“Whose was this?” I asked.
“Joshua’s,” she answered. “He doesn’t need it anymore.”
“Why did you give this to me?”
“It isn’t exactly what it seems but only you can discover what it really is.”
“You’re Elizabeth, Azrael’s partner.” I had figured it out a long time ago.
“I am.”
“Did it ever occur to you what your curse would cause?”
“I knew exactly what it would cause. The veil being torn again, the war, you.” She sat down on the hotel bed. “It was on purpose. Was it going to hurt Joshua? Yes. But in the end, it is going to separate Heaven from Hell once again.”
“What do you want from me? What do I mean to you?”
“Anna may be your mother and John may be your father, but I created you,” she said.
I turned towards her. She was a strange looking angel. Maybe it was because of the loss of Azrael or the strain of being the angel of death, but she wasn’t light like the other angels I had seen. She wore all black. Even her hair was black. Her wings were a silvery color like the rest of the angels which meant she wasn’t a fallen angel.
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t remember me because you haven’t seen me since you were a newborn baby. You were my gift to a dying world. Because of you this world will be able to live on forever. The veil will be repaired but it will be left with a door. One that can be opened from the inside or the outside.”
“You will become the ruler of Earth. Death will no longer have to be a permanent thing. Humans will be able to travel to the organized and safe realms of Heaven and Hell. Peace will be everywhere.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because I can give you whatever you want. You want Avery alive again? I’m an angel of death. I can give him to you. You want Josh to rule by your side? I will give him to you. You want your real mother to be with you? I will get her back from the demons. You want your father? You can have him too.”
“I don’t understand why you would do all of this for me,” I told her. It seemed too good to be true.
“Because what you want, I want too. I can give you all of the power you need to do this. I have lived under this divided and unhappy rule for too long. I will help you divide it into three separate but equal worlds that all have access to each other. There will be peace and prosperity everywhere.”
“I would serve as your angel of death. You would never have to kill anyone. It would be the perfect Utopia.”
“Rachael?” Jesse called from another room.
“Just think about it. You could rule with all of your hopes and dreams.” Elizabeth dissolved into the bed. Of all of the deals I had been offered by various angels, this was by far the most important and the hardest to decide.
60
Gabriel was waiting for us on the balcony, alone.
“I am going to take you to a very special place where I will train you to fight in this war with others who have been waiting for you.”
“Who would be waiting for me?”
“Some very special people,” he answered. “Jesse, how is your wing?”
“It’s alright,” he said.
“Can you fly?” Gabriel asked.
“Yeah,” Jesse told him.
“How well?”
“How far?”
“We’re going to the training facility in Sicily. We have about 2 days to teach you how to fight before the front line reaches our doors,” Gabriel told him.
“I can make it,” I don’t think he was completely sure he could but he was going to try anyway.
“Good. Rachael, I am assuming you have never flown before so this will be an experience you will probably not enjoy. It will be much better when you have your own wings,” Gabriel shifted his own wings that rivaled even Joshua’s in wingspan. Jesse released his wings and waited for Gabriel.
Gabriel held out his hand to me and I took it.
“Hold on tight,” he instructed.
“What?” all he was going to do was hold my hand? He didn’t give me a chance to change my mind as he jumped from the balcony. Did it feel like flying? No. It felt like falling at massive speeds. The surroundings were passing too fast for me to see. The only thing I could focus on was Jesse, who was flying beside me.
He was too concentrated on flying to say anything. I wanted to enjoy it, but it was impossible. The wind made it impossible to breathe if you looked straight ahead and it was freezing cold. Imagine being strapped to the outside of a jet and you pretty much know exactly what it feels like.
I pitied airplanes now. It must be awful to do this all of the time. We were only in the air for a few minutes before Gabriel landed in front of an ordinary looking warehouse on the island of Sicily.
“Welcome to our training center for young angels and half-breeds,” Gabriel opened the door and we went in. It was vastly bigger on the inside than it was on the outside and completely metal. There were several doors leading out of the huge main room that we had walked into where about 30 young angels were training with several more experienced angels.
“Most of them will become guardians for normal human beings but they all dream of one day guarding someone as important as you. All of them know who you are. We have all been rooting for you for a long time.”
“Why?” I asked. I still didn’t understand why so many people knew who I was and why so many people looked up to me. I knew little pieces, a soul strong enough to close the rift, the ability to separate Heaven and Hell, and I could possibly end up as the next angel of death but that was all I knew and I didn’t understand why that would be so widespread and why everyone would be waiting for me.
“That will be part of your training. Before we start that, however, you need to meet a few familiar faces. Jesse, would you go tell Jacob to prepare a room for her with an adjoining room for yourself?” Jesse nodded and walked away.
“Come with me,” Gabriel led me to one of the doors and opened it. It led to a hallway, still made completely out of metal, lined with more doors. He continued the entire way down the hallway to the final door.
