Out of the corner of his eye, Jack spotted Gideon in the kitchen watching him and Gabriella, when the shrill sound of the teapot whistled through the room. Jack had not put the teapot on to boil, nor had he given Gideon the means to manipulate the physical world.
“Would you excuse me for a moment, Gabriella? I’m afraid I left the kettle on,” he said, and he retreated into the kitchen.
When he entered the kitchen, he found Addison standing in the middle of the floor in his pajamas. Jack was surprised to find him activated. He had turned off Addison’s program while he had been working on Gideon’s upgrades.
“Addison?” Jack whispered, kneeling down to his AI son’s eye level. “What are you doing on?” Jack could not remember if he had installed a self-activation protocol in either of his kids. He dismissed the thought because if he had programmed them with such a function, Tori would have appeared as well. She was, after all, a quintessential busybody.
“Daddy? Who’s Gideon?” Addison looked up, rubbing his sleepy eyes. “He woke me up to give you a message.” The boy let out a frog-mouthed yawn. Jack did not understand why Gideon would bother to activate Addison to deliver a message instead of waiting for him to return to the virtual workshop. He thought he understood his programs well enough and assumed they would interrupt his conversation if the situation were urgent. Unless, Jack considered, the message could not be delivered in front of Gabriella.
“I’m sorry he woke you up, buddy,.” Jack said with a soothing smile. “What’s the message?”
Addison pointed his chubby finger out the window, drawing Jack’s eyes to a large display on the side of the building across the street. The words were a bit blurry; Jack stood up to get a better view of it from his balcony. He opened the sliding door and stepped into the night air. The words he read scrolling along the bottom of the display made his skin crawl and sent a shiver racing up and down his spine.
“THE ANGEL IS NOT THE BASE COUNSELOR.”
If Gideon’s warning was true, Jack wondered why an Angel would lie about her occupation or her reason for coming into his home. He took a deep, uneasy breath and shook his head in a vain effort to rattle the answer from his subconscious.
Jack walked back into the kitchen and slid the patio door closed behind him. Addison was still standing there in his pajamas.
“Is Mom going to be home soon?” he asked with pleading eyes. Jack walked around the kitchen island and knelt back down in front of Addison.
“Go tell Gideon I said thanks for the message.” Jack smiled at his son, trying to appear unfazed, wishing he could give the boy a physical hug. “Good night, Addison.”
Addison dissolved from the kitchen, a final “good night” on his yawning lips. Jack stood up and took another deep breath. He did not know who the Angel was, but her direct behavior had unnerved him, along with Gideon’s warning. “If the Angel was not who she said she was,” he thought to himself, “why was she here at all, and what was she hiding?”
Jack became determined in getting her out of the house so he could resume his work on Gideon and search for Evangeline.
He turned around from where Addison had just disappeared, startled to find Gabriella standing in his kitchen with a warm smile on her face. She had crept in as quiet as a cat. A sick feeling washed over Jack, making him wonder how much she had seen and heard.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Evans,” she said, her eyes crinkled with regret.
“Sorry about what?” he asked. Though her words were sympathetic, something menacing flashed in her eyes. Jack took a step back, circling around the kitchen island. His instincts told him to put space between him and this deceptive Angel.
“I’m sorry you managed to see that,” she answered, shaking her head with disapproval.
“See what?” he gulped, continuing to back away from her. She matched his movements, step for step in a cat-and-mouse dance, until he found himself backed up against the wall that separated the kitchen from the front room.
“The message on the marquee outside,” she said, her voice playful as she nodded her head in the direction of the sliding door. In a flash, her hand was at his throat, closing off his airway, and lifting him off the ground with one arm. All softness had vanished from her voice as she growled, “Who sent you the message? Where is your wife?” She gave only a slight squeeze to his windpipe, but the pain was excruciating. His head started to spin.
