I widened my eyes to take it all in, every square foot of the view, and that’s when I saw it. Something bright orange flickered into existence and streaked diagonally from the top left corner of my vision down into the center, leaving a momentary ripple behind before the ground extinguished its flame.
“Did you see that?” I traced the invisible diagonal with my finger all the way to a hill in the distance. Any sound it had made was covered up by the other fireworks.
“I think it was a meteor.” Duke stepped closer.
“Huh.” I cocked my head to the side, my eyes focused on a dark point in the distance. “I’ve never seen one shoot out of the sky like that, like a falling star.”
“Did you make a wish?” Ria put her head on my shoulder as the fireworks dwindled.
Freddy began humming When You Wish Upon A Star. Miranda swayed back and forth like a gypsy.
“I used to see them all the time,” said Nate. “At night, I’d go out on a patrol and see them hit the ground. I brought them to Sol sometimes. He liked to use the iron for some of his projects.”
I turned to Nate, my eyes widening as a spark ignited a wildfire in my mind. “Say that again.”
“What?”
“The iron. They’re made of iron,” I said, my eyes not focusing on him anymore.
“Meteors?” He nodded. “Yeah, a lot of them are, but it’s not very valuable.”
“Don’t you understand?” I bounded forward and hugged him. “This is it. This is what we’ve been waiting for. I know where she is!”
“What? Where who is?” said Nate.
“My mom. The Babylonian Pesah Josh took us to for your antidote had a vision or something when we shook on her deal.” I ran through it in my head and then said it out loud. “Iron strikes the mountain’s mouth to bridge the divide. Iron wakes the all powerful darkness inside. Iron joins the keys to creation—one in five. Iron calls the sword of flame, and all will abide.”
Nate’s wide bewildered eyes flashed green fire in an instant. “Josh let you make a deal?” He prowled the edge of the group from one side to the other, looking for a hint of Josh’s scent. “I can’t believe he let you—”
“No one lets me do anything.” I stared through his anger. “I made the decision, and I did it to save you, by the way.”
Nate’s freckles disappeared under reddening skin. He took a deep breath and stepped forward. “Deals with Graced aren’t like—”
“She knows. Some kind of fairy thing,” said Ria, trying to calm him down. “It’s ok. She just owes her a favor. That’s basically it.”
Nate’s eyes turned on Ria with cold betrayal. “You knew and you— You know what, it doesn’t matter. Eve, you can’t trust visions, especially from a Babylonian.”
I turned from Nate and searched the group for some ounce of support. My mom was out there. I knew it. I didn’t have time for one of Nate’s lectures.
Only Duke held my gaze. “I’ve been thinking about those words for a week straight, and I have to say this makes the most sense. I have a working theory about the last line, but—”
“Wait, you knew?” I tilted my head to the side.
“Josh reported it to Morales and Denisov the night you came back.” Duke’s back straightened slightly. “I didn’t know you meant to keep it a—”
“It’s fine.” I shook my head, feeling an ounce of the betrayal Nate must have felt right then. “It doesn’t matter. This is it.” I paused. “Iron just struck a mountain somewhere over there. That’s where my mom is. It’s bridging the divide between us. A little cheesy, I know. But it’s real.” I bounced on the balls of my feet, unable to keep from moving.
“And the rest of it? The darkness waiting inside? The keys? The fiery sword?” said Nate. “What about all that?”
I closed my eyes and concentrated on the blurry image of my mom in pain. “I just saw her when I was in that box.” I paused as another gear clicked in my brain. “I asked Meg about my mom just before she had that vision. This can’t be a coincidence. It just can’t.”
My heart beat in my ears, the adrenaline taking hold of me once again, the world becoming brighter as my eyes adjusted. Nate’s green essence glowed around him as if he were conserving energy, but mine was like blue solar flares jumping out of my skin in long loops of crackling light.
Duke swiped his phone and started tapping.
“What are you doing?” asked Cheryl, her voice a razor wire.
