by Ramy Vance
I turned and looked him in the eyes. He was back to his human self now. Next to him stood Deirdre, cradling her arm. She nodded in agreement.
If the two of them could forgive Enoch enough to return his soul, then so could I.
Walking over, I handed Michael the jar. “Don’t make me regret this.”
The archangel nodded before putting two delicate fingers over the jar’s opening. The mouth opened just wide enough for his massive fingers—like it was always that large an opening.
Michael’s fingers rested inside for a moment before he pulled out Enoch’s soul like he was teasing out a delicate thread from an intricate quilt. Unlike other souls, which have a silvery, off-white effervescent glow to them, Enoch’s was pure white. “God asked me to find a human worthy to serve him,” Michael said as he held Enoch’s soul. The white energy bustled like it was trying to escape. “And I searched for that human. I did not only search the present, but went to Father Time, asking the old man to help me search all times.
“In all time, amongst all the humans born and to be born, I only found one soul truly good enough to serve. One.” The white energy grew more frantic, unstable. Looking closer at Michael’s hand, I saw flakes of angelic skin burn off as several pustules swelled, threating to burst. The soul was scorching his hand, not that the archangel gave any sign he was in pain. “One—yours!”
Michael’s voice boomed that last word like the Punisher does when he’s about to do something particularly nasty and vengeful.
“So, God sought to test my choice. It was not an accident that Oche fell upon your home. It was no coincidence that the Nephilim happened upon you when tending to the dead. It was one last test, all to see if this”—he held Enoch’s soul up—“was worthy of Him.”
Without another word, Michael brought down the soul on Enoch. He was reuniting the man with what he had lost and, because I’m human and use my mouth to eat, I figured that was the orifice he’d use to get the soul into him.
But Michael didn’t place the soul in Enoch’s mouth. He poured it through the man’s eyes. With screaming rage, Enoch’s soul seeped back into the human. “You think the gods left you behind as a punishment,” Michael boomed. “After eons of divinity, you are still a limited mortal, confused by their ways. The gods did not leave you behind because they were displeased with you. They left you behind as a reward. A final release from servitude. A second chance to live your life as was intended. Mortal, human and complete.”
The man stopped struggling. Once the light was fully absorbed, he sat on his knees, his head down as human tears dripped on the hot concrete before him.
“Your soul was their parting gift, Enoch. And my only hope for you is that now that you are complete, you will finally understand.”
Enoch, now whole, burst into tears and wails of unbearable pain.
Oche dropped from the sky to be by his master’s side. “What did you do?”
“What I had to,” Michael answered.
“No. No, he does not deserve this anguish. He is the best of us all.” And with tear-laden eyes, he looked at me. “You … you did this.”
With speed beyond anything I had known possible, Oche picked up the stone that I had intended to use to destroy the jar and threw it at me.
Right at my head.
Goodbye my Lovers
When I woke up, I was in a hospital bed. There was an angel standing over me. As in a literal angel.
“Am I dead?” I asked.
“Stop being so dramatic, girl,” a familiar voice said. “You’re just waking up from a coma.”
“A long one,” the angel said and as soon as I heard her voice I realized who I was looking at. Miral … the angel from the battle. Of course, now she looked different, having traded her sword for a stetascope.
“What … what happeend?”
“Oche hit you in the head with a rock,” Egya said, taking my hand in his. “Good shot. Something that would have killed you if it wasn’t for Miral here, you’d be dead.”
“Did you..?” I touched my head. There were bandaids wrapped around my skull and it was tender to the touch.
Miral nodded. “Not much. Just enough to keep you alive. The rest was up to your natural healing abilities. You’re not out of the woods yet,” she was testing my blood pressure as she spoke. “You’ll need bed rest for a few days, but you’ll be on your feet in no time.”
“How long was I out?” I asked.
No one answered, which was troubling enough. But when even Egya didn’t have a witty quip, that’s when I really started to worry.
“How long?” I repeated.
