Page 3

“The spell doesn’t lie,” Damiel had said. “It showed us the one the Guardians entrusted these memories to.”

“What spell?” I’d asked.

“The one I cast the first time you came to the Lost City, the one that unlocked the treasure trove of memories inside that precious little head of yours.”

So Damiel had helped me come to these memories, memories he claimed the Guardians had put there. But why would the Guardians want me to have these memories?

Or was Damiel wrong? Yeah, he’d really hate to hear that. Maybe it hadn’t been the Guardians at all. Maybe the memories had come from my demon mother Grace. She certainly had the power; she’d once given Nero future visions of me and our daughter. If Grace could show Nero visions of the future, maybe she could show me visions from the past.

It would certainly be in line with Grace’s character. She’d schemed so that I would absorb Faith’s telepathic powers into my unborn child.

Or was Damiel right, and it had been the Guardians to give me these memories? But to what end? Did they think they could use me in some way, just as Faris and Grace hoped to use me? I didn’t think so. The Guardians had tried to kill me. They wouldn’t kill someone they needed. Right?

A broken train blocked the tracks. I had to jump inside and crawl through it.

Another flash. The train rattled. Another piece of the past hit me. Sierra, the red-haired angel, jumped across the train car’s roof. Her blade met a monster’s body. There were more monsters below on the ground, lured there by the sounds of battle. A beast’s jaws snapped at her. She cut across its body, severing it, splitting it in two.

But that was not the true enemy. Sierra pressed on. The real enemy had invaded her city. They were coming for her.

Sierra’s memories weren’t the only ones that lived on in this city. I saw a pale-haired angel too, wearing the weapons of heaven and hell, fighting unseen enemies in the city. She ran at them. She was outnumbered. There was no hope of victory or even survival, even with all her magic and the aid of these powerful artifacts. But she did not shy away from her duty. She charged into battle, nonetheless, to defend her city and meet her end. If she was going to die here, she would take as many of them with her as she could.

Sierra and the unnamed pale-haired warrior: they were two different angels. The pale-haired angel had lived long before Sierra. I just knew it. Centuries before. Maybe one of the angels had fought in the Final Battle for Earth all those years ago, but then what of the other angel? I knew of no other battles in the Lost City. I would need to ask Bella. She always knew everything about history, and if she didn’t know, she knew just which book to consult for answers.

I brushed my hand across the graffiti painted on the inside walls of the train car. Rough depictions of two angels: one with pale hair and one with red hair. What did it mean?

The front of the train car ended in a building, like the train had crashed full-speed into the train station. We hopped out of the missing door on the side. There, on the walls of the station, painted all over, were lots of funny symbols. I recognized those alien symbols. I’d seen them before, way back.

I remembered how Nero’s eyes had panned across those symbols in confusion.

“I’ve seen these markings before,” he’d said. “They belong to one of the ancient languages, one not of this world. I can’t read them. Can you?”

“I think so,” I’d replied.

“How?”

“I don’t really know. I guess the same way I have weird visions of things that happened long ago.”

“Can you translate them?”

“I can try.”

Where had I gotten this knowledge of the past? Of old languages? I’d once drawn some of those symbols for Bella. My sister had said they were one of the demons’ old languages. Maybe I’d gotten this knowledge of the symbols from the same place I’d gotten the memories of the long-gone past.

The symbols were from a demon language. The signs seemed to point to Grace, that she’d been the one to give me these visions.

“You’re awfully quiet, Leda,” Tessa commented.

I’d passed most of our journey through the ancient airport and broken train line in silence, lost in the memories, in those flashes of the past.

“The memories are stronger here,” I told her.

“Good,” Tessa said. “Nice to know you’re not going crazy or anything.”

I flashed her a smile. “Well, I’ve always been crazy. Nothing new there.”

When I slept, the dreams came to me. Memories, jumbled and juxtaposed. Out of time. Drifting on the satin sashes of time. Out of place. Whispering against my consciousness.

These dreams and visions had grown so frequent, they were distracting. They were trying to tell me something. Ever since my recent battle of the minds against the telepath Faith, I’d been having these dreams, or maybe since I’d been pregnant. Hard to say which one since they’d both happened around the same time.