Chapter Text
9.
The Halo doesn’t like the warehouse.
It’s the first thing Ava notices as she follows Bea inside, still reeling slightly from their moment against the jeep, from the intensity, then sudden lack thereof. Bea still hasn’t looked at her, and her brief, loaded exchange with Michael had ignited an ache in Ava’s chest that Ava doesn’t know how to deal with. She wants, desperately, to catch Bea’s arm, to drag her back outside, to make the kind of dangerous promises Ava has no way to keep, promises like I’ll never leave you or Everything’s going to be okay.
But she can’t, because the Halo doesn’t like the warehouse. It’s buzzing nervously under Ava’s skin to urge her forward, so instead of hooking her arm around Bea’s waist and dragging her away, Ava just follows her inside, adjusting her pace until they’re walking side-by-side and trying to ignore the way the Halo had started shivering against her spine the moment she’d crossed the threshold and hasn’t stopped yet.
Inside, the warehouse is sparse but not empty, and not unoccupied. Stacks of wooden pallets and ancient, rusting shipping containers serve as perches and leaning posts for just under a dozen people, all of whom are masking varying levels of anxiety under a thin veneer of affected insouciance. They perk up when Michael enters, but their enthusiasm visibly dims when they catch sight of Ava and Beatrice behind him, each expression shifting to land somewhere along a spectrum of curiosity and concern.
The one standing in the centre of the space – a woman that Ava vaguely recognises from the bar – shifts to the side as Michael approaches, revealing the man behind her isn’t standing so much as hanging from his bound hands, suspended from a crane hook and looking surprisingly unbothered by it.
“Who are they?” Michael snaps, looking past the captive. Ava follows his gaze and realises that two of the figures – one man, one woman – that she’d thought were leaning against one of the support beams are in fact tied to it, both gagged and restrained slightly too high up the pillar to be comfortable. Ava frowns – the Samaritans are apparently a lot more militant than their name suggests.
“Santo and Cella caught them snooping around outside,” the woman next to the hooked man explains. “They came looking for this one.” She hooks a casual thumb over her shoulder towards the captive, who just smiles at her, incongruously unconcerned.
The Halo buzzes a warning behind Ava’s eyes, half a second before she catches the tell-tale haze that surrounds not only the captive on the hook, but also the two tied to the pillar. Each of them has a wraith curled serpent-like around their soul. Michael’s group of idiots is in far more danger than they realise.
“Bea,” Ava says, low and quiet, flicking her eyes at each captive in turn. Bea follows her gaze then nods once, a tiny movement that Ava only spots because she’s looking for it.
“Plan?” Bea murmurs. Her eyes are roaming around the warehouse, carefully cataloguing every detail.
“Get the peanut gallery out of here.” Michael’s minions will only get in the way if – when, Ava admits to herself – it comes to a fight.
“And then?”
“Working on that bit,” Ava says. The look Bea shoots her is not full of confidence.
Judging by the rigid tension in his shoulders, Michael has noticed that their extra guests have extra guests. “You shouldn’t have brought them in here,” he says tightly. His minion shrugs.
“What else were we supposed to do with them?” she asks with the false confidence of someone who was about to be completely blindsided. “Besides, three sources are better than one.”
Bea shifts forward before Michael can reply, drawing his attention to her. “Is this all of you?” she asks, looking around at the grand total of seven unbound people in the warehouse. She can’t quite mask the scathing undercurrent in her tone, but Ava gets what she’s trying to say immediately. Get them out of here.
Michael doesn’t. “We’ve only been in town a few weeks,” he says, defensive and missing the point. “We’re more active in the bigger cities.”
“Who even are you?” one of the others asks, trailing doubtful eyes over Ava. He’s slightly more impressed by Bea, but that’s understandable given that, even if she tries, Bea can’t entirely dampen her vague air of could-definitely-snap-you-in-half, and she’s making no effort to suppress it now. “A bartender and a bean-counter? Are you sure they can handle this?”
Ava can’t help the snort of laughter that escapes her, but Bea doesn’t even spare him a glance.
“Shut up, Henri,” Michael snaps. Henri stiffens and shoots Ava a dark look.
He’s not the only one.
“You,” the Firstborn hanging from the hook says, leaning to stare past Michael’s shoulder, directly at Ava. He grins, wide and with too many teeth. “You were there. In the Vatican, when he revealed His glory to the world.”
Ava shifts as everyone except Bea turns to look at her. Beside her, Bea goes stiff from the base of her spine upward.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ava says as the Halo presses against her skin.
Hooks clearly doesn’t believe her. “Tell them. Tell them of His glory, and return what he seeks,” he says, straightening his body and leaning forward to see her more clearly. The movement leaves his arms twisted behind his head at an unnatural angle, but Hooks seem unaffected. “He would elevate you beyond all others. He would welcome you to his side. All you have to do is return the H—”
He’s cut off, violently, when Bea crosses the intervening distance in a flash and unceremoniously strikes him in the throat with a rigid hand. He chokes and sputters under the blow, then collapses forward, gasping, when she follows the first strike with a rapid uppercut to his diaphragm, driving the breath from his body. Hooks swings gracelessly on the hook as around them, Michael’s minions startle and stare at Bea warily, obviously unnerved by the sudden violence.
“Get them out of here, or we’re leaving,” Bea says to Michael in a tone that Ava’s been conditioned by months of training to obey automatically.
It clearly has a similar effect on Michael. “Guys, wait outside—” he starts, but one of them – the one closest to Ava now that Bea had moved away – steps towards him, looking outraged.
“Fuck that, Michael. Who are these two?” he demands, pulling every eye in the room towards him.
It’s a distraction that nearly costs them everything.
Even later, Ava isn’t entirely clear on what happens, but the sequence of events goes something like this: the Halo pulses an alarmed warning against Ava’s spine.
Bea turns away from Hooks, distracted by the minion’s movement close to Ava. Hooks straightens and snaps his bonds without apparent effort, surging forward to catch Bea around the waist and driving both of them to the floor.
The two other Firstborn pull away from the pillar, tearing through their bonds with equal ease and lurching forward, graceless but alarmingly fast. Michael, caught off-guard, turns to find them both bearing down on him. His minions, clearly unprepared for the sudden explosion of violence, freeze, except for one hapless unfortunate, who turns too fast and stumbles back into the path of the wraith-woman, and is unceremoniously thrown across the room.
Bea hits the floor with a sickening crack.
Ava reacts without thinking.
Pushed forward by a shove from the Halo, Ava crashes into Hooks, tearing him away from where he’s hovering over Bea’s prone form. The extra momentum gives her enough force to propel them both across the floor, most of the way to where Michael is being quickly overwhelmed by the combined attacks of the other two captives.
