Shooting Eros - The Emuna Chronicles: Complete Boxset: Books 1 - 3

by Benjamin Laskin

  “Gideon and I have to go after Rosso.”

  “Looks like it, but that’s really up to Gideon.”

  “Or Malkah,” Cyrus added. “It seems she’s the one holding all the cards here.”

  “I’m not going to put you in danger,” Gideon said.

  “Oh,” Malkah retorted, crossing her arms, “so you were going to do this by yourself and leave me a widow before we were even married, is that it?”

  “I wasn’t planning on dying, Malkah.”

  “No, but you probably will, which means you were never serious about marrying me in the first place, were you?”

  “Of course, I’m serious. I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life.”

  “Baloney.”

  “What has gotten into you?”

  “I want you to be honest with me, that’s all. You’ve been after Rosso for over ten years. If you’re right about him, then we’re talking about the end of the world, are we not? Isn’t that what the tradition says? If we lose the thirty-six righteous, game over? Do you expect me to live with that on my conscience? If you walk away and Rosso continues to eliminate the last remnants of righteousness from the world, am I supposed to live happily ever after knowing that it was my fault?”

  “I, ah, never thought of it that way,” Gideon admitted.

  “Well, I do,” she shot back. “You know, a couple months ago I was blissfully living my inconsequential life of mediocrity, but then the two biggest weirdos on the planet just had to come stomping in. Now, here I am privy to information and knowledge dealing with the fate of humanity and Heaven above—your words not mine, Baer—and I’m supposed to just look away? I’m no hero, but my feelings of guilt and shame are more powerful than my cowardice. So, here’s the deal: we’re going in—all three of us. Rosso must be stopped, and we are the only ones who can do it.”

  “What about my feelings of guilt?” Gideon said. “If anything were to happen to you, I’d never forgive myself.”

  “You should have thought of that before you started dating me.”

  “I, um, never really thought we’d get this far,” he confessed.

  “Oh, so I was supposed to be a one-night stand? Or some sort of pet, maybe?”

  “No,” Gideon answered quickly. “Of course not. Nothing like that.”

  Cyrus began to edge away, “I think I had better be going…”

  “Stop right there, buster,” Malkah ordered. “This is as much your doing as his.” She turned back to Gideon. “So, what were you thinking?”

  “It was nothing I planned on, you know that. When we first met—”

  “When we first met, I did everything I could to blow you off,” she reminded him.

  “Y-yes,” he admitted. “But, I can’t explain it. I liked you. I’m sorry. And now I love you. I’m really sorry. It just sorta happened… But I tried to be honest. I saw the mess I was headed for and I tried to warn you. I thought that if I told you the truth—told you about the kind of things I do and believe—that you would want to avoid me like the plague. But you didn’t. Why didn’t you?”

  Malkah shot Cyrus an icy glance. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I should have. But it’s too late for all that. Here we are.”

  “At a cemetery because a friend was senselessly murdered by a megalomaniacal psychopath,” Gideon said.

  Malkah’s eyes began to well again, but it wasn’t just because she was reminded of Saul, but because of the craziness of her situation.

  She fought back the urge to cry and said, “Gideon, you know what we have to do. What was that quote you said haunts you? ‘The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing?’ I can be of help. If I’m there, I can help. I have to. You and Cyrus are always saying that there are no coincidences. I must have been dragged into this for a reason. I say we work from that assumption.”

  Gideon turned to Cyrus, who nodded.

  “Okay, then,” Malkah said. “It’s settled. Now, what is it you plan to do?”

  “Expose him,” Gideon answered. “If I can get my hands on his records, he’ll have a lot to answer for.”

  “Who would publish your findings?” Malkah asked. “The media certainly won’t help. Everyone is in his pocket. You haven’t anyone to turn them over to.”

  “Not here, no,” Gideon said. “But I know some people. Rosso has lots of enemies, especially in the SLA and SFF. They might be willing to help.”

  Malkah said, “Or, their allies.”

  “Maybe,” Gideon said, “but my connections are mostly domestic. Anyway, we can worry about that after we complete the mission.”

  “Why not just kill him?” Cyrus said matter-of-factly.

  “Because then there would be an all-out manhunt for the killer, which would be me. I prefer to avoid that.”

  “Then let me do it,” Cyrus said. “I’m nobody. I’d be much harder to track. I have no family, nothing. He deserves to die. Even if you should succeed in exposing him, no court will convict him. He’ll get off, just like everyone else, and you’ll still end up dead. You know I’m right.”

  7

  Moving Targets

  Virgil and I stood together on the open field of the training grounds under the light of a full moon observing the angels as they sparred in hand-to-hand combat. It was the evening of the third day of training, and we only had two full days left to ready the recruits. They had come a long way, but there was still so much to learn.

  Because our sidearms were to be confiscated upon landing at the Anteros compound, and since there would surely be metal-detectors and pat downs, we would have to depend on our hands and feet as weapons, and reach deep into our bag of tricks. Sett and Volk returned from Earth with some good news in this respect, and if their plan worked it could prove a big help.

