CHAPTER THIRTY
HAVING MY BODY light up with countless sensors on instantaneous overload caused me to involuntarily freeze despite the danger. Adrian shoved me and Pastor Helena out of the way mere moments before those dark-colored objects smashed to the floor right where we’d been standing. We landed in a tumble of limbs in front of the first row of congregant chairs.
Most of my senses were still stuck on supernatural red alert, so for a second, I thought the wooden pieces around us were from the pew chairs breaking under the force Adrian had used to get us out of the way. Then I realized the colors were wrong. The chairs were made of light-colored wood, yet the pieces that littered the space around us were dark, and the ones that hadn’t smashed were shaped in perfect squares.
Adrian looked up at the same time that I did. The ceiling was made of a series of similar boxlike dark wood squares. It was the most decorative part of the entrant hall, and now it had a large hole above where the altar podium used to be.
A flurry of German sounded as about half of the church’s occupants ran to see if we were okay, and the other half ran for the exits. Pastor Helena got to her feet, giving a shocked look at the pile of smashed ceiling planks where the three of us had been standing.
“Danke,” she said in a shaky voice to Adrian before switching to English. “Thank you. We might have been very hurt if not for your quick actions. Now, however, you must leave.”
Pastor Helena raised her voice, presumably repeating the directive to the tourists and congregants who’d stayed behind. After she finished, the rest of them began to head toward the door. I stayed on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. Something super hallowed was up there, and every cell in my body was reacting to it. If I could have climbed the walls to get to it, I would have. But at the moment, I was having a hard time moving. Much like what happened when I first came in contact with the staff, my body was momentarily overloaded and useless.
“Please,” Pastor Helena said to Adrian and me. “You must leave. There is obviously some structural insufficiency in the ceiling, and it still might not be safe—”
“Ivy,” Adrian said, ignoring her. “I can see something up in the hole where those pieces fell out.”
“I don’t need to see it.” My voice sounded hoarse, as if I’d been screaming. “I can feel it.”
“Please, go,” Pastor Helena said again.
“Brutus!” Adrian yelled in reply. “Larastra!”
The gargoyle barreled through the front doors, knocking down anyone unfortunate enough to be in his way. I heard shocked yelps as people tried to figure out what had suddenly knocked them on their asses. All they could see was a squawking seagull running into the entrant hall, which didn’t track with the wide swath that had been cut through their midst.
Adrian barked out commands in Demonish while pointing up at the hole in the ceiling. Brutus flapped his great wings, knocking down another person in the process, and soared upward to reach the hundred-foot-tall ceiling. Once there, he flipped upside down, his wings beating faster to hover him beneath the hole while he rummaged inside it.
More pieces of the ceiling began to fall. They were smaller this time, but Adrian still picked me up, getting me out of the way. Pastor Helena ran to the far side of the hall, pulling out her cell phone and shouting at it in German. Moments later, several uniformed guards came into the hall.
They ushered the remaining people out, and when they reached us, Adrian let them hustle us toward the doors, too. We were now the last ones inside aside from Pastor Helena, who seemed to be staying. Right as the guards pushed us through the doors, Brutus let out a roar, and I saw him fly away from the ceiling with something long and thin clutched in his talons.
Adrian sprinted us to the side, shouting, “Hit the deck!” to the guards, who were still blocking the doors.
They glanced around in confusion but didn’t move or duck as warned. Then they were thrown forward from the force of a two-ton gargoyle flying right into them. Brutus didn’t have his wings in his infamous head-chop formation, nor had he been trying to hurt them, which was the only reason they survived. But from their groans and their pitiable impacts, they’d be taking some sick days after this.
Brutus kept going after he cleared the doorway. Once outside, he flew higher, until he was well over the roofs of the nearby buildings. The farther away he went, the better I felt as my hallowed sensors powered down, allowing my body to function normally. I didn’t need Adrian to keep carrying me anymore and told him that, but he didn’t stop. Instead, he picked up his pace, until everything we passed turned into a blur.
After a few minutes, we were clear of the metropolitan area and into what looked like the warehouse district. Then we passed that, too, and ended up back on the soft banks of the winding river. Brutus was about fifty yards away, hiding from the sun under a tree, the object he’d taken from the ancient hall’s ceiling in the grass by his feet.
