Anael gurgled. It was a laugh. “He hesitates. But why?”
Qiel growled. “Why does a young man seek a sage, old man?”
Anael sneered. “Answers. You hunger for an answer to the riddle of what you are. Oh, what’s to become of me?” he mocked. “Come close, my son. I have the answers—I can tell you everything you want to know.”
“What price? Your life, I suppose?”
Anael coughed up more blood and shook his head. “No, boy. I want yours.”
Qiel could not mask his surprise.
Anael waved a hand, dismissing his fears. “A simple trade—your life for your mother’s.”
Qiel lowered his hand. It wasn’t strictly in surrender, but the gesture also wasn’t devoid of consideration. “Why?”
Anael writhed in pain. “I die, and you torture me with ridiculous questions. Time is short. Yes or no?”
“Who am I that you would want me over her?”
Anael gestured to the chaos around them, above and below them. “You are a perfect contradiction—a Son of El with the blood of the Brotherhood running through you. You are a half-breed able to wield the power of El and to resist the curse of the Brotherhood.” He moved his hands as if casting a spell. “Imagine.”
Qiel had to admit that he had already done such things. And more.
“You are the next Seer, my son. The heir to the throne.”
Qiel clenched his fists and stepped backward. “No.”
Anael’s eyes reddened as his features fell slack. “You will, boy. Or your mother will surely die.”
* * *
KREIOS FOUND HIS OLD friend lying facedown in the rain. This was the last of the pureblood angels of El.
Save for one.
Kreios. And Kreios would be the last.
Yamanu was dead, struck down with Zedkiel’s own sword. Kreios, El’s Angel of Death, knelt over the warm corpse of his companion and lamented all. He was not given, but an instant to grieve. There was a mighty rumble as the ground gave way beneath everything he could see.
Kreios took slowly to the sky, hovering and staring in shock as Yamanu’s body was taken down and consigned to this mass grave, his end, their end, the loss of everything Kreios and his kind had ever had together. It all crashed in upon itself and sank down into the ground, swallowed up by the earth.
Ke’elei was gone.
CHAPTER XV
Elsewhere
THERE WERE PEOPLE IN my room, talking excitedly. I searched for Mom. She was not in her usual chair by the window. I couldn’t turn my head or move, so I was limited to what I could see from my back.
Someone said, “Keep administering CPR. Tell the nurse to get a defibrillator in here now.” Silence. Then, “How long has she been like this?”
“I don’t know. We check in on the patient once per shift,” a woman said.
More commotion. Somebody said, “Clear,” several times and there was a thumping sound. Two men came in with a stretcher and bent down. My mom was lifted into place on it and taken out in a big rush as I screamed for her in the silent hell of my own head. I caught a glimpse of her face—it was drawn, hollow, lifeless.
I was alone in the room. I cried and cried, but the tears never surfaced on my face. I cursed my father for not being here. Where is he?
She whispered again, drawing me into safer places where I could find rest. I was tired, alone, and unable to control what was happening to me. “There remains before you your darkest hour, Airel. Your resolve and desire will face their greatest testing.” I could feel in She’s voice both sadness and solid reassurance that these things were precisely as they should be. “You will yet be brought to the pinnacle of your life. There you must make your last choice between darkness and light. You will need this.”
As I looked, it was as if I was watching myself from above. There in front of me appeared the Sword of Light. I would know that blade anywhere.
“It is El’s Sword. He offers it freely to you for another season. Airel,” She said. “Wake up—awaken!”
I did, but I was no longer in the hospital bed. I was somewhere else, somewhere beautiful. I saw a door hovering before me without handle or frame. I knew this door . . . long ago I’d seen it in my dreams, in my imagination, as I’d read the Book of Kreios.
I held the Sword of Light aloft for the first time in forever. A shout rang out and resonated within the molecules of the blade, which I noticed was different now. At the bisection of the blade and the guard, right at the hilt, there was a perfect circle cutting through, admitting light, air.
I swung it around a few times. It seemed to make the blade faster. Guadagnare. Stocatta.
I walked toward the door, sword in hand, and it opened. My eyes locked onto the burning black globe I beheld through the doorway. A world on fire.
I was going home. I was going back to where it had all started, and I would put an end to what was not meant to be.
Moments later, pain knifed through me. I could feel the extent of my body, the limits of my frame, and it was awkward and weird. My lungs burned—air was being forced down into me through tubes. My eyes opened and I screamed for help.
* * *
Independence, Missouri, Present Day
ELLIE HAD A THEORY she hoped would buy her a little more time. She was already very weak, so it was a last ditch effort even to try it.
As she dissolved from the couch in her father’s library and scattered to the winds, she isolated the contagion of the Mark in her body, placing it away from her, in quarantine. She knew it was temporary at best, since—and she could feel this—the source it fed upon was her heart, but maybe she could buy a couple of weeks. The Mark’s infection was beyond her powers to overcome. She would do what she could to delay the inevitable as long as possible. Just like any driven human determined to save the world.
She didn’t know what would happen. When she gathered herself back together under a tree in the parking lot of the Midwest Genealogy Center in Independence, Missouri, she had readied herself for anything.
