Chapter Eleven - Evie #2
This time, when I flexed my hand, the bolt leaped clean and bright from my fingertips into the wall, and a sharp white crack split the silence.
I flinched and looked behind me at the veil, but the marble didn’t explode. The gold hit and spread instead, racing over the wall in branching lines, quick and searching. It traced something hidden beneath the smooth surface, and a shape emerged, long and narrow, like a seam.
My heart was going to beat out of my chest. “Mara?” I whispered, not taking my eyes off it.
Her voice came through the wall a second later, small and startled. “Evie? What was that?”
The gold brightened. The seam deepened. A line I would have sworn had not been there a moment ago now ran from floor to ceiling, thin and glowing from within.
“I think…” I swallowed. “I think I found something.”
“Found what?”
I barely heard her. The wall moved, then opened as it gave with a soft inward sigh, as if the stone were exhaling. A section of the marble folded back soundlessly into darkness, but it didn’t open into Mara’s room.
It opened into a passage.
I stared. It was narrow, more of a hidden space than a hallway running between the walls like a secret.
The air inside was cooler than my room, stale but not dusty, untouched in a way that felt intentional.
It didn’t have the softness of my alcove, and it wasn’t bright with His light.
There was just darkness and stone and a silence that felt older than this place.
“Mara,” I said, my voice thin with disbelief. “There’s… something here.”
“What do you mean?” she asked. “Evie, what’s happening?”
She couldn’t see it, and I wasn’t sure how to explain it without sounding like a crazy person. It was the space between our rooms, somehow behind it and yet still inside it.
Maybe I could escape?
“I’ll be right back.”
“Evie, I wouldn’t—”
Hope surged so fast it made me stupid. I stepped forward.
One step into the dark. Then another. The passage swallowed sound immediately.
The glow from my room thinned at my back, silvering the edges of the narrow corridor but not reaching far.
I could still see the opening behind me and the slice of my bed, just enough to turn back in a hurry if I had to.
Ahead, the passage stretched into dimness like a hidden artery. My pulse roared in my ears. I took one more step, slower now, my hand trailing the wall as if I could steady myself against the impossible. Was I really doing this?
Then it hit me. Warm. Sweet. Syrupy. That awful gilded thickness in the air, coating the back of my throat before I even had time to think, and I froze.
No.
The warmth wasn’t behind me in my room. It was ahead. Somewhere in the dark beyond the reach of the light. That terrible softness unfurled through the passage like perfume over rot. He was near.
His light wasn’t visible, but it thickened ahead of me, coating the narrow passage like honey poured over the stone.
Every instinct in my body screamed at me to turn back. I stood there with one foot deeper in the hidden dark and one still half-turned toward my room, my heart beating so hard I thought it might give me away. I looked back one more time, and the open seam glowed faintly gold, waiting.
I stood there in the dark, heart beating out of my chest, and I thought of the way He kept coming and going like everyone in this place belonged to Him down to the marrow. Maybe we did. And if I walked back into my room like a good girl, I’d prove Him right.
I swallowed hard and whispered, “Fuck it.” Then I kept going.
I moved slowly, barefoot and shaking, and still wearing that golden robe they’d given me. The passage narrowed so small I had to sidestep, my hands bracing the wall behind me, but then it widened just enough for me to walk forward and breathe again.
I kept one hand gliding along the cold wall to steady myself. The farther I went, the stronger the warmth became, that same awful gilded softness that made my skin crawl.
Then, the corridor bent. The stones ahead had a faint glow, and I stopped at what looked like a complete dead end, a smooth slab of pale marble with no way around it. There was no sign it was anything but a wall. But the feeling was strongest here and just beyond it, I could feel Him somewhere.
My hand lifted before I fully decided to move it. I pressed my palm to the wall and shut my eyes.
Show me, I asked.
The answer came at once. The marble thinned beneath my hand with a low, silent shimmer, as if the wall had become milk glass lit from behind. Veins of gold spread through it in branching lines, and then the whole surface turned translucent.
He was there standing nearly in the middle of the room, facing away from me. I gasped and ducked instinctively, dropping low so fast my knee hit the floor hard. I just knew He was going to turn around and see me, and whatever this was had just opened me up for Him to look straight through.
But He never did. So carefully, I lifted my head.
The room spread beyond the glass in a blinding wash of white and gold, so perfect it made my skin crawl.
It was ornate and gaudy, and every line was too clean.
Every surface was too polished. The whole room looked untouched by anything human, or mortal, or alive enough to leave fingerprints. Was this… His private chambers?
There was no bed, no soft places to sit. But at the center of the room rose a golden throne lifted a few feet off the ground on a dais with a spotlight shining down on it. He climbed the dais and sat down, and around Him knelt eleven figures.
My stomach knotted because these weren’t people. I knew that immediately, even before I understood why. They were too still until they moved, and when they moved, it was too smooth, too precise and robotic like automatons.
Each one was different, like deities from multiple religions. I recognized Egyptian, Indian, and others. They were in robes, veils, pieces of armor, and all of it looked ceremonial in some language I didn’t know. They formed a half ring around the throne, bowed toward it in frozen devotion.
It was a strange sight. They were beautiful in a way that felt almost blasphemous, and yet they all seemed familiar in a way that made my skin crawl. My eyes moved over them all at once and then individually catching on details that refused to make sense.
They looked so real, and yet… didn’t. One looked like a merman with scales catching the gold light in wet, oil-slick flashes.
Another had huge horns, its face too animal to be human.
One farther back had three faces with multiple arms and legs, while another bowed with snakes threaded through her hair and faint glowing lines under her skin.
One stood out only in profile, where the shadow of his head looked like a dog with a muzzle and sharp teeth.
One woman had hair the color of pomegranates and skin that gleamed obsidian under the light while another looked half mechanical in the most sacred, awful way, too many arms hidden beneath drapery until the light shifted and I saw them, metallic at the joints and moving mechanically.
And then my eyes snagged on two more of them, and my heart began to race. There was a woman at the center of the group with a man next to her.
The woman knelt in pale gold and white, draped in soft layers that caught the light like water.
She wore a crown of jewels, and beauty clung to her so intensely it felt unnatural, oppressive, as if the room had softened around her and never straightened again.
Even kneeling, even empty-faced, there was something unbearable about her.
My stomach twisted just looking at her, and I didn’t know why.
The man was almost plain beside the rest. His face reminded me of all the illustrations of Jesus Christ I’d seen as a child. Nothing in him demanded attention at first glance, no extra limbs, no animal shape, no flames or scales. He looked perfectly normal. Human, even, except for the wings.