by Diana Graves
“What’s keeping the flames going?” I asked as I approached it.
“The gas was left on,” Raphael said plainly.
I looked down at the bed of lava rocks from which the flames sprang to life. “What do I do now?”
“Let me go,” he said.
“What? No way!” I thought.
“We want the same thing, Raina. I can’t do shit from in here. Let me out.”
I hated it, but he had a point. Plus, having my thoughts to myself would be a nice change. I looked around the altar until I found what I was looking for, a sharp blade. The blade was a crescent shaped boline, normally meant for cutting herbs, but it would do just fine for what I had in mind. It looked very much like a miniature sickle as I held it over my left palm. Really, I didn’t need to cut Raphael out of me. Like with Adia, I could have just focused on his energy and pulled him out that way, but I didn’t have patience for that. Cutting my palm down to the point where the energy physically rested was mentally lazier.
I bit my lip and pressed the blade down. Dark black-red blood pooled in my hand and tricked down my arm and onto the floor, and so did Raphael. Like glowing honey, he oozed out and fell thickly to the cold wood floor. His glow flashed impossibly bright, so much so that I was forced to look away. When I looked back a man stood tall. He wore a tight band tee and stylishly stressed jeans. He looked back at me and I found his face boyishly handsome and his hair artfully messy. I didn’t like it.
“I take it you don’t feel old anymore.”
“Nah,” he breathed with his hands on his hips. He stretched his limbs out and took a few big breathes, before he stepped up to the fire and leaned in close. “She’s here!” he said loud and eerily.
A rush of hot air hit the room hard, sending me back. I had to grab the altar to stay upright. Raphael braced himself with two hands on the outside of the hearth. The hearth flames flickered and danced madly, but they never died. The massive gold curtains thrashed violently.
“What is that?!” I asked loudly.
Raphael looked back at me from over his hunched shoulders. “He’s here, too,” was all he said with a wide smirk.
“He? Him? –You mean, Him,” I said the last part quietly to myself. The air was so hot, so heavy, and so fast that it was hard to move, hard to breathe. The wind was building in pressure.
“I brought her to you!” Raphael shouted out over the sound of the roaring wind. “Just like I told you I would!”
“Raphael?!” I yelled, and then I saw him, Him.
He was tall, near eight feet. A very male, very nude god, walking slowly up the middle of the aisle. Golden skin, golden hair, but his eyes were bright white. His image flickered and suddenly he was standing right in front of me, looking down at me with those burning white eyes. There was no love, no kindness in his eyes. Only hate, only scorn. I could see why Adia worshiped him. They both had such hatred for mankind. He loathed us. He detested everything about us; our laws, our traditions, our very existence offended him. He looked down at me and saw a pest, a wasp-like vermin, and I was afraid of him. I was so afraid, I couldn’t move or say anything at all. I felt I was going to be sick.
I thought he was going to kill me with a thought or a snap of his fingers, but instead he leaned into me and pressed his hand against my chest. His hand was large enough to encompass my entire rib cage, breasts and all, but it didn’t stop there, not really. I felt his hot flesh against my breasts, but his energy moved past the physical. I could feel him moving inside me, touching my insides and I screamed out.
“This seems familiar!” Raphael said loudly over the gushing hot winds and my screams. “Guess He’s curious, too! He wants to know how Mel made you the way you are! What exactly makes you so special?!”
Physically he moved his hand down my body and then back up, up my neck and my face and to the back of my head. He was touching my organs, my heart, my lungs, and my brain! I screamed louder still. My mind was on fire with his efforts. He was tearing up my insides!
“Are you not curious anymore, Raina?” Raphael yelled.
I looked for him and in doing so realized for the first time that I was on the floor. When had I fallen to the floor? I didn’t know, but now Apollo was on top of me, exploring my insides with intent. He hadn’t said anything out loud, but he didn’t have to. His pure hatred for me was his only emotion, his only thought. Yes, I had access to in inner monologue. It was as though I simply knew his personal thoughts without hearing them. I knew he found me ugly without hearing him think it. He was a creature much like Raphael. A sentient being of pure energy, who could manipulate matter.
“I told you, Apollo. She’s different in a spiritual way, not a physical one,” Raphael bellowed. “Like you,” he said more softly, and he was making serious eye contact with me. Was that a hint or something? I couldn’t tell. I was in too much pain. Raphael pointed to his left hand and mouthed, ‘remember.’ Remember what?
