Bella patted her hand. "He's tired, child. Once he feeds, he'll be good as new."
Lina leaned into me for a hug and whispered, "You can feed off me again, Justin. I don't mind."
Bella rolled her eyes. Despite her own, very youthful appearance said, "Young lust. How precious."
Overcoming my state of shock, I found my voice. "How in the world did you find me?"
Bella frowned. "Someone saw men throw you into a truck and speed away. The only men anywhere near our town who would do such a thing worked for Franco, a local drug lord who, until now, has never given us cause for alarm."
"I told the council this snake would bite us one day," Lina said, her brown eyes flaring with anger.
Bella shrugged. "We assume he discovered a North American was in town and wanted ransom."
"No, he and his right-hand man are vampires," I said. "They wanted my blood."
Her eyes grew wide. "Vampires? We never knew."
Lina glared at her. "Because we let those scum grow too strong."
Bella's gaze frosted over. "Drug lords are not our responsibility, child."
Lina looked away. "We called the Templars to help us," she said. "When I told them your name, they were very eager to rescue you."
"More like eager to put me down," I grumbled.
Bella folded her legs beneath her. "The Templars are usually very responsive, but they asked so many questions about your identity I knew something was not quite right. So I told Alejandro to ready my flying rug."
"You mean flying carpet," I said.
She shrugged. "Same thing, dear."
"When we arrived we saw you leading those women out of the cellar," Lina said, excitement causing her heavy accent to thicken even more. "But Bella saw the Templars fighting the men with guns and made us wait."
"I didn't want a stray bullet to hit us," Bella said. "We had trouble keeping up with the jet until the engine exploded."
I glanced back at the black smoke rising from the tree line. "Yeah, things got kind of messy in there." I gave her a sideways look. "Were you actually holding up the jet with your staff?"
She nodded. "I have to say, the gizmos they put in staffs these days really help with airspeed calculations quite a bit. I don't think I could have done it nearly so well by myself."
Alejandro brought us to a halt. Turned around and sat cross-legged on the rug. The control sphere lowered itself to about an inch off the surface and hovered behind him. We were now a good distance from the smoking wreckage. "Is the Templar alive?" he asked.
I touched the Templar's neck and found a pulse. He still lay sprawled face down on the rug, his only movement caused by breathing. Bella pulled a small wand from a pouch on her belt, whispered a few words, and touched it to the Templar's back. He trembled ever so slightly and went still.
"What did you do?" I asked, horrified.
She smiled. "Don't worry. I only made sure he stays asleep until we get home."
Lights appeared above the trees. Alejandro sucked in a breath and turned back to the control sphere, pressing it down. The carpet dropped to tree level and hovered as three helicopters whizzed toward the smoking wreck some distance behind us. The aircraft stopped with pinpoint precision and dark figures leapt from the sides, vanishing into the forest. I realized, with a start, the only sound besides the creatures of the forest and the wind was the thudding of my heart.
"I don't hear the blades on those choppers," I whispered. Even at this distance, the noise from the rotors should ripple the air.
"Those aren't real helicopters," Bella replied. "The rotors are illusion."
"You mean they're like flying carpets made to look like choppers?"
"A very apt description, young man."
"Brilliant!" I said, abruptly grimacing at how loud I'd said it. I lowered my voice to a whisper. "You don't have to be invisible. Just hide in plain sight."
She shrugged. "Illusion requires a great deal of power as well."
"We should go," Lina said, gripping my arm.
Bella nodded. "Once they find the wreck empty, they'll scour this area."
Alejandro pushed down on the control sphere, taking us into the dense forest. My night vision revealed a landscape filled with life. Reflective eyes gleamed back at me from a nearby tree. The chirping and buzz of birds and insects projected a blanket of sound. Alejandro rolled the sphere forward a notch and the carpet glided smoothly forward, coasting between branches and finding narrow gaps in the foliage. After an hour of wending our way through the maze of vegetation, he took the carpet above tree level and looked back. The lights of the Templar choppers remained barely visible.
Keeping us feet above the trees, Alejandro urged the carpet forward, speeding us along so fast, the treetops blurred beneath us. A bird squawked as the turbulence of our passing sent it tumbling.
Within another hour, we reached the tiny town where my companions lived. "What's the name of this one-horse town, anyway?" I asked as Alejandro guided the carpet in for a smooth landing behind his house.
