Authors: Laura Kreitzer
“
Hello?” I called out.
“
I don’t have much time, Gabriella.” The voice was angelic, one I never thought I would hear again. A ghost-like shape shimmered before me, but I recognized her all the same. She was insubstantial, but her red silk dress and shiny brown hair over her shoulders came into view. She was more like a goddess than an angel.
“
Mom?” I breathed. I didn’t question my sanity because I wanted it to be real, and I refused to deny what was right before me.
“
Yes, sweetie.” She moved closer, the outline of her shining like a seraph. “Listen to me, I only have seconds. They don’t know I’m here.” Her head jerked behind her like she heard something. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her face to see for myself. Who were “they” anyway? “The other key, it will open the door to Zola,” she continued after a second. “The Ladies of Light have her locked up. She will have the answe—” There was a rush of wind and then she was gone.
“
Mom?” I screamed. “Mom! Come back. Please. Don’t leave me!” It was silent—she had gone. I couldn’t believe it. “No! You can’t leave me again. No!” I whimpered. The room was in absolute darkness again. I dropped to my knees, grief-stricken, alone, and terrified. My mother was a ghost. What if she was trying to get back into her body and she couldn’t because she was buried beneath the Earth? The words that had haunted me flashed in my head: Her soul was severed from her body. I felt ripped to shreds all over again, but it was what I needed—the pain—to remind me of her sacrifices and love for me.
On hands and knees, I crawled on the cold, hard floor and searched for a wall. Frightened tears relentlessly leaked from beneath my eyelids. I put my hands out in front of me to determine my surroundings. My fingers encountered more metal before I flipped something over as my face landed hard against it. Several things dumped onto the ground. The noise was thunderous in the quiet space. It sounded like I just dropped a tray of silverware. Items clanged and bounced until it was silent again. Moving whatever I knocked over out of my way, I moved forward again.
Whatever I pushed over was all over the floor—little metal instruments of some kind. It wasn’t silverware. One piece felt like scissors, and the others were bent in odd shapes. I put my weight on one hand so I could scoot the stuff away from me. As I brushed the metal pieces away, something sliced deeply into my palm when I accidently knocked it against another hard object. It sliced through my skin with no effort. I shifted my weight to my knees.
“
Ouch,” I whispered furiously. I still couldn’t see a thing. You would think immortality would give you night vision, which I thought it had after the fight outside the Divine Library, but now I wasn’t so sure.
I sat up on my knees and gently felt with my other hand a piece of something sticking out the top of my hand. It had gone all the way through, and it hurt like hell. My fingers rubbed over the object again. Maybe it was a knife. What was I doing around knives? My fingers gently felt over the cool metal one more time. It wasn’t a knife; it was a scalpel. I would know it even in the dark. I used one all the time in the Fishbowl.
As I held my hurt hand to my chest, I dragged myself across the floor. There was a wall only a foot away. I stood and followed it until I came across shelves. I was careful where I placed my good hand, afraid I’d cut myself again. My heart beat wildly in my chest. Here I was, in a dark room, my hand injured, and only a fuzzy memory of what happened at the cemetery.
“
Andrew?” I cried out again.
Zilch, nada.
Tears came quicker. I was in pain, horrific pain. My body shivered under the coldness of my skin, and, at the same time, I broke out into a sweat. I was going into shock with this injury and the rest of my circumstances. I knew it would be better for me to wait until I could see what I was dealing with before I took the scalpel out. No matter what my previous medical training was, I was dying to pull it out and throw all my commonsense out the window.
With my uninjured hand, I continued to sweep the side of the walls whenever possible. After stumbling over who knows what, I finally came across a light switch. I flipped it up, and several lights hummed to life. Why did I feel better immediately?
Well, I did, until I got a good look at the room I was in. My back slammed against the wall as a scream threatened to escape my lips. I was in a morgue or some kind of medical facility—possibly in a lab for experiments.
“
Oh, no,” I barely whispered under my breath. Where was Andrew? Where was my angels when I needed them?
My eyes shot from one side of the room to the other. I could easily see where I had scooted across the ground and where I had previously walked from the trail of . . . silver blood? Not golden blood. My heart hammered in my chest. What was going on? Each second my eyes zoned in on the different supplies: autopsy tables, morgue gurneys, examination lights, stainless steel equipment everywhere, and an organ scale. Acid rose in my throat. A wash basin, X-ray boxes, morgue instruments, biohazard containers. My head swam, and I felt faint. There were even organ jars sitting next to an autopsy table.
Why was I here? What was going to happen to me? The tears were relentless. Silver tears. Where did the gold go? Did it mean something? And as my eyes finally made their way across the room, they landed on the far wall where there were several stainless steel drawers. One of the doors hung off its hinges, blackened from being electrocuted.
I cringed away from the whole sight by putting my back as flat against the wall as possible. The pain in my hand brought me back to my predicament. I tried to shake off the terror. I had to get my act together or I wasn’t going to make it through this. My head was the first body part to move away from the wall, and the rest of my body followed. I turned to see a door and went immediately to the knob. My good hand reached out to rotate it, but nothing happened. It was locked. I needed to fix my hand before I decided to do some famous, prison-break style escape. But first, I wanted to see what was behind door number one.
I inched toward the stainless steel doors, my good hand out stretched. I thought my heart would explode with the adrenaline. My breathing was heavy. Why did I feel so weak, but only days ago I was so powerful?
Pull yourself together, Gabriella. Sheesh!