She’d thought it might kill her. But in fact, she felt better than she had in a long time, and she kicked herself for not trying it sooner. I feel like a new woman. Like I’ve just had the best spa day ever.
She walked inside.
The receptionist looked up at her. “Welcome to the largest facility for genealogies in the world. How may I help y—oh, wow. Can I just say . . . I just love your hair.”
“Why, thanks,” Ellie said. “I’m kinda partial myself.” She gave a mild curtsy.
The receptionist, a round, dowdy-looking woman dressed in the full range of browns, giggled. “We don’t get many people around here sporting that look.”
“Well, I’ve stuck with what works. In and out of season.” For thousands of years. “So, ah. . .” Ellie looked around for a nameplate. “So, Brenda. Where are the C’s? I’ve got some research to do.”
“Oh, of course.” Brenda peeled her eyes from Ellie’s electric blue mane and shoved a clipboard forward. “Sign in, and then you’ll want to take the elevator to level two. You’re so dang cute.” Brenda giggled again.
Ellie smiled and registered and went to the second floor. After talking to three different people, she was ushered to a small room with no windows and a computer sitting on a simple desk.
As she looked through the boxes of documents that traced the Cross family tree upward from Airel to John, the trail ended. John Cross apparently had no parents, no family. No past. Which meant, “Extremely complicated.” Ellie grasped at her pounding chest and coughed. Maybe not two weeks. Maybe two days.
She needed to get moving then.
Airel mentioned grandparents—they must have been on her mom’s side.
She thought back to her son. She always wondered what became of him. He must have had children—otherwise, Airel would never have been born. Without angelic blood, the family line would not have been able to continue. But Qiel was lost and assumed dead ages ago. After Ke’elei, she her
self had gone off the grid. She’d thought about it a lot, but never so much as she had in the last few weeks.
Wait a minute. What if I’m looking at the wrong parent?
What if it was Airel’s mother who carried the bloodline? What do I even know of my own family tree?
Ellie cursed. She had to start over.
She shoved the box aside and moved to the computer. There had to be something here, anything that could give her answers as to who Airel’s family were. It had started out as a hunch, an itch that needed to be scratched, but her intuition about John Cross was turning out to be a dead end.
No matter. Maybe Maggie Cross would turn up something.
She didn’t even know what she was really after. Maybe she needed to feel connected to her own past by finding out about Airel’s. Or maybe the thought of dying—of the Mark taking her once and for all—made her want to see what she’d missed.
All those years in hiding, running from this . . . and now that it’s the only thing I want, it’s the only thing I can’t have.
Ellie sat back, letting the computer do its search again and again. After an hour of digging, she had come up with nothing. Maggie Cross was much easier to trace. Maggie had a past, she had a documented history. Once Ellie had found her maiden name, she was able to rule her out. Her ancestry was clear. Airel’s mother was purebred human. And that meant only one thing.
It was down to John Cross again.
What are you hiding, John?
CHAPTER I
Arabia, 788 B.C.
QIEL WATCHED AS THE city of Ke’elei sank forever down, swallowed whole by the hungry earth. He didn’t believe in Sheol, but he was beginning to reconsider as his eyes saw things which they protested, stubbornly, were not real. Wave upon wave clapped together, capping in peaks of white foam rendered pink by blood and sucking down into the crater, drowning most of the Brotherhood army along with every inhabitant of the city.
The sea was no respecter of allegiances. All flesh tasted the bitterness of death in its swirling, icy grip.
Lying in Piankhy’s tent, Anael lived on, laboring to breathe, the general of the Brotherhood armies stooped low over his face, straining to hear his last words. Piankhy spoke in a hush with Anael, whispers Qiel could not hear as he looked on from the other side of the general’s tent. His mind raced searching for ways to escape his doom—it was his mother’s life or his. All of his considerable powers were impotent now. How could he save his mother if he didn’t know the first thing about how to find her? The best he could do was hold on and see where this game would spit him out.
Piankhy stood. “Anael is dead,” he said as if the news should have made someone sorry.
“Good,” Qiel said. “May he burn in hell for a thousand eternities.” Qiel spat and watched as it soaked into the Persian rug on which they stood. “It’s the least he deserves.”
“And what of you, Qiel? What is it you deserve?”
Qiel didn’t want to say. “Tell me what he told you.”
The general walked to a nearby table and took up a pomegranate, polishing it against his sash. “Surely you don’t really want to know.”
“What deal did you broker with the old wretch? Tell me. I want just one thing now. I can certainly sweeten the deal for you.”
Piankhy laughed. “Really? That is indeed surprising. I did not know you had . . . shall we say . . . eternal authority.”
Qiel paused. The old traitor must have more power than I imagined. Thoughts crashed together in his head like waves, and in the wake of it he wondered if Anael lived on, if he had somehow become Seer forever, if he had, like a seed, gone dormant, awaiting the most opportune time. What if he is inside the Stone? Qiel could taste malevolence in the tent, hovering near.
“What say you?” The general turned loose of the pomegranate and slipped a hand beneath his sash. “Would you like to be the next recipient of this?” He withdrew his hand, producing a heavy iron chain, and from the end of it swung a stone so red it was almost black.
