Paradise Lost Boxed Set

by R. E. Vance

  “Belief is power, Jean. You will do well to remember that.”

  “Sure,” I say, heading out the door. “Belief is power and right now I believe that you are full of shit.”

  ↔

  Just as General Shouf said, the program is scrapped and I am returned to Special Operations, doing what I do best: killing Others.

  But upon my return, not everything is the same. For one thing, we just got in the new shipment of toys we were promised, and boy, oh, boy, they are beauts. For another, General Shouf is assigned as our CO. That comes as a surprise. An Other heading the unit trained and equipped to kill Others? It has “sabotage” written all over it, if you ask me. But nobody ever asks me.

  Except it actually works, because unlike our former CO who showed compassion from time to time, General Shouf shows none. We are never given a stand-down order. We are never told to abandon the mission or change tacks. The only command Shouf ever gives is the kill order.

  An order I follow with all the zeal that my body, will and soul possess.

  Part XI

  Prologue to Part Three

  Her name is not TinkerBelle.

  Not that she can tell her human guardian that. She cannot speak it out loud, and to mime her name is far beyond her current skill at Charades. She could write it down—after all, she has taught herself the human spoken language, and she estimates that it would be a matter of days, if not hours, to teach herself how to write the language as well. But then the human would know her name, and he may foolishly try to utter it aloud.

  What is in a name?

  Everything.

  This fairy’s name is the embodiment of Creation itself. To hear it is to know true beauty. And few creatures have the fortitude to know such a thing without being … transformed. The last god to speak her name was Izanami-no-Mikoto, and as a result her children became the mountains, rivers and forests of Japan.

  That is what is in her name.

  If the human Jean were to speak her name without time to burn or magic to protect him, he would … he would … TinkerBelle isn’t quite sure what would happen to the man. Before the gods left, a mortal would have been transformed into the Northern Lights, metamorphosed into a shooting star or burst into an entire constellation. But now? Now she does not know, and it is best not to take a chance. Not with her guardian, at least.

  ↔

  In the old world, before the gods left, she was called by a secondary, less powerful name: Houlm.

  But that was the old world. In this GoneGod world she has adopted another, powerless name: TinkerBelle—or “Tink” for short.

  A new name for a new world.

  In the four months she and her new guardian have spent together, she has grown to like the name almost as much as she likes the man.

  The human Jean has taken her to some wooden construct in the middle of a vast forest. There they stay far away from humanity. The human hunts and fishes and forages, always making sure that there is plenty of food to eat and wood to feed the fireplace.

  He also makes sure she is comfortable, building her a bed and chair that are just the right size.

  He is taking care of her, as he should. He is, after all, her guardian now.

  ↔

  TinkerBelle watches the human closely, trying to determine if he is a worthy guardian. It does not take her long to see what kind of man he is … after all, she knows of what he dreams.

  When the gods created life, they made humans from clay, jinn from smokeless fire, dwarves from stone, and angels from light. Every creature that walks this Earth has its corresponding element from which they were fashioned. But she is different. She was made from the essence of Creation itself: dreams.

  Being of dreams, she knows dreams. All of them.

  And this Jean, he constantly dreams. Night after night, he is visited by the apparition that is his dead wife. Jean believes that he is losing his mind, a weak mortal so overcome by grief that he manifests the memories of his lost love via his dreams. He is wrong—not that TinkerBelle will ever tell him. His dreams are his to interpret as he chooses.

  Every night, she watches Jean and Bella as they stroll along the beach, she in her yellow dress. Tink cannot hear what they say, for dreams are visual, and her innate abilities do not produce sound. But from what she sees, she knows that this man loves this woman more than anything in the world. This man knows love.

  That is rare … especially for a human.

  ↔

  Eleven moons pass. Jean tells her that he must go to town and buy supplies. He will be gone two hours, maybe three. TinkerBelle, bored of her surroundings and interested in seeing a bit more of this strange GoneGod world, signs that she wishes to come.

  Jean refuses, stating that it is too dangerous. TinkerBelle is not used to being denied. She flies about the cabin at great speeds until she finds a small leather pouch. She gestures for him to put it around his neck. Once he does, she climbs inside.

  “This is no good,” he says. “Humans don’t wear leather pouches with three-inch-tall people in them. Someone will notice this, Tink—”

  With a whoomp, she burrows herself in the hole in his chest—the one caused by the death of his wife. She is encased by the vast emptiness that once held his love. No, it is not a physical hole, but a spiritual one. If that emptiness were not there, Tink would not be able to merge with Jean. That is not how her power works. She is Dream—and Dream, like water, fills the empty spaces more solid substances cannot.

  “Oh,” he says, rubbing his chest. “So that’s what we’re doing these days?”

  ↔

  They drive to the small town that is no more than a grocery store, a hardware deposit, a diner and a post office that sit on opposite corners of a crosswalk. Tink knows because when she is a part of him, burrowed as she is now in the hole in his soul, she can see what he sees, hear what he hears. Up and down the road a few houses line the streets, and in the far distance she sees a yellow sign with two children walking, silhouettes frozen in mid-stride.

