I stopped peering through the mirrored glass and looked into it instead, at my reflection. My eyes had changed that day. Once upon a time they were both blue, but now one was the amazing dancing gold of an angel, the other the burning red of a demon. Balance. I nearly spat at the thought. Balance was the Universe's cruel joke. I guess I was the punchline.

  One of the angels swiveled their heads, looking out of the window, turning directly towards me. I leaped up and grabbed onto the rope I had secured to the rooftop, my feet tapping lightly on the floor above them. I didn’t care if he had seen me or not, but it would sure make things easier if he hadn’t. He hadn’t.

  Josette. I had tried to speak to her after she had given her soul to me. I could hear those whispers and so many times I thought I could whisper back. I had tried to whisper back, but she had never answered. That hadn’t stopped her memories from flooding into me, usually triggered by a thought, a word, the environment, anything. At that moment I was her, in that time and place, losing myself completely.

  I let go of the rope and landed back on the precipice without a sound. The angels were distracted now; they had finally picked up the signal of the onrushing evil, and had taken up defensive positions. One stood on either side of the elevator to ambush the demons when they burst in, the other two took position in front of the desk, protecting Rachel. For her part, she had pulled a pair of revolvers from her desk drawer and had them trained on the elevator. Silver bullets, I was sure. They were poorly prepared.

  The demons were only a few floors down now, a mass of heat to my senses. Thanks to Ulnyx, I could pick them out by scent. It was a standard assault group, a front-line of fodder demons to get killed in the ambush, a second wave of devil warriors, and a fallen angel Commanding them. Thirty-six against four and a half. It would have been a pretty fair fight, not really the demonic style.

  Rebecca. The last time I had seen her, she had left me paralyzed on the floor, waiting for my spinal cord to re-attach itself while she had taken a rift-ride to Hell. Initially, I had thought that it was because she knew it was the only way to escape and keep me from following. I had told myself that she would come back, that the power she had taken from Reyzl had left her confused. It was a stupid conjecture meant to salve the emotional wound, a stubborn denial that the demon who had made me feel more alive after death than I had during life wasn’t a slave to the promise of power like all of the others. But the years had gone by, and she had remained in perdition. Mr. Ross had reported as much to Dante, though he knew only that she was seeking some kind of knowledge that couldn’t be gathered in the mortal world. What kind, he couldn’t say. Dante had total faith in his Collector, but over the years it had seemed to me that his reports were always a little bit short, that there always seemed to be something missing. Or maybe that was just my general paranoia.

  Her absence hadn’t been a total loss. Without the transferred memories and power of generations of Solen offspring, the family had fallen into a state of disarray, a shadow of their former glory, caught in the middle of a power struggle that had left them squabbling over scraps. Reyzl’s death had created a similar power vacuum amongst the higher order demons, and even now fiends and fallen angels alike were vying to take up the role, while at the same time hoping it was captured by someone else first to see how I would react. The impending attack on the angels was a standard sortie to flex some muscle. At least, it was to them.

  The demons had reached their floor. The elevator doors would slip open any moment, and the battle would begin. I knew why the demons were there. I didn’t need Obi for everything, after all I had my share of experience hacking networks and surfing the black oceans on the dark side of the Internet. It was time for me to act.

  I focused my will on the mirrored glass. My technique had improved over the years, and where once I would have just blown the crystals to shards or dust, now I superheated them, liquified them, and watched the window melt away. I slipped in behind Rachel at the same moment the elevator doors were thrown open along their tracks. Before the angels could start hacking at the fodder, I allowed myself to be Seen.

  It was like a shockwave that burst out from my physical displacement, causing the angels to stop all thoughts of attacking the demons and turn my way, and making the incoming fodder stumble into the room, and then change course in a desperate effort to get back out.

  Five years had been plenty of time to pick up some new tricks. One of them was being able to close myself off from being sensed by other Divine. Acquiring the trick had been an interesting exercise, since it required first an understand of how Divine Sight worked, and second an extremely fine control over the strands of power that fed into my physical representation through my soul.

  In the beginning, it had been a source of confusion that the Divine struggled to recognize me correctly, in some cases thinking I was a demon, in others an angel. I had learned since that each form of power had its own unique signature, in some ways like how you could use radar to tell what kind of plane you were looking at, even though you couldn’t see it. Except, in the early days the Divine had been picking up my nascent output, the purgatorial balance of the powers fluctuating ever-so-slightly depending on my current state of mind.

  Later, I had learned to control the output, and could neutralize it such that I still appeared as Divine; my true identity as a diuscrucis. The real fun had come from my experiments with mixing Josette and Ulnyx’s energy into the general flow. After a lot of trial and error and with Sarah’s help, I had discovered I could effectively negate myself entirely to the senses of other Divine, and just as importantly, I could mimic different signatures. It wasn’t very useful against the more powerful players, but it had its moments.

  I waited while the fodder demons retreated. I stood motionless until the fallen angel had made his way into the room, his devil warriors lining up behind him. I glanced over at Rachel. She had put the guns onto the desk and was facing me with a look of fearful apprehension.

