“Do you think he’s…okay?”
He looked worried. “Of course.”
“You’re a bad liar.” I attempted a smile but quickly looked down. There was the pizza. I wasn’t so hungry anymore.
“You know why all this is happening, right?”
“Not really,” I said, starting to cry now in earnest.
“The Nri are hunting us down because my father is dead. And they’re not the only ones, don’t kid yourself. The one who retrieves the Bloodstone will become the next Seer.” He stopped, allowing this new information to sink in.
“So…where is it?” I thought back to the day on the cliff.
“What, the Bloodstone?”
“Yeah.”
“That is a really good question.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “What does that mean?”
“I’m not going to talk about it any further.”
My jaw hit the floor in shock. Before I could shout abuses at him, he spoke again.
“At least not until you’ve had a chance to talk with Kim.”
“Kim? What’s she got to do with this?”
“You’d better ask her.” He resumed eating. It was grotesque to me; I wanted to barf. Oh, no…. Was my sickness coming back? And what did that mean?
“But,” I began, “why would Kim have anything to do with…” As my voice did its decrescendo into nothingness, the light came on. Oh, no.
I watched as Michael rubbed his chest, grimacing like it hurt.
From the Book of the Brotherhood, Volume 3:
…
The Brotherhood, dear Brothers and Hosts, had the honor to declare war against El from the beginning. The Fallen and their offspring, the Sons and Daughters of God, are traitors, not just to El—but to the original rebellion and the Leader, as well…
CHAPTER I
U.S. Highway 97, Oregon, present day
THE DUST HAD LONG ago settled from the landing and the white FBI helo sat immobile with its pilot just off the unusable roadway. The wreckage of the accident under investigation was strewn in lumps and shards more or less in a parallel line nearby.
It was a good decision, she thought, playing the Federal Investigation card. Gretchen was glad that she had dismissed the local yokels and cordoned off the scene as soon as she had landed.
But there were anomalies. Unexplainable things. Like this enormous dent in the middle of the road, FBI agent Gretchen Reid mused. “Holy…look at these cracks in the asphalt, how deep…” she said to no one. Harry, whom she both valued for his usefulness and despised for his subservience to her, trailed her around, his weak hands trembling a little as he wrung them together at his waist, picking his way carefully, awkwardly over and through the debris.
Gretchen lifted her pretty head and looked around, assessing the situation. The log truck just up the road, Rawlins’ car, or what remained of it, pinned underneath. Then, in the opposite direction on a line that passed through the dent in the road, the black SUV. Or what remained of it. She made the calculations in her head, sizing it up. At first blush, it would appear that either the SUV or the log truck had crossed the double yellow and caused the wreck. Probably the SUV, because Rawlins had gotten too close, too obvious, and spooked the young man Michael Alexander. High speed chase ensues. And Rawlins foolishly engages the youth. Stupid. I wouldn’t have done that. The youth, driving at triple digit speeds in the dark and in the rain, lost control.
“And caused the accident?” Again, said to no one.
Harry, still wringing his hands, met her eyes for a moment and she saw something there that didn’t fit. But she let it pass, moving on.
The SUV had hit the log truck head on. No. Not possible; it wouldn’t have landed way over there, she thought, estimating the distance from where she stood to the SUV at about 500 feet. No, that wasn’t possible. After all, just look at what happened to Rawlins. Pancake city. No, something didn’t fit.
“It’s almost like it was thrown,” she said. How could it have been thrown? Her hunch, that there was more to this incident than met the eye, was beginning to be borne out by events. She stood there in the silence, gusts of wind whipping at her hair, plastering her pantsuit to her athletic body, tugging at the fabric like jealous hands.
She turned around again. Harry had turned his back to her, looking off at the distance, his hand in his jacket pocket as if searching for a stick of gum, perhaps his eReader thing. Once more, she looked down at the dent in the road’s surface. Then, with alarm she realized she hadn’t been seeing what was right in front of her. This isn’t a dent. It’s dents, plural. There were two. Side by side, like—“feet.” That’s when she knew what she had been missing. Whatever had caused this accident…had fled the scene?
