The Turquoise Tower (Revenant Wyrd Book 6) Page 12

  “That your stomach, or are you changing on us?” Pi asked and then took a huge bite.

  “Sorry, just my stomach, I hate to disappoint.”

  “You’re boring,” Pi joked around a mouthful of food. “Imagine what would happen if you got all panther-like right here on the street?”

  “I can only imagine,” Deven said, taking another bite of his sandwich.

  “Hey, who’s that?” Clara asked, pointing across the street.

  “How should I know?” Pi said, and then chuckled. “The street is packed with people.”

  “I don’t know, he’s different,” Clara said, losing interest in her sandwich. She tossed it into a garbage bucket nearby.

  “What are you doing?” Devenstar said around a mouthful of sandwich. “Are you crazy?”

  “Oh, is it going to happen?” Pi asked, her eyes sparkling. “Was the sandwich being thrown away enough to make you change?”

  Devenstar rolled his eyes and watched the person across the street. Now that Clara had mentioned it, there was something strange about the man. It wasn’t his coarse black clothing, which hung tattered and moth-eaten off his frail form, or the way his eyes scanned the crowd as if searching for someone or something. It was an aura of malignancy.

  “Do you think it could be an alarist?” he asked, looking back at his sandwich. His stomach was off now as well, and his thoughts turned back to the Guardian’s Keep.

  “Eh, who knows,” Pi said, taking another mouthful.

  “I don’t think that’s something to just toss aside,” Deven said.

  “Well, all we know is that it’s a stranger,” Pi said.

  “Guys?” Clara said.

  “But it could be something else,” Devenstar said.

  “Right. Guys?” Clara interrupted again.

  “Or you could just be jumping at shadows,” Pi said.

  “Guys, duck!” Clara said.

  The tone in her voice didn’t move them to argument, and they followed her command just as a bolt of darklight licked the area above their head, vanishing a store sign.

  “What the—?” Deven started.

  “I tried telling you,” Clara said.

  “What are we going to do?” Pi asked, her sandwich clutched protectively at her chest.

  “I see you,” the alarist said in a false singsong voice. The brazier lifted off the ground, the bolts and chains that held it in place snapping with the exertion of the alarist wyrd. As it lifted up, the three of them were able to see the frazzled-looking alarist. A stained patch covered one eye, and his hair created a white nimbus about his head. “Why don’t you come out and play?” he said. With a heave of his arms, the brazier smashed through the window of the storefront behind them.

  The street was in pandemonium. People ran screaming from the scene. The alarist grinned, sending out licks of darklight, vanishing people on the spot. With each bolt he loosed he made a noise like he was smiting them where they stood. Finally he stopped, bent at the waist in a fake laugh.

  “I could do this all day, honestly.”

  “Get ready,” Clara said, and a yellow orb of light shimmered into existence around them.

  “No fair!” the alarist pouted. “You aren’t playing nice. I’m not having fun now,” he said.

  “That’s kinda the point,” Pi said, lashing out with sage-green fire, which the alarist batted away with a wave of wyrd. But she didn’t let up — she kept at it, shooting fire, then lightning, then pure force at the alarist. Each time the man slapped the attack away.

  “Split up,” Clara said.

  “No,” Pi said, still hammering him with attacks. “Deven, get ready. This always drains me, but you have to be ready to act.”

  Devenstar nodded.

  “Is that all you got?” the man asked, striding closer to them. “Really, I’m very disappoint—”

  But he didn’t get to finish what he was saying, because he suddenly froze in place mid-stride, his mouth still open, his hair still swinging with the force of his step. It wasn’t often Pi worked with time wyrd, because it drained her nearly completely. There was no time to wait, though. Devenstar didn’t have a weapon; he’d left it in his room, thinking he wouldn’t need it. But he sprang to action, grabbing a shard of glass off the sidewalk.

  He lunged for the alarist, strengthening the glass even as he hardened the skin of his palm. In one fell swoop, he removed the alarist’s head from his body. Pi dropped her wyrding, and the body slumped to the ground, blood gushing over the cobbles.

