Baleful Betrayal (3 page)

She caught me in a hug and pressed her lips savagely against mine. "Justin, what happened? Why are you topless?" Her nose wrinkled. "Your nipples are rock hard."

I caught a troubled look from her new companion and my eyes widened with shock. "Flava!"

"It is good to see you again,
Justin
," the healer of the Tarissan Legion said in a tone that didn't jibe with her words. "We hoped you would be here with your army months ago."

My stomach sank with the leaden weight of guilt. "I'm sorry, Flava. We should have come right after the war. Maybe we could have prevented the terrible things Cephus has done here and on Eden."
Maybe Nightliss would still be alive.

Flava's eyes hardened. "You promised us, Justin. You said you would lead us against the Brightlings and unify Seraphina." Her hands tightened. "Now the Tarissan Legion is all but destroyed and the Darkling nation is on its knees. Even weakened after the war in Eden, the Brightling empire could swallow us with little trouble."

Elyssa stepped between us. "We're here now, Flava. That's what matters."

"Where is your army?" Flava cried. "Where is our salvation?"

I took a deep breath to quell the tide of sorrow and regret rising in my throat. "The blame is mine, Flava. The moment I had a chance, I ran away from war. I thought your people could defeat Cephus on their own and I would come later and help you against the Brightlings." I ran a hand down my face. "I had no idea Cephus was capable of this. He nearly destroyed all magic in Eden."

"Thousands died here," Flava said, her voice trembling with rage. "Ketiss is dead, the legion scattered to the winds." Teeth bared, she poked me in the chest with a finger. "There is nothing but doom on our lands. You earned your name, Destroyer. The Primogenitor has punished us for our inaction against the Brightlings."

Many Darklings worshipped the Primogenitor, the supposed creator, and Cephus had tricked the population into thinking I was the Destroyer, a bringer of doom who would help the Darkling defeat their ancient enemy. I'd thought Flava had been cured of religion. Maybe she was throwing this back in my face. She had every right to be furious with me.

Before I could respond, Elyssa spoke in a calm voice. "We're here to destroy the crystoid—the crystal meteor—blocking the skyway from the Alabaster Arch." Elyssa put a hand on Flava's shoulder. "We're here to undo the damage."

"Destroy it?" Flava said incredulously. "One of those abominations turned the city center into rubble and killed most of the legion. Had I not been surveying the meteor near the skyway, I would have died as well."

"My god," I murmured. "Most of the legion is dead?"

"Yes," she said through clenched teeth. "These crystoids will be the death of us all."

"We can safely nullify them," I said, forcing my voice to remain steady. "Can you get us to the one near the skyway?"

Flava shuddered and stepped back. "Do not tempt me with hope, Justin."

"Get us there and we can do it." I added steel to my tone and stepped toward her. "Nightliss died along with hundreds of others because I waited too long." I tried to hold back the sorrow, but tears blurred my vision. "I failed everyone, Flava—everyone!" I took a deep breath. "This time, I won't rest, I won't stop until Cephus is dead and Seraphina is set to rights."

"Nightliss is dead?" The rough pain in Flava's voice nearly sent me over the precipice.

I nodded. "There was a bomb that would have killed our entire army. She sacrificed herself—took the bomb far into the sky."

Flava bit her lip and nodded. "We have all paid the price for your inaction, Justin."

"It's not his fault!" Elyssa shouted. "Do you know what he's been through? What the war against Daelissa cost him even before we asked for your help?" She angrily thrust her swords back into her thigh sheaths. "If Justin hadn't stopped Daelissa in Eden, she'd be ruling your whiny ass right now."

The Darkling reared back like she'd been slapped and her eyes went hard—a far cry from the gentle soul who'd saved my life in the final battle against Daelissa. "Perhaps that is so, but we lent you our help and received none in return. You can see the brutal results."

"Well, unless you know how to time travel, we can't do anything but move forward. Standing here casting blame in our faces is only wasting time." Elyssa sighed and turned her attention to me. "I see you took one of the enemy aether batteries."

I gladly accepted the change of subject. "Yeah, but the armor goes underneath it and I need the prongs to make contact with my skin."

