by Nikki Kelly
“Really?” Iona said. Unable to contain herself, she hurried to Gabriel’s side.
“Yes, really,” he said.
Iona excitedly lunged forward to take Gabriel’s arm, but he met her hands and brought them back down to her side instead. Before she had a chance to deflate, Gabriel squeezed the tops of her shoulders, and though he’d turned his back to me, I was certain he was smiling at her, as her plump pout stretched into a shining smile of her own.
“And this Orifiel fits into things how exactly?” Phelan pressed.
“He resides in Heaven; he is the highest-ranking Angel,” Gabriel answered, giving as little detail as possible.
Phelan’s chin jutted forward. “The Bible speaks of this Orifiel. He is named as one of the seven Arch Angels of the Throne of God. You think the Devil wants to kill him?”
“I know he does.” I stepped in. “Zherneboh—that is, the Devil—wants Orifiel dead, but he can’t pass through the gates to Heaven himself, so he must make Orifiel walk through to the only place he can challenge him—here on Earth.” I gave Phelan the part he needed to know. “One way or another, he will draw Orifiel out, and when he does, he’ll open Pandora’s box.”
“He can’t keep Vampires contained for that long,” Jonah blurted out. “They’d starve.”
“Who says they won’t be fed?” I replied. A chill raced up my spine as I considered that Zherneboh might not let what he’d trapped inside out, but it didn’t mean that dinner couldn’t be brought to them.
Phelan’s brain was already in fifth gear, and though normally he was calculated in his approach, he was also hotheaded.
I got in first. “Trying to kill them all while they are buried inside isn’t an option. The Purebloods would never allow you to get even remotely close enough.”
“We might not be able to get in, but we can be prepared for when they come out,” Riley said, his voice hoarse. He took his daughter from his wife and stroked her auburn hair, holding her tightly as she nuzzled her face under his chin.
Riley was a light soul, and as he held his little girl, his aura jetted out and pulsed, transitioning from white to seven vibrant colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. I had never seen light exude from a mortal’s form like that. His love for his daughter was unconditional, untainted, unequivocal. And it deserved all the colors of the rainbow.
I sighed. Zherneboh was gathering the Purebloods and their armies, bringing them all to one place at one time. This might be the only opportunity we would have to destroy them for good. But Riley and his daughter changed everything I was about to say. “No. Take your family and leave,” I said to him. “You won’t survive it. None of you will survive it.”
Riley looked from Claire to his daughter and then coughed, clearing his throat. “This is our home, Lailah.”
“Your home is that little girl, and she can be anywhere in the world you choose to take her,” I replied.
“Where would you have us go?” Though Claire’s tone was almost accusing, she wasn’t challenging me, she was asking, and I knew then that she didn’t want to stay here, not now that she had a child to protect.
My initial response was to tell them to get out a map and find the place farthest from here, but then something else came to me. Something Gabriel and Ruadhan had once told me. “Get a boat, and get on the water.” I locked eyes with her. “Rifts open from Heaven and Hell, here on Earth, and anyone and anything from either of those worlds can step straight through. But rifts cannot form and open over water, right, Ruadhan?”
Ruadhan didn’t hesitate to answer. “Aye, love.”
“The safest place is the sea,” I said.
“You don’t tell my men what to do. Riley is needed here—”
I cut Phelan off. “Yeah, you needed Cameron, too. He stayed and look where that got him. He was killed only yesterday, and yet you’ve made no mention of him today.” Angry, I started to shake. Though last night I’d seen some emotion from Phelan, standing here now he seemed unaffected.
“Don’t bring Cameron into this,” Phelan said.
Brooke laughed. “She’s right. For all you go on about family, you never talk about Fergal.”
Phelan’s fist clenched, and his right hand drifted toward the weapons at his belt. Ruadhan, though supposedly guarding the doorway, sensed the escalating tension. “That’s quite enough,” he said. “Let’s take a breather, shall we?”
In a show of solidarity, Riley ushered Claire through the living room, nodding at Phelan as a sign of respect. Jack followed suit, but Phelan hung back as they made their way outside.
