Archangel Evolution (10 page)

Lucas remained like a statue when Dionysus
entered the room, with the other Archangels—minus Cassandra the
nag—following closely behind him.

He approached Lucas. Lucas the Shining; Lucas
the Beacon; Lucas the Archangel perhaps? Even as Dionysus moved
within Lucas’s line of peripheral vision, he remained still as
stone, head craned skywards. “My son,” Dionysus said, “how do you
feel?”

No response.

David said, “He’s changed, my lord. For the
better.”

Dionysus knew the boy was right, if only
because Lucas
wasn’t
responding. Typically, he spoke a mile
a minute all the time. His silence was a clear indication that he
was improved, in some way.

Lucas’s face appeared to have undergone a
subtle change. All of his features were the same, and yet
different, more distinct, improved. His athletic frame looked even
more toned, as if he had just finished lifting weights.

Moving closer, Dionysus extended his hand,
placing it on Lucas’s shoulder from the front. Lucas’s head snapped
down and he made eye contact. He seemed startled by Dionysus’s
sudden presence, but he wasn’t scared. “My lord,” he said.

“Speak, my son,” Dionysus said
encouragingly.

“The pain….” He trailed off.

“I know, Lucas. Evolution is painful. But how
do you feel now?”

“Perfect,” he said. He could have said good,
or great, or fantastic, but Dionysus sensed that his word choice
was important.
Perfect.
Time to put that perfection to the
test.

Without warning, Dionysus whipped his fist at
Lucas’s head with as much speed and power as he could muster. Lucas
was quicker, raising one arm sharply to catch Dionysus’s fist in
his hand, stopping the attack cold.
Impressive.
Before the
procedure, Lucas couldn’t have thwarted the attack and would now be
lying unconscious on the ground.

“Release me,” Dionysus said.

Obediently, Lucas dropped his fist.

Dionysus turned to face the others. Johanna,
Sarah, and Percy looked impressed, while David’s eyes were as
unreadable as ever. Raising a fist in the air, Dionysus said, “For
sixty years, ever since I evolved from a demon, I have been focused
on one thing: cleansing the face of the earth from the demon
scum—the filth—that plagues it. All that time I was perpetually
mired in a belief—which I now know to be a false belief—that I was
at the top of the food chain, fully evolved, perfect in every way.
Much time has been wasted as I sought the girl who I thought would
provide a weapon destined to end the War. I was not wrong about the
importance of the girl; rather, I was wrong about how she would
come into play. Her weapon was powerful, yes, but she was never
going to help us. Instead, her purpose was one of education, of
opening my eyes to my mistake. For behold, Lucas is the proof that
our kind have never been perfected, that we have been strong—oh,
how strong—but not perfect. Now I give you perfection! And with
this knowledge and this procedure, we, the Archangel Council, will
become the true archangels we were always meant to be, to govern
the angel race, finally destroy our darker ancestors, and take our
place as rulers of the world!”

Dionysus paused to catch his breath. In the
zealousness and anger of his words, spittle had escaped his lips
and bubbled on his chin. He wiped it off with the back of his
sleeve. He said, “I will take my place next and then I expect each
of you to follow. Will you do it?”

“Yes, master,” David said fiercely. His eyes
were gleaming in the dim light.

“And you, Percy?” Dionysus asked. Percy
nodded. Letting his eyes slide to Sarah, he waited.

“I will do it,” Sarah said.

Before he could question Johanna, she said,
“Hell yeah, I will.”

“Let it be done,” Dionysus said.

T
aylor’s training
began with instruction on harnessing the power of light, from which
all other angel abilities originated. She wanted to fly first, but
understood the logic that flight was also powered by light and
therefore she needed to walk before she could run, so to speak.

Gabriel started by showing how he could
capture the lights in the stadium just by wanting them. He
explained that his eyes needed to be open, as they were the conduit
for the energy to enter his body. Unblinking, he stood still and
let the light wash over and into him. His body began to glow. At
his sides, his hands were filled with orbs of light that appeared
as tangible as basketballs, clearly defined and formed.

Something didn’t make sense. In the past,
Taylor had seen Gabriel harness light countless times. Usually he
used his hands more. Taylor said, “I thought you needed to aim your
hands at the lights to obtain their power?”

