Phoenix’s Refrain by Ella Summers

 

1

Return to the Lost City

Iwalked across the broken highway, which cut right to the middle of the Lost City. There, at the epicenter of desolation, the highway ended abruptly in a massive crater. I passed the rotting husks of buildings, relics of an ancient era. The city was a forgotten piece of the past, a throwback to a lost world that we’d never return to again, a world ravaged by the immortal war the gods and demons had brought to Earth.

The Lost City had lain mostly dormant for over two centuries. Treasure hunters sometimes braved the ruins in search of great fortune, but that very rarely happened. There might have been treasures hidden within the decaying buildings, but there were monsters hidden there too.

Sounds rang in my ears. The clash of swords. The rapid beat of gunfire. Magic, ancient and unyielding. Powerful and arrogant. So beautiful. And so terrible that it had consumed the city.

The Lost City lay on the Black Plains, the wide, beast-infested expanses on Earth that humans shunned and where monsters reigned supreme. I sure wasn’t here for the fun times. I’d come back here because this was where it had all begun…where the visions had first appeared to me.

The first time I’d seen the visions—these memories of the past—had been on a mission just a few months after joining the Legion of Angels, the gods’ Earthly army. I’d had a few more flashes here and there in the two years since, but lately these visions flowed like the floodgates of the past had opened up and unloaded everything it had onto me.

That might have had something to do with my newly-gained telepathic powers. Or maybe the visions were another ‘present’ my demon mother Grace had left with me. Whatever the case, there was something about these visions from the past, something I was sure held the key to the future. I just had to figure out what they were trying to tell me.

And so I’d traveled to the Lost City against orders…hell, without even telling the First Angel where I was at all. But now, being here, I knew I’d made the right decision. The visions were strong here, in the Lost City, just as I’d known they would be. I could hear those memories all again in perfect clarity.

I saw Sierra, the angel with the red hair and the silver wings. She walked down the highway of the Lost City, the very same highway I was now standing on. And yet not the same. The highway of Sierra’s era was intact. Mine had fallen into ruin. The tall buildings on either side of her shone brightly, the light of a pleasant sun bouncing off the pristine windows.

Nowadays, the buildings on either side of me could hardly be called buildings at all. Their windows were shattered, their insides gobbled up by enemy fire and the slow, inevitable passage of time.

Sierra’s city was not the Lost City. Back then, it had been called the Golden City. I’d seen that in the visions. I saw—no, I felt the ground beneath Sierra’s feet shake. The Golden City was under siege. I recognized these visions. They were of the city’s final golden moments.

The heavens roared. An angel landed beside Sierra.

“Sierra,” he said, dropping to one knee.

“Why do you bow before me, Calin?” she asked him.

“Because you are the Keeper,” he said. “You are our savior.”

I knew Sierra didn’t feel like a savior. She felt so…so lost. So trapped by her destiny, a destiny which had been forced upon her without her ever having any say in the matter. She felt like she’d been thrown into this whole war, a war she didn’t understand, a war that had been raging since long before she’d been born.

“Sierra, we must hurry.” Calin took her arm and led her to the gateway of the Treasury. “They are coming. You need to don the armor and wield the weapons of heaven and hell. You need to save us all.”

The weapons of heaven and hell. I had encountered them before. Worn them before. I guessed I was Sierra’s successor, a version of her in the present era.

The weapons of heaven and hell were immortal artifacts of great power, the power to kill a deity. They were unique among the immortal artifacts in that they could only be worn by someone with balanced light and dark magic. Whereas most immortal artifacts could be used by anyone with enough magical might to control them.

The memory faded away. Back in my time, I’d reached the end of the broken highway. I looked down into the crater. Beside me, my sister Gin released a deep, uneasy breath.

“Leda, are you sure we have to go down there?” she asked, gaping into the crater. “I can’t even see the bottom.”

My sister Tessa giggled. “What’s the matter, Gin? Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“I left it back in my bed. Where I wish I had remained instead of setting out on Leda’s crazy quest,” said Gin.

