The Stolen Karma Of Nathaniel Valentine (The Books Of Balance Book 1)

by Justin Bloch

  “My god,” whispered Nathaniel. The image he had stolen from Sol’s mind outside the gates made sense now. “I can’t believe an angel would do something like that.”

  “Angels are far from perfect. We have free will, just as you do. We make our own choices and choose our own destinies. Nor are we immune to the effects of our choices on our psyches. When the Morningstar fell and the armies of Heaven were set against him, it was Luna who led the charge into battle. Can you imagine that, Nathaniel? Can you imagine leading one army of angels against another, one commanded by your own brother?”

  Nathaniel’s eyes went wide. “Lucifer is Luna’s brother?”

  “She may have won in the Elysian Desert, but the strain of contributing to the downfall of her brother proved too much for her to bear.” She paused for a moment. “And now, once the Allamagoosalum is slain, Sol plans to descend to Hell with Bertha and take Luna’s life, though Lucifer will never allow him to leave once he has done so.”

  Nathaniel was overwhelmed. “I didn’t even think angels could die.”

  “Yes. There is only one way, but it is still a way. And Sol means to use it.”

  “And you’re going to let him?”

  “I have spoken against it, but in the end, it’s Sol’s choice. And one he has already made.” She gave him a stern look. “His mind can’t be changed, Nathaniel.”

  “What does Bertha think of all this?”

  “She doesn’t know, nor will she until after the Allamagoosalum is killed. As Sol won’t know that I told you. He is under enough stress as it is.” She pointed one finger at him, held him with her glare. “Do not speak to him about this.”

  Nathaniel remained silent and Nova said no more. They listened to the murmur of the wind through the leaves and thought of angelic retribution and the terrible balance of vengeance.

  Some short time later, Sol emerged from the clearing. He approached them slowly, his hands clasped behind his back.

  “So?” Nathaniel asked.

  The karma policeman sighed heavily. “She refused to answer my questions. She has made a request instead.”

  Nova stepped forward, putting herself between Nathaniel and her brother. “We discussed this, Sol. She cannot be allowed near him. If he were to die…”

  The policeman nodded gravely. “She has promised he will not be harmed.”

  “And you think you can trust her to keep her promise?” Nova snapped.

  “There is no other way. She is the only one who can tell us what we need to know.” He brushed a stray lock of his sister’s hair away from her face. It was a curiously gentle gesture, coming from him. “We have no choice.”

  Nova huffed and put her hands on her hips. “What guarantee do we have? You know what she’s like. Her whim is her will.”

  The karma policeman trained his eyes on Nathaniel’s face, then let them fall to his hand. “She said that he is not within her dominion. That he is her brother’s.”

  Nathaniel frowned, raised his hand to his chest and contemplated the tiny scar there. “Do you think we can trust her?” he asked.

  “No,” answered Sol simply. “But she is our best hope.”

  Nathaniel considered. He didn’t know how much of Pestilence’s claim to him was authentic, but if Magdalene honored it, he might be safe. Right now, what mattered was what she believed, not what was true. “Let’s try. Whatever happens, happens.”

  The karma policeman looked pleased. “Good,” he said. “Come then. Time is short.”

  Sol headed back toward the clearing. Nathaniel fell into step behind him, and after a moment, Nova followed as well. She had not yet pocketed her straight razor and, for the first time, Nathaniel wondered how he was going to kill the Allamagoosalum. He had no weapon of his own after all, and he couldn’t imagine how either of his newfound abilities could possibly help. He made a note to ask Sol about it later, when he wasn’t busy facing death at the hands of one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Again.

  When they passed the tree line and stepped into the clearing, Nathaniel’s eyes were so dazzled by the sunlight that he was unable to make out his surroundings. Things swam into focus slowly as his vision adjusted from the pleasant dimness of the forest and, as they did, he found himself even more overwhelmed. The clearing was a marvel. Nathaniel felt like he could see every leaf and stem and trunk and bloom in perfect, tactile clarity. He looked at flowers and could smell their aroma, looked at ladybugs and could hear them scuttling along, looked at dew droplets and could taste their wetness. Everything seemed more alive, more vital, more there than anything he had ever experienced before. And in the center of it all, about ten yards from where they stood at the clearing’s edge, radiating light, was the Tree of Life.

