Down in Flames

by Jennifer Siddoway

  I buried my face in my hands and laughed. “Oh God, I didn’t even think of that!”

  He chuckled, gently removing them from my face and looking me in the eyes before kissing the scars on my palms. “We’ll tell them soon. The Dunaways will want to hear about this too.”

  His touch released a swarm of butterflies in my stomach as I realized the full weight of the decision we had made. “Oh gosh, that means Lacey is going to be my sister in-law.”

  “Yep.”

  “And I’ll be…”

  “Mrs. Dunaway.”

  I smiled. “I like the sound of that.”

  “So, how are we going to defeat Aidan, future Mrs. Dunaway?”

  “We’re going to have to lure him to the surface first,” I told him. “He’s more vulnerable in the Mortal Realm to begin with. Secondly, we’re going to need soldiers – good ones.”

  I put emphasis on the final thought, hoping he caught my meaning. I’d been mulling this over for weeks, ever since Nate and I got back from the Garden. It had not been met with a warm reception when I brought it up before, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that she could be an asset to our cause.

  His brow line puckered. “Who are you thinking of?”

  “Maya.”

  Caleb almost spit his coffee on the ground and stared at me like I was insane. Maybe I was insane, it was entirely possible. She’d been arrested and taken away to Verdovis for a reason, that being because she was unpredictable and a loose cannon. I wasn’t minimizing the threat she posed, but it was that same quality which made her allegiance desirable. “Maya? Are you crazy? Last time she was here she tried to kill you.”

  “I know. She’s also incredibly talented and one of the most highly trained Guardians I’ve ever met. If we could get her to fight for us, I bet she could hold off an entire line of demons. You said they would take her to Verdovis, right?”

  “Yeah…”

  “Do you know how to get inside?”

  “Wynn, I don’t like where this is headed.”

  “I didn’t think you would, but that’s our best chance at getting the demon-slaying she-beast on our side.”

  “Alright, but in order to get to Verdovis you’ll need help from the other side. I don’t think you realize how difficult this is going to be on you, not only emotionally but physically. Are you sure you want to go through that? We can find another way.”

  I felt like he knew things he wasn’t telling me. From his concerned expression, I guessed I didn’t really want to know. “Yes. I don’t want to, but I will. It’s important we give this our best shot, and that means we need Maya.”

  “Okay, if you’re sure you’re ready, then I’ll make contact with someone.”

  I sighed, and pulled him closer to kiss him on the mouth. He cradled my face within his hands and gave in willingly.

  “I don’t want to lose you,” he whispered sadly.

  “You’re not going to,” I insisted, placing my forehead against his. “We’re doing this together.”

  Caleb sighed as he took me by the hand and kissed the finger that bore his ring. I smiled at the way it sparkled before I added, “and then we end this.”

  HJ

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Elyse asked us nervously.

  Her pale blue eyes flickered towards Caleb apprehensively as we gave her a stiff nod. “Do it, Elyse.”

  She swallowed hard and stepped in front of me with her Messenger robes billowing in the breeze. I didn’t know what to expect, except that she was going to help me cross over into the Angelic Realm. It had taken a few days of negotiation for her to agree, but once she understood the urgency of what we were trying to accomplish she begrudgingly promised to do her part. Her face hardened suddenly and she commanded, “Okay, Wynn. Don’t Breathe.”

  My brow furrowed in confusion, but before I could question her about it, her hand shot forward and plunged into my chest. I crumpled from pain immediately as the force of her wrist broke through bone and tissue, effectively severing my ribcage and grabbed hold of my beating heart dispassionately. Hurt, confusion and betrayal were all swirling through my mind as tears pricked at the corner of my eyes.

  Her hand was still imbedded in my chest as I gasped for breath and fell to my knees in front of her. While my body fell, she ripped the beating tissue from my breast and held the bloody mass in her hand.

  Looking up at her, I saw the heart still quiver. My own body felt cold, empty … lifeless. Darkness encroached upon my vision and I reflexively felt the empty cavity she had left. Caleb put his arms around and caught me, lowering me safely to the ground.

