by Jenn Stark
Was that what I’d be confronting when I went to find the children?
Nothing I could do about that, if so—but for the first time, I considered the likelihood that the weapons of these people might be proportionally sized for giants as well.
I peered more deeply into the darkness, stepping forward and to the right as I began to become accustomed to the gloom. I immediately hit pay dirt. Beside the throne were two long cases, flung open and tumbled through. And in those cases were weapons.
A spear as long as two men, a sword that was almost as long as I was. Knives with blades the size of my thigh. Throwing stars the size of Frisbees.
I picked up one of the knives and heard it again, the sudden rushing of wind outside the dome. I whirled, but the doorway was far away from me—too far. I couldn’t see anyone standing inside it, blocking my exit, and I turned back to the pile of weapons. In my right hand, the knife felt easy, unusually light for its size. I hefted it as I considered the remaining spoils.
Armaeus had been clear—I needed blades or weapons of any type, spear, axe, or sword—and I’d not only have a weapon to fight the demons, I’d have a tool to use to help pry the children out of their interdimensional dungeon. It made a certain sort of sense. The demons were Atlantean; so were these weapons. Bringing them together could only cause some sort of cataclysm, and that cataclysm might be all I needed.
I cast around and found a long, slender arrow as thick as my arm but buoyantly light, with a wickedly pointed tip. That would work. I picked up two for good measure, along with a sheathed knife, double-checking that the blade was still intact before I straightened. I scooped up a few throwing stars for good measure. Everything seemed good, so far, despite the fact that I couldn’t hear Armaeus or Eshe.
Even the cards hadn’t been a complete train wreck. The wheel surrounding the destroyed buildings could have been a blueprint of what was left of the center of the Atlantean capital. The all-seeing eyeball had proven to be a worthy X marks the spot. The constellation had been on the floor, and it’d led me once more to where I needed to be. Sure, some of the elements hadn’t worked out, and the image imprinted on my hand hadn’t proven useful, but Justice was sort of a tricky card. Sometimes it could mean that you would get your rewards for making the effort to do the right thing, or that you would get the good things that were coming to you.
Of course, it could also mean that you’d get the bad things that were coming to you. But details.
I turned around and let my gaze lift again to the oculus at the top of the dome. What must this place have looked like in its heyday? Before its ruination, before the destruction of every rock and statue. It was such a beautiful space, with the floor a rich panorama of stars, the throne made of pure gold atop a staircase of silver and bronze, and the carvings of fish and horses and sea dragons coiling around the base, bursting up out of the stonework as if they’d just emerged from the sea.
“Who lived in this place, meting out justice?” I jolted as I realized I’d spoken the words aloud, but once they were hanging in the air, I couldn’t ignore them. I looked at my palm once more, then cast another glance at the rubble littering the throne room.
It took only a few more minutes to find it.
Kneeling reverently, my weapons forgotten, I spread the broken scales out in front of me. Two shallow golden bowls hung from a chain whose links had been cut or shattered, it was impossible to tell which. They were suspended askew from a long, graceful crossbeam that had formerly sat atop a center spire. The entire apparatus was about three feet high and two feet wide, but when I held it up, I found it curiously light, almost delicate.
A crash sounded outside the dome, and I sprang to my feet, scrambling back to pick up my weapons. I realized I hadn’t heard a buzz from Armaeus’s domain in some time. Not since I’d entered the dome, certainly. Had that severed the contact? Was I truly cut off? From everything I could tell, there was only one entryway into and out of the fallen dome. Even if there was something out there waiting for me, I had to go that way.
I stepped forward, only to crash heavily down to one knee as my foot got tangled in the broken chain of the scales. I moved my boot, but the link wouldn’t budge. It’d gotten locked onto my boot buckle. “Oh, give me a break,” I muttered. Shifting the weapons to my left hand, I hauled up the center spire of the scales with my right. Shaking my boot experimentally produced no help. The plates dangled from their chains, but the whole thing looked a little like a mace. Maybe it would work as a weapon as well. It was light enough, almost comfortable to carry.
