by Karen Duvall
Bastard. He’d screwed me over. Well, not entirely, because I was now one step closer to freedom than I’d been an hour ago. Heart heavy with losing my bargaining edge, I glanced at the letter in my lap and slipped it slowly from its envelope.
four
“I’LL KNOW IF YOU’RE LYING,” GAVIN TOLD ME, his snake eyes trained on my face. He scrutinized my lip movements, eye blinks, even the way I worked the muscles in my jaw. I did a mental eye-roll. This was so typical, and so totally my fault. I’d never managed to perfect my poker face, and now I had no choice but to read aloud my mother’s letter, word for word.
My mother hadn’t written it in cursive. In fact, the characters were printed in Sanskrit that I’d have to translate. There was no salutation, so her note could have been to anyone. My throat swelled with a sadness I couldn’t express in front of Gavin. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. I held back a sigh while noting how few words there were on the page. Was this all she had to say to her daughter?
“Get on with it, Chalice.” Gavin’s lips thinned into that angry line I knew so well. His stiff posture revealed a tension he usually kept hidden. It was rare that I ever had something he wanted this badly.
I let out a breath and scanned the short message that made no sense. “Find the Fallen and you’ll find your father.” I glanced up to see Gavin’s eyes widen, his lips curling into a bare smile. He was obviously pleased to hear whatever this cryptic note implied.
“I don’t get it,” I said, disappointed.
“I’d always suspected, but never knew for sure.” He stood and began to pace. He couldn’t think without moving. “Your father was an angel. That’s why you are the way you are, as well as your mother, and her mother, and all the Hatchet Knights before her. Now we can trace it back to how it first started.”
My breathing hitched. Though Gavin once told me I was a descendant of the Hatchet Knights, an order of female knights who’d fought in the Crusades nearly a thousand years ago, my heritage was only a point of personal pride. I used to think the knights were extinct and until my experience holding the saint’s hand, having ancestors meant nothing to me. Now I hear I’d been fathered by an angel? I hadn’t given much thought to who my father really was. It could have been the gardener or the milkman for all I cared, but what mattered to me is that he had hurt my mother. Abandoned her. Let her die alone. But a fallen angel? My religious studies at the monastery came flooding back to me. The only Fallen I knew of were… “That’s impossible,” I said, my heart beating in my throat. “The Fallen are demons.”
There was a bounce to Gavin’s step as he quickened his pace. “Not all of them. Besides, they didn’t start out that way. Committing sin is what makes an angel fall from grace. And it only takes one sin for that to happen. ‘Fornication is a sin against God. Sin is transgression of the law of God.’ Book of John, chapter three, verse four.”
Brave words from someone who sinned on a daily basis, but to Gavin the Bible was just a reference book, not a religious icon. I shook my head, refusing to believe an angel could mate with a human. Fallen or not, there was no way an angel had anything to do with procreating me; I was about as far from angelic as anyone could get. Despite my denial, my heart raced and my mouth went dry.
I wouldn’t let my emotions get the best of me in front of Gavin. So I switched my train of thought to something more academic. I knew about angels and demons, demonology having been an important part of my training as a thief. I’d met a few demons, even had one as a teacher, but I hadn’t had the pleasure of an angel’s company. Pixies, faeries, trolls, elves, among other fey folk, were common within the circle of influence I’d been forced into. Other than what I’d read in the Book of Enoch, I questioned the existence of angels because I’d never seen one. And the Fallen? Nothing but a myth. My mother’s message had to be code for something else.
“There must be more in Felicia’s letter,” Gavin said, stopping midpace to stare at me. “Finish reading.”
I slumped back on the couch and shook my head. “I swear that’s all it says.”
He scrutinized me for a second and jerked a nod.
I checked the letter again, noticing something scribbled at the bottom, but it wasn’t a word. It was a drawing. Gavin noticed the change in my expression because his eyes grew hard. “So there is more.”
I considered lying, but that would be futile. He’d catch it without even trying. My mother’s drawing looked like a doodle, some thoughtless strokes of ink as if she tested its potency on the paper. But the drawing was symmetrical and looked suspiciously like a divination of runes.
