Crucified: The Rise of an Urban Legend (Swann Series Book 9)

by Ryan Schow

  His father slammed his eyes shut, rubbed the heels of his hands over his temples, set his jaw so hard his cheeks started flicking. August wasn’t looking forward to what was next.

  “I told you I should have lied,” he said.

  “So, where the hell did she teleport to? Back home? To the airport?”

  “She doesn’t need the airport anymore.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “To Jerusalem.”

  Now his eyes flashed open and he looked at August like his head was going to pop. “Why would she go there?”

  He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, in one tempered exhale. “To be with Jesus at his crucifixion.”

  And there it was. That was the point he’d gotten to in his life. That was what he was about to go through with Savannah if he decided to take the Fountain of Youth serum. The girl would surely travel through time, she would fight, she would tear apart family relationships not because she wanted to, but because by virtue of who she was, she wouldn’t be able to help it.

  “Are you fucking with me?” his father snapped.

  “I told you there are things you can’t possibly know because your mind cannot fathom them. It’s like me trying to explain the internet to pilgrims. It is possible—the internet—but it wasn’t possible then. Think of Savannah as the internet and you as the pilgrim.”

  “How did she get like this?” he asked, his mind now realizing anger wasn’t helping him understand anything.

  “I’m drawing the line here, Dad. I have to do this or you will neither accept me nor her. Just know that she is good, that she is necessary, and that I love her.”

  “You already told me that.”

  “Well now I suppose this will test your promise,” he said.

  “Are you…are you like that?” his father asked with grave hesitation. “Are you like her?”

  “No. I’m just changed.”

  He watched the old man sag with relief. Lloyd knew he’d lost his son’s physical appearance, but if August was normal everywhere else, he could manage that. What he could not get past, however, would be August being like Savannah. Well, not at first. If he knew what August was contemplating—immortality—he might very well break. At least, right now. In time though, maybe he’d be okay. As for now, his father looked like he couldn’t handle one more thing.

  “This is insane,” he said, blowing out an exasperated sigh.

  “Tell me about it,” August replied.

  Until now, Lloyd James was the biggest thing in Lloyd James’s life. He could handle his son casting a tall shadow, but he couldn’t handle him blocking out all his daylight with news like this.

  “So…is there any possibility you’re going to become like her?”

  “There is no one like her out there, Dad. Her genetics were altered, mixed, and then activated by things I barely understand. She did not want this. She never asked for any of this, and she certainly didn’t ask for the kind of suffering she’s endured. For her, she knows her life will be about suffering and no one understood suffering more while standing in a place of love and forgiveness than Jesus did.”

  “So that’s where she’s going?”

  “She’s not going there, Dad. She’s already there.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  After his multiverse self told Aloysius where to find Savannah and that he wouldn’t be coming back to this universe, Aloysius swallowed his time travel device and prepared for lots and lots of pain.

  Being sucked into the wormhole for as long as he was made for one horrific reentry. He was spit out in Jerusalem more than two thousand years in the past feeling flat out maniacal. Sweating, frenzied, he felt his bones and they felt like they were not lined up quite right. Fortunately the healing capabilities of his body were correcting these errors. He opened his eyes, took a breath. Aloysius realized he was laying in a fetal position in the dirt and there were three sets of dirty feet in sandals standing next to him.

  He glanced up, shielded his eyes from the sun.

  He was in a tight alley, one of the many in old Jerusalem. Three men looked down on him—big black beards, unkempt hair, sun beaten skin, long robes. Their eyes were huge, their bodies paralyzed with fear. They must have seen him materialize here from no where.

  One of the men, breathless, his hands shaking ever so lightly with trepidation, spoke to him in soft, scared tones.

  Aloysius had no idea what this gibberish was so he didn’t bother trying to communicate. Instead, he sat up, pushed up off the heels of his hands and got to his feet, his body hot and working overtime to heal itself.