“Not all of the people we wanted you to see could come. We had a few who were unable to leave the frontlines. But of the ones that could, I think you will be very pleased to see them,” he opened the door and I walked in.
Anna stood in the room with Avery.
“Well look who decided to finally show up,” Avery was the first to say anything.
“Avery?”
“It hasn’t been that long. You’d think a sister would recognize a brother when she saw one.” I ran over to him and he practically lifted me off of the ground, spinning me around in a circle.
“How did you get away from Job and the demons?” I asked. It couldn’t have been easy.
“I had my connections,” he said. “I know you met your Mom a while ago.”
“You made it out,” I said to Anna.
“I also had my connections,” she told me.
“Where’s Josh?” I suddenly realized who was missing of the angel and the two dead souls.
“He couldn’t make it out,” Avery stated, a strange look on his face. “They couldn’t let him come. They needed him too much.”
“There is someone else you need to meet but this is someone you have not met before,” Gabriel led me out of the room and to another hallway. This one was more decorated than the other one had been.
“The person you are going to meet here is the most powerful person you will ever meet. Respect him. Just because you are powerful, it doesn’t mean you can disrespect him. You will have noticed that many of the angels call angels who are higher than them lord or lady. You must call this angel lord. He is not forgiving for lack of respect towards him,” Gabriel opened another door and I walked in.
An angel who looked like a man in his mid-forties stood with his back to us, staring out of a window. He had blonde hair and he wore a black suit. It seemed to be ver
y common for angels to have blonde hair. It must have had something to do with the light.
“Lord Raphael,” Gabriel spoke. “I have brought her to you.”
“Leave, Gabriel,” Raphael told him.
“Yes my lord,” Gabriel left the room and closed the door, leaving me alone with the leader of Heaven.
“So you are Rachael,” he didn’t turn around.
“Yes, my lord,” I followed Gabriel’s instructions. If an angel that the angel of death called lord referred to Raphael as lord, I knew he was powerful.
“You don’t seem like much,” he hadn’t even turned around to look at me and he was already making assumptions. I agreed with him though.
“I’m sorry my lord. I can’t change the way I was born.”
“You weren’t born like this. That human woman has destroyed you. You were supposed to be great. You should have been trained and protected but her demon deals made it impossible.” I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of anything to say to him. I agreed with him though. She had messed me up.
“Do you know why you are here?”
“To fight in the war against Hell and to close the veil.”
“Do you know what you are?” was his next question.
“I am a half-breed,” I answered.
“That is not what you are,” he told me.
“I’m Rachael Taylor, the future angel of death,” I tried.
“That is not what you are either,” he was completely calm, never changing his tone.
“I am the person who can close the rift,” I tried again.
“These are all who you are, not what you are,” he said.
“Is there a difference?” I had thought I was naming what I was.
“Yes, there is. If you do not know the difference between what you are and who you are it explains why you cannot answer my question,” he told me.
“I don’t think I know what I am,” I said. “I didn’t know I was different from anyone else until a few weeks ago.”
“You need to know what you are before you can become what you are supposed to be. In order to know what you are now, you must learn what you are going to be,” that made next to no sense.
“How do I know what I am going to be if I do not know what I am now?” I wanted to know.
“You are going to meet someone else who can tell you that,” he said. “There are many things you need to catch up on because you did not know about any of this. I trust you at least know the kinds of angels?”
“Yes my lord,” I told him.
“In addition to the more pleasant things that you have and will cause, there is something that you have caused that needs to be addressed,” he continued with the same tone but I knew that it wasn’t good.
“The rift,” I guessed.
“No. You didn’t cause that. It was Joshua’s choice. What you did cause was the rekindling of an avenging angel’s fury,” he began to explain. “You see, this angel was a vicious avenging angel a long time ago and he was able to control his rage and eventually become very similar to a normal angel with only occasional flare ups of anger.”
“Until you broke his heart again. Joshua is deadly when he isn’t in a rage but in a rage, he’s an enormous problem. You are going to have to fix this. He is destroying the demon frontlines right now, but what happens when there are no more demons for him to injure? He will turn on us.”
“Before this war is over, you need to change the avenging angel status.”
“How?”
“Reverse what you did to cause it,” Raphael stated.
“I can’t.”
“Yes you can. What you cannot do is say no to me. No one says no to me,” even when his message was angry, he was not. Nothing seemed to faze him. “It will be easier than you think.”
“How can you know that?” I questioned.
“I know a great deal of things that no one else knows. It is why I am the leader of Heaven,” he explained. “But you must go now to meet the person I mentioned earlier. They are a very interesting type of human that I think you can learn a great deal from.”
The door opened and Gabriel walked back in.
“Yes, my lord?” he asked.
“Take Rachael to Alexander,” he ordered.
“Yes, my lord,” I started to follow Gabriel.
