Just thinking that felt like a betrayal to Koath, to Gabriel, and everything I held close.
Crixis wasn’t a good person. He was a murderer. Calculated and cold. He gave me more injuries than any other Demon I’d faced and purified. He hurt me physically and mentally. He toyed with my life like I was nothing but a useless speck of dust. But if that was true, if I really was nothing to him, why bother sticking to his word? So what if he said he’d stop going after me if I helped him take down Sephira? He didn’t care about my pain, so why not just kill me anyway? Why offer to train me? Why give me that book?
Why?
I was not sympathetic to his past. Yes, it was horrible what he went through, but he was such a awful person afterwards that it was hard to see his beginnings. I felt bad for his family, for his son, but did I feel the same sorrow for Crixis?
No.
At least, I didn’t want to. But if I didn’t, didn’t that make me exactly like him?
I wrestled with my inner self as I walked back to the house. I didn’t want to be anything like Crixis. My mom wanted me to forgive him, but could I? Could I truly forgive him for all that he’d done, not only to me, but to the world? I wasn’t sure if that was even possible.
I let out a harsh groan as I entered the house.
Liz was in the kitchen, reading instructions on how to cook some hamburger meal. She looked at me. “Where have you been? I thought you said you’d go straight home from the hospital.”
I couldn’t remember if I was indeed that specific, or if that was something she just inferred. I glanced to the clock, holding in my shock at how long I was across the street. It didn’t feel like that long.
“I went for a run,” I muttered, heading to the stairs. I ignored Max and Claire in the front room.
“Dinner is in twenty minutes,” she added as I took two steps at a time.
“Not hungry.” I went past the second floor, where I heard a shower going. Liz must’ve gotten Michael to come home. As I went to the third floor and headed straight for my own bathroom, I slowly closed the door and started taking off my clothes.
Crixis was wrong, I decided as I stared at myself in the mirror. I’d lost weight, if anything. I wasn’t eating much. I just hadn’t been hungry. My stomach—which was always on the flat side—looked less like muscle and more like skin-and-bones.
It was hard to force yourself to eat when you didn’t want to, so I stopped doing it. Maybe it was the whole dying thing.
I turned on the shower, rubbing my neck. When I was quiet, still, when there were no other sounds, I could still hear it. I could hear the loud snap, the cracking of my upper spine, the severing of my spinal cord from my brain. It wasn’t a good sound. In fact, it was the sound of my nightmares.
I stood in the shower, basking in the heat. My nightmares held a lot of things, actually, but I preferred not to think of them.
Soon I was lying in bed, trying to sleep even though it wasn’t even dark out yet. I heard the door creak open, and Liz wandered in, a plate of meat and cheese in her hands. “I think this one turned out rather well,” she whispered, setting it on the nightstand beside me.
“I said I’m not hungry,” I repeated what I said earlier.
“You need to eat. I know you’re worried about Gabriel, but you need to still take care of yourself.”
I chose to change the subject abruptly: “Any news on the body in the school?”
Liz simply smiled softly and patted my leg. “Nothing you need to worry about right now. I’m taking care of it.” She said nothing else about it. Not what it was, or how it happened, or whether or not I should be concerned about school on Monday.
I was a Purifier. I didn’t need to be coddled.
I needed the truth.
But I let her go without questioning her further. My bones were too tired, my skin too sore. Was I going to train with Crixis again? Was I going to subject myself to more of his insults and this soreness?
I already knew the answer.
Chapter Seventeen – Michael
After getting it ready after my shower and putting it where it’d be easy to reach, I headed downstairs. I couldn’t do it now, with company over, but it would happen tonight. The Order demanded it, and I was not one to leave a job unfinished.
I belonged to the Order. My birth, my life, my death. The Order had been around for centuries, older than the Council and their precious Purifiers. The Council would never get its way of ridding the world of Demons entirely, but the Order would succeed in burning the world down and creating it anew.
