“Our sister Vaeta fell into the darkness almost a hundred human years ago.”
“What does your sister have to do with Julius? And how did she fall into the darkness?” I seized on the words, not for their ambiguous nature alone, but because the tone of her voice when she said them spoke volumes. “On purpose?” I knew by the stricken look on her face that I’d hit on the truth of Soleil’s fear. Tears with a flickering, fiery shine leaked from her eyes and turned to steam when they met water. On a sob, Soleil pushed away from the table, her passage freeing another flurry of rust-backed paint flakes from its metal surface. Terra followed to soothe her sister while Evian remained seated.
“Vaeta is an airhead. Literally.” Evian’s face hardened. “It’s her element almost as much as her nature. Air is easier to influence than earth, fire, or water. All it took was one blowhard whispering in her ear to push her off course.”
“Don’t talk about her like that.” When Soleil’s tone turned hot, the temperature around us rose a degree or two. “She wasn’t an airhead.”
“Dial it back, Sunspot, you’ll start steaming up the place.”
“Don’t tell me what to do, Pond Scum.” Another degree of heat.
“Enough, you two.” Terra eyed her sisters sternly.
“Back off. Being an Earth Mother doesn’t make you mine.” Soleil retorted, but the temperature dropped back to normal. The smug smile Terra turned my way went unnoticed by her sisters.
“I take it Vaeta had something to do with Julius’ abduction?” I directed my question to Evian.
“According to him, she was the bait.” She spat the words like bitter venom. “In her airy faerie form she resembles a ghost, so all she had to do was let him think she was a lost spirit trying to find her way home. Malachiel used some trick to make himself appear light again, then posed as an authority figure and convinced Julius this was a side mission that required him to take on physical form. Vaeta lured him into one of few places on this plane where he could be physically trapped.”
“But why? What could he possibly gain from taking a newly minted guardian? Julius is still in training.” With me, and that was a decision I couldn’t help but fault the Powers for. I was not the right person or the right angel for the job.
Terra answered, “That’s the big mystery. We have some theories, but you aren’t going to like them.” She paused and I gestured for her to continue. “We think Darkwing—Malachiel—is under orders. There’s a good chance he is nothing more than a minion who works for the real demon behind the attack on Julius.”
Yes, I did get an instant mental image of Malachiel as one of those little yellow bean-looking characters with blue pants and big eyes. Cut me a break, those things are everywhere. If Terra’s theory was correct and Mal wasn’t acting alone, the attack on Julius might not be about getting revenge on me for whatever it was I had done to anger the former angel. While that took some of the burden off my shoulders, it added almost the same weight back, because now I had less to go on in figuring out the motive for kidnapping my trainee. I gestured for Terra to continue.
“Your situation is…” Terra paused to search for a word, “…unique. Which would have made you the perfect candidate for being captured if not for your level of experience. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you have always been an angel unlike Julius and Estelle, who were elevated to that status.” I nodded while my mind raced ahead to get an inkling of where this conversation was headed.
“He made it all too easy, didn’t he? They dangled the bait and he didn’t have the wisdom to see through to the truth.” The sorrow that filled Terra’s eyes was all the answer I needed.
“If there had been more time, I think Darkwing would have tried more subtle means to turn him.”
“Temptation and brainwashing? It would never have worked. Even a newbie like Julius would have seen right through Malachiel; subtle is not his specialty.” Then it hit me. “You think they’re going to use force? To do what?”
“What would happen if an Earthwalker took an angel by force? Would that angel be able to carry the darkness back to your home?”
“You mean Julius? I’d like to see one try something that epically stupid. There has to be a seed of darkness for the Earthwalker to feed on. Only an angel who has chosen to fall is able to foster darkness, so it would be suicide. With fireworks and a candy apple.”
“Right.” Terra shook her head like I had said something stupid and then waited for the light to dawn over me. When it did, the bottom dropped out of my world.
