Glory Reborn

by Sherry L. Brown

  I’ve got a renewed purpose. And there’s just one man I know who will track down answers.

  I hesitate though, at the entrance to Gray’s office. What demands can I make of him? Do I really think he’s powerful enough to figure out who Indy’s dad is? Yes. I do.

  Last time we talked, he was working to find places for the people in Rick’s pack.

  I hear his voice clearly through the door.

  “I’ll take Glory and Indy. They’re already both here.” A pause. He’s on the phone.

  “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

  Intrigued now, I turn my head so my right ear is closer to the door. It’s my good ear.

  “No. Neither of them know.”

  Grayson’s got secrets. I shouldn’t be surprised. But I never would have thought they’d pertain to me. To my sisters.

  “Just take care of her. Cement her loyalties to us.”

  Who is ‘us?’ The council? Who is he taking care of? If Gray’s got me and Indy, that leaves only Justice unprotected.

  I step back from the door. Quietly.

  Retrace my steps to the kitchen, finding my cell phone on it’s charger.

  “Gretch? Will you hang with Indy for a while? I’ve got to make a run.” I drop my phone into the depths of my purse.

  I catch her assurance, morphed into a question as I sweep out the room. In the garage, Marc is at the work bench against the far wall, some metal part in his hands. His motorcycle in the last stall, up on a lift. His head turns to me, and a smile appears. All the bays are open.

  I give him a wave. “Just making a run down to O’Keefes!” I hope that’s a plausible lie. O’Keefe’s is my favorite nursery.

  I hop into my sporty luxury SUV - thanks Gray - and hit the push button start.

  Backing out of the drive, I say, “Call Justice.”

  The navigation screen lights up with the phone icon, while the ringing reverberates around the space. Once. Twice. Three times. Four. Five.

  My core tightens, my hands grip the steering wheel. I slow at the gate, impatiently waiting for it to slide open.

  “FUCK!” I yell. Frustrated by the slow progress. Knowing that something is wrong with my sister.

  Knowing in my heart that she’s not at home.

  Why didn’t I pay more attention? Of course Gray had plans for us. That’s all he bloody does is plan! And we all stepped so neatly into them.

  I punch it when the wheels hit the highway asphalt. The car accelerates with smoothness. I’m taking turns at speeds I’ve never. Only in my youth. Only until it got me in trouble.

  I’m in a much safer, much more agile vehicle now. My brain argues.

  I know these roads. And I know how quickly knowledge can work against you. I slow fractionally, turning memories over in my mind. Turning the half of a conversation I’d overheard in my mind.

  Where was Justice? Why do they need our loyalties? What do we not know?

  The last. Not knowing. For some reason that burns hottest in my stomach.

  Gray is another version of my mother. Holding and releasing information whenever it pleases him. I’d been complacent. In both cases.

  Hate for myself. Hate for him. Hate for her. I feel it in my deepest reaches.

  “Call Justice.” I try again. Forty five minutes have gone by. It's not unusual for her to miss one of my calls. She’ll text back if she’s at work.

  It’ll take three hours to get down to the Springs. If I go the back roads. Or I could chance it through Denver. It’s not even two yet. I’d beat rush hour.

  Two hours in, and the dash lights up with an incoming call. It’s Grayson.

  “Glory.”

  “Grayson.” I return.

  “Your sister is not in Colorado Springs.”

  He confirms my suspicion.

  “No. She’s alright? Safe?” I ask.

  “Yes. Come home and we’ll talk.”

  We are both silent on the line after his statement. Can he sense my anger at him?

  I am not turning around. Something is pulling me to the house. Something more than memories.

  Answers. That’s what I’m looking for.

  “I’m sorry, Grayson.” I’m apologizing for not being a wife to him.

  “Just turn around and come back to the house and we can figure things out.” He says. Can he tell my apology is for more than running out today?

  “Bye, Grayson.” I hit the end call button on the steering wheel. Satisfaction and freedom. I’m not falling into his plans, and I’ll never again go so blindly.

