Love and Loss
Twisting onto his back, Raven pushed across the scorched grass on his elbows. He could still feel his phantom feet. He couldn’t possibly have changed his own future in that cave in Afghanistan, could he? The sacrifice for a different reality was meant to be a small sketch of a sigil cut into his flesh, wasn’t it? He had never read, in any journals or grimoires of priests who had preceded him of any sacrifice greater than a scar. At least not physically. He had both found and lost his adopted mother on his first journey. Wasn’t that sacrifice enough?
“Raven?” Lilah scurried to his side. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
He didn’t answer. He stared at the two cloth-wrapped stumps poking out from cut-off pants.
“Raven? Baby, what’s wrong?”
He touched the ground where his knees should have been. “My legs,” he choked out.
“Yeah? What about them?”
“They’re gone!”
“Raven.” She shot him a look of both worry and exasperation. “I’ve been dragging your ass around all over this god forsaken planet—what’s left of it—for years. Don’t you remember?”
Yeah, he remembered. For a moment, he remembered everything, from across multiple timelines.
He had been in a veterans’ hospital in Germany, a military doctor telling him there was no way to save his legs. And then Aoife was there. Aoife in a black dress and white pearls. Her long, white-blonde hair shimmering in stark contrast against the dress. Aoife vowing to him that she could save his legs. Aoife reminding him that she had the power to heal and, under certain circumstances, to raise the dead. Aoife explaining that all he had to do was come back to his destiny with the priesthood. Aoife extracting a promise from him to forget everything he had said about shunning the people responsible for his parents’ death and Tessa’s and—
But the memories weren’t solid. They intertwined and tumbled all over each other as if trying to decide which were real. He could remember his other journeys, too. A clutter of recollections. Like a series of movies in a fictional universe, each told from the different perspective of a different character. They competed with each other for his focus. One became brighter, bolder than the others.
A veterans’ hospital in Germany. A doctor telling him they could do remarkable things with prosthetics. Aoife standing in the doorway, angry at him. Whispering that she’d gazed into her bowl of holy water and seen his intrusion on her plan for her Persian book collection. Telling him she would choose his nemesis, Jakin Crutchfield, as the Last Priest over him. Yelling at him that she didn’t need him anymore and that he would never be a priest, let alone the Last Priest. The hot tears that came as she walked away on six-inch spike heels. His vow to find his last hope, Terre Vanderholt, the only person possibly more powerful than Aoife, the only one who could undo what she’d wrought.
Thunder rattled the compound. Another shipping container fell near the last one.
Lilah tugged at his arm. “Baby, come on. Let’s get you on the litter and get you out of here.”
He followed her gesture to the makeshift gurney she had hauled him around on for the last year, the one she’d appropriated from a small hospital on their travels since The Shift. How many times had she saved his life when he had been helpless?
What if he had changed things too much? He turned over his wrist to see if the Walking Lightning bind rune was still there. He sighed when he saw it. Good. He was still the Last Priest of a dead god. Still the harbinger of a new world, one better than this one. The memories were stronger now.
Once out of the hospital, he had sought out Terrence Vanderholt, the most powerful High Priest of Daegan still alive. Or alive then. If Tessa had been like a mother to him, then Terre had been a second father.
“Raven, please.” Lilah grabbed him under both arms and started to drag him toward the litter. “Don’t go inside your head again and ignore what’s happening. Please don’t do this to me. Not now. You’re all I’ve got left to live for, and the Angelseed—she’s so close, so powerful. I can feel her.”
Raven shook himself. Yes, he could feel her, too. Somewhere at a distance. Not with Lilah-the-Empath’s pinpoint accuracy but enough. This version of Lilah was lighter than the previous one but still in such deep pain and such unfathomable expectation of more pain. But if the Angelseed was close, then ascension was still possible. So was the destiny he’d walked away from at fifteen and had come crawling back to from a hospital bed.
He grabbed for The Book of Time and both hair-daggers. The sigil on the page—the poppy entwined with a sword—had almost faded away. There was nothing left of it but a shadow. Which timeline to choose? One with legs and a Lilah that had gone mad from her traumas? Or one without legs and a damaged but functioning empath and an Angelseed nearby? One timeline led to his sacred destiny, and one did not. And wouldn’t ascension make his body whole again? More than whole? And if he didn’t choose the best path to ascension, what of salvaging the human race that had survived The Shift?
He pressed the tiny hair-dagger into the skin above his left wrist. The memory of being taunted and left behind in the hospital became more vivid. He wasn’t a demon who could see across all timelines, just the ones he had altered with The Book of Time. The different choices for each was like looking into a mirror of mirrored images to infinity.
Lilah gave up and plopped down next to him, her face in her hands. Sobs shook her shoulders. “I can’t do this anymore. I’m going to lose you. I know it’s coming. I always lose everyone I love. I tried so hard not to love you.”
He had to change it, all of it. The burden she carried. The way she isolated herself and tried not to trust and tried not to love. It was a trauma response to the things that had been done to her as a child, as a young woman, and as a warrior. He’d already changed part of it, even at the price of his legs. He could do better. He could take away all the hurt from the sense of abandonment as a kid and all the shitty relationships and give her a fresh start. Those experiences had all made her who she was now. Too bad that Old Aryx couldn’t have built her a fresh body and a fresh start, but with all the emotional anguish she had endured, it didn’t matter what body her soul was in. As long as she had the memories of it, she would take that pain with her.
