Celestial Tears

by Holly Evans

  "They've barely begun the ritual. If I understand the words correctly, it will take them a total of two hours to finish it. We have time," he said calmly.

  I took a deep breath and calmed myself. He was right. Rushing in was too much of a risk. I couldn't face losing Erin, especially if it was due to my own stupidity.

  21

  The priests, for lack of a better term, hustled Logan and me over towards a set of shackles on the wall. They kept murmuring about the lady, the fiery one, but I couldn't pick out the exact words or what they were going on about. I looked at the slightly rusty shackles and looked at Logan with a raised eyebrow. I don't mind a little bondage with Logan, but that was taking it too far. Logan smirked at me and looked pointedly at the scrawny little woman behind me.

  He mouthed, "Three, two, one."

  I mule kicked the woman behind me, sending her colliding with the wall behind her. They hadn't bothered to take away our blades or my alchemy. They clearly weren't thinking this through. I slashed the throat of the middle-aged man in front of me as he reached out to grab hold of my wrist. The younger man next to him stumbled over the lifeless corpse as he scrambled to try and kick me. They were clearly not fighters, and none of them had tried to use any life magic on us. I was growing more suspicious by the second.

  Those that were left standing moved away from us and looked at us warily. The three who were whispering over Erin had continued with their ritual entirely unfazed. I ran to them, expecting to slit their throats, free Erin, and get out of there. Instead, I bounced off some invisible bubble. Wispy circled around the barrier and pressed himself against it with increasing determination before he shot off down a small hole in one of the walls.

  "Wispy!" I shouted.

  Great. I'd lost Wispy, and I didn't know how to save Erin. This was going fantastically. Logan circled around the invisible barrier while I looked around for some alchemical solution. The problem was, I didn't know what was forming the barrier, and without that I couldn't figure out how to break it down. Erin had gone entirely still. She watched Logan intently while I chewed on my bottom lip and slowly ran my fingertips over the bubble. Something was hiding the magical components from my alchemical sight. Fuck.

  Wispy reappeared and flew around my head growling and throwing white sparks. After the fifth circuit, he shot off down the narrow hallway opposite the one we'd entered through. He came back and bounced off my forehead before he returned to the hallway and emitted an awful screeching sound.

  "I think Wispy's found something," I said to Logan.

  "I'll stay here, you investigate," he said as he eyed the priests.

  I followed the wisp down the dark hallway. He vanished around a sharp corner into a darker hallway, where sigils covered the walls and glowed an eerie pale green and fiery yellow. Something about the whole thing was making my skin crawl. The sensation of someone, or something, watching me made my spine tingle. The walls were entirely smooth, bar the sigils. There was nowhere for anyone to be hiding. I continued to follow Wispy deeper into the temple. It had looked tiny on the outside. We must have stepped into an alternate plane or some such.

  Finally, we stepped out into a small room where every surface was covered in glowing sigils. I reached out and ran my fingers over them. The magic was too much. My fingertips burned within a second, and it was too strong for my mind to pick out what was in there. Wispy, on the other hand, had no such issue. He threw himself into the small dip in the wall at the heart of the sigils on the far wall. Slowly he grew in size and increased the ferocity of sparks that he threw out.

  "Wispy, what are you doing?"

  He gradually took on a yellow and then orange colour before every sigil went dark and he dropped to the floor.

  "Erin's free!" Logan shouted a moment later.

  I scooped Wispy into his cage and ran as fast as I could in the direction we had come. I burst into the main room to find the priests were all dead. Erin was standing next to Logan, pale and visibly trembling but seeming to be ok. I pulled her into a hug and kissed her cheeks.

  "I'm so sorry, I'm glad you're ok. You are ok, aren't you?" I asked.

  She smiled and leaned into me.

  "I'm ok. How's Wispy?"

  I ran my fingers over the edges of him. He felt a little weak, but otherwise ok.

  "He's tired; he'll be alright," I said.

  Our happy reunion was cut short by the smell of fire and a maniacal laugh.

