The Brightest Embers

  “I love you,” he said hoarsely. “Never forget that.”

  Then he grabbed Brutus’s low-hanging leg, using it like a pulley to swing himself onto the gargoyle’s back. A torrent of Italian from the crewman erupted behind us, but I couldn’t tear my eyes from Adrian as I tried to scramble to my feet.

  “Don’t!” I shouted as Brutus began to beat his mighty wings, lifting Adrian high above the boat. “Adrian, come back!”

  My only answer was a mournful whine from Brutus that faded as he and Adrian disappeared from my sight.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I SPENT THE next few days swinging back and forth between denial, anger and depression. This wasn’t the first time Adrian and I had been apart, but it was the first time he’d left me. More important, it was the first time I didn’t know if I’d see him again, and not because one of us might get killed. Death was always how I’d feared—or more honestly, expected—things to end between us. I certainly hadn’t expected this.

  It was now our third night in Montenegro. I’d stayed here because this was where we’d originally intended to go, so it would be easy for Adrian to find me. After all, he couldn’t have gone far. Brutus had reappeared a mere four hours after he’d left with Adrian. Half that time had to be taken up by Brutus flying back to me, so Adrian was only two hours away. He had to come to his senses soon and come back, right?

  When I wasn’t in denial about Adrian’s absence being permanent, I was alternatively blasting myself for being the one to bring up leaving in the first place, or reigniting my anger by reminding myself that I had every right to tell Adrian that I wasn’t going to put up with any more of his lies.

  “I mean, no relationship can survive if one person keeps lying to the other, right?” I fumed to Jasmine while I was on the latter part of my emotional roller coaster.

  “Right...” Jasmine hedged, but the way she drew the word out and the uncertainty in her tone made me pounce.

  “What?”

  “It’s totally wrong that he lied,” Jasmine said quickly. “Look, you know I hated Adrian when we met. I told you that you could never trust him because of what he was, and yeah, he kinda proved that with this, but still...I get why he did it.”

  My eyes bugged. “You’re on his side?”

  “I’m on your side,” she said hastily, her gaze pleading with me to understand. “Always. But I’d have lied to you, too, if I thought it would keep you alive. How can I get mad at Adrian for doing the same thing I would’ve done? You were so determined to find that weapon no matter that using it would kill you. Sure, I feel bad about the people trapped in the realms, but I don’t want to definitely lose you on the chance that you might be able to save them. If that makes me a terrible person, then I’ll own being a terrible person.”

  “You’re not a terrible person,” I said, my heart breaking for another reason. “You’ve just been through so much—”

  “Haven’t we all?” she interrupted, wiping a new spill of tears from her eyes. “I’ve lost everything except you and Costa. You’ve lost everything except me and Adrian. Adrian lost everything except you and Costa. Is it such a surprise that some of us are willing to do whatever it takes to hang on to what we have left, even if it means becoming people we aren’t proud of?”

  No, it wasn’t a surprise. I could even understand the desperation that had driven Adrian to make a deal with the person he hated most in order to improve my chances of survival. After all, there wasn’t much I wouldn’t have done to save him when I thought he was dying right in front of me. The difference was that I would’ve paid the price and then told him about it.

  Adrian had kept lying to me. In fact, he would still be lying to me if I hadn’t confronted him about it, and that was the crux of it. I could forgive him not telling me about my bio mom’s death because he’d felt a misplaced sense of guilt. I could even forgive his knee-jerk reaction of summoning Demetrius and making that bargain when I first decided to go after the spearhead. What was harder to get over was what he’d done every day after that.

  “There’s a lot about me that I’m not proud of, too,” I told Jasmine. “But it’s easier to rationalize leaving all those people behind when you aren’t the one solely responsible for their possible freedom, or continued imprisonment. Don’t get me wrong—I understand why you and Adrian didn’t want me going after the spearhead. I’m the one who eventually gave up on it for those same reasons, but that’s the point. Adrian didn’t respect me enough to let me come to that decision myself. Instead, he made that decision for me.”