Fergal’s name was the trigger for Iona’s tear-filled eyes. To Gabriel, she said, “I should go.”
Gabriel turned to me. “Would you mind if—”
“Please,” I said, encouraging him.
Gabriel escorted Iona outside, leaving only Phelan here representing the Sealgaire. He scratched behind his ear and then stepped around Ruadhan.
Jonah growled in warning from the corner, but Phelan was softer this time, a lot less telling and a lot more asking as he said, “You might not really be the Savior, Lailah, but it doesn’t mean you can’t be a Savior.”
I shook my head. “I can only do what I can do. If I knew how…” My gaze fell to the floor.
Phelan thought nothing of invading my personal space, tipping up my chin with his index finger, ensuring he captured my stare. “To be a Savior is to sacrifice, and sacrifice goes hand in hand with suffering. Be prepared to suffer, Lailah, and save us all.”
“Get out,” Jonah hissed, appearing at my side and knocking Phelan backward. But Phelan kept his eyes on mine. When I didn’t reply, finally he cocked an eyebrow and swiped his beanie from the kitchen counter.
Before exiting, he took a roll-up from behind his ear. “I may do it in silence, but every time I put a member of my family into the ground, I suffer, and I will continue to suffer so that I may save.” He knew he’d hooked me by the way I sucked in air, but it was his final sentence that reeled me in. “So babies like Riley’s don’t have to die.”
Between the blindness in my left eye and the tears spilling from my right, Jonah became a watery blur beside me. I was weak, with a desperate quiver in my voice, when I repeated myself: “I don’t know how.” And I truly didn’t.
For all my power, I was powerless.
There were so many now, and I was but one.
I may have ended a Pureblood, but it had taken everything I had to do it. How could I take on so many of them at once and ensure they all became dust before I did?
“Suffer, and you will save,” Phelan said once again, as though I were holding out on him. Finally, he left, slamming the door so hard the hinges rattled.
My skin itched with frustration, and I lashed out at Jonah. “You shouldn’t have followed me,” I said coldly. “It was okay for me to die, it was okay because I’d saved you, because taking Zherneboh with me would have saved so many more. You took that away from me.”
Jonah shifted his weight. “Really? You gonna listen to the head of the pitchfork committee?” Coming in close, he took my cheek in his palm, but I turned my face away. So with nothing else to do, he adjusted my crystal hairpin and said spitefully, “Maybe he’s right, but if Saviors must suffer, then you were sleeping on the job, beautiful, ’cause to suffer death, you gotta want to live in the first place. Maybe, instead, you wanted to be a martyr. Maybe all I took from you was the easy way out.”
Jonah’s words, as always, cut. I wasn’t out of fight, or willingness to suffer, as Phelan was suggesting. I’d laid down my life for Jonah’s, proving that I was more than willing to sacrifice myself. I was about to argue this point when I realized that he actually might be right. I was no Savior, because I wasn’t prepared to sacrifice the thing that would cause me to suffer most; I wouldn’t sacrifice Jonah or any one of my family.
They came first.
Though my legs had gone to jelly, I broke away first, staggering over to the table.
Unable to get a rise out of me, Jonah swore and stormed out.
Behind me, Ruadhan said to Brooke, “Love, would you mind, perhaps you could wait in Little Blue?”
Brooke huffed. “Whatever. I got someone to see anyway.”
She was gone before I could find my voice to warn her from straying away from the Winnebago, but then, I doubted she’d listen to me anyway.
I sat at the table and twisted the bottle of vodka by the base, lost inside my own head. Jonah had a way of being able to ruin me with just one sentence. It was a skill he was perfecting on what seemed like an hourly basis.
Ruadhan sat down next to me. “Are you okay, sweetheart?”
“Yes. No. I’m not sure anymore,” I replied honestly.
Ruadhan waited patiently, giving me time.
“Did what you saw on the hilltop scare you?” I asked tentatively.
Ruadhan smoothed his salt-and-pepper hair, before placing his hands into a prayer shape on the tabletop. “No, love. But it scared you, didn’t it?”
