Aísē: My Five Supernatural Wives

The silence held for one beat.

Then two.

Vanir was still looking at my eyes through the glasses with that expression.....the one that had no existing category for what it was finding.

I adjusted the frames.

"I’ll tell Alicia her glasses need an upgrade," I said.

The tone was Flat and Unhurried. as someone buying himself a second while he worked out what had just happened.

Vanir looked at me.

Not the estimate-updating look from earlier. Something more focused than that. The expression of a man who had just said something he wasn’t expecting to say and was now deciding how much further he wanted to take it in a room full of people, with someone he had met approximately forty minutes ago.

"Those glasses aren’t the issue," he finally said.

.....

He didn’t explain everything.

He wasn’t the type. And he didn’t have enough to explain everything. But he gave me the shape of it.....because he was practical, because it affected the political situation he had just outlined, and because he appeared to suspect that I was going to walk into a room full of people shortly who would react the way he just reacted, except some of them wouldn’t have his restraint.

What he knew was something Important.

I didn’t know what he understood but I can deduce that from what i know....

The signature in my eyes did not belong to any living bloodline. Not vampire. Not witch. Not demon, not druid, not werewolf. Something older. Something from the Age of Gods.....not a current divine being, not a saint’s holy power, not anything that should exist in a living vessel because the thing it originally belonged to was gone.

He didn’t know which god. Nor did I....

He said this plainly, without apology. He was probably Hundred-something years old.....old enough to have read things, heard things, to know certain signatures when they appeared in front of him.

What he had was recognition.

The way you recognised a language you had heard as a child even if you had never learned to speak it.

"I’ve seen that signature once," he said. "In texts. Old ones."

A pause.

"The kind the Association keeps sealed."

He looked at me steadily.

"The kind Braham Faust wrote the annotations on."

.....

I knew that name.

Braham Faust. Victor’s grandfather in Law. The archmage who had pressed his ambient pressure down on me the moment I walked through his door like a greeting and then spat blood when Mariabell expressed disappointment in him.

The man who had, I understood, wanted something specific from me.....wanted Austin exposed, wanted something resolved about Mephistopheles, had been running a very long and patient calculation that I had been the centre of without knowing it.

And now Vanir was telling me that Braham had annotated the sealed texts that contained the signature currently sitting behind my glasses.

’He knew,’ I thought. ’Before he met me. He already knew what was in my eyes and what it meant.’

I didn’t say it.

But the arithmetic of it was running.

"You think the Association meeting and the eyes are connected," I said.

Vanir looked at me steadily. "I think Braham Faust requested that meeting." Then he paused. "And I think the eyes are why."

.....

Behind me, Aisha spoke.

She had been standing still since the end of the last Chapter, her divine perception doing whatever it did when it encountered something it didn’t have a clean category for. Her Rosario was in her hand. I didn’t think she’d decided to pick it up.

"I’ve felt it too," she said. Quietly.

Not directed at Vanir. Not quite directed at me. The tone of her voice confirming something she had suspected for a while and was finding the confirmation heavier than the suspicion had been.

"Since the first time I was near him. I assumed it was the Saintess instinct when near a supernatural race. Then after we got together Some residual effect of his contact." She paused. "It wasn’t that, was it?."

Vanir glanced at her. Something in his expression was careful in a way it hadn’t been when he was talking to me.

"No," he said. "It wasn’t."

Aisha said nothing further. She looked at the floor between her feet with the expression of someone doing quiet internal mathematics.

.....

Vanir stood.

He straightened the Corps uniform with the economy of someone who had done it ten thousand times and would do it ten thousand more without thinking about it.

"The Association will contact you within three days," he said, returning to a more practical register as naturally as he had left it. "When they do.....don’t go alone."

He glanced at Aisha briefly. Then back at me.

"And," he added.....the tone of something presented as an afterthought that was not an afterthought, "Braham Faust is in London. He has been since before the Austin situation started."

A beat.

"That’s not coincidence."

He left without ceremony. The door, the Corps uniform, gone.

.....

The living room.

Liliana on the couch, still wearing the composed watchful expression she had been wearing since Vanir arrived. Mephistopheles against the far wall, arms folded. Victor in the kitchen doorway, no longer pretending he wasn’t listening.

I sat for a moment in the chair Vanir had just vacated.

’Braham Faust annotated sealed texts about divine signatures,’ I thought. ’Then requested a personal meeting with me specifically. Then had Austin exposed through the plan Mephistopheles helped design.....which cleared the way for me to be available for said meeting.’

’That is a very long chess game played by a very old man.’

"Well," Liliana said from the couch, in the tone she used when she had been listening to everything and had arrived at opinions, "that was informative."

Aisha said nothing. She was looking at the door Vanir had walked through with the expression of someone whose internal arithmetic had arrived at several results simultaneously and was working out which of them to address first.

I looked at the glasses.

At the frames. The glass. Alicia’s gift, built to suppress what was in my eyes for the benefit of humans.

’She knew,’ I thought. ’Alicia knew what she was suppressing when she made these. She knew what she was giving me and she didn’t explain it.’

Another chess piece.

Another player who had known before I did.

’How many people,’ I thought, ’already know what’s in my eyes.’

I didn’t say that either.

.....

The room settled into the particular quiet of a morning that had started in a ruined cathedral and had arrived, somehow, here.

I adjusted the glasses again. Habit, now. The frames were fine. I just did it when I was thinking.

One thought, placed plainly:

’I need to talk to Braham Faust.’

Not fear. Not urgency even. Just the next move, identified. The way I identified things.....without much noise, without making it into a larger thing than it was. Stated internally the way I stated most true things.

As a fact that had finished arriving.