Falling ~Book Three of Winged~

12th Century

I open my eyes and Etheriel is no longer standing in front of me. In fact, I am not even in the bakery anymore. The smell of baking bread is no longer in the air and is replaced with the smell of mildew and mold. The air is cool and moist around me and I am lying on a makeshift mattress on the floor of a stone six by six cell. I sit up and I am wearing a dress with a tattered bottom and it's dirty. I slowly get to my feet using the damp stones in the wall to help. Dim moonlight shines through a barred window at the top of a wall. Where am I now? I wipe my hand on the tattered dress and go up to the cell door. I barely push against it and it slowly opens with a low groan. My hand sits idle in the air before it drops back to my side. My toes curl against the cold stone floor and I wonder why I don't have shoes or even socks. I walk out of the cell and walk down the hall past several empty cells. Each cell fitted with a mattress, made out of hay and thick dirty blankets, and a bucket. I pass one with an old man curled up on the mattress, who looks like he is just skin and bones. I hear chains move from two cells down and I walk past another empty cell to it. I stare in at the familiar person. Etheriel lies on his back on the mattress, his wrists chained in front of him. He is wearing dirty and tattered pants with an off-white stained cloth shirt. His eyes are shut, but I know that he is awake by the way his chest rises and falls.

"Etheriel..." I whisper and his eyes pop open and he looks over at the door I am standing behind. His eyes focus on me and he sits up quickly. Recognition creeps into his eyes.

"How did you get here?" He rests and arm on his knee and takes in what I am wearing. Once again, I find that he isn't speaking in English and neither am I, but I think I do recognize it as Italian or French.

"It's that angel... He took me from that bakery... I was in a cell down there, what is this place?" I ask and shake his door, trying to open it.

"It's the dungeon of a castle." He says.

"Dungeon? Why are you here?" I look around and spot a set of keys hanging on a hook by a pair of stairs. I go and retrieve the keys. Etheriel doesn't answer my question.

"Bakery?" He question and tilts his head. I fumble with the lock for a bit before nodding.

"Yeah, you were explaining how the angel that is doing this is weak." I get the door unlocked and open it.

"What are you talking about?" He says and I freeze and stare at him. "What bakery?" He questions and slowly, struggling slightly, gets to his feet.

"What year is it?" I question. It must have been somewhere between 1500's and 1700's when I saw Etheriel at his bakery.

"Late 12th century..." He says and watches me carefully.

"That angel is dropping me out of order in your timeline..." I whisper and he tilts his head before holding up his wrists, showing the chains. I try several keys before finding the one that unlocks his chains.

"So an angel is messing with timelines?" He asks and I nod remembering Etheriel tell me this around three hundred years from now. Etheriel walks past me and looks both ways down the hall before heading toward the stairs with me following him. He carefully jogs barefoot up the stairs and I do so too, also barefoot.

Etheriel

I push a pin into the large map on the wall and step back looking at the scattered red tacks in it.

"It looks like he is heading north toward Canada, but his path toward Canada is all over the place." Nathan comments and I nod. He went from Louisiana to Mississippi ten across Arkansas to Oklahoma and then up into Kansas and it seems that he crossed the border into Colorado. I wish I knew his pan and I wish that I knew what the hell he did with Trinity because the more time that goes by that Dominic doesn't sense her through the sigil, the more panicked I become. What did he do to her?