Only a few beings had been evolved enough to overcome that isolation.
For most, however, to reach another dimension, they had to be deliberately born into that dimension. They had to spend an entire lifetime there… which was dangerous for a soul, particularly in a realm overcome by dark forces.
Some of those souls were recruited to that dark.
Most simply did not dare to venture to those places.
For many, many years, the worlds had been separated from one another.
For lifetimes, it had been so.
The oldest of stories told of that time.
…And a great wail rose when the gods spoke, for the door to that other place must need be lost, and those on the other side forgotten…
In those years, the Lightbringers served to ensure that nothing traveled inter-dimensionally, that no new portals were created, that no primary gates were found and reawakened, that no one, not even the gods, jumped worlds, not without immediate repercussion and elimination.
There were still breaches, here and there.
Maybe a few dozen over thousands and thousands of years, most of them in the years leading up to the reawakening of the gates.
Some of those breaches were even aided by the Ancients.
Many, many more attempts were thwarted or failed.
Alexis was far too young to remember or know of those years, but the Lightbringer who trained her told her of massacres at newly-opened gates, of the destruction of worlds, of whole races being punished, even wiped out by the Ancients when the dimensions were breached.
Even gods died in those years, if the rumors were true.
“This does not interest you?” she said, her voice colder. “Or do you already know what it is the Ancients intend to do?”
“It interests me greatly, Alexis Poole,” he said, and she heard annoyance in his voice for the first time. “But I have my orders, Lightbringer, just like every being at this perilous time. I cannot control what the Ancients decide. I cannot control what happens in every dimension. I can only do what I’m told, and try to keep you alive in this one.”
“So you are staying?” she said, her frown deepening. “Here? On my world?”
“I am staying,” he affirmed.
Her jaw hardened as she contemplated this, her mind skimming through the implications.
“Fine,” she retorted.
“Fine?” He frowned. “You must know that is not sufficient. We must talk about it more than this, Alexis Poole.”
“Talk about what?” Her voice grew a touch colder. “You just said, it is out of your hands. You are under orders, are you not? From what you said, neither of us has any say in this. We are both at the pleasure of the Ancients.”
There was a silence.
The Traveler frowned.
“We should still discuss it,” he said. “There are logistics, Alexis. Security concerns. Things I should know. We should discuss how––”
“Fine,” she cut in. “But not at this very second.”
“When we finish here,” he warned. “With… whatever this is.”
She shrugged, her voice flat.
“Sure. Whatever pleases you, friend.”
Without waiting, she resumed walking up the hill, her long legs flashing faster if just as silently, taking longer strides than before.
He matched her pace easily that time, too.
Something about that simple fact irritated the hell out of her, although she couldn’t have possibly articulated the reason why.
It helped only marginally that she knew she’d finally managed to anger him, too.
8
The Old Zoo
She pushed through the chain-link fence, sliding her body into the opening to reach the back entrance to the row of animal cages.
Big cats had been kept here once.
Perhaps some wolves.
Possibly bears too, once upon a time, at least before the Works Progress Administration, or WPA, came in to expand the animal habitats during World War II. Under Franklin D. Roosevelt, the WPA led a lot of such projects, including for other zoos in major cities across the country.
Of course, that was then.
This was now.
Those more “modern” enclosures of the FDR era were now considered inhumane, barbaric to the animals themselves, and not only due to their small size.
It was difficult to believe over a thousand animals had been housed here once.
Now, the entire zoo was abandoned, moved to a different part of Griffith Park.
The caves under and behind the old animal cages were covered, wall-to-wall, with graffiti. The only echo of the animals that once filled those chambers were the iron bars themselves, along with trap doors and the narrow corridors where zookeepers used to walk, presumably to tend to the animals out of sight of the public.
“What in the gods is this place, anyway?” the Traveler said, following through the opening after her. “I’ve been meaning to ask you… and ask you why you put it here. I couldn’t believe it when I arrived. I also couldn’t get out of this dank hole fast enough… so thank you so much for bringing me back here to experience it again. I was just beginning to think the lingering smell might actually dissipate from my clothing.”
She could almost hear him grimace.
The more evil part of her suppressed a smile.
“It smells like urine in here,” the Traveler announced, his voice holding the tone of one conveying unpleasant information, like Alexis would have missed that detail. “It smells distinctly like urine. And various types of feces. And mold. In the area of the portal itself, there was at least one dead animal I saw…”
Alexis rolled her eyes, climbing over the next opening in the wall to reach the narrow corridor that ran directly behind a larger row of cages.
She counted down cages as she walked, but more out of habit.
She didn’t really need to count.
She could already feel the approaching portal.
“Why?” he said from behind her. “Why would you put it here?”
Thinking about that, she grunted. “I had problems with the last one.”
“Problems?”
Again, she heard him frown.
“Was it not hidden adequately?” he said, understanding reaching his voice.
