Feel the Flames

by BJ Sheldon

  “Yeah, but most stories from ancient times usually have a grain of truth,” said Dorian from the corner of his mouth in a low voice.

  I wondered if Oscar could be right. Could the seal of Solomon be real? Could what I have painted really be the symbol of Solomon and the name of God? And the bigger question was why had I drawn them? Was someone trying to tell me something?

  “All right. Thanks for all your help, man,” said Dorian.

  “Yep. No problem. Any chance you can tell me what this is all about?”

  “Nope.”

  “Does it have anything to do with you not aging?”

  Dorian snorted and gave a quick two-fingered salute toward the screen and promptly slammed the laptop shut before Oscar had the opportunity to ask another question.

  “So, where does that leave us?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. You’re painting the name of God—the seal of Solomon—an ancient symbol on a signet ring that can control ghosts and demons. Whatever it all means, I’m sure it isn’t good.” Dorian stood and wandered into the kitchen.

  “Well, great. That makes me feel all warm and fuzzy,” I replied, letting out a loud sigh.

  “I wasn’t really trying to sugarcoat it.”

  Grace cleared her throat. I had nearly forgotten she was there.

  “Can one of you maybe explain what’s going on?” she asked, gently placing a few more of Sean’s old comics from the bookshelf into a box resting on the coffee table next to us.

  “You know about as much as we do. I found myself painting a bunch of random symbols for no reason, and it now appears that it has something to do with the seal of Solomon.” Both paintings sat at my feet…Sean’s superhero rendering and Solomon’s seal. I grabbed them both and rose from the couch, joining Dorian in the kitchen.

  “And the symbols translate into the name of God?” Grace tried to continue to act as though she was concentrating on her packing, but it was clear she was more concerned with what had just transpired between us and Oscar.

  “Some of them, apparently,” replied Dorian.

  “Has anything like this happened before?” she asked.

  “No,” I replied quickly.

  “Actually, that’s not true.” Dorian’s comment surprised me. “You painted the giant angel skeletons, and that was clearly a precursor of things to come. You painting the name of God can’t be a good sign.”

  “You seriously need to stop talking,” I snapped.

  The room grew quiet, the only sound being the thud of comics and magazines being dropped into a box. Grace busied herself, stacking one box on top of another. She crouched down and picked them up, balancing them against her chest as she blindly stumbled through the living room toward the door.

  “Need some help?” I asked.

  “I got it.” She fumbled with the knob a bit before finally managing to swing it open. Grace headed down the front steps in a hurry and out to her car.

  “You freaked her out,” I said nonchalantly, giving Dorian a side glance.

  “I freaked her out?” he replied with emphasis. “I think our wings did that.”

  I rolled my eyes at his comment and stared at Grace through the doorway. She was rushing to put her stuff away. I could only guess she was trying to make a quick getaway…away from us.

  “Now that we know that this could have something to do with God or Solomon, we just need to figure out why you painted it.” Dorian closed the door behind Grace.

  “And just how do you expect to go about doing that?” I asked.

  Dorian reached over and snagged the painting in question from my grasp. He held it up and stared at it.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” he replied, studying the symbols on the canvas. “But you and I both know something’s up. You don’t get these visions and paint this stuff for no reason. There’s always a reason. Someone wanted you to paint it. Can you imagine if this thing is real? If Solomon’s ring really exists? Can you imagine what kind of damage someone could do with it? What kind of power something like that holds?”

  I stared out at Grace through the window as she tried to figure out how to fit just one more box into the back of her Prius, and sighed.

  “I thought I told you to stop talking.”

  Chapter 5

  We made it back to my trailer just before sunup. Dorian’s flying had improved a bit, but not enough that his touchdown didn’t look painful as he landed hard, his knees buckling, forcing him to face plant into the dirt. I know I shouldn’t have found such pleasure in his pain, but I just couldn’t help myself. My face contorted as I reined in the laughter that tried to escape my lips watching him spit dust from his mouth. He shrugged it off and winked. I knew it was just his way of letting me know it didn’t bother him. I loved his perseverance and his ability to laugh at himself. In fact, I wished I was more like him in that way.

