Chapter Twenty-Three - Evie
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Evie
CINDRALIS’S EYES SNAPPED to mine. “Come,” she said. “I’ll show you the way.”
I gathered the hem of my robe in one hand, and we ran. Well, I ran.
Cindralis moved like the corridor had already agreed to carry Her.
She didn’t seem to hurry so much as glide, pale and impossible and effortless, white smoke trailing at the edges of Her body as if the walls themselves were exhaling Her forward.
She would turn, and the stone obeyed. A seam flashed open before we reached it.
A corridor bent where it shouldn’t have bent.
Another wall split soundlessly at the brush of Her hand.
I was starting to think she hadn’t been hiding in these walls so much as haunting them.
I ran after Her barefoot, my lungs burning, the cold stone biting at the soles of my feet.
My pulse was still wrong from Him and the sick panic that hadn’t fully left my body, no matter how far I’d fled.
Every time the walls shifted around us, I half expected to feel that syrup-thick warmth at my back, Him coming after me and dragging me out of the passage like a child who had wandered somewhere forbidden.
“Where are we going?” I gasped.
“Outside.”
I nearly tripped. “Outside?”
“We need to get you outside,” She said, not slowing. “So they can find you.”
They. My heart gave one violent kick.
Luc.
The thought hit me like a flare under the ribs, bright enough to almost drown out everything else.
He was here. Or close. Or coming. The tether between us had been raw and feverish after what happened, but this was different.
This was movement. This was nearness. This was the horrifying real possibility that I might actually see him soon.
If… The First Light didn’t find me first. That thought struck through me, and my pace quickened.
We tore through twisting passages that felt less built than grown naturally, each wall yielding for Cindralis before she even touched it. The farther we went, the more the air changed. It thinned. It cooled. It lost some of the trapped stillness of the hidden corridors.
Under the scent of dust and stone, I caught something else. Wind and sunshine. Or the promise of it.
“He has entered Heaven’s gate,” Cindralis said.
Everything in me went electric. Lucifer. My Luc. He was here, and it wasn’t a dream or a desperate little pulse down the tether. He was here.
I ran harder.
At last, the corridor narrowed and then opened abruptly into a small round chamber I had never seen before.
The ceiling arched high overhead. The walls were pale stone etched faintly with old patterns that looked almost woven, threadlike lines caught inside the architecture itself. At the far end stood a door.
Tall and gold and severe, the kind of thing that looked like it had spent centuries guarding what stood on the other side.
Cindralis stopped before it.
I bent over with my hands on my knees, dragging in air. My pulse was everywhere, in my throat, my temples. I looked down, my fingertips were still sparking faintly with gold.
When I looked up, she had stopped.
“Evie,” she said, and something in Her voice had changed. It had gone careful.
“What?”
She turned to face me fully. The snakes at Her crown quieted one by one until they looked almost ornamental again, pale, watchful, and still.
“This is as far as I can go.”
I straightened slowly. “What do you mean?”
“There are places in this kingdom where I can move unseen,” she said. “And places where even I am only tolerated as a flaw in the weave.” Her gaze held mine. “Beyond this door, I become too visible.”
I looked at the door, then back at Her. “Then come anyway.”
A faint, sad smile touched Her mouth. “I still have work to do here. There is more we all must do to get that Pretender off His Throne.”
“Edie,” she said softly, and I almost corrected Her, but then that nickname struck something in me, “if I cross that threshold as I am, I announce myself to everything in Heaven. And it’s not yet time.”
That shut me up.
Before I could say anything else, white smoke began to gather around Her hands.
I tensed. “What are you doing?”
“Helping.”
That didn’t make me feel any better, but I watched anyway.
The smoke lifted in pale ribbons from Her fingers, circling Her wrists, then spilling outward until it spun around me too.
It was cool at first, then warm, then neither.
It threaded over my shoulders, caressing my waist, through my hair, and suddenly the whole chamber smelled faintly of rain and old light.
Cindralis watched me with that same strange, impossible softness.
“When you go through that door,” she said, “they must not see you as you are now, but as you were.”
The smoke tightened.
