It must have been easy for him to say that. He didn’t know where we were standing. He had no idea what happened within these walls, what happened to tear these walls down.
“What did you do?” I asked, ignoring Andy and turning my attention to my mother. “How did you do this?”
“I didn’t do anything, Son,” she answered, waving her hands with a flourish. “This house stands, as it did when you walked away from it hundreds of years ago.”
“That’s not possible,” I said, shaking my head and bringing back the awful memory of that fateful day. “This place burned. I watched it disintegrate into ash. I watched the people inside of it die.” I swallowed hard. “I even burned as I tried and failed to help them out.”
“That’s what you think happened,” Andy said, his mouth thinning into an uneasy line.
I turned to him, arching my eyebrows as I glared.
“What do you know about this?” I growled. I was tired of being lied to by Andy and, more than that, I was tired of him hiding things from me. “And I want you to think about what you’re about to tell me, Andy. Don’t cut any corners. Don’t leave anything out and, so help me, if you lie-”
“I wouldn’t lie to you, Uncle C,” he said defiantly. “A lot’s happened since you went out. Some of it is worse than I’d like to admit right now.”
“How did I get here and where are the others,” I demanded.
“You disappeared after you ran out on us,” Andy started. “Like I said, we couldn’t find you. Days passed and then weeks, and then we did. Your mother brought you to us and you were still this horrible thing. You were still taken over by this entity. None of us knew how, or even if you would ever come back. We were on our own, and things had gotten bad. The Romani were after us. They were after Amber. We sent them out with Kyle. That ‘luck’ thing he had going for him seemed to be enough to keep them hidden. But then his luck ran out. One night, while they were hiding in a hotel in Macon, they were found.”
My heart skipped a terrible beat.
“Where are they now? I asked. Did those filthy animals take her? What did they do to Merry?”
I thought about the woman, about her bright eyes and loving smile. Suddenly, my eternity of life didn’t seem quite long enough. It certainly wasn’t long enough for me to tell her how I felt. I should have been honest while I had the chance. It was the lying, the secrets that pulled me away from her, from all of them. You’d have thought that countless millennia would have taught me not to be such a selfish jackass, but I guess you’d be wrong.
“They weren’t caught, Uncle C.” Andy said, shaking his head. “I went through your things after you went missing. I found a talisman, some kind of little wooden statue that I remembered you telling me would keep me safe when I was a kid.” Andy looked at the ground. “I gave it to Amber. It must have been enough, because they managed to get away.”
I blinked, but remained silent. I remembered the statue Andy was talking about. I’d picked it up at a carnival outside of New York in the 1930s. It was completely devoid of any sort of mystical attributes. I gave it to Andy as a kid, right after his dad died. He was so afraid that something like that was going to happen to him. I knew I would never let anyone hurt him, but I couldn’t save him from the horrors running through his own mind. So I gave him a little trinket and convinced him it was magical. It seemed to do the trick, and I must have forgotten to come clean about it. I was glad I did though, because it was either the confidence the group had in the stupid wooden thing, Kyle’s innate Irish luck or some combination of the two that kept them safe that night. Of course, that still begged the question of where exactly they were.
“What happened to them after that?” I asked, my heart suddenly pounding even faster than before. “Where are they?”
“I can’t tell you that,” he answered solemnly, still looking down at an old floor that, for all intents and purposes, shouldn’t be here.
Anger rose in me, an anger that I knew wouldn’t easily be quelled. Something had happened to me after my brother shot me, something I couldn’t explain. And it seemed as though, while I was drifting around in Purgatory, rushing from specters who seemed to remember me, my body was busy doing who knows what on earth. Things had changed in my absence. My mother was here, I was back in a house that was reduced to ash during the Civil Freaking War, and the greatest ally of my life didn’t seem to trust me anymore.
That was a hell of a bullet.
“You will tell me, Andy,” I said, my hands balling into fists at my sides. I wasn’t going to hit him. I would never do that. At least, not while I was in my right mind. Still, I had to let him know I meant business. I had to make him aware that, regardless of what I had been through or what my body had done while I wasn’t occupying it, I was still in charge here.
The entire world was at stake, and I was the only one who could fix it. Fate had seen to that and, if my mother was to be believed, the Big Guy did as well. Though the idea of the man upstairs having a greater design for me than to suffer throughout all of eternity struck me as odd and uncomfortable, if it was a truth that would help me save Amber, Merry, and the world at large, I’d make myself get comfortable with it.
“I wish I could, Uncle C,” he said, shuffling uneasily. “But it’s not my decision.”
“Not your decision?” I asked, narrowing my eyes. Then as I understood what he meant, I spun on my heels, glaring at my mother. “You are not to give him demands, Eve. Do you understand me?”
“Eve?” she asked, pursing her lips at me. “That’s rather proper, isn’t it?”
“Do you understand me?” I repeated.
She rolled her eyes. “I speak over a hundred languages. So of course I understand you. Though honestly, I think it’s rather guttural of you to speak English instead of the original tongue. But I suppose what the say about being in Rome and doing as Romans do does apply here.” She tilted her head curiously. “Even if the Romans did all burn.”
“Shut up,” I growled, before turning back to Andy.
She grabbed my arm though, spinning me back toward her.
“That was always your problem, you know,” she said, her eyes full of anger and burning red energy. Seeing her with magic was off putting, like a cobra whose teeth were coated with electricity. Wasn’t the venom enough. “You never did care enough about other people to actually listen to what they had to say. It was the reason your brother was favored by He Who Made Us, and it was why you were seen s a lost cause after only one mistake.”
“You think you know me anymore?” I asked, fire of my own in my eyes. “You don’t, Eve. You never did. I was child when I made that mistake, a petulant brat, but I was what you raised me to be. We didn’t know how responsible parents are for the way their children turn out back then. That’s one of the great things about evolution. It sheds light. Nowadays, if some kid is a monster, we don’t banish him to the other side of the world and tell him good luck. We look at his parents and say what kind of sadistic S.O.B.s are responsible for shaping and cultivating that.” I shook my head. “I guess we all know the answer to that. I might have been responsible for the first murder, but you were responsible for me. At least I’m trying to atone for what I’ve done.”
“And doing a horrible job of it,” she spat back. The magic fell from her eyes as she spoke, revealing them to be human, to be the eyes of the woman who bore me, the woman who fed me her milk and rocked me to sleep. I might have hated her now, but there was a time when I loved her more than anyone on this earth, save one person. And looking into those eyes reminded me of that time.
I shook my head. There was no prize at the end of the road that memory would take me down, and I couldn’t afford to take the time to venture it.
“You, my son, are asking all the wrong questions.” She let go of me and spread her hands into the air, looking around the room. “You wake up here, in a house that you used to be the master of, a house where you held slaves and made enemies. You wake in a house that
you deserted when justice came to show you its colors, a house that served as the deathbed for those whose lives you twisted and ruined.” She scoffed at me, her face twisting in disgust as though she had never done anything wrong. “And you stand here, asking about the welfare of a woman and her daughter. The fact that the end of the world rests on her shoulders doesn’t even play into it. You ask of her because you love her, and you are weak.”
“Love doesn’t make you weak, Eve,” I said, swallowing hard. “If you had learned that, maybe you wouldn’t have ended up in hell.” I grimaced. “Twice.” I pulled back, stepping away from her. “But, pray tell, if you’re so wise, so learned about who I am and what I need, why don’t you tell me what the question is that I should be asking.”
“Personally,” she grinned. “I’d start with ‘who is that standing behind me’.”
My eyes went wide and I turned. The breath was pulled from my body as I took the sight of a woman who I hadn’t seen for a hundred years standing before me. The last time I’d laid eyes on her, she was burning to death, and today, those burns were as fresh and grotesque as ever.
Her skin, where it wasn’t burned, was pale and translucent. Her eyes were vessels of energy and, around her, pure rage had transformed into energy.
She wasn’t a ghost. She was a poltergeist, a spirit born of rage and fueled by the need for revenge.
In short, I was fucked.
9
When you live as long as I have, it’s not uncommon to have a few (hundred) things you regret. In truth, if I could take half of my impossibly long life and chuck it into a dumpster, I would have done it and not looked back.; I hadn’t always been kind. I hadn’t always been charitable and, as much as I hated to admit it, it’s not like my redemption was a one and done type thing.
I had phases; phases that lasted hundreds and hundreds of years at a time. Sure, when I was banished after the death of my brother, I was repentant. I would have done anything to bring him back and earn my way into the safety and comfort of not only my family but the Big Guy as well. As the years ticked away though and the world grew fuller and fuller of my family’s descendants, my repentance turned to anger.
I because bitter and loose with the welfare and feelings of others. I had been treated like a terror, so I might as well be one. That was the way I thought for a long time. Then something would happen to pull me back down to reality. I’d fall in love, or grow to care about someone as if they were family, and I’d see the err of my ways.
Of course, that never lasted too long. The person I loved would either die or disappoint me in some way, and I guess I had enough of my mother in me to cut ties when I felt betrayed or otherwise failed. And, when that happened, I would turn back to bitterness. I would turn back to anger and being loose with other people’s lives.
That pattern continued pretty much throughout all of human history until about one hundred years ago, when I started seeing my brother. He was the anchor, it turned out, to keep my feet firmly planted on the ground. My newfound decency and stability didn’t mean I hadn’t hurt people though, and it certainly didn’t mean I was absolved for the things that happened in my past. One of those people, one of those things, was staring back at me right now, and I couldn’t believe it.
“Blanche?” I asked, swallowing hard as I stared at the poltergeist. I knew it wasn’t her. I knew enough about spirits and the afterlife to know that poltergeists, unlike ghosts (which are souls somehow trapped on this plane by either mystical methods or unfinished business), poltergeists are the spiritual manifestation of suffered pain and anger that was left unexpressed in life. Blanche’s soul wasn’t a part of this thing, but the thing still identified as her. So it was likely in my best interest to address it as such.
“I’m surprised you even remember my name?” the creature said, energy crackling around her. Her mouth opened and, in it, I was a mass of spiritual magic. It swirled like a storm; a storm that was ready to put the hurt on me.
Blanche lifted her hand and- with it- my body was thrust into the air. I grappled against the movement, my heart racing as I found that I was no longer in control of my body.
“Fucking magic,” I muttered, looking down at the spirit as I hung like a painting against a wall.
“I’m surprised you even knew it in the first place,” she continued. “We were cattle to you, Christopher,” she said, using the name I’d had back in the day. “We were nothing to you, less than human. You used us to plant your crops and tend to the people you deemed more important. You kept us as your own, as though you owned us. As though one person could ever really own another.” Power crackled louder around her, and my body flew against the wall, slamming hard against the frame of a house that I would have sworn no longer existed.
“You never owned me, Christopher,” she said, floating toward me, her otherworldly feet dragging the floor. “Even if I was forced to call you Master.”
My eyes flickered up to Andy, and I tried to read his expression as he stood stalwart, watching me. I had been purposefully vague about what my life in this country had been like during the American Civil War. I told him I stayed out of the fight, which was true. What I didn’t tell him, what I had never told him, was that I hadn’t stayed out of the life before the war.
I had been a slave owner in a piece of my past that I regretted almost as much as I regretted what happened to my brother. And, just like my brother, this part of the past was coming back to haunt me.
Andy’s expression remained unchanged; so much so, that I began to wonder how much of this my mother had told him. Was that how she had won his assistance? Had she told him stories of the worst parts of my long life and, if so, how did she know them herself? For that matter, how did she know about this place and what happened in it? Whatever the reason, the change between Andy and I was stark. He might have just said that he’d never lie to me, but things were different between us. I could have never imagined a time when the man I called my nephew would ever stand aside as I was being attacked, but that was exactly what was happening now.
“it was a different time, Blanche?” I said, tasting blood. I must have bit my lip when I slammed against this wall. “It doesn’t make what I did right, and you’re certainly due the anger you’re feeling right now, but you need to understand that things have changed.” I swallowed hard, the metal taste in my mouth traveling down my throat. “You have to understand that I’ve changed.”
The echo of the woman, dressed in the same uniform she’d been in on the day she died so many decades ago, chuckled bitterly. The laugh boomed throughout the room so loudly that the wall I was pressed against shook. The portraits rattled against their frames and my organs rattled against my bones.
“Has time passed, Christopher?” she asked as a glowing aura appeared beside her; a lump of blue, ill defined energy. “it is the same for me. It is the same for us.”
“Us?” I asked as pressure built against my ribcage. I felt them snap, one after the other. Pain filled me like water in a jug. A horrible thought crossed my mind. If I was to suffer enough for force me unconscious, to do what would kill a normal person, then I might be sent back to Purgatory. Worse than that, whatever possessed my body might return and continue the havoc that began right after my brother shot me.
Another rib snapped and I felt it pierce my lung. The breath caught in my throat and I screamed in pain. “You have to stop this!” I said as the aura beside Blanche was joined with ten more, and then twenty. The entire room soon became filled with light blue auras, all still ill shaped, all still undefined.
“If I die,” I started, agony ripping through my body and causing me to shudder. “If I die, bad things will happen.”
“You are without death,” Blanche said, her power vacuum eyes pinned on me. “You are like hate. You are like pain and suffering. Like all the worst things in the world, you are eternal.”
“You have to stop this!” I repeated. Though, this time, my eyes moved from Blanche and the energy surrou
nding her to Andy. He was still just standing there, arms crossed and eyes downcast. What the hell was he doing? He was just a man. So, of course, he couldn’t take out a poltergeist on his own. Still, he was doing nothing. He wasn’t even concerned. Whatever my mother had told him, it had completely shattered our relationship.
“Andy!” I shouted as loudly as I could. He didn’t look up. “Andy!” I repeated again. “Goddamn it! Look at me!”
Finally, he looked at me, tears streaming down his face. “You have to do this yourself, Uncle C,” he said, his voice cracking. “I’m sorry, but that’s the way it has to happen.”
My mother was beside him, her eyes trained on me and her mouth set, unmoving. She had magic. She could stop this if she wanted. This was perhaps her goal, to put me in a place to do damage once whatever took over my body before did so again.
She forgot one thing though. I had been alone most of my life. Sure, getting help with this situation would have made it easier, and the rules had definitely changed since my ‘deaths’ now had dire consequences, but- as everyone who has ever hated me and wanted to prove it has reminded me- I was the father of murder. I was a badass, and I could get out of this.
The taste of blood filled my mouth again, and I knew it wasn’t from a bit lip. My insides were being crushed. I needed to get a handle on this situation, and I needed to do it now.
“Don’t you want to move on?” I asked, looking down at Blanche as sweat pooled at my forehead. “You were property for your entire life. Do you really want to allow that truth to keep you from the reward you’ve so justly deserved?”
It was a lie. Blanche’s soul had very likely moved on to a better place. This poltergeist would simply stop existing if I could convince it to let go of the pain but, as a creature based and fed on rage, that was probably a blessing. Besides, it thought it was Blanche, and that was an avenue of persuasion I could definitely use against it.
Rise of Cain (Immortal Mercenary Book 3) Page 5