“Apparently not,” she said, sighing a bit, internally and externally. “I thought it was. It seemed fine for about eight years. But considering I had some bizarre cult build a temple over it not too long ago… then a newly-awakened angel cement the damned thing up… only to later blast the hell out of it when the cult began using it illegally… I’m thinking I was wrong.”
Sighing again, she added,
“After they conducted yet another illegal blood ritual over the spot… I moved it. It was that or destroy the human bodies of the two fallen angels fighting over it, and wipe the memories of a hell of a lot of confused humans… many of whom had been, and, as far as I last knew, still are, possessed by demons.”
She glanced over her shoulder at the Traveler, who frowned, clearly struggling to make sense of the picture she’d just painted.
“I was on vacation,” she said, in lieu of a longer explanation. “I was working with some of the other portals here on Earth. On that particular occasion, I was in Hawaii, tending to a portal by a volcano.”
“That doesn’t sound like a vacation,” the Traveler muttered, side-stepping a large spiderweb that covered part of the narrow corridor.
“My friends would agree with you,” she admitted sourly, remembering Devin and Jules saying more or less the same thing. “Anyway, my point is, it was easier to move it.”
“Why not simply remove the angels?” the Traveler asked. “It sounds like you had no trouble before they arrived.”
She shrugged. “I don’t mess in angel business. Not my jurisdiction.”
Gritting her teeth as she remembered what she’d found upon her return from Maui, she shook her head, focusing back on the cor
ridor behind the abandoned animal cages.
“I spent more time hiding the signature this time,” she added in a grumble. “I clearly didn’t do an adequate job before, given how much of the looney contingent it was attracting. I still might have to have a talk with that angel.”
“Angel?” the Traveler said. “Which one? I thought you said there were two?”
“The senior one,” she said promptly. “The marginally less crazy one. Although he’s a pain in my ass for other reasons.”
The Traveler grunted.
“This piss-smelling hole is suddenly making more sense,” he muttered, glancing around at the graffiti-covered walls.
Still thinking, he added,
“I take it this is not the primary gateway then, since you were able to move it?” He sounded as though he were musing aloud. “The one in Los Angeles is a secondary. Interesting. I had thought you would want the one closest to you to be the original. Or am I wrong in being of the impression you can only move secondaries?”
“You are not wrong,” she confirmed, ducking down and around to pass a fallen piece of the ceiling. “It is a secondary.”
Stopping then, she gave him a puzzled look.
“I thought you came through here.”
“I did. Obviously.”
She frowned. “I was told Travelers can’t pass through primary gates?”
That time, he hesitated, then shrugged.
“We cannot,” he said. “Well… or, I should say, not on our own. Part of that is any being’s difficulty in getting past the security measures in place around the primary gates. Part is that we have difficulty navigating the primaries on our own. Something in the frequency is different, perhaps too intense for us. I cannot say for certain, since I’ve never passed through a primary gate… not even with a Lightbringer escort.”
“So an escort works?” she said, glancing at him.
He gave her another puzzled look. “Of course. A Lightbringer can bring anyone through the gates. Any gate.”
She didn’t answer.
Still, she found herself turning over his words, thinking about them in the context of what he’d told her about what happened.
“Why would they kill the Lightbringers, then?” she said, more to herself than to him.
He answered her anyway.
“Perhaps they didn’t need them to use the gates,” he said, matter-of-fact. “Not all beings are like Travelers in this. I believe gods can pass through any portal. Perhaps demigods, too.”
She nodded, still frowning to herself.
The floor was covered in broken pieces of cement, mud, used condoms, fast food containers, soda cans, leaves, even small branches and twigs from the trees above.
“…Unless the network is damaged, I don’t need the primary near me,” she said next, answering his unspoken question belatedly. “I can feel it through any of the secondary Earth portals.”
Glancing over her shoulder, she met his gaze, noting his eyes had gone back to a light green with orange flecks.
“I can control it from here, too,” she said. “Generally speaking, it does not matter which access point I use in the physical.”
“Not at all?” he said.
“Not under normal conditions, no.” She gave him a faintly warning look. “Anyway, I could always travel to the primary, if it became necessary.”
The Traveler only nodded.
She felt a flicker of his doubt.
Biting her lip, Alexis wanted to ask him which part of her explanation he doubted.
She forced herself to remain silent.
The last thing she needed was to get in some back and forth with a Traveler, one who clearly didn’t know much about the nature of either the portals or her work.
Moreover, she didn’t want to encourage him. Clearly, the Traveler saw himself as having some kind of authority or power over her. At the very least, he saw himself as her bodyguard, or even a more formal type of guardian. She didn’t want to do anything to reinforce that impression in him. She certainly didn’t want to encourage his seeming attempts to insinuate himself into her function as Lightbringer and keeper of the gates.
She hadn’t decided if she trusted him at all yet, given what he’d told her.
Even if his intentions were one hundred percent of the Light, she wasn’t about to let some Traveler and his Ancients-as-leash-holders take over her life.
