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Caelum
Watching Quayla leave wasn’t easy, but Caelum didn’t want her coming close enough to Dunham to get captured again. He doubted building a second nest would win them much, but he’d never seen her so fragile.
Whatever had happened to her in the short time since her escape, Quayla was questioning herself. Whatever it cost him, he had to keep her encouraged until they could come up with something. The obvious solution would be to break his own egg. He could only imagine the agony involved with Dunham’s spell on the jeweled ovum, but if Quayla had a nest ready to go, it might be worth it. Once all of them were free, they could rebuild their eggs and see to the Fae Kissed CEO.
I want him to myself, but I’m probably going to have to share with the others.
He transmogrified into his phoenix and winged his way to the top of Circlestone tower. Dunham was waiting. The moment Caelum set talon on the roof, the torture started. Dunham squeezed the symbolic egg until Caelum’s wing bones snapped. His ribs pushed in, breaking and piercing his lungs.
Unable to ask why in his phoenix form, Caelum screeched fury, torment and questions.
The pressure lightened. “Transmog. Now.”
Caelum fought to gain control over his whole essence through the pain. Every cell, every feather burned with purest agony. He forced the change, the sudden absence of pain becoming almost pleasure. He lay on the roof gasping. “Why?”
Dunham’s rage seethed just under his calm surface. “You’ve displeased me.”
“I followed your orders. I destroyed the church. I came directly back here.”
“You let Quayla go.”
Caelum opened his mouth to point out that Dunham hadn’t given him any order to capture the water shield. He closed his mouth, hoping Dunham didn’t remember things the same way.
“Into your cage, now.”
Dunham marched Caelum down into his private quarters. Caelum’s former CEO broke off to activate the arm that raised Caelum’s cage once more. Caelum had little choice but to obey, so he marched back to the five grouped standing stones. He hesitated at the basin stone in reach of the stone boot and the toe swallowing his egg.
If I smash it now, there’s nothing more he can do to me.
“In!”
Caelum glanced over his shoulder.
Dunham’s calm facade was slipping.
Caelum wasn’t certain what about letting Quayla go caused so much fury, but breaking his own egg might cause Dunham to kill him outright.
The air phoenix stepped onto the stone, conscious of the illuminated runes. He relaxed when he didn’t collide with a magical barrier. A flash of inspiration hit Caelum as Dunham strode forward with a rare steak swinging in one fist.
He had completed the mission the moment he’d stepped onto the stone. The prescription against harming Dunham no longer applied. If he was fast enough, Caelum could tear out Dunham’s throat.
Caelum tucked a hand behind his back and focused on his essence. Normally, his arms transmogrified into wings, but he knew the shape of his talons like the back of his foot.
Pain shot through Caelum, dropping him to his knees. A great fist crushed his chest once more, squeezing out all of his breath.
“Do you know that when you gather your essence to transmogrify your eyes glow?” Dunham asked conversationally. “I left that little loophole in your orders to see what you would do, and to be honest, you didn’t disappoint me. You’re as tricksie and legalistic as any Sidhe.”
“If you were in my place, wouldn’t you do anything in your power to escape?” Caelum asked.
“And take revenge,” Dunham said. “Still, now I owe you double punishment.”
Dunham tossed the meat between Caelum’s feet and activated the runes that caged him. He returned to the control panel, adding the bell jar to Caelum’s jail. Dunham’s voice sounded tinnier over the intercom.
“You knew I wanted her. Delivering her might’ve been worth your freedom.”
“You’re a bad liar, boss.”
Dunham shrugged and turned the pain up to eleven.
Summuseraphi
The gaps between the standing stones let Summus see both the mortal that had caged him and the cages around Atlanta’s shields. At Summus’s feet, a pentagram of phoenix essence kept him caged. All five shields were represented, but the essences of fire, earth and air throbbed with the nearness of their origin.
The flavor of Caelum’s essence soured in response to the torment the Fae Kissed mortal inflicted. Summus couldn’t hear the screams of the crumpled shield, but he felt the echoes in his essence.
I have to do something. I can’t just sit here. I’m a divine phoenix, surely I can thwart one Fae Kissed mortal.
Summus gathered his strength. His recovery hadn’t reached the halfway point before all five of his shields call out from the same location. There’d been other calls, but none so insistent or so concentrated. He’d had to come to their call. It hadn’t even been a conscious choice, though had he had that option, Summus would’ve come just the same.
Part of his ignorance could’ve been the rushed training after being elevated. He’d never heard of anything like the spells keeping him and the three shields bound. The mortal had possessed four of Atlanta’s shields, but Aquaylae had escaped—no doubt utilizing the nature of water itself.
Good for her. Controlling myself as a shapeless liquid escaped me for years. Despite Vitae’s claims, she would learn well from an excellent teacher.
Summus squared his shoulders. She’d escaped, and now it was his turn. He’d yet to master his new element, but there were principals he’d grasped. Divine light made up the body of a divine phoenix. As light, he could travel faster and penetrate places no other phoenix could access. He wasn’t as fluid as he was in his former life, but light had advantages over water.
