Michael (The Airel Saga, Book 2) - By Aaron Patterson
CHAPTER I
Sawtooth mountains of Idaho, present day
ALL I COULD FEEL was speed. Everything was racing along under me and my body was like an arrow shot at the speed of sound, only there was no sound. I could feel the turn of the earth as if I was about to step off—or be pushed off.
Thoughts—I guess you could call them thoughts—were whizzing through me even faster. I was an observer of my own life, and everything came back in random flickers.
I saw Kim making a silly face. We were—where were we? At the mall? She looked younger. But we were shopping all right. She must have dragged me along again.
I saw the valley. The big tree where I first read the Book of Kreios. My spot was still there.
I smelled apricots. I was in the kitchen, and I must have been young, because I was looking up at my mom, my head at about countertop height, and she was canning. The sun was low and warm in the room, and everything glowed like gold. Apricots. She smiled at me.
I felt the stress knotting my center as I relived that moment in the movie theater restroom… when I first saw Kreios. I thought I was going to die.
And then I did.
I saw Michael Alexander’s smile. We were at school. That was the Great Day of the Coffee Disaster, and I so wanted to be Mrs. Napkins.
My heart fluttered.
I could feel it. But it was broken. Pierced.
Echoes from outside, somewhere else.
“…sorry…”
“…sorry…”
“…sorry…”
The Alexander residence. I was carrying Kim, busting through the garage door like Kung Fu master through paper. I tripped and tumbled. Kung Fu beginner.
The face of evil was a sidewalk chalk sketch and it came up at me off the driveway, and Kim was gone. It was black and it grew arms and reached for me, enfolded me, then became smoke and disappeared.
I smelled death.
Then I smelled Abercrombie Fierce.
Weird.
Again, the walls of my hurtling bullet-arrow rattled with the refrain: “…sorry…”
I wanted to cry.
Why?
I was floating over the lake looking at the cliff. That’s when I realized there was someone with me. But I couldn’t tell who. Michael? Then the cliff-top scene appeared and played out in front of me as I floated there.
Michael was crawling there. There was a trail of blood behind him.
The lake below boiled, the massive disturbance of an angel of El exploding out of it. Kreios hunched over my body there on the top of the cliff, and it struck me as odd: I had been husked. My dead shell remained and he was trying desperately to save it. I looked to my side, trying to see whoever was with me. I still couldn’t tell.
Michael was there on the dirt, sobbing uncontrollably, lying beside my body. Then Kreios brought the Bloodstone near to him.
What in the world…?
Michael howled furiously.
And then everything changed.
Michael was carrying me and I was in his arms.
There was a streak in the sky and I knew Kreios was gone. Where?
Then I was on my bed again. Not my bed at home, no. It was the bed I had slept in as a captive of my grandfather. My grandfather! And everything was cold. So cold.
Echoes: stabbingpain, lifedeath, fury, angercold, watergrave, AIREL, a scratching noise like pen on paper and, “…sorry… sorry… sorry…”
Icefire. That’s what it was. My heart was consumed with burning cold, and I could feel it. I hovered over myself; something was hovering over me.
Then my ears popped.
And I could hear it:
“Airel, I’m so sorry… please forgive me. I love you!”
Choices.
Choices that we make lead us to make other choices, and those choices can sometimes bust us in half and dump us in a blind alley with no way out.
Michael Alexander sat on the edge of Airel’s deathbed, his mind tearing. He could physically feel his heart rip inside his chest, crushed under the weight of his decisions. And he thought about the paradox—the utter craziness—that he was both lover and traitor to the most beautiful girl in the world.
He wanted to rip into himself. Yeah. Starting with this new scar right here. He felt the mark on his abdomen; the mark of a coward. Add that one to the list.
But what choice did he have?
The words echoed back to him from downstairs in the library:
“But she lived.”
He had watched the page crinkle under his tears as they dropped to the parchment, smudging the ink. This was not what he wanted. She was just another mission, just another cursed threat that needed to be cleansed from the earth. She was a job like so many others. But Airel somehow got in, snuck past all his defenses and took hold of his heart. He had never known love, never really cared about it. She broke the rules as if they’d never even existed.
Then he had run back to her room, hoping what he had dared to do would work, that the pen on the page would be powerful, that she would indeed live. But all he could do upon entering was stare at her lifeless body.
Airel. Her corpse was pallid and blue. It broke him afresh; tears stung his eyes. He could not help but mutter a curse against himself. He ran a nervous hand through his hair, grasping at it, wanting to tear it out.
After all I’ve done!
He thought of his wicked father, Stanley Alexander. The lies. Who can honor something like that? Yet he tried.
He had allowed James…he turned his head and let his body crumple down and down, withering. I can’t think about James and what he did.
But he continued to list off his many sins.
He had been all-in for the excitement of finding one of the immortals, the Nephilim descendants. Using his training, tracking her, finding her, observing her, standing right in front of his prey while she was totally oblivious, allowing her to take the bait, and then to spite her and all she stood for— the immortals, creation, El—he had delivered her up to the destroyer.
The Seer.
Tengu. And Tengu’s host, Stanley Alexander.
All that remained from it was total and empty desolation.
Michael stood up and violently stalked around the room, shouting, screaming at God, at El, at the whole world. He could take them on, right here, right now. His rage was a tower of all-consuming fire.
But it cooled quickly in a dousing sea of desperation. Most of his rage was directed inwardly.
At himself.
That rage quickly changed to passionate sobs of grief. He found himself on his knees at her bedside, smothering his face in her wet hair and whispering again, again and again, “I’m so sorry, so sorry.”
Michael’s heart shattered. His world was a ruin. He had become what he had only just learned to hate, and a moment too late: evil.