by Ella Summers
Tessa snickered, but the sound was so soft, I could barely hear it over the clinking of Gin’s tools. My crazy parents and I didn’t say anything for the next few minutes while Gin worked, Tessa helped her, and the rest of us fought off the flying rat monsters.
But at a lull in the wave of charging beasts, Grace turned to Faris. “So you are really going to continue this pretense that you didn’t take Leda from me?”
“I did not take her. If I had, she would have grown up by my side, not on the streets of Earth’s Frontier like a dirty urchin.” When Faris looked at me, his nose scrunched up like he’d smelled something particularly foul.
Grace’s eyes narrowed to slits. “So I suppose a newborn baby just got up and walked away all by herself?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said impatiently. “Isn’t it obvious who took her? It was your sister Sonja.”
Grace laughed at him. “If Sonja had taken Leda, she’d have grown up by my sister’s side. Or under her boot.”
“Yes, but Sonja has never been very good at holding on to her toys.” His brows arched. “Or at keeping them in one piece, especially the toys she steals from others.”
“Thea,” Grace said.
Faris nodded curtly. “To name just one of many examples. Instead of making a nuisance of yourself here, Grace, what you really should be doing is talking to Sonja.”
Grace seemed to be considering the idea, but then she shot him an incredulous look. “You’re trying to get rid of me.”
“Yes, of course I wish to be rid of you. You’re getting on my nerves. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong about Sonja.”
Grace’s eyebrows furrowed. “I will deal with Sonja later. I’m not leaving.”
“In that case, I hope you at least came armed with more than your charming wit and that adorable knife. More beasts are closing in on us.”
Grace’s lip twitched at the word ‘adorable’, but she unhooked a weapon from her back. It was an enormous trident glowing with purple magic, sizzling with telekinetic energy. “You should know by now, Faris. I always come prepared to fight.”
An odd look crossed Faris’s face, one I had never seen there before. One that I hardly recognized hidden beneath the smug mask of divine arrogance. Humor? Yes, humor. Something Grace had said amused him.
“I’m glad that you two have made up,” I said, allowing my sarcasm to seep through. “So now we can deal with the actual problem.”
A second army of flying rats had arrived, and they were even bigger and uglier than the previous ones. Their fur was bright green, like acid, and their eyes were as black as tar. I fought off the monsters, my god father and demon mother by my side.
But even working together, we weren’t making a dent in their numbers. In fact, there were more of them here than ever before. And the monsters just kept coming.
I had to hand it to Faris and Grace. They were lousy parents but excellent warriors. They cut the beasts down like they were nothing at all.
A flash from Sierra’s past hit me. I saw her fighting monsters. Monsters just like these. The vision froze me for a moment. I blinked, trying to pull myself back to the present.
The first thing I saw back in my own time was a monster jumping at me. Faster than I could think, Grace had thrown herself between me and the winged rat. She extended her hand toward the beast. I could feel a buildup of combined telepathic and telekinetic energy all around us.
The monster froze in place. It was just stuck there, mid-air, its body frozen by telekinetic magic, its mind crippled by her telepathic attack. Then Grace cut her trident, burning with magic, across the immobile beast, slaying it.
Her attack brought an old question to the forefront of my mind. “Why don’t gods and demons have the magic of telepathy naturally? Why did you have to breed it into yourselves?”
“Because the Immortals were power-hungry fools,” Faris replied.
I didn’t even try to hide my smirk. “That assessment means a lot coming from you, Faris.”
Grace was more serious. “The Immortals didn’t want to give us the power to read their minds,” she explained.
“Why not?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” said Faris. “The Immortals were hiding something from us. And from them.” He pointed at Grace.
“Both gods and demons have spent centuries trying to figure out what it is the Immortals were hiding,” she said.
“And have you learned anything?”
“No. But I will.” Faris’s voice was determined—and dangerous.
“I’ve managed to open the lock on this door,” Gin announced.
I patted her on the back. “Great job.”
I gripped the handle. The others stepped back to make room for me to open the door. Once open, I could see a curtain of glowing magic in the doorway. I poked the curtain with my finger. It felt like touching liquid caramel.
There was a growl and a scream from behind. I spun around to watch a final flying rat burst onto the scene out of nowhere. The monster jumped on Gin, throwing her to the ground.
Grace hit the winged rat with a spell, shattering it to pieces. Tessa rushed over to Gin. She set her hand on Gin’s bloody throat.
Tessa looked up from our sister’s motionless body. “She’s dead,” she declared, her eyes wide. “Gin is dead.”
3
Deities, Danger, and Drama
I rushed over to my sister. Tessa was gripping tightly to Gin’s lifeless body. She couldn’t let go. I waved my hand over Gin, trying to heal her with Fairy’s Touch, but she was already dead.
“Stop fussing over her,” Faris scolded me. “We need to get going before the passage closes.”
I turned on him, growling, “My sister is dead, and all you’re worried about is your stupid passage.”
