“Go and get them,” he said, and the host of El flew, followed by the dead, set to fight one last time.
* * *
THE WATER MONSTER THAT had tangled itself around the tower was the biggest danger to us—it was demolishing any angelic force that was out of range of the Sword’s protection. The Seer was somewhere in the tower, and I needed to see for myself if things had developed as I feared. Michael, my Michael, could be in grave danger. He could be in need of rescue.
Help me be strong, keep my heart open, and show me what I should do.
Kreios cut a wing off a nearby demon and shoved the creature toward me. I ran it through, turning it to ash. He gave me a slight nod and we saw the army of the damned coming around the north side of the tower. The Brotherhood horde would fall—victory would be ours.
I sounded my eagle battle cry, and a shout rippled through the heavenly host. The attack ordered, the angels rallied in pursuit of the enemy.
I raised my blade and looked at Kreios, nodding toward the tower. “Time for us to meet the new Seer. You with me?”
Kreios smiled. The Sword cleared a path for us.
CHAPTER XVII
AS WE NEARED THE TOWER, I felt the Sword gain incremental power. It began to buzz, sending a tingle up my arm. We poured on the speed.
Kreios hacked and batted demons away like flies. I didn’t have to do much anymore; the Sword was taking center stage now. The round space in the hilt glowed around its circumference as if the metal were in a forge; it looked white hot, but it was cool to the touch. Demons began to cower at our approach. Some covered their ears or eyes as if in pain, and their flight paths grew erratic as they fell away.
We were now closer than we’d ever been to the epicenter of the battle, to the place where the Seer and the power of the Bloodstone dwelled. Qiel had drawn up columns of water over most of the tower’s exterior. Some were buttresses of ice. The darkness here was thick. But the light that poured from the Sword and radiated from my heart was all the brighter for it.
I watched the state of those parts of the battle that were up close to the tower. Qiel was very powerful—wherever an angel flew, bits of ice would explode outward from the tower, blasting saltwater shrapnel at El’s army. Some of the blasts were so indiscriminate as to also take out the Seer’s own Brotherhood forces. It was a stupid, desperate way to fight. I sensed the end drawing near.
It was a singular spectacle, like being a battlefield observer of a conflict in which the combatants were not clearly declared by their color of uniform, their aspect, or some other feature. The armies of the damned, allied with El? Killers, joining in the fight against the forces of darkness? It was difficult for me to believe my eyes. All I could do was trust and carry on.
Kreios and I looped around the tower, close enough to feel the constant danger posed by the power of the Seer and his Bloodstone, close enough to feel the Sword wrestling the darkness away. Close enough to feel our vulnerability.
“Airel, dive!” Kreios shouted, alerting me to a blast of ice. I reacted quickly, avoiding most of it by the breadth of a hair. Some smaller pieces raked me, and as the seawater melted into my wounds, it stung and ached. I recovered quickly and gained altitude. Closer. Faster. Let’s end it now.
My strategy was simply to bring the blade closer to the Seer. It was a contest of proximity—two things could not dwell in the same space. I would force the issue. We shall see who prevails—the Creator or the created.
I felt the very air tremble as I drew near to the Seer’s seat of power.
The skies overhead were beginning to thin and clear out. Most of the Brotherhood force had fled, having been scattered by El’s armies. I could see the sun, just barely peeking from behind the clouds. The water below was not raging as it had before, and some dry spots were beginning to appear. It’s working. All I had to do was bring the sword to bear. The enemy was beginning to flee.
But then the tower began to shake. Slabs of ice weighing many tons broke off and began to fall. The whole building then erupted in angry violence, and masses of ice and glass went into freefall. When the explosion went off, sending a shockwave through the atmosphere for miles around, I knew it was all over.
We had won.
* * *
WE LIT NEAR THE top of the wreckage, 150 floors up. This was the Brotherhood command post; there was no doubting the smell. Kreios and I were both in the guard, blades raised and ready as we searched the shell of the top of the tower. The spire had broken off in the conflict.
We split up in our search for the enemy.
Soon it became obvious. The Seer was gone.
Reports came to our minds from miles away, from Yamanu and Zedkiel and Veridon—the Brotherhood was no more. All had been vanquished. The Bloodstone? The Seer? None of us were sure, but I could not feel either anymore.
I relaxed for the first time, feeling every tired and sore muscle. My bones hurt. “Kreios?” Silence.
I glanced out over the lost city of Dubai through the twisted remains of the structure as I picked my way through the rooms.
I found Kreios crouched over remains, whether human or angelic, I couldn’t be sure. I approached. Blood covered the floor at his knees, and his shoulders heaved in great, quiet sobs of grief. It was the body of a woman—from the awkward curve of her neck, I could see that it had been broken. Her face was mostly eaten away. Her hair was electric blue.
I ran to Kreios.
He held Ellie’s ruined body in his arms, her poor, awful head in his lap. I couldn’t breathe. My legs buckled and I fell next to him. We wept together.
Kreios roared. It was loud and long, and it hinted of a story filled to overflowing with frustration and pain and longing.