Ava hesitates, caught between her instinct to fight the wraith-possessed zealots and her desperation to check on Bea, because she’s still on the ground and hasn’t moved yet. The Halo isn’t helping, swirling rapidly through Ava’s chest and apparently equally torn, if the way the tingling pressure is running indecisively between Ava’s hands and her back is any indication.
Eventually, her instinct to engage the threat wins, if only just. Forcing down the swirl of nauseating anxiety in her gut, Ava bulls forward, propelled by a shove from the Halo, and slams into the closest Firstborn. He crashes into the wraith-woman and they both stagger back, giving Ava an opening to intercept a punch aimed at Michael, who apparently hasn’t gotten any better at fighting since the alley.
“Go check on Bea,” Ava snaps at him, pushing him in the right direction before dodging under another punch from Hooks and countering with a kick that pushes him back towards his fellows. They catch him, and the three of them square up to Ava in a line.
It’s three possessed zealots. She can beat three possessed zealots.
They surge forward as one, and the Halo buzzes down into Ava’s arms as she responds.
Ava’s only fought a wraith-enhanced human once before, and she’d forgotten how fast they are. The Halo is singing through her limbs, lending them strength and speed, and without it, Ava knows she’d be overwhelmed in seconds. With it, though, with its warm, golden light pulsing through her, she more than keeps up with them. Ava’s surprised when she realises that, were she fighting any of them one-on-one, she’d win easily. Even three-on-one, the large part of the challenge comes not from the fight, but the fact that she’s trying to keep their attention on her instead of Michael, where he’s leaning over Bea with his fingers against her pulse point.
“She’s alive, Ava. She’s waking up,” he calls, and the sheer relief that washes though Ava is enough that she would’ve collapsed in any other situation. As it is, it’s enough of a distraction that Ava misses a dodge and gets a solid kick in the ribs for her inattention, but the Halo tingles under it for a moment, and the pain quickly fades.
Ava isn’t the only person whose attention Michael draws. He and Beatrice had been largely forgotten by the Firstborn in the face of Ava’s attack, but his call, and Ava’s very obvious reaction to it, reminds them that there are other targets in the room.
The woman turns to move towards him, her wraith snarling in the air above her, but Ava lashes out at her, accepting a punch from Hooks to keep her attention. It works, this time, but it’s not sustainable, and the Firstborn seem to realise that at the same time as Ava does. With a synchronisation that suggests they’re communicating in a way Ava can’t hear, Hooks and Not Hooks shift in front of her, forcing her backwards as the woman withdraws. Ava tries to dart between them, desperate to keep her away from where Bea is struggling unsteadily to her feet, but they crowd her backwards, accepting blows from her that they could’ve dodged in exchange for keeping her separated from the others.
She could get past them easily with the Halo, but the Firstborn aren’t the only people in the room.
Ava glances around, noting that Michael’s minions have backed away from the sudden explosion of violence but are still within sight. Then she catches sight of the wraith-woman stalking towards where Bea is upright but swaying in Michael’s grip, and decides she doesn’t care if they see her use the Halo. They’re probably beyond secrecy at this point anyway, and her need to get to Bea is clawing at her chest, rapidly eclipsing her caution. Michael had said she was okay, but the fact that she’s letting him support her, that she hasn’t pulled away from the man she had at knifepoint only days ago, is a huge flashing neon sign that she’s not.
Fuck it, Ava thinks, and phases through the two in front of her to leap towards the woman, hooking her arms around her shoulders and dropping her weight backwards to drag her down. They both hit the ground with a grunt, but before the woman can recover, Ava gets her feet under her and pushes. The Halo helps, adding its strength to her legs, and the combined effort sends the woman sailing across the empty space to slam through a stack of pallets, where she groans and shifts for a moment, then goes still.
Ava doesn’t get long to celebrate, and she can’t check on Bea the way she desperately wants to. She can only flip back up onto her feet, just in time to dodge Hooks as he tries to grapple her, to dart under Not Hook’s fast but clumsy punch. With only two of them, the fight gets easier, enough that Ava’s almost surprised at herself and how smoothly she’s keeping up with them. The months of training, of Bea kicking her ass all over the quiet clearing in the forest, have clearly paid off.
She’s never sustained the use of the Halo for this long before, though, not even when she’d been training to phase through twenty feet of stone. The buzzing in her muscles is starting to ache in a weird, static-y way, and the metal of it is hot between her shoulder blades. Ava’s not tired, but she’s starting to feel stretched out, too thin in places, like a balloon on the edge of bursting. She’s picked up a dozen small injuries that the Halo hasn’t bothered with beyond tingling under them to numb the pain, which is only exacerbating the feeling of tightness all over her skin.
The wraith-men aren’t in any better shape. Possession apparently doesn’t grant healing like the Halo does, and they’re both sporting a kaleidoscope of marks and bruises that are darkening even as Ava delivers more of them. Ava feels a little bad for the hosts, given that they’re going to have to cope with the aftermath of this, but she’s got the guilt pinned under the memory of the sound Bea made when she hit the floor, a surprised grunt lost within the sickening crack, and it’s working.
It’s enough that when, through overconfidence or bad luck, Not Hooks leaves her an opening, Ava takes it without hesitation. Her foot slams into the side of his knee and it gives with a pop. He screams, apparently in enough pain that the host briefly reasserts himself, but his leg won’t take his weight, and he collapses to one side. He attempts to stand, unsuccessfully, and Ava just dances out of his reach.
Hooks snarls at her as he follows. Wraiths don’t tire, but Ava’s got the Halo singing through her, gleeful with its success, and her earlier assessment is proved correct – she does much better one-on-one. Hooks’ strikes get more reckless, more flashy and powerful but easier to avoid, and Ava lands several punches he might otherwise have avoided if he’d been more cautious.
Ava doesn’t realise he’s deliberately distracting her until it’s too late.
The Halo shrieks a warning in her head a split second before Michael yells, panicked, “Ava!”
Ava spins to face him, only to find that he and Bea both are obscured behind a roiling, shifting cloud of red. Ava freezes for just a moment, confused and looking around, trying to work out where it came from, when her eyes land on the collapsed stack of pallets. The woman is still lying amid the ruins, but she’s no longer hazy, and it only takes Ava a second to work out what happened – that her wraith had used the distraction of the fight to escape its host and head for a more useful target.
Ava’s confusion, and the delay it causes, is a heartbeat too long. By the time she’s worked out what’s happening, it’s mostly over.
The wraith shimmers and disappears with an echoing screech, and for a single, breathless moment, Ava thinks it’s taken Michael. But then he stumbles back, pushed by strong arms he’s not braced for, and the actual, more terrifying reality becomes clear.
