by Brian Fuller
“I don’t care what you believe, Ramis,” Helo said.
“This is Archus Ebenezer. What did she say? I want every word as precise as you can remember them.”
Archus Ebenezer, the head of the Scholus division. Helo would never forget the annoying bureaucrat. The man had flat-out called him a liar about Cain’s pendant and everything else right up until he was proven wrong. And there was no way he was going to tell them everything Cassandra had said. It was personal.
“She healed me,” Helo reported, “and told me her angel name, saying all I had to do was repeat it and I would be healed and receive a Bestowal. It’s like what happened to me when I saw Rachel ascend.”
“And what’s her angel name?” Ramis asked, “If you’ve had time to make one up.”
What was up with Ramis? The man had always been a hard-ass, but he was different now, angry.
“Not going to tell you. Not going to tell anyone,” Helo said. “That was for me. Now, can we get on with it?”
Helo related the rest of the story, barely aware of the lightening shades on the horizon. In minutes he would be in Avadan’s hands.
“And that’s it,” Helo finished. “Is there a team nearby looking for me?”
“Sicarius Nox is on its way,” Mars said, “but still a few hours out. There is an operation in progress, but we can’t tell you the details in case you are tortured for information. Sorry about that, but I think you understand better than most what they’re capable of. We just can’t risk it. Hang strong and do us proud. You get a chance at Cain, you kill him. Use Cassandra’s gift to get the Hallow Bestowal and surprise him. One good punch with your Strength will crush his skull. Got it? Get the heart and run.”
“Yes, sir.”
It was a good plan, though if there were other Dread Loremasters around, he wasn’t going to get far. And Dreads weren’t the type to have a handy fire to toss the heart into. No. This little trip would cost him his life, he was sure of it, but thinking of Cassandra stripped the fear from the prospect of dying.
“Anyone else got questions?” Mars asked.
“No,” Ebenezer said. “I’ll get his information analyzed right now and see if there’s anything we can make of it.”
“I don’t have any questions he’ll want to answer,” Ramis added.
“All right, then,” Mars said. “Survive, Helo. Just survive. We’ll come for you as soon as we can.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Helo handed the phone back to Haven, who stuffed it back in his pants pocket. “You know,” Haven said, “sometimes I think it would have been fun to be in the Gabriels or the Michaels, but after hearing you, I think I’ll stick with the Scholus. That Avadan sounds like a real piece of work.”
Helo nodded, not feeling like conversation. The horizon lightened and pinked-up, the trees gray in the predawn light. Any minute, Haven’s phone would ring out an alarm to signal the approach of dawn and Rapture. Where would he be, and who would be there?
The prospect of facing down Cain and the other Loremasters alone chilled his spine, but as the alarm sounded, he knew one thing for sure: he was glad he had taken Aclima’s place. She might hate him for it, but it was absolutely the right thing to do. The thought of her ever being in Cain’s power sickened him. The thought that she had ever been in his power sickened him.
“Good luck, Helo,” Haven said once his alarm sounded, a bright chirping noise like the happiest bird that ever sang a song to the sun.
“Thanks.”
Rapture.
Chapter 24
Avadan's Prison
The first impact broke Helo’s shoulder. A loud roar filled his ears, but so did some kind of grit. The second impact snapped a rib below his armpit. He was spinning in the dark, spinning so fast he couldn’t get his bearings. Another tumble and his left arm broke against some sort of rigid ribbing inside what had to be a metallic drum of some sort. None of it caused pain to his Ash Angel body, but with every turn of the relentless drum, more bones broke, and more dust and gravel was slathered over his body.
He was literally being ground into a pulp.
“Stop!” he yelled, realizing how stupid it was to even try. Not only could no one hear him, but whoever was doing this to him wouldn’t care. His brief exclamation was rewarded by a pile of earthy dirt in his mouth, and by the taste and smell, he knew exactly what it was: cement mix. He’d worked concrete one summer, and the scent and the texture was unmistakable. The Dreads had thrown his heart into a concrete mixer, a big one on a truck, if he wasn’t mistaken.
