It was one of the differences between a directly descended diuscrucis and a facsimile like me. She knew exactly where I was, all of the time. All she had to do was think about me, and she could See me. I couldn’t do the same, but I knew it brought her great comfort to always know where I was.

  “To be honest, I hadn’t even thought about it,” I admitted, getting back to my feet and finishing my trip across the road. I had become so accustomed to the mortal world circulating around me, at times I almost forgot it even existed. “How was school today?”

  “It’s always an adventure,” she said. “Katie Winslow and her gang tried to prank me again by swapping my Coke for a can of urine. Somehow it ended up on Katie’s head. Just because they think I’m blind doesn’t mean I have no sense of smell.”

  I laughed. A rarity these days, unheard of unless I was talking to Sarah. She had gotten into a couple of scrapes with the school princess already, mainly owing to her perceived disability and the complete lack of imaginative mischief that stemmed from it. She had always gotten the upper hand, and her payback was well measured and deserved.

  “What did the principal say?” I asked.

  She laughed again. “He said I should have made her drink it. I’m not the only one she tries to torment, I’m just the only one who fights back.”

  “I’m sure you’d love nothing more than to put your foot up her ass,” I said. She had expressed as much in the past, but doing so would risk giving up her faux blindness. How would she explain that away?

  “I’ve been thinking about that. What I’d love to do even more is Command her to put her foot up her own ass.”

  The statement made me raise an eyebrow. Even though she was a diuscrucis, she had always leaned good. The way she took care of the Awake down in the tunnels, her desire to help her fellow targets at school. Commanding was a demonic ability, and not one to be used lightly. It was out of character.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  There was the slightest pause. Just long enough for me to know she wasn’t. “I’m fine, brother,” she said. “I’m just getting fed up with that witch and her cackling minions. Anyway, I’m headed to bed. I wanted to check in on you and say goodnight.”

  I could feel the temporary relief waning into the background at the words. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know they were coming. “Goodnight, sister,” I said. “I love you.”

  “I love you too,” she replied. I expected her to break the connection, but there was a pause. When her mental voice returned, it was hushed. “Brother, be careful. You may find the answers that you seek, but you may also wish you hadn’t.”

  I wanted to ask her what she meant, what she had seen or felt about my future. I couldn’t, because she broke the connection. That was something else she had me beat on. The call was one way. I briefly considered heading underground, but there was no point. If she had wanted to say more, she would have.

  “I love you too.”

  The words echoed in my mind, bringing back a familiar memory that didn’t belong to me. I found desperate purchase against the wall of the nearest building, trying to ground myself before the past could overtake me. My vision went dark, the sounds of the city fading out and history, terrible history taking its place.

  I’m on a bed, my thighs are bloodied. The Archfiend takes my newborn baby and hands her off to his servant Izak.

  He rounds on me, smiles and laughs. He is handsome, with a mop of curly black hair and delicate features. His nearly naked body is lean and strong and covered in runes. He’s carrying a wicked looking dagger in one hand, a decanter of water in the other.

  He puts the tip of the dagger at my foot and eases it upward, the tip digging in just enough to make me bleed. When the poison begins to spread, he pours the holy water over it, filling my senses with the smell of frankincense, filling my body with even more pain. I’m already healing from the birth, my stomach shrinking so unnaturally, my muscles tightening and reforming back into my petite young visage.

  “I have heard that the diuscrucis were banned by Heaven and Hell because of the power they hold as mortals, and the infinite power they can command as Divine,” he says. The dagger reaches my inner thigh. “I am eager to see how I might use such a tool.”

  I don’t move. It isn’t because I can’t, but because I know that resisting would be useless. This is his home, his domain, and if I want to live to see my daughter again I have to be cautious. “Please don’t hurt her Gervais,” I say, tears welling in my eyes.

  He stops the motion of the dagger and leans in close, his blood-red eyes only inches from my own. “Sweet Josette,” he says. “I won’t hurt her.”