“Impossible,” she breathed, looking down, wide-eyed.
Harry turned and she looked up. As he squared his body to her, his hand came out of his jacket. He brought it together with its opposite, raising them up. She then realized that his stance was all too familiar: that of an enemy gunman. And there in those hands was his pistol, real enough.
“Say goodbye, Gretchen.”
“That’s impossible—” The last sound she heard was only the first of two shots; a double tap that exploded her head like a coconut breaking open.
Harry put his pistol, an original Colt 1911A1 .45, back in his shoulder holster. “Hollow points, Gretchen. Double tap to the head.” He kicked her lifeless body lightly, playfully. “Bet you didn’t see that coming.” He laughed aloud. “Oh, well. Maybe, actually, you did. At least the first shot anyway.”
In the distance the helo began to start up, the metallic whine of its single turbine climbing in pitch. The pilot, assigned to Harry and not working for Gretchen or even the FBI, had known what the signal would be and he was waiting for it. Harry knelt alongside Gretchen’s body in the double depression of the “dents” in the road, the cause of which he had known full well, and all along. He placed a small RFID device down inside one of the cracks, below the surface of the road, and walked away.
Shortly, with Harry aboard, the helicopter took to flight, climbing. It hovered over the scene at an altitude of 1,000 feet. The pilot depressed the “pickle switch,” a euphemism for the button that deploys munitions. A cylindrical device the size of a five-pound sack of flour released from the belly of the aircraft and fell. A retarder, like a miniature parachute, deployed from its tail, slowing its descent and homing it in on the RFID beacon Harry had planted in the road. The helo banked sharply and headed southeast at maximum speed.
When the bomb hit the ground it plonked dully, nonmetallically into the tarmac, its nose deforming and absorbing most of the force of the impact, causing the bomb to stick to the ground on the spot where it landed. Inside the canister, a kinetic firing pin pierced a thick membrane. Inside the membrane was a small amount of the chemical ethylenediamine, and as it mixed with the nitromethane that filled the rest of the bomb’s canister, a violent explosion erupted. The two “dents” in the road were now an enormous single crater.
As for the rest of the “evidence,” i.e. Gretchen Reid’s body, it was engulfed, ablaze, torn apart and ejected in millions of fragments from the crater in a radius of more than six hundred feet. Harry smiled when the shockwave passed through him in midair. He sang a chilling little song: “Goodbye, Gretchen. Goodbye.”
CHAPTER II
Ascension Island, present day
KREIOS RESTED ATOP GREEN Mountain, blandly and simply named in spite of its sublimely beautiful setting, almost 3,000 feet above sea level. Ascension Island, in the South Atlantic, was a good place to stop and rest, to collect his scattered thoughts for a little while, indulge in a stolen moment. This had always been one of his favorite places; a sanctuary of sorts for him. In the past it was always a destination. Now it was just a convenient place to stop, a waypoint on a journey elsewhere, and it made him intensely sad.
He faced south and east, away from Georgetown, his back to Wideawake Airfield, looking towa
rd where he was headed: Cape Town, South Africa.
Kreios was so heavy with care that he was numb and staring. Wide-eyed, he let whole worlds pass by in review before his imagination.
Thoughts of the history of this place randomly crashed into and through him. Ascension Island, so named because of the date of its discovery on Ascension Day, a church calendar holiday. He knew its history of course, that some Christians had tried to redeem pagan feasts like Ashteroth by making them sacred—a millennially blind tradition that just as easily could be called sacrilege, depending on the perspective. Good intentions, he thought. He had been there at Babylon when the Tower fell, when the peoples were scattered. He had seen with his own eyes what that event had wrought under the sun.