Apollo’s hand ran over my face again, but this time he left it there and I couldn’t breathe or see. Not that I needed to breathe. I could have held my breath for a good while, but I panicked anyway and my natural reflex was to grab the god’s arm and try to pry his hand off of me. His skin was hot under my hand, but more than that…the moment I touched him I understood. He could feel my insides, and I could feel his! And if I could feel his inner energy, I could take it, hold it, like I had Raphael’s.
Even as Apollo suffocated me I was siphoning off his power, his life force. I was pulling him into me, hot and burning. It hurt like hell, almost more than what he was doing to me.
He didn’t seem to notice what I was doing. His thoughts never faltered, never changed to fear or even annoyance. I was such a worm to him, such a lower being. He didn’t understand why I was dangerous to him. He didn’t understand why his subjects warned him about me, why others made such a big deal over me. He didn’t know how I came back from the dead. He simply assumed I’d made a deal of some sort with a devil or demon to come back. He’d given up trying to understand. It was time for me to die. He had better things to do, a species to bring to its knees.
It wasn’t until his image began to flicker and fade that he lifted his hand from my face and looked down at himself. He didn’t understand. The god had curiosity, but he lacked imagination. He didn’t know what I was. Hell, I was just finally beginning to really understand it myself. I was like him but not a god, not so alien as all that. I was human and more, so much more.
I didn’t need to be close to him to steal him away. Struggling in pain, I backed away from him as he knelt in confusion. He looked back at Raphael, who was still standing at the hearth, holding on against the hot wind, though the wind was dying down some.
Finally, Apollo looked back at me with anger and hate and a tinge of fear in his mind. “WHAT ARE YOU?” he asked me as he faded further into me, and his voice, his actual voice was so loud and tangible that I immediately put my hands over my ears and fell back, rolling on the ground, trying to gain more distance between us.
“He’s almost gone!” Raphael said. “Don’t give up!” My ears were hurt by Apollo’s voice, but I could still hear Raphael faintly. My ears where healing. I knew that if I’d been human I’d be deaf or worse from having heard Him speak.
I looked back at the god and found him nothing more than a shadow of a giant wreathed in darkness instead of light now. I took my hands from my ears and they came away with blood. I held my hands out weakly and called out with every ounce of willpower I had left. Burning and boiling my insides, he came, every last drop of his essence poured into me. The wind stopped but I almost wished it hadn’t. I was burning up!
“Wow,” Raphael said as he approached me. He touched my face and pulled his hand away fast. “You’re hot.”
“Help,” was the only word I could utter, and it was quiet on my trembling lips.
Raphael kneeled in front of me, clapping his hands together. “Okay,” he said with a very serious look in his eyes. “We’re f
inally here. I’ve imagined this moment for so long. What you do next will changed the world.” He physically shuddered. “Damn, I’m getting goose bumps and this isn’t even real skin!”
I tried to tell him to hurry the fuck up, but my lips weren’t functioning. I couldn’t hold Apollo back for much longer. He wanted out, and when he got out we were so dead. And not boom, you’re dead. He would take his time. I knew it because like with Raphael, I could hear him screaming inside me!
“Do you remember what you did with Adia?” he asked me. I nodded. “It’s like that, but bigger! And you can’t focus him outside your body now, or he’ll escape and kill us all. No, you have to hold him, change him while he’s inside you. I want you to think the word ‘heal.’ Think it at his energy. The bomb is on its way. It’s already been launched. We have seconds to do this. All the bombs have failed to launch, all but one and we’ve made sure it’s aimed perfectly here, just where you’re sitting actually.” He smiled. “Now I know what you’re thinking. Hey, we’ll be blasted to smithereens,” he said in a high pitched voice. “Trust me, Raina. Think heal, hold that thought in his energy the same way you thought to make Adia into a plant, you’ll make Apollo into a cure. Okay?” I nodded. “Okay.” He turned his head just as something crashed through the ceiling. “FREEZE!”
He stood and put his hand on the warhead where it was frozen in midair just feet from my face. “I haven’t actually frozen time. I just slowed our perception of it a good bit. Probably shouldn’t have said freeze. Confusing.”
He moved back over to me and pulled my arm. “Let’s get away from the nuclear warhead,” he said playfully, and he pulled my thrashing body back toward the altar. “Once time resumes at a normal pace for us, two things are going to happen at once. You are going to project Apollo into that warhead and I’m going to create a shield around us. Get it. What is normally an evil nuclear bomb will be the end to all of this shit!”