  Aloysius towered over the men by a good six to eight inches, their chins tilted back to watch him. All three of them looked amazed by his white skin, it seemed, and how good looking he was.

  To these men, he must be a God.

  At the end of the narrow alley, in wider streets, was a gathering of people with their backs to him. He appraised their clothes, then his. Looking up at the three not-so-wise-men around him, he made a decision. In a flash, he tore their throats out and sloppily guzzled down a few pints of their blood before tossing them aside.

  This served to hasten his body’s repair.

  Up the street he heard the pandemonium of the crowd. They were getting louder. Dressing in confiscated robes, Aloysius caught a glimpse of a beaten man with a huge wooden cross on his back staggering down the street.

  “Unbelievable,” he muttered to himself, making his way to the street.

  This was Via Dolorosa, the way of suffering: Jesus’s long and brutal walk from Galilee to Mount Calvary where he would die on the cross. Aloysius knew the stories of Christ, for sure, but to be here—to see him pass like that—even to a beast like him, this was surreal.

  A woman and child appeared at the other end of the alleyway, the woman gasping. She and her son were trying to catch up with the procession, both of them clearly distraught.

  He’d turned to the sound of her surprise.

  She was staring at the three dead men. When she looked up and saw his short hair and his handsome face, she seemed to fall instantly still. Only twenty feet separated them from each other, but it might as well have been five.

  He smelled them, wanted to devour them. Crouched forward, hands like claws at his side, he hissed at her, his teeth sharp, the lower half of his face and his hands clearly bloodstained.

  The two of them turned and fled, and though his animal instincts had him aching to take chase, he felt it best to keep any hunger he might have, for he was going to need it when he drained Savannah.

  Pushing past the rubberneckers, he joined the procession.

  Aloysius was just as intrigued by Jesus bearing the cross as he was the task at hand: ending this diminutive female pestilence, Savannah.

  When he finally worked his way to the front of the crowd, he’d traveled a few blocks down the long dirt road heading toward the gates of the city. He was ten feet from Jesus, watching the man take the jeering and taunting, listening to the hateful, spitting sounds of people shouting him down. The hate for this man who would become the savior of billions was startling, even to him.

  Kids threw rocks at him, until one of them hit a soldier.

  The soldier hustled around and found the offending boy, beating him then shoving him into the dirt where he lay sobbing in pain.

  Aloysius snickered as he walked by the boy, spitting a bloody loogie on the child as his mother tried to console him. The mother looked up at him and with a sneer, Aloysius said, “The little puke deserved it.”

  If something like Jesus’s death could touch the heart of a monster like him, but not a stupid little kid like the one he’d just spit on, what did that say about these people?

  Savages, he thought.

  The beatings continued and Jesus took one step after another, the burden on his body and mind made more troublesome by the delight these people took in his anguish.

  The Roman soldiers continued to whip him, to yell at him, almost like
they were trying to break him before he could even reach his destination. Aloysius knew cruelty, but theirs seemed instinctual rather than manufactured.

  Trumpets blew, startling him. He could see the rabble of people running beside them all, trying to see the criminal dragging his own cross to his death.

  Aloysius drew closer still.

  Sweat and blood leaked down Jesus’s battered body. The gashes were open and weeping, the tangle of thorns wrapping his head a sick sight to behold. He couldn’t take his eyes off the man.

  Aloysius bore his own burden. As a mutant with the vampiric thirst, only Holland’s advanced genetics and his serum would stave off most of the sun’s effects. He still bore some of the curse of sunlight. Meaning he was still overly sensitive to the sun. It was hot needles stabbing every inch of his skin. It was perspiration draining down his face, out of his hairline and down his temples. The itchy, nasty robe, kept his body from directly absorbing the light, but for all this, his body still continued to sweat in the most uncomfortable places.

  One of the Roman soldiers leading the mob turned and looked first at the women sobbing behind Jesus, and then directly at Aloysius.

