Fallen Angel of Mine (36 page)

My eyebrows pinched as I held up the
bit of plastic to examine it. It only took a glance to tell what it
was—a tiny memory card, the kind made for smartphones and other
computer devices. "This was inside her leg?"

"Just under the skin. Devon said it
looks like it was placed in just the right spot for the skin to
heal over it, but not deep enough for the muscle to reject it and
push it out."

"What's on it?"

She shrugged. "My phone doesn't have a
slot for that kind of card. I probably would have looked at it
otherwise."

I didn't blame her for being curious.
What could be stored on this thing that Elyssa or someone else
would insert it surgically beneath her skin? "Thanks, Lina. I'm
glad you gave this to me."

"I almost didn't. I was so angry with
you. With her." She gave a curt nod in Elyssa's direction. "But I
realized it is not your fault you love her. And it is no fault of
my own I—" She broke off and a tear trickled down her face.
"Anyway, I hope it helps."

I hugged her and pecked her on the
cheek. Backed away, leaving my hands on her shoulders. "Thanks,
Lina. I mean it."

She nodded as another tear joined the
first.

I dashed back to her house and grabbed
my smartphone. With trembling hands, I slid off the back cover and
pushed the tiny card into the appropriate slot. Thankfully, my
phone had plenty of battery left since it had been off all this
time. It recognized the card when I powered it back up. The only
thing on it was a fairly large video file. My heart thudded hard
against my ribcage as I started the video. Elyssa's face appeared.
She looked tired, defeated. Judging from her surroundings, she was
in some sort of high-security cell.

She looked so vulnerable. So beautiful.
My heart ached for her.

"This is Elyssa Borathen. I am of sound
mind. You may think I'm crazy, but I'm not. Elyssa, hopefully
you've found this. The story I'm about to tell you may seem insane,
but it's true. Your father wiped your mind not because you did
anything wrong, but because he couldn't control you. Because he
couldn't stop you from falling in love."

I stopped the video. My pulse hammered
and hope rode a swelling victory tide in my heart. Holy crap. Holy
mother up in heaven! Elyssa had somehow managed to record her
memories! This was irrefutable evidence. I saw the time on my phone
and realized with a jolt it was past time for the circus to move
out. Grabbing a pair of Lina's headphones so I could privately
preview the rest of the video before showing it to Elyssa, I
stuffed my phone into a pocket and rocketed out the door, back to
the bus.

The bus was gone but a white,
full-sized van waited. Bella and the other members of my intrepid
group sat inside. Elyssa, Beck, and Fausta sat in the third-row
seat speaking in hushed tones while Bella sat shotgun next to the
driver, a middle-aged Asian man I didn't know. Alejandro and a
light-skinned man with short, red hair sat in the front bench
seat.

"There you are," Bella said, breaking
off her conversation with the driver and turning to me. "Are you
ready?"

"Ready as I'll ever be," I said, trying
to keep the joy bubbling up inside from making me sound like this
was going to be the best field trip to Disney World ever. I buckled
up for safety's sake, and because I remembered how rough the roads
were in these parts.

"Justin, this is Master Curtis,"
Alejandro said, indicating the man sitting to his right. "And
Master Pokito is driving."

Curtis looked like the ginger version
of Gandalf, complete with a wizard robe and a pointy hat. I
couldn't remember meeting or seeing a single Arcane wearing such a
ridiculous getup, but even with the giddiness doing backflips of
happiness in my heart, I somehow managed to keep from
laughing.

"You've been kissed by fire," I said,
unable to control my smartass mouth.

He looked confused but took my hand
when I held it out to shake. He smiled, revealing deep wrinkles
around his eyes. "You can just call me Curtis." His voice was deep
with a touch of Irish lilt.

Pokito made eye contact with me in the
rear-view mirror and nodded before starting up the van and moving
out.

I'd wanted to watch the rest of
Elyssa's video along the way, but paranoia made me turn off my
phone. Even if I watched it with headphones, I couldn't be sure
that Elyssa's supersonic hearing wouldn't pick up on it. And I
wasn't quite ready to reveal this bombshell to her. While it was
highly unlikely I could fake anything like this, I didn't put it
past her to react negatively at first, especially considering what
her opinion of spawn must be thanks to her dear old dad.

We reached El Dorado and found a
bored-looking sorcerer standing outside the invisible barrier. He
said a few words to open it and hopped inside the van with us after
we passed inside. Pokito dropped him off at a large grass clearing
overlooked by one of the imposing pyramids. The picnic was already
well underway. A few kids kicked a soccer ball back and forth while
a plump sorcerer grilled chicken with the help of his wand. A large
group of people were making their way up one of the smaller
pyramids. I couldn't help but feel queasy thinking of all the lives
in danger and hoped the Arcanes knew how to protect themselves.
Then again, they always had the safe word for light.

The van bumped along a the same
stone-lined road I'd used to get out of the place a couple days
ago, except it went into the last place I wanted to be—the huge
square with the giant mosaics. We piled out of the van near the
square pedestal I'd slept next to on that terrifying night. Elyssa
stretched. Turned. Saw the mural with the blonde woman on it and
took in a sharp breath.

"What is it?" Beck said, looking in the
same direction.

"I think I've seen that woman before,"
she said. "Except…something was different."

"Did she have dark hair and olive
skin?" I asked.

Elyssa's head whipped toward me, violet
eyes boring into mine. "How do you know that?" She turned the rest
of the way toward me, arms tensing.

"Because you saw her for the first time
a few days ago. Her name is Nightliss." The blonde woman was
obviously a relative—a sister maybe? I wasn't sure. After my dream
with the two of them, I didn't know what to think. All I knew was
if this mural really depicted the blonde version of Nightliss, El
Dorado hid ancient secrets perhaps best left forgotten. Instead, we
were about to plow right through them.

