The Black Fortress

by E. G. Foley

  At once, a curious levitating walkway rose ahead of her amid the dark, soothing dreamscape of blue and purple mists. Pale and smooth, the path curved before her like the swell of a white marble wave.

  Ribbons of lavender fog swirled around Ramona’s whitish-gray, transparent form as she began gliding up the path toward their usual meeting place.

  It was a fanciful location they’d concocted, witch and wizard, for their secret meetings—a nowhere, a no-when—with a shimmer of ethereal music sounding silvery notes now and then, vibrating the random chunks of crystal that hung, spinning slowly, in midair.

  Stardust floated, glittering against the indigo clouds.

  Her figure left ghostly wisps of white trailing out behind her as she sped without effort toward the spindly gazebo that domed up ahead.

  Zolond was already waiting for her there, white and ghostly gray like herself. She could hear the tick-tock of his impatience as she approached with a slight flutter in her chest.

  What a fool she was, she thought. Stealing away to be with him again, like a wayward girl.

  “Well, if it isn’t my favorite witch,” the Dark Master greeted her.

  In the next blink, Ramona had zoomed the rest of the way to her destination, rematerializing under the nebulous arch of the drifting gazebo. The charcoal-shaded structure bled its watercolors upward into the cobalt blue.

  “Hullo, Geoffrey,” she said. “I trust you are well.”

  “Hmm. Pleasant party this evening?”

  “’Twas enjoyable,” Ramona conceded.

  Zolond snorted. “Frivolity.”

  “Why doesn’t your side ever have any parties?”

  “We do, sometimes. But things can get…rather bloody. Best to keep it to a minimum.”

  She gave him a sardonic smile. They floated in a wary circle, several feet apart. But neither broke their gaze.

  “Did you go to your old hideaway, then? You mentioned you might,” Ramona said.

  Zolond nodded. “I’m there now. You?”

  “Oh, just in my room at Merlin Hall. And how are the reptilians?”

  He crooked a bushy white eyebrow. “You didn’t really want to make small talk, did you, my lady?”

  She smiled in spite of herself. “Not really. I’ve been doing that all night.”

  “Then let us skip the pleasantries, my dear.” He stared at her. “I think we should discuss these matters in person. Why don’t you come to the Balefire Mountains? We’ll have lunch.”

  She laughed. “And what would Shemrazul say of that, I wonder?”

  Zolond sighed. “I’d rather not imagine.”

  “Well?” Ramona said, circling with him while the silvery chimes made the crystals hum. “Have you considered my request?”

  “I told you I would.”

  “And? Will you release our prisoners?” She held her breath.

  “Er, no.”

  “Geoffrey!”

  “However,” he interrupted before she could protest further.

  “Yes?” Ramona asked with a frown as they rotated around the gazebo like the hands of a clock counting off the hours.

  “I propose instead a hostage exchange. A swap of our princelings. Remember that old tradition? It was fading out of use even when we were young, but I think it might be a very suitable arrangement in this case.”

  “Aha,” she said skeptically. In the olden days, enemy kingdoms would exchange young princes, with each boy being sent off to live with the opposite royal court until he was grown.

  Each prince was guaranteed safekeeping in the opposite kingdom—so long as the other side did not attack.

  “Then we can both be sure neither your side nor mine starts any trouble.”

  “Zolond,” she chided, “your thinking is always creative. I give you that. But you must know I would never hand over one of our children to the Dark Druids.”

  “Don’t dismiss it out of hand, stubborn old woman. I am prepared to give you my great-great grandson, Victor, and, in exchange, you may hand over your nephew, Jacob Everton. That is a fair arrangement. You said you wanted peace—”

  “Let’s leave the children out of this, Geoffrey.”

  “But they are all that matters, aren’t they, Ramona? The future. The long game.”

  She shook her head, unwilling to budge. “Even if I trusted you with Jake, which I don’t, I have no doubt that others of your brethren would kill the boy the first chance they got to avenge Garnock. Who, might I point out, really had no business bringing himself back to life in the first place.”

