“Man, you’re strong. Stronger than you look.”
We sit together on the ground and stare at the sky.
“It’s awesome,” Mike says after a moment. “This should be on everyone’s bucket list.”
I lie back, spread my arms, cross my ankles, and simply gaze at the sky.
Mike’s gaze is on me. I feel it.
“Did you leave someone behind?”
I glance at him. “What makes you think that?”
“I don’t know. I can tell. It’s a gift, I guess.” He laughs. “A girl?”
“Yes,” I murmur.
“Did she break up with you?”
“No. I…left.” It seems okay to unburden myself to this man I don’t know and will never see again. “I was no good for her. She deserved better.”
“You seem like an okay sort.”
“You don’t know me.”
“What are you? An axe murderer? Should I be worried?”
“Maybe.”
“Oh, well, I’d better sleep with one eye open.” I half hope Mike will change his mind about traveling with me, but he doesn’t. “So, you think you aren’t good enough for her?”
“I don’t belong there anymore.”
“Been there.” He lies down beside me, staring at the lights. “Makes you feel sort of insignificant, doesn’t it? The world is so big. The universe. And here we are, worried about our tiny selves. In the big picture, what does it matter, right? If we live or die. Or whatever.”
“It matters,” I say. “To someone.”
“Does it? Even for guys like us who don’t have anyone?” He pauses. “What about God? Do we matter to God? He made us, right? He must have had a reason.”
I don’t answer. I can’t. God is not my father. Azazel is my father.
We fall silent, still staring at the sky.
32: Breaking Through
Grace
The Grand Opening for the Lighthouse Bike Shop is March 15. It snows. A few people do stop by despite the weather, including Bree and Ethan, who are home on spring break. I’m sure Ethan, who probably can’t even ride a bike, is there for the free cookies. Still, it’s good to see them.
“Why did you have the opening in March?” Bree shivers and sips our Grand Opening—i.e. Emilia’s—hot chocolate while Ethan fills his pockets with Snickerdoodles. I don’t tell him I made them myself.
“It’s when the ice cream shops open.” I quote Silas, because I’d asked the same question a hundred times. You never know in Buffalo. It could be seventy degrees, or it could be snowing on any given day.
“The shop is cool, anyway.” Bree gazes around at the various bikes, all refurbished, hanging from the ceiling and lining the wall. I have to admit Silas and Mace did an amazing job. Silas painted the bikes in psychedelic colors and added cool, old-fashioned accessories like blaring horns, neon lights and streamers. One of them is tricked out with shiny metallic gizmos so it resembles a motorcycle. “I didn’t know Silas could fix bikes.”
“He can do pretty much anything.”
“Are you selling them? These are more like art pieces.”
“Silas mostly gives them away to anyone who needs them.” There are a lot of those. The shop has become a haven for quite a few local kids who need someplace to simply hang out. Silas teaches them how to fix bikes and helps them figure out their lives along the way. “This shop won’t be very profitable.”
“He’s like the Pied Piper.” Now Bree is watching Silas show some kid how to inflate a tire.
“It helps keep his mind off being sick,” I say. “And Shannon.”
“Shannon? He still has a thing for her?”
“He doesn’t talk about it.”
“But she’s married and having a baby. That makes her basically off limits.”
“Yeah.”
The news of Shannon’s pregnancy blew up social media. Everyone seemed to think it was wonderful, a sign that she had recovered from her “lingering cold” and is thriving in her role as First Lady of California.
“I guess she’s happy. I’m happy for her.”
“You haven’t spoken to her?”
“No. I’ve called but she never calls back. Guess she’s busy.”
“I guess.” Bree shrugs. “Nothing from Jared either?”
I shake my head and try not to cry, which is what I usually do when someone says his name. As much as I want to forget him, I still can’t. The mornings are the worst, lying in bed, searching for a reason to get up at all. Winter was long and dark and cold. But lately it’s been a little easier. Maybe it’s the bike shop, or the hope of spring, or that God and time have done some healing and I can move through the day with less pain. Jared is gone, but I’m still here, and I will get through this.