  “Guess we had more than he expected?” Deven said, coming back to them and tossing the bloody glass into the garbage bucket.

  “Have you ever imagined, with all the darklight, that the Otherworld must look like one large dump?” Clara said.

  “Well, there’s people there too,” Pi said. “Maybe their eternal damnation is to clean up all the trash?”

  Devenstar looked forlornly at his sandwich, mashed into the dirty snow by many scrambling boots. “Damn,” he said. “That was a really good sandwich.”

  Cianna heard the baby crying through the darkness of the deserted keep. A whisper of movement behind her made her turn around, but there was nothing there, only the shadows of the entrance hall. Above her, the moon shone through an opening created by age and rot, the stars shining down on her through a clouded sky.

  Cianna shivered, and the baby let out another plaintive cry. To the left, up the stairs where Cianna knew Sara’s chambers to be, the way was clotted and impassible with bricks and debris. The noise of the baby was definitely coming from upstairs. The only way up was to the right, and so Cianna followed the way by memory.

  As she climbed she took stock of the rooms and corridors she remembered on the path to her room. Something cataclysmic had happened in the keep. It was void of all life, even the animals that normally nested in ruins. Occasionally her feet scraped against loose stone that had fallen, or crumbled stairs, making the climb dangerous. Every time she heard the roof moan above her, she prayed to the Goddess that it wouldn’t cave in on her. She even questioned her sanity in climbing to the top of a crumbling tower.

  The baby cried again, and a sense of dizziness plagued her. Cianna stopped and closed her eyes against the sudden lurch in her mind that would send her tumbling back down the stairs. There was a shift in the ground beneath her feet, and a strange noise, like wood creaking under distress, snapping and popping. When she opened her eyes again, she was somewhere else.

  The room was dark and in poor repair. Dust stood thick on all the surfaces, and the shadows were deep in the corners. Along the walls, large windows stood open, letting in the breeze from the mountains and the plains, shifting the worn, gossamer curtains dreamily. There was a sense of something dirty here, like a presence was watching her out of the shadows in the corners. In front of her, just this side of the deepest of shadows, sat a crib. There was movement inside.

  Behind her the door creaked shut, and Cianna jumped, her heart racing. There was nothing behind her, only shadows and the closing door. She turned back to the crib and took a tentative step forward. She knew what she would find inside the crib. It wasn’t just a baby — it was her, as she had been when her mother had died.

  Somehow Cianna remembered those scant moments after coming awake. She had been born dead, and hadn’t actually come to life until her mother died some time afterward. They said it was the mark of a necromancer, but nowhere had Cianna ever read that. Why she had been dead until her mother died, and only woke then, Cianna would never know. Maybe it had something to do with being an angel, but that didn’t make any sense to her, either.

  As she neared the crib, the shadows on the other side of the baby started to shift and mold themselves into a figure. It was a tall man, muscular under his black shirt and trousers, with long golden hair. He bent over the crib and whispered something to her, and in her mind, she remembered the meaning of his words, if not the words themselves.

  He was giving her something, placing an obje
ct in the crib with her, and she knew what he wanted. Her mother had just died, but she wasn’t to go beyond the gates into the Ever After, she was to stay behind. It was important to this man that Pharoh not leave the mortal world, that she remain trapped — for what reason, Cianna wasn’t sure.

  And then, as if he had known the entire time that Cianna was there, the man looked up and smiled. In the instant before the swirling fog claimed him once more, Cianna knew it was Arael.

  She raced to the crib, but he was gone, vanished into the darkness of the ruined room. She gripped the edge of the crib and peered over, as if afraid of what she would see. Laying there was her, as a baby. Already her hair was thick and curly, and she was dressed in a gossamer kind of black dress. In her pudgy hands was gripped the medallion, purple and silver energy dancing around its surface.

  As she watched the energy join with the golden medallion, Cianna could feel the presence of her mother inside it.

