On Midnight Wings

Watching the white-capped waves, Lucien nodded. “I can understand that.”

“I’ve only heard stories about her—Yahweh’s mother. She left Gehenna for the mortal world centuries before I was born.”

“To hunt her son’s killer.”

“You.” Hekate’s voice was soft, absent of accusation, simply stating a fact.

“Me,” Lucien agreed. He drew in a deep breath of chilled, briny air. Underneath, he caught Hekate’s sweet scent—apple blossoms and cool, shaded water.

“How have you managed to elude Leviathan all this time?”

“I haven’t,” Lucien replied, shifting his attention from the sea back to Hekate’s lovely face. “She found me once, nearly ten years ago. After I summoned her.”

“By all that’s holy, why would you do such a thing?”

“Desperation. Fifteen years imprisoned within an aingeal trap will do that to you.”

Hekate stared at him. “Imprisoned? Where? How?”

Lucien shook his head and shifted his gaze back to the heaving dark waters below. “How? My own foolishness. Where? A tattoo shop on the Oregon coast. As to the question you didn’t ask—why—as Nightbringer, I often forced mortals to face the consequences of their own selfish actions and greed.”

“I take it that you were those consequences?”

“That I was.” A wry smile pulled at the corners of Lucien’s mouth. “Your mother used to accuse me of being judgmental and arrogant. She wasn’t wrong. Once I left Gehenna, I continued my work as Nightbringer. I continued very diligently, forcing the mortal world to face what I would not—God was dead. I left entire cities in ruin, the air choked with the ashes of the dead.”

“All to forget Yahweh,” Hekate said slowly. “To forget what you had done. What you had to do.”

“To escape,” Lucien corrected, old sorrow tightening his throat. “There was no forgetting.”

Not the whispered sound of Yahweh’s weary voice: Let them have me, my calon-cyfaill. Let them bind me, chain me to their will. Let it be done before it’s too late. Let it finally be over.

Nor the weight of Yahweh’s lifeless body in his arms.

“And did it work?” Hekate asked softly.

“It did. For centuries. Until I hunted down a woman who enjoyed scamming the bereaved out of their pensions and savings. She was to be the last before I began my new life in New Orleans.”

“New life?” Hekate’s voice dropped into a husky, knowing murmur. “Ah. Dante’s mother. So that’s who reawakened your heart.”

Lucien nodded. “Genevieve.” He studied the foam-tipped waves below. “My scammer turned out to be nephilim and not mortal. She’d also laid a trap for me—one I walked right into—and forced me to recount my own sins in detail for fifteen very long years.”

Fifteen years—unaware that Genevieve was pregnant, unaware that she had been murdered after their son’s birth, leaving the newborn in the hands of monsters. A son Lucien had no idea even existed.

“So you summoned Leviathan to free yourself.” Hekate’s voice was stunned. “Or was it atonement you sought, not freedom?”

“Both, perhaps,” Lucien replied. In truth, he was no longer certain. Behind his eyes, memory stirred.

Leviathan answers in a violent storm that shakes the cliff. She rises from the deep, a valley of endless folds and marine darkness and cascading water that never touches the sea or ground. Her wybrcathl, a furious subsonic bellow, shatters the tattoo shop’s windows and fractures the building itself.

As sea spray washes away the sigils and angelic script encircling him, Lucien is freed. He battles Paloma and both are injured, but before he can finish the fight, Leviathan envelops them both in an undulating dark tide that slides over them like a bowl.

Lucien realizes that he owes Leviathan the story that Paloma had demanded; the story of his murder of her only child—Yahweh. Standing in an oceanic night lit only by the phosphorescent flashes from bizarre creatures swimming within Leviathan, Lucien gives the transformed and fallen angel the last moments of her son’s life. And the reasons for his death.

At the end of it, she asks,