The Rift

by Skn Hammerstone

  “That is why I believe that the first future is the one that you will follow,” he told me.

  “Is the child in the paintings mine and Jesse’s?” I wanted to know this more than what a lot of the other things were.

  “The girl?” he asked. “Yes. That was yours and Jesse’s child.”

  “When does that happen?” I questioned.

  “In a few years,” he said.

  “Is it the same in the other future?” I asked.

  “I’m not allowed to answer that,” he stated.

  “Why me? Why am I supposed to be this ruler? I only had one friend my entire life and he was born just to be my guardian. I can’t get people to like me and to follow me,” I really just didn’t want this, but it looked like I didn’t have a choice.

  “You are better than you think you are. You sell yourself short most of the time and condemn yourself for things that are not your fault. Why you? Because it’s what you were meant to be. Because you have the potential to be great,” Alexander explained.

  “I didn’t ask for this,” I tried. It wasn’t like Alexander could really do anything about it though.

  “Let me show you something,” Alexander began to walk towards the section of the room that was dedicated to my future, moving his cane back and forth in front of himself. He stopped and moved several of the hung paintings aside, pinning them in other places.

  There were many paintings I had not seen because of the layers and layers that lined the ropes stretched across his room. He stopped at one and took it out, handing it to me.

  “What do you see?” he wanted to know.

  “It’s a little girl sitting in a room with a baby,” I answered.

  “That little girl is a prophetess and the baby is yours and Jesse’s. As of now that little girl lives in a house without a mother where her father abuses her and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it. If you become the ruler of Earth, this little girl will be brought to you and she will never have to be with her father again.”

  “She will become like a second daughter to you and Jesse and she will live a happy life, flourishing from the teachings of the angels. Everyone has two futures and she is no different. If you don’t become the ruler, and there is a future where you do not, her father will kill her before she turns six years old.”

  “In the future where you do become a ruler and she is taken away from that man, your own daughter is going to be attacked by a demon. This girl saves your daughter’s life. If she dies at six, she can’t protect your daughter. She will never have even known her.”

  “Even if you do not become ruler, you and Jesse will have this baby girl but she will be killed by a demon. Whether you asked for this or not, this little girl is begging for it. She knows what her future could be without you. If for nothing else, become the peace maker and the ruler of Earth to save this little girl and your own little girl.”

  “So if I do not become the ruler of Earth, two innocent children will die?”

  “Not just them. Many other innocent people will also die because in the future where you do not become our queen, another will rule instead and they will destroy life. You will end war and crime. You can change this Earth and make it better. Isn’t that worth becoming our queen?” he made a good point.

  “You said that there was a future where I became a horrible ruler who creates a dystopian society. Would that be worse than if the other person ruled?”

  “Yes. It would be much worse,” he answered.

  “Then wouldn’t it be better to take the chance that it would never happen at all and just go with the other ruler?” If I could become this terrible queen, why would they want me?

  “If you could bring this world to the best that it both has and will ever be, isn’t it worth the chance?”

  “People don’t want me to be their queen,” I told him.

  “You don’t know that. I cannot force you to make this decision. My job is to only tell you what the possibilities are and try to keep you away from the choices that lead to the future Raphael does not want, but I can tell you that I believe you would make an amazing queen.”

  61

  “How did she react to her future?” Raphael asked, standing the exact same way he had been standing when he had talked to Rachael.

  “She doesn’t believe that she is good enough to be queen,” Alexander answered.

  “Good, that means she is on the right path to becoming the ruler we want,” he decided.

  “Not exactly,” Alexander told him. “Some of the things she is doing lead to her becoming the right ruler, but some of them lead to the other one.”

  “Stop these things then,” Raphael stated.

  “I can’t,” Alexander said. “You ordered them.”

  “What did I order that will cause her to follow the wrong future?”

  “You ordered her to reverse what she caused with Joshua. That choice could lead down the wrong road,” he explained.

  “Tell me this, in Joshua’s future, if he continues to be an avenging angel what does the future look like?”

  “It is not good. Blood, death, and revenge.”

  “Then I would rather she take a step in the wrong path that we can reverse than unleash a monster on the world.”

  “Yes my lord,” Alexander agreed.

  “What is Joshua’s next step?”

  “He continues to fight the demons,” he answered.

  “Good,” Raphael said. “You may leave.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Alexander left the room and carefully made his way back to his room where the painting of Joshua fighting hung, completed. He took it off the easel and hung it next to another showing Joshua in Rachael’s room with her.

  62

  I walked into the room I had been given to see Jesse asleep on his bed, his door open to my room. He had been even more tired than me because in addition to having to travel across the world, he had to protect me from harm and fight anyone who tried to hurt me.

  I took out the envelope that had been placed on my bed and took out the knife. It was the same knife that I had been holding over Joshua in one of Alexander’s paintings of the future. Was I going to kill him? I couldn’t do that. It seemed that certain steps had to be taken for each future to come true.

