“I’m not quite sure how to take that,” I said, frowning.
“Oh, since you are on my side, it’s a big damned compliment,” he said, holding out his hands with a don’t shoot gesture, grinning wide.
“Okay. I can be the boogeybitch if it makes you sleep better at night. What are sisters for?”
He smiled—but in a way I wasn’t sure I had seen him smile before. A soul-deep acknowledgment of my meaning, not just a topical agreement to my words. “Sister from another Mister,” he said in a serious tone.
“So, your Sis needs to dial back the crazy—”
“Easy there, Sis. No need to be hasty. We might just need some of that crazy soon, but it could use a tight leash,” Cain corrected.
I nodded, rolling my eyes. “Fine. Calculated crazy. Got it.” I scanned the Vatican grounds, searching for a Door, but I didn’t see one. “What are we doing here? If this quest was designed to make us react, we need to approach it with clear goals. The point of all this is to reach a final destination, not wallow in our passions—our fears, loves, victories or losses. We need a compass.”
Cain nodded. “The first Door took us to the church the night the Doors first appeared. The night your own story all began. But why that moment? Was it because there was something you needed to see, or did it just want to mess with your head?”
“I think we need to decide what Last Breath is really doing here,” I said. Cain frowned, looking puzzled, so I elaborated. “He essentially led us to the second Door, and it’s fair to say he forced us through the first Door back home.”
Cain considered that and gave a hesitant nod. “Maybe. If that’s true, is he helping guide us or is he misleading us?”
I nodded seriously. “I’m pretty sure he’s not helping. He clawed my face.”
“You stabbed him through the jugular, first. Maybe he’s dead.”
I shook my head, recalling the purring sound I had heard upon landing in the grass. “I don’t think so. His claws didn’t hurt me, so maybe mine didn’t hurt him. We both used Silver claws.”
Cain stared down at the silver foil in his palm, nodding warily. “Good point. If I was making a quest, a challenge to give people the option to find my secret stash of stuff, and I made a guardian to protect it…” Cain said, pointing off facts. I waited for more, but Cain finally muttered a curse. “I don’t know where I was going with that. Is Solomon trying to prevent us from getting there or is he helping us? Why have this challenge in the first place if he doesn’t want us finding it? And if he does want us to find it, why hassle us with Last Breath?”
I let out a sigh, thinking. “I don’t know, but those are just symptoms. The main purpose is to see if we are worthy of his Temple, right? So, he has safeguards to cut the wheat from chaff. To sort out the bad apples…”
Cain grunted. “Always apples with you. It’s like a constant kick to the groin, you know.”
I smiled. “Sorry.” I had an idea. “Keep an eye out. I don’t want the Shepherds seeing us and deciding to attack before asking where our access lanyards are. I need to think about all of this.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, thinking about everything all at once. I imagined a feather floating in my mind, one coated in silver, despite my initial attempt to make it black—as I was used to doing when I meditated. It had been doing that lately. I ignored the anomaly, not wanting to waste time forcing it back.
I fed every thought, fear, concern, desire, and wish into the feather, watching as wind seemed to make it ruffle as it slowly rotated in the center of a black field of nothingness. I focused on my breathing, dredging up anything else currently on my mind. My memory of the first Door we had gone through and participating in Father David’s story about the Demon outside the church.
I thought about Samael. The Sons of Solomon. Archangel Michael. Roland and Henri. Boiling cauldrons of danger in Kansas City. Events I was only just beginning to hear about in Boston with Quinn MacKenna. Trouble in St. Louis with Mordred hellbent on destroying Nate Temple in his quest for Camelot. I thought about every single thing happening in my world.
And everything that personally bothered me. My own lineage with Solomon. My parents. The Shepherds. Not knowing my purpose anymore, where I belonged, where I fit in. Why I woke up every single day and put on my boots. I knew I wanted to help people, that was pretty obvious.
But how did I want to help people? Putting out fires was great and all, but what was my ultimate purpose? Without an overarching cause, I was always reacting.
I was destroying rather than uniting. Destroying bad things, sure, but when the threat was gone and it was time to pick up the pieces…
I wasn’t doing anything with the people I had saved. I was just letting them continue on with their day, likely guiding them right back into some other monster’s mouth.
I didn’t want to work for the church. Mainly because I didn’t want to be bound to a group of men I thought were flawed—not in their faith, but in their applications of it.
I didn’t want to be a part of the Academy—the ruling body of wizards—but I had never had any interaction with them in the first place. What I had seen and heard from others was that they were no better than the Shepherds. They meant well but had deep seeds of corruption planted in their midst.
I didn’t want to ally with the vampires or werewolves, although I was friends with quite a few of both.
The bears were better, more noble, but I wasn’t really a part of them. I was a good friend, but would never be part of their Cave. And maybe they didn’t want me to be anything more than a friend held at a close distance. Definitely not to use them as a tool to promote my own agenda.
Whatever that was.
I wanted good. Safety. Protection.
But…I believed that some of the so-called monsters of the world weren’t that bad. They were actually kind of good.
