The Turquoise Tower (Revenant Wyrd Book 6) (18 page)

“Likely his movements are being watched. We will keep him here, we will keep him safe. That’s where you Guardians come in. You are to guard him, and fend off the fallen who come after him.”

Sara rolled her shoulders, feeling an immense weight of responsibility being placed upon her and her peers.

“But he isn’t the only thing of importance here,” Laphrael continued. “The entirety of Lytoria is important. The city itself is thought of as the seat of the Goddess in the realms. To lose this place would damage faith in Her Majesty greatly. It would be a mortal wound to the Goddess herself, maybe a wound large enough to allow Arael to slip in and take control of the Ever After.”

“So we protect Atorva,” Annbell said. “Is there anything else?”

Laphrael peered at Annbell, obvious contempt in his eyes for how short she was being.

“You angels have the rest under control?” Rowan said, siding with Annbell.

“We do,” he said.

After a few silent moments in which Atorva looked greatly distressed, he opened the doors and led the Guardians out. He shut the door silently behind him, and only when it was closed did Laphrael’s menacing gaze break from the Guardians.

“What was that?” Aladestra asked Atorva as they started down the hall.

“That was Laphrael,” he said, and then sighed. “All my life I have wished to see an angel,” he told them. “I just never thought he would be such a. . .”

“Bastard?” Rowan supplied.

“Yes, thank you,” Atorva said, closing his eyes.

Pi and Clara had been able to drag Devenstar out of the Votary’s House, but they hadn’t been able to drag thoughts of Cianna from his mind. He tried to look at the different trinkets and gadgets displayed for sale by the street vendors, but the thought of Cianna was always near at hand. Especially around the jewelry. He didn’t think she was the type to wear jewelry, but Deven imagined how good the ruby hair ornaments would look on her, and the thick, gold hoop earrings.

Market Street was lined with narrow shops, all sporting glimmering floor-to-ceiling windows where their wares could be seen on display. Every storefront welcomed buyers in with honeyed light that spilled out on the gray flagstone sidewalks.

Pi and Clara dragged him to all the vendors they could think of—clothing, weapons, wyrded trinkets—and finally they stopped to grab something to eat at one of the covered grills. It was like a regular building, but there was no space to sit, and it was outdoors. The front of the building was a counter, and they could watch their food being prepared. Despite the chill of the day, the fires inside the restaurant provided a nice amount of heat. While they huddled around a roaring brazier in the street, shoppers and passersby crowded close to them, going about their daily routines.

Devenstar ordered the same meal as Clara and Pi, who said the sandwiches at this restaurant were the best around. Apparently it was a popular tourist spot, and word of their food spread far and wide. Devenstar understood why; the sandwich was some kind of flatbread filled with meat and vegetables, and the flavors burst on his tongue. Embarrassingly, it made his stomach growl.

“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 object 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.