The Angel Stone: A Novel

by Juliet Dark

  “I never went away,” I told him, kneeling beside him on the heather bed but unwilling to let him pull me down beside him. “It’s you who went away. That monster killed you. I watched him slash your throat, and then you vanished. I thought you were dead.”

  He lifted his hand to my face and brushed away a tear. “Not dead. Only trapped in Faerie, waiting for your return.”

  “But the door is gone. I don’t know where there’s another.”

  He shook his head and laughed—a musical sound that riffled the leaves in the beech trees and made my skin tingle. “How can you not know where the door is? The door is here.” I looked around us at the Greenwood and saw we were in a valley. Above us a castle loomed, its ruined walls guarded by gruesome stone gargoyles. A broken stone archway, also carved with gargoyles, stood on one side of the glade.

  “But where—” I began to ask, but his arms were around me and he was pulling me down to the forest floor. His lips found mine and I forgot my questions. What mattered was that we were together and I could feel his warm hands touching me, peeling away my petticoat and long skirt, my tartan cloak—why was I wearing so many clothes?—and laying me down on the soft heather bed. He plucked a sprig of heather and brushed it along the line of my jaw, releasing its heady perfume into the air. He drew the flower lightly down my throat. I trembled at its touch … like velvet lips … and then I felt his lips on my skin, planting kisses on each breast, his teeth like the scratch of rough grass as he drew his tongue down to my navel and slipped his fingers between my legs. I cried out and arched my hips and reached for him, digging my heels into the velvet moss. I wrapped my hands into his hair and pulled his face to mine and kissed his mouth. He tasted like wild heather and peat smoke. His skin felt like furred moss and, where it was tenderest, flower petals. I drew him into me, feeling as though I were pulling it all inside me—the dappled sunlight, the mossy bed, the scent of heather. As it all burst, his green-gold eyes locked on mine and he said, “See, you knew where the hallow door was all along.”

  I woke up on the couch in the darkened library, my fingers digging into the velvet cushions, my body pulsing with the force of the dream.

  It was just a dream.

  The reality of that crashed over me. I hadn’t found my way into Faerie, and the man in my dream hadn’t been Liam or Bill or my demon lover. He was William Duffy, the hero of Nicky’s ballad, summoned by a sex-deprived teacher falling asleep while grading papers.

  Well, that was embarrassing.

  I unwound myself from the tangled afghan—remembering the prickly wool of the tartan mantle I’d worn in the dream—and sat up, trying to shake off the fog of sleep. On the mantel above the fireplace, a clock chimed the hour. It was eleven o’clock. I’d slept the whole evening away, but at least I hadn’t overslept my meeting with Frank and Soheila. I got up, the afghan falling to the floor. Something else fluttered to the floor—a scrap of paper. I hoped I hadn’t been shredding my student papers in my sleep. That might be hard to explain. But when I bent down to pick up the scrap, I found it wasn’t paper at all. It was a sprig of heather.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I tucked the heather sprig between the pages of Scott’s Scottish Minstrelsy, where I had searched in vain for a ballad called William Duffy or any mention of a hallow door. At last, afraid I’d be late, I went upstairs, took a shower to wake myself up, and dressed in black jeans, a black turtleneck, and sturdy black work boots. I combed my long red hair back and braided it and tucked it under a black beret. Frank had given me the beret. I felt a little silly wearing it, but it hid my hair—and perhaps made me look a bit like Simone Signoret in Army of Shadows.

  I packed a small black backpack with flashlight, compass, spell book, and Ralph. Then I crept out the back door and headed into the woods.

  A hundred and twenty years ago, when Silas LaMotte had built a house for his wife, he named it Honeysuckle House after her favorite flower and planted honeysuckle shrubs all around it because she loved the scent. But his wife had died a few months after they moved into the house, and in the years that Silas’s daughter, Dahlia LaMotte, lived there, she’d been too busy writing her romance novels to worry much about the gardens. She let the shrubs go wild. Fed by the primal magic coming from the door to Faerie, they spread into the woods, growing into a dense, twisting bramble that perfumed the whole town in summer.

