Fallen Angel of Mine (29 page)

"I told the council this snake would
bite us one day," Lina said, her brown eyes flaring with
anger.

Bella shrugged. "We assume he
discovered a North American was in town and wanted
ransom."

"No, he and his right-hand man are
vampires," I said. "They wanted my blood."

Her eyes grew wide. "Vampires? We never
knew."

Lina glared at her. "Because we let
those scum grow too strong."

Bella's gaze frosted over. "Drug lords
are not our responsibility, child."

Lina looked away. "We called the
Templars to help us," she said. "When I told them your name, they
were very eager to rescue you."

"More like eager to put me down," I
grumbled.

Bella folded her legs beneath her. "The
Templars are usually very responsive, but they asked so many
questions about your identity I knew something was not quite right.
So I told Alejandro to ready my flying rug."

"You mean flying carpet," I
said.

She shrugged. "Same thing,
dear."

"When we arrived we saw you leading
those women out of the cellar," Lina said, excitement causing her
heavy accent to thicken even more. "But Bella saw the Templars
fighting the men with guns and made us wait."

"I didn't want a stray bullet to hit
us," Bella said. "We had trouble keeping up with the jet until the
engine exploded."

I glanced back at the black smoke
rising from the tree line. "Yeah, things got kind of messy in
there." I gave her a sideways look. "Were you actually holding up
the jet with your staff?"

She nodded. "I have to say, the gizmos
they put in staffs these days really help with airspeed
calculations quite a bit. I don't think I could have done it nearly
so well by myself."

Alejandro brought us to a halt. Turned
around and sat cross-legged on the rug. The control sphere lowered
itself to about an inch off the surface and hovered behind him. We
were now a good distance from the smoking wreckage. "Is the Templar
alive?" he asked.

I touched the Templar's neck and found
a pulse. He still lay sprawled face down on the rug, his only
movement caused by breathing. Bella pulled a small wand from a
pouch on her belt, whispered a few words, and touched it to the
Templar's back. He trembled ever so slightly and went
still.

"What did you do?" I asked,
horrified.

She smiled. "Don't worry. I only made
sure he stays asleep until we get home."

Lights appeared above the trees.
Alejandro sucked in a breath and turned back to the control sphere,
pressing it down. The carpet dropped to tree level and hovered as
three helicopters whizzed toward the smoking wreck some distance
behind us. The aircraft stopped with pinpoint precision and dark
figures leapt from the sides, vanishing into the forest. I
realized, with a start, the only sound besides the creatures of the
forest and the wind was the thudding of my heart.

"I don't hear the blades on those
choppers," I whispered. Even at this distance, the noise from the
rotors should ripple the air.

"Those aren't real helicopters," Bella
replied. "The rotors are illusion."

"You mean they're like flying carpets
made to look like choppers?"

"A very apt description, young
man."

"Brilliant!" I said, abruptly grimacing
at how loud I'd said it. I lowered my voice to a whisper. "You
don't have to be invisible. Just hide in plain sight."

She shrugged. "Illusion requires a
great deal of power as well."

"We should go," Lina said, gripping my
arm.

Bella nodded. "Once they find the wreck
empty, they'll scour this area."

Alejandro pushed down on the control
sphere, taking us into the dense forest. My night vision revealed a
landscape filled with life. Reflective eyes gleamed back at me from
a nearby tree. The chirping and buzz of birds and insects projected
a blanket of sound. Alejandro rolled the sphere forward a notch and
the carpet glided smoothly forward, coasting between branches and
finding narrow gaps in the foliage. After an hour of wending our
way through the maze of vegetation, he took the carpet above tree
level and looked back. The lights of the Templar choppers remained
barely visible.

Keeping us feet above the trees,
Alejandro urged the carpet forward, speeding us along so fast, the
treetops blurred beneath us. A bird squawked as the turbulence of
our passing sent it tumbling.

Within another hour, we reached the
tiny town where my companions lived. "What's the name of this
one-horse town, anyway?" I asked as Alejandro guided the carpet in
for a smooth landing behind his house.

Bella smiled. "It's one you may find
familiar. Los Angeles."

"Interesting." It sure as
heck had a lot less traffic than the city in California. Even
though I'd heard the name a ton of times, the meaning of the name
had never really hit me. Not until my thought process wondered what
it meant. My brain rolled its eyes at my thoughts and said,
it means the angels, stupid.

"The ancient tribes called
El Dorado '
Ciudad De Los
Angeles
' when the Spanish first arrived
here, even though nobody dared live there. The first conquistadors
to reach this far inland were more astonished by the gold and
called it '
Ciudad De Oro
', or city of gold, which they later shortened to El Dorado,
or Golden One." Bella stood up and stretched. "We named this city
in remembrance of the original name."

"Why didn't the Overworld Conclave
change the name back on the placards in the city?"

She shrugged. "Who knows? They only
care for the magical history of the place. Once they discovered the
dangers lurking there, they quickly quarantined it. The Spanish
lost three expeditions sent by conquistadores to remove the gold
from the underground vaults beneath the place. They proclaimed it
cursed by evil and abandoned all efforts."

I shuddered at the thought of the
resident shadow creatures. "What keeps those monsters from
spreading all over the planet?"

"They appear to be tethered to the
city. Our studies have not discovered why, and nobody dares go into
the underground vaults."

"The shadows live there?"

Fear flashed in her eyes as she nodded.
"They live beneath the surface, banished by sunlight, if such an
existence could be called 'life'."

"The Arcane Council tried to kill them
once," Lina said. "A very long time ago they sent their very best
battle mages to clear out the vaults." She grimaced. "None of them
came back."

