Her smile grew. “It means destiny.”
I stared at her, my grip tightening on the pilum. “We’re on a boat named Destiny right now? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Gelila’s smile slipped. “No. Why?”
I managed to say, “No reason,” in a far more casual tone, yet I felt anything but casual as I met Adrian’s darkened stare.
If either of us had had any doubts that today was the last day of my life, those doubts were now gone. Sometimes, Zach’s boss wasn’t vague at all. I guess writing Time’s Up, Ivy! in the sky using the clouds would’ve been too flashy.
Despite feeling as if I’d throw up again, then burst into tears, then throw up once more, I smiled. “It’s okay,” I said to Adrian in a soft voice. “We’ve still got this.”
And amazingly, most of me even believed that. I’d heard once that the grace to face death was only given to the dying. Well, someone must be giving me something, because I knew I didn’t have the strength to handle this on my own. Not after finding out that I was pregnant. Yet here I was, not falling to pieces.
Thank you, I sent upward, even more surprised that I could say it instead of just think a silent, endless scream. But as it turned out, I had even more to say. Please. Whatever happens...please don’t let me fail all the people who are counting on me.
Adrian looked away even as his hand closed over mine, and by proximity, the pilum, too. A spasm went through him, yet he didn’t let go despite the pain. I knew how he felt. I’d brave whatever pain came my way in order to touch him, too, although mine came from my heart feeling like it was being shredded one layer at a time. Still, I closed my eyes, trying to soak in the feel of his touch one last time.
“Settle in, lovelies,” Gelila said in her cheerful voice. “We’ll reach the first of the islands before you know it.”
CHAPTER FORTY
TWO HOURS LATER, I saw a small landmass on the horizon. Then Gelila said, “We’re approaching the island of Tana Kirkos.”
With that, the pilum began to emanate so much power that holding it burned my hands. I wasn’t the only one affected. Adrian pulled away from me with a gasp, and his shadows retracted as if they’d been burned, too.
“You feel that?” he asked roughly.
I clenched my jaw. “Towel?” I managed. If I tried to say more, I might scream from the blistering pain, yet I couldn’t let go. The pilum would shoot away from me if I did.
He leapt up. “Gelila, I need a towel, quickly!”
“In the cabin,” she said, slowing the boat and giving us a concerned look. “Did you hurt yourself?”
Adrian ran into the covered section of the boat, and I tried not to think about how the flesh felt like it was being scorched from my hands.
“What’s on that island?” I gritted out, trying to distract her from questions I couldn’t answer, and myself from the pain.
“An ancient monastery with ties going back to the fourth century. It was even rumored that the Ark of the Covenant was once kept there for nearly eight hundred years.”
“You don’t say.” It hurt so much, I had to let it go! But I couldn’t let it go! Dammit, where was that towel?
Adrian ran back and gave me a beach towel. He tried to hold the pilum in order to let me peel my hands from it, but as soon as he touched it, he was knocked backward with such force that he nearly fell overboard.
“It’s not in the mood for a threesome,” I gasped out, using my knees to grip the pilum, then almost screaming at the fresh pain. Still, I managed to wrap the towel around it in several layers, since thankfully, beach towels were oversize. When I was done, I gritted my teeth and grabbed it with my blistered hands.
The towel made touching it tolerable, but the damage had been done. Every move I made tore at the burned and bubbled-up skin on my hands.
“I need manna,” I said, but Adrian was already moving.
Gelila stopped the boat completely. “What has happened?” she demanded as she came over to where I was. Then she stared in shock at my hands and knees. “You’ve been burned!”
“Move,” Adrian said, pushing her aside none too gently as he retrieved the plastic bag of manna from our satchel.
He grabbed a handful, then rubbed it on my scorched knees. I closed my eyes and breathed through the pain, which thankfully didn’t last long. When I opened them, Adrian had his clean hand hovering by the towel-wrapped pilum, while the manna-clumped one was extended to me.
“Let go, Ivy, one hand at a time. Don’t worry. If the pilum starts to get away from you, I’ll grab it.”
I didn’t want him to, even with the towel covering it. His shadows already looked as if they were cringing behind his back. His mere proximity to the pilum since its new power surge had to be hurting him. That was why I pulled my left hand away first. My right one was stronger, and I gripped the pilum with no regard to what that did to my burned skin.
The pilum tugged hard toward the island. I tightened my grip even more and wedged the bottom of it between my feet for extra anchoring. Once again, I was beyond glad that I’d gone with the less pretty, thick sneakers. All that foam and rubber was an extra barrier against the pilum.
Adrian spread the manna onto my left hand. Gelila let out a gasp as those scorched, blistered welts began to lighten at once, and then they disappeared entirely.
“What. The bloody. Hell?” she said, staring in disbelief.
“Long story, no time,” I replied, grabbing the towel-wrapped part of the pilum with my left hand and wincing as I pulled away my right one and saw that it left some scorched skin stuck to the towel. Gelila wouldn’t want this back anytime soon. Then I held out my right hand to Adrian and sighed in relief as the burning pain faded soon after Adrian coated it with manna.
