Almost Whole
Lilah was right. As much as he wanted to stay in this moment with her, maybe make love under the eclipse, he still had to find the Angelseed in the past and figure out how to convince her to help him.
Scooting his ass and spine against the boulder, he pulled Lilah into his arms, balancing her against his chest and The Book of Time against his knees so they could—as they did almost everything—figure out the best course of action together. Two pages. Only two chances left to improve the timeline. On the next page—the next doorway to the past—was sketched the simplest sigil of those that remained in the book: an ordinary rectangle with two perpendicular lines that crossed at its center. Maybe the book had once held even fewer complex sigils, but the other priests long before he’d drawn breath had used them up and left only blank, expended pages in a book bound with the human leather of its author.
Lilah’s hand brushed his as she carefully turned to the last page. He caught his breath. He didn’t dare do anything to risk changing this timeline and the sense of joy Lilah brought him. She wasn’t entirely at peace here, but it was closer than he remembered in any other timeline in some distant corner of his mind. She wasn’t fully content but happy enough, and he willingly worked to make it so every single day.
“Ooh! Skip to this one.” She tapped the last page with the chewed nail of one finger, a bad habit she’d had since childhood. “It’s an angel. See the wings? We can always come back to the previous one if this one doesn’t work.”
Raven shook his head. “We have to take them as they’re published.”
“Why? You never said that before.”
Old Aryx had bound the pages in a specific order. Funny, but he recalled everything about his incarnation as an alchemist who made deals with a demon, the gift of prophecy in exchange for a human body. Was that because those memories had occurred before his last birth and didn’t contradict any other timeline? He didn’t know. Old Aryx had joined bind runes and shared his knowledge, and part of that knowledge had been understanding better the intentions that went into creating such a powerful magical work of literature and physics. Any doubts had been destroyed when Raven returned to find a spent page with only the blood drops of Old Aryx from the spell that had returned Raven through time. However many pages The Book of Time contained, none were truly blank.
“Because the person who wrote these spells knew the right futures to choose between to get us what we need and the right order of those choices.” Still a hell of a lot of choices and the opportunity to fail in the worst ways.
Lilah shrugged. “Okay, fine. I’m just going to hold you while you trance out, so you won’t be so delirious when you come back next time and start drawing penises on yourself with sharp instruments. Unless you want to let me take the trip for you?” She turned over her wrist to expose the bind rune tattoo he’d emblazoned into her skin when she’d taken the oaths of Daegan five years ago. She wore pewter cuffs lower on her wrists to hide the algiz and hagalaz scars from her attempted suicide as a child, but she displayed the Walking Lightning tattoo proudly.
If she’d had the marking earlier in life, it would have prevented possession or the summoning of her soul from her living body. As it was, it protected her from further harm from supernatural forces, but it didn’t drive away the demon.
Raven shook his head. “I have to do this one myself. If I fail, you can journey with the angel sigil. Fair?”
“Not really. You got to do the others.”
He could tell by the tone of her voice that she was teasing. Lilah was within her rights as a priestess to take the journey, but he knew he had to take the lead on this one. There was still something he had to do. For Lilah. He’d taken away the memories of what she’d done, with supernatural help and in self-defense, to the men who’d taken her captive in Afghanistan and also to the men who’d assaulted her in her college town. There were so many other bad memories he wanted to exorcise. Her assignment for her colonel as a subject matter expert in torture, using her empathic skills to know exactly what to threaten and where to inflict pain. The psychopathic mind games Jakin had played with her or her ex-boyfriend Charlie’s lack of balls that had decimated her ability to trust just when she’d been willing to take another chance.
It had taken Raven years to overcome, if not undo, the havoc other men had wreaked on Lilah. But the trauma that still bothered her the most had happened at the age of ten and had set the course of her life.
Lilah had gone silent, into that dark place where she sometimes disappeared without warning. Often, there was no reaching her until she was willing to step back into the light.
“Hey. Talk to me.” He hooked one finger under her chin to lift her face to his. He kissed the space between her eyes.
She shook her head. “Sorry,” she choked out. “Can’t.”
He knew better than to push and get the usual it’s-me-not-you. If he pressed too hard, she’d retreat even further into her self-imposed isolation. She needed long-term therapy, the kind that hadn’t been available since the pole shift. He hated that she carried so much trauma in her past, but he knew she couldn’t just-get-over-it. To suggest such would only discount the brutality of her life and how it had been orchestrated by some of the most powerful priests and priestesses of his lifetime for their own discreet plans for power, things he’d learned more through divination than firsthand witnessing.
Maybe his trying to heal her was no better. He hadn’t asked her permission—she’d been insane in the first timeline. But she wasn’t now. Now she was a sane person with deep wounds and enough childhood post-traumatic stress to last a dozen lifetimes. Helping her now was easy to rationalize though. He was simply undoing the dance that had been choreographed for her life and setting right every wrong that the priesthood had done in secret for their own private agendas.
“No worries, Lilah. I—”
She was crying. Quietly at first. Then, sobbing, her whole body shaking in his arms.
“Shhh, shhh, Lilah. It’s okay.” He wasn’t sure what he was reassuring her of, but as long as they were together, he was certain they could beat it. He shoved away the memory that bubbled up: Jakin’s blade piercing her chest while Raven lay helplessly on the ground, her I-love-you still echoing in his ears.
“You need… you need…” She raked in a sob. After several full-body shudders, she tried again. “He’s talking to me. He. It.”
The demon. She was aware of it. Had been for years, but if it spoke to her often, she didn’t share it. Most of its whispers were directed at Lilah, causing her to damn herself privately.
