She shook the dizziness out of her head. “I’m alright!” she shouted as they crowded around her. At her outburst, they all backed away a step and stared at her with wary glances. It was unlike her to lose her composure like that. Most of the time she was their stabilizing force, the anchor of the team. They had never seen her lose her calm demeanor. Not even Weston who had known her the longest.
She had to take a deep breath to steady herself for what she was going to do next, fighting back the tears that pushed their way from behind her eyes. The ache in her chest made her heart pound like thunder against her ears. She felt the choke rise in her throat, threatening to breach the protective emotional wall she had built as a young girl. It had shielded her for so many years, but now those numbers revealed a chink in her armor.
Dunbar looked over at her captain. Her console illustrated Evangeline’s vital signs as they sped from calm to erratic. “Captain, are you all right?” she asked, taking a cautious step closer. “Captain, your vitals are spiking. What’s wrong?”
Evangeline waved Dunbar away and tried not to look her in the eye. She knew that if she made eye contact her composure would break and she would not be able to go through with it. Taking another deep breath, she closed her eyes for the smallest moment. Once she regained her self-control, she holstered her sidearm.
The others stared in disbelief. Their training dictated that they remained armed while in EVA. until they were either secure in their TRTV’s or had been relieved by reinforcements. Her action was a serious breach in protocol. To witness their commanding officer, the one required to be the strictest about the rules disregard protocol, was unfathomable.
“Captain, what are you doing?” Weston grunted. His eyes scanned the corridor with an urgent need to make sure they did not miss anything. “You’re breaching protocol! You need to arm yourself, now!”
Evangeline walked toward the door ignoring the protests from her team. She raised her trembling hand to the keypad and entered the eight-digit code as if it were second nature. There was the sound of electronic servos whirring into life, a hiss of escaping air, and the door began to slide away revealing a clean, bright laboratory filled with deactivated instruments and labeled containers filled with milky white body parts.
Evangeline was still standing in the doorway when Dunbar approached from behind. In collective confusion, the entire team lowered their own weapons. They stared back and forth from one another searching each other’s faces for answers. Then all eyes turned to Weston, the second in command, for answers. However, none came.
Dunbar placed her hand on Evangeline’s shoulder. Evangeline flinched and spun around at the touch, to gape at the woman she forgot was there. Her eyes darted around the room to find her team all watching her. She could not wipe away the tears running down her cheeks. The faceplate of her helmet acted as a display window, exhibiting the pain she had suppressed for the last ten years. She was grateful it was only her team, whom she had learned to trust with her life, that were witness to the intense vulnerability she guarded with fierce caution.
Weston approached from behind Dunbar with a cautious air. “How did you know the code, captain?” he asked with suspicion.
Evangeline turned her head and stared past him. “I’d know those numbers anywhere,” she whispered in a hoarse voice. She fought against the lump in her throat. More tears escaped from her eyes.
“It’s my dad’s code.”
SEVEN
The TRTV’s were secure against the wall of the hangar bay with their cockpit seats open in the descended position. The hangar bay crews were performing the post-mission diagnostics, refueling and reloading of any spent ordinance.
Evangeline and her squad had lined up in the hangar bay outside the drop ship. Upon their return, Graham had ordered them to stand at attention the moment they disconnected from their vehicles.
He paced back and forth in front of them like a hungry, caged animal. He was a volcano about to erupt. The hangar crew tried to act as inconspicuous as possible while casting sidelong glances in his direction. It was the proverbial train wreck. No one wanted to watch, but no one could look away.
The odor on his breath was repugnant. It was clear to anyone within a few feet he had been celebrating. His labored breathing only made the situation more unpleasant. His rage boiled under the surface. All the pilots and hangar crew could see was a viper about to strike.
He knew they could not have understood what measures he had taken to get to that point. He had found the trail of breadcrumbs that led to Matthew’s last known location. Matthew was a talented physician, but when it came to investigations and connecting the dots of a mystery, Graham was the true artist. His own research led him to the moon, its abandoned mining facility, and yet another piece of the puzzle: A secret lab.
A wave of sadistic pleasure rose and ebbed in Graham’s chest while he continued pacing and staring down Evangeline and her team.
He did not care that the lab had been abandoned, lost in obscurity under years of misfiled and incomplete records. His discovery was a victory against the Dissidents. He relished in the precious secrets he could unveil about their organization, and all for his own benefit. He needed to keep the discovery a secret.
“What you saw and heard on the surface is now classified, level Red Three,” he growled at the pilots standing at attention before him. The shock in their eyes betrayed their statuesque postures. They were unaware that Graham lacked the authority to enforce a level Red Three.
“You will not speak of this mission to anyone, not even each other, under penalty of court martial and treason.” He scanned each one of their re-focused eyes to ensure his point had been made. “Dismissed,” he growled. He stepped in front of Evangeline with venomous eyes.
Each team member began picking up their personal rucksack sitting on the cold metal deck at their feet when Graham’s next words sent icy chills down their spines. “Chapel,” he sneered, baring his blunt, white teeth. “You stay here.”
