by Ella Summers
“Are you all right?” Indira asked her.
“Better than the other guys,” her sister replied. “The Guardians’ forces tried to take control over the Vault, but I changed the password. They’re locked out.”
I guessed this ‘password’ was what allowed people to get into the Vault without picking the lock at the full moon, when the magic was just right.
She took a shaky step forward. Bloody and bruised with half of her armor plates dented or knocked clean off, she looked like she’d barely escaped a battle with her life.
“Great.” Basanti’s voice sizzled with sarcasm. “Now there are five of them.”
“Which one is that?” Leila wondered.
“It’s River,” Zane answered. “The one who got me out of the Sanctuary.”
River bowed to him. “Nice to see you again, Zane.”
“Wait, if you can get someone out of the Sanctuary, can’t you just sneak someone in?” I asked the rogue Guardian.
“It’s not that easy,” River told me. “My magic nullified Zane’s magic. It made him appear dead, thereby tricking the Sanctuary’s system.”
“I used the same trick to get out,” Cadence said. “I pretended to be dead.”
“But I can’t hide all of your magic.” River shook her head. “And getting in is even trickier than getting out, especially right now. After I got Zane out, the Guardians locked me out of the Sanctuary.”
“Why did you get him out anyway?” I asked her.
“I told you before, Leda. You need your family. They make you strong, strong enough to fight the Guardians. And strong enough to beat them.”
“Yes, you did say that. But there’s something else, another reason you helped Zane escape and find me. You wanted me to trust you,” I decided.
“You should trust us,” Inali told me.
“It’s hard to trust someone who hides behind another’s face,” Calli told the person she’d once considered a friend.
“But we aren’t hiding,” said Inali, the mimic. “We revealed ourselves to you.”
“But you haven’t revealed everything. You’re still hiding behind secrets,” I told her. “For example, why was River staying with the Guardians for all those years?”
“As a spy. I was their eyes inside the Sanctuary. It was my job to keep an eye on the Guardians’ dangerous plans.”
“Their eyes?” I said. “Whose eyes were you inside the Sanctuary?
River said nothing.
“Well?”
“I can’t say.”
“Can’t?” I asked. “Or won’t?”
River didn’t answer. I had not missed these evasive conversations with her.
“Can you at least tell me more about the Prophecy the Guardians are so worked up about?” I asked River.
She looked at Gertrude, who nodded.
“Very well,” said River.
“So apparently the Guardians had a plan for Nero’s parents—and, presumably, Nero,” I said. “You’ve shown us my past, but what about Nero’s? Did you interfere in his past as you did in mine?”
“No, that wasn’t our doing. It was the Guardians.” River looked at Cadence and Damiel. “The Guardians watched you throughout your lives. They arranged for you to meet. They set the scene so you would fall in love.”
Damiel’s face might have been etched in stone. Even the usual spark of humor was missing from his eyes.
River turned to Nero. “They wanted you to be born, so you could father a child with Leda Pandora. This child was to be the instrument the Guardians would use to create their new order.”
“The Guardians tried to kill Leda.” Nero’s voice scratched like gravel. “Up on that rooftop in Purgatory, when they’d gained control over Meda.”
“One of the Guardians tried to kill Leda,” said River. “One who, out of the belief that the Angel of Chaos was too dangerous to be allowed to live a moment longer, acted against the other Guardians’ plans. The others didn’t want Leda killed until after she’d served her purpose and given birth to the child.”
That showed the Guardians were not a single, unified force. If they had different ideas on how to do things, maybe we could use that against them. Maybe we could get them to turn against one another.
“You seem to know a lot about the Guardians’ plans,” Cadence commented.
“I have been watching them very closely for a very long time,” River said.
“What about Illias?” Cadence asked. “He took credit for my relationship with Damiel. He had a plan for us too: to get him the daggers.”
“There was a time when Illias’s plans for you overlapped with the Guardians’ plans for you,” River said. “So for a while, they worked together, united in their hatred of the Immortals.”
“Illias told the Guardians how to kill the Immortals and trap their souls inside immortal artifacts,” Gertrude said. “And the Guardians helped Illias set the scene for Cadence and Damiel to meet.”
“But Illias and the Guardians had different motivations,” said River. “Illias only wanted to get rid of the Immortals so that they were out of the way, while the Guardians went about achieving their goal of gaining the magic the Immortals had specifically denied them.”
“As long as the goals of Illias and the Guardians were aligned, they worked together,” Gertrude said. “But when their goals diverged, they parted ways.”
“So, to answer your question, Leda, that’s how both Illias and the Guardians had a plan for Cadence and Damiel,” River concluded.
“This is so nice, but we really must start our preparations. We have very little time left for question and answer.” Indira glanced at our very round bellies. “You have very little time until your babies are here.”
“To gain magic, the Guardians are planning on a mass sacrifice of magic energy of their ‘rescued’ people—and it’s all happening very soon. If you want to save everyone…” River glanced at Arina. “…if you want to save your children, then we need to begin our preparations for battle.”
