Michael (The Airel Saga, Book 2) - By Aaron Patterson Page 0,52

to control my every decision until the day I die?”

Kreios looked to Yamanu for some sign of assistance. Yamanu simply nodded, exhaling a luxurious ring of smoke. It drifted downward to the stone floor and dissipated outward, like ripples on a still pond.

That is what it was like to have a daughter, he decided. She dropped into the stillness of his life like a stone, disturbing everything. And now the ripples were beginning to fade; she was pulling away. He had to confess to himself that he mourned for the situation, for himself. He had not prepared. He was not ready. “Daughter, please…”

She ignored his feeble and late attempt at tenderness. “I will speak of it no more.”

He looked up from the floor to behold her beautiful strong-willed face. Her eyes pierced him. There were echoes of her mother in there. It all came crashing back on him—the great Decision that could never be unmade, to dwell under the sun in the land of the fallen. He had sown the wind, truly. And now he would continue to reap what he had sown.

“Goodbye, father.” She turned and left.

And he let her go, finally. He sighed in defeat and resignation. She had all the answers she now wanted. She would need more though, he knew.

“All in due time,” Yamanu said. “That is the way of it here. Under the sun.”

Kreios nodded. She was just as stubborn as her mother had been. He smiled in spite of the grief that was crashing down upon him. He loved her for that stubbornness, and so much more. He didn’t want to let her go yet.

He breathed these words in her wake: “I love you, Eriel. Never forget who you are.”

CHAPTER X

Banes, Cuba, present day

A COOL LIGHT BREEZE wafted across the dirt road, bringing with it the smell of salt water and wet grass. Kreios stood still, waiting. It was just past two in the morning and the moon hung full and fat, casting its shimmering light on the sea, long shadows over the landscape.

Beyond the single lane dirt road, a cemetery was stamped into the earth, bordered by a stone wall in disrepair. From the shaggy grass fed by ancient corpses jutted sun-bleached marble crosses, stone angels with broken wings outspread over raised tombs, mausoleums, overgrown paupers’ markers. A huge Ceiba tree, its roots climbing like smooth gray buttresses to the massive trunk, stood in the midst of the graves. Its leaves were like six-fingered hands drooping low, shading the dead from the moonlight.

A scuffling noise.

Kreios turned eyes and ears to the lone tree, watching, waiting.

A man stole in amongst the graves in the darkness past a large Spanish stone cross. He looked around him suspiciously as he moved toward a mausoleum, a house for the dead.

Kreios prayed the information he had gained from the dying lips of his last kill was solid; that he would find what he sought and that this foolish idiot would lead him directly to it beneath the graveyard.

Kreios ran swiftly to within a few yards of the man, crouching behind a white stone plinth, moving without sound.

The man heaved his weight against a massive bronze placard on the side of the tomb. Silently it sunk in and back, swinging in to one side, revealing a secret passageway. The man ducked inside and began to turn around and close the heavy door.

Kreios leaped to the entrance so fast that the man didn’t have time to react. Kreios withdrew his fist from the man’s smashed face, grabbed him by the shirt collar, and roughly pulled him outside, dashing his brains against the foot of a statue of Gabriel.

He was dead.

Kreios quickly regarded the statue’s likeness. “Not bad,” he whispered under his breath. “…though Gabe is not that feminine.” He drew his sword and ducked inside the doorway. Rough-hewn timber steps led down into the wormy darkness.

He felt at once the drain of energy that sounded the general alarm, making his presence known to the demons and men below.

Kreios prayed there was no escape route and charged down the stairs.

Ripping and tearing filled his ears as he descended: the Brotherhood were splitting, separating into demons and men. No two-for-one deal tonight.

He reached the bottom of the stairs and turned to the right, meeting a female directly. He blithely lifted an elbow, knocked her to the ground and then severed her head from her body.

“Kreios!” Something called out his name.

Kreios did not care for conversation, however. He hacked his way deeper into