Chapter Five
“Julius isn’t the intended victim, is he? He’s only the bait. I’m the one they’re after.”
It made perfect sense that both a kernel of darkness and one of light rested within this human body. All mortals carry both. Still, what would be the point? If the goal is to infiltrate my home, I explained to the faeries, I should have been the last choice an Earthwalker would want for a vessel because home was the one place, ironically, where they wouldn’t let me go.
“With you as the target, a whole other set of motives springs to mind,” Evian mused. “Gaining control of someone with your knowledge would put a lot of weight on the dark side of the balance. Angels have perfect recall, right?”
The easy answer was yes, which would be the technically correct answer. Angels do have perfect recall. I, however, do not. Three months passed between the time I left Hayward House after the great debacle and when I reappeared in front of a speeding food truck. Three months I could not account for, and another two weeks before I landed here today. I wanted to give Evian the easy answer, but my history with telling lies—even the ones that are technically truths—made the prospect iffy at best.
Soleil saved me from having to test those particular waters by asking an even more awkward question, “What are you really? Half angel? A quarter?” She circled and appraised me with the hint of a sneer playing about her mouth. That the answer was more complicated than a mere matter of degrees was something I preferred to keep to myself, but she asked, and the onus on me forced an answer. The truth.
“I honestly don’t know. By the most convenient definitions, you would consider me fully human. I require food and rest. I have,” a mild shudder ran through me with this admission, “bodily functions that I must attend to on a regular basis. If you cut me, I will bleed and if I bleed enough, I will die like any other mortal.”
“So, hardly any angel at all?” Soleil’s posture changed. Her shoulders dropped as if a heavy weight had just fallen on them.
“Enough.” I pushed away from the table, took a deep breath, said a prayer that felt like it got through, and drew on the seat of all power. A fifty-fifty gamble that worked. The light of creation flowed into my soul with a rush. Everything else fell away—the sisters, my worries, the pain of feeling outcast—as I let the light fill me with purity and reveled in the way it burned away my doubts if only for the briefest of moments.
In a single movement, the three faeries stood and moved back a few steps from the table, as if my shining was too bright for them at close range.
Mouth gaping open, Soleil’s eyes reflected back to me my true form. Hair whiter than snow fell like rain around my shoulders to brush gently over the feathery light that made up my wings. Crystal green eyes stood out large in my pale face. Love for her and for all the creatures of all the worlds swept away every vestige of fear or doubt in the same way my light-filled self had shed the flesh that anchored those emotions. In this place and in this time, I was the angel Galmadriel, a being born of the glory of creation, and nothing more. It felt amazing. It felt like home.
Ever so gradually, I let the power fade and exchanged it for the weight and doubt and pain of returning skin and bone and sinew. Flesh doused my light as surely as water eats flame. I doubted if I could repeat the performance a second time. This had been an answer to my prayer. Nothing more.
The feeling of being separated from home returned even stronger than before.
“Well, okay then.” Terra nudged Soleil aside and returned to her seat. “That answers that, and now we know why you are the target.” A shake of her head dispelled the last of the buzzing she undoubtedly felt in my presence. “The opportunity to corrupt an angel who has not chosen to fall is unprecedented.”
“Mal wanted me to think taking Julius was a personal vendetta to add more fuel to the fire. Getting my emotions riled up makes me more vulnerable.”
“From what Estelle has told us, he underestimated you once and it backfired on him.” Her lips curved into a genuine smile.
I leaned back in my chair, crossed my arms, and said, “There’s a lot of that going around—underestimating me, I mean.” Without dimming her smile, Evian acknowledged the barb in my words with a nod of her head. “I trust you won’t make the same mistake?”
“Your little guardians were right, I do like you.” Evian laughed, though her eyes flicked toward her two sisters as they rejoined us at the table.
“When did you meet Estelle?” My second trainee had been keeping secrets from me, and where was she, anyway?
