Page 73 of Vanish Into Light

“It means exactly what I said.” Beck pushed a growl into his voice. “How long has it been leaderless?”

“It’s…it’s not?” Damien winced, uncertain. “I mean, the Trio are always up in everybody’s business, and Beezie is–”

“Not Beelzebub,” Beck interrupted. “Or any of the others. Where’s Lucifer?”

Damien sucked in a sharp breath, eyes going wide with comprehension. “Pops?” He whistled, and scratched at his chin while he thought about it. “I dunno. Like – forty years, maybe? Forty-five? Maybe fifty. Nobody’s seen him since, like, ten years before the First Rift…”

He kept talking, his babbling growing more relaxed when Beck didn’t interrupt him, but Beck didn’t hear any of it. He couldn’t, his ears full of a low whining, his mind flashing with brilliant blue-white light.

Pain speared through his chest, right over his heart, a flash that was there and gone again before he could reach to touch it and search for the hot wetness of blood. An old, phantom pain. A memory.

A memory of falling.

“…eck? Becky?”

“What?” he snarled, and Damien actually leaned back away from him, tail dancing agitatedly over his shoulder.

“Jeez! Dude, just – what’s wrong? Where are you going?”

Beck didn’t remember standing, but was glad to be on his feet. He turned his back on Damien, and strode for the door.

“Beck!” Damien called after him. “What was that about, man?”

Not since before the First Rift…

“Home,” he called over his shoulder. “I’m going home.”

~*~

He bypassed the front doors when he returned to the mansion. He still needed a few minutes, before they laid eyes on him, before they wanted to touch him and see for themselves that he hadn’t hurt himself any worse than before. He spiraled overhead, banking, down and down, and then dropped straight through the hole in what had once been the atrium roof. He dove, and then spread his wings and righted himself at the last moment, landing lightly on the tiles, splashing in the half-inch of dirty rainwater standing there.

He wasn’t alone.

He didn’t startle – he didn’t ever do that, hadn’t, even, before – but his skin prickled all over with awareness before he registered that it was Morgan.

Morgan. The name made him want to laugh and sneer…and also to shudder.

White light. Sharp pain. Falling…falling.

She sat in the throne, legs too short for her feet to touch the floor, hair wet and plastered to her head. Lightning flashed, illuminating Saint Michael behind her, wrought in stained-glass glory.

“Waiting for me?” he asked, because this – not them, here, now, in these forms, butthem, ancient them – was a relationship in which he’d always been the needler, and the other had always been the enforcer. Tale as old as time.

Morgan blinked slowly, blue eyes glowing in the gloaming. She cocked her head to a birdlike angle – fitting, given the wings she should have had, he supposed. White and feathered…as his own had been, once long before time, before man, beforesin.

Sin is heavy, he’d told Lance.

Heavy as the weight of the whole heavens bearing you down, down, down to the fire below.

“You’ve figured it out, haven’t you?” she said, finally, and Beck told himself it was only the rain, and the wide, empty expanse of the room, the open ceiling that made her voice seem deeper, more resonant. It certainly wasn’t that she was growingstronger– becoming more herself…himself.

“And what if I have?” Beck countered, hating how stiff he sounded, how the cock of his own head didn’t feel all that confident anymore. With memory had come doubt, and a fear he’d never known.

No. He’d known it. Before the fall.

Morgan’s lips quirked in what might have been a smile. “I knew you would. I did. Eventually.”

“Well,” he said.

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