“Who are the powers sending in to help? Zekiel’s good under pressure, and he has experience with taking on the darkness.” Lamiel’s face went so still it felt like looking at a mask.
“Zekiel is on assignment elsewhere.” The long pause between my question and his answer told me more than the words alone.
“No one is coming, are they? You and the rest of the Powers have decided to cut their losses and throw Julius to the wolves.” To his credit, Lamiel had the grace to look down in shame. “Just like they did with me. Cowards.”
Blood thrummed toward my head with pounding force behind the rage building up inside me. ”Thanks for all your help, Lamiel.” Sarcasm dripped like sweet honey from my tongue and if strong emotions had carried physical power behind them, I think the force of my anger would have made his head explode. I felt the savage sneer curl my lip, narrow my eyes. “Thanks for nothing, Lamiel. I’ll show myself out.”
“Wait.” The inside of the tent lit with the sudden glow of Lamiel’s will springing to life. He lifted one finger, circled it with such a precise movement, it was more a suggestion than an actual gesture. I felt a heaviness fall over the two of us. “Listen carefully. All is not lost. You must trust that never will you walk alone.”
“Spare me the platitudes. Next you’ll be telling me it’s always darkest before the dawn.”
“Isn’t it? You’ll need to play to your strengths,” he gave me a pointed look, “your humanity and your allies will see you through.” Even now, his nostrils flared at the mention of my group of friends. “Trust your instincts; they’ve taken you this far. You are in a unique position to take action in an area where we, your brethren, cannot tread nor can we openly supply support. There is more at play than you understand, and I regret that I cannot provide more illumination. Trust that you are not forsaken.”
He could have sprouted a second head and I would have been less surprised. It sounded like he had faith in me.
Speaking rapidly now, Lamiel added, “None of this is coincidence. You must have been chosen for this duty, no matter the evidence to the contrary. And for good reason. Look for Julius in the place where all power is equal. If you find him before the full moon rises, all will be well. You have a weapon Malachiel cannot fight, because he does not truly understand loyalty. And for the love of the almighty, make better choices this time.” Eyes burning into mine, Lamiel dispelled the shroud of silence, and with a sound like the ringing of a bell, was gone.
Slumping back in my chair, I drummed fingers on the table and tried to make sense of his warning—if that’s what it was. Time pressed in on me, pregnant with foreboding. My trainee was in more trouble than I had thought, and each minute brought him closer to being beyond saving.
I took stock. I had no plan, no idea where to look for the place where all power was equal, the added burden of a wayward faerie, and a crew that consisted of people I’d prefer to protect rather than toss into the middle of an attempted coup. Saving Julius was turning out to be something of a fool’s errand.
Just call me the Fool.
Chapter Fourteen
Outside the tent, Leith leaned indolently against the side of a wagon that looked like it had come straight off the set of a movie about gypsies. A green roof arched over side panels painted in once-bright colors now faded to pastel hues. Patterned curtains decorated a pair of rounded windows. Framed by the deep blue-green trimmed door stood the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Considering my age, that said a lot about the woman’s beauty. Raven black hair fell in waves well past a nipped-in waist, and contrasted with the dusky blush of her cheeks. Ruby lips pouted under the pert nose she was currently using to look down on me with. She watched Leith with possessive eyes and an aggressive stance.
“Is this the broken angel?” The words were a sneer delivered in a language a hundred years dead.
“Better broken than twisted,” I replied in kind and watched those expressive eyes darken from deep brown to black under their fringe of thick and dusky lashes. Her pout turned to a hard smile and I got a grudging nod for speaking in her mother tongue.
Her haughty glance raked me up and down in that way catty women use to wreck another woman’s confidence. It didn’t work on me. At all.
“Adriel, this is Bianca.” Leith’s lazy drawl failed to hide amusement at my expense as Bianca preened. I got the impression she thought hearing her name would mean something to me, and when my expression remained remote and polite as I nodded her way, her face darkened.
