Exalted (6 page)

She
nodded, looking slowly around their cell. “I wish we had Mekal with us. He
could open any door.”

Andrew
nodded, wondering briefly if the short boy had survived. Sighing, he kicked at
one of the walls, then noticed a small depression where his foot had connected.
He bent to inspect it, shaking his head. “It can’t be this easy,” he said.

“What?”
Carlin asked, kneeling down beside him.

“The
walls are dirt, right? Dirt and whatever this red slime is. What if we can dig
ourselves out?”

Chapter Eight

Nathan slammed the stone door behind him and marched
through the packed mud hall, his hard footsteps fueled by his raging temper.

The moment he’d returned from tucking Meredith and her band
of ignorant deserters safely into a holding cell, he’d called a meeting of
several powerful Bishops and all his Shepherds. Well, first he’d ordered Shea
to fashion the illusion of a bullhorn, and he’d forced her to magnify his
already powerful voice—which was even more powerful in Alexandria, The Three's
seat of power. He’d ordered the mob in the commons into silence, and he’d
threatened to imprison anyone who uttered even one word in the next twelve
hours. He knew the limitations of his gift, and he figured they'd soon be back
to chaos—but for the moment he felt okay leaving them.

The meeting with his fellow Shepherds and the Bishops had
not gone well. He’d managed to keep them subdued with the strength of his
voice, but they’d still been angry and full of questions for which he had no
answers. Almost every one of them was preoccupied by wild rumors, and when he’d
questioned them about the origin of the rumors, several them insisted that The
One’s messenger had come into their dreams and told them of the impending
removal of the net.

The ‘messenger’ was the being called Edan. Nathan felt sure
of it. He didn’t know anyone else with, as one smitten Bishop had put it,
'beautiful honey-toned hair and haunting gray eyes'.

Nathan followed the hall until it started slanting
downward; he tried to ignore the sick feeling whirling in his gut.

It wasn’t the uproar among his fellow Chosen that had him
worried, or even what appeared to be a mass illusion precipitated by Edan. It
was what that mass illusion signified when stacked with other evidence.

Evidence Nathan had seen firsthand. Evidence that indicated
he'd made a terrible mistake.

It had happened after Meredith had cursed at him and cried
over him, while Nathan lay bleeding badly from his leg near the entrance to the
resort in St. Moritz. Julia’s Nephilim had swooped down, and a sobbing Meredith
had wrapped herself around the Hunter, tucking herself under one of his hideous
wings.

Nathan had been left there, and in his pain, he’d thought
he was suffering a delusion. Out of thin air, Edan had appeared, introducing
himself as one of The Three’s “consultants”, which Nathan knew was a lie. The
guy wore a smug, ironic look that told Nathan he didn’t care about the Chosen
at all.

“I don’t need…your help,” he’d rasped, but he was already
dizzy from blood loss.

The smirk was back. “You don’t, but what about Meredith?
You don’t trust her with a vicious Hunter, do you?”

Nathan’s blood—what remained of it, anyway—had boiled.
“What do you know about Meredith?”

“I can help you rescue her, and I can help you find The
One.”

“Who the hell are you?” Nathan had moaned.

In answer he saw a horrifying mental image of Meredith,
gutted with a blood dagger in his bedroom from childhood.

“Are you Chosen?” he bit out, though he knew there wasn’t a
Chosen who could plant such a powerful vision in his head.

Edan scoffed, then healed Nathan and gave him a time and
place.

“What do you get out of this? Who are you?”

“A friend of your enemy’s enemy.”

Nathan had assembled his team with trepidation, but Edan’s
information had been legit. Nathan had captured Julia and locked Meredith
safely away, where she'd be unable to make her usual errors in judgment. He’d
tried to forget the being that aided him, but now he had no choice but to find
out more about Edan.

It was a bold move, approaching The Three with a question,
but Nathan wasn’t sure what else to do. If he didn’t get the Chosen under
control, things would go from bad to worse. The ones who’d worked themselves
into a fervor could start a riot, putting everyone, including Meredith, in
danger.

