added to it over time? What if the Grotto is partly in the same place the angels come from? What if that out there"—I jabbed a finger at the sky—"is the realm of angels?"
Chapter 3
It was Elyssa's turn to stop dead in her tracks. She flicked her gaze to the innocent-looking sky overhead.
"Freaky, right?" I said.
She nodded slowly, eyes never leaving the clouds, as if waiting for a host of angels to burst from behind them and yell, "Surprise!"
"If the environment we see outside the Grotto really belongs to their world, it must look a lot like our own," I said.
Elyssa recovered and motioned me to follow her. "Even if we are partly in their plane, the Grotto is barricaded off from it. I read the history of the place. Looked at images with only the original buildings here. When you get to the edges of the Grotto, there's endless water to the north side, and thick forest on the others. A magical barrier won't let you go any further. The Arcanes tried for years and never succeeded. They ended up using an obfuscation spell so gray mist hides most of the view, supposedly to keep people with more curiosity than brains from trying to break through."
"Or to keep anything on the other side of the barrier from looking in? You said this place is a nexus, like a bubble in between." I imagined it as a full-scale snow globe with alien eyes peering in at us.
She looked inside a dress shop as we walked past it, her eyes settling on one of the complicated Victorian era dresses inside. "I guess it's like a pocket dimension. Maybe this place isn't even visible from the other side."
"Or maybe the sky and everything else is illusion. For all we know, we might be on the moon."
She chuckled. "I guess we're safe then."
"So there's no danger of an invasion sweeping through here?"
"Not unless they built in a back door we don't know about." She shrugged. "Anything is possible, I guess."
I grimaced, imagining an army of insane blonde women like Daelissa lining up to raid the Grotto. "The other thing that occurs to me is how you called this place a nexus. Didn't you tell me Daelissa blamed the destruction of the Grand Nexus for turning her people into those creepy cherub things and stranding her here?"
Elyssa threw up a hand as if warding the memories away. "Ugh. I really don't want to talk about the husks, cherubs, whatever you want to call those nasty little things."
The husks—or cherubs as I called them—were the creepy infantile remains of the angels caught up in the destruction of the Grand Nexus, according to Vadaemos. They wobbled around on nubby feet, like toddlers with oversized, ungainly heads and little T-rex arms. But the shiny pitch black skin and nearly featureless head hid horrors beneath. Sometimes when they shrieked, the outline of a face seemed to appear beneath the surface.
I shook my head to clear the images of our last encounter with the cherubs and found my way back to the point I wanted to make. "What makes this place different than Thunder Rock or El Dorado? Was it not connected to this Grand Nexus of theirs? And what about La Casona and the other functioning relics?"
Elyssa quirked an eyebrow. "I have no idea." She tapped a finger to her chin. "But I have a feeling we should pump Nightliss for answers the next time we see her. After all, Foreseeance Forty-Three Eleven says our former rulers were going to come through the Gloom."
We entered an alley and skidded to a halt. In this very alley, we'd had our first encounter with gray men, the creepy golems used by a man we called Mr. Gray for obvious reasons. I'd discovered a large mural of him down in El Dorado and concluded he must be an angel like Nightliss and Daelissa. He apparently wanted me dead or captured, judging from my every encounter with his minions.
"Uh, why don't we take the scenic route?" I backed up a step, remembering the ambush all too clearly. "Not that I'm scared or anything." Yeah, right.
"Let's go down another block," Elyssa said, mouth set in a grim line.
We walked down the street a little further and entered a large marble-paved roundabout. A lush, green park sprawled in the center of the huge space. Hardwood trees swayed gently in the breeze, their tops reaching toward the sky. Intricately shaped hedges adorned strategic places inside