2 The Judas Kiss

by Angella Graff

  Ben quirked an eyebrow. “Still, it’s weird.”

  Andrew mumbled something, but Ben couldn’t understand him with his mouth so full, and didn’t bother to ask the god to clarify. The pair rode again in silence, the car hurtling down the freeway, Ben unsure what was going to happen when they finally arrived at Greg’s office.

  Half-way through the trip, Ben looked over and saw Andrew’s head leaning against the glass, his eyes closed, breathing even and steady in sleep. Ben felt a momentary panic when he realized that the kid might wake instead of the god. Ben wasn’t exactly sure how he was going to explain why the kid was in a stranger’s car, having spent the last twenty-four hours in a drug-like state inside of his mind.

  Ben couldn’t tell the kid the truth about the situation, and if he used his detective status with a lie, the kid could report him and Ben would be fired, at the very least. Running his hand through his hair, Ben pressed his back against the seat of the car, trying to release some tension, and hoped that when the kid’s eyes opened, there would be an immortal thing looking out of them.

  Two hours passed before Ben’s question was answered. He’d finally been able to calm himself when he heard Andrew shifting. Glancing over as he weaved through the terrible freeway traffic, Ben saw Andrew’s eyes flutter open.

  There was a tense, pregnant pause before Andrew said, “I don’t understand sleep.”

  Ben let out a breath, his heart thumping in his ears, and he cleared his throat. “Part of our nature, I guess.”

  “You look frightened,” Andrew said. He started rummaging around in the empty fast food bags, looking somewhat put out when he turned up nothing. “I want to eat again. How often do humans have to do that?”

  “Every few hours, though some of us can go a lot longer than that,” Ben said, choosing to ignore Andrew’s first statement. “We’ll stop before we reach Greg’s office.” He glanced at the clock on the dash and realized they would be there in just under two hours.

  Andrew sighed and put his head back against the headrest. “I dislike this body.”

  “Well I’d prefer you stay in it until you can get that kid back to where he came from,” Ben warned as he pressed harder on the gas pedal. He didn’t want to be in the car anymore, and Andrew was becoming increasingly antsy.

  “I’m not going to just leave him on the side of the road,” Andrew said snappishly. “I’m making a simple statement that these bodies are fragile and exhausting. They pull on so much of my reserves that it’s a wonder I have the strength to do anything.”

  Ben licked his lips and gave a slow nod. “You get used to it after a while.”

  “Not if I can help it,” Andrew said.

  Ben fell into another silence as they hurtled down the freeway toward the city of San Diego. His mind trailed back to Stella in that hotel room and he wondered just how deep she’d gotten herself into the mess Ben was still trying to clean up. He cared about her, there was no denying that, and before he’d known about her involvement, he saw their relationship going somewhere.

  A wave of frustration hit Ben and he gripped the steering wheel tightly, giving his head a little shake. “I can’t believe she lied to me,” he muttered.

  Andrew quirked an eyebrow. “You’re thinking about Stella?”

  Ben let out a short breath, trying to calm himself down. “I should have listened to those jackasses when they tried to tell me she knew. Greg warned me more than once, and I wrote him off.”

  “You mortals see what you want to see, it’s part of your grand illusion. If you were all made aware of the reality of your world, you’d all go mad. Your mind isn’t quite capable of understanding everything. That’s why your cycle of life repeats itself so much.”

  Ben’s eyes flickered over to Andrew. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh everything. The entire cycle of birth, life and death, just repeating over and over like some sort of mad game of ring-around-the-rosies. You just spin and spin and fall and get right back up again, forgetting how much it hurt to hit the ground the first time. It’s only when your souls are battered, bloody and broken that you finally start to realize that there’s a lesson to be learned.” Andrew gave a little chuckle and shook his head. “You, for example. You’ve had a gun ripped out of your bare hand by a powerful god and you still doubt our existence. I could lift you into the clouds and you’d find some way to deny it.”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that,” Ben bit, feeling defensive and confused.