“She is a phoenix. She will rise again. But we don’t have time to wait.”
“You really are a callous son of a bitch, Faris.”
“And you’re an emotional wreck. Pull yourself together, Pandora. We have work to do and no time to waste on useless tears.”
“Faris is an insensitive ass, but he is right, Leda.” Grace pointed at the glowing curtain of magic. “Look, the passage is already closing.”
I saw it. The light curtain was flickering and buzzing like it was about to go out.
And right now I didn’t care. Sure, Gin would live. She would rise again, and it would hurt like hell. But that wasn’t the point. Just because someone was basically indestructible, that didn’t mean you stopped caring about them. Because once you started doing that, you were well on your way to treating all people as disposable. That was the gods’ whole problem. And the demons’ problem too. They didn’t care about anyone. They didn’t understand love, compassion, or anything that connected people to other people.
“If we don’t do this now, we won’t get another chance for a while,” Grace said to me. “Not until the moon is full again. Don’t you want to know who is sending you those visions? Don’t you want to know why?”
Yes, I wanted that. Of course I wanted it.
“It isn’t you?” I had to ask.
“No, Leda. It wasn’t me.”
And for some reason, I actually believed her.
“They’re right, Leda. You need to go,” Tessa said to me. “There’s a reason everything happened this way, a reason we all came to be here on Earth and ended up with Calli. It’s all linked, Leda, and you need to figure out why. Go find your answers. I’ll teleport with Gin. I’ll bring her back home.”
I hesitated.
“Gin would want you to go and figure this out,” Tessa said.
I rose to my feet. “All right.”
I joined Faris and Grace at the glowing magic curtain.
“What is it?” I wondered. “A magic mirror, a passage to another world?”
“Not quite,” said Grace. “It’s certainly similar, though. I don’t think it leads to another world but rather to a secret place here on this one.”
“Wh
erever it leads, it won’t work for long,” Faris said impatiently.
As we passed through the glowing curtain, I glanced over my shoulder. A winged rat had taken flight; it was trying to follow us through. But it stopped just before it reached the curtain. It whimpered like it wanted to go through but couldn’t. More monsters had arrived. They looked agitated that they couldn’t follow us. Tessa, holding Gin, vanished from sight.
“They got away,” I said happily under my breath.
The ruined city faded away. We popped out the other end of the glowing curtain, suspended up in the air, nothing else but empty space all around us. Then a tornado shot up out of nowhere and swallowed us. Even beating my wings at full power, navigating the wild winds was tough. I grabbed my cat Angel before she got sucked in. The moment I wrapped my arms around her, wings sprouted out of her back.
“You really are a little angel now,” I said fondly.
She opened her mouth to meow, but I couldn’t hear her over the roar of the raging tornado.
That tornado was pulling us down. Down to the ground. Very, very slowly, it was drawing us toward a floating platform in the sky. My feet set down on hard rock.
The floating island was about the size of a football field and covered in asphalt, or some similar substance. I didn’t see anything obvious to explain how it was floating like this. Must have been magic. Or Magitech.
The floating island didn’t seem to be affected by the tornado. In fact, down here, standing on the flat pancake surface, that tornado felt like nothing more than a bracing wind. I could see it spinning around us, trapping us inside, on this peculiar island. It had zipped itself up around the island, so I couldn’t see past it. My new reality ended in a tornado.
This wasn’t a natural tornado either, the kind that rolled over land. This tornado had been spun together with magic. Just like the floating asphalt island.
Grace and Faris were looking around too. Faris threw a few spells at the tornado, obviously trying to break through it, but his spells just bounced back at him.
Grace laughed at his failed efforts. “Such a man’s idea, to think he can overpower everything with brute force.”
Faris’s dark brows drew together. “I have a lot of brute force.”
Grace laughed again. “Not enough, apparently.”
“And I suppose you have a better idea?” Faris demanded.
“Naturally. We are going to wait this out.”
Faris looked at the tornado, which was showing no signs of slowing down or fizzling out any time soon. “That is unacceptable.”
“You always were so impatient, Faris.”
“I have things to do. That’s what it means to actually be important.”
The look he gave her brought a frown to Grace’s lips.
“I know what you’re trying to do,” she said.
“Good for you.”
“And it won’t work. I’m not impressed by your ego, nor cowered by your shameless arrogance. And neither is Leda.” Grace looked at me.
“Keep me out of your lovers’ spat,” I said, not taking my eyes off the tornado. The spell had to have a weakness. If only I could find it.
“It’s a little late for you to be left out of anything, dear,” Grace said breezily. “You are, after all, our daughter, and therefore very much at the center of our lives.”
She smiled at me. The look on the demon’s face was positively doting. Honestly, it really freaked me out.
But it made Faris laugh. “She isn’t fooled by the motherly act, Grace.”
“You aren’t helping,” she snapped at him.
“I have no intention of helping you carry out your nefarious scheme.”
“Nefarious scheme?” She planted her hands on her hips. “What exactly do you imagine I’m scheming to do?”
