I came to on the surface, surrounded by the smell of blood. I was lying on ice, cradled in my filthy, bloody cloak, shivering. On the night wind I smelled seraphs, mage-blood, decaying devil-spawn, daywalker blood, and the overriding reek of the blood of a Major Darkness. And, oh, yes, seraphs. Heat wisped through me. I stuttered a laugh and dragged air into my lungs. They made an awful sucking sound, like wet rubber being pulled apart. I was alive. I was pretty sure of it. Hurt too bad to be dead. I coughed hard, the sound like leather ripping, causing a shocking pain through my ribs.

"She laughs. I like her laughter," Amethyst tinkled.

The moon winked over the shoulder of a seraph. Zadkiel lifted his head from my stomach. His lips had been touching me. Healing me. Mage-heat strengthened, delicate fire in my veins. He placed my amulets on my bare stomach, and the heat dimmed. "Can you control it?" he asked.

I considered his question, but before I could answer, another did, his voice like baritone bells. "Yes. I believe so."

Zadkiel laughed, heat burning in his eyes. "I hope so, Raziel. I have no time to satisfy the cravings of a mage in heat."

The unexpected laugh and the odd emphasis on the word time resonated in my mind for a moment before sliding away in exhaustion. Zadkiel's face filled my vision. "Be safe, little mage. I thank you for the return of my mate, the Mistress, Holy Amethyst. Complete her healing, Raziel, and take her to her home. Wait there for us. We will come soon. The Dragon is striking. Battle has commenced as he seeks freedom."

"Mate?" I croaked, the first thing I ask after being brought back to life. Weird.

"Not as you think of mates," the cherub said, her voice like tiny bells in a night breeze off the Gulf, amusement in the thought. "But purposes met and satisfied, even when one of us is away from the Most High, alone in the river of time, on earth."

I remembered the river of lava in the otherness. That river?

Zadkiel placed a warm stone on my stomach where his lips had been. "For your prayer, your incantations, your blood, and your sacrifice; for all these, I thank you. And for your willingness to gift us your life, though it was not needed in the end. I thank you."

I didn't think it politic to mention that he had been willing to leave me to die in the pit while some big papa Dragon came looking for supper.

"Thanks be to the wisdom and compassion of Amethyst. You are healed," he finished. "Be blessed. Be at peace." He swiveled his head to his mate and said, "Call your wheels." Amethyst looked to the heavens with all her eyes and sang one perfect note of calling, a tone so beautiful nothing could resist it. I tried to rise from the ground where I lay to reach her. Pain arched through me, paralyzing. This was healed?

With Amethyst cradled against his chest, Zadkiel, the Right Hand of the ArchSeraph Michael, spread his patchily feathered, burned wings and gave a single mighty thrust. Wind like a tornado, scented with mint and pepper, swirled around me. And they were gone. I was left, cold and drained, on the frozen and cracked ice at the lip of the pit of the hellhole. Blackness closed in around me.

Pain woke me. Two balls of flame, plasma-bright, zipped from my stomach with a sizzle of energy and danced in the air, blinding me. I closed my eyes against the glare.

Warmth trickled into my bones from the stone on my torso. I'd been touched by two seraphs in the same night. Three if one counted Barak. Did one count a Watcher? Yet I still felt no mage-heat. A green flight feather poked my thigh. I had forgotten about the gift. At my waist, my amulets glowed, giving me strength. On my belly was a seraph stone. I'll never be able to swear that way again, not without a chuckle.

Slowly I sat up, stiff muscles creaking. My injured arm was healed, another ugly scar marking my skin. The wound in my side was no longer bleeding, but the pain when I moved was electric, stealing my breath. The scent of battle clung to me, incubating in the warmth of my body. The stenches of smoke, old blood, and death roiled out of my clothing, nauseating me. I reeked. I found a bottle of water in my cloak pocket and finished it, before attaching the seraph stone to my necklace. I thought it might be a black agate, and it felt hot against my fingers.

Overhead, a sickle-shaped moon rested its lower point on a distant mountain. The sun was a golden glow in the east. Morning. I had survived the night, underground.

"Hours have passed as you healed," Raziel said. "There is great battle in the heavens."

In mage-sight I found him, a faint glow perched in the limbs of a tall spruce, green branches framing his scarlet radiance. His crimson wings were tightly furled, wrist tips high over his head. His cloak hung loose, moving in the slight breeze. He was a bright ruby hue of energy, eyes like gems. I felt his gaze all the way to my toes. "Amethyst is wounded. She is failing. You must relinquish her wheels." He tilted his head, a half smile hovering on his lips and I could have sworn he was curious. Seraphs are never curious. Never.

"I don't have her wheels to give up." I shifted on the frozen ground. In a single heartbeat, everything changed.

A roar shivered the air. Forcas crashed from the mouth of the pit. The beast had been in pieces last time I saw it. What did it take to kill a Major Darkness?

Forcas was carrying Eli in one clawed hand, Durbarge in the other, and Malashe-el was hooked over its shoulder, impaled on a horn. Neither man looked so good. The daywalker looked dead.

Light blazed. Raziel opened his wings and stepped off the limb, hands throwing. Lightning hit the ground in a brilliant blast. Thunder boomed, eardrum-cracking, deafening. Raziel rocketed toward the Darkness, wings outspread, gathering the lightning. Thunderheads built overhead. The wind roared, buffeting me where I lay.

Light illuminated the cleared area, shining from Raziel's battle armor. Armor and sword hadn't been there only a moment before. Electricity crackled along the red-gold plate. His face was set in stern lines, his eyes glowing with battle-lust. Instinctively, I rolled under the overhang of a boulder. Too weak to rise, I curled tight, making myself small.