I thought back to the chambers beneath
Thunder Rock and wondered if the vaults under El Dorado bore any
resemblance. I remembered the huge engravings dominating the square
where I'd spent the night hiding from the soul-sucking shadows, and
two more dots connected. If Nightliss was truly an angel, and the
engraving of the blonde woman really was her or a close relative,
then the ancient citizens of El Dorado might have been right in
calling it the city of angels. Furthermore, if the images of human
sacrifice on the engravings were correct, those beings were not the
kind of angels from the Bible. True, not all angels were exactly
loving or caring—the Angel of Death came to mind—but I'd never
heard of angels requiring human sacrifice or building pyramids in
the middle of the jungle.

This realization put another kink in my
plans. Rescuing Elyssa and finding the truth behind the massacre at
Thunder Rock still held the top slots. But what if these angel
dudes were the same as the old masters, the ones who would return
via the Obsidian Arches? The engravings made it clear these beings
had used humans as slaves and worse. Were they the ones behind the
unrest in the Overworld? The ones referred to in Foreseeance
4311?

If so, they were responsible for
Maximus and probably a whole lot more. One thing was clear: I
needed to break out the yarn and thumbtacks because a king-sized
flowchart was the only way I could remember everything. Pain and
exhaustion, however, were pressuring me to forget all this crap for
a few hours and sleep.

Bella stepped from the carpet and
pointed somewhere out in the darkness with her staff. "It is said
that a man actually lives in El Dorado."

I raised an eyebrow. "A man? You've got
to be kidding. Nobody could survive there."

She nodded. "One of our aboveground
expeditions was cataloguing artifacts. In one of the pictures they
took, you could clearly see a man watching them from the
woods."

"Oh my god, that's creepy." I
shuddered. "Are you sure it wasn't one of those shadow
things?"

"This was a daylight expedition. We
would never go in at night."

"Well, whoever it was is probably dead
by now. There's no way anyone could live in that place with the
shadows."

An amused smile crept across Bella's
face. "Normally, I would agree with you. Very few people could or
would want to live in that cursed place. But I recognized this
man."

"Recognized him?"

"Oh yes. The Templars wanted him very
badly at one point, but after Thunder Rock, he was presumed
dead."

My heart froze. "Vadaemos
Slade?"

She nodded. "I am almost certain it is
he who lives there."

"Impossible. The shadows would eat him
alive."

"Do you really believe someone capable
of avoiding the Templars and his own people couldn't find a way to
survive in El Dorado?" She shook her head. "The man is a
roach."

Holy crap.

If Vadaemos really was living in El
Dorado, I had no choice. I absolutely had to go back and track him
down. Make him answer questions about Thunder Rock. After all, if
this guy had lived at Thunder Rock to avoid the authorities, it
made perfect sense for him to pull the same stunt at El Dorado or a
place like it. Why? Because who in their right mind would ever go
there? Vadaemos might be a sneaky cheat and murderer, but he had
giant balls of steel.

Fear squeezed my stomach while my heart
floated on air. I might actually have a solid lead on the mystery
of Thunder Rock! I needed to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt,
only one spawn was responsible for the massacre. Maybe, just maybe,
Thomas Borathen would see the truth and let me date his daughter in
peace.

And maybe goats will poop
gold.

Alejandro nudged me on the shoulder.
"Can you help me with the Templar?"

I jerked from my thoughts and nodded.
"We need to talk about this later," I said to Bella as Alejandro
took the backpack and equipment belt off the unconscious form and
piled them to the side. It amazed me the Templar had been able to
run so fast with all that added weight. Alejandro gripped the
slumbering form beneath the armpits and I gripped the feet. My body
ached ferociously with each step as we carried it inside, setting
the body atop a cot in a room near the back of the
house.

"I will get the healer for her," Lina
said.

"Her?" I looked closer at the figure
and realized the form beneath all that bulky equipment was
undeniably feminine even though a thick vest hid the curve of her
breasts beneath the tight black material. Bella had managed to stop
the bleeding, but the bullet wounds hadn't healed as they should
have. She'd temporarily reduced my own pain, though my skin still
throbbed angrily where the bullets had bitten into my
flesh.

Just thinking about my own wounds
turned my legs to jelly as the full weight of the insanity I'd been
through climbed on my shoulders like a sumo wrestler. I dropped
into a chair across from the cot and stifled a groan.

"I don't understand," I said to
Alejandro. "Even though I'm tired, I'm not to the point where my
wounds wouldn't heal."

He pointed out a bloody rip in my shirt
I hadn't even realized was there. Beneath it lay crusted blood, but
no wound. "It looks like you have healed except for the bullet
holes."

That worried me.

Lina returned a moment later with a
pitcher of water and some towels. "Bella is gathering the city
council to tell them what happened, and the doctor, Devon, is on
his way." She looked at the bullet wounds on the Templar and
gagged. "This is horrible." She grabbed a pair of scissors and
tried to cut the material around the wounds, but the scissors
balked each time she pressed down.

"Let me try," I said. I poked the tip
of the scissors at the fabric. The black material hardened the
instant the metal touched it. I jabbed at it. Once again, the
uniform became rock hard at the point of impact. The armor seemed
to work fine now. It had failed miserably against the bullets. "I
guess we'll just have to take it off."

Lina tugged on the hood but it didn't
budge. It looked different from the ones I'd seen Elyssa wear
before. This one had no eye slits or any point of vulnerability
where flesh showed through. The black hood and mask molded over the
facial features, all without compressing it tight like pantyhose.
Lina finally found a tiny irregularity on the seam where the hood
met the collar of the shirt. She touched it but nothing happened. A
flash of inspiration lit the tiny light bulb in my head. I took the
Templar's gloved hand and pressed it to the button. The seam popped
loose around the front and the hood split in half across the bridge
of the nose, retracting into the nape of the uniform.