Legacy of the White Raven: Volume II

Chapter Ten: Amends

    "Can you tell us what happened here?" Sebastian interjected, stepping towards Ethan. His inquiry stunted the smothering despair swelling around the slouching vampire and the overwhelmed man in glasses.

    Ethan shifted on the couch with a perplexed stare at the young mage until he recognized that it was Sebastian standing before him, then he furrowed his brow in thought as he struggled to conjure an answer from his hazy memory. Gideon seemed lost in his own grief, slouching so that his falling blond bangs hid his lowered face.

    "We were all gathered here in the living room, then the doorbell rang, and then...Axel!" Ethan recalled, looking about excitedly as a flood of memories rushed into his mind.

    "Axel? Who's Axel?" Sebastian questioned.

    "Jarell's newest agent, apparently," Gideon surmised grimly as he raised his hanging head with a scowl born of anger and contempt for the dark angel's ways.

    "I tried to get the jump on him, to give the others a chance to escape, but he...shot me with something," Ethan explained, shaking his head shamefully at his own perceived failure as he buried his face in his hands.   

    Gideon left his drooping posture long enough to console Ethan with a sympathetic pat on his slouching shoulders. "What of Amanda and Shade?" he asked hopefully.

    Ethan just shook his head in his hands. "They left soon after you did, claiming you needed them for something and we haven't heard from then since," he mumbled out.

     "More of Jarell's trickery no doubt," Gideon uttered somberly before returning to wallow in the grief of his own despair by hanging his head low once again.

    "I don't understand, how could this Axel get past my protection spell?" Sebastian wondered, shifting the topic back to what puzzled him the most. "That spell should keep any person with harmful intentions from entering this house," he cited.

    Arching his head back enough to cast his defeated gray eyes up through his fallen bangs at the young mage, Gideon hinted at the answer Sebastian was searching for. "Axel is not a person, not exactly."

    "What do you mean?" Sebastian asked, drawing himself closer to the drooping vampire with baited curiosity.

    "He is an android, one we unwittingly rescued from Jarell's clutches only to lose him again in a trade for my life," Gideon revealed, with a regretful tone shaping his mood.

    "An android..." Sebastian considered wondrously, pacing away with thoughts of how to counter such a being with his magic. 

    A tiny ray of hope filtered through Gideon's grief in the form of an idea. He sat up and turned towards the young mage who wandered the large room with his thoughts. "Sebastian, can you perform the spell on Corbin from here?"

    "No, I'm afraid not," the mage frowned as he turned to face Gideon with the hard facts. "I'll need to be in his presence in order to direct the spell's power."

    "Then all is truly lost," Gideon sighed, as a wave of grief crashed over him again, forcing him back into a defeated slump. "Without so much as a single clue to where they have been taken, I have no idea of where to start looking."

     "I know exactly where to start," Sebastian declared confidently as he marched back over to the couch.

    Both Gideon and Ethan climbed out of their pits of anguish long enough to focus on the young mage with a glimmer of hope that his words stirred. Their urgent and expectant expressions were more than enough to prod Sebastian into revealing more.