Lost Grace (The Reminiscent Exile Book 4)

by Joe Ducie

  All that was left was sacrifice, selflessness, someone nailed to a cross… This time, if such a ransom was required, it would be me paying the bill. No more friends, or allies, to suffer for my arrogance. My clever little plans spanning worlds, space, and time.

  That thought gave me strength as we summited a small, sheer cliff face and reached a plateau—a wide space covered in black rock and rivulets of fast-melting snow. Steam rose in quick curls from the narrow gullets breaching back to the cavern below.

  Dread Ash of the Everlasting stood on the edge of the plateau, on a precipice of sharp stone, a knob of rock overlooking the entire landscape within the purple shield—and a drop of about a thousand feet to the glassed hillside of deadlings and monsters below.

  Her back was to us, but I had no doubt she knew we were there. A light breeze swept her golden-brown hair around her head, as red lightning tore across the canopy of the shield. Dread Ash looked like what she was—an ageless god, surveying the world as if it were just being forged from the fire. Only this wasn’t the beginning of something, this was the end.

  With Annie at my side, Arlon and Caitlin at my back, I strode across the plateau and held my rune sword before me. My voice, a tone of raw command, echoed across the space—punctuated and somehow enforced by the lightning strikes and the shaking mountain.

  “Ashaya D’levaney, Seventh Born of the Everlasting, you will surrender to me. You will unmake the degradation surrounding the Atlas Lexicon, and you will release your prisoner, Tal Levy of the Knights Infernal. Do this now or be destroyed.”

  Dread Ash, pixie-faced Fix, sweet Tal—names upon names, disguises within disguises—

  took a delicate step forward until her toes brushed the very edge of the thousand-foot drop. She spun, elegance and grace, and smiled at me below cheeks tear-stained and flushed. Her eyes, Tal’s lovely eyes, were as black as midnight on a night with no moon.

  With a cry that shook the heavens, she thrust the stolen sword down between her feet, into the stone, burying the blade halfway along its length. “Give me your sword, Declan. You made the blades as twins. I require both to escape this hateful place.”

  “No,” I said. “That doesn’t work for me.”

  “Then I’ll tear it from you.”

  “Bitch, come at me.”

  She laughed and that was all manner of unnerving. We had jumped back and forth between advantage and disadvantage so much over this long night and dark morning that I didn’t know where we stood—probably best to assume I was arguing from the low ground. Safe to assume I was screwed. “You are the most infuriating, the most unpredictable, man I have ever known.” She blinked her coal-black eyes. “I’m going to miss you, I think.”

  I straightened my posture, stood tall, and cut my blade down through the air. “Talking’s done,” I said.

  Dread Ash inclined her head and clapped her hands together, fusing purple fire with dark light, and shot five spiralling arcs of energy across the plateau. I swung my sword again, focused my Will tied to the petal in my heart—acting on a foreign prayer—and a wave of force repelled the sickly beams of fire, shooting them skyward, where they were lost against the purple sky.

  Arlon and Caitlin opened fire but Dread Ash moved fast, faster than fast, a blur on the wind, zig-zagging across the plateau. My allies were thrown aside, back against the cliff face, save Annie, who drew a level bead on the demigod in human form and placed a hot inch of spinning lead in her lung.

  Dread Ash blinked in surprise, in pain, and fell to her knees before me, blood blossoming on her chest, spilling down her blouse. She looked furious as Annie calmly pulled back the hammer on her revolver again.

  “That…” Ash laughed, coughed up a mouthful of heart’s blood. “That shot was impressive.” She looked at Annie, tilted her head, and grinned twin rows of bloody teeth. “Ah, I see, you are like him.”

  Annie held the barrel of her gun between Ash’s eyes. She paused. “What?”

  “It’s not important,” I said.

  Ash laughed. “She doesn’t know, Declan?”

  “Know what?” Annie said, though something flickered in her eyes, something scared, something knowing. An oh so sneaky, sneaking suspicion. “Talk, bitch.”

  Ash’s skin began to knit itself back together, healing, I levelled the blade against her neck, ready and willing to take Tal’s head from her shoulders. Better that than another minute slave to the Everlasting. I tried to tell myself it was what she would want, that it wasn’t murder, but such blurred distinctions were so much bullshit. Loving me had cost Tal everything, more than once, and here I was to put her out of her misery.

