“Aria,” he breathed. When he opened his eyes, he was sure of it.
“Hello, my love.” The woman smiled as her hair whipped around in the current of her own power. “I’ve missed you.”
CHAPTER NINETY NINE
Spring Street Apartments
Manhattan, New York
Key leaned back against a wall, his head propped against Jon’s, and his body longing for a strong cup of coffee. Across from them were Tahir and Rooke, sitting near Jin and Aiden’s bathroom door. Rooke had his head in her lap, curls strewn astray, his mouth open in a snore as they waited for something…anything.
Tahir yawned. “It’s been twelve hours. How long does it take to snatch a spirit from the otherworld?”
“I didn’t figure it would take this long, either. That is unless he’s really dealing with bizarro-world Jin who doesn’t have a memory.” Key rubbed his eyes, tiredly. “Things shouldn’t be this hard.”
“Things seem to get incredibly complicated when dealing with those two,” Jon grumbled. “If they are destined to be together, then they are
destined to cause trouble together. Your proverbial Bonnie and Clyde except without the raging desire for destruction. A goodwill version, if you will.”
Key chuckled. “I wish Shemhazi would get back with my coffee. I feel like we haven’t slept in days.”
“That’s because we haven’t,” Jon huffed.
Key felt Jon shifting a bit and Key’s head fell from resting against Jon’s to plopping on his shoulder. Jon ran his fingers through Key’s hair before tucking some of it behind his ear. “Get some sleep, Morgan Lefay. I’ll have no idea what to do when they magically wake up, so you need to be at your best.”
“I’m fine,” Key said, although his hand moved to his mouth to cover up a yawn. “I’m an angel. I’m–”
“Stronger, faster, smarter than you. Yeah, I get it.”
Key made a noise that was almost a laugh but not quite. “I’m glad you know.” There was silence, comfortable silence that almost made Key take Jon up on his offer for a quick nap but a question niggled away at him. One he didn’t want to ask, but one he needed to ask. “What do you plan on doing after this is all over?”
He felt Jon’s breath flutter across the top of his head and he turned his head to look up at him. Or the bottom of his chin, rather. “You mean if I survive?”
“Yeah.”
The human shrugged one shoulder. “Go home, I guess. Try to salvage my life. Get my job back. I’m really glad I don’t have a pet because my pet boarding fee would be astronomical right now.”
“You don’t have someone waiting for you back home?” Key asked, his eyes now trained on an invisible spot on the floor.
“You did a thorough and probably highly illegal background check into my life and you’re asking if I have someone waiting for me?” Jon sighed. “You know I don’t.”
Key didn’t know why he asked. He didn’t know why he needed to know. He didn’t know why he was happy to have heard his answer. “So you’re going home to no one. That doesn’t sound...”
“Fun?”
“Fulfilling.”
He shrugged again. “I’ve been married to my job in an attempt to overcome and achieve something greater than my best friend. We all have our purposes. Mine isn’t to be as great as him, I suppose.”
“You’re amazing, Jon,” Key murmured. “You’re a good friend, loyal and capable. Honestly, you’d make a great Captain in Caeli.”
“With you angels? Is that even allowed?”
“No,” Key said, remembering all the ways they were different, all of the ways that even if he gave in to the fact that Jon made him feel absolutely incredible, it would never work out. Jon belonged here. Key belonged in Caeli.
Still, Jon’s warmth was heaven sent, crafted by The Creator in all the glorious, wondrous ways someone could come into your life, blow it all to hell and make you smile as the shrapnel fell all around you. Yes, he was crass, yes, he was hard-headed, and yes, sometimes a little stupid, but Key felt that Jon balanced him. He talked back when others would quake under his stare. He questioned Key as a leader, as a person, when Key always considered himself irreproachable. He made Key a better leader through his constant nagging, making him remember things he’d gloss over in the throes of habit. He made Key think about emotions that he’d decided that he didn’t need.
He made Key feel.
“You have small hands,” Key whispered as he slipped his hand into Jon’s.
“Just because you have freak hands that glow in the dark doesn’t mean mine are small,” Jon grumbled as he laced their fingers together. “They fit,” he murmured. “Look, Key, I know–”
“Don’t,” Key warned, even when he felt his breath catch. “I told you before. Don’t complicate things.”
“Oh,” Jon’s voice dropped to a low whisper, “like when you had your legs wrapped around me in Dr. Timoko’s office and you let me dry hump you like a horny teenager or when I had my tongue down your throat? That kind of complicated?”
Key felt his face heat up.
“You two are annoying,” Tahir called out from the other side of the room. “It’s sickening and it’s hurting my stomach,” she said. She softened her words with a smile. “Why don’t you two take a walk…or a cold shower or something?”
Key thought it was a good idea, detangling his hand from Jon and standing. He stretched out the kinks in his back and legs and helped Jon to stand. “We can probably find Shemhazi with my coffee this way.”
“Or a motel,” she quipped right before her phone began to ring, the shrill sound catching everyone’s attention, even the Keepers. Sheepishly, she answered it and ducked her head. “You’re looking for Key?” she said into the receiver. Tahir looked up at him. “Is your comm dead? Shemhazi says he’s been trying to call you for hours.”