How long he’d banged around he couldn’t guess, but at some point water was injected into the mix, and the slurry stuck to his increasingly busted body. Ingenious, really. It was inconspicuous and incapacitating and would certainly bust up Dreads just as well as it was busting him right now. He would keep that in mind.
By the time someone dragged him out of the wet cement—though his cement-coated eyes couldn’t tell who—he figured there wasn’t one bone in his body that hadn’t at least cracked, if not outright broken. Maybe a finger or a toe had survived, but all of his limbs were Jell-O, and his ribs might as well have been run over by a tank.
Someone was saying something, but his hearing had suffered the same fate as his vision, his ear canals stuffed. He was moving—probably in a truck bed or car trunk—and the road was bumpy, but not bumpy enough to free him from the hardening concrete.
The bad news: whoever was doing this to him knew how to handle Ash Angels. He’d be lucky to get his shot at Cain.
To pass the time, he slipped into meditation, Cassandra’s words turning over in his mind: “Why do you keep staring at the dark part, stupid?” A hard question. Why did the dark part attract his mind and his attention whenever he slipped into the meditation? Come to think of it, the whole background scene was as black as deep space, a colorless abyss save for the sun and the half of the ball reflecting its light. It was the light, not the blackness, that was extraordinary in the meditative image. The ball was neither darkness nor light, only a reflection of one or the other, split in half.
Again Cassandra’s words sank into his heart. “Why do you keep staring at the dark part, stupid?” Even now, the dark side of the ball irked him, demanded he do something to fix it. He forced the desire away, keeping his mind’s eye pegged to the fiery reflection on one half of the ball. The reflection was a connection to the light, a mimicking of something it could never be but could only borrow.
Thump.
He’d been dropped somewhere. In a few moments, something started tapping against the left side of his ear, and after several seconds, he could hear better.
A voice said, “Morph a little smaller, please.”
While the sound was still muffled, it was unmistakably Avadan and his theater-ready voice.
Morph to something smaller. Why hadn’t he thought of that earlier? In his broken up, mushy state, it wouldn’t have done much good, as it wouldn’t now, but he still should have thought of it.
Helo tried to picture himself as a freshman in high school before his growth had come on. There was an old team photo of him on the JV squad. Thinking of pictures helped his morphing speed, and as he slimmed down, he could feel the concrete cracking and slipping off his body, aided by someone swinging a hammer.
Bit by bit and chip by chip, the concrete flaked and fell away. Light—fluorescent light—resolved into view above his head, sounds coming clearer as a woman with a red aura pulled plugs of concrete out of his ear canals. Turning his head for a better look was hopeless as all the bones and muscles needed to complete the action were shattered and torn.
“Get prisoner 7717 dressed,” Avadan said. “Clean up his face, too. I certainly don’t want to stare at that . . . mess . . . while I fill out his prisoner questionnaire.”
“Really, Avadan?” the female said, voice exasperated, like a teenager who was tired of ridiculous parental demands. “You’re still doing the stupid questionnaire thing?”
&nb
sp; Avadan had lost his mind, Helo was sure, just as Aclima had said. The woman leaned over and started picking chunks of concrete off Helo’s face. He recognized her from the Tempest. This was Ashakaz, Jumelia and Cain’s only daughter. She wasn’t dressed for extracting someone from concrete, her silky dark blouse befouled with gray concrete dust. There was a family resemblance—the dark complexion, the attractive face—but Ashakaz herself . . . something was off.
While he couldn’t get as good a look as he wanted, her hazel eyes did not hold the same intensity, hardness, or malice he had noticed in the brief glares he’d seen from the other Loremasters. Helo knew what unhappiness looked like. He’d seen it on his mother’s face more often than he cared to remember. He’d seen it in Cassandra for weeks. Ashakaz’s expression was that of someone who was worn out, done for. And here she was, doing scut work for Avadan.
Helo could only catch glimpses of where he was while Ashakaz yanked him around to stuff him into a prison-orange jumpsuit. A cell of concrete and metal bars enclosed him, something he might expect on Alcatraz or in a maximum-security cellblock back before anyone thought prisoners deserved anything better than dungeons. But the electric chair in the center of the room was the centerpiece. Ashakaz’s aura flared, and she hefted him into the chair, strapping his wrists, legs, and head down with worn leather straps and tarnished iron buckles.
