The Presence of Angels

Raven · Chapter 19 of 19 · 6-minute read

Dagaz timeline, total lunar eclipse

Three of Cups Compound, somewhere in what was once the State of Virginia

This time, he didn’t drift slowly down into his body like a dandelion fuzz on a summer breeze. The force of the tug was more like a splat against a wall. He slammed into his body, hard, knocking the breath out. He gasped for air and rose to his knees, back curved, bind rune tattoo still against the sigil of angel wings.

And he was naked.

His ears weren’t ringing. That was the second thing he noticed. Whatever was in this timeline, he either had to accept and carve the wings into his forearm or… accept a timeline where Lilah had died as a child and where the demon would stand before him and express disappointment in Raven’s abilities to make good choices. He had messed up, badly.

But the demon had been right—Raven couldn’t turn away from someone in need. Even to his detriment, that was who he was at his core. If he were physically able, he would be the one to rescue those in need or make their existence easier. No matter what the trappings of his physical existence or the world around him, it was who he was and that dictated his actions and those dictated his future. Whatever timeline his error had created this time, it was probably worse than the last one.

The third thing he noticed changed his mind.

Empathically, he could sense Lilah’s presence. Not without troubles but mostly whole, mostly at peace. The memories tumbled in on top of one another—a timeline where he’d been alone for years and had never known her and a timeline where he’d found her after the apocalypse, after years of searching.

She was here. His Lilah.

Before the sigil on the page began to fade, he reached for his hair-daggers. They were gone. His hair hung long from the top and back, over the shaved sides. A white-handled athame with a nine-inch blade rested where the pages of The Book of Time joined the binding.

He scratched the wings into his forearm and watched the scar heal. He rubbed one fingertip across the scars: a poppy and dagger, a phallus, a window, and now angel wings. All different doorways in different timelines and memories of other timelines that had not been chosen. It was a disorderly mess in his head, but as the new cuts healed, the memories solidified and became clearer whereas the others receded into dreams.

Raven stood tall, book and athame in hand. Every page was blank now, except one with the bloodstains of Old Aryx the Alchemist, who’d seen everything in his gift of prophecy and had written it into the sigils as guideposts on an uncertain journey and bound them all together in the hide that had covered him in his incarnation as an alchemist, priest, and prophet.

The night air was quiet except for the crackle of two bonfires at opposite ends of the compound and one in the center where he’d remembered a boulder in one future and a demon in another. The fires were bright enough to light the stone and grass labyrinth he’d built alone when he’d first found this place while on the run from Aoife and her nanotechnology-enhanced soldiers. The fruit trees, the squash, the smell of rabbit stew. The memories were sorting themselves. He was here tonight for some ritual under…

Raven tilted his head toward the night sky. An eclipse. The moon was still blood red in the shadow, but the shadow was fast giving way to light. He stalked to the center bonfire, raised the athame to the moon, and flung the fully expended Book of Time into the flames. It went up in a roar of sparks as if some purple and blue demon had been exorcised. Raven watched it burn to ash. He fought the pain of burning such a precious book, but he still held all the memories Old Aryx had shared with him in a mind-meld of tattoos. Old Aryx hadn’t always intended for the book to be destroyed by fire when all its spells had been used up. In the knowledge that had passed between them in their melding of priest-marks—one witnessing the future and one the past—Old Aryx had seen the DNA from the book’s cover used to create clones for the Order of Daegan. He feared the practice would be used to recreate his physical body for a future incarnation and disapproved. He’d decided then that the spent book be burned, along with what remained of his body.

When the flames had consumed The Book of Time, Raven lowered the athame and sank the blade into the ground at the edge of the bonfire, symbolically returning Old Aryx’s body and work to Mother Earth.

Glancing down at the scars on his bare legs, memories came flooding back. The war wounds had landed him in a veterans’ hospital. There, he had made a deal with Aoife to no longer turn his back on the priesthood that Tessa had protected him from.

He remembered his deep affection for Lilah back at the Florida University where they’d gone from friends to spending all their time together, taking assignments to find and protect the world’s most dangerous books for the St. Augustine Special Collections Library.

The night he’d realized the pole shift had begun, which had been the same night a featherless Angelseed had attacked Lilah, hands on Lilah’s heart and third eye. After that, Lilah had not seemed anything like the woman he knew, except for the ringing in his ears and her occasional despondency over past sins. Mika had died in Lilah’s body, and Lilah was long gone.

The long years alone, searching for the real Lilah through the natural disasters that had left the human race huddled in small communities here and there and on the brink of extinction. And then finding her. Finding Lilah.

She didn’t have the memories he did of those other timelines when she’d been food for a demon or of the ones where they’d battled the apocalyptic elements alone, happily, for years as friends, lovers, partners, searching for the angel who could initiate his ascension with the touch of her hands on his chest. But he carried enough good memories for both of them, and now that he’d found her, they had years to make up.

The flames glowed on his bare skin. He could feel Lord Daegan, the long-dead god, coming to life inside him as the earth shadow on the moon slid into bright light. Archangel Michael’s return from his absence on Earth. The full moon shone down through the opening of trees above, lighting up the entire compound and leaving the edges in dappled moon-shade. He glanced over his shoulder at her, his Lilah, standing watch in the shadows behind him.

“Is it done?” she asked.

Raven nodded. “It’s all in order now.”

“Good. Are you ready to ascend?” Lilah stepped out of the shadows, her pink-brown hair golden in the fires’ glow, her wide and dark wings rising high above them both.

Again, Raven nodded. “I cannot wait for you to finally touch me.”

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THE END

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All the stories in the universe of the Secret Lives of Librarians can be read in any order, unless specified in a numbered series like The Payback Archives.

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