“No. Please remember that I’ve lived for eons. When you look back across the entirety of the human race, I am not responsible for an inordinate number of offspring. In fact, with the notable exception of the time of the Roman Empire, I have been very particular with the… I do not have to explain myself to my own daughter!”
Slap! “You do not have the right to call her that! You were nothing more than a sperm donor; she is my daughter and nothing of yours.”
I fixed Myra with my steeliest glare. “Nothing of mine? You can’t even pretend to tell me that you’ve looked in those eyes every day for all these years and not seen a piece of me looking back at you. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to finish this conversation without getting hit again.”
Emily jumped in again. “So I had four hundred and thirty-six brothers and sisters down through history. Are any of them alive now?”
“One, but you might not want to spend much time with Cain. He has sibling rivalry issues. Your mother is the first woman I’ve shared enough of myself with to have a child in some number of years, so you’re the only—”
“How many?” The small voice came from Myra.
“Excuse me?”
“How many years? How long has it been since you ‘shared enough of yourself’?”
“A couple hundred years. I had a son. He died in the war.”
“Which war?” Emily asked.
“The Revolutionary War. We fought together. He caught a bullet in the leg, and it had to be amputated. It got infected, as so many of them did, and he died. It wasn’t pretty. I held his hand when he went. He was twenty-two.”
“I’m sorry,” Myra said softly.
“It wasn’t the first time I’ve held one of my children as they’ve died. It’s not something that gets easier the more often you do it, though.” We were quiet for a moment, both of us lost in thought. I flashed back on the dozens of times throughout history that I had watched my reflection dim in my child’s eyes, and Myra shuddered slightly, as if thinking about losing Emily.
“So why did you come back?” Myra asked after a long moment.
“What?”
“Why did you come back? After all this time, why come back now? I don’t think I’m going to believe that you suddenly developed a misplaced parenting gene and decided to pop in to see if you had knocked me up and had a daughter to raise, and I’m sure as hell not going to believe you came to see me again for another tumble after all these years.”
“Mom!”
“Oh, don’t be all outraged, Em. I’m pretty sure he’s heard it all before.”
“I have, and more besides. But to answer your question, I didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?”
“I didn’t come back. At least, not intentionally. I was just riding along on my way back east and got hungry. So, I pulled in at the next stop. It wasn’t until I walked into the diner that I remembered that this was your place.”
“You… forgot me?”
“No! No, I didn’t forget you. I just didn’t remember that this was your place until I walked in. And honestly, if I had remembered, I probably would have kept on rolling. You know, trying not to reconnect and all that.”
“So you stopped because you just happened to get hungry near my exit?”
“Well, not exactly.” Michael had apparently forgotten my instructions to keep his mouth shut and had either forgotten or was choosing to ignore the outcome of our last interaction, that last day in the Garden.
Michael is the right hand of the Man, the hand that held the flaming sword and was in charge of enforcing Dad’s edicts. When we were tossed out of the Garden, Michael did the tossing. Or at least, he started the process. In the end, it took several of the Archangels to get the job done, and some of them looked a little the worse for wear by the time it ended. Michael in particular had seen better days. I’m pretty sure I broke his nose in the scuffle.
That may have been the first day of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but my sense of right and wrong had been pretty deeply instilled long before. When he put his hands on Eve, and she cried out in pain as he twisted her arm behind her back to remove her from the only home we’d ever known, I reacted without thinking. Further reflection brought me to the conclusion that had I thought before I socked the head of the militant Archangels in the snoot, I would have done the same thing. Every time.
Chapter 7
Obviously, there was no love lost between Michael and me, and the revelation that he may have had something to do with my uncomfortable reunion—not to mention the repeated slapping of my face—led me to turn, very slowly, and face the immaculately dressed scion of Heaven.
“What do you mean, not exactly? And let’s have an answer without any of the standard angelic bullshit, if you don’t mind too terribly.” I could affect a pretty solid posh British accent of my own when the situation warranted, and I felt like it definitely warranted.
“Wouldn’t dream of it, my boy.” He knew I hated it when he called me that. I always had. “I may have manipulated your hunger pangs a little to bring you to this place. These ladies are very important, and both have a role to play in what is coming.”
“And what, exactly, is coming, Michael? And what do you have to do with it?”
“Well, Adam, ever since you and Eve left the Garden, things have been moving toward this final confrontation.”
“You’re obfuscating. What confrontation?”
“Just because you’re obtuse does not mean that I am obfuscating. The final confrontation of Good and Evil, Adam. The choice between Right and Wrong, between God and Satan, between Order and Chaos. The Choice.”
“Oh.” I knew it was coming eventually. Dad had explained back in the Garden that when he gave us free will, he knew that we would eventually have to make a final choice between the Light and the Dark. I had always assumed the “we” he talked about was each individual, that everyone made their own choice, but Michael made it sound like there was one big Choice that would decide the fate of the entire human race. I said as much to him.
