Sinister Seraphim of Mine (Overworld Chronicles Book 8) (34 page)

By the time Elyssa and I clambered out of the hole, Grundwig had already formed a neat hole in the ceiling.

The troll inspected her claws. "My fingers are tired."

"I'll bet." I resisted the urge to muss her hair. Despite her somewhat alien features, she looked like a kid.
Elyssa would smack me in the head if I did that.

"I will wait in the tunnel," Grundwig said.

I heard a scuffle and saw Elyssa's legs vanish into the hole in the ceiling. I nodded at Grundwig and hurried after my girlfriend. We went up the stairwell and made it to a ladder identical to the one in the east wing. Elyssa opened the trap door and poked her head through. After several seconds, she climbed all the way out. I followed her.

This roof looked about the same as the other, with large gooseneck vents, an interdictor in the center, and a circle of aether generators covered in tarps. There was, however, one big difference: the distinct sound of moaning coming from somewhere ahead of us. Elyssa and I crouched low and silently made our way toward the disturbance.

She looked around the corner of a generator. Leaning around her, I took a peek. Two people on a carpet hovering a foot above the ground were going at it. Judging from the blue cloaks lying next to them, they were part of the Arcane military forces.

"We should get back to our patrol, Charlie," the woman said in a quaint British accent. Her tangled brown hair hung over the side of her face, and her cloak was rumpled.

Charlie, a man with a long, thick beard and close cropped hair, replied with a growl. "They won't miss us. Besides, this will only take a moment."

"How lovely," she said. "I'm so glad you have endurance."

"I'll show you endurance, Clarisse." He bit the woman's ear.

"Ow, Charlie, that really hurt," the woman said, pulling away. "Charlie, you bit me."

"It wasn't that hard." He sighed. "Let me get you out of that shirt."

Elyssa pulled me back behind the generator and gave me a disbelieving look. "What are you doing?" she mouthed.

I shrugged and mouthed back, "Watching." I pointed to the Lancer mounted on her wrist. The silver darts it shot would knock out the lovebirds.

She shook her head and put her mouth to my ear. "If we knock them out, they'll know we were here."

I put my mouth to her ear and whispered, "Camouflage?"

"We'll still make noise bending the grate where the statue is."

I looked back around the corner, saw Charlie trying to disrobe Clarisse, and wondered if making out on a flying carpet was something I should put on my bucket list. An idea came to me. A hovering carpet didn't exactly have a parking brake. In fact—I channeled a wave of Murk and pushed it gently against the carpet.

As I'd hoped, it drifted to the side a few inches. The amorous Arcanes didn't seem to notice. As gently as possible, I pushed the carpet all the way to the edge of the roof. The rug had been set to hover a foot off the ground. That meant once it went off the roof, it should slowly drop until it was a foot off the ground. Charlie and Clarisse were so busy making out, they still hadn't noticed. I gave silent thanks that people closed their eyes while kissing.

With a final nudge, I sent the carpet off the edge of the roof. Instead of easing toward the ground, it plummeted like a rock.

I heard two panicked cries fade into the distance and felt a horrified grimace contort my face. Elyssa gave me a look of disbelief.

"It shouldn't have done that," I said.

"I know." Her hands clenched. "I think the gig is up."

A patrol would surely find the two dead Arcanes, and they would know someone had penetrated their defenses.

Chapter 31

I couldn't believe I'd just sent two sex-crazed Arcanes plummeting to their deaths off the side of Kobol Prison, during a covert mission, no less.

"We need to get the statue anyway," Elyssa said in a harsh whisper. "Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll think it was an accident."

I nodded and rushed toward the vent in the center. With a quick tug, I bent open the grate, reached inside, and ripped the duct-taped statue from within. Elyssa pushed the bent grate back into place and we had just started for the trap door when a flying carpet swooped down from the night sky.

An Arcane on the carpet said a word and the top of his staff glowed with light. He held it high. Light glinted from the rings on his fingers that allowed him to use magic in the interdiction field. "I know I heard something."

"I heard the scream too," the other man said. "We should send out a general alert."