  Zolond shook his head, his white hair cottony in the dreamworld of their rendezvous. “You see, that is the difference between us, dear. To my way of thinking, if a warlock can do a thing, then why should he not?”

  “Well, he couldn’t, could he? So the question is moot,” she shot back.

  “He nearly did,” Zolond said. “Would’ve succeeded, too, if not for your nephew.”

  “You are not taking Jake!” she exclaimed. “Not now. Not ever.”

  “Very well, then, give me your little scientist. What’s-his-name, Archie? He could be a great help with my experiments—”

  “Never!” Ramona whooshed across the gazebo to glare in his face. “Don’t you lay a hand on Archie! I will turn your reptilians to dust if you even—”

  “Now, now!” Zolond laughed and lifted his hands, clearly startled by her ferocity. “Don’t get yourself into a tizzy, ol’ girl. It was only an idea! Why won’t you work with me on this? At least I’m trying to find a solution.”

  She turned away, shaken by the mere mention of Archie getting dragged into all of this.

  Threatening rough-and-tumble Jake was one thing. In many ways, the scrappy former pickpocket could take care of himself.

  But Archie was a simple, trusting soul. He might have a genius intellect, but he possessed none of his roguish cousin’s street smarts.

  “This was a mistake,” Ramona said tersely over her shoulder. “I should’ve known there’d be no reasoning with you.” She swept around to face him. “Do you really want a war? It’s been a long time. Perhaps you have forgotten how dreadful they are.”

  Zolond did not answer. His furrowed brow told her he’d grown annoyed with her for attacking him about Archie; his pale eyes were chilly.

  “Goodbye, Ramona. Your company grows tedious tonight.”

  “Geoffrey!” she insisted, but he left the conversation, fading away into the purple fog.

  “Blast it,” Ramona said under her breath, also returning to her own time and place, in her body, in her room.

  She drew her hands back from the crystal ball as its inner glow faded.

  When the light had gone out from it entirely, a great wave of fatigue washed over her. Lord, she was more tired by their exchange than she had realized.

  Drained.

  “Well? How did it go?” Oriel asked, bringing her a glass of water.

  Ramona sighed. “He has not agreed to any specifics yet. But I can’t help but feel we’re making progress.”

  Oriel searched Ramona’s face worriedly. “You don’t have to keep doing this, you know.”

  Ramona gave her a weary smile of gratitude. “But, my friend, I am the only one who can.”

  CHAPTER 15

  The Prophet

  Hours later, in the middle of the night, Archie Bradford awoke with a start and shot bolt upright in bed. He sat there for a moment, blinking in the darkness, a cold sweat dampening his face.

  It took him a few breaths to get his bearings. His heart was pounding, but the room he shared with his cousin was quiet.

  In the bed on the opposite wall, Jake slumbered peacefully, his pale gold hair illumined in the shaft of moonlight shining through the window.

  Archie could hear his cousin breathing, but no other sound came from the rest of the Bradford suite. Jake’s nearness was reassuring after that horrid dream had come back yet again.

  Archie swallowed hard and touched his chest through his paja
mas.

  His heart was still thumping like it might yet burst out of his chest and make a run for it down the hallway. He strove to calm himself.

  Unbeknownst to the others, it wasn’t his little Italian coffees keeping him awake at night, nor his wrestling with the ongoing puzzle of how to free Aleeyah from her smoke form.

  It was this…recurring nightmare.

  Slowly, he lay back down on his pillow, but his eyes remained open wide. Nearsighted as he was, he could not quite see the ceiling clearly.

  It didn’t matter. His inward sight was all too keen, and lately, he’d been having another of his uncanny dreams.

  A vision, he feared.

  Archie was fairly sure the Kinderveil had lifted at last. After all, he was twelve now. Despite his best hope of being born with no magical powers—as if having a genius intellect hadn’t already made him enough of an odd duck—recent evidence suggested there was a high statistical probability that he had, in fact, inherited a mild form of his father’s psychic gift.