  Jasmine’s eyes were still brimming over. “Would talking with you have made any difference? I kept telling you not to go after the spearhead, but you kept doing it, just like you’re still doing it now.”

  That hit me in all the places that felt raw from Adrian leaving me. I blinked, forcing back the new shine in my gaze.

  “Demetrius said there’s a countdown, and Adrian confirmed that. If I don’t find the spearhead, then a demon will, and countless thousands more people will get enslaved when the realms reopen. We might, too,” I added, because like Adrian, her worry for me was stronger than her worry for strangers. “So our only hope is to grab it first, then hide it where the demons won’t know to look.”

  “But if you touch it, you’ll die,” Jasmine said brokenly.

  I took her hand. “Remember how the slingshot had no effect on you because you’re not a demon, Archon, Davidian or Judian? The spearhead would have no effect on you, either. Hallowed weapons can’t be activated by regular people, so I’ll find it, then you and Costa will take it somewhere and hide it where no one can find it again, even me.”

  Her grip, which had been slack before, tightened. “You’re not going to try to use it?”

  I squeezed back, blinking harder this time. The words I promise hovered on my lips, but somehow, I couldn’t say them even though I tried twice. “You’re right,” I settled on. “You and Adrian are all I have left. Now that he...he—” I still couldn’t say left me. “Well, now that he’s not here, I refuse to lose you, too.”

  She threw her arms around me and cried in a way that reminded me that she was only nineteen. She looked like a woman, acted like a woman and had lived through more hell than most people would experience even if they lived to be a hundred, but in reality, she still wasn’t old enough to legally drink.

  Then, surprising myself, I also cried in the kind of no-holds-barred way that was better suited to someone twelve than twenty-one. It was exhausting, embarrassing, and gave me a headache, yet it was also one of the most freeing things I’d done. I wasn’t prepared to handle everything that was still ahead of me. As for what was behind me, I didn’t know if I’d done the right thing, the wrong thing or the stupid thing. Yet in those brief, unrestrained minutes, I allowed myself to simply ache without my usual worry, second-guessing or self-recriminations.

  Afterward, I let Jasmine go, trying to push back my battered emotions as easily as I wiped my still-dripping tears.

  “We’ll be okay,” I told her, patting Jaz on the back with a briskness I didn’t feel. “We’re tough, right? We’ll get through this. Then, when all this is over, we can go back to a semi-normal life. We have fake names and fake ID now, so we don’t have to worry about the police being after us on top of minions and demons. You could go back to college, make new friends, and maybe I can track down Adrian and see if it’s possible to put things back together between us.”

  He didn’t think so, but if the spearhead was out of the picture, then neither of us would have a destiny pulling us in the opposite direction. I’d like to see what our relationship would be like without fate, bloodlines and angels and demons trying to tear us apart.

  Jasmine grabbed a nearby tissue box and blew her nose before responding. “You really think that’s possible?”

  I wasn’t sure if she meant fi
nding the spearhead and getting it safely out of everyone else’s reach, her going back to college or my finding Adrian and somehow making things work. Either way, my answer was the same.

  “I hope so.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  WHEN I WAS LITTLE, I saw a movie called Planes, Trains and Automobiles. I now felt like I was starring in one called Trains, Ferries and Taxis, because that was what I’d been traveling in for the past two weeks.

  I’d waited one more day in Montenegro before leaving. As devastated as I was, I couldn’t spend any more time nursing my broken heart. I’d already given any demons that were after the spearhead enough of a head start. So, I’d gotten the bank account information from Costa, nearly fainted at how much money was in them, then made arrangements for the first stop on our spearhead-hunting trip.

