The Paradise Prophecy (39 page)

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Authors: Robert Browne

BOOK: The Paradise Prophecy
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Batty spotted the gun where it had fallen and clamored across the steps, reaching for it, getting it in his grip. Pulling himself upright, he aimed again and squeezed the trigger—
—but the gun clicked. Empty.
Shit.
And now Callahan was on the ground, and he could see that she was weakening. She tried to strike out, but Belial knocked her back with another invisible blow. Then the redhead moved forward and stood over Callahan, blood pouring from the wound below her shoulder blade.
Raising her voice so that she could be heard over the roar of the rotors, she said, “Give me the manuscript, Sebastian, or I’ll rip her head off and drink her fucking blood.”
And Batty had no doubt she’d do it. No doubt at all.
But then something unexpected happened.
Batty heard a sound, a soft
plock
that registered just below the whine of the chopper blades. Belial’s eyes went blank and she stumbled forward slightly, as if buffeted by a sudden wind.
Then she turned, and he could plainly see the hole in the back of her head, a small trickle of blood seeping from it, turning her copper-colored hair a darker shade of red. He hadn’t seen an exit wound, so he could only assume the bullet was lodged in her brain—or what was left it. The impact had surely mushroomed through her skull, destroying everything in its path.
Then another shot rang out, hitting her in the cheek, spinning her around, the side of her face turning into raw, bloody hamburger. A third shot quickly followed, putting a hole through the back of her neck, and she dropped to her knees, her eyes now filled with shock and rage and dismay.
It took Batty a moment to figure out where the gunfire was coming from. Swiveling his head, he looked toward the helicopter.
Across the yard, McNab lay on his belly, a sniper rifle in hand. He smiled, as if satisfied by a job well done, but Belial suddenly screeched and swept an arm through the air.
A chunk of the temple broke free, rocketed across the yard like a small comet and slammed into the helicopter’s gas tank.
As McNab jumped to his feet, the chopper exploded in a ball of fire behind him. He screamed as the flames enveloped him, instantly turning him into a roasted human marshmallow. Then he slammed to the ground and stopped moving.
The concussion lifted the helicopter several feet into the air, then it dropped back down, landing on its side, its rotors snapping as the flames quickly gutted it.
And as they burned away, Belial teetered a moment, turning to Batty, her eyes now full of sadness, a fountain of blood pouring from the hole in her neck and down the side of her face. Then she toppled onto her back, the blood spreading on the ground beneath her.
As he slowly regained his senses, Batty staggered to his feet, shell-shocked, not quite believing what he’d just witnessed. He stumbled to the bottom of the steps and stood over a broken Belial, once again wondering how he could ever have taken her into his bed.
After a moment, Callahan got up and stood next to him, her fists involuntarily clinched, as if she were waiting for the bitch to make another move.
Then Belial’s mouth opened and blood bubbled up on her lips as she tried and failed to speak.
But Batty heard her voice inside his head.
This isn’t over, my darling. We’re connected, you and me.
That was Rebecca’s gift to us...
Then air escaped from between her lips as the life went out of her eyes and her body abruptly went still, abandoned by its occupant. It was, after all was said and done, just a human vessel, a skin, a means to an end that meant nothing more to her than a wrecked car or a torn dress. She had no use for it now and she was gone.
A moment later, the rumbling stopped.
The sky was clear.
The earth still.
Even if Batty’s heartbeat wasn’t.
37
 
T
hat old woman with the really long neck is staring at me,” Callahan said.
They had been hiking for what seemed like hours, following the winding trail down the mountain past the rice fields and the tribal villages, both of them on edge, but exhausted after the debacle at the temple.
And that’s exactly what it had been. A debacle.
What else could you call it?
Two good men were dead, the temple in ruins, a helicopter destroyed, and Batty and Callahan were lucky to have gotten out of there with their souls still intact.
One of the only blessings to come of it, Batty thought, was the dispatching of Belial—at least in her current human form. But he knew they hadn’t seen the last of her.
This isn’t over, my darling.
Belial might not return in the form of knock-’em-dead redhead, but she’d be back, stronger than ever. You could count on it. It would take a lot more than a couple of clueless mortals to destroy her, and all he could think to do was to keep moving forward in hopes they’d get lucky again the next time.
At least they’d come away from the debacle with a bit of knowledge. Thanks to Brother Philip, they now knew this went well beyond a few calculated attacks against the guardians. There was a plan in motion and it was an ugly one. A plan that would reach its conclusion during the coming eclipse.
The fourth moon.
Batty knew about lunar tetrads, knew they were rare, but he’d never considered that there was a power in them that would help Belial and her friends open the gates of hell. And he knew in his gut that this was exactly what they were planning. After years of trying, they had finally harnessed enough corrupted souls to overwhelm all the good in the world and deliver to them the paradise they sought.
The paradise they had lost.
But based on what Brother Philip had said, he could only conclude that Saint Michael had a plan of his own. A plan that involved the sacred traveler, whoever that might be.
A wandering soul. The Telum.
The word itself was Latin for
weapon—
which was why he had asked Philip about it—but how could a person be a weapon?
And what about the key the guardians were protecting? Was its secret somehow hidden in this manuscript he had tucked under his arm?
Was that why Gabriela and Ozan had worked so hard to decipher it?
Why Belial had wanted it?
“She’s really giving me the evil eye,” Callahan said. “Should I be worried?”
Pulling himself out of his thoughts, Batty looked off to their left where an old tribal woman with gold neck rings was watching them work their way down the trail.
“I doubt Belial would be able to find a new skin quite that fast. Besides, she’d do a lot more than stare.”
“You can understand why I’m a little jumpy,” Callahan said. “And I don’t like the way she’s looking at me.”
“Relax. She’s a Kayan villager. She doesn’t mean you any harm. In fact, if you asked, she’d probably take you into her home and feed you.”
“Just as long as she doesn’t try feed
on
me,” Callahan said. “I’ve had enough excitement for one day. And what’s with the neck rings?”
Batty threw her a glance, surprised that in all of her travels, Callahan hadn’t encountered such a sight before.
“The Kayan consider an elongated neck a sign of beauty,” he told her. “The rings force the collarbone and ribs to compress and make the neck look longer than it really is.”
“You truly are a font of information, aren’t you? My own personal Internet.” She looked at the Kayan woman again. “How can they do that to themselves?”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t you wearing five-inch heels when we went to that auction?”
Callahan conceded the point with a shrug. “Speaking of which, my feet are killing me. Along with every other part of my body. Let me check to see if I’ve got a signal now. Maybe we can get somebody to pick us up.”
She stopped and pulled her cell phone out of a pocket, checking the screen and not happy with what she saw.
“Shit. You’d think if the missionaries can build a temple up here, someone could erect a cell tower.”
Batty shook his head. “I sometimes wonder how the world survived before those things were invented.”
“Why don’t we ask the lady with the stretched neck?”
 
