A Temptation of Angels

by Michelle Zink

  But no one said a word. She allowed the silence to sit among them until she couldn’t stand it any longer.

  She stood up, pacing away from them. “That is… well, it’s nonsense, that’s all.”

  She expected Galizur to answer. To soothe her worries, as he had done since she arrived. But he didn’t. Even Griffin remained silent. It was Darius who dared to speak the truth she couldn’t deny.

  “So you’re just a normal girl, then?” He continued without waiting for her answer. “It’s normal for someone to come into your home in the dark of night, kill your parents, burn down your house? It’s normal for you to make an escape and to follow directions on a piece of paper to find refuge?”

  She relished the coldness in his voice. Only reason could help her now.

  “And I suppose if you look back on your childhood everything else will seem normal as well. You had a childhood like any other? There were no strange games? No specialized lessons? Nothing to make you think you might have to escape one day or perhaps even fight to protect yourself?” His eyes dropped to the pendant visible atop her gown. When he spoke again, his voice was a notch softer—perhaps even kinder—than it had been before. “No inexplicable gifts?”

  She swallowed against the lump that formed in her throat, thinking of her parents. Of fencing and chess. Of Find the Way Out and tea at Claridge’s followed by strolls through the very same neighborhood she had traversed in her nightdress to find Darius and Griffin.

  None of it—none of it—was an accident.

  Darius’s eyes burned into hers in the moment before she dropped her gaze.

  “I thought so.” His voice was missing the satisfaction she expected.

  This time, she didn’t let the silence settle for long before lifting her head to look at Galizur. She was grateful that her voice sounded stronger than she felt. “I’m listening.”

  He nodded.

  “Over the past months, the Keepers, along with their families, have been executed, one by one. It was alarming enough in the beginning, for with the loss of each Keeper, Earth’s future grew more and more uncertain. At first, the Dictata appointed replacements right away, but they, too, were killed, almost as quickly as they could be appointed. Now, new appointments have been suspended until the executioner can be found.” Galizur gestured toward the Orb. “And as you can see, the demise of the Keepers has had a profound effect.”

  Helen’s gaze slid to the massive, rotating globe. She was captivated by its beauty, yet its movement suddenly seemed laborious, even to her. She felt it struggling to stay alive. To keep turning.

  “Assuming I believe you, what can we do?”

  Darius’s voice came from her right. “For now, stay alive.”

  “How do we do that? If what you say is true, I haven’t even come fully into my… knowledge.”

  Helen was surprised to hear Anna’s voice, soft but strong. “We’ll help, Father and I. It’s our task to oversee the Keepers. To ensure their safety and continuity. It has become harder, of course, but it’s still our charge. One we’ll die fulfilling, if necessary.”

  Darius flinched at her words but said nothing.

  “There is one more thing,” Griffin said.

  “What is it?” Helen could not imagine anything stranger than what she had already heard.

  “Those who hunt us are hunting something else as well.”

  “What?”

  “Perhaps it will be easier to show you.” Helen followed Galizur to the Orb. Stopping in front of it, he gestured to the floor beneath the Orb. “This is the gateway to the Akashic Records. And there is only one key.”

  Helen looked down, her eyes settling on a tiny pinprick of blue light emanating from the ground. She didn’t know how she had missed it before. The light seemed to pulse with an energy that made the floor buzz beneath her feet.

  “The Akashic Records are an accounting of everything that ever has happened or ever will happen in the history and future of mankind,” Griffin explained, his voice ringing through into the cavernous room.

  “I know what the Akashic Records are,” Helen said softly. “But I thought they were a myth. A legend.”

  Galizur nodded. “It’s standard protocol for things of this nature to be presented in such a way to the young Keepers.”

  She lowered her eyes to the blue light in the floor. “If they’re as real as you say, how can they be accessed from here? And what does this have to do with the murders?”

  Galizur tipped his head toward the light. “This is simply the gateway. The gateway to everything.”

  Anna approached, her eyes kind. “It’s dangerous for mortals to have access to the records, Helen, which is why no one knows where the key is hidden.”

  “But that’s not keeping someone from trying to find it,” Darius added. His voice still held a trace of boredom, but she could hear the tension in it, as if it took effort to seem so apathetic.

  Helen steadied her voice. “How do you know?”

  Darius studied his fingernails, and she had the strangest sense that it took effort to compose himself in the moment before he met her eyes.

  “Because they’re killing us to find it.”

  The words echoed through the room, bouncing off the concrete walls of the underground bunker.

  “Well, don’t look at me,” Helen finally said, glancing at the point of light glowing at the base of the Orb. “I don’t have it.”

  “You don’t know that,” Darius said. “None of us knows, which is the point of the whole thing.”

  The blank look on Helen’s face must have said everything, because Darius continued. “The Dictata always keeps the Keeper of the key a secret. It’s safer that way.”

  Helen tried to make sense of all the disparate information that had been thrown at her. “So we have to find the key to keep it safe from whoever is killing us?”

  “No.” Griffin shook his head. “There will always be those who want the key. It doesn’t matter who has it. In fact, it’s better not to know.”

  “Then what are we supposed to do?”