This dimension was hers.
Until they changed the locks, or fired her, or replaced her with some other being, or killed her, or someone else killed her, or she died some other way… it was hers.
“How long do you intend to be here?” she asked him.
She heard the Traveler smile.
When she glanced back at him, in spite of herself, she didn’t see any humor in his aura, or in his pale, now gold-colored eyes. He studied her in the moonlight sifting through the bars above, his narrow mouth still wearing a whisper of that empty smile.
“You don’t seem to appreciate my coming here to assist you, Lightbringer,” he observed mildly. “Perhaps you missed some element of the news I brought? Or perhaps you think yourself so far above your brothers and sisters in skill and cunning and general badassery that you have nothing to fear and no need of me?”
She rolled her eyes. “No need to be so melodramatic, Traveler.”
“So you are not concerned for your own life?” he pressed, sounding skeptical. “Or are you simply too busy suppressing your obviously-intense feelings about today’s events to allow yourself to think about such trivialities?”
Alexis didn’t respond to that.
She didn’t look at him, either.
Yet the Traveler wouldn’t leave it alone.
“Is it me?” he asked, his eyes still boring into her back. “Is this my failing? Have I conveyed some aspect of this threat badly, or incompletely to you, Lightbringer?” Pausing at her silence, he added, “Did I mention that the danger is to the dimensional matrix as a whole? That it could threaten every living creature known to us? Including me?”
She looked at him.
Snorting a bit, she shook her head.
“You communicated all of that, Traveler,” she said, aiming her eyes back at the spray-painted tunnel. “There are holes in your story to be sure… holes I could drive a truck through, if I were so inclined… but you were clear on the stakes. You did not pull any punches in conveying that part of things, at least.”
“Then I am baffled as to why you are not more afraid.”
The humor left his voice entirely that time.
A low-level anger reached its voice instead, possibly mixed with frustration, or maybe disbelief. That voice changed everything about him, making her glance at him again, in spite of herself, staring at him with new eyes.
He returned her gaze, that anger blazing in his irises.
“Help me to understand, Lightbringer,” he said, his voice deeper-sounding. “What is this? Is it arrogance? Bravado? Denial?”
Her jaw tightened.
Looking away once more, she didn’t answer.
By then, they’d reached the cage housing the portal.
Sliding left and under another fallen beam, she entered the inside of the cage, pushing past the locked metal door. Walking so that she stood in the exact center of the cement floor, she glanced around first, noting the placement of everything, the condition of the metal bars, the broken cement––even the dead rat the Traveler had mentioned.
Then her eyes fell on the portal itself.
A roaring lion covered that part of the moldy cement, teeth flashing in its red, open mouth, its mane a brighter orange and gold. Inexplicably, pale blue wings filled the walls on either side of he painted lion. Those wings connected to the lion’s tawny back, matching a crystal-colored crown on its head.
When the Traveler saw it, he grunted.
“More blue. I should have noticed on my way out.”
Alexis didn’t look over.
She approached the wall inst
ead, her hands held up towards the image of the lion.
Before she touched it, before she resonated with the light she could feel…
She hesitated.
For the first time since he’d first told her about the dead Lightbringers, about Darynda, about the attack, a wave of emotion hit her.
It came up so quickly, she couldn’t control it.
She stood there, breathing hard, feeling her body tremble. She couldn’t control the tremble, either. She didn’t realize she was crying until the wall in front of her blurred, turning into a moonlit panel of pale blue, orange, gold, and red, the lion’s roar and wings growing indistinct as the colors grew brighter behind her eyes.
Her chest hurt so badly, it felt like she’d been stabbed.
She was still standing there, holding up her palms––
––when warm arm arms enveloped her.
She froze, feeling every muscle in her body tense.
If he felt it, it didn’t dissuade him.
He held her, his warm breath near her ear, his muscular arms now entirely solid, gripping her past the swords she wore on her back, wrapping around her shoulder and ribs. She felt the length of him, every finger, every line of muscle in his arms, the outline of his legs, the shape of his jaw and chin and part of his face.
Despite how insubstantial he’d looked in the club, his muscles felt like living steel.
His skin felt like velvet.
His bones like crystal, or some hard stone.
She felt herself relaxing in those arms.
She wanted to resist, but some part of her refused, ignoring the fear reaction that came up when the Traveler’s presence enveloped hers.
She lowered her arms and hands somewhere in that.
He held her lightly at first, but as she relaxed, his grip tightened, pulling her strongly against him. Instead of freaking out from the near-restraint, she relaxed more, leaning her weight into the length of that warm solidity.
She closed her eyes.
He didn’t speak, and some part of her was grateful for that.
After a few seconds, he released her, and she should have been grateful for that, too.
Lightbringer: An Enemies to Lovers Urban Fantasy with Demons, Portals, Witches, Renegade Gods, & Other Assorted Beasties (Light & Shadow Book 1) Page 6