“I don’t know.” Faris frowned as if the admission grated on him. “Or at least I haven’t figured it out yet. But I will find out what you’re planning. And I will stop you.”
Her eyes twinkled with delight. “Well, aren’t you a regular storm cloud on a sunny day.”
Lightning flashed across the sky, visible above the swirling tornado.
“Very funny,” Faris said drily to Grace.
“That wasn’t my doing.”
“Someone is coming,” I told my unhinged parents.
The tornado wall parted slightly, like curtains being drawn apart, then two figures stepped through the opening. The tornado zipped closed behind them.
I couldn’t see much of the two people, besides their silhouettes. But as they came closer, my breath caught in my throat. I gasped. One of them was Zane, my brother, the very reason I’d joined the Legion of Angels and set off on this mad, mad path of deities, danger, and drama.
The other person was someone I didn’t recognize, a woman with long black hair braided along the left side of her face. She was dressed in a leather suit that perfectly fitted her tall and slender body. She carried a long sword on her back.
My brother Zane wore a fitted t-shirt and a pair of thick pants made of a durable fabric, the kind you’d put on when you had to trek long distances across the wilderness. He’d cut his light brown hair since I’d last seen him. It was cropped short—and a little spiky. And he’d been working out. His chest was broader, his shoulders wider. It looked like I hadn’t been the only one to step up my physical exercise these past two years.
I rushed forward to hug my brother. “You’ve gotten bigger,” I teased him, pinching his biceps.
“So have you.” Zane set his hand on my belly.
I looked down, blushing. “There really isn’t anything to see yet.”
“There is for me,” he told me.
Zane was a telepath and a powerful one at that. He could see things that others could not, things that were there but hidden to the naked eye.
“In any case, congratulations, Leda,” he said with a bright smile. “I know this isn’t how you ever envisioned bringing a child into the world, but we will make it right. We will make it safe for her. I promise.”
I set my hand over his, my eyes tearing up. “I know I can always count on you to have my back, Zane.”
“And I can always count on you to have mine,” he replied. “Joining the Legion of Angels to gain the magic to find me…” He whistled, clearly impressed. “You are the truest, bravest, craziest sister that I could ever ask for.”
“But I didn’t have to find you. You found me. How ever did you escape the Guardians?” I asked him.
“River got me out.” He glanced at the woman at his side.
I looked at her. Something was…well, weird. Something was very off about all of this. I could feel it. Right now, my gut was warning me that this woman was a liar. It was warning me not to trust her.
But it was Grace who voiced my concerns. “That woman is a Guardian.”
4
The Rogue Guardian
I looked at Zane. “She’s a Guardian?”
“You can trust River,” he said quickly. “She’s different than the others. She helped me. She got me out of the Guardians’ Sanctuary.”
Faris gave River a cool, assessing look. “She is a Guardian. All Guardians want to destroy every god, demon, supernatural, and human in the universe.”
“And all gods want complete dominion over the known universe and to subject everyone in it to their will,” River countered.
“Of course,” Faris said, unabashed.
Daddy Dearest sure wasn’t helping matters.
I stepped forward and looked at River. “What makes you different than the other Guardians?”
“For one, I’m not trying to kill any of you,” she said lightly.
“Why not?” I asked her.
River shrugged. “It’s counterproductive.”
“Counterproductive to your objective?” I guessed.
“Yes.”
“And what is your objective?”
She spread her arms and smiled. “I can’t say.”
; Typical. Just typical. One of these days, I’d love to have a normal conversation with someone.
“You know something about the visions I started having in the city two years ago—and am having again now, don’t you?” I asked the rogue Guardian.
“Yes.”
I waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t.
So I continued with my questions. “This place is connected to the visions.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve been here before.”
“Yes.”
“Did you send me the visions?” I asked.
“No.”
Well, she clearly wasn’t going to tell me more about that. So I moved on.
I looked around at the swirling tornado that surrounded us. “What is this place?”
“An echo chamber.”
“An echo chamber?” I asked, then felt a bit like an echo chamber myself.
“Memories are stored here. Think of this place like a vault for memories. The Vault can tune in to someone’s mind and send them memories.”
“That’s some very complicated magic.” Faris’s tone was casual, but his eyes were very sharp.
“It is,” River agreed.
“But the Guardians cannot use magic,” I said. “They neutralize it.”
River’s smile didn’t fade. In fact, it grew wider. “Like I said, I am not like other Guardians.”
She didn’t elaborate, and it was clear she wasn’t going to.
“So you used this repository to send me visions?” I asked.
“Not I.”
Of course not. Not that she was going to tell me who had sent me the visions.
“Ok, so someone used this repository to send me visions?”
“Some very specific visions,” River told me.
“Why? Why connect to me? Why show me those visions?”
She smiled.
“You don’t know?” I asked.
“I know, but I can’t say,” she said, for what felt like the one-millionth time since I’d met her five minutes ago.