  Andrew waved him off, smiling a little. “I’m not criticizing you, Benjamin, I’m merely pointing out the nature of your existence as a human. We were a lot like you, once. We all go through it, newborn beings thrown into existence by a grand force of energy without real explanation. We stumble and cry, we rage and search for the meaning of it all and eventually, as a whole, we learn. Now, there are a few stubborn ones, the arrogant ones who never learned their lessons. The naughty children who should be standing with their noses in corners. Those little things never learn their lessons and continue to blunder around, all the wrong ideas, never moving on.”

  “And what about you?” Ben asked, unable to stop himself.

  Andrew smiled. “Dreamer, I guess. The romantic, you beings have come to call it. Seduced by the elements, unable to let go, despite it being my time. I like the wind, and the storm. They’re chaos, but I understand their nature. They make sense to me.”

  Ben didn’t know what to say to all of that, so he kept silent, letting Andrew’s words settle into his brain. It made sense, on some fundamental level, and as much as Ben didn’t quite believe him, Andrew had a better point than the crazy beings he’d met so far. He had a better point than the arrogant people who wanted the world to believe that God was a petulant toddler who would burn you for eternity for not subjugating and worshiping the right way.

  San Diego city, along the same coast but an entirely different world, soon came into view. It was late afternoon, and a haze had settled over the city from the sea air, and the rolling green hills looked misty and dense. The traffic was terrible as Ben came to a near stop, creeping along at a snail’s pace, searching for his exit.

  Andrew was becoming restless, fidgeting in his seat a lot, and Ben knew it would be best to get him out of the car as soon as possible. It was obvious the god, and probably the kid, didn’t like confined spaces, and they’d been in the car for hours.

  After twenty-minutes at crawling speed, Ben was able to take an exit and pulled into the parking lot of a strip mall littered with restaurants and shops. Andrew was out of the car before Ben could put it into park. Grabbing his wallet from the glove box, Ben got out and locked up.

  “This isn’t where Greg works,” Andrew said, shielding his eyes from the low sun with his hand. “What are we doing here?”

  “Whatever you want to talk to Greg about is going to have to be after office hours,” Ben said. He checked his watch and then looked at the line of buildings, deciding that a little Vietnamese Pho restaurant looked the most appetizing. "I know we’re pressed for time, but while you might not have to worry about your job, I’m a cop and the last thing I need is to cause a scene and break the law.”

  Without waiting for Andrew’s reply, Ben strolled across the pavement and opened the door to the restaurant. The smell of rich spices flooded his nose, and Ben realized that he was starving. Andrew was close at his heels and they were seated at a small table near the window.

  Andrew seemed perplexed by the menu so Ben ordered a couple of large Pho, which arrived quickly. After showing Andrew how to compose the noodles, cilantro, spices, and sprouts with the broth in the large bowl, the two men devoured their meal in relative silence, simply enjoying the time out of the car.

  “I think I should give Greg a call,” Ben said as he pushed his nearly empty bowl away from him.

  “Not the best idea,” Andrew said. “Greg knows that you’re going to be contacted by someone. Asclepius is keeping him in the loop, and although he might no
t be well liked, there are enough of his kind out there to feed him basic information.”

  Ben let out a breath and ran a hand over his face. “Okay, so what do you suggest? Barge into his office?”

  “Perhaps less barging and more showing up unannounced,” Andrew said with a shrug. “I don’t want to cause a scene, but it’s more than important that we reach the portal.”

  “Why?” Ben finally asked. “I mean, who are we going to talk to, exactly, and why does it have to be in Greg’s office?”

  Andrew crossed his arms and sat back against the hard, wooden chair. His eyes met Ben’s for the longest time before he answered. “I wonder if they’d bothered to explain more to you, you would have understood it. Maybe you would have moved faster.”

  Ben felt his face heat up. “Maybe I would have saved my sister’s life, you mean?”