  If I didn’t have the knife, I wouldn’t be brandishing it like I was going to kill him. I took the knife and, noticing a dresser, put it in the bottom drawer. I would leave it there and never take it with me.

  I tried to fall asleep but I couldn’t. I kept tossing and turning and worrying about my future. I could be either the best ruler Earth had seen or the most terrible tyrant in history. It must have been around midnight and I still hadn’t fallen asleep so I got up and moved to Jesse’s room, getting into his bed.

  I was apparently going to have his kid in a few years anyway, although I didn’t know how that development was supposed to happen. Even if I didn’t feel that way about him, which it looked like I didn’t really have a choice with all of my futures putting me with him, he had an extremely comforting presence.

  Maybe it was something all guardian angels had in order to keep people calm when they were afraid. Whatever it was it had me asleep in a matter of minutes.

  63

  The voices woke me up a few hours later. They were even worse than before in the asylum and I didn’t know what they were. Shrieking and crying in my head. I stumbled out of Jesse’s bed and moved back into my own room. I needed help from someone who would understand but I didn’t know who that would be.

  Maybe Alexander knew what they were. I’m sure he must have seen this coming. Gabriel might know. He was an arch-angel. It turned out that I didn’t need to find help. Help had found me.

  “I apologize,” Joshua looked tired, worn out, and defeated. “Because you are destined to be the next angel of death the souls turn to you when they can’t reach me. I had to take a break from them. They have been getting worse and worse and it was slowly depriving me of my energy.”<
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  “I will take them back. I just need a few minutes to rest.” He sat down on my bed, his head in his hands. His whole world was falling apart and there was nothing he could do. The frontline must be worse than any war I had ever learned about.

  He was trembling with fatigue, desperate for just a few minutes of relief before he went right back into the fight. He didn’t deserve this. No one did. They wanted him on the frontline because he was an avenging angel. It made him deadly and a huge weapon but it was destroying him.

  “What did they do to you?” I asked.

  “They didn’t do this to me. I did it to myself.” He was shaking even harder now, struggling just to breathe. I couldn’t just let this happen to him. It wasn’t his fault I didn’t want to be with him anymore than it was Jesse’s fault I didn’t want to be with him. It was my fault for still loving a man who was dead.

  Ignoring the voices as best I could, I sat down next to him, letting him rest his head in my lap.

  “Shhh,” I rubbed his back, trying to at least stop the shaking. “It’s ok.”

  “No it’s not,” he said it wasn’t but he wasn’t shaking quite as violently. “I have messed up really bad this time. I’ve destroyed everything. I hurt you and I never meant to. I would take it all back if I could.”

  “You don’t have to take it back,” I told him. As soon as I had seen him I had remembered what Raphael had told me. I had to reverse what I had done or he would turn on Heaven. I couldn’t let that happen any more than I could let the innocent little girl Alexander had told me about die. “I was surprised and I didn’t think about what I said before I said it.”

  “I shouldn’t have told you. You didn’t need to know. It just gave you another thing to worry about,” he was getting worked up and the shaking was getting worse.

  “Stop, Joshua,” I told him. “I reacted like I would have reacted to anyone saying anything to me that I didn’t normally hear. With anger. But when I react with anger I just say whatever I think will make it go away.”

  “Even if what I’m saying isn’t true.” It sounded legitimate to me. Hopefully he would buy it too.

  “It’s my fault. It is all my fault. Everyone who is suffering right now and everyone who is hurt. I opened that rift and I caused this war.”

  “Stop blaming yourself! Sit up and look at me.” He slowly sat up, barely able to meet my eyes. “You couldn’t have stopped this. Someone was bound to do it sooner or later and it needed to be done so that Heaven and Hell could be separated again.”

  “I did all of this for a love that doesn’t even exist,” Joshua stated.

  “How do you know it doesn’t exist?” I couldn’t believe I was doing this.

  “You said so yourself,” he answered in confusion.

  “I lied,” I leaned forward and kissed him. There, it was done. I had made up this whole crazy story about how I actually wanted to be with him and wanted what he wanted in order to save the angels. Hopefully they were happy now.

  I pulled away and he looked at me in disbelief, the shaking completely gone. His eyes looked so familiar; so beautiful and so intoxicating. Had I known then the effect kissing an angel has on someone with angel blood I would never have done it.

  Because angels live forever, they are intended to be with the same angel forever in almost a forced faithfulness. When an angel kisses another angel, they are given a sense of euphoria that consumes them and makes it impossible for them to love another.

  It would wear off eventually for someone who wasn’t completely an angel because only angels were meant to have this feeling, but it would last long enough for me to do something I would later regret.

  He gently began to kiss me back but it wasn’t enough. I had to have him, all of him. He was like a drug that was impossible to give up. I clung to him, daring him to try to let go of me. It wasn’t a dare he was going to listen to.