  The vampire hybrid stood a head higher than everyone else. Aloysius held the soldier’s eye, but his gaze dipped to Aloysius’s chin, growing wide at the sight of it.

  Aloysius knew what he was looking at: the blood all over his chin.

  He swiped a robed arm over his face, using the sweat and force to get most of the blood off. The soldier finally looked away.

  Aloysius’s gaze shifted past the hardened soldier, to a large palace where he saw a weeping woman standing beside a man consoling her. The woman under the gateway was remarkable only in her pale features and her sorrow, in her swollen eyes and her sniffling, in the extraordinary pain that so clearly beset her.

  As she stood there trembling and juddering, wrapped from head to foot in a bluish-green mantle, her agony lay naked before the hateful, jeering crowds, uncontrollable, uninterrupted.

  Aloysius zeroed in on her eyes and there he saw something profound and unmistakable. He didn’t know how he felt in that moment. Hatred for her? Envious? He didn’t know his own mother, so he would never see that look he was seeing now: a blindingly intense love and longing by a mother for her child.

  He knew right then that he was looking at the Blessed Virgin, at the Mother Mary.

  His heart was struck with a sudden turmoil when he spotted the girl just behind her, the girl with the lazily shrouded head, the girl he longed to eviscerate.

  Savannah Swann.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Inside the room with the spilled garments, I dress myself as best as I can, finally wrapping a cloth over my head. I look like someone who needed forty-five minutes to get ready but took only five instead.

  This will have to do, I tell myself.

  I hear voices out in the hallway. I step outside the room, leaving the fallen woman behind. There I see a man reverently ushering a woman through the palace. I know these people. A wave of dizziness shoots through me and I vacillate for a second, slightly off balance.

  I knew I’d see these people, but I never expected to feel this. Moving past me is the Baptist John and Jesus’s mother, Mary. Following them are several woman and a young man, one of Joseph’s nephews, I think. Behind them, looking extra nervous, is the caretaker of the property who let them pass through here to see Jesus.

  I still my restless heart for a moment, not sure I can do this. But I must. This is why I’m here! Why I’ve come!

  It wasn’t just to watch the final walk of a martyr heading to his death. I’m here to witness a man making the ultimate sacrifice for the love of his people because he is beholden to a higher power.

  Outside, the sounds of blowing horns and a noisy crowd intensifies. As I make my way out of the palace, it’s to get to the street—a hard packed dirt pathway between buildings. Moments later I find myself under a gateway standing behind Mary and John’s entourage.

  I open my mind, let myself know and feel everything.

  Mary’s thoughts burn brighter than most, her emotions pulling me into their gravitational pull. Her heart aches so fiercely for her son I feel the pain afflicting my own heart. She’s scared of what she’s about to see.

  Slipping down ever so lightly into her memories, I see her walking with John only moments ago, strangled by her emotions, helpless to do anything to stop this flood of pain, and unsure of her own ability to handle seeing her son like this.

  My eyes are her eyes in this memory and I’m seeing her looking down at the dirt, seeing the pathway marked by a long, consistent line of her son’s dripping blood. This alone threatens to break her. She tells herself to press on knowing her heart won’t be able to handle what her eyes are about to see.

  He was her son, though; she was his mother.

  Blinking quickly, I pull out of her memories, focus on the boy in front of me. He turns and his eyes widen, like he’s seeing an angel. My eyes clear and I fully detach from Mary. This boy is enthralled by my beauty, but then he sees the state of my garments and his eyes settle.

  No angel would dress like this.

  He says something to me in a language I don’t understand. I gather from his feelings of intense curiosity that he’s asking me who I am. He’s also wondering if I’m real. I lift my forefinger to my lips and quietly shush him. His eyes narrow as his brows pull together in a frown, his mouth moving like it wants to say something, but no words coming forth.

  Our attention is drawn to a converging horde up the street, a flood of people no more than eighty paces away. The crowd is getting more rambunctious by the second. I slink around the boy, past a few women in this small entourage, and take a place just behind Mary.

