Page 80 of Vanish Into Light

“Just think,” he said, at last. “The world might even now be normal if I hadn’t been so greedy for the mortal plane.”

“You’ve always been so dramatic,” she said, and had the pleasure of watching his brows shoot up; watching him turn toward her with wide, golden eyes. She smiled, even as she felt cracks spiderweb across her heart. “Just think: you started the whole apocalypse because hell was too boring to tolerate.”

He stared at her a moment – and then smiled, fleetingly, before a somber expression overtook his face again. “I’ve never once had to explain myself to you,” he said, wonderingly.

“No,” she agreed. “And that’s always gone both ways.”

“It has.”

A low, deep rumble echoed from across the city somewhere. She watched his head turn to chart the sound, and looked herself reluctantly: why face more destruction and horror when she could study the clean, beloved lines of his profile?

When she looked, she saw a jet of orange fire across the rooftops, at least five miles away; the gray plume of smoke tumbling up into the leaden heavens. An explosion.

“It will only get worse,” Beck murmured against the shush of the rain, its pattering on his wing overhead. “In abandoning hell, I’ve doomed the earth to become it.”

“You went back once, already, and it didn’t make things better up here.” Not in the grand scheme of things – and not for her, certainly.

He shook his head, lips compressed, gaze fixed on the dying-down of the distant explosion. “I don’t remember it, you know? Being – him. Before I was…” He touched his chest. “Me. There are flashes.” He frowned. “Glimpses – but it’s like old bits of nightmares. Secondhand stories. My only real memories are of being Arthur Becket. Even in hell, I was Arthur – I was Beck. I don’t…” Another head shake, set of his jaw grim. “I don’t think it’s enough to go back down there. I don’t think that’s the answer.”

Hope blossomed, unfurled like a flower stem in her chest. “What is, do you think?”

A gust of wind blew rain in their faces.

Beck blinked and said, “It started with a fight, and I think it has to end with one.”

And hope, fragile a thing as it always was, got crushed beneath the bootheel of reality. It was too easy to see Michael’s sword thrust through Raphael’s heart – and to envision Beck there, instead.

“He’ll need to rest, first,” Beck said. “Get his strength back.”

“Beck–”

“I can’t leave it like this, Rosie.” He turned to her with his jaw set – and his eyes gleaming with undisguised anguish. He gestured to the night that lay sprawled before them, its fires, its screams, its soot-covered debauchery. “This isn’t a world that anyone wants to live in.”

It hurt to breathe; it hurt to look at him. She said, “I don’t want to live in any world, no matter what it looks like, if you aren’t a part of it.”

His smile was soft, and small, and devastating, because she knew, then, what he meant to do. Just like she knew he wouldn’t be swayed from it. He reached to cup her cheek, his skin cold, and wet; she leaned into it anyway, shivering. “No one’s ever loved me the way you do.” His thumb swept across her cheek, the natural heat of his skin bleeding through the chill of rainwater. “I would take you with me, if I could, and keep you always.”

“Beck.”

“Lance is good to you. Let him be, even if you’re hurting.”

“Beck, no, I don’t–”

His thumb pressed over her lips. “This is my decision to make,” he said, leaning in close, so the warmth of his breath fanned across her face – across the hot, fresh tears that tracked down her cheeks. He wiped at them with careful fingertips. “Sweetheart. Baby.”

What else was there to say? She didn’t have to give voice to all the ways losing him again would flay her: he already knew.

Another explosion sent shockwaves rippling up through the soles of her boots.

What alternative was there? What else could they do?

He said, “Come fly with me.”

And so she did.

~*~

“Gavin, shut the fuck up,” Gallo said, wearily, and, maybe out of shock, Gavin complied. He blinked at Gallo, clearly surprised to have had the youngest and sweetest member of their Company be the one to tell him to stuff it. “Nobody asked you to fuck Satan, so just – damn. Stop talking about it.”

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