  “Your sister isn’t dead,” Andrew said, giving Ben the answer to his unspoken question. “I’m not entirely sure how they managed to save her body. God knows these things are bloody fragile and there was nothing I could do to keep that priest’s heart working. But…” he trailed off and shrugged. “She’s alive.”

  “Nike has her?” Ben asked, his voice a low growl.

  Andrew nodded casually. “That she does. Nike’s a bit sentimental, if you will. Doesn’t like to body hop, and those Greek morons haven’t quite figured out how to use bodies with an active consciousness, so their choices are fairly limited between brain-dead humans, and keeping their hosts severely drugged.”

  “But you’ve figured out how to use someone without drugging them,” Ben said, a half-question.

  “It’s not complicated, for our kind, anyway. Then again, I’m a lot older than they are. While you humans are the infants, they are the toddlers, the Greeks. They came in well after we were here.”

  “The Norse gods?” Ben asked a little snidely.

  “The Norse folk who named us and began to worship us came around long after we’d lost corporeal form,” Andrew said. “We could still talk to them from time to time, and I’ll admit their sacrifices were tempting, and some of them had stories interesting enough for us to stop and listen. Heimdall, they called me. The guardian. I always found it interesting how humans would explain away phenomenon. Take the rainbow for example. Before humans discovered it was light reflecting through water vapor, they believed it was a bridge to where we lived. They believed that we had form like theirs, and waged battles similar to their own. I found the idea that I was a guard, a watcher, a little perplexing, but I suppose it was because I spoke the least. I liked to watch them, but I liked to watch the storms even more. I was more interested in mixing my form with the wind and rain once I discovered how.”

  Ben was listening with a deep frown, drawing back years before on his mythologies class he’d taken in college. He remembered the big ones, Thor, Odin, Loki. He remembered the stories, his friends had all read the comic books and occasionally there were TV shows and movies. He remembered the legends vaguely, but what Andrew was saying struck something in him. Something he didn’t know how to explain away.

  “We had long since surpassed corporeal form when the others came. The ones who settled in Greece and Rome, as they would become. They were childish, greedy and forceful. We tried to warn them, the humans were getting more aware, more powerful, and more persistent. When they began to copulate with them, to reproduce, we warned them that it wasn’t meant to be, but they didn’t listen to us.” Andrew took a long drink of his tapioca milk tea and sighed. “They figured out how to inhabit human bodies before we did, but then again, we weren’t really interested in doing that at the time.”

  “So what made you interested?” Ben asked.

  “Necessity,” Andrew said simply. “This isn’t the first time our little friends have attempted something stupid. A lot of my kind had moved on, gone back through the god portals to wherever we came from and, as you humans call it, evolved. A higher state of consciousness or being. Frankly I was in love with the elements, and I saw no hurry to leave. It wasn’t until all of the gods began losing power that the portals began shutting down. I never realized it was us that kept them going, kept them open, allowing the newborn gods through to live out their existence until they were ready to move on.”

  As crazy as it sounded to Ben, it made sense on a logical level. “So you’re stuck here?”

  Andrew gave a short shrug. “I don’t think so. Not yet, anyway. Eventually, if we don’t cross back over before all of the portals shut down, we will be. I think at some point we will simply fade into nothing, become the elements. I don’t actually know. Funny, isn’t it? The humans worship gods, and expect them to know what happens beyond death, but we know no more than you.”

  Ben took a long drink of his water and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. He stared at Andrew, processing what he was saying. He still didn’t quite believe him, and smiled at the irony of what Andrew had mentioned earlier, about being faced with the impossible and yet still unable to believe what was right in front of him. He glanced down at his phone and saw it was about time to leave.

  “We should head out. There’s going to be a small window of time where Greg will be in his office after the patients leave. If we wait any longer, he may head off home and we’ll lose our chance. Mark and my sister broke in once, already, so there’s probably going to be higher security around his office.”

  Andrew nodded and waited while Ben paid the food tab. They headed back out to the car, Ben sliding behind the wheel, and within minutes they were back on the road. The office wasn’t far from the restaurant, and as Ben pulled into the hospital parking lot, he was struck with the memories of when he’d first come here.

