Sinister Seraphim of Mine (Overworld Chronicles Book 8) (16 page)

"She's crafty when it comes to social manipulation," Jeremiah said. "Fortunately, she has never been good at applying the skill to warfare."

"I would appreciate you keeping knowledge of my family's past to yourself," Thomas said. "Elyssa believes our daughter, Phoebe, is still alive and working with the Exorcists."

"I can certainly understand why you'd want to keep such a thing discreet," Jeremiah said. "I will respect your privacy in the matter."

"Thank you," Thomas replied.

The legal scroll for Kassus's release arrived about thirty minutes later, during which time Elyssa told Justin everything her parents had said about her lost relatives. She'd always understood Justin's desire to reunite with his sister, but she'd never quite identified with it. Now she did. Phoebe was out there somewhere. Her
sister
was out there. Elyssa knew with certainty she had to bring her home.

Justin squeezed her hand and grinned. "Let's go free a bad guy."

Chapter 14

Jeremiah accompanied me and Elyssa down to Kassus's cell.

I had to admit I was still reeling over the news flash about my girlfriend's long-lost family members. If the Exorcist ninja was really Elyssa's sister, and not part of some trick, I planned to do everything I could to ensure she reunited with her family. Sure, it sounded like she had some severe abandonment issues, but if Ivy could overcome brainwashing by a vengeful Arcane and an insane Seraphim, surely Phoebe could purge herself of centuries of hatred and anger.

Yeah, right.

It might take a little more than Axe body spray and smooth words to get through to Phoebe. I'd probably have to kick her ass first. Given my complete and utter failure to even stop her from beating me silly, winning such a contest was a long shot.

Jeremiah entered Kassus's cell and presented the amnesty scroll to him while Elyssa and I turned the outside wall transparent and watched.

The mage read through the fine print and stopped. "You're putting me on a leash."

"But a lengthy leash," Jeremiah said. "You continue to provide us with information and we'll continue granting you asylum."

"I don't need asylum," the other man said, slashing a hand through the air. "I need freedom."

I decided it was time for me to step inside. Kassus blanched when he saw me. I returned a confident smile. "You can have your complete freedom if you want it just as soon as you give us the information we need."

Kassus stared at me with suspicion. "What's the catch?"

"Whenever we need information, we call, you answer." I shrugged. "Go where you want, but keep your arcphone close."

"What's to keep me from ignoring you?" he asked with a sneer. "You think you can find me once I'm out of here?"

As I'd expected, my power play had triggered an alpha male response. It was time to show him who the pack leader was. I bared my teeth, flung out my arm, and shackled Kassus in an ultraviolet web. His eyes went wide. I gagged him with a strand of Murk before he could shout and jerked on the web to pull him close to me. Taking my other hand, I extended my pinky finger and slowly grew a thin shard of Murk from it. The whites of Kassus's eyes grew even larger. With a jab, I plunged the Murk needle into his heart, or at least made it look like it was piercing into him.

Kassus went red, bellowing and straining, the veins on his neck bulging like a snake that just ate a Chihuahua. I wasn't really stabbing him, though. As the ice-cold Murk needle touched his skin, I simply decreased the length of it just like the fake knives we used in my favorite live-action role-playing game, Kings and Castles.

With a final smirk, I released the shackles and pushed him against the wall. "Now I'll always know where you are. If you give me any trouble, I'll be more than happy to leak your whereabouts to Daelissa. She's extremely unhappy with you for a multitude of reasons. That way, I don't have to go through the trouble of punishing you myself." I brushed my hands together while staring at the trembling battle mage. "Are we clear?"

Kassus nodded.

"I said, are we clear?" I enunciated each word in a calm, precise voice.

"We're clear." His voice shook ever so slightly, though I couldn't tell if it was rage or fright lending the vibration.

I gave him a friendly smile. "Great. You're welcome to go into hiding after we conclude our business today, or you can stay here without worry Daelissa will learn of your freedom and have her agents hunt you down like a dog."

Kassus gritted his teeth and looked down. "I guess I'll stick around for a while. Just don't expect me to do anything more than provide information."