  What did he have me do? Cianna wondered. Why did he make me do it? Her fingers found the medallion that she wore, and she tried to plunge her mind into its depths, but there was no response. She had thought all along that it was the will of her mother, placing herself in the medallion. Had she been wrong? Had Cianna been working for her father? Was it really the will of Arael to trap Pharoh in the medallion, and if so, for what purpose?

  Cianna sank to the floor as the ground beneath her shifted sideways again. Her hand clasped tight to the medallion, willing it to speak, though it remained silent.

  Joya knew the difference between what she was seeing and what was real. She had experienced the touch of a verax-acis for so long that she was surprised there hadn’t been any mental damage from it. As it was her muscles had twitched uncontrollably for long enough that she thought it might become permanent. Having gone through what she had, Joya knew what she was seeing was the product of the verax-acis.

  Her mind swayed annoyingly, and she felt like the ground was going to give way beneath her. Underneath the veneer of the placid, healthy plantation she had lived on and loved, Joya could see the reality. It was like two images merged together. As she pushed with her mind, she could see the scene before her become translucent, as if the vision was thinning over her sight enough for her to see through it. Underneath, she could see the verax-acis in the center of Vorustum-Apaleer, talking with something else.

  As if he knew that she wasn’t fully under, he turned and looked at her. His lips were stained red against his white, wrinkled face, and his teeth poked out menacingly, like broken glass, just in sight beyond his lips. When his eyes fixed on her, Joya’s mind shifted in a sickening way, and the plantation came back into focus, along with the man striding through the fields toward her.

  “Joya,” Dauin said, holding out his arms to her. Joya studied his face, trying to find something about him that was slightly different. In her experience the verax-acis couldn’t create exact copies of things in your mind, they had to alter it a little, make a lie of it, just enough that they could trick you, bend your mind to their way of thinking, make you doubt yourself.

  But there her father stood. He wore a beard now, as sometimes happened in the fall and winter. It was the same golden blond she remembered, and his hair the mirror of Jovian’s: tousled, curly, though not as messy as her brother’s. A smile lit his face and wrinkled the skin around his eyes as he came to her. A soft breeze rustled the hay, bringing the woodsy scent of her father to her nose.

  As much as she wanted to doubt that it was really Dauin, she found herself falling into his embrace, and sobbing like she couldn’t remember ever crying before. She wound her arms around her father and squeezed with every ounce of her being, taking in the feel of his arms holding her protectively, cradling the back of her head against his coarse shirt. The embrace of her father wasn’t anything she would ever forget, and after thinking he was dead, this was like a sheltering island in the stormy sea of her life.

  “I never thought I would see you again,” Dauin said, rubbing her back, soothing away the tears.

  “Neither did I,” Joya said.

  Joya’s head hurt, and it was only then she remembered the verax-acis, and that this might only be a dream. But did it matter? No matter how she had come here, Joya was happy for it. She was reunited with her father. Honestly, she could have died then and not cared. She hadn’t realized how hard life had become, and how numb she had grown to it with all the death. But here, looking up into the stormy blue eyes of her father, Joya felt what she used to be. She felt like a daughter again, and not a sorceress, not an angel, not a Guardian. Here, she was Joya Neferis, and this human man was her father.

  “After Amber came and destroyed the plantation, I thought all of my children had it out for me,” Dauin said, and Joya’s blood ran cold with his words.

  “What do you mean, Amber?” Joya asked pulling away from him long enough to look into his eyes.

  Dauin nodded, and held her out at arm’s length. “But look at you, here you are. My little girl, a Realm Guardian. My, how you’re growing up.”

  There was a feeling inside of Joya that washed away all the happiness. The tears dried on her cheeks, creating a chill that Dauin’s words mirrored in her soul. She was grateful for the moment she had felt normal, because now all those feelings of being different, of being something other than just Joya, were back. The danger of their mission was weighing down on her. She felt her breath catching in her chest, which was tight, like it was being squeezed by giant hands.