  Mark had been with them, in his disguise of a blind priest, Abby madly in love with him, defending every psychotic thing that came out of his mouth. Ben’s mind was still reeling from his brush with cancer, and asking him to process an immortal gospel writer and the Biblical bad-guy Judas had just been too much for the over-worked detective.

  Now, however, Ben had been through so much that he was simply tired. His mind had been stretched beyond its capacity for actual understanding, and now, when a kid riding a skateboard walked up to him and claimed to be an immortal god who needed his help, he simply accepted it and moved on.

  The parking lot was rapidly emptying of cars, nurses going home after their shifts, the final patients and hospital visitors walking out to their cars, faces somber. This hospital wasn’t the happiest place to be. It was a behavioral health hospital that specialized in neurological problems, and from what Ben had seen, a lot of the cases were hopeless.

  That much could be seen from the visitors heading back out to their cars, faces drawn, eyes down. They walked stooped, defeated, and Ben knew exactly what that felt like. The pair got out of the car and tried not to make eye contact with anyone as they walked in the front doors.

  There was no one at the security desk and Ben wondered if Andrew had something to do with that as they approached the elevator. Ben jabbed the button and a moment later, the doors opened. Ben hit Greg’s floor and as the elevator made its slow trek up, he looked over at his companion.

  “So do you have a plan? And you never did tell me who you were going to contact.”

  Andrew looked up at the checkered lights on the elevator roof and gave a little sigh. “I plan to order Greg to open the portal so I can have a chat with someone who might have some information on Mark and Judas’ whereabouts.”

  “And this friend is?” Ben pressed.

  “Truthfully?” Andrew asked. “Truthfully I don’t want to tell you because you’re not going to believe me, and the human notoriety of this god is rather… intense.”

  Ben frowned, confused by Andrew’s hesitation. Even Greg, who seemed to spill information like a fountain at times, kept a lot of the details from Ben. Andrew was the first to openly discuss the nature of his being, his plans, and his name right from the start. “So what if I know him?”

&n
bsp; “Your acceptance in this situation is fragile at the very least,” Andrew said. The elevator gave a sharp ding, and the electronic voice announced the floor. The pair walked out and stood in front of an empty nurse’s station. “If I give you a name like ‘Zeus’, you’re going to become defensive.”

  Ben sighed and looked over at the empty desks. “Are you doing this?” he asked, gesturing to the empty chairs.

  “I thought it might be easier if the watchful eyes were sent on a brief task. Nothing dangerous. They just all needed a cup of coffee and bathroom break. I didn’t want to be delayed in getting to Greg’s office.” Andrew’s voice was matter-of-fact, and he led the way down the familiar hall, Ben close at his heels.

  Through the windows on either side of the large wooden door, Ben could see light in the front of the office. He stepped ahead of Andrew and tried the handle, but it was locked. With a sigh, Andrew nodded and Ben felt the lock shift under his hand.

  “Go on,” Andrew pressed.

  Still unused to these nonchalant displays of power, Ben shook off his nerves and pressed forward, stepping into the warm office. He shut the door behind him softly, and motioned Andrew to follow him to the back office where light shone under the closed door, letting them know that Greg was still in.

  As they approached, Ben smelled a sudden waft of cigar smoke and realized that they were about to meet Asclepius instead of the human version of the neurology doctor. He turned to Andrew whose expression and raised eyebrow told Ben that he was already aware of the god’s presence.

  Ben gave a short nod and without knocking, walked right in. Asclepius sat behind Greg’s desk, his feet up, a cigar pinched between his left thumb and forefinger, and a glass of scotch in the other hand. He looked up, his eyebrows raised in mild surprise, and he grinned at the pair.

  “Well I guess I owe Gregy five bucks,” he said as Ben and Andrew walked in. “He seemed pretty paranoid that you were going to show up. And with a friend, too. How thoughtful.”

  Ben stepped aside and Andrew walked forward. “I need the portal.”