“Beatrice!” It takes Ava a moment to realise that the terrified scream had come from her own throat, torn from her chest as Bea falls to her knees with her head in her hands. Ava starts forward, feeling like she’s moving in slow motion, but an arm catches her around the waist and yanks her backwards. She struggles against Hooks’ hold on her, panic making her clumsy, and by the time she remembers she can phase, manages to shove herself free and stagger forward, Bea’s climbing to her feet.
She’s smiling.
“Bea,” Ava whispers, aching, because it’s Bea’s face, but not Bea’s smile, and her movements lack any hint of her usual grace.
“Ava,” Bea says, but it’s all wrong. Ava has heard Beatrice say her name in a thousand different ways – pleased and exasperated, curious and cautious, afraid after a nightmare and lost in pleasure under Ava’s hands – but never like this. The inflection is too harsh, her accent too sharp, and she’s close enough now that Ava can see that her beautiful, expressive eyes are black from edge-to-edge.
Closer. She’s closer. Because she’d been walking towards Ava this whole time and Ava hadn’t noticed, too lost in the terrified nausea in her gut and the way the Halo is clawing at her chest.
“Ava,” she says again, her tone still wrong and writhing over Ava’s skin. “Come here, Ava.”
Ava shrinks away from her, away from the sick, toothy smile on her face. Behind Bea, Michael has struggled back to his feet, but he doesn’t move, apparently caught in the same vice-grip of indecision as Ava.
Their paralysis costs her, because in the face of Beatrice stalking jerkily towards her, Ava had forgotten about Hooks.
He takes advantage of her inattention and slams both feet into the small of her back. Ava stumbles forward.
And Beatrice catches her.
Beatrice catches her, because Beatrice always catches her. Ava hadn’t realised before now that it was automatic, like breathing is automatic, like a heartbeat – a response so ingrained into the very muscle memory of Bea’s arms that it happens even when it’s not Bea controlling them.
“Bea,” Ava says, quietly desperate. Bea’s arms are frozen around her, but Ava can feel her fingers flexing against her back, the shift of her muscles under her skin that hints at an internal struggle. “Bea, fight it, please, I know you can fight it.”
“Ava,” she says, soft and familiar. It’s right, it’s her Bea, and just for a moment, her eyes blink back to brown. “You have to—”
She cuts herself off with a snarl, foreign and feral, and her eyes swirl black again. Her arms go painfully tight, her fingers clawing at Ava’s back, and Ava catches the sob building her throat as she phases through her body to stumble behind her.
Not-Bea – because Ava can’t think of her as Bea, not like this, with her oil-slick-eyes and savage grin – turns to face her and lashes out with a kick, but Ava dodges her foot easily. Then dodges again, and again, constantly dancing out of reach. Not-Bea’s face is twisted in a grimace of frustration, but the wraith is working with Bea’s body, Bea’s strikes and grabs and counters, and Ava knows all of them almost as intimately as she knows her own. Not-Bea is fast, but not Beatrice-fast, like something’s dragging at her limbs, and Ava’s got the Halo, buzzing anxiously against her heart but lending her more speed than she’d had when sparring.
There’s only one way to extricate a wraith, though, and Ava knows, deep in her heart, that she’s not going to be able to do it. She can’t bring herself to hurt Bea, even when it’s not Bea, and she thinks the Halo would probably resist even if she tried. So instead she just circles and dodges and blocks with her heart twisting in her chest, trapped in a stalemate with Not-Bea grinning at her, manic and alien, until Hooks reminds her that he’s there.
One of his arms is hanging limp alongside him. It’s not an injury Ava gave him, so he must have landed wrong when he kicked her. It does nothing to slow him down, though, and Ava is distracted enough by Not-Bea that he gets dangerously close before she notices. His working fist curves just past her ribs as she sways back from him, and his momentum carries him forward a step, planting him between her and Bea.
It’s a mistake, because Ava can’t force herself to hurt Beatrice, but she has very little compunction about hurting him. Especially now, with Bea staring at her, oil-eyed and sneering, over his shoulder. Ava’s first punch fractures his rib, her second bloodies his nose, and her third hits his already-dislocated shoulder. Hooks’ host howls as the wraith briefly loses control, and Ava mumbles a quick apology before she grabs his working arm and tugs, ducking her shoulder against his chest and using her weight to throw him toward Not Hook, where he’s still struggling to stand where Ava left him. Hooks crashes into him with a grunt and rolls, then goes still.
Not-Bea just watches her, her head tilted. “You needn’t fight, you know,” she says, her tone almost conversational. Her voice sends ripples of warning over Ava’s skin, an instinctive reaction to the way it’s just familiar enough to be unsettling. “If you go to Him, He will honour you. He is grateful to you for His freedom.”
“Get out of her,” Ava grits out through clenched teeth, but Not-Bea’s grin – so twisted, so alien on Bea’s face – only grows.
“Why would I? He will be most pleased when I deliver not just the Halo Bearer, but also the means of controlling her.”
They circle as they talk, carefully distant. The Halo is whining softly in distress in Ava’s skull, but its power is still glowing within her, pulsing along her bones. Michael’s minions are still scattered around the room and mostly unmoving, apparently having realised they’re out of their depth, but Ava’s lost track of Michael. The last time she’d seen him was when Bea shoved him away, but he’s not there now, and Ava can’t tear her eyes away from Bea long enough to find him.
“I won’t let you do that,” Ava says with more resolve than she feels.
Not-Bea laughs. The sound of it scrapes, knife-like, over Ava’s heart as it twists in her chest. “You cannot stop it. You won’t damage her.”
“I will,” Michael says, appearing suddenly from behind the shipping container at Bea’s back. He’s got half a broken pallet in his hands, wound up in preparation for a strike.
“No, don’t hurt her!” Ava yells at him, automatic, unthinking. Michael falters, and Not-Bea takes full advantage, wrapping one hand around his throat and the other around his wrist and twisting with her entire body, easily throwing him, ragdoll-like, to slam against the side of the shipping container. He slides to the ground with a groan, but doesn’t collapse like Ava’s half expecting.
“Michael?” Ava calls as Not-Bea turns back towards her with a smirk.
“I’m good,” he says, from his knees, then surprises Ava by launching himself upward.
It surprises Not-Bea as well, judging by how Michael gets close enough to seize her around the ribs in a bear-hug from behind, trapping her arms against her sides. Not-Bea fights him, writhing and twisting in his grip, but Michael just bends backwards, lifting her feet off the ground, and holds on grimly. “Ava, if you’re gonna do something, do it now,” he calls, pulling his head back as Not-Bea tries to headbutt him.
