I leaned forward even more. “If you didn’t find me, then who did?”
Andy swallowed hard again. “She did, Uncle C.”
“Who the hell is ‘she’?” I asked, renewing my question.
“I am,” a voice answered and, from the dark, a woman walked forward.
There, from the dark, walked a woman who I never thought I’d see again…twice.
“Lord in heaven,” I muttered, looking over her.
There, beside Andy, stood a woman I had set on fire, a woman I had sent to the afterlife in the most gruesome way possible, a woman who had tried to murder me and the woman I cared about.
There, beside Andy, stood my mother.
She shrugged.
“Don’t look so surprised Cain. Death didn’t take the first time. I can’t imagine why you thought it would have the second.”
6
“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked, pulling harder still at the chains. Looking at my mother, I no longer just wanted to send Andy a message about how ludicrous it was for me to be locked up. I wanted to pull loose of these shackles and wring her neck. I wanted to let loose an eternity’s worth of anger and resentment right onto her. I wanted to make her pay for what she tried to do to Merry, for what she intended to do.
“I’m here to help you, of course,” my mother said, barely blinking as she took me in. “And don’t bother pulling on those chains. They’ve been spelled. You’re not getting out of there and, if you keep struggling, they’re going to react poorly.”
“Spelled?” I asked, a streak of anger running hot through me. “By who? Do you still have those witches in your pocket?”
“The Lunar coven?” she asked, referring to the group she’d aligned herself with in an attempt to steal my immortality and horde it away for herself. “They’re all dead. No, Son. The magic running through those chains, much like the blood running through your veins, belongs to me.” A horrible grin slid across her face and, for a second, I saw the mother I used to have. I saw the woman who made me feel better when I fell down, the woman who taught me of the world and its beauty. I saw the woman who gave me life and then turned away from me when I took life from her son.
“Did you think I wouldn’t learn anything from them?”
“You learn how to get out of hell?” I asked through gritted teeth.
“What makes you assume I was in hell?” she asked, and she moved closer to me, her arm outstretched as if to touch me.
“I assume you went to hell because you’re a selfish bitch who- not only is singlehandedly responsible for kicking the entire human race out of paradise- but you also tried to murder your own son.” I nearly growled at her. “And if you touch me with that hand, you’re going to lose it.”
She chuckled hard, shaking her head. “You always did have your father’s tongue. It got him in trouble too.”
“You got him in trouble,” I answered, obviously alluding to the whole ‘apple in the garden’ thing. I mean seriously. Who wants an apple that much? –
“The past is in the past, Son,” she answered, even though it was she who brought it up. “What you need to worry about is the future, and it’s certainly a doozy.”
She was talking about Amber, about the fact that she was the Antichrist. She must have known what was going to happen in the future. She must have always known. My mind flew back to that day in the maze, to the things she told me. She said there was a storm coming. She said she was the only one who could stop it. And then another idea tickled at the back of my mind.
My mother had been so desperate to get my immortality. She had drove through all the magic she could to keep herself on Earth and, once it was used up, she wouldn’t be able to stay here without what the Big Guy gave me. She constructed an elaborate and frankly insane plan to get that done. She failed. I thought it was over but, now she was back and acting like being here was as easy as throwing together a ham sandwich.
She was lying to me. Something else was going on here. Something huge was keeping her here. I would have asked her, but it didn’t matter. I was about to murder her her treacherous, troublemaking ass all over again.
“Come a little closer and say that,” I muttered. She had stopped moving, her hand still hovering in the air in front of me, a hand I now knew was capable of some pretty gnarly magic.
“I understand your hesitation, Son. I get why you’d be reluctant to believe what I’m telling you. I made a mistake. I wanted to do right by you, to do right by this world. I went about it the wrong way.”
“Right by me?” I balked, still pulling at the chains. Suddenly a shock of electrical energy poured through the chains, shooting through my body and sending a torrent of pain into my already aching frame.
I crumbled to the ground, breathing heavy and looking up at my mother from the floor of wherever the hell I had been taken.
“You think you’re the only person with things to atone for, Cain?” She shook her head. “You’re not. Not even close.”
Hearing my name was such a strange thing. No one would dare address me by my given name. Mostly anyone who knew enough about the supernatural world to know who I was also knew that calling me by my name would bring about the wrath of the Big Guy. No one wanted that.
Still, since my mother preceded me in birth (or however the Big Guy brought her into the world) she was exempt from that specific caveat of the curse. Still, she wasn’t exempt from the rest of it, meaning she was about to get a hell of a shock herself, seven times more than what I’d just received.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” I barked, and now it was my turn to smile slyly.
