Avi Marie's Arc

Chapter 16 of 30

The horse climbed into the rift. Below, the stone castle shrank to a black speck. Avi Marie held the writ tight. The blue sky inside the opening was calm, but she did not trust it. Her superior had warned her they would hollow her the moment she arrived. She looked up and rode on toward the pale light above. Then the sky changed. A cold pressure pushed down on her, like a hand on the back of her neck. Far above, three shapes moved against the light. They did not come closer. They only looked. She felt her sight tug at the edges, the same tug she had felt the night her mortal died. "They know I'm here," she said aloud. Behind her, wings beat. Azrael dropped from the higher air and pulled level with her horse. He dressed in white, but his face was set hard. He had lost someone he loved to the object these angels guarded, and he wanted its keepers as much as she did. "You came," she said. "You'd have died alone." He looked up at the three watchers. "They felt the writ. His name on it. They know he let a stranger cross." The torn edges of the rift began to move. Stone and earth slid inward, closing the gap like a shrinking mouth. Dirt rained down past the horse. The blue sky above narrowed foot by foot. "They're sealing it," Azrael said. "Behind us. Not ahead." Avi Marie understood. The angels above were not letting her up. They were cutting her off from below. "The way back down," she said. "They're closing my way home." "Then don't look back." Azrael's wings strained. "Up is the only door left." She drove the horse higher. The rift below groaned and shut. A wall of rock met, and the light from the castle vanished. The passage she had climbed was gone. She could not return to the stone castle, to Petra, to Malphas, to the ledger she had left as proof. The cold pressure lifted. The three watchers pulled back into the light and were gone. Avi Marie floated in a hollow of pale cloud with no floor and no way down. "They didn't hollow you," Azrael said. He sounded almost surprised. "No." She turned the writ over in her hand. His name. His seal. "They locked me in with them instead." Azrael studied the sealed rock below, then the empty light above. "Same thing, given time." Avi Marie set her jaw. She had wanted to climb to the ones who ordered her mortal killed. Now she had no choice but to reach them. The door home was stone. The only path led up, to angels who had just proven they feared her enough to trap her. "Then we go to them," she said, and turned the horse toward the light.