Dunham only has so much life and water essence.
Summus bowed his head, folding his wings around him like a cloak. He put Caelum’s suffering not out of mind so much as within the caress of his wings, using it as fuel for his focus. Summus ignited his essence. Like a star, he unleashed waves of power and light against the magical barrier. Divine energy rebounded off the walls of his cage, each wave stronger than the last.
Lines forming the pentagram beneath Summus’s feet intensified, throbbing in time with the waves of power. He invested more essence, slamming a battering ram of light against the walls of his prison. More and more energy rebounded off the walls, across Summus, into the opposite side of his cage and back again. The energy picked up speed and force. The power buffeted Summus more with each pass, growing in a crescendo of power.
“It’s about time,” Dunham said.
Summus looked up, barely able to see the mortal kneeling inside the other stone circle. An avaricious smile disappeared as Dunham lowered his head, pressing palms flat on the stone as if bracing himself
Blue-white fire flickered to life around Dunham—a growing aura of divine flame. Realization hit Summus a moment too late. The energy he’d employed against the cage drained away like the stone beneath him had gravity to restrain light itself. Summus’s essence, connected to his assault dragging the divine phoenix to his knees.
Power tore itself away from Summus in an agony that seemed to claw his soul while stripping the flesh from his bones.
On the opposite stone, Dunham struggled to his feet wreathed in Summus’s power. His face rose, eyes blazing with the same fire that shrouded him. “Now that you’ve volunteered your essence, I’ll take it all if you please.”
The gravity beneath Summus grew claws and fangs, ripping more and more essence from him. An eternity or an instant later, the draw vanished. Darkness hedged Summus’s blurry vision. His hands had shriveled to skeletal fingers in pallid skin gloves. The world he’d crumpled against swam violent teeters and totters.
Raising his head took all of Summus’s strength.
Dunham stood mere feet away on the other side of the barrier, somehow more than real. He wore an angelic mantle that seemed to cast shadows along his body, creating an undulating halo of writhing dark and light plasma.
“You should rest while you can, Summuseraphi. I’ll require more from you in due time.” Dunham turned his back on Summus, his aura settling around the mortal like a fitted suit without robbing Dunham of the clinging sense of power.
What have I done?
Quayla
I backed off a short distance and pulled out the two tactical headsets. With Anima providing oversight through one of them, we’d be able to infiltrate the hotel. As long as I got the jump on one or two of their sentries without sounding the alarm, I’d been able to roll my Johammer away with no one the wiser.
I hung the spare headset from my belt. “Tie in through this and walk me through what I’m facing.”
“There are two, well, let’s call them sentries on third-floor balconies overlooking each side of the hotel. There are two more at ground level, lurking in shadow and a pair patrolling a slow circle through the parking lot.”
I had to assume the sentries could see as well or better than I could in the low light, giving them an advantage. I waited for the sentries patrolling to come into view, intent to get a feeling for how much time I’d have between circuits.
First glance suggested the sentries dressed in a hybrid of modern battle armor and a heavily spiked medieval style field plate mail. They edged into the radius of a street lamp.
I gasped.
The spikes, the armored plates, they were part of the creatures themselves. I’d never seen or seen reference to anything like the things guarding the hotel. The miasma of their taint reached to me from across the street.
My gaze shifted to my baby, a forlorn white jellybean in the darkness. Tactically arranged sentries allowed for multiple overlaps. To clear the side which held my baby, I’d have to descend from above and take out a third-floor sentry without alerting his partner. If I managed to subdue both, I’d have to eliminate the ground sentries the same way, hoping the rovers didn’t notice until I took them down too. All of that work went to hell if I made even one mistake, and it seemed likely guard placement on adjacent sides offered those sentries the ability to catch me in the act.
I turned off the headsets and strode down the block, tucking the equipment back into my bag and taking a bite out of a Hershey bar.
Anima’s whisper emerged from the statue. “Shield Quayla?”
“I love my bike, Ani, but it’s just a motorcycle no matter how many changes Caelum made to it.” I sighed and bit into more chocolate. “I already have one statue for communicating with you. A backup is nice but not worth risking my freedom.”
She didn’t answer right away, making me wonder how cowardly my explanation must have seemed. I still needed to investigate the hotel more, but not until I was ready.
“I don’t know how to say this without sounding condescending, but you made a mature choice,” Anima said.
“Yeah.” My feet felt heavier than they should, and the chocolate lost its flavor—not that I stopped chewing my way through the goodies I’d bought. “How much further to the cache with the phones in it?”
“Four miles as the phoenix flies.”
Four miles?
Physically, I could manage the distance, but emotionally I didn’t have four more miles in me. “What about a Walmart?”
“The nearest open Walmart is about a mile and a half.”
“Fine.”