Everyone froze in place. The team looked at each other with confusion, not understanding Graham’s aggression toward Evangeline. She remained at full attention, staring straight ahead.
“I said, Dismissed!” Graham roared over Evangeline’s shoulder.
Weston and the others all took one step forward, a sharp turn to the left, and marched out of the hangar toward the door carrying their gear. At the last moment, Harper, bringing up the rear, looked back at his commanding officer with concern. Lennox grabbed him by the arm and pulled him through the hatch and out of sight.
Graham turned toward the hangar crew and his dark blue eyes seared into their souls. “Clear the room!” he shouted. His limited control over his rage made it clear he wanted no witnesses.
Not needing to think twice about it, they scurried out toward the door on the opposite side of the hangar. The crew wanted to be as far away from Graham’s wrath as possible. The rage emitting from his transplanted Angel eyes, was horrific.
Evangeline stood motionless, watching Graham pace in and out of her peripheral vision. She suspected why he was angry. His rage and her heartache all stemmed from the same man. Matthew Chapel.
Silas Graham was the closest thing Matthew had to a best friend. He had been the head of security at Matthew’s clinic for as long as Evangeline could remember. Graham was a stickler when it came to rules, protocols, and defining the hierarchy of authority in an organization. Some in the clinic had commented that he had an unhealthy obsession to determine who had the final word on every decision.
Along with being rigid when it came to the rules, Graham exuded a vanity that bordered on narcissism. He had had several body parts replaced over the years due to his vanity. He replaced his leg bones to make himself taller. He replaced several major muscle groups to give himself an athletic stature, and he replaced his liver twice from years of hard living.
Of all the times he replaced his natural body parts with those of Angels, only once was had it been necessary to
save his life.
It happened on the unfortunate day Matthew’s clinic had been the target of a Dissident attack. In the beginning, their non-violent methods were considered little more than a great nuisance. They shut off power grids, reprogrammed monitors, and displayed copies of their manifesto or political rhetoric. The worst of their tactics had been reprograming all public transit vehicles to change routes in the middle of rush hour causing people throughout Olympus severe delays in reaching their destinations.
When their pranks amounted to nothing more than creating irritation among the citizens of Olympus, the attacks grew violent. The transplant clinic where Matthew and Graham worked was the first place where serious injuries and fatalities occurred at the hands of the Dissidents. The power grid overloaded, electrocuting almost everyone in the clinic. Some thought it had been a miscalculation in the distribution system that caused the overload, but after the resultant damage to people and property. The Dissidents had gone from a public nuisance to a terrorist organization.
Evangeline had always been grateful that her father had been out of the clinic at home having lunch with her mother when the attack happened. Graham was not so lucky. His office was next to the clinic’s main power distribution line. The explosion left his body burned from head to toe and forever blinded.
Matthew bumped Graham to the top of the list for transplantation. The Angels, the white-skinned saviors from across Olympus, came to the clinic and offered themselves to restore the injured back to complete health.
It took a few days for Graham to get used to his new skin. The milky white color made him do double takes in the mirror for weeks. Children, mistaking him for an Angel, would walk up to him and ask why he was wearing a security officer’s uniform or why he looked sad when his friends all looked so happy.
“The Angel skin is so pure, it has no genetic defects. That’s why it has no color,” Matthew explained. Evangeline never understood why some people decided against the enzyme that caused the white skin to take on the pigmentation of the recipient.
Graham liked his new flawless skin, but his new eyes remained foreign. Even among the thousands of Olympians who had chosen to replace their eyes with those of an Angel, he felt that he was somehow less than human. In the beginning, doctors performed eye transplants to cure blindness, or other congenital issues conventional methods could not correct. They perceived a broader range of the visual spectrum, which included ultraviolet and infrared. Within time, it became a status symbol, a mark like a tattoo, to replace one’s natural eyes with those of an Angel.
However, Graham never grew accustomed to see those eyes looking at him in the mirror.
The Angel blue eyes that had only ever expressed love and peace now exuded hate, fear, loneliness, lust, sadness, and every other emotion humans had ever known. It made him feel like a stranger in his own body. Those dark blue irises stared down into Evangeline’s deep, dark brown eyes.
“Explain yourself,” he growled into her face.
As his breath wafted on her face, Evangeline felt a wave of nausea. “Commander?” she coughed, pulling her head away from his. The alcohol on his breath was obscene.
“Don’t give me the dumb act, Captain!” Graham roared. “How did you know he was there? Somehow you knew!” He started pacing again, yelling with his hands. “How long have your parents been in contact with you? Somehow you knew your father had been there!”
Evangeline broke from standing at attention and took a step toward Graham. “Commander...” she sneered, looking him up and down with heavy judgmental. “With all due respect, you know I haven’t seen my parents since I was thirteen years old… Since a few days before they disappeared… Since a few months before they were labeled as sympathizers and traitors… Since before they ruined my life.”
Graham stood with his hands on his hips. “I don’t believe you,” he said in a quiet, menacing tone. He was a cat ready to pounce on a bird. “How else could you possibly know the code to that lab?” He folded his arms in a manner that gave her the impression that he believed he had won.
