Page 39

Loren

Jonathan’s shouts chased us out of the catacombs, but I wouldn’t be stopped.

My mind and heart were focused ahead, pulled by the fragile thread that had always connected Indy and me.

Whitney followed while panting at the effort of keeping pace.

I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him winded before.

Up and up and up. The many sets of stairs I’d practically flown down became mountains to hike, and I was breathing hard, too, by the time I reached the top and skidded through the turn toward the nearest hall.

The corridor stretched on and on until it felt like a joke.

Like the end was, in fact, endless, and my steps led me nowhere at all.

Until I arrived.

The door was ajar, and that sight alone shocked my feeble heart.

The red ooze dribbling from the knocker’s maw had created a pool on the floor that I stepped over as I pushed inside.

All-encompassing darkness draped over me, smothering, as I fought my way forward, breathing in the acrid smell of smoke.

It billowed and rolled, waist high and rising.

Thick clouds I waded through, gasping and gagging because it was all too familiar.

It was our trailer where he’d burned up in bed while the smoke detector screamed.

It was a club bathroom where I’d had to sit and block the door so no one would walk in and find a man on fire.

It was Indy’s car, the one before the Pontiac, fully ablaze by the time I found it parked at the lookout he loved so much.

There was smoke, but no flames.

No light in the pervasive dark.

So, like in the catacombs, I let my nose guide me, following the stench of scorched hair and flesh.

My eyes adjusted, but the cloud was as dense as a wall.

I stepped forward and swatted it away, squinting and straining and sobbing by the time my foot struck something metal, and I stopped.

I dropped to my knees to feel around.

But the air was clearer down here, and I could see more easily than before.

Chains blanketed the floor.

They spread out like a web, or a net with a wide perimeter anchored by bulky iron weights.

In the open spaces of the net’s grid, golden feathers littered the ground, using any hint of light as an excuse to shine.

They spread to the edges of the web, growing denser toward the middle where they piled around a huddled form.

A human form.

An abject cry escaped me, and my glaive came to hand before I thought to summon it.

I stood, almost stumbled, then swung the blade down, rending the chains from the weights that anchored them.

Casting the polearm away, I knelt again, shoving the net aside to uncover the person trapped beneath it.

When my hands brushed Indy’s body, ash smeared my skin.

His clothes were charred as black as everything else in the room, and his face was stained as well.

I crept closer, pressing into him, nearly laying on top of him in my need to touch him.

My fingers threaded through his curls and found them similarly powdered with soot.

Then my palm pressed tentatively against his chest, over his heart, and I waited.

The rise and fall was subtle but steady, and his heart thumped weakly beneath my hand.

“Indy?” I whispered while sliding my arm behind his head and lifting him.

“Doll?”

His eyelids twitched, and his lips followed suit.

My hound whimpered and circled, ill at ease while I rejoiced.

Indy was alive. Moving and breathing and, while I watched, slowly waking.

Golden eyes fluttered open, cutting through the darkness to fix on mine.

“Hi, baby,” he rasped.

I scooped him up, moving swiftly but carefully until I had him seated across my lap.

He felt wrong somehow.

Too limp. Too light.

Too… cold.

He blinked again, dazed and leaning hard against me.

Any other movement seemed to be beyond him, and his head lay in the hollow of my shoulder as though he lacked the strength to lift it.

“Nero’s dead.” His lips curved a wavering smile.

“And I think…” He swallowed audibly, and I would have sworn I heard the sandpaper in his throat.

“I think I might be, too.”

“No,” I assured him while I flooded with doubt.

“You made it. You’re okay…”

The light in his eyes dimmed—pale yellow overtaking the gold.

They looked faded amidst the ash peppering his face.

Aged. Old.

“I’m not,” he whispered, and his smile was so, so sad.

The last few days had been spent in tears or near them, so I wasn’t surprised to feel hot tracks cutting down my cheeks.

Indy made a soft, soothing sound.

I knew he would have reached for me if he could.

Cupped my face. Held my hand.

Instead, he stayed still.

“Don’t cry, Lore,” he murmured.

“That’s my job.”

I’d seen the end enough times to recognize it.

This was different, but profoundly the same.

I couldn’t deny it.

“I’m taking you home.” The words cut me on the way out, and the taste of blood filled my mouth.

A flicker of brightness lit Indy’s face.

Dwindling sunshine. Dying light.

“Yeah?” he asked.

I nodded, wanting to reassure him but stricken once more with silence.

A touch on my shoulder made me jump, and I glanced back to see Whitney standing over us.

“We should hurry,” he said.

My head wobbled another nod as I stood, lifting Indy like he was nothing.

He loved being carried like this.

Loved ringing his arms around my neck and rubbing his face in my hair.

But now he hung limp in my grasp.

I stumbled into the hall and found an open patch of wall.