  This is fair, I thought. It was because of me that her life ended.

  “Wynn, don’t be afraid,” she told me softly. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

  Her sweet, feminine voice echoed inside my ears as my limbs fell limp and the entire world went black.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Holy Ground

  ML

  I woke up feeling heavy, lying on a bed of clouds with Elyse and Caleb standing over me. There was a giant weight on my chest, making it difficult to breathe, and I gasped for air in panic. As my eyes focused on the halo of light surrounding them, her blonde hair rustled in the breeze and relief spread across her face. “Wynn!” she breathed out happily. “You scared us for a minute there, I was afraid we lost you. I’d never done anything like that before.”

  Her voice quavered as she spoke, as if she’d been holding her breath waiting for me to get up. I sat up to look around, but even the slightest movement sent a jolt of painful tremors through my ribcage. I forced myself to focus on the new surroundings to distract myself from the pain and started breathing through my nose. As I gazed out at the heavenly scene, it became clear that we were hidden in a cave of ice at the base of a mountain pass. Verdovis prison became visible on the horizon, halfway submerged underneath the snow and an aurora borealis light display weaving ribbons of color through the sky above from ice crystals in the atmosphere.

  I shuddered from the cold as a gust of wind whipped by. “Aughhhh!”

  “Here, take this,” Elyse offered, handing me a gray, fur-lined cloak that she had tucked beneath her arm. “I brought it for you when Caleb told me where you were going. Even though you can’t technically die, that leaves frost bite and hypothermia as a very real possibility.”

  I took the fabric from her and shrugged into its sleeves, shivering in appreciation at the warmth of its thick wool fibers. “It looks like some of the Guardian’s,” I mentioned. “Is that on purpose?”

  She nodded slightly, while crossing her arms in front of her chest. “The Crystal Keep is not a friend to you. Any of the guards would happily turn you into the Council, or Ezekiel, without a batting an eyelash. I thought it might help to disguise your face while you’re breaking in to get Maya.”

  I groaned, slowly rising to my feet and blinking past her to the white landscape of snow and ice. “What happened?” I asked them cautiously. All I could remember was calling Elyse to help us and then her hand plunging into my chest, followed by searing pain. “Elyse, you killed me.”

  “Yes, I did,” she agreed. “It was the only way to get you here.”

  “You mean I’m really dead?”

  Caleb nodded, glancing over at her with a timid smile. His brown, windswept hair was dark as coal against the white backdrop when he responded, “Well, at least until Elyse returns your heart. She’s keeping it safe for us while we’re in there.”

  My heart?

  It wasn’t until that moment that I realized she was holding the pumping lump of human flesh. The pulsing mound was a perfect anatomical version of what I’d always seen in textbooks, the aortic valve and superior vena cava still intact. My eyes grew wide at the sight of it, followed by a powerful, visceral reaction – I almost vomited. There was nothing about seeing my own heart in another person’s hands that would ever be okay. I shook my head repeatedly, choking down the bile in my throat and looked a
way from her to signal my repulsion.

  Thankfully, she was sensitive to my distress and put the heart away. “Don’t worry,” she assured me quickly. “I’ll take care of this while you’re gone. Nothing’s going to happen to your body, or the stake, until you and Caleb get back – I’ll make sure of it.”

  “Thank you, but I still don’t understand why this happened,” I told her, mystified.

  Caleb and Elyse looked at one another tensely and I became increasingly frustrated that I’d been kept out of the loop. “Do you want to tell her, or should I?”

  I turned to him and asked, “Caleb?”

  He sighed, pulling the hood up around my head to conceal my hair and ran his finger along the ginger tresses. “You’re a demon,” he reminded me, moving down to the fasten the brooch underneath my chin. “You’ve been to Hell and back. Once you’ve set foot in the Demonic Realm it places a mark on your heart that weighs you down. You’d never make it to Verdovis with that kind of limitation. You’d fall to Earth like a stone. We had to take away your demonic power.”

