A Mystery of Light Read online

  And so he did, the white pool of divine radiance spilling across the prison floor. The singing stopped, Ashakaz’s eyes regaining focus. She blinked and looked at him.

  “Helo!” she said, grabbing one arm with the other. “Listen. You’ve got to protect me from him. He’s coming. He will kill me for what I’ve done.”

  “How did you know I was here?” Helo asked.

  “He knows,” she said. “He knows! You are angel born. You have to stop him before he finds me. You’re the only one who can!”

  Helo extinguished the hallow.

  “Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin’ for to carry me home.”

  The pendant had to be active. Either that, or this was a first-rate acting job. At least he knew that hallowing canceled its effects, a tip he needed to pass on. He activated the hallow again, Ashakaz cutting off midchorus.

  “He’s got the pendant?” he asked.

  “He must,” she said. “He’s controlling me, just like Cain did before.” She stepped forward and melted into his body. “Please help me.”

  Helo wasn’t buying it and pushed her away. “Deep 7 is the mo . . .” And then it hit him. Archus Ramis. If one of the remaining Loremasters—Jumelia or Avadan—had captured him, they would have control of the pendant. Even worse, if Ramis had cracked, they’d know almost everything about the AAO. Including where they were right now. The Archai must’ve realized the danger. And it had to be Avadan. Who else would be blasphemous and weird enough to have a Dread Loremaster sing “Swing Low”?

  He dropped the hallow, and Ashakaz went zombie singer again, her discordant voice singing the old African spiritual with a hollow quality that turned it into a dirge. Before leaving, he scanned the room to see if Ashakaz had left any other clues or messages, but he came up empty.

  He tapped the door, and it swung open to reveal Diarchus Joan standing against the wall, eyes closed and pinching her nose.

  “What’s been done to protect Deep 7?” Helo asked. The door shut and the lock popped behind him, choking out the song. “You’ve known for six months that Ramis might have compromised you.”

  She nodded and opened her eyes. “We’d hoped that Cain was the one who had orchestrated whatever scheme led Ramis out of here with the pendant. With Cain’s death, we thought the plot might have had an end. That’s the primary reason we wanted Cain alive for interrogation. We needed to know how compromised we were.

  “Months passed with no word. No Ramis and no report of anything indicating that any of the Loremasters had any sensitive information about the AAO. Then the Visionary massacre turned everything on its head. We’ve been scrambling ever since, moving what Visionaries we have left to new locations, putting all of our facilities on alert. There are some here who still don’t believe the pendant has the control and reach you say it does, but I am a believer.”

  “Ashakaz believes Avadan’s coming here,” he said. “She’s terrified.”

  “Or is acting like it,” Joan said. “She is a pretty little liar. Everyone in the Archai agrees on that. She gives us information she wants to give, lies about knowing anything else.”

  “Still,” Helo said, “I think the song choice is deliberate. If Avadan is controlling her, he is sending a message that he’s coming to take her. Or maybe he’s just screwing with us. Has there been any indication the Dreads are homing in on wherever we are?”

  “No,” Joan said, “but we had two Visionaries this morning have some pretty disturbing visions. Everyone’s on edge. Well, I’ve said more than Grand Archus Gideon would like, I’m sure. Thank you for your help. I’ll walk you out.”

  The security level was one of the places they’d denied him access to, probably afraid Ashakaz would seduce him and he’d stage a jailbreak to help her. He wished he had a way to explain to everyone why he wanted to help Aclima so they wouldn’t think him some sweaty-palmed teenager turned to goo by Aclima’s good looks. Dolorem had understood. Simeon did too.

  As they approached the elevator, the lights in the floor and the ceiling flickered for a second.

  “That normal?” Helo asked as the elevator door rotated open.

  “When there’s a switch to internal power,” Diarchus Joan said. “There wasn’t one scheduled for today . . .” She pulled out her phone and they both climbed into the circular elevator. After a few taps, she put it up to her ear. “This is Joan. Did we just switch to internal power? Okay. Why did we do that?” A long pause. “Keep me posted.” She slid the phone into a pocket in her uniform. “Level 5, please.”

