Crucified: The Rise of an Urban Legend (Swann Series Book 9)

by Ryan Schow

  “I can’t do that,” Amanda says.

  The Georgia lookalike is beside her, blood stained and weak.

  “Sit down,” I tell the redhead and she does, unable to mask her pain. With the last of my energy I do for her what I did for mini-G. She smiles, but does not thank me. Amanda has a perpetual frown.

  What the hell?

  “Where did you learn that?” Amanda asks.

  “Draco.”

  “What’s a Draco?” mini-G asks.

  I look at her, then at Amanda. “You don’t know him?” She shakes her head. “Well then I understand why they want to kill me.”

  “They want to kill you because you won’t let them do to your world what they’re trying to do to mine.”

  “They?”

  Just then the air gives a little burp and I haul myself up to my feet. I’m looking at him in the eyes (first mistake) and he’s looking right back at me.

  Why am I not charmed?

  This new traveler glances down at Aloysius and shakes his head. The two of them could be twins.

  “He was all show and no go,” the Aloysius twin says. “I don’t know how many times I had to tell him size doesn’t matter to those with telekinesis, but he was sure he could take you.”

  Every last ounce of fight in me dies. I can’t stop this man.

  Looking at the girls, he says, “Looks like you stacked the deck in her favor.”

  “We did,” Amanda replies.

  He draws a deep breath through his nostrils, tilting his chin up but keeping angry eyes upon them. Still speaking to Amanda, he says, “We have enough to deal with in our own world, why must you pollute their world with your presence?”

  “I don’t know who you are,” I say, having heard enough, “but why don’t you just piss off to wherever you came from?”

  “That’s a great idea,” he says. He says this with his eyes digging into me, his hand on my soul. Then, turning to the others, he says, “You three coming?”

  Amanda looks at me and says, “Maybe we’ll meet again.”

  “Thank you,” I tell her.

  Something slips into my head, a series of numbers and coordinates, but then some other symbols, too. Things I don’t understand that might make sense later, when I talk to Draco.

  And then they’re all gone.

  By now, Aloysius is just ash and I’m standing before him, not in the construct but out in the open with the mourners who suddenly seem to realize I am here. Their eyes go to the pile of ashes at the feet of Jesus and the two thieves.

  I don’t know how much time has passed, but the darkness is back inside me, The Operator fueled and looking for more chaos. Using that same darkness, that same harnessed power, I separate and bind the ashes of Aloysius’s body so they cannot rejoin each other. No reason leaving him here only to have him somehow come back to life and hunt me down later.

  “You know we could wipe the map of this filth,” The Operator whispers in my head, hypnotic and bold.

  “This was a treat. Be a good boy and go back to your cage and perhaps I’ll let you out to play more often. Fight me on this and I will never let you out again.”

  He slides low inside me, down to the depths where his cage door is wide open. Once he’s in, I close his door, engage the locks and leave the grinning sociopath in the depths of my own internal construct.

  Now I am fully back and the darkness is out of the sky, back inside me where I don’t want it. I waver against the sounds of sobbing. How much time has passed? It feels like no time at all; it feels like hours. I stand before Jesus, fall to my knees before him, open my mind to him so that he knows he is not alone.

  “I am thirst,” he says, delirious.

  Someone speaks and another comes forward with a sponge, pointing to a small barrel of either sour wine or vinegar. A woman dips the sponge and wets a hyssop, which she then places on the tip of a long reed. She hurries back to the cross, lifts the reed and wets his lips with the hyssop.

  Jesus looks down, sees me and the connection between us opens fully. A mighty flood of emotion roars in to me once more. This time I’m ready for it. I place a hand on his foot, level him with my love.

  His thirst still a burning thing, his throat sticky and raw, he is suddenly in my head, wondering if God sent me to be with him.

  “No,” I whisper using telepathy.

  “Then why are you here? Are you my angel?”

  “Yes.”

  I feel a great relief wash over him. He has been here in pain, feeling abandoned by his apostles, betrayed by Judas, forsaken by his father. He is ready to die, but dying is different than merely pledging your life for something. Giving it had been the burden he’d borne, the burden he now prays will reach its conclusion.

  “You do not know how important you will become in the future,” I tell him in his own language, which is strange to me because I don’t speak Aramaic, or whatever language this is, “but this selfless act, your death, will be the salvation of billions. You are an example to men and women who—devoid of faith—will become different people.”

  “Are you one of those people?” he asks in my head.

  “No.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  He waits, feels me, and then in this place of in between, he says, “Ah, now I see. You are a mix of light and dark, but without the discernment to decide which you must become. The savior or the saint.”

  I close my eyes, tap into the construct I was brought into with Draco, the same construct I was brought into by Aloysius. It takes a moment and then I feel the shift. There is a soft haze over everything. Using my mind, I rise up before Jesus, levitating so that I can look him in the eye. His head is lolled to the side, his face a bloody, ragged mess. The thorns are stuck into his scalp, driven in there by abuse, held in place by the sharp, green barbs.

