“What, by murdering this ‘thug’ guy in public and then cornering my daughter in the women’s room?”
“I don’t know what that was all about, truthfully,” Michael said. “All I know is that the blond guy got us to safety before Stanley could take Airel.” Michael’s voice became lower. “But it was too late for Kim.”
My dad sighed, and I could tell that he wanted to argue about it. Come on, Michael, dress this thing up a little better for us. I couldn’t interject without giving the impression that I was helping him make everything up as he went along, and I further knew that now wasn’t the time to be spilling all the beans about angels and demons. My parents didn’t need anything more to freak out about.
“The problem was,” Michael continued, “that we didn’t know the blond giant was the good guy. See, he was trying to keep us safe, but we resisted him and escaped. Unfortunately, that played right into Stanley’s hands.”
“Airel, why didn’t you just come home?” my mom asked, her hand balled up into a fist, tears smearing her eyes. “Wouldn’t you have been safe here? Why didn’t you let the police handle this?”
I reached out to her. “Because, Mom. I didn’t want to put you and Dad in any danger.”
“That is so selfish of you, Airel,” she cried, and then hid her face behind her hands and collapsed into my dad, who sat down on the arm of her overstuffed chair and held her.
After a while, my dad said calmly, “So what happened in Oregon?”
“Stanley got the upper hand,” Michael said. “He and his operatives kidnapped us and flew us to South Africa.”
“And then?” My dad was calm and cool; it was alarming.
“We were able to break free from our captors while the deal was being made on the docks in Cape Town. We fled to Simon’s Town, where we scraped together enough cash for a room, and we hid there.”
“And when or how did I come back into the picture again?” my dad asked.
“There was a knock at the door at about three a.m. We opened it to find you passed out on the floor with your hands and ankles bound. The rest is exactly like we told you that day, sir. We pulled you inside and did our best to try to keep you safe,” Michael said. “And then you woke up, made a few phone calls, and we were on our way home.”
Our house was so quiet, I could hear the neighbor’s radio playing classic rock in his garage with the door down. Or maybe that’s my new super-power-activated angel blood playing up again. My dad was silent for a long time. My mom had recovered—mostly.
Finally, Dad spoke. “I don’t like it. There are too many holes. Michael, are you sure you’re telling me everything, son?”
Michael nodded. “Everything I can remember, sir. I was out of it for quite a while too.”
Actually, that’s true. In fact, most of what Michael had said, though shot through with lies, at least contained somewhat of an element of truth. I guess he learned these techniques from the Brotherhood. I shouldn’t be shocked, or even surprised.
“What about you, Airel?” my dad asked. “Does this jibe with what you remember?”
Only old people say words like “jibe.” “Dad, I was the crazy girl who was so out of it that I thought I’d been gone for months when I finally called you. Remember? When that Agent Reid lady told me that I’d only been missing for like, thirty-six hours? I think I was drugged too, most the time, so everything is all mixed up in my head.”
My mom groaned.
“Gretchen Reid,” my dad said. “I remember. She’s also dead,” he said matter-of-factly. “A lot of people are dead. Your blond giant ‘good guy’ left a trail of it—death and destruction all the way from Portland to Cuba to Cape Town. Unless, of course, there’s a mass murderer out there who looks exactly like him. I’ve done my own research.”
“I know, Dad,” I said.
“No, you don’t know, Airel,” my dad said, his voice rising. “The people involved are still out there. What’s to stop them from coming after both of you again? You don’t know what it’s like to nearly lose your only child. And you don’t know what kind of people these are.”
“Oh, and you do?” I asked. “You do, Dad? How?”
“That’s neither here nor there.”
“Whatever. Listen, I may not be an adult yet officially, but I turn eighteen soon, and you know what? I get to celebrate that birthday without my best friend because she’s dead too. She doesn’t get any more birthdays. And I get to go on without her. So don’t preach to me for being young and/or ignorant of the evils in the world. I’ve seen plenty of it, enough to know that you guys,” I motioned to both of my parents, “can’t keep me safe anymore. I need to make my own decisions.”