I yanked the first door open. Inside was a body, the toe tag dangling. I’d seen many, many dead bodies before, but for some reason this one really bothered me. I slammed the door shut and closed my eyes, trying to shake the image from my head. This time it didn’t help, and I fell back to the floor, useless. I rocked back and forth for a few minutes, trying to regain my composure. When I finally opened my eyes, they landed immediately upon a small piece of paper with a string tied around it lying only feet away on the ground. It looked eerily like a toe tag. I scooted toward the paper. I held it in my grasp for several seconds before I looked down at the name on it.
Gabriella Noelle Moretti.
“
No,” I mouthed. “No.” I got to my feet, the paper still in my grasp. “No! No . . . this can’t be!” I looked down at the paper again. Nothing had changed. It was me. I was dead. I was in a real morgue—not in some prison or being held captive. I had died.
This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening. No. I shook my head.
I dashed across the floor to where the charts were and tore through them until I found mine. There was an autopsy paper, which I quickly tossed away, and below was my death certificate, signed by the coroner. I read over it to find the cause of death. “Burn to the chest and blow to the head,” was listed. My hand automatically went to the back of my head where my hair was matted with blood. There was no wound, just the evidence of it. I slid to the ground, holding my own death certificate.
My injured hand, with the silver blood, long forgotten, all I could think about was my family and Andrew, and how I was so close to being with my angel mother again in heaven. I yanked the scalpel from my hand and watched as my skin healed immediately, quicker than before. The power was back, the pain stronger than ever as I lifted my hand to blast the morgue door open, grabbed a lab coat, and tore out of there.
EPILOGUE
It was the hardest decision I ever had to make. Ultimately, I chose to conceal myself from those who thought I was deceased—which was everyone. Jeff Vittorio had made a promise, and if he thought I was dead, and the Ladies and the Soul Stalker thought I was dead, hopefully my angels would be safe. That was the only form of protection I could safely offer them. My mission was to find Zola, restore the minds to those that had been altered, and return the light to the angels who had been turned to Shadows. I could save them—I would save them all. Light, Shadow, or Soul Stalker wouldn’t stop me now. With their precious Illuminator out of the way, and Gabriella in full force, I would solve this mystery. It was what I did best.
It had been one week since I died horribly in Italy. My body had been shipped to Oregon—shocking news to someone who died in Italy and rose from the dead on another continent—and now, through the cover of the morning darkness of shadows, I arrived at my burial site.
Anyone would be curious, I told myself.
Oregon had never looked so beautiful. As the sun rose, the fall colors were bright on the line of trees hovering on the border of the cemetery. Everything looked on fire. I watched as my grave was dug, and the tent was set up. And I watched as flower wreaths were placed around the hole that my casket would soon descend to; the same casket that would be empty of one, Gabriella. I wondered how the morgue explained my missing body, or if they explained it at all.
As the hours ticked on, a small crowd of people gathered under the tent.
“
Invisible,” I whispered. The air around me shimmered and went still.
As each day passed, power flourished and multiplied within me. There was something different with the electricity zinging through me, like my death had changed part of me. Invisibility was one of the new tricks I had learned from watching Ehno and Lucia. I’d been told several times before that I was powerful—
special
—but never in my wildest dreams did I believe I would possess abilities of this magnitude. But even I had limits—I felt drained after holding myself in a covert, concealed charm for too long. I didn’t care—it wasn’t every day that one had the opportunity to attend one’s own funeral.
As I hovered dangerously close to my grave, I was surprised by the amount of people who had come to say their final goodbyes. Before the angels, I had practically drawn into myself and had effectively become a recluse in the past year—no one else had been around to love me besides my family. There was Adam, but we saw how embarrassingly that ended.
My father and mother, dressed in all black, held on to each other. It broke my heart to see them this grief-stricken when I could easily reveal myself to them. I couldn’t—it would be too dangerous. Not just for them, but for all the angels. I knew too many secrets, and my life was best spent “dead.” I couldn’t risk being protected by those who would die doing so. I had come to one conclusion while I waited for my funeral: it would not be the Shadows I would destroy, it would be the Ladies of Light and the Soul Stalker. When I Illuminated the Shadows, I would not deliver death—I would deliver life, light. The only problem was that every angels’ mind had been altered, their perception changed. I needed to return to Abelie’s. The
Timeless
book was still there, and I knew it would lead me to the Prophetess. She had answers, and all I had to do was find her.
Jenna walked up to the podium to speak. Her face was tear-stained, and her nose was red from wiping it. My heart gave a horrible, wrenching jolt. What made the whole scene even worse was little Jules, holding several white roses in her tiny palms. She was a doll in her black dress. She stood next to the silver casket as her tiny tears dripped on her tiny cheeks. It was that which made me break down. I cried, not for my death, but for my family. I knew what it was like to lose someone you truly loved. It was only a week ago that I placed my own mom—the most beautiful angel of all—into the solid ground below.
“
Not many people knew Gabriella as I did,” Jenna said through her tears. “And that’s too bad. She was self-righteous at times, but she was humble when needed. She placed others before herself and loved deeper than anyone I’ve ever known. She was there for me when times were tough, and she was always there for Jules. She was not one to let someone into her heart, and she was fearful of relationships with people. Because of this, many of you don’t know the carefree, fun-loving girl inside. So let me tell you a few things I do know about my sister that you might not know. She was intelligent beyond her years. Well, you all already knew that.” There was light laughter. “She was beautiful, inside and out, and had a fantastic sense of humor, not to mention her sarcastic side.” Jenna smiled then, her eyes reminiscent.
“
Since she’s no longer here to share her smile with us today, I thought I would tell you a story about my sister.”