  “Eliminating the immediate threat is the most important thing,” Griffin said.

  And now Helen understood. “Find them before they find us.”

  “Want to jump?” Griffin asked his brother as they emerged from Galizur’s some time later.

  Darius shook his head. “Not with the girl. Not yet. Besides, the lamps will be turned off soon. We should be safe enough.”

  Griffin nodded. The exchange didn’t make sense to Helen, but she was too tired and overwhelmed to ask about it. She focused instead on keeping pace as they continued away from Galizur’s building.

  Dawn was beginning to lighten the sky in the distance, though overhead it was still a deep and mysterious blue. Helen was grateful the brothers didn’t try to speak to her on the way back to the house. She couldn’t have borne more conversation about angels, demons, and executions.

  They moved swiftly through the streets of London, though Helen’s exhaustion made it feel as if she were moving her body against a very strong current. She had to trot to keep up, all the while clutching the long wooden box Galizur had given her. But while Griffin sometimes looked at her with sympathy, Darius didn’t spare so much as a glance. Still, she refused to give Darius the chance to feel smug by asking him to slow his pace.

  Helen’s instincts screamed as they skirted the streets with lamps in favor of those as black as pitch. Finally, in one particularly dark alley, she managed to gasp a question in spite of their pace.

  “Why do we keep to the darkest streets? If we are in danger, wouldn’t it be wiser to stay in the light?”

  Darius, a few feet in front of them, snorted at her comment. She ignored him, waiting for Griffin to answer instead.

  He kept his eyes on the street in front of them, his eyes scanning the streets as he answered. “It’s not safe to walk in the light right now.”

  She shook her head. “Isn’t it safer than the dark where someone might
sneak up on us?”

  “No, it isn’t,” he said. “Light is another means of travel for us. And we’re not the only ones who use it.”

  She didn’t know what to make of the answer, but then she thought of Darius, appearing in the light of the lamp on the way to Galizur’s. She scoffed inwardly at the idea taking shape in her mind. That Darius might have moved from one light to another wasn’t possible. She wanted to tell Griffin so, to dismiss it as nonsense, but it was all she could do to keep up. She added it to the growing list of questions to ask later.

  They came to the end of the alley. Darius stood, surveying the street in front of them. While it was far from brightly lit, the streetlamps cast their murky light across the road, making it seem infinitely brighter than the backstreet from which they’d just come.

  Griffin stopped beside his brother. “I’ll keep her with me.”

  Helen looked from Griffin to Darius and back again. “What do you mean? Where are we going?”

  “Across the street,” Darius said. “Now be a good girl and stay with Griffin, will you?”

  She was so shocked by his patronizing tone that she didn’t answer right away. By the time she’d gathered her fury, Griffin had a firm but gentle hold on her arm and Darius had already stepped into the street.

  “Don’t mind him.” Griffin followed his brother with Helen in tow. “You’ll get used to it.”

  “I highly doubt that,” she said. “And for the record, I have crossed a street before. All by myself, too.”

  Griffin looked around, and she had the distinct impression that she was trying even his patience. “I’ll explain everything later. For now, you’re just going to have to trust me. The safety you once took for granted is gone. If you want to stay alive, you’ll stay with us and do as we say.”

  The lack of mockery in his voice sobered her like none of Darius’s snide commentary. This was someone who wanted to see her safe, and it seemed there were very few of those people left. She would have to trust him.

  They crossed the road at an even quicker pace than the one they had used in the alley. The brothers’ eyes moved constantly, roaming the streets for danger as they headed toward the darkness on the other side of the street.

  Stepping onto the cobblestone walk, Darius ducked into the shadows along the edge of a crumbling building as Griffin ushered Helen in the same direction.

  They were only feet from the darkness when she heard the sound.

  It reminded her of the time a bat had found its way into her room through the firebox. The poor creature had flown around her chamber, desperately seeking escape while she opened window after window, trying to coax it out-of-doors. She was not frightened, but later, she would remember the deep, slightly ominous sound of its wings beating the air.

  It was this that made her stop, looking above her for the spread of something dark and in flight.

  But Griffin was not looking upward. His gaze was pulled to the streetlamp closest to them.

  A moment later, she understood why.

  There was a man standing within the circle of its illumination. She did not immediately register that he seemed to appear out of nowhere. That she had not heard boot steps and that neither Griffin nor Darius seemed to have suspected they were being followed.

  She did, however, register the bloodred of his eyes, piercing the smoky light of the streetlamps.

  The man stepped out of the light, his dark clothes making his pale face seem like an apparition floating above his body. A low growl sounded from his throat in the moment before he smiled, flashing teeth capped almost entirely in silver.

  “I told you the light was dangerous.” It was all Griffin had time to say in the moment before he shoved her back into the shadows. “Now, don’t move until we say so.”

  NINE

  She pressed her body against the crumbling building just as Darius stepped forward. An irrational satisfaction blanketed her fear. This stranger obviously intended her, and the brothers, harm. But there were two brothers and only one snarling… whatever it was.

  Then she saw the other man stepping from the pool of light cast by another streetlight.