Her grip loosened, and he began coughing as he gasped for precious air. Her hard stare only intensified. Jack tried in desperation to thrash his feet against his captor, but his efforts were as useless as kicking a solid wall.
“Who sent the message?”
Jack continued to struggle, clawing with his own hands to loosen her grip. He managed to choke out a few strangled words.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Gabriella’s face contorted from a gentle smile to a sneer of delight.
“You really are a terrible liar, Mr. Evans,” she chuckled as she increased the pressure to his throat. “No matter. I was truly hoping you would be more cooperative before I killed you. But, since now it’s no longer necessary to maintain this absurd charade.…”
Her voice trailed off and her clothing seemed to ripple. The white, sporty outfit transformed, retracting inward from the edges like an undulating amoeba. Her collar began to crawl up her neck and around her jaw, enveloping her head and face in a dark, black hood. Within seconds, her whole body was clad in a familiar, inky black body suit.
Jack dangled in the air, horror-struck. He could only think that this new persona before him looked like the mysterious figures that had attacked him and Evangeline in the arena. His life was again in the hands of a dark, malevolent figure.
He did not feel the spin as she grabbed him with both of her hands and threw him through the wall into the front room where their conversation began.
The impact knocked all the remaining air out of his lungs. He landed in the middle of the room, covered in dust and debris, gasping for breath. The agent walked around the corner with the slow, stalking gate of a feral cat. Jack tried scrambling to his feet, but he was still dazed from the impact and moved like a drunkard. Within seconds she had pulled him back to his feet, her fists clutching his shirt, her dark mask millimeters from his face.
“Your wife retrieved something from the lab off-world. Is it the antidote? Where is it?” she hissed, shaking him like a rag doll. He struggled to keep both of his feet from sliding out from beneath him. She could have shaken him all night, but it would have been useless. Jack knew she was talking about the note, but he did not know where Evangeline had hidden it, and no beatings in the world would have changed that simple fact.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he lied. The agent tilted her head to one side. An hour could have passed in the frightening second she considered his answer. Jack could almost hear the malicious smile in her voice hidden beneath her mask.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” she clicked with her tongue. “Oh, my dear Mr. Evans. Must we really proceed like this? I truly am in such a dreadful hurry.” With one swift motion, she stepped around his legs while maintaining a hold on his shirt. With the force of a twenty-foot fall, Jack’s head struck the end table as the agent pounded him into the floor. The wedding album flew off the table, pages fluttering like a bird’s broken wing. It sailed through the air and smashed against the Chapel family clock, knocking it off the wall. Careening to the floor, it shattered upon impact.
The collision with the table sent a burst of pain coursing through Jack’s head, like fireworks exploding in his skull. A crack had sprouted across the surface of the end table where Jack’s head had made impact.
Jack lay helpless and weak on the floor, resigned to his death.
“For Evangeline,” he thought. “Her secret will die with me.”
The black agent grabbed his arm, jerking him into a sitting position. His unfocused eyes looked past the black spots dancing in his vision. He was unaware of the s
plotch of blood soaking the carpet, or the blood trailing down his neck and seeping under his collar. His vision blurred into darkness, and his sense of his surroundings was growing dim. Jack was grateful for the impending oblivion. The pain had become almost unbearable, but he would endure it to the end if it meant Evangeline would be safe.
“One last time, Mr. Evans,” the woman in black snarled. “Tell me what your wife retrieved from the lab, and where it is, and I promise that when I find and interrogate your wife, I will make her death quick and painless.”
Jack did not fear dying, but the thought of Evangeline falling prey to this woman and her vicious cohorts sent a surge of anger through his body. He knew her promises were shallow and brittle; he called her bluff.
“I don’t believe you,” he said. “I think you would show her no mercy. If you found her now, she’d be already as good as dead.” He spat a defiant gob of blood into the hooded face of his assailant. She returned his insolence with a blow to his head with her fist, causing his nose to erupt with blood. All his strength left him as his limbs went as limp.