Gin’s words didn’t fool me. She might have been a little scared right now, but she was even more excited. She was an avid reader of adventure books and had always dreamed of being part of a great adventure of her own.

“You love it, and you know it,” Tessa told Gin. She wasn’t fooled either.

Gin and Tessa weren’t my sisters by blood, but they were my sisters in all the ways it truly mattered. We had grown up together under the guidance of our amazing foster mother Calli. It had been a good home, full of love and understanding and guidance. All those things that I didn’t get from my blood parents: Faris, the God of Heaven’s Army, and Grace, the Demon of the Faith.

I looked all around. Most of the Lost City had been consumed by the final battle for Earth and had deteriorated even further in the time that had passed since then. The streets had split open, and the buildings were slowly crumbling to pieces. Some of the underground structures were still intact, though.

“Don’t worry,” I told Gin. “I won’t let you fall.”

I wrapped one arm around her and the other around Tessa. Then I spread my angel wings, beating them gently as I slowly lowered us into the crater, all the way down to the ground. Angel, my feline companion, hopped in after us.

We landed in what seemed to be an ancient airport. This was a time capsule of how things had used to be, a taste of the Earth before the gods and demons, before magic and monsters.

“This way,” I told my sisters, Angel strutting by my side.

We walked down the long airport corridor.

A flash from the past hit me, and I saw Sierra walking down this very same corridor. She was wearing the weapons of heaven and hell, marching into battle. Her armor was silver, just like her wings. In her hand, she held a burning sword. Blue flames licked the blade.

Magic fire rained down from above. Sierra jumped aside to avoid the blast.

I sidestepped several holes in the otherwise-smooth ground. Time was a funny thing, though. The holes weren’t where they were supposed to be, not where the magic had impacted the ground in Sierra’s time. Who knew what had happened in the centuries since then.

Yeah, memories were weird, especially visions from the past. I’d once spoken to Nero about the memories that kept coming to me.

“I’d guess someone buried them there,” he had told me. “It’s no coincidence that they are coming out now. I believe they were triggered by the Nectar and maybe by the Venom, by your growing abilities, your growing magic. If I’m right, as your power grows, more memories will surface.”

And he’d turned out to be right. I’d certainly had more memories since gaining Ghost’s Whisper, the power of telepathy.

“In my dream,” I’d told Nero. “Sierra spoke of inheriting someone else’s destiny, and the gateway only opens to someone who embodies light and darkness. Sierra wasn’t the first keeper of the weapons of heaven and hell. I wonder how many keepers there have been? And where they all are now?”

“I believe I’m looking at one right now,” he’d told me.

“I don’t know, Nero. Sierra was so…powerful. I’m just some watered-down version. You probably have a better chance of opening that gateway than I do.”

“I have darkness and light in me, Leda, but they’re not in balance. They’re in conflict.”

“And that makes a difference?”

“More than how much magic you have, I believe. You survived Venom mixed with Nectar. If that isn’t proof of your light-dark balance, then I don’t know what is.”

Yeah, I was balanced—or at least my magic was. That’s what I got for being the offspring of a god and a demon.

Or maybe that’s why I was unbalanced, torn between two worlds, destined never to fit in either.

I reached out and traced my finger along the edge of the very large hole in the wall in front of me. Something had blown that hole in the wall. I wondered what spell had done it.

I led the way through the hole, up the many, many stairs that ended in another hole, this time in the ceiling. I climbed out, then reached down to help Gin and Tessa up. Angel crouched down, wiggled her butt a few times, then leapt through the hole. She landed soundlessly beside me.

“Good kitty.” I scratched her under her chin, then rose from my knees.

We were standing on what had once served as an airport runway. The asphalt surface had cracked and fractured since those days. There were holes larger than my foot in it.

We walked a few minutes, then the broken runway ended abruptly with the skeletal corpse of a plane. We climbed through the plane, its shell eaten away by the winds of time.

Nero’s words and mine hummed in my ears.