  His words are a lie. I know it, but I’m powerless. The tears flow more freely. The knife moves up my abdomen, coming to rest over my heart.

  “I’m not going to kill you,” he says. “Even I’m not monster enough to kill my own flesh and blood. I want you to know that I could have. That I have shown you mercy today. I want you to know that you have a daughter, and that she is in my care.”

  The words are worse than a dagger in my heart. He lifts the blade and places it and the decanter on a small table. He leans in again and puts his lips to mine. I return his kiss, knowing the consequences for denial. He moans. I cry. He breaks the kiss and puts his hands under my small body, careful not to damage my wings. He carries me over to the window. I can see the city off in the distance.

  “Do not come back here,” he says. “I will kill her if you do.”

  He throws me out the window.

  At first I move horizontally, and then I begin to fall. Instinct takes over. My wings spread, catch the currents of air, and lift me back into the sky. No longer trapped by his power, I close my eyes and will myself back to Heaven.

  When I regained myself, I was holding crumbled mortar, my tension causing me to dig deeply into the cement. The tears were streaming from my eyes, the same way they had the dozens of times I’d been assaulted by that memory. I fought the emotions, forcing them back down into my soul.

  “Josette,” I whispered, hoping that maybe this time she would respond. She didn’t. I steadied myself, wiped my eyes, and took a deep breath. I had work to do.

  The Belmont Hotel hadn’t changed much in the five years I had been there, outside of the police tape cordoning off the entire ‘penthouse’. I had put the tape there to keep the druggies, alkies, and whores away from anything they could hurt themselves on. I had added runes to the doors to ensure that the deterrents didn’t need to be effective.

  As usual, I entered through the roof, gaining access from the neighboring building and leaping across the gap. I took the stairs down and put my hand against the hinges of the door, defusing the metal so I could push it open, checking the runes inside the frame, and re-soldering the hinge on the other side. The process seemed complicated, but it only took me half a second to complete.

  I had torn down every wall on the floor that wasn’t weight-carrying, leaving myself with a large, almost labyrinthine studio which in the early days after the betrayal I had used to practice my craft, refine my control, and make sure I was never left powerless again. The space was nearly empty, with the exception of a small desk with a task chair and a laptop, a mattress on the floor that hadn’t been used in years, an old wooden steamer trunk, and a literal pile of weapons. Not just cursed and blessed pointed blades, but also assault rifles, handguns, and a number of other tools of violence. Some might have said that I kept the instruments of pain as trophies, but I had destroyed so many others it made the pile look like a pittance.

  The reason I kept them wasn’t clear to me, but it was a compulsion I didn’t see a need to deny. They came from angels, demons, vampires, werewolves, the Turned and the Touched. They came from mortals too; I hadn’t limited my work to the Divine, especially when it came to violence against the innocent. On some level the stack reminded me of my purpose, a unique installation that spoke of what I had become. I unstrapped the sword from my back, and threw it onto the pile. Take the weapons away from the killers, and then use them to kill. Balance.

  I looked over at the steamer trunk. I had found it at Obscura Antiques in the East Village, a popular shop that specialized in oddities and abnormal relics. What had made it special to them was the intricately carved series of patterns that when looked at from a certain angle bore an uncanny resemblance to the Virgin Mary. What had attracted me to it was that the carvings were seraphim runes of power. They rendered the trunk both indestructible and secure, able to be opened only by the angel or part-angel who traced the runes on the front in a unique pattern.

  I had spent three months tracking its origins backward. It hadn’t always been a steamer trunk; the wood had originally been installed on Pope Urban’s carriage, protecting him from danger both mortal and Divine while he would travel the countryside. I didn’t know who had reconstructed it in its current form. It’s discovery had been a bit of good fortune and a bit of gathered knowledge.