“Oh, not until this morning. Right before I called…came to find you. Soleil ran into her down by the docks.” A gleam in her eye said there was more to the story. “I think it’s going to be on the news; they’re calling it a solar flare.”
“You mean Soleil literally ran into her?”
Evian grinned her answer then elaborated, “They collided over the bay and, between their combined power and Estelle’s shocked outburst, took out cellular and Internet service for half an hour over a ten block radius.” When she saw my stricken look, she said, “Estelle’s perfectly fine. She just had to get out of sight until she stopped glowing. I think she got quite a charge out of the experience.”
Under normal conditions, undirected angel energy has no effect on electronics. Under duress, though, all bets are off. My first few weeks of being semi-human had cost my former employer more than a few headaches when I fouled up the cash register, her car stereo, and her GPS. The cell phone in my pocket hadn’t fared any better, and I still maintain it was this phenomenon and not ineptness in the kitchen that made me produce such lousy coffee. I must be settling into my new skin well enough that the little cell phone had stopped freaking out around me. Strike worrying about that off my To Do list.
Leave it to Estelle to collide with the only other supernatural being in a mile-wide area. The corners of my mouth twitched a little.
“Does that mean you’ll help us? If we help you, I mean.” Soleil flashed me a hint of Bambi eyes while Terra’s face gave away nothing of her thoughts. A sudden spark of insight showed me how heavily Soleil’s hopes were pinned on mounting a side mission to pull her sister from the darkness at the same time I busted Julius out of Malachiel’s prison.
When I felt the sudden ping of conviction that had always preceded an assignment from on high, I stilled to make sure I wasn’t just mistaking my own desire to help for an actual directive. The ping came again with an electric pulse and I knew if more than a minute or two went by without me communicating my agreement, the next jolt would be harder. My erstwhile bosses didn’t mess around.
The pause lengthened while I rifled through the catalog of history stored in my head for a time when a guardian angel had ever been assigned to assist a fae and came up empty. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised at the offbeat assignment, given my unique position.
“Yes, I’ll help.” A sigh escaped while I sent a mental note homeward and received the bare minimum response—another tiny ping. It still hurt to be ignored. Funny they could hear me just fine when I accepted an assignment, though. Chances were good the headache I’d been battling was going to make its way to a lower part of my body before this was all over. Was there a pill for that?
I let the three of them have a moment to bask in the triumph of getting me on their side before I lowered the boom. “But only if you agree to some stipulations.” Masks of wariness fell over their faces. An eternity of political intrigue among the fae had honed their ability to prevaricate to a fine edge. While bound to speak it, truth, to them, is not an absolute, but is measured in degrees of need to know so tiny that a statement of irrefutable fact could have a lie of omission buried at the heart of it. Refusal of an assignment was not an option if I wanted to remain a guardian in good standing, but who was I kidding? That ship was already bounding across the sea—and not on her maiden voyage, either. Becoming earthbound had turned me into an outcast anyway, so if anything these faeries had to say posed more of a problem than I wanted to deal with, the Powers That Be could go scratch.
I would still find and rescue Julius, but on my terms, and without being bound to helping a devious faerie who might have chosen darkness.
“Swear an oath that you will answer any question I ask of you to the fullest extent of the truth.”
To Evian’s frowning surprise, I deadpanned, “Underestimating me already? Your reputation for treacherous speech is well known. It’s not my first time dealing with someone from the fae lands.” Direct eye contact belied any humor in my words and Evian stood to swear her oath.
Laying her fingertips across my wrist, she avowed to be truthful with me. The tingle of her honesty prickled the skin along my arms and up my spine. Each sister took her turn. By the time Terra begrudgingly promised honesty, my skin felt like a thousand spiders danced across it.
“First question, Why the sudden effort to save your sister after a hundred years of leaving her to her own choice?”
“Circumstances have changed.” Terra snapped out her answer and earned a hard look from me.
One more terse comment that left me unenlightened and I was going to angel out and take my chances getting back to the surface. Getting wet wouldn’t kill me and the sooner I was out of here, the sooner I could find a way to free Julius on my own.