  It was tall, but not as high as some of the other trees which formed the canopy over this section of Eden. Its branches and leaves formed a sphere above its trunk and splashes of purple peeked through in places. The leaves were slim and bright kelly green, shiny on their topside. As if he were looking through some powerful microscope, Nathaniel realized he could see every individual leaf despite the fact that there were thousands upon thousands of them on the Tree. The purple peeking out from between the leaves revealed itself to be the Tree’s fruit, round and about the size of an apple. He wondered what it would taste like, whether it would be sweet, savory, tart, juicy. He could see the fruit with the clarity with which he saw everything else, and as he gazed at it, there was nothing more that he wanted. He forgot about Sol, about Nova, about the Allamagoosalum. He forgot about Magdalene as well, until she stepped out from her hiding place behind the trunk. Only then did he forget about the fruit.

  Nova had said she was young, so Nathaniel had pictured a teenager with black hair, black fingernails, black clothes. Dark lipstick and pale skin, heavy eye shadow and a perpetual scowl. Magdalene was none of that. She was perhaps eight years old, and her dirty blonde hair was plaited in two braids, one on either side of her head. She was wearing a bright green jumper and had on white knee-high socks and shiny, green patent leather shoes. There was a round, pale gray pin at the neckline of her jumper. A row of freckles started at one ear and finished at the other, running across her cheeks and button nose. She held her hands behind her back. She looked in all respects like a normal little girl, save for her eyes, which lacked both irises and pupils. They were pure white, so bright that they seemed to glow from within. Her sclerae were devoid of any visible veins. On seeing those eyes, Nathaniel finally understood the definition of white as the absence of all color.

  “Is this the Cipher?” she asked. Her voice, like the rest of her, was utterly un-odd, a high, child’s voice. Nathaniel watched closely, but her chest failed to rise and fall, and there was a stillness to her body when she was not moving, as if it wanted to rest, to lie down and be at peace. Her actions seemed forced and stilted, as if she had to compel her form to obey her will. Nathaniel realized that there was no life in the girl standing before him, the dead child Magdalene.

  “Yes, milady,” answered Sol. “The Cipher Nathaniel Valentine.”

  “Hmph,” the dead child snorted. “He’s not really such of a much.”

  Nathaniel, unsure of how to act, what to do, or when to do it, bowed slightly.

  Magdalene giggled, then sketched him a little curtsey in return. “You are my brother’s,” she said. Her tone fell somewhere between a question and a statement of fact.

  “So I’ve heard,” answered Nathaniel.

  Something about this struck her as funny, and she laughed in the carefree way that only a little girl can. She patted the trunk of the Tree of Life as she giggled and with every touch of her palm against the bark, the Tree shivered. Nathaniel watched her uneasily and wondered if the laughs escaping her lips were real or false. Her blank eyes gave nothing of her emotions away.

  Nova spoke up for the first time. “We have business with you, Magdalene. We would like to transact it.” Her voice was hard, but Nathaniel heard an edge of worry, a note of apprehen
sion.

  The dead child’s face soured and her laughter died. “Would you, now?” she asked. “The only business I have is with this sapling, seraph. I would not have you tell me what is my concern.” A shrub near the entrance to the clearing began shaking and, as Nathaniel watched, withered brown and lifeless.

  “We want to know who Elizabeth Cummings was reincarnated as,” Sol said. There was something in his tone that sounded familiar, but Nathaniel couldn’t immediately place it.

  “It’s a secret. Come and play with me and maybe I’ll tell,” giggled the dead child.

  “We don’t have time to play.”

  Magdalene puffed her bottom lip out, pouting. “You won’t even play a little?” She dashed behind the trunk of the Tree, then peeked out. “We could play Hide and Seek! There’s lots of good places to hide here in the Garden now that everything’s fallen over.”