  “By ripping out my heart?” I demanded.

  Caleb flinched, but he continued by explaining, “It’s what gives you life and the source of all your demon power; without it you can move between realms freely.”

  “So, not only am I in the Angelic Realm, where everyone wants to kill me, but I’m also without any powers to protect myself,” I clarified.

  “That would be the crux if it,” he agreed.

  “How did you get here?”

  He sighed. “I was never born in the Mortal Realm the way you were, it isn’t tied to Earth the same. I’ve also been here before, so I knew the way already.”

  “Well, one things for sure, we’re not going to get Maya out by fighting our away across. It will have to be done in secret.”

  “Wynn, I know you’re scared, but there was no other way. It was weighing you down, so I removed it from your body,” Elyse told me matter-of-factly. “It’s still being guarded at the safe house. Nate and I are going to defend it, while Caleb and your spirit break into Verdovis. You’ve got twenty-four hours before I have to put it back, or you really will die.”

  I smiled at the odd gesture of sisterly protection and pulled the cloak up around my neck to fend off the chill. “Twenty-four hours,” I repeated, more for my own recollection than anyone else’s, and breathed out a sharp exhale. “I guess we better get started.”

  Elyse nodded, disappearing in a burst of light and the sound of fluttering wings.

  “Alright, you heard her,” Caleb muttered as he took me by the hand. “Tick tock, babe. Let’s go.”

  I nodded, following him out into the snowy terrain. My body felt heavy and weird as I struggled to keep up. Caleb was able to march quickly through the snow, breaking a trail for me to follow, but even then, I found him getting farther and farther ahead of me. I was too tired and out of breath to even call out to him. He eventually glanced back to check on me and found me struggling to keep up, so he doubled back to duck behind a snowdrift to pause. “How are you doing, Wynn? Are you okay?”

  I panted, trying to catch my breath. “I’m … trying….”

  “We’ve got to keep going,” he insisted. “The sentinels are patrolling everywhere. If we keep stopping one of them is going to find us.”

  “Okay.”

  I really didn’t want to, I just wanted to rest here in the relative cover of a snowy hill forever, but despite myself, I pushed on my knees to straighten up and forced myself to start trudging back into the freezing wind once more. It was just another battle, only it was a matter of enduring the relentless elements this time. Frost had already started forming on my cheeks, and my lips were turning blue from the unforgiving wind.

  Forgetting myself and my discomfort, I retreated inside myself, focusing on breathing through my scarf, and putting my feet one at a time literally into Caleb’s footsteps. It made me raise my legs higher to clear the mounds of snow, but it was easier than trying to plow right through. I couldn’t have guessed how long we silently marched, or even the path we took as Caleb kept us out of sight, but I slowly realized we had come to a stop, and when I looked up, I discovered we were standing within sight of a great glittering fortress. The storm of wind and ice made it difficult to stand when we made it to the Crystal Keep. The pain of it caused me to tear up and the wetness immediately turned to ice. I had to blink to get them out of my face. I whimpered slightly from pain as we crouched behind a snowdrift to see if the coast was clear. Verdovis Prison was so much worse than my vision when I’d seen Caleb’s fall. It had been built into the side of a mountain, entirely out of ice and two of its four border walls were completely inaccessible, the others were submerged in snow.

  At the gate were two statues of hooded beings that mirrored one another, towering over the courtyard leading in. The height and perspective of looking up at them induced vertigo by itself even though their eyes did not move, I felt like they were watching me. Their construction was made of clear, shimmering material I wasn’t sure if it was crystal or ice. To enter the keep, we would have to cross beneath them and sneak past twenty guards. As we crossed the mountain path towards the keep, I caught sight of some frost giants keeping patrol of the grounds outside. They didn’t seem to notice us, but kept a deliberate circuit around the exterior.

  “How do you want to do this?” I asked him quietly.

  “Keep your head down and follow me,” he whispered.