“Four weeks,” Miral finally said.
“Four weeks? That means that—”
“Valentine’s is just around the corner,” Egya chuckled.
I smiled at the Ghanian. ‘Thank the GoneGods … he was still annoying.’
↔
I spent the next three days in bed, catching up on everything that happened. I had been knocked out. Oche and Enoch, seeing that they had lost, surrendered the Soul Jar over to Michael.
And I had been playing Sleeping Beauty for the last few weeks with Egya, Aldie and Deirdre refusing to leave my side.
Friends to the end.
On my last day in the hospital, I got a visitor … someone I had been expecting for some time now.
Michael hunched over as he entered my hospital room and stared at me with overbearing silence.
“I suppose you want to know my story?”
He shook his head. “The annoying hyena man told me all.”
“So why are you here?” I asked.
“To thank you.”
“For what?”
“For honoring my brother’s wishes,” he said with a deadly seriousness.
“Yeah, Gabriel was a good guy.”
“And a fool,” Michael said, nodding.
“I don’t know about that. If he was a fool, then aren’t we all? After all, you really do believe that the gods abandoning the Others on Earth was a gift?”
Michael sighed, looked around the room for a place to sit and not seeing one, resigned himself to standing before he finally said, “I have to. I have seen the face of good. Served Him with every fiber of my being. I have to believe that this,” gestures around him, “is either my reward or one more way to serve. Perhaps both.”
“You’re pretty naïve for you age.”
Michael looks down at me and at first I thought I had pissed him off. Again. Then he bellowed out in laughter, sending thumbing reverberating base through me, “Perhaps. But the naïve part of me is also the happy part of me.”
“Always look at the bright side of your life,” I hummed.
“Excuse me?”
“Not a Monty Python fan? Nevermind then … what’s the not so happy part?” but if Michael had an answer he didn’t share it. Instead, he said, “Enoch is dying. Cancer. I now understand why he is so bitter.”
“We’re all dying, Michael,” I said. “Some of us faster than others … but we’re all dust in the end.”
“As it was intended to be.”
“Sure,” I agreed. “If that floats your boat, then, yeah … as it was intended to be.”
↔
We went to the airport later that day. Aldie was already there, with a ticket to Melbourne in his hand. “My next seminar,” he said, shyly.
I gave my ex a big hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you. For everything.”
“All part of my purpose,” he said, before snapping his fingers twice and adding, “You really should attend one of our weekend getaway seminars. The next one is on how to embrace your mythical past and use it to help mold your epic future. We have a ton of inspirational speakers: Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyon, the Jolly Green Giant. And, oh! the minotaur that guarded Mino’s Labyrinth will give the keynote on how he turned his legendary riddles into the world’s leading Escape Room experience. He made a mint riding that wave. So, you in?”
He gave me that
look of his … the one that says there’s always a good reason for everything, even drowning in lava. ‘At least you’d be warm,’ I thought.
“Excuse me?” he said, confusion on his face.
“Never mind.” I shook my head. “You’re just …” I looked deep into his impossibly blue eyes and sighed. Why fight it? “You’re just rubbing off on me.”
“So, you’ll come?”
“Maybe. I’ll come to one of your events. Eventually.”
“Excellent.” He clicked his heels like Dorothy ruby-slippering her way home, and taking my arm, helped me onto the tram. “I’ll put you on our mailing list. Lots of value-add content in there. Lots.”
“I’m sure,” I said, stopping before security. Then, turning around, I gave him one more goodbye kiss, this one on the lips. “Thank you, Aldie. You are …” I searched for the words until I found the perfect ones. “You just are.”
His expression lit up with a smile that threatened to split his face in two. “Thank you, Katrina. That is truly a great compliment, coming from you.”
Hello My Lover
Egya, Deirdre and I returned to Montreal by coach, and what I was praying would be a normal life. We started our journey in first class, continued it in a private plane and, now that it was over, it felt right to fly home in the style that most people do. I’m not saying that first-class flights and private planes are bad, but if the people who have that kind of luxury go through the kind of shit we just went through on a regular basis, then give me economy class any day of the week.