Ava is not above begging, not now. “Bea, please. I know you can hear me, please. Please.” Not-Bea looks at her, face twisted in a snarl as she fights the restraining arms around her, but Ava gets close enough to touch, reaches out her hand with the Halo tingling in her fingertips. “Please. Bea, I can’t—”
Ava’s palm makes contact with her cheek, gentle amid the violence of her movement, and Bea goes suddenly stiff, then still, then sags all at once. Michael staggers slightly, unprepared for it, but Ava presses forward, brings her other hand up to cup her other cheek. Bea’s head is tilted down against her chest, as limp as the rest of her, and her eyes are closed.
“Bea?” Ava whispers, hesitant. Hopeful. The Halo is an ache in her hands, trying to press through her palms, but Bea doesn’t react. “Beatrice?”
Bea sucks in a breath. Tilts her head up. Opens her eyes.
They’re black from edge-to-edge.
“No,” the wraith growls, and lashes out with both feet.
The kick catches Ava squarely in the chest and forces her back several steps, but it’s a secondary side effect. Not-Bea’s main aim had been to knock Michael off balance, and in that, she succeeds. He stumbles back and falls, losing his grip on her as they both hit the ground, and Not-Bea rolls away.
When she springs to her feet, she’s got a wooden shard from one of the pallets in her hand, snapped to a jagged point. It’s a crude weapon, but in Bea’s hands, a lethal one. Ava starts forward, intent on getting between her and Michael – who’s struggling back to his feet, unsteady – but Michael isn’t Not-Bea’s target.
“Enough of this. You can either come willingly,” Not-Bea says, watching Ava with black eyes and spinning the makeshift stake casually between her fingers, “or I can motivate you.” Her meaning becomes terribly, gut-wrenchingly clear when she catches the stake in her hand and flips it, pressing the sharp point against her own throat.
“NO,” Ava screams, inside her own head as much as out loud, and the Halo, matching her panic, reacts.
It slams out through her chest in an incandescent wave that sweeps indiscriminately through the warehouse. The force of it drives Ava to her knees, and she only gets a second of watching it rocketing towards Michael – of watching the glow under his skin get brighter as it gets closer – to worry that it’s going to ignite his divinium and she’s just killed them all before it hits him and Bea almost simultaneously.
The effect on each of them is almost comically different. Michael is picked up and slammed – again – against the side of the shipping container, like an invisible hook has slipped around his chest and yanked him backwards. He hits it hard enough to dent it and falls with a pained groan, but he doesn’t explode, so Ava’s counting it as a win.
In contrast, the blast passes through Beatrice almost gently, pushing her back half a step and forcing her head to tilt upwards towards the ceiling. If not for the cloud of red that leeches from her on the tail end of the wave, dissipating in the air behind her with a shriek, Ava would’ve thought her entirely unaffected. There are two other echoing shrieks behind Ava as she climbs to her feet, and she glances over her shoulder to watch the last of the other two wraith dissolve into nothing.
Bea sways precariously, dropping the makeshift stake from nerveless fingers and tilting sideways as if in slow motion, but Ava shoves herself forward to catch her before she falls. Ava’s legs feel jelly-weak and shaky, and Bea is trembling violently against her, more unravelled than Ava’s ever seen her. Even together, they’re both too wrung out to stay standing, and together they collapse to their knees, still wrapped around each other and clinging tightly.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Bea gasps into Ava’s shoulder, but Ava shakes her head.
“It wasn’t you,” Ava says, fisting her hands in Bea’s shirt. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I wasn’t fast enough, I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it. I’m so sorry, Bea.”
Bea just shakes her head and tightens her grip, pressing herself against Ava so tightly that Ava can feel her heartbeat against her chest.
Around them, Michael’s minions are starting to emerge. Michael struggles to his feet somewhere behind them and starts issuing orders, something about checking on the former wraith-hosts and retrieving the woman from the bed of shattered pallets, but Ava ignores the shuffle of movement around them. The Halo will warn her if the wraiths come back, and given what they’ve just witnessed, Ava thinks it’s unlikely that any of Michael’s minions will come near them.
Instead, she tangles her fingers through Bea’s hair, pulled loose from its bun in the commotion, and scratches her nails gently over her scalp. Bea’s still shaking, but it’s easing, and her huge, gasping breaths have slowed against Ava’s skin. Ava knows they should get up, get out of the warehouse and away from the people who just saw her very obviously using the secret magical artefact that they’ve been hiding for months. But that would involve standing up, and standing up would involve pulling out of Bea’s arms, and Ava isn’t ready to do that yet.
“Are you okay?” Ava asks eventually, tugging carefully with the hand in her hair until Bea raises her head. They’re both covered in grime and dust, and while Bea doesn’t have any visible injuries, Ava can’t get the crack of her hitting the floor out of her head.
“My head hurts,” Bea admits, uncurling a hand from Ava’s jacket to rub across her forehead. “I probably have a concussion.” Ava’s eyes go wide and worried, so Bea adds quickly, “A minor one. I’ll be okay.” She drops her hand, presses it gently against the side of Ava’s ribs. “Are you okay? I kicked you…”
“The wraith kicked me,” Ava corrects, aching at the guilt in her tone. “And I’m fine. Halo healing, remember?”
“Ava,” Bea starts, but Ava cuts her off, reading the guilt in her eyes.
“It wasn’t you, Bea.” Ava’s hand finds her cheek, runs her thumb in little arcs over Bea’s skin. “Besides, I did great. The wraith barely touched me.”
Bea laughs, weak and watery but sounding like herself again, like Ava’s Beatrice. “You did very well. I’m proud of you.”
“I had a good teacher,” Ava says softly, then tilts her head forward to brush their lips together. Bea sinks into the kiss with a whimper of relief, and when Ava draws back, she doesn’t go far, leaning forward until her forehead is pressed against Ava’s.
They stay like that for a long moment, just breathing together, until the clatter around them becomes loud enough to intrude into their tiny, calm bubble, reminding Ava that they’re surrounded by Samaritans who are about two minutes away from getting brave enough to start asking questions.
“C’mon, we should get out of here,” Ava says, pulling back so she can stand. She tugs Bea to her feet and holds her until she steadies. “Michael can deal with the mess.”
Michael, obviously in earshot, grumbles something too low for Ava to hear, but Ava ignores him. Instead, she links her hand with Bea’s and tugs her towards the door, suppressing a smile at the way Michael’s minions duck out of their path.
They’re most of the way to the door when behind them, there comes the familiar scent of burnt ozone and the screech of tearing glass. “Trust Lilith to turn up after the hard part,” Ava mutters, twisting to face her with a snappish greeting on her tongue.
It catches and dies in her throat.
The figure stalking through the boiling, shrieking air isn’t Lilith.
It’s the noise that Ava registers first, the high-pitched, trilling cry that’s haunted her nightmares since that horrific day on the waterfront, where her dreams of living a normal life had died along with Lilith. Then the smell, so much more pungent than when Lilith appears, hot metal and burning sulphur. Then the silhouette, the huge, hulking figure, burning, misshapen, nightmare-sized.