  He had not yet officially announced the emergence of this latent talent, though he’d griped to both Jake and Nixie about his concerns occasionally.

  He just kept hoping the thing might go away all on its own.

  Like a rash.

  He especially avoided his empath sister’s probing gaze. Izzy sensed something was bothering him, of course, but Archie did not wish to alarm her or anyone else by revealing this horrid premonition. They were all upset enough over Red and everything that was happening. So, he let his sister think it was just the distressing situation overall gnawing at him.

  Nixie also had noticed he was not quite his usual cheery self, but she was the sort of person who respected it when someone said, “I don’t want to talk about it,” because she was the same way.

  Archie’s dearest wish was simply for everything to go back to how it was before—like it was at that gorgeous beachside villa in Taormina—well, with one amendment. That they got their beloved Red back, and soon.

  Unfortunately, the nightmare that had begun plaguing him a few weeks ago made Archie fear that things might never be the same again.

  He hoped with all his might that he was wrong. That this was no vision, just an ordinary dream. An unpleasant one, of course, but merely the result of something he ate.

  A figment of his imagination. A spasm of his overactive brain.

  It was comforting to think so.

  He assured himself once again this was probably the case, then closed his eyes and did his best to fall back asleep.

  Finally, his pulse eased back to normal.

  Although the dream did not return, it left him with a foreboding sense of doom. A dark inner whisper of premonition warning him that, before all of this was over…

  One of them was going to die.

  PART II

  CHAPTER 16

  Chosen

  Morning hatched like a great golden egg over Merlin Hall: a bright, cheerful Monday with a clear blue sky and the smell of autumn in the air.

  Excitement was palpable throughout the palace as everyone from Elders to students dressed and eagerly hurried off to join the various activities they were scheduled to participate in during the week of magical business ahead.

  Everyone except Dani O’Dell.

  As the hired help, she saw the others off, wished them luck, and waved them out the door, holding her wee dog, Teddy, in one arm so he didn’t escape.

  When everyone had gone, she shut the door behind them, put the dog down, and looked at him, refusing to mope.

  Wagging his stump tail, the little brown Norwich terrier gave her a double yip that seemed to ask, “All right, what do we do now?”

  “Chores,” she replied.

  Then she got to work tidying up the Bradford family’s suite.

  Sunlight filled the high-ceilinged parlor that connected all the bedchambers.

  Teddy followed her from room to room as she made the beds, smoothing coverlets, plumping pillows, and straightening up as she went, folding castoff clothes into neat piles or tossing them into the laundry basket.

  Did she mind her chores? Not in the least. Dani took her post as Isabelle’s companion very seriously, and rather than chafing at her tasks, she considered herself lucky just to be here.

  A magical palace? With fairies? The chance to be with the one and only Jake on all of his adventures? Plus, Isabelle and Archie, Nixie and Maddox?

  Dani loved them all. Even the half-terrifying Elder witch.

  Besides, she’d have a lot more chores to do than this light work if she were back at home in the squalid tenement house where her wild tribe of older brothers lived with Da—none of whom ever thought to pick up after themselves, let alone say thank you for all her labors.

  She shuddered to think how close she had come to being stranded permanently in the harsh, dreary world of the London rookery.

  Once Jake had been reunited with his aristocratic relatives, she had feared she would never see her pickpocket friend again. But it turned out, to her joy, that she was as essential to Jake as he was to her.

  They had survived by relying on each other in London’s harshest quarters, and he had refused to leave her behind. Her golden-haired hero had come back for her, insisting to his formidable aunt Ramona that Dani be allowed to tag along.

  It was only at the young Lord Griffon’s insistence that his great-great aunt had taken pity on her, appointing Dani as lady’s companion to Isabelle.

  The Elder witch had decided that Dani’s rookery toughness could be a boon to the sometimes too-delicate Miss Isabelle.

