“In here,” he hissed. “Hurry!”
She sprinted to the door, moving at superhuman speed. Flinging it open, she slid inside, squinting into the darkness. A loud slam behind her made her jump. She called the Light in a soft glow, using as little of it as possible.
Multiple lights grew in response all around her. Her Light acted strangely, and it took her a minute to figure out why.
The room she stood in was completely covered in mirrors on the floor, ceiling, and every wall. The door she’d used to enter didn’t have a handle on this side, and it was impossible to tell where it even was.
The unexpected turn of events caused a pit in her stomach. What was going on?
Chapter 14
Draconel’s face appeared through the wall just enough to whisper.
“Go now, act natural.”
The wait had felt like forever, but they’d barely moved in line. Alex turned to the others.
“This line sucks. We’ll never make it in. By the time we get there, they’ll be shutting down. Let’s go somewhere else.”
Sophie grumbled, putting up a fake argument that she just wanted to go inside and dance. Ethan told her she’d get to dance sooner by going somewhere else, and they left the line. Turning the corner into the alley beside the building, they bunched up to edge past a drunk man urinating against the brick wall, oblivious to their passing.
The rest of the way was clear. If there was normally any form of guard or watch on this side of the door, Draconel had taken care of it already.
There was only one door in the length of the wall, and it cracked open as they reached it. As it swung wide, Alex could see the thickness of the metal—it looked like it would survive a blast from a nuclear bomb.
With a wordless gesture, Draconel beckoned them inside. A hallway ran into the heart of the building, and the pounding bass from the club beat weakly through the walls, but Draconel ignored it in favor of the stairwell beyond a door just inside the outer wall.
There was no sign of a guard, but the scent of Light lingered, so fresh that Draconel must have just judged a Dark mage before opening the door.
At the top of the stairs, Sophie stepped to the fore. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, then nodded.
Pushing through the door, she raised her arms, the gesture helping her to focus the projections she sent out with her Light.
Draconel followed her, then Ethan and Joseph, and finally, Alex and Grace. It hurt him to be so far back in the order, relegated to the rear so that he wouldn’t get in the way when and if the fighting with magic began, but he couldn’t fault the logic. He was the most useless one among them. Even Grace could help out, albeit subconsciously.
By the time he entered the hallway, guards slumped to the ground ahead and behind them, asleep.
Draconel led them forward, gesturing Sophie ahead any time they came upon a Dark mage in the halls. The way wasn’t as straightforward as Alex expected. It hadn’t been built for ease of access, but as a defensible stronghold. There wasn’t another building in Manhattan like it. Wars didn’t come here anymore for normal mortals.
Despite the lack of main thoroughfares, they came across fewer enemies than Alex expected. He pushed his way to the front, beside the archangel.
“Where are all the Dark mages?” he asked.
Draconel peered ahead, even though it looked like he was staring at a wall.
“Zara has them distracted. She’s doing a better job than I thought possible. Don’t worry, she’s safe. I guarantee you that.”
Alex had to accept that and hope the situation wouldn’t change for either of them.
The next door led into a large conference room, big enough to hold a few dozen seats, but it was devoid of any furniture. Draconel led them across the room toward the far corner. Just as they reached the center, the door they were targeting opened.
Alex froze, and so did the others behind them.
Men in black clothing poured through in a rush. Alex looked to the side for an escape route, then behind them. At each corner of the room, men rushed to surround them.
“No!” Ethan screamed and launched bolts of Light into the men, but shields of Darkness snapped into place in front of the men, blocking the attack.
“Hold!” Draconel shouted. Ethan paused, arms extended, Light glowing from his palms.
The Dark mages formed a ring around them, two dozen men. They were outnumbered in every way.
“We need to fight our way free,” Alex said. They had little chance, but it was their only hope of survival. Dark mages and demons rarely took prisoners for long. “You could judge half the men in one sweep of the Light. What are you waiting for?”
“I’m sorry, Alexandriel,” Draconel said. “This will be easier if you don’t fight it.”
The ring of mages tightened, and Draconel stepped through them, turning to watch with sorrowful eyes.
Stunned, Alex couldn’t think of anything to say. Even when hands reached out to grab his arms and twist them behind him, he couldn’t do anything other than stare at the archangel who’d betrayed them.
If there was another exit to the mirrored room, Zara couldn’t find it. The mirrors covered everything, and there were no imperfections or points of weakness. She could barely tell where the door she’d entered from was.
Taking a moment to calm herself, she hummed a few low notes, focusing on them to prepare herself for the unexpected.
“Draconel?” she said, her voice uncertain. He’d led her in here, so there must be a reason. Even faced with the uneasy feeling in her stomach, she trusted her mentor. She had to.
That familiar, musical voice drifted into the room, although she didn’t see him anywhere.
“I’m sorry, Zara, but you won’t be playing any further role tonight.”
“What’s going on?”
He didn’t answer, but a light that didn’t come from her appeared in the room.
No, it appeared through the mirrored wall in front of her. It was a window, not just a mirror.