  “Diuscrucis,” the fallen angel said. I knew this one too. Alyle. “Who are you fighting for?”

  I looked around the room, soaking in the smell of fear and uncertainty, the smell of hopefulness. It was the burning question whenever I showed up where both factions clashed. Which side would I be aligning with today? Where did the balance rest? For the first two years, I had been a staunch ally for the angels. I had killed more demons than I could count. I had freed them up to take on their more peaceful pursuits in the name of goodness. The killing had been great for them but had left me tired and empty. The idea of my eternal future being predicated by violence was less than appealing.

  For two years after I had declared peace. I had disappeared from the fight, an observer to the balance that kept mankind in control of their own destiny. I had spent much of that time seeking knowledge. The knowledge that Charis had told me I would seek. The Demon Queen. I had solved that riddle after I had seen my eyes. I still hadn’t solved the mystery she had so desperately wanted me to. I still didn’t know how to find her. After she had given me the Grail, she had vanished again. Even Mr. Ross didn’t know where to.

  It was Dante who had pushed me to get back out into the field. He was worried that both factions were getting too comfortable again. I had spent a year picking sides, at first with a clear goal in mind, and then almost randomly depending on my mood when the fight broke out. Tonight I was trying out a new tactic.

  I looked at Rachel again. “Please get under the desk,” I said.

  She glanced over to the angels on the other side of the workspace, then dropped to her knees and crawled under it.

  “Diuscrucis?” one of the angels asked. Silas. He had replaced Moses as the elder seraph at the Catskill Sanctuary. An old, wise angel, we had worked together a number of times.

  I reached behind my back, unclipping the simple, mortal sword from its sheath and holding it up in front of me. I traced the polished steel with my eyes. No runes, no magic, just straight up sharp, pointy metal.

  “Myself,” I said, leaping over the desk and removing Silas’ head. In the same motion, I pulled one of the revolvers to me, firing a bullseye right between Alyle’s eyes. It wouldn’t kill the demon, but it sent the desired message.

  The angels turned on me. The devils turned on me. For a moment they forgot about their own war. For once there was a more important threat. I let off the remaining five rounds in the revolver, perfect hits on five of the devils, and then roared, my body shifting and growing, turning into something wholly inhuman; a massive form of muscle and strength and bone. I felt a sword dig deep into my thigh, but I ignored it. I pounced forward and ripped into the devils, my massive claws shredding them.

  They tried to run, but the elevator shaft was small, and it made a lousy escape route. I smothered them with my size and speed, tearing and ripping into them with a visceral fury that rose into my consciousness whenever I took the Great Were’s natural form.

  I could smell the angels regrouping behind me, organizing themselves for a combined attack on my flank. Alyle was with them, joining in their fight against me, accepting their wordless request for help. It was an interesting development. It wouldn’t help them. I crushed the final two devils, and then gave up Ulnyx’s form, becoming man-sized once more. I pulled my sword to me and stood stiff straight before the remaining angels.

  “Why?” the fallen angel asked. I knew the question would be echoing through all of their minds.

  “Balance,” I said. I had learned that it was the answer to everything that didn’t make sense.

  I danced forward, a black clothed blur through the line of angels. They fought well, but Josette had been the best of them before she had become part of me, before my own power had been mixed with hers. It was over in a blink.

  I took a cloth from my jeans pocket and wiped down the blade, and then dropped it to the floor. I returned the sword to the scabbard on my back. The angels were already dissolving, first to dust, then to nothing.

  I walked over to the desk. “You can come out now,” I said to Rachel. I could hear her knees sliding along the floor, and then her head popped up over the edge of the desk.

  Forty-five years old, short brown hair cut in a bob, brown eyes, a little overweight. She was intelligent, compassionate, and a staunch supporter of good. She put her hands on the desk and pulled herself to her feet. She knew I wasn’t going to kill her, so her fear had fallen to the background.

  “Balance?” she asked.

  I sighed. “The cause and the effect,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about how to resolve it.”

  She tilted her head. “So you’ve decided just to kill everything?”

  “Not everything. You’re still alive,” I said.

  She frowned. “What happened to you?” she asked.

  Where should I start? I had met Rachel only a few months after I had recovered the Grail. She had been instrumental in providing the resources I had needed to reset the balance - finances, transportation, information when she had it, and something more.

  “I always told you that things would change when the balance was reached,” I said.

  “You know that’s not what I’m talking about,” she replied.

  I knew, but I didn’t want to talk about it. Rachel had been there for me when I had needed a friend more than anything. No, not a friend. A mother of sorts. She had done a better job in the few years I had known her than my biological mother ever had. She was one of the few who could even pretend to understand what it was like to be me. That I was unable to relate to her, to be close to her, to even remember what that was...

  “Landon,” she said, her voice concerned. It snapped me out of my useless introspection.

  “Memories,” I said at last. “I’ve tried to fight them, but I can’t escape. I’m tired of trying.”

