They find weem. He explains everything, including scalar magnetics, etc. But in response to Azazel’s worries, he just chuckles. “I created that boy to destroy the Sons—you think he’s actually in danger?”
Fine. Whatever. Azazel just wants the location of the Sons, then, thank you very much. She thought Weem would actually help. Dick.
Concerned both with Jason’s safety and arabella’s curse, a races to the Sons’ headquarters. She’s met by arabella and several members of the Sons with guns. A gunfight happen—marlena and az against the Sons. They are victorious. Arabella is killed in the crossfire.
On the run and setting off all kinds of alarms, they narrowly avoid several skirmishes.
The prison/holding cells have been opened, and az discovers this is jason’s doing. The compound is flooded with people and all the security has gone down.
Az is concerned with J, but they run across a wing with four or five pregnant girls—mina included. They can’t just leave them there.
Marlena takes them out. She promises to rejoin az as soon as they are safe. Az is pretty sure Jason went for the top, liam hoyt, so she goes to his office.
On her way there, she is greeted by the site of bodies, shot and dead, littering the hallways. Jason’s handiwork, she knows. She shudders.
When she arrives, she finds Jason doing something really horrific to the guards outside of liam’s office. At first he pays her no attention, but then something deep in his eyes comes on and he sees her. She gets him to let go of the sons, who hobble off, screaming.
Jason murmurs something to her about Michaela being right. And after all, she’s the only one who can kill him. End this, he begs her, giving her a gun.
Az throws the gun down. “No effing way,” she says. “We didn’t get this far believing stupid prophecies, Jason.” And she thinks back to what the woman said, that they are powerful and that if they cling to their good intentions and their humanity, they cannot go wrong.
Jason tells her that she has no idea what he is. He tells her that for the Sons, he killed people. Lots of people. After the sorority girls. He killed anton. He is absolutely evil.
“No,” she says. “No, you’re not. Nothing about you is evil.” And she kisses him.
And suddenly, the sounds of gunfire fills their ears. Screams. Etc.
They open the door to liam’s office. Inside, he and all the councilmembers with him have shot themselves.
Marlena appears at this point, out of breath, and reports that everybody she’s seen just spontaneously committed suicide.
Okay—flash to end.
Mina razzing Az about her loud orgasms. “Oh, God. Can you hold the baby? She only gets quiet for you or Jason.”
Hey. Some little powers were hard to let go of.
The Unexpected Romance of Hallam and Marlena
Someone has mentioned to me that they'd like to know exactly how Marlena and Hallam started dating. While I don't think I've quite got the energy to write a full-blown story about it (although you are perfectly welcome to do so if you'd like), I did think I'd explain exactly how the pairing of the two of them came about. Originally, I didn't plan for Lilith to come back in Trembling. Instead, I was going to have Azazel be jealous of Marlena, who I wanted to bring back. I love Marlena as a character. She's probably my favorite character in the entire series. And I hated that I only got to write a few short scenes with her in Breathless. So, I'd always been searching for ways to bring her character back.
Anyway, I thought Marlena would be living with them in Florida, and I toyed with the idea of having her be working for the Sons. I wasn't too sure of her in Breathless. It did seem awfully convenient that the Sons found Jason and Azazel in her apartment. I thought that she and Hallam would be dating, but both secretly working for the Sons.
I even wrote my first outline for Trembling with all of this in mind. But then I started thinking about it, and I realized that the Sons would never employ a woman, and what was more, I couldn't see Hallam, who'd been so gung-ho for celibacy in the first book, suddenly doing an about-face and living with a woman. So, I took Marlena off the outline and stuck in Lilith instead. Which turned out to be loads of fun, and I'm glad that I did.
If you read the first two outlines of Tortured, you know I didn't intend for Marlena to show up in this book either. But once an idea for her to show up presented itself, I had to take it. Hallam was on my second outline for Tortured. He was going to come back and tell Jason that Anton wasn't even dead—that Edgar had faked Anton's death to twist Jason even more. But I decided that Edgar was actually too much of a dick not to consider Anton expendable. And on top of all that, in the first draft of Trembling, Jason not only told Hallam he never wanted to see him again, but shot off his knee caps.
So, when I thought of Hallam coming back, I figured, if he did, he'd have to be in a wheelchair or walking with a cane or something. And I didn't intend for him to come back at all.
What happened? Well, Azazel gets herself into really frustrating situations sometimes, and then I have to figure out a way to get her out of them. In Tortured, she went running out of her grandmother's house wearing a nightgown. I got her to New York City through the kindness of strangers. I thought that once she was there, she'd remember how to get to Marlena's house. But once I had her walking around in the city, I realized that was next to impossible. There was no way a girl from West Virginia would remember how to find an apartment in New York City. I wouldn't be able to do it. I didn't know what I was going to do. Then I remembered that Azazel had Father Gerald's phone number in her nightgown.
I had her call Hallam. But because Hallam was a cripple, I didn't let him answer the phone, because he wouldn't have been much help. Also, I wanted to amp the feeling of despair there. I don't like to make anything easy for Azazel, especially after she's just pulled a stunt like that. (Seriously, Azazel, couldn't you have stolen Grandma Hoyt's car or gone upstairs for a change of clothes and some cash?)