“Nice to meet you.” I took a step toward her with my hand held out in greeting. Bianca navigated the steps with all the grace of cat in predator mode, grasped my outstretched hand and whispered, “You’re too tame to hold his attention long.”
I flinched. Not at her aggression, but at my own. Getting or keeping Leith’s attention had never been part of my mission, and yet a spark of something akin to jealousy raged dangerously close to the surface. A little tingle of power ran down my arm to shiver through the tenuous contact, and this time it was Bianca who flinched and tried to pull away. Teach her a lesson, a voice in my head commanded. Give her a good jolt. That voice had become a lot more vocal lately. I’d have to think about the implications of that at a later date.
“Be nice, Bianca.” The warning interrupted my train of thought and was delivered with an air of indulgence from Leith, then met with a sniff and a whirl of patterned cloth as Bianca reentered the wagon and slammed the door hard enough to set the wagon’s springs creaking.
Beckoning to me, Leith held out a hand, which I ignored for a long beat. He met my steady gaze with a smirk, then turned toward the midway and left me standing there without a backward glance. I contemplated standing still until he was gone.
Instead, I dawdled along behind him and examined my hostile reaction to Bianca’s challenge. An eternity spent in the service of humans and I had never realized how intense was the pressure of temptation they battled. No wonder free will was such a big deal. Concentrating on the nature of my human side’s baser instincts let me ignore, at least for a few minutes, the cause for them.
Jealousy. Really?
An expensive emotion and one I could ill afford given my dual nature and ethical responsibilities. As long as the tiniest smidgen of angel remained in me, having a relationship with a man would be just wrong. All kinds of wrong.
Leith is more than just a man. By that token, maybe he didn’t count.
As if he knew I was thinking about him, he slowed until I caught up and we continued walking side by side.
I pushed the thought far away into the deepest reaches of my psyche before it posed more temptation than I could handle. Even the most fleeting of accidental touches, like when his arm brushed against mine as we walked, was enough to transform my pulse into a raging beast with a craving for more. He excited me in ways I only understood from a million lifetimes of watching people, but had never experienced for myself. I wanted more. Almost as much as I wanted to breathe, and all the while knowing more had as much potential to bring me life as it did to be the death of me.
“Adriel.”
Leith’s voice penetrated my thoughts with the impatience of someone who was becoming tired of repeating himself.
“Wake up.” His fingers snapped just ahead of my nose.
“What?”
“We’re here.”
“We are?” I looked up to see that we were standing in front of the entrance to the mirrored depths of the Funhouse. “You’re joking. Tell me you’re joking.”
A wide grin split Leith’s face. “You’re not claustrophobic are you?”
“Of course not.” Okay, maybe a little, but only because small places weren’t built for someone with wings. What? My wings are there even if you can’t see them. Confined spaces make my back twinge with the effort of keeping them tucked tightly enough not to catch on anything. Even when they’re tucked away, I feel them like phantoms. According to Amethyst, people with tall auras feel uncomfortable in low-ceilin
ged rooms, so I might not be totally crazy. “Lead on.”
Bare-bulb carnival lights lined the pathways between mirrors, their reflections creating a disco-ball effect as they repeated from one side to the next. Dust lay thick along the edges of the path Leith led me down, his steps following no deviation. He knew exactly where he was going.
Two minutes in, I knew this was no regular funhouse attraction. Amid the standard mirrors that warped my shape from tall and thin to short and wide, were some that offered more. I passed a parade of the various bodies I have taken on in the course of my guardian angelship. Goth girl with her jet-black hair and makeup morphed into a plain-looking woman in her mid-forties who peered over a pair of half-rimmed glasses. A little girl with pigtails and overalls grew into a grizzled woman with a kindly face. Leith sped up his pace and the next image I saw was a weary-eyed woman covered in scars and tattoos that quickly altered into fifties housewife complete with bouffant and twinset.