  There is a phone booth in front of the grocery store and Jean stops by its accordion door, his hand on the handle. He keeps it there for a long time before he sighs, drops his hand from its door and goes into the store instead.

  There is a faint movement in Jean’s peripheral vision, a shimmer that gleams in front of the diner’s window across the way. Jean doesn’t notice it, but TinkerBelle does—and it makes her heart beat with fear.

  She uses Jean’s vision to catch another glimpse, his hearing to try and confirm what she thinks she saw … but it is no good. The human is oblivious to the danger. Once he is in the store, the glimmer is nowhere to be seen.

  ↔

  He walks through aisle after aisle, picking up supplies as he goes, and ends at the checkout where a young woman picks up item after item and runs it under a red light that caresses the goods’ surface with a beep.

  As they walk out of the store, TinkerBelle intently uses all of Jean’s senses to confirm if the glimmer she saw is what she believes it to be. Thankfully Jean takes his time, pausing by the phone booth again. Once again he debates entering, until finally his hand slides the door open and he mutters, “Oh, hell,” as he digs out coins from his pocket.

  He dials a number and within the empty chamber of Jean’s heart, TinkerBelle hears the overwhelming clamour of bells that fill the confined space. For a moment her senses are overwhelmed; she covers her ears and closes her eyes to hold out the sound. It finally stops with a comparatively softer voice that says, “Hello?”

  “Hi,” Jean says. “It’s me.”

  There is silence on the other end.

  “I’m … I’m up North.”

  More silence.

  “I’m done.”

  “With what?”

  Jean sighs and squeezes the bridge of his nose. “You know with what.”

  Silence.

  “You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you? You were always such a hard-ass, Miral!” TinkerBelle
can feel Jean’s heart speed up as the walls around her thump with growing intensity. “Fine. I’m done with the fighting, the hunting. The killing.”

  “It just doesn’t end with a declaration,” the voice says.

  “I know,” he says, his own voice quivering.

  “What has changed? You were done once before. What makes you so sure that you won’t go back to the Army, Jean?”

  “Because I made a promise to Bella. To help Others and be something … something good in this world. I plan on keeping my promise to her.”

  There is a long silence before Miral says, “If you want to help, then come home. There is plenty for you to do here.”

  Jean hangs up the phone and TinkerBelle can feel warm tears caress his cheeks. He wipes them away and with blurry vision goes to the car. The blurry vision is no good, no good at all. TinkerBelle cannot be on the lookout for the glimmer now. She cannot confirm her fears.

  But then she hears it: a short, high-pitched whistle that no human lips could make. Jean, if he noticed it at all, would assume it a bird, but TinkerBelle knows better. She knows that only one creature can make such a piercing sound: a banshee.

  ↔

  So a banshee is hunting them, TinkerBelle thinks. The banshees are powerful, determined hunters who become obsessed with their prey. And it is stalking her … no, that is not right. The banshee could not possibly know about her existence. If it did, it would not come alone, but gather its tribe to hunt her. The mere fact that it is a sole banshee means that it does not hunt her—it hunts her guardian: the human Jean.

  TinkerBelle considers this for a long time. Jean is (or was) the Scourge of Others. To claim his head would be a considerable prize indeed. Somehow this banshee must have gotten Jean’s scent and tracked him up to these woods.

  TinkerBelle considers telling Jean. After all, he is a formidable warrior and her guardian. But she decides better of it. The human is healing, still fragile from years of violence. To fight now, before he has found his soul again … that would be detrimental to his rebirth.

  And besides, it is only one banshee. Its tactic will most likely be to sneak up on Jean in the night and slit his throat as he sleeps.

  Such is the way of cowards.

  ↔

  Jean assumes that strength comes from size, but he assumes wrong. TinkerBelle may only be three inches tall, but she is mighty.

  The banshee sneaks in through the woods, seeking to take down the great Scourge of Others. Another fifty feet and he will be at the cabin’s door.

  TinkerBelle meets him before he breaks the forest line. Although the banshee has never seen a creature like TinkerBelle before, she can tell that he knows he is looking at the fairy made from dreams. He behaves like most creatures do when they meet TinkerBelle for the first time: reverent at first, humbled by her beauty; but reverence turns to desire and desire turns into a need to possess. To own her.

  The banshee reaches for her—but before his claws are able to get close, she whispers her name.

  The banshee falls to the ground, tears of joy streaming from his face, and his body begins to transform into perfectly formed cherry blossoms, as if freshly fallen from their branches, that will now reside in the middle of the forest until they eventually decay away.

  Even with the gods gone, my name still holds power, she thinks with satisfaction. She returns to the cabin where the human Jean still lightly snores, completely unaware that his charge just saved his life.

  ↔

  The next day the human packs his things into his precious car. With a gesture, he invites TinkerBelle to join him again. With a whoomp, she complies.

