Gargoyle Rising

by Meraki P. Lyhne

  “We will stay at this hotel for a few days. I have already booked you a room and taken the liberty to have your clothes from school brought up. You may go lie down a while once we have eaten, and settle yourself in.”

  “Thank you.”

  It was odd how she’d spent the past two months in silence but now felt glad for it. She didn’t know what to say, and she didn’t want to ask questions, because the one she really wanted the answer to was also the answer she feared and the one Father would bring up if they talked at all—whether they had completely lost Alex Rhoden, and whether she had then completely destroyed all those years of work.

  “Tavi is here, too. He’s looking forward to seeing you again. If you have the energy for it, maybe you and he can talk tonight? I know he would love to hear how you are doing.”

  Rebecca nodded and forced a smile, but she made sure to keep her mouth full or at least chewing. In the end, it looked like Father understood the hint and stayed quiet, settling for her company.

  After dinner, which Rebecca had fought to not just shove down because she was so hungry, Father showed her to her room on the fourth floor. Upon entering the room, she knew right away why her mind was so tired. The convent had not only been silent, but it had not been extravagant, and the world outside assaulted her senses with colors and shapes and impressions. Even the room did, but the bed looked like it was a lot more comfortable than the narrow bed of purity in her cell.

  At discovering a bathtub and complimentary bath oil, her body practically screamed to be pampered. She locked the door, rummaged through her bags to find fresh underwear, and finally took the long bath she needed.

  Again, the huge difference between life in the convent and outside stood out to her, and she wondered whether she would ever find God if she hadn’t managed in that time. Was it a sin to focus on her own physical well-being and dream of soft sheets when she had failed Father in getting ready for whatever he had come to ask of her? Or was she simply acclimatizing again to be able to function in the world she had to be the warrior in?

  No answers came to her, and she went straight to bed after having dried her hair. She didn’t want to watch TV or anything. Just sleep.

  Father collected her in her room the following morning, and she felt rested but not ready. Should she confide in Father that she didn’t feel ready? Or would he be disappointed in her for not telling him the truth at the convent so she could have stayed and looked further for God? Mostly, she hoped he would just advise her so she wouldn’t feel so lost.

  “How did you sleep?” Father asked as they sat in the restaurant after having collected their food from the morning buffet.

  “Very well, Father.” She looked at her food and didn’t really find any of it delicious. She had picked something in the lines of what she’d eaten at the convent, and her stomach growled at her for it.

  Father chuckled and pushed a plate with a danish to her. “The good thing about a buffet is that we can go again. And change our mind.”

  “Change our mind about what?” she asked, worried he’d seen right through her. But the smile on his face didn’t fit what she expected if he knew of her doubts.

  “I know it’s a big change coming from silence and with your heart so close to God to this...” He motioned around them. “But it is in this world you must serve God and His Kingdom on Earth. Living the silent life of servitude is not what He needs from all of us. What He requires of us, His soldiers, is not easy, which is why only His most trusted and strongest are chosen.”

  Rebecca smiled and plucked a little cupcake from Father’s plate. He laughed heartily and stood. She watched as he grabbed a new plate and went to the buffet again. Once back, he placed a meal that could only be described as sinfully delicious in front of her—bacon, eggs, bread roll with cheese, a croissant with chocolate filling, and a cappuccino.

  Father picked up his own fork, looking pleased with Rebecca’s reaction to the meal. “Now, eat up.”

  An hour later, Rebecca followed Father through the hotel and into a conference room. Chairs scraped over the floor, but she didn’t have a line of sight to see anyone. As Father continued into the room, twenty plus unknown faces were revealed. And Tavi. He smiled at her as their gazes met.

  Father turned and placed his hands on her shoulders.

  “I’m so happy to hear that your time in silence offered you such a gift. I told you then that I would continue to have faith in you even when you stumbled. This time, I will show you all of the people you will be working with. We are God’s Legion because we are many.” Father swept his arm as to introduce the many people. Father pointed Rebecca to sit at a table with three others—faces Rebecca recognized from the morning buffet—before Father took the podium.

  “We are moving in on one of our most dangerous adversaries in a long time. We know for a fact that they are in direct league with Demons, and we know for a fact that they have the occult knowledge to have evil spirits work for them. These are men twisted with sin and who have turned their backs on God. Now, we would of course much rather show them the path back to the love of God so they could learn of His forgiveness, but we know for a fact that these men know of God. They attend mass in a Catholic church. They stand there and fold their hands and take His name into their mouth, and when they leave, they work for the Devil and aid him in the destruction of God’s Kingdom here on Earth.

  “We can’t save everybody, and it is not our job. We are the Kingdom’s last line of defense. We are the warriors of God’s Kingdom. We are His Knights, and we rose to overtake the Knights corrupted by the Devil. We shall not fail, because we were handpicked and chosen by God Himself.” Father turned to look at Rebecca. “We are exempted from his laws for mankind because we serve directly under His command.