  I slipped off the canvas bag with the paintings from my shoulder and quietly handed them to Dorian. As he disappeared through my studio door to put them away, I strolled toward the middle of my yard and laid down on the ground, staring up at the sky. The darkness had already begun to fade, replaced by the gradual glow of the sunrise over the horizon. The chirping of the crickets diminished while the night air was gradually replaced by the warmth of the sun. But I closed my eyes and listened to them anyway, hanging on to every beat of their waning song. My heartbeat slowed, and I forced my breathing to match it.

  “Do you know how many bugs live in the ground? You’re going to get spiders in your hair.”

  “Shut up, Dorian.”

  “Just trying to help.” I heard him chuckle quietly as his feet shuffled in the dirt next to my head.

  I opened a single eye to catch a glimpse of him. The morning light bounced off his light blue eyes causing them to appear almost clear. After spending most of my life alone, I enjoyed having him around. I wasn’t always sure how to act around him since I was so used to living a solitary life. Even when Sean was alive, he wasn’t there twenty-four-seven. Most of my existence had been spent with my art, my thoughts, and my fears. But with Dorian in my life, it was spent trying to figure out how to accommodate sharing everything with another—not only my home, but my thoughts and ideas, as well.

  I stared up and studied the morning sky. The oranges and golds blended into the edges of the bright blue and were in direct contrast of the clouds racing across the heavens. An unconscious sigh escaped my lips as I got lost in its beauty. My thoughts drifted back to the sights I’d seen over the centuries: the mountains of Nanga Parbat, the Patagonian Desert, the Petrified Forest. The world was breathtaking and resilient…and incredibly vulnerable.

  “When I see mornings like this, I wonder how there could possibly be people out there like Grace who don’t believe,” I said, matter-of-factly. “I mean, look at that sky. It almost looks like a watercolor piece. Even I couldn’t paint something that beautiful.”

  “You weren’t exactly a big believer in God yourself before I met you,” said Dorian, chuckling.

  “Hey. I believed. I did. I was just so angry most of the time that I didn’t stop to think about the bigger picture. I’ve grown. I’ve matured. I’ve become more accepting. More worldly, as it were.”

  Dorian snorted and crouched down next to me.

  “Find something funny?” I asked, giving him the stink-eye.

  “Mature? Accepting? Have you been drinking?”

  “Oh shut up, you jackass,” I said, playfully sticking my tongue out at him.

  “You were a girl with wings. The wings of an angel. How could you not think about it?”

  I ignored the question. I knew the answer, but it would have sounded far too selfish on my behalf. It was one thing to know it in my head. It was quite another to say it out loud.

  I sat up a bit and leaned back on my elbows. My gaze rose, again studying the morning sky. I took a deep breath and allowed the scent of grass and wildflowers to linger a bit before exhaling.

  “I know that th
e atmosphere is made mostly of nitrogen and oxygen. I know the sky looks blue because the air disseminates the blue sunlight more than the red. I also know that the atmosphere scatters the light making the sun appear yellow while out in space. And all of it is perfection. If even one thing was off by a single molecule…or if the earth was even a hundred miles closer to the sun…or if there was no moon…the world would not exist as it does in all its glory. Not in the way it exists now. That’s the science of it…but that’s not all of it.” I laid back down and folded my hands behind my head.

  “I know what you mean. People think that science excludes the handiwork of God. But what they don’t realize is they aren’t mutually exclusive. I think people have become desensitized to miracles and faith over the centuries, instead choosing to replace those things with logic and facts.” Dorian paused and sat down beside me. “These are the same people who don’t take the time to watch a sunrise or walk through fields of wildflowers or even appreciate the smell of fresh-cut grass. Birth, death, famine, natural disasters, volcanos, and on and on and on. They break everything down into atoms and use science to take away the mystery of God’s work. Humans have taken the beauty and miracle of life for granted over the centuries. No one believes in the mystery of life anymore.”