  Or at least it had. When the door to Faerie was closed, the woods were blighted. Flowers died on the vine, and now their leaves hung yellowed and dry, like scorched paper. The bare branches resembled bones in the moonlight. Ducking under a low arch, I felt as if I were passing through the skeletal jaws of an extinct sea monster …

  At least, I hoped extinct. The bare limbs creaked and moaned around me, and the dry leaves chattered like gnashing teeth hungry to devour me. Your fault, your fault, I imagined the shrubs muttering. I’d been unable to stop the nephilim from closing the door, and now the woods were dying. I was almost relieved when I came to the cave.

  Almost.

  The cave still freaked me out a bit. The entrance was a narrow cleft between boulders. I had to take Ralph out of my backpack so I wouldn’t crush him. He scurried into the narrow opening before me. I followed, turning sideways and pressing my back against damp stone and feeling my way with fingertips along the slimy rock—there just wasn’t room to hold a flashlight—until I found the notch that signaled the …

  Drop. As usual, I missed it and plunged headfirst into the cave, landing on my knees in the dark. For a moment, as I scrabbled in my bag for my flashlight, I thought I heard a scraping sound, but when I fumbled the light on, the shadows shrank back too quickly for me to make out their shapes. Only Ralph remained, crouched by my side, his eyes big in the beam of my flashlight.

  “It’s okay,” I said, trying to reassure myself as I aimed the flashlight around the tunnel. “They’re probably just bats.” I counted to a hundred. When I was sure nothing was coming, I turned and followed Ralph into the tunnel that led to the campus. As dirt floor gave way to tile, and stone walls to cement, I breathed easier—or as easy as I would ever breathe twenty feet underground.

  When I reached the first crossing, I stopped and took out my compass and map. The map was hand-drawn by Soheila. She’d been in the tunnels before 1959, which was when a senior named Dolores Maynard had disappeared in them. Liz had them closed then, so that no students would stray into them again. She’d had all traces of them erased from campus maps and memory of them expunged from the memories of all mortal students and faculty. A wealth of campus lore had persisted about the tunnels, though. As Soheila had explained to me, no spell could entirely destroy a memory. Erasing a memory from the conscious mind simply drove it deeper into the subconscious, where it became lore, which, it turned out, was how most urban legends got their start.

  Since she was not mortal, Soheila remembered the tunnels, and she had suggested we use them to move about the campus, unobserved by the nephilim. The map was sketchy and incomplete (by her own admission, Soheila and her succubi sisters had lousy senses of direction), and every time I ventured into the tunnels I worried that I would stray into one of the unmapped sections and vanish like poor Dolores Maynard.

  Who, I had learned last spring, had evaporated into steam and taken up residence in the heating pipes.

  I shook that thought away and concentrated on the map. Soheila’s note had said to meet her beneath Main Hall. I traced out the most direct route, trying to choose tunnels I’d been in before, but I hadn’t traveled this far in the tunnel system yet. I’d gone only as far as Fraser, where there was an entrance to the tunnels through Soheila’s office closet. But Main was on the far north side of campus, and some of the tunnels leading there were sketched in with dotted lines—Soheila’s code for unexplored. In one of them, Frank had scrawled Here be dragons! next to a cartoon of a ferocious fire-breathing beast.

  Very funny, I thought, taking the tunnel to my right. It was narrower than the one I’d been in an
d lined with wide steel pipes that were covered with rust and peeling paint. Previous tunnel explorers had left their marks on the walls: a long-nosed Leroy was here, several hearts with initials, and a scrawled Help me! My English teacher has read too much Poe and buried me alive behind this wall!

  I followed the twisting route until I heard voices. I stopped and listened.

  “I’m just saying he didn’t seem so bad. The man was a Jets fan, after all,” a man’s voice, which I recognized as Frank Delmarco’s, said.

  “He wasn’t even a man,” replied a lilting female voice that could only belong to Soheila Lilly. “He was an incubus, and it’s in his nature—our nature—to be pleasing. He probably told you he was a Jets fan to win you over.”