The Tarask stomps into the warehouse, dislodging showers of rust from the metal and dust from everywhere else and trilling its weird, eerie call, and for just a moment, everything freezes.
In her back, the Halo screams.
It’s the only word Ava can think of that encompasses the noise that tears through her, rattling along her teeth and aching in her bones. It stops after a moment, trailing off into a panicked whine, but the damage is done. The Tarask turns its massive, alien head towards her, takes a single, thundering step forward, and the frozen moment shatters.
Michael’s minions all react with varying degrees of shock and horror. The smarter, or more resilient ones backpedal rapidly, retreating from the nightmare given form that’s materialised in front of them, but not all of them are so lucky. Henri, the one who’d been so very dismissive of Ava and Beatrice when they’d arrived, is frozen in place, directly between Ava and the Tarask. The Tarask doesn’t pay him any attention, but he’s not moving, and Ava can see exactly what’s going to happen in her mind’s eye.
“Ava,” Bea says, fear wrapped in a warning as she tightens her fingers around Ava’s hand, because Bea can definitely see it too, and she knows Ava well enough to know what she’s going to do about it.
“I love you,” Ava says, meeting Bea’s anguished gaze for as long as she can. A moment, a heartbeat, no more. Then she phases her hand out of Bea’s grip and shoves herself forward, propelled by the Halo even as it wails its objection to both moving away from Bea and getting closer to the Tarask.
Ava crosses the distance in a second and hooks her arm around Henri’s waist as she gets close enough. The Tarask rocks backward slightly, apparently surprised by her aggressive move, and it gives Ava the opening she needs to pull them both past it. It takes a swipe at them as Ava slides them around it, but it’s a poorly aimed reaction, and Ava dodges them both under easily. Henri is screaming shrilly in her ear, but he stops when they both hit the ground and roll.
They end up close to where Michael is standing, staring transfixed at the Tarask. There’s no fear on his face, but there’s something distant, almost serene, in his expression. It’s totally at odds with the chaos around him, and when Ava flips back onto her feet, she punches him on the arm to get his attention.
He blinks like he’s coming out of a trance and looks at her with a frown.
“What are you doing? Get them out of here!” Ava orders him, shoving him towards where two of his braver idiots are crouched over the prone forms of the Firstborn.
She doesn’t wait to see if he obeys, because on the other side of the Tarask, Bea is moving forward, circling it with a knife in each hand. The sight of it shoots fear-bitter adrenaline directly into Ava’s heart, and she rushes back towards it, flaring the Halo to grab its attention. She has no weapon and no plan, but the alternative is letting it go after Bea, who’s concussed and unarmed beyond her throwing knives, too small to be of much use against the bulk of the Tarask.
“Bea, get out of here!” Ava calls, stopping her forward rush as the Tarask turns towards her. She darts to the side, first one way then the other, but it tracks her unerringly, stomping closer as Ava circles to draw it away from the others. The Halo is almost vibrating with fear against her spine, but its power is still pulsing through her, hot and buzzing in her bones. It’s helping to keep a lid on Ava’s own panic, because last time she was here, like this, in a warehouse with a nightmare bearing down on her, Lilith died.
Ava forces away the thought of the same thing happening to Bea, because if she dwells on it, she’ll break.
“I’m not leaving you to fight it alone,” Bea snaps. Ava wants to both hug her and shake her, because Ava has no intention of fighting it at all. She has a vague plan of distracting it until the others get away, then running very fast in the opposite direction.
It’s not a great plan, and when it’s derailed, Ava’s almost glad.
“Hey, ugly!” a voice calls from somewhere above them, followed by the deafening sound of a gunshot. The Tarask lets out a loud, trilling shriek, turning to face the new threat, and gets shot thrice more for its trouble.
The sound of the shotgun blasts echoes through the empty space, reverberating off the metal walls, so it takes Ava a moment to find the source, but when she does, she almost collapses with relief.
Mary’s here.
“You call this laying low?” Mary calls from the shipping container she’s somehow on top of, pausing to reload her shotgun before bringing it back up. The Tarask wavers, caught between going after Ava and addressing the new threat, the one with a weapon that could actually hurt it.
“Hey, I lasted two months longer than you thought I would,” Ava calls back, relief swamping the snark she was aiming for. “Where’s—”
Her question is answered before she finishes it, when the air above the Tarask is rent open by a fiery gash and Lilith emerges, claws first – because Lilith has claws now and Ava has questions – and with her face twisted in a snarl. She lands on the Tarask’s shoulders and drives her claws down into what would be its forehead, were it human, then yanks backwards, opening a row of parallel gouges down between its horns before she ducks its answering swipe and vanishes in a burst of flame to reappear at Ava’s side.
“I got the idiot civilians out,” she tells Ava shortly, obviously choosing to ignore the way the Halo echoes Ava’s relief. “Do you have a plan?”
“Don’t die,” Ava says, wincing as Mary fires again, deafening. “How—”
“Your freeloader called for help,” Lilith says. The Halo buzzes at her, but it’s too anxious to be properly annoyed.
“Divinium?” Ava asks, but Lilith just rolls her eyes.
“The Halo said help. It failed to mention the Tarask. You’re lucky Mary practically sleeps with her shotguns, or we wouldn’t have those either.” Lilith straightens, alarmed. “Speaking of—” She evaporates in a burst of flame to reappear behind Mary, just long enough to hook her arms around her before they both vanish again, just barely dodging the vicious swipe of the Tarask’s massive spike. It’s apparently decided to deal with the larger threat rather than chase the Halo, though Ava isn’t sure if it’s a deliberate choice or a base, animal instinct to bite back.
On the Tarask’s other side, Beatrice has gone still, but it’s the stillness of intense concentration that Ava’s only seen a handful of times, when she’s about to do something particularly difficult. Ava shifts on her feet, stuck between going to her and trying to draw the Tarask away, but before she can decide, the Tarask turns, and Bea moves.
Ava barely sees it, only properly works out what she’d done moments later, when the Tarask rears backwards with a warbling shriek. Ava isn’t sure how many knives Bea threw in in that rapid, graceful movement, but at least one found its mark, sinking point-first into the gouges Lilith had torn in its head. The blade doesn’t last long, either melted or dislodged when the Tarask flails at it, but it’s clearly caused it something like pain at the very least, and in combination with the shotgun blasts, they’ve managed to at least aggravate it.
Mary reappears in a flash and a hail of buckshot, roughly halfway between Bea and the Tarask, with Lilith close behind her. Lilith only lingers there for a moment, though, before she melts back through a haze to reappear on the Tarask’s other side, close enough to take a swipe at it before vanishing, inches ahead of its retaliatory strike. There’s only so much damage that Lilith can inflict, even with her weird claw-fingers, and considering how her last encounter ended, Ava doesn’t blame her for being cautious.