  He was under that same euphoric effect and he wasn’t going to leave. Had I looked up then I would have seen Jesse come, disoriented, out of his room only to stop suddenly, his heart once again shattered on the floor.

  64

  I woke up, alone, the next morning wondering what had happened. Why had I done that? I was just supposed to reverse what I had done not completely go above and beyond that. I got out of the bed and found a set of training clothes laid out for me on the top of the dresser. I hadn’t been alone the whole morning then.

  The voices had stopped. I assumed Joshua had taken them back before he returned to the front line. He was lucky he was gone. I don’t know what he had done to cause that but I was furious. He had to have known what he was doing because I certainly didn’t.

  I put on what they had left me and opened the door, leaving the room. A group of other teenagers were moving down the hallway and I went with them. Jesse had left his room already and I had no idea where he had gone or where I was going.

  Several of the teenagers were whispering and glancing over at me. I hated being the center of someone’s attention. It made me uncomfortable but I found it worse to actually say something to them. It turns out I didn’t have to.

  “Are you Rachael Taylor?” One of them asked.

  “Yeah,” I answered.

  “Welcome to Sicily, Lady Rachael,” another one told me.

  “Thank you,” apparently that was my title and everyone was going to call me that. I didn’t really like it. It made me seem too uptight.

  “My name is Stephanie,” the first one spoke again. “This is Mathew. We’re students here.”

  “It’s nice to meet you,” it seemed like I had been meeting a lot of new people recently. “Are you both angels?”

  “Mathew is half angel, half human and I’m mostly angel with some demon,” Stephanie answered.

  “I’m…”

  “Half angel half demon,” she finished for me. “We know. You’re Alexander’s favorite subject in prophecy class.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. That must be really boring,” I told her.

  “No. You’re actually quite fascinating. Did you really get into a fight with the angel of death?”

  “A verbal one,” I said.

  “No one has ever been brave enough to do that. He’s really frightening actually,” she was in awe.

  “He’s not once you get to know him,” I stated.

  “He’s attractive isn’t he?” apparently he was fascinating to her as well.

  “I guess,” I shrugged. I wasn’t really happy with him right now.

  “It’s called an angelic trance,” Jesse caught up with me. “What he did to you last night.”

  “What exactly is that?” I asked.

  “It’s where a person with angel blood is given a feeling of euphoria when they kiss or are kissed by another person with angel blood. If you aren’t completely an angel, it wears off. If you are a full angel it never goes away.”

  “I didn’t know about it,” I told him. I could tell he was just as angry with me as I was with Joshua.

  “We have to get to class. Professor Alexander doesn’t like it when people are late,” Stephanie and Mathew moved faster to avoid us.

  “I get it, ok. I will never be as good as him no matter how hard I try and no matter what I do for you,” Jesse stated.

  “That isn’t true. I didn’t know about that whole angelic trance. If I had, it never would have happened!”

  “I can’t be like him ok? No matter how hard I try! The more powerful the angel, the more powerful and stimulating the trance. He has limitless power and he can just blow your mind. I will never be able to give you that.”

  “I don’t have enough power. You wouldn’t even feel anything different than you would if you were kissing a human. I’m useless.”

  “You could try,” I told him.

  “Yeah, cause that would do so much good,” he started to walk away from me.

  “I talked to Alexander yesterday. The prophet,” I said. He stopped walking. “He showed me two futures that I could have. In both of
them we had a little girl together.” Jesse turned around. I didn’t know if he was supposed to know that or not but I couldn’t let him go feeling like this.

  “When?” he asked.

  “In a few years. She’s going to have your eyes,” he still didn’t say anything.

  “I’m supposed to be the leader of the Earth when the veil is repaired. You’re going to rule beside me for the rest of our lives. We’re going to create a peace between Heaven, Hell, and Earth,” he definitely didn’t know this but I thought if I was going to be told, he should be told as well.

  “What about Joshua? What happens to him?”

  “I don’t know. He isn’t in any of my futures,” I didn’t mention the one with the knife because I didn’t know what that one meant.

  “What happens if you don’t become queen?”

  “We still end up together and we still have a daughter,” I answered. I didn’t mention the fact that she would die. It wouldn’t be helping my cause here. What was my cause though? Did I want to be with him or did I just want my friend back?

  Jesse walked slowly and hesitantly back over to where I stood.

  “Is this just to make me feel better? What happens in the other future? The one they don’t want you to have?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “They don’t want me to know anything about it because they don’t want it to happen. But they said that no matter what the future, I always end up with you.” That last part was a lie. I had no idea what happens in the third future.

  “Would it really work?” he asked.

  “You won’t know until you try,” he was probably right. It probably wouldn’t affect me but even if it didn’t, I would act like it had. My life was completely dictated for me and they wanted me to know that. That was why they told me my future. It was so they could force me into becoming what they wanted.

  I didn’t really have a choice either. I had to make Jesse think I wanted to be with him in order to have the daughter that was so important to my existence. Jesse cupped my face in one hand and leaned towards me, unsure.