“Of course, there is. There was one Choice all those years ago in the Garden, and Eve made it. She chose Chaos, and you were removed from the Garden. Had she chosen us over your friend the Lightbringer, you and all your descendants would have grown and lived in the Garden forever. But she chose poorly, and humanity has suffered for it for millennia. This choice is like that one, and it will be made just like that one was, by a random human on behalf of you all.”
Silence hung heavy in the afternoon air as we all contemplated the angel’s words. Michael couldn’t lie; the Archangels never learned how, so what he said was certain to be truth. It might not be the whole truth, since angels certainly knew how to hold things back, but it didn’t feel like one of those times. Of course, I hadn’t had any of my long talks with the Seraphim in a long time, so they could have learned a few new things.
“That’s not fair.” My head snapped around, and my eyes locked on Emily, who stood beside the picnic table. Her eyes glistened as she stared a hole into Michael. “I’m not going to abide by the decision of some person who hasn’t even been chosen yet, someone who knows nothing about me and has no right to make a decision that will affect my whole life and the life of generations to come. That’s just not fair, and I’m not going to put up with it.”
“My dear girl, not only is it fair, it’s the basis for your entire country.” Michael laughed. “Your idealized existence is run by people who don’t know you and couldn’t care less. This is just more representative governance, dearie, and you will deal with it because no one asked your opinion. Leave the grown-up talk to the grown-ups and go back inside to your dishes. We’ll call you when you’re needed.”
Emily walked up to Michael, looked him square in his sky-blue eyes, and slapped the shit out of him. Then, she spun on her heel, marched over to the picnic table, and sat there, arms folded and jaw set, daring anyone to try to make her move. Yep, that’s my kid, I thought.
“
You deserved that one, Mikey. Now what’s the deal, really? Somebody somewhere is going to run into Lucky, get tempted, and they’re going to make another Eve-level Choice? I thought we were a little far along the road for that.”
“Oh no, Adam, not at all, not at all. This Choice will be so much more than Eve’s little choice that she may as well be forgotten by history. This Choice will determine the true outcome of humanity. You see, now they’ve seen what Chaos is, they’ve seen the Dark. When Eve made her decision to bite the fruit, you two had no idea what the Dark was. You had no frame of reference, so Eve’s decision was made in a vacuum. A little unfair, really, that she’s taken the blame for it for so long. After all, it is human nature to want to know what’s behind Door Number Two. I should know; I helped write that bit.” Halfway through his pretty little speech, Michael had to stop to spit a little blood from his mouth, which diminished the impact somewhat, but the words sat me on my ass just the same.
“You’re saying Eve was set up?”
“Excuse me?”
“Set up. Should I speak slower so you get the whole idea? The whole thing was planned from the Beginning. She didn’t have a choice after all. She had to take the fruit.”
“Of course not. She could have refused to eat the fruit. Of course, if she had, we would have come up with something else. Eventually, you were going to have to leave the Garden. It was the only way you could see the world, after all.”
“So for thousands of years Eve has suffered, thinking she brought all the evil into the world, that if she had been just a little stronger, or if Lucky had caught her on a better day, or if she hadn’t wandered off alone that morning, that she could have said no and spared the world a wealth of suffering. Now you tell me that if she’d said no, you would have just kept on coming until eventually one of us gave in?” I might have been yelling a little by the last bit.
“Pretty much, yes.”
The smug smile did it. I knew he was trying to push my buttons, and he had always been the second-best manipulator out of the angelic herd. At that precise moment, however, I didn’t care. I just knew that he had allowed Eve to suffer the guilt of falling to temptation since the dawn of time, and I was, to put it mildly, pissed.
I hit him. I swung from the knees, and I punched the leader of the Angelic Host right in the nose with everything I had.
Angels aren’t really that different from the rest of us when they choose to take human form. They bleed, even though they can’t die. They can hurt, though, and a shot to the nose stings like a son of a bitch.
When I put everything I had into a roundhouse that connected solidly with Michael’s nose, I felt the satisfying crunch of cartilage under my knuckles and knew that I’d broken it once again. Damn, that felt amazing.
I highly recommend punching out a pompous Archangel once an eon or so. It’s good for the soul.
“Dammit, Adam, that hurt!” he said from where he lay on his back in the dusty parking lot.
I liked him a lot better with blood spattering his dress shirt than I had just a few seconds earlier. “It wasn’t meant to tickle, you prick. Screw you and your little games. I’m outta here.” I turned on my heel and headed back toward my bike, determined to leave Texas and Michael behind me as quickly as I could.
“Dad.”
I stopped. There were only a couple of words that could stop me in my tracks, but that one was a lock.
“Please don’t go.”