"I agree. I don't know how, but something is—" He broke off as another flying carpet rose above the edge of the roof. "Bloody hell."

The other man looked. Two half-naked, but otherwise unharmed Arcanes blinked at him, their skin white as sheets.

"Are you kidding me?" the man with the glowing staff said.

"Carpet malfunction," Charlie said. "The wind just about ripped my cloak straight off."

"Save the hogwash for later, you idiot," the man said. "You two sneaked away for a bit of light snacking, did you?"

Clarisse looked down. "Just a bit of harmless fun."

The other carpet came closer to hers, and the man with the glowing staff burst into a laugh. "Judging from the size of that hickey, you might want to be sure you're up to date on your tetanus shots, love."

The driver of his carpet chortled.

"Please don't report us," Charlie said.

"I almost sounded a general alert because of you two idiots." The other man's smile vanished. "Charlie, switch with me. Maybe some time with Bernard here will teach you a lesson."

Bernard, the driver of the second carpet belched. "Bloody sauerkraut has been giving me a tummy ache tonight."

Charlie gave Clarisse a hopeless look and then switched places with the staff man. After a few more stern words, Charlie's new partner took off in one direction while Clarisse and the staff man took off in another.

Elyssa snorted, trying hard to repress a laugh. I tried giving her a stern look but could barely keep from laughing myself. We rushed back down the trap door, into the basement, and down into the tunnel where we collapsed into helpless giggles.

Grundwig raised both of her bushy eyebrows as she watched us. "Are you dying?"

That only made us laugh harder.

"I'm so glad you didn't kill them and set off a general alarm." Elyssa stroked my cheek.

I gave her a
what can you do?
look. "I didn't expect their carpet to drop so fast."

"You're too clever for your own good." She pecked me on the nose. "Now that my heart isn't pounding a million miles a second, let's have Shelton test out the omniarch."

I pointed up. "In the basement."

"I have sealed the hole in the ceiling of the basement in the other building," Grundwig said.

"Thanks for covering our tracks." I flashed her a quick smile and climbed back into the basement. Once there I took a picture and sent it to Shelton. A moment later, a portal opened in the room.

Shelton pumped a fist, but knew enough not to whoop. "What's the plan now?" he asked.

"Give us a minute," I said and turned to Grundwig. "Can you cover the holes here?"

She nodded and vanished into the hole. When she returned, she dumped an armful of dirt and bits of broken stone. Grundwig hawked up a huge gob of snot and spit it on the dirt, then mixed it up with her claws. Within minutes, she'd smoothed the mess over the hole in the ceiling and the hole in the floor. Her concoction dried to an almost perfect match.

"Do you do plaster repair?" I asked, thinking about some of the holes in the walls of the mansion.

The troll tilted her head.

"Ignore him." Elyssa turned to me. "What next?"

I motioned them through the portal. Once we were all through, I deactivated it. "I think I remember the details of the cherub room enough to open a portal there."

"It'd be nice not to have to sneak in," Elyssa said.

Drawing upon my terrifying memories of the loading docks, I willed the omniarch to open a portal there. The portal opened to utter darkness. A low rumbling growl echoed from within. "Close!" The portal winked off.

Shelton looked as pale as I felt. "Didn't we learn the dangers of trying to use this thing without an exact visual?"

"What made that noise?" Elyssa asked.

I thought back to the Void and the beast Jeremiah had told me about. Was it possible the omniarch somehow opened not just to a void, but to
the
Void when it couldn't find a place to match the image in the user's mind? Or was this some other unholy place we'd found? Now certainly wasn't the time to investigate.

"Let me try," Elyssa said.

Shelton backed up ten steps and held his staff at the ready.

My girlfriend closed her eyes and stood in front of the omniarch for several long seconds. A portal flickered open. Through it was a concrete wall with an anarchy symbol spray painted on it. "I noticed this when we were there the last time."

I poked my head through the portal and looked around. The cubes had been reorganized into three different stacks. I heard someone whistling and activated the camouflage on my armor. The portal was facing the rear wall of the large loading bay. From the backside, it was invisible. Unless someone walked along the wall, they wouldn't see it.

