Kelsey, Nick, Brooke. His buddy Matt. Cigars and absinthe. The fun of it all, of being in the human form, of looking like them and being able to kiss human lips and walk their pretty streets, to look up into the sacred blue of their skies, to lift his face to clean rain and listen to wind in the night, to watch TV, to go to the movies and eat popcorn, to feel warm human hands on his human skin, to sink into the dark of her.
“You’re far away,” Talia said.
“I’m just in shock. Seeing you again. Remembering you. Realizing—oh, my Talia, all that I’ve forgotten.” He took her again, held her close. “All that I’ve missed.”
She saw the truth, though. She knew him so well. They had been children together, born in the same basket, their eggs warmed by the same egg ladies. Their families had entwined their destinies long before they were born.
Trying to hide his tears, he turned away from her. “I belong to you,” he said, feeling the twin pulls of his fiercely divided loyalties. Again, he hugged her, and again felt Brooke’s absence in his arms.
Her eyes met his. The question that flickered in them now was a dark one. Then she held up her hand.
Her Electrum ring glowed softly. His ring. He took her hand and kissed it. She laughed a little, deep in her throat, and he wanted her. He wanted her so badly that he began to exude from under every scale on his neck. She brought a towel and wiped it gently. Her hands touching him evoked desire so great that it seemed beyond his trembling flesh, beyond belief, beyond body itself, a longing that was literally fantastic.
But if he did this then he could not leave her, not a second time, it was too cruel. And yet he had the children, the vow, and the other dear wife. And he knew, as soon as he was with Brooke again, he would lose himself in the wonders of human life and human love.
“It’s only a few minutes,” she said softly. She drew up the wooden blinds, and he saw in the evening light a diamond hanging in midair. In its facets, he could see another house, lights just coming on in the windows, and a small form at one of those windows looking out.
Kelsey was waiting for her daddy to come back.
“I have the permanent salve,” she said. “Choose.”
He took her hands. “We always knew the danger of the mission. I have a life there, now. I have children who need their father.” And he wished—he just wished.
“You won’t remember me.”
“You’ll find somebody else,” he said.
“Don’t mock my love, please.”
He would leave her forever wanting him. If only he had known it would be this hard.
He had known. She had known.
She began to apply the salve, and he let her. It sank deep into him, into the most secret corners of his deepest cells, and as it did, this old homestead began to look stranger and stranger. He noticed that blinds closed up here, that there were no chairs but only these strange, three-legged stools. He saw the spinning wheel and the loom, ancient and obviously heavily used, but who used looms nowadays? And the grate and the big iron cook pot, so strange and archaic, and candles instead of electric lights, all so just plain weird.
But then she did an odd thing. She applied salve to herself.
“But no, you mustn’t.”
“Look, the sun is setting and Kelsey’s gotta be getting scared. And Nick’s liable to blow our heads off if we come up in the dark.”
“Brooke?”
“Yes? Hello?”
Talia had been with him all along. Now, as they changed from seraph to human, fixed by the DNA salve, he threw his arms around her. “It’s you, it’s always been you! Did you know?”
“Not until I followed you through Samson’s little gateway. Then I knew.”
“But you escaped from the Corporation, you came home, you came to meet me even though you could’ve stayed back.”
“To protect you. Remember what I am.”
“The Guardian Clan.” He laughed a little. “You really are a guardian angel.”
“Who you need, Mr. Drinker and Smoker and hell-raising daredevil—the idea that any sane person would volunteer for an assignment like this!”
“It had to be done.”
“Which is why I love you so.” She smiled up at him, and as she did, her face shimmered, the scales smoothing in blurry waves, the brow widening, the cheeks growing less narrow, the eyes deeper, less wide, more human, the nostrils opening more, the lips softening and becoming red, the teeth thickening into human teeth. And he could feel by his own internal shivering that he was doing the same.
This was not shape-shifting. This was fundamental DNA transformation. When his brother ended his tour of duty, this would be his house. He would reenter his old body here, he would find his wife and bring her here, and there would be eggs here, and the egg ladies would brighten the house with their laughter again, in the coming years, in the ages.
But Talia and Aktriel were dying into the human form.
She took his hand more firmly. “Ready?”
“How do I look?”
“Perfect. Or no, you’re missing that mole under your left ear.”
“Whose gonna notice?”
“You know your daughter. She’s inherited your following and watching instincts.”
“Do we need to take salve for them?”
“Born of earth as they were? They have the DNA to shift, but not the skill. They’ll stay as they are, with their good seraphim hearts in those lovely human forms.”
“Are you gonna be on my case again?”
“Always.”
Then they were in their familiar woods, and for a fleeting moment his soul was in both worlds. Brooke said, “I’ve got something on the tip of my tongue.”
He shook his head. “I feel like I just woke up from a dream I thought I’d never forget.”
“Which was?”
“I forget.”
She came to him and kissed him. “We’ve all been through too much. And it has to end. It ends here.” She looked toward the house. “It’s time to return to normal life.”
“Can we?”
“I think we can. I mean, have you noticed that it’s six and nothing’s happened yet? No 2012 shift here.”