Bending carefully, I traced a doorway, then stepped back to let Whitney pass.

He paused at the threshold, likely wondering as I did what happened to souls robbed from Hell.

We had no guarantee he could leave this place.

It seemed too simple; a power I’d not been privy to.

But that was no surprise.

Moira never was one to share secrets with her pets.

The brief hesitation ended when Whitney thrust one foot forward, crossing from this realm into a better one.

Going home. His home, too, I supposed.

And I hurried out after him.

We arrived in Sully’s flat in the aftermath of battle.

The invading hounds were gone, and Sully, Abigail, Gunnar, and Dottie were in mid-cleanup.

They spun toward us, their arms loaded with shards of broken furniture and mouths agape, but I barely spared them a glance.

Gasps and surprised exclamations bounced off my brain as Sully rushed toward us.

She got one look at Indy, unresponsive with his eyes shut and his breathing dreadfully shallow, then she tugged on my arm.

“Take him to my room, Lore.”

I was already headed that way, leaving her with Whitney, who had survived his journey from Hell.

As I left, my hound’s ears tuned to the sounds of their reunion, their joy at odds with my anguish.

In Sully’s room, I laid Indy on the bed, atop the quilt that reminded me of my sister.

She had been bundled up and buried in something similar, and part of me wanted to strip it away because no, I wouldn’t bear witness to another death.

I wouldn’t give up another precious thing.

But he felt cold, and the quilt would keep him warm, so I wrapped him in it then crawled onto the mattress beside him, tucked in close the way we slept most nights.

The light of indoors showed more clearly what had been obscured in Nero’s chambers.

Indy’s skin was gray but not burned, and his purple curls were peppered with thick, black soot.

He looked like a chimneysweep, like he should have been wearing a flat cap and suspenders and toting a broom on his shoulder.

Instead, he wore a crop top and hip-hugging jeans that had scattered ash all over Sully’s bed.

And he was so still.

I closed my eyes and breathed him in, wishing for a whiff of the honeyed amber sweetness the warding spell had long ago deadened.

Now he smelled like acrid smoke and days-old perfume, and I missed him.

I had been missing him since the day Evander told me he had to go.

It never really ended because I missed him always, in both the lead-up to tragedy and its aftermath.

I mourned what I had and what I’d lost, and it confirmed over and over how much I hated change.

Even the shifting seasons came as an affront, like sand slipping through an hourglass counting down days, months, years.

He was transient, this phoenix of mine.

Always passing through but never failing to cut his path through my life and leave trenches in his wake.

The landscape of my existence had been carved by him.

Valley-deep aches and euphoric peaks.

I didn’t know what I would do without him.

He was sleeping, but this was an infinite sort of rest, and flames would come soon.

Then I would have to move away from the only kind of fire that could burn me and watch as it stole Indy away.

I couldn’t do it again.

Curling closer, I pressed my face into his hair and squeezed my eyes shut until I saw nothing but stars.

I heard nothing but the shallow pants of his breath and, deep in his chest, the timid beat of his heart.

Then a voice. Make that two.

Arguing behind the bedroom door I’d closed.

“I don’t know how you got in here?—”

“You warded against Hell, Miss Sullivan. Not Heaven. And I’d advise you let me through.”

The door opened, but I didn’t sit up.

I didn’t even lift my head to look at the new arrival because I already knew who it was.

That damned angel.

Soft footsteps carried Evander to the bedside while I stiffened and hugged Indy’s motionless form.

He may have finally found peace, but it continued to elude me.

I couldn’t even get a moment of privacy.

The angel loomed, casting me in his shadow.

I didn’t move. Let him watch.

Let him gloat, if that’s what this was.

Or—the more I considered, the more it rang true—let him grieve.

When I cracked open a tear-blurred eye, I saw past the foot of the bed to the doorway where Sully and Whitney crowded in the frame.

Abigail, Dottie, and Gunnar flanked them.

The room had become a theater, or maybe this was a wake, and we were all mourners giving final farewells.

But there was still a pulse.

A slim chance of survival remained as long as Indy’s chest rose and fell.

I clung to that and to him, clutching the edges of the worn old quilt until my hands throbbed.

I’d been so determined to restore Indy’s warmth, but it startled me when it actually happened.

Something hot and fierce swelled in his core, pushing through the layers of the patchwork blanket until the fabric began to glow.

I recoiled with a hiccupped breath, expecting sparks, then flame.

And it was a bit like that.

The warmth, the light, continued to rise.

It broke free of Indy’s body to form a tiny ball in the air.

It flickered, surging bright then dimming in an uneven pattern.

It reminded me of a firefly, something that begged to be caught and kept, a natural nightlight to war against the dark.

The tiny beacon flashed again, a yellow-orange smear in the water of my eyes.

I stared, afraid to blink and miss it, and my eyes fixed on that stubborn flare until, abruptly, it went out.

