Matchbox Girls (20 page)

She went inside, wondering if she’d made the wrong choice. Would Corbin have actually preferred death to the monster’s assistance, as his body language seemed to indicate? But how could she have known that? How could she have known they’d know each other, as they seemed to? She didn't have time for Corbin to die a heroic death, anyhow. She opened up the hotel’s first-aid kit and unpacked antiseptic and other supplies.

“Is Mr. Corbin okay?” asked Lissa. “Is the bad guy gone?” She slipped off the bed and came over to hug Marley’s leg. The TV was on, but tuned to a weather station both girls were ignoring.

“He’s hurt, but I think he’ll be okay.” Marley wondered who they considered the bad guy—the griffin or the monster. “Did you know the man who was just in here?”

Tears filled Lissa’s eyes. “No,” she whispered. “He was scary.”

Marley dropped some gauze and wrapped her free arm around the little girl. “Yes. He was.”

Lissa whimpered into her shoulder, “We couldn’t make him go away.”

Kari, on the bed and holding her doll close, said, “He’s too big. They’re all too big. I couldn’t open the door.” Marley blinked and then realized she was talking about the door at Penny’s, the one Ettoriel had been magically holding closed.
I wonder if Senyaza has child therapists in their super-powered ranks
, she thought uneasily. “You’re both still very little. It’s okay. You don’t have to be as strong as grownups.”

“The fire says we could be,” Lissa whispered.

“What?” Marley blinked and pulled the girl away to look at her. “What says you could be?” Lissa just shook her head. “Listen to me. Things are awful right now, but it isn’t up to you to fix it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you. They’re part of the problem. The only thing you should be doing is staying safe.”

“Nobody else is fixing things,” said Kari sulkily. That hurt. While Marley was still staring at her, trying to find something to say other than a plaintive
I’m trying
, the door to the room opened.

Corbin was back and the monster was still with him, half supporting him, half dragging him.

-twenty-two-

“
H
ere he is, sweetheart. Safe and sound.” The monster smiled crookedly as he released Corbin’s arm. Lissa scrambled back onto the bed beside Kari, as if she thought the monster would reprimand her.

Corbin sagged immediately and Marley leapt to help him to a bed. He folded his fingers over her hand. “Marley,” he said, his voice urgent. “Did you offer him anything to get him to help me?”

“What? No!” She wondered,
What could I have offered him that he couldn’t have just taken
? “I did punch him in the nose, though.”

Corbin stared at her and then broke into a broad grin. “You’re beautiful.”

Marley’s face felt warm and she turned to gather up the first-aid supplies. “What is he, anyhow?” she mumbled.

“We call them kaiju. Big monsters. Generally speaking, they want to destroy the Creator’s work, in a variety of nasty ways. My friends in the hospital try to keep their numbers low.”

“I’m right here, you know,” said the kaiju, aggrieved.

“That’s a problem you could solve anytime,” snapped Corbin.

The kaiju ignored him to address Marley. “You could at least say thank you, sweetheart.”

“Do you have a name?” she asked him, as she inspected Corbin. He had several wounds on his arm and torso, and a chunk missing from his shoulder. She thought a leg might be injured, too, but she wasn’t going to ask him to take his pants off while the kaiju was still there unless Corbin mentioned it.

The crooked smile returned. “I try not to, but they do make paperwork easier.  My last driver’s license claimed I was Severin something-or-other. I liked the sound of it. Severing.”

“He’s in the books as the Whispering Dark,” muttered Corbin, wincing. “Low priority due to his focus on single targets. Asshole.”

“Mmm. Low priority. I’ve lived a very, very long time as ‘low priority,’ raven boy.”

“Old. And thus, very, very dangerous,” concluded Corbin. “As I said, when celestials reincarnate, they retain the same personality but lose their memories of their previous existence. Newborn kaiju are barely more than rabid animals. The longer they’re allowed to survive, the better they get at staying alive and wreaking their own particular brand of destruction.”

“And see how good I am at staying alive? You owe me
your
life now, boy.”

Corbin’s jaw clenched. Marley touched his arm and then pulled her hand away. “So what now? Is Absolven gone for good?”

It was Severin’s turn to look irritated. “No. He ran away rather than fight. Maybe if
somebody
hadn’t stopped me from bringing him down…. well. He'll recover, and return. Humanity makes you people so
resilient
. And of course, the half-breeds must always stick together, even when they’re otherwise trying to kill each other.”