I felt my clothing change first. The horrible golden robe loosened and rewove itself around my body. The heavy pale gold softened into something lighter, finer, older. Silky fabric slid over my skin in new lines, baring one shoulder, belting at the waist, falling in elegant folds to my feet.
Then my hair raised up as if the air around me had turned suddenly electric. That sensation was the strangest of all, a cool, weightless shifting over my scalp and down my back. I lifted a hand as the smoke thinned and caught a lock that had slipped over my shoulder.
Brown. Not pink. It was now completely brown.
I looked down. My golden robe was gone. In its place was white draped fabric in graceful Grecian folds, beautiful in that ancient way that made modern clothing feel suddenly clumsy.
My skin looked brighter somehow, almost lit from within.
My hands were still my hands and yet not.
They were mortal and something else layered together.
Cindralis looked me over, and Her expression shifted into satisfaction.
“What?”
“The glamour is good,” she said. “But it is not perfect.”
My stomach tightened as I glanced around at myself. “What’s wrong with it?”
Her gaze held mine.
“Nothing one will notice at first.” She stepped closer, Her voice lowering. “But if someone gets too near, if they look too long…” Her fingers hovered near my face. “Your eyes betray you.”
I went still.
“They are still Evie’s,” She said. “Not in color. In ache.” Her gaze sharpened. “Ediphiel had innocence still clinging to her. Wonder. You look at the world like it has already bitten you.”
That landed harder than I wanted it to.
“So what do I do?”
“Do not linger,” She said. “Do not let anyone hold your face in their gaze. Keep moving.”
I looked up at Cindralis, and memories hit me hard enough to make me stagger. Not all at once, but in flashes.
My hands in wet clay. Light spilling from my fingers into flowers and fruit and the veins of leaves and curves of petals. A garden so new it felt holy. There was warm air. Water singing over stone. My own laughter, light and easy and full. And someone watching me from the edge of it all.
He was bright and beautiful in that unbearable way with auburn hair lit like polished copper and bright blue eyes fixed on me with that same impossible familiarity. White wings, pristine and vast and untouched behind him.
My breath caught. “What am I?” But the words lodged in me because I knew. “Heavenly…” I whispered. And then it came again. “My name was Ediphiel.”
Cindralis’s face softened. “Yes.”
I stared at my hands. I wasn’t just Evie. I wasn’t just the girl with pink hair and a bad temper and a body that kept betraying her. Ediphiel. I had been a…. Heavenly Artisan. One who shaped beauty and called it work. One who walked in Eden before it broke. One who fell in love there.
Something deeper stirred under that name, something vast and old and sealed away too completely to reach.
I looked at Cindralis. “He knew me.”
The First Light.
Maybe not everything. Maybe not whatever still slept underneath Ediphiel. But enough. Enough to recognize something in me before I could name it myself. Enough to choose me for His pet project.
Cindralis didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.
I looked down at my hands, at fingers that suddenly felt like they belonged to two lives at once.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“I never stopped looking.” Her voice nearly broke on the last word, though Her face did not.
I swallowed hard and looked at the door. “What happens when I go through?”
“You keep moving,” She said. “You do not stop. You do not let fear get to you. You go outside, and you let yourself be found.”
My heart stumbled. “By Luc?”
A faint smile touched Her mouth. “If fate is feeling merciful.”
That hurt in a way I didn’t have time to examine.
Behind the door, something trembled through Heaven. Like the realm itself was shifting under pressure.
Cindralis heard it too. The snakes lifted their heads. “Go,” She said.
I looked at Her one last time. “What if I can’t find him?”
Her smile turned small and sad and strangely proud. “You will. You will see him, and when you do, run toward him, and do not look back.”
Then She touched my cheek, just once, Her fingertips cool as moonlight on skin. “Go, little maker.”
I put my hand on the gold doorknob, and without turning it, the door opened. Sunlight poured in, real sunlight, fierce and clean and almost painful after all the curated honey-glow behind me. Wind hit my face, real wind, lifting the hem of my dress and whipping my hair back around my shoulders.
For one staggering moment, I could only stand there in disbelief before I stepped through.
The first thing I saw was sky, endless and luminous and raw with actual distance. The second thing I saw was white stone blinding in the light with terraces and columns and gardens laid out beyond me in impossible symmetry.