Chapter 39
“Gaia.” Whispered like a prayer, her name tangled on my tongue, as if I didn’t hold the divine right to speak it.
She bit the inside of her lip, pale yellow brows rising, cheeks growing fuller as if she…
Was she holding in a laugh?
“Now that you’ve dropped to your knees, you owe me twenty pushups.”
“I’m sorry.” The words, my mind, were a confusing, bumbling mess. I scrambled to right myself, forcing my soft legs to hold me. “What?”
Leaning on the curve of her full hip, Gaia crossed her arms. The scabbard fixed to her belt shifted with the motion. “You get this a lot, I’m sure, but you remind me so much of your mother.”
My throat bobbed. I could think of nothing to say. What could I say? I was a mere mortal beside her. I must have been staring. Fuck it, I know I was staring.
Airy laughter bubbled out of her, so light and carefree.
Oh my God, could she hear what I was thinking?
She waved towards the back of the cave. Come.
Her lips didn’t move, yet her voice rang against the stones, the walls, the bones, the hard-packed mud, she and the elements fused as one.
She stepped into the gloom, wings softly glowing and illuminating the path, thick heels indenting the dirt.
I glanced at my doppelg?nger, whimpering in the corner. A pang of hurt lanced through my heart. What about her? I thought.
You’re not ready to face her, Gaia said, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.
It’d been so long since she answered my thoughts, I almost forgot she could do it—almost forgot I’d spent a full decade giving up headspace to her and the other two archangels, Fei and Akosua.
She’ll be there when you are. Don’t worry.
A chill raked my spine, as if the same emptiness that haunted that lonely girl in the corner had wrapped around me. I shook it off, jetting after Gaia.
Her silhouette burned back the shadows. When she turned down a tunnel, everything left behind pitched into darkness. Including me.
“Wait!” I said, hands flinging out in front of me as I fought my way through the lightless cavern, chasing after the faint glow of her wings.
She turned down a fork in the path. A faint roar rose from its depths.
My stomach twisted. Where are we going? I wondered.
I can’t stand the sight of the bones, she sighed. Some of those belong to my friends.
Her scribes. I gulped. The Coffin Seeker. He’d gloated that the inner caves were supposed to be the worst.
My palm clapped over my mouth as we turned down yet another winding hall.
Water trickled over the path, my feet sloshing in the loose dirt. Or was it blood…
Gaia interrupted my thoughts. It’s just water, River.
Just when my legs felt like they might give out, shafts of light streaked the dim corridor. I dared a glance at my feet. No bones, no bodies, only puddles and rocks. The roar I’d heard when we entered grew steadier, fiercer, louder.
The pathway opened up into a chamber, its ceiling as tall as a mountain peak. Ferns dripped from the walls and a waterfall thundered in the middle, its mist glittering in the air and dusting my cheeks.
A rainbow arced across the turquoise pool. I paused on the black lava bank, breathing in the ice and moss and magic.
Behind the falls, faint flickers of green and yellow and red poked through. Even with the obstructed view, I knew what they were—the Empyrean symbols for the Watchers—exactly like the ones in my mom’s lair at Natural Bridges.
Gaia hopped onto a boulder, sitting still as the stone. The bottom tips of her wings grazed the ground.
The waterfall beat against the pool’s surface, but it might as well have been my shoulders. “I killed a man.”
Kicking a thigh-high boot over a knee, she tucked her fist under her chin. “I know.”
“And you’re okay with that?” Hot shame crept up my neck. “I’m a murderer.”
Soft light radiated from her, painting her square face, her wide jaw, her slightly upturned nose, in an otherworldly glow.
“Isn’t that against some heavenly law? It’s against mortal law for sure.” I glared at the waterfall, at the shining glyphs behind it, at the empty space where my mom’s should’ve been burning bright. “Will I turn into a demon? Will I be sent to the Fall?”
We’ve all done things we’re not proud of. The cavern pulsed with the words. I heard them in my heart, my soul, my mind just as much as my ears. It doesn’t make you evil.
I scuffed the sole of my shoe on the ground. “You’ve killed people?”
She slid down the stone, coming to join me at my side. Her arm grazed mine.
“I convinced an entire elven kingdom to fight in a war I fear we will never win. Hundreds died—soldiers and innocents alike. So, guilty as charged.” The tips of her wings shuddered. “And it’s only going to happen again.”
“It’s inevitable, isn’t it? This war,” I said, pacing the waterline, my shoes sinking into the dark sand.
Gaia didn’t answer, standing tall and straight like a chiseled, porcelain statue.