I didn’t offer a direct answer. “I don’t understand.” I pinched my thumb and forefinger together. “I was this close to death, but I wasn’t afraid. I was ready to die. When I came back, still I was ready.… But this morning … I don’t get it.”
“If you no longer feel the same, something must have changed?”
“Yes, I suppose so.” A lump formed in my throat. “I’m frightened, Ruadhan.”
He pulled me into him, and careful of my mask, he rubbed my back up and down. “Do you know, in my experience, sweetheart, death is something people fear only if they have something—someone—to live for.” Ruadhan released me. “So, little love, who are you living for today that you weren’t yesterday?”
I squeezed my puffy eyes together, and the face that manifested in my mind provided me with the answer.
I didn’t offer it to Ruadhan.
“Why don’t I make you a cup of tea?” he said, getting up.
I wrinkled my nose. “Doesn’t really do anything for me anymore.”
“Aye. But it can be comforting to hold something warm in your hands, and truth be told, I quite enjoyed making it for you. I’ve missed it while you’ve been gone.” It was impossible to refuse him; I smiled and he left me to go in search of the teapot.
I drummed my fingertips on the table while I waited, considering Ruadhan’s words.
The kettle whistled, and a spoon clinked into a waiting mug. I pushed Brooke’s stack of fashion magazines aside, revealing a leather-bound book underneath.
I recognized it straightaway.
Jonah’s sketchbook. I picked it up and a pencil rolled out from inside one of the pages. I caught it before it hit the floor. “You found Jonah’s drawings?”
“Aye,” Ruadhan said, fetching milk from the fridge. “Over the years, you get to know one another’s habits. No matter where we go, or how long we stay, the lad always keeps his valuables in his pillowcase. Didn’t know he’d started sketching again. Mind, was a bit of a surprise finding that when we left Henley.”
Putting the top of the pencil between my lips, I ran my fingers over the suede leather cover, wondering what Jonah had drawn. I shouldn’t look. It was his personal property, but then, given that I tended to be the focus of so many of his sketches, it was too tempting not to.
“I don’t think he’d appreciate your looking through it,” Ruadhan warned at my shoulder. He placed a mug down next to me as I opened the book with care. Off the first page, I read Jonah’s full name aloud, and I recalled what it had felt like to let the syllables roll off my tongue when I had thought the person they belonged to was gone forever. “Jonah Cyrene.”
“Huh,” Ruadhan said.
“What?” I flipped through the pages, making my way to the one bookmarked by the charcoal pencil.
“In all these years, the lad never told me his surname. Funny…”
“What is?” Procrastinating, I stroked the edge of the page, mustering the courage to turn it, unsure of what I might find. If he’d sketched me, how might he have seen me after he’d pulled me out of the third? After he’d seen me wearing the butterfly mask? After we’d spent the night together?
I flipped the page, and the pencil fell from my lips.
It wasn’t me Jonah had drawn.
Two triangular eyes were set within a round head, with a round body to match, complete with two arms, hands, legs, and feet.
Jonah had taken the triangular eyes and the gloved hands I’d told him about, but somehow he’d seen what I hadn’t. He’d sketched a complete figure. Jonah had sketched a robot.
One I’d seen before.
Refusing to feed, I had been suffering at the time. To numb the pain, I’d turned to the bottle, drinking more than I should have, but still, I remembered the image. The robot was on a painting in Darwin’s house that depicted the apocalypse. Darwin had said it had been in his family for generations.
The portrait was a sign all right; it was the image of the day I would die.
And just then, another sign slapped me in the face.
“Jonah’s surname,” Ruadhan said. “Cyrene.”
I tore the page from the sketchbook and folded it into my jeans pocket. “What?”
“It won’t mean anything to you, sweetheart, as you’re not of the Christian faith. But the Gospel talks of a man named Simon of Cyrene, you see.” Ruadhan paused, scooping up the pencil and taking the sketchbook from my hands. “He was the man who helped Jesus carry the cross to his crucifixion.”