  That knowledge had come from the contents of the trunk; hundreds of books, scrolls, and ancient pages that I had spent the better part of my two years on hiatus collecting, studying, and organizing. Some I had stolen from Universities, some from museums, and others I had tracked down in the possession of an assortment of demons and angels. The demons had been happy to trade the parcels for their lives. The angels had been more stubborn, and an unfortunate number had died not even knowing what it was they were protecting. In the beginning, I had felt some semblance of guilt, but Charis had been right; it was all a matter of perspective.

  As for the texts, I knew they were a clue to the knowledge that she had wanted me to find. I had happened on it almost by accident. One of Rebecca’s books had included a reference to a scroll I now had in my possession. The reference had included an image, and the image had included an emblem, drawn so small on the paper that no human hand could have been responsible, and no mortal eyes could have seen it regardless. The emblem was a rune, similar to the number seven, with a zig-zag on the top line and a sharp diagonal slipping up and to the left from the foot. It appeared on all of the texts I had collected, and nowhere else.

  I didn’t know what it meant, who had created it, or how to interpret it, but I was sure it was connected to Charis. I had spent nearly three years learning as much about the Divine on Earth as I could. I had followed thousands of dead ends, discovered leads and connections hidden across the mythology of human culture both ancient and contemporary, studied demonic and angelic texts, and learned to read as much of both languages as possible without a complete reference translation. It was the only character I had ever found secretly emblazoned across every level of divinity and humanity, carefully placed on specific pages of specific texts, the resultant strings creating a dialog of some kind. I couldn’t decipher it, because there was one string missing. One resource I had yet to find, an unknown item that held the key to learning the truth and finding myself once more. Even if I had it, I didn’t know if I would be able to solve the encryption, but I had to try.

  I grabbed the USB drive from my pocket, hopped onto the task chair, and slid the device into the laptop. I typed in my password and navigated through to the drive. There was one file on it, a two hundred gigabyte flat file of transaction data. It was going to be a long night. Then again, they all were.

  If there was a pattern to the data, I was having trouble finding it. IDs, dates, and dollar amounts streamed down the screen, scrolling for almost forever. I pored through the information, tried to match up dates to dollar amounts, dollar amounts to other dollar amounts, ids to dates and so on. The second most important lesson I had learned was patience. I had eternity to try to work it out.

  The pressure in my head broke me out of my digital trance. I blinked for the first time since I had sat down and opened up my soul to Sarah’s request.

  “I’m here,” I said to her, reaching up and hitting the power button for the monitor. Twenty hours. I was supposed to meet Sarah for training an hour ago.

  “You’re supposed to be here,” Sarah said, her voice trembling. “Something’s wrong.”

  Chapter 3

  I took a deep breath, a feeling of worry crossing my deadened threshold.

  “I’m on my way,” I said, already headed for the door. “What happened?”

  “Kelsie. She’s one of my children. She’s missing.”

  The words spilled out in a tumble of fear, worry, and guilt. I slipped through the door and leaped off the side of the stairwell, focusing on breaking my fall, and landing tenderly at the bottom of the steps. I blasted through the lobby and out the front door, not even giving the latest Punkmo a chance to see what had caused the disturbance.

  Kelsie belonged to Trish, an Awake vagrant who had learned too late not to talk about the Divine. She had spent three years committed, and had nowhere to go once she had been released. She sold herself on the street to make money, and Kelsie was the result. Sarah had fallen in love with the little girl in an instant, and had taken the pair into her refuge. That had been a year ago. Sarah spoiled the little girl whenever she could, and in return Kelsie had taken to calling her “auntie.” She loved that.

  “When was the last time you saw her?” I asked. I bent down and lifted the manhole cover, slipped in and replaced it. It was about a mile down to the village. I focused, feeling the strength pouring into my legs.

  “Before I left for school,” she said between sobs. “She said goodbye to me. Trish said they went out to panhandle. Someone distracted her. When she turned around, Kelsie was gone.”

