“Ideally, yes.” As she spoke she looked down at the tanzanite, her long lashes casting shadows on her face. She was mesmerized by the gem, but he was mesmerized by what she was saying, unsure if he liked where this might be going. “But some stones are too large or too strong to be fully contained in our bodies. We can absorb their properties, but the stone itself must be stored somewhere safe.”
He froze as the implications of what she’d just said sunk in. If she’d absorbed his Enoch gem, it could be lost to him. “Somewhere safe,” he repeated, almost numbly. “Like a dhampire vault protected by Wardens?”
“Exactly,” she said with a nod, and ice formed in his chest. “The stones need to be protected because if one were to fall into the wrong hands, it could destroy us.” Her gaze flew up as if she sensed his mood, and she laid an apprehensive hand on his arm. Her touch was gentle, her voice concerned, and he wasn’t ready for any of it. He stepped away. She followed. “Razr? What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong?” he rasped. “What’s wrong? I saw the Enoch diamond in Scotland. My diamond. And I’m thinking I might not be getting it back.”
“What?” Her head snapped back as if he’d slapped her, shock written all over her face. But on its heels was anger, coming in fast and hot. “Wait.” She advanced on him, finger pointed like a weapon. “You’ve known all along that I had it? You’ve been lying to me this whole time? Why the charade?”
“Because I didn’t know you,” he said. “I didn’t know what you do with the gems. And it was too important to fuck up. I thought you were just storing it, but... You absorbed it, didn’t you?” It was part of her. He knew it. That was why, at Shrike’s castle, his ring connected to her like it was linking to Wi-Fi.
Silence stretched, the room growing so quiet that Razr heard his own heartbeat pounding in his ears. Jedda took a step back, and he smelled fear in the air. Dammit, he hadn’t wanted it to go this way. And he still had questions. Lots of them.
“Jedda?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “It’s...” She swallowed hard and took another step back, her gaze locked on the floor. “It’s my life-stone.”
“Life-stone?” He didn’t like the sound of that. Sounded...permanent. “What is that?”
She scooched to the side, edging toward the door. Reaching out with his mind, he locked it.
“It’s my life. It’s the building block on which all the other stones sit. Only my death will release it.” A cloud of diamond dust formed around her, glittering in the overhead lights, coating the artifacts nearby.
Fuck. This just kept getting worse. “Can you replace it? Obviously you survived before you got it, right?”
It wasn’t cold in here, but she shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. And she still inched toward the door. He hated that she was so afraid of him, but hell, if someone wanted the one thing that kept him alive, he’d be a little nervous, too.
“A replacement for the Enoch gem wouldn’t be easy. It would have to be a stone at least as powerful as the Ice Diamond.” She gestured to Azagoth’s jewels. “Not even these would do. Well, maybe the Lucifer ruby, but it would turn me so evil I’d have to be destroyed.” She swallowed so hard that the sound echoed around the room. “And even if I found a gem that would work, removing the energy the Enoch gem gives me would be dangerous. I’d have to be bled out and mutilated almost to the point of death. I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He cursed, long and hard. “So what you’re saying is that if I want my gem, you have to either be tortured or killed.”
Her gaze snapped up to his, and more dust billowed out of her. “Yes,” she croaked.
Mother. Fuck. He couldn’t kill her. That just wasn’t an option. But he was going to kill the fuck out of whoever stole the thing and gave it to her.
“Where did you get it?” When she didn’t reply, he felt the first stirrings of unease. “Jedda,” he prompted again, “where did you get the gem?”
“Don’t,” she begged him. “Please...”
Oh, shit. No. Son of a bitch, this couldn’t be. The unease veered sharply to dread, the same gut-twisting, heart-pounding sensation he’d felt when he’d sensed something wrong with the custodians of the gems but hadn’t found them yet.
“We had a deal,” he ground out. “I tell you about my robes, you tell me whatever I want to know.” That wasn’t exactly the deal, but he doubted she’d quibble over it. Not now. But he wished she would. He wanted desperately for her to have a solid reason to not tell him what he feared the most––that she had taken the gems in the first place.
It made sense. The gems had been in use at the time, one turning all demons in a mile radius to ash, one healing all injured angels within a ten-mile radius, and one creating a barrier through which no demons could pass to reach the humans who stood at the center of a fifty-foot circle with the gems. He, Darlah, and Ebel had been miles away, using the harnessed gem power to devastating effect on hordes of advancing demons. He’d never been able to figure out how demons had broken through the barrier, but now he knew.
Demons hadn’t broken through. An elf had.
Jedda started inching toward the door again, but this time he didn’t feel bad for her fear. Some vengeful part of him welcomed it, and whatever shame he felt for that was drowned out by the memories of the screaming custodians.
“Tell me!”
Jedda jumped. “I...my sisters and I...we found the gems. In a cave––”
“Bullshit!” The obvious lie broke his last tenuous thread of control, and with a roar, he seized her by the throat and backed her against a display case full of weapons from the Great Demonic War of Talas. “You stole them. You killed the humans who held them and you stole them.”
“No!” Clawing at his arm as he held it at her throat, she shook her head wildly. “Just the one human. My sister killed her. My other sister and I, we stole the gems from the other two humans and ran. They were alive when we left them.”
Fury and hurt blurred his vision, so he got right up in her face. “They died right after,” he snarled. “Their lives were bound to the gems and to us. When the gems were stolen, they died. Slowly. Their organs dissolved and their bones broke, and they collapsed in on themselves. Took hours.”
He trembled with the force of his rage and the horror of the memories. The human who had been bonded to Razr’s gem, a young man named Nabebe, had been chosen by Razr, rescued from certain death as a baby abandoned in the streets of eighteenth-century Baghdad. Razr had raised him, trained him, and given him eternal life as long as he was in possession of the gem.
Razr’s voice broke as he told Jedda exactly what had happened to the boy he’d considered a son.
“Nabebe screamed until his throat was raw and he drowned in his own blood, and I couldn’t stop it.” All Razr had been able to do was hold the boy and vow to inflict the same punishment on the people responsible.
“Oh, gods,” she croaked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I assumed only elves bond with gems. I mean, humans are…humans.” She stopped fighting him, tears welling in her eyes, but it didn’t move him at all. “It was a long time ago––”
“And that makes it okay?” he asked, incredulous.
“No, just listen. We...my sisters and I... Things were different back then.” She reached up, attempting to peel his fingers away from her throat again. He loosened his grip, but right now he wanted to keep her where she was, where he could feel the beat of her heart in the palm of his hand. “Gem elves’ moral alignment comes from the gems we absorb. Gemstones from the human realm are mostly neutral, and gems from the demon realm are usually tainted by evil. Then there are enchanted stones. The most powerful stone we absorb becomes our life-stone, the one we will die without. It also determines our alignment.” She swallowed and licked her lips, as if needing time to collect her words. And her breath. “See, when gem elves are born, the parents have gems standing by, ready to infuse the infants within moments of birth.”
He released
his grip a little more, and she relaxed slightly, the heated flush in her cheeks turning mottled. “Neutral gems?”
“Not always. Obviously, the parents’ alignments play a role, but so does the sibling factor.” She cleared her throat. “Now, do you want to hear the rest? Because it’s easier to talk when someone isn’t threatening to kill me.”
That was probably true.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she swore. “Where would I go? I don’t know how to get out of this place.”
That was also probably true. Plus, the door was locked.
On top of all that, he didn’t like manhandling females. And like it or not, he desperately wanted to believe she hadn’t killed anyone on purpose. Which sucked, because he’d sworn to avenge Nabebe. He’d promised to slay the thieves and recover the stones and set the world right again.
Cursing, he released her and backed up, his anger receding enough that he was shamed to see the red marks his fingers had left on her pale neck.