  Still, I hesitated.

  And Dread Ash told Annie Brie the truth.

  “A petal of the Infernal Clock rests in your heart, child,” Ash said around her wicked grin. “You died and were brought back to life, an immortal half-life. Your doing, Declan? Were you lonely?”

  Annie’s grip on her revolver slackened, hardened again. She glared at me. “That true?”

  I nodded slowly. “On Diablo Beach. Scion killed you. You were dead for maybe ten minutes. Emily had seen it, or perhaps I told her in the past, and she had slipped a petal of the Infernal Clock into your jacket. I used it to heal you. To bring you back.”

  Annie considered all of that, a range of emotions warring across her face. “Oh. OK, thanks.” She looked back to Ash. “What do we do with her?”

  I blinked—and thought that, perhaps, if we survived the next few hours, Annie and I were not done with this conversation—but matters at hand demanded our attention.

  “Please, Ash, don’t make me do this. Let her go.”

  The blade twitched in my hand, drawing a thin line of blood against the Everlasting’s neck. Pearl droplets trickled into her collar, staining the soft cotton crimson.

  “Even when you win, you lose,” she said, and wasn’t that my curse, my obscene truth. “Are you going to peel me as you did Axis, Declan? Drive me mad as you did my brother? He rages about you—across time and space, echoing through the great machinations and gears at the heart of the universe, I can hear him. He’s coming for you.”

  “I’ll do for all you Everlasting before too long,” I said. “I’m giving you a chance to save yourself, Ash.”

  “Don’t you want me dead, sweet thing?” she said, tossing my own words back at me, pulled no doubt from Tal’s mind.

  Across the plateau, Caitlin cradled Arlon in her lap, pressing a bandage to a hell of a scalp wound on the side of his head. She looked at me, eyes wild, unfocused, lost, as the shield howled overhead. We had minutes, perhaps less—I honestly didn’t know—before the canvas around the Atlas Lexicon tore and the Void spilled across True Earth and simply unmade the world.

  A decision was about to be cast, one way or the other. An end to a plan set in motion ten thousand years ago on this blasted mountain.

  Ash closed her eyes, whispered a harsh word in an alien, guttural tongue—dark speech, if ever I heard it—and a crimson bolt of lightning flashed down from the shield and struck the hilt of my sword, the one embedded on the precipice in the stone. A shockwave of energy burst outwards, riding a blinding flash of light, and we were all tossed across the plateau, scattered in the explosion.

  I held on to my rune sword, the beginnings of something that, if all would be well, could one day be a weapon to rival the Roseblade, but it was a near thing. I landed hard on my back, sharp rock digging into my spine. My shoulder wound bled fresh across my chest. I wheezed against broken ribs. The pain receded again as I clutched the hilt of the sword, borrowing the blade’s celestial energy.

  Then Dread Ash was upon me—she leapt through the air like a lion, and came down atop of me, pinning my sides between her legs, holding my shoulders against the rock with her knees. She dug her thumb into my pierced shoulder and I screamed. My hand holding the sword jerked and tossed the blade aside.

  At once, I was flooded with fatigue, pain so blinding I nearly passed out, but Ash hel
d me, brought me back.

  “No, no,” she said. “You don’t get to slip away. The tether weakens, Declan. I thought you a fool to burn the grove of celestial illusion, but no, you’ve freed me. I can escape. In time, Axis will create another seed, and millennia from now we shall have a new grove. What’s a few thousand more years after so long? Nothing to me, and you will be ages dead… buried and forgotten.”

  She laughed and closed her hand around my throat. Her legs pressed against my cracked ribs, drawing the breath from my lungs. I gasped and Dread Ash squeezed, cutting off my air.

  I stared up into those black eyes, that bloody grin, as the world grew white and hazy at the edges, in defiance of the purple sky, the ash on the wind, the strikes of vicious lightning and the scent of burnt copper, the tang of the Void, all around us. The last of my defiance. I felt the cavern burning beneath us, a slow vibration that would last forever.

  “You lose, Declan,” Ash whispered.

  My lungs screamed for air, my heart pounded against my chest, fast and desperate.

  My heart…

  Ah, shit, a terribly awful plan occurred to me, as consciousness faded.