  I did exactly what he said, ducking behind walls of ice and keeping quiet so none of them could hear us. Fortunately, the wind and falling snow muffled even our small crunching steps, and the snowdrifts meandering through their patrol were enough for us to sneak between. Whatever tracks we left behind were quickly obscured by the storm; it was difficult for us to fight through, but the weather was certainly an advantage for our infiltration. We passed beneath the Elder’s statues and skirted along the wall until making our way inside. Their cold stony gaze watched us infiltrate the Angelic Structure, full of judgment and disapproval. Caleb led us through the outer perimeter, and we climbed in through one of the portcullis archways.

  Once inside, the prison made no pretenses of being anything but a severe and austere dungeon: simple hallways and corridors were pocked with small, unadorned cells. Usually nothing but a floor and bars, or perhaps chains as well. Our footsteps echoed down the icy corridor and we searched for the holding cell. Sound doesn’t echo on the ice the way it does in other places, its clearer, crisper somehow. At the end of our junction, Caleb and I ducked around the corner to see if the coast was clear. Carefully, I peeked out from around the wall and saw three guards loitering.

  “How many?” Caleb whispered.

  I held up three fingers and put a finger to my lips.

  He nodded. “Okay, we can wait until they leave. There’s a gap from when the guards walk the halls and leave this area unmanned. Once they turn the corner we can find Maya’s cell.”

  I watched the guard do exactly as he said, continuing along their circuit and heading off the other direction. As long as we remained hidden, there was no reason our plan couldn’t work. Moments later the guards’ footsteps faded off into icy corridor. As they disappeared around the corner we crept out and peeked in every doorway until we found the one with Maya. Inside the frozen chamber, the fallen angel sat still on the icy floor. Her black wings curled around her back to keep her warm and her long, black hair hung down across her face. The only clothes she had was a dirty gray prison dress that barely kept out the chill.

  When she looked up at the sound of our arrival, Maya was visibly surprised. Her sunken yellow eyes blinked slowly and assessed the two of us skeptically. When she saw us her aura sparked dangerously, like an electrical charge untethered to a grounding wire. Tiny pulses of energy crackled and popped as it swirled around her body. I cleared my throat and approached her cautiously.

  My red hair came tumbling out from the hood as I lowered it to speak with her. “Hello, M
aya. We’re here to get you out.”

  She snorted at that sarcastically, and turned to me with a little grin. “Why would you do that? I tried to kill you.”

  Her voice was low and hoarse from months of not being used on a regular basis.

  I chuckled softly and told her, “No one’s perfect, and we need your help. I’m going to kill Aidan once and for all. To do that, I need warriors. I know you and I have had our differences in the past, but this is different – it’s important. Listen, if we don’t stop him, Aidan has plans to invade the Mortal Realm. He’s got an army ready to invade and I can’t let that happen. People will die and the entire world will become an extension of the Demon Realm.”

  Maya listened to me with a look of confusion on her face, glancing back and forth the between me and Caleb. I could almost see the wheels turning in her head, putting the pieces together. Then her eyes flitted down to where Caleb’s ring was sparking brightly on my finger. I didn’t attempt to hide it, or conceal the truth, but didn’t flaunt it at her either. Her eyes narrowed at the sight of it, her inky black hair and hollow cheeks, reflecting darkly in the lamplight. She clutched the iron bars between us, but didn’t say anything.

  “So, you’re going to let me out of here?”

  I stuttered at her reaction, “Y-yes, I believe that is exactly what I just said.”

  Before I could start picking the lock, however, Caleb placed his hand on my shoulder to let me know he had something to say. “Before she does, you and I need to talk. What you did was unacceptable. Coming after Wynn like that was reckless and put a lot of innocent people at risk. You should be ashamed of yourself. We’ve been through a lot together and I know you’re capable of more. All this hate you keep buried inside is like a poison, it’s going to destroy you.”

  Despite her circumstances, she had been putting up a strong front. But with him she was surprisingly demure. Her lip twitched, accentuating the beauty mark on her cheek. “I know, I’m sorry.”