Sacrifice
Hagalaz timeline, total lunar eclipse
Three of Cups Compound, somewhere in what was once the State of Virginia
Orbs of silver, gray, and gold swirled around the figure that was neither male nor female. A thinner orb of pale green and silver extended out past its physical body, like a glowing outline. Ancient alphabets he both knew and didn’t know moved through each orb, through its body, and sometimes shimmered on its skin. The figure seemed to be lit from the inside. He had heard tales of a single demon that had partnered with the priesthood. In a few old manuscripts in a Daeganean library in Prague where he’d studied for six weeks, he had seen sketches of the red-eyed demon that he now knew to be remarkably accurate.
Raven stared at the sigil on the page beneath his wrist. He wasn’t quite sure what it was, but it resembled a Madonna and child. Already it was fading, yet he had a second distinct set of memories: the one that had been and the one that was now. He removed a hair-dagger, thumbed one end of it so that a blade protruded from the other end, and bared his other arm. If this was the timeline he had chosen, then all he had to do was carve the sigil into his own flesh before the ink faded from the page.
He peered up at the reddening moon. He still had time, in the sky if not on the page. He had read enough journals of his predecessors to know that each foray into the past did not take an equivalent amount of time in the present.
But something was different.
He spun to look behind him. A whoosh of memories came back. New memories. He distinctly remembered coming here alone, but now he also clearly remembered—
“Tessa.”
He sighed, his heart filling up. Not the Tessa he had hugged goodbye in the past, the young thirty-something Tessa who smelled of hot chocolate and warm cookies. Not the older Tessa with streaks of gray in her hair and happy little crinkles at her eyes, the one who also smelled of hot chocolate and warm cookies, the one who had spirited him away from his freshman class at high school and explained to him that both his parents had died and that she would be his guardian from then on, the one who had spent the next few years on the run with him, moving from town to town, country to country to stay one step ahead of a priesthood that had declared war on his parents and their bloodline for reasons no one could tell him, or that no one would. The one who had taken a call at midnight about someone on a bridge about to jump, the one he had found at sunrise at the foot of that bridge, stabbed in the neck and thrown into the dark waters.
This Tessa was different. Some form of the prior two Tessas. This Tessa was older than he’d ever known her, with coarse silver hair pulled into a single severe braid. The wrinkles cut deep into her face and at the corners of her mouth as though she had once smiled much more than now. She blinked at him as if she had no idea why he called her name, but he remembered every detail of how she had been either at his side or at his back since the night she had answered a phone call, telling her to save the woman on the bridge and had instead grabbed her go-bag and his, roused him from sleep, and headed to their new hide-out in the Faroe Islands, off the coast of Denmark. His memory of the grief of losing her tangled with the joy knowing that she was with him now and had in this timeline been with him for years.
Something behind this Tessa moaned. She stepped aside, her dark robes swishing at her booted feet. She tightened her grip on a long chain that trailed in the scorched grass behind her and gave it a yank.
A woman—no older than Aubrey’s mother had been when he’d left her with Tessa—stumbled forward. Long brown hair with hues of pink and gold. Glimmers of sigils on her bare arms. Eyes that might have been brown or blue if they didn’t gleam a pale yellow. A dirty tablecloth with two ends tied around her neck and the other two wrapped around her and tied at her waist.
Behind her back, above her shoulders, rose two knobby, featherless wings, like elongated but broken elbows. The chain, imbued with green moldavite beads, encircled both her upper arms and wings. The pulsating energy of the tiny flecks of meteorite kept her docile. Once her broken wings healed, she’d be formidable, but even now, she could still be dangerous. One touch with her left hand and she could steal a man’s past, and one touch with her other hand and she could steal his future. A true Angelseed, a human girl injected with the DNA of Archangel Michael in one of Aoife’s super-secret labs where most of the subjects died horribly from the infusion of a god’s genetic material. Maybe this was the angel he needed in the New Age, though this one had shown no signs of willingly joining forces with him.