Qiel found himself holding his breath. He watched as the stone began to glow, as it began to swing like a pendulum ever closer to him, moving at last in defiance of all gravity, hovering at the limit of its leash, the chain stretched taut and horizontal from the hand of the Brotherhood general across the tent, the stone straining at its bonds, trying to get to Qiel.
“Mmm. It wants you, but do you want it?”
Qiel considered. “My mother—she lives?”
Piankhy shrugged. “I suppose so.”
“Deliver her to me. Then I will take up the Bloodstone. I will be your Seer.”
“Anael was crafty,” he said, teasing the chain now only by finger and thumb. The stone hummed louder, pulsing, its red rich and decadent. “That was what he proposed to me, I must admit.”
Qiel doubted this, but as the stone grew louder in his ears, his doubts began to fade.
“I could not have planned a better solution to our problem. I am gladdened that you came to a reasonable conclusion so fast.”
The Brotherhood was lost without a Seer, a leader to steer the horde into all unrighteousness and every dark strategy of the just rebellion. And the line of Kreios, most powerful of all the Fallen, lay fallow and broken, disused, until Qiel was born. And activated.
Qiel’s virtues were self-evident—he was human, he was angelic . . . and he would be, as soon as he agreed and fulfilled the terms of the contract, demonic. He could be the most powerful being on earth. “Only let Uriel go free. Then you may have me.”
Piankhy nodded. He chanted an incantation in a dark tongue, words Qiel imagined Anael might have used. A cloud of vapor formed in front of Qiel’s eyes and became a shadow, and in this shadow, he could see his mother’s face. She was seized with terror. As fast as it had appeared, it was taken away, her essence blown to the farthest reaches of the earth.
The general laughed. “She is free. She is broken, but she is free. Now fulfill your duty and say the words that will seal the transaction, boy, the words that even now are burning in your mind.”
Qiel fell into a trance and found his lips forming these words: “I pledge life and soul to the Brotherhood. This life is not mine; there is only the Brotherhood, the clean nothingness. I swear in blood I shall soldier for my Brothers. Brothers in blood, brothers in death, brothers in the fires of Hell. And I their Seer.” The stone was close now and Qiel touched it, sealing the deal.
His world became red.
Piankhy wound the iron chain around Qiel’s neck and bowed low, his face touching the ground. “My brother. My Seer.”
* * *
URIEL THOUGHT SHE HAD died when the Bloodstone released her. All at once she converged into one place again, within the heavy black fabric walls of the tent. She saw a glimpse of her son, a sight that broke her heart, for she could see what was in his eyes. But it was over too soon and she was in the wind again, taken leagues away from him. With what little strength remained to her, she reassembled and collapsed on the face of the mountainside, gasping for air.
She breathed her first breath and squinted her eyes, feeling the pain of both.
Water was soaking her cloak. She scrambled to her feet, a mad craving rooted deep within her heart, an addiction of blackest passion for the stone. All she wanted was more, to be rejoined to the Bloodstone, to feel cocooned within its terrible facets again, and safe inside the nothingness of it. Red and beautiful, it was evil, wonderful.
But then she looked to the horizon. Over a small rise, she saw it and cried out. This is all that is left of the beloved city. The valley that was once bedecked in hopeful tones of green, open and bright and full that led up to the city, was now a slough of mud and the putrid stench of the sea, the dying, and the dead. The mountain, once white, was now nothing but a black hole. Water poured into it. As she looked on in disbelief, the water began to calm and diminish. The mountain, now sheared clean of the evidence, stood over a dark lake. The troubled surface spread itself in the well of the hole,
a vast silent witness covering the affronts just under its muddy flood.
The torrent had taken the city and killed most of the Brotherhood army and anyone else unable to fly to escape.
Uriel was a part of that. She had killed her own family, had betrayed her own. Now she was left with nothing. The Bloodstone had confiscated everything and spit her out when she ceased to be useful.
In the dread space of this waste, her thoughts turned reflexively to her only son, Qiel. He was the only, the last person she loved. The last person she thought she could ever love. What has happened to you, son?
“Qiel. Where are you?” She flew over the lake, searching for survivors. She hoped and prayed to El that her son yet lived. Nothing remained—the last of the Brotherhood horde had fled. A lone tent stood on a lump in the morass of what was left in the valley.
She flew there because there was nowhere else.
Empty. All gone. Only lying on a cot in the tent was the shriveled body of Anael, already in decay. Her longstanding adversary, the only one who knew where her son might be—if he was still alive—and he lay here dead.
Uriel cursed the heavens and fell to her knees and wept. Her heart broke under the weight of her guilt. Qiel was lost. Her father was gone. Her family and friends were buried under a murderous sea. And it is my fault. She was a traitor, she was the one who had abandoned all, she was the one who had raised her fist to El.
This was her reward.
Wiping her face, Uriel stood. She had to find her son. She had to know whether he was alive or dead. One man would know. Yshmial. The boy’s father.
CHAPTER II
Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, Present Day
The Airel Saga Box Set: Young Adult Paranormal Romance Page 83
