Cai’s eyes panned over the Unseen that surrounded his own battered group then faced Parisi again. “You should ask yourself how many of your men you’re willing to lose trying to take them,” Cai retorted, “Because we are all willing to die to keep them.” Parisi looked at each of Cai’s brothers in turn, and then at Evelyn and Josh. For all their wounds and fatigue, he saw only deadly resolve in their eyes.
“Think about what you’re about to do,” Cai continued. “Kill us and the Blessed families will unite. The Unseen Order will be at war with the Blessed. How will that serve God or your church? Think about it.”
Christian aimed his pistol directly at the Unseen commander’s head. “Think about it really hard,” he urged. The next few seconds were prolonged by tension as the two sides faced each other.
“You are heretics,” Parisi said. “But on this day, you have done service to God. I will leave you in peace, now. But the Mother Church does not easily forget interference with her affairs.”
Cai nodded. “Maybe, but you and I decide what happens here today. There’s been enough dying.”
Paris gestured to his men and they lowered their weapons. “Let us go,” he said. “I think the two of us will meet again, Cai Selkirk. Tell the traitor, Martin, that I will come for him. His treachery can only be washed away with his blood.” Two helicopters flew overhead as Parisi walked away. They descended a few miles to the east and the Unseen went to meet them.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Cai ordered.
The group started the long walk back to their vehicles, carrying their wounded and dead.
Chapter Sixteen
Cadell awoke in his own bed. His blankets were tucked tightly around him with the skill and care that only a mother could muster. His muscles ached slightly and a stiffness in his joints discouraged him from leaving the warmth of the bed, but his joints were overruled by the growling in his stomach. Still weary, he donned gray sweat pants and a matching shirt. Pulling on a pair of running shoes, he left his room and set out for the kitchen, hoping his brothers had not awakened as ravenous as he had and cleared the house of everything edible.
By the time he and his brothers had negotiated the swamp, reached the cars they had left on its outskirts, seen Chepi safely into the care of her sisters and made the forty-five minute drive back to Boston, everyone in the group was well beyond the point of exhaustion. Astrid, Brandell, Helen and Emily had seen to their wounds and helped them into bed. Cadell barely recalled the trip home from Easton and was unsure how long he had been asleep.
Descending to the house’s ground floor, he was greeted by the divine aroma of brewing coffee. He followed his nose and found his mother hefting a huge pot of spaghetti and dumping it into an equally-large strainer. She looked through the resulting column of steam and smiled at her youngest son. “How are you feeling?” she asked.
Cadell took the largest mug he could find from a cabinet and filled it to the brim with coffee. “I’m still a little groggy,” he replied. “But this will help,” he added, sipping the steaming beverage. “How long did I sleep?” he asked, opening the door of one of the refrigerators and removing a package of sliced ham.
“Almost two days,” Astrid replied. “You were all in bad shape when you got home. We almost lost Colm,” she added with a slight catch of her voice.
Cadell placed a handful of ham between two slices of rye bread. “It was a tough fight,” was all he could think to say. “How is Colm?” he asked.
“He’ll be alright, but Emily wants him to stay in bed for a few days,” She said. “She’s been healing him as quickly as his body can handle.”
“What about Evelyn?” Cadell asked, biting into his sandwich.
Astrid added a measure of some kind of spice to the spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove. “She’s still sleeping,” she replied. “Whatever the two of you did in the swamp must have been incredible.”
Cadell took a seat at the kitchen table. “It was … different,” he agreed. “Different than any of the other times I’ve called Uriel’s power. I was able to hang on to the power for longer than ever before. It faded for a while and then came back. That’s never happened before.”
“Maybe you’re just getting better at controlling the power,” Astrid postulated. “Uriel would only give you what he knows you can handle.”
“It’s more than that,” Cadell said. “It was Evelyn. When we call the power together it’s…” he searched for a word, “Amplified, somehow. We were channeling more power than either of us should have been able to handle. It wasn’t just doubled because there were two of us. If I had tried to channel anything even close to that level of power by myself, I know I would have been burned to a crisp. Channeling all of that energy is probably why Evelyn and I are so damned tired.”
Astrid stirred the vat of sauce with a wooden spoon.
“You’re both Sevenths,” she observed. “Maybe you complement each other in some way we don’t know about yet. There have never been two Sevenths born into one generation before. There’s no way to know how you will affect each other.”
“I’ll have to pray about it,” Cadell concluded.
“Where is everyone else? Are they still sleeping?”