  Adrian had listed several places where the spearhead might be. The good news was that most of them were on this side of the globe. The bad news was that still left a huge amount of territory to cover. It hadn’t been a big deal for Adrian back then. He’d had demon realm vortexes to use for his mode of travel, and those were nearly as quick as teleportation. I, however, didn’t have access to either demon realm vortexes or the light realms, which were even better because I could simply think my way to wherever I wanted to go in those. No, I had to do this the slow, hard way.

  Flying would’ve shortened things by a lot, but that would mean leaving Brutus behind. At least once over the bumpy, sleep-deprived and seasick two weeks I’d spent traveling, I have to admit that I considered that, but I couldn’t. For starters, Brutus was invaluable when it came to his fighting abilities and his capacity to get us away quickly if the fight was unwinnable. More important, however, he was a cherished friend.

  Yes, when we’d first met, I’d viewed Brutus as an unwanted protector that Adrian had thrust upon me. After all, aside from his history as a guard gargoyle for a demon realm, he was the size of an elephant and his farts could peel the skin from your nose. He also drooled when he slept, and I feared for stray cats when he flew at night despite repeatedly telling him that he was not allowed to eat them. But over the past several months, he’d become much more than a protector or even a pet. If I cried, he’d sit with his head as close to being on my lap as he could manage, and when I’d hold in the pain so I didn’t upset the people around me, he’d stare at me, his solemn red gaze seeming to silently promise that he’d fix everything if he could.

  Lately, he’d also taken to bringing me back “presents” from his evening flights. When we were in Travemünde, Germany, the departure city for the ferry we were taking, it was a rosebush complete with roots from his tearing it out of the ground. After we’d ferried from Travemünde to Malmö, Sweden, it was a small, fancy marble birdbath that must have previously adorned an upscale backyard. When we had to spend the night in Stockholm because our train didn’t arrive until the following day, Brutus brought me back a gold-colored statue of a ten-horn stag. From the damage to the bottom of it, it had been ripped free from some permanent fixture. I only hoped it wasn’t a national monument.

  He might not be able to speak beyond grunts, chuffs and roars, but clear as a bell, Brutus kept letting me know that he loved me. I loved him, too, weaponized farts and all, and you didn’t abandon those you loved just because the road with them was bumpier than the road without them. That was a lesson I intended to teach to Adrian, if I survived all this to see him again.

  Our last stop was Jukkasjärvi, a little town in the uppermost northern part of Sweden. Unlike most of the other passengers on the train with us, we weren’t here to get a glimpse of the famed aurora borealis, more commonly known as the northern lights. Instead, we were looking for an artifact that had never been associated with this place.

  Maybe that’s the point, I thought as we got off the train and I got my first good look around at the village bordered by forest on one side and a long, winding river on the other. Who would think to look in a tiny arctic town for an ancient Roman weapon that had last been seen in the heart of the Middle East? Not me, and probably not anyone else, either. This place was so remote, if I wanted to hide something where it would never be found, I’d certainly consider hiding it here.

  Brutus chuffed with relief when we collected our bags and he was finally able to leave the luggage car. He’d had a much smaller area to hide in this time, so he was glad to be off the train. He stretched out his wings as if getting the circulation back in them, then beat them until he hovered a few dozen feet from the ground. I didn’t know if he was expelling some pent-up energy, or going higher to get a better look at his new surroundings. Either way, it didn’t go unnoticed.

  “Where did that seagull come from?” the blonde woman next to me asked, her accent outing her as British.

  “He’s mine,” I said, lowering my voice as if embarrassed. “I take him everywhere with me, so I snuck him in the baggage car when they told me that pets weren’t allowed on the train.”

  The woman gave me a look I was used to, but hey, a seagull was a lot more normal type of pet than what Brutus really was.

  “He seems to like it here,” she finally said, looking back at Brutus as he made a few wide circles overhead.

  He did look happy, and I wondered if it was from more than finally getting to stretch his wings. Jasmine and I were pulling our coats tighter around us because it felt like it was only a couple degrees above freezing, but Brutus appeared to be reveling in the cold. Then again, I suppose he would. He’d been born into a lot colder conditions than this.

