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As predicted, Jerome refused to leave my side while I went with Uriel to find my cousin. So did Remiel, which was perhaps also not unexpected—he had seemed really upset with me for getting my throat cut. Magda was nice enough to go with us as well, and she opened a portal directly into the AESPCA, predictably setting off a ton of alarms. She told us to just go, and she’d deal with security and the alarms. Uriel, Remiel, Jerome, and I set off for the archives. Working in the archives gave my cousin access to a lot of information that he perhaps shouldn’t have had.
“How long has he been working here?” I asked.
“About four years,” Uriel said. “I helped him get the job. I was hoping it would give him a sense of accomplishment, especially the part where he was making his own money.”
“I think that has to be done when they are children, or it doesn’t take,” I said.
“Yeah...” Uriel said and sounded sad. “After our first child, Iago, decided to die, we vowed to do everything we could to prevent another child from losing the will to live,” he told me, sounding even sadder.
“I didn’t know you had a child that died,” I admitted. “I am sorry. If something happened to Jerome or one of my nieces...” I shook my head.
“Iago was a very gifted seer, and the things he saw weighed on him.”
“Even as a child I can remember him telling me some things were unavoidable. He’d seen all the ways in which changes could be made, but they all ended the same way,” Remiel said softly.
“Yes,” Uriel said. “He would tell us the same thing. Eventually, he just couldn’t handle it anymore. Of course, Zadkiel and Jophiel were gone by then, so we had some experience with death in our family, but when it’s your own child, nothing prepares you for that. We tried very hard to avoid having more children after that, especially another archangel. I was never angry with you for being an archangel, Soleil, I was afraid for you and your parents. Most of the second generation of archangels have all lost the will to live. I know you’re too young to know them, but you’ve had seven archangel cousins die before now. So, when you were born and you were an archangel and then Leviathan and Lucifer had given you even more power, I became fearful, and the fear made me angry.”
“And you were a little jealous,” Remiel said. “I saw your face when Soleil told you why she’d been chosen to accept the gift.”
“I admit I was a little, because Emmelda, who was born just a few years before Soleil, did not have archangel powers beyond what the others would have given her,” Uriel said. “But after hearing their reasoning, it makes sense. After seeing Hecate talk to you and Leviathan today, and all of you forgiving each other, it didn’t just make logical sense, it felt right.”
“Why do you teach angelic superiority?” I asked. “I have wondered about that my entire life.”
“It was in response to an angel named Dragonislav, or the Dragon’s son. He was a seraph; he and Francesca were a couple for about two centuries. Francesca was just a regular angel, wingless without much power and no special powers. Dragonislav was emotionally abusive and physically abusive toward her. He told her she would be nothing without him; she wasn’t even a seraph, let alone like her powerful daddy and uncles or her dead brother. He battered that thought into her head day after day after damn day. We tried so hard to get her to leave him, but she was an adult and she loved him. Eventually he convinced her the only way she would ever contribute to this world was if she helped him with his science experiments. He told her she was smart enough to be a lab rat, but not smart enough to work in the lab. Dragonislav had an eye for the ladies, possibly not always consensual either. Francesca had a good friend named Meredith; Meredith was descended from a long line of battle fey, and Dragonislav decided he would have Meredith and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Not even poor Meredith. Meredith became pregnant and gave birth to twins, but unfortunately, she had been damaged mentally and physically by Dragonislav and she died within a few months of their birth. Dragonislav insisted Francesca raise his sons, but Meredith’s death had made her realize she couldn’t stay with him anymore. She fled him one night and came back home. However, Francesca was every bit as damaged as Meredith had been. She may have been raped repeatedly like Meredith; I don’t know. She would never talk about her time with him. We worried she too would give up and die, just as Iago had. My wife and I came up with the solution that if we could make Francesca see her own worth, her own value, she might be saved. It worked but required us to denigrate Dragonislav and others like him. When I felt Francesca was finally doing better, Dragonislav came back into her life with his two small sons, just four years old. She immediately went back to him for the sake of those boys, and he immediately began tearing her down again. After a few years of this, we decided the world would be better off without Dragonislav, and three of us made it happen,” Uriel said as we came up to the door of the archive. “Balthazar took over for Dragonislav, which is how he and Francesca ended up together for a time.“
“The world was better off without him,” Remiel said.