Like a university lecturer, Gabriel said,
“Very astute observation. You’ve probably seen me do it before,
right?” Taylor nodded. “That’s exactly how you’ll need to start
out. While the only requirement is to desire the light, that can be
quite difficult in practice. Because your hands and arms are
instruments of your mind’s will, it sometimes helps to direct them
at what you desire to help focus your mind. Understand?”

“Focus. Right,” Taylor said.

“Good. Now you try.”

Wanting to prove him wrong and show him that
she could focus without using her hands as training wheels like
some twelve-year-old angel learning the basics, Taylor remained
still, like Gabriel had, directing her thoughts at the beaming
stadium lights.
Monkeys! Cute, little chimpanzees running amok
through a supermarket, throwing cans and boxes and fruit and
rolling cantaloupes down the aisles like bowling balls. And ice
cream! No, no—an ice cream maker! A giant, shining metal machine
filled with churning, oozing, viscous ice cream. Chocolate, her
favorite! And then it was overflowing, dumping gallons of the cold
treat onto the floor, creating a tsunami of flavor! Dammit, get out
of my head, damned monkeys and ice cream!
Taylor silently
screamed.

Gabriel interrupted her thoughts when he
said, “Taylor, just try it using your hands to help the first time,
nothing is happening.”

“No, shut up,” Taylor said through clenched
teeth. “I can do this.”

Refocusing herself, Taylor tried to imagine
that she was reaching her hands out to grab the lights, to steal
away their precious energy.
Now the monkeys had left the
supermarket and were at the ice cream factory. Happily, the
marsupials swam in the ice cream lake, swallowing mouthfuls of the
chocolaty delight and spitting it back out. Others had started an
ice cream ball fight, rolling piles of snowball-like projectiles
and launching them across the room. Splat! One monkey was hit in
the face, but instead of hissing or growling, it squealed with
delight as it licked the sugary slime off its face. No, no, no, no,
no, splat! Another monkey hit. No, no, no! Get the hell out of my
thoughts, monkeys!
Taylor cursed in her head. But it was to no
avail, the monkeys continued to swing and swim and splat across her
mind.

Grudgingly, she admitted defeat. “Can’t
concentrate,” she said.

Gabriel said, “What did you see?”

Taylor sighed. “Monkeys.”

“Monkeys?” Gabriel said, smirking.

“And ice cream.”

Gabriel’s smirk turned into a chortle and
then a guffaw, and soon he was laughing so hard he was crying. His
case of the laughing-flu soon became airborne and the various
demons and angels who had been watching Taylor began chuckling,
too. If there was one thing that Taylor’s mom had taught her to be,
it was a good sport. “Taylor, if you can’t laugh at yourself every
once in a while, you will become so uptight, even dogs won’t like
you,” she used to tell her—and so Taylor was soon laughing with the
rest of them.

When she stopped, she said to Gabriel, “Did
you enjoy that? I hope you peed your pants,” which started a whole
new round of laughter.

After wiping the happy tears from his eyes,
Gabriel said, “Are you ready to try to do this my way?”

Ignoring him, Taylor outstretched her arm and
aimed it at one of the massive stadium spotlights in the corner.
Seeing her hand reaching out for the light, Taylor was easily able
to visualize her fingers pulling at the beams of light, like cords
of rope, extracting them from the fixture. And there were no
monkeys this time.

She felt her body begin to warm as the light
was soaked up by her eyes and start to flow through her veins. In
seconds her arm was glowing, and then her entire body. “I think I’m
getting the hang of this,” Taylor announced. “How do I make an
orb?”

“Just visualize it. Again, it might help if
you use your hands to help. Pretend you are rolling the orb out of
the incoming beams of light.”

Licking her lips in concentration, Taylor
imagined that the beams of light were coming so fast that she could
barely keep up with them. She made a motion with her hands like she
was squeezing something together to make a snowball. She felt like
she was a mime on the streets of New York, performing for a group
of tourists while dressed as if she had recently swam in a bag of
flour. Or maybe she was playing charades, trying to act out making
Christmas cookies so her team could guess it.

