The Sweetest Burn Page 13

  “Yes, she is the last Davidian, and yes, that is David’s slingshot embedded inside her skin,” he said almost gently.

  To my great consternation, the priest dropped to his knees, mumbling prayers in Latin. He kept hold of my hand, though, and for an old guy, he had a good grip. Then he pressed a kiss to the tattooed loop around my finger.

  “Sanguine David, armorum Dei,” he breathed, finally releasing me. “Blood of David, weapon of God.”

  I backed up as soon as I could, unnerved by the misplaced worship. If this priest knew me, he’d haul me over to the nearest confessional booth and then bolt it shut until I’d disclosed all my sins, which would take a while.

  Adrian flashed me a grin. “Don’t let this bother you. Father Louis is an emotional guy. You should’ve seen his reaction when Zach told him who I was. He dumped a vat of holy water over my head and began reciting the exorcist’s prayer.”

  I couldn’t help but snicker at the mental image, which lessened the awkwardness of the moment. After crossing himself, Father Louis rose, smiling at me with a sheepish expression.

  “My apologies, miss. I was unprepared. Believing in something is not quite the same as seeing it in the flesh.”

  I reassured him that all was well while I mulled the truth of that statement. Months ago, I had believed the slingshot would work because everyone had told me it would, but still, I’d been blown away by actually seeing demons and minions fall by the hundreds from it. No wonder the good father had lost a little of his cool after Adrian told him who I was. Seeing and believing were two different things.

  And sometimes, believing and trusting were two different things, too. I knew that God was real because of everything I’d been through, yet I still struggled to trust in Him. After all, it seemed reckless at best to hinge the fate of the world on a twenty-one-year-old who was far from the smartest or bravest that humanity had to offer. Any divine being that thought that was a good idea was deserving of a few doubts, if you asked me.

  “You remember Costa, and this is Ivy’s sister, Jasmine,” Adrian continued the introductions. “We’re here so Ivy can build up her tolerance to the staff. The sling comes out in the presence of demons, which is why we need to see Blinky.”

  “The demon’s name is Blinky?” Jasmine asked in disbelief.

  Adrian snorted. “He refused to tell us his real name and I don’t recognize him, so we had to call him something. You’ll understand why we picked that when you see him.”

  “Please, allow me to watch the sling’s manifestation,” Father Louis said, his voice almost trembling with excitement.

  Adrian clapped him on the back. “Get me a bag of a hundred percent, hand-tossed grave dirt, and you’ve got a deal. The last priest I went through must’ve mixed regular soil in with the batch since it did nothing but piss off the demon it landed on.”

  Father Louis beamed. “Done.”

  I now knew why the grave dirt we’d used hadn’t worked on Oblivion. Father Louis hurried to the front of the chapel. I thought he was leaving to get the agreed-upon hallowed dirt, but instead, he locked the chapel doors and came back.

  “You never did explain how Blinky managed to be on hallowed ground without exploding or something,” I said to Adrian.

  He smiled, and for the briefest moment, he reminded me of Demetrius. The demon was the only other person I’d seen who could convey such dark expectancy with a mere curl of his lips.

  “You’re about to find out, but I’ll give you a hint—if hallowed objects exist, then so do their counterparts.”

  With that, Adrian grabbed one of the four pillars that flanked the altar and turned it on its axis. With a grinding sound, the entire altar and part of the stone floor beneath lifted up on its side, causing the candlesticks and velvet cloth to crash onto the floor. The new position revealed a square, open space beneath the altar, with stairs that led down.

  “You’ve heard of trap doors, well, this is a trap altar,” Adrian said, his grin turning challenging. “Follow me.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  FATHER LOUIS TOOK one of the altar’s fallen candles, lit it and brought it down with us. Without that single flickering flame, we wouldn’t be able to see anything. Well, most of us wouldn’t. My eyes were already adjusting to the dark. As I’d told Costa, my abilities were like a muscle; the more I used them, the more they were there when I needed them.

