in both kidneys as I breezed past his hip.
Dazed and totally embarrassed, I could feel the rage rising up through my neck to scorch the tips of my ears.
“Do not give sway to the negative way,” said my father.
I guess he learned that little ditty from Xanthos, back in the day.
I couldn’t care less. My father was the one who had dragged me into this mess in the first place. He was the one dumb enough to let Number 1 get the drop on him, and then he did absolutely nothing to save my mom. It was my father’s fault that I ended up an orphan, and then what did he do? He left me my inheritance—the stupid List, plus the ridiculous mission to protect an entire planet from all sorts of creeped-out alien invaders, even though I was only a kid. Which, I have to say, seriously screwed me up. Wouldn’t it screw you up? Heck, I couldn’t even have a girlfriend without her getting kidnapped by drooling interplanetary delinquents. And to add insult to injury, every now and then, just for chuckles, my father seemed to pop back into my world so he could boss me around and kick the crap out of me.
So, here and now, all I wanted was to kill my deadbeat dad for all he had done to me. Like ruining my life.
Yeah, I seriously wanted to kill the guy. I wanted to finish this whole stupid Alien Hunter thing right here, right now.
My father relaxed his fists and let his arms hang loosely at his sides.
“I recognize that look in your eye, Daniel.”
“What about it?”
“It is hate, pure and simple. Hate fueled by rage.”
“So?”
“Making his targets slaves to hate is how Abbadon wins, son. It is how he has always won.”
Chapter 56
MY FATHER TRANSFORMED the walls of the barn into movie screens onto which he projected a series of extremely graphic and grisly scenes, all of them rated H for Horrible and Horrifying.
And Historical.
Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes devastating Central Asia and Russia.
King Herod the Great ordering the execution of all the young male children in the village of Bethlehem so he wouldn’t lose his throne to the “king” whose birth three wise men had read in the stars.
The horrors and tortures of the Spanish Inquisition, including the burning at the stake of all those whom the church declared heretics.
Robespierre and his Reign of Terror. Sixteen thousand people losing their heads to the guillotine.
King Leopold of Belgium’s atrocities in the Congo.
The murders of the Romanov family by the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1918.
The mass murder of many millions of people in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin.
“Do you see him, Daniel?” my father asked as we watched Nazi soldiers wiping out the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941.
“No.”
“Look carefully. There. Skulking in the background.”
I stared beyond the hate-filled Nazis and the terrified Jews, and saw two glowing red dots.
I looked harder.
I saw him. The two points of throbbing red were his hideous, burning eyes.
“It’s Number 2! He was there?”
My father nodded. “Throughout history, whenever humankind, fueled by ignorance and hate, turns against itself, you will see him.”
And I did. Now that I knew what I was looking for, Abbadon was easy to spot. His appearance always changed, but his eyes never did. They burned like stoked embers in a hearth under the blast of a bellows whenever humans committed atrocities against other humans.
At the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of unarmed Indian protestors by the British in 1919.
In the killing fields of Cambodia, when the Marxist Khmer Rouge regime murdered more than two million of its fellow Cambodians.
He was there when Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds.
He gloried in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
He cheered on the holocaust in Rwanda when a million Tutsis were butchered.
“He is always there,” my father said. “He triumphs when hatred overpowers all other human emotions. Study him, Daniel. Study everything he does—and I mean everything. Every movement, every gesture, every telling smile. Look for his weaknesses.”
“I don’t see any!”
“Look harder.”
I did, but all I saw was the crimson-eyed fiend lurking in the background, delighting as human beings turned on one another. I watched until I couldn’t watch anymore.
I turned my head away from the carnage flowing across the barn walls just as Colonel Gaddafi was sending foreign mercenaries into the streets of Tripoli to murder his fellow Libyans.
“Focus, Daniel! Focus!”
I refused to look at the horror displayed on the walls any longer.
“Who is this monster?” I demanded.
“Focus, son!”
“No. Tell