I did not like the octuplets’ savage rearranging of life and death, as though they got to decide who lived and who died. But right now, we didn’t have the luxury of arguing with them. We had little time left, and we needed Indira’s magic to attack the Guardians.
I’d promised Arina that I would help her save her children, and I was determined to save the other people the Guardians held prisoner too. In my heart too, I knew I had to stop the Guardians now and save my daughter’s future.
“We’re ready.” I looked at the other pregnant women.
They all nodded. I saw the same determination shining in their eyes that I felt burning in my heart.
Nero caught my hand. “Wait.”
“I’m not sitting this one out,” I told him. “Not this time. You can’t do this without us.”
His voice was softer, gentler. “It’s too dangerous, Leda.”
“We must stop the Guardians, Nero,” I told him. “We can’t allow our daughter to lose her goodness or her family.”
“There’s an entry point to the Guardians’ Sanctuary not far from here,” River said.
“Then that is where we’ll make our stand against them,” I decided. “And save our children’s futures.”
33
Memory Stream
While the preparations were being made for our attack on the Guardians’ Sanctuary, I spent the time with Nero and Angel in our room. My cat was indulging in a very long nap, obviously resting up in anticipation of channeling that much magic. She was a smart little kitty. Actually, she was a smart big kitty. My lion-sized feline companion was no house cat. She took up a whole bed all by herself.
“I need your help with something,” I said to Nero.
“Anything,” he replied immediately.
“The octuplets are hiding something from us, something out of the past. I intend to find out what it is. And I need you to be my tether, just like you did before, so I don’t get lost in the memory stream. Time is so
open, so endless.”
“You’re planning on using your magic to look into the past?”
“My magic.” I stroked my very round belly. “And hers. She’s stronger now. Her powers have grown a lot. If the three of us combine magic, together we can figure this out.”
Nero set both his hands on my belly, over our daughter. “She really is that powerful,” he said in awe.
I smiled. “Yes, she is. And with her help, with her magic, we’ll be able to see directly into the past. We don’t need to view the past through the Vault, which the octuplets have stuffed full with preselected memories. We will control what we see or don’t see, not the octuplets.”
“Then let’s get started. We don’t have much time left before the battle.”
His hands were still on my belly. I set my hands over his, then I reached out with my mind, connecting to both my husband and to our daughter.
I was in a jungle. I didn’t see Nero beside me, but I could feel that he was with me, just as I could feel our child.
I looked down, but I didn’t have a baby bump anymore. In fact, I wasn’t even inside my own body anymore. Whoever’s body I was in was very small. I extended my hands in front of me. They were a child’s hands.
I took a few steps toward a nearby stream. A young girl of nine or ten with pale blonde pigtails and big, inquiring eyes stared back at me. She looked like a younger version of me—no, a younger version of my mother. I had my father’s eyes.
So I was in Grace’s body, back when she’d been a child.
She tucked a few loose wisps of hair behind her ears, then walked away from the stream. She followed the trail deeper into the jungle. I wasn’t in control of her body. I was only a passenger, a witness to some past event that would shed some light on my existence.
At least that’s what I hoped. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I’d never before gone fishing for gold nuggets of information in the memory stream.
I saw a faint flicker of movement. A few steps off the trail, a man stepped through a tree, then disappeared. Of course he’d never really been there. His body had been too translucent. He looked like a memory fragment, like a scene out of the distant past.
It was Grace who’d come to that conclusion. It seemed I was tuned in to her thoughts.
Her powerful telepathic abilities allowed her to see that hidden magic mirror where others would just pass it by, unaware that there’s a passage to another world nearby, Nero said in my mind.
Grace stepped up to the magic mirror. It truly was hidden, even when seeing it through Grace’s eyes. She’d only found it because she’d caught the memory fragment of someone who’d once taken it.
She took the plunge. As she passed between worlds, a cool feeling washed over me, like I’d walked through a waterfall.
Grace looked around at the new world she’d discovered.
This isn’t a demon world, she thought. Or any world I know about.
From her hiding spot in the snowy woods, she watched a boy teleport between rings that had been set up around a sports field.
A djinn, commented Nero.
Also on the field, two teenage girls stood facing each other. One fired a gun at the other. The girl who’d been shot in the head fell dead to the ground. No one rushed over to her. No one expressed any shock whatsoever at this very public murder.
A few moments passed, then the dead girl rose from the ground, alive once more.
A phoenix, said Nero.
The girl with the gun threw it down. Then she touched her hand to the phoenix girl’s chest—and transformed into her.
A changeling, Nero said.
The real phoenix picked up the gun and shot the girl who’d stolen her face. The changeling must have succeeded in mimicking her powers because after a few moments of being dead, she too rose from the ground.
There were others training on that sports field: mermaids and genies, phantoms and unicorns. On the sidelines, a few elves were crafting magical artifacts.
Grace watched them all for a few minutes, then she turned and went back through the invisible magic mirror.