Then I completely forgot that Hallam was a cripple and had him show up at the Sons' headquarters after he got Azazel's message. Suddenly, I remembered my initial plan to make Hallam and Marlena date. It was perfect!
A week after I finished the first draft, I remembered that Hallam was supposed to be a cripple. Since it was easier to rewrite the scene in Trembling, I just took it out. Besides, it made Jason look like a bigger dick than he needed to look.
I'm not really sure how the courtship between Hallam and Marlena went. I imagine that they both have family in southern Wales, and they bonded over their shared heritage. Furthermore, I imagine they swapped stories about Jason as a kid. Then, once they both knew that Jason was going to live in New Jersey, I imagine they both wanted to be close to him to look after him. I think Marlena probably made all the first moves. I imagine that she had to teach Hallam how to kiss, because he was horrible kisser. And I think that they're a good fit, since they really do have a lot in common. Someday in the distant future, I'm sure they'll have little kids with British accents, which will be the most adorable thing (because there's nothing cuter than little kids who have British accents).
On Violence and Sexuality in Teen Literature
Wherein the Author Makes Lots of Excuses for Her Books
Violence
When I was a little kid, my favorite books were ones by J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. What really, really got me about both of those authors was that their books dealt with a pervasive sense of evil. Lewis had the kiddy version, with characters like Edmund and Eustace, who eventually come to redemption through forgiveness. Tolkien, however, had the ring, a nasty little bauble that turned the wearer into something monstrous. From a formative age, I've never been able to shake the way I felt when Bilbo and Gandalf have the last conversation before Bilbo leaves the Shire, and Bilbo doesn't want to leave the ring behind. Whenever he calls it "my precious," I get chills.
I guess there's probably nothing that I've written where the pervasiveness of evil doesn't factor into
my work, but it's maybe the most obvious here in The Jason and Azazel Trilogy. You see, the issue that I have as a grown-up is that, now, I don't really believe in evil, in much the same way as Azazel's parents don't. When I write bad guys in my books, I try to give them reasons for doing what they do—I don't simply call them evil and leave it at that. I truly believe that the real world is more complicated than that.
What I wanted to do in these books was to play with this idea for as long as I possibly could. Jason and Azazel don't believe in evil. At least, they don't believe in the pure, unadulterated kind. And they desperately don't want to believe that they don't have a choice.
That was maybe what bothered me the most about the ring in The Lord of the Rings. It was just an evil ring, through and through. You couldn't use it for good, even if you wanted to. No. It had to be destroyed. As a kid, I was particularly bothered by this idea, because I really thought it would be cool to have an invisibility ring, and I didn't see why it had to be such a bad thing. Why couldn't the ring be cool?
Throughout my life I was drawn to stories that revisited this same theme. I remember being somewhat enraptured by Heart of Darkness in high school. Kurtz was like Bilbo or Frodo, going in with the best of intentions, only to be twisted by darkness. So were the boys in Lord of the Flies. In Orwell's work, the people were twisted by the evils of totalitarian government. Always, it was the same. "Some things," intoned the authors of books far and wide, "are simply bad."
But I don't think that. Really, I don't. I think people go to war with good intentions. I think serial killers rationalize away their atrocities. I think Hitler really believed he was doing good stuff for the German people. And I also think that people make their own choices. Rings don't make people evil. Neither do jungles.
So, I set out to test my theory. Could I expose two people to the most evil things I could throw at them, and have them come out on the other side still essentially human?
Somewhere towards the end of Trembling, I wasn't so sure anymore.
I'm not sure if I think that the choices Jason and Azazel made were the best ones throughout the books. Certain scenes turned my stomach and disturbed me more than I wanted to admit to myself. When Azazel shot Lilith in the head, I looked at pictures of people who'd been shot in the head at close range in an attempt to try to describe it. I may never get those images out of my head. But one thing I do know for sure. I forgive Jason and Azazel for what they did. I hope, if I've done my job correctly, you do too.
Now, what's this got to do with teenagers? Lots of people seem to think that teenagers are really, really stupid. They think that if you show teenagers a bunch of violent movies, let them listen to death metal, and give them some zombie video games, they will all start pulling Columbines or killing themselves. If there's any credence to an argument like this, it's simply that violence shown in popular entertainment is often unrealistic and that there are never any consequences for the violence. I learned a long time ago, when Joss Whedon brought Buffy back from the dead in season six, that you can do anything you want in a story, but you have to earn it. So, fine. I let Jason and Azazel get off completely scot-free from the authorities. But I screwed up their heads as much as I could.
Jason deals with his own violence by burying it. Nothing helps him do this better than intimate contact with Azazel, which is why he jumps her several times. And sometimes, I think he tries to channel whatever he's feeling into sex, and I think he gets a little scary then. It isn't until this book that Jason ever deals with any of what he's done, and the first step for him is admitting to Azazel that he killed Anton. Azazel forgives Jason everything he's ever done. She loves Jason unconditionally.
