Seraphs by Faith Hunter Page B

population had died.
    But to the consternation of Christians and Jews, there hadn’t yet been a rapture or a messianic appearance. The Muslims had been devastated to discover that other religious believers had survived too. Only nine hundred people in Utah had lived through the plagues. The Hindu messiah, the Kalki Avatar, hadn’t come. Most telling, the Most High had not yet appeared, though smart people never said so aloud. People with big mouths had been known to drop dead when making that observation. Derek Culpepper, gloating and satisfied, left the dais.
    An accused had the right to speak, and because Derek hadn’t asked a question, I didn’t have to answer one. I could, however, speak to the prejudice, and to the fatal altercation between a handful of mages and an entire army. The Mage War was taught to every mage child from the cradle up. It wasn’t taught quite the same way in human schools. Truth, the tourmaline ring whispered. Use only truth.

Chapter 7

    T ruth? How much truth? I stood, smoothing my skirt, drawing attention to the strange clothing, so different from the severe dress of the orthodox; to my skin and scars, both radiant; to my jewelry, which was ostentatious, and not a style humans would wear. It wouldn’t hurt to remind them I was a mage, with weapons hanging around my neck. And that I had never used them against the town. I allowed myself to be sworn in.
    In the singsong voice used by mage storytellers, I started speaking. “In the Beginning of the End of the World, came seraphs bearing the judgment of the Almighty, and the plagues they brought that punished the humans. War followed the plagues. Few survived.
    “Darkness came, the Darkness that was of the spirit and the flesh. The handful of living descended into anarchy and violence or chose sides, joining the seraphs fighting the Dark, or joined the Darkness and the lures they offered. Evil walked the earth, stalking humans, killing, eating them. Darkness that raped and pillaged and kidnapped and bred with human captives to create new demons to cavort with the old. In all, nearly six billion died.”
    I heard the crowd muttering, and I knew what they were saying—that mages were the result of Darkness raping human women and getting them with child, false accusation based on prejudice. I drew on the tourmaline to amplify my voice, and slowly walked toward the edge of the dais so all of them could see me. With each firm step I let my boots ring like a drum on the wood floor of the platform, and made my skirt bells chime, the speaker becoming part of the storytelling art. In Enclave, mages lived for the story, and I wanted the humans to hear the neomage version of the end of the world. Wanted them to hear the truth. “And during the End of the World, neomages were born.” I told them of the human babies born during the time of the plagues, infected or dead at birth. Malformed, genetically damaged.
    “Nine months after the first plague, at the end of the final plague, a few hundred thousand human women survivors, those who had been in the first trimester of pregnancy at the Beginning of the End, gave birth all around the world. These children were viable offspring, beautiful children. Children of human fathers and mothers. But they were not human themselves. Conceived just before the first plague, carried successfully through all three plagues, the pestilence and disease had twisted their DNA into something different. Something new. Something never prophesied in all the years of human existence.” I reached the edge of the dais. The TV camera was positioned at an angle to catch the crosshatch of scars on my cheek and the solid glow of scars on my left hand. I put it from my mind.
    “The Last War was decades long and hard. The ice age began. When the first neomages came into puberty, in the fourteenth and fifteenth years of the war, their talents and gifts erupted. These children of man had no power of their own, but could use the power