Corbin’s hand twitched and Marley grabbed it, wrapping her palm around his long fingers. After a heartbeat, his fingers curled lightly around hers. Severin noticed, his gaze resting on their linked hands, and his smile made Marley feel dirty.

“Are we running away again?” asked Kari. She was still holding her sister’s hand.

“The security of the building has been seriously compromised. The power Ettoriel's flinging around, to shut down an entire hotel...” said Corbin, gazing off into space.

“Compr—?” frowned Kari.

“Shattered. Broken. Shot to hell,” said Severin helpfully.

Kari’s brow wrinkled. “I thought compromise meant sharing?”

“No, compromise means surrender. That means to give up.” Severin smiled over at the kids, and Marley shook herself.

“It has two meanings,” she said, and glared at Severin.

He mouthed something at the kids—she couldn’t tell what—and all her rage and hatred came boiling back. She suddenly didn’t care about old grudges surfacing inside the hotel room. She was ready to press some new ones herself.

Corbin’s fingers squeezed her hand lightly, and she took a deep breath. “And yes, we have to go someplace else.” Marley paused, looking at Kari’s sulky face. “But I agree, we can’t run forever.”

“It’ll be over with one way or another soon enough,” said the kaiju. He sprawled in a chair. “The raven boy knows. Tell her, raven boy.”

Corbin paused and then disentangled his fingers from hers, running his hand through his hair. “If the angel is planning on doing a major ritual, something that will affect the world Geometry, he has to do it on a specific date. A day and a half from now.”

Marley glanced at the date on the weather channel still muted on the television. “August…thirteenth? What’s so special about that?”

“It’s not an annual event. It’s a celestial conjunction, but one that involves the Machines of Heaven rather than stars. A valence day, it’s called.”

Marley remembered. “Penny—the angel—said something about a valence event.”

Corbin nodded, but before he could speak, Severin said, “The Hush was created on such a day. And the Covenant.”

Glumly, Corbin said, “Yes. The functions shaping Creation can be altered at a high valence point. Sometimes. Occasionally. They mostly don’t stick. We got lucky with the Hush.”

“Did you? How nice for you,” the kaiju said, as if the topic bored him.

“So is Ettoriel trying to remove the Hush or not? Zachariah said he was, right? But you don’t think so?”

Corbin grimaced. “If he was, I’m sure 'Severin' here would be helping him instead of chasing off his servants. Although he is more subtle than the usual kaiju...”

Suddenly the kaiju was in Corbin’s face, one finger pressed against Corbin’s forehead. “Listen up, raven child. One: I don’t care about your precious Hush. It has never inconvenienced me in the slightest.” He flicked out a second finger. “Two: I’d rather kill an angel than work with one. Three:
Don’t make me change my mind
.” There was a frozen moment, as Corbin and the kaiju stared into each other’s eyes from a distance of about six inches. Then the kaiju’s mouth curved up into a hard, feral grin. He leaned even closer and whispered in Corbin’s ear.

Corbin’s reaction was instant: He shoved the kaiju so hard that the creature actually flew away from him and hit the wall. He slid down it until he was crouching on his heels, still smiling. No, not just smiling, laughing to himself.

Fresh blood darkened a bandage on Corbin’s arm. “Thank you for your help,” he said coldly. “Do you have any other plans in that direction we should know about?”

“Well, as long as I’m here, I’m plugging the hole in the security. And if I stay here while you leave, nobody will notice you fleeing the scene, at least for a time.”

“Oh, thank God,” muttered Marley.

“No, thank
me
,” said the kaiju. “Thank my self-control, honed through many years of not being serially murdered by the raven boy’s friends. Because you are such a tasty snack that I don’t really want to let you get away.” He considered. “Either of you.”

* * *

Marley stepped out into the hotel parking lot. The endless smoke-twilight had finally turned to night, but that only made the flames easier to see. On the near mountainside, she could make out individual blazes and their fuel: candle flames consuming the chaparral, matchstick flames burning a tiny doll’s house. Steam billowed from the fire eating the home as a helicopter fought the hot air nearby, but the weather was too dry and the fire too hot. There was land burning that hadn’t burned in a long, long time.