The agent still held him up by the front of his shirt. She was unwilling to let him slip away into unconsciousness until she was satisfied.
“Oh, Mr. Evans,” she sang. “I do wish this would have gone another way.” Her hand slid down her thigh and past her knee, her fingers stopping at a seam bisecting her leg. The seam opened downward, pulled by an invisible thread, revealing the handle of the blade sheathed at her calf. She drew it out, slowly, letting Jack’s imagine run rampant with what she planned to do with it.
“Know this,” she cooed behind the black mask, “your wife will tell me what I want to know. And she will die in exquisite agony begging for death.”
Jack did not fear his own imminent demise, nor did he quail at what Olympic officials could do to him if they found out the skills of his hacking creation, but the razor thin blade reflecting his own frightened, bulging eyes - that sapped any courage he had left in his trembling frame.
Resigning himself to his fate, he took a deep, ragged breath, and a feeling of peace overpowered his fear. She could kill him, and slice him to bits, but he had won. He would die, but he had not given in.
His arms hung limp at his sides; he would be unable to defend himself from her final attack. His eyes began rolling around in his head, unwilling to focus on any one thing within the room.
“For Evangeline,” he thought again as the darkness enveloped his mind.
She raised her arm above her head in a long, slow arc, savoring the terror in his darting eyes. She been recruited for the grace she displayed as she exercised tenacious brutality. She lived for the thrill of the hunt, to stalk her unsuspecting prey. Until that final moment, when she could gaze into their terrified eyes, before her swift hand extinguished the last spark of life within him. She lusted for this power over the inferior.
Jack closed his eyes, refusing to watch her blade reach its apex, when a sudden shot rang through the air, an invisible force striking the agent’s head, making it cave in as if it had received a blow from a sledgehammer. Like a puppet, her body collapsed, crumpling in a heap on the floor before him. Her iron grip ceased and she fell backward onto the carpet.
Jack could do nothing more than force his lungs to breathe as his head collided with the floor again. His weak mind wondered who had fired the shot that felled the woman in black. As he tried to lift himself off the floor, another unknown woman stepped into his line of sight and stared down at him. She was dressed in dark, but common, clothes; nothing as sophisticated as what Gabriella had worn. She had a knapsack hung over one shoulder and her other hand hung at her side, a short-nosed rail gun still clutched in her grip. A renewed wave of fear suffocated Jack as he lay wounded, dazed, and confused on the floor.
She crouched down on top of the fallen attacker, using her right boot to pin down one arm, and her left knee to hold down the other, all the while holding the gun underneath the dark figure’s limp chin. Jack’s blurry vision spotted blood pooling underneath the dark hood as the seconds passed in agony. He flinched when another shot thundered in his ears, blasting a pinkish mass across the fabric of the broken sofa.
Grabbing the cloaked agent lying next to him on the floor, the new mystery woman shackled her arms and legs with some bindings she pulled out of her pack. Satisfied with her work, she walked away from the still, black form and into the bedroom. The sounds of drawers and doors opening and closing traveled down the hall to Jack’s ears. The sound her approaching footsteps broke into the silent moment. Jack recognized the blanket she had retrieved from the linen closet. She once again stooped down and covered the blackened Angel, rolling her up like a spare rug and tying off the ends with straps she also retrieved from the knapsack.
Jack had watched this unable to conjure a coherent sentence, and trying to ascertain if this new invader posed any threat to him. Once she finished rolling up the body, she turned her attention to Jack. Placing a gentle hand behind his tender head, she lifted him off the ground to a seated position.
“Can you walk?” she asked in a soft, but firm, voice.
Jack’s head lolled into a single nod, as any movement above his neck sent mind-splitting pain shooting through his head. His focus was growing clearer. She eased him up off the floor and supported his weight as she helped him to a chair. Jack recognized the grim irony that his nameless savior led him to the very chair he had offered his Angel visitor a few brief minutes prior. Once he was seated and steady, she left for the kitchen. Jack could hear the water running in the kitchen sink. The strange woman returned with a damp towel, pressing it against the back of Jack’s head with a healer’s touch. Jack felt the room wobble and spin about him.