I turned, and there was Emily, not looking at me, but looking at me all the same.
“Please?”
“Why?” I asked. Like it mattered. She was my kid, after all. If she wanted me to stay, I was staying.
“I think this might be important. And I think you might have to do this, no matter how big a douchebag this guy is.” Well, that cut right through it all right there.
Sometimes, there are things you just have to do, whether you want to or not, whether the people you have to do them with are douchebags or not. Sometimes, things have to get done. And sometimes, you’re the only one that can do them.
“This is gonna suck,” I said as I walked back over to her.
“Probably.” She tossed Michael a dishrag for his bleeding nose.
“I’m gonna need some coffee.” I walked toward the rear entrance of the diner.
“I’ll handle it. The lunch rush is over, and you never could make coffee worth a shit,” Myra said as she passed me on the way into the diner.
“Hey! Wait for me!” The Archangel tried to get his bloody nose to cooperate enough to let him follow us into the diner.
To quote one of my favorite philosophers, I had a bad feeling about this.
Chapter 8
‘Talk.”
We were sitting in the back booth with Myra next to me and Emily on the inside facing her mom. Michael and I took the outside seats. The diner was empty except for us, the cook, and a Mexican kid washing dishes. With the dinner rush over, the place would be closing soon, so Myra had locked the front door as soon as we came back in through the kitchen. She had gotten coffee and a fresh towel for Michael’s nose.
“I said, talk.” I leaned toward Michael and put a little more menace into my voice.
“Oh really, Adam, don’t try. You caught me off guard, and I need you, which are the only reasons you’re still mobile. I can kill you, remember? It’s what I do.” He wasn’t kidding. Michael was the Lord’s enforcer, the one who dealt with anyone who broke the rules seriously enough for Dad to take a personal interest. I remembered.
“Mr. um, Michael... please. Would you please tell us what’s going on and why you brought Adam back here after all this time?” It looked like Emily had learned negotiation from her mother, 'cause she sure as hell didn't get that silver tongue from me.
“Of course, since you asked nicely.” He actually raised one eyebrow at me with that line. If I had any regrets about punching him in the snoot, they were gone.
“Now, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, there is coming a time of Choice, where a representative of humanity will make a decision between Order and Chaos, Good and Evil, the Light and the Dark. This human will decide the fate of all mankind for the rest of time, and it is up to you, Adam, to find him.”
“Huh?” I did mention that Emily was the eloquent one, right?
“Was there a particular part that you didn’t understand, or was that just your general stupidity shining through?”
“Let’s take another look at the bit about me finding him. Why me?”
“Because you were there at the time of the first Choice, of course. Everyone who was there for the first Choice must be there for the final Choice.”
“So you’re saying that because I was there when Eve took the fruit… wait a second, you said everyone?”
“I believe I did.”
“Well, that’s gonna be a problem, seeing as how Abel’s suffering from a bad case of dead and Eve won’t be in the same time zone as me.”
“Your latest offspring shall fill the void left by your second son, and as for Eve, well, you’ll just have to be persuasive, won’t you?”
“And Cain?”
“Cain, too.” Michael managed to lose the smug expression for just a minute at the mention of my oldest son. I hadn’t seen Cain in a long time, even for us, and that wasn’t a situation I wanted to change. Eve and I both had some issues with forgiveness: she couldn’t forgive herself, and I couldn’t forgive Cain. The last time we had seen each other was the kind of meeting that inspired country and western songs, the kind of songs that featured destroyed bars, at any rate.
“No deal. I’m not going to put Eve through that, I’m not going to deal with Cain, and I’m not going to let Emily get anywhere near either of them. Period.”
“This is not open for debate, Adam, Son of God.” Michael turned the Voice on me, and his had more behind it than just practice. His Voice came complete with Power, the kind that comes from a guy that sits on a big throne, and I knew that
the floor was closed for debate.
I looked at Myra, then at Emily. I closed my eyes for a second. “This is tough. I know this is going to be hard to believe, but everything he said is true. We do have to do this. He can’t lie; it’s part of what makes him insufferable. We have to do this, and we both have to go.”
“Both? You mean all three of us, right?”
Michael shook his head. “Actually, Myra, you don’t have to go. Emily’s presence is all that is required.”
“Oh, hell no! I sit here for almost twenty-five years waiting for my one true love, and the day he walks back into my life, you tell me he’s just going to ride off with my daughter and some overdressed angel with a bloody shirt? Well you’ve got another think coming, Mr. High and Mighty Archangel. There is no way in hell this woman is getting left behind while Captain Immortal rides off into the sunset again. He’s stuck with me, at least until I get to find out if he snores too much or can’t figure out how to put the toilet seat down, and that means you’re stuck with me, too. And if you don’t like it, I can bloody your damn nose for you again real quick-like.”
The Chosen Page 4