  Annie, I thought. Annie… do this for me.

  I sent my terrible plan from my heart to hers, along the celestial petals that joined us together beyond life and death. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t even whisper, but the thought may as well have been shouted from the mountaintops for Annie. I knew she heard me. I knew it.

  As my sight dwindled, the world reduced to a narrow corridor, where all I could see was Dread Ash’s snarling face, Tal’s corrupted expression, and beyond that the awful purple sky, I readied myself to die—and to stay dead this time. I didn’t feel anger, or hate, or anything except relief. If this was the end, so be it. I’d earned a death like this a thousand times over, some would argue it was too quick.

  Someone blocked the purple sky over Ash’s shoulder—someone wearing a killer leather jacket, with jade-green eyes and sharp black hair. Detective Annie Brie, blood-spattered and bruised, tears in her eyes, raised my rune blade over her head behind Dread Ash.

  Her chin trembled, she sniffed, and whispered, “I hear you, Declan.”

  Annie drove the infinitely sharp point of the blade through Dread Ash’s back, right through her heart, and out the front of her chest.

  Ash’s eyes widened—in fury, in pain—and her grip on my throat slackened. I felt that for half a second before Annie completed my terrible thought and kept driving the blade downward and into my chest.

  There was no pain, nothing, as the tip pierced my heart and struck hard against what was hidden. A chime, church bells on high, echoed across the plateau, up the mountain, and down into the Atlas Lexicon. For just a moment, the lightning in the shield recoiled as if stung, shying away from that pure sound.

  Finish it, I thought.

  With a cry, Annie wrenched the blade up and back out of me. The sword left my chest—coated not in my blood, but in glowing, ghostly, silver-blue divine light. The petal of the Infernal Clock, my stolen immortality, left my chest, and I felt a great sadness, an infinite regret, at its passing. As if I’d lost something I’d never know again, a glimpse of the true turning of the world. I was robbed of its protection.

  Annie wrenched the sword upwards and dragged the tip back through Ash’s chest. The petal passed into her heart—Tal’s heart—and when the blade exited her back it was clean, bloodless, and without the petal.

  Ash’s hands fell from my throat and I sucked in a gasp of air like a man nearly drowned. My lungs strained, shot and abused, but the air was good, redeeming. I blinked and the world came back into focus, as Dread Ash fell from me, fell next to me against the hard ground.

  Her eyes flickered from pure black, to swirls of white, to Tal’s eyes. She convulsed on the rock as if in seizure, and her chest—her heart—blazed with celestial light.

  Ash turned to look at me, quivering, crying. Afraid. Her hand found mine and she squeezed it hard enough to snap my fingers. I embraced that pain, I’d earned it. The look on her face was terrible to behold, sad and miserable.

  “I’m scared,” she whispered. “Oh, Declan, I’m scared.”

  Though it cost me, I reached over with my free hand and gently cupped her cheek. Dread Ash leaned into my palm, her tears mixed with my blood, and I pulled her close.

  For the second time in my life, I held one of the Everlasting as she died.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  LIKE RAIN ON A SUNNY DAY

  (One day, when this is all over, I’m going to Disneyland)

  Annie knelt next to me as I felt Ash’s grip slacken and watched the life leave her eyes. I held that lifeless gaze a long moment as cold fingers fell still. Annie ripped my shirt open and ran her hands over my chest, over my heart.

  “There’s no wound,” she said, and placed her warm hand flat against my chest. “Declan, I stabbed you in the heart, and there’s no wound.”

  “The petal healed me on its way out.” Or whatever. A dozen aches and pains, broken bones and stab wounds remained, but not my heart. “Parting gift, for all the trouble it cost me.”

  Annie took a deep breath and exhaled. “Is she… gone?”

  “You just killed one of the Everlasting, Annie,” I said, not quite willing to let go of Tal’s hand just yet. “As far as I know, you’re the only person in the history of creation ever to do such a thing. That’s going to bite us later, I’m sure.”

  The purple sky screamed, rippling with lightning. I’d hoped Ash dying—and there were four sad words—would have severed that monstrosity of a shield, but no, it was beyond that now—self-sustaining, and work still to be done. I needed to get up and get on with that work, mill the last of the day’s grist, but I was tired, beaten, at what could only be described as an utter loss. If the world was about to end in Voidflame, then so be it. I’d been robbed of death again.