Astrid retrieved a block of parmesan cheese and began grating it into a bowl. “Your brothers started waking up about two hours ago. They all came in to raid the fridge like you did.” She answered with a chuckle. “Cai is in the library talking to Martin. Christian, Clive and Callum are in the living room, playing with the X-Box. Josh woke up long enough to call in sick and went back to sleep. Your grandfather and Helen are at the market, fetching French bread and a few other things.”
“How are you feeling?” Cadell asked his mother. “Projecting your magic all the way to the swamp had to have been hard on you.”
“It was,” Astrid admitted. “But Helen was helping and she’s getting stronger all the time.”
Cadell stood and refilled his mug. “I’m going to look in on Evelyn and Colm.”
“Wake Evelyn up if you can,” Astrid advised.
“Dinner will be ready soon and you all need a good meal in you.”
“Yeah,” Cadell agreed. “But don’t be surprised if
we all go back to bed after our bellies are full.”
Astrid stopped what she was doing and turned troubled eyes to Cadell. “It really was a near thing out there, wasn’t it? Colm wasn’t the only one of my boys I almost lost, was he?”
Cadell stared into his coffee for a moment. “You almost lost all of us,” he said. “And it would have been partly my fault if you had.”
Astrid stepped closer to her son. “What do you mean?” she asked, touching his arm.
“I’m a Seventh, mom,” Cadell said. “I have some of the abilities of all the Blessed castes, but I’ve never really learned to use any of the blessings except the ones that came with the warrior caste. If I’d learned to use my healing abilities, I could have healed Colm in the swamp and I might have been able to save Eve. Colm wouldn’t have had such a close call.” Cadell turned and stepped away, feeling unworthy of his mother’s sympathy. “If I’d let Clive help me develop my abilities from the scribe caste, I might have been able to help decipher the scrolls faster, and who knows how much trouble that would have saved us? I’ve failed, mom, failed the family and the Calling.”
“No one thinks you failed the family,” Astrid assured him. “And if God or Uriel thought that you’ve been failing the Calling, you’d know about it.”
“Maybe,” Cadell replied, sitting down at the table again. “But the fact is that I’ve been selfish all this time.
I’ve been running away from my responsibilities as a Seventh because I didn’t want to be different.”
Astrid turned the heat under her sauce off and sat across from him. “Keep talking,” she said.
“All my life,” Cadell began. “I’ve run away from being a Seventh. From the time I was born, everyone treated me like I was different. But I didn’t wan
t to be different, even though I was a Seventh. I was primarily born into the warrior caste, so I learned those skills and avoided learning the ways of the other castes. I’ve been trying to pretend that I was just a regular Blessed Warrior. I haven’t been doing as much as I should have, for the family or for the Calling. My selfish hang-ups kept me from saving Eve and almost cost Colm his life. I can’t run away from what I am anymore.”
“So…” his mother prompted.
Cadell managed a weak smile. “For starters, I want you to start teaching me to use magic. I’m going to get Clive to teach me to use the abilities of a scribe and I’m hoping Emily can stay around long enough to at least get me started on learning to use my healing abilities. I have to get over myself and start giving one-hundred percent before anyone else dies because of me.”
Astrid reached across the table and touched his hand. “I’ll teach you all I can,” she said. “Just don’t be too hard on yourself. You’re not the first young man who wanted to fit in. Most young men do.”
Cadell smiled and squeezed his mother’s hand. “But I’m not most young men.”
“No,” Astrid said proudly, “you’re not,” she agreed. “Now go wake up Evelyn. Your grandfather and Helen will be back soon and we’ll be sitting down to dinner.” “What about the ceremony for Eve?” Cadell asked.
“Evelyn will want to know.”
“The body is in the thaumaturgy chamber. I used a stasis spell to preserve it,” Astrid explained. “Everyone was wounded and exhausted. I thought we could hold the ceremony after everyone had a chance to recover.” “Right,” Cadell said. “Evelyn was close to Eve. It will be hard enough on her to say goodbye. Eve was the closest thing to real family that Evelyn had.”
“She has us now,” Astrid said. “She has you.”
Astrid and Helen had cleaned Eve’s body, dressed it in a burgundy gown and styled its hair. It floated, suspended by magic and covered in a shroud bearing the sigil of the Archangel Camuel and bathed in the light of the dozens of candles that lit the chamber. In the fluctuating candle light, Eve’s face seemed oddly content.
