Michael (The Airel Saga, Book 2) - By Aaron Patterson Page 0,76

neck. It was him.

I felt his sobs as they racked both of us in heaving grief. He did not return my embrace. I pulled away to see what was the matter. I then saw a thing that would change me forever, just like every little thing I had been made to endure since we had first met, since he had activated me, since we had sparked our intense bond to each other.

It was the face of a child.

Held in Michael’s arms was a boy of no more than about ten years of age. His eyes were pallid and dull in death. Michael’s face was drawn back in overwhelming pain. His sobs came in stabbing spasms as he moaned and cried.

I didn’t know what to do. I had been thrust into a cup of such an impossible admixture of morbidity, pain, love, and sympathy, it felt absolutely crazy to be stirred up within it. It hurt beyond words, but I was with him. I knew that I could do anything, endure anything as long as I had my Michael. It was a fact, so I stayed there with him on that little beach in the darkness as he held the corpse of a boy.

Answers? They would come. I believed that, and it was enough.

CHAPTER V

MICHAEL KNELT IN THE sand, filled with grief. What have I done?

But it wasn’t his fault. Surely not. Why does it have to be like this? This is unbearable! Why do they have to do this kind of thing? He raged against what had happened, and at his hand. Again. Regret, most bitter of all the emotions, rained down upon his heart and mind, soaking into the very marrow of all that he was.

He knew the methods, of course. He should have seen it coming. But he didn’t imagine it. It took wickeder minds for that.

Airel whispered to him, “What happened?” She stroked his back, and it calmed him a little.

At first he was unable to speak. Once he tried, however, the words began to come easily. “They…I knew they had sent scouts. I just didn’t think…I just didn’t think the Brotherhood would do it like this. To send the…the Garrison of the Offspring!” Michael knew how horrid and evil it was. Demons manipulating the minds of the innocent, the children, making inroads against El by turning the children against Him. It had been a product of cold genius to him when he had first beheld it years ago. But now it was too real. “They sent the children.”

“What?” Airel said. “What does any of that mean?” She looked horrified in the darkness, looking back and forth from the dead countenance of the corpse to that of his own.

“It means,” Michael tried his best to regain his composure, “that they have opened up the entire armory against us. And they want us to know it. Not that they’re desperate. But that they will do whatever it takes.”

“To do what, kill us?”

“Yes.” He looked away from the dead eyes of the child across the river, to the distance. “And recover the Bloodstone.” Tension, then. Heavy and sudden, full of unfinished business that would have to remain unfinished for now. “That’s what they’re trying so desperately to grab for. The Infernals don’t care how much military capital they have to expend in order to gain it.”

He looked at her. She seemed very scared, which was unlike her.

“Don’t worry. At this point it’s every man for himself in the Brotherhood. They’re still not beneath the idea of killing each other in order to get the Bloodstone. With it comes the power of the Seer. They want that more than anything.”

He looked back to the rapidly cooling body of the child in his arms.

“What happened?” Airel asked him.

He sighed. “I asked Ellie to help me ferret them out,” he began. “I had begun to see some suspicious activity around the fringes of our movements here in Arlington. Since our plane isn’t here yet, and since I also didn’t want them to follow us when we leave, I decided we needed to confront and destroy them…”

Grief raked its claws across his wretched mind once more as he thought about the aborted life of the child he had killed, the missed unlimited chances it represented for life. For good or ill, the boy had a right to live. Michael had revoked all of that with a single act.

He tried to move on with the account of how it had happened. “With Ellie’s help,