Forty minutes of slow trudging brought me to an oasis of nocturnal capitalism. I sidelined through the grocery section to restock my binge supplies before heading to electronics. Caelum’s cache held free phones, but I just couldn’t face the extra distance. I wanted to go home. I wanted to curl up on my couch with Dylan and watch some geeky movie that would make him happy. I wanted my life to go back to some semblance of normal.
It took an eternity to get someone to sell me a prepaid smart phone and activate it, but in the end and in no small thanks to Anima, I walked out of Walmart to meet an Uber that for once wasn’t a gas guzzling behemoth.
The closer my ride brought me to my apartment, the more the ache in my chest dug into my heart. My driver stopped. I didn’t look up, focusing instead on rating and tipping him as a last-ditch stall tactic to procrastinate. When there was nothing else holding me in the car, I shoved the rest of the dense Cosmic Brownie in my mouth and got out.
My parking space gaped empty without Dylan’s car or my baby parked between the stone bumper and the curb. The three-story walk-up loomed above me in the predawn. A large glass oval glowed, back lit by the low-watt bulb hung in the landing. Just left of the front door, my landlady’s windows remained unlit—a good thing all in all.
The old lady had joined forces with my beloved Dylan and Detective Sabrina Foxner to invade Faery and rescue me from the Lady. Mrs. Cox and her humongous old tome had proven a veritable wiki of all things faerie. While the canny old grandma’s knowledge had been shocking, Dylan had surprised me the most. He had none of the knowledge of Mrs. Cox and none of the training the police detective gained over a decade or more time on hard streets. All Dylan had had was love and a new gun when he charged into a strange, foreign world to help me.
And I thanked them all by ignoring their objections and having Summus rewrite their existence so all but Mrs. Cox had never heard of me.
Standing in the street staring down my mistakes wasn’t getting me anywhere. I marched up the stairs, taking the extra time to ease the old door open before tiptoeing up to my old apartment. I winced with every creaky stair, but I made it to my door.
A prickle of taint pushed against my skin. Until I’d reached my door, I’d pushed the state of my apartment from my thoughts.
Not like I haven’t been somewhat distracted.
Goblins invaded my apartment while I was recovering in the sanctum. They’d broken my furniture to build an inverted crucifix which they’d used to torture Judith when the flower shop worker showed up worried about me.
“Something I can do for you, son?”
I turned to find Mrs. Cox leaning on a cane she didn’t need. An unobtrusive button on the cane told me the walking aid contained something sharp.
“You must be Mrs. Cox.”
Her sharp eyes nailed me to the wall. “And you are?”
“Quayl, Quayla’s brother.”
“Were you twins? Where is Quayla? I haven’t seen her.”
“Yes. She had to go out of town. Since I was visiting Atlanta, she asked me to come by her apartment and pay her rent.”
“I don’t take checks.”
I smiled. “She has cash in her bedroom, but I don’t have a key.”
“So, you were planning on staring at her door until it magically opened up?” Her scrutiny shifted up and down.
I was planning on breaking in, but you’ve probably figured that out by now.
“You stand like Quayla, and your eyes are very similar. Do you have any identification?”
“Airline lost my luggage. I’m waiting on a text to tell me it’s caught up.” I looked down at my duffel. “My other bag, this one’s junk food and electronics.”
“No,” Mrs. Cox’s word had bite. “You need an ID to get onto an airplane.”
“Actually, I only need it to get past security. I tucked my wallet into my carry on, but the plane didn’t have enough overhead space so they forced me to check the bag at the gate.”
“Which means it was on the plane with you.”
“I know, right? How they lost the bag between the departure and arrival gates is beyond me.”
Mrs. Cox didn’t seem convinced.
“Look, I don’t want any trouble, Mrs. Cox. Quayla said you might have a spare apartment after I got her rent settled, but I can go anywhere. She told me one of the headboard knobs hides a cubby with her rent.” I stepped around her to the stairs. “She’s hoping to return before her rent’s due again.”
The lock to my apartment door clicked open. “Stay here, young man. Let me check out your story.”
Taint and burned white sage hit me like a battering ram. The world spun. I sat, dropping onto the stairs harder than intended. When the world steadied a bit, I twisted just enough to see my door and watch for trouble coming up the stairs.
Mrs. Cox emerged a few minutes later. She shuffled to the next apartment over, paying minimal attention to how she moved the cane. She unlocked the door. “This tenant moved out a few days ago complaining about the white sage I burned up here. They left the place a wreck. If you help clean up the place, you can camp out until the job’s done.”
I rose. “I’d be happy to help.”
“Come along. I have an old cot in the basement. Not as nice as a real bed, but it’ll do in a pinch. When the apartment’s clean we’ll talk about the vacancy—once you have ID.”
“That sounds fair.”
Mrs. Cox eyed me sideways when I led the way to her cot storage. By the time I got it back upstairs I was ready to fall over. Mrs. Cox hadn’t been kidding. I hadn’t talked to the young dental technician very many times, but I’d been unaware Elijah was such a slob.
Isn’t much of a shock Mrs. Cox got the better end of this deal.
I passed out on the cot.