"Defensive circle!" I shouted.
Elyssa blurred to the side as jaws snapped at her. She tossed the baby in an underhanded motion toward Bella.
"Don't throw the baby!" Shelton yelled at the top of his lungs.
Bella caught the small form without trouble, cushioning the momentum by swinging her arms with it. Since the baby had survived being shot from the mouth of a dragon, I highly doubted landing on the floor would have hurt it.
The leyworm chasing Elyssa wasn't much larger than a car. Which still made it more than we could handle. Shelton growled a word, and a shield sprang up around us. The leyworm smacked into it, coiling in on itself like an insanely large snake. It hissed and roared, snapping at the barrier.
The baby, for its part, continued to cry at the top of its lungs.
I figured the leyworm was a baby itself, judging from the size. I watched as it slithered the perimeter of the shield, as though probing for the way in.
"It's intelligent," Adam said. "Look at it. Like it knows what it's doing."
I noticed two puckered scars where scales had inadequately covered some old injury, and wondered what could have hurt the leyworm like that. The only time I'd seen an injured leyworm had been—I gasped. I'd seen this creature before. I'd rescued it from the clutches of Dash Armstrong, Maximus's pet Arcane. He'd been using the creature to power an arch along with some kind of funky Tesla coil, using cruel barbs which he'd stabbed into the leyworm's scaly side. I'd freed it, and it had promptly eaten Dash.
"Can we move with this shield with us?" I asked.
Shelton shook his head. "Not easily. This is a lot bigger than what I'm used to. If I tried to maintain it while we move, I might lose it, and junior there gets a full meal deal."
"Options?" I asked.
"I have Lancers," Elyssa said, adjusting something strapped on her wrist. "They might knock it out."
I watched the leyworm snake around, its glowing red eyes fixed on Shelton. It seemed to know the Arcane was straining to maintain the shield. Noticing the beads of sweat gathering on my friend's forehead, I knew he had to be giving it his all.
"Elyssa, be ready just in case," I said, and took a gamble. I walked to the edge of the shield, and waved my arms to attract the leyworm. Red orbs narrowed to slits. "Remember me?" I said. "I saved you from Dash Armstrong? The crazy guy using you for experiments?"
The leyworm roared in my face. The shield saved me from a face full of dragon breath and spittle.
"Don't you have any gratitude?" I said. "I saved your life."
The "little" dragon made a low growling noise, and regarded me for a moment.
"We're not here to hurt little babies," I said. "But we want to know what's going on, and how in the world your, uh, parents are making angel babies."
The leyworm tilted its head ever so slightly, as if trying to judge my character.
"I can't…hold much longer," Shelton said, his face glowing red.
"I'm ready," Elyssa said, quarterstaff spinning.
The leyworm looked at Shelton. It looked at Elyssa. Then it let out a hiss that sounded more like a sigh, and motioned with its head.
"Promise me you won't attack," I said to it.
It made another hissing noise.
"Lower the shield," I told Shelton.
The hum of the shield faded, and Shelton bent over, panting. Bella and the others held their staffs in defensive positions, various hues of deadly energy glowing atop them. The leyworm simply turned and trundled away, straight toward the giant dragons in the center.
"Maybe we should take the baby and run," Adam said, glancing curiously at the little bundle of joy.
Bella had calmed it down, stroking its cheek affectionately as it stared at her with wide eyes. "She's adorable."
"Something ain't right about dragons upchucking angels," Shelton said. He looked tired, but seemed to have caught his breath.
"That's not our biggest problem," Elyssa said. "It's Seraphim. If Daelissa is somehow making angel whoopee down here, she won't even need to fix the Grand Nexus."
"Somehow, I doubt she's getting it on with leyworms," I said.
"That does seem improbable considering the size differential and other physical incompatibilities," Cinder said. "Provided, of course, female Seraphim do not have extremely flexible—"
"I'm going to stop you right there," Bella said, giving him a warning look.
The small leyworm hissed and growled at the leviathans. The other two dragons regarded us before making low rumbling noises, which I prayed were assent.
"They look exhausted," Meghan said. Her eyes widened as she caught sight of something beyond.
I followed her gaze and my stomach flip-flopped.
"You've got to be kidding me," Adam said.