His eyes lighted on the giant hole in the wall - he could see most of the kitchen through it and was almost in awe that half the wall was missing. All around him, his home was in ruins, like the remains of a bombed out building he had seen in historical documentaries in school. At his feet, Evangeline’s treasured clock laid in a pile of broken metal and splinters.
The woman knelt down next to him and examined his wounds.
“Are you Jack Evans? Husband of Captain Evangeline Evans?” she asked as she wrapped a bandage around his head. Jack would not survive a second assault, but his resolve only intensified to take any information to the grave. He could tell that his nose was swelling up, and he wondered if it was broken.
“Who wants to know?” Jack moaned. “Are you going to tell me you’re a base counselor as well?” he asked with as much sarcasm as he could muster. She smirked a little at his weak joke.
“My name is Felicia Romano, and, believe it or not, I’m a friend,” she answered. “My goal in coming here tonight was to find out how much you knew about the illness.” She looked around the room. “It would seem the Quorum thought you might know more than you let on.”
She stood up, walked into the kitchen, and returned with a glass of water for Jack. She found him holding the bandage to the back of his head. “I have to say that I would actually agree with them. You do know something.”
Jack was in too much agony to play games. “Do you always treat your victims’ wounds before physical interrogation? There’s another wall you can toss me through,” he said, nodding towards an unblemished wall near his office. He wanted to know if he was going to need to prepare himself for more torture. The woman chuckled.
“I wouldn’t be able to toss you if I tried. I’m not like them,” she said, pointing to the Angel cocooned in a blanket. “I’m just a regular, human girl.”
Jack’s grasp of reality had been shaken, but he did not trust the new woman any more than he trusted the one who had just tried - and almost succeeded - to kill him. She stood up and spoke into the console on her arm.
“This is Felicia. I’m going to need help with an extraction of Mr. Evans and an agent.” She noticed Jack staring at her. Their eyes locked for several moments when she huffed. “If I wanted to you dead, Mr. Evans, I
would have just let her finish what she started. Relax.” She walked over to the rolled up blanket, grabbed one end and dragged it across the floor into the kitchen. Jack could hear grunts and heavy breathing. Turning his head as far as he could he watched Felicia heft the body up onto her shoulder, and trudge to the open patio door. Jack wondered if that was how she had snuck into the apartment during the attack.
She dropped the blanket onto the railing with a clang, letting it fall over the edge. Jack felt a small twinge of sadness. An Angel, even one that had tried to kill him, died while his life was spared. He knew he was going to need therapy if he survived the night, and more dark irony flashed through his foggy mind. The death of the Angel posing as a counsellor would drive him to much needed professional counselling.
Jack did not see the body fall into the open bed of a garbage transport heading to the LTZ for recycling. His eyes canvassed the room; the bloody stains on the carpet, the cracked end table, photographs that had fallen like confetti as the album soared towards the clock.
The clock. Evangeline would be devastated when she found out how much damage it had sustained. Then his eyes caught something that seemed out of place in the disheveled room. A small piece of paper, curled in on itself, sticking out of the broken shaft of the pendulum.
Jack’s eyes darted to the kitchen where he spied Felicia standing on the balcony engaged in a hushed conversation with her arm.
He reached down to the floor to pick up the broken piece of metal, and his neck burst into flame as pain shot up his arm. Ignoring the agony, Jack retrieved the yellowed paper from its cocoon. The small roll of paper resembled a stick being wound up to tight for who knows how long. Jack wondered if Evangeline even knew about the clock’s secret document.
Jack unrolled the paper enough to see the printed words; it appeared to be the title page of an old book, a rarity hidden within a rarity. Under the title there were words scratched in neat handwriting:
Avenging Angels (The Seraphim Chronicles Book 1) Page 25