“Do you remember the visions I had last year in the Lost City?” I’d asked him.

“Visions of the past,” he’d said. “Your proximity to the weapons of heaven and hell triggered them.”

“I saw memories stored in those immortal artifacts, just like the gods’ memories stored inside their immortal artifacts. I think it takes a very strong emotion to imprint a memory on an immortal artifact. The glasses exposed the gods’ memories stored in those artifacts. But I didn’t have the glasses last year when I saw those memories in the Lost City. And why am I seeing this woman’s memories now when the rest of you are not?”

That was a good question. Why was I seeing Sierra’s memories? What was so special about her? Were we somehow linked through time because she had once worn the weapons of heaven and hell, just as I had?

My sisters and I jumped out of the corpse of the plane. We followed the old train line. Angel led the way, balancing effortlessly atop the slim profile of the broken tracks.

It was this way. I knew it. I could feel it. The visions were drawing me in closer. Something important lay at the end of the line.

The visions were coming from there. But what were the visions? Nero’s father Damiel had once said that he’d unlocked these memories in my mind, but Damiel was famous for never telling the whole story.

“The spell doesn’t lie,” Damiel had said. “It showed us the one the Guardians entrusted these memories to.”

“What spell?” I’d asked.

“The one I cast the first time you came to the Lost City, the one that unlocked the treasure trove of memories inside that precious little head of yours.”

So Damiel had helped me come to these memories, memories he claimed the Guardians had put there. But why would the Guardians want me to have these memories?

Or was Damiel wrong? Yeah, he’d really hate to hear that. Maybe it hadn’t been the Guardians at all. Maybe the memories had come from my demon mother Grace. She certainly had the power; she’d once given Nero future visions of me and our daughter. If Grace could show Nero visions of the future, maybe she could show me visions from the past.

It would certainly be in line with Grace’s character. She’d schemed so that I would absorb Faith’s telepathic powers into my unborn child.

Or was Damiel right, and it had been the Guardians to give me these memories? But to what end? Did they think they could use me in some way, just as Faris and Grace hoped to use me? I didn’t think so. The Guardians had tried to kill me. They wouldn’t kill someone they needed. Right?

A broken train blocked the tracks. I had to jump inside and crawl through it.

Another flash. The train rattled. Another piece of the past hit me. Sierra, the red-haired angel, jumped across the train car’s roof. Her blade met a monster’s body. There were more monsters below on the ground, lured there by the sounds of battle. A beast’s jaws snapped at her. She cut across its body, severing it, splitting it in two.

But that was not the true enemy. Sierra pressed on. The real enemy had invaded her city. They were coming for her.

Sierra’s memories weren’t the only ones that lived on in this city. I saw a pale-haired angel too, wearing the weapons of heaven and hell, fighting unseen enemies in the city. She ran at them. She was outnumbered. There was no hope of victory or even survival, even with all her magic and the aid of these powerful artifacts. But she did not shy away from her duty. She charged into battle, nonetheless, to defend her city and meet her end. If she was going to die here, she would take as many of them with her as she could.

Sierra and the unnamed pale-haired warrior: they were two different angels. The pale-haired angel had lived long before Sierra. I just knew it. Centuries before. Maybe one of the angels had fought in the Final Battle for Earth all those years ago, but then what of the other angel? I knew of no other battles in the Lost City. I would need to ask Bella. She always knew everything about history, and if she didn’t know, she knew just which book to consult for answers.

I brushed my hand across the graffiti painted on the inside walls of the train car. Rough depictions of two angels: one with pale hair and one with red hair. What did it mean?

The front of the train car ended in a building, like the train had crashed full-speed into the train station. We hopped out of the missing door on the side. There, on the walls of the station, painted all over, were lots of funny symbols. I recognized those alien symbols. I’d seen them before, way back.

I remembered how Nero’s eyes had panned across those symbols in confusion.

“I’ve seen these markings before,” he’d said. “They belong to one of the ancient languages, one not of this world. I can’t read them. Can you?”

