Sacred Duty
The terrain below looked like Scotland or perhaps the Faroe Islands off the coast of Norway and Iceland where he had hidden with Tessa. All green mountains. From this height, he could see an eastern coast. Water. Lots of water. The Atlantic Ocean? Closer inland was a city that looked familiar with its red tile roofs. With his mind, he aimed in that direction and found himself flying over it.
Santiago de Compostela.
Raven glided in the direction of the medieval cathedral. He was close enough now to see the pilgrims trudging into the Spanish city with their backpacks from various paths that had been travelled for over a thousand years.
Damn! I’m getting good at navigating between timelines!
Almost as soon as he thought it, he felt a tug westward, backward. He’d floated intentionally but too far. He drifted high again and circled over green Galicia, the more remote Northwest territory of Spain. He knew the area well and recognized the beauty of O Cebreiro Pass as he sailed over it and headed back. Between Sarria and Santiago, the slate roofs gave way to red tile. He felt the tug downward again, this time toward a small town of stone buildings and farms. He slowed down as a small stone church came into focus, a tiny courtyard of grass around it, all surrounded by narrow streets of stone.
His feet touched the ground and suddenly he was wearing hiking boots, khakis, and a black T-shirt. He could have been mistaken for a modern pilgrim, traveling to visit the silver urn where St. James was buried beneath the high altar of the cathedral. Raven patted his topknot to make sure his hair-daggers were in place. He’d been here before, on assignment for the St. Augustine Special Collections Library, years ago. The memory was muddled. Like a dream but a dream from another timeline. Lilah’s assignment to meet a rogue bookseller on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage had gone awry and her colleague and previous boyfriend had refused to go after her. Then Jakin Crutchfield, the bad boy priest of Daegan, had been sent to retrieve her. Jakin had failed, so Raven had volunteered to bring her home to Florida. He had, of course. Unlike Jakin, Raven had never let her down.
He’d walked this trail from Sarria almost to Lavacolla to find her. Along the way, he’d passed the church in front of him now. It was memorable for its tiny chapel and almost no space at all for a congregation, but even more memorable were the pagan fertility symbols—phalluses and pregnant bellies—carved in stone on the outer walls of a building a third the size of his last decent studio apartment.
Raven’s pulse quickened. If he was here in this place to change the future, then Lilah must be here, too. Maybe this was the same time where she’d lost her way on The Way of St. James in one of their past adventures together. Maybe he’d find her here and take away some pain that kept her from being whole. Or in this timeline, had he already rescued her from the cellar and lost her at a young age? He tried to shake away the confusion. The order of timelines could be changed because the priesthood could look into the future and make different choices. The demon could see across timelines, but so could Old Aryx; he’d thrust his bind rune against Raven’s and shared his knowledge while at the same time garnering glimpses of future events. The demon had gifted the earlier incarnation, after all, with prophecy, so had Old Aryx manipulated the pages in The Book of Time to provide the right time doorway for each choice forward?
Why would Raven be here at this church if Lilah had already died as a child? He’d set his intention to carry out is sacred duty and find the Angelseed, but it hadn’t been a pure intention because he hadn’t been able to stop thinking of Lilah and how to bring her back. She had once stood on this very spot—he could sense the energy here across several timelines—and in at least one, she’d gone inside the medieval church.
“Lilah?” he called out as he yanked on the wooden door. He stepped inside the dim chamber, lit mainly by light surging through the three large windows over the altar. “Lilah? Are you here?”
Something rustled in the shadows behind the altar. The sunlight was so fierce that he had to raise his palm in order to see.
“Lilah?”
“I knew you’d come for me!”
The voice didn’t sound like Lilah’s, but it was little more than a hoarse whisper. He squinted into the light, both hands now as a shield against the brightness.
“Lilah? Lilah Burns?” Would she know him in this timeline? Was this after he’d followed her from Cill Stuifin in Ireland to Florida and then back to the Camino in Spain? Or had he dreamed those times with her? Was this some other timeline where they had not yet met? Or where she’d died as a child? Or never been born?
The woman rose to her feet, a silhouette against the light. He still couldn’t see her face, but her energy didn’t feel like any version of Lilah’s.
Then from behind the woman rose two shadows that blocked the light. Wings! They stretched out across the space behind the altar, large enough to touch both walls and obscure the sunshine outside the three windows. He could see her fully now, thanks to the light from the open door behind him. Her cheeks, red from crying, caught his attention almost as much as her dark wings.
The Angelseed. A human woman, little more than a teenager, injected with DNA that had been found in modern-day Iraq in what had once been the ancient kingdom of Archangel Michael. Here, the Chaldean prince with a “face like lightning” had fought for the Hebrew god. He had left the kingdom sometime later, and though because of his absence he was often described as a dead god, all those in the priesthood knew he would return in the End Times.
The priesthood had been established almost three thousand years ago to prepare for that day. It had moved quietly underground as kingdoms rose and fell and had wandered far from Chaldea. Angels no longer guarded nations in physical form, so Siobhan had used her gifts as the ranking High Priestess of Daegan to create a career in diplomacy that would allow her access to archeological sites all over the planet. Aoife had followed in her mother’s footsteps, both as High Priestess and diplomat, always secretly in search of ways to build an army of angels to fight with the archangel upon his return.
Siobhan’s search had paid off, as she’d seen in the books of prophecy, by finding the DNA of the most powerful archangel when he’d been injured in battle and using it to create chimera, a genetic monstrosity of human and angel. The Angelseed was one of thirty test subjects and, to Raven’s knowledge, the only one in this timeline who’d survived the fusion of angel DNA. Raven recognized her from his sole visit to the lab Aoife had constructed in Slovenia to carry on her mother’s work: tall, with long dark hair that held a pinkish cast in the low light but shone almost gold when the sunrays struck it.
The last time he’d seen the Angelseed, she’d been dressed in black leather with the back cut out for the new wings that had sprouted, and she’d flirted shamelessly with any halfway attractive male at the lab. This time, she was wrapped in a sheet tied around her neck, and heavy chains circled each wing near its base at her shoulder blades. She tried to run toward him but the chains, secured to the base of the altar, jerked her backward.
“Mika?”
“Who’s Lilah?”
He ignored the question. He wasn’t even sure if Lilah existed here. Or would again. But a troubled planet with a dwindling human race struggling to survive was back where he’d left it, and he needed Mika to fulfill his destiny. With or without the love of his life, he still had a duty.
“Mika, what are you doing here?”
Her happy smile sagged. “You didn’t come to rescue me?”
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