Back home, we hired a taxi and made our way to campus. Egya and Deirdre walked up to the dorm, but I wanted a few minutes to myself. I needed a walk to clear my head and think about things. It was, after all, February 14th. I might have missed the first few weeks of school, but I had made it back in time for Valentine’s. Surprise, Justin!
Oh Justin … How I looked forward to seeing him and making my return his best Valentine’s ever—if you catch my oh-so-not-subtle-at-all drift. I could just see our reunion now. He’d say, “Kat, where have you been?” and I’d be all like, “Miss me, lover?” and he’d take me into his arms and everything would be OK. We’d make whoopee, as Ella puts it, and then I’d tell him everything. Everything, and we could roll the credits on our fairytale romance with the classic And they lived happily ever after clause.
Wishful thinking, I know, but I kind of felt like I deserved it. I had just saved the world … twice.
Off in the distance, a flock of birds was flying and diving and gliding in a manner that reminded me of Alfred Hitchcock’s’ classic horror, The Birds. And me, being me, I went over to investigate closer.
As I did, I continued to think about Justin and what the future had in store for us. I really wanted things to work out, but fairytale endings were few and far between in the GoneGod World. We’d most likely fight, and maybe worse.
Whatever our end, the last thing I expected was to see Justin holding another woman while fighting a flock of metal birds that circled the campus above.
What the hell did I miss here?
By
S.W. Clarke and Ramy Vance
Chapter 1
Even with five hundred years of immortality under my belt, I still couldn't apply lipstick right.
“Call me Isa,” I said to my reflection, pressing my lips together. “No one calls me by my full name.”
The girl who stared back at me widened her green eyes, adjusted one red curl back into her bun. The eyeshadow was too dark, the lips too red; after a year in this form, I still hadn’t mastered the right shades for Irish coloring.
“I’ll call you whatever you want,” Aimee said, stepping into my line of vision in the mirror, “but if you make us late for class because you’re pretending to be someone else again, I will play the Brazilian samba while you sleep.”
I shuddered, turning toward her. “Not the samba. The drums are like a giant’s footsteps on my eardrums.”
She grabbed her backpack off her bed, slung it over one shoulder. “Then get your Gabbana-Coach-cinnamon-swirl whatever, and let’s go.”
“It’s Dolce & Gabbana.” I swiped a hand through the straps of my handbag. It was the perfect size for all my needs: textbooks, notebooks, my laptop, and even a makeup bag. I was starting to like fashion. “And I think it suits me, don’t you?”
Of course, she thought the bag was a fake. How could I afford the real thing on a research assistant's wages? I hadn’t told her—or anyone—about what I had stashed away in my savings account. Five hundred years was a long time to save.
Regardless, even if Aimee knew something about fashion, she would have been too kind to point out a fake.
Aimee crossed to the door, surveyed me as she opened it. “For class? Isabella, you could go in your pajamas and you’d be a knockout.”
I offered her a faint smile as I passed through the door. She might have been right. After all, I knew what humans found “aesthetically pleasing,” and this form was it. The youth, the red hair, the green eyes, the 0.7 hip-to-width ratio.
And yet. I stepped into the hallway, found myself staring at Justin Truly in profile. Justin-Perfect-Truly, I always thought when I saw him. Black-haired, blue-eyed, lithe as a jaguar and twice as muscular.
Jaguar, I thought automatically. Kingdom: Animalia. Genus: Panthera. Class: Mammalia. Species: P. onca.
"Uh, Isa?" Aimee said, stepping in front of me. "We have to get better about that staring thing. It's a little creepy."
"He's a jaguar," I murmured. Men like that were an endangered species.
Justin hadn’t noticed me from where he stood, knocking on Katrina's door down the hall. No one answered. He straightened, and his eyes passed over Aimee and me. I waved, all my fingers moving separately.
