The Angel of Elydria (The Dawn Mirror Chronicles Book 1) (59 page)

“You’ll tell me…everything? Why?”

“Because you’ve done more for me tonight than any one of my followers has in months. You’ve brought me my brother’s hands and tongue. Just what I expected of a―”

“What are you getting at?” Penny stepped back, breaking away from Nestor’s hand. “I’d die before I let you hurt Annette or Hector,” she snarled, balling her hands into fists.

Nestor frowned. “Are you certain about that? I’ll get to them anyway. Is standing between myself and the inevitable worth never learning the truth about who you
are
?” Nestor coaxed.

Penny faced him with unblinking tenacity. “Absolutely,” she spat.

Disappointment shadowed Nestor’s face and he sighed. “What foolish ends noble lives often meet,” he said, shaking his head. With inhuman speed Nestor reached out and touched a finger to her chest, sending Penny shooting across the room into the wall. Nestor closed his eyes as if concentrating and appeared in front of Penny faster than her eyes could track. Once again he reached out with a single finger extended, and Penny only had a moment to jerk her head out of the way. As his fingertip connected with the wall that had been behind her only seconds before, the surface of it exploded into hundreds of tiny bits, showering the room with rubble. Penny jumped back again, almost falling victim to another explosive assault from Nestor’s finger. He appeared to be growing tired as he lurched forward to stop her, his face awash with apparent frustration. Penny stumbled as he rushed her again, backing her into the corner.

“Accept your fate, you can’t escape. Be still and your death will be easy,” Nestor commanded, his fingers trembling as they grasped for her.

Death is easy…

Penny felt the thought stirring in the depths of her mind. She looked at Nestor with wide eyes as she pressed herself into the crook of the corner. He was right, there was no escape―but perhaps fleeing was not the answer. Penny clenched her jaw, hoping that her insane idea had the slightest chance of stalling the Angel long enough for her to get to Hector. Nestor’s hand shot toward Penny’s forehead and she ducked just in time for the wall to be obliterated again, creating a crater the size of a small pond. Penny reached forward and wrapped her hands around Nestor’s stony forearm, catching a glimpse of his surprise before the white flash came.

Penny focused on thoughts of the masked entity that haunted her dreams in hopes that it would be enough to stun Nestor, yet as she summoned up memories of the nightmares that had plagued her for months, something very different emerged from the flash of white light.

She was stuck in the realm that separated reality from the dreams she tried to summon. She stood enveloped by the powerful, humming whiteness, watching as a face began to materialize before her. As the light streaming all around grew less intense, Penny recognized the mask from her dreams floating freely before her, without a cloak or body of any kind. Penny tried to breathe as she stared at its hollow eyes, the sarcophagus mask smiling back with iron lips. Frozen with horror, it took her a moment to notice what was happening to her body.

When she looked down at herself, she saw with shock that three pulsing black veins were growing out of her chest, reaching toward the mask. They oozed with a light film of slime and a dark substance surged within them at rhythmic intervals. Penny could not even manage to scream as she watched them snake forward, wrapping around the mask like the roots of a tree burrowing into soil.

She felt her heartbeat getting more frenzied as even more of the root-like veins began to stem from her body. They sprouted from her neck and legs, all quivering and reaching out toward the mask. Her heart began to rage in her chest like a snare drum, intensifying until all she could hear and feel was the frantic surge of blood. As her heartbeat grew to a panicked hum, the cloak of the masked entity began to flow down from the mask, like ink spreading through water. With an abrupt silence, Penny’s heart stopped beating.

Everything went deathly silent and still. Then with something that felt like a resonating snap in her chest, Penny’s heart started up again, this time beating at a normal rate. With a final shock, the veins that had grown out from her body broke off from her one at a time, each one feeling like a small sapling being uprooted as it was drawn into the masked entity. From within her, where the deep weariness and terror had been, there now burned a light as bright as that of the sun. A sinister murmuring rose from the masked entity, as if dry, cracked lips were chanting and singing behind the mask.

“You are mine, and I am yours,” the soundless voice that she had come to know so intimately puffed into her ear. “I have sought you before, and I will seek you now, and forevermore until we burn together again.”

The vision was ripped from Penny’s eyes and the sight of the goblin palace flowed back. Penny could now see that where her hands had touched Nestor, two diseased-looking black marks appeared to have been burned into his paper-white flesh.

The Angel stumbled backward and wrenched his arm out of Penny’s feeble grasp, gasping in horror at the hand-shaped singe marks on his arm.

“What have you done to me, you horrible, wretched creature?! What is―how can you control the flow of Anti-Magic?” Nestor demanded, his eyes widening as the deep, dark marks started to flow up his arm, blemishing his flesh. He tore off the front of his cloak, panicked at the sight of the sooty discoloration snaking its way through the veins in his neck, staining his face and eyes with poisonous black spots. The Angel fell to his knees and gripped his head.

“NO!
THIS CANNOT BE! Silence! Silence, I will not hear your lies―begone, you―NO!”
Nestor howled, and his frenzied stare fixed in terror on an empty spot as if it were haunted by a specter that only he could see. The whites of his eyes were splotched with black lines that pulsed and bulged. Nestor roared, the sound one of utter belligerence and defeat. He spread his trembling wings to their full span and rocketed into the air without warning, tearing through the stone ceiling as if it were mere tissue paper and creating a shower of debris and rubble as he shot into the sky. Penny scrambled forward and stared through the gaping hole.