  We soaked in the silence, contemplating the wonders of the universe for a few moments longer. I finally sat up, hesitating for a split second, and then rose off the ground. As I dusted off the back of my jeans, Dorian picked himself up off the ground and waited patiently for me to finish. Then, without a word, we walked inside my trailer. I immediately found my way to my bed and plopped face down on that old, lumpy mattress. I could hear Dorian rifling through a stack of books in the corner. I wondered what he could be searching for, but I was only half interested in his activities. There were things on my mind.

  Just like the painting of the angel skeletons from before, I’d been shown images of things I didn’t know how to decipher, and worse yet I thought I had been done with the visions—not a single one since the Badlands. Then suddenly, I’m seeing what was possibly the seal of Solomon and the name of God. I wondered why I couldn’t have visions of kittens or a simple rain storm. But mostly I wondered what the point was to it all. Was someone trying to tell me something? And if so, who?

  I grunted into the mattress, letting out my frustration.

  “You okay over there?” Dorian asked. I heard the thud of something hitting the floor.

  I lifted my face up from the mattress and watched him bend over to pick up the book he’d dropped.

  “Just thinking how nice it would be if these visions just…stopped. You know? Like permanently.”

  “Yeah. I’m sure they suck.”

  “Vacuums suck. My visions rank up there with someone ripping my brain out with a fork.”

  “Yum.”

  I grabbed a pillow and whipped it at Dorian’s face. He ducked, my pillow hitting the wall of books behind him knocking a few off the top. In turn, they went toppling to the floor.

  I shot him a look, but he only smiled in return. He wasn’t scared of me.

  On the one hand, I liked that about him.

  On the other, not so much.

  “What about your visions?” I asked.

  “What about them?”

  “They never seemed to affect you the way mine did…or do.”

  “Mine mostly came to me in dreams. They weren’t painful…and they didn’t compel me to paint, if that’s what you mean. And I don’t sleep anymore, so…” Dorian shrugged.

  “Why is this happening again? Why am I seeing things I don’t understand?”

  “Better yet, why do you see the things you do?” Dorian straightened up and mindlessly tugged on his shirt. “You see the skeletons of angels, and you suddenly meet me and Lillith and find out that you have to fight Azazel to keep him from raising the Fallen. Seems like a hell of a coincidence. Now you’re painting Solomon’s Seal and the name of God. Odds are it means something is coming. I mean, what else have you painted over the years that’s come true? Anything?”

  I thought about his words and tried to remember all the times I was compelled to paint.

  And then it hit me.

  I pushed myself up off my bed and marched out of my trailer. I raced toward my studio. I flung open the door, and it slammed against the outside wall with a crash. Dorian was close on my tail as I rushed to the far corner where I stored my paintings. They were all stacked one in front of the other up against the wall. My fingers skimmed some of them, one-by-one, as I tried to remember when I’d painted each one. There were hundreds. Not all of them were vision-fueled masterpieces. Most of them had been painted just for fun and purely for the love of it. But there were a few in my collection that I’d been compelled to paint. I kept those off to the side and away from the others—almost as if they were tainted somehow.

  I browsed through them, studying every image and brush stroke. Each one was named, its moniker scribbled in pen on the back.

  Fire Escaping from Cave

  Shooting Stars from Heaven

  Man with Brown Laces

  Granted, they weren’t great titles.

  As it turned out, there had been a reason I’d painted those angel skeletons, but it had only been revealed to me once Dorian and Lillith were introduced into my life. It signified the Fallen and their plot to overthrow humanity. So, it stood to reason that perhaps there had been a specific motive behind why I’d painted all of the others over the years. Maybe there was something I was supposed to have stopped. Or maybe someone was trying to tell me something that was going to happen in the future. But how would I know? Had I missed the signs? Was it already too late?