Evangeline mirrored his gesture and stared equally hard at him. “It was a hunch. Those numbers, that particular order of numbers, my dad always used the code on the safe in his study when he wanted me to find a surprise he’d brought me home from one of his trips. It was our little game. I saw the numbers and just gave it a shot. I had no idea it would actually work.”
Graham did not change his expression. “Again…” he took a deep breath, “I don’t believe you.” His voice was thick with danger.
“You can believe whatever you want, sir,” Evangeline spat. She was weary of his posturing and began to gesture with her arms. “I’ve been an outcast since they disappeared. I was branded as the daughter of traitors. My future in medicine was gone. I had nothing. I ended up being raised in a group home until I was eighteen and I aged out. I joined the military in order to avoid scratching out a life on a farm or the factories in the LTZ. My parents abandoned me for some stupid cause.” She stared him down with all the vehemence in her soul. “You can believe whatever you want.”
Silas Graham, the man who had once been her father’s closest friend, had become her fiercest enemy. She loathed how easy it was for him to believe the reports of her parents’ abandonment, how he joined the bandwagon to denounce his old friend for the sake of a minor promotion. “Permission to be dismissed, sir,” she snapped to attention, refusing to look meet his eyes any longer than necessary.
Graham was not impressed, dissuaded, or discouraged. He knew she was hiding something. Guilty until proven innocent was his mantra. It had worked for him as a security specialist and it would continue to prove true for him until the day he died. He dropped his arms to his sides and walked up to Evangeline, staring face to face, as he looked for the slightest crack in her defenses.
She stared right through him, and he knew it. It infuriated him to know he could not bully her. Evangeline was not intimidated by his position or his size.
Graham spun on his heel and marched toward the door. He left her alone in the hangar standing at attention. Just as he cleared the doorway, she heard him yell. “Dismissed.”
Evangeline’s posture relaxed, a deep sigh escaping her lungs. She hated that side of herself. The part of her that was rigid and inflexible: The immovable object. Dig in. Do not retreat. Do not compromise. It was her only defense in a confrontation.
After letting herself breath for a moment, she stepped back toward the drop ship and picked up her bag. Flinging the pack over her shoulder, she reached down with a casual brush of her hand and checked the safety on her sidearm. She could not help but let her thoughts wander to what hid in the barrel.
It was a note. A note she found in the lab, handwritten in penmanship so much like her own, written by her father.
EIGHT
Evangeline woke up screaming. The same nightmare had been haunting her for five years. The same nightmare that spoiled her dreams ever since her last mission off world. The fateful mission on which she found her father’s note and reopened the gaping wounds in her soul. It was the same horrible vision about her parents and their profound absence in her life.
She sat up, curled herself around a pillow, and started to shake with racking, uncontrollable sobs.
Jack woke up beside her. It was not new for him to be startled awake in the middle of the night by her screaming. The nightmares had become so common that he was no longer scared by her outbursts. Their routine on nights like that was always the same. He sat up, with his back against the headboard, and he pulled her over to him to rest her head on his chest. He would pull the blanket up over her shoulders, and stroke her hair while she cried in the safety of his arms.
There was never any way of knowing what might trigger an episode. It could have been something she ate, something she saw or heard during the day, or something that brought up an old memory. There was never any rhyme or reason, the nightmares just happened. Sometimes days or weeks passed betwee
n episodes. But often they occurred several nights in a row, days on end. It was her own personal hell, and there was no end in sight.
Jack once suggested Evangeline see a therapist to try to understand why it happened. However, Evangeline refused to talk to anyone about it. She knew why she had the nightmares. She did not need anyone to shed light or insight on the problem. They all stemmed from the secret that burned away at her ever since she found the note from her father. The note that laid hidden in a secret place.
No. Talking about it would not help. She would just have to deal with it on her own in the best way she knew how. Which was ignore it in the hopes that they would simply go away.
She was grateful, especially on the nights when her past haunted her dreams, that she found Jack. When she returned to Earth, her first husband, Erik, did not cope well with her nightmares. He did not understand why she refused to talk to anyone about it, even him. The day the divorce finalized she convinced herself that he had done his best. She had thought it was better for both of them that she was on her own with her pain. She had felt broken, torn, and incomplete. She felt flawed and unfixable.
About five months after her divorce from Erik, and almost a year after her return to Earth, she first met Jack. She was in a restaurant with Tishia Dunbar (now Tishia Lennox) and a group of Tishia’s friends. Tishia was having a baby shower. She and her husband, Sam Lennox, received their license to have a baby after the mandatory post-marriage waiting period. It turned out they were not cousins after all, but neighbors.
They had moved back to the LTZ after their tours of duty were complete and married not long thereafter. Evangeline understood why. Once someone had been off world, few people could relate. It did not help that Tishia had a crush on Sam since she was five and enlisted with him just to make sure he stayed alive.
They had come in from the LTZ to celebrate and brought a group of friends with them. Most of them looked like they were from the LTZ. They were a little rough around the edges, but polite, fun, and sometimes a bit raucous.
Avenging Angels (The Seraphim Chronicles Book 1) Page 4