Azazel can't bury what she's done. She tries, but she can't stop thinking about it. When she doesn't think about it, she dreams about it. She lives in a near-constant agony.
All I was trying to do was make sure my story seemed somewhat believable on a certain level. Oddly enough, I seem to have cemented by theme and answered the questions I asked at the beginning of the trilogy. Evil doesn't exist in and of itself, but it can arise from the consequences to the choices people make. And the more a person takes away another person's choice, the more likely it is that evil will follow. Is that something I think teenagers should think about? Well, heck yes. That's the kind of stuff I beg them to think about when I teach literature.
Sexuality
Breathless got a mention on a pretty big Twilight site at one point. A few of the readers on that site denounced the book as being all about sex, which they thought was absolutely horrible.
I didn't understand that, because when I was a teenager, all I thought about was sex. Like constantly. And I always felt weird about it, because I was a girl, and girls, as I understood it, were not supposed to think about such things. So on one level, I suppose there's so much sex in the trilogy because I thought it was interesting when I was sixteen and because I still find sex interesting.
On another level, I don't think there's anything wrong with sex. In fact, I think sex is good. I'm not sure why our culture has this silly idea that teenagers aren't ready to hear about such things. During most of history, people have been getting married in their teens. My own grandmother was married when she was Azazel's age and pregnant with her first kid. And that was only in the 1940s. It's kind of ludicrous to think that just because our culture tells people to get married later that our natural instincts will also kick in later. They won't.
Thirdly, I was vaguely disturbed by messages I was receiving from various book series which featured girls in relationships with older guys. In those relationships, the girl wanted to have sex, but the guy didn't. In fact, at least two different teen series featured a main character sleeping in the same bed with a guy but not having sex because the guy didn’t want to. These were committed, serious relationships between two kids who were in love. And the guy was saying no?
I didn't like it, and I wasn't totally sure why. On the one hand, it was completely unrealistic. Crawling into bed with someone you are sexually attracted to and expecting not to have sex was a recipe for disaster. Girls needed to know two things about that situation, I thought. One was that if they weren't ready to have sex, they shouldn't put themselves in such an intimate situation. Two was that they were the only people who could decide if they were ready. Their boyfriends could not decide for them. Expecting a guy to have restraint in a situation like that was pretty silly. It was also kind of dangerous, I thought. I really didn't want to write a book like that. At all.
But the real issue I had with it, I guess, was that it perpetuated a stereotype that romance novels have been perpetuating for years. The idea was that men were more sexually knowledgeable and mature than women were. When I was a teenager, I read countless paperback bodice-rippers in which a virginal woman went to the bed of a man and he "taught her the ways of pleasure" after a brief sensation of pain at the beginning. I was sorely disappointed when I actually had sex and my boyfriend not only didn't teach me any "ways of pleasure," but was completely clueless about my anatomy. Plus, it hurt the whole time.
I didn't want to write books that made girls feel the way I did about sex when I was seventeen. That's why the third book is all about orgasms.
I don't want to write teenage erotica. There's enough adult erotica, and if a teenager really wants it, she can find it herself. So, I made a purposeful decision that there would never be any onscreen sex in the trilogy. I set up the scenes and then I cut away. However, I did choose to leave the orgasm scene on screen. I didn't spend time in the book explaining how to have an orgasm. I felt that this was something, again, that a girl could seek out information about on her own (but I did want her to feel that she should seek out this information, and that it was her responsibility to do so, and that, above all, it was her right to have orgasms.) Still, I think it's pretty obvious in that scene what happens. I only hope it's not tawdry. If teen girls are discouraged from expressing sexual desires in our culture, then they're doubly d
iscouraged from talking about orgasms.
I couldn't figure out how to be comfortable enough in my own skin to broach the topic with a boyfriend until I was in my twenties. I just hope that teenage girls today don't have to feel that way. "Express yourself, don't repress yourself," as Madonna put it.
Apocalypse Trilogy Extras
Afterword
Of all the stories that I've written, none has more deeply challenged and disturbed me than the Jason and Azazel books. While often, returning to these characters' struggles and triumphs has given me a sense of euphoria and excitement, I've been plagued throughout with questions of the actual morality of the stories.
It seems that other people reading them have had similar reactions. Many people write to me saying things like, "I don't know what's wrong with me. I must be a really twisted person, but I just want Jason and Azazel together." Other people leave reviews or comments decrying the books as devoid of moral value. And, in many ways, Jason and Azazel are responsible for my exit from the teaching profession—both because income from the books (and almost entirely those books, even though I've written lots of others) made it possible for me to feel financially secure enough to go it on my own, and because the fact that the books deal with Satanism made certain parents so angry that they put enough pressure on the school system and me to make me too uncomfortable to remain working there.
While I am relatively sure that the people who didn't want me teaching their children never read my books, I'm also uncomfortable pointing at them as proof that I am indeed a deeply moral person. It's not because I don't believe that I am very moral. I am. I have a strong sense of what's right and wrong. But for some reason, I've always been drawn to stories that call morality into question.
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