  “Nah, I can always tell a real fan. Besides, he had no reason to win me over. And when we were on our way to the door that morning, he told me something …”

  I held my breath, eager to hear what Bill—clearly whom Frank was talking about—had told Frank. They’d gone together to find a way of unmasking Duncan Laird on the morning of the summer solstice, but then Bill had stepped between Duncan and me and taken the lethal blow meant for me.

  “He said that if anything happened to him, I should tell Cal—”

  “I don’t want to know,” Soheila cut Frank off. “Whatever protestations of love he made—however real they might have seemed—make no difference. He’s gone. Callie needs to get over him.”

  “But that’s just it. He may not really be gone. He said …”

  In my eagerness to hear what Frank said next, I stepped forward—and tripped. My flashlight clattered to the ground.

  “What’s that?” I heard Soheila cry.

  “It must be Callie.”

  “Frank, don’t. You don’t know it’s her …”

  But Frank was already barreling down the tunnel, like one of his beloved football players, ready to tackle an unknown foe. You had to love Frank—but if he was keeping Bill’s last message from me, I was going to throttle it out of him.

  “I’m fine, Frank,” I said, scrambling to my feet and shining the flashlight at him. In black turtleneck, jeans, and beret, he looked like a special-ops agent. “I just fell.”

  “Jeez, McFay, could you be a little more careful?” he huffed. “You scared Soheila.”

  I heard a musical laugh behind Frank as Soheila came into view. If anyone could make urban guerrilla camouflage look chic, it was Soheila Lilly. She was wearing tight black leggings, which clung to her every curve, tucked into tall lace-up boots. Her silk turtleneck was just a shade off black—aubergine, I thought, although it was hard to tell in this light—and worn under a black leather jacket. Her abundant dark hair fell in luxuriant waves around her face, and the beret Frank had given her was tilted to a rakish angle. Whatever she wore, Soheila emanated a seductive charm. Whenever she laughed, the air around her rippled with the scent of cardamom and cloves, reminding me that she had once been a wind spirit, before the desires of humans had shaped her into a beautiful woman. For thousands of years she had fed on those desires, becoming a succubus who needed the human life force to survive, until she had fallen in love with a human, whose returned love had made her partly human. When Angus Fraser died, Soheila had sworn off feeding on humans, using Aelvesgold to maintain her life force. But now that she was cut off from her source of Aelvesgold, she would inevitably grow weaker. I noticed that even though it was warm in the tunnels, she looked as if she was freezing. Still, she smiled as she said, “I think Frank was just looking for an excuse to come to your rescue, Callie.”

  Frank scowled, an expression so habitual that he had vertical lines etched on his forehead. Those furrows had deepened over the last two months, as he’d watched his college fall into the hands of evil creatures. He carried an extra burden of guilt, I knew. Frank had worked as an undercover operative for the internal-affairs division of IMP—the Institute for Magical Professionals—preparing a report for them on unorthodox otherworldly activities at Fairwick. But Frank hadn’t known that his report would be used by the Grove to coerce IMP into going along with the closing of the door to Faerie. Or that once the door was closed and most of our fey colleagues were gone, the nephilim would be able to take over the college. I knew Frank wouldn’t rest until he banished the nephilim and got our friends back, which was why, I was pretty sure, he’d been so quick to come to my rescue right now, not, as Soheila was hinting, that he was sweet on me. My suspicions were confirmed by the glance he gave Soheila under lowered brows.

  “I’m pretty sure McFay can take care of herself,” he said. “She’s more powerful than the two of us put together.”

  Soheila looked from Frank to me and then back at Frank again. “You’re right. Callie is growing very powerful.” She gave the two of us a smile that turned the stale tunnel air into a sultry desert breeze laden with spices, then turned on her heel and walked briskly away, tossing over her shoulder. “It’s time we put that power to use.”

  Frank and I followed side by side—as Soheila had planned. She was always trying to arrange for us to be alone together. Since Soheila had renounced human contact, she wouldn’t allow herself to admit her feelings for Frank, and she also thought my attachment to the incubus was unhealthy. In her view, that made Frank and me the perfect match.

  “What’s up?” I asked Frank.

  “Soheila thinks that Duncan Laird was contacted today by the Seraphim Club in London. White Eagle, our informant in the mailroom—”

  “You mean Earl?” I asked.

