of his temples as though he had a headache. And he said, with an enormous sigh: “Ah. The eyes.”
“Yes, the eyes,” she said. “Your child … Alecto’s eyes.”
A ripple of ice over the face. A hardening of the mouth. He said quietly, “Don’t call her—”
“Alecto! Alecto! Alecto!” repeated Mercy shrilly. The other Lyctors flinched each time she said it, as though it were an aural stab. “John, you are trying to start a fight with me to get out of the fight I am trying to have with you, which is a painfully domestic tactic. Those are A.L.’s eyes, Lord … right there in your genetic code.”
“There could be any number of explanations,” said God calmly.
“Yes,” said Augustine. He tapped his cigarette out into the emptied cup of tea. “There could be. You’ve offered us explanations for everything over the years. But—some of them didn’t hold up on examination … It was the power I could never get my head around, you know? I follow power back to its source, John. It’s the skill you asked me to perfect. And the longer I looked at yours, the less things added up.”
“This has been troubling you for a very long time, then,” God said finally. “A.L. always did bother you two the most … If I’m such a liar, why didn’t I lie to you about her? I told you the truth about Annabel’s resurrection, and in the end you killed her for it.”
“My lord,” said Augustine formally, “you told us the truth about Annabel—about Alecto—because she knew the truth about it too, and you never could control her. Even after two centuries, I’m not sure she ever managed to lie. That was what stayed my hand for such a long time. How would you have asked Alecto the First to lie—how would you have persuaded that mad monster into even an unsophisticated con?”
God said, “Don’t call her that.”
“A monster, John!” Augustine barked. “She was a bloody monster in a human suit! She was a monster the moment you resurrected her, and you went and made her worse!”
There was silence in that room. The air had cooled, somewhat, but it was still hot and sticky and it smelled like everyone’s sweat. It smelled like hot perfume, and cigarettes, and fear.