He closed his eyes too, he could clean himself up later. Right now, he was exactly where he needed to be. And that was in a small bed in a tiny apartment with the girl that called herself Leila Loudon.
They slept until mid-afternoon when the sun started to stream in through the dirty window. Leila awoke first, quickly opening her eyes and expecting to see an empty space beside her. But it wasn’t. Jerome laid there, his face a picture of serenity. She reached out and gently stroked his cheek, making sure he was real. Everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours seemed like it could be a dream. Angels weren’t meant to exist and they certainly weren’t meant to be lying right before her eyes.
His skin was soft like a feather and so smooth it could be made of porcelain. She couldn’t stop the smile spreading across her face. Not only was he nice to touch, but good to look at too. If the world wasn’t in such a terrible state, she might even daydream about his light blue eyes with their thick eyelashes and his luscious locks. She wanted to run her hands through his hair, it would probably be silky smooth just like his skin. She didn’t dare though, she didn’t want to wake him.
It was another fourteen minutes before Jerome opened his eyes. He didn’t wake as peacefully as her. His eyes flew open and he immediately sat up, ready to move quickly and fight if need be. His heart was pounding in his chest.
“What’s wrong?” Leila asked with concern. He had gone from soundly sleeping to a hyper state in under a second.
“I don’t know, I guess I panicked. I wasn’t expecting to be here,” he shook his head, rubbing his eyes to adjust to the afternoon sun. “I need to get going. I fulfilled my promise to you. I am released now.”
“I’m not going to go through this with you again,” she rolled her eyes. “I’m helping you. Full stop and enough said. Now, what’s the plan?”
“It will be dangerous.”
“And you’ll protect me.”
“I can’t guarantee you’ll come back alive.”
“You’re not scaring me. It’s just as dangerous to stay here.”
It was a good point. Jerome sighed, resigning himself to the fact he was going to have an offsider whether he liked it or not. If he was being completely honest, he didn’t mind. The girl fascinated him and he didn’t want to leave her by herself. Whatever danger he was getting himself into, at least he would be able to keep an eye on her. It wouldn’t be much, but it was something. He had no idea why, but he felt such a strong urge to protect her that he couldn’t switch it off.
“Fine. You can help.”
Leila had waited all day to hear those four words. “Good. First step is cleaning you up.”
“How’s your head?”
“Much better. I think I’ll live.”
“Good to know,” Jerome smiled. He waited while she got out the horrid ointment and water again. She spent the next hour pulling out glass and shrapnel from his neck and arms. He didn’t feel much pain, his body already starting to heal. Each time she fished out a piece, it was a mere pinprick on his skin. Or perhaps it was the way he couldn’t stop watching her that made it feel painless.
As she finished, his mind wandered to what he needed to do next. When he had left that morning, he had no idea where he was going. All he planned was to get away from the apartment. He had hoped the answer would become clear, perhaps a sign from above would show him what he had to do. Yet it hadn’t happened. For all intents and purposes, Jerome was on his own.
“So where do we go now?” Leila asked, ready to embark on the journey no matter where they were going. She didn’t have anything to keep her there, not one tiny thing.
“I don’t know,” he had to admit in the silence. “I need to get home but I think I was sent here for a reason.”
“I thought you said you fell here.”
“I did, but perhaps it happened for a reason,” Jerome had been thinking about it ever since the attack. To the best of his knowledge, no angel had fallen to Earth before. He didn’t even know it was possible without the council’s involvement. He doubted anyone even had the knowledge to leave the village, let alone the nerve to actually do it.
That only left one option – someone wanted him to fall to Earth. It probably wasn’t council sanctioned, but whoever did it was powerful enough to make it happen. That meant he had a purpose on Earth. He was supposed to do something important and he couldn’t run home without carrying out the mission.
“What’s the reason then?”
“That’s the question, I don’t know,” he could only speculate, wishing someone had let him in on the master plan before they made him fall.
“Well, what were you doing before you fell yesterday?” Leila prompted, hoping to spark some kind of memory that would have it all make sense. They needed a north star, something to guide them somewhere, anywhere.
“I went to the council.”
“What for?”
“I wanted them to ask humans to help us fight the war.” As the words escaped his mouth, they now sounded so foolish. The humans were busy fighting their own war, they wouldn’t be interested in fighting another. Especially when they were up against demons.
“The war against the demons?” She waited for the head nod before she went on. “How could we help?”
“I wasn’t sure. I just figured we might be able to work out something. It doesn’t sound so smart now.”
Leila, on the other hand, thought differently. “Are you kidding? Can’t you see what’s happening? The demons are killing the guardian angels. Without angels, nobody is protecting us. Without protection, we aren’t being guided by the forces of good. Your demons are attacking us too in a roundabout way.”
