My skin tingles as his words sink in. “Sent. To kill me. Are you high?” I want to scoff at him, but I can see in his eyes that he believes every word. In his heart what he’s saying is the truth. His job was to find me and kill me.
I take a step back.
“I won’t kill you, Aidan. Not now. Maybe I never would have. I see now how vital you are, how this may be what was meant all along—no matter what my fellow prophets say.”
“Prophets? What are you talking about?”
“Where I come from there are still prophets. Or seers, as some call them.”
“Where the hell are you from?” My heart thunders as I imagine him saying, I’m from Krypton, or even that he’s from some hidden monastery in the Holy Land. But instead he looks at me with a heightened sense of unease, like he knows what he’s going to tell me is even more insane than that.
And then he motions to the cave and the Devil’s Gate sign, again gripping his cane tight, and says, “That cave over there is a doorway. Part of the name is true, it is a gate. But not to a devil. I came through that doorway from another time, Aidan. Ancient Babylon. The sixth century BC.”
I laugh out loud. It’s absurd.
But then all the breath is sucked from my lungs as I remember my mom’s words: his father’s place is another time . . . And I watch Sid begin to change before my eyes, his face growing more etched, skin darkening as if he’s been in the dust and sun for days. I watch the air around him blur, see his pin-striped vest and pants turn into a sort of tunic made of coarse tan fabric, and the tattoos on his arms and chest morph into a language, symbols lost to history long ago. His markings clearly say that he’s a slave, and I suddenly have knowledge about him as I see his soul: he’s a servant of the king, a maker of potions and keeper of knowledge. His rank is low, but his teacher was the highest ranked in the palace. The head prophet.
His teacher’s name was Belteshazzar: the prince and protector of Bel. Once named Daniel of the Israelites, of the tribe of Judah.
“I know this is difficult to comprehend,” he says, studying me, “but it’s true. I came through a tear in the fabric of Creation, much like your father did. It’s how we prophets tell the future. We peek through the keyhole of time.”
“No.” I back up a step and nearly fall over a rock.
He keeps speaking, lost in his need to spill out all his secrets. “When King Darius’s council sent me here to kill you, they assumed you were merely a mistake, easily gotten rid of, that if you had any power at all you’d just be another magician, another prophet like them. But then I saw you, and I knew they were wrong. You’re a whole other creation. You can straddle the lines between spirit and flesh without any effort at all. I’ve never heard of such a thing. It’s why you can’t be put down as if you were only a mistake of nature, why you must see this through and finish awakening your powers.”
I put my hand up. “Hold on. What do you mean King Darius’s council?”
I know Darius was the name of the second king when the prophet Daniel was held captive and that Daniel was a servant in the palace—beloved by the king. Darius was the king who sentenced him to the lions’ den and then embraced Daniel as a brother when God saved him. Daniel was head of his council of magicians. But that would mean . . .
“Is Daniel one of the men who want me dead?”
Sid seems thrown by my question. “Your father? No, no. He was sentenced to execution because of his crime.”
“He was killed?”
“No, the story in the annals would have changed soon after my arrival here if that was true, and it didn’t. The story still says that Daniel remained in the palace of Babylon well into his life, even after his people, the Israelites, were set free of their captivity. So I can only assume God saved him from death a second time, as he saved him in the lions’ den.”
I swallow, too overwhelmed to know how to feel about it all. “What crime was he being punished for?”
“He broke a very important law by forging a relationship with your mother. That bond never should have happened. But that alone wasn’t the problem. He crossed a line that must never be crossed: he left something behind in his wake.” He gives me a pained look. “You.”
I blink at him, eyes stinging.
“When your parents conceived you, all the elements and threads of the future changed. All past futures became irrelevant. If you’d been a normal child, or even a boy like I was, with small gifts, it might not have been so catastrophic. But because of what you are, because of the potential locked inside you, it changed everything. The spiritual world has been affected. Your father should’ve taken care of it before leaving here and made sure your mother didn’t give birth to you, but he must not have known. He seemed pained beyond anything I’ve ever seen when he was brought to the temple and charged. He was the best of us all.”
I try to imagine him. My father. Not some alien, not an angel—or a demon, like I’d always seen in my nightmares. Flesh and bone. But not just any man. A prophet, a magician, who could travel through time, who lived thousands of years ago. And made the mistake of creating me.
“Your father asked that I be the one sent to find you,” Sid continues. “And because King Darius loved him, his request was granted. Before I left, he told me the story of how he met your mother, how he’d only just been taken from his father’s people and brought into slavery. A boy of twelve, Daniel was powerful even then, truly close to God, and he found a way through a doorway one night while he prayed. He stumbled into shadow and collided with your mother, a girl who felt as lost as he did. He said he only stayed a day, but it was as if his spirit had been lit on fire after that. He went back every year, soon discovering that the day he was slipping through the tear was your mother’s birthday. The last time he went they were both sixteen—that was the night before your father was going to be brought into the fold of the magicians’ council.”