  She sat down in the hay, and Dauin didn’t stop her. She felt as if he knew precisely what his words had done to her. He stood over her, and she was cast in his shadow. She felt his shadow was menacing, somehow, and when she had fully caught her breath, she looked up at Dauin, though most of his face was plunged in darkness form the setting sun and the onset of night.

  “What did you mean, Amber destroyed the plantation?” Joya asked. Her head swam.

  “Why did you come back?” Dauin asked. His voice was no longer happy to see her. “To finish the job?”

  As he spoke a plume of smoke drifted toward them, smothering the sight of her father and bringing to her nose the scent of burning flesh. Screams drifted on the smoke, and Joya stood in a rush.

  “What is the powerful sorceress going to do?” Dauin asked, his stance menacing. “You weren’t strong enough to save us when we needed you! You killed Ashell and would have killed Alhamar if Jovian hadn’t finished the job for you. Those are the actions of a really compassionate being. The angel side getting the better of you? Already you’re losing your humanity?” Dauin started to circle Joya, and she wanted nothing more than to sink back to the ground and give in to the tears his words conjured.

  Instead she stiffened her spine. In the distance the flames engulfing the plantation lit the night, and she could feel the heat even from where she stood. Joya folded her hands in front of her, willing away the pain her father’s words brought to her.

  “This isn’t real,” she told herself.

  “Isn’t it?” Dauin asked, coming to stand beside her, looking at the plantation. “This is how it happened. Right here Amber stood, admiring her handiwork, and that damned black shuck she rode in on stood beside her. She was like Arael come back to life. As long as I can remember, I will never forget the hatred in her golden eyes, the hunger in them, how they had turned more feral than any wolf I’d ever seen. She fed on all of this death like some damned rephaim.”

  “This isn’t real,” Joya said again, closing her eyes.

  “Oh, yes it is. Verax-acis, you think. Sometimes the best lie is the complete truth. Did you ever think of that? Sometimes the best way to fool a person is by telling them the honest truth.” Dauin stopped talking and in the night air the insects and bugs stopped their incessant chatter. Joya opened her eyes to see if he was still there, and he was, but different.

  She saw her father standing beside her, lit like a torch. Flames kindled his hair and his clothes like the driest of tinder. The skin on
his face blistered, burst forth fat and blood which quickly caught flame as sheets of skin sloughed off his form.

  “Soon Angelica and Jovian will face the mask,” he said. “And it will wear a very familiar face. I hope you are happy with your new life, Joya — it was bought with the blood of your past.”

  “I never wanted this life!” Joya screamed at him, but everything was gone, and Joya stood in the center of a void. There was nothing around her except her own body, but even that was questionable. She wasn’t sure if she even existed physically here.

  But before she could give it any further thought, a light bloomed in the darkness. The silvery-blue light reminded her of the light she had seen in the center of Vorustum-Apaleer.

  Maybe it’s a way out? she wondered. Without hesitation, Joya stepped into the brightness of the light, and out of the darkness of her vision. But still, her father’s words haunted her. Was he right? Was he telling the truth, or was it just another way for the verax-acis to mess with her mind?

  Maeven stood on the edge of the battlefield. Around him rained fire, blood, ice. Through the air fluttered feathers both black and white, drifting toward ruined ground like snow. Jovian had told him to stay here, to the edge of the battle, and Maeven hadn’t argued. Before, when he was thinking of this moment, of this fight, he’d wanted to join in, but when he saw the angels fighting on the ground as well as in the air, arcing through the sky like birds, he had stayed back without argument.

  He felt ashamed, like a coward. He had allowed his boyfriend and his other companions to waltz onto the field without an objection. Maeven found now that Jovian had been right; this was no place for him. So he stayed behind, hidden behind a boulder, watching as angelic bodies fell from the heavens and broke upon the churned earth of the battlefield. And then, like stars raining out of a night sky, angels with both black and white wings started to plummet from the sky and to the ground.