“Not while you’re under my roof,” my dad said. “You still have school to finish, and quite a bit of catching up to do. And a lot of learning yet.”
He paused. I knew what was coming.
“Airel,” he said, “I think it’s best if you and Michael take a break from one another until things settle down.”
I knew it! “So . . . what, you’re going to come to my classes at school and make sure we don’t speak there either?” It was just like Dad to circle the wagons and try to establish control in a crisis. And now, just like Michael’s story, my whole life was going to have nothing but holes in it. Dad knew how much Michael meant to me now. How much I needed him in order to be able to get through all this pain and loss. Why was he doing this to me?
“Airel, it’s for your own good, sweetheart,” my mom said, obviously backing her husband’s play like a “good wife”. That made me so angry, I couldn’t see straight. “You’ll thank us,” she went on, “years from now. You need to finish school—make that your priority.”
“Yeah, but how? How can I go back, after all that’s happened?”
“After all that’s happened,” my dad said. “Yes. Your mother and I feel this is what’s best for you, Airel.”
CHAPTER IV
WHAT WAS BEST FOR me turned out to be a pretty easy test for me to pass—at least, at first. Two days hadn’t gone by before my mom told me she had convinced Dad to allow me to see Michael, but I would have an early curfew now.
“So I need to be home by eight? No exceptions?”
“Not unless you want to be grounded,” she said, brushing my hair out of my eyes.
I smirked and sighed in resignation. I felt pulled in five hundred directions at once. I wanted to come back home forever, have it be like it was before I learned I was half angel. But I also felt smothered here, like I was, well, drowning.
Getting back into the routine at school was as daunting to me as preparing for an ascent of Everest. I thought it was going to kill me. I knew I was going to face memories of Kim everywhere and I also thought I would be the class pariah, now not invisible but instead, untouchable.
To my great surprise, though, people were pretty decent and sensitive. My teachers helped me out with all my catch-up work, which, weirdly, only amounted to a couple of weeks of stuff for all the time I felt I’d spent Out There, growing up. And after everyone had gawked at me for a few days, the braver ones actually walked up to me and gave me notes expressing their condolences about Kim. There was real face-to-face relationship stuff happening. Part of that weirded me out a little. But things settled down and I got into a kind of groove. A rhythm.
I still had nightmares. Flashbacks. And I still had a lot of questions, too.
Michael was there, he was always there, and we shared the Thing Secret between us about Africa, about all that had been done and all that had precipitated our time there. We would sometimes sit together for lunch and he would ask me, “Do you think they’re okay, wherever they are?” and I would know exactly who he was talking about—Kreios and Ellie—and I would give him a kind of noncommittal answer, a ho-hum-I-suppose.
The truth was, I didn’t know the first thing about my angelic grandfather or his only daughter. Though it felt cold and harsh, I thought sometimes they might be gone—dead—and this on
e thought actually helped me to believe that one day, I might be able to move on with my life.
Christmas break started to beckon in the wane of a rough December, and it was much colder than it normally was in Boise. I had settled back into my American teenager life, my student career path, even having made a few new friends. Life felt normal.
And I wanted that.
Most of me, anyway.
***
Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho—Present Day
HIGH UP IN THE Sawtooth Mountains, Ellie took her time in her father’s house. It was a far cry from where she grew up, but he had both the time and the resources to build it the way he wanted it. The emptiness of the corridors saddened her, though, because without Kreios, this house was an empty building made of stone and metal.
Where are you? She reached out again, standing on the porch that overlooked the meadow below. A young eagle bellowed its flight call, and the peal echoed over the green landscape.
Ellie gave up, frustrated. Kreios was either dead or somehow beyond her reach. She prayed to El that it was the latter.
Something about Airel’s father, John Cross, bothered her. He, like his daughter, had a secret. The more she pondered it, the more it unsettled her.