Soleil nudged Terra with a sharp elbow. “Vaeta told Julius she had been coerced into helping Malachiel capture him.”
“Do you believe that?” I let my eyes rest on Evian since she was the one who had gone to the effort of bringing me here in the first place.
“Him? Yes. He faithfully repeated everything she asked him to say.” Evian focused on the bowl in the center of the table, repeated the gesture that was currently keeping me dry, and leaned over to blow gently across the mirrored surface.
Amid the ripples rose a hazy image of Julius standing in the shadows of what looked to me like the exterior of an abandoned building. He looked haggard, but whole.
“I have a message for Evian from Vaeta; tell my sisters I need them.” He whispered as the moment replayed in the watery scrying mirror. “Her words have the ring of truth, and if not for her I would not have been able to contact you. Even if you can’t help me, you should find a way to free her from the darkness. Find the earthbound angel. Tell her…” Playback cut off there and began again.
“I have no reason to doubt the conviction of his words to me. Hers to him are another kettle of carp. She always was the best of us at creative truth-telling.”
The phrase was incredibly apt and if Vaeta had the means to lie well enough to convince Julius of her veracity, the situation was more dangerous than he knew. “Define kettle of carp.” If helping him meant helping her, I needed to know what I might be up against.
“Open to different interpretations. She could have meant that she intended to drag us into the darkness with her.” Evian made a flicking motion with her hand and Julius’ voice faded into silence.
“Why don’t you just use that,” I waved toward the bowl, “to contact her? Doesn’t it work both ways?”
“You’re familiar with astrology?” It seemed an odd question, but I nodded. “Aquarius—it’s an air sign that means water bringer and is also one of Vaeta’s names.”
Evian’s explanation seemed to be missing some parts—like all the parts that actually explained anything, so I waved my hand in a circular motion to indicate I needed to hear more.
“
Our two elements have an affinity with each other. Air can carry water, so Vaeta enclosed the moment you’ve just seen along with the rest of Julius’ message in a series of bubbles and sent them here to me. Not the best method of contact and it works only in one direction, but effective for communicating across great distances. By our laws, if she stays away from faerie for a hundred years, she can never return. While our kind doesn’t recognize free will to the same depth yours does, we do try to respect the right to choose, and as long as we were convinced it was her choice to stay, we were willing to accept her being lost to us. But, if she was coerced and is in need of rescue, we’ll risk all to save her.” Evian’s words felt like truth.
“If Julius is being held in the dark realm, I’m not sure how much help I will be. For one, I am an angel. If I put so much as a toe into the underworld…well, I’m not sure exactly what would happen, but think catastrophic consequences. And for two, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m stuck in physical form. Permanently. The only way I can get into the dark realm is to choose to go there when I die.” So I’m still a little bitter. Sue me.
Terra gave me a look that said she was beginning to doubt my level of intelligence before pointing out the obvious, “If Julius has not fallen, and neither has he suffered catastrophic consequences, clearly he is not trapped in the dark world.”
There was a flaw in that logic that had me pinching the bridge of my nose to relieve the pressure in my head. “You’re telling me that Julius is trapped in this world while Vaeta remains in the dark world, and the two of them are able to interact closely enough with each other to blow bubbles.” The set looks on all three faces hinted that I had just hit upon the thing none of them wanted to mention. “The only way that scenario is possible is if the two of them are in a nexus.”
A door between worlds.
Evian’s resigned nod gave me all the confirmation I needed. This mess was getting complicated. The Fringe, an area where two worlds came together, was a place of unpredictability. A nexus was the Fringe on steroids. In order for a portal leading to many worlds to exist, the physical and metaphysical laws for each world must be blended at the meeting point to anchor the portal. Even the most stable nexus had the potential for chaos.
Earthbound Wings: An Earthbound Novel (The Psychic Seasons Series Book 6) Page 3