  "Thank your little wisp for me," a harsh feminine voice said.

  We turned to see what can only be described as a fire hag, and she was barring our way out.

  Hags are a deeply unpleasant form of fae. They're usually only found in Scotland, and are thankfully quite rare. They appear as worn-down, sharp-edged old women in tattered clothes with sharp claws and thick leathery skin. Hags are vicious and predatory, but they can be talked down if you know how. I glanced at Logan while I tried to weigh up our chances. The woman's hair was pure fire. It crackled and licked down her bent back. The fire caressed her crooked hands and looked as though she would be able to throw it a good distance.

  I didn't have anything on me to protect us against fire; I'd been thinking about poisons and such. Suddenly, I remembered the shadow armour! I pulled out the last three capsules and thrust them at Logan and Erin.

  "Swallow these. Now. They're fire proof," I commanded.

  The hag cackled, and we were surrounded by a wall of fire that singed the tips of my hair and made Wispy grumble.

  “You’re pure magic, you don’t need fire protection,” I whispered at him.

  I knocked back my capsule and hoped I was right. I hadn't had much of a chance to really test just how good the armour was against fire.

  "Be good little things and stay there while I retrieve my stone. Then I will finally be free," the hag crooned as she walked around us.

  "Stone?" I asked sweetly.

  "Yes, sweetie, the stone. The one that wretched priestess has been hanging onto. She drained her priests, don't you know. That's why they came here, to my prison. They were kicked from their own temple for going against the word of their magic network. Her magic was a thing to behold, but alas, her mind and body just didn't survive," the hag said like a mother discussing her child failing a grade in school.

  Logan, Erin, and I all shared a look. That was the tear. We weren't leaving that temple without it.

  22

  The armour had covered us entirely, but it would only remain that way for a short period of time. The hag had casually wandered down the hallway deeper into the temple.

  "We need to get that tear, but we won't know where it is without her," I said.

  "Follow her. Jump her. Steal it," Erin said.

  I had to smile at the brutal simplicity of her plan.

  With that, I ran through the wall of fire, pleased to find that the armour did, in fact, work. We jogged after the hag and found her continuing down the hallways at a very sedate pace.

  "Oh, do you wish to be my followers, dearies?" she asked.

  "Yea," Logan said brightly.

  "How wonderful," the hag said.

  I wasn't entirely convinced that she believed us, but she hadn't tried to kill us, so it was a start.

  We followed her down another hallway until we came to a brightly lit room where half of the roof had caved in. A... what I think had once been a woman was perched on a stone throne. Its skin had peeled off most of its face, and its jaw was hanging loosely and broken. The body was deformed and bloated with an awful putrid smell rolling of it. The thing blinked its eyes, and a spark of magic flickered under my feet.

  The hag wasted no time in setting the thing on fire. It crackled and melted in the heart of the inferno, leaving nothing but a pale blue stone and a pile of purple ash.

  "That will be ours," Logan said as he stepped in front of the hag.

  I snuck around behind him and hoped that he could occupy her long enough to get the stone into my magic-breaker bag. I pulled the breake
r gloves on, the risk too great to handle the stone without them. Fire enveloped me and blocked my vision as it swirled and danced around me.

  "No, it won't. I have been trapped for too long!" the hag screamed.

  I continued pushing forward in the direction the stone had been and hoped that the armour would hold up just a little longer. The heat was beginning to grow as the armour started to fade. The stone came into view, and I tucked it in my magic breaker bag and secured it to my belt. Stage one complete.

  Now we just had to keep a hold of the stone and kill the hag. No big deal.

  I turned back in the direction that I thought the hag was and reached through the fire dancing around me, hoping that the breaker gloves would form a hole. The entire circle of fire dissipated - progress! The room around us was small and didn’t offer us much in the way of movement. The hag stood in the middle - the stone throne at my back. Logan and Erin were circling her. Their shadow armour was thinning. We needed to break down her fire before our armour gave up.

