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 you power.” 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