by Brenda Huber
“I vow to you, I will protect you with my own life, now and always,” he said in a deep, oddly layered voice, using a language she shouldn’t understand. Shouldn’t but did. Words that left her completely baffled, and shockingly compelled to repeat them back to him.
Something odd shifted inside her, seemed to click into place. Unsettled, she pressed her lips together, fearful of what she might let slip out, and listened as he went on, “I will safeguard your happiness and put you before all things. I bind myself to you. Qui et illisium speccaté.” Now and forevermore. “I will do everything within my power to help you find that sword, and I will not take it from you, ever,” he finished in English.
Had he not realized she could understand everything that he’d said? All of it?
Umm, all righty then.
She hadn’t been expecting anything quite so excessive. A simple yes would have sufficed. Phoebe didn’t know how to respond to his pronouncement. At least, not rationally. But her gut was telling her he’d meant every word. And she always trusted her gut.
But the things he’d said…
And the way he’d said them…
He’d sounded as if he’d meant something far more serious—far more permanent—than just searching for the sword.
No, she scoffed. That was just crazy. She’d misunderstood somehow. It was her illness, her exhaustion making her misinterpret things.
Uncomfortable with his grave demeanor, she twisted her hand until she could shake his in a curt, businesslike manner. “We have an arrangement then.”
He tilted his head, the strangest look crossed his face as he leaned back. “An arrangement?”
“Yeah.” She frowned. “You know, a deal. Business.”
“Business.” A lethally seductive smile crept over his face. Her heart stuttered in her chest.
Business. Business, she repeated. This is just business.
He turned her hand over in his once more. Slowly—oh Lord, so slowly—his steady stare locked on her, he lifted her hand to his sculpted lips and pressed a lingering, very unbusinesslike kiss to the center of her palm. Those blue, blue eyes held her captive.
She couldn’t move. Couldn’t look away. Couldn’t jerk her hand back, though that was what she should be doing.
At last, after what felt like an eternity of oxygen deprivation, he drew his lips from her skin. Taking far longer than he should. “We have an…arrangement.”
Oh, why does that sound as if he means something entirely different than what I intended?
Troubled, hoping that strange, intimate vow and his stomach-fluttering kiss had just been an odd demon way of sealing a deal—some cultural thing she wasn’t aware of—she drew her hand away. The weight of his prolonged stare made her fidget. Just when she didn’t think she could take it a second longer, he stood and returned to his chair in the corner. She cleared her throat.
“My father’s people have been Guardians of the sword back to the beginning,” she said, eager to break through the sudden tension clogging the room. She went on to tell him what she knew of the Prophesy, strikingly similar to the version he’d told her earlier.
“I was ten years old the first and only time I saw the actual sword. It was the night of the fire. The apartment building where we were living at the time burned to the ground. It was dark, and the smoke was thick. I was very young, but I remember it like it was yesterday. I still dream of it once in a while. It happened pretty quickly, just a glance really, but it made an impression. Especially since the circumstances were so intense, and I’d never seen my father carrying a weapon before, any kind of weapon.”
She looked to Sebastian, expecting him to begin questioning her then, but he just nodded, waiting in silence for her to continue.
“The sword seemed so out of place given Dad’s area of expertise, you know? Anyway, Dad’s journals documented it pretty thoroughly so I would recognize it again, if ever I saw it. The sword was actually a medieval broadsword. Forty-five inches in length. Three inches across the forte. Just over four and a half pounds. The fuller—that shallow center indentation that runs the length of a straight double-edged blade—was etched with symbols, glyphs of some kind. Dad was never able to interpret them, nor were any of our ancestors.” She rubbed at her temple as she recited what she knew, the facts that her father had documented in his coded journals.