She sighs. “Where’s Penny?”
“Upstairs. She has homework.” Penny isn’t happy that we’ve opened the bike shop to the public. She’s still worried that Torega is lurking around, but we’ve seen no sign of him since Jared left.
Since Jared left. In fact, everything has been relatively normal since then. Maybe Jared took all the demons with him.
Ethan comes over, cookie crumbs on his chin.
“How’s school?” I ask.
“You know. Same old, same old.”
“He hates it,” Bree translates.
“Working on any new games?”
“The company wants a Wrath of the Watchers Two.” Ethan wipes his mouth. “The first one’s already sold over fifty thousand units.”
“Really?” I remember the night of the GAME-ON convention. Jared and Ethan in their goofy demon outfits. Bree and I dancing down the street. It seems like a million years ago.
“You should come over to my house tonight,” Bree says. “We can watch The Office, like old times.”
“Sure.”
***
That night, over popcorn and The Office in Bree’s basement, I tell my two oldest friends about Jared and Darwin Speer.
“You have got to be kidding,” Bree says.
“I read about this so-called scientific breakthrough,” says Ethan. “The Swiss Health Board already approved it for sale and GIBE has endorsed it.”
“What’s GIBE?” asks Bree.
“The Global Initiative for Biotechnology and Human Engineering. They’re working to eradicate genetic diseases through gene therapy.”
“So this is a good thing, right?” says Bree. “I mean, who doesn’t want to eradicate genetic diseases? Jared does have some pretty awesome genes.”
Ethan clicks away on his laptop. “Wow. It looks like Harry Ravel has already pushed through legislation to approve Speer’s treatment for use in California, ahead of the USDA. I bet those Hollywood movie stars are lining up as we speak.”
“Let me see that.” I scroll through the post. “This is unreal. How can they do this so fast?”
As I am scrolling, the subhead of another story on the sidebar stops me cold.
Dana Martinez, 26, found dead, former girlfriend of Darwin Speer.
33: Everywhere I Go
Jared
I gaze down from the top of a high bluff. The town of Alta hugs the harbor below. Everything is layered in snow, although it’s a clear day, for once, the first sunshine we’ve had in a very long time.
“What the heck is that?” Mike points to a silver, circular building that dominates the tiny town.
“The Northern Lights Cathedral.” The structure looks like a ribbon of spiraling steel rising to the sky. An arctic Tower of Babel.
“I can’t decide if it’s beautiful or the ugliest building I’ve ever seen.” He laughs. “It sure is different.”
He stayed with me through the entire trip. His leg healed rapidly, thanks to the Celox and, perhaps, to me. I could have moved a lot faster without him, but in the end, I decided I wasn’t really in that much of a hurry after all.
Mike was good company. He talked a lot, filling the nights and the still air between us with stories of his previous life
as a Marine sergeant and then a police officer in Chicago. This suited me. Listening to his constant prattle kept me from my own dark thoughts.
It took a month to get to Trondheim, and then we had to stop when the mountain trails were closed due to a series of severe snowstorms. We spent days on end laid up in a DNT cabin as the snow piled up around us. We played rummy and Go Fish with a deck of cards we found in a drawer or read some of the well-thumbed English-language paperbacks previous hikers had left behind. Mike ate endless sunflower seeds and told me about his travels since his retirement from the force, the people he’d met, and the times he almost got himself killed. The bear had not been his first brush with death. He planned to visit every single country on earth before he died. He only had twelve more to go.
Once the weather cleared, I borrowed a pair of skis from the cabin and we set out again. I had never skied before, but Mike showed me what to do. Once I got the hang of it we made good time, although we stopped often to take in the scenery. Mike took lots of pictures with an old point-and-shoot camera he had in his backpack. I noticed that, like me, he didn’t carry a phone.