Back on her own world, she ran out of the jungle. She rushed into a palatial house with white walls that sparkled like diamonds and tall towers that looked like they’d come out of a fairytale. The young demon’s castle even had a moat, where tamed miniature sea dragons splashed in crystal waters.
Grace didn’t stop running until she found her sisters in a grand ballroom with marble floors and high walls accented with real gold. Her identical twin Ava was dismembering animated suits of armor, while a teenage Sonja battled a giant she must have assembled from numerous large statues. Its horselike head nearly scraped the domed ceiling.
“Ava, Sonja,” Grace said breathlessly. “I have discovered something incredible.”
Then she told them all about it.
“An unexplored world, you say? And new kinds of magic?” Sonja hacked off the statue giant’s legs, and it fell motionless to the floor. “We must check it out. I need a new challenge.”
And so Grace led her sisters back to the jungle, through the invisible magic mirror, and onward to the undiscovered world.
“This is strange magic indeed,” Sonja declared, looking down upon the training field. “And very rare magic where we come from. The Immortals had all of these powers.”
The three demon sisters watched the passive magic students train their magic until Sonja, obviously bored of only watching, got up and marched out of the snowy woods.
“Sonja, where are you going?” Ava asked her.
“To find my next challenge,” Sonja said. “I’m going to challenge one of these peculiar…beings to battle.”
Twenty bucks says the passive magic kids totally kick Sonja’s ass, I said to Nero.
But the three demon sisters never made it to the training arena. Between one step and the next, they were whisked away to…well, I wasn’t exactly sure what it was. The sisters appeared to be inside a small log cabin, but all the windows showed in any direction was sky. Lots and lots of open sky. Grace went over to one of the windows to take a peek, and that’s when I saw that they were way up in the clouds. The ground wasn’t even visible from here.
Two youthful women sat on rocking chairs. Their eyes were wise, their hair wild. And their clothes, made from various animal skins, were hand-stitched.
“Where are we?” Grace asked them.
The woman with the crystals growing in her hair said, “This world is called the Sphere, young demon. How did you find your way here?”
“I followed the memories through the magic mirror,” Grace told her.
“Her telepathic powers are strong for a demon,” said the other woman, the one with the silver bracelets.
Crystal looked Grace over. “Yes. They are.”
“You know what we are, but what are you?” Ava asked them. “You aren’t demons or gods.”
“No, we’re not,” Silver chuckled. “We are another kind of deity.”
“There is no other kind of deity. Unless…” Sonja looked them over closely, but she didn’t seem impressed by what she saw in them or their shabby cabin. She shook her head. “No, you’re not them.”
“Who?” Ava asked.
Sonja opened her mouth, but Grace answered first. “Immortals. Sonja doesn’t believe they are Immortals.”
“I’ve told you to stop digging around in my head,” Sonja growled at Grace.
Grace planted her hands on her hips and shot back, “And I’ve told you that it’s hard to ignore your thoughts when you leave them all hanging out there like that.”
I liked this version of Grace. She was cool.
Sonja gave her little sister the evil eye, then she returned her attention to the two mystery women. “In any case, they are not Immortals. The Immortals were far more…” She puffed out her chest. “…commanding. And regal.”
“You didn’t know the Immortals, young one,” Crystal said gently. “There aren’t many gods or demons l
eft who did. Your thirst for battle, your immortal war, has made sure of that.”
“But you did know the Immortals?” Ava asked them.
Crystal nodded. “We did. They were powerful and wise. Though their obsessive study of magic was eventually their undoing.”
“The Guardians,” Grace said, her voice hardly above a whisper.
Crystal nodded again.
“I am one of the eidolons,” Silver said.
“And I am of the spirits,” Crystal declared.
“Like demons and gods, eidolons and spirits are the Immortals’ creations,” Silver explained. “Eidolon magic is passive dark magic.”
“And spirit magic is passive light magic,” Crystal added.
“So you rule over all those with passive magic?” Sonja asked them.
“We do not rule over anyone,” Silver said serenely.
“We don’t even show ourselves to them,” said Crystal. “We merely exist. And watch.”
“Without interfering in others’ affairs,” Silver added harshly.
“So you don’t have worshippers?” Sonja frowned like she found the idea ridiculous.
“Certainly not,” Crystal replied. “Most passive magic users don’t even know that we exist—or that we protect their worlds.”
There was a hint of warning in her tone, as though to warn the demons not to get any ideas of conquering the worlds they protected.
“Most people still worship the Immortals, and we are content to let it remain so,” Silver said.
“Why?” Sonja’s nostrils flared. No, she definitely didn’t like the way the spirits and eidolons worked.
“Because we desire neither power nor glory,” Crystal said. “And we don’t need people to worship us in order to feel a sense of self-worth.”
“And you spirits and eidolons get along?” Sonja’s eyes narrowed. “You never fight?”
“Well, there are occasional differences of opinion, but those can be worked out through calm, rational, open discussion. There’s certainly no need for violence.” Silver’s eyes dipped to the dagger at Sonja belt.