What does any of it matter: he knew, for instance, and by personal experience, that Ascension Island was once used in what mankind commonly called the Second World War, in the Battle of the Atlantic, that the Allies had conducted operations against Nazi U-boats from the island. He knew it had served cross-Atlantic boatplanes as a refueling depot in the age of the propeller. He knew it once served as a coaling station for steam-powered transatlantic passenger liners.
He knew it all. He had seen one of the roots of the problem at Babylon. They had built a tower to their own glory. El had scattered them. Men were forced from then on to go their separate ways, to build their rickety empires with different languages. It was inevitable that different customs would emerge, that different ways of thinking would develop; different world views, alien to one another, would ensue. The chasm of worldview between men since Babylon was inevitable, he thought. And beyond hope.
The more of man’s history he saw hurtling on past him at breakneck speed, the more meaningless and nonsensical it became. He had left paradise for this? No. Not this. In moments like these he prayed for the Brotherhood to come out of cowardly hiding and confront him. To take him. After all, why not? Perhaps then he might find meaning.
Honestly, he didn’t care where he was, or even when. It was all the same perverse blur, an affront. He cared less too, in the final analysis, that the Brotherhood was sure to be tracking him. Each flight, he knew, was like a cannonade at point-blank range. He thought of hiding from it all within the folds of time…perhaps going back to his little concrete room in the mountains of Idaho… walking through that door...
Perhaps, he thought, he was secretly hoping they would come. All of them might converge upon me, thinking I possess the Bloodstone. Then he might go down to Hell and take all of them with him. His mind flashed with Germanic legends of Valhalla, Gotterdammerung; the end of the world in a cataclysm of fire. He had known the demon Wotan, source of the legend. All these pagan legends had their dark angelic sources.
“The life is in the blood,” he said, and he would spill it all. “Survival of the fittest,” he said, mimicking Wotan’s lie to the poor befuddled German philosophers, a lie that had now enraptured the entire world.
He ascended to the horizontal of a large white stone cross and sat upon it, an angel of El, hanging his head in desperation. His back to its post, he rested drooped on its arm, lifted up above the earth, and the tropical breezes filtered through him.
His thoughts relentlessly clawed back, torturing him: Airel was gone. Eriel was lost forever. There was nothing left. There was nothing but blood in the streets, running in the gutters, the blood of the Brotherhood…and finally, eventually…of Michael Alexander.
The traitor. The Judas Iscariot.
The warm breeze lifted him from his homicidal bent, brought him memories of his home. Millennia ago. It was indeed a different life. Filled to brimming with quiet, with solitude, with peace and fulfillment.
He smiled.
How long had it been since he had done that?
It was her face: Eriel. Oh! How she looked like her mother! Wonderful. Beautiful, full of life and full of fire. It was she that had kept him going after his beloved wife had passed on. But how many countless years had passed over him in indifferent numb purposelessness since then?
He growled at the breeze. “It’s all over now,” he said aloud. She his beloved, and Eriel, and even Airel—every trace of his love and every reason for which he had abandoned paradise were now wiped away, obliterated. They were to be no more.
“But what does that matter?”
They were all gone. All three, gone. They would not return to him. He was abandoned, alone, dead, hollow. Kreios set his jaw and gnashed his teeth, his eyes narrowed to warlike slits. “We will meet again, young Michael Alexander. We will. And when we do…I will exact payment in full. And I will take my time.”
The angel lifted up his head and stood to his feet on the cross. Looking east and south. The sun behind. Darkness before him. He was beyond intrepid; not even El could change his mind now. He had a very great many of the Nri to kill, and quickly.
Kreios deftly flexed his body and leapt into the air with a curse for the Brotherhood. The angel shot forward into the sky, leaving a misty contrail in his wake. The shape of wings, made of light and mist, hovered over his back.
Kreios drank in the elation of pure power and speed. There was something magical and holy about flying. Indeed, there had been a day when he was holy…but that was another time. Another life.