“And Rachael,” Raphael added.
“Yes, my lord,” I stopped.
“Do not let what you see corrupt you. You can go one of two ways. One of them is the way we want you to go and the way that will ensure peace and harmony, restoring the Earth to the way it was meant to be.”
“The other way is not a good way to go, but there is an equal chance that you will go that way. Only you can make this decision.”
“Yes, my lord,” I began to follow Gabriel again and the door closed of its own accord behind us.
“You will like this next person. His name is Alexander and he is an… interesting character.” Gabriel went over to an elevator and I went in. The floor numbers were all written in Hebrew characters but from the location of the button he pushed, I was pretty sure we were going to the top floor.
“He likes to be high up. He says it helps him think,” Gabriel explained. The elevator moved up far past where the roof of the building should have been before it stopped and the door opened to a hallway that looked exactly like the ones downstairs.
Gabriel showed me down the hallway to a door near the middle. He opened it to a room that was very different from the uniform appearance of the other ones. It was filled with paintings. Each one of them depicted a different event in recent history from nine eleven to Afghanistan.
“Alexander?” Gabriel asked.
“In the back, Gabriel,” he answered. Gabriel walked towards the back of the large room and I followed. Every one of the paintings was perfectly done, almost like a photograph. I began to recognize some of them as people I actually knew as I got farther into the room. There was one of Joshua making a deal with Jesse.
That had been recent, obviously. There were also a few of just Joshua and Jesse. What became truly unsettling was when I began to appear in these paintings. The first ones were things I had experienced. The alley with Josh, the asylum, Elijah’s attack on the boat, Daniel in France, and the fateful recent experience in Venice.
That was when they ceased to be things I already knew. Every painting I came across was of me but I had never experienced any of these events. Bloody battles, strange but peaceful scenes with Joshua. Not all of them were quite this normal though. There was one of Jesse kneeling before me and another of him kissing me or was I kissing him?
There was another of me holding a knife over Joshua’s head and one of a door surrounded by a shimmering black material with me standing with a key. There was what seemed to be a several year gap between that one and the next. In following painting I was dressed in strange clothes, sitting on a throne, surrounded by kneeling angels and humans as well as demons.
Many of them reflected this same scene with me as ruler over a group of people but as they progressed it seemed that I was in the late stages of pregnancy. The last one was of me and Jesse with a dark haired baby girl.
“Lady Rachael,” a teenage boy with dark hair was sitting in front of a bright window, another painting half-finished in front of himself depicting Joshua as an avenging angel destroying the demon army. A huge, disturbing beast lurked in the background.
He wore sunglasses, most likely to protect his eyes from the sun.
“My name is Alexander and it is a pleasure to finally meet you,” he reached for an ornately carved cane and stood. He moved the cane back and forth in front of himself as he approached me, holding out his hand.
I shook his hand and he smiled, taking off his sunglasses. His eyes were clouded over.
“Did you paint all of these?” I asked, although what I really wanted to know was if he was blind. If he had painted them though, he couldn’t be.
“Do you like them?” he wan
ted to know.
“I don’t understand them,” I admitted.
“At one point, all of them were the future. Some of them still are and some have become the past,” he said, he tilted his head to one side, his eyes staring off into space. “I am the last prophet on Earth. I see these events in my mind and I paint them but I can’t see them anymore once they have been put on paper.”
“Why not?” I questioned, although I was pretty sure I already knew the answer.
“Because I’m blind,” he stated. “Most people don’t think that blind people can paint or see what things look like in their head. But I can. That was how they realized I was a prophet. I occasionally see world events but many of the things I see are about specific people.”
“Like me?” I asked.
“Yes, like you,” he answered. “You have been the most intriguing person I have ever seen in my visions.”
“I’m not that interesting,” I told him.
“You wouldn’t think so from the paintings that I have on display. It seems that you are just the person that everyone has told you that you are the entire time. The repairer of the rift, future angel of death. But there is another, far different future that I have started to see about you.”
“Raphael has taken all of the paintings I have made of it in order to keep you towards the right path but there is an equal amount of probability that you will follow the second future as there is that you will follow the first.”
“What is wrong with the second future?” I asked.
“It is exactly the same as the first in appearance, you as ruler of Earth and restorer of peace. A loyal angel by your side and your first born child. But I’m sure you have heard of the term dystopian society.”
“I don’t think I have,” I told him.
“It is essentially the opposite of a Utopian society. In your first future you successfully rule a Utopian society. In the other it is a dystopian society. On the outside it appears the same as a Utopian one, but the farther in you go the more corrupt it becomes. You could become a very great leader or you could become the most terrible tyrant we have ever seen.”
“I don’t want to rule Earth,” I had been trying to tell people this for a while now. I didn’t want to be a ruler, I didn’t want to be the angel of death, and I didn’t want to be the repairer of the rift.
The Rift Page 16
