Page 10 of Fated Angel

“I don’t know…” Colt’s voice waivers, but his body responds to the closeness of his angel and melts into her embrace. He’s worried about her, beyond worried. As the night progressed, she became more and more obsessed. They set out to save the world, but the gleam in her eyes is making him wonder if the power the obsidian offers has become Gabby’s ultimate goal. It’s changing her, molding her into someone Colt is beginning to not recognize.

He sets his chin on the top of her head as they embrace, and his eyes wander over to the witch. She talked to them as if they were the bad guys, as if all this time they were fighting the evil presence after the power of the obsidian. Colt shudders, a dark premonition beginning to form in his mind, but he can’t quite grasp the scope of what’s happening in front of him.

“I think we should go back to Veritas. There has to be another source of power?—”

“Are you kidding?” Gabby pushes away from him, her face drawn tightly in confusion. “We already have two stones, Colt. The third one we missed. We can’t fail again. I will not fail again!”

“Gabrielle, you didn’t fail,” Colt insists, but she’s already turned her back to him.

He steps forward, reaching for her, but as he does her bag begins to glow with an ominous, dark pulsation. Gabby’s muttering, power spiraling around her and building so bright that Colt has to shield his eyes. Her wings snap out, stretching, pulling as far as they can as they point towards the ceiling. Gravity seems to draw away from her and she rises a foot off the ground, her hair floating as if underwater.

“The fourth stone will be mine, Colt,” she says over her shoulder. There's a flash of something unfamiliar in her crystalline blue eyes, but her soft smile is the same one he knows and loves. She turns forward again, and Colt’s breath hitches as she pulls out the two shards and holds them above her head as her chanting continues.

“I will complete you, obsidian. Lead the way.”

Without the spell from Blaise, without the recited words even he’s memorized, Gabby’s called on the fourth stone. His jaw is slack, eyes wide, as Gabby floats back to the floor. She turns to him with a bright beaming smile, the one he’s gotten so used to, and bounces on her toes.

“The obsidian wants to be whole, Colt! It showed me the way. Come, hurry, it’s just a quick flight?—”

“Gabby! What was that, what did you do?” Colt cries, grabbing her shoulders and trying to get her to focus.

She blinks, innocently confused, and looks up at him with big, round eyes. “What do you mean? Blaise’s spell was letting the cult find the stones before us. Lighting the way to it like a beacon. We’re only two people but they’re all over the place, searching, waiting for us to point the way. I had to do something.”

“How did you know to call on the power of the stones? I’ve never seen anything like what you just did, Gabby, and I’ve been around long enough to have seen it all.” Colt’s voice is laced with a deep-seated worry. The woman before him is the same he’s known and loved, her excitement shining through everything that just happened, but he can’t disregard what she’s just done because she seems normal again.

“The obsidian told me, silly,” she says nonchalantly, as if it’s obvious. Gabby stands on her tip-toes and pecks Colt softly on the lips before grinning. “You’ll never guess where we get to go next!”

The Great Pyramids of Giza rise from the horizon like the harbingers of death. Colt’s flying behind Gabby, watching her closely. The further they got away from the cave, the more determined she became. There's no more spiraling together in flight, no more wings brushing in an embrace midair. Gabby’s streamlining toward the pyramids with hard determination written all over her face.

Colt’s mind flashes back to Hell, back to when the corruption of the obsidian first started to leak from Dunabar. The darkness was more like a shadow, nothing to worry about as it crept beyond the walls meant to contain it. It was a queer feeling to be near it, as if you didn’t want to be there but had no idea why. It wasn’t until the plant life around it started decaying and the demons who lived there became more rash and brutal than ever that anyone noticed the problem.

Dunabar was supposed to retain the great power, protect it, but right before Colt’s eyes, the corruption became complete. There were other things going on in Hell, other responsibilities, that kept everyone distracted from the spreading darkness. Lucifer’s dream of a paradise had been utterly and completely destroyed. They all knew, but the foreboding of being near the building redirected their minds away from the threat.

Is that what’s happening to Gabby? Is she becoming Dunabar personified?

Colt thinks he can see blackness tingeing the tips of her fingers, as if the obsidian’s rubbing off in more ways than one. He knows he can’t stop her, not without hurting her, so he resigns himself to protecting her at any cost.

“How are we going to get inside?” Colt calls over the wind rushing by his ears.

Gabby laughs, turning in the wind to fly on her back and smile at him. “You’ll see,” she says, and lets him fly over her long enough so that she can stroke his face lovingly. His Gabby is still there, the love still burning strong in her eyes, but will it be enough to protect her from the corruption she’s holding?

Colt follows his angel to the tallest pyramid and lands beside her near the middle of the great stone legend. Their wings snap back in unison, as they always do, but this time Colt makes sure to stroke Gabby’s before they disappear. It’s as if he needs to touch her, to ground her to this moment on this mortal plane, before she floats away from him into the ether.

“Watch this.” Gabby smiles brightly as she pulls one of the shards of obsidian out of her bag. It pulses black light, and the closer she gets to the stones, the brighter the glow is. “Without the first shard, we would never have been able to get this one. They’re intertwined, protected. This one demands the first stone like a key.” Her voice is quiet, shushed with an awe that she can’t contain.

Colt watches in worried anticipation as she presses the shard to the stones of the pyramid and the cold, hard surface seems to melt and shape around the shard. “How…” he gasps, stepping forward and putting a hand on Gabby’s shoulder.

Her smile couldn’t get wider if it tried, and as the stones melt away into a passage inside the pyramid, she doesn’t hesitate. She walks inside, Colt’s hand falling empty in her wake.

“Gabby?”

She doesn’t turn as he calls her, doesn’t even seem like she heard him. Colt’s face hardens; it’s getting worse. He follows her inside, one foot after the other, his eyes only on Gabby’s hand as she clutches the shard so hard her knuckles are turning white.

Inside the pyramid the path seems to spiral, one straight line to a corner, and then a sharp right turn. They walk for what seems like ages in a maze with only one direction, the hallways becoming shorter and shorter until they open up in an enormous room in the center. Colt looks up, and up, and up. He hadn’t realized the slight decline of his steps, and as he gazes to the ceiling, he can see a light coming through from the pinnacle of the pyramid.

Gabby breathes a sigh of sheer awe, but she doesn’t turn to face Colt. “This is magnificent! Can you believe this was in here the whole time?”

Rows and rows like a reversed version of the pyramid outside hold countless treasures. In the center of the room is a solid gold platform on which an ornate sarcophagus lays under the shadow of the Egyptian god Osiris. His hands are held over the sarcophagus, palms up, hundreds of feet in the air.

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