The Rift
Page 22
“Take care of her Jesse,” he ordered. “You cannot let anything hurt her.”
“I won’t,” Jesse agreed. Job smiled in satisfaction. He had won and gained a show of angelic suffering.
“It’s ok, baby,” Joshua took her face in his hand and firmly kissed her. “I love you, Rachael.” He took several shaky breaths, the last one ending in a death rattle.
“Rest in peace, my friend,” Alexander stated. Rachael bowed her head and let go of his hand.
“Get her out of my way,” Job told Daniel. Daniel started to walk over.
“Don’t touch her,” Jesse moved in front of him and went over to Rachael. “Come with me.” He helped her to her feet and guided her away, an arm around her waist. Job moved over to the body.
“Warning; this will not be a sight for the weak of heart or over emotional. If you meet either of these criteria, you should look away,” Job said, mockingly. He stood over Joshua and got a good grip on the hilt of the dagger. Taking a deep breath, he pulled it quickly out. Joshua’s body jerked and he grabbed Job by the throat. An angry stream of Hebrew erupted from his mouth before he once again fell back on the ground.
Job brushed off his suit and stepped over Joshua’s once again still body.
“I should brush up on my Hebrew before I jump to conclusions but I believe I was just called every curse word in the dead language. Such hostility after all I have done for him,” Job held out a hand and the gold sheath was ripped away from Rachael’s hip.
“Thank you,” Job slid the dagger into its case. “That will be the last you will hear from him. Congratulations, Lady Rachael. You’ve been promoted to angel of death and you’ve become queen of this entire Earth. Enjoy. I am sure you will visit me. I have an open door policy.”
“Daniel. Call off the army and return them to Hell. Joshua will soon be paying for our energy bill. Enjoy your new lover, Jesse. You only have a few months for that.”
“What do you mean by that?” Jesse demanded, keeping a protective arm around Rachael’s waist.
“Rachael knows,” Job smiled and began to walk away with his demons and fallen angels. “Elizabeth knows too.”
“I have no idea what he’s talking about,” Elizabeth stated.
“I don’t care!” Rachael snapped. “Joshua is dead.” She tried to stay strong and hide her tears but she couldn’t. Jesse held her quietly. He had expected to be dead by now, but it hadn’t been him. It was Joshua.
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The coffin was carefully taken into a crypt several days later; Joshua’s body inside, forever at rest as the only casualty of the war. All other souls, demon, human, and angel, had been restored to their bodies. It was a small crowd gathered at the grave, only the arch-angels, Alexander, Anna, Elizabeth, Jesse, and Rachael.
Rachael had her face covered with a black veil. It could have been to hide her emotions or hide herself from her newly found subjects; either way it almost completely obscured her face. Joshua’s coffin was lowered onto a pedestal inside the crypt and the four angels who had carried it backed out of the small building.
One by one the angels gathered said their goodbyes before leaving the crypt until Rachael, Jesse, and Elizabeth were the only three left.
“Do you want me to leave?” he asked Rachael. She nodded. “Alright.” He kissed her forehead and left to wait for her outside. Rachael lifted her veil and there was no sign of tears or sadness. Only quiet satisfaction.
“You have done very well, Rachael,” Elizabeth told her.
“They believed all of it, mistress,” Rachael stated.
“Every last fake tear and every last agonized word,” Elizabeth laughed quietly. “I found the scrolls.”
“Where are they?” Rachael asked.
“In a museum in England. I will send someone to get them,” Elizabeth answered.
“No one suspects anything?” she questioned.
“Not even Raphael or Alexander, that little prick,” she said, with a last insult for the blind prophet.
“Good,” Rachael looked down at the Joshua’s cold, pale body.
“What about you?” Elizabeth hinted. “Did it work?”
“Yes, but I believe Job knows,” Rachael said.
“He knows, but no one suspects it and Job won’t come out and tell anyone directly,” Elizabeth reassured her.
“We’ll tell Jesse it’s his. He’ll know when it comes that it isn’t, but until then he will have no idea,” Rachael decided.
“You’re going to have to make sure he has reason to believe that and you need to do it soon,” Elizabeth advised her.
“I will. It won’t be hard,” Rachael put the veil back on. “This is almost too easy.” Rachael left the crypt. Elizabeth leaned down towards the body.
“You think you have made the greatest sacrifice in dying for the woman you love. You left this Earth with the thought that she loved you. You were wrong. Burn in Hell, Joshua, knowing that she never loved you.”
Elizabeth left the crypt and the heavy, stone door closed. Far away, deep in the darkest place in Hell, Joshua’s soul screamed in anger and pain as Elizabeth’s whisper reached him.
