Prologue

The lights flashed, the music pounded, base turned up so loud Az felt it as much as heard it, just as she felt the brush of the people as they ran by, flowing toward and away from her, lights glinting off and around them like some sort of nighttime traffic montage. In the midst of the chaos she alone stood silent and unmoving, watching the scene spread out around her like she was encased in glass, physically present but so very far removed. Tangles of hair obscured swaths of her vision but she made no attempt to remove them. Dimly, as if miles away, voices called to her but she wouldn't answer. It never even occurred to her to do so. Her eyes watched the people slide by and away and begin to blur as if they were moving too fast to grasp, phantoms from some previous reality too far removed for her to comprehend now. She tried to clear the images, to focus, because it seemed important that she do so, there was something relevant here, something she needed to grasp, tasks she needed to do, but the distance that permeated her mind refused to be traversed. The softly pleasant fuzz, though seemingly an impotent foe, denied surmounting and Az relented, casting her gaze down at the light speckled floor. She watched the random twinkling spheres as they darted in and out of her vision, acknowledging and following them out and away, close and touching, till they became not insubstantial randomness but sweetly diverting friends whose patterns and deeds were known to her, familiar, familial. Familial. The word fell into her world with an almost audible slap, cracking her reverie with a physical pain and reflexively she brought up her hands to ward off the ephemeral enemy. Blood. It covered them. Az stared at her appendages in uncomprehending stupor. She closed her hands to fists and then reopened them. They were still bloody. She gagged and they dripped.
Boom. Boom. Boom. The blood mingled as darkness with the lights as they danced across the floor to the pounding tempo of the steel and stone room.
Boom. Boom. Boom. Their splatters echoed through her bones, and yet the droplets followed the lights, crossing, colliding, colluding with them. Az wanted to do the same, fall into them and expire softly somewhere at the end of where the light could reach, fading fast into darkness.
Boom. Boom. Boom. She stepped away with them. The first steps felt rusty, halting, but melted finally into rhythm and soon even her hands joined, punctuated by the drops of dripping blood as she flung them around her.
The young knight looked up from the spitting, snarling shell of what had once been woman, satisfied that the ensorcelled shackles binding her would be sufficient to ensure the safety of his fellow soldiers, and did a quick survey of the mess that had once been this club's super secret VIP room. A bevy of shattered furniture and people littered the floor, bodies in various states of undress lay broken where they had fallen, spewing myriad fluids onto the marbled floor. Even as he watched one of the armor clad soldiers stumbled, his foot sliding through a patch of coagulating blood.
“Careful,” he called out to the man, “falling in full armor on this floor is going to mean a very bad day.” he cautioned suddenly feeling very tired.
“Ask Commander Connor if we can strip down.” he told one of the men over at the door who promptly relayed back an affirmative.
A sigh of relief escaped the young man as he moved to the doorway and began tearing off the heavier pieces of his armor, wincing as various wounds and bruises made themselves known and keeping one vigilant eye on the room. With a heartfelt twinge he saw a young girl being coddled by various knights of the order as others brought the beast that had been her mother careening by. Cradled in one of their cloaks she clutched at their arms white knuckled as they moved to stand protectively in front of her. William Harkey, rare second-generation Knight of the Silver Tree, fresh from his purification apprenticeship and on his first 'real' case, pulled a hand across his face in soul deep exhaustion as he thought of the two girls who had lost their parents, awful though they had been, this night to magic and madness.
What a screwed-up place this Earth had become. Not, mind you, that it had been a perfect place before, but it had sure gone downhill since the day a handful of well meaning scientists had accidentally broken a barrier erected over two thousand years ago slicing one dimension into two, effectively sealing off the power known as 'magic' from what everyday humans thought of as the 'real world'. Now things like little girls calmly walking into your office headquarters stating that their moms are “bad people” happened. Except that the stoic little girl wasn't just the offspring of an immoral human but a malevolent Mesopotamian goddess sealed in a blood-curse for two thousand years, a curse she was now breaking free of due to the return of magic (i.e. her power) to the realm. And now you get to tell this kid, who is only trying to get protection for her sister, could you please hang on for three years while your mom, Goddess of blood, sex, and storms, rampages till the paperwork goes through and, oh yeah, we find someone well versed enough in Mesopotamian mythology to bind your mother without killing you since you're also part of the blood-curse. God, he had felt like an ass. He sighed, letting some of the anger leave him. At least it was all over now.
