The Brightest Embers

  Way to start off the new quest, Ivy! Demons of the world, beware—the last Davidian is back, and she’s got vomit!

  “What a rookie reaction to a realm trip, right?” I said out loud, brushing aside Adrian’s concerned hovering. “Don’t worry. I’m fine. Did I get any puke on my dress? Dammit, I did!”

  “We’ll need to get new clothes anyway. It’s much cooler here.” Then Adrian’s eyes narrowed as he looked around. “But this doesn’t look like Moscow. Where are we?”

  “Trier, Germany,” Zach replied.

  “Germany?” I repeated. “That wasn’t on the list of places you gave me, Adrian.” If it had been, I would’ve picked going here before going to the arctic end of Sweden. Hell, we’d had to travel through Germany in order to get to Sweden!

  “Why are we here?” Adrian asked. “This didn’t make the list of favorite places.”

  “It should have,” Zach said mildly.

  I gave Adrian an exasperated look. “Were you sending me to the wrong places on purpose again?”

  “No,” Adrian said emphatically. “I swear, I didn’t even think of this place as a possibility because I only came here once. I’d been to those other places many, many times.”

  “Quantity isn’t everything,” Zach said, still in that mild tone. “The place you visited here left an impact on you.”

  I arched a brow at Adrian. “Oh? How so?”

  He shifted uncomfortably. “The one time I came here, I got ragingly high and tried to set fire to the Aula Palatina.”

  “What?” I said even as Zach asked, “And how many other times in your life did you attempt arson?”

  “None,” Adrian replied, his tone defensive now. “I mostly stuck to hurting myself when I visited this world.”

  “You see?” Zach said with satisfaction. “Impact.”

  “Or a temporary case of ‘like father, like son,’” I noted. “Demetrius burned down one of your former favorite places, remember? You probably got the arson idea from him...”

  My voice trailed off as an idea began to form. Zach looked at me, his mouth doing that not-quite-a-smile thing. “Exactly.”

  I glanced up at the sun’s midlevel position in the sky, then down at my vomit-spattered dress. “We need to hurry. We have to get Brutus, get some new clothes and then get to whatever place you tried to torch, Adrian. Something very important is there.”

  * * *

  WE ARRIVED AT the Aula Palatina, or Basilica of Constantine, with two hours of sunlight left. That should be enough to feel around for something hallowed, hopefully find it and get to somewhere safe before nightfall. If worse came to worst and it took longer, Emperor Constantine’s former palace entrance hall was now a church, so we’d be on hallowed ground. I’d rather wait out the darkness hiding on the property than take our chances looking for a hotel. Zach—of course—had disappeared on us while we’d been waiting for a taxi.

  “I will see you again,” he’d said right before vanishing.

  With him, that could mean five minutes or five weeks. Either way, we couldn’t count on him to pull us into the safety of a light realm if we finished after dark. We had to assume that we were on our own, and with Demetrius declaring open season on us to all the other demons in this world, I was paranoid about being caught on non-hallowed ground once night fell.

  At least this place hadn’t been known as one of Adrian’s “favorites.” That was how Demetrius had found us last time, so without that, we might be okay. Just in case, I’d bought my new outfit without trying it on, since dressing rooms had full-length mirrors, and I’d made sure not to look into any of the mirrors in the main area of the store.

  I’d also made sure to pick pants and a long, loose sweater instead of another dress. Not only was I warmer, it allowed me to stuff rocks into my pockets for the sling, and the longer, generous cut of the sweater hid the bulges. Adrian had changed, too. Gone were the homespun white top and drawstring pants he’d gotten from the light realm’s inhabitants. Now he wore a dark blue silk shirt and a black jacket over black tailored pants.

  No, we hadn’t been able to afford all that from the strips of paper Zach had given us. Our first stop had been the nearest international bank. The Archon-glamoured “passport” Adrian used for identification had worked as well as predicted. Since it was also good for any name Adrian selected, he’d picked one of his many bank account aliases to take out enough traveling money.