  “I want to be the savior not the saint,” I tell him, “but I have seen where this goes.”

  “You end up like me.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is the burden we must bare.”

  “I am not sure I can do it.”

  “You are enough,” he says. He tries to lift his head to look at me. The struggle takes most of the energy he has left. “You are who you are supposed to be.”

  “Let me ease your pain,” I tell him.

  “Let me ease yours,” another voice says, surprising me. This is the voice in my head earlier, the booming one telling me “no.”

  “Okay…”

  “I am going to show you who you are,” this commanding, yet warm voice says, “but only if your true desire is to see this.”

  “You know it is,” I say.

  And with that, this presence spiritually peels back the skin of my face, separating my cranium like it is a puzzle most easily undone. The way this force peels away my head, it’s like He’s removing a set of clothes rather than the physical components of me.

  “This is your brain, right?” He asks, showing me my brain. Feeling nothing, no pain, I say it is and He says, “This is you, but it is not you at all.”

  And then He peels open the folds of my brain where there is a brilliant, whitish-yellow light. This light, however, is not a light as much as it is a portal not just to somewhere, but to everywhere.

  A flood of energy washes over me with the revelation.

  This presence begins to undress this light—this grapefruit-sized portal to everywhere—slowly drawing back the skin and bones and blood of my entire body. This hidden body of mine is light and the light is a portal—not solid, but open. Once the body is removed completely from this incredible light, it begins to bleed outward, growing incredibly bright. When the body itself is gone, all that remains is the shape of a human and a light so bright it seems to emanate from everywhere, pushing though the portal and expanding.

  The voice says, “You are so much bigger than you think, little one.”

  The presence that was inside me continues to drive outward, moving far and wide, like trillions of
little fingers of light becoming one with the air, with everything. And then there is that gigantic voice, the voice who commanded me not to intervene when what I wanted was to slaughter everyone.

  “This is you,” He says. The voice is warmth; it is a love I cannot describe, a love I’ve never had, a love I never thought I deserved.

  I am no mouth, no wet eyes, no skin to tingle at this new revelation, but I feel it. I feel Him. I feel everyone. I feel everything.

  “God?” I ask.

  “You are God,” He says. “You are the air, the wind, the water and the earth. You are everything and nothing, you are your lovers and your enemies, you are my son, his mother. You are me and I am you.”

  “But…”

  “You were given this body to contain you, but inside what you call a mind, you keep even more darkness close at hand. This has dimmed the light inside you. You’ve imprisoned this carrier of sin inside you. You will gather and contain so much darkness, little one, that it will erode you, and eventually stamp out the last of your light. But you know this, don’t you?”

  He means The Operator, and all the other souls I stole as Raven.

  “I do,” I say.

  “This is you, Savannah. All this light and love. Feel it. Feel me, us. You are not alone. You have never been alone, not at your birth and not the whole of your years. We are always around you, always with you, for you are us and we are infinite. We are you.”

  Words cannot describe this incredible freedom.

  “Take stock of your life, child. You have always wanted love, and now you’ve surrounded yourself with it: your parents, your friends, Rebecca, August, Chloe. But you have always been loved. You only need to be the conduit to it, for there is more than enough for you. There is so much love you will drown in it if only you will ask, if only you will shine your light so bright that not a speck of darkness can edge its way into the essence that is you.”

  “How do I get rid of the darkness when there is so much of it to go around?”

  “The darkness of the world will be there whether you fight it or not. To engage it is to fight, and to fight is to lose, even if you win. Be bigger than the darkness. End it by virtue of being so bright that there is no fight because there is no enemy. With so much light, darkness cannot exist.”

  He lets me sit with this for I don’t know how long.

  Eventually it takes hold.

  I understand.

  “Now go back into your body and purge yourself of this darkness. Let it all out. Purge it for your sisters, Elizabeth and Raven. Purge it for all the lifetimes of you, for all the versions of you, for this body. Empty it out here and now, little one.”

  With that I am slamming into my body, a body bent on two knees before Jesus on the cross, both my hands upon his feet. Blood and sweat, the iron of the spike. I look up and my heart breaks for him, but he knew this was coming. He knew this and he was prepared.

  I turn to the sounds of men coming. Using my spiritual hands, I reach up inside Jesus and cradle his heart with my hands. I don’t ease his pain; I just let him know that he is not alone. With his heart in my hands, I fill him not just with the love of me, but with the love I draw from everything and everyone else I am connected to.

  Beside me, the guards are using massive hammers to break the legs of the thieves to hasten their deaths.

  Right then, Jesus opens his eyes, and in an agonized voice, he says, “It is finished.”

  In those moments, as I hold his heart, I take everything I felt in his mother—all the love, the longing, the pride and fear—and I give it the largest place in his heart. He jumps from an expected sob.

  He knows what I’m doing for him.

  Then the voice in my head—the booming one that continued to tell me no, this voice I can only assume is God’s—it says, “Love is the way, child. Be love.”

  As I’m processing this, I feel Jesus letting go. Then in a ragged voice torn apart by grief and torment, he says, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

  And then he’s gone and my heart shatters with him.