I prayed I would be alive to see it.
As I went down the stairs, I overheard the two teens talking in the living room.
Max, the odd boy, seemed to be trying to compliment Claire’s looks. “That headband matches your eyes.” He said nothing more as his fork scraped across his plate.
The Morpher took her time to say, “Thanks.” As if she wasn’t truly certain if it was a compliment or not.
I had nothing against either of them. I wished them well, in the upcoming days. The old me would’ve hated having a Morpher know our identities, but now there was no time to worry about such things. Now, the clock was so close to striking twelve.
I felt a hand pull me into the kitchen, and I met Liz’s questioning eyes. She had waited for me to come down; two full plates sat on the table, opposing each other, silverware carefully positioned beside them.
“What are you doing? Let the kids have some privacy. I think—” Liz paused, lowering her voice to a bare whisper. “—Max likes her. It’s hard to tell, because he doesn’t have very good social skills.” She motioned for me sit down, and I did slowly, nodding along with her, as if I cared about Max’s little crush.
I didn’t.
My caring was limited to a few things: Gabriel waking up, Kass dying, and the Order’s dream being realized.
We ate in relative silence, ignoring the few laughs and awkward conversation we overheard from the living room. It wasn’t until we were washing the dishes and putting everything away that Liz said, “I’m worried about Kass.”
“That makes two of us.” For two entirely different reasons.
“I can’t remember the last time I saw her eat a plate full.”
Clearly. The girl hadn’t been eating since that business with the Original. If she had been eating, a lot of the current stuff going on could’ve been avoided. My life could’ve been a whole lot easier. The New Age could be that much closer.
But no. Little Miss Kassandra Niles had to make it difficult.
I hated her, sometimes. I hated that she thought she was invincible. I hated that she was always the center of everything, as if the world revolved around her. I hated the fact that she had changed him, made him into nothing more than a teenage boy. Whatever she was, whatever special, unique brand of Demon she was—I didn’t care. She’d die all the same.
That night, as Liz laid beside me, just like she had ever since Gabriel’s coma, I quietly, deftly slid out of bed. Without a sound, I reached beneath the antique nightstand and retrieved the vial I prepared earlier.
My footsteps were quick and quiet. I was trained, though nowhere nearly as proficiently as Kass and Gabriel. I went up the stairs, straight into the bathroom she shared with Gabriel. Since he was already in the hospital, there was no way he could get caught in the crossfire again. Kass might not eat, but she did do a few other things.
I took hold of the tube of toothpaste in my hand and flicked the vial to make sure it hadn’t hardened. Poking the needle in the base of the tube, I injected the entire ounce of liquid into the partially-used tube.
It would take a day or two, but the poison would get to her this time.
She would feel weak, exhausted. She would be tired all the time. She’d get the shakes, start to vomit uncontrollably. She’d lose her ability to control her muscles, if I let it go that long. But I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. The Order gave me a deadline.
Monday was the day.
Chapter Eighteen – Gabriel
I followed the broody, tall dark and handsome version of me (not to say that I wasn’t handsome, because I definitely was) through the hospital. We slowed as we came upon the exit that sat in the empty cafeteria, its sliding glass doors firmly closed. I glanced to him. “Uh, tried that already. This entire place is like a weird labyrinth. There’s no way out.”
He stared at me, giving me a look that said I was beyond stupid. He then took a step, and the doors slid open. I readied myself to tell him that he was wrong and I was right, but as we walked through the all-glass vestibule, the outside doors slid open to reveal a grassy field.
I spun, glancing all around. The hospital doors that we walked out of a second ago were no longer behind us. What kind of magic was this? “Okay, that did not happen last time,” I said slowly.
He smirked. A strange sight, to see myself making such a smug expression. “You truly are a bright one, aren’t you?”
“The sarcasm,” I said. “You’re not good at it.”