  “What kind of a church is this?” Jasmine whispered as we descended the stairs. The tunnel around us was so narrow, if I stretched out my arms, I’d hit the wall. That’s why Brutus had to stay up in the chapel. Even though the staircase descended only about fifteen feet, there was no way Brutus would fit in this tiny space. I hoped no one in our group was claustrophobic. Even I was starting to feel twitchy from our cramped quarters.

  “A very special one,” Father Louis replied. He didn’t sound unnerved by our surroundings. In fact, the old priest sounded almost giddy. “It originally came from the French village of Chasse-sur-Rhône. No one knows how old the chapel is. Some say five hundred years old, some say a thousand.”

  I was more surprised to hear of its original location than to hear of its age. “Someone moved an entire stone chapel all the way from France to here?”

  “Oh, it didn’t come here first,” Father Louis said, further surprising me. “Its first destination was New York. It stayed there forty years and miraculously survived a fire that leveled the castle next to it. Then the chapel was inherited by another family, and they had it transported stone by stone to here.”

  “Why would anyone cart around an entire chapel once, let alone twice?” Jasmine asked, voicing my own thoughts. “You could build several new ones with much less time, money and hassle.”

  Father Louis reached out, touching the stone walls fondly. “There’s something special about this place. If you stayed here any length of time, you’d feel it. Right, Adrian?”

  Adrian was still at the front of our procession, and at that, he threw a glance over his shoulder at the priest.

  “I don’t know that I’ve felt something special, but it is the only place I’ve kept coming back to, so I suppose that counts for something.”

  All I felt was the thrum of hallowed ground across my senses, which, although stronger from the multiple churches on the campus, wasn’t unusual. Maybe Father Louis was just romanticizing because the chapel had such an unusual history.

  “How did you come to have a trapped demon down here, anyway?” I asked.

  Adrian opened a small door at the end of the staircase—and something hit me with a full-body punch, knocking me back into Father Louis and Costa. With my momentum, I flattened them against the staircase.

  “What is it, what is it?” Jasmine cried.

  I looked around, dazed. “I don’t know.”

  And I didn’t. I couldn’t find the cause of the force that had thrown me on my ass. All I saw was darkness behind the small door that Adrian had left open as he rushed to me.

  Then I felt it; an indescribable pull toward something beyond that door. My heart began to pound and every hallowed sensor in my body began screaming out an alert. The reaction was so intense, I barely noticed the pain as the slingshot began to glow and uncurl itself from my arm.

  “Oh my God, it’s here,” I whispered. Then I said it louder as excitement mingled with my certainty. “The staff is here!”

  “What?” Jasmine said with disbelief.

  Father Louis, still flattened on the staircase next to me, bowed his head in awed reverence. “In nominee Patris, et Filli, et Spiritus Sancti,” he began to intone.

  “Ugh, anything but that,” a disgusted voice said, with the same Demonish accent Adrian had.

  My head whipped around. That hadn’t come from Costa, who was farther up the staircase. It came from beyond the open door.

&n
bsp; “Shut up, Blinky,” Adrian snapped. He cradled my head, wincing as the now fully extended sling grazed his arm. “Are you okay, Ivy?”

  Actually, between the slingshot and my overloaded hallowed sensors, I felt like I was being split in two and barbecued. Despite that, I managed to smile. We’d found the staff! No more fruitless searching, no more worrying about it falling into demons’ hands, no more realms swallowing innocent people and places. I’d start dancing in glee, if I could move yet.

  “I’m fine, but I need help up.”

  Very gently, Adrian lifted me to my feet. Costa helped Father Louis up even though the old priest had fallen on top of him, and Jasmine edged by them to get to me.

  “Are you sure about that— Hey, look! It doesn’t hurt when I touch it,” Jasmine said in surprise, holding up a piece of the glowing, golden sling.

  “Huh?” I said, stunned into a grunted response. “How?” I added a bit more eloquently.