“You’re hearing a voice?”
She shrugged in his arms. “I-I hate it when you say it that way. Like I’m crazy for hearing voices. I don’t even know if it’s a voice or if it’s just… I don’t know… intuition. I can’t tell the difference. Just that it feels like these aren’t my thoughts, but they’re dressed like my thoughts.”
“That’s the way demons and angels sound, sweetheart. They sound like intuition. Like lessons we’ve forgotten. Like epiphany. Sometimes they sound like voices. Sometimes they’re just thoughts.”
He knew. He carried the essence of a dead god in his own seventh chakra, like a halo above his head. It was what was left of Daegan, the beloved Archangel Michael, a power that was passed from the most recently initiated priest to the next with the intention that one day, he would ascend. Priests and priestesses passed their generations of power down to the next at each initiation and elevation ceremony, but only the Last Priest owned—for as long as they were the most recent living priest—that god-power.
“He’s laughing at you.”
Raven stiffened. “What?”
“The demon. He’s laughing at you. He’s saying that you are misinterpreting what ascension means. It’s more literal than you think.”
Sighing, Raven hugged her harder. So the demon knew his thoughts as well as Lilah’s. It made sense—it could see across all timelines, which was a feat he’d come to admire.
“He says you’re afraid of it because you think you’ll lose who you are. Your oneness with Lord Daegan will make you more of who you were meant to be, and you’ll be able to access the memories of all your incarnations for thousands of years. A part of you will die away, yes, but not a part that you’ll miss. The part that has been a seeker of truth.” Lilah pulled away. “Is that true? You’ve never told me your fears about ascension.”
He brushed away the tears on her cheeks. “It’s true. I know I’ll change physically somehow, and I know that being in a different body will make me different somehow. Just like one day, I may be in an old man’s body with aches and pains and be cranky as hell so that you won’t want to be with me.”
He knew already from the timeline where he’d lost both legs and had to depend on Lilah to lug him around on a litter that how he felt about himself and the world and his place in it could shift with physical change. He didn’t want who he was to be obliterated by ascension, but it was his duty, even if ascension wiped his existence from all time and space.
“I don’t know if I’ll like myself better or if there’ll be anything of the me I am to care. And that’s” —he took a deep breath and willed himself to say it— “terrifying.”
“He says the you that you are now will like the you that you are then.” Lilah sniffed back a tear. “I know we’re taught not to listen to our demons. I mean, not to listen to demons. But mine has never been wrong.”
“Hmm. There’s a difference between never being wrong and in constantly reinforcing your past doubts and sins. It tells you you’re a bad person and you believe it.”
“He doesn’t tell me I’m bad. I do. He just reminds me of what I’ve done.”
“Regardless, your demon enjoys taunting you. The asshole wears you down with negative self-talk, and the agony that self-talk causes you sustains him. It. Whatever.”
She nodded against his chest. “Intellectually, I know all that. But I can’t make my emotions believe it. He says… he’s telling me my destiny. I thought my purpose was to be the empath to usher in a new age. Like some kind of human antenna security guard. But he says it’s more than that. He says…” She stopped, as if listening. “My destiny is to unite you with the angel that’s needed to lay hands on you, and that ordination will cause your ascension. Only an empath can bring the angel to you. He says your destiny is with her in your arms, not me.”
“If you’re trying to guilt me into letting you take the angel sigil for your own journey, I’ve already said yes.” He said it half-jokingly. Anything to lighten the mood, but the demon had Raven’s attention, even speaking to him through Lilah. And it was grating against all her doubts and fears of losing him. Surely the demon was feasting now.
Sighing, she snuggled harder against him. “I’m just so sorry, Raven.”
“Why? What about?” He kissed the top of her head.
“That I’m not happier. That I get caught up in negative stuff from my past. That I’m so damaged. I try to be better; I really do. It’s not that I’m not grateful. I am. I feel like I have everything I could ever want. I have you, and I have you in the only way I’ve ever wanted to be loved. It should be enough. It would be enough for any other woman. But I struggle with it every day, no matter how happy you and I are. Or how safe we are. Or how we work together like real partners.”
“Lilah. We are real partners. And I could not be more satisfied to have you by my side. Don’t apologize for your PTSD. That’s apologizing for being the person who was mistreated.”
“But if I were stronger—”
“No. Stop it. No human being should have to be that strong. Your PTSD is because the human mind and body and spirit aren’t designed to be that strong.”
“But the demon keeps telling me I’ve failed, and he’s right.”
“Stop feeding your demon.”
Or I’ll figure out a way to stop it myself.
Raven leaned his head against the boulder and stared up at the moon. She was right about one thing: the window was closing. If he could change her body somehow, could he take away the years of trauma response, stress hormones, tensions? Regardless of how much time passed since each of her traumas, her body itself remembered them, even if she didn’t. If he could take away more memories, then maybe he could lessen the PTSD even more. He’d been toying with the idea, but now he was determined. He wanted to give her the gift of peace as much as she’d given him the gift of joy.
“Lilah? I’m going to see what that rectangle is all about, okay? I’ll be back shortly and then we’ll find that angel and we’ll do what we were meant to do together, okay?”
Tearfully, she nodded.
“Good. And remember, no matter what happens, I love you exactly as you are.”
The second before his bind rune touched the sigil on the page, he remembered. He’d never in this timeline told her that. Not in words. He did love her exactly as she was. Any changes he’d make were solely to make her life better for her and that meant keeping the demon from tormenting her with fears and doubts and bad memories.
As the sigil propelled him upward, outward, he heard Lilah wail somewhere behind him. “He says you’re not coming back to me!”
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