My mind was numb, beneath reason. I felt all my hope vanish. The war, the Seer—none of it mattered anymore. Why did Ellie have to die? My eyes were clamped tight shut and Kreios didn’t try to comfort me. I hadn’t the strength anymore to comfort him.
We were lost in our own grief.
But then I sensed Michael for the first time in forever, not far off. I could hear him. He needed me. I was on my feet in an instant, and running.
* * *
Michael had run out of luck, run out of rooms.
They had chased him into an office with a single door. There was a wall of windows to his right, a door guarded by two demons to his left, and nowhere to go. There was no way out. His back to the wall, he faced down his demons, nothing but a stupid club in his hand, a night watchman’s trinket. “I’m not dying without a fight.” He prepared for the worst.
“Michael!” It was a desperate, feminine, beautiful sound. It was Airel.
At the sound of her voice, the two pursuing demons froze.
“Airel.” He lowered his club as the demons turned away from him to investigate this new development. “You showed up just in time.”
Airel stood bold as a warrior woman, covered in blood and sweat. Her shirt clung to her, torn and dirty, but light emanated from the pure place of her one and only heart, scars and all. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
“Hey. You two.” She puffed her hair out of her face. “You do know you’re the last two, right? Do you really want to mess with me?” The Sword of Light appeared from out of elsewhere into her left hand, its blade bathed in white fire, and she casually held it there.
The demons squirmed and tripped over each other trying to back up. “Who is this?” one of them hissed.
“I am Airel, daughter of El.”
They cowered and whimpered like frightened dogs, looking for a way out.
She pointed. “And that is my boyfriend. And I am going to kill you. Now.”
They made a dash for the windows.
She gave chase.
Before they could make it through, they were dead. As the momentum of her strike carried them onward, they shattered the glass with their corpses, already beginning to turn to ash. Airel finished with a flourish, crouching low in a skid at the buil
ding’s edge, blade swept across and down to one side, head bowed in reverential control. The demons descended in an arcing plume toward the earth below.
Michael took a deep breath and dropped his weapon, sinking to the floor, back still to the wall. “That was pretty hot, babe.”
The sword vanished from sight. Airel came to him and wrapped her arms around his neck, kissing him fiercely. “Michael, I’m so glad you’re not dead.”
He pulled her closer and they kissed, but they drew apart and just breathed the air of the aftermath. It was finally over.
He noticed now for the first time that he felt much better. The Bloodstone had to be gone for good, and he would be left alone now that it had a new host.
He pulled her face closer, his fingers tangled in her lovely long dark hair, his hand moving up her neck to the curve of the back of her head, buried deep there in those intimate places. He kissed her lips in painfully gentle love, savoring all of her nearness, feeling in his heart at last a consummation and release now that they could finally be together. “I love you,” he breathed.
She seemed to drink him in with her eyes. “I love you too, Michael.”
Their words were few.
CHAPTER XVIII
BACK HOME. THOSE TWO words were filled with equal amounts of hope and pain. So much had been lost, so many things would never be the same ever again. And yet this place in the mountains, in the midst of an anomaly where time didn’t mean the same thing as it did in the rest of the world, was as much home as home could be under the sun.
It’s a good place to camp out. That’s how I felt. Having seen the things I’d seen, having done the things I’d done . . . well, I just couldn’t give the real world much weight anymore.
This was where I’d found my one and only love, suffered real betrayal, suffered death, lived again, trained my hands for war, and came to know my grandfather, an angel of El. If home was where the heart was, home was right here. The people I loved were here. Those who were not here lived on in fond memory.
Hope and pain.
Hope and pain, a marriage of opposites. That’s what life under the sun was—tension.
It had been months since Dubai. The world was a wreck, and it would never be the same. The changes wrought by the war were too profound to begin to catalogue, but I resolved to keep a journal about as much of it as I could manage. In essence, things were much quieter, and that was both good—hopeful—and bad because the world overflowed with the pain of its losses. And it still struggled with the disbelief of what it had seen.
After the war, El recalled the two-thirds. The host of heaven crossed over to elsewhere, paradise, rising upward beyond where the thin places could touch. Before going, the war captains reported success on all fronts, though there were two loose ends—the Seer and the Bloodstone. Those kills had never been confirmed. Kreios and I could only assume the worst then. My biggest clue that things were unfinished was that I could still call up the Sword of Light at will. I trained with it daily early mornings in Kreios’s dojo.
Home.
Yet I still felt unsettled, as if I was the one thing on earth that didn’t belong here. I couldn’t shake the feeling that even though I’d learned to let go—to give in to the link between my true identity and the will of El—something was still out of order. Something was still wrong. I guess that’s how we know there’s still work to be done.
I was completely lost as to my dad, and I craved closure. I brought him up with Michael once, but things became so awkward between us, I let it go. I could only assume he hadn’t made it through the war. And I couldn’t ask Kreios because after he left to bury Ellie, he hadn’t come home. Like so many things in life, I would have to content myself to wait for the answers.