“I think she drew rune stones,” I told Gavin, tracing the design with my finger. I knew the symbolism of runes from my studies in European art history. Some scholars believed they originated from the Turkish alphabet, others thought Greek or Roman. Regardless of how the system got started, its purpose was to foretell the future. “It’s a spread of the four elements.”
“Earth, fire, water and air.” Gavin resumed his pacing, still with his eyes trained on me. “She must have been divining something for you. What symbols did she use?”
I sucked in my lower lip and bit down, thinking. I realized that I could tell him the truth and lie at the same time. Would he know which was which? “Harvest, Wisdom, Dice Cup and Thorn,” I said, listing the signs out of order. I bit my lip harder and tasted blood.
Gavin rushed to his desk and snatched up a notepad and pencil, thrusting both in my face. “Draw it for me.”
I sketched the four runes my mother had drawn, only I reversed their order. This would affect the divination’s meaning and I had no idea how. I wasn’t a fortune teller. I’d have to find out the real meaning behind my mother’s message some other way.
I held my breath when I handed Gavin the notepad.
He grabbed it from me and, grinning, he said to the drawing, “You thought you were so clever, didn’t you, Felicia?”
Damn. What had I done? “What does it mean?”
“I thought you knew how to interpret the runes.” He raised his brows and gave me one of his superior looks. But he was wrong. I knew the correct order of my mother’s runes, I just didn’t know what it meant. “It’s a warning. This tableau tells me the silver veil is closed to the Fallen’s spawn.”
Which would be me, if my father was a fallen angel. But there was no such thing. My mother’s message was symbolic, not literal. Any skeptic would recognize that, but because Gavin was a sorcerer, he couldn’t. He was all about spells and rituals; science be damned. My mind, on the other hand, was open to anything I could see, touch or smell, whether it be magic or science. I’d learned long ago how to adapt to the world I’d been thrown into. He’d said the silver veil, which was rumored to be the entrance to the first and lowest level of the seventh heaven. Except there was no documented proof the plane existed. Kind of like the Fallen. My, what a coincidence.
“The Fallen don’t exist,” I said. “The concept is religious dogma.” If all I had to go on were predictions and visions, what other conclusion could there be? Still, the very idea gave me a chill. My father, a fallen angel? “Look, you know as well as I do that angels are supposed to be pure spirit. So if they’re not flesh and blood, there’s no way an angel could fornicate—”
“Oh, they’re flesh and blood, all right,” Gavin said with a knowing smirk. “Out of the twelve orders of angelic beings, the lower orders can manifest as human if they want to. I’m guessing your father was a guardian of the twelfth order, the Arelim.”
I had to laugh. That was ridiculous. “You mean like a guardian angel?”
“Exactly.” He folded his arms and the black silk of his robe slid back to reveal flesh so pale I could see a thread of purple vein through the surface. “Even I used to have one.”
“No way.”
“Well, not now, no. I had it killed a number of years ago. I used it to bargain with a demon.”
That didn’t surprise me, but it didn’t convince me, either
.
He cleared his throat. “But that’s neither here nor there. Point is, your father was more than likely a guardian angel, and I wager he had belonged to your mother.”
Gavin returned to his chair and sank into it with a flourish. Heaving a sigh like the weight of the world had just risen off his shoulders, he said, “I know what we need to do.”
And by “we” he meant to include me. Which was okay because I had vital information now. I had a rune divination I needed interpreted, which might help me gain my freedom somehow. A thrill coursed through me that I had to hide. This felt right to me, as if I could really make it happen. Except like almost everything in my life, it would come at a price.
Why had Gavin waited until now to give me my mother’s note? What was so special about today as opposed to last month, or last year? He said I hadn’t been ready until now. I think it had something to do with me reaching my breaking point today. I’d become more of a handful. Change was in the air.
“There’s someone I need you to see,” Gavin said, hands steepled, the tips of his index fingers touching his lips. “Someone very special who never talks to anyone, but I know she’ll talk to you.”
