Michael (The Mark) (The Airel Saga, Book 4: Part 7-8) (2 page)

Shortly, with Harry aboard, the helicopter took to flight, climbing. It hovered over the scene at an altitude of 1,000 feet. The pilot depressed the “pickle switch,” a euphemism for the button that deploys munitions. A cylindrical device the size of a five-pound sack of flour released from the belly of the aircraft and fell. A retarder, like a miniature parachute, deployed from its tail, slowing its descent and homing it in on the RFID beacon Harry had planted in the road. The helo banked sharply and headed southeast at maximum speed.

When the bomb hit the ground, it plonked dully, nonmetallically into the tarmac, its nose deforming and absorbing most of the force of the impact, causing the bomb to stick to the ground on the spot where it landed. Inside the canister, a kinetic firing pin pierced a thick membrane. Inside the membrane was a small amount of the chemical ethylenediamine, and as it mixed with the nitromethane that filled the rest of the bomb’s canister, a violent explosion erupted. The two “dents” in the road were now an enormous single crater.

As for the rest of the “evidence,” i.e. Gretchen Reid’s body, it was engulfed, ablaze, torn apart and ejected in millions of fragments from the crater in a radius of more than six hundred feet. Harry smiled when the shockwave passed through him in midair. He sang a chilling little song: “Good-bye, Gretchen. Good-bye.”

CHAPTER II

Ascension Island—Present Day

KREIOS RESTED ATOP GREEN Mountain, blandly and simply named in spite of its sublimely beautiful setting, almost 3,000 feet above sea level. Ascension Island, in the South Atlantic, was a good place to stop and rest, to collect his scattered thoughts for a little while, indulge in a stolen moment. This had always been one of his favorite places, a sanctuary of sorts for him. In the past, it was always a destination. Now it was just a convenient place to stop, a waypoint on a journey elsewhere, and it made him intensely sad.

He faced south and east, away from Georgetown, his back to Wideawake Airfield, looking toward where he was headed: Cape Town, South Africa.

Kreios was so heavy with care that he was numb and staring. Wide-eyed, he let whole worlds pass by in review before his imagination.

Thoughts of the history of this place randomly crashed into and through him. Ascension Island, so named because of the date of its discovery on Ascension Day, a church calendar holiday. He knew its history, of course, that some Christians had tried to redeem pagan feasts like Ashteroth by making them sacred—a millennially blind tradition that just as easily could be called sacrilege, depending on the perspective.
Good intentions,
he thought. He had been there at Babylon when the tower fell, when the peoples were scattered. He had seen with his own eyes what that event had wrought under the sun.

What does any of it matter?
He knew, for instance, and by personal experience, that Ascension Island was once used in what mankind commonly called the Second World War, in the Battle of the Atlantic, that the Allies had conducted operations against Nazi U-boats from the island. He knew it had served cross-Atlantic boat planes as a refueling depot in the age of the propeller. He knew it once served as a coaling station for steam-powered transatlantic passenger liners.

He knew it all. He had seen one of the roots of the problem at Babylon. They had built a tower to their own glory. El had scattered them. Men were forced from then on to go their separate ways, to build their rickety empires with different languages. It was inevitable that different customs would emerge, that different ways of thinking would develop; different worldviews, alien to one another, would ensue. The chasm of worldview between men since Babylon was inevitable, he thought.
And beyond hope.

The more of man’s history he saw hurtling on past him at breakneck speed, the more meaningless and nonsensical it became. He had left paradise for this?
No. Not this.
In moments like these, he prayed for the Brotherhood to come out of cowardly hiding and confront him. To take him.
After all, why not?
Perhaps then he might find meaning.

Honestly, he didn’t care where he was, or even when. It was all the same perverse blur, an affront. He cared less, too, in the final analysis, that the Brotherhood was sure to be tracking him. Each flight, he knew, was like a cannonade at point-blank range. He thought of hiding from it all within the folds of time, perhaps going back to his little concrete room in the mountains of Idaho … walking through that door ...

