The Dead Hamlets: Book Two of the Book of Cross Read Online Free Page B

was bloodied and beaten, but I had what I’d come for. I felt whole again now that I was full of Baal’s grace. How to describe the grace? It’s what makes the angels what they are. It’s their essence, or maybe the closest thing they have to a soul. It’s also what my body uses as power for all the little tricks I’ve learned over the ages, as well as the ones that just come naturally, like resurrection. When the grace is in me, I think I can almost glimpse God everywhere in the world: in the rays of sunlight coming into a dark room, in the feel of a breeze on my skin, in the scent of the sea air, in those quiet moments where you’re drifting to sleep and your mind opens up to everything outside of it. When I’ve burned through all the grace and I’m empty inside again, I know that God is gone and never coming back.
    I was wearing clean pants and a shirt I’d taken from Baal’s wardrobe before I started the fire. I had also taken a couple of credit cards from Baal’s wallet. I used them to go to the airport and catch a flight to London, but first I used a bit of that new grace to heal all my injuries, so I looked like just another traveller. It wouldn’t do to pass through security looking like I’d just killed an angel.
    I spent the time in the air staring out the window beside my seat, at the clouds and the sky and all the miracles of creation. I thought about other miracles, like Penelope, my one and only true love. Penelope, who had given off a grace herself thanks to her angel father. Her grace had fed and nurtured me, so I didn’t have to hunt the seraphim when I was with her.
    I thought of the miracle that was Amelia. A child who never should have been, because I’d been unable to father children during all the ages before I met Penelope. It seemed my divine body and mortal women weren’t all that compatible. Which was probably for the best. Who knows what mischief a hundred other versions of me running around in the world might cause?
    And then Penelope and Amelia died at Hiroshima and that should have been the end of it. Hiroshima was the end of miracles. Until Morgana gave birth to Amelia.
    The first time I had seen my daughter had been when she’d erupted from Morgana’s womb in a wave of blood and snakes and black rings on the floor of an abandoned Irish pub the faerie had taken over for their festivities. I don’t know how Morgana had managed to reach into the grave to steal Amelia from Penelope’s dead womb, but she had. Perhaps she’d done it as an act of simple trickery, as the faerie can be like that.
    Or perhaps she’d stolen Amelia as an act of revenge against me for the King Arthur incident. When I first met Morgana, I’d taken her away from a tower in the woods guarded by a troop of men under an enchantment, in order to deliver her to King Arthur. I was trying to become one of the knights of Camelot at the time, and I thought it would earn me some favour with Arthur. As usual, I was woefully misguided. Arthur and Morgana had some sort of history together, but I didn’t know the nature of it until he tried to kill her with that strange blade of his. I stopped him by putting my own body in between them to shield her. Perhaps I should have let Arthur kill Morgana and Excalibur drink her blood. Then I wouldn’t be in this situation now. But I’ve never been very good at doing the right thing.
    Our relationship was definitely troubled after that. We made up and patched things over, because when you’re both immortal or close enough to it, you’re going to have to learn to live with each other. And when one of you is a faerie queen, there are definitely going to be drunken nights where you both wind up in the same bed. But there were other incidents over the ages, so we each had plenty of reasons to want to even the score with the other.
    But stealing my daughter crossed a line. Morgana had not only stolen Amelia from Penelope, she had stolen her from me. My memories of her now were