I couldn’t help being wary. “Who is she?”
“You know her.” He tapped his mouth again. “In fact, you two just met. She’s the original owner of that hand you were supposed to bring me.”
That should have stunned me, but instead it made sense in an odd, behind-the-looking-glass kind of way. The connection I’d made with the saint’s hand is what resonated for me. The woman still existed, just not in the usual way. “I thought she was dead.”
He tilted his head left to right. “Not completely. All that’s left of her now is her head. Her other body parts were parceled off centuries ago. We’ll find them eventually.”
“So where is she?”
“Denver.”
“Colorado?”
“Saint Geraldine, or what’s left of her, is entombed at the Cathedral Basilica there. We had her moved when it became too dangerous to keep her at the Sultan Ahmed Mosque in Istanbul. The political unrest in the Middle East is such an inconvenience.” He grimaced as if tasting something sour. “The cathedral is a beautiful church built by one of our own members over a century ago. You’ll be impressed.”
Dizzy with anticipation, I tried to be the compliant thief Gavin expected. “So Denver is where you’re sending me next.”
His grin tilted one corner of his mouth. “Saint Geraldine may be the only one who can help us find your father.”
Autumn was damn cold in Denver. I was thinking this while standing on the sidewalk outside the Vyantara’s Father house in Denver’s warehouse district. I arched my back to stare up at the redbrick building that used to be a factory. It looked abandoned now, though I knew a modest number of sorcerers, witches and other magic users resided within. Three angry-looking effigies of gargoyles glared down at me from stone shelves just below the roofline. I wondered if they’d ever been alive. Probably, considering the rare death of a gargoyle rendered it in stone.
A gust of wind blew a flurry of fallen leaves around my ankles and I stiffened. Was it wind, or something else? I’d never visited the American Fatherhouse before, but I’d been to a few in other countries. My trips abroad, which were always to steal a magical object coveted by the Vyantara, never lasted but a day or two since I couldn’t be away from Shui any longer than that. It took only one day at a Fatherhouse to feed an eon’s worth of nightmares. If it was supernatural, it likely lived in or around a Vyantara Fatherhouse.
I removed one nose filter and sniffed the air. An animal stench permeated the night, mostly fecal, and the stale odor hinted at its age. Must have been a stockyard nearby years ago, but not anymore.
Peering up at the stone gargoyles, I saw shadowy silhouettes that skulked around them and pulsed with whatever darkness still smoldered inside the dead creatures’ corpses.
Slipping out one of my contacts, I could see that energies of the night, particularly this close to the magic wielders inside, coalesced in clusters of shapeless shadows. A few flickered with light, meaning life still seethed within them. I fingered the bottle of salt water I habitually carried to nullify curses and hexes. The water didn’t always work, but I had my Balisong as backup. If it breathed, it could bleed.
“Welcome, Chalice.”
I spun around, grabbing my knife from the sheath I’d strapped between my shoulder blades. Crouching low, I put my weight on my back leg, ready to leap at my assailant head-on. I flicked the blade open and held it in my left hand, my right palm flat against the pommel.
Having only one contact lens in place skewed my vision. It was a lot like looking through a kaleidoscope, the images fragmented, and my depth perception wobbled. The effect left me queasy.
The large person standing before me—at least I think it was a person, though it could have been a troll—took a quick step back and held both arms up as if to ward me off.
“Hey,” its surprised voice said. “I’m only the welcoming committee, the Vyantara’s housemother. Truce?”
I closed my unprotected eye and studied this committee of one. It was definitely female and she wore a colorful but shapeless caftan, the huge dress bulging in all the right and wrong places. Her pale face held wide, innocent eyes, and she had a Kewpie-doll mouth that she pursed as if to whistle or blow me a kiss. I lowered my knife and she released a breath that made her sizable bosom deflate to more normal proportions. Her hand fluttered against her chest and she blinked while fanning herself with a handkerchief that seemed to have materialized out of thin air. “Dear me, child. You gave me a scare.”
