The Turquoise Tower (Revenant Wyrd Book 6) (13 page)

“How do you even know this?” Maeven wondered.

“Frement technology isn’t only of the steam variety. We have texts from before the veil of the Shadow Realm went up. Our people started out studying the stars; it was only when we were shut off from the heavenly bodies that we turned to more earthly advances. No doubt I could tell you much about the darkness that surrounds our planet.”

“You know all this, but you thought you were going to fall out of the planet when you left the Shadow Realm?” Angelica teased. Caldamron looked to his feet and Jovian thought that if he could blush, he probably would have just then.

“Alright, does anyone else find it odd that the meteor was heading toward the west?” Russel asked.

No one answered. Jovian gazed off toward the west, wondering precisely what was happening. He looked up at the heavens once more and wondered how many of those stars were out there, and if there were as many stars in the sky as he could see, would they all eventually crash into the planet?

But then something strange happened that made Jovian question what Caldamron had just told them.

Hundreds of lights flickered in the west, each climbing toward the place in the sky that the meteor had just plummeted from. Fiery trails were left in their wake, and each seemed to be racing one another. They made Jovian think of flaming arrows shot from some distant parapet in the Barrier Mountains, but they didn’t travel in stationary lines. Instead they flitted here and there, spinning around one another like birds on the wind.

Up they climbed, steadily, into the clouds high above. And then, as they reached the crest of the sky, the zenith of their flight, just when Jovian thought they might leave this world and enter the darkness beyond the sky, there was a flash. Thunder shook the air, like two giant boulders colliding together with such force that they were split in two.

The lights flickered. One by one they turned cold as each individual ascent was greeted with a violent flash of light.

And then, one by one, each of the objects turned black and fell, smoking, through the clouds and toward the earth below.

Jovian looked questioningly to Caldamron. The frement shrugged.

“Well, I could be wrong,” he said.

“Alright—” Cianna started, backing away from the trail as if she were trying to move away from the train of thought forming in her head.

“That is the beginning,” Russel whispered.

“Of what?” Angelica asked.

“The war on the Ever After,” Cianna said.

The chill winter breeze toyed at the ends of Hilda’s black hair. She pulled her cloak tighter against the bitter afternoon, and the fear that shook her core. What had she seen? She and Justice had been sitting at the table moments before, settling in against the cold of the approaching night when several . . . things had fallen out of the sky, quaking the ground as they landed.

She’d never hated living in the wilds of the Realm of Earth until Davin had died, leaving her and their son alone. Without city or town around, it was up to her to raise their son. She wasn’t a fearful woman, but lately the lands were dangerous. The chaos dwarves had passed not too far from her home just weeks ago. She and Justice had hidden in the secret room under the floorboards until they could no longer hear the rumbling passage of the baneful beasts.

At least there were advantages of living in less populated areas; mostly they avoided attack from alarist and fallen alike, which was something only the smaller towns were escaping nowadays, if the telfetch she shared with her sister in the Realm of Fire was an indication.

But now this?

The shiver that ran up her spine had nothing to do with the cold this time, and everything to do with the memory of what she had witnessed.

“Mom, what’s that?” Justice asked, setting his cards down and pointing out the window and to the west.

Hilda had finished her move before looking out to where her son was pointing.

“I don’t see anything, Just, why don’t you finish your hot cocoa?” She pulled the housecoat tighter around herself and checked the front door. She would have to have it replaced soon. When it was windy out she could feel the cold cutting through the house.

“No, there’s definitely something happening,” he told her, his eyes following a point through the sky that she hadn’t seen.

Again, she went to the window and searched for what he was trying to show her, but this time it didn’t take long. Hundreds, maybe thousands of points of light were trailing through the sky from the west, gaining height as they went. She’d seen things like this before, but falling from the sky, never ascending into it.

The points of light left smoldering trails in their wake, like puffy clouds or vapors straggling behind them. As the objects climbed higher Hilda realized they were reaching a point nearly right above her house. Indeed, she was watching them so intently that she was now crouching down and looking up.

And then a bright flash nearly burned her eyes. She yelped against the jab of pain, and then sank to her chair when the roar of something she could only call thunder shook her house. The noise was tremendous.

Hilda began to shake. And then something large slammed into the ground outside her home.

“Look!” Justice said, standing on his chair and pointing out the window.