Beyond the two leyworms were more babies than any mother could survive. At least a dozen angel infants crawled, bawled, wriggled, and drooled. The scaly red coils of the dragon which had spit out the baby formed one half of a protective semi-circle, with the purple hide of the other dragon completing it. Several younger leyworms formed a loose inner perimeter, preventing the babies from wandering outside.
"What beautiful scales," Bella said, admiring purple dragon's diamond-shaped plating.
"Dah nah," cried out a cherub as it wandered in from the dark, making a beeline for the babies who began wailing at the tops of their lungs.
The small leyworm streaked for the creature, and using its long snout like a club, batted the cherub toward the purple dragon. The creature opened its gaping maw and swallowed the disgusting form whole.
"What the hell is going on down here?" Shelton said, staring aghast at the monstrous dragon.
"If I am correct, a baby angel will eventually emerge from the gullet of the dragon," Cinder said.
Heads turned toward the golem.
"Explain," I said.
"In your account of the Vadaemos incident, leyworms swallowed a great number of the cherubs." Cinder took out his arcphone, and projected simple three-dimensional image of a leyworm swallowing a cherub. "As you know, leyworms seem to feed directly from ley lines."
"We don't know exactly what they do to it," Meghan said. "The prevailing theory is they help keep the planet healthy by managing the flow of aether. Kind of like earthworms do for soil."
"Perhaps," Cinder said. "Inside a leyworm, the aether takes on different properties. You once mentioned the incident of a Templar swallowed by a leyworm, being irradiated by something like malaether."
Meghan tapped a finger to her chin. "That's right. Aether in its natural form isn't harmful, but whatever a leyworm does with the energy makes it dangerous, at least to most of us." She shrugged. "Whether it's identical to the malaether thrown off by the Cyrinthian Rune when it was trapped inside the arch, I don't know."
"I see where you're going with this," Shelton said. "And I don't like it."
I stared at the image of the leyworm swallowing the cherub. At the sheer volume of aether suffusing the beast. It didn't take much of a leap to see what Cinder thought might be happening.
"You're saying there's enough light essence in the leyworms to reverse the husks. To turn them back into angels."
"Precisely," Cinder said. "It must have started happening after you left."
"I witnessed leyworms swallowing dozens of cherubs," I said. "And I don't see nearly that many babies."
The young leyworm blinked at me, and rumbled. It led us into the space between the giants. We followed it far back to the opposite side of the obsidian slab. Bones the size of shipwrecks jutted from the floor. Adam directed the glowballs higher. I noticed small infantile forms littering the area. I jumped back, expecting them to attack, but they lay motionless. I walked closer, knelt next to the body of a cherub. Shelton prodded it with his staff. It clinked.
I ventured a careful hand and touched it. It was petrified. I looked up at the leyworm bones. I saw bits and pieces of internal organs. The area around the carcass was blackened, as if something had exploded.
"I estimate hundreds of bodies," Meghan said in a whisper. "Maybe more."
"It must have overloaded," Cinder said. "Perhaps the sheer number of cherubs caused a chain reaction. The pattern appears to have started as an implosion which sucked both light and dark aether from everything, and then exploded outward after petrifying the creature and the husks within it."
The young leyworm blinked and rumbled.
"The leyworm that spit out the first baby was drawing so much aether from the ley line beneath this place, it was literally absorbing the entire flow," I said. "And that was for one cherub."
"How many are left?" Elyssa asked. She blew out a breath. "If only we could light this whole place up instead of running around in the dark."
"Perhaps there is a way to do that in the control room," Cinder said.
I looked at the baby Bella carried then turned to the leyworm. "Why are you helping the angels?" I asked. "What do you plan to do with the babies?"
It simply stared at me for a moment, before slithering back toward the nursery. Following the creature, I switched back to incubus sight. Tendrils of gray energy drifted from the young leyworms nearby, swirling like miniature vortexes into the outstretched hands of the babies.
I told the others what I saw. "They're somehow converting aether into essence."
"It's gray, so it must be neutral essence," Adam said. "Maybe that'll keep the babies from aligning with Brightlings or Darklings."
"I don't get how these dragons know what they're doing," Shelton said. "They're a lot smarter than they look."
The young leyworm made a low rumbling noise.
Shelton gave it a nervous glance. "How do they know how to feed angels?"
