“You helped her.” Amma’s voice was just behind him as she leaned in close.
“Her cries were distracting.” He sniffed and pointed to the guards. “Now, what to do with them?”
Amma crept around him to the edge of the barrels they hid behind. “I know what we can do.”
When she stood, Damien reached out, grabbing her wrist. “What are you doing?”
“Getting rid of them,” she said. “Trust me, you gave me an idea.”
He hesitated then released her. They hadn’t spoken of the arcana she’d demonstrated back in the Grand Athenaeum, but perhaps she was finally ready to reveal whatever magical secret she’d been keeping all this time.
Amma cleared her throat, took a massive breath, and then bolted at top speed right toward the guards.
“The fuck?” Damien groaned, using the last bit of his patience to stay still. “She’snotgoing to attack them,” he reassured himself, though he was coming to realize he didn’t have much confidence in ever really knowing exactly what Amma would do.
At his side, Kaz chirped. “Maybe she’ll get herself killed!”
Damien blindly swatted and connected with something furry but kept his sights on Amma as she ran right up to the men and skidded to a stop, breathless. “Dead!” she screamed. “They’re alldead!”
The guards questioned her all at once, bumbling their words, hands hovering over hilts and squeezing halberds. Amma didn’t give a straight answer, her voice frantic as she continued to shriek, “You have to go now! They’re being attacked! Please, do something!” Damien nearly jumped at the urgency himself, uneasy at hearing Amma distressed at all.
Three of them took off in the direction she pointed, leaving her there with the other two. Brilliant. Two, Damien could handle without anyone else seeing, but then one of them grabbed her, proclaiming something about taking her to safety, and all three sprinted inside the temple, slamming shut the massive doors behind them.
“Shit.” Damien dropped his head forward and thunked it against the barrels. In the wake of Amma’s screams, the city fell into an eerie quiet.
With the villagers dispersed, darting inside at the chaos, and no more guards standing watch, Damien lifted his head again and stood slowly. Alone, he simply wandered up to the front of the temple, cautious but pointlessly—there wasn’t even anyone about to stop him. He squinted up into the sunlight, then at the doors. There were distant screams again, men fighting off imps and, presumably, Xander himself, muffled from the far side of town. With a sigh, Damien gave the door a gentle tug, but it was sealed shut. He gave it a heftier jerk, but still it remained closed.
Growling, Damien began to circle the stone structure, Kaz scampering unhelpfully along beside him. There would be another way in, hopefully still unlocked. Sprinting from one column’s shadow to another just in case there were prying eyes, he took in the large, stained-glass windows, breakable, though that wouldn’t be terribly stealthy—the attention needed to stay on Xander.
In the shadow of a column near the corner, he placed a hand on the stone of the building, arcana gathering in his palm and seeping outward as he cast a simple spell to locate Amma inside. The whole temple pulsed back, and he was thrown against the column. He would have been on his ass had the stone pillar not been there. Groaning at a wince in his back, he steadied himself. It was no wonder Xander had no intention of going inside. Goddess of vengeance or not, the divine energy in the place was intense, suggesting priests and protective spells on the building.
But luck did smile on him in the form of another door. When the handle didn’t budge, Damien’s frustration took over. Amma was inside, and he’d been apart from her for too long. Taking a step back, he pulled out his dagger and sliced into his palm. Taking down the door would require a stronger spell, and it would be loud and messy, but it was the only way to take him to Amma.
And then the door opened.
Damien closed his fingers around the arcana that was about to burst from his hand. “Amma,” he hissed, staring at her diminutive form standing in the open doorway.
“Hey!” Her smile was bright, as if she had not just almost been blown to bits with infernal magic. “Come in, quick—I told those guys I had to pee, but I’ve just been wandering around looking for a door, and they’re going to wonder where I went.”
Damien fully snuffed out the spell and stepped toward the door, but Kaz yelped and backed away. “Wait around back,” instructed Damien, and the imp scurried off, fluffy tail disappearing around another corner. “It’s too holy for all his infernal blood.”
She watched him step inside, a small pout to her lips. “But you’re in here.” She closed them in and dropped the lock bar back into place with a thunk.
“Well, I’m not a—” Damien clicked his tongue. He’d almost said he wasn’t an infernal creature, but chuckled instead. “I’m not as susceptible as he is.” He had his humanity to thank for being able to stand on the hallowed ground inside and not immediately catch on fire, in any case, but how he would hold up remained to be seen.
They stood in a small hallway that ended in another that crossed it. The building wasn’t particularly large from the outside, but it was housing at least two guards and gods knew how many holy people. He didn’t need to put out any feelers to know the place was thrumming with divine arcana, and he pressed a hand against his own chest, his heart thumping a little harder.
Amma began down the hall, pointing. “There’s a big worship chamber that way. A priest and priestess were praying up at an altar.”
“Of course they were.” That was, perhaps, some of what Damien was feeling. “Using my arcana in here may alert them to our presence.”
“The guards are in there too, but the room was pretty bare otherwise. I didn’t see any relic that could be theancast erfind. Would have been nice if Xander told us exactly what it looks like.”
You’ll know it when you see it, he had so unhelpfully told them.
“What’s that way?” Damien nodded toward the other end of the cross hall, the small move making him slightly dizzy.
“Let’s find out,” she said, creeping down to the end, and Damien followed, disappointed that how he felt was distracting him from fully appreciating her willingness to misbehave. The room they entered into appeared to be completely dark, only a faint glow around the windows that lined it near the ceiling, but Amma was apparently seeing things better, gesturing for him to follow when he stopped on the threshold. Vision blurry but slowly seeping in, there was an oppressive pressure on his temple, but he could tell the next chamber spanned what seemed to be the width of the entire building with a ceiling that was twice as high as where they’d been.
