Judgment Stone (9781401687359)

by Robert Liparulo

Tyler stepped forward and offered his hand. “Nice to meet you, sir.”

  “Your mother and father gave me hugs,” Owen said. “Can I get one from you? Or are you too old for silly stuff like that?”

  Tyler grinned and moved in for a hug.

  Owen said, “It’s good seeing you so healthy. A lot better than the last time I saw you.”

  Tyler pulled on the chain around his neck until the bullet popped free from his pj top. “They pulled this out of me,” he said.

  “Wow,” Owen said, raising his eyebrows. “You know, I’ve had quite a few of those pulled out of me, but I never thought about wearing one around my neck. That’s cool.”

  “How many times have you been shot?” Tyler was completely fascinated now.

  “Enough to wear them as earrings and make a whole necklace out of them and a ring . . . for every finger.” He waggled his fingers in front of him.

  “Man!” Tyler said.

  Owen stooped to picked up two cups, which he handed to Jagger and Beth. He said, “Tyler, I got coffee for your mom and dad.” He picked up another cup and held it out to Tyler. “I figured you’d rather have hot chocolate.”

  “Thank you!” He grabbed it, peeled off the lid, and drank.

  “Made it from scratch myself,” Owen continued, retrieving his own cup. He walked around the table, placed his satchel on the couch, and sat beside it. “The hotel didn’t have hot chocolate. I guess there aren’t too many requests for it here in the desert. But I showed them how to make it with a Hershey bar and milk. How’d I do?”

  Tyler nodded, cup to mouth.

  Jagger placed a hand on Tyler’s head. “Why don’t you go get dressed, buddy.”

  At the bedroom door, Tyler turned to grin at Owen. The chocolate on his upper lip had run down both sides of his mouth, turning it into a Fu Manchu mustache. He said, “My favorite verse is John 4:50.”

  Owen looked surprised. “‘Go,’ Jesus replied, ‘your son will live.’ The man took Jesus at his word and departed”?

  Tyler’s eyes flicked to his mother. “Mom says it shows that you don’t have to see God for Him to help you. The boy never saw Jesus, but he was healed. She says people believe too much in what they can see, and not enough in what they can’t.”

  Owen nodded. “You have a smart mother.”

  “Yeah,” Tyler said.

  Jagger raised his left arm, causing the sleeve below the elbow to flop down. “I feel naked without RoboHand. I’ll be right back.”

  He went into the bedroom and shut the door.

  [ 29 ]

  “Sweet boy,” Owen said, taking a sip from his cup.

  Beth felt herself blushing. She sat in a chair beside the couch and said, “I don’t even know if my interpretation of that passage is right.”

  “It is for you,” Owen said, smiling. “Scripture is layered with meanings. Like seeing different colors when we look into a prism, depending on the light and angle. That’s the magic of God’s Word.”

  “But you wrote it.”

  “No more than you and Jagger made Tyler,” Owen said. “Just as God knit him together in your womb, He knit the words I wrote in my head.” He set his cup on the table and touched her arm. “Whatever the Holy Spirit led you to believe about that verse, it’s the lesson you—or Tyler—needed to learn at that moment. But I remember that event as a testament to the power of prayer. When that official pleaded with Jesus to save his son, he was praying.” Owen shrugged. “It’s almost incidental that God happened to be standing there in the flesh at the time. He begged for his son’s healing”—Owen pushed the coffee table away and knelt in front of it—“on his knees, clutching Jesus’ garments.” He brought his fists together, close to his chin, and leaned his head back. Beth could see the man gazing into Jesus’ face. In a heartbreaking tone, Owen said, “Please heal my son, Lord. Without You, he will die.” He looked at Beth. “I fail to see the difference between that man then and us now.”

  Beth’s heart ached. She felt her lip quiver and tears ready to come. Not only because Owen was right, but because she had prayed those very words in much the same way when Tyler was fighting for his life. And just as God had answered the official’s prayer, He had answered hers.

  Jagger came out of the bedroom, buttoning his shirt, flexing his hook open and closed. He stopped, his gaze moving between Owen on his knees and Beth near tears. “I . . . uh . . . ,” he said, hitching his thumb toward the bedroom. “Let me know when you’re done.”

