The Protect Her Box Set: Parts 7-9 (6 page)

“How far is it to the gate?”

“It’s still several miles away. It’s in a cave system that borders the furthest cemetery on this side of the island,” Ezekiel said.

“So you distract them, and I’ll go around,” I said.

“I’ll go with you,” Samuel said.

“I work better solo,” I replied. “Especially since you said you don’t know how close you can actually get to it.”

“Guardians take those kinds of risks,” Samuel said.

He had listened to what I said earlier and appeared to be taking it to heart. Suddenly, I kind of liked the guy. Too bad he was an archangel. I was going to protest further, but I caught a shifting of the demon group out of the corner of my eye. Something was passing through on its way toward us.

“I’m assuming you can put on a light show that will distract them and give us all time to get away?” I looked at Ezekiel. I didn’t want to give him the opportunity to hurt anyone.

“A mirror trick,” Samuel said. “Rudimentary, but effective.”

There was a low hum, and I realized that the archangels were speaking to each other but masking the words so that I couldn’t understand the discussion. All of the secrets were more than frustrating. I could see that Samuel was arguing vigorously with his brothers. Ezekiel’s face turned beet red, but he paused. Then he looked at me with his lip curled. “I expect that you will take good care of my brother since he is rather insistent on this course of action. If I had it my way, we’d all still be waiting for Benjamin’s return back at the cemetery. He and I have a lot to discuss. ”

My eyes widened. How was I supposed to take care of an archangel? As much as I was starting to like Samuel, I was starting to like Ezekiel less to the same degree. Whatever was happening on Calamata Island wouldn’t be stopped by him. I could only hope that he didn’t add to the problem. “I guess it’s a good thing for a lot of people then that you’re not the one in charge around here.”

The crowd of demons was continuing to shift, and now I could hear the snorts of something that I knew wasn’t a human possessed demon vessel about to enter our midst. We were out of time to talk about this any further.

I pulled out my knife and scanned the fence to our right. It was about six feet high and solid brick. Easily scalable. “Looks like you all are about to get a visitor. Let’s get this show on the road.”

The four archangels turned in unison, and I saw sparks flying from their fingers. I had to admit that I was curious about what was coming in a morbid kind of way. The air rippled around me, and Samuel slapped my shoulder to urge me to move. “They won’t be able to hold the mirage for long.”

I didn’t need to be told twice. We dashed across the road to the wall, and I managed to find a foothold right away to push upward. Samuel made it to the top first and reached down to help me up. Just before I dropped to the other side, I glanced at the wild fray in front of me. I let my fingers go so that I slid the ground.

“What is it?” Samuel said when he saw my face.

I took a deep inhale of air and steadied my mind. “I just never expected to see a Grecklel demon in real life.”

Samuel’s mouth fell open. “They aren’t even supposed to be able to exist outside of Hell.”

“Guess it’s a day of firsts then,” I said grimly. “C’mon. We gotta go.”

CHAPTER SIX –
PAIGE

“You are sure about this?” I asked for probably the tenth time since we arrived outside the cave system on the opposite side of the island. We were standing outside a small crevice in the rock wall that soared above our heads and blocked out the morning sun. It was cold in its shadow. The crevice that Benjamin said was the way in appeared barely large enough to accommodate me, much less Benjamin’s taller, broader form.

“There will be demons posted at all of the obvious entry points into that part of the caves,” Benjamin said. “You were right. I’ve been over almost every square inch of these caves over the years. I know them like the back of my hand. I made sure that I had multiple routes to the gates in case it was ever necessary.”

“Gates?” I asked. I was focused on his words more intently than usual because even though I would never admit it, I had a slight phobia about being confined in closed-off places. If there was space around me, then I could manage it fairly well. I found that I even enjoyed spelunking with Benjamin, but he had kept our adventures to well-worn, spacious caves.  But the situation in front of me was going to mentally tax every bit of my self-control.

“Gate,” Benjamin said. “I said gate.”

I cocked my head toward him then. “No, you didn’t. You said gates.”

Benjamin shook his head. “No, I said gate.”

My curiosity was piqued, but I could tell that Benjamin was digging in, and that was one thing I did know well about him. He was far more stubborn than I was, and I thought I was expert level stubborn. It was an acquired skill that I had honed over years of negotiating with the people that I conned for money, safety, and information. The thing was I wasn’t sure I did want to know the answer to my question. There was only one other kind of gate between realms I was aware of in existence, and that was the gate to Heaven.

Surely the gates to both Heaven and Hell wouldn’t be located in the same place?

Benjamin seemed to glide across the ground to stand directly in the crevice. He examined it. “Do you remember the first time I talked you into doing a cave walk with me?”