  Before joining up with us, the soldiers were already superb athletes and highly skilled in the martial arts, but they never learned how to apply their expertise to their angelic natures. Skeptical at first, when one member began to show progress, another and then another became convinced that what we were teaching them was genuine.

  And as their confidence grew, so did their focus and commitment to the various exercises we made them perform. When the recruits began to discover their divine energies, their athletic prowess improved dramatically, along with the power of their punches and kicks. Still, for the odds that we were going to encounter, their abilities and progress remained too little for what would be required of them.

  The hardest thing we could get the recruits to accept was how crucial prayer and study was to their advancement. They allowed that some of our peculiar physical exercises and disciplines could be of use, but because of the crowded time frame in which we were operating, the spiritual training was difficult for them to accept, or even comprehend.

  Luckily, as in most things in life, example proved to be the best instructor. As the first couple of days of our angel boot camp showed, Corporal Nisus was the most outmatched in terms of fighting and athletics. Big, burly, and ferociously intimidating, back at the Academy he rarely had to resort to actual fighting, plus he was out of shape. To his humiliation, the other recruits regularly cleaned his clock and outdid him in every contest, even the cadets Ares and Troy.

  Then something changed. By the end of the second day Nisus was holding his own, and now he was dancing circles around the others, not just leaving them in his dust, but pounding them into it whenever one of them was foolish enough to tick him off.

  What differentiated Nisus from the others was how intently he took to prayer and study. It earned him some razzing at first, but no one was laughing now. Virgil and I exchanged knowing smiles as we watched Nisus blithely dispatch one after another of his fellow recruits.

  “Why do you think the corporal took so quickly to prayer?” Virgil asked me.

  “I can only speculate, but it seems that it is the older guys, the SWAT guys, who are more open-minded about it.”

  “I thought it would be
the young guns like Private Typhon or Cadets Ares and Troy. They seemed the most inquisitive, and because of their youth, I figured they’d be more into learning something new.”

  “Yeah, well, prayer isn’t a video game,” I said. “There are no 3D goggles, no joy stick, and no keeping score.”

  Virgil chuckled. “You got a point there.”

  “I also wonder if it isn’t precisely because Corporal Nisus is older that he has embraced the spiritual side.”

  “How’s that?”

  “He remembers,” I said. “I think guys like him and Captain Abishai are beginning to recall the stories of their youth. I could see the recollection in their eyes yesterday during our Tanach class.”

  “I picked up on it too,” Virgil said. “They seemed to be mining their memories, squinting off into the distance in reflection. Anyway, whatever the reason, look at Nisus go! He’s really coming alive.”

  “And the others are taking notice. I think we are going to have a very different study session this evening.”

  Another shocking revelation for the recruits was learning that angels require neither food nor sleep; that such practices were something we had picked up from the humans.

  With prayer and study no longer emphasized by the Academy, the cupids had found other ways to occupy themselves—nearly all of them hedonistic. The Academy therefore hit on the idea of regular meal and sleep times to drastically cut back on the amount of mischief the cupids were getting themselves into. The cupids found these two human necessities most enjoyable, and crime rates did drop significantly.

  When on day one I informed the recruits that we would neither eat nor sleep, I thought I was going to have a rebellion on my hands. Fortunately, Volk and Sett stepped in. They confirmed what I said, and even regaled the recruits with stories from their youth, of times when they would regularly spend weeks, even months in the field without food or rest.

  “Angels of God do not sleep, they do not eat, they do not fornicate, and they don’t play Xbox,” Volk said.

  “What do we do for fun?” Cadet Ares groused.

  “Should the day come that you realize what it is like to serve God,” Volk answered, “you will never dream of fun again. Nothing is more ‘fun’ than serving the Almighty. You will not want to eat or sleep, for every minute of every day you will desire nothing more than being close to God. You will look back on your wasted years of self-indulgence with shame, and beg HaShem to never allow you to live in such ignorance and blindness again.”

  “I’m hungry and sleepy already,” complained Orion.

  “It’s an illusion,” Volk said. “It’s because you are spiritually sick. As you purge these impurities from your being, you will find sources of strength and endurance that now is beyond fathoming.”

  And so it was.

  The first forty-eight hours were tough on the men. They were irritable and impatient, but the fast cleared the cobwebs from their minds, and with the start of the third day, the recruits were discovering reservoirs of energy and vitality they had never known.

  I proved this to them by making them run the obstacle course again. With no food or sleep, they should have done worse, but lo and behold, each recruit completed the course for the first time. Their times still stank, but they finished and proved to themselves that it could be done. We heard no more complaints after that.

  After the night’s sparring practice, and since sleep was no longer necessary, we moved back into the yeshiva to study, pray, and meditate until sunrise, when once again we would go outside to train and put into effect the spiritual energies we gained from our yeshiva work.

  Inside the yeshiva, we broke the recruits into three groups. Virgil led one group in prayer, I taught lessons from Torah, Tanach, and Talmud, and Captain Volk conducted classes in Kabbalah and the higher angelic arts. After a couple of hours, the angels moved to the next instructor.

  There was only so much knowledge that could be imparted in our limited time frame, but as we repeatedly pointed out to the budding angels, none of what they were learning was really new to them. They already knew everything; they had just forgotten.

