Crux (The Aurora Lockette Series) (18 page)

He spun his chair around
, and looked into my eyes. “Are you sure you’re going to be invisible to Asag and the other upper demons?”

I shifted my weight.
“Well, no but Sam said the Shyama can’t sense him in Spirit. That’s why he doesn’t have a handler.”

“
Look, you do what you want, but at least let a group of Blockers get closer with a truck or something, some sort of strike party that can get you out. Just in case.” He put his hand on my hip. “Please.”

It
made sense and I couldn’t say no. “You’re right.”

“
And I’m going with them, too.”

“
I figured.”

“
What are we waiting for?” Sam appeared beside us, dressed in black pants, a gray shirt and black boots. His long hair flowed down his shoulders, with one small braid down the side of his face.

“
Mate, please don’t do that,” Gavyn said. “You gave me a start.”

“
Sorry,” Sam said. “So used to being in Spirit that I forget sometimes.”

I found Konstantin, who helped me identify some strong
Blockers to take with me. With Dennis’s blessing, I took six.

We
stopped at the armory to fill in my mom in and picked up some weapons. She gave me a hug and told me to be careful, then we were on our way.

I climbed into the backseat of a
black SUV with Gavyn. I’d been taken in one of these not too long ago. I took the flash of anger I felt and pulled it inside. It gave me a bit more motivation to do what I needed to do.

Sam sat next to me. He faced forward, hands on his lap. He
looked awkward in his solid form. I was tempted to pity him, but I knew better.

“
Did you braid your own hair?” I asked him, with a hint of a smile.

He turned to me.
“No,” he said in a serious tone. “Of course not.”

I gave up on joking with him.
“Then who?”

“
My girlfriend.” He faced the front of the car again.

I looked at Gavyn, who shrugged his shoulders and smiled. I smiled back. I was insanely curious about Sam’s love life and the hilarity of it felt out of place.

The driver rolled to a stop. “I’m guessing if we get any closer they’ll notice us,” he said.

“
Right,” I gave Gavyn a hug and a kiss, “we’ll be back here in two hours.”

“
How do we know if we need to come get you?” the driver asked.

“
If we don’t show up.” I drank in Gavyn one last time, from his wild black hair to his perfect eyes, just in case. I soaked him all in and stuck it firmly in my memory bank.

“
Be careful,” he whispered, his voice cracking.

“
I will.”

I shut the car door because I couldn’t take it anymore. Sam was waiting
for me outside.

“
Let’s go,” I said.

AURORA

We walked away from the car. I was reluctant to leave Gavyn again so soon. I so badly wanted to turn around
, but I couldn’t. I had to focus on the job at hand.

Instead, I gave over to Spirit
and let the white fog enveloped me. My body was heavy and tugged at me as it slid off, but I let it go. Sam was waiting for me, already enveloped in Spirit.

He said nothing, just held out his hand.

I took it and we flew. I didn’t go as fast as we did last time. I needed a few seconds to refocus my energy on what we needed to do.

“
Do we have a plan?” Sam asked in that calm way of his.

“
Go inside, see what’s going on, leave,” I said.

“
That’s not a very good plan, yet it is enough of a plan,” he said.

I looked at him, floating next to me in his weird Spirit form.
“What does that even mean?”

He smiled. There it was: his sense of humor.

“Who is your girlfriend?”

“
Vera. She is the one who can bend time and space. The only one who can do so.” The pride and affection leaked through his voice and made him seem more human.

“
Bend it? Like, make it rewind or fast forward?” We’d landed outside the largest rock that the Shyama had showed me. Asag was inside. Waiting.

“
She can, in extreme circumstances, rewind or fast forward time, but only for a matter of seconds. It is very taxing on her.” He pushed his hand through the rock.

“
Oh.” I didn’t know what to say to that, partially because it was one of the coolest things I’d ever heard of, but mostly because I had no idea of what I was walking into. “Do you think they will be able to see us?”

“
I believe not, unless we want ourselves to be seen.”

“
Hell no,” I said. “Let’s go.”

I stepped forward into the rock. Red and brown dirt filled every inch my vision and pressure formed around me. I moved forward until the dirt was gone and we were surrounded by darkness. The pressure lifted, and we were inside a dark cave tunnel.

It was a pathway of sorts, barely tall enough for a human to stand in. Red and black wet rock surrounded us. The rock beneath us was smoothed out, as if hundreds of feet had paced over it. Lanterns were shoved haphazardly into the rock walls, and they were burning with a gas flame.

Clicking noises moved down the space. Sam flattened his misty self against the rock and motioned for me to do the same. I
needed to remember that—we couldn’t walk through any living thing. We’d have to be very careful not to inadvertently touch any of the Shyama.

I affixed myself to the ceiling with my flight ability. Three lower Shyama passed by us with inches to spare. They didn’t pause or acknowledge us at all as they walked by, much to my relief, but my body still reacted to them strongly.
I’d better get used to that because soon I would be surrounded
, I told myself.

I detached myself
from the ceiling and floated after them. Sam was right behind me.

The clicking noises got louder and louder as we progressed. They filled up all the space around me, so loud it nearly drowned out my own thoughts. Sam and I held hands. It was not a move of affection or comfort, just necessity to keep track of each other.