I cracked a small smile, as much for the memory as hearing Benjamin’s nickname for spelunking. He made the whole thing sound gentrified by calling it ‘cave walks.' That had always been something I noticed about Benjamin. He was a little bit more formal than most of the people around us, which I always thought was odd for a guy I thought was in his thirties. It wasn’t until just this moment that it hit me that it was probably more an indication of how old he really was.

“I hated it,” I said. “It was dark and wet, and I tripped over a rock and sprained my ankle.”

Benjamin chuckled. “You would have thought that you broke a leg the way that you wailed and flailed about.” He flapped his arms and then put the top of his hand against his forehead clearly mimicking his impression of me and my injury.

I walked over to him and smacked his arm. “It hurt. I ripped my jeans and skinned up both of my knees. Being outdoors just wasn’t my thing.”

“And now, I can barely get you to stay inside long enough to sleep,” Benjamin said. “If you weren’t out haunting the graveyards or running or hanging out by the lake at my cabin, you were checking out the caves to see if you could find your way to the center of the earth.”

“I snapped out of my funk and realized that it was possible my memories wouldn’t come back,” I said. “I had to make a decision. I could hide in my room forever, or I could figure out how to live all over again. Turns out, I didn’t like being outside before all of that happened, but it was for a completely different reason.”

“I’m sorry, Paige,” Benjamin said. “I can only imagine the gamut of emotions you must be feeling right now.”

“You mean because I’m supposed to be possessed by an ancient goddess, or the fact that I found out that my entire life since the accident was a lie?”

“I never lied to you,” Benjamin said.

“Omission is a lie in my book no matter how you want to spin it,” I said. I eyed the crevice critically. I felt the flare of anger inside of me, but it wouldn’t do me any good to get into this argument now. It would serve no purpose other than making me feel better for getting all of it off my chest, which was a bad reason.

Screw it.

I shoved my finger against Benjamin’s chest, and he took a step backward in surprise. “I am pissed off at you, Benjamin. I think you knew all along what I was, and you lied to me.”

He shook his head. “I swear that I didn’t know. This has been a safe haven for people with demon problems since I came here. The police force on the island knows that when unusual things pop up here or across the bay on the mainland that they are supposed to let me know. They patrol the bay to make sure that we don’t have any trouble trying to sneak onto the island. It was one of my patrols that found you.”

My mouth fell open, and I gaped at this new tidbit of information. “They told me it was local fishermen.”

“Of course they did,” Benjamin said gently. “That’s what they were instructed to say. Sheriff Halpren brought you here first, and you reeked of demons.”

“Why didn’t you keep me here? Why did you send me back to the mainland?” My words trailed off as the explanation rose in my mind. “You wanted to see if whoever did that to me came back to finish the job.”

Benjamin's hand came up to touch my shoulder, but I pulled away. My mind reeled. “You are no better than them,” I hissed.

“You are focusing on the wrong thing,” Benjamin said. Although his tone was even, I could see the stiffening of his shoulders. His hand hung in the air between us. “I had information that told me that Bruno Proctor was going to make a play for the relic again. I couldn’t be sure that bringing you back to the island wasn’t exactly what he wanted me to do. I had no idea who you were, and there was no way that I could have known you were actually Eva’s vessel. I only knew that you were a girl who had clearly gotten on the wrong side of the wrong demon. And because you lived after the attack, that demon might come back. If he did, it would give me the opportunity to catch him and make him stop his sniffing around my island.”

“So what changed your mind?” I didn’t care. I wanted to get to the relic as quickly as possible, and then I was fairly certain I never wanted to see Benjamin’s face again.

“You were a girl with no memories,” Benjamin said. “I kept tabs on you. You had no visitors. You were treated and then were on the cusp of being released. You had nowhere to go. It isn’t in my nature to turn an innocent out to a pack of wolves.”

“How lucky for me.” I twisted my face into a grimace. “I don’t know how you can expect me to believe anything you say. Because it is just as plausible that you did know that I was the vessel, and you brought me here to the island to make sure that Eva couldn’t return.”

“If I had known when you were found that you were Eva’s vessel, I would have killed you myself,” Benjamin said flatly.

“Finally, you are saying something that I completely believe,” I said softly. There was a long pause as we stared at each other. Whatever ties that I felt for my past on the island seemed to fall away then. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it because I did have an affinity for this strange place with all of its secrets. But at the end of all of it, it wasn’t my home. That was the truth that hadn’t been said, but I needed to do it now. “When this is all over, if I survive, I won’t be coming back here. To live, I mean.”

Benjamin’s face darkened. “I know. You have Riley now.”

“Even if I didn’t, this isn’t where I want to live the rest of my life,” I said. “For three years, my life has been in a weird kind of holding pattern. I realize now why, and I guess it was necessary. But there’s a whole world out there that I haven’t seen, and people I haven’t met, and adventures that I haven’t taken. It’s all waiting for me, and I don’t want to miss it. That’s part of being human, after all.”