“Messaging Denisov. Come on, we can get approval on the way.”
Cheryl grabbed his upper arm. “You know she can’t leave. Someone else can do this. If the Babylonians—”
Duke stroked his hand over hers and held her angry stare with a loving one of his own. “Denisov and most of the units are near San Diego by now. This can’t wait; it’s too important.” He paused. “What if it was my mother? Yours?” His fingers rubbed Cheryl’s hand until her grip loosened.
Nate shook his head. “Eve, I can’t let you—”
He stopped midsentence when my eyes fired a warning shot to his.
He continued anyway. “What you saw in that box, it wasn’t real. What you saw in the sky might just be spiritual. It could be a meteor, a demon, an energy blast meant to lure us away. There’s no way of telling until someone gets over there.”
“You’re right.” I nodded and strode toward the roof access door. “Us.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Griffith Park was the nearest place to where the meteor had hit, as far as we could tell. It was only fifteen miles away, but with the traffic, it felt like Nate and Duke were taking the slowest possible route.
I sat in the front seat of Nate’s Jeep and watched dark shrubs and scrub oaks loom over the road. The headlights of Duke’s white BMW kept catching in the mirror and blinding me temporarily. Shivers ran up and down my arms as I expected something to jump out at us. I pushed each worry down, though. Finding mom was all that mattered.
“Hold on.” Nate turned onto a fire access road just before we reached the observatory. He hadn’t said a single word since we got in the car, but I could see the wheels turning behind his eyes, his glances at the side of my face burning into my cheeks.
“I see it.” Ria pointed over my shoulder to a faint orange glow at the top of one of the tallest hills. It was easily still a mile away, but there was no doubt something was there.
Loose gravel crunched under the tires, and several times sharp branches scratched against the door as Nate maneuvered us closer and closer.
Suddenly, my whole body jerked forward against an unyielding seatbelt. The tires skidded to a dusty stop, and when it cleared, I saw a charred tree lying across the road like a dead body. The ashen remnants of its leaves were scattered around oblong, contorted branches.
“How did you see that?” I asked, barely discerning it from the night sky beyond even with two sets of headlights shining on it.
“It’s glowing.” Nate clenched his jaw and looked straight ahead.
“Like essence glowing or…” Ria leaned forward, squinting.
I shook my head and wiped my hands on my pants. Essence fed by my excitement could only last so long, and now mine was completely gone. How was I supposed to find her if she was hidden by essence? Maybe a mirage?
I wrenched the door open before Nate could stop me and looked all around the hillside. The orange hue at the top of the mountain was gone. It had been one, maybe two, football fields away.
Two car doors thudded shut behind me as several more pops of fireworks echoed in the distant sky. Duke and Cheryl stepped up to my side. “At least we know we’re in the right place.” He smiled and checked his phone again. “Denisov still hasn’t responded.”
“This tree’s sapped with dark essence,” Nate called back to us as he inspected the roadblock.
“This doesn’t feel right,” said Cheryl, her back rigid as she scanned the hillside.
Duke peered around and stepped closer to the fallen tree. He sniffed the roots. �
��This thing has been fed dark essence for longer than a night. Could be just some bad soil.”
“Now the ground can be evil?” Ria almost laughed.
Duke nodded. “Cursed would be more accurate.”
Ria scoffed. “Seriously. You Patrons are so dramatic. Come on, Evey. Let’s go find your mom already.”
I sucked in a prideful breath as I pushed down the reservations and rational thoughts that were beginning to seep through the blurry watercolor of my mom’s painful expression. Ria looped her arm in mine.
“We need to split up,” Duke said authoritatively, his white V-neck tight against his lean, muscular torso. “Cheryl, you take Freddy and Miranda. Nate and I will take Eve and Ria. We’ll continue to try and contact Denisov as we walk.”
Cheryl looked daggers at him the same as I did.
No one ‘takes’ me anywhere.