“The cross guard was inlaid with silver,” she said. “When Dad first came to be Guardian, he had a very trusted and ethically unshakable mentor working for a respected antiquities museum. Dr. Brewster was also a leading expert on several ancient languages. Dad, being the archeologist that he was, asked his mentor for a favor, asked him to analyze the sword. But Dad was cautious, swearing Dr. Brewster to secrecy, making him promise not to show the sword to or talk about it with anyone else. His mentor, of course, agreed.
“According to the documentation in Dad’s journals, Brewster ran extensive tests. Unfortunately, even after studying the sword in great detail, he was unable to decipher the glyphs on the blade. However, he did date the sword back to the early sixth century. He gave Dad all the results of his findings, everything pertaining to the sword. The strongest indicator that there was something…unique about it came in the materials used to make the sword. His findings showed that the grip was made of—”
She broke off, glancing away, uneasy.
Sebastian leaned forward, drawing her focus back to him. “Made of what?”
She licked her lips. “It’s not unheard of for the grip on these types of swords to be fashioned from horn. But Dr. Brewster believed this grip was actually crafted from bone.” Phoebe drew a deep, fortifying breath. “The one and only test Dad had allowed was a tiny sample to be taken for DNA testing to determine what kind of bone it was. But the tests were…inconclusive. Bone of unknown origin, they read. It didn’t fit anything in the database, mammalian, reptilian, or other. He never did figure out exactly what kind of bone it was, or what it might have belonged to. And Dad, for obvious reasons, refused to allow the sword to be sent in for further testing.
“But Dr. Brewster had also found one other even more disturbing clue. Grips on these kinds of swords were often wrapped in leather. This bone grip was covered with skin. Dr. Brewster had also taken samples of that too, but he didn’t tell my father, not until the results came back. According to the tests results, the skin was something close to, but not quite, human. Of unknown origin. And, although there were no known dyes present, the skin itself was distinctly red in pigmentation. Red with some kind of distorted black markings. Only the black segments showed dyes. Dr. Brewster believed the black segments were actually tattoos of some kind.”
“So the bone would have been demonic in origin,” Sebastian surmised, rubbing his jaw, his expression thoughtful. “Or even angelic, I guess. But the skins would most definitely be demonic. No angel that I know of would have red skin. The problem is, there are a lot of demons with that skin pigmentation. Maybe Animagi? Or Carpathï?”
“My father later wrote in one of his journals that he feared Dr. Brewster had let something about the sword slip to someone. Or that he’d retained samples from the grip for further examination. Maybe took pictures, or something.”
“Why would he think that?” Sebastian asked sharply.
“Less than twenty-four hours after he’d returned the sword to my father along with the documentation, Dr. Brewster was found in his lab in the basement of the museum, murdered. His lab had been ransacked.”
“Could his murder have been related to something else he might have been studying?”
“Museum officials insisted everything on his inventory lists was accounted for. Dr. Brewster hadn’t gone on an excavation in decades. The man practically lived in the basement of the museum. According to my father, Brewster had taken on researching the sword as his final project before retirement. He wasn’t researching anything else, nothing
at all.”
Sebastian seemed to be rolling those facts around in his head. His brow was puckered, his focus now distant. “Anything else?”
Anything else? The damned thing was made of bone and skin! An innocent man had been murdered because of it. Isn’t that enough?
She stared hard at him for a moment. She felt like she could trust him. Like she should trust him. Still, sharing this much information, willingly, about the sword…it was taboo. As if she was crossing some invisible line.
“A single, rough cut, blood red stone was set in the pommel. Fist sized,” she admitted with a great deal of reluctance.
“Ruby?”
She shook her head. “Red Jasper. It’s among the oldest known gemstones. In fact, Red Jasper is even mentioned in the Bible. The high priest, Aaron, was said to have one in his breastplate. It was called Odem then. Red Jasper was held in high esteem with the inhabitants of ancient Babylon and Egypt, and was made into protective amulets. Red Jasper was often referred to as the stone of perseverance.”
“I remember,” Sebastian muttered.