  The hag snarled at us, baring her crooked yellow teeth before she lifted her arms and filled the room with a raging inferno. The heat knocked the air from my lungs, leaving me to gasp. The rising panic wasn’t helping anything. I closed my eyes and tried to calm and relax. I needed to conserve air and get through this. The heat suddenly vanished. I took a deep breath and filled my lungs, preparing for the next fire.

  The hag was growing tired. The next fire surrounded just her and a few inches around her. Our armour was fading fast. Logan’s armour was growing particularly thin over his torso, and Erin’s hands were already bare. We needed to end this.

  We moved in closer to her and tried to slash at her with our silver blades through the fire. She screeched, a painful sound that threatened to make my ears bleed. After three attempts, we hadn’t gotten anywhere. We needed a new tactic. I ran through my alchemical arsenal. Anti-venoms, healing things, fire powder. I grabbed a handful of my fire powder. It was the only thing I could think of. She was a fire elemental; she was immune to fire. How far did that go, though? The fire powder wasn't technically fire, it was an alchemical abomination.

  Logan and Erin were keeping her on her toes, continuously darting in and trying to hack and slash at her. I strolled right up in front of her with a grin on my face. She gave me her full attention, which gave Erin an in.

  "What are you grinning at?" the hag demanded as she blocked Erin's blow without acknowledging her.

  I gave a shrug and threw a handful of the powder in her eyes. At first it did nothing, to the point that the hag laughed. Logan landed a harsh kick to her lower back, which knocked her focus, and that was all it took. The fire powder burnt through her eyes and cheeks as though they were paper. She screamed. Her fire extinguished. Erin dove on her and drove her knife into the hag's neck again and again until Logan dragged her off the hag's corpse.

  Logan held Erin close and calmed her. The wildness left her eyes, and she sagged against him. I understood her actions. She’d been kidnapped and then had broken priests trying to sacrifice her. That didn’t change the fact that we needed to leave. She could have all the comfort and sympathy in the world once we were safely back in our hotel room.

  "We need to get out of here before something else comes up," I said, the exhaustion washing over me.

  Erin nodded numbly as Logan guided her out of the room. One stone down, two to go.

  23

  Logan took point through the jungle. I trusted his shifter senses to follow our trail back to the city. I held Erin close to me with my arm around her shoulders. She hadn't said a word since we'd left the temple. My stomach growled as the smells of the evening in the city drifted around me.

  "I can't face people," Erin said quietly.

  "We'll get a nice hotel with room service," I said as I squeezed her shoulders.

  She gave me a faint smile, and we followed Logan into the city. He pulled out his phone and frowned for a moment.

  "I've secured us a room at the Ivory Dragon, it should be close. Fein won't be happy about the cost, but we need somewhere safe and comfortable," he said as he looked at the map on his phone.

  Erin flinched when a fire elemental brushed past her. My heart went out to her; she'd clearly been traumatised by the situation, not that I blamed her.

  Finally, Logan began to walk again. He led us through the colourful streets and past the street vendors with their delicious-smelling foods. We arrived at a brilliant white hotel with lots of glass and expensive sculptures in the lobby. We let Logan check us in and followed him to the elevator.

  "We'll keep you safe," Logan said as he squeezed her hand.

  She nodded.

  Wispy woke up when we were one floor away from our room. He grumbled and rolled around his cage, looking for more leaves. Erin reached into my bag and slowly poked some of his food through the thin bars with a smile on her face. Wispy purred appreciatively.

  "Thank you, Wispy," she said softly.

  Our room was positively sumptuous. The beds were huge and very comfortable, the air conditioning had been set perfectly, and there were even little magic-imbued chocolates on the pillows.

  "I thought you'd feel better sharing a room with us tonight," Logan said to Erin.

  "Thank you," she said quietly.

  I sat down on the edge of the larger bed and encouraged her to sit with me as I stroked her hair.

  "You need to talk, bottling it up will make it hurt so much more," I said gently.