  “What’s going on?” Helo asked.

  The elevator door slid shut, and she looked at him as they descended. “Bad weather. Really bad.”

  “A Sheid,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Let me help,” he said. “I can hit it before it even gets here.”

  “We’re not defenseless, Helo,” she said. The elevator stopped at level 5—command and control. The female Michael who had retrieved him before waited at the landing. “Take him back to the lobby,” Joan said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Diarchus Joan and the Michael guard switched places and the door closed.

  “Lobby,” the guard said.

  The door slid shut, and the elevator hummed to life, a series of backlit numbers in the metal above the door counting down. Four. Three. Two.

  Darkness.

  The elevator shuddered to a stop, the vibration running up through Helo’s legs. Not a sliver of light leaked in from anywhere.

  “They’ve killed the power,” the guard said, voice awed.

  “They?” Helo said. “You mean Dreads or Ash Angels?”

  “The internal power plant is protected,” she said. “It’s nuclear, like submarines. There’s no way Dreads could have gotten to it. No way.”

  “Sounds safe,” Helo said sarcastically, feeling his way along the elevator wall with his fingers, searching for the door. “What’s your name?”

  “Spice,” she said.

  “Spice, does this thing have an emergency hatch or something?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Emergency lights should kick on. They should be kicking on.”

  The crack at the center of the doors slid under Helo’s fingers. Not much to get a grip on. Wedging his fingers into the crease, he flared his Strength and pulled, the two curved doors sliding away with a shriek. Muffled rumbling—voices and the pounding of boots—filled the silence. All he could find by probing with his fingers was the smooth metallic wall of the shaft. He searched toward the top, but the elevator hadn’t ascended far enough to make the bottom of the first floor palpable.

  Click.

  Two small red lights bathed the elevator compartment, one from the ceiling and one from the floor. Spice’s hand rested on her gun hilt. Helo checked the ceiling for a hatch, but it was only white paneling that housed the lights. Had they really not built an escape hatch? He supposed safety regs for immortals might be a little lax.

  “What’s the protocol if attacked?” Helo said.

  Spice eyed him, expression uncertain.

  “Come on, Spice,” he said. “We’re under attack, here. The time for keeping secrets is over. I’m on your side.”

  She cleared her throat, hand rhythmically squeezing the handle of her BBG. “The reliquarium is on lockdown. That thing is Fort Knox. There’s no way they’re getting in there. The computers will erase themselves and dump all their data onto a single memory board, which will be given to Fox 1. All the members of the Archai should be removing their hearts right now. Those will be given to Fox 2.”

  “What’s with the foxes?” he asked.

  “Two teams of three—Fox 1 and Fox 2. There is a secret emergency exit on the seventh level. The Fox teams fight their way out with those two items. Everyone else is to fight to the death or disablement.”

  Helo nodded, trying to figure out how to get out of the tin can they were in. Why would the Dreads—certainly with Avadan at the helm—attack Deep 7 besides to des
troy it? While Ashakaz had feared that Avadan was coming specifically for her, he had to think the crazed Dread Loremaster had more up his sleeve than petty revenge for Ashakaz turning herself over to the Ash Angels.

  But the shade of fear on the Archai’s faces he’d seen over the last week assured him that they had expected something like this, and, even worse, knew that Ramis might have given up secrets Helo knew nothing about.

  “You say there’s an escape hatch on the bottom level—the council chamber.”

  “Yep,” she said.

  “Then that’s where we’re going,” he answered.

  Spice’s eyes narrowed, and she pulled the gun from her holster. “You gonna use this chance to run?”

  “No, we’ve got to—”

  Everything shuddered and shook. Hard. The elevator compartment bucked back and forth, air dense with the groaning of stressed metal and the tinkling of shattered glass. Helo shouldered into the wall, knees buckling, Spice collapsing on top of him. Her gun skidded free.

  The elevator fell.

  Chapter 5

  Shafts

  In the brief moment of weightlessness, Helo’s hands scrabbled over the smooth elevator walls, hunting for a handhold, but the fall was short-lived, a clunking sound bringing their descent to an abrupt stop. Spice’s body slammed into his, then rolled off. The red lights were still on, glinting off the shattered pieces of glass. Helo rolled over onto his side and pushed himself up. The elevator had a safety mechanism after all.

