Fallen Angel of Mine (13 page)

But then—

She shuddered at the thought of recovering it.
And why would her freshly-brain wiped self even know to search for
it after…after doing her business?

Gross.

She could hide it in her mouth, but what about
after she was mind-wiped? Would she spit it out and forget it?
Elyssa cursed and paced the floor. She didn't have much time to
decide and the last remaining place she could think to hide it made
her shudder again. It wasn't ideal, but she had no other
choice.

The sound of a door sliding open awoke her
sometime later. She hadn't even realized she'd fallen
asleep.

Jack smiled at her. "It's time."

Elyssa went with him and three other guards
meekly, hoping against hope she could convince them she was no
threat and manage escape at some point. As they stepped outside the
barn and headed for the large stone chapel nestled in the trees
behind the huge manor house, her senses picked up a white-hot blip,
absent only a moment before. Jack and her guards sensed it
too.

And all hell broke loose.

I could hardly believe my eyes but
there was no denying how familiar the image on the massive stone
slab seemed. The dark and my night vision
had
to be playing tricks on me. Though
I could zoom in, the oily wisps of darkness drifting from the
shadow people around my circle made it hard to stay focused, like
staring through a thick haze of gasoline fumes.

My eyelids felt like lead weights and it was
all I could do to stay awake. But I couldn't sleep knowing a
thunderstorm, a wild animal, or anything might blot out a part of
my hastily-drawn chalk circle and destroy my only protection. There
was no way in hell I was shutting my eyes for a second around these
monsters.

I woke up as the first rays of dawn caught my
eyes. Panic swept over me in a wave. I leapt to my feet, pivoting
on my heels and searching for any signs of the dark creatures from
last night. But they were gone, vanquished, apparently, by the
light of the sun. I dropped to my knees and blew kisses at the
great pinkish hue spreading across the horizon. I was so happy to
see it, I swore I'd never complain about it being in my eyes
again.

After gathering up my things and stuffing them
inside the backpack, I walked over to the engraving I'd noticed
last night. By sunlight, the engravings were even more impressive,
their dappled hues sparkling in the light. From a distance, they
could pass for paintings. I realized then they weren't simply
engravings, but intricate mosaics, inlaid with what looked like
crushed colored stones or maybe even jewels, rather than painted.
Then again, there might be some magic involved in their
preservation—nothing I had the skills to detect.

Aside from the strokes of yellow indicating
blonde hair and the pale color chosen for her skin, this woman
looked so familiar and so much like someone I knew, it had to be
more than coincidence. I thought back to the small olive-skinned
girl with slanted green eyes and black hair I'd met just days ago,
only to find out she was Nightliss, formerly just a cat as far as I
knew. This blonde woman could be her sister. Maybe even her evil
mirror universe twin.

Where the other engravings showed horrendous
variants of human sacrifice at the bottom, this one illustrated
what appeared to be throngs of people kneeling, hands outstretched
over their heads, threads of white connecting their fingers to the
fingers of the woman. Whoever this chick was, she had been a bigwig
back in the old days.

"This is crazy." I shook my head and stared
harder at the mosaic then at the others situated around the square.
None of the people in the others looked vaguely familiar, though
they all had a similar ethereal beauty about them. I couldn't
imagine how long it had taken someone to create these masterpieces
or why I'd never seen them on Discovery Planet. They might not be
members of the Seven Wonders of the World, but they had to be in
the top twenty.

My gaze caught on the last mosaic and stuck,
taking in the long silvery mane of hair, the haughty cast of the
face, and most importantly, the crowd of gray-robed men depicted at
the bottom, standing and looking with emotionless expressions
toward whoever viewed the image. When I thought none of the other
effigies looked familiar, I'd been wrong. The hair was longer and
he wasn't wearing spectacles, but this guy was—no it couldn't be—it
simply couldn't! I stepped closer, peered up at the monument, and
saw the cruel cast of those gray eyes staring out at the
world.

This man was no other than Mr. Gray. The man
whose gray-suited abominations had attacked me once in the Grotto,
and again with a garbage truck.

I closely studied the other engravings, but
aside from Nightliss's Barbie wonder twin, none rang a bell in the
slightest. What was this place and why in the hell was Mr. Gray's
mural in the mix?

It was enough to make my head hurt. I reached a
tentative hand toward the slab. My fingers met a slick surface a
few millimeters from the eye of one of the gray men. I pressed my
palm to the surface and ran my skin against it. It felt slicker
than a greased pig. I looked around in case a security guard or
someone had arrived to start daily patrols. Seeing no one, I turned
back and spit. The glob didn't even run down the side, instead
dropping straight to the ground without leaving a mark.

Yeah, definitely magic.

No doubt, I should investigate this place more
thoroughly, but I didn't want to stick around. If those shadow
creatures returned at night, I wanted to be a long way away. As I
traveled along the paths, eventually retracing my steps back to the
broken arch where my night of bowel-churning panic had started, I
realized, despite the mid-morning hour, there were no tourists,
guides, or guards wandering the paths. Surely this was a hotspot
for tourism, considering the ancient buildings and amazing
mosaics.

Or maybe I was missing something
important.

It was too late to stop my palm from slapping
my forehead as I remembered an app I'd stuck on my phone some time
ago to combat my terrible foreign language skills, namely Spanish.
I turned on my phone and pulled up the Spanish-English dictionary
I'd downloaded and translated a placard near the broken arch, which
had unceremoniously dumped me in this hellhole.

It read:
A
broken Obsidian Arch, presumed destroyed by whatever calamity
killed the inhabitants this marvelous city many centuries
ago.

"How would noms know about Obsidian Arches?" I
wondered.