  “Supernaturally charged objects only react to people who can harness supernatural power, like you and me,” Adrian replied, holding up his thickly gloved hands. He’d also worn gloves the first time I met him. At the time, I’d thought it was because he didn’t want to leave fingerprints after kidnapping me. “But to a normal person like Jasmine, the sling is nothing more than ordinary rope,” he finished.

  “But you can’t use the slingshot, Adrian. Only I or a descendant of Goliath can, so why does it burn you?” I wondered.

  Adrian’s expression became shadowed with more than our dark surroundings. “It’s hallowed. My abilities are derived from opposing forces, so whenever something hallowed touches my skin, I have an adverse reaction, and the more powerful the object, the more intense the reaction. That’s why I always wear gloves.”

  Jasmine looked away, but not before I saw a knowing look cross her features. I began to wind the sling around my hand. I didn’t need it to brush against Adrian again and have the subsequent welt be another reminder to Jaz about his lineage. Besides, I must have a decent amount of darkness in me, too, because the slingshot burned me like fire whenever it activated.

  “I’m sure that Moses’s staff is here,” I said, getting back to the point. “Every hallowed sensor I have is ringing off the hook, so it must be somewhere inside that room.”

  “Moses’s staff?” that unfamiliar voice repeated, followed by low, disdainful laughter. “Who did you bring here, Adrian? A delusional treasure hunter or an extraordinary idiot?”

  “I brought the last Davidian,” Adrian shot back, “and you’re about to watch her recover the second-most-hallowed weapon in existence.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THAT STATEMENT WAS greeted by silence. I tested my legs and found that I was able to stand again. Wow. This hadn’t happened when I found the slingshot. Then, I’d just felt a full-body alert and a strange pulling sensation that had led me to its location. How powerful must the staff be if just being in its vicinity was enough to knock me off my feet?

  Too powerful.

  As soon as the depressing thought crossed my mind, I shoved it back. I had to do this, no matter the consequences. On the bright side, at least it would be over soon.

  “Let’s do this,” I said, and walked into the small room that a glance showed to be a crypt.

  A man stood next to a stone burial vault, which was the only furniture in the room. He looked to be my Dad’s age, with thick brown hair, pale skin and a ramrod-straight posture that reminded me of a marine at full attention. That was where his human similarities ended. He was shirtless, which revealed odd extensions of flesh beneath his arms that looked like flaps, as if he were wearing a base-jumping suit made of skin. That wasn’t what made me stop and stare in fascinated horror, though. It was his eyes. All several dozen of them.

  Eyes covered his entire upper body, even on those skin flaps. Worse, they followed my every movement, as if just being there wasn’t creeptastic enough. I was so, so glad that he had on a pair of baggy pants. If those eyes were all over him, I didn’t want to know.

  Then I met the gaze of the eyes in his normal-looking face, and really shuddered. No human could infuse such raw, unadulterated evil into their gaze. Not even minions could. Demons had a monopoly on that, and this one seemed to be the grand master of it. I felt chilled all the way to my soul as I stared at him. If I didn’t have a demon-killing weapon wrapped around my hand, I might have walked out right then.

  But I did, and more than that, I could feel an even more powerful weapon inside this room. So, I stared back and tried not to let him see how rattled he made me feel.

  “Why does he have eyes all over him?” I asked Adrian in an admirably calm voice.

  “Blinky used to be a seraph,” Adrian said, giving me a slanting look. “Seraphim were one of the highest levels of angels, radiating light like firestorms, but Blinky lost all that, plus his feathers, when he rebelled during the Fall.”

  Demons were so evil; I often forgot that many of them used to be angels. I hadn’t heard of a serpah before and had never guessed that an angel—fallen or otherwise—could look this freaky. Being covered with feathers and radiating light would have helped, but still. With those strange, wide flaps sprouting from his upper arms, back and legs, Blinky looked like a cross between a man and a manta ray. Add in the dozens of eyes covering him, and once again, my preconceived notions about angels had been proven wrong. One day, I had to pick up a Bible and research this stuff.