Jerome tried to take in the words. He hadn’t considered the impact the angel war was having on the humans. But she was right. Their numbers were significantly reduced, there wasn’t nearly enough to protect even a fraction of Earth’s population now. With the humans exposed, the demons could easily influence them to commit all sorts of evil acts. Their war was one and the same.
“We need to all fight together,” Jerome said resolutely. “If we don’t then both our worlds will be taken over by demons.”
“And they’ll slowly kill us all.”
They sat in silence on the bed letting the words sink in. The situation was terrible, in both the village and on Earth. If someone didn’t do something to stop it, it would just worsen until they were completely destroyed. The world as they knew it would no longer exist, demons would take over. In other words, hell would spill out and envelop them.
“Do you have any idea what to do?” Leila asked. No matter how much she thought about it, she didn’t have a clue how to fix anything. She was barely surviving herself, how she was meant to save the world was completely beyond her. Nothing she had done before was enough to save any of her friends or family, she wasn’t the best in judgment.
“I think I might,” Jerome replied, trying to reach memories he had thought long forgotten. Ever since the war had broken out, something had been niggling at the back of his mind. It was such a brief skerrick of a memory he wasn’t even sure if it was real. It could have been a made up fairy tale for all he knew, but he couldn’t stop thinking about it regardless.
“You want to share then?” The anticipation was killing her. If he had an idea, then she wanted to hear about it. They needed to get going.
“When I was little, my mother told me a story about a prophecy,” he started, trying to remember all the details. “She said a war would one day be waged against the angels. She didn’t say who would be behind it, but they were dangerous. It would be enough to kill off the entire angel population.”
“Your mother told you this as a bedtime story? It’s nightmare inducing.”
“Angels impart knowledge by telling stories to their kids. It’s not meant to make them feel good, it’s to pass on what they know,” he explained, ignoring her grimace. “So the prophecy warned it was coming but it didn’t say when or where. Just that it
would happen. I think the demons are the ones the prophecy was talking about. And if I’m right, then we’re all doomed.”
“There isn’t any way of winning? Surely we can’t just give up because someone predicted the future.”
“There was more to the prophecy but I can’t remember what it was. When my mother told me, she didn’t give me the complete details. She said it would make more sense when I was older.”
“You can’t ask her about it?”
“She didn’t make it.”
“Oh,” Leila looked at her hands, anywhere but at him. She thought about her own mother and how much she wished she was there to talk to. There wasn’t a day that went by when she didn’t miss her. “I’m sorry about your mom.”
“It’s okay, it just makes me more determined to do something. I don’t want my family’s deaths to be in vain. The demons can’t win.”
“No, they can’t,” she agreed. “So we need to find the prophecy. If it talks about the war, then it might say how we can fight back.”
“We’re talking about something centuries old. There’s no way we’ll be able to find it.”
“Anything can be found if you look hard enough.”
Jerome wasn’t convinced. As far as he knew, it was just a story handed down verbally from parents to their children. There was nothing to say it was on Earth or even tangible. “Where would we even start looking?”
“I know just the place,” Leila grinned.
CHAPTER 4
When society started to break down eighteen months ago, there were a few unspoken rules people followed. One was that they wouldn’t make the world’s national treasures collateral damage in the violence. That meant the ancient monuments and museums were off limits and somewhat of a safe haven. Leila would spend hours hiding in the Aron City Museum at the beginning. When her family was all gone, it was the only place she still felt safe.
That was more than a year ago and all rules were long forgotten now. As the violence escalated, people didn’t care anymore. What good was an Egyptian mummy when they were fighting for their lives? The reasons for holding onto the past were no longer important.
When Leila walked through the corridors of the museum now, she was almost numb to the sense of loss she used to feel. The whole place was in disarray. What used to be the shining pride of the community was now cluttered with debris and broken exhibits. They would never be able to salvage all the history that died there.
“Why did you bring me here?” Jerome asked as he tried to avoid stepping on a piece of priceless china. There didn’t appear to be anything important hidden underneath the dust.
“Because we need to find something old. The museum has the oldest stuff out of anywhere.” To her, it seemed logical. If you needed something ancient, you go to the big building that housed all the old stuff. It was like going to the supermarket for food – you just assumed it would be there.
“What if we get caught?” He regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth. The look of disbelief he earned for it was enough to give him an answer. There was nobody guarding the museum, there was nobody guarding anything anymore.
They started their search at the back of the museum. The layout was like a timeline. The further you got from the entrance, the later in time the artifacts were dated. And they needed to find the most ancient of them all.
After three continuous hours of looking through piles of debris and dislodging tonnes of dust, Jerome started to grow weary. He wasn’t convinced there was anything to find, perhaps they were just wasting time and energy.
“How can we find something that we don’t even know what it looks like or even exists?” He asked, not expecting an answer.
“We stay positive.” The voice came from behind a broken display, its glass lying on the floor surrounding it. Leila was in amongst it somewhere, getting her hands and clothes filthy dirty, no doubt.