  You survive, Declan. You always survive. Oh, how right you’d been, dear.

  A howling wind swept across the plateau, rife with ash and the swirling dust from the glassed deadling army below.

  Tal Levy opened her eyes.

  “Hey there, sweet thing,” she whispered, her voice a rasp almost stolen by the maelstrom. “You do like to keep a girl waiting.”

  *~*~*~*

  Annie and Tal helped me over to the edge of the cliff face, over the knob of jutting rock where Ash had driven my sword into the stone, twin and brother to the proto-Roseblade, the rune blade that was already going to be infamous for slaying an Everlasting. And, perhaps, for stealing the scant-understood immortality of the infamous Declan Hale.

  There was one hell of a headline for the Ascension City Times tomorrow morning: EVERLASTING KILLED BY IMMORTALITY. This and other bitter ironies in the news at eleven.

  Tal and Annie carried me between them, as gently as they could.

  Arlon and Caitlin stood back, ready to help if any of us fell, but knowing this one was out of their depth, above their pay grade. Hell, we’d all been out of our depth most of the night, just doing the best we could with the tatters of that oh-so-clever plan devised one should-have-been-drunken night in a quiet tavern of the Vale Celestia, ten millenniums ago in time’s true measure.

  “Are you sure you’re up to this?” Annie asked.

  “Nope.”

  A haunted look lurked in the back of Tal’s eyes, and I imagined it would be there for some time. But she was strong, stronger than I could ever hope to be. “There’s no one else, Detective Brie,” she said. “Declan started this, and Declan will finish it. No love of mine will stumble at the finish line.”

  And if there was little mercy in her voice, a resentment in the word ‘love’, was that any one’s fault but my own?

  I gripped the hilt of the rune blade and felt a trickle of its power. Enough to stand on my feet.

  The shield raged overhead, great forks of lightning scoured the landscape, smashed into the towers of the Atlas Lexicon and sent marble, glass, and ste
el raining to the ground—we were in the eye of the storm, the Void so close now that great patches of darkness were bleeding across the sky. Holes in the very canvas of our reality—thin enough that anything, simply anything, could break through. I glimpsed a monumental, lidless eye in one of the dark patches, some abomination beyond reckoning, staring into our world.

  That wouldn’t do.

  At the last of my strength, I held the rune blade up over my head and brought it crashing down into the rock next to its twin. The blades sung a swift harmony as I fell and I gripped both hilts in my hands, down on one knee, proposing quite the engagement to the purple sky. I poured Will into the swords, focused my intent, and bolstered by the sheer amount of energy burning within the heart of the mountain, I cast that intent against the shield surrounding the Atlas Lexicon.

  That’s all any real Will casting was, at the end of the day—intent, focus, energy.

  I threw my Will against that of the Everlasting Dread Ash—a contest under normal circumstances I could never win, a puppy trying to fight a bear, but Ash was dead. Nine were now eight—seven, without Emily Grace. The shield roiled against my power, bucked like some wild thing caught in a snare.

  The degradation around the Atlas Lexicon wailed. Nothing ever died easy in my line of work.

  And then it split.

  Right across the top of the dome the purple shield split, and a great scar of blue sky, honest golden sunlight, poured into the Atlas Lexicon, flooded the landscape, lit up the city and made the silver towers shine magnificently.

  The stitch broken, the thread severed, the ugly shield exploded outwards on all sides, dissipating into nothingness stolen on the air. Ragged, oily chunks of the shield fell like burnt cloth over miles of valley, a blizzard of tainted lilac snow, burning to nothing before it struck the ground. In the space of three seconds the purple sky faded and was replaced with bright sunshine, a cloudless blue sky.

  A pressure I’d almost grown used to, the terrible weight of the Void, disappeared with the shield. The terrible patches of impending doom and Lovecraftian horrors winking at me from beyond the stars fused, scarred over. There’d be weak spots, places that would need to be monitored for years to come, as what I’d done was nothing more than a field medic’s attempt at triage, but I thought it would hold. For what felt like the first time in days, I took a breath of clear, fresh air, rolling down off the pristine peaks of the Swiss Alps, and beheld the entire valley of the Atlas Lexicon—emerald forests, glacial blue rivers, mountains capped with pure white snow.