Ava herself can’t get close enough to do any real damage with the Halo without getting skewered, and she has no other weapon to hand, but she can at least distract it. Shifting away from where Bea and Mary are standing, Ava pulses the Halo in steady beats that are definitely going to annoy Lilith, but also have the Tarask whipping around to face her.
Only to be shot in the back again, the sharp crack of Mary’s shotgun drowning out its frustrated shriek as another of Bea’s knives finds its mark in one of the gouges left by Lilith.
They probably can’t kill it, Ava thinks, but they can at least annoy it until Lilith gets a lucky shot or they wear it down to the point it gives up. This could work. If their luck holds
Which it doesn’t.
What happens next happens fast. The Tarask turns back to face Mary, trilling in what Ava imagines is frustration, in the same moment that Lilith appears behind it again. Ava isn’t sure if it’s due to Lilith’s bad luck or the Tarask’s good judgment, but either way, it puts Lilith in exactly the wrong place at the worst possible time, directly in the path of the Tarask’s talons as it turns. It seizes her around the chest almost accidentally, and Lilith cries out in surprise more than pain.
Her cry is echoed behind her a moment later as Mary yells her name, but Beatrice catches her around the waist and holds her back. From the angle she’s at, Mary can’t shoot without hitting Lilith as well as the Tarask, and Bea’s grip on her is stopping her from charging forward like she very obviously wants to. The Halo has a similar grip on Ava, even as it keens in her skull, horrified, so Ava can only watch as the Tarask lifts Lilith higher, tilting its head at her like it’s confused.
The air around Lilith distorts as she tries to teleport away, but the Tarask hangs on. Ava struggles wildly against the Halo’s restraining pressure – because she’s in another warehouse and with another Tarask and she can’t let this happen again – and she’s almost through it when Lilith brings both hands up with a savage snarl, her fingers elongated to sharp points, and sinks them into the thickest part of the hand wrapped around her. Her claws tear bright, fiery gashes in the Tarask’s skin, and the Tarask flinches back from her and jerks its arm, like someone reacting to an insect landing on them, and Lilith flies sideways to slam against the shipping container.
The side of the container, old and rusted and already dented from Michael’s repeated impacts, buckles under her weight, and Lilith disappears through the twisted metal with a cacophonous crash.
“Lilith!” The cry comes from three directions and at varying levels of anguish and horror. Mary yanks herself away from Beatrice and straightens, stalking slowly towards the Tarask and firing shot after shot as she goes. On its opposite side, Ava yanks at the Halo and pushes, forcing a blast of power towards the Tarask that slams it forward several steps and leaves Ava swaying on her feet.
Between them, the Tarask roars. Ava doesn’t know if it can feel frustration, but she gets the feeling they’ve pissed it off. This hypothesis is confirmed when it turns, sinks both talon-hands into the rusting door of the shipping container. The metal shrieks in its grip, but it’s not until the Tarask twists, yanking violently, that Ava works out what it’s doing, and by then, it’s almost too late.
Beatrice sees it first, and yells a warning as the Tarask swings the door like a bludgeon in a deadly, horizontal sweep. Ava phases at the same time as the Halo shoves her backwards, out of range, but Ava isn’t its main target. At the apex of the arc, the Tarask releases, sending the heavy metal door scything through the air towards Bea and Mary.
Bea, further away, sees it coming and flattens herself to the ground.
Mary, closer, doesn’t.
“Mary!” Ava screams, panic turning her voice shrill, just as a burst of fire distorts the air around her. The metal doesn’t stop, doesn’t slow, but by the time it slams against the far side of the warehouse – against the door they came in through, Ava notes with growing alarm – Mary is nowhere to be seen.
Ava only has a second to hope that whatever Lilith did worked before the Tarask is stalking forward towards Bea again, shedding rust flakes from its talon. Ava needs to lead it away, but their only exit door is now blocked, and she refuses to leave Bea trapped. She has an idea, but it’s something she’s never done, and she’s got nothing beyond an encouraging hum from the Halo to say it’ll work.
But the Tarask is getting inexorably closer, and Bea’s only just back on her feet, out of knives and backpedalling rapidly towards the wall, and Ava finds herself running forward before she realises she’s doing it.
Please work please work please work, Ava thinks desperately, to herself as much as the Halo, as she darts past the Tarask, just out of reach, and slams solidly into Beatrice. Ava wraps her arms tightly around her as they stumble back towards the massive roller door, and then, with a huge, soul-wrenching flare of power from the Halo, through it, and out onto the street. Bea stumbles back several steps, braced for an impact that hadn’t come, and slips out of Ava’s weakened arms. Without the added support, Ava falls to her knees, gasping and spent. The Halo feels soft and slippery in her grasp, and every single one of her muscles aches like she’d run a marathon.
“Ava!” Bea is next to her in an instant, catching her shoulders to stop her faceplanting to the ground. “What just…did you just phase us both through the wall?”
“Yeah.” She doesn’t know where Mary and Lilith ended up, but the Halo is still flexing weakly along her spine, a sure sign that the Tarask hasn’t given up. “We can’t stay here, it’s—”
She’s cut off by an ear-splitting shriek of metal on tearing metal as the Tarask follows them by the simple expedient of rending through the wall of the warehouse. Their momentum has only carried them so far, and it emerges through the new hole alarmingly close.
Far too close.
“Bea, go, go,” Ava says, pushing at her weakly, but Bea ignores her. Instead, she drags Ava upright-ish and pulls her backwards, but it’s not nearly fast enough. The Tarask is stalking closers, and the Halo is wailing in Ava’s head again, and her legs are only just working. “Bea, just drop me, go!”
“I will not leave you,” Bea hisses, grunting as one of Ava’s legs gives out entirely and she sags in her grip. She hauls Ava against her more firmly, staggering backwards, but it’s still too slow.
The Tarask is close enough that they can feel the heat emanating from it.
“Ava,” Bea says into her ear, half plea and half apology.
Ava presses her head into Bea’s neck for a brief moment – into her favourite place in the world – as a final indulgence, because she got a single, bad idea – one distant, desperate chance.
“Sorry, Bea,” she whispers against her skin, then shoves her away. Bea stumbles back, unprepared for it, and Ava falls to her knees in front of the Tarask, drags together every thread of the Halo’s strength that she can reach, and pushes.
The resulting explosion is spectacular. It slams out of Ava – out of her chest and her mouth and her fingertips – in an incandescent blast that craters the pavement, turns night into day, and throws Ava and the Tarask upwards and apart in opposite directions. The Tarask deforms mid-air, partially melted and trailing molten divinium, then vanishes in a swirl of fire.