Now upright, Helo could get a good look at his jailer. Avadan stood near the metal bars of the cell taking notes, clipboard in hand. He had procured a gray prison uniform, patches and all, worthy of a warden. It would have been more effective if he wasn’t wearing the top hat and purple snakeskin boots.
Ashakaz leaned against a wall to the left. Her black miniskirt and blouse were dusted over, and she swatted the debris away with fingers covered in rings. Even the toes peeking out of four-inch heels had rings. By comparison, the one ear he could see modestly sported a single hoop earring.
“It’s hard to believe this is really the guy,” Ashakaz said. “I thought he’d be . . . more. The bigshot Helo. Strange they would send him instead of good old Auntie Aclima, don’t you think? I mean, if they’re going to swap hearts, why not send someone Cain doesn’t want?”
“Do shut up, Ash,” Avadan returned without glancing up from his writing. He tapped the pen against the clipboard a few times. “It’s time for us to get his information so I can send it to record keeping.”
Ashakaz rolled her eyes, but Avadan only had eyes for the clipboard. He flipped a page back.
“Trace Daniel Evans,” he finally said, taking a seat in a metal chair a few feet from the electric chair. “You have been convicted of five counts of “pissing Cain off,” a felony, and one count of “taking my mommy’s place,” a capital crime. Those are the reasons you are here. So I just need to get a few details for your file and you’ll be all set to start serving your sentence. Let’s see, first up. Social security number, please?”
Helo glared at him. He wasn’t going to play Avadan’s stupid game.
“Social security number now,” Avadan said, tone turned from bored middle manager to angry interrogator in a heartbeat.
A clock ticked somewhere, but in the relative silence, Helo could make out faint yelling and screaming coming from elsewhere in the prison. Avadan was a sick, sick man.
The Loremaster sighed and turned to Ashakaz. “Ash, could you do a little desecration to loosen Mr. Evan’s tongue a bit?”
Helo braced himself. With his body a pulped wreck, desecration would be like soaking him in gasoline and lighting him on fire. Ashakaz barely moved, shifting her weight to her other leg, as the red field spilled across the floor and enveloped the electric chair. He squeezed his eyes shut in anticipation of mind-rending pain.
But there wasn’t any. No pain. No agony. Not even a twinge. He opened his eyes. Was the desecration field still there? Yes, it was. Were his feet touching the ground? They were. By the looks on Avadan’s and Ashakaz’s faces, he could tell he wasn’t the only one surprised.
But Avadan’s surprise turned to delight in an instant, crazed eyes lighting up with glee. He stood, forgotten clipboard crashing to the ground. Purple snakeskin boot after purple snakeskin boot, he came until his face was inches from Helo’s. Helo stared back into those lunatic brown eyes. There was a hint of Aclima in their shape, but in no other way was he his mother’s son.
“No pain at all!” Avadan said after a long stare. “Enough, Ash.”
“How is that possible?” Ashakaz asked as the desecration disappeared.
“You’re angel born!” Avadan said, face like that of a five-year-old just handed a puppy.
Ash’s face screwed up skeptically. “Angel born?”
Avadan ignored her. “You’ve seen an angel. Been bathed in celestial light, haven’t you, Helo? Not an ascending Ash Angel but an actual being from the celestial realms! Am I right?”
“How does that matter?” Ashakaz said, walking forward tentatively.
Avadan turned toward her. “Angel born was a term coined by Micah, an Ash Angel scholar back in the middle ages. You see, full-blown angelic visitations on the mortal plane are extremely rare. They come more often in dreams and visions, or the angel cloaks his glory. But Helo here has seen angelic glory with his waking eyes. It makes Ash Angels immune to desecration forever after—among other things. Does the Ash Angel Organization even know this, Helo?”
Helo had never heard of angel born before, though there were lots of little things missing from his education. But if he were truly immune to desecration, he owed Cassandra big-time.
Helo opened his mouth. It felt dry and dusty, and when he spoke, it sounded like half the air was leaking through a hole in his windpipe. “What other things?” he asked.