  There’s a finality to my goodbye. I’m not ready to analyze it yet, but I believe I might have just ended my marriage.

  Things will be different when I find answers. How?

  That depends on the nature of the answers.

  Chapter 15

  The house smells of dust and stale air. I should have realized Justice wouldn’t stay here.

  The pack turned against her and Indy. Grayson took them out.

  So where is she now?

  I don’t spend a lot of time in the entranceway or living room. Just a pause to sniff the air. Confirming this is home. Then I head to the kitchen. And the addition built off it.

  Wind blows against the windows. It’s the only sound in the otherwise soundless vacuum of the house.

  Dried lavender. Sage. Does Justice still purify this room as mother did?

  On the work table is the bundle of half-burnt herbs.

  Guess she does.

  Time slips away so easily. After she died, I made trips back to check on Justice and Indy. But then they just became less and less frequent as our lives diverged with the basics of living.

  Guilt for that.

  I step over to her sitting area. Her favorite chair.

  A basket of yarn at the feet, knitting needles still jutting out like chopsticks from a bowl of noodles.

  I sit. Lift the basket into my lap. It’s heavy.

  I pull the yarn from the top. Underneath are three fat leather journals. I set them in my lap, and the yarn back in it’s basket on the floor.

  I open the top journal. The leather binding cracks with dry-age. These haven’t been opened in some time.

  The language of the first half of the book is unfamiliar to me.

  I flip the pages until I find writing I understand.

  Twelve pages of medicinal herb uses. Useful. I flip some more. The back half of the book is more like...recipes for spells.

  Casting circle formations. Star charts. Reading energies. Transcending this plane.

  I flip through them all, running my fingers down the penmanship wishing I could absorb the knowledge with the swipe of my fingers. But, it’s so much. She knew so much. Believed so much.

  I tuck the first journal against my hip, and crack open the second.

  This one begins with a mix of the old language and English. Seemingly less uniform and substantive than her first book, this one is too much a blending of real and unreal. Notes. Haphazardly written. Sketches of plants. Bugs. A sword. Maiden, Mother, Crone. Triad. Three. Celtic knots. A map of the moon’s surface, it’s positioning in relation to the earth.

  Is there any way to understand this? Decode it? Make use of it? Probably not.

  Still, something is powering my hand. Keeping me flipping every single page. The next. The next. Gleaning insight into a woman that also happened to be my mother.

  As a child, can you see a parent as anything other than the provider? I couldn’t. I could not equate the mad, paranoid, eccentric as a true mother either. But she lived in a completely different world. These ‘journals’ are proof of that.

  Three quarters of the way in my name catches my eye. My eyeballs ping back and forth devouring the short details in the margins of the pages. This spell takes up two pages front and back. Summons of a Daemon. That’s her ever-so-helpful translation note at the top.

  I read it all again. Because shock is forcing me to deny it.

  Rage. Pure unbridled ra
ge. It starts in my heart and bleeds from my spine, up my neck and to my head.

  Mother.

  You lied to me.

  I shove the books from my lap and let that rage swallow me up. Take me away.

  Chapter 16

  I wake in increments. First noticing the hard floor beneath my hip. Then noticing I’m naked.

  My brain catalogs everything in its attempt to piece together the blankness. I’m laying on a two-by-four. My pillow has been a chunk of drywall. My hands are covered in white dust, and dirt. My knuckles massively swollen, like I’ve gone two hundred rounds with a punching bag, without gloves. A splinter under my nail bed, so throbbing painful, it must be embedded deep.

  My entire body is a mass of aches, muscles tight. Like I’ve ran a marathon, then decided I needed to pump iron at the gym for ten hours.

  I’m in her garden. Facing the bordering swath of forest. There’s a breeze at my back, and a swath of moonlight hitting my shoulder.

  There’s a terrible wrongness to the air. And I have caused it. My heart knows what my nose smells. Fresh earth, wood, destruction. There’s a glitter of glass in the grass beside me.

  I don’t want to turn around.

