Chapter 6
T hirty minutes later, Rhode and Drea—his care provider and soul bond to Bronze’s other brother Chrome—walked out of the sick bay where Clara was being seen. Bronze barely let Drea’s purple nitrile gloves hit the waste bin before he rushed over to both of them. But before his first question could leave his lips, Rhode pegged him with a warning look that said far more than any expression had any right to.
All’s good. Settle. And then finally . . . We’ve got a lot to talk about.
Drea squeezed on a few pumps of hand sanitizer from the wall unit outside the patient room, gave her hands a few good hearty shakes to hasten the drying and dispense with some of the alcoholic fumes, and dug around in her lab coat for her always-present bottle of lily-scented moisturizer. Mages, even in the middle of the night, the woman stuck to a personal care routine with enough diligence to make the Armed Forces seem like they were slacking in the scheduled efficiency department. Figured it made sense, given that she chose to have ass-length hair and all the maintenance that came with it and had still managed to patch up their boy Rhode after his captivity far better than any of the sentinels ever could.
Not for the first time, Bronze wondered why more mortal civilizations weren’t matriarchies. Shit made sense, even if he was a millisecond away from the vein in his temple exploding and taking him into aneurysm territory over the woman’s dallying.
With painfully slow movements, Drea finally finished her mile-freaking-long skin care routine and gave them both a reassuring smile.
“She’s sleeping now. Fluids are dripping into her just fine, and all her vitals are steadily creeping toward normal. Whoever she is, she’s damn lucky you found her when you did.”
Bronze nodded and did his best to keep from not so slowly escorting his brother’s mate way the heck out of earshot so he could get to the bottom of whatever Rhode had managed to discover. The former seraphim commander of Chrome’s intelligence unit may have been out of the game and stuck in the mortal realm like the rest of the sentinels, but old habits didn’t just die hard with that one. They were pulverized into atomic ash and cast to the wind along with the dead secrets of his enemies.
Efficient, that one.
In other words, the dude also knew stuff. And, yeah, Bronze really needed to know what he knew.
“Appreciate the help,” Bronze said before placing a hand on the small of Drea’s back and urging her down the hallway toward her and her mate’s living quarters. No easy feat, given that the woman was nearly as tall as he was and had a backbone stronger than most suspension bridge cables.
Her long blonde braid, a bit mussed from its hasty middle-of-the-night erection but still just as heavy, smacked him in the chin on the back spin as she whipped out of his hold. The look in her violet eyes promised a certain kind of punishment that made even Bronze’s balls tense up on alert. “Um, no . You do not get to wake me up before the ass crack of dawn, have me explain to Chrome why I’m being forced to put work clothes on, drop me in front of some poor injured woman and say, ‘Here, fix her,’ without providing me details.” Her insistent finger found the precise spot on his chest that had zero padding and abysmal pain tolerance, and she rage-poked the shit out of him. “I’m here, and thanks to me, so is she, so start talking. I want deets.”
“Ouch! Fine, okay? Fine.” Bronze murmured his agitation, grabbed up her hands and, with a show of caring patience worthy of a goddamned Academy Award, slowly placed them at her sides. But because he wasn’t born yesterday, he strategically moved his grip to her shoulders lest she get any more bright ideas for sudden movements or finger jabs.
Her mouth, however, he couldn’t do anything about.
“I’m serious, Bronze. Just what the hell did I walk into here?” Some of the fire had extinguished from her plea and had been replaced with the compassion and concern that made Chrome and the others love her and allowed Rhode to trust her implicitly with his care following his captivity in Cyro’s camp, despite the seraph’s well-guarded secrets.
Right on cue, the seraphim commander sidled over to Drea and replaced Bronze’s hands with his own, then turned her to face him. “You are, by far, the greatest asset to any of us, and to me, especially.”
A subtle flush darkened Drea’s already heated cheeks. Mages, the woman cranked out BTUs like a frickin’ fighter jet engine when she sank her teeth into something. But the tells of exhaustion were there for those who knew to look for them. Despite the calculating questions running behind her eyes, the shadows beneath them told a different story, as did the way her shoulders sagged into Rhode’s far gentler hold.
Girl was as ferocious and determined as a honey badger but had a paltry amount of experience exerting her dominance when she was bone tired. Who could blame her?