The sigil scratched into his arm still stung, but it had already healed into a slightly elevated mark.
“I’m going to change this, Lilah. I’m gonna do this for you.”
She shook her head. “It’s not like I haven’t heard you say that a million times.”
He pulled her hair away from her face and stroked her cheek. Brushing back the teardrops with his thumb, he remembered it all. The nights huddled under the stars. Hiding from nanotech-enhanced soldiers. Warm nights and desperate kisses. Freezing cold nights and desperate kisses also. And still she had never remembered what had happened in Afghanistan. His chants of forgetfulness had held because she’d never been ready to face it, and that pain was sustenance he’d cheated the demon of. In this timeline, she’d been the stronger of the two of them because she’d had to be.
Raven stared down at the two wrapped stumps as Lilah, grunting, dragged him toward the litter. He wasn’t as bold now as he remembered. In one memory, he had always been the one to run toward instead of away from the sound of gunfire, always eager to help whoever might need it. In this timeline, in this body, he had to put his own survival, even the most basic things like dragging himself to safety, ahead of rushing to protect others. Who he was in this body was different from who he had been in a body that was whole and healthy. His very physicality filtered his perceptions and dictated his actions.
But how could this have happened? Long before Lilah had been deployed to Afghanistan, Raven had left the hospital in Germany with both legs intact. Not fully recovered—he recalled that recovery, even with Aoife’s magic, had taken a couple of years—but his limbs had been whole. He had spent a year in Dublin with Terre at the Scholar’s Library named for his parents. Somehow, his taking away Lilah’s memories of what she had done to protect herself had retroactively changed time. Any High Priest or High Priestess could gaze into the future and change the course of their own timelines, based on what they saw. The difference in the timelines depended on Aoife’s appearance in the hospital, on the deal they made to save his legs and for him to be her pawn in exchange; he knew in his gut that it had to be her handiwork. She’d hinged their agreement on his interference with her plans and changed her mind about his part in the future she saw.
Damn. Time travel could change not just the future, but if a High Priestess could see that future, she could change that future’s past as well. The demon had been right when it had told him he couldn’t change the past. He couldn’t change his own, but Aoife, seeing his future, could.
He clutched The Book of Time to his chest and tried to remember a time when being helpless to run away or to defend the helpless hadn’t emasculated him. Except for the hope of ascension and for his destiny, this wasn’t a life he wanted to live. Except for taking care of Lilah, he couldn’t add to the hurt she lived with every day. If he did, he knew she wouldn’t survive it. She would be just as mad as she had been when she squatted on that boulder in a different timeline, clawing wings into her back.
Lilah stopped tugging at him and paused to rest. Gasping for breath, she studied the litter and merely shook her head. She glanced at the closest shipping container, its doors still open but promising to be more tomb than safe haven. Instantly, she thought better of it. Instead, she dragged him toward a tall pile of debris and crouched next to him, ready to pounce on anyone or anything that threatened him.
“They’re here,” she whispered. “Can’t you feel them?”
Not like she could. Her senses were so strong, she could almost read their minds and definitely their intentions.
A blast ripped a hole in the unbalanced shipping container at the end of the compound. Two men crawled through, both carrying assault rifles. Both were in some kind of uniform. One was short with shaggy, dark hair and the other at least a foot taller with long, flaming orange hair and an even longer beard. Raven had never seen either of them before, but he was damned sure that Aoife had.
They stopped at the same time as if connected somehow and scanned the entire compound. Even though he and Lilah were hidden behind debris and charred brush, the two men raised their arms in sync and pointed to Raven and Lilah’s exact location. Nanotech-enhanced, no doubt.
A woman strode through the narrow gap between them. Long brown hair with a pinkish tint in the bonfire’s glow. Spindly, featherless wings stretching out behind her like elongated elbows. She didn’t stop. She didn’t even slow down. She was headed right for Lilah and him.
“Raven.” Lilah was breathless. “She’s not going to help us.”
His empathic guardian was right. He could feel it, too. But he didn’t have to be an empath to tell by the look on her face that the Angelseed wanted them both dead. Or maybe captured for Aoife.
A third man sauntered in behind the featherless Angelseed. He wore the robes of a Daeganean priest. The soft silver aura around him confirmed Raven’s suspicions. Jakin Crutchfield. Aoife’s sometimes partner. He twirled a dagger in one hand, so comfortable with the feel of it that he didn’t even have to look. The Angelseed stopped, and Jakin made his way determinedly across the compound.
Lilah scrambled to her feet, reaching for a dagger of her own. “Stay here, Raven. Stay down.” Her voice cracked. She glanced over her shoulder at him. “I love you, you know? If I’ve ever really loved anybody, it’s you.”
The memory of her as a stranger faded, and all the tender, unrealized feelings he’d had for her since the day they had met squeezed at his heart.
Jakin’s hurled blade struck her in the chest before she could turn around.
“Lilah!” Her name caught in Raven’s throat. There wasn’t time to tell her how he felt. She was still standing when Jakin reached her and didn’t fall until he pulled the knife from her heart.
There was nothing Raven could do. Nothing he could do in this timeline to save her.
In this timeline.
He slammed his wrist—the Walking Lightning bind rune tattoo—against the sigil on the next page of The Book of Time.
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