And all around me, the trees started to die. The air filled with the sound of leaves drying up to the point of desiccation. A second later the now dead trees dropped their leaves onto the ground with a great WHUMP! The three angels spun around just in time for my volley to reach them. I spotted the death energy latch onto their feet, and I grated my teeth together as I tried to hold the three heavenly creatures in place. Two of them stabbed at the ground as if the ground was some monstrous creature and I felt the cut of their blades with each thrust. I clenched my jaw tightly as my body twisted and turned; each stab of the angel’s swords travelled across the ground and into my flesh.
I could taste blood in my mouth as my body channelled the stored energy from the ground to heal the wounds the angels were inflicting on me. I’d been stabbed before but usually, the blade was a butterfly knife of a switchblade, this was different. I ran a hand across my abdomen, and that’s when I felt the blood seeping through stab wound after a stab wound. I could feel whatever energy I’d been hoping to store up in advance of my assault dissipate like smoke from a freshly snubbed candle. It wouldn’t be long before the body of Scott Richter went the way of all my other hosts. My unnatural essence would drift away, and I’d be forced to find another fresh cadaver to occupy.
And Charlotte would be dead.
I had no idea why the guys upstairs wanted the girl dead, and if I didn’t think of something fast, she’d meet her end inside a damp concrete bunker overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The trio of angelic hitmen would probably kill Sparks as well.
I needed a miracle about a thousand kinds of fast.
What I didn’t expect was that miracle arriving in the form of Amy Curtis.
8
It was her.
The woman who taught me what love was all about. The woman whose life ended because of me.
I blinked a few times and tried to focus on the shimmering form of Amy Curtis resplendent in a solid chest plate embossed with angelic script. In her right hand was a six-foot-long golden spear; it’s tip burning with holy fire. Her left arm was hidden neatly behind a golden shield with two Greek characters embossed on its gleaming surface: A Ω
“Amy?” I croaked. “Alpha and Omega?”
Amy’s honey-blonde hair swept back over her shoulders in the morning breeze and on her back were fixed a pair of brilliant white wings, each one tipped with gold. She knelt down before me and placed an ivory-skinned hand on my abdomen. I reached up to touch her face and she pressed her left cheek against my palm.
“There isn’t much time,” she whispered.
“B-But I saw you die. I saw you … I-It was my fault,” I whispered through a mouthful of blood.
“Be silent,” she said firmly. “I need to concentrate.”
She closed her eyes whispered a Word of power. Instantly the pain I’d felt at being repeatedly stabbed disappeared. I looked down to see the blood on my shirt begin to fade and I could feel the skin on each stab wound knit back together.
The trio of Angelic assassins shrieked in unison as I slowly got back to my feet on a pair of wobbly legs. “You died, Amy … you died. I saw what happened on that beach. I caused it.”
She shook her head. “You didn’t cause it. It was simply to be, Reaper. It was my time and no-one else’s.”
“Y-You’re an angel!” I said shakily.
“A better gig than my previous work in the sex trade,” she said calmly. “Stay behind me because you don’t stand a chance against those three morons. And I am no longer Amy Curtis.”
Zariel stepped forward brandishing his flaming gladius. “Ambriel,” he roared. “This is none of your concern. Leave this place for today we do His work.”
Ambriel/Amy drove the shaft of her golden spear into the ground, and the earth trembled beneath my feet. I grabbed her shoulder to steady myself and instantly a jolt of immense power shot through my body like a cruise missile. It lifted me off my feet and sent me careening through the air, crash-landing upside down against the passenger door of Spark’s SUV. The impact was hard enough to leave a Tim Reaper-shaped dent. Sparks would be thrilled about that.
“The child is not for you,” Ambriel/Amy shot back as she took up a fighting pose. “He has not condoned your presence here today, now go back to the realms of the infinite lest you taste His fury.”