“Right now, you know what we know. It does none of us any good to conjecture on speculation, especially not at this late hour. As you said, she’s sleeping, so there will be no further answers for any of us tonight. I suggest you take the opportunity to return to Chrome. He’s wired the sick bay to alert you instantly if a patient even snores funny. At the first sign of a change, you’ll be the first to hear of it, I promise. Please, Drea. Go rest. You’ll be a better help to her if you’re not using every spare amount of energy to keep yourself from getting annoyed at Bronze. That is a feat that can tax even the strongest warrior.” He winked at her.
“Asshole,” Bronze muttered.
Drea shuffled her feet and let the seraph kiss her on her forehead. “Fine. But the second she’s up, I’ll be here, and I want answers.” The look she threw Bronze over her shoulder could have melted whatever poor stubborn polar ice caps still remained.
Message received.
Bronze nodded his thanks and hefted as much appreciation as possible into the grin he volleyed back. “You’re the best, as always. Get some rest.”
“Don’t”—her jaw cracked on a yawn she was too slow to cover up—“tell me what to do.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Once her footsteps turned into nothing more than retreating echoes, Bronze stood next to Rhode. “She’s going to kill you for lying to her. You know that, right?”
“Who said I lied?”
“Drea does not know what we know, because I saw the way your eyes settled on the lycan woman’s belongings before Drea stuffed them into a plastic bag. You know something, or at least some part of you recognized something of hers.” Bronze let the note of challenge settle around the hallway. When it hit the floor unanswered, a different kind of unease reverberated back at him through the quiet, and he cursed inwardly.
It was a dangerous thing to tear secrets out of spies. But to attempt to unearth them from a former spy who’d been tortured, lost to time, experimented on, and rescued with no knowledge of what happened or whether the celestial powers stolen from him would ever return?
Forget honey badgers. Bronze had just poked an unstable atomic bomb held together by secrets and seclusion.
Despite the cold warning swirling in Rhode’s eyes, Bronze never bristled. He had too many questions about the lycan woman, and the memories of how he found her, coupled with the remnants of the sun deity’s little lycan prophecy where he was concerned, only made him twitchier.
Rhode let his chest fall and directed Bronze to another empty patient room across the hall. “Let’s talk.”
The identical four walls, beige cabinetry, and jars containing every possible size of sterile-wrapped gauze under the sun made for a terrible audience to what Bronze needed to both say and hear.
After he spent so many eons cracking jokes and lightening the mood at the expense of his brothers, the ironic change of spotlight that was only enhanced by the sterile glow of all that medical shit was an oddly hollow experience. His past was so riddled with sunken holes and buried promises, he sometimes wondered whether there was anything of worth to find there at all. When Saulé, the celestial goddess with the supremely unhelpful lycan premonition, cast down her beam of light on him, he’d half expected it to bounce around an empty tunnel shrouded with nothing but cobwebs that shielded up his trap doors.
He should have known someone would eventually test the load-bearing qualities of his past to see just how swiftly those in his life would fall through.
Rhode strode into the room after him with a large plastic bag in his hand.
Bronze lifted a brow. “It’s a little late for takeout, but I can always eat.”
Once the door shut them into the small space, Rhode placed the bag on top of the counter, and the familiar garments the lycan woman had worn when Bronze had found her were pulled out in a neatly folded pile. Everything had been dried and folded into a succinct little bundle, and Bronze tried not to look too closely at the loose white blouse that sat on top. If he stared at the fabric with the same intensity the damn thing called to him with, the conjured image of a pair of perfect breasts molded with the stuff would distract him away from the answers he intended to throttle out of Rhode.
Bronze swallowed hard and sliced his gaze away, instead focusing on the peculiar necklace Rhode had grabbed that had been tucked beneath the woman’s outerwear.
The thing kind of looked like a cross between a large fang and a small horn of some kind, though why the woman would wear it was beyond even his wildest fashion sense, which wasn’t saying a whole lot considering he pretty much vacillated between graphic tees, various leather chest holsters and baldrics, and full-body metallic armor.
“What’s that?” he asked. “Something of hers?”
Rhode took the necklace—for it was a necklace, judging by the thin strap of leather Bronze now recognized from when he’d examined her neck for injury—and placed it by itself on the counter, far away from everything else. Though the seraph held the object with great care, he also wasted no time releasing the thing. Once his fingers were free and clear of what looked like bone matter, he breathed a soft sigh of relief and collapsed onto the small nearby stool. Even though he had been rescued from captivity the better part of a year ago, he was still occasionally plagued by bouts of exhaustion and weakness. Damn, it hurt to see, but Bronze wouldn’t belittle the angel’s progress or pride by looking away.
“I’ve seen something like this before,” Rhode said calmly once he’d regained more control of himself.
“You have? Where?”