In contrast to the rest of the building, the room on the other side had a stone floor. The majority of it was a pale cream color, the stone seemingly unbroken and seamless save for a large pentagram inlaid with stone so black it looked like the Darkness.
A massive crystal five feet across hung from the high ceiling directly over the center of the pentagram. It had no noticeable hue and was so clear that she could see the rocky ceiling on the other side, only slightly distorted. Smaller gemstones were spaced evenly around the crystal, and these burned with overflowing Darkness, wisps of it escaping into the air.
Robed and hooded figures were lighting black candles and arranging crystals around the pentagram. After staring at them, their deformities became obvious. They couldn’t possibly be human, not with the way their bodies twisted and moved under the black robes.
She’d had just enough time to take in the scene when a door on the far side of the ritual chamber opened and Alex was dragged into the room between two Dark mages, kicking and fighting to free himself.
“Draconel!” he shouted. “Why have you done this?”
Alex!
What was going on? Why were things falling apart?
She refused to believe Draconel had orchestrated all of this. If he had turned against them, they stood no chance.
Zara readied a laser of Light and aimed it at the mages pulling Alex toward the pentagram. The Light hit the window and bounced, reflecting and ricocheting around the mirrored room so fast it left blinding traces of Light crisscrossing her vision. She had to piece together what had happened after it was over.
The beam had reflected over and over again until it finally struck her and her body blocked it from going any further. She couldn’t see anything for a few seconds while she waited for the afterimages to fade.
Draconel appeared outside the window, standing on the cream stone. He turned toward her and spoke through the wall. “I wouldn’t attempt any magic inside that room, if I were
you. It won’t make it out. There’s nothing you can do.”
That son of a bitch!
Her entire being vibrated with anger as she finally let herself believe what was rapidly becoming obvious. Draconel had ruined them.
Zara ran at the glass and slammed her fist into it with all the vampiric strength she could muster. Such a blow would have felled a giant redwood tree, but the glass barely budged. The archangel turned away without comment.
However this room was constructed, its builders knew who—and what—would be contained within.
Alex had been placed in the pentagram, his hands and ankles bound and tied to stakes driven into the stone.
“Leave him alone!” Zara shouted at Draconel. “I was the one the Angel Killers were after. Take me and let him go!”
Draconel turned back to her, a small smile on his face.
“Oh, no. You were never the target. It has always been Alexandriel. This ritual can only work with an angel bound in mortal form as the fuel source. How convenient for the High Court of Heaven to send such a gift to Earth for Hell to use, a tool to forever change the nature of the balance. All at my suggestion.”
Alex strained every muscle against his bonds, but his mortal body was too weak to do anything but tire itself out.
He couldn’t hear who Draconel spoke to, but there was only one person it could be. He ached to hear Zara’s voice, but wherever she was, only Draconel could hear her.
The archangel’s words battered him. Draconel’s betrayal wasn’t recent if he’d been responsible for Alex’s punishment from the Court. How could an angel, and one so highly placed in Heaven and the Light’s favor, have become corrupted? He was an archangel!
“Why?” Alex asked “You’ve been working for hell for weeks? How could you turn your back on the Light?”
Draconel shook his head, emotionless in the face of his fellow angel’s anguished questions.
“Far longer than weeks, Alexandriel. I was the one who set up the trap that destroyed the Beacons. I whispered in Hitler’s ear. I guided Franz Ferdinand’s motorcade to his assassin. That’s just in the past hundred or so years.”
Alex was so distracted that he forgot about his personal predicament until a hooded form with hints of a scarred and burned face cinched the ties around his ankles tighter.
“You were responsible for killing the Beacons?” Alex asked. “How?”
Draconel shrugged. His demeanor had remained casual and dispassionate, as if discussing dinner plans. “It was simple. I appeared to the most powerful of them in my true form and told them that Heaven was no longer willing to sit back and allow the Darkness to make inroads on the balance. On my command, they gathered every Beacon from across the world in one spot. They practically fell over themselves to obey.
“Once they were in one spot and celebrating the renewed contact with Heaven, I sent a massive force of Angel Killers and demons to strike in the middle of the night when most were asleep. They never stood a chance.”
All the breath had left Alex’s lungs. He couldn’t talk, his mind blank with shock, but it didn’t matter. Draconel continued talking, as if eager to finally get the deceptions he’d been carrying for years off his chest.
“I asked Raphael to task you with overseeing that religious procession the day you ran into Zara. It was my fourth attempt to make your paths cross, and once I saw you following her, I sent the Dark mages to ambush her. You were always so altruistic, Alexandriel, and I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist stepping in.”
Alex found his voice. “You sent the mages after Zara just so that I would get in trouble?”
Draconel smiled fondly. “Yes, I thought it was quite clever. I’d already floated the idea to the Council of sending angels to live as mortals and learn more about them and the balance. Since the anti-interventionist stance was my idea, they were receptive to it. I didn’t even have to persuade them to send you to Earth as a mortal. I volunteered to keep a close eye on you so you wouldn’t come to harm.”