I searched the space where it had been.

The emptiness. The hole torn in my universe.

And my hound bayed.

My eyes shuttered closed, and I buried my face in the crook of Indy’s neck where his pulse thumped against the thin skin.

It beat as softly as a butterfly’s wings while Evander heaved a breath.

“It would appear my job is done,” the angel said.

“I think yours is, too.”

I didn’t need to see him to know he was talking to me.

When I didn’t look up or loosen my grip on Indy’s limp body, Evander spoke again.

“Loren, I’d like to give you something. Rather, I’d like to take something from you. Assuming you’re ready to be rid of it.”

I tensed.

Hell took from me. Starting with Moira and ending today.

I had nothing left to give.

“Some might consider it a miracle,” the angel added, his voice distant.

No miracles.

Not for me.

Give it to Indy. Save him the way you should have when I sent him to Heaven.

I gave him to you. Trusted you with the most precious thing I’ve ever had, yet we still ended up here.

I lost, and gave, and everyone took , and no.

As much as I wanted to say all of that, I didn’t breathe a word.

I lay as motionless as my phoenix, my eyes shut against the world.

“It may hurt,” Evander warned.

I doubted I would notice.

He touched me then. A tentative hand pressed against my spine, sending a spike of ice straight through to my core.

I gasped and bucked back, and Sully shouted something from across the room.

It burned in a way only cold could, searing and spreading through my body.

I was wrong to think I’d be able to ignore it.

Even my grief couldn’t overpower this terrible hurt.

It was like I was dying, being torn apart physically as well as emotionally.

Evander’s frigid fingers burrowed in, and I yelped.

Sully shouted again, and I heard feet thundering closer to the bedside.

But I didn’t look, and I couldn’t move, frozen by the angel’s grip while he took from me, purging something that felt intrinsic, removing what had become part of me a hundred years ago.

By the time he withdrew, my tears had soaked the pillow beneath Indy’s head.

I was shaking so hard my teeth chattered, and my chest ached through every breath.

I felt empty and hollow, but also free.

Gingerly, I rolled over to see the angel standing by with his hand held out.

A dusty gray blur of a thing hovered above his upturned palm.

It looked soft, wisping with dust and a flap of broad, flat wings.

Like a moth, I thought.

A bland, gray bug, but it made so much sense.

The hound found Indy.

Sniffed him out in a damp cellar tucked beneath Brooklyn’s gritty streets.

He guarded our phoenix, whimpered and whined for him, and drew me back to the task of protection over and over again.

We were both drawn, it seemed.

Like a moth, yes, to a stunning flame.

Seeing it wasn’t enough to convince me.

I searched and listened for the second soul that had been inside of me, the beast that haunted my thoughts and possessed my body.

But he was gone. I was alone in my own skin, and it was quiet.

Blinking blearily, I watched as Evander raised his hand higher, and the fluttering thing took to the air, making looping circles skyward.

It rose until I thought it might collide with the ceiling but, instead, it wisped away like smoke.

A candle blown out.

Evander let his arm drop, and I saw Sully beside him with her cheeks flushed and glistening wet.

“What did you do?” I asked the angel in a ragged voice.

Evander nodded at Indy and me huddled on the mattress.

“You’re men now,” he replied.

“Merely mortals.”

It took several seconds for the words to take on meaning I could comprehend.

Even then, I wasn’t sure what he meant.

“I don’t understand.” Or maybe I was reluctant to believe.

“Men… Not just me?”

“The phoenix is gone,” Evander said.

“But Indy…?”

Hope was a delicate thing, as fragile as glass, and it contained a future so beautiful I hardly dared to imagine it.

To see it shattered would break me, too, so I held my breath and fixed my eyes on the angel’s pale blue ones until he nodded.

“He’ll live, and so will you. For one more life.”

Sully’s audible sob rang in my ears.

“And then?” I practically choked on the words.

“That’s for you to decide,” Evander replied.

I glanced over at Indy with his eyes closed, features slack, and body unmoving.

But his heart was beating, and his chest rose and fell, and I was hopeful .

My thoughts circled an unbelievable truth.

A miracle greater than anything I’d ever dared to pray for.

It was hard to breathe, much less speak, but I needed to say it out loud.

“We’re… human?”

The angel nodded, and I nodded right back.

“And he’s…” I looked at my beautiful boy again.

My light, my love, my everlasting.

“He’ll be okay?”

Evander dipped his head.

“Given a bit of time.”

Time.

We’d had a lot of that.

My phoenix was a transient thing.

Forever coming and going, and I was always there.

For every death and rebirth, I’d been beside him, and I told myself I excelled at grieving.

But really, it was more about waiting.

For Indy to become himself again.

To return to me life after life, and to love me as fiercely as he always did.

We had time. And, for Indy, I would wait.