Slowly, the baby settled down. As its steady heartbeat pulsed through the leaf and into his skin, Timothy wept. This child would be born tomorrow and cradled in loving arms, while another precious child would not awaken to another dawn. He snatched up the dagger again and gritted his teeth. There had to be another way! There just had to be!
A weak whistle spilled down from the sky. Timothy slid the dagger behind his belt and looked up. The silhouette of a great dragon passed in front of Pegasus and dove toward him. In a gust of wind and flapping wings, Grackle landed gracefully, Listener sitting in the control seat, dressed in purple sweat pants and a black leather jacket. She whistled again, and, while the dragon lowered its head to the ground, she waved Timothy aboard.
Timothy let go of the leaf and scrambled up the dragon’s stairway. When he settled himself in the already warm passenger’s seat, he reached around and hugged her from behind, his cheek nuzzling hers. “Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?”
She nodded forcefully.
“Then let’s go.” Just as he was about to pull back, her two companions buzzed around his eyes. The weaker one brushed against the stronger one, and they seemed for a moment to be annoyed with each other.
Listener whistled. Grackle spread out his wings.
“Wait!” Timothy called, falling back in his seat. “Wait just a minute.”
Listener whistled again and massaged Grackle’s warm scales, breathing a lower whistle to keep him calm.
“I have an idea.” Breathing rapidly, Timothy ran his fingers through his hair. “It might work, but our timing has to be perfect.”
A shout pierced the night. “Who goes there?”
“It’s the guard!” Timothy clasped her shoulder. “Get us out of here!”
She pursed her lips and blew a shrill blast. Just as Cliffside came back into view, Grackle beat his wings and vaulted into the air. After gaining altitude in a tight circle over the garden, he shot away toward the land of the shadow people.
Timothy twisted and looked down. The torch streaked toward the village. Soon, Abraham would know. Brushing aside Listener’s hair, he leaned forward and kissed her on her scaly cheek, whispering, “You are the bravest of the brave, little lass. I love you like my own daughter.”
Listener nodded, rubbing their cheeks together. Warmth flooded Timothy’s heart. Words weren’t necessary … She loved him, too.
As they approached the bowl-shaped valley, the wind grew colder and colder, stiffening his fingers and numbing his skin. He could barely extend his frigid arms to point the way or force out spoken directions into the biting wind.
Listener didn’t seem to mind the cold. As she guided the dragon in the direction Timothy pointed, her little brow furrowed whenever a gust threw them slightly off course, but, other than an occasional shiver, she remained stoic.
Timothy leaned to see around Grackle’s head, searching for the river’s exit point. Now in darkness, except for the crossing rays of the two moons, the interlaced shadows seemed to blend together, making everything below a crisscrossed web of dark shapes. Since the light tunnel had gone out, there would be no beacon to guide them.
Finally, a glimmer arose from below, a sparkling ribbon. “The river!” Timothy shouted. “Follow it to the right!”
Listener whistled two short bursts and tapped the dragon’s neck. With a sudden feeling of lost weight, Timothy retightened his belt and hung on as Grackle banked and dove at the same time.
Blistering cold wind flapped Timothy’s hair and cheeks, bringing shivers so violent, he thought his bones might break. Even Listener trembled, but she kept her wits about her as she slapped each side of the dragon’s neck in turn, taking him out of the dive.
Now below the tops of the surrounding ridge, the air tempered, allowing Timothy to speak without trembling. He pointed at the mouth of the river. “Over there. That clearing next to the clump of trees.”
Listener guided the dragon to the spot, and they landed gracefully next to the river. As Grackle shuddered his wings, Timothy unstrapped his belt and glanced all around, whispering. “The light from the tunnel always kept the shadow people away, but now that it’s dark, they could be lurking. Pegasus will likely keep them away from the river, but once we go into the forest, there’s no telling what might happen.”
He slid down to the ground and helped Listener dismount. Gazing up into the cold dark sky, he brushed his cheek against hers. “I will miss you,” he said. “Your willingness to die for others will never be forgotten.”
Listener’s brow furrowed, and she squeezed his hand.
“Shhh. We have to wait a moment.” Timothy stroked her hair. “Our timing has to be perfect. Without more than one witness, who will believe such a story?”
A faint roar rumbled in the sky from far away. Timothy looked up and scanned the darkness. “That sounded like Albatross.”