We were zigzagging down the last series of rows before it occurred to me that looking at Leith’s images might be enlightening. Without seeming to, I sped up just enough to catch a glimpse. At first I thought the phenomenon only worked on angels because Leith looked exactly the same until, in the next to last mirror, I noticed a slight difference. His eyes glowed with some kind of inner fire. His magic? Maybe. I filed the image away to think about it later.
Trying to see his inner persona had distracted me from realizing that even as I sped up my steps, Leith had done the same, and by now we were right on the edge of running. The path widened out and the mirrors on either side turned to clear glass that showed the sides of a long tunnel.
“Hurry or we won’t make it.” Leith grabbed my arm and broke into a dead sprint. My long legs had no trouble matching his pace as we raced for the doorway ahead of us. I chanced a single glance back and saw that behind us, the lights set to illuminate the path were dimming, one after the other. If we didn’t hurry, when the last one went out we would be completely in the dark.
That final minute stretched out long amid the sound of our pounding feet and labored breathing. We hit the end of the line just ahead of the fading light and my heart dropped like a stone. It was a dead end. I balked, but Leith’s inexorable grip pulled me forward on a collision course with a thick glass wall separating us from the mouth and the light at the end of the tunnel.
We hit the glass at full tilt and, to my amazement, slid right through with nothing more than a faint tingling sensation to mark its passing. The momentum carried us into watery blue daylight and we pounded a fair way down the cobbled street before we lost momentum and slowed to a walk.
“Where are we?” Somewhere I probably wasn’t supposed to be without express permission from the Powers.
“Does it look like Kansas, Toto?” If the grin was supposed to soften the mocking tone of his voice, or worse, be considered charming, it failed harder than Pepsi Free.
“Ha, so funny I forgot to laugh. Where are we?” Thatch-roofed cottages with stucco walls in faded blues, pinks, and yellows lined both sides of a narrow thoroughfare.
“Plausible deniability, Adriel. If you don’t know, you never have to admit to being here. Fifteen minutes is all we need. You still have the item with you, right?”
I pulled the telescoping cane out of my pack and held it out for him to see. “Of course.”
“Come on, then. Let’s get this done.” He started off down the deserted street and, wondering where all the people were, I followed. One thing was for certain, we were not in any part of the mortal world where I had ever been before, and since there was no such place it stood to reason that we were in another world entirely.
At the fourth cottage on the right, Leith paused and cast a sober look at me. “You should probably let me do the talking. Faldor can be a bit touchy sometimes. And whatever you do, don’t stare at his nose. He’s sensitive.”
“Okay.” I shrugged and followed him through the door. The charming cottage-style exterior could not have been more different from the cave-like interior of the house. Directly opposite the door was a fireplace large enough for me to stand up in without fear of knocking my head against the flue. The soot from a thousand fires darkened the walls in an ombré effect that started out black near the cavernous hearth and lightened to a steel gray around the entrance door.
Hanging over the fireplace was the trophy head of an animal I couldn’t quite identify. The best I can do is say it looked like Howdy Doody and a buffalo had a baby. Shaggy ginger fur covered a narrow, sloped forehead that really didn’t go with human-shaped ears the size of dessert plates and short horns that curled out low on either side of a lightly-furred face. It even had freckles. Fascinated, I looked around the room a bit more.
Bunches of herbs dangled from heavy wooden rafters and perfumed the air with pungent, earthy scents. I counted fifteen different sizes of mortar and pestles arranged in tiered shelves to my right. The shelves looked like they had been built by someone who refused to read the directions because from where I stood, each one was slightly askew.
A bank of mismatched cabinet doors ranged around the room leaving only space for the fireplace and a doorway that led to what I assumed was a sleeping area beyond. A scarred table with a thick top that had been fashioned from a single slab of wood took up most of the room’s center. Half the table was covered with tightly stoppered bottles full of liquids of various colors, several of which glowed with their own light.
“Faldor,” Leith roared, “Haul your sorry carcass out here. You have guests.”
“Smooth,” I commented dryly and received a gently-placed elbow in my side as a response.
“You bring me what I asked for?” The voice that emerged from the back of the cottage was deep with an accent that sounded faintly British. “I don’t work for free.”