“Right. The curse,” she answered, waving the idea off. “I’m not worried about it, Cain. I can handle a shock. What I can’t handle is letting this world circle the drain and not doing anything about it.” She knelt down so close that I caught a whiff of her scent, a whiff that took me back millennia. “You might not believe me, Son, but I’m not here to fight you. I never was. You’ve lived your entire life wishing you could die. All you’ve ever wanted was for this torment to be over. So I looked to end it for you. I didn’t want you to have to suffer through what’s to come. I turned my back on you when you needed me once. I figured it was the least I could do.” She stood now. “But you proved me wrong. You proved to me that you wanted to live, and that you were stronger than me. In truth, I didn’t think you were capable of doing what it took to end this. I guess we all see our children as babies, regardless of how long they’ve been out of the nest.” She looked wistful for a moment, like she was actually lamenting the loss of something, the loss of me.
I shook my head. I knew better.
“I was wrong though, Cain. I see that now. I think you are strong enough. I think you might be the only one who can actually fix this. I think it might have been the real reason you were kept around the way you were. God always did like for people to know he had things under control. What better way to prove you always knew how things were going to end than to plant the cure for it at the very beginning.” She shook her head. “It’s actually quite beautiful when you think about it.”
“You’re insane,” I said through a near locked jaw.
“Perhaps,” she answered. “Perhaps I always have been, but I’m also right” She looked me up and down. “I don’t think you’re going to let me down this time, Son. I think you’re going to do what’s necessary to save this world and the billions of innocent souls that live within it.” She swallowed hard. “I think you’re going to kill that little girl.”
7
“Andy, take these chains off of me,” I said, looking past my lunatic of a mother right into the eyes of my nephew.
He blinked at me. “Uncle C,” he said, shaking his head. “I just need you to listen to m-”
“Now!” I screamed, rage pooling up in my chest and exploding out through my mouth. Andy might have been a middle aged man now, but I remembered when he was a kid, when he crapped his pants watching The Exorcist an
d came to me with his hands in his pockets asking me how to get girls.
I didn’t need to listen to him, not about this. Amber was an innocent little girl and, though my mother was right when she told me there were billions and billions of other innocents in this world, that didn’t mean I was willing to sacrifice one to save the others.
“Calm down, Cain,” my mother told me, shaking her head and pursing her lips.
The stare I gave her would have rusted metal if I would have focused it the right way.
“You’re unimaginable,” I said, sweating and shaking from the electrical impulses still snapping throughout my body. “How dare you come here, pretending to take some kind of mythological high road. It’s been millennia since you had anything to say to me that wasn’t lies. You don’t know me. You don’t know what I’m capable of, and you sure as shit don’t get to tell me what I will or won’t do.” I stood again, looking her over as I took slow and steady breathes. “I’ll take your head off your shoulders before I so much as give that girl a harsh look.”
“Taking my head off won’t do you any good, Son,” she answered. “I already ruined the world. I won’t be the one doing it again.”
“Andy,” I said, a snarl in my voice. “You listen to me. I have been there for you since you were a baby. I was there for you when your father died, when you thought the world was going to fall down around your ears. I have loved you every day of your damn life. You will not turn on me for my mother. Is that understood?”
“I would never do that to you,” he answered, hurt in his voice and on his face. Still, he didn’t move to free me. So he mustn’t have been too hurt. “There are things going on that you don’t know. When whoever took over your body was in control, he did horrible things. He killed people, Uncle C. He hurt everyone he came in contact with. So, when Eve came to us with your unconscious body telling us she had a way to bring you back and talking about the End of Days, we had no choice but to listen.” Andy blinked back tears. “This is all for you, so you don’t ever have to go through what happened to you before. Don’t you get that?”
“I do,” I answered. “And I appreciate it, but I’m me now. I’m back and I’m not going anywhere. So come over here, and unlock these damn chains.”
He looked down at the floor. “I can’t do that. They’re infused with magic. I couldn’t mess with them if I wanted to.” He looked up at me, breathing heavy. “You get that, don’t you, Cain?”
My heart skipped a beat as I realized what had just happened. Andy just addressed me by my name, and it was no accident.
“That’s my boy,” I muttered, steeling myself and waiting for the imminent reaction from the Big Guy.
“You,” my mother said, turning to Andy with narrowed eyes. “You should not have done that.”
It didn’t matter whether Andy should have done that or not. The truth was, he had, and there was no getting around it now.
As if on cue, the world began to shake around us. I thought it was an earthquake at first. Lord knows the…well, the Lord had used that old chestnut enough when dealing with people addressing me by my name. As it continued, I realized it wasn’t an earthquake though. This felt different. It as more centralized, less chaotic. This was localized in a specific space, and that space was right under my feet.
I tripped as the ground began to swirl and circle underfoot. Looking down, I realized what was going on. A sinkhole was starting to form right under me, the pavement below cracking and splitting. In pieces, it began to swirl. This wasn’t exactly how sinkholes usually acted in the world but, since the Big Guy created it, it occurred to me that this thing could act in any way it wanted.
Busted open to reveal spinning and swirling earth below, I began to sink into the ground.
“Look at what you’ve done,” my mother snarled, looking over at Andy before turning back to me.