  “Tavi. You and Rebecca started this. Please begin debriefing so we can put her up to speed.”

  “Yes, Father,” Tavi said, looking proud as he went to the podium.

  Father came to sit at Rebecca’s table.

  “Sister Rebecca and I have been stationed at a school in England where we suspected one of the Collectors was furthering his education. About six months ago, we learned who that asset was. His name is Alex Rhoden, a charge under the esteemed and renowned art collector Henry von Hessen from Germany.”

  Father pushed a file closer to Rebecca. She opened it and found the school’s yearbook portrait of Alex Rhoden.

  “An unfortunate interaction scared Alex Rhoden away,” Tavi continued. “We stayed behind because we suspected there were more Collectors. When Sister Rebecca secluded herself in the need of time to pray, I took her to the school parking lot. Here, I saw a man I recognized from the files as Jared Wilkins, a getaway driver for the first asset, Alex Rhoden. He was speaking on a very friendly term with a man we have learned is a homosexual, and he lives in sin with a student there named Nathan Grewe, who holds the qualifications for us to feel sure that he is indeed a Collector.

  “The man he lives with is Lucien. We don’t know much else about Lucien, and he stays in their apartment across campus for the most part. We know quite a bit more about Nathan Grewe, a former national level Taekwondo champion who has even lived and trained in Korea. He has worked as an assistant curator in an auction house in Oregon, and his papers describe highly intelligent man who is well-versed in ancient and occult languages.”

  Rebecca turned a page in the file, finding a smiling Nathan and a candid shot of Lucien which was really bad, because some of it was blurry. It looked to have been taken at a party at school, and with all the movement around him in the picture, she wasn’t surprised a better photo hadn’t been produced at the time.

  Father stood, breaking her thoughts.

  “Thank you, Tavi, for your briefing.” Father turned and looked at the many people in the room, while Tavi smiled, collected his things, and left the podium. “Brother Peter, would you continue?”

  A man stood and made his way to the podium. “Wel
come back, Sister Rebecca.” The man nodded at her, and she felt better about everything. She had from the time Tavi told about all he’d found, but the warrior brother had shown her she was part of something bigger after she’d felt so alone and like a failure.

  “Sister Rebecca and brother Tavi have done good groundwork, getting us clear and useful intel. This is their first mission for God, and it seems clear why He has chosen them to work among us.

  “Now, to what we’ve found on Alex Rhoden since he ran off. We’ve learned that Pritchard Browman, his mentor, came and got him late one night. We tracked them for a while, but they disappeared in Poland. They are professionals, and it has taken us since then to track them down again. This was only possible because we got a tip about Mr. von Hessen having thrown them both out. They’ve resurfaced in Philadelphia, of all places.

  “It turns out that Pritchard Browman grew up in Philadelphia and has family there. Lots of it, in fact. He has an illicit daughter with his High School sweetheart, and his dad is... was a known fence who worked as such through his pawnshop. Jerry Browman, better known as PB, died February twenty-second. He was buried two days ago. With them in mourning, it would be the right time to strike, since their guard might be down.”

  The man packed away his papers and went back to his seat, while the man next to him took the place at the podium.

  “What we do now.” The man looked around the room. “We eliminate key players within the Collectors’ rank. We have devised a plan based on the intel we have now, and we have a backup plan. The objective is to capture Alex Rhoden and Pritchard Browman to get further intel on the Collectors’ organization, what they have, how many they are, who the other key players are, how they operate, etcetera. We’re going to do that on multiple levels.

  “Sister Rebecca will gain access into the heart of the organization through Tavi, who will introduce her to Jared Wilkins, a young single man with a love for cars.”

  The man looked at Rebecca, who again turned the pages in the file. A picture of an unassuming young man with a clever glint in his eyes smiled back at her. Not her type. Well, not like she had a type, since she’d never looked at a man as anything but one to stay away from in that department.

  “The snatch and grab of Alex Rhoden and Pritchard Browman will not be easy—especially since we don’t really know just how many people he knows in Philadelphia, and we’re still not sure just how big his family is. We have two plans in place. First of all, we’re going to use a cursed object to incapacitate them. Going in strong would be our downfall, as both men are more than capable of handling themselves, and Mr. Browman has made both himself and Alex Rhoden vanish right under our noses before. If we go in more than two men, we can’t keep this quiet. Our best people are in place in Philadelphia as we speak, and they are holding back and observing from afar to not tip Mr. Browman off.

  “The cursed object will, if we don’t move quickly, kill them, but it is the only one we have of enough value to pique their interest. We are, however, capable of reversing it within about fifteen to twenty hours. If they don’t bite, we’re going to bomb the shop, and from what our stationed team has learned so far, Mr. Browman and especially his departed dad, PB, had enemies who would do things like that. We will leave a trail that implicates crime circles in the area and make do with the knowledge that two such powerful adversaries to our mission are gone.”