“Oh, come on, Helo!” Avadan prodded. “They don’t know about the angel born, do they? You know why?” The odd Dread Loremaster was practically trembling with excitement. “Micah recorded some really interesting facts in his book, Mysteries of Light, and I have the only copy! I took it from him after I tossed him down a well. I really didn’t mean to kill him, but he didn’t know how to swim and the well was a bit deeper than I thought. The AAO doesn’t have a copy, do they?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s the big deal?” Ashakaz said, returning to the wall and leaning against it. “So we can’t Desecrate him.”
Avadan gaped at her in disbelief. “What’s the big deal? You ignorant slut! Have you done any reading at all during your afterlife, or have you just been sitting around waiting for the TV to be invented so you could sit around even more and wait for reality shows to be invented?”
Ashakaz let loose with a middle finger bright with jewelry.
Avadan shook his head. “Look, idiot, celestial angels only show up when the proverbial pedestrian of evil—that would be us—is about to get hit by the speeding dump truck of righteousness. It means trouble is coming, and it means Helo here is at the center of it . . . somehow. And you’re a Blank! Oh, my goodness. This is lovely.”
“Get a room,” Ashakaz grumped as if put out, but her expression had turned from bored to attentive.
“What are you talking about?” Helo asked, wondering how much the manic Avadan would reveal.
Avadan backed away, pacing, his boots drumming up a rhythm on the concrete floor. “When mortals see a celestial being, they are briefly changed, their bodies actually glowing with an aura. But it fades. Ash Angels who are angel born have auras that are stunning to behold for the rest of their afterlife. But you’re a Blank. That is an amazing advantage . . . wait. What was the angel’s name?”
Speaking Cassandra’s name would heal him and give him another Bestowal. He itched to do it, itched to beat these two nutjob Loremasters to a pulp, but the goal was Cain. He had to get Cain to come to him. Then he would strike.
“I’ll only talk to Cain.”
Avadan frowned. “Why?”
“You know why,” he returned.
Avadan grabbed him by the cheeks
and pinched. “Nothing you could say to him will stop him from destroying you. You’ve got nothing to offer that he wants besides your misery, and he’s doing a bang-up job of getting it, wouldn’t you say? The angel’s name, Helo. Now.”
Helo wasn’t sure what good the name would do Avadan, but if the Dread Loremaster wanted it so badly, Helo had to keep it from him.
“What good will it do you?” Helo rasped, throat still caked with dust.
Avadan released him. “To see if the angel is on my list. I’ve been keeping a catalog, you see. I’m a scientist and like to document things.”
“She’s not on your list,” Helo said.
Avadan pursed his lips and nodded. “A female angel! Interesting. Ash, get my smiley-face T-shirt and lab coat. They’re on my chair in the office.”
Ashakaz rolled her eyes and left the cell.
Avadan began unbuttoning his warden’s shirt. “How can you be sure she’s not on my list?”
“Doesn’t matter. I want to speak to Cain.”
“Cain, Cain, Cain,” Avadan said, tone irritated. Then he straightened up and cast off his shirt. “But wait! You haven’t said the angel’s name yet, have you? So it was recently. Yes. You were not immune to desecration just yesterday! And you still have a gift coming to you. And healing.”
This Dread really did put the lore in Loremaster. Helo stared him down. “I’ll only talk to Cain.”
Avadan sighed and shook his head. Ashakaz returned with the shirt and lab coat, and Avadan handed her his top hat and took them. “Well, I’ll let him know of your request. Tomorrow we’ll put you in what I like to call the Talking Pool to loosen your tongue. My research shows that nothing can cure an Ash Angels’ vulnerability to water’s icy touch upon their nerves. I’ll have you telling me everything I want in no time.”
“Why don’t you dunk him and get the information now?” Ashakaz asked.
Avadan’s laughter boomed through the wall. After slipping the smiley-face shirt over his head, he said, “You really are a brainless little twit. Look at his body. In his current state, he’d die if we tossed him in the water, and Cain doesn’t want him dead yet. He’s still got his all-important ‘final act’ to perform for Mr. Helo, but he promises to let me grind him up when he’s done.”