“I think so,” I’d replied.

“How?”

“I don’t really know. I guess the same way I have weird visions of things that happened long ago.”

“Can you translate them?”

“I can try.”

Where had I gotten this knowledge of the past? Of old languages? I’d once drawn some of those symbols for Bella. My sister had said they were one of the demons’ old languages. Maybe I’d gotten this knowledge of the symbols from the same place I’d gotten the memories of the long-gone past.

The symbols were from a demon language. The signs seemed to point to Grace, that she’d been the one to give me these visions.

“You’re awfully quiet, Leda,” Tessa commented.

I’d passed most of our journey through the ancient airport and broken train line in silence, lost in the memories, in those flashes of the past.

“The memories are stronger here,” I told her.

“Good,” Tessa said. “Nice to know you’re not going crazy or anything.”

I flashed her a smile. “Well, I’ve always been crazy. Nothing new there.”

When I slept, the dreams came to me. Memories, jumbled and juxtaposed. Out of time. Drifting on the satin sashes of time. Out of place. Whispering against my consciousness.

These dreams and visions had grown so frequent, they were distracting. They were trying to tell me something. Ever since my recent battle of the minds against the telepath Faith, I’d been having these dreams, or maybe since I’d been pregnant. Hard to say which one since they’d both happened around the same time.

I tried to work through all these scenes that seemed disconnected. They were from different eras, but something connected it all together. Something linked them. I could feel it. I just couldn’t put my finger on it. Perhaps it was the weapons of heaven and hell? The two angels had wielded them, and so had I.

My gut told me that all of this was connected to what was happening with the Guardians. I couldn’t say why. I just felt it. And I’d learned to trust my gut.

I hoped my confidence didn’t come from somewhere deeper, like Grace’s scheme for me. I hoped that I wasn’t falling into her trap. Or Faris’s trap either. Or the Guardians’ trap for that matter.

Maybe Grace really was behind all of this. I could have gone to her and demanded answers, but demons, like gods, never gave you a straight answer to anything. That wouldn’t have fit into their whole plan of universal domination and manipulating us lesser beings.

The ruins were quiet, except for the soft steps of our shoes against the shifting rubble. A shrill ring punctuated that stillness, a dramatic, orchestral ringtone from a movie of old.

I ignored it and kept moving.

“Are you going to answer that?” Gin asked me.

I shrugged. “No. Not really.”

We kept going, and another minute later, my phone rang again, once more breaking the silence.

“Are you going to answer that?” Gin asked.

I pulled out my phone and glanced at the screen. “No,” I declared and pressed on, deeper into the building.

Sure enough, a few minutes later, my phone rang again.

“Ok, Leda. What the hell is going on with you?” Tessa asked. “Who keeps calling you?”

“Various people,” I said cryptically.

“Spill it.”

Tessa gave me a look far too commanding for her young years. She must have learned it from Calli. Calli, with a single, silent stare, could squeeze secrets out of someone better than the Legion’s Interrogators could with all of the tools and magic at their disposal.

“It’s just Alec calling,” I said as my phone rang once more. “He can wait.”

The next time my phone rang, Tessa grabbed it from my hand. “You’re ignoring people, aren’t you? People from the Legion.”

“Maybe.”

Gin glanced down at my phone screen. “You’re ignoring Harker too?”

“Wow, Harker’s calling now,” I commented. “That escalated fast.”

“What is going on, Leda?” Tessa demanded. “Why is the whole Legion of Angels calling you?”

“Well, not the whole Legion of Angels,” I said. “But this is certainly working its way up the hierarchy.” I sighed. “Truth be told, I’m not exactly supposed to be on this mission. Or on any mission, for that matter. Nyx has grounded me. She told me I’m not to go on missions because of my condition.”

“That makes sense,” said Gin.

“That makes sense?” I repeated, exasperated. “How does it make sense? I’m pregnant, not an invalid. I’m just as powerful as I’ve ever been. Maybe even more powerful. No, scratch that. I’m definitely more powerful.”