“He forced your hand. That’s what he did,” I answered, looking up at her as the world itself began to swallow me up. “Free me from these chains or you’ll lose me. Now, neither of us need to pretend there’s anything sentimental here, but you just got finished spouting about how much you needed me to get things done.”
“I understand the objective here, Son,” she muttered, extending both her hands as flairs of magical golden energy encircled them. “Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
She closed her eyes and the chains began to burn. I was covered up to my chest when they finally loosened, rusting and melting away as though they had aged centuries in the span of minutes.
With my newly free hands, I grappled at the broken pavement in an attempt to wrench myself from the hungry ground.
“Don’t both,” my mother said. Flicking her wrists, the golden energy around her hands now encircled me as well, lifting me up from the earth and setting me beside her.
I shuddered, brushing up and down my arms as though that might take the specter of my mother’s magic away. I didn’t want her touching me in any way, even if it was to stop me from being gobbled up by the ground.
“You’re welcome, by the way,” my mother said, perhaps reading my expression and obviously disgusted body language. “Now how do you stop this thing?” she asked, motioning to the still growing and still spinning sinkhole.
“It’s the Big Guy,” I explained, shrugging and looking at the gaping maw. “You don’t. You just have to let it run its course.”
“And if it’s course tears down the building we’re standing in?” my mother asked me, her eyebrows ticking upward.
“Then I suppose you should have picked a more secure prison to house me in,” I answered.
“Or more trustworthy alliances,” she answered, looking back at Andy.
“Oh he’s quite trustworthy,” I answered. “To the right people.” I gave him a quick slap on the shoulder.
“Stand back and let me take care of this,” my mother said, stepping closer to the swirling sinkhole. A part of me wanted to push right into that mess. Maybe it was a direct portal to hell, and the devil himself could take ownership of her. I didn’t though. Andy was with her. He had given his trust to her, at least in part, and that meant there was more to this than what I was seeing now. I needed to wait and get the full scope of what was going on. If, after that, I needed to take my mother out; well, it wouldn’t be the first time.
“What are you doing?” I asked, leering at her as she performed some spell over the mass. “I told you that there’s nothing we can do. You start up with that mumbo jumbo, and you’re just going to piss Him off, and that’ s the Him with the capital ‘H’.”
“I know all about upsetting He who made us,” my mother answered without turning to me. “This spell isn’t for the earthly defect. It’s to strengthen the structure we’re standing it, to make sure it stands.”
“Who gives a damn if it stands?” I asked shaking my head.
“You might,” she answered. “Once you find out where it is I’ve taken you.”
My heart leapt a little at the suggestion. What was she talking about? Where was I?
I looked over at Andy for answered but, before he could give me any, my mother swirled back around. “That should do it,” she answered. “Now, hold still. We’re headed up.”
“Up?” I asked, swallowing hard. But there was no time for questions. A flash of light, golden like the energy my mother had just been manipulating blinded me. When it subsided, I was a room that didn’t look too familiar at first. It was large and filled with exclusively antique furnishings. It was very Antebellum, very Old South. Still, it didn’t look worn. It didn’t look aged. It was like I had been taken and dropped into a scene from the past.
And then, looking up, I saw a painting of myself in Confederate garb.
The sight took me back to a time I wasn’t proud of, a time I would have just as soon forgot. And perhaps that’s what I did. Perhaps I had moved so far away from the person I’d been when I pose for this painting, that I had forced myself not to think about the place it was created
in.
Seeing it now though shattered those walls. I knew where I was though, and more than that, I knew how impossible being here was.
“Oh,” I stammered, looking around. “Oh no.”
8
When your name is literally synonymous with giant, fucked up mistakes, it should probably be a given that you’ve done a thing or two you sort of wish you didn’t. That was certainly true for me; the king daddy of giant, fucked up mistakes.
Sure, there was the whole “Abel’ thing. I smashed my brother’s head in with a rock at the dawn of time and pretty much doomed myself for the rest of eternity. Still, given what he’d just put me through with the whole ‘lost in Purgatory’ thing, part of me thought that debt was at least partially paid.
Still, that didn’t mean I hadn’t done other things I wasn’t ashamed of. As a guy bouncing around this wild, wide world I found myself on the wrong side of a lot of issues. What can I say? I’m old and, more often than not, set in my ways. There was a large stretch of time when I didn’t like change. This house was a testament to that, and what happened here was a testament to the mistakes I’d made in the past.
“This isn’t real,” I said, spinning around to get a good look at the room. “This is magic. It’s a mirage.” I narrowed my eyes and tried to find something. Magic was deceptive, but even the most professional of magic glamours had a tell or two. Nothing was perfect, and that meant that I should be able to find an oddity in this place. There should be a beam of wood that sat impossibly askew or a lamp not quite setting on a counter, instead floating in the air above it. There had to be something to let me know this place wasn’t real, because it couldn’t be. It just couldn’t.
“It’s not, Uncle C,” Andy said, staring at me as he reverted back to not using my given name. “This is very real.”
Rise of Cain (Immortal Mercenary Book 3) Page 4