The moon was yellow in the eastern sky, coming toward full now, rising in splendor.
They both fell silent, and both for the same reason. “Why are we out in the woods, Wylie?”
“We’re—” He stopped. Why were they out here? “I came looking for you,” he said at last. “That’s it.”
“And I came to find you.”
“I was in the cave?”
“Well, you’re here.”
“I feel like I was on Mars or something. A million miles away.”
Suddenly she threw herself on him. In the gathering dark, he felt very alone. Odd. Homesick even, but for where? His house was a quarter of a mile away. His only house.
“I think our kids are gonna be missing us,” she said.
They headed up the hill.
The love that is so great that it cannot be seen, that seems not even to exist, but is in fact the silent binding that confirms the world, followed them, lingering close as if to enjoy the warmth of what they had found together.
“Where have you guys been?” Nick yelled as they came up out of the woods. “It’s getting darker and darker around here!”
“I got lost,” Wylie said.
“And he got found.”
“You got lost? How? I thought you’d been killed.” Nick threw his arms around his father, and Wylie felt his surging youth and his love for his dad and then Kelsey’s, also, from farther down by his knee, holding Bearish up like an offering to her household god.
As he entered with his children into the calm light, he heard the calling of another father whose desperation began pouring into his mind the moment he was inside the house.
He remembered the book and Martin and Trevor, and their quest to recapture their invaded world. “I’ve got work to do,” he said.
Nick f
ollowed him upstairs. “They’re in terrible trouble,” he said. Then he added, “I’ve written some.”
Wylie stopped. He turned to his son. “Oh?”
“Do you imagine that I don’t know what I am, Dad? After what I’ve been through? What I’ve done for you?”
He looked at his son, he thought, as if for the first time. “What you are?”
“What we are, as a family. We’re not the same, Dad, we’re in communication with other worlds, we have powers and I know it and you can’t say otherwise. That’s why they tried to kill us, and why they failed. I defended us, too, dad, and I’m owed.”
“Owed what?”
“You have to take me into your confidence, and you will never go into a gateway again like that without me to help you!”
A memory flashed, of a cottage in the woods. Funny memory, like a dream. Less than a dream, just a daytime imagining, the stuff of a story, no more.
“I, uh—”
“The solstice is coming and Martin and Trevor need us, Dad. But you’re, like, lost in your own mind all of a sudden, and right now is the worst possible time for you to lose the thread.” He paused. “Actually, I’ve written a lot. I’ve written the entire story of what you and Mom just did on Abaddon and who you are, and you can read that later, because right now we have a huge emergency and Dad, there is no time!”
He went into the office.
From downstairs, Brooke called, “What’s going on?”
“Nick just wrote his first short story.” He sat down at the laptop. “Talia,” he said, “it’s a beautiful name. But who’s this Aktriel? You’ve got to find a better name than that.”
“Dad, you’ll read that later. Right now, it’s time to write, because when you do write, something new is gonna happen.”
“Nothing’s there. I can’t write.”
Nick grabbed his hands, thrust them onto the keyboard. “Do it!”
After a moment, there was a whisper in his mind. He typed a few words.
“Trevor, Dad, you need to write about Trevor.”
It was as if lightning had blasted him and shattered him, and he had a vivid image of a vast room lit by a curiously affecting, even disturbing, glow, a light that was blue and very alive, and communicated more clearly than any scream that it was in terrible trouble.
His fingers moved on the keys, then sped.
“At last,” Nick said. “Trevor, buddy, listen up.”
Wylie was at his desk, but at the same time in another place deep underground, and there was heard as another voice. “And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, ‘It is done.’”
But it was not done, not for the seven people who were struggling in that dark underground hell for their lives and the life of an entire world.
“There’s a gateway down there and they don’t see it, Dad.”
“I know.”
“Then write it! Say where it is if you know!”
“But they can’t come here, they can’t read this!”
“Just do it!”
Silently, in the dark of the great cavern where Martin and his little band struggled to break the soul traps, the hidden gateway to Abaddon slid slowly into focus, and began to open.
TWENTY-FOUR
SOLSTICE 2012 ON THE TWO EARTHS A TALE OF SEVEN SOLDIERS
AS MIDNIGHT APPROACHED, THE FOURTEEN great lenses ranged around two-moon earth shimmered darkly. There was nobody to see, though, but for a scattering of seraph soldiers, and gangs of wanderers lined up, waiting to conduct their new masters into the cities that still stood, and out into the flats of the new lands, where enormous shantytowns were still under feverish construction, amid heaps of dead sea creatures and dead wanderers.
“Dad!”
He stopped. Came back to the world of his office. Turned to Nick, tried not to shout at him, which was what he wanted to do, to tell him to just shut up!
“Dad, you need to focus on Martin and Trevor.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, just do it!”
His fingers shot back to the keys, began flying.
Downstairs, little Kelsey also ranged across the night of the other world, looking for Winnie. Lindy, Brooke had found. She was on a truck that was running down to Denver, which was intended to become a major resettlement area for the Corporation’s starving billions. There her destiny would be simple: like all wanderers, she was to be worked to death.