  Charis had known what would happen. She had known because she had gone through it. Maybe it had taken her almost two hundred years, but she wasn’t me. I had never handled it well. I tried so hard to handle it, but I was drowning. I knew the knowledge she was waiting for me to find would be my salvation. It had to be.

  “There’s something else I need,” I said, shaking off the heaviness. “Your database.”

  Rachel looked back at her computer monitor. “My database? What for?”

  Whispers and hope. My search for information had brought me to Shanghai, China, where I had spoken to a minor fiend who also happened to be one of the Asian archfiend’s top spies. He had told me of the whispers. That the angels were passing encrypted messages through the most benign pathways. That not all of the angels knew about it. I suspected that Rachel’s charity’s financial transactions might be one of their transports.

  “Research,” I said.

  She looked back at me. “Let me help you,” she said. “I know I don’t understand what you’re going through, but you need someone to ground you.”

  “No,” I replied. “You can’t help me like that now that the balance is steady. Even if you could, if you did you would fall. I know how old you really are. You wouldn’t survive.” I reached into a pocket and pulled out a thumb drive. I handed it to her. “Please, just copy your database to the drive.”

  Chapter 2

  I walked out of the Taylor building through the front door, a loaded USB drive tucked away in my leather jacket’s inside pocket. I slipped across the street and looked up towards the top of the building, expecting to see Rachel standing at the window, waiting for me to step out into the night. She wasn’t there. Unexpected, but not surprising.

  I had been holding two bases of operation for the last five years. The first was the hidden excavation beneath the Statue of Liberty, where Rebecca had once lived. The second was my original room near the top of the Belmont Hotel. Rachel had spent months of her life trying to talk me into moving to a different location - she had gone so far as to offer me the penthouse of one of the residential towers her corporation owned. It had been tempting in the beginning, but what kind of mortal comforts did I need? I didn’t sleep. I didn’t eat. I didn’t even void. I was a ghost with mass and kinetic energy.

  The Belmont was familiar, and I could still feel the charge in the air from the night I had spent learning swordplay with Josette. I didn’t know if it was real, or my memories making it real. Either way I didn’t care. It was comfortable. The Statue... Everything about the Statue oozed Rebecca, right down to the bottle of perfume she had kept in the nightstand drawer next to her bed. I didn’t sit there and sniff it or anything as forlorn as that. What I had done was study her books, study the runes, and keep up the hope that one of these days I’d go down there and she’d be there waiting. Waiting to explain what she had done, and why. It was almost as big of a mystery to me as Charis’ words.

  “Survival,” she had said. It could mean so many things. I had thought she had allied with me because I was her best shot at it. Obviously, I had been wrong.

  I had been too sensitive. I had cared too much, too quickly. I had gotten burned by mortal fire, burned by hellfire, burned by trust. You couldn’t fight the Divine and care about anything. The alternative was to suffer pain and loss over, and over, and over again. When it was one of the only things that could hurt you, feelings became the enemy. Like I said, I liked to lie to myself.

  I felt a slight pressure in my head and a tingle that floated down my spine towards the place that I identified as my soul’s cage. I couldn’t help but smile. I sat down cross-legged in the center of the street, ignoring the cars that swerved smoothly around me.

  “I’m here Sarah,” I said, opening myself up to the connection.

  “Hey, Landon,” Sarah said, her voice clear in my mind.

  She had changed so much since the first time we had met, when she had helped me find the answers I didn’t even know I was seeking. She had been a child then, but never just a child. She was a true diuscrucis, the only one in existence, born of the non-consensual union between a demon and an angel. The angel was Josette. The demon was Gervais, her brother, an archfiend operating out of Paris, France. I had never confronted him for fear of revealing Sarah. That didn’t mean I didn’t know where he was.

  Josette had asked me to protect her. Sarah herself had named me protector before I had even known it would come to be. Could she see the future? She said she couldn’t, but she was the one person who could lie to me. If she could, she never let on.

  “What’s up kiddo?” I asked.

  The only time I could feel my soul breathing was when Sarah connected to me. I was her protector, and I would never let her see me sweat, never let her see what my world had become.

  “Just checking up on you. When are you coming by to do some more of that ninja training of yours?” she said.

  Her voice was light, cheerful. So unlike how she had been the first time we had met. Knowing she was safe had allowed her to grow, to blossom, and to live as though she were almost normal. She was still residing underground with the other Awake, but she went to High School, had mortal friends, and even mortal crushes. Nobody in the world knew she was different except me, though she needed to be more careful about not revealing her ability to See.

  I reached into my pocket and touched the USB drive. “I’m doing great sweets,” I said, pushing my mental voice up an octave to sound more chipper than I felt. “Maybe tomorrow night? I’m on my way back to the Belmont to do some research.”

  I had spent hundreds of hours over the last three years teaching Sarah everything I... no, her mother knew about fighting. I found a certain measure of comfort in being able to give her something of Josette’s that she could hold on to, even if she didn’t know, or at least didn’t say she knew, where that particular skillset had come from.

  Her laughter boomed in my head. “You’re sitting in the middle of traffic,” she said. “Do you have to do that?”