Duke pretended not to notice. “Cheryl, you go back about a hundred yards and come around the east side. We’ll hike around to the west, each with our phones in hand. If anyone sees something—demon, Babylonian, another patch of dark essence, anything—text or call, and we all retreat back to the cars. Denisov will need a survey to make a battle plan. We are surveying, nothing more.”
I grimaced. Not if my mom is up there.
I started forward first, a bush catching at my pants and snapping as I pulled. The hillside loomed at something less than a ninety-degree angle, but not by much. I led us in a diagonal line so we’d be on the opposite side of the summit where Cheryl would come up.
After three minutes, Ria was panting. “Nate, why don’t you just zip up there?”
“Could be traps. Not worth it.” He massaged the shoulder that had been hit at the movie studio. He did that a lot lately. “Especially if there’s going to be a battle at the top of this thing.” He clenched his jaw. “You’ll need me, even if you won’t listen to me.”
“It’s my mom, Nate.” I stopped and turned to him. “Imagine if it was Grandpa. What would you do to get him back?”
He held my stare for a moment longer, and then stepped in front of me. “I’d lead.”
We zigzagged our way up the hill for several more minutes. Branches scratched at my arms to try and hold me back, light red lines etched into my skin.
“There’s still one thing I don’t get,” said Duke, hopping lightly from stone to stone as I took one step forward and slid two back in the sandy earth. “When you made that deal with Joshua’s contact, he reported that dark essence exploded out of her head just before the vision?’”
“Yeah.” I nodded, my eyes fixed on the horizon.
Bridge the divide. Iron bridges the divide. This has to be it.
“What did it feel like? Was it like a spark under your fingertips? Did it touch your hand at all?” he asked lightly without looking at me.
“Attention forward. We don’t know what’s up there,” said Nate testily.
“Right. You’re right.” Duke nodded and smiled, perfect dimples denting his cheeks.
The ground leveled out as we approached the top, and I sank lower, as did Nate, in case there were scouts. Duke and Ria crawled up next to us—Ria the only one out of breath and sweating.
The mountaintop was more of a plateau speckled with burnt, lifeless trees, their leaves ash and their limbs twisted and gnarled like they’d curled in a fire before being extinguished. In the center of the small grove, a long scar sliced through the earth, pushing up dirt on either side and stopping just thirty feet away. A black boulder sat in a crater at the end with dirt spilling over the edges as a wave of air infused with rotten eggs blew toward us.
Ria coughed and plugged her nose “Oh, kill me now.”
I shushed her with wide, unbelieving eyes. How could she say something like that at this moment? Hadn’t she ever seen a horror movie?
“Do you see anything?” I whispered to Nate. I tried to slow my breathing, to control my emotions, but it was no use. Everything was shadow and sparks of faint neon light from the fireworks still shooting into the sky a few miles away.
“Negative.” He rotated his gaze back and forth like a camera.
Duke checked his phone, the blue light illuminating his face. “Cheryl is on the other side. No sign of Babylonians.”
“How would we know if they were here?” asked Ria.
“They could be shielding their essence, so there’s really no telling,” said Nate.
“Until I go out there.” I stood and jogged forward ten feet before Nate could appear in front of me.
He did, of course. His green whip in hand.
At least that was one spiritual thing I could see.
I kept my body tensed, hands raised and fingers curled to meet an attacker. My plan to lure a dim-witted Babylonian was short-lived, though. Nothing came at us.
At least Denisov would be proud that I was taking my position as bait seriously.
“Defense formation,” Nate barked.
Duke and Ria fell in on command.
My eyes widened in surprise as Ria put her hands up like Grandpa had been trying to teach her for the past ten years. We put our backs to one another—each of us one side of a square. All of us inched toward the meteor as one, keeping our heads swiveling back and forth. Cheryl, Freddy, and Miranda were doing the same thing on the other side.
Within thirty seconds, we made a wide perimeter around the meteor. No smoke, no orange glow, no indication whatsoever that it had just hurtled through the sky.