The smoking creature wasn’t the only one. For minutes afterward, several more of them landed around her home. Thankfully none of them landed
on
her home. They sat there, watching each beast fall from the sky like smoking boulders heaved out of the Ever After to crack the land below.

“Stay here,” Hilda told Justice, her hand resting protectively on his shoulder even as her eyes studied the creature outside. She unlocked the door and stepped out into the bitter air, pulling her house coat closer to her. The door thumped closed behind her.

Hilda looked up, but there were no more objects racing toward the apex where the others had met their end. There was also no more falling debris. Her feet took her ever closer to the twisted form that puffed black smoke into the still afternoon air.

Black feathers were the first thing she noticed. Black feathers and charred human flesh.

Hilda stumbled back as the shape of the figure became apparent. A blonde woman lay on the ground before her, her hair melted and tangled from fire, her wings nearly bare of the black feathers that had been scorched away from some attack high in the heavens. She looked to have been wearing a length of black cloth wrapped around her, but it was now mostly burned away.

She was broken and bloody, her body twisted in an odd way that couldn’t have happened if her bone structure was still intact. In her hand she held an ebon blade, and Hilda reached for it, before pulling her hand back. There was something perverse about that blade, something that twisted her mind petulantly.

The almost perfectly white skin was charred so badly in some places that Hilda, now close enough to discern the form better, could see splotches of blood and raw meat where the skin had cracked with heat.

With a hand to her throat, she turned. For a moment she could have sworn she saw one of the lumps on the ground move.

This can’t be happening,
she thought, her eyes traveling over each of the numerous forms smoking on the ground around her small log cabin.

“Justice,” she called, racing back to the house. “Start packing your things!”

The door was open. Why was the door open? Hadn’t she closed it when she came out?

Hilda burst through the doorway at a full run, only to come to a sliding stop as the scene unfolded before her.

The table lay on the floor in ruin, Justice’s chair beside it. A massive black-winged figure took up most of the common room, his wide back to her, his bald head bent over something. Blood dribbled on the floor, creating a small puddle at the fallen’s bare feet.

Hilda skirted around the edge of the room, her destination the long sword that hung above the fireplace. The sword she never thought she would have to use, and indeed hadn’t used since Davin died.

But then the black-winged figure turned, and its coal eyes fell on her. Justice fell from the angel’s hands, crumpling to the floor, his eyes sightless, his face ashen. He looked at her with his dead, brown eyes, and she felt an accusation there. She should have been inside helping her son, not out there investigating.

A cry froze in her throat when she saw the twin puncture marks on Justice’s throat, and the spill of crimson blood that stained the top of his white tunic.

“Amazing what a little food can do for the system,” the fallen spoke. His voice was like something echoing out from beyond the Black Gates. Hilda fell to her knees, as if her body had lost all will to continue holding her up. “Already I feel stronger.”

The fallen held up his hand, and Hilda couldn’t help but look at him. Where his skin had been charred it was starting to look healthy, whole once more. In a symphony of squelches and pops his wings began reforming, looking less broken and tangled. As he arched his wings above his head, scraping the ceiling, Hilda could see long black feathers forming from the once bare skin of his wings.

“Almost complete . . . just need a little more.” The fallen smiled down at her as he drew closer.

The fallen stepped out of the house, dropping the dead form of Hilda unceremoniously at his feet. His eyes traveled up to the peaks of the Barrier Mountains. It was up there that his master thought they traveled.

More of the host,
his mind thought. Even thinking about the heavenly host, and their cursed offspring, made his skin itch. What he wouldn’t give to drain their blood, gain the strength that only came from killing an angel.

While he wasn’t part of the sentry, he was so close already, it would be such a shame to let them slip through his fingers when he could turn this failure into praise from his master.

With a powerful beat of his wings, Asfrodium lifted off the ground and into the sky, headed for where the LaFayes traveled towards the Turquoise Tower.

Moonchild
, the voice called into the darkness of Grace’s dream.

The pleasant dreams of the times before Arael came vanished in the blink of an eye, replaced by a serene vision of the field of flowers swaying in the fertile breeze. In the distance she could make out the twisted branches of her tree, and Grace meant to set her feet to the path, but something stopped her.

A hand on her arm turned her around, and before her was the starry-eyed Goddess, fat with child. She smiled at Grace, and Grace smiled back. Reverence filled the air, and Grace’s eyes were drawn to the silvery points of light that glittered like gems in the inky strands of the Goddess’s hair.