  “Is this the only elevator in this place?” he asked, getting to his feet and eyeing the gun at his feet. The elevator had stopped halfway past the second floor, about the bottom three feet of the second level’s exterior doors showing.

  Spice pulled the gun to her and stood up. “No. There is a secure elevator on the opposite side of the compound that serves all eight floors, and another that only goes between levels three, four, and five. But they may all be out of commission.”

  “Stairs?” he asked.

  “No.”

  The doors to the second level whined as someone pulled them apart, revealing Ash Angels running in their direction, boots and knees visible in the opening. A hallway lit with the same red emergency lights as the elevator filled with Ash Angels.

  Helo shook his head. They really hadn’t planned for this contingency when they’d built the place. If the elevators weren’t functional, everyone was trapped on their own floor.

  “Let’s get out of here. You first.”

  She nodded. Then the muted booms of BBGs from a level above them reverberated into the elevator compartment. Yelling came next. Spice threw him a worried look.

  “You okay in there?” a male with a light Hispanic accent said. A concerned brown face appeared in the gap. Three more pairs of boots waited behind.

  “Help her out,” Helo said. “Fast.”

  The sickly feeling of a Sheid’s presence washed over him. Aclima had told him you could know a Sheid by the feel, and this one Helo knew. This Sheid he had faced on a gravel road in the woods of Colorado. He hadn’t even gotten close to it. It brought with it a rainstorm that had practically crippled Sicarius Nox and a host of Michael soldiers.

  Spice was only about halfway out, her eyes and those of the Latino helping her both closed as if remembering something. Helo understood how hard it was to resist the torching effect of such a powerful Sheid, but being angel born had its perks.

  “Get her out!” he yelled.

  Eyes fluttered and regained focus.

  Boom!

  Something landed on top of the elevator, rattling the loose glass and collapsing the opening six inches. Spice scrambled out, and Helo grasped the floor and hauled himself up, hands grabbing his arms and pulling.

  Boom!

  Metal whined, the gap in the elevator door small enough to press into his thighs.

  Boom!

  He slipped free into the hallway, elevator plunging, the Sheid and its swirling blackness following it down. It passed through the opening in the shaft too fast for Helo to see whose form it had taken. Moments later, an earsplitting crunch signaled the elevator’s demise, the floor vibrating with its impact.

  Helo craned his neck to see down the shaft, but only an extra murk of black at the bottom hinted at the Sheid’s location. Spice and one other Ash Angel crawled to his side and peered over the side. The Sheid had fallen all the way to the bottom floor. That was the reliquarium. Was that where it wanted to go? Helo needed to get down there—in one piece. It was a long way down, and he didn’t have the Toughness Bestowal to do a brick jump. There looked to be a pipe he could shimmy down on the opposite side of the shaft.

  A bullet tore off the left side of Spice’s head, and Helo flinched back into the hall along with the other Ash Angel as more bullets tore into the gap. He pulled the rest of Spice’s body farther back into the hall and took her BBG. Only one of the other Ash Angels around him was armed, a man holding a BBG. He looked like a Michael.

  “What’s your name?” Helo asked.

  “Arrow,” he said.

  “Can you handle a weapon?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Anyone else?” Helo asked of the four others standing around.

  The Latino who had helped him out of the shaft raised his hand. “I’m Cielo.”

  Helo tossed him the gun. “I’ve got to get down there. I need you to keep the Dreads up there off my back while I climb down that pipe. Anyone got Glorious Presence?”

  Blank stares all around.

  “Okay. Arrow, Cielo, cover me.”

  “You got it,” Arrow said. “Can you really kill Shedim with your bare hands?”

  “Yep,” Helo said, eyeing the pipe barely illuminated by the red emergency lights from the hallway. He hoped it wasn’t greased, or he was going to have a very fast trip to the bottom. “The rest of you, go find a weapon.”