The narrow dirt and rock tunnel ended in front of us, abruptly opening to massive cavern beneath us. A human walking along this path would have fallen in the dark to a horrible death. Stalagmites fill the walls, and we were levitating near a massive one, hundreds of feet above the cavern floor. Hundreds of gas lights were shoved into the walls and ceiling. I looked around the massive space, shocked that something big enough to fit a football stadium in existed beneath the surface of the earth.

But that
wasn’t what scared me. Every square inch of this room was filled with Shyama. Misty lower ones and upper ones that were presumably inhabiting a body of sorts.

Some of the bodies were…
strange. They were human, but they looked dead, like maybe they’d been dead for a while.

“
How many do you think there are?”

“
At least a thousand,” Sam guessed. “It is hard to tell, but I’m sure there are more.”

I scanned over the shadowy bodies
and looked for some kind of pattern behind their movements, but they all seemed to be randomly wandering.

“
We need to find Asag,” I whispered. I squeezed his arm tighter, floating us closer to the crowd of Shyama beneath us.

“
What is that?” Sam asked, pointing at something with his finger. “There is something strange.”

And I saw
what he was pointing at, though there wasn’t much of anything to see, just the sense that something was wrong. In the far corner of the open cavern, there was the deepest darkness I’d ever encountered. It was something void of light, sucking in everything around it like a black hole.

As
I got closer to it, I noticed how every Shyama near it struggled to avoid being sucked into the darkness. There wasn’t much light here; it was all being absorbed by the black mass.

Sickness seeped into my veins along with an icy distraught feeling.

“That’s him,” I whispered. “We have to get closer.”

Sam said nothing, just squeezed my arm. I landed about twenty feet behind the cloud of darkness. Dark
, fluid shapes twisted and turned inside the mass, with small explosions of red, black and white light. It was like a Shyama times a thousand.

“
What the hell?” I whispered, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.

“
Hell, indeed. Very strange. There are many things inside one thing,” Sam whispered back.

It was moving across the cavern, and we carefully ducked and wove around the Shyama, struggling to keep up with it.

It paused and the room seemed to still with it.

Every Shyama froze in place, their weird flashing momentarily stopped
. “What’s happening?” I said.

We froze
, too. The horrible darkness that was Asag swirled faster, twirling into a tall column shape. It whirled like a tornado in the small space, then took shape. The ground rumbled beneath our feet.

Oh holy hell. It was the incarnation of every nightmare I’d ever had. It was humanoid, well over twenty feet tall. It
flickered from misty darkness to scaly, sticky skin every few seconds. The face was empty, though, and that was the worse. There was a head, but there wasn’t a nose, eyes, or a mouth. Just swirling black matter.

He turned towards the Shyama,
and several human-looking upper demons formed a loose circle around him. He raised his hand up and the rocks behind him started spinning. They moved faster and faster until they were just a blur of movement.

He spoke in
a strange voice that sounded like boulders rubbing together. At first I couldn’t understand, and then I did: “It begins.”

Then
I felt revulsion throughout my body—a dreadful, foreboding, cold dead feeling.

“
Wait here,” I didn’t wait for Sam’s objection. I zoomed into the air, moving faster than I’ve ever moved, and flew towards the rock, right around Asag.

I saw
a tiny little hole, the size of golf ball, inside the spinning rock. I was so close to Asag I could feel the darkness pushing into me, but I inched to the spinning rock. I needed see what was on the other side.

A whole world opened up on the other side. It was a mirror of the world on my side. A reflection of the cavern I was standing in opened up in front of me.

But the differences were vast in that there was an army waiting on the other side. Wispy black creatures were zooming back and forth across the ceiling of that cavern, so many of them it looked like the air was boiling with darkness. Shyama were waiting in endless lines right behind the hole. All matter of strange creatures were mixed in, some look evil but some look radiant and beautiful.

One was dark and beautiful; a tall creature with flowing black hair and a curvaceous feminine figure. I saw her move so softly, hair swaying, hips swiveling. I know who she was without being told: Ki

I didn’t understand what they were. I couldn’t even wrap my mind around it, but they were all waiting.

As I stared through, the
hole widened another half inch.

Shit.

I backed away, almost bumping into Asag. He still had his monstrous hands up. I could feel the power whirring around him.

I pulled back, ready to attack, and then stopped.

Who was I kidding? He’d crush me. I needed help. Now.

I zoomed back to Sam who was planted in the exact same spot I left him.

I grabbed his arm and we rocketed through the air and punched through the rock in under second. Back outside, the sun grazed my face and the sickness from being near Asag left.

The effort of super-fast flight left me exhausted. I dropped to my hands and knees, taking deep breaths to recover.

“What was that?” Sam asked. He was back in his solid form, braid long gone, hair wild.

“
It’s an opening.” I gasped between breaths.

“
What is on the other side?” he asked.

“
An army. An army of strange and beautiful and terrible things that don’t belong here. And it’s getting bigger. They’ll be able to climb through any minute now.”

I lurched to my feet.

Sam picked me up and threw me over his shoulder. “We have to tell the others. I’ll carry you until you catch your breath.”

I was too tired to argue, so I let him carry me. I waited for my breath to even out and some energy to return, but my limbs were stubbornly rubbery.

“I did not know you could move that fast, like a sound wave,” Sam said.