He glanced again at the knot of knights looking for the eldest daughter, needing to reassure himself that some good had indeed come from the wretchedness of this evening's work, but as he scanned the crowd, and then the room, she was nowhere to be found. He turned to the soldier nearest him and inquired. The man knew nothing. An irrational fear began to coil through the knight's abdomen. Had something happened to her after all? Had he failed the esoteric little girl with the wide, haunted eyes? He hurried from the chamber, randomly pulling men aside and questioning them, each time louder, more frantic, and he could picture himself in their eyes as he dashed about, a young, frazzled, half armored Pacifier frantic over his first failure. He could see them shake their heads as they pulled away, remembering the first time they, too, figured out that this job was not a fairytale and that the shining knights didn't always save the girl in the end, sometimes they just killed her. Will could feel anger building in him. No, not this time. It would happen sometime, yes, but not with this one. Finally one of his brethren did more than shrug, he pointed. With little discourse Will threw himself down the knight's pointed path, tossing aside those who stood before him, impervious to their glowering and grumbling, till he saw her and froze.
Barely breaking five feet, she seemed even more diminutive on the deserted dance floor as she flung herself from one end to the other. Twisting, twirling, her fluid moves were totally at odds with the driving beats of the club music, but juxtaposed over it, its industrialism merely amplified the beauty of her softly measured arcs of body. Untrained, improvised, her anger and frustration guiding the whirling cacophony of her limbs, she was the soul of the room personified. Fury, justice, grief, and redemption, her body sang for them all, peeling away the masks of duty and obligation to expose the humanity, the disgust and weariness that engulfed them, pulling it gently from their souls like the tide and cleansing it away in the sway of her form, the graceful bow of her spine, the supplication of her hands as she thrust them, bloody, out and upward to some unseen absolution. It was a magic most ancient, sweet and pungent like summer earth on a starry night, and Will stood silent for long seconds letting it wash over him. He took one long, last deep breath of air thick with magic and then pulled his duty to his charge back around him. Feeling as if he were killing something vulnerable, Will stepped out onto the floor.
Az felt him the moment he stepped away from the crowd and slowed the steps of her movements, still following the lights till they danced up the expanse of his glimmering silver greaves. She didn't think he knew it but his power flared out around him when he was emotional and as he walked closer it fell over the furthest reaches of her skin. He felt almost like sunlight, if sunlight would have been a rainbow white instead of bright yellow. His power felt warm, warm in a way she had felt only infrequently during the course of her life, warm like smiles. She did not want to feel warm now.
“I don't want to stop.” she said anticipating his words as he drew nearer.
“I know.”
“You can't make me.” she stated matter of factly.
“I know.”
Her brows drew together in consternation. She was so used to fighting, for everything, that accent threw her off her game. He could see her mind working, trying desperately to figure out the angle. As always when he was around this child part of Will felt bruised.
“I'll wait.” he merely said.
She didn't move.
“What do you want?” her voice sounded angry and strained as she glared at him.
“You're hurt.”
“And?” she snarled, ”Everyone's hurt.”
“Yes.” he replied, “We should both go get bandaged up.”
“What's one more scar? You go.” she said.
“I'll wait.” he repeated.
“Why?” she challenged, aggravated, his power washing over her, scouring away some of the anger and guilt.
“You're my partner in this, remember?” he said.
Az did remember, the words, the promises, the warm feeling of trust however tentative. Trust he had, so far, delivered on. Az sighed. She felt hurt, drained, and scared but she would die before she would let them see, let anyone see.
At her sigh Will moved to touch her arm and Az hurriedly stepped back.
“Don't.” she said, then, a little less sharply, “You..you don't want to touch me right now.” her hair falling forward shading her face as she looked down.
“It's ok, Ace.” Will said and then gently reached out and settled his hands on her shoulders.
Az said nothing as his words shuddered their way through her.
“It's ok.” She turned the words over and over in her head.
It had been so very long since anyone had told her that and so very, very much longer since she had believed it, but right here, right now, she did and the knowledge unwound her. It pulled apart the knot of fury and bitterness that had sustained her and left a yawning abyss of uncertainty in its wake. A sob clenched her chest and Will pulled her into his soft embrace as she battled tears.
“Come on, Ace,” he said and drew her along at his side,” lets go get those cuts looked at.”
She nodded blandly, swiping away the tears that had managed to squeeze out of her eyes and then looked up at Will with something eerily like pity.
“Yeah.” she said knotting one bloody hand in his tunic and leaning her head against his side in a child-like gesture of trust.
Will said nothing, merely vowed to himself to fill her eyes with something other than that worldly hopelessness in times to come and, as some weird sense shivered down his spine, renewed his previous promise that she would not be this knight's first failure. In her quietly defying mind, Az was thinking much the same thing. As she walked Az's eyes surveyed the chaos and disarray of the prior melee, the soldiers sitting getting lacerated limbs bound, others carrying off the more severely injured and vowed to herself never again. These were the last good people she would allow her mother to hurt, the last sacrifices she would allow to her mother's insane, grotesque appetites.
Hands curled into Will's tunic, Az walked to the exit with an almost foreign emotion starting to bubble up from deep down within her, pushing its way relentlessly forward through the pain, guilt, and weariness: hope. The thought struck a note of excited terror through her; a real, ordinary life. A future. How very droll. The barest hint of smile touched the corners of her pursed lips. A future...