  “No,” Beth said, “it’s okay . . .”

  Owen rose and plopped down on the couch. He chuckled. “I was just acting out the scene Tyler said was his favorite verse.”

  Jagger half smiled at Beth. He walked around the table and sat beside Owen. “Do that for Tyler. He’ll love it.”

  “Do it for everyone,” Beth said, wiping her eyes, laughing a little as she did. “Change the world.”

  Jagger shifted to face Owen. “When Tyler told you his favorite verse, you looked surprised.”

  “Only because I could tell he knows who I am.”

  “We decided that we wouldn’t keep anything from him,” Beth said. “We told him about the Tribe, the Immortals—”

  “About . . . ,” Owen started, gesturing toward Jagger.

  “About Jagger being one, yes,” Beth finished for him.

  “We told him he couldn’t tell anyone,” Jagger said.

  “We—Jagger and I—are trying to work through it,” Beth said. “We couldn’t do that and keep it from Tyler at the same time.”

  “It affects him as much as it does us,” Jagger said.

  “How’s he taking it?” Owen asked.

  “He doesn’t understand the implications,” Beth said, thinking about all it might mean . . . moving around so people wouldn’t notice Jagger’s perpetual youth; how one day Tyler would look the same age as his father, then older, then a lot older; having to explain that to his wife and kids; Jagger being there at Tyler’s deathbed, Tyler old and worn out while Jagger was still young and vital . . . so many problems to overcome. But they’d have years to figure them out. Most important, they were a family, and families did what they had to do; they accommodated one another no matter what.

  Owen clamped his hand on the back of Jagger’s neck, brotherly. “And how are you holding up?”

  Jagger shook his head. “Still trying to get my head around it. The crash got me thinking of God as an ogre, someone who couldn’t care less about the people He created. Being here, surrounded by so much love for Him, His saving Tyler . . . I think I was coming around. But now . . .” He shook his head. “It seems so . . . so . . .” He looked at Beth for help.

  “Pointless,” she said, then rushed to say: “That’s Jagger’s thinking, not mine.”

  “Hey,” Jagger said. “Apparently I’ve been on a quest for God’s forgiveness for thirty-five hundred years. Why would He give it to me now?”

  “He took Ben,” Beth said. “I believe He forgave him.”

  “And others as well,” Owen said. “Not many, but some. You’ve changed, Jagger. You got off the path of the Tribe, trying to earn His grace.”

  “I feel like praying, going to service, doing what He wants me to do is just a different way of doing the same thing, of earning my way into heaven.”

  “Depends what’s in your heart, what your motives are,” Owen said. “Do you love Him because He’s given you things—Beth and Tyler, for example. Or do you love Him simply because He’s God? Despite the bad things. Big difference.” He squinted at Jagger, thinking. “If your love for God is pure, no matter what, then the God I know will open His arms to you.”

  Jagger frowned, looked at his lap, where his fingers were absently rubbing the hook that used to be his other hand.

  “What?” Owen asked.

  “I just don’t know if such love exists.”

  “It does,” Owen said definitively.

  Tyler’s door opened. He came out rubbing his stomach. “Something smells good.” />
  Owen reached out for the bag he’d brought and tossed it to Tyler. “Libbah,” he said. Bedouin bread made with dark wheat, water, and vinegar, rolled flat, buried in sand on which hot coals were placed. Somehow sand never stuck to it.

  “Yum,” Tyler said, reaching in and biting into one while digging in the bag for another.

  Watching Tyler chow down, Beth realized she was starving, despite her aching grief for the monks who’d died last night. “Ty,” she said, holding out her hand. He tossed her one, then one to Owen and another to Jagger.

  “There are honey packets and a carton of diced fruit on the bottom,” Owen said.

  “I’m fine,” Tyler said around a mouthful of bread.

  Owen nudged Jagger. “We need to talk business,” he said.

  [ 30 ]

  Jagger and Owen sat in the two heavy wooden chairs on the balcony outside the apartment watching Beth and Tyler wend their way through a small courtyard two floors below.

  “Amazing child, Tyler,” Owen said.