“Yeah, well, I guess the Legion wants to keep your baby safe,” Gin said. “It’s not every day that a child of two angels is conceived.”

She was right about that. The child of an angel was a precious miracle indeed. And the child of two angels…well, there had only ever been one of those before, and he was the father of my baby. Even so, Nyx needed to chill out. But I supposed chilling out wasn’t part of the First Angel’s job description.

“I hope we don’t get in trouble with the Legion for going off with a rogue angel,” Tessa chuckled, looking at Gin.

“You know, you’re right.” Gin grinned. “Think we should call the Legion and turn her in?”

“Na. We’ll give her a little time.” Tessa turned toward me. “But we’re keeping our eyes on you, angel.”

I snorted. “I think we’re finally here actually.”

Gin stepped forward. This was why I’d asked her to come along with me to the Lost City. A broken door lay before us. I remembered it from my last mission through the city. It had seemed insignificant at the time, but now, yeah, my visions kept snapping to this spot. This place wasn’t part of the memories, but I kept seeing flashes of this door. It was the key to the memories.

Gin was good at fixing things. Really good. And her lock-picking skills were second to no one.

Gin knelt down in front of the broken door and started looking it over. “There is a barrier of some sort here. Magic. It’s weak right now because of the full moon.”

The full moon was tied to the monsters and their shifting tempers. Right now, when the moon was full, the monsters’ magic was erratic. And that erratic magic here in the Lost City had weakened the barrier of this broken door, eating away at it, making it hard for the barrier to hold its seal. Just as Bella had speculated. That’s why I’d come here now when the moon was full.

The problem was the beasts always got a bit moody around the time of the full moon. Luckily, I was somewhat of an expert monster slayer.

My phone rang again. It was a number I didn’t recognize. But the name ‘Heaven’ was displayed prominently on the screen. Must have been someone’s idea of a good joke.

“Heaven is calling,” I told my sisters.

Yeah, Heaven. As though that would make me answer the phone.

I looked up at the sky and said, “Nice try, Nyx.”

I could hear the rumbling of beasts.

“What’s that?” Gin asked, unsettled. She nearly dropped her tools.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told her. “I’m on it.”

I was already up and swinging my sword through the overgrown centipedes. Damn, their armor was tough. I blasted one with a fire spell. It worked better than my sword.

“How are you coming with that door, Gin?” I called back.

“Just a little bit longer,” she replied.

Tessa was helping her, holding her tools and keeping an eye out in case any of the beasts got past me. The centipedes were gone, but now I had some rather large silver wolves to contend with.

And by silver, I meant made of actual metal. They weren’t covered in fur like normal wolves. They were made of some kind of strong metal, stronger than anything I’d ever encountered. My sword bounced right off them. Even my magic didn’t put a dent in them. Nothing was hurting them. Sure, I could force them back with some well-placed telekinetic blasts, but they just kept rushing forward. We were being overrun.

“Now would be a good time to get that door open,” I told Gin, trying to keep the panic out of my voice.

I didn’t know what was on the other side. Hopefully, it wasn’t more monsters. All I knew was things weren’t looking good here. The monsters came at me from either side—and from above.

Magic flashed, and then the beasts were gone. A combined blast of thunder, fire, and lightning had split them into little bits of metal. That blast had also knocked me on my ass.

I looked up and saw Faris. So he’d been the one to blast the monsters to bits. And save my life. Damn it. I really didn’t want to owe Faris anything.

He pulled me to my feet. “You really must be more careful. You are carrying priceless cargo.” He looked down at my belly.

Faris saw me as a moderately useful weapon, but he saw my unborn child as the weapon to end all wars.

“You didn’t answer my call.” Disapproval flashed in his eyes.

“Heaven. That was you,” I realized.

“Naturally,” he said smugly.

I shook my head in disbelief. “I should have guessed.”

The God of Heaven’s Army. Heaven. Made sense.

“All right then,” Faris said, dusting leftover magic off his hands. “Let’s do what we came here to do.”