  We focused on particular passages from the sacred texts that we knew would trigger their angelic memories, and so begin to resurrect the divinity within them that had been patiently awaiting their attention since the day of their creation. The five days at the yeshiva training ground was one long remembering.

  By the end of the third day, most of the recruits were already, to their own amazement, speaking words and thoughts they knew no one had ever taught them. To my own personal gratification, it was none other than Commander Sett who excelled at this. Almost as if someone was speaking through him, he at one point began to recite entire chapters of Tanach, the Holy Bible, from memory—words he had never heard or read before.

  He became particularly animated when quoting from the books of the prophets, as if the very prophets themselves, men like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, Ezekiel, and Micah were speaking through him.

  “‘…Then those who feared the Lord spoke one with another,’” Sett bellowed, reciting from the prophet Malachi, his clenched fist striking the air. “‘And the Lord listened, and heard, and a book of memory was written before him, for those who feared the Lord, and who honored his name. They shall be Mine,’ says the Lord of Hosts, ‘My own possession in the day that I make, and I will spare them, as a man spares his own son who serves him. Then you shall return and discern between the righteous and the wicked, between him who serves God and him who doesn’t.

  “‘For, behold, the day comes,’” Sett continued to thunder in recitation, now on his feet, his eyes blazing, the prophetic words seeming to address each of us and the situation we were facing, “‘it burns as a furnace; and all the proud, and all who work wickedness will be stubble; and the day that comes will consume them,’ says the Lord of Hosts, ‘But to you who fear My name shall the sun of righteousness arise with healing in its wings. You will go out, and leap like calves of the stall. You shall tread down the wicked; for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet in the day that I make,’ says the Lord of Hosts!’”

  “Dude,” Cadet Troy whispered to his pal, Ares, “that was awesome!”

  “Sett rocks,” Ares whispered back. “I felt like I was there, man!”

  I smiled in deep satisfaction. With Sett fully on board, I knew that the others would quickly follow.

  Only afterwards did I learn what prompted Sett’s transformation from commander-in-cynicism to the high priest of holy. He never participated in our various training sessions, either on the field or in the yeshiva. Instead, he was receiving private lessons from Captain Volk.

  “What did you do to him?” I asked the captain as we watched Virgil run the recruits through a series of acrobatic drills intended to sharpen the angels’ agility and means for escaping deadly situations. This time Sett was among them.

  “He learned that if you want to know how to get to the top of the mountain, you ask the guy who goes up and down it everyday,” Volk replied. “Sett finally began to realize that what we do is not magic tricks. And as he began to do some things himself, like whirling, he grew increasingly curious.”

  “But he’s so stubborn. You must have done something else.”

  “When we returned from our last trip to Earth, I took him to the Midrashic Cave.”

  “But surely Sett couldn’t have lasted more than a minute up there. Not enough time for him to really see or absorb much.”

  “You forget who he was traveling with, Kohai.”

  “I’m sorry, Captain. You’re right. I still have so much to learn.”

  “You do,” he said. Then, after having pinned me to the ether with his fierce blue eyes, he rubbed my head and added, “But you’re doing a hell of a job with the recruits. I’m extremely proud of you.”

  After all the harsh reprimands and smacks that I had received from Captain Volk since I had come under his tutelage, his praise and rub of the head meant more to
me than just about anything. I tried to remain soldierly and not show my elation, but my eye’s misted and a smile erupted nonetheless. Thankfully, the captain, who was observing the recruits and mentally noting their mistakes, was too busy to notice my sentimentality.

  “What did Sett say when you showed him the cave, Captain?”

  “It was as you might imagine. Pure wonderment.”

  “Did you pull the move-the-granite-block trick on him?”

  Volk grinned. “That never gets old, does it, Kohai?”

  I chuckled. “No, Sir, it doesn’t. How long did he last up there?”

  “Long enough for him to realize that everything he knew or thought he knew until now was hardly worth knowing.”

  “I’m glad he came to his senses,” I said. “Without him and his prestige we wouldn’t have a chance.”

  “Sett is a curious fellow,” Volk reflected. “We go way, way back, he and Captain Cyrus and I. We’ve had our disagreements over the centuries, to say the least, but he was always a cupid of character. Captain Cyrus saw this better than I did, I must admit. On more than a few occasions I was tempted to knock his block off, but Captain Cyrus showing better judgment, interrupted to cool my wrath.”

  “Do you think that Sett has the potential to become a great angel?”

  “All cupids do, Kohai. And it’s never too late. If a cupid performs teshuva, repentance, and seeks HaShem with all his heart and all his might, there is no telling what heights he can attain.”

  “Even the Hall of the Immortals?”

  “There is no Hall of The Immortals, Kohai.”

  “Huh?”

  “That is Academy propaganda. A true angel has no need or desire to be immortalized by the Academy.”

  “But, what about Bauer the Brave and Varner the Virtuous?” I said, shocked at this latest revelation. “You said they were great cupid angels.”

  “They were, but there is no Hall. If these giants are anywhere, it is at HaShem’s side.”

  “What about the Seven Rungs of Righteousness? Is that a myth too?”