I simply didn’t want it attached to me. Setting the scales down temporarily, I dropped the other weapons as well and slid the long knife out of its sheath. With one swift cut, I sliced through the chain…and into the stone floor.
Whoa.” My eyes bulged as I hauled the knife back out of the marble, and I stood for a moment longer. If this was indicative of the Atlanteans’ strength, no wonder they were viewed as gods. Suddenly the ol’ “sword in the stone myth” took on new resonance. How many Atlanteans had survived the Great Flood? I suddenly wondered. How many still roamed the earth?
I gathered up the weapons and the scales once more, then moved back quickly across the large, constellation-strewn floor, toward the triangle of light that marked the opening. As I walked, I realized that the clinking chains of the scales weren’t hindering me. The weapons too, once I got used to their ungainliness, were no hardship to haul across the floor. I seemed to be gaining strength, not losing it, and I drew in a deep, experimental breath.
Oxygen flooded my lungs. I felt light, almost buoyant, and despite the unknown of what was outside the dome, I was feeling unreasonably excited, practically filled with glee. I shook my head, muttering to anyone who should be listening on the other side. “Atlantis to Earth, do you read,” I tried. “I have no idea what I’ll be able to bring back of this, but I’m ready to come home.”
Silence.
Great. I got all the way to the sunlit opening of the dome and peered out. No one was congregating in the small clearing that marked the break in the last round wall and the center dome. I swallowed and stepped outside.
More silence.
The wind whistled around the dome, making an odd keening noise, and I frowned up at it. Was that all that I had heard? Clear of the dome, I focused again, more desperately this time, trying to fix on Armaeus’s face, his hands. His eyes. What was it Death had said? I needed to remain tethered to the person in my own plane who had the strongest hold on me?
There was no one who really fit that bill, of course. Nikki was a friend, but we’d met only recently. That left Armaeus, and even that connection was a little pitiful, now that I thought about it. I had nothing and no one who really wanted me, needed me. I was alone.
I was alone, and I was never going to get back.
Sudden despair leached through me, and I faltered, slowing to a stop in the center of the courtyard, weighed down by chains and weapons and the inescapable truth of my life. I was no one’s. I had no mother, no father. I had no lasting friends. I had come into this world a mystery, and it seemed I would go out that way too.
And I was so, so far from everything I knew.
A flickering buzz sounded in my ear again, but as I lifted my head, the sudden wellspring of emotion caught me so quickly that I staggered back. That emotion wasn’t coming from me, though. It was coming from outside of me, a force ripping through the universe with a single word:
Mine.
Suddenly, Armaeus stood in front of me, as clear as if he were standing there. Relief washed through me. I focused and could hear words, demands—something I couldn’t understand, couldn’t quite catch…
And then a solid silver spear zipped right by my face, and Armaeus disappeared.
“Crap!” I scrambled backward, dropping the scales, and the chain tangled into my boot buckle a second time. I dropped the arrow as well but held on to the long knife, whirling around. The spear lay on the ground beyon
d me, almost to the makeshift door of the dome, useless. It was as tall as I was, though, and no sooner had I bent toward it when another blade soared by me, black as pitch. This was a knife, thick as my head, and it clanged against the far wall before dropping to the ground. Its obsidian length gleamed in the hot sun, and I stared at it, mesmerized.
“Um, this would be a good time for me to come back, Armaeus.”
But it wasn’t Armaeus who responded to me. An unearthly scream rose from one side of the wall circling the dome, and as it rose in crescendo, its owners rose with it—literally, hovering in the sky. At first I thought they were the Valkyries again, come to serve me with another death notice, but these weren’t the fierce Nordic women I had met before. These were something altogether different.
I let my own blade arm drop, my jaw dropping with it.
Angels.
A horde of angels hovered on the far end of the wall, glowing bright white with enormous white-gold wings soaring above them.