  I do though. Perhaps needing to see. A dark place inside of me, wanting to see.

  The house is completely razed. Not just the addition my father built.

  I correct myself. The-man-I-believed-to-be-my-father built.

  The entire structure beyond her space. The house is timbers. Splinters. The second story collapsed into the first.

  Odd jutting shadows in the darkness. What was once a square, traditional, farmhouse is now a pile of debris.

  There’s an odd glee when I look at that mess. I know I did it. Even if I don’t remember it.

  It took power and strength to do it. I destroyed her world. Her legacy.

  I could skip over there and dance upon the wreckage. That’s how satisfied I am. I just gave my mother the biggest fuck-you of all time. Avenging years of emotional and verbal abuse. I could light a match and drop it on the pile for extra emphasis. She robbed me of a mother’s love. Forced me to give up dreams of true love and happily-ever-afters. Made me become a functioning adult by age twelve. I owe nothing to her.

  No, the wrongness isn’t from the house - or what’s left of it. It’s from the prostrate form of the old oak beside the house. It’s roots stick straight up in the air, it’s trunk parallel to the ground.

  I am breathless. I was able to uproot a three hundred year old oak tree? Straight from the ground? How? The sheer magnitude of strength it would take.

  And such a waste. A beautiful tree, massacred in a senseless frenzy. Tears prick behind my eyes. Why?

  That simple question spirals me into an entire world of unknowns. What had even happened?

  I remember finding the journals, sitting in her chair and flipping through books, cataloging which ones might be worth keeping, which were only silly ramblings. Finding one of the oldest. The spells for raising a demon.

  Shit. She had complex and very sophisticated details listing the requirements. How to hold the demon on this side. She believed in such things. She rambled about the other side almost non-stop in her later years.

  I probably need to find that book. I need to find it, some clothes, and get the hell out of here.

  My car is probably still parked out front. It’s late, but how long until one of the neighbors notices the destroyed house? We’re not spitting distance, but they can still clearly see our house from across the way.

  I pick my way over to the rubble. Careful of the glass. The nails protruding from the studs. I’m not going to analyze the destruction now.

  Get the journals. Get to my car. Get out.

  Humans will think it’s a fluke tornado or maybe a sinkhole.

  I flip a piece of siding out of my way. The door frame. No door in sight.

  Pages of that journal flash in my mind’s eye as I work. Her ecstatic note: It worked! 12 weeks no complications!

  She made note of my birth date. Healthy girl. My glory.

  I took the un-capitalization of my name to mean one thing only. She was proud of her accomplishment. And had very little imagination.

  I was disgusted by it. Disgusted by my name, and by her. By the way I came about.

  That was when I had felt the change. The raising of my heckles. The lifting of my lips to snarl. Show my teeth and growl. My hands changing to a size I’d never seen before. Unrecognizable with nails shaped like talons. The fur wiry and bristled. Not like the soft tufts of my wolf form.

  And then. Darkness.

  I flip a board over. Out of my peripheral vision I see three shadows emerge from the woods.

  I turn fully to them.

  One man, dressed in a suit. Flanked on either side by...

  My brain wants to dismiss the label that popped into it. Demons.

  Horns spiraling atop inhuman heads. Jutting lower jaws, protruding carnassial teeth. Thick muscles on inhuman frames. Medieval type armor over leather clothes. Mouth-breathers for sure. They both have weapons strapped to their backs and belts.

  Suitman, he’s too far away for me to make out fine details, but I can see he’s handsome. Square jawline, wide lips. Slashed eyebrows. Blondish hair artfully mused. It’s a symmetrical face. Ideal. His only detractor might be that his eyes are little bit close together. The devil?

  I’m so flummoxed by their appearance, I don’t even realize I’m standing naked until his eyes rove over my entire body. I cross my arms in front of my chest.

  Suitman smiles at my attempt to hide my nudity.

  “Glory Skollen.” There’s power behind his voice. A prompting that has me stepping towards him.

  I stop, one foot poised in air, before I take another step. What am I doing?