Fausta swept the area with her gaze
then turned to me. "We are being watched."

Beck knelt down to fiddle with his
shoelaces before muttering, "Yep, over next to the painting of that
dude."

"As it so happens, that's near the
entrance to the vaults," Curtis said, sliding a slender black wand
into a leather holder on the belt around his gray wizard robe. He
reached into the back of the van and produced a staff a couple
inches taller than him. Alejandro, Bella, and Pokito had similarly
outfitted themselves, sans the silly-looking robes.

"Vadaemos?" I asked Fausta.

She shrugged. "I saw movement and a
flash of pale skin. It's unlikely anyone from the picnic wandered
this far."

A chill worked its way up my legs. I
looked down, halfway expecting to see shadow tendrils writhing from
the ground and grasping at me. Before Curtis closed the back doors
on the van, I peeked inside. "Where are the
flashlights?"

"We didn't bring any," Curtis
said.

"None at all?"

He shrugged. "You have us. We can light
the place up like the sun if we have to."

Bella touched my arm. "Light will not
be a problem, Justin. We are particularly good at
illumination."

I hoped they were right, I thought,
slipping my heavy backpack onto my shoulders.

"What the heck do you have in that
thing?" Beck said, studying my full-to-bursting pack.

I shrugged. "Supplies."

Fausta unzipped her jeans and started
to pull them down. I thought my eyes were going to pop out of my
skull. In fact, I was just about to ask why she'd suddenly decided
to disrobe when I noticed the skintight Templar uniform beneath her
civilian clothes. She saw me looking and winked. "Hoping for a
show?"

"I know I was," Beck said, waggling an
eyebrow.

She didn't so much as look at him. "The
hood on my Nightingale armor provides night vision, should I need
it."

Elyssa's expression soured, probably
because she hadn't thought about it. Unless they'd brought her a
spare uniform, though, her old bullet-riddled outfit probably
wouldn't have worked too well. Or maybe it was because Fausta's
curves looked pretty fantastic outlined by the sleek black
material. When she tied her glossy black hair up in a ponytail, it
amazed me how similar she and Elyssa looked. Their faces,
thankfully, were distinctly different thanks in part to the Italian
nose on Fausta's face.

"We ready?" Beck asked, his eyes making
one more pass over Fausta before trotting toward the place our
watcher had been.

The others looked to me. "Uh, head
out," I said. Oh yeah. My leadership skills were
amazing.

The rest of us sauntered toward the
entrance Curtis indicated earlier, while Elyssa and Fausta fanned
out around the structure in case our watcher bolted from cover.
Maybe Vadaemos would save us the trouble of entering a
shadow-infested warren of tunnels fraught with danger and give
himself up outside. We had no such luck. Beck, however, found muddy
footprints leading from behind the massive mosaic to the base of
the towering pyramid.

Half a footprint protruded from beneath
a slab of rock. My Indiana Jones training kicked in almost
immediately. "A secret passage." I looked for torch sconces,
usually the most obvious concealment for levers in every adventure
movie I'd seen, but saw only rock roughened from the passage of
time and elements. I pushed against the slab, looking for an
indentation or hidden latch to pop it open, but the aforementioned
pits and scars from the elements made that all but
impossible.

"This is not the entrance I would use,"
Bella said. "Or am I remembering incorrectly?"

Curtis nodded. "The researchers made
note of this particular passage as very dangerous thanks to a steep
slope and a pit at the bottom filled with spikes."

My lips peeled back in a grimace. "Wait
a minute, you already knew about this hidden passage?"

"We know about several of them,
primarily in this pyramid." Curtis motioned to the other structures
around the huge plaza. "Each one has what we think are sacrifice
pits and entrances into the underground city, but many of them are
caved in. This particular one is the most intact." He waved his
staff at the area where the muddy footprint disappeared and said,
"Open sesame."

The stone vanished into thin
air.

I stared at the gap. "It's gone? I was
expecting it to slide open."

Curtis chuckled. "No, the entrance is a
combination of a barrier spell and the illusion of stone. We don't
know how it's stayed powered all these centuries."

"It taps into the ley lines somehow,"
Bella said.

Curtis raised an eyebrow. "That's one
theory. Actually, my paper on—"

"Hello down there!" Beck shouted down
the open passage. His voice echoed several times, as if whatever
chamber lay below was huge. He tapped a foot inside what looked
like a ramp descending into the darkness but his shoe went right
through it. "Illusion," he said. "That's a nasty trap."

Fausta's eyes narrowed. "Our watcher
wanted us to fall into that trap."

I shook my head. "If we're talking
about Vadaemos Slade, the same jackass who outsmarted the Templars
and spawn all at once, this little trick is child's
play."

"I agree," Elyssa said, tossing a
fist-sized rock down the tunnel. It skittered down the unseen
slope, scraping as it went. When the scraping stopped, everyone
listened intently for the thud.

A soft, meaty smack sounded seconds
later.

"Doesn't sound too far," Beck
said.

A loud
RAWR-HEEHAW
echoed from the pit,
sounding like a mix between a lion and a pissed-off donkey.
Everyone jumped about a foot. Fausta's eyes went huge. Elyssa
pressed a hand to her heart. Bella gripped my arm in a vice and
squeaked.

"What in the hell was that?" I asked,
backing away from the opening.

Elyssa touched the hilt of her swords
where they protruded diagonally over her shoulders, as if their
presence soothed her fears. I felt particularly naked with only the
simple silver knife I wore on my side. Then again, what good would
knives or swords do against whatever thing lurked down that
passage?

I thought the shadow people were the
worst this place had to offer. Obviously, I was wrong. And if I
wanted a chance at getting Elyssa back, I had no choice but to face
it.