I stepped forward, and nothing happened. “This can’t be it. Maybe the prison’s under the mountain. This can’t—”
The rock was at my feet now. Smooth black bubbles had solidified under the hard surface. I looked at my friends’ backs, each of them chancing peeks back at me.
“It looks like a normal meteor,” said Duke. “And there’s no sign of dark essence that I can see.”
Nate nodded.
I stared back at the rock, then at the surrounding trees—black and leafless. A meteor couldn’t do all that. About thirty feet away, a gnarled oak with a hole in the center was the only one not charred, though all the ones around it were.
Nate put his hand on my shoulder. “There’s nothing here.”
I shook my head and turned back to the meteor, stomping my heel on the edge of the rock. No pain, no feeling, just the sound of the stone cracking like dry bones.
The others backed away. Nate stayed near my shoulder.
“Eve.”
This couldn’t be a dead end. Something had to be here. This was the bridge. This was the chance.
I stomped on it again and again, shockwaves rattling up into my knee as the stone crumbled. Just a hunk of rock, light speckles of iron ore scattered throughout.
I brought my heel down with everything I had.
It broke into five pieces.
And so did I.
My foot went through the stone, far beyond the ground, and dangled in a void. Something tore loose inside me like a muscle pulled from bone, but the pain that should have come eased into sleep so deep that I floated above my body, the hilltop, everyone. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t possible because it was happening, and it all felt natural, like I’d done it every night of my life. My mind cleared, and I wasn’t worried anymore.
The world was a misty rainbow of soft lights. No solids. No gravity. Just streams of pink and blue and green aurora borealis flowing out of everything. The soil was a light brown brook bubbling with green seedlings. The trees gushed rivers of green with yellow stars twinkling in the current. Nate’s essence was almost the same color, coming right out of him and floating up into the sky where I swam.
I glided over to it, reached out, and dipped my hand into the sea-turtle-green stream.
The smell of fish in an open air market. Canvas awnings and rough wooden posts. People in tunics cinched around their waists with cloth belts and ropes. They haggled over prices.
Nate walked through the street smiling, a woman with caramel hair and a purple tun
ic tucking her arm in his.
Then the air went dark, and fire fell from the sky. Everything was burning. Her hand slipped out of his.
I came up for air, unable to hold my breath any longer, still floating above Nate. He looked up like he could see me.
I smiled. “That was such a nice memory until the end.”
I floated up higher without trying and dove through the brown stream of light that floated up like a fog from the earth below.
Four rivers with a fountain at the center. Thousands of green plants rose above me like a jungle that never seemed dense. Someone waived.
I giggled and continued to float upward on a breeze. It was so peaceful. I could stay here.
A stream of metallic gray light glided up from the gnarled oak with the hole in the center. I dove toward it. “So sparkly.”
I stood in the middle of a red valley with a metal scepter in my hand. The world was desolate—no plants, no buildings, and no people. Winds of ruin wracked the damp, sticky grass, and everything was silent.
I inhaled sharply and shook my head. “I don’t like that. I don’t like it.” I pursed my lips sourly and looked behind me. The thin gray stream tried to follow, but I went higher, and it couldn’t reach me.
“What’s that one?” I giggled again, easily forgetting what had just happened.
A slippery piece of black licorice slithered toward me through the sky. It didn’t look nice, just like the other one, so I turned around and started back to Nate. He had my body in his arms.
I turned around to see if it was still following me, and the black light stabbed through my chest.
A dark, rundown ranch outside the city. Three stars were painted on the dilapidated archway over the entrance—about a half mile from the house. Paint peeled off window shutters that clattered against the glass as I entered and slipped into a dark room. Green ivy surrounded the beams. A bald man in a suit sat in the corner on a bed with a woman lying down next to him. She had my hair. He smiled, his teeth so white. He reached around the woman’s neck, took something, and threw it at my feet—a small silver wing with a jagged blue stone cracked in half.
Iron Inheritance Page 24