South Africa and the circumstances surrounding their return didn’t add up. He knew more than he let on—he was more than he let on. Ellie pored over book after book in her father’s library, trying to trace her lineage. She looked for the link from Kreios to Airel, but a huge part was missing. John Cross was not mentioned in the line of the Sons of El.
Am I going about this all wrong? Could it be her mother who is in the line?
Ellie ran her hand through her electric blue hair and muttered a string of curses in her native tongue, words that expressed her true feelings. This is going to be harder than I thought.
***
Boise, Idaho—Present Day
I WAS AT SCHOOL walking down the hall to math class a couple of days later when I saw it—blue hair bobbing up and down in a sea of teenagers hurrying to their final class of the day. There was a little pompom of neon coming toward me, converging on the same door I was headed to. We met at the threshold simultaneously, and I couldn’t believe my eyes.
“Hey, girlie. Howzit?”
I dropped my textbook and hugged her savagely. “Ellie.”
CHAPTER VII
Arabia, 1230 B.C.
URIEL HAD BEEN FORCED to meet with Anael well out of the way, in an inconvenient place. The Brotherhood’s draining draw had been a significant concern to him, but he didn’t know her very well yet, didn’t know that she could shadow even the draw and eliminate all trace of her true allegiance with the Brotherhood. It was no matter. Caution was certainly merited at this stage of their uneasy conspiracy.
So she had agreed to meet him well outside the walls of Ke’elei, in the bowels of the forest, in the darkest stage of the night so that the conference between him, the leader of the angelic council at Ke’elei, and Uriel, the living catalyst who would be its undoing, could take place.
Anael, an ancient-looking figure crowned and bearded and robed with white, walked delicately into the clearing where she waited, concealed not by her supernatural talents but by her black cloak, by fronds of fern and tangles of creeping vines on rotting trunks. “Traitor, speak,” he said. “Show thyself.”
Uriel emerged from the darkness and felt the pale light of a slivered moon illuminating her features. She pulled back the hood of her cloak and allowed the sickly light to fall upon the unnatural hair of her head, like the breast feathers of a tropical bird. Out here, away from all constraint and rule, she could be who she really was. Out here, outcast, she could leave Eriel, her erstwhile friend Santura, and Kreios, Zedkiel—even Uncle Yamanu behind. “I am here.”
Anael smiled at her. It was veiled with a sprinkling of fatherly benevolence, making it all the more chill, dread, and evil. “I am glad indeed to see that I have not labored in vain, child.”
“Let us be quick about our business,” she said. “The forest might house a witness against us if we remain too long here.”
Anael agreed with a nod. “You must know, then, what I require as payment for the surrender of the council’s plans and strategy?”
“I am able to guess,” Uriel said, spitting onto the mossy earth. “Do I need to speak it aloud here, or no?”
“No indeed, for I shall speak it for you. You will bring me the red stone that hangs from the neck of the Seer.”
“A different man now holds that office, old one. Kreios punished my master in the clipping of one wing, as well as the slaying of his slave and host. You must know that such a request is … that it would be impossible for anyone but me to fulfill it.”
“Yes, I am aware of your talents.” He waved his hand in dismissal and disdain. “What I am not yet assured of, though, is the quality of your character—whether I can trust you to follow through on our bargain.”
She scoffed and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Can two traitors ever trust one another?” She dissolved from his sight in an instant, reappearing on a limb above and behind him. “A better question, old one,” she said, waiting for him to turn toward her, “would be to ask yourself if you want to trust me.” She dissolved again, reappearing directly in front of him, right in his face, saying, “Or even more, if you can afford not to.”