Zariel shrieked loud enough that his voice boomed across the bay with explosive force. He jumped high into the air; higher than a ten-story building and then he lashed out with his Holy sword. A pillar of yellow-blue flame shot out, and it was aimed directly at Ambriel/Amy. I struggled to get back to my feet but faster than I could twitch a finger, Ambriel thrust her golden spear, and it tore through the pillar of flame dividing it in half. The tip pierced Zariel’s armour easily; impaling the angel. He plummeted to earth landing hard enough to leave an impact crater. The other two angels shrieked and then took to the heavens, disappearing.
I hobbled behind Ambriel as she calmly walked up to the now dying angel. She grasped the shaft of her golden spear with one hand and covered the angel’s eyes with the other.
“He is the maker of all,” she said soothingly. “He knows the good in you and that because of your goodness you decided to try and smite the child. But she is special among all His creations, and you took it upon yourself to act in His place. You are forgiven this sin, but your penance is oblivion.”
Zariel blinked weakly and reached out with a blood-covered hand. A sharp gust of wind blew in off the bay and the dying angel simply dissolved in the breeze like sand sifting through your fingers on a windy day. Within seconds he was gone, and the golden spear fell onto the ground with a loud clang. Ambriel grasped the shaft with one hand and stood up. She turned to face me and offered that same smile I’d seen when she told me that she believed me to be a good man. It was thoughtful, earnest and pure. And I immediately felt ashamed for feeling that same warmth I’d felt when she was alive.
Amy Curtis had died because of me, and now she was an angel named Ambriel.
“I-I’m sorry,” I whispered as I avoided her gaze. “Because of me, you lost out on a full life.”
She placed a palm on the side of my face. I felt her warmth and love through that gentle touch, and it only made me feel worse.
“What happened was ordained from the moment I was born,” she said firmly. “And it is because of love that I came to you here this day, Reaper. All is not well in the realms of the infinite, but you knew this when you encountered Jael. I am here to tell you that He has chosen you to save that child because forces exist with the sole purpose of ending her life.”
I drew in a deep cleansing breath and stepped back from the newly minted Angel. “I don’t even know what she is? The girl draws out complex formula and symbols including the language of your kind and hellspawn. I’m pretty sure there aren’t any eight-year-olds in existence who can do that. Be straight with me, Amy—”
She raised a finger. “Ambriel is now my name.”
I nodded. “Yeah … sorry, Ambriel. Look … what is Charlotte? If I am to protect her from angels and those assholes from you-know-where, it will help if I knew what I was dealing with.”
“She is your charge,” said Ambriel. “And you must keep the girl safe until it is time.”
I threw my hands up in the air in frustration. “Time for what? Why is it that everyone upstairs speaks in riddles? How the hell am I supposed to keep the child safe if I don’t know why she’s on some cosmic hit list in the first place? Ambriel … she made the killer of her mother disappear. Poof! Gone! Now for crying out loud, please tell me what she is!”
Ambriel flashed me a worried look. She opened her mouth to say something and then as if on cue, thunder rolled across the sky like a freight train. The angel flapped her golden-tipped wings a few times and then hovered into the air. As I gazed up at the woman I’d fallen in love with, a woman who was no longer a woman but a powerful angel, I suddenly felt a surge of anger rising from the pit of my stomach. I’d kicked the cr
ap out of myself for months because of what happened on that beach in Lawrencetown. I’d drunk myself silly as I mourned the loss of a woman who’d taught me in the short time we were together that it was okay to drop my guard. That love is complex, a riddle in its own way. A mystery that is unsolvable.
Charlotte was my charge. The Man with the Big White Beard had picked me to act as a bodyguard to an eight-year-old girl that the forces of good and evil wanted dead. And what the heck was going on up in the halls of the holy anyway? If God were as almighty as they say, you’d think he’d have a grip on rogue elements within His ranks. Like Jael and Sariel and their warped plan to end humanity and reunite with the fallen. And now, angelic assassination squads with a contract on a little kid. It was beginning, frankly, to piss me off.