  “I’m tired, brother, let’s make this quick.” Darius almost sounded bored, something that made Helen doubt her earlier faith in the brothers’ ability to fend off the strange men now advancing. Perhaps Darius and Griffin were mad rather than competent.

  “Fine with me,” Griffin said. “I’ll take this one. Did you bring your glaive?”

  “No. You?”

  Griffin shook his head with a sigh. “The sickle it is, then.”

  The silver-toothed fiend snarled as Griffin took a step forward. He pulled loose the strangely shaped object hanging from his belt. It opened with a clanging hum, and Helen saw that it was a kind of sickle, small enough to hold in the hand and shaped like a boomerang. But this was no boomerang. Forming a kind of open V, the light reflected off the honed blade on one side and caught the tips of metal teeth jutting from the other. It would rip a man apart.

  “Keeper scum.” The insult was hurled from the second man as he pulled a sickle from his belt.

  His companion advanced on Griffin, his own weapon in hand. The two pairs circled each other as Darius replied, as casually as if they were having tea and talking about the weather.

  “That’s offensive coming from a wraith. I think I’m going to have to defend my honor.”

  There was a breathless pause before Darius raised his sickle against that of his opponent. The clang that followed was earsplitting, and Helen, cowering in the shadows, looked around, expecting someone to emerge from one of the dingy flats and rail about the noise.

  But no one came. As she watched the brothers, raising their sickles, hooking those of the other men and making it difficult to free them and continue the battle, she had the feeling that their very existence was a dream. That she and the brothers and the two beings that fought them existed in another world—one that was separated by the finest of veils from the one in which she had lived all her life. That the sound of the battle in front of her was muffled and shielded from the sleeping world around her.

  She clutched the long wooden box tighter as Griffin’s sickle locked with that of the being that fought him. The other man growled, pulling on Griffin’s sickle until Griffin was far too close to the man’s body. Helen cringed, trying to watch the battle while she also planned her escape, should the brothers not make it out alive.

  Find the Way Out was a game that died hard.

  A moment later, Griffin seemed to loose his grip on the sickle. It brought him still closer to the other man, and for a split second, Helen thought Griffin was giving up. She realized his strategy when the fiend’s grip loosened with their sudden proximity. Griffin, taking advantage of the momentary slack, drew his sickle down and away from the other man’s in one effortless swing. Then, he brought it up in a graceful arc, slicing the razor edge of it across the fiend’s belly.

  She stifled a gasp, expecting the man to cry out. Or at least to bleed. But he did neither. He simply continued fighting even as Griffin, now with the upper hand, pummeled him with repeated kicks and slices of his sickle until the man’s flesh was torn in places.

  And still, Helen didn’t see a drop of blood.

  When she was finally able to tear her eyes away to Darius, she found much the same sight. Darius’s opponent was on the ground, Darius bringing the sickle down again and again, slicing with one edge, ripping and tearing with the other. Yet even as the man on the ground seemed to give up, he, too, did not bleed.

  Finally, Griffin’s opponent toppled over, crashing to the ground like the man now under Darius’s boot.

  Darius spoke calmly. “I thought we were going to make it quick.”

  “You’ve had more experience than I have,” Griffin said, his voice wounded.

  Helen wanted to look away as they brought down their sickles. Now there would be blood, and they would have to leave these souls, however evil, in the middle of the w
alk to be pulled apart by the starving dogs that roamed the slums.

  Yet, as the brothers brought down their weapons, she could not look away. She watched in rapt attention as their blades swung through the smoky light, wincing as the blades crossed the necks of the men lying on the ground. She mentally prepared herself for the severing of their heads, but a moment later, their bodies disappeared in a rush of wind and a flash of hot blue light.

  Helen stood motionless and stunned in the silence that followed. The world seemed to come back, little by little, until she could feel the wind lift her hair, smell the oil in the lamps lighting the street.

  Griffin walked over to her, closing his sickle with a quiet clang, and hanging it back on his belt.

  He wiped his brow. “Are you all right?”

  She nodded, clutching the wooden box like a lifeline.

  He reached for her arm. She was surprised to find his grip gentle.

  “Come on,” he said. “You’ve had a long night.”

  Darius did not speak on the way home. He walked in front of her and Griffin as he had before, only this time, she did not question their choice of the smallest, darkest streets.

  When at last they walked through the back door of the house, Darius headed straight for the stairs.

  “Get as much sleep as you can, Helen.” He did not turn to her as he spoke. “Tomorrow we’ll have to make decisions regarding your safety.”

  By the time she and Griffin reached the grand staircase, Darius had already disappeared into the halls above it.

  “You shouldn’t have followed us.” Griffin’s voice was soft as they climbed the stairs.

  Had Darius made the same observation, she would have fired off a smart retort before she could stop herself. But there was no accusation or annoyance in Griffin’s voice.

  “I’m sorry, but I remembered something my mother said. Something about you and Darius taking me to Galizur. And then I remembered you and Darius saying you were going to see him.” They reached the top of the stairs and headed toward the first hall. “I didn’t want to wait here alone.”

  “Helen.”

  She did not realize Griffin had stopped walking until she followed his voice, finding it two feet behind her. She stepped back to where he stood.