"Excellent." I took the scroll, pressed it against the wall, and handed him a quill. "Why don't you sign this, and we'll get started."

He signed it without another word.

"Let's proceed to the war room," Jeremiah said. "I believe that will be the best place to conduct the interview."

"More like an interrogation," Kassus mumbled.

We joined Elyssa in the corridor and headed back to the levitator and the war room. A Templar from the evidence department delivered a foil bag with Kassus's arcphone and Elyssa supplied the man with an arctablet as well.

"The portal blocker isn't something we invented," Kassus said in answer to the first question we asked him. "When we drained the water out of Thunder Rock, we found a huge warehouse full of stuff we'd never seen before. There were these cubes of all different sizes and colors. This crazy Arcane chick, Serena—she was head of the Gloom Initiative back in the day—figured out the things were packaged arches."

"I'm familiar with them," I said.

Kassus paused, a confused look on his face. He'd been out of circulation since before the Battle of Bellwood Quarry, so he was probably wondering how I knew about the packaged arches. He shook it off and continued. "Anyway, the cubes had these symbols I recognized from arch control rooms that have Alabaster Arches in them."

"The weird ones in the upper corners of the world maps?" I asked.

"Yeah." He shrugged. "They ain't Cyrinthian, that's for sure. Serena found an obsidian tablet inside the warehouse that had a lot of those symbols on it. When you touched one of the symbols, it played these really strange musical notes." He patted the shirt pocket of his gray jumpsuit as if looking for a pack of cigarettes. "Serena figured out the symbols are a written version of a music-based language."

"Interesting," Jeremiah said. "Where is this Rosetta stone?"

"I recorded a lot of the sounds on my phone. As for the tablet, it's probably in the Gloom with her," Kassus said. "Good luck if you want to get to her, though. There are only a couple of Gloom arches, and Daelissa has complete control of both of them."

"You mean like the one in the Church of the Divinity?" I asked.

He nodded. "Sure. There's another in Thunder Rock, too. But the Exorcists own the church. Ain't no way—"

"We control the church," I said.

His forehead wrinkled. "How in the hell?"

"There's a lot you don't know." I curled up one side of my mouth. "After we're done gathering information, I'll bring you up to speed on world events."

"Let's return to the portal blocker," Jeremiah said.

Kassus stared at me for a second longer, squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, and nodded. "Yeah, yeah, fine. We found these shelves full of little statues. Everyone figured they were decorative because we ran them through some tests and couldn't find anything magical about them. The odd thing was even though there had to be over a hundred of these things, there were only ten unique designs."

Jeremiah raised an eyebrow. "Describe them, please."

"I got something even better," Kassus said, flicking on his arcphone and tapping in a complicated passcode. He projected a hologram. "I took pictures."

The pictures of the statues weren't of great quality, but as he flicked through them I recognized some of their shapes immediately. Jeremiah's eyes betrayed a hint of surprise. The statues were designed to match the icons on the Chalon, though there were a few I didn't recognize. The last one, a circle with lines reaching out from it in a starburst pattern, reminded me of a symbol I'd seen on an omniarch.

Kassus pointed at the picture. "Each statue has musical language symbols on them." He rotated the image of the omniarch statue and magnified tiny etchings on its base. "I thought these were just scratches because they're so small, but once I analyzed them, I matched them to the music language on Serena's tablet." He traced his finger from right to left across the three symbols. "Playing them in this order activates the statue. Playing them in reverse deactivates it."

I looked carefully at the symbols but didn't recognize them.

Kassus continued. "My head researchers took one of each statue back to our testing facility at Kobol Prison and studied them. That was about the time I started testing a panarch to see if I could use it to nab one of those baby angels the dragons were protecting at El Dorado."

"Panarch?" I asked.

"Yeah, that's what I call the arches you can take anywhere without a destination arch."

"We call them omniarches," I said.

He wrinkled his nose. "Sure, whatever."

I pshawed. "Our name is better. Panarch sounds like something you'd call a sandwich."

"Or a venereal disease," Elyssa added.