For a moment, I wondered who the ‘we’ was in that story. And if the death of Kabal’s father at the hands of my uncles was an impediment to Kabal and Helia’s relationship, or if Kabal even knew. “No, not Kabal, you can’t guess ahead on this. We’ll finish it, once we finish this.” It was a natural assumption twins among supernaturals was incredibly rare, like maybe one in every ten thousand births.
We entered the archives.
My cousin was not at the desk where his supervisor said he should be. We were forced to search the archives to find him. They are massive. It’s probably the world’s largest collection of books in one place. There were millions of ancient texts dealing with everything from history to fiction to forbidden magic. There were giant papyrus scrolls mixed with regular bound books and even stone tablets. The majority of the works dealt with magic, but there were histories written by mortals and about mortals as well as the massive tomes containing magical spells, recipes, and biographies of supernaturals.
The room was round and three stories tall with a walk-around balcony on the upper floor shelves. The hallway slants down the closer you get to the archive, so I was pretty sure most of the room was below ground. The ceiling reflected the weather conditions outside, and right now it was dark and covered with more stars than one could see with the naked eye within the city limits of St. Louis or possibly even the surrounding towns. Even in Red Bud, Illinois and Angelville, Missouri, this many stars couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. Light pollution was a terrible thing for star gazing.
We each took a section and began walking up and down the aisles, looking for a place he could have hidden. Remiel suddenly let out a shout and we heard a loud crash. Uriel beat me to them; Remiel had my cousin pinned to the floor, and my cousin has hitting him repeatedly in the head with a large, leatherbound book. It was sort of comical; I pulled my lips in to keep myself from smiling or laughing.
“Francis, let us help you,” Uriel said. I admit, I had only met this cousin once in my entire life and I had forgotten his name until Uriel said it.
“I don’t want your help! You betrayed us!” Francis shouted at Uriel. “You just let Francesca go to prison, you got her a shitty lawyer who did more damage to her case than help, and now you’re just letting her sit there and lose her mind.”
“You believe fracturing your soul is helping her?” Uriel asked, taking a step toward Remiel and Francis.
“I was going to use the magaru to get her out of there. Until that bitch sent her pet demon to destroy it!” Francis shouted.
“That pet demon is your Uncle Zadkiel,” Uriel said.
“You lie!” Francis shouted. Uriel sighed.
“I have done so many things wrong with you and your mother,” Uriel said.
“Don’t talk about my mother! You should have helped her!” Francis shouted. I raised my eyebrows, do what? Did Francesca and Francis have different mothers? I wasn’t sure that was possible, because as far as I knew Uriel and his wife had been together for eons. Or had Uriel strayed and had a child with someone other than his wife? I added it to the list of things I needed to ask someone about later.
“You’re right, I should have done more to help her when she was first injured. I waited too long and lost her. Now, we’ve lost you too unless you let Soleil try to heal you,” Uriel said, sounding defeated.
“She’s a liar and manipulator, she won’t heal me, she’ll destroy me, like she did with the magaru!” Francis shouted.
“No, I will try to heal you,” I said, and it sounded lame even to me.
“My mom told me you were evil. I’m not going to trust you,” Francis said.
“Your mom doesn’t know me,” I said. “How could she know what I was?”
“She does and you tried to kill her once. Why wouldn’t you try to kill me?” I raised my eyebrow and decided glaring at him was my best option. I was also going to shut up, because I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.
