things. The pattern is by your design. For crying out loud, the big guy’s omnipotent! How do you not know? Indeterminate? What in the name of all the levels of hell is going on?”
Silence.
“Tell me.”
Silence.
“Tell me!”
You are hereby ordered to resume the ultimate purpose for which you were created.
“He’s not just human, you know,” she shouted. “His bloodline carries the mark of an archangel.”
She ground her teeth. Let’s see what they did with that little surprise revelation.
More silence. Heavy and stretching.
She shuffled her feet. “Well?”
Death, you are forbidden to continue your interaction with the lifeguard.
Her mouth fell open. “Are you fucking kidding me? I just told you Patrick is the last in a Nephilim line and you tell me I’m forbidden?” She blinked, unable to believe what she was hearing. She was Death. Not a child. No one forbade her anything.
If you refuse to resume your purpose you shall be Confined.
“Confined?”
The matter is finished. Return the lifeguard to the world of man and resume your purpose.
Fred clenched her jaw. “No.”
Silence again.
“This is not right. What Pestilence is doing is not right. If you lot want to sit on your collective thumbs and see what happens then so be it, but I’m not going to.”
The silence stretched.
She glared into the whiteness one last time, shook her head, and transubstantiated.
To nowhere.
Her throat slammed shut. Why wasn’t she back with Patrick?
As forewarned and foretold, The Fourth Horseman has refused a divine command and is hereby confined.
Ice-cold disbelief rolled through her. “What do you mean, forewarned? When? By who?” There was no answer coming, and something told her she was alone. She gaped into the whiteness, heart hammering, blood roaring. Muscles frozen.
She swallowed, physically incapable of doing anything else.
The Deities had Confined her.
Oh, Shit. Patrick. What is going on?
For the umpteenth time, Patrick walked about the room. Or was it one hundred and ten minutes? Time didn’t seem to exist here. After the initial stunned shock following her abrupt disappearance, and an uncomfortable few seconds still waiting for her to return, he’d explored the library. Discovering there was no exit, he moved about the small space just to keep his mind from his upcoming confrontation with the Disease.
Perusing a random selection of books pulled from the surrounding shelves had achieved nothing. None of the tomes made much sense, most referencing periods of time long before, as far as he could tell, dinosaurs walked the planet. Those that were dedicated to man were violent diatribes that left an unsavory taste in his mouth and made him long to meet the writers in person.
With each passing minute, his mind tried harder and harder to contemplate his future.
He refused to let it do so, and in an act of sheer desperation, he’d finally dropped into the more comfortable looking of the two armchairs and pondered his past. Or more to the point, his family’s past.
Had his parents known? Had they suspected? On what side did the bloodline come from? His mum’s? His dad’s? His father had run his own landscaping business and his mother had been a high school English teacher and, as a consequence, he and Steven had grown up with a love of the outdoors and a passion for reading.
Both brothers had prayed regularly of course. At the altar of the surf gods, and paid regular homage to those deities’ bikini-clad priestesses as often as they could, especially Patrick during his late teen years. But as for legit, organized religion and church? Nada. Not since their Sunday school days when they were little kids, and those days ended early due to Steven arguing too much with the teacher about how none of it made sense, and Patrick backing up his big brother with gusto.
They were just two typical Australian boys growing up on the coastline of the world’s largest island.
Nothing in his life had pointed to an ancestry of such…divine…significant heritage.
Except for predicting the future on more than one occasion? Or resuscitating drowning victims seemingly beyond saving?
“Bloody hell,” he muttered, pushing himself to his feet. He shook his head in disgust at the conceited train of thought. “Next you’ll be throwing a barbeque for all the swimmers on Bondi with just one fish, a loaf of bread, and a bottle of water.”
Moving around the small room again—damn, what he’d give for a door—he wondered what Ven was doing.
A sudden realization struck him and he bit back a curse. He’d yet to ask Fred what she thought his brother had become. What exactly did a second-order