Adrian finally set me down, but he kept a tight grip on my hand. “Easy,” he warned me. “Give yourself a minute.”
Now that I was back in the proximity of the mystery object, he was right: I was back to feeling like every nerve ending had been set on fire and then rubbed raw. I could stand under my own power, though, so the initial effects of being blasted by a supernatural shockwave seemed to have worn off. Now all I had was what felt like a case of full-body hives...and an almost overwhelming urge to grab the unknown object at Brutus’s feet.
“I can feel it pulling me toward it. Once I let go of your hand, I won’t be able to stop myself from grabbing it.”
A ragged sigh came out of Adrian, and his sapphire eyes filled with pain. “I know.”
Part of me didn’t want to move. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to him yet. I needed more time, just a little more! But for once, I didn’t need my willpower to slap down the selfish parts of me that would choose Adrian over the world. The object’s lure was too strong. It pulled me to it with a relentlessness that only grew the more I hesitated, until soon, I felt like it would rip me apart if I didn’t go to it.
Yet if I told Adrian to take me away, he would. In a heartbeat. The urge to grab the relic would pass as soon as I was out of its range, and Brutus could fly it to safety. We could have the extra time I so desperately wanted, if I told Adrian it was okay to do what I knew he wanted to.
“It won’t get any easier if we wait,” I finally said, starting to tug my hand free of Adrian’s tight grip. “I’ll never be ready to say goodbye to you. Not today, tomorrow or even a hundred years from now. So let’s not try to say goodbye. Instead, I want to say that I love you, Adrian. More than I ever knew it was possible to love anyone. Being with you has been the best thing to ever happen to me. Never doubt that.”
His gaze grew wild, yet he let me pull my hand free. “I love you, Ivy. You made every moment of the hell I experienced worth it because it brought me to you. You’re the only part of my life I don’t regret, and I will love you from now until the moment I see you again.”
I stared at him, unable to look away even as I began to back away. My feet were moving me toward Brutus and the object he guarded, but my whole heart felt like it was straining toward Adrian. I couldn’t do this! I couldn’t! But I couldn’t abandon those people. I was the only chance they had.
“We will see each other again one day.” My voice was ragged from my throat closing off. “I know we will.”
He set his jaw and his hands closed into fists. I kept backing away, feeling my heart break with every step. This was the right thing to do; I knew that. Yet it didn’t lessen the pain, and when Adrian’s gaze began to brighten from unshed tears, I missed a step and stumbled.
He started forward to grab me, then stopped, fists clenching again until his bones strained whitely against his skin. I steadied myself, holding out my hand in silent plea for him to stay where he was. No matter what I knew to be right, if he touched me again, I didn’t trust what I’d do.
To give myself strength, I looked away from Adrian and at the object at Brutus’s feet. It paid off. That single look felt like a shot of adrenaline to my body. The power in the object tightened its hold on me, moving me toward it with greater speed. Right then, I knew I couldn’t turn back and go to Adrian even if I wanted to. It had me now.
The sky, which had been a hazy blue before, was filling with dark clouds. They grew thicker and higher, until they choked off the rays from the sun. Their darkness matched my pain at the knowledge that I would probably never see Adrian again, until I was sure that I was the cause of the abrupt change in weather. My emotional wounds had activated the staff enough to make it rain inside a hotel hallway; it made sense that the heartbreak I was feeling now had manifested into the roiling, pitch-colored clouds that now covered the sky.
“I’ll always love you,” I said, but I didn’t dare turn around. I couldn’t bear to see if his face mirrored the agony I was feeling. Thunder boomed and lightning flashed across the sky, causing Brutus to growl. He might like the new darkness, but he obviously wasn’t fond of the coming storm.
I wasn’t, either. It signaled the end of my relationship and probably my life. I took a deep breath, and another round of thunder boomed across the sky.
“This is the right thing to do,” I whispered, and though I still knew it to be a fact, it felt less true.
Then, before I abandoned everything just to feel Adrian’s arms around me one more time, I reached down and grabbed the long, thin object at Brutus’s feet.