Key frowned and looked down at his phone. The battery wasn’t drained but he didn’t have a signal. “That’s weird.” He grabbed the phone from Tahir. “Shemhazi?”
“I need you to meet me at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, back in Midtown.”
“That’s doable. I know where it is.” Key put a hand on his hip. “Do they by chance serve coffee since I know mine is probably a block of ice by now?”
“Oh, right. Your coffee. There’s no coffee here but,” George said, “you can come and greet your peers. Cobra is here. They are doing surveillance and recon in Team Bear’s place.”
Key raised a brow. “They were sent to New York knowing we would be there?”
“Yeah, some things have changed. A lot. I can explain it once you get up here.”
“Got it,” he said, closing the phone. “Tahir, wake Rooke up and set up an outside perimeter. We are headed out.”
Tahir blinked then looked at Aiden and Khione’s prone forms, then to the Keepers. “Will that be okay?”
“I trust them. Nobody travels all this way, being that creepy, to do any harm.”
Derrick scoffed and Josh grinned.
“Do what you need to do. We will watch over the passage,” Moses said, his voice deep, comforting, as he looked at them from across the room. “She will be safe and we will guide Aiden home.”
“See,” Key said. “Creepy people can be trustworthy.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED
St. Patrick’s Cathedral
Manhattan, New York
“Okay, forget the Children of the Corn back at the apartment because this is the creepiest shit I’ve ever seen,” Jon said as he gazed up at the towering gothic inspired building. “Is a church supposed to look like this? How do you get salvation in a place that looks like it houses goblins?”
Key agreed. If you stared straight up at St. Patrick’s Cathedral from the steps, it looked like two horns towering towards the late evening overcast sky.
“Why this place of all places?”
“Remember the bridge?” Key asked.
“I’ll never forget the bridge.” Jon shuddered. “What
’s this nice lovely gargoyle mansion have to do with that?”
“If you remember, Praesidium is a low powered working Einstein–
Rosen bridge that connects one realm to another. Causatum chambers work with these bridges to either allow us to make changes or to actually travel to this plane. Each chamber can dump us or “changes” out anywhere, like an off-ramp.”
“More complicated drivel,” Jon muttered.
“There are three here in New York–Masjid Malcolm Shabazz in Harlem, Tu Bodega in the Bronx, where we originally dumped, and,” Key absently waved behind him, “The Rockefeller Center. They probably dumped out of there.”
Jon made a small “ah” noise before he followed Key as he walked up the short set of steps.
They walked through large bronze doors decorated with carvings just like the Great West doors at St. John’s and into the house of worship.
The interior of the cathedral was far more pleasing to the eye than the outside. They were greeted with a marble floor so pristine that you could see your reflection in it and pews that lined both sides of the marble walkway like burgundy and wood dominos, all the way from the rear of the cathedral to the altar. Ivory columns reached to the ceiling and views of colorful stained glass peeked in between them. The ceiling itself reminded Key of Timnath-Heres with its intricate star-shaped carvings highlighted by more windows.
“Impressive,” Jon whistled.
“We’re headed for the Lady Chapel in the back,” Key directed as the two walked down the aisle, side by side. He looked down at his phone again, grinning at Tahir’s screenshot of a bewildered Jin they’d received on the way here. Good. Good. Now he could concentrate on what he was born to do.
His duty to Caeli.
When they reached the rear of the cathedral, behind the sanctuary, Key was greeted by a group of ten waiting in the smaller selection of pews. Marcus, Jerome, and Spencer were busy looking over what seemed to be a simple map but Key knew better. It was an Influx Map, one that mapped out the spiritual flow of a particular area. It resonated on the holographic screen displayed between them almost like swirls of paint over oil.
A bunch of the LMs were there too, which happened from time to time. Under certain circumstances, LMs were dispatched under one Luminary General for a mission. This time, their mission commander was Hugo.
Standing by the statue of the Virgin Mary, their heads together in deep discussion, were Hugo and George.
George spotted Key and Jon first and broke off his discussion to walk over to them. “Where are the brats?” he asked, looking over their shoulders.
“Watching over the apartment,” Jon answered.
A man approached them from a wooden structure that looked like a confessional. “Mr. Elder,” he said, a warm smile pulling at his mauve colored lips.
George turned towards the person and his face mirrored the man’s upon recognition. “Father Gutierrez.”
The priest, dressed in all black with the ever familiar white clerical collar, walked up to George and clapped him on the back, a friendly chuckle accompanying the move. “I’ve been trying to get you back in here for years, even Juba tried with no luck and here you are. Stirring up trouble?”
George turned to the rest of them. “Father Gutierrez is probably one of the only humans on earth who I told of my real identity. It was during a drunken confessional, one I’m ashamed of, but in the end, he believed me. Now he offers help to those who he knows I can trust. It’s been a time or two a hungry or injured angel has made their way here and experienced Father Gutierrez’s kindness.”
“The Lord called me to help his children,” he glanced over the crowd. “That includes his angels. The sanctuary will be closing soon but you guys can stay as long as you need. Just don’t mind the janitors.”