The Selkirks, Evelyn and Emily stood in a circle around the body, all dressed in their finest clothing. Evelyn cried softly with Cadell’s arm gently around her shoulders. Also in tears, Emily had turned to Clive for support, his hand holding hers. Astrid, her hand in Brandell’s, had managed to stem her tears, but her eyes still glinted with tears trying to form. Helen, on the other side of Evelyn, took her new friend’s hand to offer additional comfort. Beginning with Evelyn, each of the mourners approached the body and offered silent prayers and remembrances.
Cai then came to stand in front of the body. “Lord God,” he said. “We have gathered to honor our blessed sister Eve, Blessed scribe born of the Corey bloodline. She lived her life in service to your Blessed Calling and gave that life in its service. She is estranged from her own family so I, as the leader of the Selkirk family, claim her as one of my own. It is I who ask that Camuel, patron Archangel of the Corey family, to claim our sister Eve in God’s name. Her spirit is already with him; we ask that you now claim her body that they both can rest.” Cai returned to his place in the circle and Evelyn and Emily took positions at either end of the body, Evelyn at the head and Emily at the feet. They each took the end of the shroud bearing Camuel’s sigil, lifted it off the body and folded it carefully before returning to the circle, with Evelyn clutching the shroud to her chest.
The Selkirks, Evelyn and Emily each raised their hands with their palms facing Eve’s body while Astrid and Helen stepped backward out of the circle. The sigils on the Blesseds’ palms of the flared with angelic light and each took a step forward. The body was surrounded by that same light, and after only a few seconds, the transparent form of a tall, wigged armor-clad man appeared at its head. He extended his hands over the body and then both the figure and the body faded away. Evelyn threw herself into Cadell’s arms and sobbed.
Pure, unrefined warmth from the fireplace had eased Evelyn’s grief somewhat as she stared into the crackling flames. She had not spoken for two hours and the Selkirks had left her to her thoughts as they grieved themselves. Despite her sadness, she was also grateful to be among the Selkirks. For the first time in her life, she felt truly welcome among Cadell and his family. She would miss her aunt, but her sense of loss was lessened by her new sense of belonging.
A hand touched her shoulder and she looked away from the fire to see Cadell next to her chair. Emily and the rest of her new family stood just behind him. “What is it?” she asked, turning slight to face them.
Emily came to Cadell’s side. “There was a reason that no one from my family came to Eve’s memorial ceremony,” she explained. “Uncle Randal isn’t in charge of house Corey anymore.”
“I didn’t think you could remove a house patriarch,” Evelyn said; “unless he either retired or died.”
Emily shook her head. “The family didn’t remove him, Camuel did. Everyone was too busy dealing with the ramifications of that to come to Eve’s ceremony. Uncle Randal has been stripped of his Blessing, his power.
Camuel even removed the sigil from his hand. He’s a normal person now. His link to Camuel is broken.”
“Because he disowned Eve and me,” Evelyn concluded.
“That was only part of it,” Cai interjected. “He refused to help us against Blackwell and Azazel and he did that out of pride. Azazel and his horde were almost turned loose on humanity and Eve is dead because he let his hurt feelings interfere with the Calling. He had to answer for that.”
“That’s between Uncle Randal and Camuel,” Emily declared. “What matters now is that my brother Alan is in charge of the family now.” She knelt in front of Evelyn and looked her in the eye. “Alan said that you can come home with me. He wants you to finally be a real part of the family.”
Evelyn got up and stepped closer to the fireplace, her back to Emily and the others, gazing into the flames for several seconds. “No,” she said, turning to face Emily again. “I want to stay here. I want to get to know you, Emily. I want to get to know all of the Corey family. But I belong here.” She stepped into Cadell’s arms. “This is the first place I’ve ever really belonged.”
The Selkirks gathered around her, Cai placed a hand on her shoulder and looked at Emily. “Evelyn is a Selkirk,” he proclaimed. “She’s ours to protect.”
“Alan’s not going to like this,” Emily said, a wry smile on her face.
“Tough shit,” Callum said with a shrug of his shoulders.
Christian smiled at Evelyn. “Evelyn is one of us now,” he affirmed. “If your brother wants a beating, let him come and try to take her.” Emily looked on as Evelyn received a hug from each Selkirk in turn.
Returning to Cadell’s embrace, she looked at Emily again. “I’m home,” she proclaimed. Cadell held her tighter.
About the Author
Ray Chilensky lives in rural Tuscarwarus County, Ohio. He has worked briefly in law enforcement and for several years in private security. He has studied political science and history at Kent State University. Late in life he decided to pursue his passion for storytelling and combined that passion with lifelong interest in history and politics to seriously peruse a writing career.
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