  “I think so,” Jagger said, working a jeweler’s screwdriver into a hinge on RoboHand. He thought the few spare parts he kept would make the prosthetic right again.

  “And Beth . . . I see now why you were so adamant about cutting all ties to your past, willing yourself to forget it in order to be with her.”

  The car crash that had taken his arm had also damaged his para-hippocampal gyrus, the brain’s memory banks. Owen had theorized that Jagger’s ten years of trying to forget 3,500 years of wrongful living, his wishing so badly that he were normal, coupled with the rapidity of his healing—specifically his brain—had resulted in a wish come true: a true loss of memory of his life before meeting Beth. What Jagger hadn’t told Owen was that since learning of his immortality some of those memories were coming back, and they disgusted him. If Jagger were God, he wouldn’t forgive himself.

  He looked away from the confused scattering of buildings splayed out in the compound before them to look at Owen: the man’s wild splash of auburn hair and beard, strong jawline, muscular build, and eyes that had seen so much and gave back nothing but compassion. Jagger had no idea how Owen had witnessed a hundred lifetimes of sorrow and maliciousness without becoming bitter.

  He said, “You told me before that you used to visit me, but I asked you not to come by anymore after I met Beth.”

  “You wanted to rid yourself of all reminders of your past.”

  “Before that, we’d gone parachuting together?”

  Owen grinned at the memory and nodded. “The last time in Taupo, New Zealand, 1985.”

  “So we were friends?” Jagger was thinking about the feeling he had upon seeing Owen this morning, and wondered if some of that stemmed from a relationship they shared a long time ago. If the terrible images he was having were indeed memories, why couldn’t good things come back too, nice feelings, eventually happy memories? Certainly he couldn’t have been miserable—or thoroughly corrupted—for all that time?

  “After you left the Tribe,” Owen said, “we became friends, yes.”

  “And I knew who you were? That you were the Apostle John?”

  “All the Immortals know.”

  Jagger shook his head. “Hard to imagine I’d turn my back on you.”

  “I understood, even more now that I’ve met Beth.” He took a bite of the libbah he was holding, then opened the satchel in his lap. He pulled out a tablet computer, tapped a button, and let his fingers dance over the screen.

  “You have an iPad?” Jagger said.

  “Just keeping up with the times. Here.” He handed it to Jagger.

  On the screen was an array of photos: Bale, the big guy with raccoon eyes, the woman he’d identified as Steampunk, a man with glasses he had seen among the others. These photos were different from the ones Gheronda had shown him—crisper, newer.

  “Those are the ones who attacked last night.” Jagger handed back the iPad. “The Clan.”

  “And this stone they took . . . you say after you touched it you saw angels?”

  “I didn’t know what they were at first, but then I saw them in the chapel. They were coming down on beams of light, standing over the praying monks.” He looked Owen squarely in the face. “I think an angel helped me. Steampunk had me dead to rights, shot an arrow from a crossbow at me, maybe ten feet away. The angel reached its hand out, and the arrow missed. Then the angel touched the crossbow, and the string broke.” Jagger rose from his chair. “Hold on.”

  He went into the apartment to his nightstand, picked up a folded washcloth, and returned to the balcony. Laying the washcloth in the palm of his hand, he used RoboHand to open it up and reveal the fragment of stone Ollie had given him.

  “Ollie said this broke off the larger stone.”

  “Does it . . . work like the other?”

  “Touch it.”

  Owen looked at him, then down at the fragment. After a few moments, he moved his index finger toward it. He touched the fragment, twitched, but kept his finger on it. He looked around, a dazed expression on his face. “Whoa . . .” His eyes settled on something below and stayed there.

  Jagger followed his gaze to Beth, Tyler, and Gheronda coming back through the courtyard, probably heading outside through the garden entrance to see the real destruction of the main gate. Jagger felt the pressure in his palm lessen, and saw that Owen had removed his finger and was now sitting back in his chair.

  He was still gazing around, and he raised his hands as if to catch a ball. “I’m still seeing them,” he said.

  “The vision will fade pretty quickly after you stop touching the fragment, a few minutes or so. Longer with the big stone. That’s how I was able to see the angels in the chapel. They faded before my eyes about ten minutes after Steampunk took the Stone from me.”