Nodding, Listener pointed at a spot over the ridge. The white dragon, just a tiny blur in the moon’s glow, was closing in fast.
Chapter 22
Facing the giant, Sapphira raised her flaming hands higher and whispered, “Jehovah-Shammah, I know you’re here with me. Grant us victory over our enemies, for they extend their prideful fingers into your holy city and dare to touch what is sacred with their bloodstained hands.”
She edged closer to Bagowd and leaned into his protective energy field. The giant’s electricity buzzed across her skin, sending bullets of pain up and down her spine and through her limbs to her fingers and toes. Steeling herself, she called upon her internal fire. Flames leaped from her body, exploding outward from her head, hands, and torso. The fire ate away at the giant’s electric shield, and his surrounding glow shrank as she pushed closer to his feet with her inferno-clad body.
Bagowd swung a foot at her but missed. “Begone, fiery demon!”
Thigocia swooped low and took advantage of the weakened field, sending a blast of flames that torched the giant’s foot. Bagowd roared, but he kept his hands in place. Using the turbine’s output and the incoming light from the ten giants at the distant power plants, he refueled his electric cocoon, making it grow wider and taller. The dragon’s fire mixed with the shield again, and the combined energy grew into a twisting column that shot past the clouds. Sapphira trudged closer, and with each torturous step, the column dwindled.
Thigocia took aim at the giant’s feet again, but a streak of red scales zoomed in front of her, making her swerve away. “No!” Arramos shouted. “Do not break off the central attack! We must keep the firestorm going. It is the only way to destroy the tower.”
Sapphira screamed through her flames. “That’s what Mardon wants you to do! The vortex will break down the dimensional barrier between Heaven and Earth!”
Thigocia looped back toward Sapphira. “How do you know this?” she asked as she swept by. She rose again into the air and began another orbit, too far away now to hear an answer.
The giant grunted. “The girl is degenerating the field! I must increase the power!” A new surge of electricity blasted from his body, brightening the upward column and rebuilding his electrified barrier.
As Thigocia approached again, Bagowd’s electric cloak pushed down on Sapphira’s flaming shield, making the orange tongues surrounding her body tremble. Pain knifing through her heart, Sapphira spat out her reply to Thigocia in short bursts. “I know this because … I am an Oracle of Fire … an underborn who saw the ancient days. … I have made many firestorms … so I know what they do.”
Arramos dove down and barged in between Sapphira and Thigocia. “While we delay, our storm dwindles!” he said, making a tight orbit around the giant to stay in shouting distance. “Roxil and I destroyed Mardon’s tower once before, so we know what we are doing.”
Thigocia beat her wings furiously, trailing Arramos. “But what if she speaks the truth?”
“There is no time to argue. You said you would not doubt me when this hour came.” With a burst of wing power, he launched higher into the sky.
Thigocia followed him, calling back to Sapphira, “I have no proof that what you say is true, so I must keep my word to Arramos.”
Sapphira stretched her pain-racked body, reaching for the dragon in vain. “Noooo!”
The three dragons again stirred up the mix of fire and electricity. The brilliant column continued to rise. The clouds evaporated, leaving nothing but a clear blue ceiling that seemed to bend and wrinkle in the heat of the twisting cylinder that stabbed the sky. The blueness streamed away from the atmospheric wound, leaving a black hole that expanded with every second. Soon, black faded to gray, then white. Brilliant light shone through the hole, like a sunray penetrating the clouds.
Sapphira continued her relentless march toward Bagowd, bending at the waist as she strained to slide each foot forward. The electric shield pushed down on her like a thousand-pound load. A clanging sound of metal on metal made her glance back. A red-headed girl pushed up from the last rung on the ladder, dragging Excalibur behind her as she mounted the top of the generator.
“Karen!” Sapphira called through the flames. “Don’t!”
Karen laid the sword on the roof and rested in a crouch, her arms dangling limply as she panted. “I just … want to help.”
A loud creaking sound erupted from the sky. The hole in the ceiling widened, revealing another land far above—a shimmering blue curtain bordered by a grassy field with several people and a horse standing nearby. The fiery tornado transformed into a cylindrical beam that solidified into a transparent tunnel of light. The tunnel knifed through the hole in the sky and attached to the center of the curtain, making a bridge between the two lands.