“Thank you.” She reached up and absently rubbed her throat. “So as I was telling you, gem elves are super competitive. Since we all need stones to survive, we can get really intense around them. Family members have been known to kill each other for a single, small ruby.” She faltered over that, and he wondered if there was a story behind it. “When my sisters and I were born, my parents hoped to prevent us fighting over stones, so they gave us each an enchanted life-stone with unique alignments. Manda’s was evil, Reina’s was neutral, and mine was good.”
He frowned. “Why would your parents align your newborn sister with evil?”
Her gaze drifted toward the Lucifer ruby, as if seeking its input. “Good and evil are subjective, are they not?” She smiled thinly. “In my realm, all gems and alignments are rendered neutral. Those who have absorbed evil gems can live in the elf realm and have normal lives. It’s what’s expected of those whose life-stones are evil. It just doesn’t always work out that way.” A tremor crept into her voice. “It didn’t with Manda.”
As strange as that sounded to Razr, he figured he didn’t have much room to judge, given that some angelic traditions were just as callous and brutal. He scrubbed his hand over his jaw as he tried to put all this new information together.
“Okay, so I get the need for siblings to not fight, but how would these alignments prevent you from fighting over, say, some lady’s non-enchanted diamond wedding ring?”
“Non-enchanted gemstones are common, so there’s really no competition except for rare types like Taaffeite. But when it comes to enchanted gems, the alignment of our life-stone makes us crave gems of the same, or similar, alignment. Every stone outside of our alignment shifts how we feel, how we act, and it can even conflict with our life-stone and make us sick.”
Interesting. And bizarre. “Can you ever change your alignment?”
“Yes. But only if we replace the life-stone, which we do a few times in our lives as we find more powerful gems. But since most of the minor gems we gather tend to match the alignment of our life-stone, if you change the alignment of your life-stone, all the gems of the old alignment will conflict with it.” She glanced over at the Lucifer ruby. “Going from neutral to either good or evil isn’t that risky, and even going from good or evil to neutral isn’t always a disaster, but you really don’t want to shift from evil to good or vice versa.” She reached up and wound a long lock of hair around her finger. “Our life-stone also controls our hair and eye color.”
“Well, shit,” Razr breathed, unsure where to go from here. He hadn’t exactly planned for this scenario. He especially hadn’t planned to get physically involved with one of the very people he’d vowed to butcher horribly. This was extremely inconvenient. “So your sisters had the other two stones?” At her reluctant nod, he cursed. “One was found. Ebel’s amethyst.”
She closed her eyes and blew out a long breath. “Manda had that one. I don’t know how he tracked us down, but he did. We were young and dumb, and it was before we learned to store the gems in a safe place.”
She paused, and he knew that whatever she was about to say was going to mess with everything he’d always believed: that Ebel had done what was needed, and whatever he’d done was justified. But now that Razr had let Jedda into his life, his views were no longer black and white. They were now a million shades of jewel tones.
“What happened, Jedda?”
Her ice-blue eyes grew liquid, like water on the surface of a melting glacier. “He tortured us, killed Manda, and took the gem back. Reina and I barely escaped.”
Irrational rage spun up at the knowledge that Ebel had tortured Jedda. Didn’t matter that he’d pretty much planned to do the same thing. Which was what made the anger so irrational. Well, that and the fact that Ebel was dead, so Razr’s anger was pointless.
Inhaling deeply, he cursed Ebel’s name and refocused his line of questioning. “You said Manda’s alignment was evil. The Gems of Enoch are good. So how was she able to absorb the stone’s power without it changing her?”
“It did change her,” she insisted. “But not as much as it should have. I don’t know why. The gems changed all of us in different ways.” She looked somewhere beyond him, somewhere in her mind he couldn’t follow. “They aren’t as good as you think.”
That didn’t make any sense. “They’re infused with angel blood,” he argued.
She shrugged. “I don’t care if they’re infused with the blood of all the archangels and Enoch himself. I’m telling you, their energy is like nothing any of us had ever felt, nothing like I’ve felt since. It’s almost as if their frequency cycles at super-high speeds through all the alignments. We assumed they were neutral, but they’re anything but.”