He paused a half second, hitched his backpack up and started the opposite way down the hall.
"He didn't wave back," I said.
Aimee glanced the direction I was staring. "That wasn't a wave, Isa—you looked like you were casting a spell on him."
I smacked my forehead as Aimee laughed, turning us toward the stairwell. "Merda," I said. "I think I’m losing my touch now that I’m mortal."
"It's fine. He's really good looking," she said as we started down the stairs. "But don't talk about him being a jaguar anymore, OK?"
"OK," I said. "Hey, wait up!"
Aimee was barreling down the stairs like a dervish, pulling on her hat and gloves. By the time we hit the first stairwell she was already fully suited up, only her eyes and nose visible. “We’ll make it if we run," she called back to me, muffled through her scarf. "And not Isabella-running, either.”
I was taking the steps a pair at a time, and I was breathless by the time we emerged onto the street. “Hey,” I protested, “what does that mean?”
At that moment, the cold hit me like a wall. As a native Brazilian, I would never get used to Montreal winters.
"It means you're my best friend, but you run like a beached dolphin," Aimee said.
“Thank you.” I set one hand to my chest.
She glanced back. “Why are you thanking me?”
“In my culture, it’s an honor to be compared to a dolphin. They’re the most intelligent mammals in the ocean, not to mention how my kind resembles—“
“Isa,” she said. “Class. Stat.” And before I could finish soapboxing, she struck down the plowed sidewalk toward the Liberal Arts building. I ran after, and as we careened past people walking down the sidewalk, I regretted wearing these black boots with their spindly heels.
Turns out, a pretty pair of heels does nothing for functionality.
"Porra!" I yelled, sliding on the ice.
It was only when I heard a “Woah,” and felt a pair of hands catch me at the waist that I knew who had saved me.
My head turned, and I nearly melted into those blue eyes.
"You okay?" Justin-Perfect-Truly asked.
Aimee appeared next to us. “Sorry,” she whispered to him, grab
bing my hand and pulling me out of his arms. She always turned mousy and shy when we got outside. "We're going to be late for class."
And we were off again. "Curse you," I said. Suddenly I could have cared less about English 101. You'd think since I was fluent in all the Romance languages (and a few others, to boot) I’d have tested out of the class. Turns out, if you’re an Other, you don’t get that option; as a sophomore, they had finally graduated me from English as a Second Language into the standard classes. "That could have been my chance at love."
"Trust me, Isa," Aimee said breathlessly, "you'll find love again."
I could only glance back to where Justin stood looking after us, both hands raised as though he’d been offered free samples at a Chinese restaurant in a mall food court.
He seemed awfully sad these days. Cute-sad, but sad nonetheless.
And as Aimee and I rushed into our English class and slipped into our seats, I couldn’t help but wonder if that sadness had to do with Katrina Darling.
The auburn-haired, fashion dynamo had been missing since the start of the semester. Today, like every other day for the last three weeks, her seat in front of me remained as empty as ever.
↔
It wasn’t any of my business what had happened to Katrina. We weren’t friends, or even acquaintances. The most she’d ever said to me was “Thanks,” when I passed her the syllabus on the first day of English 101.
And yet.
Maybe it was how boring our professor was, or the fact that I would get an A even if I happened to miss the next month of lectures—hey, I was octolingual—but her absence fascinated me.
As the professor called roll again, and “Katrina Darling?” came out of his mouth to no reply, I did that thing that encantados do.
I began to imagine her life. My hand went to the amulet around my neck, and I rubbed at the teardrop crystal as I envisioned her somewhere in Europe, riding low on the back of a teal vespa and chucking ninja stars at the legion of ghouls chasing her. Her auburn hair would have whipped out of its bun and she would have on a pair of those tall leather boots I’d seen her wearing once last semester—did she ever wear anything twice, for that matter?—and even on that vespa, she’d look cool.