Michael (The Airel Saga, Book 2) - By Aaron Patterson Page 0,106
incoherently.
She must have read my mind. “I’ll look after him, girlie. Go ahead. He just needs rest; I don’t think he knows how to take care of himself.” She motioned me forward toward the cockpit.
“Hex won’t mind?”
“Hex? No, in fact he’ll be glad for a change of company. I’ll keep Bishop occupied back here.”
This is cool. I stepped forward, glad for a diversion from all the stress. “I’ll be right back.”
Muizenberg, South Africa, present day
Kreios walked barefoot along the cool empty beach in Muizenberg, the colorful swimmers’ stilt house changing rooms lining the wide sandy expanse above the high tide mark. He could no longer ignore the huge drain on his mind, his body, his will. New thoughts started to take shape in him, new ideas. They were different. Dark and ugly.
It could be that I have overstepped, he began. Like the gentle waves along the shore of Muizenberg, the thoughts were small but consistent and relentless.
He felt the draining pull toward it.
But he also felt El somewhere in the midst of it all. He couldn’t tell if El was the source of the new thoughts—which called him home to paradise, or so it seemed—or if El was in opposition.
Kreios allowed himself a bittersweet indulgence and set his mind searching along all the old corridors of pain and loss within. His bride: the day he had held her in his arms as she expired from a long and fatal childbirth; the day he buried her in the frozen ground. His Eriel: the day she had simply vanished and he could not know if she was alive or dead. Or worse, if she had been ultimately turned by the Brotherhood that had activated her. And Airel. Sweet girl. Too short, his time with her. That had been the case every time.
The depths of his broken heart cried out to El for an answer, and this for the first time since before all this insanity had been set in motion, before the episode at the movie theater, before he had been forced to intervene in Airel’s life. As the heart of the angel of El broke, as he became utterly desperate, as he asked foundational questions, a ready answer came to him.
“Stand and knock.” Kreios heard the voice of El as clearly as when he had been with Him in Paradise. He was alone on the beach, except for a few lone figures in the distance. He wriggled his bare toes into the sand and waited for more. There is always more.
He closed his eyes and willed his mind to become clear and oriented solely on El. Moments passed. And then it appeared: the door.
It was the selfsame door behind which Kreios had always been able to find answers. Of course, it had usually happened that the answer was in the form of a weapon. But this time it was different. This time it was not a weapon. It was an enjoinment. The frameless door opened to him.
The mind of El poured pure light into his angel of death, calling to remembrance all the instances of purpose and power for which he had been created and to which he had been called. Kreios recalled his forgotten itinerant works, especially in Egypt on the night of the first Passover, the night he had moved through the streets of the city of Pharaoh in the middle of the night, looking for lamb’s blood on the lintels, slaughtering every firstborn son. He had forgotten. Until now.
He had forgotten about the conquest of Canaan, too. He had forgotten about his help to the commander Joshua, to the great king David. These were righteous warring men with great quantities of bloodshed on their hands. Kreios was of the same construct.
As El poured understanding into him, Kreios remembered it all. And then the perspective shifted in regard to his current mission. It was not a desperate lone-rogue bursting fit of rage, a reaction to unconscionable Brotherhood transgressions. No. It was instinct. Kreios had been made for such a thing, such a time as this. He had been created for it.
As Joshua had held the javelin aloft, so El now lifted Kreios up. And then El said the rest; what Kreios had been waiting to hear: “See, I have given them into your hand.”
The door faded and he opened his eyes. He could feel his strength begin to return.
“Lift up your eyes.”
Kreios did, and beheld a swarm of birds darkening the sky.