All he did was smirk more. “Pay attention, boy. I’m about to give you a history lesson that you won’t soon forget.”
That made me want to vomit. History? Bleh. Boring. Who cared about history? I was in the now, wherever the now was. Wherever I was…
“Perhaps you know something of it,” he went on, lifting his right arm to the field before us. Suddenly, a cloudy image popped up, and it was like a movie, its bubble following exactly what he said. “In the beginning, there were only a few of us. We were meant to serve Him.”
A crowd of winged beings appeared in the cloud, wearing all white, their features varied in skin tone, but perfect in every way. Their wings seemed to flow with the breeze; their expressions expectant as they stared to the cloud above them. One appeared in the forefront; this winged man practically exuded light. His face was covered in a white metal helmet, his body wearing a similar armor.
“We were creatures of His creation, just as mankind were. We were stronger than man; ethereal to their…mud-pit faces. We were better. And yet we were forced to serve. We had no choice of our own.”
The beings in the cloud, in the blink of an eye, knelt.
The other me’s voice hissed, dripping venom as he said, “Mankind was given free will. They were given a plethora of choices. They did not always choose the right path.”
A garden, an apple, a city burned to the ground. All of humanity’s downfalls flashed before my eyes, and for a moment, all I could do was blink. All the death, all the destruction—why? For what? The raping and the pillaging, the stealing and the conquering? It all seemed needlessly violent.
“A choice was made, and thus, those who did not want to serve were cast out, cast down.” As he talked, the picture morphed to the winged beings, their perfection in tatters, as were their clothes and their wings. They tumbled downward, caught in a slow-motion fall. “We were no longer welcomed in His kingdom, but we made our own.”
The one in the armor was the only one who did not tarnish. While his brethren fell, he floated down, still radiating the same light that he had before.
“Why was he not affected?” I asked, glancing to the darker version of me. “Why did he keep his wings?”
“There was a time when he was His favorite child. His light outshone even the sun. They called him many things,” he answered. “Morningstar was his favorite, for he relished in being the brightest thing in the sky.”
“Why are you showing me this?”
“Because hubris was the reason for the Great Fall; I want you to know it all, to be prepared to make the choice.”
“What choice?” My eyebrows furrowed, and out of my peripherals, I saw the Morningstar take off his helmet as his feet touched the ground. He was out of the movie-like cloud; a real entity before us. I watched, stunned, as I stared at yet another version of myself. His armor faded away, and on his skin, thin, delicate tattoos sat, sinking into his flesh, vanishing as his blue eyes met mine.
I was the Morningstar?
But…no. I couldn’t remember, but I was fairly sure I had a life that did not involve starting wars and falling. Plus, there were no wings on my back. This was all a trick. It had to be.
“The choice everyone makes sooner or later,” he stated. The third me walked toward us, melding with the one beside me. We were alone in the field once again. “The choice we all must make. The battle is eternal; the war will rage forever on. If you put down the mantle, there is a long line of those who would take your place.”
Mantle? “I don’t get it. And, here’s a hint, I don’t do riddles. Whatever you’re trying to tell me, just tell me straight,” I said, crossing my arms. “And please, while you’re at it, tell me why you look exactly like me.” My please wasn’t so nice as it was riddled with exasperation.
He heaved a gigantic sigh. “You are me.”
“You’re me?” I echoed, the air not being any clearer.
“No. I am not you, but you are me.”
“That makes no sense. Am I in the crazy house?” I looked around; the field was calm, the green grass swaying slightly with the wind. The sun above us beat hot on our backs. This was just insane.
“You were given one chance. Do not waste it.” He sent me a frown, a glare that made the blood in my veins freeze. There was something behind his stare that I didn’t trust, something I didn’t like; but it was hard to put a finger on it.
I didn’t know what the truth was; he could’ve been feeding me lies, and I’d not know it.
