“Your assignment.” Michael changed the subject and handed Gabriel a piece of parchment.
Gabriel opened up the parchment, and his eyes flickered across the page. His head suddenly jerked to mine, then Michael’s. It almost looked as if he didn’t want to read what it said.
“Read it, Brother.” Raphael put his arm on Gabriel’s.
“Athena and Adonis, you are hereby assigned a Black Mission. Communication will not be possible. You may not return to Headquarters for anything. We will not help you. Nobody will know your location or progress. Rendezvous will take place a week from today in Gasworks Park at midnight.”
I felt alone and confused. It’s not normal to go out alone, to go without any aid from Headquarters. “Where are we going?”
Michael motioned for his brothers to exit with him, then turned to me. “Into the Fire, sweet Athena, into the Fire.”
Chapter Eight
Two hours later
“So we’re supposed to just sit here until someone walks up to us and offers us a tourist map? Seriously?” I kicked another can and crossed my arms. “And how cryptic can a person get? Into the Fire, Athena. What does that mean? Literal fire? I hate fire.”
Adonis rolled his eyes for the twelfth time and took a swig of water from his pack. “Thena, I swear, if you complain one more time…”
I mimicked his words then took a seat on the cold cement bench next to him. We’d been waiting by the Seattle Monterail for what seemed like forever. A person was supposed to deliver a map. That’s all we knew, and then he was going to take us into a hidden club of some sort. Sounded like a bad TV show to me, but that’s the only intel we’d received. So there we sat. Bored and alone. I didn’t want to count the rat that ran by my foot a few minutes before; it was too depressing.
A homeless man pushed his cart past us, an all-time low for a Seeker, by the way, and then stopped in front of Adonis. His shaking hand held out a tourist map of Seattle. As Adonis reached for it, the man flipped the book. On the back, in scratchy black writing, was one word.
Cell.
Great! A word that rhymed with hell! That should get us far.
“Go down…” The man shook his head back and forth, back and forth. “…down, down, down,” he said. And then I realized… the man was possessed. He had to be. Every instinct told me he was human, but his eyes were red, blood red. His skin was so papery thin it looked like it was merely a mask for something else, something creepier than his battered face.
“You go down…” he repeated, pointing to the ground. His eyes suddenly rolled back, and he laughed. Wow! Even better. Just like a horror movie, only worse.
“Listen,” I said getting closer, “give us the information orˉ”
His head turned as his crazed eyes took in my face. “He is waiting. Now you must go down.”
I was ready to ask where. No, that’s a lie. I was ready to kill the man, even though we didn’t kill humans unless absolutely necessary, when he suddenly opened the map. His movements sped up, almost as if he’d been overwound and released. His hands pulled at the different pages, flipping them one at a time, giving the appearance of a fan being unfolded in front of us. And that’s when I saw it.
The word cell was written several times, but when the pages fanned out, they worked almost like a comic strip. Pointing down the street, under the tunnel, and into a side exit.
“The key…” He laughed then threw it into the air. Adonis swiped it out of the sky, and with the same motion, hit the man across the face.
A hiss escaped the man’s mouth as black ooze dripped from the side of his ear. A blood-curdling scream erupted from his mouth, and he disappeared down the street, shopping cart in front of him, like a bat out of hell.
“That was…”
“Weird,” I finished.
“Well, at least we know where we have to go.” Adonis grabbed his pack and led the way.
I laughed. “Yes, we go down… got that part solid in my memory.”
Adonis ignored my sarcasm. No small feat, considering I could feel him tense next to me. He was usually in better humor.
“There.” He pointed to the overpass.
We walked up to the door located beneath the overpass.
“So, what? Do we just use the key to unlock it and go… down?” I asked.
He shrugged and pulled out the key from his pocket. “Might as well try.”
The minute the key connected with the lock, it was sucked in. Adonis released it as the key twisted on its own, emitting a nerve-racking sound of metal-on-metal that made my skin crawl.
The door slowly opened. A man at least seven feet tall was waiting on the other side. He looked like he should have been playing for Seattle’s pro-football team instead of guarding some sort of club as a bouncer. He was almost as wide as the door and looked to be just as crazed as the homeless man.
“The name’s Styx, and you are?”
“I’m Adonis, and this is Athena. I believe someone is expecting us.”