Perhaps
,
he thought, he was secretly hoping they would come.
All of them might converge upon me, thinking I possess the Bloodstone.
Then he might go down to hell and take all of them with him. His mind flashed with Germanic legends of Valhalla, Gotterdammerung; the end of the world in a cataclysm of fire. He had known the demon Wotan, source of the legend. All these pagan legends had their dark angelic sources.

“The life is in the blood,” he said, and he would spill it all. “Survival of the fittest,” he said, mimicking Wotan’s lie to the poor befuddled German philosophers, a lie that had now enraptured the entire world.

He ascended to the horizontal of a large white stone cross and sat upon it, an angel of El, hanging his head in desperation. His back to its post, he rested drooped on its arm, lifted up above the earth, and the tropical breezes filtered through him.

His thoughts relentlessly clawed back, torturing him: Airel was gone. Eriel was lost forever. There was nothing left. There was nothing but blood in the streets, running in the gutters, the blood of the Brotherhood, and finally, eventually … of Michael Alexander.

The traitor. The Judas Iscariot.

The warm breeze lifted him from his homicidal bent, brought him memories of his home. Millennia ago. It was indeed a different life. Filled to brimming with quiet, with solitude, with peace and fulfillment.

He smiled.

How long had it been since he had done that?

It was her face: Eriel. Oh. How she looked like her mother. Wonderful. Beautiful, full of life and full of fire. It was she that had kept him going after his beloved wife had passed on. But how many countless years had passed over him in indifferent numb purposelessness since then?

He growled at the breeze. “It’s all over now,” he said aloud. She his beloved, and Eriel, and even Airel—every trace of his love and every reason for which he had abandoned paradise were now wiped away, obliterated. They were to be no more.

“But what does that matter?”

They were all gone. All three, gone. They would not return to him. He was abandoned, alone, dead, hollow. Kreios set his jaw and gnashed his teeth, his eyes narrowed to warlike slits. “We will meet again, young Michael Alexander. We will. And when we do, I will exact payment in full. And I will take my time.”

The angel lifted up his head and stood to his feet on the cross. Looking east and south. The sun behind. Darkness before him. He was beyond intrepid; not even El could change his mind now. He had a very great many of the Nri to kill, and quickly.

Kreios deftly flexed his body and leaped into the air with a curse for the Brotherhood. The angel shot forward into the sky, leaving a misty contrail in his wake. The shape of wings, made of light and mist, hovered over his back.

Kreios drank in the elation of pure power and speed. There was something magical and holy about flying. Indeed, there had been a day when he was holy … but that was another time. Another life.

CHAPTER III

Arlington, Oregon—Present Day

“AND THE LORD PUT a mark on Cain, lest any who found him should attack him…”

I pored over this verse in Genesis 4, just one page before the one to which Kreios had guided me what seemed like an eternity ago. I was stunned at how much the Bible said, and with so little. The trouble was, what did it all mean? I was reading by the light of my Tracphone in the darkness of my hotel room, having grabbed the Gideons’ copy of the Bible out of the nightstand.

I had no idea why I had turned absentmindedly to this page. I was just sitting there reading it when it jumped off the page and grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go.

Oh, Kreios … I really, really miss you.
I wished more than anything then for my grandfather to come home to me. And home—at least as I had always thought of it up to that moment of my life— was now simply wherever he was. It’s not that I didn’t care about or miss my parents. I didn’t have the luxury of time enough to reflect on them or what they might be thinking, how they might be worried about me. Truth be told, I was trying to avoid that subject. It was too painful, too far out of my control.

I was a prisoner again. A prisoner to circumstance. It sucked.
Is life really like this? Just all kinds of crap that happens to you? Or does a girl get to make a choice every now and then?

She
crowded into my mind.
“But you’ve already made all kinds of choices…”

True enough. The realization made me hurt unbearably.

I was completely frazzled and confused and lonely and in need of somebody stronger than me. Though the tears threatened the edges of my eyelids again, I was sick of crying, sick of being carried along, sick of abdicating, sick of this slimy acquiescence that marked
me
somehow. And I supposed all of us, really, bore some kind of mark.

