Six wings carried me up the side of the tower and set me down on the roof’s edge.
White hair whipped across my face on the landing and kept moving after I’d stopped.
The coat kept moving too. Many years of it now, remade twice and cut the same way both times.
I faced the fires, and my shadow swung out ahead of me across the rooftop, horns first, then the crooked circle of a halo above them.
The sky above was dark and London burned in patches below.
Somewhere past the third ring, a building came down all at once. The sound arrived a full second after the dust had. Nobody screamed when it fell.
I counted the rings before I caught it. Twelve, from here. Some hung dormant, sealed black circles waiting for a turn that hadn’t come yet.
Others stood open, and flying armies were still dropping out of them onto the streets below, unhurried, like a delivery running to schedule.
A single open gate anywhere in the country should have emptied every response team the Association could field. Tonight there were twelve rings over London, and nobody was coming.
The largest ring hung directly above the skyline like a wound, black going to red at the edges.
Six hours open. I’d counted every one of them.
The air tasted like a struck match held too close to the tongue. Underneath that sat a smell I wouldn’t let myself name.
You are doing the brooding thing again.
Azazel’s voice or my voice, whichever mouth it started in didn’t matter much anymore.
Stolen story; please report.
I am the youngest one on this roof, and still the only one carrying a sense of humour. The least you could do is laugh.
Not tonight.
No. I suppose not.
He was waiting at the far edge of the roof. Gold mask, serpent-shaped.
Behind him, the last defence line the Association had bothered raising still smouldered, days cold. Nobody had rebuilt it. Whoever was left in charge didn’t have rank enough to give that order anymore.
“You came,” the man said, with the flat certainty of someone who had never once considered the alternative.
“You knew I'd.”
“I knew you’d want to see it finished.” He tilted the mask a fraction. “The Fourteenth Constellation.”
He said the title like a name he’d been using for years.
I never found out who started calling me that. I stopped bothering to correct the ones who did somewhere around the second dozen.
“Last time, you refused,” he said. “I’d rather you didn’t, this time.”
He remembers you fondly. The way a wolf remembers a limp it caused.
I let the question stand between them unanswered.
I raised the sword instead.
The blade had been simpler, once. Most things had.
My own eyes caught in the reflection along it. Violet, all the way through.
The man’s shoulders dropped, which surprised nobody. Something closer to grief.
He moved first. I’d been hoping he would.
What came off his hand wasn’t lightning. It looked like lightning and it arrived late and far too loud, which lightning also does, but the light in it was wrong.
Black at the core, with a red burn running along the fork. It left nothing behind it on the rooftop except a line where the gravel had stopped existing.
Zeus had thrown that, once, when there had been a Zeus.
I took it on the flat of the blade and felt ten years of coat try to leave me all at once.
He is showing off. Somewhere under all that theatre, a dead man is being made to perform.
“I know whose it was.”
Then take it back off him.
I closed while the light was still dying.
“Seventh Form,” I said. “Blackout.”
For one beat there was no light on that rooftop at all.
Then everything inside forty metres of me was cut at the same time. The gravel. The air. The smoke still coming off the defence line. Him.
It broke over him like weather over a wall. The gold mask came out the other side unmarked, and something underneath the mask was pleased.
Above us the largest ring turned a few degrees to follow him.
“Better,” he said. “You were slower last time.”
He is not lying to you.
“No.”
That is the part I dislike.
Six hours the ring had been open, and I had known for at least four of them that closing it and winning weren’t going to turn out to be the same job.
I set my feet where the gravel was still there, and went to meet him.