The Namaru had made the water solid, able to be held and able to cut, but that was the funny thing about water. It could be solid, but once it was inside you . . . it was inside you. Once the water of Lethe was inside you, swallowed or rammed into your gut, you were well and truly fucked.
“I know this,” he repeated, but the statement sounded vacant . . . each word void of meaning.
He knew it all right. He’d once been prisoner in Tartarus, below Hades, and then had ruled Hades and its Fields of Elysium for a time. He knew the River Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness—rather, he had known it. “Had”—it was such a good word.
“You think, therefore you are. But you’re a Titan. You created yourself from the Chaos, a single thought in the nothing. If you can’t remember who you are, what you are, how can you be anything at all?” Without that thought, that one “I am,” a Titan wasn’t a Titan. When you were your own creator and you forgot it all, even that single thought, how could you hold yourself together? How could you paste yourself onto the fabric of the universe?
You couldn’t.
The shadows began to roll backward from the ground up, back into his mouth and eyes. “I . . . I am. . . .” The words, thick and slow, were caught in the moving poisonous waste and washed away.
“No, you’re not.” With the demon and angel gone, I shoved the blade farther into him. It was for my own personal satisfaction. In him an inch or a mile, it didn’t matter. Lethe was inside him and part of him now, and he couldn’t remember enough to undo that. “You’re not anything at all. You’re nothing. Less than nothing. You don’t even exist.”
The eyes stretched wide, the fake lips gaped wider, the shadows a waterfall, filling him up until his face began to distort under the pressure. He threw back his head to stare blindly at a sky he couldn’t recognize, a sun he didn’t know. The scream that tried to escape became a whimper as it too was sucked back inside him. And then he was gone, an implosion of time and space that took a small slice of the world with him. I almost tumbled into that rip in reality. I’d stood so close that I felt the black-hole pull of what lay outside of everything there was. I couldn’t see it. I didn’t think anything but the dead Titans could see that, but I felt it and it was horrible. It wasn’t hungry or greedy; it was a complete lack of . . . life and death and everything between, before, after, and beyond. If I fell into it, that was fine. If I didn’t, that was all right as well. A lack doesn’t care—which made it somehow worse.
Then an arm went around my waist and I was yanked away and up into the air. The tear ate more of the world, several handfuls’ worth, and then sealed itself up. It too, like Cronus and the sword with them, was gone. I could do without the two and didn’t need the third anymore. I heard the beating of wings and grinned over my shoulder. “Those flying lessons paid off, didn’t they?”
Griffin grinned back, the wind from his wings blowing the hair in his eyes. He was a kid who’d gotten the best present ever . . . to fly like Superman. “I’ll have to practice carrying people more. Twelve feet up is all I can manage.”
“Or we can hopefully not be in this situation again.” He dropped lower until he could ease me to the ground, on which I sat down the second he let go. It wasn’t that my knees buckled or anything that trite; it was for the sheer need of touching what we had only just saved. Touching air was the same; reality was the whole damn kit and kaboodle—I had no idea what a kaboodle was, but it came to mind as I scooped up dirt in my hand and held it up for solemn contemplation. “Kaboodle,” I announced to Leo, who nodded.
“Damn fine kaboodle it is too,” he confirmed.
“That it is.” Legs crossed, I let myself fall backward to stare up at the sky. It was well worth staring at, and I did so happily until I heard two voices in unison say, “It’s you.” I propped myself up on my elbows to see Azrael and Eligos standing shoulder to shoulder and regarding each other with mutual disdain. Azrael had some disgust mixed into the pudding, but Eli seemed more glum, which was hardly like him.
“I can’t believe I was replaced by you,” the demon said. “It’s embarrassing. They couldn’t have gotten a flamingo or a canary? Both would be less insulting. The Canary of Death. It has a much better ring to it.”
“You were an Angel of Death? Why does that not surprise me?” I snorted, sitting up and brushing the rest of the kaboodle from my hands. Cronus was gone, but suddenly the wingless demons remaining were more of a threat than they had been. Here was hoping we had a standoff between what was left of the angels and the demons. The cold war was over on Earth, but it was still thriving Above and Below.