The closer we got to the Nordland, the less in a hurry I felt. Had Grace and Ralph and everyone moved on with their lives? I thought of them often, especially Grace. Her absence weighed me down, like a stone I carried with me.
“Man, I hope there’s a decent hotel down there. I could use a shower and a hot meal,” Mike says. We haven’t had either in weeks.
We trudge down the hill and stop at the first inn we find, a rambling farmhouse on the outskirts of town. Inside, an elderly woman gives us the key to a large room with a kitchenette and private shower. Mike is thrilled beyond speech with the hot water and clean sheets. I take a shower and Mike gives our clothes to the proprietor to wash. I wear a threadbare bathrobe I find in the closet while Mike cooks the rest of the canned food we’d carried. We eat at a small dinette by the large window as the sun sets.
“We’ve walked twenty-one hundred kilometers.” Mike glances at his watch. He’s been keeping track the whole trip. “Thirteen hundred miles. That’s kind of crazy. Felt more like five thousand.”
“How’s the leg?”
“Fine. Good as new. Hey, want some coffee? I want to use up the last of it. And there’s a machine here.”
“Sure.”
Mike makes coffee and comes back to sit at the table.
“What’s next for you?” He sips from a mug of steaming liquid. “I mean, after you see your father.”
“I think…I’ll stay here for a while. It’s…where I belong.”
“There’s no place like home.” He puts his cup down. “I gotta tell you, though. I may be way off here, but something tells me you’re running from more than just your girlfriend. What is it? Are you wanted by the law?”
“Not the law.”
“You can be straight with me, you know. I’m not a cop anymore. We’ve been together for what…six months now? I’ve told you my whole life story. But you haven’t told me anything about your life. Talk to me. And don’t tell me this is all about a bad breakup, because I don’t buy it.”
I let out a long breath. “Okay. I’m going to see my father, who is a fallen angel chained up in the Abyss, deep in the earth under the island of Seiland, across that channel.”
Mike stares at me for a long time. Then he opens his mouth and laughs with gusto.
“I get it,” he says. “You don’t want to talk about it. Well, I tried.” He drinks his coffee. I stare out the window. “You need to know, though…no matter how far you run, you can never get away from yourself.”
I look at him.
“That’s what you’re really running from, isn’t it? It doesn’t work. I’ve tried it. Believe me. I’m a lot older than you.”
“I doubt that,” I murmur.
“Look. Whatever you’ve got going on in your life, I know it seems bad to you. But running away will not fix it. The way I look at things, you have to accept who you are, what you are, and go from there.”
“That’s what I’m doing.”
“Really? Look, Danny. I consider myself a fairly good judge of character, and I get the sense that you wish you were someone else. That you were a mistake, somehow. But can I tell you something? Something that’s really, really true? You aren’t a mistake. No matter what you think. No matter what you’ve done. You aren’t…forsaken.”
Why did he use that word? The word that runs through my mind like a never-ending song. Is he actually speaking a truth that I am unable to accept? No, it’s true for everyone else in the world, but not for me. Mike doesn’t know what I really am.
And yet, his words begin to replace that endless loop in my brain: Not forsaken, not forsaken, not forsaken… I want so badly for this to be true.
After he goes to bed, I stay up and stare at the sky. This is my last day on earth. Above it, anyway. The last time I will see these stars. The last time I’ll have a chance to hear the voice of God, a voice that has been silent my entire life. But has the voice truly been silent, or have I not been listening?
But then I remember. I set my course when I collaborated with the enemy. I surrendered. I am an agent of the world’s ruin, as have been all my ancestors. This is my fate.
I stay up all night, not wanting to miss a moment of the beauty still left in this world before it all fades to fire and darkness.
***
Early in the morning, I find my clothes, washed and pressed, outside the door of the room. I put them on and, leaving Mike sleeping peacefully, I tiptoe out, closing the door quietly. I slink down the creaky stairs. The front desk is empty so I go out the door unseen.