"I can't believe you don't know how to adjust that by now," Elyssa said. "Tug up and out on the hem."

I pinched the hem at my waist and did as instructed. This time the armor spread over the pack instead of under it. I met her raised eyebrow with a shrug. "Hey, nobody ever told me it was that simple." I nearly groaned with pleasure as my frozen nipples thawed.

Flava knelt next to the unmoving soldiers and studied the aether pack. "Cephus has grown bolder by the day, sending his minions to kidnap any Seraphim still living in the city."

I pulled off the soldier's mask and exposed the shaved head, scar, and eye socketed with a gem.

Flava gasped and stumbled back. "What is this monstrosity?"

"One of Cephus's victims," I replied. "I don't even think he was a solider before."

"He's engineering Seraphim into soldiers." Elyssa's voice seethed with disgust. "What happened to the city population?"

"They fled to the outer edges," Flava said. "Without the skyway, there is no way off the skylet."

Tarissa floated on a massive miles-wide skylet above a tremendous aether vortex. "If memory serves, it's about half a mile to the ground from the edge of the city?"

Flava nodded. "It is less now due to the crystoids, but not enough for someone to survive the fall."

"How many crystoids are in the city?" Elyssa asked.

"Two—one on the eastern edge, and the other to the west near the skyway." Flava pulled the pack off the unconscious seraph. "They are enough to disrupt the skyways in all directions."

"Where is the rest of the Darkling army?" I asked.

"I hope they still maintain our national borders," Flava said. "Ketiss thought we could defeat Cephus without withdrawing other troops from their positions. We lost contact with the outside once the crystoids hit."

"I wish he'd been right." I tugged the aether pack off the other soldier and handed it to Elyssa. "You might as well wear this in case I run out of power in this one."

Flava turned away and slid her tattered uniform down to her waist to strap an aether pack between her shoulder blades, then slid her arms back into the sleeves and fastened it in the front. The low-profile pack made a discernable bulge against her upper back, giving her the appearance of a hunchback. I decided not to share that observation since her admiration for me had dwindled from hero to absolute zero in the past few months.

Besides, I didn't feel like joking about anything right now. The people of Pjurna were hurting something awful and I had to complete my mission if there was any hope of fixing it.

"What about them?" Elyssa looked at the slumbering soldiers. "Can we do anything to restore them?"

Flava knelt and pressed her hands to the head of a seraph who looked barely older than me. Then again, he might be fifty years old. Seraphim like my mother could live for thousands of years, provided nothing awful happened to them. The destruction of the Grand Nexus had ended the First Seraphim War over two thousand years ago by sundering the link between Eden and Seraphina. In Eden, all the Seraphim had been reduced to infantile husks with an insatiable appetite for life force. On this side of the Nexus, the results had been less spectacular, but no less devastating, reducing the life span of any Seraphim caught in the blast to centuries instead of millennia.

"I might be able to heal him, but I dare not use all the power in this aether pack for him," Flava said after a moment of silence.

I looked up and estimated how high we'd have to go to catch a recharge from the aether beams. "I don't suppose you learned how to fly since the last time I saw you?"

Her eyes regarded me gravely. "I was one of many who trained so we could fight the archangels on even terms, but I have nowhere near the skill of Cephus's"—she looked with distaste at the scars on the seraph's face—"mutants."

Brainwashed they might be, but I hated to leave these soldiers without helping them. For the time being, it couldn't be helped. I'd learned the hard way that making command decisions sometimes meant sacrificing the lives of others. In this case, I didn't feel all that horrible about not helping the seraphs that had tried to kill me earlier, but I didn't want to appear insensitive.

"Once we destroy the crystoid, we'll have all the power we need to help them," I said. "We have to go."

"Agreed," Elyssa said without hesitation.

Flava frowned, but nodded. "The trek through the city is dangerous and the crystoid is guarded by more soldiers."

"Soldiers like them?" I motioned to the mutants.

Flava shook her head. "Unless the guard has changed, the crystoid soldiers are loyalists of Cephus and the Void, not like these poor souls."

"I guarantee they reported to Cephus that we're here." Elyssa clenched her teeth. "There goes our quick mission."