Gelila stared back and forth between the manna bag and my now-healed hands. “Is that some sort of magic healing paste?”
“Close enough,” Adrian replied.
“We need to go to that island,” I told Gelila. “Take us there.”
“No point. They’ll turn you away,” she said, still sounding as if she were in shock. “Women aren’t allowed on that island.”
I let out a short laugh. After all I’d been through to get to this point, I’d be damned if a gender exclusion policy was going to stop me. “They’re going to let me on. Trust me.”
Gelila shook her head as if the movement would better allow her to clear it, then she looked at me. “It’s forbidden. After I transitioned, I wasn’t allowed to set foot on that island despite doing so for years beforehand. You can go ashore on one of the other islands—”
“Gelila.” Adrian pulled out all our remaining money from the satchel. Her eyes widened at the pile. “This is yours to keep if you stop arguing and take us to that island now.”
Her face was very expressive. That was how I knew when her shock lifted and her toughness came through. “Why that island and no other? You intending to do harm to the blokes there?”
“I promise you that we are not,” I said, meeting her suspicious stare. Then I took a chance. “You saw how this stick burned me when I touched it, right? But wood doesn’t burn unless it’s on fire, yet there’s no fire here, so how did it burn me?”
“I don’t know,” she said, staring at the pilum now.
She’d already seen enough to have her previous version of reality shaken. I hoped it would be enough to take her the rest of the way. “It burned me because it’s not just a stick. It’s one half of a very holy relic. The other half is on that island, and I have to put the two pieces back together. That’s why you have to take us there and nowhere else. Do you understand now?”
She let out a laugh that I well recognized. It was one that said This shit is too crazy to be real. “I don’t understand a bit of it, but if you mean the monks no harm, and if you’re ab
le to talk your way onto that island despite no woman ever doing that before...who am I to stop you?”
I flashed a quick smile at her. “Good enough for me.”
* * *
TANA KIRKOS WAS a long, thin stretch of an island, with a tall ridge of rock jutting through the tops of thick jungle as if the island had a spine. More rocks acted as natural barriers where the island met the water, and I didn’t see a dock anywhere. I also didn’t see a beach, a single building or really any signs of life. If Gelila hadn’t mentioned the monks and the monastery, I would’ve been sure that it was uninhabited.
Gelila seemed to know where to go, though. As we approached, she cut the engine and allowed the current to drift the boat closer to a lower formation of rocks.
“One of the monks will come out here soon,” she stated. “You might not be able to see them, but they can see you.”
Well, didn’t that have a faintly ominous ring to it? “Why do we have to wait for them?”
She gave me a level look. “If you set foot on this island without their permission, they will forcibly try to remove you. I assume that’s the kind of trouble you are looking to avoid?”
It was, but... I cast a glance at the sky. It was still a clear, sunny day, yet the sky had changed from light blue to a deeper, richer shade.
“How long until sundown?” It had taken us a good two and a half hours on the water to get here, and it had already been around two in the afternoon when we set foot on this boat.
She glanced at her watch. “’Round two hours, but no worries. I have no trouble navigating the boat after dark.”
Adrian and I exchanged a glance that I had to look away from, or I’d be swept away by all the emotions roiling right beneath my self-control. I knew for certain that I wasn’t coming back, and odds were, neither was he.
“That’s fine,” I managed to say. “But don’t, uh, wait around for us. Once we’re on the island, just leave.”
Her brows went up and that suspicion was back on her features. I tried to come up with a reason that would keep her safely away from what might be a dangerous situation while also not making her think that we were crazy suicide bombers.
“The monks will have lots of questions about how we came to be in possession of the pilum.” Adrian’s smooth voice cut through what had quickly become loaded silence. “It’s a long story, needless to say, yet we want to be sure to tell it. Come back to get us in the morning, Gelila. We’ll be done by then.”
Only that last part wasn’t a lie. We would be done by morning, and probably, much sooner than that.
Gelila shrugged. “You’re giving me more than enough for me to make another trip out here, but as I told you, I don’t think both of you will get onto that island.”
I didn’t argue with her about it again. Either she was wrong and the monks would make an exception for me, or we’d get around them by outrunning them. Either way, it was happening.
“Someone’s coming,” Adrian said.
A flash of orange peeked through the thick brush at the base of the rock, then a robed man appeared, smiling and saying something in an unfamiliar language. I glanced at Adrian, but he shook his head. He knew a lot of languages, but not this one.
Gelila replied in the same language, and the smile wiped from the monk’s narrow dark-skinned face, which was the only part of him visible from his head-to-toe robes.
“No,” he said in heavily accented English. “I am sorry, but it is forbidden for women to set foot on Tana Kirkos.”
I cast another glance at the sky. We didn’t have time to break the news gently, so I stood up, held out the pilum that was now vibrating with barely contained energy, and said, “You will let me on. I am the last living descendant of King David, and I know that the spearhead of Longinus is here. The base of that ancient weapon is in my hands, and I have come to reunite the two parts.”
The monk stared at me with shock. So did Gelila. I hadn’t called it the more well-known term of the Holy Lance because I’d tried to be a little vague for her sake, but she clearly knew what I was talking about.
