Juliet Dark - The Angel Stone

“Callie?”

The voice behind me barely pierced the fog of grief. I still couldn’t take my eyes off the stone as it receded down the road. I saw the cloaked man touch a gloved hand to it, and beneath the beaked mask he smiled wolfishly. My grief acquired barbs.

“Callie!” A hand shook me roughly, the voice louder now in my ears. He was trying to turn me around, but tearing my eyes off the stone felt like ripping something inside me. William’s face loomed out of the rain, as hollow-eyed as the skeletal masks of the condemned prisoners.

We’ll all be dead if I can’t get that stone away from those monsters , I thought, and then William’s face bobbed like a balloon over me, getting farther and farther away, as if he was floating over me—or I was sinking down beneath him.

I sank deep into the darkness, into a waking dream, as if falling into a pit. Far above the pit hung a gibbous moon that looked down on me with a cold and pitiless eye. I could feel the angel stone pinning me down—its gravity pushing me ever deeper into the dark.

But then I was being lifted and carried out of the pit. I struggled to open my eyes and saw William’s face instead of the cold, heartless moon. I couldn’t keep my eyes open for long, though: the force of the angel stone was dragging me down into a nightmare world where, instead of being carried by William, I was taken to a dungeon. I wasn’t alone there. The skeletal faces of the condemned women in the cart were with me, as were my friends from Fairwick—Frank and Soheila, Nicky and Ruby Day. All of us had been condemned by the nephilim to this cold dungeon, where our hands and feet were bound by cold iron and the beaked-faced creatures came and took us one by one to another room, where someone screamed and screamed and screamed …

When I was able to open my eyes, I caught glimpses of William and Nan. I saw that they had carried me to Mordag’s cottage and put me in the upstairs bedroom under layers of wool blankets and sheepskins, but when I closed my eyes I was back in the dungeons and nothing could keep me safe or warm—not the hot tea that William held to my lips or the broths that Nan brought. Just by looking at the angel stone, my soul had been pierced. How could I ever have thought I could wield it as a weapon against the nephilim? How could I ever have thought I could save my friends back in Fairwick when I couldn’t even save myself?

“Foolish girl,” my nightmare inquisitor said when at last they came to take me to the torture room. “You didn’t come here for this.” He touched the stone and I felt a cold weight against my breast, as if a heavy stone had been laid there. “You came for your demon lover, to consort with him. Look, here is his devil’s mark on you.”

I looked down and saw the dark circles on my wrist where Liam’s hand had encircled mine when I banished him to the Borderlands. As he dissolved, the shadows had bitten into my wrist.

“You see what trafficking with the devil has gotten you,” he sneered.

The weight on my chest grew heavier, crushing my lungs. My hands clawed at the stone, trying to push it away, but it was too heavy. It held the weight of every regret—banishing Liam, loving Bill too late to save him, failing to save my friends and students from the nephilim back in Fairwick.

Somewhere I heard a woman’s voice say, “She can’t breathe,” and I knew that in a sheepherder’s cottage on a Scottish hillside I was strangling to death.

“I’m sorry,” I gasped with my last breath. “I couldn’t save you.”

“But you did.” I heard a man’s voice. “You saved me .”

I felt something press into my hand. In the cottage room, warm fingers gripped my hand. In my nightmare dungeon, I looked down and saw the heart-shaped brooch, then looked up and saw the red glass eyes of my inquisitor fastened on it. The mask couldn’t hide his surprise. I wasn’t supposed to have the brooch.

I curled my fingers around it. In the cottage room, a hand closed over mine. In my nightmare, the inquisitor opened his mouth and let out a raucous caw. Black glossy wings filled the room with wind and noise. I could barely lift my hand in the tumult, but then I felt another hand on mine, guiding it to my chest. As soon as the cold silver heart touched my chest, the weight burst. I opened my eyes, gasping for breath, in the cottage. William was by my side, holding my hand.

“She’s back,” I heard Nan say.

When I saw the look of relief on William’s face, I didn’t have the heart to correct Nan. I wasn’t back. I was trapped in the seventeenth century. But I did manage to squeeze William’s hand and whisper before I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep, “I think I know how to get those bastards.”

Once the immediate danger to me was past, Nan came less often, leaving William to care for me. I felt bad that William was stuck watching over an invalid—and worse that, while I lay in a warm bed, Mordag and eleven others were in the dungeons of Castle Coldclough. Nan had told me that the number of the accused was up to twelve, but she was right that I was too weak to face the nephilim now. I had to gather my strength. I sat up when William brought me oatmeal—my parritch , as he called it—in the morning and broth in the evening. During the day I watched out the window at the foot of the bed. In the morning, I followed his progress through the heather as he led Mordag’s sheep, which a neighbor had been tending since she’d been taken, into their pastureland; in the evening, I waited for the moment when I’d spy him silhouetted against the lilac sky, a lithe shape like some pastoral figure on an antique vase. In between, I thought about the vision I’d had of the inquisitor. The angel stone he wore had exerted great power over me. I didn’t even like to think of how it had made me feel, but I forced myself, remembering the cold weight of despair that had nearly crushed me. Despair, guilt, regret—the stone had evoked every mistake I’d ever made. It seemed to pull them out of me like a magnet. Only the Luckenbooth brooch had broken the spell and released me. I lay in bed each day trying to figure it out, my thoughts spinning in fruitless circles.

Then one day after a week or so, I got up to meet William downstairs as he came in the door. His eyes lit up at the sight of me; his cheeks glowed red as apples from the cold air. I felt a corresponding flare in my own heart but then a pang, because I was planning to leave as soon as I was able to get the stone away from the nephilim.

“I’ve been thinking about what happened when I saw the witch hunter,” I said, as I spooned out the stew that William had made for us.

“Are you sure you want to be thinking about that?” he asked. “You were raving as if you were being tortured …”

He paused and looked up at me, his eyes shining in the firelight, and I suddenly wondered if he spent his days thinking about his captivity with the Fairy Queen. “I mean,” he continued, “I know you are worried about your friends and that you must get this stone to save them, but perhaps it’s better if you use this time to get your strength back for when it is time to go.”

“Is that what you did when you were in Faerie?”

He looked surprised but then nodded. “Aye. I thought of what I should do if I had a chance to escape. I even dreamed sometimes of the lass who would save me …” He looked away, embarrassed. Since we’d returned to the cottage, he’d studiously avoided touching me more than he had to in the course of nursing me back to health. Sometimes I wondered if that first night we’d spent here, when we’d come together so urgently in front of the fire, had been as much a dream as the dreams of the Greenwood. “But those dreams of mine were a great deal more pleasant than the ones you were having,” he said. “I don’t like to think of you dwelling on them.”