He swallowed, breaths coming too shallow for comfort as they hugged the darkened wall of the space. The floor was scattered with tables and many benches, moving shadows and glints of strange light here and there filtering through the colored glass of the windows above, though it was difficult to tell what might have only been in his head.
A hand took his, and Amma tugged him a step closer to her. “Are you all right?”
He nodded intuitively though it wasn’t true.
She squeezed his hand and then let go. He would have asked her not to if he thought opening his mouth wouldn’t lead to vomiting. “I bet what we’re after is hidden up there,” Amma whispered, pointing to the far end of the room.
There was a statue on the back wall set into a deep alcove, stairs running along an arch on either side to a massive set of wooden doors. The statue was presumably of Yannveceny, a thin-limbed goddess draped in robes and holding out a pendulum, a blade attached to it on a chain that perpetually swung.
“Is that what you lot do?” Damien asked, strained. “Put your important, religious things up high?”
“Or underground,” she said. “Wherever is least convenient for thieves.”
Damien felt the presence before seeing or even hearing it—a holy person of some deep persuasion was headed their way. He grabbed Amma and pulled her into an alcove, sliding the two of them into a shadow just behind the bent arm of another statue. He felt the breath go out of her, shocked at the sudden movement, but she made no other noise, just pressed her back up against him.
There were footsteps that found their way to the largest statue of the goddess. Damien knew he shouldn’t use the arcana to hide them like he had in the Grand Athenaeum, especially not when the priest’s sibilant whispers began to fill the chamber with prayer. They were not loud, but they swelled in his head, stabbing at his mind, and there was a constant pulse, the cadence of that pendulum, ever-growing with every swing.
Then there was another feeling that pressed on him but from the inside, pushing out. Noxscura. The urge to release the magic, to strike out and kill the man, to level the whole temple flooded his being. With the hand not wrapped around Amma’s middle, he reached up and rubbed an ear, trying to block the prayers out, but they only became louder, and that rhythm intensified, knocking at his brain like it could crack his skull right open and release the deepest evil within him.
Amma shifted around to face him, pressing close to remain in the darkened space. She slipped a hand upward and placed it on the side of his face, rubbing her thumb across his cheek. He could see her lips moving, saying something, but couldn’t hear over the muffled prayers echoing in his head.
Save for the spell to send Corben off to Faebarrow, Damien hadn’t truly touched Amma since he had taken her away from her home both at her request and his insistence, not since he had held her close and looked into eyes intoxicated with what he had done for her. High on the chaos of releasing the Army of the Undead, of terrorizing a royal house, of spilling the bastard marquis’s blood, and even higher on the way she had clung to him and pulled him close to her, he had a brief if mad thought back then that the rest of the world might actually give the two up, and they could escape from whatever vows they’d made to anyone else and only be beholden to one another.
That, of course, was impossible.
But now he had her again after days and nights of holding himself back, of convincing her to keep that damn book close to ward him off. But the Lux Codex wasn’t an oppressive force between the two anymore, and he could finally feel the soft touch of her fingers on his face. No one had ever been so gentle with him, and he wished he could just trap the two of them there so he never had to give up that touch.
Fuck, what was this bloody temple doing to him?
But the noises had all stopped, and the pain too. All he could feel were those soft fingers on his skin, and he was reaching up, wrapping a hand around her wrist, being just as gentle, not to pull her hand away but to lean further into it.
With newfound clarity, the sounds inside the temple came back, but the priest’s prayers had stopped. Damien’s eyes snapped to a figure trekking his way across the room. That overwhelming feeling removed itself fully, and Damien squeezed Amma’s hand as he carefully removed it from his face. The robed priest left the way the two of them had come without noticing either one in their shadowed alcove. So much for divine arcana.
“Let’s go,” he said, and the two hustled to the stairs on either side of the statue and upward to the large set of doors.
Opening with a low creak, they eased their way through the smallest crack possible and slipped inside the room. This space was not meant for worshipers, the shelving on the walls holding bound tomes and parchment rolled up messily, but no apparent effigies or religious artifacts to make Damien feel especially awful, only a desk and chair in the room’s center. It was strange to keep an office above an altar, but then it wasn’t really an office, he supposed, when he saw what was sat on the desk: a finely-woven basket holding a satiny, turquoise blanket, and nestled inside that, the still form of an infant, fast asleep.
Damien’s eyes darted around the rest of the room, empty. His senses were already high even without casting, he would know if there were others hiding inside, especially priests, but to find a child so small all alone was strange. At least, he was fairly certain it was strange, but Damien would be quick to admit he knew nothing about child rearing. Then again, there was a mad blood mage afoot, attempting to break into this very temple, so why anyone thought leaving their spawn here at all was a mystery.
“Oh, no.” Amma crossed the room on silent feet to lean slightly down and look at the infant. “Oh. No, no, no…”
Damien glanced back out the cracked door, but there was no one in the chamber below. “What’s wrong?”
“Theancast erfind.” Amma began to gnaw on a nail. “This is it.”
Damien wasn’t normally so slow on the uptake, and he could blame the oppressive aura of the temple, the recent brush with Amma, or his annoyance of being here under Xander’s direction for his cloudy mind, but the truth was much more likely that what Amma was saying was just rather preposterous. “Well, I’m sure we can move the child without waking it to grab the relic.”
“Damien, the babyisthe relic.”
No cloudiness of mind could misconstrue that, and yet. “I don’t understand.”
“The Ouranic,ancast erfind, it translates tosacred infant.”
Damien ran a hand down his face as he took a step toward the desk, and then stopped abruptly when the floorboard beneath his boot creaked.
“Damien,” Amma hissed as the human relic stirred with a whining noise.
“I didn’t mean to.” The baby’s whining began to escalate. “I said, I didn’t mean to,” he hissed directly to it as if that might convince it to stop. The baby began to properly squall. “Amma, do something.”