Anael smirked at her, unperturbed. “Talents aplenty. If I did what my rash thoughts now suggest to me, I would try to choke the life out of you.” He shrugged. “But I know you could easily escape my grasp.” He paused, regarding her. “I also know what motivates you.” He stepped closer and she took a step back, the closeness unwelcome. He looked down on her and continued. “I know how powerful it is, vengeance. All that pain and suffering. The sure knowledge that what you suffered, and at the hand of your own father, no less, wasn’t the product of love, or even of a modicum of fatherly concern. I know what you feel, child—that it was spite. That he hated you for killing his beloved as you entered this world, and now blames you,” his eyes widened and intensified, “for everything.”
Uriel stepped back once more and raised her hand against him. “Stop. Enough.”
“I know,” Anael continued, “that what fuels your fire is your father’s regret. That he regrets having ever come here to begin with. That he regrets having loved and lost. That he regrets you, most of all, and that he sees not a daughter when he looks upon you, girl. I know what he sees.”
Uriel gritted her teeth. “Cease.”
“He sees in you his eternal punishment.”
“Stop.” she demanded, and though her intent was to brandish forceful tones, the word exited her lips desperate and petulant.
He relented. “Oh, I can trust you, girl. I know that I can trust you. And your hatred. For such things also fuel my fires.”
She pushed him backward. “I care not.”
“Liar.”
“You can have the bloody stone. I revel in the fall of great kingdoms.”
“Fill up your cup with potent revenge, then, for you shall drink your fill, girl, and have all you want of it.”
She crossed her arms. “Agreed.”
“Our pact is firm.” Anael turned back toward Ke’elei.
“When next we meet, we shall together overthrow two dominions.”
“Yes,” he called to her over his shoulder. “Under the great tree.”
She watched him depart the clearing. She then dissolved into the air, invisible, undetected, the perfect infiltratrix.
CHAPTER VIII
Cape Town, South Africa—Present Day
FRANK WAS OVERJOYED; NEW and terrible strength coursed through him. Those who moved past him as he walked through the airport couldn’t know how awesome it was, how truly awesome. The power, the elation, the strength, the clean black redness of the whole world ticked along like a well-oiled machine, and he was its master. He was its engineer.
Ticking clocks and Swiss watches, Frank
thought. How keen I now am. He noticed things he hadn’t seen before—puddles of rank water, collections of ruddy dirt in the crevices of long hallways, the shining brown shells of cockroaches crawling, filthy beggars and street children who smelled … sweeter.
But now he approached the gate for his flight to Zurich. It would have irritated him that he had to stop off in Johannesburg and Amsterdam on the way, back when he was somebody else. But now Frank was somebody new. Somebody powerful. Someone who knew how to kill, knew from personal experience, and wasn’t afraid to do it again.
“Boarding pass, please,” the flight attendant said, her palm out, a plastic smile on her face.
Frank produced the document and looked at her chest. The name tag said “Emerald”, which shocked and pleased him. “What a brilliant name,” he said. “I’ve never met a girl by the name of Emerald.”
She tore off the stub and handed him his pass. “Ja, well, my surname’s Ruby, so you can imagine the kind of life I’ve had to lead, especially in school.” She smiled.
Frank decided that the smile wasn’t genuine. But he also decided that he liked her in ways that made him feel especially dirty, which suited his new tastes just fine. “Are you flying with us to Schiphol, or only taking tickets?” he asked her.
“Ja, to Amsterdam. And then on to Zurich.” She tapped his still-outstretched boarding pass, which showed his connection to Zurich. “Just like you, Mr. Wiseman.”
“Ah.” Mr. Wiseman. Echoes of another life. That made him feel old. And she was less than half his age. “Well, I look forward to seeing more of you,” he said.
She smiled again, rocking forward on her toes and then back down. “Well, maybe I can swap with Tanya for the first class cabin.”
“I should like that, if you could.”
“Only if you promise to tip me well,” Emerald said, winking at him as he moved down the jetway. She then greeted the next passenger.
Frank was rather loving this new life. Now that he was finally free of that idiot harpy Kimberley to whom he had been married for all those years, he felt emancipated, new, fresh. Like anything was possible.
The Airel Saga Box Set: Young Adult Paranormal Romance Page 67