  “Magdalene, we have come for an answer, not a game,” stated Sol, and Nathaniel realized where he had heard the tone before. It had been used on him countless times when he’d misbehaved as a kid.

  The dead child withdrew from behind the Tree. “You’re no fun,” she sulked. Beside Nathaniel, a flower suddenly wilted and died, shriveled into a husk of itself. After a moment, life reappeared in the blossom. The green of the stem and leaves, the blue of the flower. The stem trembled, then righted itself.

  “Who did Elizabeth Cummings become?” questioned Sol.

  “What do you think will happen when I finally kill this Tree?” asked the dead child. She placed her hand on the trunk, which began to shiver again. The slim, shiny leaves quaking against each other sounded like tiny rattles. “Do you think it will be only Eden which dies, policeman?” She looked toward Sol. Her grin was malicious. “I think maybe it will be the key to something more.”

  “Tell us who she became, Magdalene,” said Nova.

  The dead child shook her head back and forth with enough force to send her braids slapping against the sides of her head, then cast her white gaze on Nathaniel. “I want to play. If you don’t, then I don’t have any use for you.” She waved a dismissive hand at them and turned to face the Tree, placing both of her hands upon it.

  Nova looked at Sol and shrugged, at an impasse. They could not afford to waste time playing Hide and Seek, especially on grounds as large as the Garden of Eden, but they couldn’t leave without the information the dead child knew. And neither of the karma police seemed to have any ideas. Magdalene was spoiled, used to getting her way, and Nathaniel doubted that she would reveal what she knew even if they did agree to play with her. Nathaniel tossed the problem about and realized after a moment’s consideration that the situation was not entirely dissimilar from the one he had faced with Magdalene’s brother.

  “I’ll play with you,” he said. Although the dead child did not remove her hands from the Tree, she cocked her head toward him. Both of the karma police turned, alarm clear on their faces. “Ring around the Rosy, do you know that one?”

  The dead child pulled her hands from the tree and faced him. The grin on her face was triumphant, overjoyed; her blank eyes seemed to shine with an even greater light. “Of course I do!” she cried, delighted. She took several steps toward him, then paused, looking at him suspiciously. “No fooling? You’re really going to play?”

  “Nathaniel, you must not,” intoned Sol. “You know what she is.”

  He ignored him and nodded at the girl. “Sure, why not?”

  From beside him, Nova whispered plaintively, “Nathaniel, no.”

  The dead child Magdalene skipped the rest of the distance to her new friend. She favored him with a wide grin and Nathaniel saw that it was the smile of a lunatic, one that touched even her blank eyes. He realized that not only was she a child, she was a mad child. He began to wonder if his calculated risk had perhaps been a monumental mistake.

  “It’ll be ever so much fun,” said Death and clapped her hands before her. Somewhere behind them, a tree crashed to the ground. She extended a small, delicate doll’s hand to him. “We’ll play over here,” she said, smiling slyly. “Take my hand and I’ll show you how we play where I come from.”

  Chapter XXI

  He had expected her hand to be cold, but he had not expected it to be so cold that it actually hurt him to touch it, like holding a metal bar that has been left out overnight in the middle of winter. She gripped his hand for a moment then let it fall, as if only to let him know that there would be no take-backs. They were playmates now, for better or worse.

  He began to notice things about the dead child, now that he was closer to her. The first and most obvious was the way she smelled, not of rot and decomposition as he would have guessed, but something more subtle and unpleasant, like the smell of damp, dead leaves that have been left to fester in an autumn pile. Nathaniel could remember times as a child when he had leapt into the piles his father had raked, heaped into mounds like barrows, only to discover that the leaves deeper toward the core were wet and slick. He had scrambled out of those piles as quickly as he could, sometimes frantically. The slimy leaves had whispered to him of worms and slugs and other creatures which were still abominations at his young age, and his play had without fail been ruined.