Elyssa activated her camo and touched her hand to my head. A blurry image of her faded into view as she activated the friendly vision function. We stepped into the facility and headed for the source of the whistling. A young man in Exorcist robes walked along the center row of cubes. Judging from the size of the stacks, the center row was nearly triple the width of the other two. Unlike the last time we'd been here, the tallest stack was three cubes high. The cubes were also no longer transparent, but opaque like a frosted window.

We eased into the space between stacks in the row closest to us for a clear view of the center aisle and the man.

The man held a small crucible filled with gray fog. He took one of the null cubes from a stack and placed it on the concrete floor. With a touch of his wand, the frosted glass turned clear.

The cherub inside abruptly jerked into motion, crying, "Dah-nah! Dah-nah!" Its nubby hands groped at the glass, as if it could somehow reach the source of life energy within the man.

The Exorcist shuddered and seemed to force himself to hold the gray glass sphere to the cube. Within seconds, the color inside the orb changed to ultraviolet. He waved a wand over the cube and the glass frosted over. The cherub inside, apparently unable to detect anything, went silent. The man whistled loudly and a humanoid form made of red clay strode into view. The golem hefted the cube and took it to the row of cubes closest to the wall where the portal was.

A yellow light flashed in my armor's heads up display, warning me my camouflage charge was running at about fifty percent. Elyssa tapped my arm, probably to warn me in case I didn't know. I pressed a hand to her armor and to mine, willing aether to flow through me and into the armor to keep it charged.

The Exorcist repeated the exercise with the gray orb. Sometimes it glowed white when he held it to a cherub cube, and other times ultraviolet. Each time, he'd make the golem carry the cube to one of the other two stacks. It didn't take me very long to understand what was going on. They'd figured out how to separate the Darklings from the Brightlings before putting them in the aether pods.

There was a loud rumbling noise and one of the steel shutter doors rolled up. A semi-truck trailer backed into the loading bay. Two Exorcists entered through a side door a moment later and opened the back of the trailer. It was packed to the gills with null cubes.

More of the clay golems appeared. Each one lifted stacks of cubes and placed them in the center row.

"Fresh delivery from the Grand Nexus," one of the Exorcists said. He held out an arctablet. "Signature."

The man sorting the cubes sighed and made some squiggles with his finger on the tablet screen. "I hate all this new techno-paperwork."

"Don't blame me," the other man said.

"Remember the good old days when you could 'misplace'"—he made air quotes—"a piece of parchment and nobody knew any better?"

The man with the tablet shrugged. "Luna don't give no slack to slackers. The other day, me and Ronnie saw—"

A door clicked open and banged shut. Elyssa and I backed out of our hiding niche and crept along the row toward the front where the delivery truck was docked. Even with our camo activated, someone with a sharp eye would spot the blurs in the air if we moved around too much, so we kept low. By now our armor was back to full charge thanks to my efforts, so I didn't have to keep my hands occupied for the next several minutes at least.

A figure in a tight, hooded cloak and skintight armor like the kind Templars wore walked silently across. Judging from the curves revealed by the armor, the figure was clearly female. The hood, however, hid her face. I doubted Daelissa walked around with a hood up unless she didn't want people laughing at her bald head.

The two delivery men and the man sorting the cubes each dropped to one knee and bowed.
Then again, maybe it is Daelissa.

"I told you to stop bowing," said a voice that definitely didn't belong to Daelissa. "Stand up."

The men stood, but kept their eyes on the floor.

The hood turned toward the delivery men. "What is the status of the Grand Nexus?"

"The light bomb killed off the shadow people and most of the Flarks," said the man with the arctablet. "We have everyone hauling off the Seraphim husks. We should have it cleared out in time for Daelissa."

"Casualties?"

The two delivery men looked at each other. The one with the tablet spoke. "Nearly fifty vampires, seventeen of our people, and five battle mages."

The woman made a hissing noise, as if sucking a breath through clenched teeth. "Give me their names and I will see the families are cared for."

"Yes, Luna." He made as if to bow, but the woman gripped his shoulder. "I am not Montjoy. You will not bow and scrape to me. Do your work and all will be well." Her hand tightened. "Am I clear?"