“I must leave now, Reaper,” Ambriel said. “I will be watching you. I will be there during those dark moments, and I will guide you when you need to understand your place in the world. Remember that you are not one of them. And perhaps that is a good thing because He has a plan for you and I’m beginning to think it is much larger than you or I or anyone can imagine.”
I drove my hands into my pockets. I watched as Ambriel took to the heavens like a meteor and as quickly as she appeared to save my bacon, she was gone.
I surveyed the damage to Das Bunker and then cast my gaze onto the Tim Reaper-shaped dent in the passenger door of Spark’s SUV. I let out a weary sigh and said, “Sparks is going to rip me a new one for that. Perfect.”
9
I stormed back into the bunker to find Sparks seated in a folding chair with her Glock pointed at me the moment I walked in the door. Charlotte was busily scrawling more of her strange, encoded language onto the cold cement floor of the firing bay. All around were chunks of concrete that had fallen from the ceiling of the bunker during the attack.
“Thank you for not shooting me,” I said, as I closed the blast door behind me. “You can put your gun away.”
“You look like someone tossed you out of a moving vehicle,” said Sparks as she holstered her Glock. “What the hell happened to you, Reaper? Who was bombarding this place? We’re lucky we didn’t get buried alive in here.”
I glanced at Charlotte and then at the chunks of concrete scattered all over the floor. There was enough damage to the bunker that I’d have to hire a contractor to conduct the repairs. And that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I said, stepping over a large piece of what used to be the ceiling. I gazed up at the hole above my head and noticed a spider web of rebar. About twice as much as you’d see in a modern structure. Those old engineers knew how to build things that would stand the test of time. Still, I was going to probably have to abandon the place and find a new safe house as I could see daylight through the hole.
Sparks’ eyes narrowed. “Try me.”
“Three angels wanted to get into the bunker and they were coming after me,” said Charlotte, sounding very matter-of-fact. “They very nearly killed Mister R. if it weren’t for the involvement of another angel.”
Sparks and I turned our heads toward Charlotte in unison. “I thought you said they were shrouded?” I said.
“But once the angels attacked they dropped their shroud and I could see them,” she commented.
“Angels!” Sparks threw up her hands. “So, there are forces from Heaven and Hell who want to get to Charlotte? But why? She’s just a little girl!”
“She’s that and a hell of a lot more,” I grumbled as I stepped over a few more chunks of concrete and gazed down at what Charlotte was scribbling across the floor in white chalk. I put both hands on my knees and stooped down to see an angelic script; some of which I was familiar with from ancient texts I’d glimpsed over the years.
But there was something different about what I was seeing compared to what the girl had written on her bedroom wall. The characters were smaller and clustered into neat rows. There were the usual indices and algebraic formula, but this time there were also perfect spheres stretching out from a large orange circle that looked to be at least a hundred times larger than the smaller spheres. I counted the circles and said aloud, “Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. That’s the solar system.”
“Jupiter is so pretty with its swirls of colour. Like a giant marble.,” said Charlotte in her eight-year-old voice as she started to draw spirals and cloud-like images that radiated out from the planets. She drew a flat looking spiral and pointed. “This is another galaxy, but I don’t know what they would call it because they don’t know it’s there yet.”
“Who are they, kid?”
“Scientists,” she pointed out. “And they don’t know everything about the Solar System either.”
Sparks knelt beside Charlotte and studied the complicated image the child had drawn. “Well, the universe is the biggest place there is, sweetheart. We only live on a tiny dot compared to the whole of the cosmos.”
Charlotte stopped what she was doing and stood up to look at the results of her efforts. She folded her hands behind her back and paced along the edge of the huge formula. I glanced at my watch and decided that we’d have to head for the hills sooner than later because if Heaven sent three angels to take down the little girl, they’d surely be sending reinforcements after Ambriel kicked the trio to the curb. The only problem was that we didn’t have any safe place to go. And when dealing with divine creatures, there wasn’t such a thing as a safe place: they would always find you regardless of where you’d hide.