Ava isn’t so lucky.
She’d been thrown higher than the Tarask, a result of her lower mass acted on by the same force, and without the Halo, her only way down is gravity. The Halo had all but vanished at the moment of the blast, remaining only as a faint, pulsing spark in Ava’s heart, keeping it beating with the dregs of its strength. Ava can’t even reach out to stabilise herself, numb below the collarbone like she’s back in the orphanage bed. She flips helplessly through the air, high enough that even with the Halo the landing would hurt, slowing as she reaches the peak of her arc.
She slows. Stops. Hangs in the air for one, breathless moment.
And then Ava’s falling.
Beatrice is too far. Beatrice doesn’t catch her.
Someone else does.
“You are such an idiot,” Lilith yells at her, huffing as Ava’s back slams into her chest, mid-fall and with the wind tearing at her with greedy fingers. Ava thinks Lilith’s arms wrap around her, but her body is still a numb deadweight below her shoulders and she can’t be sure. They’re still falling, the ground swinging alarmingly quickly towards them, but seconds before they hit, the world goes red and sulfuric, and the sensation of free-fall goes light then limp then heavy again. The haze clears, and they’re still falling, but the ground is a relatively safe distance away again.
It happens twice more before Ava fully grasps what’s happening. Lilith had caught her, mid-air, and is now teleporting them to regain altitude and delay the inevitable impact. Her arms are tight around Ava’s chest, and the fact that Ava can feel that now means the Halo is coming back, slowly, but levitating is energy-intensive, and they’re running out of time.
Lilith has apparently reached a similar conclusion. “I can’t keep this up indefinitely,” she growls, groaning as she pulls them through another veil of fire, “and I can’t shed momentum, so if you could get the idiot in your back to do something…”
“I’m trying,” Ava snaps. The ground is rapidly approaching again, but now she’s got her bearings, she can make out two figures on the ground, one leaning heavily on the other. They get close enough for Ava to see the sheer terror in Bea’s expression before Lilith sinks them through fire and they end up high in the air again.
“Ava!” Lilith hisses, clearly pained.
“I’m… can you move us?” Ava asks, desperate. “I don’t want her to—If I fuck this up, they shouldn’t see.”
“If you fuck this up, they’ll need to recover the Halo,” Lilith points out, pragmatic as ever, but there’s a tremor in her voice that Ava thinks she isn’t supposed to hear.
“Just far enough that she doesn’t see us hit.” Lilith doesn’t answer, and the ground is coming up quickly again. “Please, Lilith. You told me not to be cruel.”
Lilith groans into her ear, but this time, when they re-emerge from the flame, they’re a short distance from where they were. It’s not perfect, and it won’t take long for Mary and Bea to catch up, but it’s better than nothing.
“Now do something,” Lilith growls into her ear. Ava closes her eyes.
Please please please I’m sorry please one more one more one—
The Halo whines softly in her head, but it tries. Ava goes numb below her collarbones again but Lilith hisses in her ear, a reaction to the heat of the Halo even through their clothes. The ground is rushing towards them, but it’s not until it’s close enough for Ava to pick out cracks in the asphalt, for her to convince herself that not only is she about to die, but that Lilith’s about to die for her again, that the Halo flares. It feels like a piece of Ava’s soul is dragged out of her along with it, not as a scream but a choked, gasping exhalation, because Ava doesn’t have the strength for anything else.
They slow, but don’t stop.
Ava only has a second to hope it’s enough before they hit the ground with a thud.
At the last moment, Lilith twists violently, wrenching them sideways so they roll instead of splat. Ava doesn’t feel the impact with the ground, or her breath slamming out of her, or the way the asphalt of the road scrapes across her skin. She aches, vaguely, in her skull and neck, but she can’t force her eyes open to check the damage. She can hear Lilith nearby, groaning but alive, and the distant sound of running footsteps getting closer.
The Halo whines once, soft and shaky, then vanishes, and Ava fades into blackness.
|||
Ava comes back to warm hands on her face, a familiar voice in her ear.
“Ava, Ava, please.” It’s Beatrice, it’s always Beatrice.
“Beatrice,” Ava says, or tries to. The sound makes it to her throat, but not out of her mouth.
Ava forces her eyes open.
The sky behind Bea is full of stars.
Ava fades.
|||
Ava comes back to the sound of an argument.
“We can’t take them to a hospital. Ava has a magic metal disk in her back and Lilith has scales.” It’s Mary. Mary’s here.
“Where do we go, then?” So’s Michael.
The engine is rumbling through her skull.
There are warm arms around her. Ava can feel them.
“No hospital. We’ll take them to the apartment.” Beatrice. Beatrice is pressed against her.
“Bea,” Ava says. It works this time.
There’s a hand on her face.
Ava fades.
|||
Ava comes back to a whine in her head.
“The Halo’s awake again.” Lilith, exhausted, annoyed about it. “It’ll heal her, Beatrice. It’s still there.”
There’s a weight atop her hand. Fingers curled around her own.
They squeeze gently. Ava can feel it. Squeezes back.
“Ava?” It’s Bea. Her voice is hoarse.
“Bea,” Ava mumbles. The Halo hums a tired greeting at the base of her skull.
There’s a hand on her face.
“Ava, can you open your eyes for me, darling?”
Darling. Bea hasn’t called her that before. Ava decides she likes it.
“Yeah,” Ava mumbles. Then does. Bea is hovering over her, concern all over her face. “Hi.”
Bea’s smile is like a breaking dawn. “Hi,” she says, stroking her thumb under Ava’s eye. “How do you feel?”
Ava checks. Winces. “Sore.” Checks some more. “My legs aren’t there.”
“They’re just numb, Ava. It’s temporary. You’ll heal.”
Bea sounds sure. Ava believes her.
“Tired,” Ava says.
The Halo is buzzing weakly along her spine.
“Sleep, Ava. It’s okay,” Bea says.
Her hand is in Ava’s hair.
“You’ll stay?” Ava asks.
Her eyes are too heavy.
“Always,” Bea says.
Ava sleeps.
|||
The next time Ava wakes, she wakes properly, all at once, to the feeling of Bea’s body curled against her side and the weight of Bea’s hand resting over her heart. The apartment is dark around her, lit only by the moonlight slanting through the window, and Ava has no idea what time it is.
The Halo hums a greeting down her spine, part joyful and part apologetic. It’s obviously not back at full strength yet – the glow of power in her chest is closer to a banked fire than divine inferno – but her legs move when she flexes them against the mattress, and she can feel the softness of the sheets against her feet. Ava wants to hug it, but has to settle for thinking warm thoughts towards the golden glow of power resting just behind her heart. It’s mostly symbolic anyway – the Halo has a front row seat to the waves of emotion pulsing through Ava’s chest, the ones that feel like Thank you and Sorry I almost killed us and I won’t ask so much of you again.