  “She is the Davidian?” the seraph-turned-demon replied, with a disdainful snort. “You must be joking.”

  The insult chased away the last of my unease. “Blinky, is it?” I said, my tone cool. “I totally get why they named you that. You’re an ophthalmologist’s dream.”

  He smiled, and that simple stretch of his lips managed to ooze malevolence.

  Jasmine walked in, took one look at the demon, and then walked out, visibly shaken. Adrian stopped me when I started to go after her.

  “Costa’ll make sure she’s okay,” he said. With a single glance at the demon, Costa left, looking relieved to do so.

  “Don’t touch the circles around him,” Adrian warned me. “They’ll hurt you because they mark the limits of the cursed earth.”

  “Cursed earth?” I repeated, and leaned down, but didn’t touch the three separate lines that formed circles around the demon. The one closest to me appeared to be made of pale, loose sand, the second ring looked like it was ashes laminated into the stone floor, and the third was formed from a dark stain that resembled dried blood.

  Adrian knelt next to me, his finger resting near the pale sand circle. “Yep. We poured and then glazed over these lines around Blinky after we let the hallowed ground knock him out. I told you that hallowed items have their counterparts. This first ring is made up of the ground bones of Moloch, a half demon who ordered child sacrifices for his worship. The next ring contains ashes from the Tower of Babel, and the third contains spilled blood from the first battle between Archons and demons. Put items like these together, and they turn whatever ground they rest on into condemned earth, making the space where Blinky stands as safe as home base.”

  I was openmouthed at the history behind these innocuous-looking circles. “Where did you even get those things?”

  He arched an amused brow. “Former demon prince, remember?”

  Right, I kept forgetting that. So, that’s how Blinky could survive beneath a chapel. The cursed earth formed an invisible shield under him and around him. It also explained why there were no locks on the door to this crypt. If the demon took one step outside of his tiny, protected space, it would be his last.

  And I now also knew that cursed objects would hurt me in the same way that hallowed ones hurt demons, but that didn’t tell me everything.

  “You never told me how you ended up trapping a demon in the first place,” I reminded Adria
n.

  He shrugged. “I ran into Blinky a couple years ago while he was trolling for students to supply a nearby realm. I forced him onto hallowed ground, which almost killed him, and then I made this section for him in the crypt so I could interrogate him about the slingshot. I told you, at first, I was looking for it because I wanted to kill Demetrius. It wasn’t until later that I discovered I couldn’t use it even if I did find it.”

  No, Zach had hidden that from Adrian, much as the Archon had hidden a lot of important things from me. I continued to look around the room, seeing more strange circles drawn into the walls. They even went over the door, which was still open after Jasmine and Costa’s hasty exit.

  “What are those?”

  “Muters,” Adrian replied. “They cancel out the vibes left by supernatural objects. That way, other demons can’t follow their trails back to the source and find Blinky.”

  “That’s why I didn’t feel the staff before.” I let out a shaky laugh. “Those ‘muters’ must’ve dulled its vibe, too.”

  And when Adrian had opened the door, it broke the muting circle, allowing the staff’s residual power to light up my hallowed sensors enough to knock me off my feet. Now for the really hard part.

  “Miss, please, where is it?” Father Louis asked anxiously.

  As if it had been marked with an X, I went over to a section of wall only about two feet outside of the demon’s circle. Lucky for us, whoever had buried the staff hadn’t hidden it a few steps over, or we’d have another big problem on our hands. I pressed my hand against the wall. Power reached out to zap my palm, and I smiled despite the fresh spurt of pain.

  “It’s right behind here.”

  Adrian turned to Father Louis. “We’ll need a power drill, work gloves and lots of cloth.” To me, he said, “You’re not touching it, Ivy. Not yet. I’ll pull it out, and then we’ll lock it up somewhere safe while you build up your tolerance to it.”