“And now we circle back to sacrifice.” Morales threw her hands in the air. “It is not possible for him to survive if Solomon sacrificed himself, which seems very likely according to his granddaughter’s and his Guardian’s accounts.”
“The last time we trusted the word of a Guardian, I lost a quarter of my people,” said a tan, weathered face from the screen, his green eyes staring at Morales menacingly.
“What are we going to do about Solomon’s daughter?” A high-pitched woman’s voice cut in.
Morales’ shoulders drooped. “She can’t be alive—not after all this time. There’s no logic to it.”
“There doesn’t have to be logic involved when you’re dealing with Babylonians. They’ve never kept your peace, and Eve’s mother is proof of that,” said Denisov. “It doesn’t matter that they’ve kept her alive this long; the only thing we need to focus on right now is how to get her out.”
Morales looked like she was about to say something again when someone tapped my shoulder.
I spun around with my fists raised and my heart hammering my eardrums.
Duke smiled, a step out of my reach for precaution. “Need some help with the door?”
I dropped my fists and turned back. “They’re about to decide something.”
“It’s about time. They’ve been at it for hours. I had to step out for a while to get some fresh air. They keep talking in circles.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Why would you be in…?”
Duke shrugged. “Curse of being the president’s son. That’s his voice now.”
A deep voice murmured indistinctly for another moment before stopping abruptly. I turned and pressed my ear against the crack when the door creaked outward so quickly that it pushed me into Duke. He caught me gently.
“Brooks. Harding.” Denisov stopped advancing. “Perfect timing.”
Morales bumped into her shoulder, mumbled an indistinct apology, and stepped back.
“The regional leaders and the president have agreed that the Tercets will hunt down Kovac and find your mother as I prepare us for the inevitable.” She tightened her jaw. “We’re going to get her back.”
I nodded, her sharp, intense eyes convincing me to believe her more than Morales ever could. “I want to help you find him, find my mom.”
Her hawk eyes narrowed. “You’re what Kovac wants, and as long as we keep you close, they’ll come to us.”
My mouth hung open as I processed what she meant.
Bait? She wants to dangle me out there like a worm on a hook?
Perfect.
“We’ll be ready.” Denisov put her hand on my shoulder and then started forward again, Morales not looking at me as she followed.
“This is going to be interesting,” said Duke as he watched the pair disappear.
“What is?”
“Looks like my father finally put Denisov in charge of L.A.”
CHATPER TWENTY-SEVEN
It took a week. That was it. That was all the time necessary to completely change the way the college operated.
Classes were cancelled.
Every Patron was put into a military unit under The Defense, and almost every one of them was assigned a part of the city to patrol.
Except us.
My fingers curled around the metal handles attached to the thick iron cords that stretched into the floor. The arena’s bright lights glinted off the shiny metal before being absorbed by the black mat under my feet. Nate stood near the outer wall, his hands behind his back in a military “at-ease” position that looked very uncomfortable. Ria sat next to him, her brown and white beagle sniffing her feet as she scratched his ears. Freddy and Miranda were each pretending to sword fight with Duke and Cheryl—our overseers.
Denisov had a funny way of staying true to her word. I was locked within the bounds of headquarters in order to make Kovac come to us. Meanwhile, every other person—including the Tercets, the top trio The Defense had—was out trying to hunt him down. Not exactly an open invitation for Kovac to take the bait.
I pumped my arms up and raised my hands over my shoulders, the thick iron cables straining. Sweat beaded down my forehead and onto my nose, dropping past my lower lip as I exhaled.
I lowered my arms back down, and a series of weights clunked together under the floor. Aside from sparring circles in the Warrior section of the arena, we had weight machines specifically designed to test our strength. Press a button up top, and the weight adjusted below so that when you pulled on the handles you could lift different amounts.