But where was the empath? The one he truly needed to light his way to the angel who would ordain him for ascension? There were other angel chimera who might aid his cause voluntarily—he’d seen them—but empaths were far rarer and far more necessary to fulfill the prophecy. At least in this timeline.
Raven twisted as far in one direction as he could see without letting go of the book, then spun in the other direction. He peered into the shadows of the forty-foot shipping containers. No Lilah. No empath.
“Where is she?” Raven demanded of the demon. “Where’s the empath?”
The demon didn’t even smile. “There are no empaths left in this timeline. Verily, you may find a few with minor skills, but none as strong as Lilah Burns. None who can unite with angel-blood as can she. None who can usher in your ascension and the return of your god.”
Raven glanced back at Tessa, but Tessa frowned at him as if he were talking gibberish. She didn’t share the memories he had of Lilah crouching on the rock where the demon now stood.
“Where is she?”
“Not where but when. She is not in this timeline. I told you, you would be disappointed in your attempts to change events in the past. But look.” The demon extended one long glowing finger toward The Book of Time. “You must choose. Do you want this timeline without the empath? Or the other timeline when she cowered here? Either way, a sacrifice is required.”
Raven stared at the fading sigil on the page, still visible but remarkably fainter. He clutched the tiny blade and paused over his forearm. All he had to do to keep this timeline—to keep his beloved guardian and second mother alive—was to cut a bloody sigil into his skin and the timeline would be forever changed.
Burned grass crunching underneath him, Raven sat back on his haunches. The demon wasn’t malicious. It wasn’t without desires, but it was without petty emotions or revenge. It was less than jealous and more than fond of demanding justice and following contracts. It sought a certain balance that he could appreciate.
“I don’t understand. Aubrey de Lune had a daughter.” He looked up at Tessa, half-pleading. “You remember, don’t you? Aubrey had a daughter named Lilah.”
Tessa pressed her lips together. “She had a daughter, but her name wasn’t Lilah.”
No…. Raven shook his head. “That’s not possible. I saved Aubrey, so she had her daughter. It was a turning point in Lilah’s life. Lilah Burns should be here in this timeline.”
The demon glowed almost white, then back to silver spheres swirling with lights around its head. “You cannot know what things you will change. Even if you divine for it. Such would be arrogance to think you hold sway over the rivers of time. Throw your sticks into the river or build trenches, but you cannot stop the force of the flow and it will roll over you and make its own way and sweep you away with it. Your choices in this moment will alter where you are in the river of time—floating with it or smashed against a rock. You, in your arrogance, walked through a doorway in space and made choices that changed the flow of time, and you cannot wrestle the river to suit your yearnings. You acted to prevent two tragedies, a woman-child’s abduction and another woman’s death, both out of instinct because that is who you are, priest or no priest. You hear cries of doom and run toward the cries to help instead of away from your destruction.”
Raven glanced from the fading sigil on the page to his arm. He had only minutes left to decide which timeline would remain.
“But I saved Lilah’s mother!”
“Lilah did not need you to ‘save’ her mother. You, Young Aryx, are both an arrogant and pitiable fool. As you always are, in this body or ones long since dust or leather. You assumed you knew the path that time would take to lead to the incarnation of Lilah Burns. Within a year of the empath’s birth, her mother was attacked by a man with a weapon but taken by a man pretending to rescue her. She was to have been taken to a man who would have controlled the gifts of her bloodline, but the pretender fell in love with her. You did not save Lilah’s mother so she could meet Lilah’s father and conceive a child. They were to meet that day, but instead of the empath’s father, it was you who spirited away the mother. You who ‘saved’ her. They did not meet. They never met. And Lilah was never born.”
Raven groaned. Lilah on the rock with green eyes when her human side peeked out from behind the demon. Green like her lanky father’s. “Aubrey’s daughter in that timeline. If I save this timeline”—the one where Tessa was alive and well—“she might still be the harbinger. Lilah’s soul would have incarnated in a different body, but still the same person.”