Michael’s ankle had healed to the point that he could walk on it again, though he told me it still bothered him when the weather was changing. “You’re just getting old,” I told him, which provoked a love punch in the shoulder. Oh, how I loved that man. I was convinced there was no greater joy than to be in love with your best friend in the whole wide world.
One morning after breakfast, we decided to put his bum ankle to the test and walk out to the cliffs. We hadn’t been there since . . . well, since a lifetime ago. Michael and I descended the long stairway to the meadow, holding hands and watching an eagle soar high in the cool autumnal blue-eyed bliss above us. “Your ankle okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Good. I’m glad.” I bumped into him as we walked, rubbing our arms together, and he smiled at me.
“Do you think Kreios will find anything this time?”
“Heck if I know,” I said. “Do I look like a Seer to you? I can’t predict the future.”
He sighed. “I sometimes wish none of this ever happened. Except you, of course.”
“I guess that’s the price we pay for being perfect for each other.” I was feeling a little silly.
“We’ve both been through a lot; it changes you. I don’t see how we could come out of this stuff unchanged.”
“Change for the better, though, in the end. Right?”
He put his arm around me. “Right.”
He still could make me crazy with a look or a simple touch. Was he perfect? Not by a long shot. But who was I to talk?
We came to the woods that separated the meadow from the cliffs. “Airel, do you ever dream of anything anymore? Sometimes I dream of the day we can go for a walk, hold hands—”
“Um,” I held up our interlocked hands, “what are we doing right now, then? Going for a drive?”
“And come home to our house. And go to sleep and wake up next to each other.”
My heart began to race. He could do that to me with such ease.
“You know, we could be two old people, doing crosswords on the back porch, watching the sunset, drinking iced tea.”
“Coffee for me, pal. I’m not a tea girl.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll be old, so it had better be decaf, right? We don’t want you to trip and break your hip getting to the bathroom at three a.m.”
“Jeez, Michael, that’s so sweet that you want our life together to grow into this perfect cliché,” I teased him.
He chuckled. It was a nice sound, one I hadn’t heard much lately and one I hoped to hear more of in the days to come.
“Do you think it will ever be like that for us?” I lifted my face to the golden rays of the sun as they filtered through the red-orange-yellow leaves of the forest. We had talked like this before, of course. But part of me wondered what was going on inside that sensitive and brilliant head of his.
Michael sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe not . . .”
“Maybe not? What?” I pivoted on a hair trigger and got short with him.
“Airel, hang on. This isn’t one of those ‘if we were the last two people on earth’ kinds of scenarios. You and I chose each other.”
“We sure did.”
“I’m just saying we have a lot to work out between us. I mean . . .”
“Yes?”
“I’m just saying . . . Have you thought about the age thing?”
“Michael, what are you trying to say?” But I knew.
“You’ll be young forever—”
I cut him off. “I do age. Just very slowly.”
“Yeah. Slowly.” He stopped and reached out to hold my chin with a finger and I let him, drinking him in. He took a moment to put his words together carefully—I could see it in his eyes. “Airel, will you still love me when I’m an old man?”
My brows furrowed. “Of course,” I breathed, but my heart blanched at the cold way he posed the question.
“This is our reality, Airel. I mean, will we ever have children? Should we?”
I turned aside and walked off the path. “I don’t want to talk about this. Can’t we just pretend everything’s going to be okay, Michael?” I gazed at the filtered sun. Leaves flitted high above. I watched one fall.
“Is that what you really want, Airel
? The fairy tale? The dream?”
“No. Yes.” I rubbed my face in frustration.
“Because when you grow up, you come to find out the fairy tale is a lie. I’m surprised you don’t know that yet.”
I turned and stuck my finger in his chest. “Oh, I know it, Michael. I know all about it. I wear the scar on my heart that proves it, buddy.” I opened the collar of my shirt. “Your own father gave me this wound, Michael, and not very far from here.”
That hurt him. “Airel, I . . . that’s not what I was trying to say . . . trying to do here.” Finally he said, “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too, Michael.”
With tears in his eyes, he pressed his fingers to his abdomen. “I have my own wound too, Airel.”
And I remembered how it had all unfolded that day, how he didn’t hesitate to do whatever it took to save me. I reached out and touched the hand that touched his wound. “We both have scars.”
He held me tight on the trail for a long time, and we cried. “What a beautiful disaster we are, huh?” he said, pulling away and wiping his eyes. “Oh, God.” He shook his head. “How come I can never quite do what I really want to do with you? You make me so crazy.”
I laughed through my tears. “Ditto.”
“I just want to know it will be fine—more than fine.”
“You’re looking for guarantees?”
He shoved his hands in his pockets and turned away.
“Because guarantees are for fairy tales,” I continued. “Kid stuff.” I waved my arms dramatically. “Things smart people like us have learned to do without.”
He still faced away from me. “I fell for you the moment I first laid eyes on you, Airel. I didn’t know who you were, but when we ran into each other in that coffee shop, I knew. I knew. I chose you right there and then.” He turned back toward me.
The Airel Saga Box Set: Young Adult Paranormal Romance Page 90