Shouting in the parking lot dragged Marley’s gaze away from the distant inferno, and she pressed her back against the wall instinctively. A work crew comprised equally of staff in suits and staff in overalls worked at cleaning up the disaster area the lot had become. She wouldn’t have noticed before, but now, with recently educated eyes, she was pretty sure magic was going on. The hotel staff and occupants had woken up from the glamour that had kept them from knowing of the conflict outside, and now they were cranky and confused. It was, she gathered, unusual even among the supernatural set to blink and realize you’d spaced out through a mythological monster tearing up the place.

Her rental car, at least, was fine, tucked in a corner away from the main swath of destruction. Had Corbin moved the fight away from their escape vehicle on purpose? She turned to ask him as he came out the door behind her, but then thought better of it. He was still sullen and cold, not quite rude but definitely unfriendly. Whatever the kaiju had whispered in his ear had transformed him.

The kids trooped out behind Corbin, but Severin the kaiju had stayed in the room. When Marley had left, he’d been on a bed, snickering at a gory action film. He’d waved without bothering to look at her, a dismissal from his attention, and she’d been glad of it. But she wondered if he’d show up again. If he did, she hoped it would be in a place with more room to run.

They loaded up the car and left in silence, directed around the recovery work by an angry man in a nice suit who seemed simultaneously furious that they were leaving, and glad to see them go. Corbin had spoken and then argued with a similarly dressed man who had appeared at the room door as they were preparing to leave. Explanations had been demanded, and Corbin had turned the demands back on the concierge with aggressive, angry remarks about the hotel security. He’d been furious, and the kaiju had laughed at him, and that had made it worse.

Marley peeked at Corbin from the corner of her eye while they waited for the light to change at an empty intersection. His mouth was tight, his jaw hard, as he stared out the window.

“If you look in my backpack, right back there, there’s a sheaf of paper I wanted to ask you about. Next to the Lullaby Plaything. A folio of a book. I’m pretty sure it has some kind of enchantment on it. That’s possible, right?”

He gave her an unreadable look and then rifled through the bag until he found the papers. He glanced at it and then flipped through it. “It’s encoded. Locked to a specific key. The owner’s touch, probably.”

“But it’s decoding itself, look and see.”

Corbin shrugged. “Where did you get it?”

“At Zachariah’s house. It seemed odd. Out of place. As if somebody wanted me to find it.” It seemed obvious now that some kind of magic had been present.

“What’s the point of wanting you to find a book you can’t decode? Oh, right, you said this was at Zachariah’s house.” He made a disgusted sound. “With time and the right resources, I could remove the encoding. But it’s not going to happen in the next couple of days.”

Lissa, quiet and withdrawn since the kaiju had returned to the hotel room, suddenly said, “Can I see?”

Marley felt Corbin looking at her inquiringly. She said, “Not—not right now, sweetie.”

“It shouldn’t hurt her. It’s a passive working.”

Marley shook her head. “The magic may be harmless, but the words might not, and I told you, it’s decoding itself.”

Corbin glanced through the pages. “He said. I kind. Really good. Cat.”

Marley blew out her breath, suddenly exhausted. “Look, I don’t understand magic, and I don’t understand everything the kids can do. The Lullaby Plaything didn’t react the way you expected it to. Until we can explain that, I really don’t want to let them play with other things I don’t understand.” She met Lissa’s gaze in the rearview mirror. “Sorry, sweetie.”

The little girl looked away, out the window. Again, Marley felt uneasy. She didn’t know how to deal with children who were angry at her. Her friends, she could coddle and scold and snap at, but the dependence of these children was too new.

“I told you, it’s just an encoding. It’s not going to react strangely to them, because it only exists in two states, on and off.”

“Then why is it decoding itself? Did somebody install a dimmer switch?”

Corbin frowned at her and then down at the book. He remained silent for a while, his fingers twitching. Marley continued driving, making her way to a fire evacuation shelter they’d identified before leaving the hotel. It wouldn’t be comfortable, but it would be a place to rest, and both Corbin and the kaiju had assured her that the angel would have personal and magical difficulties hunting her amidst so many humans.
Angels want to protect humans
, whispered the kaiju’s voice in her memory.
And the raven child’s precious Hush will limit the angel's abilities to act without harming them. The glamour he's borrowed can only go so far.