She’d already opened her mouth to finish her story, but his words registered, and she stopped cold. “You remember? What do you mean, you remember?”
Sebastian gave her a hooded look, one she couldn’t interpret to save her soul. “I wasn’t Hellborn.”
“Um, what does that mean?”
A deep frown settled upon his brow. For a moment, she thought he might refuse to answer.
“It means,” he finally said, “that I was created before the Great Fall, not after. It means that my wings weren’t always black.”
Her mouth fell open and her lungs froze. She blinked at him, unable to form words.
“Do you remember anything else about the night of the fire?” Sebastian asked, all his attention locked on the here and now. Locked on her.
She couldn’t respond, just kept sitting there staring like a dolt with her mouth hanging open.
Now he looked peeved. He snapped his fingers in front of her face. “Phoebe. Focus. The night of the fire? Did anything else stand out as odd?”
She blinked and shook her head. Oh, they’d be coming back to that topic, to be sure. He couldn’t just drop a bombshell like that—oh, by the way, I’m one of the original angels that fell from Heaven—and expect her not to ask questions.
She struggled to drag her focus back. “My father was frantic. I remember that night, fire aside, because his behavior was so unusual. Normally, Dad was efficient and calm. Always patient. Always so…so steady.”
“He woke me up in the middle of the night. He was yelling, beside himself. Flames licked at the walls. The heat was so intense. The smoke was black, billowing, and so thick it was hard to breathe. My eyes burned and it was difficult to see. He snatched me up, right out of bed. He had this old burlap satchel slung over his back, the one he always took with him on all his digs, and this big glittering sword strapped to his side. Those were the only things he grabbed—the bag, the sword and me. I don’t remember anything else about that night.
“We spent the next several weeks in one hotel after another…it was all a blur. He tried hard to make it seem like a grand adventure. But, looking back, I can see now that he was nervous, always looking over his shoulder. Always packed and ready to go at a moment’s notice. Eventually, we went back to Mexico, back to the jungle to begin a new excavation. Only then did he start to relax. After a while, everything went back to normal. Or what was normal for us, anyway. I never saw the sword after that night.”
“Do you remember where that dig was? The first one you went to after the fire?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t.” She frowned, looked down at her hands as one name circled her memory, unspoken. One she knew all too well. One she’d only recently connected the dots to. One that, for some reason, she held back from speaking aloud now. Trust wasn’t instantaneous in her book. It wasn’t something you gave away randomly. It was something you earned. And he hadn’t quite earned hers. Not just yet.
“At that age, one ruin had looked much like another. I was only interested in exploring the jungle and the physical ruins at the time, I’m afraid I didn’t pay much attention to names.”
Her eyes flew wide, and she caught her breath.
“Dad’s bag!” she blurted. “When that demon kidnapped me, I had a leather satchel—oh, my God! I have to find that satchel. Dad’s last journal was in there. And—”
“There was no satchel, no bag in the cave with you.”
She looked at him, but she wasn’t seeing him. Her mind was in a whirl, scrambling to figure out what had happened to that bag.
“He must have taken it with him when you came. He has to have it, the demon who took me.”
“Sïnsobar,” Sebastian hissed.
She nodded, pushing up on trembling arms. The sheet started to slip, and she made a hasty grab for it. “I have to get it back.”
The lightness on her left wrist finally registered. Dad’s watch! No, not that too. Filled with anguish, she gripped her bare wrist, far more frantic over the loss of the watch than she had been over the satchel.
“What’s wrong?” Sebastian’s brow puckered in alarm as he came forward in his seat.
“Dad’s watch,” she whispered around the lump welling in her throat. “It’s gone.”
He reached for something on a small table beside the bed.
A flash of silver landed in her lap with a heavy thud. She snatched it up and held it to the meager light. Tears slipped down her cheeks, unchecked.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” he asked.