Overall, the Shepherds definitely didn’t share this opinion. Maybe that was my reason for not wanting to be a part of them. The fact that they had left Roland out to dry the moment they realized he was no longer able to be the poster boy of their cause.
But I wasn’t important enough to start my own…what, a gang? An organization? Maybe a church or open up shop as a private detective. Callie’s Angels, I thought to myself, playing on the concept of Charlie’s Angels. I let the errant thought drift and fade away.
The long and short of it was that I didn’t have the answer. And right now, I wasn’t necessarily looking for an answer. That wasn’t how meditation worked. It wasn’t a cosmic fortune cookie machine where you pop in twenty-five cents of focus, twist the dial, and receive the keys to the kingdom.
No.
Meditation was about viewing processes. You tossed in the parts and watched the gears of the machine of life begin to rotate, searching for meaning and purpose to the function. In that act, perhaps you could see a place where your unique gear could fit, improving the overall mechanism.
Problem was, maybe I had the answers to life right in front of me.
I just didn’t know what my gear looked like. What shape it was. What my self looked like.
I was, figuratively speaking, a red-hot mess.
Cosmically speaking, I was a Zen-hot mess.
Who was Callie Penrose?
I pondered that very carefully—in an abstract manner. I imagined inserting myself as a cog into the mechanism of life in my mind’s eye. I shaped my cog like a Shepherd, watching the possible futures. Then I tried as a wizard. Then I tried as a Nephilim. Then I tried as a figure in Nate’s life, with no specific purpose of my own.
That one made me growl in disappointment. That wasn’t going to happen. I would only meet Nate as an equal, never a pawn.
I tried reshaping my cog many different ways.
And I found no answers. Bits and pieces of each attempt were pleasant and worthwhile, but primarily worthwhile for others, not myself. Not fully.
I felt resistance—pressure at my internal frustration
—so I released the construct, the machine vaporizing to nothing, leaving only the white rose on the black background.
Wait…
My heart began to race, realizing that a white rose was not the chosen imagined construct for myself. It was a black feather. No, a silver feather…
My focus vibrated warningly, threatening to fall apart. I relaxed all strain and control, letting my subconscious do as it would. After a few flickers, a white rose slowly rematerialized before me. I studied it absently, careful not to look too closely at the new addition to my meditation.
It meant something.
What had changed? I was still the black feather, and still the silver feather. I could see them occasionally flickering into existence, superimposed over the white rose, as if all three belonged.
Then I noticed the faint outline of feathered wings arcing out to either side of the rotating rose and feathers. I felt strain again and relaxed my mind, allowing myself to become a casual observer in the halls of my own mind.
The image abruptly clarified.
Wings hung on either side like they belonged to the center apparition. The rose and two feathers. The wings glistened with a bluish, white glow, sometimes seeming to be made of feathers and sometimes like dry ice and chips of floating stone.
This was entirely strange. The whole point to meditation was to have one rock-solid focal point. But my focal point was shifting all over the place, changing, morphing, growing wings for crying out loud.
It had to symbolize my own inner struggle—that I didn’t know myself. Which likely had to do with Dorian Gray’s ever helpful comment. About how everyone he spoke to was terrified of me. That he was even terrified of me. That they had taken to calling me the White Rose in fear.
There were so many loose ends in my life.
Heaven wanted me. Hell wanted me. The Shepherds wanted me.
They also didn’t want me.
My parents loved me. My parents abandoned me.
I wanted to do good things. But I was willing to do bad things to attain those good things.
I wanted to know more about my past. But I was terrified to learn anything more about my broken childhood. My broken family. But I was forming a new family of friends. Of brothers and sisters bound by more than blood.
And some of them were monsters.
I liked a guy—really, really liked a guy—that was, on the best of days, an incredibly dangerous person. He also wanted to do good things, and had definitely done bad things in order to achieve the ends he sought. And…I probably would have done the same in his shoes.
But from the outside looking in…
I wasn’t sure if we could be seen as the good guys. Maybe we were actually the villains.
I’d trapped a freaking Angel on a ring around my thumb. How was that a good thing? Even if he had Fallen, there were already rules and precedents in place to handle that kind of thing.
And none of them included some upstart wizard in Kansas City kicking the doors down to keep the Angel for herself.
I realized, suddenly, that this had always been my cross to bear. It was such an epiphany that it almost broke me out of my meditation. I very calmly relaxed, focusing on the shifting image before me in a very unspecific way.
Look, meditation was tough. Take my word for it. If I say I focused in an unfocused way, I know what the hell I’m talking about.
I heard Cain grunt and realized I had spoken the thought out loud. My entire construct wavered—on the verge of collapse—but I gripped it defiantly for a moment, enough to solidify it again like I was righting a wobbling canoe. Then I set it back adrift. It settled, flickering slightly, and I let out a deep breath of relief.
I didn’t dare risk snapping out of my meditation because as bizarre and conflicted as my thoughts were right now…they were just thoughts, and fuel for my focus. I fed them—the fading sounds of Cain beside me, the chirping birds in the trees, and the sensation of warmth from the sun—into my construct. The shifting-winged-double-feather-white-rose-chi symbol that symbolized my rock-solid understanding of myself.
