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There’s nobody here. A city of nine million people feels empty. I look around, and then behind me, hoping to dive back into the coziness of the restaurant. But it is closed. The lights are off. When I peer through the windows, it looks as though it hasn’t been open in a long time.
“Okay, great,” I say to myself. “More weirdness.”
I can feel a tingling in my fingers and my toes, a certain excitement, or perhaps anxiety. It’s not just fog. It’s what Crichton and Bryn called the gloom. There's power in this dense mist, but there’s also danger. I take a few steps out into the street, hoping I am not walking into traffic. I see large shapes rising and falling in the mist — but they are not vehicles. They are monsters.
Big things. Dark things. Horned beasts with sharp edges and lumbering bodies.
I have fallen into a nightmare realm. Not Hell. It’s not hot enough to be Hell. I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t know how to escape. Is there any way out of this thick, infernal mist?
“NINA!”
A desperate voice calls my name. I turn toward it because I recognize that voice. Not Thor. Not Bryn. It is my brother’s voice, calling my name.
“JONAH!”
“NINA!”
I run toward him as fast as I can, but as the fog rolls back around to reveal him, I almost wish I hadn’t. He is not as he was. He is lying on the cold ground, his fingers and lips blue, his eyes glazed. He shrieks my name, but he does not hear my responses. What gives me the most anguish is the way his midsection is ripped open and great black crows are feeding on him. He is fallen, and there is no saving him. The beasts that consume him seem to be doing so without cessation, never finishing. Coil after coil of steaming flesh disappears into their curved beaks.
“Get away from him! Get away!” I flap my hands at them, and they change. They are not birds anymore. They are mouths. Sharp mouths. Cruel mouths. I can try to pry one set of jaws away from him, but others appear in their place. The consumption is endless and he is beyond help.
“Bryn,” Jonah croaks. “It was Bryn.”
“What was Bryn?”
It is hard to ask the question while bearing witness to this unimaginable torment. Jonah’s pain has always been my pain, and I have felt as though I were being torn apart from the inside out since I was told of his loss.
“Bryn killed me.”
As if on cue, Bryn comes stalking through the gloom. He is tall and he is strong and the beasts draw back from him in respect. I try to run, but I can’t move. It is like the fog has become glue around my wrists and ankles.
I am being held. I am being restrained. Then I feel something sharp and the whole world fades…
Chapter Thirteen
Bryn
Twenty-one years ago…
“Bryn! Open up! Please!” Ivy’s panicked voice draws me from my irrelevant pastime.
I go to my front door and wrench it open to greet my guest. I’d know her voice anywhere, of course, even muffled through several walls while I immerse myself in old tomes of liturgy.
Ivy is on my doorstep with tears in her eyes and a prominent bump beneath her sweater. Her hair is all fluffy and puffed up in the latest style, which is to look like a lion’s mane, I think. I’m not good at fashion, but I always notice absolutely everything about her. It is just after midnight and she must have driven three hours to come see me in one of the worst storms we’ve seen in years. I don’t bother to ask her if she is okay. It’s obvious that she isn’t.
“I’m pregnant, Bryn.”
“Yes,” I agree. “You are.”
This is not news. The announcement went out at least a month ago. We have all known that Ivy and Craig were going to produce some spawn since that time. It’s been the talk of the Brotherhood, mostly talk about all the angel blood, whether we can harvest it or not, and how we'll have to distill it because the outcross to Craig is going to dilute it.
I am little more than an apprentice in the Brotherhood. The youngest member and the hardest working. I am desperate to prove myself and move up the ranks. If I'd managed to do that earlier, I might not have been forced to watch the most beautiful woman in the world run into the arms of another.
Ivy is sensitive and sweet and carries a vulnerability about her that makes me worry for her. Her angel nature is not far from the surface. It needs to be protected. I know that my urge to protect her is just as strong as some other entities’ desire to harm her. Trapped in human flesh, she is one of the few direct manifestations of the divine that can be hurt.