The Halo doesn’t understand words very well, but it speaks Ava fluently, and the contented golden tendrils that weave through her ribs feel close enough to a hug to count.
Beside her, Bea stirs gently. She’d either not been sleeping, or sleeping only lightly, because her eyes are alert when she blinks them open. “Ava?”
“Hi,” Ava croaks, smiling at her as she shifts up on an elbow. The Halo tugs at her attention lightly, and Ava realises her throat is bone-dry. “Is there water?”
“Yes, here,” Bea says, twisting to reach behind her. She comes back with an uncapped bottle of water, and she helps Ava prop herself up so she can drink it without spilling.
Once Ava can talk without feeling like her throat is shredding itself, she flops back against the pillow, blinking up at the ceiling. Bea settles back against her side, curling her arm over Ava’s waist, and Ava rolls her head until she can see her face. Bea’s looking at her with eyes bright in the moonlight, and Ava can’t help her grin because they’re both here, they both survived, and she wriggles her arm until it’s hooked around Bea’s back, until she can use it to pull her more fully against her side, just because she can. Bea shifts willingly, but she’s close enough that Ava feels her flinch, ever so slightly, at the pressure.
“Are you okay?” Ava asks, bringing a hand up to ghost over a bruise on her cheekbone.
“I’m fine,” Bea says. Ava squints at her, and Bea sighs, adds, “I have a minor concussion and some bruising on my back. Nothing to worry about.” Ava wants to press the concussion thing, because that seems like it should maybe be something they do worry about, but before she can, Bea asks, “How are you feeling?”
“Sore,” Ava admits. Every single one of her muscles aches, but she can feel them all, and the mild discomfort is almost a relief when the alternative is terrifying numbness. “Is Lilith okay? Mary?”
“They’re both fine,” Bea assures her. “Lilith has some new scales and Mary dislocated her shoulder again, but they’ll both recover. They left this morning.”
Ava relaxes, sighing at the release of tension she hadn’t realised she’d been carrying. She basks in the feeling for a moment, before her brain catches up to what Bea said. “This morning?” It’s night-time. “How long was I out?”
“Almost twenty-four hours,” Bea says softly. “You fell a long way.” You scared me, is what she’s not saying, but Ava hears it anyway.
“I know. I’m sorry,” Ava says, trying to keep the guilt in her throat out of her voice. There’s a whole conversation in that apology. Bea wants to beg her not to do it again. Ava wants to promise that she won’t. Both of them know it’s futile. Instead, Ava just smooths her fingers over Bea’s cheek, leans forward to kiss her gently. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” Bea echoes against Ava’s lips, then tilts her head down to rest against Ava’s chest.
They stay like that for a long time, pressed together and breathing in sync. The Halo is tingling in the tips of the fingers that Ava’s trailing through Bea’s hair, and Bea slides her hand under Ava’s shirt to rest on her sternum, just over her heart.
Eventually though, over Bea’s shoulder, Ava catches sight of a suitcase resting open on the chair. It’s half-packed with clothes, and behind it their wardrobe stands open and half-empty.
“We’re out of time, aren’t we?” Ava asks softly, but Bea shakes her head, shifts upward until she’s leaning over Ava again.
“No,” she says, pressing a hand to Ava’s cheek. “We have to go back, but we’re not out of time. Not for us.”
It won’t be the same, though, and Ava can tell Bea knows it. But maybe, Ava thinks as Bea leans down to capture her lips in an insistent kiss, maybe that’s okay.
“I’m sorry,” Ava says when they finally break apart and Bea settles back against her. “You were right. We should’ve stayed away from Michael and his stupid club.”
Bea laughs softly. “We should’ve, but it wouldn’t have mattered. Mother Superion wants us in Madrid. Apparently she and Camila have found someone who claims she can help, but she’ll only talk to you.”
“Really?” Ava asks, intrigued.
“Mmm. Sister Yasmine. She sounds…interesting.” Bea falls silent for a long moment, letting her thumb trace little arcs over Ava’s skin. Ava lets her eyes drift closed and sinks into the feeling, and she’s most of the way to asleep again when Bea adds, “Michael’s coming with us.”
That gets Ava’s attention. “Really?” she asks again, more incredulous this time. “Why?”
“Mother Superion will want to talk to him,” Bea says, but she’s stopped meeting Ava’s eye. Her hand trails down to rest against Ava’s chest, in the gap of skin between her collarbone and the collar of her loose sleep-shirt. “And Jillian’s been helping us. Returning her son to her seems like the least we can do.”
“And you want him where you can see him,” Ava guesses. “You don’t trust him and his crazy plan to stay away from me.”
“I’d rather know where he is than have him blunder around behind us, yes,” Bea says. Ava smiles at her tone.
“You still don’t like him.” Bea huffs lightly, shakes her head. “He’s not so bad,” Ava insists.
“Miguel was just an idiot. Michael is a dangerous idiot. If we didn’t need him for what he knows, I wouldn’t have any problem leaving him behind,” Bea says. Her fingers are tracing little, distracting patterns over Ava’s skin, and the Halo is matching them lazily.
Ava laughs softly, but frowns when Bea’s words spark a memory of a conversation she’d forgotten. “He didn’t know about the Halo, though. That it’s awake and can feel things.”
“In fairness, we’ve had it for a thousand years and didn’t know that until a month ago,” Bea says. The Halo perks up under the attention, sliding playfully over Ava’s scalp in tingling waves. “Maybe Reya, whoever she is, didn’t feel it was important enough to mention.”
“Or maybe it wasn’t like that before it came here,” Ava says, thinking out loud. “Maybe something changed when Adriel put it in a human.” Bea just blinks at her, so Ava goes on, “Maybe it’s… Mother Superion said the Halo acts as an amplifier. I think it is aware, sort of, but with the feelings stuff it just…wants what I want, but more. Louder.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because it really wants to kiss you most of the time,” Ava says, matching the fondly exasperated grin that melts across Bea’s face with one of her own. “And it doesn’t have a mouth or lips or anything, so I’m pretty sure that one’s coming from me.”
“Interesting theory,” Bea says, eye dancing. “We’d have to test it, I suppose.”
“We should definitely—” Ava starts, only to be cut off by Bea’s lips against her own. Ava laughs into the kiss, then wraps an arm around Bea and tugs until she shifts to rest her body against Ava’s chest, familiar and grounding. The Halo hums in all the places they’re touching, and Ava sinks into the feeling of it, into the comfortable weight of Bea on top of her, against her skin and breathing her air and in her heart.
Because there’s a war coming and they might all die. But until then, Ava’s happy and warm and in love, and Beatrice loves her back, and the Halo is alive and singing through her bones.
Everything else can wait.
fin.