CHAPTER III
Arlington, Oregon, present day
“AND THE LORD PUT a mark on Cain, lest any who found him should attack him…”
I pored over this verse in Genesis 4, just one page before the one to which Kreios had guided me what seemed like an eternity ago. I was stunned at how much the Bible said, and with so little. The trouble was…what did it all mean? I was reading by the light of my Tracphone in the darkness of my hotel room, having grabbed the Gideons copy of the Bible out of the nightstand.
I had no idea why I had turned absentmindedly to this page. I was just sitting there reading it when it jumped off the page and grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go.
Oh, Kreios…I really, really miss you. I wished more than anything then for my grandfather to come home to me. And home—at least as I had always thought of it up to that moment of my life— was now simply wherever he was. It’s not that I didn’t care about or miss my parents. I didn’t have the luxury of time enough to reflect on them or what they might be thinking, how they might be worried about me. Truth be told, I was trying to avoid that subject; it was too painful, too far out of my control.
I was a prisoner again. A prisoner to circumstance. It sucked. Is life really like this? Just all kinds of crap that happens to you? Or does a girl get to make a choice every now and then?
She crowded into my mind. “But you’ve already made all kinds of choices…”
True enough. The realization made me hurt unbearably.
I was completely frazzled and confused and lonely and in need of somebody stronger than me. Though the tears threatened the edges of my eyelids again, I was sick of crying, sick of being carried along, sick of abdicating, sick of this slimy acquiescence that marked me somehow. And I supposed all of us, really, bore some kind of mark.
But I hated labels. I hated that my favorite books, for instance, had to be categorized as this or that or the other thing. Why couldn’t they just stand alone on their own merit? Why did life lump everything together? “Grrr,” I said to the lame hotel room painting hanging above the mirror.
Kim, snoring next to me on the bed, stirred a little but didn’t wake. Across the room on the other bed, came a voice: “Date went that well, eh?”
“How ‘bout you shut your face, Ellie,” I muttered, with more than a little menace.
No reply.
I continued: “Or I’ll come over there and finish the job I started when we first met.” I was so peeved. How was anything about Michael and me any of her business? I just wanted her to go away. As I brought my knees to my chest and dropped my head into my folded arms, I willed for her to go away.
But then the bed moved and I looked up reflexively. I jumped a little. She was sit
ting there right in front of me, on my side of the bed. How did she get over here so quick, so quietly? “Whaddayou want,” I spat.
“Girlie, I was going to ask you the very same thing.”
“Stop calling me that.”
“Calling you what?” she asked in her insufferably cool accent.
“What gives you the right to poke your nose into everybody’s business? And then act like nothing’s happening, calling me by pet names. You’re not my mom. Lay off.”
“Sorry, girlie, it’s just who I am.”
I could tell she wasn’t going to stop irritating me. It was too much fun for her. “Look, I’m not enjoying the game, okay? So bug off.”
“You’re perilously close to profanity where I come from.”
I just rolled my eyes at her. You’re about to hear much worse.
“Airel, what’s bothering you? Do you want to talk?”
I just looked at her. I wanted to shout, “HA!” at her, but I didn’t want to wake Kim. I looked at the clock: near midnight. “The only thing I want to do is sleep,” I said lamely, hoping she would go away. “But I can’t seem to.”
Ellie placed a sympathetic hand on my knee, saying, “Shh. It’s all right, now.” And then that old weird feeling came back for me, the ripping apart of my heart and soul, and all I could think was oh my gosh, she’s crazy evil. I brushed her hand aside, and as I did, something stabbed at my heart. It went deep; I didn’t know what it was. It was just awful, that’s all. “Just stay away from me, Ellie. I don’t want to talk to you or see you or anything. Just leave me alone!”
I couldn’t describe how she looked right then if I wanted to. But there was deep meaning and pain in her eyes. The source of it—I couldn’t begin to know. “It’s all right,” she said again, standing.
She looked down on me with eyes that pierced right through me, flesh, half-angel blood, bone, and marrow. “I’m gonna step out for a bit.” She stood there for a split second, looking at me. It creeped me out, because for all I could make out of it her expression was one of love and acceptance.
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