All she could see were the stars blinking back at her. She kept gazing upward through the puncture wound in the castle ceiling for several long minutes before realizing that all the heaviness and fatigue that had weighed down on her bones just minutes before had vanished. It had gone, and it had taken the Angel of Elydria with it.

T
he walk back up the stairs was somehow just as tranquil as it was daunting. Though Penny did not know what to expect at the end of the balcony, a strange calmness had come over her. The emotions that had been so uproarious minutes before had stilled. She pushed through the curtains and onto the balcony and heard Annette’s distinctive scream.

“Penny! Thank Heaven you’re all right!” Annette wailed, gripping Penny around her ribcage hard enough to restrict her breathing. “We thought you had―”

“Where’s Nestor?” Simon yelled from beside her, fear still rampant in his gaze.

“I sort of—well, he’s gone. It’s hard to explain, I―”

“Are you hurt at all?” Hector hobbled forward, disbelief in his eyes as he looked Penny over. His nose had a slightly crumpled look and a splatter of dried blood smudged his face.

“No, I’m okay. Where’s Cyrus? How did Simon get away?” Penny asked, looking around for some clue as to what had happened. Echoing shouts still rang out from below and several goblin stragglers continued to dash across the now almost-deserted square. It was only a matter of time before Annette’s commands wore off and a group of angry goblin rangers stormed them.

“It was the Bishop. He flew up on a moth. Phobos and Deimos were with him, but they looked worse than dead. We tried to stop him, but he pulled out something that looked like a whistle and when he blew it, Cyrus came shooting out from the room and they―they got away,” Hector sighed.

Annette, who simply refused to let go of Penny as if she were in danger of being swept away with the wind, gasped. “Where’s Argent? Wasn’t he with you?” she squawked.

Penny flushed. “I―I left him sitting in the street…you don’t think when all those people ran off that he was―”

A loud groaning and creaking of hundreds of different mechanical parts sounded from above their head, interrupting Penny as a large shadow obscured the moonlight. The magnificent Royal Dirigible floated above them, an elephantine mass in the starry sky. On the airship’s deck they could just make out the outline of a silver-haired man waving energetically. Penny smiled, remembering Della’s last advice to Argent.

When you wake up you must go straight to the Air Harbor…

Moments later the four of them sat atop the cottony cloud as it soared higher into the sky. Hulver became a tangle of crooked towers with points of blazing color as they rose above the haze of the city. The night air was cold, but it could not have felt more wonderful. With effort they made it onto the railed deck and greeted Argent. He explained in a tongue-tied flurry how he had made his way to the Airstation during the confrontation and proceeded to wake a very incensed Zayne as quickly as he could.

Shortly after, they made their way inside and collapsed in exhaustion on the sofas in the cabin. They told Argent the shorthand version of what had happened, but not a single one of them had so much as a scrap of energy left, even for talking. It was only minutes before they were all asleep with heads resting on shoulders and laps.

THE NEXT DAY when they were safely on route back to Iverton Penny told them all, in great detail, of the confrontation between herself and Nestor and relived the vision of her final encounter with the masked entity.

“What could you have possibly done to make him react in such a way?” Hector wondered and Penny shook her head.

“There’s no way of knowing―I’m just grateful it
did
happen, otherwise I probably would’ve been reduced to a bloody smear,” Penny said, then stopped as something occurred to her. “I do remember him saying something about Anti-Magic, though. Do any of you know what that is?”

Hector shrugged, but Argent’s expression darkened a shade. Penny was sure Argent knew something as she studied the contemplative look in his eyes, but decided she would try to wheedle the truth out of him after they got back to Iverton.

Once all accounts had been told and theories had been discussed, the majority of the return journey was spent asleep or nursing their various wounds and recuperating. Every night Penny dreamt nothing but the harmless, nonsensical scenes that she had come to miss so dearly. The lightness she felt since Nestor had flown away remained.

When Iverton appeared as a tiny collection of miniatures outside of the Airship’s windows, all five of them rushed out on to the railed balcony. Penny felt a sense of warmth and ease as she gazed upon the familiar sights of the castle and Grand Cathedral in the distance, feeling as if she were finally home for the first time since she had come to Elydria. As the huge dirigible bounced down on the runway and the golden staircase clanked out, Penny and Annette bounded down it, laughing in elation.

At the bottom of the stairs, a wonderful surprise awaited: Gavin, Wendy, and Humphrey. Annette gave a high pitched yell and leapt into Gavin’s arms, then let go and threw herself on top of Wendy, all three of them making a riot of noise. Penny felt a great rush of emotion as Humphrey pranced up and down, whining as she skipped over to him. She threw her arms around his warm, furry neck as he licked her face. He pressed his cold, wet nose into her ear, sniffing it in the way that made her go silly with giggles. Humphrey gave Hector an energized sniff as he drew closer to the group, which Hector returned with a tentative pat on the anteloo’s head. By the time Gavin swept her up into a bone-crushing hug, Penny had to turn her head away to wipe away the rogue tear that escaped.