“Nay, Lord Aryx. You bend to your own wishes. The soul molds to the design of the body in all its glories and imperfections. You cannot put her in any other body and expect the same outcome. Every incarnation is a new incarnation. Even the same body as it ages will mold the soul to its melancholies. But a soul that enters a body at birth, even a different body by the same mother? There will be differences you may or may not like.”
“Then I’ll take it. As long as it’s Lilah.”
“The other daughter was formed of something different. A moment in time. Even the joining of a different Manseed on the same day would be a different child, but a different father altogether brings no fruit to your wants. Lilah’s father was also an empath. He and her mother shared a common ancestor more than half a millennia ago. Lilah Burns was the last of the empaths of double lineage. There is no empath in this timeline as strong, nor will there ever be.”
An explosion shook the compound, harder than the ones from earlier in the night. A drone buzzed low overhead, passing between them and the red moon above. Aoife, no doubt.
“Choose, Lord Aryx, or the choice will be made for you. But understand that even a choice not to choose is still a choice with a permanent score.”
The sigil on the page was barely visible. If he let it fade completely, then by default the new timeline would fade with it. Along with Tessa. And if he quickly carved the sigil into his forearm, then Lilah Burns was lost forever, never born.
Damn it, he was the Last Priest of Lord Daegan. It was Raven who was destined by his position in the line of initiation to be the conduit for the archangel’s return and to salvage the planet after the pole shift that had clearly occurred in this timeline as well as others. All of that was meaningless, according to the prophecy, without the empath. Not just any empath, but the one with wings of blood and fire.
Tossing the unbloodied blade onto the book, he felt the flicker of lights around him and shifted to look at Tessa. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I love you, Tess. And I miss you so much.”
Her face filled with love, but she said nothing. He’d been with her as long as he’d been with his real mother. Everything went still as fog moved in around him, obscuring the Angelseed at first and then Tessa. He never broke her gaze, not once. He wanted every second with her until she was gone.
And then she was gone.
⁂
Thurisaz timeline, total lunar eclipse
Three of Cups Compound, somewhere in what was once the State of Virginia
A clump of grass, uncharred, stood where her feet had been. His eyes stung. His chest hurt. Raven looked up at the rock, at the mad version of Lilah Burns, with bleeding wing-like scars on her back and the translucent demon-spheres spinning around her head. He’d sacrificed his Tessa for the empath, but she was still useless to his mission like this.
“Why don’t you just leave her body?” Raven gritted his teeth. He couldn’t keep his voice from cracking. “I know you’re able to do that. What do you want?”
“What I have always wanted. A body.”
“Then take one! There must be someone else.”
“Hmm, perhaps. But I quite like this body. I feed off her despair and self-loathing, and I am well-fed.”
“Parasite! Fine. She can’t be the only person who hates herself for the things she’s done.”
“I am not a parasite. In time, you will understand what I am. I can choose any body, and I choose the body of Lilah Burns with all her raw pain. No one but an empath could feed me so well.”
“Please. Can’t I persuade you?”
“Another deal? To leave this body? For what? You have already promised me a body and failed your contract with me. And this one was offered to me by your priesthood—if not by you—in exchange for my services to expand her gifts. Are you not amused by what a priesthood will do for a stretch of millennia in the name of a god whose return they await? Are you not surprised that the Order of Daegan would resort to pacts with me in his absence?”
“I’ve never made any oaths to you. Never asked anything of you. Until now. I’m asking you to leave this body.”
“Young Aryx, I shall never leave this body. Are you so unstirred by your confidence? You would ask me now for a blood oath if you could have what you desire, with no concern for fulfilling your vow to me. You would find some suitable excuse for your failure, but you would still be bound to me until your oath is fulfilled. As you are now.”
“But I never—”
Fire shimmered through the swirling spheres around the demon’s head, and Raven realized for the first time that it was angry. Its silvery hand scooped a rune he recognized out of the churning vapors around its head—kenaz, the rune of clarity—and flung it at Raven’s face.
“See for yourself!”
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