Just trust me.
The symbol began to shift and pulse as if breathing, pleased that it was allowed to be without my interference.
I thought about the quest, the Doors, Cain, Last Breath, the Sons of Solomon back on Earth, how I was going to choose the next Door, what was motivating my choice in the Doors, and what I was willing to do, what price I was willing to pay, what I really wanted from all of this…
Everything and everyone was focused on one single place…Solomon’s Temple.
It was said to house all the riches of the world. All the knowledge of existence.
I realized I didn’t really care about that. Power sounded nice, but only insomuch as I could utilize it for good in the world—to right a wrong.
Knowledge was the same. If it helped, great. If not…I didn’t really care. I wasn’t like Nate, who loved learning things for the sake of learning them.
I realized that I wanted, more than anything, to make sure no more little girls were left on the steps of a church, all alone, without parents, in a world full of monsters. That without evil, none of that would have taken place.
The little girl would have lived to see her parents’ faces.
The focal construct burst into flame, the rose and feathers and wings igniting like a magician’s flash paper, knocking me out of my meditation as surely as a bucket of cold water had been dumped down my spine.
I opened my eyes, panting to see Cain staring over my shoulder. “Oh, good. You’re done braining. We have company.” I turned to see three Shepherds approaching at a swift jog about a hundred yards away, coming from the building where I had met the Conclave. The official headquarters of the Vatican Shepherds.
I climbed to my feet, facing them directly. I kept my hand free of the hilt of the katana at my hip, momentarily surprised to find it still there and not wedged in the grass from my fall. Cain had his bone dagger sheathed at his belt but I shook my head pointedly as his hand drifted closer to it.
“Let’s see what they want, first,” I said under my breath.
Cain was frowning at the approaching Shepherds. “Since when did Arthur become a Shepherd?” he asked warily.
I turned to see Arthur leading two other Shepherds my way. His face was hard and uncaring.
“The Conclave awaits you, First Shepherd Penrose,” he said formally, lowering his eyes. Beckett Killian and Claire Stone dipped their heads as well. Like we were not close friends, but an unquestionable command structure. And apparently, I had broken the glass ceiling. First Shepherd…
I shared a long look with Cain, but his faux façade of serenity was a gentle reminder that this place wasn’t what we thought. Maybe it was real, maybe it wasn’t.
But me being the First Shepherd pretty much confirmed that it was a nightmare.
Chapter 29
The three Shepherds led us into a familiar room to face the Conclave of milky-eyed wizards who essentially ruled us. None of them looked familiar to the ones I had met in the past.
But…I couldn’t really remember any of the faces I had seen during my last visit with the Conclave. The more I stared at the men before me, the more familiar they became, and I could faintly recall private discussions with them from previous weeks when we had formulated our attack plans for the Knights Templar, led by Olin Fuentes.
Malachi, the head of the Conclave cleared his throat, looking like he had been healed of the wound that had almost killed him a week ago. The room wavered for a moment, but I ignored the dizzy spell as I focused on my long-time mentor.
“Congratulations on your victory over Olin Fuentes and the Templars. I trust you brought proof?” he asked with a bureaucratic smile, letting me know he didn’t doubt me and this was just a formality.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out a silk pouch full of werewolf fangs. I rattled them in my fist, then handed them to Claire. She didn’t meet my eyes as she accepted them and took
them to the table for the Conclave to inspect. She returned to my side, eyes downcast.
“Thank you, Miss Penrose. You fill our hearts with pride,” Malachi said.
I nodded humbly. “I couldn’t have done it without Shepherd Killian’s assistance in locating their hideout, or Shepherd Stone smoking them out with the frontal assault.”
Malachi nodded. “They will be rewarded for their contribution, but at this time I want to extend an honor that none have ever received. The Spear of Longinus that you entrusted to us has been restored.” He stood, and lifted a long, white spear from the table that I hadn’t noticed until now. My fingers itched hungrily but I kept my face calm.
Cain murmured something behind me, and it sounded troubled, but I held out a hand to calm my old friend. I’d told him—at least a dozen times—not to speak before the Conclave.
“Please accept this weapon, and know it will be of great aid against Hell’s Horsemen of the Apocalypse, led by Nate Temple and his ilk.”
I nodded grimly as I approached, feeling a flush of anxiety that I kept hidden from my face. “I will end the plague of Horsemen, as the Vatican demands,” I vowed.
“We know, Shepherd Penrose. We know…You have always acted in the best interest of the Church. We have faith in you,” Malachi said, a hidden smile on his face as he motioned to a door on my right.
I hesitated, my hand almost touching the spear. His milk-white eyes—like all the other members of the Conclave—had briefly flickered darker. My fingertips tingled this close to the Spear, eager to snatch it up. So close…
Cain was suddenly behind me, and I heard other members of the Conclave grumbling about the break in protocol. I glanced over at him, ready to chastise him for the disrespect in front of my superiors. “Get back in your place—”
Cain was pointing at a door to the side of the room. I glanced over to see a strange, Silver door that hadn’t been there a moment before. I frowned, puzzled.
Sinner: Feathers and Fire Book 5 Page 17