Kassus blinked at us a couple times before throwing up his hands in surrender. "Fine, we'll call the damned things omniarches. Now, can I finish?"

"Please do," Jeremiah said.

The battle mage looked up, as if trying to download memories from his brain. "Where the hell was I? Oh, yeah. I tested the
omniarch
"—he practically spit the word—"and found out I couldn't open a portal to our testing facility. My head researcher and I eventually narrowed the cause down to this statue." Kassus jabbed a finger on the omniarch symbol. "After a series of tests, we figured out the musical tones activated some sort of portal-blocking ability in this statue. The other statues didn't seem to affect the omniarch."

That's because you didn't test them on other arches.
I had a feeling these statues might be a stopgap for keeping the Alabaster Arches closed if we could get our hands on them. Unless I was completely off track, each statue represented a realm. In other words, if I took the Seraphina statue, activated it, and put it next to an Alabaster Arch, the arch would be unable to create a portal to Seraphina, although it could connect to other realms.

"Does Daelissa know about the statues?" I asked.

Kassus chuckled. "Hell, no. We took credit for coming up with a spell to block portals."

Thank god.
That meant she didn't know to use them to protect other assets. I thought of another question. "How large of an area will one statue block?"

"Just a few hundred yards radius," he said. "There are two of them, one on the roof of each wing of Kobol Prison to maximize the coverage and ensure both arches are covered."

I suppressed a grimace.
How in the hell are we going to get inside the prison without a portal, much less the roof without Daelissa knowing?
This was going to require some creative thinking. "How do I deactivate the statues?"

Kassus fiddled with his arcphone and retrieved a list of recordings. The first file played a short but complex series of sounds that sounded like an elephant had swallowed a symphony orchestra and farted out the first part of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

"That deactivates it?" Elyssa asked.

Kassus showed his teeth. "Sure does, sweetheart."

I was a little surprised at how cooperative he was being and found myself growing suspicious. I didn't want to get into the middle of enemy territory and find out his information was bogus. "Are the statues at Thunder Rock active? In other words, could I open a portal there?"

Kassus's eyebrows pinched. "You're crazy if you think you can sneak into Thunder Rock. That place is full of Synod soldiers and vampires."

"Can I open a portal there?"

"Yeah, but you'll have to run down a long rock tunnel without any cover to reach the room." He pshawed. "I don't know how much traffic that tunnel gets now, but Serena had a constant stream of her people going up and down the damned thing with artifacts so they could take them to the Gloom for study."

"Can you open a portal to the tunnel?"

The battle mage squinted as if trying to envision something. He nodded. "Yeah, there's a vein of crystal I always looked at when I went down that tunnel. I could open a portal there, but it's at least a three-hundred yard run."

I grinned. "I'm pretty fast."

Kassus grunted. "Hell, it's your funeral." He raised an eyebrow. "What do you want with the statues?"

I wasn't about to tell him anything. "How much does Daelissa know about the omniarches?"

"Considering we only recently figured out what they were, probably not much," he said. "Back in the day the Arcane Council forbid anyone from using the omniarches after a whole group of researchers vanished into one and never came back." He laughed. "Dumbasses. At least it kept their true nature secret for my people to discover."

Some of Daelissa's operatives already knew about the omniarches, and I didn't want to take the chance they could use them to open a portal directly into the center of the Templar compound, or anywhere else we thought was safe. These statues would provide added defense measures.

"I believe we've covered this subject in sufficient detail for now," Jeremiah said. "Let's talk about the aether pods."

Kassus leaned back. "Can I get a sub sandwich first? I'm dying for some real food."

I glared at him. "Keep talking."

"Fine." He threw up his hands. "Those aether pods use a secret recipe I cooked up when I was experimenting with ways to increase my power output."

"I assume your people know this recipe?" I asked.

"Yeah. Daelissa wanted results fast, and I wanted to live, so I gave the spell to my best people." He muttered a few choice curses my supernatural hearing picked up on. "I'll copy the instructions from my phone. Don't take any shortcuts or you'll kill yourself. That's what happened to Watkins, that idiot. He didn't use pure silver on the rings. The aether leaked and fried him like a chicken."