  Well, Dani believed she had helped Izzy grow stronger. And she knew for a fact that Isabelle (and Miss Helena) were helping her to smooth out her own rough edges in return.

  In any case, becoming a lady’s companion was a higher rank in life than she had ever aspired to. A paid companion to an aristocratic girl was no common chambermaid, but ranked among the genteel folk of the world, equal in respectability to a governess or tutor.

  As far as Dani was concerned, her getting this position at all was the luck of the Irish, plain and simple.

  Moving on to Isabelle’s chamber, she carefully cleaned a spot off one of the older girl’s white kid gloves, as she’d been asked to do. She also got Izzy’s dinner gown ready for this evening, hanging it on the front of the wardrobe and dusting the rich blue satin with a lint brush.

  Returning to the sitting room, Dani tidied up the informal dining table, then arranged the pillows on the couch.

  She returned Archie’s extra pair of spectacles to his room or he’d never find them again, then she spotted a pair of shoes Jake had left under the coffee table. She went and tucked them under his bed.

  When she came back out to the parlor, she looked around to make sure she hadn’t missed anything.

  It was then that a splash of white beneath the table caught her eye. She tilted her head. What’s that?

  Going over to the table, Dani bent down and crawled halfway under it, reaching to retrieve what proved to be a white feather.

  Climbing to her feet again, she stared at it, puzzled. It was soft and fluffy, about five inches long. But where had it come from?

  Not the Gryphon, clearly. He was in the clutches of the Dark Druids. Besides, Red’s feathers were a rich scarlet hue, except for the few mysterious gold ones that had grown in after he’d molted.

  No, this lovely, soft wisp of pearl-white reminded Dani of the feathers on the wings of the angel who had saved her life more than a year ago in London—Celestus, who disguised himself as a nice blond physician that tended to arrive with his doctor bag right when he was needed. Only in private did he reveal his magnificent angel wings.

  But the feather couldn’t belong to poor Dr. Celestus, either, Dani thought. Because, much to her horror, the Dark Druids had cut his wings off when they’d captured him and held him captive with demons for guards not long ago.

  The Order had rescued him, but not before he’d been maime
d.

  Normally, it wasn’t possible to contain one of the Light Beings, from what she understood. But, apparently, one of those Nephilim artifacts that were part of the Atlantean treasure trove had the ability to turn spirit beings into flesh.

  By using the winged disk artifact from Atlantis, Lord Wyvern and his minions had projected a field of the same frequency the Light Beings sometimes used to manifest themselves in fleshly mortal form. (So Archie and the smartest wizards in the Order theorized.)

  Once the evil warlock had trapped the angel in corporeal form, it had been easy for Wyvern to take Celestus prisoner, holding him, as it were, in an invisible cage made of silent sound waves.

  It made little sense to Dani. All she knew was that once Lord Wyvern had captured poor Celestus, he had treated him unspeakably.

  No doubt the devil the Dark Druids served had ordered Wyvern to do it, for Shemrazul had a special grudge against that particular Light Being. They seemed to have known each other for a very long time.

  Eons.

  On that day in Wales when Shemrazul had nearly escaped the underworld after Jake had killed Garnock, it was Celestus who came down to stop him—in warrior form this time, not as the gentle doctor. The Light Being had slammed down to earth with three of his fellows, all wearing armor like Roman centurions. Then Celestus had led the quartet of archangels to deal with the would-be escapee.

  The four mighty angels with their shining spears and brightwield swords had shoved the giant red devil back down into the pit.

  Thinking about it made Dani shudder. Well, Shemrazul must’ve enjoyed taking revenge on his nemesis for those few weeks before the Order managed to rescue Celestus in that same desert battle where Red had been taken prisoner.

  Dani had heard it was Janos who had actually saved the angel.

  The quick-thinking vampire had turned the winged disk artifact on the lesser demons who’d been guarding Celestus, thereby forcing them into flesh-and-blood form. Then he’d hacked them to bits with his darkling blade.

  For all his charm, Dani could well believe that Janos could be very, very mean when he chose.