There were pale stone doors on either side of the
torch-lined hall, spaced apart at odd intervals. It was impossible to be sure
he’d taken the correct route down; unlike at the compound, the paths here never
changed or disappeared, but there were dozens of them, and Nathan wasn't sure
if each descent led to the same place. He wondered what was behind the pale
stone doors. Holding chambers? Meeting rooms? Everything here was so much
more…primitive than at the compound. It made sense; the pyramid at Alexandria
had been The Three’s home in ancient times. But as Nathan walked softly down
the cramped hall, his chest felt tight with dread and fear.

He tried to banish the feeling. He trusted The Three. His
powerful ancestors were ancient and wise, and despite their tendency toward
frightening displays of gift and rumbling gruffness, Nathan thought they had
always seemed judicious.

Meredith’s wide, concerned brown eyes flashed in his mind,
and he recalled what she’d told him about Julia and her headaches. If it were
true, she was most likely overstating the harm, or misunderstanding what,
exactly, was happening.

The Three had chosen Julia. She was to be honored, not
harmed.

They
did
tell me to apprehend her any way I could.

But they didn’t want him to hurt her.

And he hadn’t. Even Shea hadn't, with the illusion that
helped him capture Julia.

Dizzy had.

Nathan shook his head, thinking of the sick girl. Although
she'd sneaked away, he’d been informed that Dizzy had ignited the angry scene
that he’d had to break up in the commons. And she seemed to take a perverse
pleasure in hurting The One. There was also the insidious rumor that Dizzy was
a more direct descendant of Methuselah, a rumor Nathan was sure Dizzy had
minted herself.

The hallway leveled off, and Nathan’s heart hammered. At
the compound he’d had to cross the water to reach them, always an unpleasant
experience. Here, he simply had to follow the hall that cut through the center
of the pyramid down, down, down, through many doors, around many curves, until
it narrowed further, he passed the stone doors, and he began to feel their
presence.

He rarely showed up uninvited, almost never without some
kind of summons. Often if he had a question, he would simply find himself
summoned. The summons was more a feeling than anything else.

Nathan had a bad feeling now. It made his arm hairs stand
on end. Another step and the bad feeling materialized into faint screams. His
feet moved faster as his chest pumped. The screams were male, and they were
punctuated with moans.

The Three’s chamber was at the end of the hall. Water and
fog. Everything down here smelled like dirt. Old dirt. The walls felt like they
would close in on him, but Nathan kept moving. When the screams made his
eardrums ache, he felt certain he was right about the voice. He threw open the
door, washed with dread, and saw a horrible sight.

Edan: not a Chosen, not a Nephilim, but a Demon. He was on
his knees in the mud, his arms spread out and chained to the wall.

Between his neck and shoulder on each side poked the
bleeding stubs of wings. Dark, leathery Demon wings.

The Demon turned, and the wing-stubs vanished.

Edan was a Demon, Nathan thought dizzily. A Demon who’d
angered The Adversary and gotten his wings clipped.

A Demon in the pyramid…

But that wasn’t the worst thing. The Demon was wrapped in a
cloth Nathan thought was scarlet. Then he saw bits of white, clean of the blood
that he could see pooling at the demon’s feet.

Its handsome face contorted in pain, and Nathan…

Nathan couldn’t stand to…

“No,” he muttered, staggering backward. He couldn’t stand
to see another being, even a Demon, suffering like that.

Until that moment, it was the worst thing he’d ever seen or
heard.

Then he heard someone else screaming.

Chapter Nine

Julia awoke gasping, her nightmare forgotten in the panic
of not being able to see anything. When she remembered what the utter darkness
all around her meant, her dread quickly mounted. She wrestled with her
breathing, trying to make it slow enough and soft enough that her straining ears
would be able to tell her what her eyes could not.

