Page 53 of Revelations

“Sweet boy, problem is…you don’t have her.”

Something squeezed his heart into a suffocating grip. “Tell me something I don’t know. Isn’t that your job?”

For four hundred and fifty years, he hadstood silently by and watched. He had gotten so close to her, much closer than he had imagined was possible after all that had passed; almost close enough to reconcile with the dreams that kept him company in the night. But an abyss still lay between him and his heart’s desire.

“These eyes have seen it all and these ears have heard it all, or so I thought. But you confound me.” She grasped his hands and closed her eyes.

A soft humming filled the room. He could not tell if it came from her or from someplace else entirely. They sat that way for several minutes. Even the cat hopped up in his lap, purring softly after using its claws to prick a tiny hole in his jeans.

Her eyes flew open, no longer black as night but iridescent sparkles. “I’m sorry.”

Kael’s heart hammered against his ribcage. “What? What did you see?”

“The prophecy shall come to pass, but not in the way anyone expects.”

The oracle’s body shook as if overcome by an arctic breeze. Francesca bolted off his lap with a shrill hiss and ran to a far corner.

“No one will see this coming.”

Chapter 13 – No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

With Thomas passed out in the passenger seat, the Camaro raced back to Washington. Greylyn drove on pure instinct. Her heart and mind were too scrambled to make sense of anything, not even mundane tasks such as driving.

Remarkably, Thomas did not have a scratch on him. Dried blood matted his curls and stained over eighty percent of his clothes. But all of his wounds, even where he had been sliced nearly in half, had completely healed; not so much as a scar.

She chanced a peek at him from time to time. Aside from his deep snores, he had not moved or uttered a word.

No question, she was eternally grateful that he was alive. But the deep knot in the pit of her stomach clearly knew not to trust the demon-miracle.

Kael had appeared out of nowhere, slaughtered a banshee, conjured a demon, and somehow saved Thomas from death. And she had thanked him by racing off without so much as a “thank you.” She owed him her gratitude, but also her rage. In no way, shape, or form was summoning a healing demon a good idea. These creatures were only called when someone was beyond grief and willing to sacrifice anything to save another’s life. But there was always a heavy price. The question she most wanted to ask Kael was who would pay it and how.

A loud groan brought her back to the present. With the sun cresting over the horizon in the rearview mirror, she pulled the car directly up in front of Sofia’s apartment building. No one walked the streets. There was a surprisingly lack of noise—not even a squeak from the crickets in the overgrown patch of grass outside the building.

Greylyn’s skin prickled at the unease in the air. This ramshackle block of downtown DC had morphed into a proverbial ghost town.

Despite the weight differential between Thomas and herself, she deftly hauled him out of the car and up the flight of steps to the elderly woman’s apartment. The door was unlocked. Surprising, but that was not what sent Greylyn’s guardian radar off at full blast.

The silence was more deafening inside than outside the building. Nothing, not even the usual gentle humming, came from the back workroom. The atmosphere was heavy, oppressive, with a strong putrid, almost rancid odor. The smell of disease and death permeated the air.

After helping Thomas onto the tattered brocade loveseat, she ran to the workroom. Something was wrong, so horribly wrong.

Trepidation squeezed her heart as her fingers tried the doorknob. Locked, from the inside. She rapped on the door with her bruised knuckles. Nothing.

“Sofia! Someone there? Anyone?”

The stillness throughout the apartment pierced her usual calm.

She kicked the two-paneled oak door with all her might. The wooden door splintered. One more jab with the heel of her boot, and it finally fell back with a thud that echoed through the tiny apartment.

In horror, Greylyn collapsed in the ruins of the doorway. A mournful wail erupted from the core of her soul, spewing out a torrent of grief, shock, and utter anguish.

Bodies littered the floor. Mouths were wide open as if gasping for breath. Black-tinged fingers reached out to her, begging for help. Their eyes stared, lifeless. The pallor of their skin, the blackened extremities, the blood pooling at the corners of their lips—Greylyn recoiled, stumbling over her own feet as she scurried to back away.

The black plague.

In this modern day and age of medical marvels, somehow all present in the apartment had died of a sudden onset of the black plague. She had witnessed the scourge many years ago and had been grateful when it was finally eradicated after exacting a tremendous death toll of close to two hundred million people in Eurasia alone.

How had it appeared to consume Sofia and her colleagues in such a short span of time? Greylyn had only been gone a few hours; a few precious hours.

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