The Sweetest Burn

  I turned to give the Archon a scathing look. “You promised me that you’d look out for my sister.”

  “And I did,” he replied in that infuriatingly calm tone. “I left Jophiel to watch over them.”

  “You’d like him,” Costa said to Adrian, giving him a hand slap instead of a hug. “He quotes Scripture all the time.”

  “And I missed that?” Adrian replied with heavy irony.

  “Yeah, but—” Costa eyed the ring on my finger that Jasmine hadn’t noticed yet “—guess you were busy with something else.”

  Adrian’s hand covered mine, hiding the ring. “We were, but before we get to that, I owe both of you an apology.”

  Costa’s brows rose, as if he’d never heard those words from Adrian before. My sister looked at our clasped hands and her mouth curled down, but all she said was, “For which thing?”

  I shook my head at her choice of words. Good to know she still had her spiteful side even after being trapped with a Scripture-touting Archon for this timeline’s version of weeks.

  “For accusing you of betrayal.”

  The words fell flatly from Adrian, but his hand flexed around mine almost convulsively, indicating his true emotions.

  “It wasn’t you, Jasmine, although I was sure you’d done it,” he went on. “And it wasn’t you, Costa, although I thought you were the only other option. It was me.”

  My sister’s features darkened until all the blood must have been rushing to her face. “You,” she almost hissed. “Again.”

  “Not by choice,” I said quickly, squeezing Adrian’s hand hard. “This wasn’t like before. Demetrius was, um, able to track Adrian through his blood, but none of us knew that.”

  Now Costa’s brows really rose, although I wasn’t going to tell them how. That was Adrian’s secret to keep or to reveal.

  “I’m sorry, too,” I said, meaning it, but also trying to fill the new, ominous silence. “I thought it was you who’d snuck behind our backs to Demetrius, Costa. Please forgive me.”

  A muscle ticked in his jaw as he glanced at Adrian, then he gave us a lopsided smile. “I guess I’m sorry, too, because I thought it had to be Jasmine since I knew it wasn’t me.”

  “And I thought it was you for the same reason,” Jasmine said, with a pleading look at Costa. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Looks like we all are,” Costa said, but I noticed that he took Jasmine’s hand and no one else’s. Then he turned to Adrian. “That must be powerful magic Demetrius is using.” His tone was casual, but the look he gave Adrian made me wonder if he suspected the truth. “Do you have a way around it?”

  “Yep, Zach fixed it, we’re all good,” I rushed to reply.

  Adrian sighed. “I’m not hiding this from my best friend, Ivy, even if he’s no longer my friend once I tell him.”

  “Tell me what?” Costa asked with open challenge.

  Adrian dropped my hand and squared his shoulders. “I’m Demetrius’s son,” he said in an unwavering tone. “His real son.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  WE DIDN’T HAVE a chance to tell Jasmine and Costa about the binding ceremony. Not with how they took the news about Demetrius. Costa was the opposite of congratulatory, of course, but my sister just lost it. She railed at Adrian, at me and even at Zach, who pulled his usual disappearing act after her first shout at him. Finally, Costa suggested they take a walk.

  “It’ll give us time to think,” Costa said, tugging her a step down the hill. “Let’s sit by the river. You love that.”

  She snatched her hand away. “No. I’ll go alone.”

  I stared at my sister as she stomped down the hill. I would’ve gone after her if I didn’t believe my presence would do more harm than good. Right now, Jasmine might believe that this proved all her worst suspicions about Adrian, but after she calmed down, she’d realize it was no more Adrian’s fault that Demetrius had fathered him than it was my fault for being the last Davidian. Sometimes, the only choice life gave you was how you handled the things you didn’t choose.

  “She’s confused, angry and worried, but she’s strong,” I said once she was far enough away that she couldn’t hear me. “She’ll come around. She’s handled everything else that’s been thrown at her since demons kidnapped her six months ago.”

  Adrian’s gaze held hints of sadness as he looked from Costa to me. “Maybe she can’t handle this. It’s about more than who my father is. It’s also about who I am, and that’s half-demon.”

  “You were half-demon when you worked with an Archon for years to rescue innocent people from becoming realm slaves,” I said, my tone sharpening. “You were half-demon all the times you faced a horde of murderous minions and demons to protect me, and you were half-demon when you bound your soul to mine so you’d prove to me and everyone else that you weren’t fulfilling your fate.”

  “You did what?” Costa said in disbelief.

  Adrian glanced at him. “Living with demons taught me that trick, only this time, I used it against them instead of for them.” To me, he said, “Demons tie humans’ souls to theirs to create minions. It’s how regular humans suddenly get superhuman strength, and also how demons ensure that minions won’t betray them because, as you know, then the minions would suffer the same consequences. That’s how I knew that Zach could tie my soul to yours. Any power that demons have first originated from Archons.”

  I gripped his hand. “See? Once more, you prove that your bloodline is just that—a bloodline. Not a template for who you are now or who you will be later.”

  He touched my face, his large, strong hands managing to be feather soft against my skin. “You believe that, and I love you for it. But I don’t think most people share your opinion.”

