Book One: A Storm of Glass and Ashes

Chapter One: A Domestic Advent

The end of the world came with nineteen boxes of iridescent cake pearls.

"Nineteen," Haven Center West said, with emphasis.

For obvious reasons, she went by Hawk. It was her favorite bird and easier than explaining what happens when fundamentalists-turned-hippies do too much mescaline. The worst part, she thought at times, was that her father had been on a Christianity kick. Heaven Centered, to remind her to always look to Jesus. Her name was just about the only thing her father had contributed to her upbringing. Good riddance.

It wasn't the religion's fault that her parents were flakes. She didn't really blame the mescaline, either. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Fortunately for Hawk, her parents' religious fever--not to mention relationship--lasted about as long as her mother's other serial hobbies. This year alone, Hawk's mom, April Rayne, had gone through archery (Hawk got the very expensive compound bow, but no arrows) fish (Big, empty fish-tank Hawk promptly turned into a terrarium for her various collections of insects; she did not like fish) and, now, cake decorating. Which was how Hawk became the proud owner of five large cases of cake-mix, two five galleon buckets of white buttercream, four Russian piping tips she couldn't make heads or tails of, a case of food coloring, and nineteen boxes of edible pearls coated in a rather disturbing red/gold shimmer.

Her spouse, Alisdair "Alex" West, looked on in consternation. He was a rather attractive white man, brown hair, sharp blue eyes like somebody had filed color down to a razor point, in his usual work uniform of professionally nice dress pants and a button down shirt with no tie. He kept a clip-on Windsor knot in his glove compartment in case he had to meet a client. He came with the aura of a golden retriever. Hawk thought this wasn't fair. If the universe had a sense of justice—which it did not—Alex would have struck people like a Mastiff. Brazilian Mastiff at that. Formidable, and with the jaw muscles to make your car a bit concerned. The kind of dog that would eat your problems before you knew about them. But Alex was good at presentation, and about as honest in that department as P.T. Barnham. People just saw the typical under-educated white guy and assumed he was coasting on his Black wife's laurels.

She often let him coast; it made it more fun when she could finally feed the racists to him. She was a Black woman--mixed race, sure, but the white hadn't expressed itself so much as peeked out of Hawk's biology and decided to go back to bed--who was too tall and too interested in odd things to ever fit in. April Rayne, ever the Mommie Dearest, had raised Hawk with a nineteen seventies approach to race relations. Hawk hadn't even learned how to take proper care of her hair until she was nineteen and one of her Black college professors gave her their mamma's phone number. She'd accepted this, the way she accepted the boxes of cake pearls, and reminded herself to call April more often. You must choose your battles in this world, after all. Fighting to make her mother less of a flake? That was a no-hoper. But making a place where her mom could be her mom, no damage done to any party? That, Hawk could do. Sometimes people were worth the extra work of salvage.

"Those are edible?" Alex put down his tablet and grabbed a box of cake pearls. Shaken, some of the shimmer fell from the box's seams and landed on the rich wood of their antique table. It looked old, which it was, and expensive, which was a testament to Hawk and Alex's skill with a belt sander and patience with polyurethane lacquer. They hadn't quite gotten a finish so smooth your breath might mar it, but the wood's natural chatoyance put anything of the edible glitter variety to shame. They'd fished this thing out of a dumpster somewhere. It was worth everything they hadn't paid for it.

"Technically. I'm willing to bet they've never come out of the box." Hawk pulled another four boxes out of the shipment from her mother. April Rayne's candy-coated shipment came with a kind of dustless patina that spoke of many hours of care from some harassed minimum-wage employee, and many months of display without interest. These had moldered beneath their permanent use-by date until April Rayne, deep in the throes of obsession, decided that her world would not be complete without nineteen boxes of red/gold shimmer edible pearls. Hawk glared at the last box, then turned her gaze in horror at Alex as he reached in and ate one.