Bella smiled. "It's one you may find familiar. Los Angeles."
"Interesting." It sure as heck had a lot less traffic than the city in California. Even though I'd heard the name a ton of times, the meaning of the name had never really hit me. Not until my thought process wondered what it meant. My brain rolled its eyes at my thoughts and said, it means the angels, stupid.
"The ancient tribes called El Dorado 'Ciudad De Los Angeles' when the Spanish first arrived here, even though nobody dared live there. The first conquistadors to reach this far inland were more astonished by the gold and called it 'Ciudad De Oro', or city of gold, which they later shortened to El Dorado, or Golden One." Bella stood up and stretched. "We named this city in remembrance of the original name."
"Why didn't the Overworld Conclave change the name back on the placards in the city?"
She shrugged. "Who knows? They only care for the magical history of the place. Once they discovered the dangers lurking there, they quickly quarantined it. The Spanish lost three expeditions sent by conquistadores to remove the gold from the underground vaults beneath the place. They proclaimed it cursed by evil and abandoned all efforts."
I shuddered at the thought of the resident shadow creatures. "What keeps those monsters from spreading all over the planet?"
"They appear to be tethered to the city. Our studies have not discovered why, and nobody dares go into the underground vaults."
"The shadows live there?"
Fear flashed in her eyes as she nodded. "They live beneath the surface, banished by sunlight, if such an existence could be called 'life'."
"The Arcane Council tried to kill them once," Lina said. "A very long time ago they sent their very best battle mages to clear out the vaults." She grimaced. "None of them came back."
I thought back to the chambers beneath Thunder Rock and wondered if the vaults under El Dorado bore any resemblance. I remembered the huge engravings dominating the square where I'd spent the night hiding from the soul-sucking shadows, and two more dots connected. If Nightliss was truly an angel, and the engraving of the blonde woman really was her or a close relative, then the ancient citizens of El Dorado might have been right in calling it the city of angels. Furthermore, if the images of human sacrifice on the engravings were correct, those beings were not the kind of angels from the Bible. True, not all angels were exactly loving or caring—the Angel of Death came to mind—but I'd never heard of angels requiring human sacrifice or building pyramids in the middle of the jungle.
This realization put another kink in my plans. Rescuing Elyssa and finding the truth behind the massacre at Thunder Rock still held the top slots. But what if these angel dudes were the same as the old masters, the ones who would return via the Obsidian Arches? The engravings made it clear these beings had used humans as slaves and worse. Were they the ones behind the unrest in the Overworld? The ones referred to in Foreseeance 4311?
If so, they were responsible for Maximus and probably a whole lot more. One thing was clear: I needed to break out the yarn and thumbtacks because a king-sized flowchart was the only way I could remember everything. Pain and exhaustion, however, were pressuring me to forget all this crap for a few hours and sleep.
Bella stepped from the carpet and pointed somewhere out in the darkness with her staff. "It is said that a man actually lives in El Dorado."
I raised an eyebrow. "A man? You've got to be kidding. Nobody could survive there."
She nodded. "One of our aboveground expeditions was cataloguing artifacts. In one of the pictures they took, you could clearly see a man watching them from the woods."
"Oh my god, that's creepy." I shuddered. "Are you sure it wasn't one of those shadow things?"
"This was a daylight expedition. We would never go in at night."
"Well, whoever it was is probably dead by now. There's no way anyone could live in that place with the shadows."
An amused smile crept across Bella's face. "Normally, I would agree with you. Very few people could or would want to live in that cursed place. But I recognized this man."
"Recognized him?"
"Oh yes. The Templars wanted him very badly at one point, but after Thunder Rock, he was presumed dead."
My heart froze. "Vadaemos Slade?"
She nodded. "I am almost certain it is he who lives there."
"Impossible. The shadows would eat him alive."
"Do you really believe someone capable of avoiding the Templars and his own people couldn't find a way to survive in El Dorado?" She shook her head. "The man is a roach."
Holy crap.
If Vadaemos really was living in El Dorado, I had no choice. I absolutely had to go back and track him down. Make him answer questions about Thunder Rock. After all, if this guy had lived at Thunder Rock to avoid the authorities, it made perfect sense for him to pull the same stunt at El Dorado or a place like it. Why? Because who in their right mind would ever go there? Vadaemos might be a sneaky cheat and murderer, but he had giant balls of steel.