Archangel's Enigma (Guild Hunter)(108)

Because the reason Alexander had submerged rather than destroy this place was because it was a burial ground. Naasir’s brethren, who he’d never met in life, wouldn’t mind him coming in to take something. He was one of them. But no one else was welcome here, and he would permit no one to defile it.

A black feather drifted down.

Realizing Jason had to be growing concerned, he climbed back up so he could wave at the spymaster. Then he dropped down once more and, after a little more careful chipping, twisted the handle of the door and pushed as hard as he could. A creaking groan sounded. He slammed his shoulder against the door. Once, twice . . . and he was falling into the frigid place where he’d been born and where so many had died.

“It’s only Naasir,” he said to the ones who slept here in the stone coffins Osiris had created one by one around a small home, until they became the walls and the floor of a large stronghold. Each square block held a twisted child who was two, or broken bodies who were still one.

“I’ve come for a book,” he said, able to sense them all around, curious and excited that he’d come. “It’s red with a golden design on the front, and it has a lock stamped with the shape of a griffin. That’s a kind of half bird, half lion.” His breath frosted the air as he spoke, his claws having sliced out of his boots to grip at the ice that covered all surfaces.

Icicles dripped from the ceilings. Stalagmites grew from the floor.

It was a cold, desolate place, but Naasir felt no sense of danger or unease. Only his brethren lived here now. Alexander had incinerated Osiris and taken his ashes far from here before the Ancient buried this place. “I brought you something.” Reaching inside his pocket, he pulled out a toy that made music and kept it in his hand as he walked down the iced-over stairs to the lower level.

There, in the laboratory, he placed his gift on the large table where, according to the notes Raphael had taken and held in trust until Naasir was ready to read them, Osiris had cut up countless misshapen and twisted bodies, many while they were still alive. “I have a mate,” he told the others, thinking not of the evil things that had happened here, but of how it had been reclaimed. “The book is for her. She’s a scholar.”

A stalactite fell from the ceiling in the dim depths of the laboratory. Taking the cue, he went to the spot and discovered that everything was encased in ice. Going back upstairs, he found his ax and returned. He was careful as he chipped here, too.

The book lay on the floor in a block of ice.

Cutting through until he could pick it up, but while it still had a protective coat of ice, he held it in his gloved hands. “Thank you,” he said to his friends. “One day, I’ll bring my mate here. She has wings, but she’s brave and she’ll come down.” He didn’t think Andromeda would find it strange that he knew his friends were still here, happily playing among themselves—she understood him, knew that his mind wasn’t the same as hers.

Another stalactite fell in a tinkling symphony.

Smiling, he turned and walked out. As he climbed the stairs, he heard the music start to play behind him and knew his toy was welcome. Tucking the iced-over book in his jacket, he closed the door and made sure the seal was tight. Then he spent time packing snow all around it.

Climbing to the surface, he said, “We have to fill the hole back up again. No one can know what lies here.” His brethren had earned their peace.

“The falling snow will do that itself, but we can help it along.”

Together, the two of them began to manually fill the hole using the extendable shovels Naasir had in his pack. Meanwhile, the icy book began to melt against Naasir’s body heat. Realizing it might get damaged, he put it on top of the pack so it would remain cold.

Night fell and still they shoveled.

Even after the hole was no longer visible, they stayed, waiting to make sure they’d left behind no trace of their visit. By the time dawn whispered softly over the landscape, there was no sign anyone had ever been here but for Naasir’s footprints as he walked away from the site. Those were quickly filled in by the fresh snow that fell in a gentle rain from the sky.

His friends were safe again.

And he had the Grimoire.


*



Andromeda didn’t know how she’d survived the past five days. Her parents were exactly as she’d left them, their excesses changed only in the specifics. Lailah and Cato still indulged in vicious sexual torture with “willing” playmates who may simply have been too scared to protest, and every so often, they meted out violence just because it was a “fun” way to break the ennui that colored their every action.

Even today, a hapless young angel screamed in her mother’s quarters while her father sat in the great living area dressed only in pants of red silk while two naked vampires danced for him. He’d invited her to sit with him, watch the show—Cato was so jaded that he’d forgotten what it was to be a father.

Andromeda had been barely beyond a toddler the first time she’d seen her father having sex with a woman not her mother. He’d been strangling the whipped and bleeding woman at the time. Shocked, she’d cried. That day, her father had stopped and carried her out of the room. He hadn’t bothered the times afterward, and she’d learned not to come unannounced into any room in the stronghold.

As for Lailah, Andromeda’s mother had met her on arrival, and told her she’d placed a special triptych in Andromeda’s room. Immediately nauseous, Andromeda had hoped she was wrong. She wasn’t. She’d found three naked men waiting in her bed.