 
T
hey were moving through a forest of pines when Batty thought about Milton and the seven missing pages from the Devil’s Bible.
It was a foregone conclusion now that Milton was a guardian himself—an idea that might seem far-fetched to some, but to Batty’s mind, only made sense. Milton was a deeply religious man and a passionate civil servant who often spoke out against the king. He had almost gotten himself killed for it, and had spent much of the latter days of his life in sightless seclusion, his reputation tarnished. And it wouldn’t be outside his nature to take on the responsibilities of
Custodes Sacri
, especially if it meant he’d spend those last days in the service of God.
But Brother Philip had said that the curse on those pages had driven Milton blind—just like Galileo before him. And that Milton had
destroyed
the pages when he realized how dangerous they were.
But could any of this be true?
Could both of these men have had possession of the pages at some point in their lives?
Philip had said that Galileo had given Milton “the bug,” and Batty knew that the poet had visited the astronomer on his travels through Europe. Had an obsession been born during that visit? An obsession that had eventually been satisfied, only to drive Milton blind?
And why had Ozan wanted to know about the pages? Were they somehow mixed in with his attempts to decipher those verses from
Paradise Lost
? And did it all relate in some way to this mysterious Telum?
There was a connection here. There
had
to be.
But Batty had too little information to figure it all out.
So maybe he needed to start with Ozan’s and Gabriela’s obsession. In chapter eleven of
Paradise Lost,
the Archangel Michael takes Adam to the highest hill in Paradise and shows him a vision of the future. Adam witnesses the death and destruction of Noah’s flood, the rise of the tyrant Nimrod and the Tower of Babel, the deterioration caused by old age, the ravages of war and disease—all of which could be prevented if man were to live a virtuous life.
But there were no secret messages to be found in that chapter. No codes to be deciphered. Batty himself had been through the book time and again and had never found anything.
But then he suddenly remembered something. A small bit of curiosity he had set aside when things started getting crazy on the plane. Before Belial had hijacked Callahan and the plane started its nosedive, he had been looking through the manuscript, marveling at the ink on the pages, the words crossed out, the inserted revisions.
But as he had flipped to the end of the book, he had noticed something odd. Something wrong with the binding.
Something
missing
.
Could it be that simple?
Batty stopped in his tracks, fumbling for the book bag. As he reached inside and grabbed the manuscript, Callahan realized that he was no longer walking beside her and turned to look.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
Batty found the stump of a fallen pine and sat, pulling the book into his lap. “I think I may have just figured it out.”
She came over to him. “Figured what out?”
He quickly flipped through the manuscript until he reached the last chapter—what would be chapters eleven and twelve in the revised version, but was actually chapter
ten
here. He checked the binding, saw the torn edges, as if several pages had been removed.
“Is it possible?”
“Is what possible? What’s going on?”
He looked up at Callahan. “Ozan and Gabriela were trying to decipher the wrong chapter eleven.”
“What do you mean the wrong chapter eleven? What other chapter eleven is there?
“
Paradise Lost
was originally divided into ten chapters,” he told her. “Until the publisher asked Milton to split two of those chapters to make it seem longer and look more appealing to the readers.”
He showed her the manuscript. “This is the original ten chapters.” He gestured to the torn binding. “But there are pages missing here. Torn out of the back of the book. But if you look at the verse, it’s complete. It ends exactly where it’s supposed to end.”
A light came into Callahan’s eyes. “He wrote another chapter. The real chapter eleven.”
“The
right
chapter eleven,” Batty said. “The one they should have been trying to decipher all along. And look how many pages are missing.”

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