  “Most don’t,” Costa agreed, ignoring the quelling look I sent him. “But some do, and I’m one of them.”

  Adrian stroked my face a final time before going over to Costa. “Thank you,” he said, grasping Costa by the shoulders.

  Costa rested his hands on Adrian’s arms, leaning in until their foreheads touched. “For decades, I saw who you used to be, and I hated that man. Then you rescued me and Tomas, and I spent the next several years seeing you fight to become someone else.” Costa’s voice thickened. “You did, and I love that man like a brother, no matter who his father might be.”

  Adrian pulled Costa into a hug that made tears prick my eyes, especially when Costa hugged him back just as hard. Then they separated, doing those awkward back slaps that men did when they were trying to downplay the fact that they’d experienced an emotional moment.

  “Hey, I noticed something in those photos,” Costa said, changing the subject, which Adrian seemed glad to do, too.

  “The tablet ones?”

  Costa patted his pants pocket, where I presumed Father Louis’s phone was located. “Yep. There’s no service here, so it was either look at those or listen to Jophiel recite entire books from the Old Testament.”

  Adrian grunted knowingly. “So, you chose the pics?”

  “Memorized them until the battery died,” Costa replied in a fervent voice.

  I stifled a snort. Good thing Zach had walked away during Jasmine’s tirade or he’d probably take issue with that comment.

  “Anything would help,” I told Costa. “We went to the places the tablet implied the staff would be, and while it had been there, it’s not now, and there were no other maps or clues.”

  Costa scratched his chin. “I’m not sure this means anything, but in tiny letters on the back of the tablet, it said ‘Made in Poland.’”

  “What?” I said in disbelief. The stone map with ancient runic writing that was our only clue to the second-most-hallowed weapon in the world had been mass-produced in Poland?

  “Did whoever took the staff leave that as a fucking joke?” Adrian growled
, echoing my next thoughts.

  “Maybe it was a decoy?” Costa offered, giving a helpless shrug. “You know, to throw demons off, if they found it?”

  “Then why bury it in a chapel?” Adrian burst out. “No demon could enter one. If I hadn’t used dark objects to curse the ground, Blinky would’ve been fried on contact with the chapel.”

  “Maybe whoever left it assumed that minions could’ve found it and brought it to their master,” I said, taking a wild stab.

  Adrian’s expression reflected all of the frustration I felt at this looking like yet another dead end. “Doubtful. What would a minion be doing in a church in the first place?”

  Nothing I could think of. There wasn’t anything remarkable enough about the chapel to draw that sort of attention to it. It was a small, hardly well-known one, and looked so unimpressive from the outside that no minion would feel compelled to search it for lost relics. In fact, if not for the chapel’s unusual history of being moved from place to place, there would be nothing notable about it at all. It certainly hadn’t been located in the center of a divinely parted sea or a locust storm, either.

  Wait a minute. There hadn’t been anything unusual about the area around the chapel. In fact, if Adrian hadn’t trapped a demon there that he wanted me to practice my skills on, we would’ve never swung by Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and found the stone map in the first place. We certainly wouldn’t have found the staff’s prior locations, giving us a rough timeline of where it had been over the past hundred years...

  All places that Adrian had also been very familiar with, and it wasn’t the first time. He’d also been the former ruler of the same realm that David’s slingshot had been hidden in. An idea slammed into my mind as if hurled by the slingshot supernaturally coiled inside my arm. What if there wasn’t just one map, but two?

  “With the realm bleeding onto the campus and demons slaughtering and kidnapping at will, we didn’t have time to wonder why there was no weather or other natural phenomenon around the chapel,” I said, interrupting Adrian and Costa’s dispute over whether the stone tablet was a deliberate red herring or just what the staff’s guardians had available to write their clue on. “We know the staff had been at St. Joan’s for a few years at least, so that area should have been known for freaky weather or strange geographical incidents, right?”

  “Yes,” Adrian replied, drawing the word out as he realized the implications, too. “So should its old locations in France and Long Island, but I don’t remember hearing about anomalies there, either. But we know the staff does affect its surroundings in powerful ways. That’s why the sailing stones in Death Valley were our first stop. After that, I figured we’d check out Honduras, where fish rain from the sky every year, then the Taos Hum in New Mexico, then Venezuela for the Catatumbo lighting—”

  “All places with freaky anomalies,” I interrupted. “Especially the fish thing, but if we don’t think the tablet is a joke or a decoy, then it’s an authentic clue from whoever took the staff. In that case, nothing on it was accidental. So, maybe the ‘Made in Poland’ decal was left on there for a reason.”

  Adrian stared at me, my meaning sinking in. “You think the staff is in a church in Poland,” he stated.

  “I think it might be,” I replied, and that wasn’t even the craziest part of the theory that had taken over my mind.

  Costa let out a disbelieving snort. “Talk about hiding a clue in plain sight! The decal was so small, anyone could have missed it.”

  “You didn’t,” I told him, with a grateful smile. “I probably never would have noticed it in those pictures.”

  He grunted. “You didn’t have those pictures as your only escape from endless sermons.”

  No, but Costa had. Coincidence? I was starting to doubt it.