  “Angels,” Owen said. “They’re everywhere. I saw four walking with Beth and Tyler and Gheronda. They’re on the roofs, on the terraces. Just seem to be strolling around.”

  Jagger felt a strong urge to pick up the fragment. The word reenter came to mind. He wanted to reenter that world, as though what happened when you touched it wasn’t that the spiritual realm became visible as much as it was that you entered it, became a part of it. He wondered if that was simply a failing of his humanity. As Beth had told Tyler, we believe what we can see and not what we can’t. Was Jagger subconsciously unwilling to accept that the spiritual realm was all around him—whether he saw it or not?

  He flipped the washcloth back over the fragment, trying to lessen the temptation to touch it. He didn’t know why it seemed like he shouldn’t, but the urge felt too needy, too much like he imagined a drug addict felt about getting a fix.

  “Do you,” Jagger asked, “see . . . other beings?”

  “Demons?” Owen said. “They’re here too. But not many. Ugly things, aren’t they?”

  “Last night Beth and I saw a demon, and it seemed like she saw something slightly different from what I saw—more grotesque.”

  Owen thought about it, nodded. “Anthony the Great claimed to have seen angels and demons,” he said. “He was from around these parts, actually. He’s called Father of All Monks. His journals record that as he became closer to God, more holy, if you will, the demons grew more hideous. He believed the holier you were, the more terrible the demons appear.”

  “What if you were just plain evil?”

  “Well then, the demons would seem like beautiful creatures to you. I guess it correlates with sin. To a righteous person, child abuse is vile, repulsive. But to a pedophile it’s not so awful, maybe even attractive.”

  After a minute Jagger said, “You don’t suppose Anthony the Great got his hands on a piece of the Judgment Stone? And that’s why he saw angels and demons?”

  Owen’s eyebrows went up. “I hadn’t thought of that.” He squinted, thinking. “That would explain the visions he describes in his journals.” His brow furled. “It’s fading,” he said. His eyes and head moved slowly around, as though he were watching d
ust drifting in the sunlight.

  Jagger flipped the sides of the cloth over onto the top. He returned it to the nightstand drawer, and when he came back, Owen was blinking his eyes.

  “Wow,” he said, and smiled. “I like that about God. Most of the time when He reveals something to me, it’s a wow experience.” He opened his eyes as big as they could get, shook his open hands on either side of his face, and said, “Wooooooow!” He closed his eyes and his lips moved, but nothing came out. A private prayer, just him and God.

  Jagger looked for Beth and Tyler, but they were gone. No doubt Tyler was climbing on the rubble that had shattered away from the wall around the three iron doors that protected the main entrance. And Beth was telling him to be careful, and Gheronda was giving her an earful about how this made twice in six months that the sanctity of the Haven had been violated. Which Jagger wondered about: did whatever treaty the Immortals and keepers—mortals sworn to help them and keep their secret—had agreed to way back when, a thousand years ago, he’d heard—did it prohibit attacks on Immortals who were in Havens, or attacks on Havens themselves? Because as far as he could tell, the Clan hadn’t come to harm an Immortal. Ollie and the monks had gotten in their way, but the Clan had not come for any human; they had come for the Judgment Stone.

  “Whew,” Owen said, finished with his prayer.

  “Is that the first time you’ve seen anything like that?” Jagger asked.

  “I’ve seen angels before, some in human form, some . . .” He nodded, pointing around at nothing. “Like them.” He scooted to the edge of his seat, looked around, squinting, as if trying to see through the veil again. “When an angel comes to you—me anyway,” he said, “that’s what you see, only an angel. This . . . this was different. There were more lights, more . . . I don’t know, as though you can see the air, the spiritual air around them, everywhere. Before, it was like seeing a fish out of water—not that they’re uncomfortable or in danger when they come to visit, you understand. But this time it was like seeing fish in their natural environment, swimming around, zipping here and there, totally at home and free. It’s not just seeing angels, it’s seeing the whole spiritual world, God’s world.” He shook his head. “Over the years, I’d heard rumors of something called the Judgment Stone. But that name doesn’t really fit.”