Michael (34 page)

“You’re not a full blood,” Michael said. “Then what are you? Explain yourself.”

“Yeah,” I said, “because this…I mean, this is messed up. You’ve been lying to us the whole time!”

“Shh!” Ellie hissed at us, “we still need to maintain at least a little bit of order here.” She sat forward a bit and directed herself only at me. “Airel, what I mean to say is that I’m just like you are. I’m a half breed.”

“Wait. What? So you’re a…an Immortal? You’ve been changed too?”

“Yeah.” She sat back and looked at both of us for a moment.

“But you’re not,” Michael began, “I mean, you’ve never been a member of the Brotherhood?”

“That’s an incredible question for you to ask me, kid. Like you have room to be suspicious. And, no, I’m not with the Brotherhood, though they’ve been known to recruit women from time to time. But you knew that, didn’t you, otherwise you wouldn’t have asked, right?”

This is just crazy sauce!
Weirdly, in spite of what maybe should have happened in my heart and mind, instead of being angered by Ellie’s confession, I was newly energized.
That’s what it is! That’s why there’s this weird connection between us all the time!
I was exultant. “So wait,” I said, “tell me everything. How did you change? What happened? How did…I mean, who activated you?” Suddenly we really did have all kinds of stuff in common.

“Patience, grasshopper,” she said in her funny accent. “All in due course.”

“Hold on,” I said, interrupting Michael before he could get another word in, “I’ve been dying to know, since we’re finally getting down to it here. Where are you from? How old are you?”

She giggled and obliged me. “I kind of lost track. If I’m honest. But it’s fair to say that I’ve been around a long time. A very long time.”

My mind raced.

“Anyway in answer to your question of where I’m from, I guess you could say I’m headed home right now. That’s why I figured it was a good time to come clean. Cape Town is my own fair city. My own most recent fair city. I’ve been known to haunt Sydney and London from time to time.”

“Wait, I thought you were from Portland. Or Seattle,” Michael said.

“You assumed. I carry documents too numerous to list. What the documents say on their face is what allows people to draw their own conclusions in concert with how they think. And when you’ve got as much experience as I do, you know how to make connections and how to use them. At the moment, officially, I’m a dual citizen of ol’ Zed-A and the USA—”

“Zed-A?” I asked.

“South Africa’s official initials, girlie. Anyway, I guess you could say in regard to my American citizenship that I’m African-American. Though with skin this fair in an intellectual climate as intolerant and closed-minded as America is currently, I know it’s the unpardonable sin for me to say so. If the world even believes in sin anymore.”

I laughed at her little rant. I supposed she deserved it. “So you’re from Cape Town? Is it cool?”

“Crikey, yeah. I’ve been all over the place. Quite literally. And Cape Town is one of the most naturally gorgeous spots on earth.”

“Why did you lie?” Michael blurted out.

I felt a little ashamed at myself, feeling like a too-eager turncoat. That, plus his question made me blush a little, but I nevertheless waited for her answer.

“That’s easy, mate. You can’t trust anyone these days. I have a lot to lose. There’s a lot at stake here. Actually, you should feel privileged that I shared the truth with you even now. You ought to feel some measure of gratitude that I’m demonstrating enough faith in you to confide this.”

“Okay, but why?” he persisted. “Why did you have to keep us in the dark at all? Are you even here because of El…and orders…or was that all just a lie too?”

Ellie leaned across the table toward us and lowered her voice. She pointed to me. “Airel knows the answer to that already.”

After a split second of confusion it did indeed become clear as a bell to me. I looked at Michael and said, “She’s here to protect me.”
That’s crazy! How could I be that important?
And of course it was beyond prudent for her to keep that to herself for as long as she dared.
She must think we’re headed for something enormous, then…still though…little ol’ me? She’s here to protect me?

But I knew. After all, I knew, and it was flooding into me. After all I had read in my grandfather’s Book, after all I had experienced, after all the impossibilities of my own resurrection from the dead, my still-developing abilities, and the fact that I could now call the Sword of Light at a whim and wield it in battle, the very Sword my grandfather had been the only angel to possess…
well, perhaps technically it had belonged to his brother Tengu, before he had joined the rebell—
all of it came crashing into me with brute force. I grasped the edge of the table to steady myself. I was breathing hard, like I had just run a sprint. “Whoa,” was all I could articulate.

“See? She knows,” Ellie said. “Now, Michael, how ‘bout let’s fill her in on the rest of the plan. The
why
of it. The danger. She’s gotta know. She’s gotta know now.”

For the next hour we sat at the table as they filled me in on how we were going into, basically, the lion’s den. And how not just Kim was effectively the bait, but me as well.

Kreios,
I thought desperately,
you had better freaking show up. We are taking some huge risks now. Risks that might change the whole world forever.

