you, he’d better remove all evidence of his transgression before I see you.”
I turned to look at Damiel, who now ‘saw fit’ to roll up his shoulders and shrug. Not without looking pretty damn pleased with himself, mind you.
I pivoted back around to my father. “I take it you have news,” I said, trying to defuse the situation. That’s me: professional angel defuser.
“I’ve spoken some more to the locals about the Keepers of Knowledge. The Keepers are kind of like historians—or priests. Maybe a bit of both,” he replied. “But no one knows where either the Keepers or their library is. The Keepers are key to their culture, but no one in living memory has seen them.”
“The Keepers could be a myth,” said Damiel.
“But then I had an idea.” My father pulled out a dagger. “We can use this to find the Keepers.”
“Which one of the sixteen Tears is that?” I knew it was an immortal dagger. The mystical, blue-silver glossy glow of the blade gave it away.
“The Opal Tear.”
So that’s where the missing dagger was. We’d accounted for all the others.
“The Opal Tear possesses the power to track magic,” my father said. “The same power the hunters wield to find the Immortals’ descendants. And we can use that power to find the Keepers.”
“Won’t we need to wait for the world’s magic to shift back to tracking dominance to use it?” I asked.
“No. Whereas all other magic is influenced by the world’s current magical dominance, the daggers remain mainly unaffected. The immortal daggers’ powers always work.”
Nice to know. On the flip side, though, that meant the daggers’ negative influence on people—namely, making them go completely mad—couldn’t be silenced by the magic shift either.
“Where did you get the Opal Tear?” I asked my father.
“From Illias.”
“I thought we’d already gotten all the daggers Illias and the Magic Eaters had.”
“You did. Illias got this relic after he came here. It was a gift from some locals sympathetic to his message of the Immortals’ power.”
“And the demons don’t know that Illias has—had—an immortal dagger?”
“Not yet. They aren’t tracking him. Only me.”
My gaze panned down the length of the dagger. “I find myself skeptical that Illias would gift you a dagger he knows we plan to destroy.”
“He didn’t gift it to me,” replied my father. “I requisitioned it for the good of the universe.”
Damiel laughed out loud. “Well, Silverstar, now that you have your own immortal dagger, you can return mine.”
My father looked at the Sapphire Tear strapped to his belt, then at Damiel. “No.”
Damiel stopped laughing.
“You requisitioned it for the good of the universe?” I said quickly. “I bet Illias didn’t like that line.”
“The priest is, at present, blissfully unaware that the dagger has left his possession.” My father lowered his voice to a conspiring whisper. “And if we move quickly enough, by the time he finds out, it will be too late. We’ll have found the Keepers’ library and used its knowledge to destroy the daggers.” He pounded his fist into his open palm. “Before they kill anyone else.”
28
The Demon Princess
More so than the other immortal daggers, the Opal Tear was decidedly schizophrenic. When Damiel and I asked it to lead us to the Keepers, it gave us several, constantly-shifting locations.
Well, it didn’t actually talk to us per se; we just kind of felt what it was telling us. We waited until the dagger settled on two locations, then made a blind guess as to which was correct. We had at least a fifty percent chance of being right. Unless the cheeky dagger was messing with us. Then we had no chance at all.
I used the Diamond Tear to teleport us to a large island. It also happened to be a highly active volcano, clearly one of the sixteen situated across this watery world.
The ground growled beneath my boots, shooting vibrations up both my legs. I really hoped that the magic didn’t shift while we were here. Sure, there was only a one in sixteen chance that this would be the volcano to blow its top, but I still didn’t like those odds. You know what odds I liked? Zero. As in no chance of death. Dying was totally overrated. I’d already been there and done that.
“Why would the Keepers be hiding here?” I wondered.
The earth was hard rock, the air smelled of sulphur, and a blanket of thick, dark clouds loomed over the island like a bad mood that refused to be broken.
“It’s one place no one would think to look.” Damiel’s