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Alexander sat in his studio, the only light a thin ray from the setting sun. He was peacefully finishing a painting of Jesse and Rachael’s daughter when a frown covered his face. He attempted to go back to his painting but he couldn’t. The paintbrush fell out of his hand as he drew in a shocked gasp.
He clutched his heart in agony, his cane falling onto the ground. He reached for something to stop his descent. His hand grabbed the half-finished painting, tearing it in half. He doubled over in pain, curled up on his side on the floor. He began to scream, his hands moving from his heart to his head.
Violent visions flashed through his head, ripping apart his mind. Alexander writhed on the floor, clawing for anything to hold on to in order to bring him out of his prophecies but he couldn’t get them out of his head.
He stumbled to his feet and grabbed a paintbrush covered in blood red paint. Without the aid of his cane, he tore his way through his studio until he got to the section with the proudly displayed, peaceful paintings of Jesse and Rachael’s rule.
The red paint cut through them like a knife, completely destroying them. Alexander ripped them off of the line, tearing several of them into pieces. He dropped the paintbrush again and ran over to his easel, flipping through the paintings until he reached the one he was looking for, counting each page.
He stood before it, breathing hard before the visions began again and he collapsed onto the floor.
“Alexander!” Gabriel ran into the room and stopped beside the motionless prophet.
“We made the wrong choice. We were all deceived,” Alexander choked out. Gabriel looked up at the painting before him and swallowed hard. Rachael stood, holding a blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby with three men around her. Jesse, Joshua, and Josh.
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Rachael sat in her throne in the newly erected palace. She was surrounded by her new, loyal subjects. Elizabeth lurked in the shadows of the throne room, a triumphant smile on her face. Jess sat beside his queen, wanting for nothing else in the world.
Rachael smiled as the monarchs, dictators, and presidents of every country in the world pledged themselves to her service. No one could know the horror that was going to come.
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As an attentive reader you must have noticed that Rachael was not always the one telling her story. I was also telling it. There are pieces of this story that she could not tell. Some of them, she didn’t remember. Others, she refused to say. It was my job to fill in the pieces that she did not.
She reached a point in the telling of her life where she was too corrupted to accurately inform you of these events. Rachael was not and still is not a bad person. I do not want you to believe that about her.
The choices she made were not her fault. It was the fault of Elizabeth. There is very little known about what Elizabeth truly put this girl through. If I
knew more, I would have told you. Rachael refuses to tell anyone what she did to her. All that I could learn was the small amount that Jesse got out of her with his energy-transfer angelic trance.
What he learned was just a tiny taste of what happened. This form of training had been used thousands of years ago in order to force angels that could possibly fall into serving the arch-angels. When Raphael realized what it really did to these angels, he outlawed it.
It was causing a lack of love, hope, and all positive emotions and replacing them instead with hate, anger, and vengeance. Elizabeth, however, was not willing to listen to this rule. With the future queen as her loyal servant, she would gain more power than she could have ever gotten on her own.
I suppose you still have many questions about what else happened in Rachael’s life. This hardly seems like an ending with so many things left untold. What is it about this future that is so wrong? Will this peace last?
What is Elizabeth’s reasoning behind her plans? There are many other things I have not told you and that is because this story is not over. There is more that I have to tell you, but not now. This was not a story that was never meant to be told and there are many powerful beings, both angel and demon, who are pursuing me.
They do not want anyone to ever learn the truth but it is my job to tell the world what is going on. One of the things I cannot tell you yet is who I am. You will learn that in time but right now is not that time.
I will tell you one thing. If you have come to a conclusion about what it is Elizabeth and Rachael were talking about in the crypt, you are most likely correct. It was blatantly obvious if you knew what you were listening to.
You knew more than Jesse at that point. He would have no idea what was going on for another month, and even then he wouldn’t know the truth. As for the scrolls that Elizabeth was getting for Rachael; they were a very important set of instructions that would play into what Elizabeth was planning. Rachael didn’t even realize just how dependent on and trusting of Elizabeth she was.
Elizabeth was using her for a purpose that Rachael could never understand. This peace that had been created was a cover for something far darker that no one could expect. Even Elizabeth did not know what she had gotten herself into.
She was too confident in this dystopian society that she believed she was forming that she couldn’t see what was going on deeper beneath the surface. I have run out of time to tell this story now. I will do my best to give to you the next piece but I can guarantee nothing. It is highly probable that I will be dead long before then.
I can hear them coming even now. Stay safe, my friends, and do not give up. The gates of the afterlife will not be open for long.
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The Rift
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SKN Hammerstone is a Young Adult fiction author from Pennsylvania. After graduating from high school at the age of 16 she began her writing career and continued it through college.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR