Legends (To Absolve the Fallen Book 3)

by Aaron Babbitt

  Now, sure that he was awake, Alex stood dumbfounded. She let him go and stood back to look into his eyes.

  “Alex, it’s okay to be sad.”

  “What did they write?”

  She breathed deeply before replying, “It said, ‘God hates fags.’”

  Alex nodded slowly. “Metatron did this.”

  “I don’t think so, Alex. There were witnesses in the bar who saw four men walk out after Matt when he left. They had already accosted him for being gay. They’re in jail right now.”

  “Ten rednecks couldn’t have taken Matt,” Alex argued. “It was a demon that wanted us to hate the people of this town. This was planned.”

  “Get dressed, and come to the living room when you’re ready. We’re all mourning together, and I think Elizabeth could really use you right now.”

  He changed his clothes, and the pain swept over him. The surreal notion that Matt would not be around anymore began to sink in. He could feel the truth in what Marla spoke. She was right: Liz did need him, and so did their unborn child. They needed him to put an end to this madness once and for all.

  When his mother came to check on him thirty minutes later, she found that he was gone.

  ***

  Alex walked into the very morgue his classmate, Michael Thompson, had been in before John resurrected him. He still felt the qualities of a dream as he descended the stairs and heard Abbie’s quivering voice discussing the previous night’s events with Catherine and the sheriff.

  “Alex,” she sobbed. “Oh, Alex,” she repeated. For once, Abigail Martin seemed to be without adequate words to convey her emotions.

  “Not this way,” Alex mumbled as he looked at Matt’s pale face and his stitched neck. In all the ways he had been afraid he and his friends would die, never had he envisioned a hate crime. “We’ve come so far,” he said a little louder. “It’s not going down like this.”

  Abbie’s sorrow became confusion. “What?”

  He focused his thoughts. He could fix this. “I’m going to bring him back.”

  Realization dawned on Abbie’s face. She stepped over to comfort him. Placing an arm around his shoulder, she said, “Alex, honey, we have to--”

  “No!” he shouted, shrugging her gesture away. “I’m not going to accept this. I’m not going to move on. John could do it, so I can too. Raphael!” he screamed.

  In an instant, and with a flash, time stopped, and the archangel stood before him. If it were possible, Raphael wore a more grim expression than Alex had ever seen on him.

  “Good,” Alex said, wiping tears from his eyes with the back of his hand. “We’re going to bring him back.” He walked toward the body, vaguely aware that all movement from the others in the room had ceased. Once more, it was just him and Raphael.

  “Not this time, Alex,” the angel replied with a slow shake of his head.

  “What do you mean, ‘not this time?’ You’re not seriously suggesting that you won’t intervene, are you?”

  “That is precisely what I’m saying,” the angel confirmed. “There is nothing that can be done now. Listen to Abigail’s wisdom. Accept this.”

  Alex glowered at the angel. “Like Hell. We’re going to bring him back, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “I’m sorry, child, but you do not command me.”

  “God wouldn’t want this to happen. Ask Him! He’ll tell you to help me.”

  Raphael shook his head sadly. “My heart yearns to--”

  “You have no heart,” Alex interrupted, pointing an angry finger at him. “You’re an angel. You do what you’re told! And I’m telling you to bring my friend back to life.”

  The archangel’s form suddenly flared, and he grew much larger. His voice boomed. “I’ve told you more than once that I do not heed your commands. I serve only at the Father’s discretion. And this is one matter He was very clear about.” The angel’s fury subsided, and he shrank to his previous size. “This is His will.”

  Alex shook his head. “It can’t be,” he defied quietly. “This isn’t how it was supposed to be. If you won’t help, I’ll do it myself.”

  “I told you, Alex, this is His will. Neither of us can change that.”

  “What about my freewill?” Alex countered. “What happened to the concept that, with enough faith, anything is possible?”

  “Freewill is exactly the point here. You made a choice, one Sophie warned you against. Matt made the same choice. Can you not see the effect it would have on freewill and the concept of sacrifice if I simply gave you back your friend? Would it not make Matt’s choice less noble?”

  “This isn’t about nobility. This is a punishment for choosing wrong.”

  “No. You didn’t choose wrong, and this is not a punishment. In fact, your actions saved many prophet lives, not to mention the thousands of mortals in Kingstone. But,” he motioned to the corpse on the table, “this is a consequence. You knew what was at stake, and so did he. Your selflessness was admirable. Your willingness to sacrifice your life for people you don’t even know is the very reason you are in the position you’re in. Matt, as your friend, was just as altruistic, and he now resides in Paradise. He’s in no pain, I can promise you. No one judges him; no one hates him. He’s finally happy.”

  Alex collapsed to his knees, sobbing. “I didn’t know it would be like this.”

  Raphael sighed. “I wish I could say it gets easier.”

  “The cost is too much.”

  “All lives are fleeting,” Raphael answered. “What matters is what you do with your life. Knowing what you know now, feeling the pain that you’re feeling, would you have chosen differently and sacrificed all those lives?”

  “I don’t know,” the boy answered honestly.

  “In time, you will. After the immediacy and shock wear off, after you’ve seen more of the plan, I have faith that you will see how right the decisions you and Matt made were. You have so little time on Earth to make the right choices. An eternity awaits you beyond this to enjoy the knowledge that the consequences were worth it.

  “Now, rise. There is still more work to do.”

  Alex looked up and the angel was gone.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” Abbie said, pulling the prophet up off the ground and embracing him tightly. Her tears fell onto his shoulder as she squeezed him.

  He hugged her back, but without much strength or feeling. “This isn’t over,” he whispered. “Someone is going to pay.”

  And Abbie found herself hugging only air.

  ***

  “Goddamnit, Hank,” Chris Macon yelled to the guard he couldn’t see but knew could hear him, “you know I didn’t kill anyone. Let me out of this shithole.”

  He pressed his fat body against the bars of his cell and looked out in vain. There wasn’t a cop in sight. He slammed his fists against the bars in frustration and turned back to the bench on which he’d spent the majority of the last four hours. It startled him to see a kid sitting on his bench who had not been there before.

  “I know you didn’t kill him,” Alex said.

  “You’re the kid on the news,” Chris observed. “How the hell did you get in here?”

  “Of all the things happening around you that your tiny brain will never understand, that is the least of your concerns. I’m going to ask you a series of questions. If you answer them to my liking, I’ll be on my way. If you don’t, I will take what I need from you.”

  Chris snorted in disbelief. “I have a lawyer. You can ask him your questions.”

  Alex bowed his head, then looked up and replied, “That’s the wrong attitude.”

  Chris fell to his knees as what felt like electricity coursed through is body. His muscles tingled, and he found that he had wet himself, when he looked back up at Alex with a new respect. He screamed for help, but no one came.

  “They can’t hear you. As hard as it may be to believe, this conversation is happening completely in your head. One more time...I am going to ask you some questions, and you will answer
to the best of your abilities. If you fight me, or if your memory isn’t good enough, I’ll break you down until I can rummage through your mind, like the trash it is. That journey will probably be very painful for you, and it may result in seizures for the rest of your worthless life. It could even kill you. But I will get what I want at whatever expense to you. Are you ready?”

  “I don’t know anything,” Chris contended.

  “I’m sure that’s almost true,” Alex agreed. “And it might be that the demon that actually killed Matthew Hartley hid itself well enough that you can’t recall any details on your own, but I can help.”

  “You can’t...you can’t do this,” Chris stammered. “I’m an American citizen. I have rights. I have a lawyer,” he added, as if maybe Alex hadn’t heard the first time.

  “You are not in a court of law right now, Mr. Macon. It’s just you and me. We’ll start with something easy: What is the last thing you remember before leaving the bar?”

  “I was drunk; I can’t remember what happened.”

  Chris screamed as it seemed that something just tore into his skull.

  “You were drunk because you and your wife are having money issues,” Alex told him. “Matt said something that angered you, made you feel a little more vulnerable than you already had. You see, Mr. Macon? I will come to the information I need. Whether the process is slow and painful or quick and easy is your choice.”

  “When I get out of here, I’ll tell everyone what you did,” Chris threatened.

  Alex shook his head. “You won’t remember what I did.”

  More pain swept through Chris’s head as memories of the night flooded his mind. He could only focus on the pain, so Alex had no problems tugging at the memories he needed.

  “You and a friend, no doubt in a nearby cell, followed Matt out of the bar. There were two others. One of them was the first to confront my friend.

  “Mr. Macon, you have no idea how much physical pain you avoided through Matt’s death. I guess the tradeoff is that you get me now, instead.”

  Chris Macon curled into the fetal position and whimpered. “Her voice was so soothing,” he said finally, softly. “I believed her when she said everything would be all right.”

  Alex’s eyes narrowed as he followed Chris’s train of thought directly to the hazy recollection of a face. But the feeling and the sound of her voice, echoing in Chris’s mind, was all Alex needed to identify a familiar presence.

  “Eva,” he whispered angrily. “I should have known.”

  Chris Macon awoke on the ground with a feeling of abject terror. It was like he’d had a nightmare that he couldn’t remember. His head throbbed painfully, and after he touched a wet spot on his face, he discovered that his nose was bleeding. He also noticed, to his chagrin, that he had pissed himself. He’d never had a hangover like this before, including the time his gas was so bad he thought he was having a heart attack.

  With a grunt, he got up, shoved his fat body against the bars of his cell, and yelled for Hank to let him “out of this shithole.” He felt like he was repeating himself but was unsure why.

  ***

  “I don’t know where he is,” Mary Tanner said with a shrug of her shoulders and a look of helplessness on her face. “Did he say anything to you?” she asked Marla.

  “He had a hard time accepting the news,” Marla answered reluctantly. “And he’d made up his mind that it was a demonic attack.”

  “It was,” Garrett announced as he walked into the house. “Two of them. Patheus and Eva. It strikes me as strange that Matt was such an easy target for them, but Eva can already walk around undetectable to almost everyone, and Patheus can teleport. Both are abilities gifted the demons by their master, that may have also had a hand in Matt’s death. Metatron’s presence at the scene is faint. It may not have even been in Kingstone at the time, but it helped its lackeys. Of that much, I am certain.”

  “I wish I had known that earlier,” Alex’s voice commented from behind them. “It would have spared me some of my investigation.”

  Everyone spun to see Alex walking into the dining room, where they had all converged. He looked haggard and tired. Immediately, Mary and Elizabeth got up to see if he had any injuries. Finding none, they both began to chastise him for his unannounced departure.

  He waved his hand as if to dismiss their concerns and sat in the nearest open chair. “We’ve been going about this all wrong,” he stated, as Nagina and Salmar walked into the room. “We keep waiting for Metatron’s attack, so we can react and, with any luck, end this war. I have a new plan. With or without anyone else’s help, I intend to bring the battle to them. I believe I can locate Metatron at any time, and I’m going to use that power to hit him hard. I figure that if an archangel is really so tough, Metatron should have much to fear.”

  “What if he is not the only demon present when you appear?” Salmar inquired. “What if there are many?”

  “More importantly,” Garrett added, “what will Kingstone do if we all launch a surprise attack against Metatron, and its forces, which are already poising themselves to strike, swarm the town without us here?”

  “When I go after Metatron,” Alex replied darkly, “it will be to destroy him. I believe his forces will crumble without leadership.”

  Nagina shook her head. “No, they won’t. Patheus led Metatron’s forces for the last fifty years—ten years with us all believing Metatron was gone for good—and Jeremiah before that. Someone will step up to take control of the world’s demonic population.”

  “Like I said, if I have to go alone, I will,” Alex reminded them. “I’ll give you all a little while to decide what you want to do. If Catherine did what she was supposed to do, the Attorney General should be expecting me. If someone would be so kind as to attend to my parents while I’m gone.”

  “Attend to us?” his father asked. “Son, we’re grown, and we can tend to ourselves. For that matter, your mother and I are a little concerned about you.”

  Alex recoiled a little from the statement. “Why?”

  “You aren’t acting like yourself. Dr. Martin said you had touched too many demon minds, and I think she might be right. I can understand your anger, but it’s starting to take over. I can see that now.”

  For only a second, Alex began to reconsider his choice. However, his resolve set in when he remembered the way Matt had tried to warn him against Eva in Las Vegas. If things had been dealt with properly there, if Alex had been thinking with his head instead of his libido, so much would be different.

  He knew that focusing on regrets was feeding right into Metatron’s plan. He shook his head and said, “I never told you this, Dad, but when God spoke to me, He would always look like you. At first, I thought it was because He wanted me to see Him like a father, but now I understand that there was a greater meaning in His choice.

  “Do you remember my little league games?”

  “Of course,” James affirmed. “I was at every one.”

  Alex smiled. “I don’t think I ever hit a single ball in a game that wasn’t a foul.”

  “I seem to recall a few very powerful line drives,” his father corrected.

  “Maybe,” Alex agreed, laughing, “but that isn’t the point. I would have never stayed in that game for as long as I did if you hadn’t had faith in me. You pushed me to finish what I started and to try harder when things didn’t work out. I never did anything remarkable, but I also didn’t give up.

  “When God appeared to me as you, I felt that, no matter what I did, He would have confidence in my ability to make good decisions—as long as I didn’t give up. I have a chance to hit a homerun and win this game for us. Believe in me like you did in those old, rusty stands behind the middle school. I can finish this.”

  James nodded. “All right, Son. Finish it.”

  ***

  Sara almost had her gun drawn, in response to three loud knocks on her motel room door, before she was hit with the familiar feeling of John from the other side. She r
ushed to the door and opened it to find whom she expected standing there with an expression of relief, then one of serious concern.

  “Matt was killed last night,” he explained.

  “The head of security?”

  Brianna had also come to the door by this time.

  He nodded. “Demons caught him outside the compound. I came here to tell you that it’s not safe to be this far away anymore. We can’t keep them out if they really want to get in, and Matt was just the first. It’s only a matter of time before they come to Kingstone in force and wipe out any prophet who isn’t protected.

  “The prophets have built temporary shelters around the safe house, and more are under construction. There’re trailers all over the property that could easily take the two of you. You’ll have a place to stay, but we need to leave now.”

  “Okay,” Sara agreed. “Brianna doesn’t have anything with her but the clothes on her back.” She picked up a backpack and added, “I have everything I need in here, so I guess we’re ready when you are.”

  John smiled. He found himself caring for Sara in a slightly different capacity than he previously had. Briefly, he considered a life with her. They could both provide for and teach Brianna, while exploring their own interests and jointly changing the world in whatever ways they could. The thought pleased him, but he knew it could never be.

  He knew it because Nancy had returned to him a few hours ago and told him that it was finally time. After all these years, the training, the fighting, even after thinking he’d lost his guardian angel, his destiny was upon him. He couldn’t afford any distractions, which was precisely why it was crucial to see these two new friends to safety before the end.

  ***

  Albert O’Riley sat in a very institutional-looking room, with plain, off-white, stone walls and suspended fluorescent lights. Four armed F.B.I. agents stood vigilantly behind him. And across the table was the boy he believed to be the leader of a terrorist cult. The boy looked positively calm.