It’s cold and gray as I walk down the road toward town. The mist falls over everything like a harbinger of gloom. The town is larger than I expected, with neat rows of houses that seem the norm in this country. I head to the harbor and scan the few fishermen in the marina, getting ready to cast off for the day.
At the end of the pier, a small whaler with an outboard motor is tied up next to a larger fishing trawler. I approach the salty-looking fisherman on deck, preparing his nets.
“How much would you take for this boat?” I ask, pointing to the little whaler. I hope he speaks English.
“How much you got?” he replies in a crusty voice.
“Five hundred.”
He shakes his head. “Two thousand.”
“I don’t have that. How about if I rent it?”
“No rent.” The fisherman shakes his head. “Two thousand. Cheap.”
He seems fairly immovable. I open my mouth to try a different tack when a voice booms from the pier.
“I got this!”
I turn to see Mike hastening toward me, lugging his backpack as well as the one I had left behind. “You forgot this,” he says. He sets the backpack down and pulls a wad of kroner out of his pocket.
“No.” I hold up a hand to stop him. “You can’t come where I’m going.”
“Without my money, you aren’t going anywhere,” he says with a sniff. He turns to the boat owner. “There. Can you add some gas?”
The man pockets the money with a grunt. “Where are you headed?”
“Seiland,” I say.
“You want to take this little boat to Seiland? No, no. Why don’t you drive to Storsandnes and take the ferry to the hotel?”
“There’s a hotel on Seiland?”
“Yes, yes. Closed now. Open in the summer. Most for the scientists, miners. But the ferry runs all year in good weather. You want to go?”
“No,” I say. “I would rather go alone.” I turn to Mike. “Thank you. I can’t repay you.”
“That’s okay,” he says with a wave. “It’s been real, you know? Traveling with you. I wish you…joy, Danny No-Last-Name.”
I smile. “You too.” Sensing he might want to hug or something, I hasten to get into the boat, pull out the choke and yank on the starter. It turns over on the third try. I push the choke in slowly until the engine stops sput
tering. Mike unties me from the dock.
“Do you know how to drive this thing?” he asks.
“I’ll figure it out.” I put the throttle in reverse and back carefully away from the pier. Mike soon disappears into the mist. I push the tiller to turn the boat and head off in the opposite direction.
I can barely make out the outlines of land on either side of me as I navigate the channel. As long as I don’t run into one side or the other, I will eventually come to Seiland. The ailing engine drowns out any other sound on the water, even the hammering of my own heart.
Mike’s words still rattle around in my head. Not forsaken.
There is still time to turn around, to go back. He might still be there, waiting. We could go get a big breakfast, and I would tell him everything.
I keep going.
A half-hour later, the water grows thick with ice, and I know I’m closer to land. The fjord I want is to the north, farther up the channel, so I motor along the icy edge for a time until I recognize the deepest fjord on this side of the island—so deep that the water doesn’t freeze. My breath shortens as I steer the boat into it.
Staying close to the shore, I search along the steep, forbidding rockface for the waterfall that hides the cave entrance. That’s how Grace and I went through the last time. I motor back and forth twice, but I find no waterfall at all. Nor is there any opening in the rock, not even a sliver.
Finally, I stop searching and idle the engine. I bob in the water, wondering what went wrong. Is this the wrong fjord? After all these months, have I come to the wrong place?
Or is the portal to the Abyss now closed?
This is something I had not considered. My road ends here. I have no Plan B. No idea what to do now. I listen for the call of Azazel, but I hear nothing.
And then—something. A low rumble, gathering strength from above. The water shivers, rocking the boat. He’s here. Azazel. He’s coming for me. The rumble grows and the wind strengthens, creating a vortex in the water. The bow of my boat drops dangerously. I grab the throttle and throw it into gear, but the circling current is too strong. I feel the inexorable pull of the water dragging me under. This is Azazel, bringing me to him. I let go of the rudder.
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