  “So, let’s assume we’re right about the significance of ‘Made in Poland,’” I said, continuing with my theory. “Was Poland on your list of places with freaky weather occurrences?”

  “No,” Adrian said, his arched brow questioning where I was going with this.

  “When we get back to the real world, we can google Poland to see what parts have freaky natural occurrences,” Costa said.

  “We could do that,” I agreed, taking a deep breath. What I was about to suggest sounded insane, but after all I’d been through, I was starting to believe that more than a series of random coincidences and flukes had led us to where we were now. Add in some cryptic Archon speech about a map “of sorts” and a staff that might be controlling a lot more than nature, and maybe we’d been looking at this puzzle from the wrong angle.

  If not, well, then, this wouldn’t be the first time that someone called me crazy. “The staff is what Moses used during his infamous standoff with Pharaoh, but what was the point?” I asked, plowing ahead with my theory.

  Adrian lifted a brow. “To call down crushing plagues?”

  “Yes, but what was the point?” I insisted. “Everyone knows the ‘let my people go’ line that Moses kept repeating to Pharaoh, and after the plagues, Pharaoh did. So, what if the staff’s influence isn’t limited to nature? What if, just like with Pharaoh, the staff’s greatest accomplishment is influencing man?”

  I began to pace, so consumed by my theory that I couldn’t stand still any longer. “And if so, what if thousands of years later, the staff’s influence caused two sets of people to do the exact same crazy thing? After all, it cost huge sums of money to have an obscure little chapel disassembled and moved brick by brick over thousands of miles just to be reassembled again, and for what? There’s nothing special about the chapel! But we know that’s what happened, and we know the staff moved with it from France to New York to Milwaukee. So what if the staff made both those chapel owners do something senseless and costly, just like Pharaoh did something that he would have considered senseless and costly by letting his entire enslaved work force leave? And if so, then instead of looking for the staff in places with freaky nature anomalies, should we be looking for it in places with freaky human anomalies?”

  I was almost panting by the time I finished, having rushed through those last sentences without taking a single breath of air. When I was done, Adrian said nothing. Neither did Costa. They just stared at me, until the silence passed awkward and headed right into uncomfortable.

  Okay, so they didn’t seem to share my views on the staff. Wait until they heard the rest of my theory, and it was either tell them now or keep it to myself forever.

  “There’s more,” I said. No way could I keep this to myself. “I found the slingshot in your former realm when I was looking for Jasmine. We found the tablet by going to your former home at the campus, the chapel’s location in New York just happened to be at a chateau that you used to stay at, and its original location of Chasse-sur-Rhône in France just happened to be the first place you went to when you were exploring the human world. Yes, you’ve been all around in your very long life, but that’s too many coincidences. I think the tablet isn’t our only clue to the staff’s location, Adrian. I think the real map is you, so let me ask you—have you ever been to Poland?”

  If I thought they’d looked skeptical before, this time, both Adrian and Costa’s faces registered sheer disbelief. Then, after a silence that slashed across my nerves, Adrian’s expression changed, becoming so hard and calculating that, for a split second, he reminded me of Demetrius.

  “Yes, I’ve been to Poland,” he said in a stiff voice.

  I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. Now, for the million-dollar question. “Any particular place?” If he’d been all over that country, it would blow a huge hole in my theory, but the look he gave me sent chills up my spine.

  “There was one that I kept going back to.”

  “Was it a church?” Costa asked, his tone almost urgent.

  Adrian answered while keeping his gaze locked with mine, and what I s
aw in its depths convinced me that I was right. “Calling it a church is an understatement.”

  Zach appeared, walking over as casually as if he hadn’t left in an angelic huff. “Are you ready?”

  “For what?” I asked, wary.

  He smiled, a rare real one. “To go to the Salt Cathedral.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  ZACH LED US through the gateway to Wieliczka, Poland. All of us, even though I had wanted Jasmine to stay behind. Zach refused, saying that he had important tasks to carry out and couldn’t continue to act as our supernatural doorman. That analogy would have amused me if he didn’t follow it up by disappearing as soon as he’d pulled the last of us through.

  “This is just great.” I could still feel the gateway, but true to Zach’s warning, I could no longer cross through it. “Get your Archon ass back here, Zach! You can’t strand us in a tiny foreign town with no passports, money, transportation or weapons!”

  No response. I resisted the urge to give the gateway the middle finger only because I didn’t think Zach could see it. The only person more upset than me was Brutus. He snarled at the bright light around us, hitching his wings up to cover himself. Then he glared at me as if to say, More sunshine? How could you?

  “Don’t worry,” Adrian said, rubbing my back. “I can call someone and get what we need. We just need a phone.”

  Costa pulled out Father Luis’s cell phone, tried to turn it on and then put it back. “Yep, battery’s definitely dead.”

  I forced myself to relax. Okay, so we might have a long walk ahead of us, but there were worse things. At least it wasn’t dark, making this area demon-free for a few more hours until the sun went down. After that, well, where there was a light realm, there was a demon one. I could only hope that it wouldn’t drop on us or leak out onto us, either.

  Adrian looked around. “I know this place. It’s the town’s version of an urban market.”