  “How do you know my name? And who are you? And why are you here?” I project my questions over the distance between us.

  “There’s lots of things I know. I’m Alastor Moon. And I have a proposition for you.”

  A smile breaks across his face, wide. It’s the kind of smile meant to reassure, but comes off like an alien is operating underneath his human skin.

  “What?” I ask.

  “I offer you a place, by my side. A place that values you for who you are - not what you are.”

  “And who am I?”

  “A great beauty.”

  He had me up until that charm oozed out. Alastor Moon. I could have believed he came by the name arbitrarily. Maybe even seen it as some sort of sign.

  I mentally slap myself. After all this time I still believe Life has some sort of goodness to send me. Hope. How silly of me.

  No. This is all wrong. Another cruel turn. His name I could believe a random bit, amusing. But not his presence here.

  I look to my feet, searching for a weapon, contemplating my run time. My car is still parked out front. But the keys...I remember sitting them on the side table when I came through the house. I’ll have to dig through the rubble to get them. Impossible with demons on my heels.

  “What about answers? Would you like those, Glory?”

  He’s seen the resistance on my face and offers something else. I do want answers. I drop down to my knees, right palm covering a jagged piece of wood. A weapon.

  “Your mother…” He dangles the words like a carrot tied to a string.

  I look up. He’s gotten closer. He’s even with the demolished oak. Mere steps from me. His thugs, have spread out further. Being a predator myself, I know this hunting technique. Circle around and block the escape.

  “My mother?” I ask.

  “She made you. And what you are, it may be the only thing that’ll save us in the war to come.”

  “She made me. And what am I?”

  “A weapon.”

  “A berserker.” The ancient word slips from my lips, unexpected. It settles in the air with a rightness that is neither heavy nor light. It is perfectly balanced.

  Suspended.

&
nbsp; His chin dips once in solemn agreement.

  Justice too. I don’t say it aloud, but the rightness continues. I recognize it in my sister as I now recognize it in myself.

  “What do you want me to do?” I have no capacity for politics. Or any practice with it. No ability to negotiate with flowery words and subtleties. No, straight and to the point is all I know.

  He smiles the tiniest bit. Lips pulling back to flash a fang on one side.

  “Come with us.”

  No way am I going with the devil and his demon sidekicks. Something doesn’t feel right about them. I spin on the ball of my heel then. Vaulting atop the collapsed roof. Rough shingles beneath my feet, but at the top, I skitter down the other side of the roof, dropping just ten or so feet to the grass of the front yard.

  On my right, mouth-breather one appears from around the corner of the rubble. On my left, mouth-breather two.

  I sprint to my car. A meaty, chainmail-covered arm appears from nowhere in front of me, and I collide painfully with it.

  Sprawled on the ground, attempting to catch my breath. And, if I’m honest, scared beyond my wits at the hulking creature above me.

  Alastor Moon comes to stand beside the mouth-breather.

  “What you don’t understand, Glory, is that the world is not black and white. The world you live in, it is not the only world. At one time, you lived in our world, and us in yours. And soon they will be united again.”

  He lifts his gaze from me on the ground to the demon standing above me. “Pick her up. Tie her hands behind her back. We’ll take her with us.”

  He spins, and I hear his words of exasperation. “These new-worlders are positively oblivious. If we don’t speed up phase one, it’ll be another millennia before we rule, my consort.”

  A female form glides from behind the bumper of my SUV, meeting Alastor in the drive. She is in the simplest description what could be defined as an ‘angel.’ Flowing white robe, fluttering in a non-existent breeze. Coppery red hair, face inhumanly beautiful. Wings, not of feathers, but of a diaphanous material with a pearlescent sheen. Her feet don’t touch the ground.

  I’ve been transfixed, my eyes magnetized and studying her and offering no resistance to the gruff ministrations of MB (short for mouth-breather) one. His job of tying my hands behind my back done, he pushes my shoulder to get me to move towards Alastor and this apparition woman. At my first step, Alastor turns his head to look at us over his shoulder.