  After a brief look at each other, the two armed Ash Angels sidled up to the side of the open elevator shaft. Helo backed up a few paces, eyes on the pipe. Just as he was about to run, two red auras flashed by, probably using Toughness to survive the jump to the bottom. Cielo and Arrow took potshots at them, but Dread gunfire from above drove them back.

  “Ready?” Helo asked.

  They nodded, leaned out into the shaft, and fired upward.

  After a four-step jog, he leapt into the darkness of the shaft, eyes fixed on the steel pipe, which looked to be about four inches in diameter. It wasn’t oiled, but it wasn’t easy to hang on to, either. Flaring his Strength, he dug his fingers into the smooth surface, trying to get purchase on the wall with the tips of his boots. He slid about ten feet down before he got control. He was craning his head down, trying to figure the distance to the bottom of the shaft, when a spray of bullets exploded around him. He dropped farther down, grateful for his lack of aura. There were no lights in the shaft save for the single red glow from inside the crushed elevator compartment at the bottom.

  The report of gunfire echoed through the shaft as he half slid, half shimmied down the pipe. A white aura fell past him. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought it might be Arrow, the BBG clanging at the bottom just before his body crunched into the ruined elevator. Bullets sparking off the shaft’s walls came less frequently and less accurately, and Helo quickened his pace. He did not want to be crippled by some lucky shot.

  The greasy, dark feel of the Sheid strengthened the farther he descended. Would it be hunting the Fox teams? Had Ramis compromised those, too? If the Fox protocol had been invoked, then one team would be collecting the Archai’s hearts on level seven while the other would be grabbing the computer backup on level four or five.

  The elevator doors to levels four, five, and six were still closed. Seven and eight were both open, eight’s opening half concealed by the elevator’s wreckage. The door to seven looked like it had been smashed inward. Yelling and gunshots echoed into the shaft from both floors, but it didn’t take any guessing to know that the Sheid was on level seven, the
council chamber. It sounded like a hurricane had erupted somewhere inside, the wind ejected out the door rippling his Deep 7 uniform.

  He bent his legs and pushed off the wall using his Strength, arcing across the shaft and down through the doorway into level seven. He tucked and rolled over his shoulder, using the momentum to come to his feet . . . right in front of a soldierly Dread holding one of their knockoff rifles. The Dread’s eyes widened as he spun in front of the statue of Michael and the Dragon, red emergency lights highlighting the gilded sculpture.

  Helo melted the Dread’s head with a jet of Angel Fire before the guy could even get his rifle to bear. The body collapsed, and Helo grabbed the rifle off the floor. The banging and yelling were mixed with the howling wind storming out of the auditorium where the Archai had passed judgment on him a week before. Helo edged up to the arched entryway and angled his head around the side, the steady blast of air pulling at the skin on his face.

  The faint glow of the emergency lights revealed the Sheid in a hellish hue of red and black. It walked at an even pace, now halfway down the center aisle, which was bordered with emergency lighting strips. Around it swirled auditorium chairs in a virtual tornado that had ripped the Ash Angel banners from the walls. The Sheid had taken the shape of Archus Ramis, a cruel but appropriate mockery. It was clear the Archus had probably spilled every last secret to Avadan.

  Four Michaels maneuvered around the edges of the completely desecrated room, snapping off pointless shots at the Sheid. But just as the Sheid had done with the hail in Colorado, it blasted the swirling chairs outward with the force of missiles. Helo retreated behind the edge of the archway, a chair rocketing into the statue behind him and bouncing off. A moment later, he moved back around the arch and found two Michaels still standing. One held a sanctified sword in his hand and was limping as he looked for an opening, face twisted in agony in the desecration. Helo couldn’t spot the other two Michaels in the gloom.

  If he could get close enough to the Sheid, he could surprise it with a hallow, but dodging the chair-nado would be tricky. The dark creature moved steadily toward the raised platform. The large double doors to the Archai’s secured chambers had been ripped from their hinges, three Ash Angels crouched in the hall beyond, geared up heavy, one with a backpack. That had to be Fox 2 with the backpack full of the Archai’s hearts. It was the prize the Sheid wanted. Helo shuddered. What could Avadan do if he had the entire Archai in his grasp in one of his torture chambers?