As Father Gutierrez ambled away, George seemed eager to get to the reason they were all there. “Cobra has been tasked with doing surveillance on The Eleven,” he started.
“Just surveillance?” Jon asked with his brow raised. “Last time we talked, they had manufactured some kind of super-angel-virus. Seems like more than enough reason to do more than just surveillance.”
“We’ve got rules we have to follow,” Hugo answered as he plopped down on a pew. “Silly if you ask me, but just because we are preparing for a war with The Eleven doesn’t mean we can deal the first strike. They haven’t technically declared war against us, so we can’t be the ones to declare it against them.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Jon shot back. “That’s silly.”
“Blame the Treaty of Mercy,” Hugo answered. “It was first drafted as a measure to protect those who wished to seek revenge against rebels. Now it has become a sort of protection for them. We break the treaty and we’ll have The Glory Beyond on our backs and trust me, you don’t want the Glory Beyond on your backs.”
“So you have to wait to be attacked?” Jon scoffed. “You all really are angels.”
“That’s why we are doing enhanced surveillance. I think it’s better to know what they are doing before they do it. We have narrowed their location down to a few spots.”
“No supernatural homing beacon on the bad guys, huh?” Jon asked.
“Nah,” Chance, one of Ryuu’s Luminary Mutare’s said. “Most use high power clogs they acquired during the War. Couldn’t sniff them out if they were a rose in a pile of shit.”
“Language,” Sissy hissed, the freckles across her nose scrunching as she did. “We’re in a church for fuck’s sake.”
“But you just–”
Hugo shook his head before pressing on. “Although we don’t have much to work with, Spencer, Marcus, and Jerome are trying to pinpoint them by their spirit mass patterns, which we all have on file thanks to Penume. It’ll still be hard, so we plan on spitting the teams up and assigning you to a location.” He looked up at the group. “Keane, for now, you’ll be with me until we have Jin Amaris secured.”
Key shook his head. “That mission is complete. She can go to her assigned spot.”
“Okay. So, Keane, you’ll be with Tahir and Rooke.”
The young brunette turned red and started to sputter. “W–why Rooke and Tahir? I thought I would be staying with Sissy?”
The Mutare mentioned rolled her eyes and perched her head against her fist, her bright red hair cropped close and contrasting with the pristine white walls. “Take advantage of the opportunity to go stare in Rooke’s big stupid eyes all night, would you?”
The LMs, sans Keane who looked put out, all broke out into laughter and Key smiled. He felt like he was at home, in a room full of soldiers as they prepared for a big mission. He could feel the adrenaline, the buzz of anticipation.
“What’s that phrase you always say, Jon? The action?” Key asked as he nudged the human. “I haven’t felt this excited for some since…”
“We were stuck in a steampunk prison with four metal murderbots after us?”
“Uh, yeah.” Key laughed. “That.”
CHAPTER
ONE HUNDRED ONE
SPring Street Apartments
Manhattan, New York
Jin woke up gasping for breath, a hand flying over her skin to stop the pain of the fire.
There was no pain. There was no orange glow from the flames. There was no searing heat, no smoke, or the hissing sound of wood bending and warping under the destruction of fire.
There was only a dim room filled with candles. Her room. Her apartment. Her home. “I’m…I’m back?”
Jin felt her hand being squeezed and she looked down. Aiden was next
to her, staring up at the ceiling like he’d never seen one before. Slowly, he turned to her and blinked. “You’re home,” he uttered, his voice rough with emotions.
“How–”
“Welcome, Jin.”
Lined up in front of the windows were a group of people she’d never seen in her life. They were smiling at her, tears glistening in their eyes as they took a step closer to the bed. “We are so ha
ppy you are here,” a woman with soft, knowledgeable eyes said. “Finally, Khione’s destiny has been fulfilled.”
“K–who?”
“Oh, you didn’t get a chance to meet her but she is the reason you are here,” a taller man with a beard said. “With Khione’s passing, we now are yours. The Keepers of The Belief.”
Jin’s brow pinched. “Uh…”
The woman nodded as if she understood what Jin was trying to say. “It’s a lot of take in. We’ll give you some time to get adjusted to this realm again before we explain. A few of your friends have left but there are two who are still downstairs. We will go and wait until you are ready. Then we’ll talk.”
“Can we get food?” a fair one with green eyes said. “Gotta be a place around here that serves organic fries.”
“What the hell are organic fries?” another said. He had hair like Aria, so long the locs flowed down his back.
“Fries made with organic potatoes,” green eyes shot back. He turned and smiled at Jin. “We’ll be back when the sun sets in two days or two weeks or two months or two years. We will hear your call and we will come to you.”
Jin swallowed audibly and nodded, unsure of what they were talking about. “I…look forward to that?”
They filed out of the room, one by one. A woman with short dark hair lingered in the doorway, gazing at her, an emotion crossing her face Jin couldn’t read before she followed the others out of the room and out of the apartment.
Aiden sat up, his jaw still slack. “I can’t believe that worked.”
Jin reacted by shoving his shoulder. “What is wrong with you? You could have died!”
A Third of the Moon and the Stars Struck Page 55