I sat, mouth agape.
Okay, universe, I’m listening.
FOURTEEN
THE WINNEBAGO WAS EMPTY. With no sign of Brooke, I couldn’t ask her permission to borrow her coat. She’d have to forgive me. I bundled myself beneath its warmth and pushed my hands deep into the pockets. There, I found the business card Darwin had given me the night before. I smoothed out the creases as I contemplated my next move.
Jonah had disappeared, so the downside was that I couldn’t ask him how he’d come up with a robot from my brief description. But the upside was that I wouldn’t have to argue with him about my decision to leave for London, alone. Even Ruadhan, who usually trusted my judgment, hadn’t especially liked the idea.
Unable to travel across water by the power of thought, I’d have to take a ferry over the Irish Sea to Holyhead, but first I could at least use my legs to get as far as Dublin. I searched for the rucksack Iona’s borrowed clothes had arrived in, but found an overnight bag stashed in the driver’s cabin first. With little consideration, I emptied the contents onto the passenger’s seat and stuffed the clothes Brooke had lent me inside. Halfway to the living quarters, I stopped. A metallic scent permeated the air. I went back and scanned the items dumped from the bag: a pack of old cards, some matches, aftershave, underwear, shirt, jeans, and a beanie.
The beanie—though a summertime aroma from a recent wash tried to mask it, the heady, coppery scent of dry blood remained, woven into the fabric.
The cards caught my attention next. They were plain, the kind you could buy for a pound at the local corner shop, with a linen finish and a simple red-and-blue diamond pattern on the back. I pressed my thumb against the top of the pack and fanned them inside my palms. I counted fifty-four cards in the deck. The ability to absorb specifics was, up until now, one I hadn’t considered to be of great use, but then without it, I wouldn’t have just recognized a tiny tear in the top right corner of the six of hearts. Though this was the same deck I’d seen when I first returned to Little Blue, this tear was new.
Brooke, it seemed, had a regular visitor, one who apparently enjoyed card games. No wonder she’d been upset at being ousted from Little Blue; clearly there was a reason she wanted some privacy. I scratched my head. Either she was hooking up with a human, or somehow, somewhere, she’d met another Vampire and was secretly sneaking him in and out of the Winnebago when no one was looking.
Both possibilities presented almost insurmountable difficulties.
* * *
I DON’T KNOW WHY I DECIDED to walk through the town. Maybe I was hoping Jonah would appear after all, or maybe it was because I was starting to get hungry and this time the fuel I needed was not solar-powered. The streets remained empty and I wondered if, given the influx of Vampires descending, Phelan had warned the locals to stay off the streets and remain in their homes. It was the best I could hope for. I highly doubted Phelan would evacuate—“Stand and fight” was his motto, not “Fright and flight.”
As I walked parallel to the gates of the church, I noticed they were unlocked. Up ahead, one of the church’s coffered doors was ajar. From inside, I recognized a low, mournful sob—Iona. Why was she inside the church when the Devil himself was filling up Pandora’s box only a mile behind her? The word reckless came to mind, but then I couldn’t hold it against her; there were plenty who’d have said the same of me on more than one occasion.
I kept a respectful distance from the silver and vaulted myself over the finials of the gateposts. With caution, I headed toward the heavy wooden doors. Even with my impaired vision, the precious metal popped out against the scenery like a 3-D movie. On the doors, every handle and hinge had been cast from solid silver. And though the centuries-old stained-glass windows remained intact, the Sealgaire had gone to some effort to encase the ledges, and, for added security, sheets of the stuff covered some of the stained panels themselves.
Though I wasn’t religious, there was something awe-inspiring about the way the autumn sun streamed into the nave, spreading over the pews and casting a warm glow into even the smallest pockets of darkness. Iona sat at the very front, hands in her lap, her head bowed.
“Iona,” I said.
“Oh!” She jumped. Then, realizing it was me, she wiped her eyes and said, “Sorry, you startled me.”
“I was passing, and I heard you from outside.”
She sniffed. “All the way out there?”