  The Roman soldier is telling one of the men not to break Jesus’s legs because he is gone. My body is reduced to small fits of agony. One of the soldiers kicks me aside, my body rendered to the ground. I get to my feet, unconcerned with these fools. But then one man tosses his spear to another and tells him to stick Jesus in the side to be sure.

  I don’t know if I can take it, but I must.

  When the soldier lances Jesus in the side, blood and water sprays out in spectacular display causing the darkness in me to rise once more.

  This is the darkness I must purge from me. I draw it up from deep within me, calling it forth. Malevolent energy channels into me, fortifies me, strengthens me. I stalk over to the soldier who is pawing at the blood on his face, rip the spear from his hand and hit him open-palmed in the chest so hard and with so much force his ribcage literally crushes around my hand.

  He drops dead on the spot and I tell myself this is me changing history. But I also know this is me getting the darkness out.

  But this darkness…

  It is too big for this, too big for me. I turn with an indignant stare, lay eyes on each and every man that would dare challenge me.

  None steps forward.

  With the spear in hand, unable to speak their language, I cast judgment upon them with my gaze, pummeling their hearts with fear. True to their cowardice, they mumble to themselves as they scurry off, slowly at first, and then breaking into a run. I turn to Jesus, see his dead body, know there is so much emotion still swirling in me.

  If I laid waste to all these men, the darkness would still be there. It would still gather like a storm inside me, lying in wait. I cannot go on killing people.

  It solves nothing.

  The foul energy wants out, though. The darkness in me is dying for escape. I feel it rattling up through me, my rage coming to a boil, ready for escape. I draw in all the pain of the mourners, all the pain of those who love Jesus, the pain of Mary, and I let it become the bomb inside me.

  The grounds beneath my feet begin to quake with all this darkness. Rocks vibrate all around me; entire boulders split in two. And then this force inside avalanches out of me, exploding forth like a nuclear bomb. The scream that leaves my mouth is a lion’s roar behind the world’s largest bullhorn. The trembling of earth and stone scares everyone, even me.

  And then it stops.

  I stop.

  As I stand here shaking all over, the chords in my neck strained from the force, something is different. No, everything is different. I feel suffused with peace. And then I sense him: Jesus’s spirit. He’s here just like my spirit was here when I hovered over my shot body for what felt like forever. Just like fake-Abby’s was when she hung herself. Just like Cameron’s was right before she died.

  “I knew I would find you,” I say into the ethers, my body drained, my spirit weary but blessed.

  “You found yourself, too,” he says into my head.

  The brightness, the warmth, the compassion he bestows upon me heals me, turns me around, lets me know that this two year struggle for me to find out who I am has finally come to a close. I am me. I am perfect just the way I am.

  “Thank you,” I say to him.

  “Young angel, you have brought me peace. Now return to your time with the knowledge that might begets might, but love can quiet entire armies before even one boot steps into the fields of war.”

  Smiling, touched, blessed with the wisdom of a man I could not fathom ever meeting, I come out of the ethers and find myself standing beneath his body. I don’t remember standing so close as to be directly under him, but here I am nevertheless.

  I look up just in time for a drop of blood from his beard to strike my face on the inside corner of my eye. I refuse to blink as it seeps inside me.

  “My blood is now your blood,” he says. “With this blessing, your sins are paid for in full, and you need not sacrifice yourself any further to God,
for you are absolved of your past. Go now into your future, little lamb, and purge yourself of that which will surely lead you to wars of your own making, and then live.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  August flies into SF International where I pick him up in the Audi and tell him he’s coming home with me. He doesn’t object. At least the endless parade of kisses he lays on my says he’s with me all the way.

  I call my father who answers on the last possible ring. He and Orianna are out to lunch together.

  “Hey sweetie!” he says. “Savannah, right?”

  “The one and only,” I tell him.

  “I’m on my way home from the airport and I just wanted to see if I could make a play date with August.”

  “I’m good with that.”

  “What about a sleepover?” I say.

  “Are you really asking me that?” he asks in a jovial tone.

  “I just want to be respectful with it being your house and all,” I tell him, looking at August. He frowns. Then: “How do you feel about an extended playdate with multiple sleepovers?”

  “You going to start paying me rent?”

  “If I need to,” I say with soft laughter in my voice.

  “No rent, I’m good on the sleepovers,” he says. “Are you two a thing now?”

  “We will be for years to come.”

  “You sound sure,” he says, “which makes me happy.”

  “I am. Sort of saw it already.”

  “In the future?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well alrighty then,” he says. “Listen, me and your mom…”

  “Are at Don Pisto’s, I know. Enjoy your lunch, the Mexican Sashimi is amazing.”

  “That’s what I’m having,” he says, delighted.

  “I know, Dad, that’s why I said it. Tell Orianna I love her and miss her.”

  “Didn’t you just see her?”

  “To her, yes, but to me, no. I’ve been…gone for a little bit. A lot has happened.”

  “Like?”

  “It’s a long story I just might tell you one day.”