“Sorry.” I closed the knife and slipped it back in its sheath, my heart still pounding with the surge of adrenaline. “You startled me.”
“Your father mentioned you were skittish,” she said, eyeing me up and down. “But he didn’t tell me you weren’t much bigger than a pixie.”
I ignored the comment, but not the reference. “Gavin isn’t my father,” I said curtly, needing to get that straight right away. “He kidnapped me and I’ve been his slave ever since.” I waited for her reaction.
She nodded, her forehead creased with concern. “How awful.” Her gaze wandered to the bag at the curb. “Your luggage?” She turned her back on me and waddled over to snatch up the bag like it weighed no more than a loaf of bread. As if I hadn’t just confessed the most horrendous events of my life, she said casually, “Let’s get you settled in your room, shall we? And you can tell me all about the kidnapping and any other nastiness you’ve been forced to endure, hmm?”
Like I’d willingly share anything personal with the Vyantara. What I just told her was a memorized response I had perfected in my teens. I’d taught myself to bleed the emotion out of it so that it couldn’t be used against me. Getting it all out in the open was my best defense against inquisitors looking for my weak spots.
Halfway to the stairs that led to the front door, she spun around with her right hand extended. “For goodness’s sake, where are my manners? I’m Zeppelin, but please call me Zee.”
I curled my smallish hand around her massive paw, and quickly let go. I didn’t like touching people if I could help it. Since I couldn’t wear a body glove 24/7, my daily analgesic lotion usually sufficed, but not always. Direct contact with people sometimes gave me a rash. It was a psychosomatic response. I had trust issues.
“Has Shui arrived yet?” I asked, before following her up the stairs.
“Trains can’t travel as fast as jets, dear,” she said over her shoulder. “I expect he’ll be here tomorrow. And so will your fa… Sorry. I mean so will Gavin Heinrich.”
I’d much rather Shui fly here under his own steam because he’d get here faster. But despite the wings, gargoyles were not strong flyers. They could travel short distances of up to five miles without any trouble, but anything longer was too exhausting for them. They were bottom heavy, or at least Shui was.
Once up the ste
ps, I crossed the threshold into the massive building and, heaving in a shallow breath, I felt a surge of panic when an invisible weight squeezed my lungs. I coughed and tossed Zee a puzzled look.
She nodded. “Stay calm and give yourself a minute to acclimate. I realize how overwhelming it is to be in the presence of so much magic all at once, but it’s temporary. I promise.”
I wasn’t so sure, but my breaths soon became less labored, and I exhaled in relief. “What just happened?”
“Think of the Fatherhouse as a pressure chamber of supernatural energy.” She waved a hand at the high ceilings, then at all the filled cases and shelves artfully arranged throughout the enormous room we’d just entered. It looked like a museum. “We’re surrounded by curses and charms, not to mention a few entities encased in some of these objects. That’s a lot of power all in one place.”
“I hope you keep it well contained.” I imagined the pentup energy as a bomb ready to explode. The other Fatherhouses I’d visited hadn’t been nearly as ominous as this one, but at least six months had passed since I had stayed at the house in Switzerland. Could be that all Fatherhouses were like this one now. That was a disturbing thought.
Zee shrugged like it was no big deal. “Wards. They keep the energy in and everything else out. There’s one at every door and at each window upstairs.” Her smile made her pudgy cheeks bulge. “You have nothing to worry about, dear. Come, let me show you your room. Your, uh, Gavin says you’re an art historian.”
I scowled. “Yeah. So?”
“You’re going to love this.”
She ushered me into a freight elevator the size of a small bedroom and pushed the up button. The open walls allowed me a view of the entire downstairs as we slowly climbed toward the second floor. Steel beams braced the first level’s ceiling of what looked like the original wood used to build this place. The planks were dark, pitted, splintered and scorched. We arrived at our destination with a clang and shudder of cables and pulleys. I followed Zee out of the elevator, noting how this floor’s ceiling wasn’t as high as the one downstairs. This level was sectioned off by a hallway lined with closed doors. It felt claustrophobic compared to the wide-open space below.