But I hated labels. I hated that my favorite books, for instance, had to be categorized as this or that or the other thing. Why couldn’t they just stand alone on their own merit? Why did life lump everything together? “Grrr,” I said to the lame hotel room painting hanging above the mirror.

Kim, snoring next to me on the bed, stirred a little, but didn’t wake. From across the room on the other bed came a voice: “Date went that well, eh?”

“How ‘bout you shut your face, Ellie,” I muttered, with more than a little menace.

No reply.

I continued: “Or I’ll come over there and finish the job I started when we first met.” I was so peeved. How was anything about Michael and me any of her business? I just wanted her to go away. As I brought my knees to my chest and dropped my head into my folded arms, I willed her to go away.

But then the bed moved and I looked up reflexively. I jumped a little. She was sitting there right in front of me, on my side of the bed.
How did she get over here so quick, so quietly?
“Whadda
you
want?” I spat.

“Girlie, I was going to ask you the very same thing.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“Calling you what?” she asked in her insufferably cool accent.

“What gives you the right to poke your nose into everybody’s business? And then act like nothing’s happening, calling me by pet names. You’re not my mom. Lay off.”

“Sorry, girlie, it’s just who I am.”

I could tell she wasn’t going to stop irritating me. It was too much fun for her. “Look, I’m not enjoying the game, okay? So bug off.”

“You’re perilously close to profanity where I come from.”

I just rolled my eyes at her.
You’re about to hear much worse.

“Airel, what’s bothering you? Do you want to talk?”

I just looked at her. I wanted to shout, “Ha!” at her, but I didn’t want to wake Kim. I looked at the clock: near midnight. “The only thing I want to do is sleep,” I said lamely, hoping she would go away. “But I can’t seem to.”

Ellie placed a sympathetic hand on my knee, saying, “Shh. It’s all right now.” And then that old weird feeling came back for me, the ripping apart of my heart and soul, and all I could think was
Oh, my gosh, she’s crazy evil.
I brushed her hand aside, and as I did, something stabbed at my heart. It went deep; I didn’t know what it was. It was just awful, that’s all. “Just stay away from me, Ellie. I don’t want to talk to you or see you or anything. Just leave me alone.”

I couldn’t describe how she looked right then if I wanted to. But there was deep meaning and pain in her eyes. The source of it—I couldn’t begin to know. “It’s all right,” she said again, standing.

She looked down on me with eyes that pierced right through me, flesh, half-angel blood, bone, and marrow. “I’m gonna step out for a bit.” She stood there for a split second, looking at me. It creeped me out, because for all I could make out of it her expression was one of love and acceptance.

Then she turned and slipped out the door.

I was so angry at her. How could she think I wanted to be her friend after she so shamelessly flirted with Michael, like, every five seconds? I saw through her. I could see that she was working some angle, was playing some game. I wouldn’t play along, even if she pretended to play nice.

It all made me very tired. I fell back on my pillow and dreamed instantly.

It was the kind of dream that was difficult to judge; I couldn’t tell if it was real or not. Dreaming or waking, this is what happened: I got up from the bed, peeked around the curtains through the window, and saw her. She was walking away with someone … it was Michael. After that, everything was totally blank.

***

IT COULD HAVE BEEN hours, days before I woke. And when I did, I was so disoriented that I thought I was back home in my room before all my synapses were firing properly. It was jarring, that “Where the heck am I?” feeling.

And I woke with a start, like I had just hit the ground from some precipitous fall from dizzying heights. I was pretty sure my spasm, which rocked the whole bed, was what woke Kim from the sleep of the dead as well. We both popped up from the pillows and stared at each other wide-eyed, wild-haired. She looked horrible.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“Ew, Kim,” I said. “Dragon breath. What did you eat?”

She opened her mouth wide and hissed, “Piiiiiiiiizza, with loooooooooooots of gaaaaaaaarlic.”

I gagged and turned away. I really did want to barf. She smelled like a freaking demon.

And that’s when it all came thundering back at me. I heard Michael’s voice in my head, urging me to talk to Kim about the Bloodstone.