“He’s talking about Francesca,” Remiel said to me, and Francis whacked him in the face with the book instead of on the top of his head. Blood spurted from Remiel’s nose. Now I was totally confused. I didn’t believe I had ever attempted to kill Francesca. She was a lot older than I was and wow... If Francis was Uriel’s and Francesca’s son... incest was not okay. “You don’t get to say her name either,” Francis said and went to whack Remiel again. Uriel stomped over, bent down and grabbed the book, yanking it out of Francis’s hands. “Uriel isn’t his father; Uriel is his grandfather,” Remiel told me, and I actually sighed with relief.
“You murdered my father, let my mother go to prison, and now you’re going to let her murder me, while she’s pretending to help me!” Francis said, somewhere between a shout and a cry.
“I have never tried to kill your mother!” I protested loudly, relieved by the revelation Francis was not the product of incest. He continued to struggle with my two uncles. Fuck it. I dug the key out of my pocket and walked over and stuck it on Francis’ forehead while trying to find the break in his soul. The missing half of his soul returned to his body once the magaru had been destroyed, which was the spray of blood I’d felt in the Stygian. But being in the same body didn’t mean they would go back together. I wasn’t sure I could heal it. The key was still just a key as far as I could tell.
“The Key,” Francis breathed, with great reverence.
“I don’t know about it being the key, it is certainly a key, though,” I replied.
“The Stygian key,” Francis said and still sounded reverent.
“Yeah, okay someone can explain that to me later.” I began pushing magic. When my magic washed over the key, it glowed red for a moment and then went back to being a large, rusty key. I wondered if we should all get tetanus shots after handling it, perhaps two in Francis’s case since I was pushing it into his forehead quite hard. The soul was not knitting back together. I pushed more magic. Still nothing. I did the only thing I could think of, I yanked both halves of the soul out of Francis, leaving him dead for all intents and purposes for a few moments. Uriel started to say something and then shut up. I pushed more magic at the soul. Still nothing. I pushed more magic. Nothing. Finally, I pushed all the magic I had at the soul. It remained broken down the middle. I sighed, took a few deep breaths and took the stupid key off Francis’s forehead. I stuck the key in the soul and turned it like it was a lock. Nothing. I repeated the gesture while pushing magic at it. Then I shoved the soul back into Francis. He gasped and tried to sit up, but Remiel had used the moments he was dead to get a better grip on his limbs. Fuck!
Still kneeling I grabbed Jerome’s hand and we both pushed magic at the soul. Still nothing. Jerome grabbed Uriel’s hand, and I saw magic flare between them. After a moment, Uriel took hold of Remiel at the shoulder, again magic flared, and we all thought about the healed soul.
Fuck!
“Soleil,” Uriel said, and his voice broke. “It’s not going to work.”
“It has to work!” I told my uncle.
“The soul doesn’t heal like the body or mind,” Uriel said to me. “It is what it is.” Uriel looked down at Francis. We all did, and then Uriel ripped the soul back out of the body. Francis lay still, no heartbeat, no breathing, nothing. Uriel said something to the soul and then the soul disappeared. I stared at him.
“We could have gotten the entire throne together and tried,” I told my uncle.
“It wouldn’t have helped. Please leave me with my grandson. Send Magda and the AESPCA investigators in here to collect the body and start the investigation. Oh, and I guess that new guy. I’ve forgotten his name, but the one that replaced Magda,” Uriel said, and knelt down next to Francis.
“Come on,” Remiel said, getting up and taking hold of Jerome at the shoulder and guiding him out. I numbly followed them.
“We could have tried with everyone!” I protested once we were out of the archive.
“Uriel’s correct, chance it would have worked is slim.” Remiel told me. “Once someone has fractured their soul, going insane is the best that can be hoped for them.
“But to just kill him?” I asked.
“Was the kindest fate we could have hoped for.”
“I just...” I stopped. Okay, I wasn’t a huge fan of Francis or Francesca, but this seemed cruel.
“Soleil, come on,” Remiel said, and started down the hallway, taking my arm at the wrist and pulling me along. We ran into Magda about halfway down the corridor. She stopped us and Remiel told her what had happened.
“Poor Uriel and Francis,” Magda said and sighed. “No doubt Miguel will need to take statements from you tomorrow.”