  Now we looked like regular tourists instead of slightly suspicious hippies. If not for the “seagull” that followed every taxi we took by flying over it, we’d seem downright normal.

  We got out at the Aula Palatina, which was in a populated area with several shops, offices and restaurants. Adrian had given me a brief history on the way over, so I knew it used to be part of Emperor Constantine’s palace. The former entrance hall didn’t look very palatial today. It was a tall, rather plain-looking redbrick structure shaped like a long, covered stadium. The basilica’s only outward decoration that I could see were two sets of cathedral windows. Still, it was enough of a tourist draw that we were far from the only people there.

  “No!” I told Brutus when I caught him giving hungry, lingering looks to a dog that two other tourists were walking nearby. At least, I hoped Brutus was looking at the dog.

  Brutus chuffed as if to say, Hey, I was only reading the menu, not ordering! But he stopped eye-munching the group, and I gave him a couple pats in praise.

  In all of our rushing, we hadn’t stopped to get him any raw meat, so no surprise that he was hungry. I was ravenous, too, but neither of us could add an early dinner to our schedule. We’d eat after we’d checked the entrance hall, which hopefully wouldn’t take long.

  When Adrian and I went inside, leaving Brutus to guard the exterior, I really didn’t think it would take long. The interior was almost as sparse as the exterior, with only rows of wooden chairs, some overhead lights and a small altar interrupting the vast open space. No paintings, no shrines, no carved figurines, no statues, no frills at all, which meant no apparent place for a two-thousand-year-old hallowed weapon to be hidden.

  “Feel anything?” Adrian asked in a low voice.

  “Not yet.” And from the sparseness of the interior, I had no idea where to begin looking for hallowed-blocking wards. If not for my suspicion for why Adrian’s “like father, like son” sole brush with arson was at the same place Zach had specifically brought us to, I might have walked out.

  But Adrian had inexplicably tried to burn this place down, just like Demetrius had burned down a former hiding place of the staff of Moses. Demons had natural aversions to hallowed objects, which was why they couldn’t touch them without lots of pain. Maybe Adrian’s demon side had subconsciously reacted to the spearhead by attempting to destroy it, just like Demetrius had almost destroyed Moses’s staff without knowing it.

  It was possible, and since Zach had brought us here, there had to be something of value to find. I gave my whole body a shake, as if that would work free whatever kinks must be blocking my hallowed sensors.

  “Let’s start with the altar,” I told Adrian.

  It was only a wooden podium with some ferns on either side, but no need to ignore the most obvious hiding place. With the podium’s height, it could fit a two-foot-long, ancient iron shank inside it. In this spartan, relic-free environment, no one would probably give it a second glance even if they did see it. They might confuse it with a construction tool.

  We wandered over to the podium casually, as if it weren’t our intended target. The church wasn’t full, since it was a Thursday evening instead of a Sunday morning, but it wasn’t empty, either. I managed to walk behind the podium and check out the interior—empty except for a Bible and loose papers that looked like sermon notes—before we were stopped.

  “Can I help you?” asked a woman with salt-and-pepper
streaks in her black hair. Her accent was German, no surprise, and she had lovely dark brown skin and deep black eyes. A light splattering of wrinkles cut deeper around the corners of her eyes and the sides of her mouth. Smile lines, I realized, and took that as a good sign.

  “Sorry,” I said, trying to think up a reason that wouldn’t result in her calling security. “I, uh, thought I heard a kitten mewling back there.”

  From her expression, she wasn’t buying it, but she smiled and said, “What a relief that you were wrong. I would hate to have one jump out and startle me during my next sermon.”

  “You’re the pastor?”

  “Yes,” she said. “For a few weeks now.”

  Damn. I’d been hoping she’d been there for a while and might—dare I be so optimistic?—know the location of the relic we were after. Hey, it had happened once before.