Phoebe nodded as she slipped the battered time piece onto her wrist and clutched it to her chest, too grateful for words. Frowning, Sebastian settled back in the chair, scrutinizing her in an odd way. Clearing her throat, Phoebe gathered the shreds of her dignity.
“I’m afraid there’s no hope for the satchel,” Sebastian warned her.
She closed her eyes and took a deep, leveling breath. Okay, all right. It wasn’t the end. Inconvenient? More like a royal pain in the ass. But not the end.
“I’ve read and reread that journal so many times, translating Dad’s code and double checking to make sure I haven’t missed anything, I’ve pretty much memorized it. It would have been nice to have as a point of reference, but it’s not going to break us. The maps might be a little trickier. I’m pretty sure I can replicate them. Probably.”
“Wait, he had maps?”
“Yes, that’s where the real danger lies. Dad used the code to label the maps, denote landmarks. But if someone recognized those landmarks they might be able to fit the puzzle pieces together.”
She’d feel much better about the situation when she was back in Mexico and actively searching for the sword herself.
“Sïnsobar mentioned another demon that was supposed to be coming for me. Somebody called…” Oh, damn, what was that name? “Dim something. Dimy?”
“Dimiezlo. One of Stolas’s minions,” Sebastian confirmed, nodding. “He’s a nasty piece of work.”
“Well, they probably have Dad’s last journal now.” She mustered the strength to roll over on her side to face him. She tugged the blankets up, tucking them firmly in place. “It shouldn’t be a major issue, not unless they’re familiar with the region. My father encrypted all his journals. It was a code he only ever taught to me. It started out as a game when I was young, but then, after the fire, it became serious. Eventually it was the only way we communicated about anything, at least in writing. They won’t be able to read the journal themselves, I’m sure of that much at least.”
“Then we still have a slight advantage.”
“Not with me in this bed,” Phoebe pointed out, filled with determination. Once more, ignoring the trembling of her limbs and the shaking in her hands, she made to sit up.
But Sebastian was on his fe
et before she could blink. His large hand pressed against her good shoulder, careful but insistent, urging her back against the pillows. “Oh, no, you don’t. Not yet. You’re not strong enough. Tell me where to go, what to look for.”
“That’s just it. I don’t know.” She gave up struggling and sagged into the mattress, exhausted. No way was she going to let him hunt for it while she languished in bed. He’d find the damned thing and she’d never see him or it again.
Not that it mattered if she saw him again. She bit her lip, unhappy with the taste of the lie souring her mouth.
What should it matter?
Answer? It shouldn’t.
But it did.
And she didn’t know quite what to think about that.
“Every journal I found was filled with clues. Clues and more clues. A hodgepodge network of riddles I had to work through. Riddles only I could work through. The clues form a map of sorts leading to yet another journal. It’s a complicated process, one I’d hoped I was reaching the end of.” She studied his face, bit her lip. And decided to test the waters. Would he keep to his word, or was he no better than the other demons she’d encountered? No better, just sneakier? “Dad said he would leave a trail of breadcrumbs, should the sword ever disappear.”
“So there is a way to recover it, even though it’s in Stolas’s hands?” He leaned forward, his expression avid.
His excitement set off faint warning bells. Was it just ingrained caution? Or something more sinister? She hesitated. She needed him to trust her, regardless of whether or not she trusted him. If he trusted her, he might relax his guard. If his guard was down, she might be able to escape if need be.
Besides, he already knew most of the crucial information. She wasn’t confirming anything new. Not yet, at least.
“Yes.”
“Yes, for sure. Or yes, you hope?”
She licked her lips as she considered her answer. Automatically, he reached out and smoothed Chapstick over her lips again, catching her completely off guard. She blinked at him, nonplussed.
Stirring herself, she replied, “Yes. Definitely, yes. He would have ensured there was some way to find it, no matter what. I firmly believe that. But we can’t wait. Too much is riding on that sword.”