  Putting his car into Drive, he slowly makes his way up the dirt path, passing near where the forest line meets his property. He spots the colorful heap of cherry blossoms. “Oh, hey,” he says, curiosity coloring his voice. “I didn’t know cherry blossoms could grow up here.”

  Next Bee Nurseries, Nappies and Dirty Pixies

  Matthew had scanned our tickets, re-examined our passports and let us on the plane—so when I saw that our pilot was some overweight man in his sixties, I was severely disappointed. As we walked on, the overweight pilot gave us a half-hearted welcome. He wore the expression of a man who had done a ton of wrong and was being punished with the Paradise Lot route. Next to him was a stewardess who had either just gotten out of jail for murdering her neighbors and their damn yapping poodle, or was still serving time and this was her punishment. Either way, she did nothing toward making the skies any friendlier, just glared in our general direction. The pair of them looked like they were one “What do you mean ‘there are no more pop tarts’?” away from going kamikaze with the plane.

  I gulped as we walked on. There are two things I hate more than anything—flying and baking. I hate them so much that I honestly think I would prefer a root canal followed by a full-body wax while marathoning Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise on fast-forward.

  When Penemue walked on, our captain gave the angel one look and said with all the expression of a sleeping bulldog, “Can’t you fly?”

  “I can,” Penemue said, “but the inflight service is lousy.”

  Our captain narrowed his eyes and then burst into laughter. He shrugged at the stewardess and said, “It ain’t much better here,” to which the stewardess nodded in un-mirthful and un-ironic agreement.

  ↔

  The plane rattled as it took to the air and I held my chest as my heart tried to break through my ribcage. We got to cruising altitude, and as much as I tried to reassure myself that the worst was over and that we’d be on the ground again in less than two hours, I just couldn’t calm down. I was beginning to resolve myself to one hundred and twenty minutes of living in an anxious haze when Penemue offered me an alternative kind of haze—a drunken one.

  Four hard pulls later from his blessed bottle of Drambuie and my heart slowed down. My head started to swim with a false sense of accomplishment.

  Sinbad was sitting on her seat watching some inflight movie, her face equal parts intense concentration and amusement. She was enthralled in that way only kids can seem to muster, all of her senses engaged on the screen. I envied her.

  Penemue was sitting two seats over, uncomfortable in the tight confinements of the plane and sipping on a second bottle of Drambuie. I guess he snuck in more than one. Not surprising in the least, and at that moment I was perfectly accepting of his drinking problem. I could’ve given the inebriated angel a friggin’ kiss.

  Conner’s head popped up from the seat in front of me. “Settled?” he asked.

  I shook my head. It felt like the plane was spinning loop-the-loops.

  He didn’t seem to notice my discomfort. “What the hell is wrong with Miral?”

  Of all the questions he could have asked, that was the one I didn’t want to explore. Not when we needed to focus on finding those kids—and certainly not when we were basically in a building that had been put on its side and flung into the sky.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Wrong reaction on my part.

  A thin sheen of frustration-induced moisture glazed Conner’s crystalline eyes. He was angry with me, and he had good reason. In the forty-eight hours we’d been working together, I’d lied to him. Lots.

  In my defense, they weren’t lies so much as glaring omissions that I purposefully hid from him. Further in my defense, I omitted not because I didn’t trust him, but because I didn’t trust his bond with Miral. I figured a man like him was used to having the upper hand in a relationship with a mortal. But when you were dating an angel, that was another story altogether. He was guaranteed to tell her everything, whether it would be in the form of a full report or casual, accident pillow-talk. In other words: anything I told him, she was bound to find out.

  That was why I hid the fact that I was being blackmailed by my former commanding officer, General Shouf. Miral wouldn’t like that. But if I didn’t tell him about General Shouf, then I couldn’t tell him that I’d fo
ught those friggin’ monsters before … that they were a military experiment gone wrong, and that the reason they turned to foam when they were killed instead of just becoming a corpse on the ground like everyone else was because they weren’t actually monsters at all. They weren’t anything, really, except a mixture of cells and magic: animated creatures that didn’t come from the Black Lagoon, but rather Black Ops.

  I also omitted that Mr. Cain, our prime suspect, had offered me a job with a salary that had more zeroes in it than a ZIP code had numbers.

  All of that was somehow justifiable. After all, being blackmailed, job offers and military secrets were, in a way, my own damn business. Not his. But what I also didn’t tell him about was that I was fairly sure Sinbad had more in common with the monsters than a six-year-old girl in a pirate’s costume.

  Sinbad needed to be a secret because, unlike the monsters, Sinbad was a thinking, considerate creature that exhibited free will. And that was something Miral absolutely could not find out about.

  When the gods left, they took the power of Creation with them. That was the common belief, anyway. But if Creation was in fact still possible … well, let’s just say that angels got very testy around that subject. As in, Sodom-and-Gomorrah testy. She’d see this as a much greater threat to the world than a bunch of kidnapped kids. Creation was god business.

  I didn’t give a frig about gods or their business before, and now that they were gone, I cared even less. There were children taken from their families, their homes, and being held captive by the stuff of their nightmares. That was all I cared about. Period.