  Logan set about ordering us a veritable banquet, including a large bouquet of leaves for Wispy. I let Wispy out of his cage, and he sat on Erin's shoulder, where he pressed himself against her neck and tried to comfort her.

  After a few minutes, she looked me in the eye and asked, "Is it always like this?"

  Pain threaded through her voice, making it waver. I brushed away the tears that formed.

  "No. Not always. Sometimes it's exhilarating, others it's downright terrifying," I said.

  Logan came and sat next to me and kissed my temple.

  "I bet neither of you were almost sacrificed, though," she said with a wry smile.

  "Actually..." Logan said.

  Erin's smile brightened.

  "A sex cult decided that Logan would make a fantastic male to join their program; unfortunately, they forgot to mention the part where said program meant draining the male's blood and then his life essence. They were effectively batteries for the orgies," I said.

  Erin snorted a laugh.

  "It sounded great at first," Logan said with a grin.

  I continued to stroke Erin's hair.

  "I'm sorry we failed you," I said.

  She shook her head.

  "You didn't. I'm not a child that you should need to babysit. I'll fight harder next time."

  I lifted her chin to look at me.

  "This wasn't your fault. Don't go down that path," I said firmly.

  She sighed softly and pursed her lips before she relaxed.

  "How did you two meet?" she asked.

  I glanced at Logan.

  "We were roommates in college," he said with a wicked smile.

  "He strolled into the room as if he owned the entire city!" I said, remembering the swagger in his step and the tilt to his chin. He'd stopped dead in his tracks when he saw me.

  "You were a vision," Logan said to me.

  "I had soot in my hair and basilisk scales stuck to my cheek!" I exclaimed.

  He gently nipped my ear.

  "I couldn't take my eyes off you. I'd expected some boring work-obsessed guy when they told me I had to room with an alchemist, instead I got the most incredible woman," he purred.

  Erin blushed.

  "So, you've always gotten on?" she asked as she stretched and petted Wispy.

  "I don't believe we've ever had a serious argument," I said.

  We'd had disagreements over who took which treasure hunting assignment, and some ethical points, but they were quickly resolved. We were a good team.r />
  We were all absolutely exhausted. Once we'd eaten our fill and Wispy had devoured every last scrap of greenery he could reach, we put on a movie and set about relaxing. The stone's presence remained firmly in the back of my mind. I put the breaker-bag inside a second breaker-bag, to be absolutely sure, before I buried it in my backpack. Erin took her shower first and came out looking far more relaxed and contented.

  Logan and I enjoyed a long hot shower, complete with the relaxation salts the hotel had kindly provided for us. The exhaustion slipped away, leaving nothing but bliss and contentment. Erin was fast asleep with Wispy on her pillow when we emerged.

  I curled up in Logan’s arms, glad to feel the solidity of him. It wasn’t often that I looked for protection or security, but I needed it that night. I’d almost lost both of them, and I couldn’t bear the thought of being without them. I kissed Logan’s chest and he stroked my hair.

  “We did everything we could, Kit. This is just part of the game we play,” he whispered gently.

  We’d always called treasure hunting a game. It was usually so much fun; we cavorted around the world solving puzzles and bringing back beautiful shiny things. Of course, it wasn’t always fun, but the exhilaration usually washed away the fear and threats we faced. It blotted out the blood on our hands. Logan kissed down my jawline tenderly. His warm scent of sandalwood and amber made me smile.

  “We’re all safe, that’s what matters,” he whispered.

  I sighed and allowed myself to relax. We had two more tears to bring back. Fretting over what could have been was a waste of energy. I glanced at Erin’s peaceful sleeping form one last time before I closed my eyes. It had been a long day, and I was glad to leave it behind.

  24

  We woke up just before noon and ordered a large selection of foods to keep us going while we tried to look for leads on the second stone. I didn't want to stay in Rio past midnight for fear of word getting around and another attempt being made on our lives. We couldn't just hop on a transport to some random place, though.