  “Shh. The code names are to protect the network, McFay. White Eagle tells us that Laird received a package today from London.”

  “I saw it!” I said. “He had a package on his desk when I was in his office. It had foreign stamps on it. He put it in his file cabinet when he saw me looking at it.”

  “Good work, McFay. Soheila thinks it may have information about the nephilim’s plans. Now we just need to get into the office. That’s where you come in. Someone has to break through the wards—and who better than a doorkeeper?”

  “I’ll do my best,” I assured him as we joined Soheila at the foot of a flight of stairs. She sat on the bottom step, holding Ralph in her hand. They appeared to be having a conversation.

  “Ralph is going to go upstairs and make sure the building is clear. If he sees a security guard, he’ll distract him.”

  “Are you sure that’s safe?” I asked. “Those guys are scary. Nicky said today that they look like trolls.”

  “Trows, actually,” Frank said.

  “A species of troll from the Orkney Islands,” Soheila explained. “They’ve made a compact with the nephilim in exchange for a supply of Aelvesgold. It’s very disappointing. The trows may not be the brightest of the fey, but they were essentially harmless creatures until the nephilim got ahold of them. Once they’ve pledged allegiance to a master, they’re unfailingly loyal. They haven’t a shred of initiative, though, and they’re not quick on their feet. Ralph should have no trouble staying ahead of them, will you, my brave little soldier?”

  Ralph squeaked and fluffed out his fur, preening under Soheila’s praise. Apparently, magical doormice were not immune to succubi charm. She carried Ralph up the stairs, inched open the door at the top, and crouched down to let him through the crack. I knelt beside Soheila on the darkened stairwell, peering past her into the dim lobby of Main. I could make out a guard sitting on a chair, tipped back, eating Cheetos, and listening to a baseball game on a small portable radio.

  “A Red Sox fan,” Frank muttered. “Figures!”

  The guard was so mesmerized by the game that he didn’t see Ralph creeping across the floor until he was practically under his feet. Ralph sat up and squeaked.

  “Oi!” The guard shouted, narrowly missing Ralph as he tipped forward in his chair and spilled his bag of Cheetos on the floor. Ralph dodged under his legs and ran a circle around the guard, who spun trying to keep up with him and then toppled dizzily over to one side. Soheila giggled at
the sight, but I was too worried for Ralph’s safety to enjoy the spectacle. The trow might have been slow, but he was huge. One misstep and Ralph was mouse soup. But Ralph nimbly evaded the lumbering guard and took off across the floor away from us, with the guard in hot pursuit. We could hear his footsteps pounding toward the opposite side of the building.

  “Come on,” Frank said, clamping Soheila on the shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  A tremor passed through Soheila at Frank’s touch. She pretended to need something from her backpack while Frank took the lead. Glancing at her, I saw a flush of crimson in her cheeks. She looked up at me, her eyes wide, her pupils dilated. “Hurry!” she commanded, expelling a gust of air that nearly knocked me over. I wanted to comfort her, but I knew that the last thing she wanted right now was to be touched by a human, so I followed Frank through the dimly lit lobby of Main Hall, past bulletin boards where the magenta Alpha flyers glowed in the dark with a malevolent radioactive sheen. Soheila caught up with us on the stairs. At the top, Frank held us back with a restraining arm while he checked that the hall was clear, then motioned for us to follow, backs against the wall, to the dean’s office. When we reached it, Soheila stepped in front of Frank and held her hand over the doorknob.

  “It’s warded,” she said. “One touch and it will send an alarm signal to Duncan Laird.”

  “Then we won’t touch it,” I said. I raised both hands and focused my attention on the door. As a doorkeeper, I could dissolve wards. Ironically, it was Duncan Laird who had commenced my education in wards this past summer. Since then I’d been studying Wheelock’s Spellcraft and had learned how to open warded doors. The trick was to fit the opening spell between the wards, like a skeleton key slipping into a lock.

  “Adulterina clavis,” I murmured, sending the words into the spaces between the intricate labyrinth of wards Duncan had erected. I felt the words still tethered to me, navigating around the wards. Something clicked … and the door swung open.