The newly formed tunnel of light surrounded the giant, giving him a sleeve of protection. With his hands still raised, he held the end of the tunnel steady, his palms pressing against the inner walls and his feet supporting the base.
Arramos shut off his fiery jets. “No more flames!” he ordered. “There is nothing more we can do. We have failed!”
Thigocia wheeled around and flew straight toward the vertical column. “Failure is not an option!” She smashed into the tunnel chest first. In an explosion of sparks, the barrier flung her away in a whirling backward somersault. Stunned, she flapped her wings awkwardly and spun slowly toward the waterfall.
“Mother!” Roxil zoomed under Thigocia’s body and helped her spiral safely downward.
“Excellent!” a man called from the turbine room floor. “My new tower is complete! My father’s dream of a stairway to Heaven is finally a reality!”
Sapphira cringed. Mardon’s voice. Now he’s going to try to climb up to Heaven! Her body still aflame, she crept close to Bagowd’s legs and laid a fiery hand on the tunnel wall. With a spine-jarring jolt, her hand sizzled and bounced away. She gripped her wrist, holding back a cry of pain. It was useless. The tower was complete; she hadn’t stopped it.
Shutting off her flames, she hurried back to Karen. The redhead’s gaze was fixed on the sky. “What’s up there?” Karen asked. “Who are those people?”
Sapphira looked up. The land in the sky drew closer, inch by inch, as if the tunnel were reeling it toward the Earth. The people in the small crowd near the curtain grew more detailed, but since they were moving around, it was hard to lock on any one of them. Finally, she caught a glimpse of a familiar face and followed it, a young man walking between a horse and the tunnel of light. When he paused to speak to a much older man, his identity became clear.
Covering her mouth, Sapphira dropped to her knees. “Elam!”
As gusty winds tossed his hair, Elam stood close to Dikaios and Naamah. “I think all we can do now is wait for the connection.”
The horse nodded toward Zane and his nine followers. “Unless you have words of wisdom for our soldiers, I would agree.”
The storm clouds thickened and descended, their feathery undersides brushing the treetops. Black funnels spun down. A dozen twisting tongues licked the ground before getting slurped back into the cloud bank only to be replaced by a dozen more. The ten wanderers huddled, the wide whites of their eyes a stark contrast to their soiled clothes. Though unable to see the looming catastrophe, the one blind man obviously felt and heard the rumbling storm and shaking ground. Only Zane seemed to try to keep a brave face as he firmed his chin and stared into the wind.
Elam sighed and shook his head. “I’ll try to come up with a last-minute pep talk, but I don’t know if it’ll do any good.”
“I sense that you have no faith in their abilities,” Dikaios said. “Do you have an alternate plan?”
“Maybe.” Elam looked back at Heaven’s shield. “I need something to block the connection, a barrier of some kind.”
Naamah picked up a cloak from the ground. “Perhaps this will work. You used it to cover me. Now it might serve another good purpose.”
Elam took the cloak and slipped it on. “It might help, but something metal would probably be better.”
“The only metal is inside Heaven,” Dikaios said. “There is none in the Bridgelands, at least none that I have seen.”
“Then this will have to do.” Pulling the hood over his head, Elam approached his ten soldiers, but just as he opened his mouth to speak, the clouds lowered to the ground and enveloped them in soupy gray fog that swirled in a frantic dance. Damp misty hands slapped Elam’s hood down and mopped his hair with dewy fingers. The fog gathered into streams and funneled toward Heaven’s shield in a twisting horizontal cylinder, clearing the rest of the air.
Like a huge spinning snake, the cylinder lunged at the shield, striking the blue wall just a couple of feet away from where Acacia stood, but she stayed put, still keeping her halo of light in place. As the rush of fog struck the shield, the mist evaporated as soon as it made contact, but the barrage of new fog continued unabated.
The cylinder grew thicker and thicker, until it finally became rigid and slowed its spin. At the point where the fog struck the shield, the gray streams extended tiny fingers that drilled minute holes and attached to the blue wall. Like a ten-foot-thick rope being pulled at one end, the cylinder drew taut and yanked at the shield. The wall groaned but didn’t bend.
At first gray and opaque, the cylinder slowly cleared to a translucent yellow, then to pure bright crystal. Thousands of sparks of light zoomed toward the shield and splashed against it in tiny bursts of energy.