Really? That sounded great, but could I do that? I didn’t know.
“I know how you think, Raina. I’ve been in your head, remember. You have to believe in yourself. Doubt is the killer of dreams. And if that didn’t help you, think of the children,” he mocked a sad face.
“Okay, one.” I wasn’t ready.
“Two.” NO! I wasn’t ready. How do I do this?
“Three!”
Fuck! “Heal!” I screamed with everything I had, and I pushed Apollo out of me so fast, so fiercely that I pulled my insides into knots with the force of it. I aimed him right at the warhead and Raphael put up a dome over us as it exploded. The ground shook and trembled for what felt like forever. The sound was deafening. My hands were over my ears and my eyes were closed tight the entire time. I didn’t open them until the earth stopped moving around us, and then I saw Raphael huddled over me protectively, clinging to me inside the large dome he’d made to protect us. Slowly I lowered my hands from my ears and the first thing I heard was his laughter.
“You did it!” he laughed. “You, a human, saved mankind from utter destruction and killed a god! Woohoo!”
I couldn’t help it. As much pain as I was in, I laughed out loud. Had we really done it? “I’ll believe it when I see it for myself,” I said with a raspy voice.
A NEW NORMAL
“THREE YEARS AFTER the Zombie Apocalypse was averted, Washington State is still closed off from the rest of the world. In spite of the state’s isolation, a recent poll shows that the majority of the surviving citizens are in good spirits and thriving. The strongly held consensus within the state is that a local vampire hunter and alleged demigod, Raina Kirkland, somehow used magical-godlike powers to heal the zombies of their affliction and neutralize the nuclear properties of the bomb that still physically devastated a small portion of the city of Tacoma, but nothing more. The scientific community believes the bomb to have been a dud, but still has no scientific explanation as to how those infected were healed, or what came next.”
“Turn that shit off!” Nick groaned from the couch.
“Yeah, kids. Corporate owned news will rot your brains,” Michael joked as he walked toward Thomas and Isobel with a zombie’s stride. It was a good act. It should be since Michael was a zombie for all of five hours three years ago. Isobel stood tall on the chair she had been lounging on, and smacked her uncle with a pillow.
Thomas didn’t use the remote to turn off the TV before he stood up from the couch, where he’d been sitting beside Nick. He simply blinked and the TV screen went dark.
“I just get curious about what they’re talking about out there is all.”
“Us,” I said with a roll of my eyes. “They’re still talking about us as though it happened last week.” I was standing in the archway of the living room, having come from the kitchen to call them to the table. “It’s time for dinner, anyway.”
As we all headed out of the living room and toward the kitchen Michael put his hand on my shoulder. “You have to understand, sis,” he said playfully. “One minute we’re all walking corpses, and then they throw a bomb at us and we’re gods!”
“We’re not gods,” Isobel said with her nose scrunched up at her uncle. “We’re just different.” Those were my words. That was what I told everyone who came to me with questions.
‘Why can I fly?’ they’d ask me.
‘Why can I breathe under water?’
‘Why am I young again?’
‘Why can I see, for the first time in my life?’
‘Why can I hear?’
‘Why can I talk?’
‘Why am I healed?’
‘Why am I whole?’
‘Why am I so much more than human?’
The short answer, we’re different now. The more complicated answer…When that bomb went off we were healed, all of us, even through that lead-lined room of horrors. We were stripped of our injuries, stripped of our faults. We were given a new lease on life, and it had so many perks. We were a state of super humans, bathed in the powerful remains of the god that would have seen us all perish. All disease was wiped away. We were all perfectly who we were meant to be; witches, elves, big foots, ogres, trolls, centaurs, mere-folk and humans, living together in peace, finally in peace. The rest of the world was going nuts, and we were glad to have no part in it.
I sat down at the dining table in my house, with the people I loved most in the world sitting around me. Isobel, Thomas, Michael, Nick and Everett sat to the right of me. Tristan, Seth, Fauna, and Katie sat to my left; she and Everett’s new babies lay in a large bassinet by the table. Katie rocked it lightly with her foot to keep them from fussing. Two beautiful babies, a perfect blend of witch and human, one with brown eyes and black curls and the other with red eyes and blond locks; Erwyn and Lynden Guthrie.
From across the table a tanned Alistair raised his glass of wine and I raised mine. “To life and love,” he said with a wink.
“Salute,” Tristan said, and then we drank.
♦
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