A roar of fury met their cries, and I whirled, no longer trying to protect myself, no longer trying to understand. A new host of creatures surged over the far wall—not with wings but with arms and legs and…well, tails. Practically glowing with darkness, they growled and snarled, their humanlike figures as twisted as the angelic host was pristine. Then, as if both groups remembered I remained down in the makeshift pit, they turned their combined fury on me.
And not merely their howls. As if as one, they flowed down the walls—angels flying, demons racing—both of them hurtling toward me as if I were the last jelly bean at the bottom of the bowl.
“Crap, crap, crap!” It was too far to make it back to the dome. Even as I moved, the chain clambered after me, so I bent down and scooped up the rest of the scales holding the artifact by its base. The golden disks swung precariously, and I was reminded once more of its mace-like features. I whirled around, and I brandished the scales with a war cry of my own. “Get away from me, you freaks!”
The screaming chaos in my brain surged forward, and I swung once, twice, shocked on some level that I wasn’t cleaving through muscle and sinew, claw and bone. The tone and tenor of the howling demons changed, but I couldn’t stop—wouldn’t stop.
Everything that had been boiling inside me surged to the fore. The revelation about my mother, Viktor’s manipulations, even the petty betrayals of Nigel and Brody, people who owed me nothing and yet whose actions pricked at me unreasonably hard. And then there was Death with her cryptograms, and Armaeus and Eshe, and—I was weary to my bones. Tired and sick and so furious I could barely keep the scream wailing inside me from ripping me apart.
I slashed again and again, meeting no resistance, and almost stumbled as I realized what was happening.
The two groups had stopped. Completely stopped as if mesmerized by me and my mace-like scales. I shook the thing again, and they fell back, whispers rushing through them like a sickness. I didn’t know why. More to the point, I didn’t care.
“Get back from me—back!” I screeched, jabbing the scales forward as though it were a lit torch thrust against the darkness. It had the desired effect, or it started to anyway. The creatures fell back, but only until they formed a tight circle around me, a sentient wall of angel and demon or whatever the hell they were, as sturdy and impassable as stone.
And then…the front wall of them knelt down.
Whoa.
I stood up straight as I struggled manfully to keep my eyeballs from popping out of my head. This wasn’t your ordinary kneeling either. Both angel and demon alike bent forward at the waist and put their foreheads on the ground, dirtying their pristine wings and getting dust on their claws, respectively. They held that position for a full thirty seconds while I spun in a tight circle, trying to find a way out.
For the record, thirty seconds is a long time to be venerated.
But there was nothing doing. Beyond the first wall of combatants, a second one stood, all of them looking at me as if they’d seen a ghost. I thought about the card burned into my hand. I did sort of resemble that figure, wielding my scales like a weapon. Were they picking up on the image’s energy? If so, I would totally take it.
The interior circle stood again, and two of them stepped forward, like captains of opposing football teams. I tensed, holding out my scales, ready to bludgeon anyone who got too close.
“Stop right there,” I warned, and they stood, whether because they understood what I was saying or from the tone of my voice.
“Miss Wilde.”
Relief spiked again, but I couldn’t spare the words. In front of me, the two creatures brandished the same kinds of weapons I’d seen inside the dome. Delicate arrows, a long curving blade, throwing stars, a narrow sword. They held these up like an offering, and I frowned. I’d lost my other weapons somewhere, other than the broken scales.
Finally, I found my voice. “Any weird contractual obligation I should be aware of before I take these things?”
The Magician was silent for a beat, then his voice whispered in my ear again. “Take what, specifically?” he asked, sounding worried.
He wasn’t the only one, though. A rustle of concern seemed to be slipping through both the angelic and demonic hordes, the sound of confusion, almost dismay. The last time that had happened, I’d gotten spears thrown at me.
“Screw it. Never mind.” I thought about Justice and her scales, each side evenly matched, her eyes blindfolded so she wouldn’t make an inappropriate choice. Even though the Justice etched onto my hand didn’t buy in to the blindfolding part, I didn’t want to offend either party by choosing the other first. I bent and set the scales down by my side, then reached out both hands.