So much for stealth and finesse.
Cephus's people knew we were here and they would be ready for us.

Chapter 3

The plan had seemed so simple. The last remaining crystoid in Eden was in the ocean, far enough away to be no danger to the noms—normal humans. Each crystoid beamed aether through a sky portal bridging the dimensional barrier between Eden and Seraphina and straight into Cephus's fortress.

The quickest way to transport an army to Pjurna was through the Alabaster Arch at the Three Sisters way station in Australia, but it wasn't functioning due to the crystoids Elyssa and I had been sent to eliminate.

Using the last sky portal seemed the best way for a covert mission to succeed. How Cephus had detected our small bodies against the expanse of the sky before we'd fallen even a few hundred feet was still a mystery. Once the other sky portals began to close, he must have expected an attack.

Flava led us down winding pedestriums, using cover and stealth every step of the way. We spotted more aerial patrols overhead and were forced to hide until they were gone.

"I have a feeling the guard on the crystoid will be tripled by the time we get there," Elyssa said.

"That is why we are not going there first," Flava said.

I gripped her arm and turned her to me. "Where the hell are you taking us, then?"

She jerked her arm from my grasp. "To find all the help there is in this world."

"Legionnaires?" Elyssa asked.

Flava nodded. "There are a few left. Perhaps enough to clear the way to the crystoid." She cast a scathing glanced at me and opened her mouth as if to throw another insult my way, but turned and resumed walking.

The hike seemed to go on forever, taking us in a southwestern route that curved to the outskirts of the city. Short domiciles sprinkled the land, varying shades of crystalline structures like the insides of a geode—a far cry from the towers of the city center. Small roads wound back and forth between the seemingly random placements of the buildings.

"How beautiful," Elyssa said, kneeling beside a bed of blue roses.

"Not so lovely if a flying patrol spots us," Flava said. "Hurry."

The buildings were tall enough to provide some cover, but not like the high-rises back the other way. "Seems harder to hide around here," I said. "Why not stay in the city?"

"Because nothing works in the towers," she said. "There is small aether well that supplies some of the houses here."

I switched to incubus vision and spotted a nimbus swirling in a courtyard dead ahead. Logic dictated that was where we'd find the remnants of the Tarissan Legion. The updraft rose for several yards before swirling away, drawn to the north by the crystoid. It seemed Cephus's big purple fortress—a pulsating zit on the fair skin of Tarissa—held a monopoly on aether in these parts.

"We are here," Flava said, motioning to what looked like an igloo formed from blue crystals. "Our last hope waits inside."

I really wanted to call her out for being melodramatic, but the scowl on her face told me she'd probably punch me in the mouth. "Lead on."

She removed a gem from the inside of her uniform's collar and touched it to another on the side of the igloo. A section turned to mist and she stepped inside. Elyssa and I ducked through the opening and followed. An empty, round room with a domed ceiling lay on the other side. The mist solidified into a wall behind us.

"Well, that was anticlimactic," I muttered. "Where is everyone?"

Flava touched the gem to the floor and it misted away as the door had. We followed her down into a tunnel. A few yards later it opened into a wide cavern. The rocky walls, stalagmites, and stalactites, were a welcome relief from the overuse of crystal in the city above. It was as if the city designers went out of their way to make everything look completely different from the good old bricks and mortar we used in Eden. Then again, most of these people had probably never seen the mortal plane.

A sera with glossy white hair, porcelain skin, and elfin ears stepped from behind a rock formation and looked at me uncertainly.

"Lanaeia," I said in a hushed voice, uncertain how enthusiastically I should greet her.

"Oh, Justin!" She flung herself at me, embracing me so firmly I felt the breath explode from my lungs. "We are saved!"

Elyssa cleared her throat. "I'm here too."

Lanaeia kissed my cheeks and moved to Elyssa, sparing no enthusiasm. "The tyranny of Cephus will finally end!"

Flava bared her teeth. "Why are you so happy,
girl
? He abandoned us."

Lanaiea's silver eyes flashed. "You dare call me a human child,
zhuka
? I lived thousands of years before you were even a spark of life in your father's groin!"