Today, without thinking about my mom or Kovac or anything else that would make my pulse pound, I could lift the equivalent of a VW Beetle. As long as I steadied my breathing, my talent seemed to be working finally. I still couldn’t see the essence that had bottled up inside me for years, which meant I was nowhere near conjuring a spiritual weapon, but the strength was enough for now, especially knowing that if I just tapped some uncontrollable part inside of me the sight would come and I’d be able to lift a downtown bus.
“Fetch!” Ria called just before a tennis ball smacked my shoulder. Her dog continued to sniff around her and Nate.
I stooped down and picked up the ball, then threw it her way as she got up to meet me on the orange track. “The dog obviously does not like that game.”
She grinned. “Who said I was trying to get him to play?”
I bounced on the balls of my feet and started jogging toward the other end of the arena. As long as I kept moving, I didn’t think so much. I didn’t think about Kovac’s blinding white smile as he talked about imprisoning my mom. I didn’t think about how he wanted to capture and kill me to break her spirit, to torture her before he slipped his knife through her ribs. I didn’t think about Grandpa not doing anything to try and save her, about how I’d been doing the same by staying here for seven straight days without trying to search for her once…But where would I even start?
“Hi, Eve!” Miranda waved a sword at me mid-fight.
Duke parried the steel out of her hand with a metallic clang and sighed. “Again.”
I grinned. He and Cheryl were tasked with making sure I didn’t leave headquarters while also making us battle-ready—Denisov’s term for everything related to the college now. It was more like a military base than anything else at this point.
I put on a burst of speed as I rounded the corner, imagining just for a moment that I was a Messenger. I’d only seen Josh one time since he’d left me in the courtyard. He’d been sitting in a chair on the roof looking up at the stars. I’d started to say something and he disappeared.
Jerk.
Duke said Denisov gave him a special assignment but wouldn’t elaborate. How did Josh expect to be some perfect soldier if he couldn’t even recover from a bad fight? It’s not like anyone else was even mad about it. I wasn’t. So he’d recommended us tracking the demon; so Meg had made me take an oath, big deal. Those were bold moves, and he hadn’t tried to stop me, hadn’t tried to hold me back. That was what I loved about him.
Liked about him.
“What are we running from?” Ria yelled and threw the tennis ball at my back.
I stomped my foot into the ground for a quick stop and turned around. Ria doubled over with a stitch in her side, breathing heavily.
“Sorry. I didn’t know you were following,” I said, barely out of breath.
She stood and came closer. “Do you want to talk?”
I drew in a calming breath and shook my head.
Ria nodded. “Good. Me neither. Talking about feelings is for sissies. Real girls do obstacle courses,” she said and sprinted to the right before I finished processing her words.
I grinned. “You have to start at the beginning!” I yelled when I saw her going for the middle of the course, just after the part where Cheryl had taken me down and nearly skewered my head with her golden spear. “Cheater.”
“As if Denisov’s going to catch us.” She stopped just before entering the field, her soft green
eyes searching for booby traps. She’d been testing every inch of the course all week and had already found two rope loops that snatched feet into the air and one trip wire that turned on a flame thrower.
I was glad I’d never made it that far.
“Just be careful.” I followed her as she took the first step. “Nate’s already had to save you twice.”
She flashed a sly smile. “I like it when he saves me.”
I rolled my eyes, unable to help from grinning at her as I dashed forward and grabbed a swinging rope, easily grasping one after another. Ria ran around the side and beat me onto an angled balance beam that lead up to a narrow wall.
“Your dog’s getting in my way again.” Nate appeared at the base of the wall, his red hair even with our feet, the Beagle’s head pressed up against his khaki shirt as he held it in his arms. It wagged its tail and panted when it saw Ria, a strand of drool dropping onto Nate’s shoes. “See, it has a thing with feet. First he’s sniffing them, then he’s slobbering all over them.”
“Leo’s being a good boy, isn’t he?” Ria cooed.