We bought a few little souvenirs from the street merchants before catching another taxi back to the airstrip. “Wideawake; what a cool name,” I said. I was thoroughly engrossed, and as it turned out, clueless. I should have known better.

The bottom of our little world didn’t drop out until we boarded the plane again: Kim was gone. At first I thought she had just woken up and needed to use the bathroom or something, that maybe she had gone into the hangar for some reason. Something temporary, something that meant she would be
back.

But she was gone.

Ellie was as angry as I had ever seen her. “We’ve gotta find her. NOW.”

“That’s a good girl, Kim. You’ve done well. Very well.”

Kim had been faking it for hours on the plane, pretending to be asleep. It was so crazy how the Bloodstone gave her the ability to do superhuman things, like resist powerful psychosomatic drugs intentionally slipped into her drink by psychopathic blue-haired trust-fund girls. How it gave her new desires she hadn’t ever put together for herself. Take-over-the-world-type stuff. She felt, with it, that she could fly.
Perhaps I will…

And time flew by too. Normally she would have been impatient. But the Bloodstone lent to her a different perspective; it was larger. She could see more of the historical picture with it, see that everything happened again and again in cycles of evil; that she only need wait for the next one. It would be along just as surely as the next bus to the end of the world. And that made her less jittery. So when the time became ripe she was ready.

But on the threshold of the total surrender of her will, she hesitated. Destiny loomed over her in the form of pure doom; there was no hope save for her last free decision:
Is this what I really want?

“Hush my dear,”
the Bloodstone cooed,
“and savor the taste…”

It does taste good….

Under the carnal influences of the Bloodstone, she sprang from her seat and bolted from the plane. No one saw her; the pilots were indoors filing their flight plan and checking the weather. The ground crew was busy elsewhere. The gang of three, those troublemakers, those molesters, those kidnapping liars, would be back soon, so she took off at a dead sprint.

But she wasn’t really Kim, was she?
No, not anymore. Now I’m better than Kim. I’m Kim as I should have been. And I will evolve into something truly magnificent. Something immortal.
Kim told herself that her root motivation wasn’t jealousy; that she didn’t really just want to be like Airel, to have what she had, to be beautiful, to live forever, to have Michael for her own. But it was all lies. Fighting fire with fire, she told herself lies that countermanded the previous lies. In fact, the truth was,
everything
was a lie.

None of it mattered.

She would be beautiful.

Untouchable.

She was beginning to wheeze, to pant, to convulse as its—her—legs pumped up and down over the dead moonscape of lava rock. She was spewing forth more evidence of the presence of the Bloodstone: gooey black tar oozed from her nostrils and a fume of that vapor poured out from her mouth in puffs.

For an instant one of the legs failed to pump properly, stumbling over an irregularity in the field of rocks. Down she went. There was no pain; only the Bloodstone’s manufacture of an all-consuming elation that dwarfed all other indicators of pain or reality. There was blood on the hands now though.

Slipping the straps from each shoulder one at a time, it took the pink backpack off and reattached it to the front, running her arms through the straps again so that this time the bag rested on her chest.

A ripple appeared on her back as razor sharp wingtip talons skillfully pierced the skin and the fabric of the dress, protruding slowly like a plant growing out of fertile ground and then unfurling like the petals of a diabolical flower. At first green, the wings quickly changed to brown, matching the lava rock landscape that was spread roundabout.

“Tengu deserved his end,”
the Bloodstone—Nwaba now—thought.
“Now it is my turn…”
Swiftly the wings descended, and the hybrid creature shot into the sky as if launched from a catapult. The wings of something, anything, that could fly; the face of a human.
“Well…as far as is reasonable,”
Nwaba said to himself. After all, this chameleon had never quite been fully anything.

Nwaba flew, his wings protruding from the spine of the one named Kim, toward the peak of Green Mountain. He could detect the stench of one of his oldest foes. Kreios. He might know Nwaba better under younger names. Only if Kreios had truly been paying attention would he know him as Nwaba.
“We shall see, Kreios. And we shall see you soon.”

The one named Kim spread its arms wide in menace as the wings shot her swiftly through the air, pink backpack first, toward the place where Kreios had last stood upon the earth. That place with that accursed symbol, the cross.

CHAPTER XIV

Cape Point, South Africa, present day

DREIOS DECIDED TO MAKE landfall in an isolated spot. Cape Point provided that in spades.

An isthmus that projected from the continent, it was the south-westernmost point of Africa, and it divided the Atlantic ocean from the Indian ocean. The land raced upward from sea level like a scalded cat, its steep slopes creating precipitous and sheer drops from dizzying heights to the crashing surf below.

Kreios swooped in along the tops of the waves as he approached, feeling the salt spray in his face as he went. Considerably far below the Cape Point Lighthouse, he alighted gently on the cluster of rocks that El had heaped up here as a boundary to the deep.