He sighed. “Come. There is more I must show you.” Behind him, a doorway appeared. An ancient, wooden door with metal accents, that quite literally stood out of the ground, no walls to hold it up. It was an odd sight in the field, wholly out of place.
“Okay, that wasn’t there before,” I whispered, obediently following him through it.
We stepped into a dimly-lit hall. Nuns hurried to and fro, completing their duties. Some held the tiny hands of children, others cleaned and mopped. I was led to an adjacent room, where half a dozen cradles sat, babies in each of them.
Was this an orphanage?
“What…” I started to ask, but the other me held up a hand, silencing me immediately.
“Just watch.”
I shut my mouth and watched, not sure what I was watching. A room full of babies? How exciting, how thrilling. I should mark this day on my calendar: the day that I died of boredom.
Two voices interrupted the silence; a man and a woman. “This seems a little far-fetched, dear.”
“I’m telling you,” the woman’s voice spoke in hushed tones, “this is it. I can feel it.”
“And what do you feel? Because you sure didn’t bother telling me on the drive over here—and it was half a day of driving.”
“Koath, just—just hush.” As she told him to hush, we watched the two people enter the nursery. The woman was no more than thirty, her hair a long, luscious brown. She had a hand on her belly, her pregnant belly.
The man beside her was a little older, his goatee starting to grey. He was not an intimidating man, but there was an air about him that I felt was familiar. Did I know this man? The woman—there was nothing familiar about her. She was a stranger to me.
A nun walked by, heading to the middlemost cradle, carefully picking up a baby. “It is funny you should mention a child like that.” She smiled a wrinkled smile, moving closer to the woman and man. “One morning, a few weeks back, I woke up early. It was freezing out, and somehow my window was left open. I went to shut it, and do you know what I heard outside?”
The woman exchanged looks with, from the look of the rings on their fingers, husband.
“A baby’s crying. I checked on the nursery, but it was coming from somewhere else.” The nun gestured to the child in her hands. “I found him by the front door. No papers, no anything. His temperature was hot, in spite of the cold. I took him to the hospital, but he wasn’t sick. He’s a perfectly healthy baby boy. I will never understand why t
he parents left him on our doorstep like that.”
The woman smiled at the nun. “Does he have a name?”
The nun returned her warmth, saying, “We chose Gabriel. God’s Messenger.”
“A fitting name,” the man said.
“Are you interested in starting the adoption process?” The nun was hopeful.
The man and woman met eyes, and before they could respond, I heard the other me say, “Come. This is only the beginning. We have a long way to go before you make your choice.” When I looked at him, he stood before another new door; this one was at least on a wall, so my brain didn’t do too much bugging out.
Heaving a sigh, I went to follow. What was I supposed to do—stay in the nursery and make friends with the babies and people who couldn’t see me?
I had no idea what to expect next.
Chapter Nineteen – Kass
I never really knew how much I depended on Gabriel. I took him for granted, I guessed, because he was always there in my life, even when my Guardian/dad wasn’t. He was the boy who’d do anything for me, and I was the girl who’d do anything for him, including risking my life to save him from another girl who had a thing for pet Nightwalkers.
I missed him so much. I missed his stupid ramblings, his nickname of raccoon, and his wiggling eyebrows. I missed going on nightly walks with him, sleeping in his bed, and catching up on our favorite TV shows. My life was incomplete without him.
Not to sound dramatic, but without my tall blonde boy, I was like half a person.
I rolled out of bed that morning, shuffled to the bathroom, and did my morning routine without any interruptions. I was in and out in less than ten minutes. All I planned on doing today was heading across the street. I didn’t even bother showering. Brushed my teeth, slapped on some deodorant, twirled my hair up, and chose some clothes that didn’t reveal too much skin. I was going to be around Crixis, after all.
No thanks to that, even though he’d seen a lot of naked women throughout his life. I didn’t need to be one of them.
The Nightwalkers Saga: Books 1 - 7 Page 113