“Still hate that name, by the way,” I chimed in, shaking my head even though I wanted to smile. It felt like we were all back at my house, like Grandpa would come out any minute and tell us a riddle or say something in Latin.
“You would be a DeCaprio hater.” Ria pursed her lips and stood upright. As she did, her knees wobbled and her toes pointed down over the edge of the wall. Her arms whirled back uselessly, and she started to fall.
In that moment of weightlessness when her ponytail splayed out, Nate jumped up to the top of the wall, planted his feet, and caught her by the forearm, allowing her body to lean at a 45 degree angle
She grinned mischievously as Leo barked. “I’ll never let go.”
“Nate, if you say, ‘I’m king of the world,’ I’m going to be sick,” I said.
Ria widened her eyes like I was exposing her biggest secret.
“Seriously?” Nate’s eyes expanded in realization.
Ria batted her eyelashes and flashed another perfect smile.
“You know if it’s not Indiana Jones, you might as well be talking to a wall,” he said and let go.
“I hate snakes!” Ria screamed and plopped onto twelve inches of padding.
“That’s the spirit.” Nate smiled and hopped down next to her. “And rats. Don’t forget rats.”
“Ok, you two have gone from cute to adorable to sickening in record time. Seriously, I feel sick.”
“Make sure to throw up on the other side of the wall,” Nate said without looking back at me. “It will protect us from the splatter.”
“Such unconcern from my own Guardian,” I said dramatically and jumped down on the opposite side to start a part of the course I hadn’t tried yet.
I jogged forward toward a series of tires, then up and down ramps that would have strained my legs if I wasn’t feeling so strong. I dug my fingers into handholds on a fifty foot wall. I scaled down, the rope barely burning my skin even though I held it tight the whole way.
I ran forward again, silencing my mind with the effort of my body. Each breath was a gift of silence.
Until a trap door dropped out from under me.
I plunged into a small metal box. The reverberations reached through my heels and into my shins as my feet hit the bottom. Then the trap door flapped upward again, plunging me into darkness.
I breathed in deeply like the air was suddenly thinner and blinked rapidly to try and adjust my eyes to the lack of light. I searched for a handhold to lift me out but found nothing but smooth, cool metal.
“Ok, wasn’t expecting this.” My voice echoed all around me. The box was about two shoulder-lengths square and double my height. I jumped and slapped my fist into the metal trap door, but it didn’t budge. Instead, the slow squeak of a pulley crawled across the metal—one squeak every two seconds. I jumped up again to see if it would stop, if I’d somehow turned something on, when my knuckles collided with the trapdoor quicker than last time.
It was descending.
Blind panic seized my chest, and I slammed my fists into the walls. “Turn it off! Nate! Ria! Somebody!”
I spun around and searched for a weak point, a corner seam, another hatch for me to crawl through, but there was nothing.
Metal pressed onto the top of my head, and I put my arms up as a brace, but it was no use. It kept coming toward me, pressing me into the floor, squeezing the air out of the box, out of my lungs.
“No.” I shook my head and crouched down on my hands and knees, ready for my back to take the weight. I should have been able to do this. How much had I lifted before? This should be nothing.
Beside an oak tree, my mom’s face flashed into view, pain and agony etched in every line.
I sucked in a breath and focused everything I had on her as the cool metal pressed into my back and sent shivers down my arms and legs. I pressed with everything I had, but the darkness gripped my muscles and squeezed the energy out of them. I couldn’t scream. I could only see my mom’s face, the pain painted in her eyes.
Then it stopped.
Several voices spoke to me at once, murmurs from far away until Nate’s alone cut through the fog.
“Eve. You’re ok. Just stand up. You’re ok.”
I blinked at the bright halos of light shining behind their heads. I tried to say something, but my voice scratched against my throat.
“Evey, take my hand.” Ria reached down, her face pale, her eyes pools of concern.