  “Ivy,” I said, taking a risk by whisking up my sleeve before I extended my right hand. The sling tattoo was now on prominent display. Between that and my real first name, if she was in on any of the supernatural secrets that had brought us here, she’d have no doubt as to who—and what—I really was.

  She gave the tattoo only the barest, uninterested glance before she shook my hand. “Pastor Helena. Pleased to meet you.”

  My hopes sank. I couldn’t feel anything powerful dinging my hallowed radar, and the pastor seemed not to recognize my name or my very famous tattoo. Still, something had to be relevant to our quest here. Maybe I just had to be more direct.

  “My husband tells me this hall was built in the fourth century by Emperor Constantine.” I looked around as if admiring what I saw. “If these walls could talk, right? Bet they’ve seen a lot of amazing people and relics come and go. Didn’t I hear a rumor that the Spear of Longinus was once housed here?”

  That was pretty direct, but Pastor Helena only shook her head. “Nein, I’ve never heard of that.”

  I gave it one final try in case she was feigning ignorance because she thought I was a nosy tourist. “I’m the last Davidian,” I said bluntly. “And I’m here for the spearhead.”

  She frowned as she gave me the look that countless doctors and therapists had given me when I told them that I could see icy, dark, duplicate images of places. The look that said, Oh, you’re batshit crazy, huh?

  “Fraulein,” she said carefully. “I think—”

  A loud, cracking noise sounded above us, as if a thousand branches had snapped all at once. I looked up to see something large and dark dropping down right on top of us.

  And at the same time, every hallowed sensor in my body went berserk.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  HAVING MY BODY light up with countless sensors on instantaneous overload caused me to involuntarily freeze despite the danger. Adrian shoved me and Pastor Helena out of the way mere moments before those dark-colored objects smashed to the floor right where we’d been standing. We landed in a tumble of limbs in front of the first row of congregant chairs.

  Most of my senses were still stuck on supernatural red alert, so for a second, I thought the wooden pieces around us were from the pew chairs breaking under the force Adrian had used to get us out of the way. Then I realized the colors were wrong. The chairs were made of light-colored wood, yet the pieces that littered the space around us were dark, and the ones that hadn’t smashed were shaped in perfect squares.

  Adrian looked up at the same time that I did. The ceiling was made of a series of similar boxlike dark wood squares. It was the most decorative part of the entrant hall, and now it had a large hole above where the altar podium used to be.

  A flurry of German sounded as about half of the church’s occupants ran to see if we were okay, and the other half ran for the exits. Pastor Helena got to her feet, giving a shocked look at the pile of smashed ceiling planks where the three of us had been standing.

  “Danke,” she said in a shaky voice to Adrian before switching to English. “Thank you. We might have been very hurt if not for your quick actions. Now, however, you must leave.”

  Pastor Helena raised her voice, presumably repeating the directive to the tourists and congregants who’d stayed behind. After she finished, the rest of them began to head toward the door. I stayed on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. Something super hallowed was up there, and every cell in my body was reacting to it. If I could have climbed the walls to get to it, I would have. But at the moment, I was having a hard time moving. Much like what happened when I first came in contact with the staff, my body was momentarily overloaded and useless.

  “Please,” Pastor Helena said to Adrian and me. “You must leave. There is obviously some structural insufficiency in the ceiling, and it still might not be safe—”

  “Ivy,” Adrian said, ignoring her. “I can see something up in the hole where those pieces fell out.”

  “I don’t need to see it.” My voice sounded hoarse, as if I’d been screaming. “I can feel it.”

  “Please, go,” Pastor Helena said again.

  “Brutus!” Adrian yelled in reply. “Larastra!”

  The gargoyle barreled through the front doors, knocking down anyone unfortunate enough to be in his way. I heard shocked yelps as people tried to figure out what had suddenly knocked them on their asses. All they could see was a squawking seagull running into the entrant hall, which didn’t track with the wide swath that had been cut through their midst.