  The dead child’s lips were dry and cracked. Her skin looked unhealthy, as if someone with a talent for stage make-up had tried to cover a deathly pallor with a rosy blush. Her fingernails were ragged and uneven. Her green jumper was stained and appeared to be coming apart at the seams. Most disturbingly, there seemed to be something (or somethings, Nathaniel could not tell whether there was one or several) in her hair, slithering back and forth across her scalp, always blocked from view by the thick tangles of her hair.

  She led him to the Tree, positioned him on one side and herself on the other. She giggled and Nathaniel realized how badly frightened he was. She held out her hands, one on either side of the trunk, and waited for him to take hold. He hesitated for a moment, wondering if it was too late to cry off.

  “Come on!” she whined, and stamped her foot on the ground. On the edge of the clearing, a magnolia tree wasted away and returned to life.

  “Nathaniel,” Sol whispered, holding out a hand, but said no more.

  Nathaniel reached out and locked his fingers with Magdalene’s. The flood of pictures began immediately, a vast array of death images flashing by like slides in a projector manned by a meth addict. He hadn’t been sure it would work as it had on the seraphim until she had briefly taken his hand when he agreed to play with her. The dead child began singing on what felt like the other side of the world, and he began to spin around the Tree of Life. The pictures were appalling, peaceful, beautiful, sick, hilarious, revolting. The only common thread was that they were all fascinating, and Nathaniel had to work to keep from being sucked in and losing sight of his goal. He had no idea whether he could actively pick out knowledge from another’s mind, but he meant to try, and he could not afford to waste any time. Already he had circled the slim trunk of the Tree twice, and the fact that he could not make out the words of the dead child’s singsong worried him.

  He focused his mind and tried to probe Magdalene’s. At first, all he could see were more images

  (a woman, naked and overweight, in a tub of warm water. Her hand hangs over the side and

  drops of blood fall from her fingertips and stain the bathmat.)

  of death. But what he needed was not the dead but the living, the eternal, ongoing soul. He concentrated

  (a dog, tongue lolling from mouth, swollen and the gray of ashes in a fire pit.)

  on finding some thread of life in her thoughts. The dead child’s voice, so far off, was beginning to sound more excited and he hurriedly searched, hunted for anything alive. He grasped at wisps of smoke and shadow,

  (a bouquet of wilted but still colorful tulips, placed in a graveside vase.)

  reached for anything that looked the least bit solid

  (an old man, bedridden, in the midst of what will be his final stroke.)<
br />
  and at last caught hold of something deep within Magdalene’s psyche,

  (a kitten, newly birthed and being licked clean by her mother.)

  hidden away in arcane corners the dead child seldom visited. Nathaniel rifled through the images, the billions of snapshots of living souls that Magdalene held within her mind, each picture linked to countless others, portraits of the souls and their prior bodies’ deaths. He barely registered most of what passed through his mind. He was only interested in a single image and he focused his mind’s eye on catching it.

  When it finally did appear, he was so surprised that he nearly stumbled while turning about the Tree and, in some far off part of his mind that seemed incredibly unimportant, he felt his hold on the dead child’s fingers begin to slip. He tightened his grip even as he brought the precious image to the forefront of his mind, filing away the information that came with it almost absentmindedly, and saw for the first time the karma policeman’s darling Stella. Even with her head caved in as it was (and he knew that if he wished, he could watch Raymond strike her with the butt of the pistol, but he wanted no such thing, not ever) she was beautiful; he could see both her mother and her father in her face. The girl who was holding her, Elizabeth, was homely and chubby, her cheeks riddled with acne. Raymond had shot her in the chest when she’d pulled Stella’s bleeding body to her, and Elizabeth had died instantly, even before the karma policeman’s daughter. And though it was Elizabeth that Nathaniel had come to find, it was Stella he lingered on. Stella, with her bloody hair and deep red lips. Stella, who would never take to wing again, who would—

  He was falling backward suddenly, nothing but air in his hands and centripetal force pressing at his chest. The image of the two girls blinked out of his mind as if someone had flicked a switch in his brain and he landed awkwardly, unprepared to brace himself. Dizziness washed over his addled mind. On the other side of the Tree, he could hear the dead child Magdalene laughing madly.