On the sunlit side of the earth, the gigantic flats that had replaced much of the mid-Pacific were covered by an impenetrable fog, as trillions of tons of gasses boiled up out of the drying soil. Where India and China had been was a new ocean, stormy and unsettled, floating with what appeared to be islands that were actually made of furniture and ice chests and logs and carpeting and toys and siding and plastic doors, flowerpots, Styrofoam cups, shipping beads, any container that was closed and would float, and on these islands were rolling hills of the corpses of cattle and dogs and monkeys and all manner of beast, and human corpses with pale-glazed eyes, and swarming masses of gulls and crows, and hordes of pelicans flying from place to place, their craws bulging.
They all saw this, the Dale family, in their new free minds, and as she watched, Kelsey sang softly to Bearish, whom she cradled as if he was the whole world. She sang the ancient lullaby her mother had taught her, “Dereen Day,” that had come up from the quiet hearths of the Union and into the quiet hearths of Ireland a very long time ago, a song shared between angels and men. Her voice came up the stairs from the lonely pool of light where she sat carrying in her arms not only Bearish but all the dead of a whole world. She hummed to them and sang in her little voice. “Dereen Day, the nightjar calls upon the heath…”
Outside, night swept on and the evening star shone on the peaceful horizon.
She had been sending her mind down the roads of the other earth for a long time, had this very private child called Kelsey, for she shared with Winnie the same bond that her brother did with Trevor. So she sang not only to her Bearish but to Winnie’s, whom she had found in a cradle of snow, the night flakes whispering along his fur, as they whispered across all the little corner of Nebraska where Winnie had given everything she had to give, and laid down.
Now, as Kelsey sang to Bearish and Winnie’s Bearish, she sang also to Winnie, to the silver of the ice that crusted her cheeks, and her red car coat that was being worried by the winter wind, and to all the little lumps in the ocean of little lumps that were left everywhere on earth that wanderers had passed, each one somebody whose strength had not been enough to meet the Corporation’s cruel test. Survival of the fittest—the Corporation’s way—was not the way of the true of heart, human or not.
In the office, Nick and now Brooke along with him, struggled to get Wylie to concentrate on the place that counted, the soul prison where Martin and Trevor and their few struggled for the life of their world.
“The souls,” Brooke whispered, “can you see?”
Wylie sighed like a weaver does working on a difficult knot. The only sound in the house was Kelsey’s singing coming up from below.
“Okay,” he said. He began to type again.
But he saw the lens that stood in the ruin of the Giza plateau. It glowed angry red now, and red light leaped out of it, a huge column that reflected off the shattered city and the desert, making it appear as if the whole landscape was on Mars.
With it came a sound, at first a crackling like the rattling of a great curtain, and then another sound, a snap, then another louder one, and the lens seemed to shimmer, to shudder within itself, and seraph were suddenly walking away from it, each carrying a little bundle or a suitcase, some carrying briefcases or rolling bags, some in black, some like hurrying officials in hats and coats, some carrying their babies or baskets of eggs, or with their childrens’ hands in theirs. They came clutching receipts for the tickets they had bought, and began to stream out past th
e Mena hotel toward Cairo, and up and down the banks of the Nile.
Another sound came, then, the gigantic spitting noise, a volcano makes when it vomits lava. Some of the colonists turned, others kept on, intent on getting to whatever corner of the new lands they had bought. Already, some were boarding buses that had been smashed in the explosion of the pyramid and trying to get them started, while others threw out the skeletons of the tourists who had died there, and marveled over their delicate, colorful clothes.
With a roar so huge that it would over the next few hours echo around the entire world, a massive red column of material shot out of the hole where the lens had been. The lens itself arced into the stratosphere, turning over and over, and as it turned changing shape, twisting and melting and then falling and becoming black, then blacker still, and landing in the Arabian desert not far from Mecca, a city of corpses of those who had died praying, surrounded by a desert coated with wanderers who had fallen beneath the sun.
None saw it strike, but Wylie and Brooke did, and Nick and so also Trevor and Martin. Deep in their traps, the souls of Lindy and Winnie sensed some signal from the outside, and for the first time since she had been pulled from her body, Lindy realized that she was not buried alive in a coffin, hideously and inexplicably unable to die. She began to call the name of the strongest and most trusted person she knew.
“I hear my wife,” Martin said. “Lindy is calling me!”
At the same time, though, diamonds began to appear in the air, shimmering black, as Samson prepared to move the souls that would make him rich in Abaddon.
Winnie, who had been alone and cold and feeling drawn to some great joy she could not reach, now felt herself in the arms of her friend Kelsey, and heard a lullaby her mom had sung her every night of her life, “the nightjars calling upon the heath…” and rested in the knowledge that somebody was at last saving her from the monsters who had bound her here.
In Mecca, a new black stone now lay not far from the Alhajar Al-Aswad, and of the same material and the same shape and color, for the last one that fell here had started from exactly the same place thirteen thousand years ago, as Abaddon failed in its last attempt to steal the human worlds, and the raw hole it had left had been filled, and the pyramid built to close the wound, and remain as a warning—one that Abaddon had spent thirteen millennia tricking and deceiving mankind into forgetting.
2012 The War for Souls Page 32