She counted to sixty in her head five times before she felt
reasonably sure she was alone. She took a deep, loud breath, and a shiver
rippled through her, a full-body flinch. She scuttled back against the cool,
damp wall, terrified that she still couldn’t see. The absolute dark was the
earth pressing around her. No one was coming to save her. Cayne had
disappeared, and her friends weren’t nearly strong enough. Julia was completely
at Methuselah’s mercy.

She felt crushed anew when she thought about her mother.
Had she seen this, too? Or did she just not want Julia, the way her aunt
hadn’t.

Hurt was replaced by a wave of mortification. She’d been so
scared she’d
peed
. The memory heightened her fear.

Frantically, her hands skittered over her body, finding it
clad in something warm and soft, no remnant of her earlier horror. But when had
that happened?

Julia gritted her teeth, shoving her humiliation aside, and
a whimper slid from her lips. She wanted Cayne, would have been embarrassed to
admit how much she wanted to be held by him.

I need to get out of
here. I have to get out of here and find him.

But the terror of Methuselah, the memory of the feeling
he'd transferred to her when she touched him—the knowledge that he was a
Celestial and she was insignificant—made it hard to move.

You have to! Think of
Cayne!

She stood shakily, running her hands up and down the wall
behind her, making sure it was all the same packed dirt. It felt that way, so
she stepped to the other wall, running her hands all the way to the bottom of
the wall and then as high as she could, needing to map her prison cell. She
only allowed herself to take baby steps, to make sure she covered every inch.

She had only taken a few when she heard a rumbling near her
ear.
That’s not going to work.
She
shrieked, tripping on something, falling and landing on her palms. She came up
shaking and whimpering. The voice had been
right
beside her
.

Suddenly there were two torches burning. She shielded her
eyes from the light, then looked across the room. Despite its never-ending
feel, it couldn’t have been more than thirty feet at its widest. The ceiling
was low and made of the same packed earth as the walls and the floor. The wall
was shorter near a stone door, and Julia gasped when she saw a dark shape
rocking near the threshold.

Her stomach heaved and her throat constricted. She couldn’t
breathe, and yet her mouth made little aaaha, aaaha noises.
 

“Do you know why you
are called The One?”

When
she only breathed, his voice boomed inside her head. “
ANSWER. ME.”

“I
don’t,” she whispered. The dark spot didn’t move, and Julia swore it seemed to
be sucking the light from the torches. Just looking at it made her feel like
dying. She recognized it as that familiar dementors-in-the-building sensation
from being around Edan—but this was magnified so much she wondered if her soul
really was being sucked.

She
heard a soft, dark laugh before she felt the rumbling of that voice inside her
head.

“I was so called, once. After I was trapped
in this forsaken realm, The Alpha decreed that none of his servants could speak
my name. By my followers I was called The Exalted One, but over time it was
shortened to The One. My mutinous cohort, my fellow banished, became defined by
me
. The Adversary. As my adversary,
he tried to gain control of the Earth, but I banished him to the depths.

I took the name Methuselah among humans. I
fathered children. And when The Alpha erected his barrier, I developed a plan.
For two thousand years I’ve been guiding that plan through the bloodlines of my
descendants.”

The
dark shape moved, taking the horribly perfect form of Methuselah as he stepped
toward her. “I am The One. You are my creation. Why do you think I would share
the honor of my name with you?”

Julia
shook her head, feeling warm tears trickle down her cheeks.

“Because
in the end, you will be me. I will pour my power into you. I will carve you out
to carry my essence. You will become Celestial for a time, you will destroy The
Alpha’s barrier, and I will be returned to my exalted state.”

Julia
shuddered as she felt what could only have been Methuselah’s dark touch in her
mind. She found herself longing for his plan to succeed..

“Shall
we begin?” He stood before her now, stunning in his power. He raised his hands
to cup her face, and Julia felt her skin warm where his fingers touched her.

It
felt...good. Such pure power. Blinding. Hot. She felt her mind crack open, felt
a molten strand of white light seep inside. It made her feel—

     
No.

     
She felt the gentle push
of energy as fingers pressed her forehead. The dizziness was good. If she shut
her eyes, she couldn't even remember her own name. But there was another name…