  If you asked someone to think of a demon realm, they would probably say it contained fire. I don’t know how that rumor got started, but the opposite was true. They were frozen because there was no sunlight. If I were looking for a scientific reason for their existence, I’d say they were a mishmash of M-theory and parallel universes. Take a demon powerful enough to manipulate the gravitational field between a spot in this world and the mirror image world next to it, smash the two together to form an overlapping “bubble,” and you had a new demon realm complete with whatever buildings, cars and humans had been unlucky enough to be sucked along for the ride. I’d been on that particular ride, and it was like being on a roller coaster set to the speed of “please, someone kill me now.”

  “Are you here for the Icehotel?” the British woman asked me, dragging my attention back to her.

  “Yep, we’re spending the night there,” I said, trying not to sound as unenthused as I felt about it. Unlike Brutus, I didn’t have fond memories of being in perpetual cold.

  “So are we! Are you staying in a cold room, or warm?”

  I knew what that meant because I’d had to choose between those two options in order to make the reservations. “Cold. We wanted the full experience.” This was a lie—dammit, why was I stooping to lying to a total stranger?—but I had my reasons for picking the frozen option.

  She elbowed the man next to her. “That’s what I said we should do, but this cheap bugger called it rubbish.”

  The cheap bugger in question rolled his eyes. “She’s paying to freeze her arse off while we’ll be warm and happy, no offense t’ya, miss.”

  I didn’t take any because I agreed with him. The cost of staying in the ice part of the Icehotel had staggered me, but it was where Adrian would have stayed when he was here. If I was retracing his steps in the hopes that they would lead me to the spearhead, I had to retrace all of them.

  “Oh, the bus to the hotel is pulling up,” the woman said, glancing up at Brutus once more. “Best call your pet down and hide him in your bag.”

  I stifled my laugh at the thought of a bag that would be big enough to fit Brutus. “No need. He’ll follow by air.”

  Her brows rose. “You trained him like a hunting falcon?”

  That was one way to spin it. “He came to me trained” was what I said.

  She
gave me another “you’re weird” look, but said, “Quite. Well, since we’ll be seeing more of you at the hotel, I’m Zoe, and this is my husband, Dylan.”

  “Iris,” I introduced myself, choosing an I name so it would be easier to remember. I kept that theme when I waved Costa and Jasmine forward after I’d shaken Zoe’s and Dylan’s hands. “And this is my sister, Jada, and her boyfriend, Carl.”

  “Pleasure,” Costa said after giving me a startled glance when I called him her boyfriend. Hadn’t Jasmine told him I knew their secret, as if it wasn’t obvious? Men. They weren’t nearly as good at hiding things as they thought.

  I was surprised when their response to Costa and Jasmine was much stiffer than the friendliness they’d shown me. They shook Costa’s hand as if they’d really rather not, and they kept giving Jasmine oddly censuring looks.

  “Carl, eh?” Dylan said, looking Costa up and down. “Short for Carlo, I expect?”

  What did he mean by that? I wondered, when a deep voice said, “And I’m Zach,” right behind me.

  I turned around, stunned. Zach stood there, wearing his usual hoodie and jeans, his demeanor as casual as if he’d been traveling with us this entire time. I barely registered the much longer pause Zoe and Dylan had before they accepted the hand that Zach held out to them.

  “Is this your boyfriend, then?” Zoe asked me, releasing Zach’s hand almost immediately after she grasped it.

  “No,” I said with all the repellence I felt at the thought. Dating an Archon would be so sacrilegious!

  “Ah.” Zoe’s smile turned into a smirk. Then she leaned forward and whispered loud enough for everyone to hear, “I feel the same way about dating another species.”

  For a second, I panicked. Were she and Dylan minions? Was that how Zoe knew that Zach wasn’t human... Oh. Wait. That was not what she meant.