Then the monk recovered from his shock. “Why do you believe the spearhead is here?” he asked, his voice now flintlike.
New rustling in the brush behind him combined with more flashes of orange proved that he hadn’t come alone, either, and soon, three more robed monks appeared. The first monk’s whole demeanor changed before my eyes. Gone was the kindly half-stooped older man who looked like the most confrontational thing he’d ever done was politely shoo away female tourists. This man stood with a soldier’s ready-to-charge tenseness, and his newly hardened stare promised that he could kick ass and take names.
I held the pilum higher. “Because this directed me here, as I can prove. No matter where you’ve hidden the spearhead, no matter how many wards you’ve put around it so its power can’t be felt—and you had to have warded it or I’d be a mindless mess right now—the pilum will lead me straight to it.”
The monks exchanged quick, measured looks. Then another one came onto the narrow rock ledge. “If what you say is true and you are the last of David’s line,” this new monk said in much better English, “show us the holy marks on your body.”
“You have the stigmata?” Gelila whispered in awe.
Since the monks had demanded that I do the supernatural equivalent of putting my cards on the table, I gave up any attempt at vagueness. “Nope,” I said to Gelila. “I have tattoos of ancient hallowed weapons that turn into real ones when demons are present.”
Gelila gasped at that, but I was more focused on the monks’ faces. Since my hands were full, I nodded at Adrian, who pulled my right sleeve all the way up and then raised the hem of my sweater, revealing my torso from hip bone to bra.
“David’s slingshot,” I said, wiggling my bared right hand. “And you can only see some of it, but Moses’s staff runs from my neck all the way to my foot.”
The monks exchanged another look, then more rustling behind them and above them revealed another half dozen monks, all clothed in the same bright orange robes. The monk who’d demanded that I show him the goods said something sharply in their native tongue, then all of them suddenly dropped facefirst to the ground. I dropped down, too, expecting a spray of bullets or other imminent attack.
Adrian didn’t move, although he let out a short, humorless laugh. “There’s no danger, Ivy. They believe what you are now, so they’re throwing themselves prostrate before you.”
Oh. I felt foolish and more than a little embarrassed. “Get up,” I told the monks, getting up myself. “Believe me, I don’t deserve to be worshipped.”
Hell, if these monks knew how much I’d bitched about my destiny, let alone all the steps I’d taken to avoid it, they wouldn’t bow down to me. They’d throw rotten fruit at me.
“Davidian,” the monk with the good English said, his wrinkled features easing into a smile as he got up. “I am Sebhat. Allow me the honor of welcoming you to our island.”
One of the other monks began saying something excitedly in their language. They all looked up, including Gelila. I did, too, but didn’t see anything aside from a dark spot by the sun.
“The Lord Himself smiles on your visit,” Sebhat exclaimed. “Behold, He causes the eclipse to appear a full day early to commemorate it!”
Eclipse? With a sick feeling, I realized what the smaller dark ball by the sun was. The shadow of the moon, which meant that this was a solar eclipse. And that shadow would get big.
“Ivy.” Adrian’s voice held all the tension that instantly rose in me, too. “Day is about to become night.”
“Fuck,” I breathed, and got horrified looks from all the monks. If they thought my language was upsetting, wait until they realized it wasn’t God causing the early eclipse. He hadn’t thrown a sky-altering welcome party for me yet, and I doubted
today was the day He was going to start. But demons could manipulate the sky to their advantage, although this was really pulling out all the stops.
Then again, demons could smash dimensions together to create new realms. Speeding up a planetary alignment by only a day shouldn’t be too hard, and this was the last play of the game. Whoever won this round won the whole thing.
“We’re about to be under attack by demons,” Adrian told the monks, grabbing the satchel and jumping onto the rock ledge. I came over to that ledge, then turned my back so he could pick me up by my waist. That way, he didn’t have to worry about the pilum accidentally brushing him.
“But demons cannot attack here. This island is holy ground!” the first monk who’d met us protested.
“Every inch of it?” Adrian challenged.
Sebhat gave us a grim look. “No. Not all of it.”
“Like I said.” Adrian’s voice was crisp. “We’re about to be under attack.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
WE TOLD GELILA to drive her boat away as fast as she could. She’d be far safer on the water than she would be on the island. Then we followed the monks up the steep, rocky terrain. The jungle was so thick around us that I could barely see the ground, let alone the path that the monks traveled with ease. But the possibility of losing my footing was hardly my biggest concern.
“Please tell me you’ve got lots of guns on this island,” Adrian said. “The eclipse won’t last long, but while it does, they’re going to hit us with everything they’ve got.”
And if we survived that, nightfall wasn’t far away, so they’d be back for more. Yeah, lots of guns would help. Bullets couldn’t kill demons, but they could kill minions. Besides, pumping demons full of bullets would distract them, and I’d need all the distraction I could get to reach the spearhead, reattach it to the pilum and use it before one of the demons stopped me.
“We have many swords, but only a few guns,” Sebhat replied.
Adrian ground out a curse in Demonish. Sebhat looked sharply at him. “How do you know that tongue?”
The Brightest Embers Page 24