Blood and Feathers (45 page)

They watched him go, exhausted and bruised and punch-drunk.

Alice spoke first. “Is that it? Is it over?”

“Over?” said Vin. “Nah. It’s never over. This is just another fight. There’ll be more.”

“And this is how you live?”

“Sucks, doesn’t it?” But he was grinning as he said it, and he landed a friendly punch on her arm. “Admit it, you
love
it.”

“‘Love’ isn’t
exactly
the word I’d use...”

“It so is.”

“It so isn’t.”

“Is.”

“Isn’t.”

“Can you two just leave it? I feel like someone’s dad. I don’t like it; it makes me feel old and responsible, and like I need a drink. Which I can’t have because someone threw mine in the river.” Mallory sounded like he was only half-joking. “Besides, we need to get out of here.”

“Yeah, this place is totally dead,” said Vin, shoving his hands in his pockets. Mallory shook his head, muttering something under his breath.

Alice looked around them. “Gwyn. Where did he go?” she asked. There was no sign of him, nothing at all. He had simply vanished. “Should we try to help him?”

Mallory shrugged. “It’s not our concern.”

“But he’s...”

“He’s one of the Fallen now, Alice. And he doesn’t deserve your sympathy, nor your pity.”

“And to think, when we first met, you were giving me the whole ‘brothers’ spiel. What happened to that, by the way?”

“Fuck it.” Mallory kicked a stone that lay in his path, and watched it bounce along the rock. “That was clearly my charming naivety speaking. It won’t happen again. In the meantime, I suggest we find a way out.”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

If You Want to Get to Heaven,

You Have to Go Through Hell

T
HE SUN WAS
setting as Jester dialed a number on his phone. The snow had stopped, and already the air was feeling warmer. Whatever had happened down there, whatever they had done, it had obviously worked. The world went on unknowing, but the angels had broken hell’s hold – for now, at least.

“I’ve got him,” he said into the mouthpiece, slapping the large wooden packing crate he was sitting on. A muffled shout came from inside. “He ran straight into it, just like we planned.”

He paused, listening to the voice on the other end of the line.

“No, no-one. He popped up all on his lonesome at the other end of town. No trouble at all.”

A pause.

“Would you just let me handle this? It’s the least I can... No. Alright, alright. Whenever you’re ready, he’s all yours.”

He snapped his phone shut and slid down from the top of the crate. It was large enough to hold a man – just – and built of thick wood, reinforced with steel plates. A small grille was set into each side to allow air to flow through, and it was next to this that he crouched.

“You hear that, Purson? Enjoy your time in your little box, won’t you? Because the next time that lid opens, you’re going to wish you were back in hell.”

A
LICE HAULED HERSELF
up through the cave after Mallory. Her arms ached from the climb and her fingers were sore, adding to the bruises, the cuts and the utter, utter exhaustion she already felt. But above her was daylight. Well, she told herself,
twilight
. She didn’t care if it was pitch black up there. It was the world. The real world.

It wasn’t hell, and however imperfect it was, she would take that.

“Come
on
,” she called over her shoulder to Vin, who was whispering urgently to himself. Risking a glance back over her shoulder, she realised he was talking into a phone. “
How
has he managed to get reception down here?”

“You’re forgetting: the Fallen are all about technology. Xaphan,” said Mallory from somewhere above. There was a shower of soil, and his hand reached back down for hers. “We’re there.”

She let him haul her up, and she found herself in a field, lying flat on her back in deep snow, staring up at stars. “You know, compared to hell, this feels positively balmy,” she said, sitting up and brushing snow from her hair. She shuffled out of the way as Vin’s hand clamped around the edge of the hole and Mallory helped him out.

“You’re not even out of hell, and you’re on the phone already? Unbelievable.”

“Some of us have social lives to maintain.” Vin brushed the snow from his hands. “Of course, not that you’d know anything about that.”

“Wow... Seriously. Who was it?”

“No-one. Really.” He turned his phone over in his hands, and was about to drop it into his jacket pocket when it chirped. “See? Mister popular. Right here,” he said, scanning the screen. His face brightened. “That’s what I’m saying. Guess who’s got a date?”

“You’re expecting us to believe that there’s someone out there who would
voluntarily
spend time with you?” asked Mallory, his head tipped back.

Vin pulled a face. “Sari wants to get a drink sometime.”

“She must have got hit on the head.” Mallory stretched his wings out and sighed happily. “Poor kid.”

“Piss off,” said Vin. Alice laughed, and looked up at the sky. It looked no different from any other clear night she had seen, with the stars glittering high above them.

It looked no different, because it was no different.

The only thing that had changed was her.

She watched as the two angels, Descended and Earthbound, set off across the field ahead of her. They were still bickering, occasionally swatting at each other. She looked back down the hole they had clambered out of; through caves and tunnels, through blood and fire and ice. Through hell.

Mallory stopped, turned. “You coming, or what?”

And then she wrapped her coat about her, and hurried after them.

I
N THE SHADOWS
behind them, a pair of dark-rimmed eyes flashed red, and watched them go.

CODA

“Y
OU’VE HEARD THAT
Lucifer’s body has been captured?”

“And what good is that, Adriel? With most of the Twelve still loose, and Lucifer able to ride any one of the Fallen?”

“It’s something.”

“It’s nothing. Worse than nothing.”

Michael watched the last of his choir moving among the motionless figures on the Plains; watched them moving slowly and methodically through them, killing the Ghasts they found. From high above, it almost looked as though they were taking up positions on a grid.

Beside him, Adriel looked down over the edge. “And what about
them?
The ones the Fallen took?”

“What about them indeed?” said Michael thoughtfully, then shook his head. “Hell has enlarged herself, and that cannot be. If we leave things like this, balance is... unsustainable.”

“But the taken... they’re innocents.”

“In my experience, Adriel, no-one is an innocent.”

Michael’s angels had stopped moving. One by one, they raised their arms and fire flared in the palms of their hands: tiny orange stars casting a hot glow across the Plains of the Damned.

“This isn’t the way.”

“That’s for me to decide. This is my army.”

“Is it? Are you sure about that?” Adriel spoke softly, and Michael showed no sign of having heard him.

“Michael?”

“Not a single one worth saving,” said Michael, balancing a ball of flame between his hands.

He tossed it over the edge of the cliff, and turned away as his angels began to retreat, fire spinning behind his eyes.

“Let them burn.”

About the Author

B
ORN IN
W
ALES
in the UK, Lou Morgan grew up in a house with an attic full of spiders and now lives on the south coast of England with her husband, son and the obligatory cat.

Her short fiction has been published by the British Fantasy Society,
Hub Fiction
and
Morpheus Tales
, and most recently her story “At the Sign of the Black Dove” appeared in the
Pandemonium: Stories of the Apocalypse
anthology.

She drinks a lot of tea, is very mouthy about archery and likes cathedrals, comics and Christopher Nolan movies. And probably things beginning with other letters of the alphabet, too.

She can be found online at loumorgan.co.uk, or – far too often – wasting time on Twitter as @LouMorgan.

Blood and Feathers
is her first novel.

Acknowledgements

T
HERE ARE SO
many people I should mention here that they could almost fill a book by themselves – and even then I’m sure I’d manage to leave someone out. That being said, these are the people who would inflict actual physical pain on me if I forgot them. So.

My deepest thanks to Jon Oliver: editor, friend and all-round good guy, for taking a leap of faith; and to the team at Solaris – Ben Smith, David Moore and Michael Molcher – for making me feel like a part of the family.