He wasn’t sure what to believe, but right now, he supposed it didn’t matter. They still had a crazy fallen angel to deal with, and then he had to figure out what to do about his own situation. One thing was clear: he wasn’t getting back to Heaven anytime soon.
And why didn’t that bother him as much as it should?
“Razr?” Jedda’s voice was small. Trembling. “Are...are you going to kill me?”
Fuck. The fact that she had to ask left him trembling as hard on the inside as she was on the outside. “No,” he said, reaching for her.
With a small gasp, she shrank away from him, and he couldn’t blame her. Mere moments ago, he’d yelled at her. He’d wrapped his fingers around her delicate throat. He’d terrified her.
Ashamed, he reached again, slowly, letting her come to him. It took a long time. Too long. But finally she eased into his embrace, and nothing had ever been so worth the wait.
He tucked her close, his heart breaking when she sobbed into his chest. “We’ll figure something out,” he swore. “We’ll fix this.”
How, he had no idea, and if she believed him, he deserved an Oscar.
She nodded, and then she suddenly jerked away from him. Alarmed, he instinctively looked around for an enemy, but she was actually smiling, even as a tiny diamond tear plunked to the obsidian floor.
“I have an idea. I mean, I don’t know how much it’ll help, but it can’t hurt. Something happened recently to put the Gems of Enoch into play, right? I mean, that’s why you were able to find mine in Scotland. And that’s why Shrike invited me to that icky dinner party.”
“Yes,” he said slowly. “I’ve been wondering what’s up with that, as well.”
“Then let’s grab the crystal horn and go.”
“Where?”
She grinned. “Where else? Middle Earth.”
Chapter Eleven
Razr could tell that Jedda was still shaken as they materialized in the elven realm, which she’d said was known to her people as Filneshara, The Timeless Lands. Maybe being here on her home turf would be good for her, would ease her rattled nerves and help them both find some answers.
That was, of course, assuming they could find her sister.
“That’s a pretty cool trick,” he said, as the tourmaline she’d summoned fo
r travel between elven hotspots and the The Timeless Lands disappeared back into her palm.
“Tourmaline is the only stone that allows us to travel here. We can only possess one at a time, and it can’t be heavier than two ounces. Any more than that can throw us into dead space that we can’t come back from.”
“That sounds kind of horrible.” He checked out their surroundings, disappointed that they could be anywhere in the earthly realm. They were at the top of a grassy hill surrounded by forest and meadows, which was scenic and colorful, but nothing special.
“It probably is horrible,” she said. “No one has come back to describe the experience.”
He frowned at her. “Then how do you know it exists?”
She pointed to a pond nestled in the valley of more rolling green hills in the distance. Its mirrored surface reflected sunlight from overhead and bright, candy-colored flowers in the meadows, not a single ripple marring the image.
“We can see them in the reflection sometimes. No one goes there except kids looking to scare themselves.” She shook her head. “It’s like when human kids play Bloody Mary with a bathroom mirror. Except this is real.”
“Have you seen them?”
She shivered and started down the dirt path toward the trees. “My sisters and I went to the pond when we were girls. We saw three…I guess you could call them apparitions.” She swallowed hard. “I can’t imagine being trapped like that, clawing at the surface and hoping someone will save you.”
Er, yeah. Razr’s punishment wasn’t looking so bad now.
A lavender-scented breeze rustled through the trees as they entered a jungle forest unlike anything Razr had ever seen, and the deeper into the woods they went, the more he realized he had been wrong about this realm. The trees swayed with the fragrant wind, their limbs heavy with silver-laced leaves that sprinkled glitter with every gust of air. It was clean here, with no hint of industrialization. No smog, no chemicals, no man-made filth.
As they walked, the trees got taller and more ornate, and Jedda giggled when he stumbled to a stunned halt. Mushrooms littered the forest floor, lit up like little neon bulbs in every color imaginable. Tiny winged creatures zipped between them, bouncing off their caps before darting upward in sprays of sparks. And here, in this forest, the trees grew around gemstones of every shape and size, their trunks surrounding them like string art.