And then there was the issue of Him. Seriously. What was the hell going on in the realms of the infinite, anyway? This was the second time in the same damned calendar year that I’d been drawn into the perilous world of the politics of the omnipotent, so why me? I didn’t possess the power of the Almighty. God had always been the ultimate bad ass. He was the biggest show in the universe. Nothing could be a threat to Him, absolutely nothing. So why would He be coming after an innocent little girl? What possible threat could Charlotte pose to the great order of the universe?
I threw my hands up in the air. “If the guys from upstairs and downstairs are after Charlotte, is there any safe place at all?”
“Maybe she has the answers in her formula,” added Sparks.
“Once again, I remind you both that she is in the room,” said Charlotte in her grown-up voice. She took a deep breath and then reached over to pick up her piece of chalk. “I’m always hiding. I’m always running and I can’t remember the last time I could simply breathe easy. The house was supposed to keep us safe and hidden but that didn’t work and I must discover the reason why.”
I grunted and I knelt beside her. I’d have put an arm around the kid to give her some comfort but that would have been weird and she might send me packing just like she did with the guy who killed her mother. Or caretaker. Or whoever the hell the dead woman was back in North-End Dartmouth.
“Kid, listen … when you say that house was supposed to be safe, what are you talking about?”
She pointed to her scribbling. “The form I drew on the wall of my bedroom. It was supposed to create a slip – a place where we would escape the gaze of the Eternals.”
Sparks ran her hand through her hair in frustration. “Eternals?”
“It is the name for those who are what you might call divine,” she said. “Only I didn’t have enough time to finish it.”
I pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “So, you’re saying that you can shroud us if you have enough time to create a … what is it? A slip?”
She nodded. “Yes. If I can draw up a proper form, they can’t see me while I am inside the protective boundaries of the slip. I won’t be taken. I’ll be safe for a while.”
Sparks decided to kneel down beside Charlotte and she threw caution to the wind by placing a hand on the girl’s shoulder and giving it a tiny squeeze. “When you say taken … what does that mean?”
Charlotte immediately reverted back to
her eight-year-old self. “My soul. They would take my soul and use it against God.”
I took a deep haul on my cigarette and gazed up through the hole in the ceiling. If I could provide enough cover, enough protection for the girl, maybe I could buy her enough time to create one of those slips she was talking about. She could be safe from attack and maybe that would give her a chance to learn the truth of why she was a target. I took another puff and then cast my gaze onto Charlotte.
“You know what I am, kid,” I said ominously. “Now it’s time for you to tell me and the good detective here what precisely you are. Care to explain?”
Charlotte stood up and spun around on her heels. She placed both hands on my abdomen and gave me a sharp shove. “You don’t get to boss me around, Mister R. I am not a thing. I am just me. I’m Charlotte. I’m eight. I see things that nobody else can see … that nobody could ever understand.”
I raised a finger to say something but Charlotte gave me another shove.
“I see everything,” she continued, this time in her adult voice. “And right now, I am seeing you, death-dealer. I am seeing a drunkard named Amos Regan. I am seeing how he beat up his wife and kids. I am seeing how you took him when he was hit by a streetcar. I am seeing Martin Chisolm now. I am seeing how he ran a still in the woods of northern Vermont. I am seeing how he was cut down by other bootleggers and how you took him the moment he breathed his last. I see what you became because of him. I see the faces of the lives you have taken through the years. Each life had a soul and you snuffed them out as easily as stubbing out your cigarette under your boot heel.
You wonder what I am, what are you, death-dealer? A puppet on a string? An eternal force that one day decided it might like to become a human being? You are not one of them. You will never be one of them unless He deems it to be so and even then, would you say yes if the choice were given to you? Because to truly become human you must experience the pain of humanity. People are born into this world amid screams of pain. People leave this world in pain, whether by accident or by some terrible disease that rots them from the inside out. The very act of being alive is a journey fraught with pain. Heartbreak when your love no longer loves you back. Grief when those closest to you pass away.”
The Girl On Victoria Road: A Tim Reaper Novel Page 8