There was a long pause where those umber eyes of his seemed to glaze over with some distant memories before returning to the present. “At Cyro’s grotto.”
Every molecule in Bronze’s body stood up and took notice.
“What?” Bronze dropped his arms and pushed away from the counter he’d taken a lean-to on. He had half a mind to charge at the seraph and shake more words out of him, but that faraway haze returned again and, with it, an eerie sense that what Rhode was about to reveal was just as much for his benefit as Bronze’s.
“Cyro referred to it as a relic.”
Huh. Interesting.
Bronze’s voice gentled. “When did you see it?” Careful. He had to be very careful here, but shit, he wasn’t skilled with the whole patiently diplomatic routine.
“The better part of a century ago, we were located in a different underground location from where Drea and Chrome found me. One time, when Cyro visited my cell, he didn’t come to me right away but instead stopped to converse with an apex about something. It was unusual for him to hold such a conversation in front of me, though perhaps he thought I was not capable of listening. Most of the time, he was right. That time, however, I had a brief respite of a more lucid moment. I heard every whispered word.”
Bronze let the seraph’s mind wander where it needed to go, though every instinct burned with fury at the mention of Rhode’s time there, of what the angel must have endured, especially with an apex charmer—the highest class of charmer and the most ruthlessly powerful—as a jailer. More than once, Bronze had thought it was a blessing from the prime mages that Rhode didn’t and wouldn’t remember his time there. Now, after witnessing firsthand the angel’s glassy eyes and haunted visage whenever the past came upon him, he wasn’t so sure.
Rhode spoke idly, seemingly unfazed by the memories that tumbled out, as if used to the dull blankness. “The relic holds dormant celestial magic.”
Bronze stiffened. “How is that possible? What would Cyro want with it, and why the hell would a female like her be found wearing it?”
“Cyro was convinced it was the key to entering the Empyrean somehow. He never mentioned specifics, but he believed it contained a core component capable of opening up the gates again, so that he might finally have the means to enter and lay siege to Heaven’s highest realm.”
The room, small as it was, got about a thousand times smaller under the weight of Rhode’s revelation. “What are you saying? That this horn thing has magic that can get us home?”
Home. By the mages, how long had that word sat like a lead weight on his chest making each breath that much harder to punch out? Yes, it had been right, what he and his brothers had done. Sealing off the gates of Heaven so the Empyrean and all the souls in it would be forever free from Cyro’s tyranny and invasion, even if it meant Bronze and the sentinels might never hope to see the realm’s light again.
For Bronze, however, it wasn’t just about the homecoming that had made his eons in the mortal realm particularly painful. It wasn’t just the wasted years or the endless battles or the daily depletion of his celestial powers.
It was about who he’d left behind and the sacred vow he’d sworn to uphold that had been forever lost to him.
Polina.
“Can we get back?” Bronze asked through a tight throat. “Can that thing get us back?”
Rhode blinked away the fog that had settled over his expression, and familiar clarity once again returned to his features. “I don’t know, but I do know that Cyro has a relic identical to what your lycan female was wearing around her neck.”
Bronze’s enthusiasm stalled out at that. There was a second relic? “How do you know it’s not the same one?”
Rhode shook his head. “I thought it was the same one at first, but after I examined it more closely, I noticed a crack at the base of this one. I removed the fastener to get a better look, and I was correct. The one Cyro had was pristine. I remember how strong the glare of its pure opalescence was compared to the dinginess of the grotto and how I winced when I looked at it. The relic was pristine but also, somehow, incomplete. The base of it was shorn and jagged, while the rest of its curvature was unblemished. Cyro had made a point of saying so. This one, however,” he said, pointing to the fang-like bit of stone that sat so unassumingly on the counter, “is flawed, though only slightly, and when you remove its fastener, the base is cut in a similar way as to fit together with what I’ve seen before. I believe it is the other half of what Cyro has.”
“The other half . . .” Bronze trailed off, giving his thoughts free rein to thoroughly freak the fuck out.
The Empyrean. Dormant magic.
Was he really facing down an item that could return them all to their home? And more to the point, what the hell was a half-dead lycan female doing with the damn thing wrapped around her neck?
“Why would—” Insistent alarms sounded out from the room across the hall. He’d heard them before. They were the sounds of steady rhythmic vital signs kicking into healthier, higher gears when someone returned to the land of the living. But for the first time, those sounds took on a different cadence. One of desperate questions, worried outcomes, and . . . hope.
Rhode got to his feet and opened the door. “Let us see what she can answer.”