“I mean, there has to be an alternative to more violence,” I pondered out loud as I walked back and forth, back and forth, following the crescent shape of the pool.
I twisted the sleeves of my shirt, the fabric drooping and soiled. Orange and black wisps of ink peeked out of the cuff.
Finally, the angel decided to speak. “I have one too.”
Chin snapping up, I met her stare. That wasn’t what I was expecting her to say. Her eyes flicked to my wrist. Green flames danced playfully behind her pupils, in place of irises.
“You have a tattoo?” My mouth hung open longer than I’d intended, but the shock was real.
Rolling up the gossamer sleeve of her forest-green tunic, she held out her arm to show a grayscale dragon, permanently in flight below her inner elbow.
“I have a few, actually. And this one—” She pulled up the platinum strands of loose hair that weren’t braided along the crown of her head, and revealed a small anchor, blotchy ink and uneven lines on the back of her neck. “Lost a bet to a sailor one night.”
Despite it all, a ghost of a smile danced over my lips. “No kidding…”
Letting down her hair, she bumped my shoulder with hers, broad and plush.
“Your mother used to come here when she’d visit.
When she wasn’t off calming a tempest or rounding up mischievous river sprites or redirecting selkies back into the wild depths of the sea.
” Her gaze locked onto the shoreline, as if the memory was dancing before her eyes.
“We’d sit on this beach, split a bottle of wine, dip our toes in the water, and gossip about the seraphim. ”
I filled my lungs with air, and for the first time in a long, long time it didn’t feel stabbing, heavy. Haunting.
“I miss her.” Emotion softened her rolling accent. “And while Mira’s not here anymore”—she turned to me then—“you are.”
Spoken as if that meant something, as if the fate of the realm wasn’t truly doomed.
“I heard that.” Her laugh was a shift of the earth, deep and rumbling.
My cheeks flushed. I really needed to tighten my mental shield. If that was even possible; Gaia was looking at me like it wasn’t, or at least, that’d it be really, really hard.
It was funny, I’d wished the Voices away for so long. But now that I had hers in my head again, I felt healed, whole—even if the whole telepathy thing was extremely intrusive.
She pursed her full lips, but it wasn’t enough to stifle her smile. “With you, Mortal Earth stands a chance. We can fortify the realm. We can restore the wards.”
“How? There are only two of you.” I stopped when she raised an eyebrow, then corrected myself. “Okay, like two and a half.”
“We have to summon the Angel of Air,” Gaia mused.
“What about,” I said, gulping nervously, “the Angel of Fire?” Akosua’s voice of fervor and flame, her words—spitting and passionate—shot through my mind.
Our gazes drifted to the symbols behind the falls: earth, air, and fire. I narrowed my eyes, swearing a faint blue flickered alongside them—but it was probably just a trick of the light and the rushing water.
“We…” She trailed off, pulling at a silver thread dangling from her clothes. “We don’t know.”
“You don’t think she joined hell like they claim she did?”
“I think that realm is founded on lies.” Gaia curled her fingers, and a translucent wave of Source broke through her tight fists.
Dirt shook loose from the walls. Ferns fluttered.
The force of it rustled the air in my lungs.
“Akosua wasn’t thrilled with your mom’s decision—none of us were—but she wasn’t evil.
She was steadfast in her loyalty to Empyrea.
This switch to suddenly fight for the enemy, it just… doesn’t make sense.”
As if Gaia had turned on a faucet, all of a sudden the details from that night at the Boardwalk flooded me.
And I let myself watch them, let myself feel the shock, the pain, the betrayal all over again.
Facing Ryder and Leif. Surfing the concrete wave.
Seeing Javi on top of the wreckage. Smoke and shadows and crooked limbs.
Serpentine and avian, evil, gruesome. It was only when Finis had me alone that she revealed the reason why they hadn’t just outright killed me.
They wanted my powers.
Desire and desperation are different things, the Coffin Seeker had told me deep in his haunted, wet dungeon.
I hated to think of him, hated even more that he might be right. Again.
“What if,” I said carefully, “this is all just a ploy to try and get us to join them? You said yourself, Chthonia is built on nothing but lies.”
It’s true. Gaia’s voice barreled into my mind. They thrive on deceit.
“When Chthonia’s lackeys almost captured me earlier this summer, one of their Greater Demons told me they wanted my powers, that they needed them in order to bridge the realms, to rule Mortal Earth.
” As I spoke the words out loud, exhilaration grew in my chest. “What if that’s what they have planned for all of us? ”
A beat. To siphon our powers?