Alex sputtered. He’d been thoroughly played. All this time, he’d thought Zara was the target, the one who needed protection. “Why so much interest in Zara, then? If she was just a way to bait me into a mortal body, why go to such effort training her?”
With a careless wave of his hand, Draconel dismissed the question. “She is a curiosity, nothing more.”
At that moment, a demon drove a thin nail through his shin with a mallet, and Alex’s world exploded in pain that removed the ability to think.
Chapter 15
Zara backed up as Draconel left Alex’s side and walked at the glass wall separating them. He passed through it as though it didn’t exist.
The angels’ conversation had enraged Zara. It didn’t take long for her to figure out that Alex couldn’t hear her from inside the room. She reached out with every one of her magical abilities, but they were all rebuffed by the mirrors. All she could do was stand and listen, hatred of Draconel rising in her and burning at the back of her throat.
When the demons began torturing Alex, Light lifted from his body and swirled upward, drawn to the heavy crystal above. It glowed with the collected Light, intensifying as the punishment continued.
Draconel was now within reach. She gathered the Darkness around her, preparing to strike a blow that would make even an archangel flinch.
He held up a hand. “That won’t do you any good.”
She frowned but paused. She’d spent too many hours obeying his instructions while he trained her.
“You can hurt me a little, but it won’t get you out of the room. And I have so much more to tell you. Surely, you’d like to hear about your parents.”
Zara hesitated. She wanted to blast the ears right off his head. “I know who my mom is. That’s all that matters to me.”
“The woman who raised you was not your biological mother,” the archangel said. He folded his arms and leaned against the wall he’d walked through. “Your birth mother was an Angel Killer, one of the most powerful of all time. Her father had struck a deal with Hell and conceived her with one of the Disgraced, the fallen angels, the most senior of the demons.”
His words battered at her confidence. She wasn’t the product of demon spawn. Her mother was a wonderful woman who had dedicated her life to ensuring Zara was safe.
But the Darkness… it’s a part of me.
She didn’t want to hear any more, but Draconel’s musical voice was so seductive in its revelations.
“She died giving birth to you,” Draconel said. “My theory is that her Dark nature couldn’t come to terms with giving birth to so much Light. She’d been weakened from the pregnancy, her body confused and drained from both fighting and sheltering the life growing inside her. Your life.”
“No,” Zara whispered. Had she started her life by ending that of an Angel Killer? She was a natural at it. Maybe it’s just who she was. “How do you know all of this?”
The wry smile on his face made her fists clench. Energy gathered in her palms from the overpowering desire to strike him.
“Can’t you guess? I arranged your conception, and I took you from your mother when she died. I found Susan Thompson and persuaded her she wanted to raise this baby. That it was her chance to have the child she always wanted without needing a man to get it.”
It all fit. Damn him, but it could be the truth. It was impossible to trust any of the words out of his mouth after the layered deceptions he’d woven around them all. She hated feeling like a pawn.
With a loud cry, Zara shot a bolt of Darkness at Draconel. He saw it coming and simply faded into the wall before she got it off. The spear of black raced around the room, bouncing off the mirrors. It traveled impossibly fast before coming to the same end as the laser of Light she’d fired earlier, hitting her body and absorbing back into her.
She fell to her knees and screamed her frustration and pain, mournful echoes haunting her until they faded. Draconel had manipulated her entire life, including the circumstances s
urrounding her birth, and for what? So that she could help bring Alex here on this day to meet the requirements of a ritual? Was this all her life amounted to?
“Why?” she shouted. It was a simple question, but it carried so much meaning.
Why train her so intensely just so she could sit in a mirrored box and watch her world come to an end? Why answer all of her questions, encourage her curiosity, be her mentor? Was it all just so that the eventual betrayal would be that much sweeter? Was he loving this?
Draconel ignored her, although she knew he could hear her. He stood on the other side of the glass wall, only a few feet away.
Another pained scream ripped from Alex as the demons surrounding him prodded him with needles and nails.
She leapt to her feet and slammed her hand against the wall again, a sharp pain exploding through her hand. It had been long enough that most of the vampiric energy had drained from her muscles.
Draconel was so close. If she could just walk through the wall like an angel could…
The archangel’s words from the planning session came back to her.
I’ve taught you everything you need to know for this task. You’ll be able to solve every problem you come up against. Remember that if it ever seems hopeless.
She’d barely even had to do anything. The distraction she’d provided was pointless when the enemy knew she was coming. The situation sure felt hopeless now.
If she could get out of this room, she could save Alex. There had to be a way.
Once before, she’d asked the Darkness how to use an ability, and it had shown her how to shape the power to look into the past. Beacons of Light could use all seven abilities of the Light, but angels had capabilities above and beyond those.
Weren’t Beacons just part mortal and part angel?
Zara touched the reservoir of Light inside her and whispered to it.
Fallen: An Angel Romance Page 20