The seraph and Forcas met in the mouth of the hellhole with a crash. The humans fell and rolled close to me, Eli facedown, Durbarge looking at the sky. His eye was open and didn't blink. His patch was gone, the empty socket black in the night. Malashe-el rolled down the incline and landed below me in a heap of tangled limbs. The Dark and the Light fought sword to sword, blades ringing.

Checking my weapons, I found the walking stick sword restored to its sheath beside the tanto that I had last seen in Forcas' jaw. Two throwing blades had been left in the corridor outside the Mistress' prison. The silver-hilted sword I had worn over my spine now belonged to Barak. I had only my two blades and a single throwing knife, amulets, and a feather, which I may or may not be able to use. Ducky.

I tested the amulets on the necklace tied to my waist and I found them half empty, or worse, drained to uselessness. The seraph stone felt like a null, a stone with potential power, but sealed, locked away. Beyond the ledge, lightning flashed and hit the ground near me. Dissipating energies flayed my body. Eli yelped nearby. If I'd been human I would have been hurt too. Instead, power flowed into my amulets, restoring them. But not enough.

Through the mountain beneath me, I felt familiar tremors, regular and evenly spaced, like footsteps. I remembered the Dragon who had been imprisoned by Mole Man's sacrifice and blood, remembered the chain drenched with seraph blood, the links made with the blood of Mole Man's progeny. Made with Lucas' blood. Raziel had mentioned a war in the heavens. My muzzy brain put it together. Crack the Stone of Ages. Forcas' boss, the Dragon, is loose.

The last time it was free, it took dozens of seraphs and the self-sacrifice of a human to chain it. I closed my eyes. The Dragon was loose, the Mistress was wounded, and someone seemed to think I had her wheels. I can't do this. I don't know how. But I had to.

I gathered myself, seeking my center, that calm place of nothingness in my mind. And I reached down, below me, into the rock heart of the mountain. Ancient energies reached back to me; the might of stone, cold and hard and without remorse. I pulled them in, fast, storing them in my blood, my muscles, my nerves, and bones.

Drawing on the strength of the Trine, I opened the blended scan, feeling a sickening lurch as the otherness caught me up, the world and my stomach surging drunkenly. Through my torn and acid-pocked dobok, light flared, yellow and dark blue. I pushed away the tattered cloth and pulled the pear-shaped citrine nugget and the sapphire owl out, the wild-mage-stones glowing. Through the otherness, they scintillated like small suns. I touched the owl and felt the otherness settle as power trickled into me from the sapphire.

I had a moment, a moment in time, to study the sensation. Finger on the amulet, I saw movement, the river of energy, of Light. It flowed beneath me, through me, picking me up and floating me along the current. It meandered through its flat plain: the river of time, I was pretty sure. Whatever that meant.

In the world, lightning hit the ground again, a huge burst. I felt my body jerk as the power crackled through me. But it wasn't important. Almost as an afterthought, I directed the energies into the amulets at my waist. I felt Barak's feather shimmer with power.

Swords clashed, seraph-steel and demon-iron. I smelled fresh seraph blood. The footsteps of the Dragon were growing nearer as his might pounded the mountain I was drawing upon. The earth quaked. Dust rained down from the boulder, covering me. Beside me, the river flowed. In it were stones and boulders and eddies - incidents and people?

From the otherness, I studied the entrance to the hellhole; sickly yellow-orange-reddish light emanated from the rocks and from the ground. The stone of the mountain itself had been polluted, a malevolence much more powerful than the first time I saw it, as if my ability to see it was growing. Or as if it was gaining power. Tears of Taharial, I'm pulling that into me. With a wrench, I cut off the draw of power. Something was coming. Something big. Fear tightened my body.

Relinquish her wheels, Raziel had said. I recalled the huge purple cobra that had entered my conjuring circle, the snake made of eyes, the snake that had filled my lungs. A snake that was part of Amethyst's wheels, I was sure of it. I concentrated on the purple eyes that had nearly drowned me, remembering their concentrated stare. "Come," I said.

Overhead, in the otherness, thunder boomed, a concussion that knocked Raziel and Forcas to their knees. Hanging above us was a massive, interconnected ring of lavender stones, faceted amethyst hoops the size of a football field pulsing. It looked like a gyroscope turned on its side, concentric wheels within wheels, each turning its own way, each releasing mists of blue plasma. And on one end, a golden nosecone, its navcone, bursting with Light. It was Amethyst's wheels, her vast crystalline ship, healed and whole.

The stone sang, a single note of joy and hope and life. And it opened its eyes, eyes on every square inch of its lavender structure, dark purple eyes, hundreds of them, thousands of them, all looking at me. The song of the wheel changed key and hummed a softer tune, an audible caress.

"Crap," a voice murmured nearby.

Instantly, I was back on the Trine. Smoke, fire, and a ghastly reek of death whipped in the icy wind. A golden rim of sun glanced over the mountains to the east and cast long rays onto the world below. Shadows still gripped the valleys, streambeds, and Mineral City. Below me was a ledge of rock; above me was another. I was still sandwiched between them. I blinked and remembered to breathe, surprised that I still could.

Eli held me, our bodies wedged beneath the boulder edge. In his fist shone the healing amulet I had given him. And in this reality too, hanging in the air before us, was Amethyst's wheels. As one, the eyes blinked, crooning. "Saints' balls," Eli whispered. I laughed brokenly. His arms tightened about me.

In the dawn sky far overhead, lightning flashed, thunder rumbled. A battle was taking place there, in the upper layers of the earth's atmosphere, in the here-not here. In the small, nearly level space, Raziel and Forcas were locked in combat, bodies writhing and straining as they wrestled. Below us, the earth shook. The big, bad Dragon was dangerously close.