Jerome sighed and kept going, but only for lack of a better plan. They were up to the section on Ancient Greece, slowly making their way through the evolution of the world. He didn’t understand most of it, he hadn’t even heard of a lot of it. They didn’t exactly focus on Earth’s history in school, it’s not important to protecting the current day humans.
When six o’clock ticked over, Jerome’s eye caught something familiar. Lying on its side in a smashed casing was a statue of a Greek God. The little warrior was still intact, he held a spear in one hand and a shield in the other. Jerome picked it up, blowing off the dust that had settled on it.
“What’s that?” Leila asked, joining him. She wouldn’t admit it, but she was more than ready to give up the search. In the very least, she was happy to have a momentary distraction.
“It’s a statue.”
“I can see that, it’s like every other one of the hundreds of statues here. Why are you looking at that particular one?”
“I’ve seen it before.”
Leila was disheartened, she had hoped he would have a better reason for stopping. Perhaps he was just tired of the fruitless search too. “I’ve seen it before too, about a thousand times in this room alone.”
Jerome was distracted, trying to recall a memory from a few years ago. “No, this actual statute. There’s one just like it in the council building in my village.”
“In the angel world?” Now, he had her attention.
“Yeah.”
He handed it to her so she could get a better look herself. It was heavy, far heavier than expected just by the looks of it. Apart from its weight, however, there was nothing distinguishable about the stone statue.
“It must just be a coincidence then,” Leila concluded, handing it back. “We should keep looking.”
Jerome smiled, relishing the information she didn’t know. “There’s a secret compartment.”
“What?” She did a double take, unsure if she had heard right. “Where?” She took the statue back and examined it more closely. Running her hands across the stone, she couldn’t feel anything but the smooth rock. “This is solid, there’s no compartment.”
“There is, you just have to know where to look.” He turned the statue over in her hands and pointed to the God’s back. So tiny that it was barely visible to the naked eye, was a series of symbols. They both had to squint and find some light to see them properly.
“So there’s symbols, it doesn’t mean there’s a secret compartment,” Leila pointed out. She handed back the statue, still believing they should go back to their search.
“Watch this,” Jerome commanded. Using both his hands, he turned the head of the God. It took nearly all his strength, but he managed to rotate it completely around and then back again. “When the symbols align, the head will completely come off. And then you will see the secret compartment.”
Leila couldn’t even talk she was so surprised. She hadn’t felt any of the grooves in the neck with her fingers, no wonder even the experts hadn’t discovered its secrets.
“So make the symbols align and let’s open it.” She was impatient so see what was inside, if anything.
“It’s a code, you have to work out the correct combination.”
“Well, what was the code on the one at the council building?”
“I don’t know.”
They both grimaced at the statue, wishing it was able to speak on its own behalf and tell them what the correct code was. Examining the number of symbols, there could be hundreds of ways to organize them. If they were going to randomly try and guess, it would take a decade to try them all.
“I don’t know about you, but I am so tired I could fall over,” Leila sighed. “Do you want to call it a night? We can come back tomorrow.”
“Sounds good, but I’m taking the statue with me.”
“Of course, nobody is going to miss it.”
They made their way through the quiet museum and locked the door behind them. It wouldn’t restore the prestige of the place, but perhaps it would slow someone down when they tried to vandalize it next time. It was
all they could do.
The streets were practically deserted at that time of night. As soon as darkness fell, people retreated to their safe places. That was normally something as flimsy as a makeshift tent in an alleyway or the shell of a house that had been set alight. They went anywhere there weren’t people that could hurt, maim, or kill them. Leila and Jerome stalked the streets without being seen by a single set of eyes.
The apartment seemed even smaller with the angel inside, his wings touched the walls no matter where he stood. Several times Leila had to duck underneath them to get around. The grey feathers tickled her face every time.
They spent the evening staring at the statue and studying the symbols around the warrior’s neck. There were suns, moons, mathematical symbols, eyes, and weird things that neither of them even recognized. They were nonsensical, there appeared to be absolutely no correlation between any of them.
“Alexander would be able to figure this out,” Jerome said, staring into the statue’s face and wishing it could talk. “He opened the one in the council building. It’s the only reason I know about the secret compartment.”
“Is Alexander your friend?”
“Yeah, you could say that. He saved my life only the other day.”
Leila nodded, deep in thought. She used to have friends too, but that seemed like an eternity ago now. Some had been killed, some had been the killers, and some were probably in hiding now too. Wherever they were, they weren’t friends anymore. Leila doubted she would trust any of them if she saw them now. Too much time had passed, people changed.
“Did I say something wrong?” Jerome asked, fearing the silence and the sadness in her eyes was because of him.
“No, I was just remembering,” she tried to make her lips smile but they would only go halfway. “It’s a pity we can’t call Alexander and ask him what the code is. We can’t, right?”
World Without Angels Page 4