  I turned the corner, not slowing at all when I reached the huge open cavern that was Sarah’s home. Once it had housed a hundred people at most, but it had grown in the last five years. Nearly six hundred lived here now, gathering water and electricity from lines run long ago to a now forgotten generating station. The Awake looked up at me, some with fear, some with admiration. They scurried out of the way as I approached.

  “I’m here,” I said out loud, pushing open the flap to Sarah’s tent in the center of the small city. Sarah was sitting on the floor, her arms around Trish. I saw Izak sitting in the back corner of the tent, his body expressionless, but his eyes betraying the sadness that he felt at Sarah’s pain.

  Sarah dropped her connection to my soul. She looked up at me with her empty eyes. I felt another pang of hurt that mirrored Izak’s. She eased herself out of Trish’s embrace, stood up, and fell towards me.

  The refugee camp wasn’t the only thing that had grown. Sarah had gone from a young girl to a young woman; her body lithe and strong like her mother’s, her face proud and defined like her father’s. Her once pigtailed hair fell to her shoulders in highlighted ringlets, and I was sure the tight jeans and black t-shirt she was wearing were getting her plenty of appreciative looks. I caught her in my arms and held her, kissing the top of her head and stroking her back.

  “I’ll find her,” I said.

  I looked at Trish. The emaciated blonde woman remained hunched over on the floor in silence, her body wracked with distress.

  “I’ll find her,” I repeated.

  Sarah backed away from me and returned to Trish’s side. “Tell him where you were,” she said to the woman.

  It took Trish a few tries to compose herself enough to speak. “Penn Station,” she said. “We were working the afternoon crowd, trying to get some money for the community. This guy bumped into me, I got knocked down. By the time I got back up, Kelsie was gone. I screamed her name. I looked for her. I grabbed a policeman, but he thought I was hallucinating or something. Oh, Kelsie.” Her sobs started anew.

  I wasn’t going to tell Sarah, but that wasn’t the first time I heard the story. Young girls had been disappearing across the city for the last six weeks or so, stolen right out from under their parents’ noses. I had considered looking into it earlier but hadn’t acted. Karma didn’t exist, but it was still a bitch.

  “I’ll go down to Penn and see if I can pick up a trail,” I said. “You didn’t sense any Divine?”

  Trish shook her head. As an Awake she knew we existed, and she could feel when we were around. I hadn’t expected her to have sensed one, or she wouldn’t have been there. The Awake avoided Divine with even more fervor than they avoided the Sleeping. My killer was a plain, ordinary mortal, which meant he should be easy enough to track down.

  “I’m coming with you,” Sarah said, her voice firm. She was trying to preempt my objection. She failed.

  “You’re not coming with me,” I said. “You know the stations are dangerous.”

  I wish I had known how dangerous the stations were when I had asked Obi to meet me at Grand Central that first time. They had only recently re-opened the tracks that had been demolished by my inadvertent expulsion of power.

  “I can take care of myself,” she argued. It was predictable.

  There were only a few kinds of demons who could stay in the mortal dimension full-time without a more powerful demon to keep them alive. Vampires, werewolves, and nightstalkers were the most prevalent of the Devil’s children. Then there were the fiends - they had been human once, died and gone to Hell, and had begged to be sent back to continue their dirty deeds.

  All of them preferred to stay out of the light as much as possible, but the stations were the hunting grounds of the nightstalkers; powerful humanoids that were more often associated with the term ‘zombies’. They weren’t the shuffling, stupid, brain-eating variety. They were the Devil’s first earthly creation, and while they ran more on instinct than intelligence, they were fast, strong, and silent. They would be a threat to me in a large enough group. Sarah had power, but her body was mortal and couldn’t heal.

  “I can Command them,” she said, either reading my mind or getting ahead of my thoughts.

  “How many?” I asked. Nightstalkers hunted in groups. I didn’t have the power to Command, but I knew that it meant dedicating a piece of the mind to keeping the target under control, like a computer dedicating memory to each running application. There was a limit.