  Adrian barked out commands in Demonish while pointing up at the hole in the ceiling. Brutus flapped his great wings, knocking down another person in the process, and soared upward to reach the hundred-foot-tall ceiling. Once there, he flipped upside down, his wings beating faster to hover him beneath the hole while he rummaged inside it.

  More pieces of the ceiling began to fall. They were smaller this time, but Adrian still picked me up, getting me out of the way. Pastor Helena ran to the far side of the hall, pulling out her cell phone and shouting at it in German. Moments later, several uniformed guards came into the hall.

  They ushered the remaining people out, and when they reached us, Adrian let them hustle us toward the doors, too. We were now the last ones inside aside from Pastor Helena, who seemed to be staying. Right as the guards pushed us through the doors, Brutus let out a roar, and I saw him fly away from the ceiling with something long and thin clutched in his talons.

  Adrian sprinted us to the side, shouting, “Hit the deck!” to the guards, who were still blocking the doors.

  They glanced around in confusion but didn’t move or duck as warned. Then they were thrown forward from the force of a two-ton gargoyle flying right into them. Brutus didn’t have his wings in his infamous head-chop formation, nor had he been trying to hurt them, which was the only reason they survived. But from their groans and their pitiable impacts, they’d be taking some sick days after this.

  Brutus kept going after he cleared the doorway. Once outside, he flew higher, until he was well over the roofs of the nearby buildings. The farther away he went, the better I felt as my hallowed sensors powered down, allowing my body to function normally. I didn’t need Adrian to keep carrying me anymore and told him that, but he didn’t stop. Instead, he picked up his pace, until everything we passed turned into a blur.

  After a few minutes, we were clear of the metropolitan area and into what looked like the warehouse district. Then we passed that, too, and ended up back on the soft banks of the winding river. Brutus was about fifty yards away, hiding from the sun under a tree, the object he’d taken from the ancient hall’s ceiling in the grass by his feet.

  Adrian finally set me down, but he kept a tight grip on my hand. “Easy,” he warned me. “Give yourself a minute.”

  Now that I was back in the proximity of the mystery object, he was right: I was back to feeling like every nerve ending had been set on fire and then rubbed raw. I could stand under my own power, though,
so the initial effects of being blasted by a supernatural shockwave seemed to have worn off. Now all I had was what felt like a case of full-body hives...and an almost overwhelming urge to grab the unknown object at Brutus’s feet.

  “I can feel it pulling me toward it. Once I let go of your hand, I won’t be able to stop myself from grabbing it.”

  A ragged sigh came out of Adrian, and his sapphire eyes filled with pain. “I know.”

  Part of me didn’t want to move. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to him yet. I needed more time, just a little more! But for once, I didn’t need my willpower to slap down the selfish parts of me that would choose Adrian over the world. The object’s lure was too strong. It pulled me to it with a relentlessness that only grew the more I hesitated, until soon, I felt like it would rip me apart if I didn’t go to it.

  Yet if I told Adrian to take me away, he would. In a heartbeat. The urge to grab the relic would pass as soon as I was out of its range, and Brutus could fly it to safety. We could have the extra time I so desperately wanted, if I told Adrian it was okay to do what I knew he wanted to.

  “It won’t get any easier if we wait,” I finally said, starting to tug my hand free of Adrian’s tight grip. “I’ll never be ready to say goodbye to you. Not today, tomorrow or even a hundred years from now. So let’s not try to say goodbye. Instead, I want to say that I love you, Adrian. More than I ever knew it was possible to love anyone. Being with you has been the best thing to ever happen to me. Never doubt that.”

  His gaze grew wild, yet he let me pull my hand free. “I love you, Ivy. You made every moment of the hell I experienced worth it because it brought me to you. You’re the only part of my life I don’t regret, and I will love you from now until the moment I see you again.”

  I stared at him, unable to look away even as I began to back away. My feet were moving me toward Brutus and the object he guarded, but my whole heart felt like it was straining toward Adrian. I couldn’t do this! I couldn’t! But I couldn’t abandon those people. I was the only chance they had.