It seemed to be the right decision. The two creatures stepped forward and placed their weapons onto my hands and forearms, while bracing my arms and hands with their own. The demon’s long-clawed fingers dwarfed mine, while the angel’s hands were smaller, smoother. I stared at both figures close up, and realized…they looked remarkably humanoid. Even the demon’s image shifted and roiled, like a projection that had slipped its tracks. Beneath its imagery of a snarling-mouthed creature, it looked almost mannish as well. A very big man, but a man.
They seemed to be waiting for me to say something, but I didn’t know Atlantean.
“Thank you,” I said. English wouldn’t have been the universal language in their time, but I threw in a short head bow as well, and their response was swift and sure. They spouted a line of nonsense to me as if I should know it, and I managed a smile.
I shifted my attention back to Armaeus, sensing the tide about to turn. “A little assistance here would be good,” I muttered.
“You have but to say the word.”
Frowning, I rolled my eyes. “Help me!” I called, maybe a bit too loudly, holding the weapons closer to my body.
Apparently, that was the wrong thing to say. As one, the horde took flight around me, their screams a furious bellow—and attacked.
Chapter Sixteen
I burst upward with a scream, throwing my arms out wide to protect myself. Shouts of alarm brought me back into focus as metal clattered against glass. I felt ripped apart, shredded, like some sort of spiny-armed creature, and everything hurt.
“Yo, Sara!” The clattering stopped, and Nikki’s strong arms were around me, hauling me back as my arms flailed and legs churned, my eyes not seeing the conference room around me but hands and claws and wings converging on me, my limbs being stretched and pulled in all directions. “Whoa! No more Red Bull for you, sister. Take it down a notch—I said take it down!”
Her words were light, but Nikki’s hands locked on my shoulders as she talked, and I realized a moment later that I was no longer flailing but held fast in place, one of her large booted feet bracing my left leg wide, which felt like the only thing keeping me upright.
“Can’t breathe,” I managed, and she snorted somewhere above me.
“Well, if you can’t breathe, you can’t kill me, so I consider that a wi
n.” She held me for another long three counts. “You good?”
I blinked my eyes open, but my head still hung forward. I saw a series of polished shoes that cost more than I made in a month. The Council ringed me, not those…people. Things. Whatever they were. “Yeah,” I gasped at length.
“Take it easy, dollface. The adrenaline will wear off in a few.”
Armaeus’s voice crackled through the room. “Look up at me, Miss Wilde. Only at me.”
I turned my head toward him, and his gaze trapped mine as Nikki eased her hold on me. Eased it—but she didn’t let go. Still, her words proved prophetic. Every fight-or-flight urge seemed to dissolve to nothing as I came fully back to present, and I sank into her grasp like I never wanted to leave it, my mini collapse all the more pleasurable because I had somewhere soft to fall.
“Simon.”
The Magician’s words vaguely penetrated my skull as Simon’s Chucks came into my peripheral view. He edged in close beside me, but I didn’t see him, not really. I couldn’t see anything but the Magician’s gold-and-black eyes. “You fed us all the imagery we need, but I want to take the device off you, submit it to further testing,” Simon said. “You good with that?”
“Mmph,” I managed as I felt his light touch at my neck. He removed the chain with a delicate tug. Then there were more tugs at my arms, my legs. Gentle at first, but one made me flinch away. All the while, Armaeus’s gaze held mine, his wordless energy surrounding me.
“Can we move this along, please?” Nikki’s voice sounded unnaturally strained in the silent room, but it wasn’t Armaeus who responded. It was Eshe.
“It would be best for her to black out,” she said dispassionately.
“I’m not going to black out.” I shook my head, shrugging off Armaeus’s stare and Nikki’s light hold. No one moved as I took a step forward, my hands coming up for balance. I was surprised at the state of my arms. They were chapped and raw, like I’d had to run through a fire pit. “What the hell?”