Sid pauses for a moment before saying, “His manhood was going to be severed. He must have felt the fear of it.”
“Wait, what?”
“I believe you call men like your father and myself eunuchs.”
I look down at his crotch. “They cut off your . . . ?”
He smiles at my shock. “It’s quite common for men who live in the palace as servants of the king to be castrated. It keeps us focused on our tasks. Less . . . distracted, if you will. Plus, it keeps the king’s bloodline unsullied.”
My stomach rises. I shake my head as I try to wrap my mind around something like that. My own balls ache with the thought.
“I think your father knew I wouldn’t be able to kill you once I found you,” he continues. “In fact, I made my decision soon after Eric told me about you three years ago. He said there was a young man who could see demons and read the energy of ancient objects. Hearing him talk about you, I knew he’d found the child I was looking for.
“It was more than a relief; I could finish my task and return home. Of course, first I had to kill you.” He gives me an odd smile, and my insides squirm. “But then I saw you. A scraggly whelp of a boy sitting in Hanna’s office. You were eating a sandwich, so focused on your meal you didn’t even seem to notice I’d walked in the room.”
My pulse speeds up, thinking how stupid I was back then. Must’ve been around the time Ava’s foster parents were murdered. I was so hell-bent on blocking out everything and pretending I was normal.
“You had this glow about you—I can’t describe it, but I couldn’t stop staring at you. You look so much like your father, even the way you carry yourself.” He pauses. “I had a job to do, but in that moment I knew I couldn’t go through with it. I knew you were meant to be here in this place, in this time. So I found a way to remain here, to help you fulfill your destiny. And now that you’re here, now that I see what you’re capable of, I know I made the right choice.”
He leans forward on his walking
stick like he’s exhausted himself. “Please don’t throw away everything I’ve sacrificed to find you and keep you alive—everything your father sacrificed. You have to see this through, follow the path that your destiny asks. You have to remain where you can stay safe.”
“Safe?” I say in disbelief. “How can things ever be safe? I have demons that may soon be after me, I have men in some other time plotting to come kill me and drag my body back to the stone age, and my sister is—” I stop, realizing what slipped out. Ava has to stay out of this. If her troubles collide with mine, my brain might implode.
“You don’t understand, Aidan.”
“I understand survival. That’s all I need to understand. I’ve been doing things on my own for eight years now—longer, really. I can do it on my own again.”
Sid reaches out but then lowers his hand. “You can’t leave before you’ve finished your awakening. You don’t understand everything that’s happening to you.”
I glance at the mark on my hand. “Is that why this thing on my arm is growing?”
“Yes. As it reaches your heart, it will near completion.”
“And it’s Kara that’s making this happen?” I still don’t understand how Kara’s connected to all this, why Sid is using her. I’m having enough trouble digesting all the bits about my father being some eunuch Bible character. Plus, the idea that Sid is from a time even archaeology can’t totally figure out.
“I chose her because of her curse: her power to attract would bring you to her, then to us. The counterspell I put on her could act as a sort of key to unlock your potential. And when you were finally . . . linked . . . you would find a sort of balance. Or at least that was the thinking.”
My teeth clench listening to him talk about her like that, like she’s a means to an end. I consider socking him in the balls and then remember he doesn’t have any. “Do you know how sick that sounds?” I ask.
“Kara understands what’s at stake. She chose this path as much as I did. I never lied to her.”
“No, you’re a saint. You just used her vulnerability to manipulate her.”
“Ask her yourself. I saved her, Aidan.”
“You’ve lied to yourself so much you believe your own bullshit now.”
The air around him flickers again. His clothes go back to the pin-striped suit, and his tattoos become more circus variety than ancient. It makes me wonder which version of him is real.
“How do you do that?” I ask. “Change what you look like?”
“I only allowed you to see a past version of me in my soul, to see through the veneer of flesh a little deeper than you normally go. Nothing about me actually changed as we stood here in this place.”
“But the tattoos on your arms . . . ?”
He lifts his hands, showing me his colorful forearms. “I had these images of dragons and vines and bones inked over the ones I carried with me from the past. What you saw a second ago was my state of being as I came through the tear in time.”
“Can you see souls like I can?” I’ve been wondering this since the moment I met him.
He gives me a sad smile. “Once I could. But the longer I’ve been here, the more my sight has failed me. What little connection I had to the spirits is now waning. It’s a consequence of my having stayed longer than I was meant to. There are many rules to this time game.”
I shake my head. “I have no idea how to absorb all this.”
“Ask me anything. I can help.”
“I don’t know.” I don’t know anything for sure anymore.
“I can help you and your sister,” he says, like he’s bargaining. “Think of your sister, Aidan. She won’t fare well on the streets.”
He has no idea how true that statement is, but not for the reasons he’s thinking.