From some hidden pocket, Leith pulled out two bottles of pale amber liquid and set them on the table hard enough for the clinking sound to carry through the doorway. Beer? The wizard worked for beer.
Faldor strode through the door and despite my assurance to Leith, I couldn’t help but stare at his completely unremarkable nose for a few seconds. He returned my perusal with a sardonically-raised brow.
“You have got to stop doing that.” Faldor warned Leith with a cheerful grin.
Apparently Leith’s sense of humor had stopped maturing somewhere around age twelve. Faldor was made to blend into a crowd of bankers. Average height and build with mouse brown hair. Wire rimmed glasses perched on a nose that would not draw a second look. The only thing that stood out in his face was the merry twinkle in his eyes.
“He does this every time he brings someone here.”
Beside me, Leith let out a barking laugh. “You should see your face.”
“You should grow up.” I extended my hand to Faldor and said, “I am Adriel, pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise.” Faldor ignored my outstretched hand—I was beginning to sense a trend; no one wants to shake my hand—traded an oblique look with Leith, and gestured toward one of the chairs circling the big table. “Did you bring the item?” He reached over to twist the top off one of the bottles and as he did, he turned it so I could see the label. Cream soda. Tipping up the bottle, he swallowed the entire contents in three big gulps, belched, and wiped a hand over his mouth. I bit my lip to hold back a smile.
Reaching over my shoulder, I pulled the compacted walking stick from the side pocket of my pack. With a flick of the wrist, two hidden sections telescoped into place and all it took was a twist to lock them. I laid the cane on the table.
“Will this work?”
Faldor lowered a hand to hover over the cane and closed his eyes.
“Hmm. Yes. A strong personality. Stubborn. Creative. Passionate. This will do nicely. Give me a minute to compose the proper ingredients.”
Leith pulled two more bottles from another secreted pocket and Faldor’s grin widened. “Ah, sweet nectar.” A lascivious look plastered itself to his face
and he reached for another bottle.
“Spell first, drink after,” with a quick hand, Leith slid all three out of reach and earned himself a dirty look, but Faldor nodded agreement and began to bustle about the room pulling from various shelves a series of ingredients.
A stone mortar and pestle landed on the table in front of me along with a fistful of herbs.
“Grind those to paste,” Faldor handed me a bottle full of pink liquid. “Use this. Just enough, you’ll know when it’s right.” He assumed a lot, but I set to with a willing hand. When I cracked the seal on the bottle, the scent reminded me of the flowers in the fields back home. A homesick tear trembled on my lashes until I dashed it away. There was no use in crying over what I could not control.
Faldor grabbed the mortar and dumped the contents into a small cauldron that swung on an arm to suspend it over the fire. I watched with fascination as he muttered to himself while selecting items to add. A gallon of water followed the herb paste into the pot and then, I swear to you, an old shoe.
“For distance,” the wizard announced.
A pencil landed in the pot with a rattle as it hit the sides. Faldor had tossed it from atop a short stepladder. Almost faster than my eye could track, he crossed the room to open another cabinet and pull out an old battered compass. “For knowledge and direction. And this last is to bind the spell to you.” On his way back past the table, he seized several of my hairs and yanked them out of my head.
“Ow.” It popped out before I could bite down on the exclamation.
The hairs went into the pot and a puff of smoke rose from its depths. Faldor seized the cane from the table, ran it through the pink and roiling cloud.
“Quaere Veritatem,” Seek truth, Faldor intoned three times. The cane lit up pink for a moment before returning to normal. He handed it back to me. “It’s a single use spell that will work across worlds and will last for no more than three hours. Speak the owner’s name three times to trigger the spell. I wish you luck,” and with a smooth motion, Faldor snatched a second bottle of cream soda from the table, popped the top, and slugged it down. When he set the empty container back on the table, it was with wobbly hands. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear he was drunk.
Earthbound Wings: An Earthbound Novel (The Psychic Seasons Series Book 6) Page 9