I stood and took her hand, easily climbing out of the gray, metal cube set into the floor, no trap door to conceal it. I looked around with wide eyes, everything like a dream, like my mind couldn’t believe that the world still existed. “What happened?”
“It was an essence trap. It concentrates spiritual energy—the more you fight against it, the stronger it becomes,” said Duke, his white shirt sucked tight to his lean body, Cheryl right behind him.
“But I—the metal, the ceiling was—” I looked back down at the square hole. It was only four feet deep.
“Essence takes different forms for each person,” said Nate, stepping forward an inch. “Normally, people see the trap as essence and either have to conjure a spiritual weapon or control their emotions enough for it to lose power. I’m sorry, Eve. I should have—”
I shook my head and swallowed another gulp of air to make sure it was real. “It’s fine. I’m fine.” I looked around at their concerned faces and saw my mom’s flash across my vision again, blurrier now. “I just need to get some air. I’m ok. I just—” I jogged to the side door and up the ramp, the roof the only safe place in my mind now, the only place where the ceiling couldn’t press in on me again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Warm summer air slapped the sweat on my face when I got to the roof and looked out at the city, the sun’s ambient light almost completely gone from the horizon. Distant office lights peppered the sides of the skyscrapers, and the constant flow of traffic on the nearby freeway was like a rush of water down a rocky riverbed.
I inhaled until my lungs hurt and then pushed it out slowly. Small spaces didn’t usually do that to me. But then again, I guess it wasn’t really a small space, was it? I still didn’t understand how essence could affect people like that, but I began to understand how well the headquarters must be protected. To my eyes, any Babylonian could walk in off the street and shoot us all, but if this place was designed with traps like that, it seemed very unlikely.
But then, that meant the Babylonians didn’t have those same protections. Only one or two that Josh could have killed himself with, but luckily didn’t. How could there be such a difference between our headquarters and theirs? It didn’t make any sense.
I inhaled again and closed my eyes. My mom’s brown eyes swam into view—not in pain anymore, but not exactly as real either. They looked like the picture I’d memorized as a kid. What I’d seen in that box, that was a completely new expression, almost like it
was really happening right then.
What if it had been?
My mind whirled with questions, with places Kovac might hide her, with images of what he must be doing to her. Maybe that’s what it was—he was torturing her and I’d seen her somehow.
I clutched a red roof tile on the wall that traced the perimeter. It crumbled to dust a second later, and I stepped back, searching the city’s skyline for some clue to point me in the right direction. Just aim and fire.
The golden street lights intersected with neon signs. The florescent offices scattered their reach up to the red beacons at the top of tall spires. Even the first signs of the stars glinted in the gray-black sky, making a map of lights for me to follow. I traced the constellations that used to be taped above my bed. Something to aspire to—that’s what Josh had said they were in the car ride over here.
A thud like a cannon shook my chest, and I sucked in a breath, my fists coming up in a defensive position. A second later, blue sparks popped into starbursts and showered a low industrial building a few blocks away. Several more thuds shot off in quick succession, gold and pink and green stars filling the night sky for a fleeting instant.
“How did we forget the fourth of July?” Ria’s voice crept up next to me.
I stood there transfixed, bewildered that time was still passing us by.
Nate, Freddy, and Miranda came up to my left and stared up at the sky. Duke and Cheryl lingered somewhere behind us.
A shower of green sparks blossomed into a flower not two hundred feet above. Orange and yellow and pink followed, each preceded by a thunderous boom.
We watched in silence, pointing out our favorites. It was the first time my mind had quieted completely, and the effect was immediate. My whole body began to loosen as if my muscles had been in knots. Each crackle of light that burst into the sky was the exact distraction I needed, much closer to home than the hopeful starry light imprisoned in the darkness beyond.
I closed my eyes and let the light filter in through my eyelids as I breathed in and out calmly. When I opened them, a finale of cannons announced the end just before the sky filled with a kaleidoscope of rainbow starbursts twinkling as they floated down through the sky.
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