Benjamin slipped into the crevice without acknowledging my words. I knew that I had hurt him. Again. But it would hurt worse in the long run if I wasn’t honest with him. It seemed strange to think that a person like me would have the power to break an archangel’s heart, but there it was. It was another sad accomplishment in my short, tumultuous life.

I had no choice but to follow him into the crevice. Immediately, I felt my claustrophobia kick in as I felt the stone walls rub against my back and the top of my head. The light from outside quickly fell away as I forced my limbs to move deeper into the rock. I focused on the sound of movement in front of me. Then I saw a light further up ahead.

“Just keep moving toward the light,” Benjamin’s voice wafted back to me.

The light was bright enough that I knew it wasn’t natural.

“I thought you said that you weren’t going to use magic,” I said.

The rock walls opened up around me into a small room. I found Benjamin standing there waiting for me. There was dust on his clothes and across his face. His hair was in disarray. That wasn’t like him to look disheveled. Then I wondered if he used magic to always look perfectly coifed.

“I wasn’t,” Benjamin said. He pointed at the small orb of light hanging in the air above our heads. “This wasn’t me.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oops. I don’t know how to control any of that. I didn’t even know that I could do it without consciously thinking about it.”

Benjamin looked up at the orb and then back at me. “You’ve been practicing using magic.”

“How else did you think I was planning to take on a thousand-year-old goddess?” I asked. “We share this magic source. So I think it’s just a matter of who grabs a bigger piece of it when the time comes.”

“Your plan is risky, especially since your control seems…volatile. I left supplies here just in case.” Benjamin held up a pair of flashlights. It was slightly annoying how prepared he always seemed to be.

“I’ll manage,” I said dismissively. The problem was I had no idea how I had created the orb to begin with so I had no idea how to make it go away. I scrunched up my nose, closed my eyes, and concentrated. I thought about making the cave dark again. I counted to ten and then opened my eyes. The orb seemed to mock me as it swirled slowly around the air above Benjamin’s head. I sighed. “Help me turn it off. Please.”

Benjamin snapped his fingers, and we were plunged into darkness. A second later, the flashlight beam illuminated Benjamin’s face. He handed the other one to me. “I must have hidden the relic just outside the boundary of the Hell Gate. I wouldn’t have been so reckless as to hide it inside the boundary.”

“Because that few feet would have made all the difference.”

“Because I have no idea what would happen to me inside the boundary,” Benjamin said. “Paige, this is important. Because you’ve opened yourself up to magical energy, you are at as much risk as I am. No matter what happens, you must stay outside the boundary of the Hell Gate.”

“Or what?” I felt a pit of dread growing in my stomach.

Benjamin turned, and his beam lit up another tunnel leading deeper into the caves. “Let’s just plan on not finding out.”

It seemed like sound logic based on what I knew at this point. I motioned with my flashlight. “Lead the way.”

“Just keep behind me, keep quiet, and run if I tell you to run,” Benjamin said grimly. Then he ducked into the tunnel. It was the reminder that I didn’t need. Everything was fun and games until a demon got involved.

Usually, it wasn’t a problem for me to keep quiet. The cave walks with Benjamin in the past often were accompanied by long bouts of silence. There was something calming about the quietness of the caves. But today the silence felt stifling. I wanted to talk. It was almost an affirmation that I was still alive and not dreaming.

These were the thoughts running through my mind when I ran right into Benjamin’s back. “Why’d you stop?” I whispered.

Benjamin clicked off his flashlight and motioned for me to do the same. That’s when I heard the noises of movement coming from somewhere in front of us. I held my breath and waited.

“Are you sure you know where the hell you’re going?” The voice was magic to my ears.

I pushed around Benjamin. “Riley?”

There was a short pause. “Paige?”

I waved my flashlight in front of me letting the light bounce off the walls. “I’m here!”

Suddenly he was there. He wrapped his arms around me even as I fell against his chest. “What are you doing here?” he whispered as his mouth brushed my ear. It sent a shock of pleasure down my spine.

“The relic is somewhere around here,” I said.

“Samuel.” I heard Benjamin’s voice behind me, and I peeked over Riley’s shoulder. I saw one of the archangels standing there that I remembered from the cemetery.

“Benjamin,” the other angel said. “Ezekiel’s looking for you.”

Riley released his hold on me, and I swung to his side so that I could see both of the archangels.

“He won’t find me any time soon. Why are you here?” Benjamin asked, glaring at his brother.

Samuel cast his eyes toward the ground.

“He was the only one of your brothers who had the balls the offer to help me close the Hell Gate,” Riley said.

“Why are you attempting to do that?” Benjamin asked. His voice had turned hard.