“I have a warm bed for her at the house,” he says. “Food and shelter. I can keep you both safe.” He comes closer. “I won’t harm you, I swear. Look in my eyes and see I’m telling the truth. I won’t do anything to harm you as long as you remain here.”
There’s no red spark of a lie in his eyes, but something in me can’t quite give in until I’m sure. Maybe it’s the dark gravity of the doorway behind me. Maybe it’s because I’m totally exhausted, but I pull my knife out of my pocket. “Hold out your hand.”
He steps back and blinks at me for a second. But then he holds out his hand to me.
Before he can figure out what I’m doing, I take it in mine and slide the edge of the blade hard against his palm, opening up the skin.
He hisses in pain and pulls away, cradling his fist against his chest. Blood seeps through his clenched fingers, running along his knuckles in shiny red lines.
I grip the sharp blade in my left hand and slice my own palm open. It stings like a fire, but I grit my teeth and hold the wound out to him in offering. “An oath in this place of power. You will never raise a finger to work against me or mine. If you do, everything you’ve worked for will be turned to ash.”
He only hesitates for a second before reaching out to grip my bleeding hand with his own. “I swear it. I’ll never raise a finger to work against you.”
“Or mine,” I say.
“Or yours.”
I release his hand and back away a little. My body tingles from exertion, and my lungs burn, like I finished sprinting up a hill.
“So you’ll stay with us,” he says like he’s checking.
I don’t answer. I pull the amulet from my pocket and toss it at his feet, not wanting anything from him now. Then I turn and walk back toward the car.
THIRTY-TWO
I knew the truth of where I came from would be . . . unusual. But how do you prepare yourself to find out you’re a cosmic error in the space-time continuum, the son of some long-dead biblical prophet, and marked for death?
As unreal as it all sounds, though, the pieces fit: my different gifts; the robed men in my vision when I touched that strange tablet in the shed; the way Sid acts around me; the demon’s claim that I have no father here . . .
I don’t, because he’s been dead for more than two thousand years.
God, that’s just . . .
Fuck.
The ache in me grows. I cover my face with my hands, fighting the emotions threatening to consume me.
Someone knocks on the door, but I can’t move.
“Aidan,” whispers Rebecca’s voice through the wood. “Are you okay?”
I should probably answer her, open the door or something, make sure she’s okay, but I can’t bring myself to face anyone right now. To face anything.
After a minute of my silence she walks away, and I breathe a little easier.
Darkness falls eventually. Ava comes into the room, plops her bag down, and crawls into her bed.
“Rebecca’s worried about you,” she says. “Everybody knows you’re in freak-out mode, and they want to know why.”
I stare at the ceiling, seeing the house of cards that is my life ready to fall. I make myself breathe deep.
“I didn’t think you’d want them knowing it’s my fault,” she says. “But I know it is. I’m sorry about taking off.”
The beach . . . God, that seems so long ago. I should still be angry—furious, really—but I’m too tired.
“I thought you’d left,” I say. “For good.”
She’s quiet, like she didn’t expect that. “I really am sorry, Aidan. I just . . . I’d been inside for way too long.”
But that’s not the whole reason. Why is she lying?
I look across the room at her. “What was the note about, Ava?”
“I told you, I freaked out.”
“You said you knew how to fix things.”
She rolls over and faces the wall. “I had an idea, but it didn’t work.”
“What idea?”
“It doesn’t matter
anymore, Aidan.” She sounds disappointed.
“Why won’t you tell me what you did?”
She doesn’t answer.
“I wish you knew how much this is killing me,” I say. But I don’t want to argue with her anymore. And I feel like I have something new in my arsenal, something I didn’t have before, with this knowledge about my origin. If I really am as big a deal as Sid says, then maybe that can help me protect Ava. Somehow.
“I love you, Aidan.” But I can hear tears in her voice. “Everything’s gonna be fine.”
I want to shake the answers out of her, to force her to tell me everything she’s been hiding. But I just listen to her breathe and pray that this new revelation will give me a way to save her. A way to be free from this life. A way to be free from the lies and the pain.
I turn to the window and stare out at the night sky. It’s a dark midnight-blue dome shimmering with the glow of city lights on the horizon. Only a handful of stars are visible; the rest hide behind the shroud of modern progress. You have to leave the city, go into the mountains, to see the actual sky. Here, in this glow of humanity, all that’s discernible are remnants of the truth.
I watch Mom from the doorway across the room. She rocks back and forth in the rocking chair, eyes gazing off into another world. The sun comes in from the window beside her, shining on her pale skin and making her golden hair look like she’s bathing in liquid light.
She rubs her rounded belly and turns, spotting me.
“Come here, Aidan.” She waves me closer.
I cross the room, feeling odd, like I’m not quite walking on solid ground. “Does it hurt?” I ask, amazed at her swollen belly.
Darkness Brutal (The Dark Cycle Book 1) Page 22