  She is wringing her hands, her heart clearly conflicted. I am once more drawn back into the wake of her emotions.

  She turns and speaks to the man beside her, John. I don’t understand what she is saying with my ears, but I understand what she means from where I am inside her mind.

  “Should I stay for this, or should I leave right now?” she asks John in her language, her eyes desperate, pleading. The torment on her face is evidence of the crushing sorrow she’s barely holding at bay. “Oh, how will I be able to endure it?”

  John turns with soft, sympathetic eyes and a reassuring hand and he says, “If you don’t stay, it will always serve as a cruel regret.”

  Defenseless and lost, she nods while dabbing her nose and eyes, and then she steps out from the gateway and moves toward the street. Ahead she sees her bloodstained son dragging the backbreaking cross forward amidst the whipping taunts of the soldiers and the riotous, belligerent crowd behind him.

  I have to pull out of Mary’s head because the crashing emotions hit me so hard they threaten to imprison me. I do not realize this until I’m out of her, but tears skip down my cheeks, my eyes a constant flood.

  Nearby, people are turning to look at Mary in her weakest, most vulnerable state and now I’m looking at them because they do not share this woman’s pain. They are there to see the criminal punished.

  For them, this is a show.

  One of the gawkers asks his sidekick who this bellowing woman is and the sidekick looks at Mary, smirks, and says in his own language, “That is the criminal’s mother.”

  Both scoundrels turn and begin laughing at her, first quietly, and then uproariously while pointing at her and slinging insults. This is where I draw the line. Moving behind Mary and John, cutting through Mary’s teary-eyed entourage, I make a beeline for this scourge.

  The uglier of the two cretins must sense something in my eyes because he stops right away, looks me up and down and then he makes like he’s going to spit in my face.

  I seal his mouth shut then start to heat his eyes. Not enough to burn them, but enough for him to know to shut the F up right well and now.

  I feel my cheek twitching with rage, not just for him, but for all of this. I should not be here. Not w
ith my triggers: injustice and bullying. This is tasteless and revolting. The menace’s eyes are watering but I psychically hold his lids open, let him see the hatred I feel sliding through my eyes. When I let go of him, I mentally hit him with a psychic punch in the chest, knocking him back a good foot. He turns, stumbles, then runs from me like I’m the devil herself.

  I hear the sobbing behind me, but I cannot turn around because my world is cast into shades of grey and I know my eyes are shot through with black. When I turn to the crowds, when my eyes set on Jesus, my heart cracks wide open and I feel everything.

  I feel the whips on my back as he suffers them, the thorns buried in my head the way they are buried into his; inside, a great chasm of sadness tears me open. This is the most painful thing I’ve ever had to watch.

  I ache to lighten his load, to heal his body, wipe the map clean of these f*ckers and let him walk the world, but I’ve been told “no” by someone far greater than me. So in spite of my instincts to protect those who cannot protect themselves, I will not interrupt this torturous event.

  When Jesus gets near, Mary rushes out into the street before him, overflowing with the forcefulness of her love, battered by his mistreatment, tormented by his state. She falls to her knees before him, her hands upon him, around him. She weeps furiously, unconcerned by Jesus’s persecutors, by the hissing and hollering masses.

  “My son!” she wails.

  Looking down, his burden stayed for the moment, his face breaks and he whispers, “My mother.”

  I cannot stop these tears. They will not stop. My feet take me forward, delivering me into the masses.

  The executioners behind Jesus mutter insult and mock him. My hands ball to fists in the street and the ground quivers at my feet. Not seeing me, one of the men shouts at Mary. I don’t know what he is saying, but I know what he feels.

  “Woman, what do you want here?” he shouts, like she’s a pestilence. His eyes are cruel judgment, his demeanor wild with the conviction of his ways. “If you had raised him better, he would not be in our hands now!”