  One particular canvas gave me pause, and I slid it out from the center of a rather large collection. I held it flat at eye level and blew on it. Years of dust floated aimlessly through the air creating a transparent cloud of particles that seemed to catch a breeze and rose toward the ceiling.

  I turned it around and showed it to Dorian.

  “Where do you think this is?” I asked.

  Dorian pursed his lips, his eyes lighting up with recognition.

  “That’s Devils Tower, right? In Wyoming.”

  I turned it back around and studied it again.

  “That’s what I thought, too. I painted it about six months ago.” The tower rose in the distance and was surrounded by fallen rock, bushes, and trees. Everything was green and lush except for one lone tree at the base of the giant rock formation. The tree stood nearly fifteen feet tall, completely barren of leaves or bark. At the very top, four large branches stretched out in different directions like the rotors of a helicopter. As each one extended outward, smaller twisted branches curled about like fingers grasping for the sky or reaching for the tower itself. It was ugly and visibly out of place, but it had a violent elegance that caused me to stare at it a bit longer.

  I finally set the canvas down near my feet and continued to browse through my collection of paintings. Moments later I pulled out another one. I stood back to let Dorian see it. “This one kinda reminded me of a dementor, like from the Harry Potter books.”

  “The what books?” Dorian asked.

  “Seriously?”

  “What? It’s not like I had a whole lot of time to read when I was a Hybrid. I was a little too busy saving the world every week,” he replied. “Forgive me if I don’t know what a defector is.”

  I turned the canvas around so he could see it.

  “Dementor.”

  “Whatever.” Dorian squinted as he considered the image. “It looks a bit like the grim reaper. No face, dark cape. But it almost looks like you painted it like it’s moving. It looks…blurry. When did you paint it?”

  “A few weeks before I met you.” Dorian was right. It did look a bit like the grim reaper, only without the skeleton hands and the long scythe. I set it down next to the one of Devils Tower and continued to peruse.

  And then, an image on a small canvas caught my e
ye. It was decades old, tucked all the way at the back near the wall. I froze, remembering the day I’d been compelled to paint it. It frightened me so badly back then that I’d quickly put it away and had worked hard to forget I’d ever painted it in the first place.

  I found myself staring at the grotesque nature of the scene, all a bit too gruesome for my taste. A naked figure seemed to be thrashing about in a chair with dark shadows hovering above. It was difficult to work out exactly what was taking place, but it was clear the victim was being tortured somehow. An ominous form stood in the background watching the scene unfold. I couldn’t make out who or what it was, but it didn’t take much to figure out that it was completely evil. The entire scene was all a bit out of focus as if watching it all unfold through billows of smoke. I quickly tucked it away before Dorian could catch a glimpse of it, hoping to drive it from my thoughts, as well.

  I was immediately thankful that I’d learned to keep Dorian out of my thoughts, otherwise he would have known in an instant that I was lying.

  “What have you got there?” Dorian asked.

  “Oh. It’s…nothing,” I muttered, quickly turning around. “Just a painting I found from years ago. I was just—just admiring at how much better my artwork has gotten since then.”

  A sudden crack of thunder shook my studio. The shock wave from the boom slammed against the walls and ceiling, echoing with violence throughout the building.

  “What the hell was that?” asked Dorian, spinning himself around in panic.

  “Are there supposed to be any storms rolling in today?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  A loud knock rattled my studio door, but the guest didn’t wait to be invited in. The door swung open, and a man I’d never seen before stood before us.

  I didn’t recognize him, but I knew in an instant he was going to be trouble.

  Chapter 6

  We drew our swords and aimed them at our visitor. His eyes were gray and sinister, and his hair hung below his shoulders—a bright red that just didn’t seem possible. He was handsome in a gruesome sort of way—his sharp features setting a tone of mystery and menace that made me feel uneasy.