I found an area map entitled,
El Dorado, An Overworld Historic
Reserve
. The map offered a tiny stick
figure to show me where I stood on the path, and an arrow to show
which way I was facing. When I took a few steps in the real world,
so did my little partner on the map. I turned around a few times,
keeping my eyes on the map and watched the arrow spin with
me.

Cool!

Unfortunately, the box for extra maps was
empty, or I would've taken along the magical version of a GPS. On
the plus side, the map clearly indicated the path I was on would
take me out of this god-forsaken place and back to civilization.
The name of the city tickled my brain, though. Where had I heard it
before?

My dictionary translated it
into
golden one.
Then it hit me. El Dorado was the mythical city of gold. I
vaguely recalled reading about some dude named Montezuma coming
down with a really bad case of the runs here too. Or maybe I was
mixing reality with the plot of a video game I'd played. I
certainly hadn't seen any gold lying around, but if it truly was
the same place, I wanted no part of it. Any movie I'd ever seen or
video game I'd ever played where the main character was looking for
a mythical city only led to disaster, not to mention an ending
scene where everyone had to run for their lives as the place broke
apart and fell into an abyss all around them.

"Nope, nope, nope," I said. "You can keep your
gold, you friggin' creepy place."

The path terminated about a hundred yards
later. At the head of the path sat a marble slab displaying a long
list in dozens of languages. I found the English version and read
it.

Please state your preferred
language.

"English?"

The marble shimmered, erasing the list, and
replacing it with a couple of paragraphs of text. A disembodied
voice rang out, sounding exactly like the dude who voices over
apocalyptic movie trailers. I jumped five feet back with a
yelp.

"Welcome, visitor!" the voice boomed. "El
Dorado, Overworld Historic Reserve number one, one, nine, has been
interdicted by the Conclave and closed to the public due to
unstable variances coexisting between Earth-plane and the Gloom.
Field trips must be cleared by the Master of Overworld History,
Skavius Peckmoore. His office is located at The Ezzek Moore Arcane
Academy for the Gifted, number twelve Conroy Place in the Grotto.
Please direct all inquiries to his office.

"This site is protected by a
physical interdiction barrier. Should you somehow find yourself
trapped within, the safe word is
Exodus
. Please note this will only
work during daylight hours to prevent hazardous otherworldly
entities from egress. Should you find yourself surrounded by the
aforementioned hazardous otherworldly entities, use the safe
word
Illuminate
.
This recording is a service of the Overworld Conclave Safety
Administration, all rights reserved."

I read the notice once more, cursing whoever
hadn't thought to post a few more warning signs throughout the
place, especially with this guy's voice boldly declaring the
certain doom one faced while trapped inside this insidious ruin.
Then again, they probably figured nobody would ever come through a
broken arch smack-dab in the danger zone. I made my way down the
path, holding my hands out. An invisible barrier greeted me after
only a few feet. My stomach clenched at the painful memory of the
last time I'd come across such a barrier.

My mom had put it up to keep me from
reaching her. Then she'd stabbed me in the heart with a devastating
declaration, telling me Dad and I were no longer a part of her
family. And if we dared look for her, she'd ask for Templar
intervention.

Shoving aside those grim thoughts, I
stood near the barrier and said, "Exodus."

I expected a bright light accompanied
by some cool sound effects. Instead, an invisible bell dinged and a
red arrow appeared on the path a foot to my left, pointing, I
hoped, toward escape. Using my hands against the invisible barrier
as guides, I found the exit and slipped through.

"You are now exiting
Overworld Historic Reserve number one, one, nine,"
the announcer declared in bombastic excitement, nearly scaring the
pants off me. "Thank you for visiting!"

Once I recovered my wits, I
took a good look at my new surroundings.
From outside the barrier, the rain forest appeared to go on
for miles and miles without a trace of the ancient city hiding
behind the magical shield. An intense desire to walk away urged me
to get moving. I realized a spell must be behind it, probably to
keep noms from coming close enough to bump into the invisible
barrier. Why anyone would wander all the way out here without
foreknowledge of the hidden city, I couldn't imagine. Still, I
supposed it was better to be safe than have one hitchhiker discover
and post about it on the internet.

The rising sun seemed a little brighter
outside the barrier and the air a bit more humid. I blew the
blazing, heavenly body another kiss to make sure it understood just
how much I appreciated all the hard work it did for the citizens of
Earth, protecting us from Gloom monsters and such. A series of loud
dings interrupted my Sun worship. I turned and saw a timer on the
path counting down from ten. I wondered if the barrier would slice
anyone in half if they were standing there when it
closed.

"The barrier is now closing," the
automated voice shouted cheerfully. "Please stand clear. Keep all
extremities away from the invisible opening, as amputation is
likely to occur. Thank you."

Not wanting to risk my
limbs, I set out at a brisk pace to move myself away from the
cursed city and hopefully toward a town or, at the very least, a
cell phone signal. I found a winding road made partially of broken
and crumbling asphalt, but mostly of rutted dirt and pockets of mud
where trees shaded it from the sun. I was eager to run as fast as I
could and hopefully find a town somewhere, but the tiny bits of
wisdom my thick skull had somehow accumulated offered advice of its
own: Running
might
get me someplace faster, but such a someplace would likely be
in the middle of nowhere and devoid of humans. My incubus tummy
required essence from human emotion. Dashing blindly into the
wilderness would only increase my demonic needs and the insane,
gut-clawing hunger accompanying it.

My supernatural batteries were already
running low again thanks to my night of terror straight out of the
X-Files. I knew I couldn't count on Nightliss to give me another of
her magic kisses, so I decided to take it easy and hope someone
might come down this lonely road.