Elam patted Dikaios’s neck. “Please stay with Naamah, no matter what happens.”
“I will protect her as you would,” the horse replied.
Elam edged close to the cylinder. It hovered over the ground just above his ankles and reached well over his head. As he extended his hand to touch it, a buzz of electricity tingled his skin, but he ignored it long enough to push a hand into the path. Several sparks zapped his fingers. “Ouch!” He jerked his hand back. “It’s electrified.”
Zane reached out and pushed his hand into the center. “I feel a tickling sensation, but it seems harmless.” He picked up a stone and released it inside the beam. It hovered near the center for a moment, then floated toward the shield, accelerating through the beam until it smacked against the blue barrier.
“As I suspected,” Enoch said, “it should be safe for you and your companions to enter. The idea is for all ten of you to stand in the gap between Earth and Heaven and disrupt the path of those electrified particles so that Acacia may stand safely at the connection point to the shield. For the sake of all unredeemed humans on Earth, the beam must be extinguished.”
Zane waved to his followers. “Let’s do this job quickly. Our eternal reward awaits!”
The men formed a chain, locking elbows as they entered the beam about ten feet in front of Heaven’s shield. As soon as the light enveloped the last man, he called out, “I can see!”
Elam tugged on Enoch’s sleeve. “Why can he see now?”
“To remove all potential excuses,” Enoch replied.
Thousands of sparks bounced off the men’s bodies and splashed to the ground, reducing the electrical attack on the shield. The men stood straight, pulling in their bellies and expanding their chests, like superheroes repelling bullets.
Enoch waved at Acacia. “Move the portal in front of the connection point. The time to unleash the weapon is almost here.”
Keeping the fiery halo swirling around her hands, Acacia slid her feet sideways and edged into the beam. As soon as she entered, dozens of energy particles lashed her face. Dropping to her knees, she called out, “Father Enoch! Help!”
Enoch waved frantically at the ten men. “Too many of the particles are still getting through! Assemble in two rows and fill in the gaps!”
The men scrambled into staggered lines of five and raised their hands to block as many of the tiny sparks as they could, but hundreds still passed around them and through the halo, spattering against Acacia. She struggled back to her feet, tucking her chin against her chest. Some of the sparks adhered to her blue cloak, making her appear to be on fire, and her white hair began to rise in the electrified light. “It’s not so bad now,” she grunted, still keeping her head low. “I can stand it.”
Far down the cylinder in the opposite direction, a bright hole opened in the distant sky. The horizon drew slowly nearer. Trees collapsed as if swallowed from underneath. Ponds splashed high as their shorelines clapped together and disappeared. It was as if the entire land had become a river tumbling into a chasm.
Elam backed away from the cylinder and laid one hand on Dikaios and the other on Naamah. In mere moments, they, too, would be washed into the void.
The hole widened to fill the entire horizon. An image coalesced within as if the sky had transformed into a movie theatre screen. A huge man stood with his arms upraised within the cylindrical tunnel of light as a river of water fell into a building beneath him. Two smaller people crouched at the man’s feet, while another stooped near an inert body lying on the ground.
As the Earth drew closer, details colored the people on its surface—the giant, furrows etched across his brow; a girl at his feet, red-headed and tear-streaked; and the other girl, white-haired and flaming.
Elam swallowed a lump. “Sapphira!”
Zane pointed through the tunnel. “I see a giant!”
The other nine fidgeted, breaking the links between them. Hundreds of sparks zoomed past and hammered Acacia. She fell to her knees again, holding up the portal with trembling arms, but she didn’t cry out.
“Hold fast, men!” Enoch shouted. “Do not fear this son of the Earth! If you stand firm in your faith, you will defeat this demonic giant!”
The tunnel shuddered. A new pulse of energy shot millions of sparks into the barrier of men, half of them passing around and between their quaking bodies. As the particles riddled Acacia, she moaned but kept the portal in place.
Elam screamed at the men. “Form your lines! She can’t take it much longer!”
As the ten men pushed closer together, the sound of the disappearing horizon crashed all around—trees splitting, water splashing, and rocks smashing together in a cacophony.
The giant let out a deafening roar. The strongest pulse yet shot through the tunnel. The men scattered, diving out of the connecting beam just before the wave of energy arrived. It smashed against Acacia and pinned her to the shield.