  Rebecca heard what the man was laying out, and her heart rate rose at the knowledge that two men would either be kidnapped or assassinated on intel she had helped provide. Another thing that kept her focus was the young man in the photo. All she had mentally tried to prepare for the past two months would be put to the test, and she felt ignorant and not at all suitable to court a man. Cars? She knew absolutely bupkis about cars other than how to drive them, and she was the passenger more times than not.

  When she looked up again, the man on the podium had returned to his seat, and Father stood to take the podium. He held out his hands and blessed them all.

  Rebecca stood by the elevator with the file under her arm. Her mind went in circles about how she was supposed to react when introduced to Jared Wilkins. What really gnawed at her resolve was that she couldn’t think of one credible chain of events that wasn’t taken out of some romance movie, and from what she’d observed at school, things didn’t go that way in real life. If she needed proof, then her whole line of mistakes from the second she locked onto Alex Rhoden proved how inept she was.

  “Hey.”

  She jumped, but it was just Tavi putting his hand on her shoulder.

  “Sorry, I was lost in thought.”

  “And concern, from the look on your face. Father said for you and me to talk this through, since I’ll be the one introducing you.”

  “How did you manage to become his friend?”

  “Well.” Tavi stood aside and let her enter the elevator first. He then pushed the button to her floor. “I introduced myself when I saw them in the parking lot the day you left. I called Father immediately, and he had a man follow Jared. When I knew where he’d be, I went to the same shop and bumped into him. Made sure to have a car magazine, and we chatted about Le Mans.”

  “So I have to know about cars?” Rebecca shook her head at how impossible the task all of a sudden seemed.

  “No, that’s a man talking to a man. Men usually don’t want the love interest in their life to be what a dude can be in their life.”

  “Oh, great. I’m reduced to a piece of ass.”

  “No, not with this guy. He’s a gentleman. He holds the door for women whether he knows them or not, and it’s not to check out their ass.”

  Rebecca glanced at Tavi, and he looked like he meant it and hadn’t just said it to calm her nerves.

  “I failed with Alex Rhoden because I had no idea how to be a love interest, Tavi. God can’t reveal that in a convent. Would I even be believable in his circle as a virgin?”

  “I don’t know. Finding virgins your age isn’t exactly common, but you are a devout Catholic woman, so that could be.”

  “Would he want to waste time on a woman who won’t have sex with him? You say gentleman, but...” Rebecca couldn’t even finish her sentence. Where did she get her information, really? Movies. Feminist memes on Facebook. Oh yeah, and all the sex memes comparing sex to pizza, or making sex something men got more of if they helped clean the house. It was supposed to be sacred, and all Rebecca saw were women acting like whores and men running around after short skirts like it was their one goal in life. And she hated it. Hated the idea of sex. She could barely fathom how a man could even respect a woman if she’d had sex with him.

  “Rebecca, do you fear sex?”

  “Yes. I fear being unclean under God.”

  “Sex is a part of human nature. God made it that way.”

  The elevator doors opened, and a couple waited to get on. Rebecca stayed quiet as they left the elevator. Tavi stopped by a door.

  “This is my room. Come in and talk.”

  She followed him into his room and took a seat at the table by the window, looking out over the river.

  “It’s supposed to be sacred,” she finally said.

  Tavi sat across from her and placed a bottle of juice and two glasses on the table.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “But then why make it... good so that people strive for physical pleasure instead of the spiritual pleasure of doing right by God?”

  “Because a husband and wife are to receive pleasure from one another under their holy unity, too. Maybe it’s a test.” Tavi sat back and looked out the window for a few minutes. “First Corinthians... Because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.
Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.”

  Rebecca contemplated the quote Tavi had chosen.

  “As a Warrior of God, I’m to use whatever weapon against the profaners is needed, even if it feeds their lack of self-control to focus on God,” she said. She’d repeated that to herself during prayer so many times over the past two months. Yet it still didn’t ring true.

  “Exactly. Thou shalt not kill, yet we do to secure His Kingdom.”

  “I don’t know if I fear becoming unclean, or if I just fear the unknown.”

  Tavi reached over to take her hand, and she smiled because he understood her struggle. “Or do you fear giving your purity to Jared?”

  “Absolutely!”

  “You don’t find him attractive?”

  Rebecca looked at the closed file on the table. “He’s... so average.”

  Tavi chuckled and opened the file to the young man’s photo. “I’ve had to go with women I didn’t find attractive, but I needed intel from them. I took them to my bed, too, without being interested in them as a person. It was difficult at first, but I’ve learned to focus only on what I found attractive about them and then pushed the rest from my mind. There’s always something beautiful about every one of God’s children. And we do it for them, the entirety of God’s children, because they all deserve a place in His Kingdom. It is for Him to judge, others to guide, and us to fight. We all have our role.”

  Rebecca looked at the photo, once again noticing the glint in the eyes. That was kind of attractive. “Tell me about him.”

  “Well, he laughs a lot. He has one of those contagious kinds of laughter. He’s giving, respectful to strangers, and he listens to people.”

  That didn’t make sense in her mind. Why would a man like that choose the Devil?