Chapter 1435: Helel, the Angel Who Lost Heaven

He turned his head away. Her finger moved, bringing his face back toward hers without hurting him, and she waited until he was staring into those empty eyes.

{Look at what you did to the mother who raised you.}

She had fed him, protected him, corrected him when he needed it. She had raised him after his real mother died, knowing enough of what he was to understand whom she was caring for— she but she didn’t care and raised him as her own.

Marcus hardened his expression beneath her gaze, refusing the accusation before she had finished making it.

{You and the others stripped piece after piece away because you wanted answers. You made me a complete hollow for the Pages whose power none of you can even begin to fathom.}

"You brought it— you brought it upon yourself." Speaking against the force holding him required effort, but anger helped him push the words out. "Who told you to reincarnate into one of our families?"

She became still.

Marcus drew enough air into his lungs to continue, his voice strengthening as he returned to the reasons that had justified everything they had done.

"With your connection to HIM, what did you expect, huh? We waited for lifetimes for somebody carrying the same knowledge you had only for you to deliver yourself into our family. You knew about HIM. You knew about the Pages, about what we had spent all that time searching for." His mouth twisted. "If you had told us what we asked, you wouldn’t be like this."

The Hollow Woman studied him until he began to resent her silence. She tilted her head, then slowly shook it, and Marcus ground his teeth at the suggestion of pity in the movement. He could have endured her hatred more easily than this.

{Let us imagine I know exactly where the Pages are. What would you do with that knowledge now?}

His attention had sharpened at the first sentence before he could stop it. She watched the change, then lowered his kneeling body a little farther, leaving him to look up at her.

{Your Master could leave you witless whenever he wishes. Your bloodline belongs to another, and your Soul is branded so deeply that you cannot finish a hateful thought about the girl you destroyed. Tell me, Marcus. What would you do with that knowledge?}

He stared back through the anger burning in his face. His memories of power could give him nothing with which to answer her, and the trembling in his limbs had become impossible to disguise.

{This is where your cruelty brought you,} she told him. {It drove your mother to suicide, and afterward you turned against the woman who raised you when your own was gone. I knew the darkness slept inside your Soul. I knew what lived beneath the righteousness an Angel should have carried, and I raised you anyway.}

Marcus’s expression shifted at the mention of his mother, then closed again. The Hollow Woman remained before him, her voice entering his mind with the same clarity as when she first spoke:

{You rewarded me by helping them turn me into this. A hollow.}

He could see the faint smile had barely altered her face. The vacant eyes and emptied expression remained, leaving him to confront what he had helped make of her while she held him helpless above the carpet.

He tried to draw upon his anger again, but she spoke his name before he could find an answer.

{Helel!}

"Don’t—" His face twisted at the name that belonged to him before he became this— a mortal.

{Helel, have you ever wondered why the Primordial Lotus never chose you?}

His struggle ceased. She leaned closer, bringing that still, hollow face almost level with his own, and watched the hatred in his eyes falter.

{From the very beginning, why do you think it chose your twin instead of you?!}

Marcus stared at her. His mouth parted, but the reply he had been forcing together was gone. The question reached into something his outrage could not dismiss, and he remained kneeling before her until she moved her fingers and released him.

She sent him back onto the couch with enough force to leave him sprawled among the cushions.

The landing spared the furniture and his bones, producing little sound beyond the rustle of his clothes. Danton and the Lord had only recently departed; even while humiliating him, she had been careful to leave the room undisturbed.

Marcus forced himself upright as space folded around her. He caught the last trace of her almost-smile before she vanished, and found himself staring at an empty stretch of carpet with her question repeating in his mind.

Why did it choose your twin instead of you?

Elsewhere upon Hell’s Paradise Island, Phei sat back slowly, faint spirals of gold moving through his amethyst eyes.

"Who the fuck is that woman?"

Slave Sight had carried the entire encounter to him, including the words she spoke directly inside Marcus’s consciousness. He had felt Marcus’s terror when space folded and the relief when the visitor proved to be someone else, then watched the Hollow Woman force him to kneel with a movement of her fingers.

Phei knew who had raised Marcus after his mother’s death but that explained very little of what he had just witnessed. She could perceive the stolen bloodline where Danton and the Lord’s avatar had failed, and he had been unable to see what power she used to hold Marcus.

Whatever they had done to her, she retained enough to look into an enslaved Progenitor’s Soul and mock what she found there.

"Hollow my ass," he muttered, recalling that tiny smile.

Then there was Helel himself and the twin the Primordial Lotus had chosen. Phei had gained an original name and a question Marcus himself seemed unable to bear, though neither told him who the Hollow Woman had been before this life. Her connection to HIM—whoever that was— remained equally unexplained.

Marcus had understood whom she meant without needing a name, leaving Phei to listen to two people discuss someone he could not identify.

He owned one of the Pages himself, for fuck’s sake— He would have appreciated knowing who was apparently important enough to be spoken of like that.

The System had revealed something of the Page in his possession, and Marcus’s memories had shown him how long the Angel Progenitor and the others had spent searching. The answers beyond that remained maddeningly out of reach. Phei could follow a remembered conversation about the Pages, the plans they’d made to obtain them, then lose he’d lose connection to Marcus’s memories at the very point someone should have explained the Page’s purpose and real origins.

Marcus still possessed all that knowledge— Phei was certain of that, just as he was certain these absences went beyond ordinary forgotten memories— he was just not allowed to know them: The Pages’ origins, their number, what gathering them would accomplish and the identity behind HIM were all concealed from him— although he could reach events on either side of those missing answers.

The two Legacy Families’ deepest plans had yielded similar fragments and concealed from him. Enough survived for him to understand portions of what the Heavenchilds and Maxtons were preparing, but he could not follow them far enough to discover the whole of it.

Names and intentions led into gaps he could neither see through nor account for.

Althea’s whereabouts remained hidden in the same way.

He knew she was alive and being fed, and that she was not being tortured. That much had kept him from tearing through Hell’s Paradise Island in search of her once he left this sky. Yet the memories that should have shown him where she was being held remained inaccessible.

He had intended to make Marcus tell him. A command should have sufficed with the Slave Mark but Eira stopped him before he tried. The fairy had been unusually serious when she explained why something that resisted a Soul Slave’s master so completely might belong to a power beyond the slave himself.

Fate could be involved, or a Law, or an ancient restriction bound into these affairs long before Phei seized Marcus.

Eira could not identify the cause but forcing Marcus to drag the answers out might destroy his mind without overcoming whatever concealed them, and pushing farther could kill him.

Phei had little objection to Marcus spending the rest of his existence drooling into expensive Heavenchild furniture. Keeping him alive was the troublesome part. The death of an Original Progenitor carried consequences Phei wanted to understand before he brought them upon himself, and ignorance was a stupid reason to risk them even if he would kill Marcus now, he wanted to watch the bastard suffer as a mortal.

He would leave those memories alone until he knew more.

The Hollow Woman’s visit had already shown him another way to learn what the family was hiding, one that required considerably less effort than tearing at an obstruction Eira could not identify.

Whatever concealed Marcus’s past had allowed Phei to witness his present. He had heard her speak of the Pages, of HIM and the Primordial Lotus through a conversation that had taken place after the enslavement. Others would come to Marcus, believing themselves alone with someone they trusted, and Phei could watch them through the same way.

He could listen while the Heavenchilds discussed their plans— Marcus would remain inside the estate, among the very people whose secrets Phei wanted.

He was an information jackpot.