Something began to form in her hands. An
amoeba of light, ill-defined and wobbly, bounced and waggled
through her fingertips.
More power
, she thought,
I need
more power
. She reasserted her claim on the light’s energy and
imagined her eyes were huge vacuums, sucking generous watts of
electricity from the bulbs. The amoeba was not an amoeba any
longer, having formed into a glowing ball, an orb. As Taylor
strained to get every last drop of energy, the ball suddenly grew
bigger and bigger and brighter and brighter and then was gone,
having imploded into nothingness. There was a crackle and a pop and
a shower of sparks from above, as one by one, the dozen or so bulbs
exploded and burnt out, leaving a quarter of the field in shadowy
darkness.

“Nice one, Tay,” Gabriel said.

“What the hell….but I did everything right!”
Taylor said.

“Almost everything,” Gabriel said. “I wanted
you to make your own mistake on this one to ensure you learned the
lesson. In this case you tried to soak up more power than you
needed to form the orb you desired, and thus, it had the opposite
effect. Not knowing what to do with the extra energy, the orb
reversed itself and was unmade.”

“Unmade? What is this, the freaking
science-fiction channel? Speak English, you mean
destroyed
?”

“You could put it that way, but it’s not like
a piece of paper going through a shredder—there are no
scraps—rather, it’s like a drop of water evaporating into steam.
The orb is still there, it’s just changed—back into light.”

Taylor frowned. “But why couldn’t I just
store the energy I didn’t need?” she asked.

“Actually, you could have. You just didn’t
know how.”

Growing impatient, Taylor snapped, “Why
didn’t you just tell me how before I started?” She glared at
him.

Gabriel stared right back, emotionless. He
said, “Taylor, I am attempting to teach you ten years of technique
in only a few months. You are just going to have to trust me.
Sometimes you will need to make mistakes and figure things out on
your own in order to learn. Can you handle that?”

She wasn’t sure why she had gotten so angry.
She knew he was only trying to help her. The speed that the anger
had boiled up took her by surprise. She felt chastened. Raising her
eyebrows, she said, “I’m sorry, you’re right.”

With a wink, Gabriel said, “I never thought I
would hear those words.”

“Don’t push your luck, buddy,” Taylor said
lightly.

“Okay, now try again.”

Taylor outstretched her arm.

W
hile the War Room
remained nearly half-empty—with five of the twelve chairs
unused—somehow it felt fuller than before. The New Archangels, as
Dionysus was calling the current members of the Council, were
seated and discussing the future, which was feeling brighter by the
minute. It had taken more than two hours to use the room to evolve
the remaining angels. Even Cassandra was able to participate after
being revived with smelling salts and a bucket of water on her
head. Although there was anger in her eyes, it dissipated after
seeing that Lucas was not dead and was, in fact, improved,
perfected. Given Cassandra’s bold reaction when she thought Lucas
was dying, Dionysus suspected there was romance in the future for
the two of them. He would have to monitor
that
situation
carefully to ensure it didn’t impact their judgment, although he
suspected it wouldn’t, given they were cut from the same mold
manufactured by Evil Corporation, of which he was the
President.

While each member of the Council had been
attractive to begin with, the act of evolution had taken that
beauty to a whole new level. To his frustration, Dionysus could
barely take his eyes off of Cassandra. Her skin was like porcelain,
her features perfection. The use of makeup would be silly, like
trying to improve upon a work by Michaelangelo. And she was aware
of the attention he was giving her, batting her eyes and pouting
her lips like some damn showgirl. He would come up with a solution
later—maybe a bag over her head or clown’s makeup or something.

The others were changed too: Lucas seemed
calmer, more reserved, more intelligent even; Johanna and Sarah
looked like Amazon women, as fierce as they were beautiful; Percy
looked like a Swedish-god, with strong features and captivating
blue eyes; Dionysus was also improved, but the differences were
more subtle.

However, the most impressive changes had
surely been wrought on David. While he had looked a year or two
older than his age at the start of the day, the boy now appeared to
be a half-decade older. His boyish features had dissolved, and in
their place was a vision of a man. If he looked like Gabriel
before, he appeared as his twin brother now. In fact, if the
brothers were standing next to each other, it would be difficult to
discern who the eldest was. The similarities in appearance between
the brothers were so great that it was disconcerting for Dionysus
to rest his gaze upon the boy’s face for too long. It was as if his
greatest enemy from the past had found a way to inhabit his
brother’s body and thus learn all of Dionysus’s darkest secrets.
But the comparison ended when the boy spoke, his words harsh and
uncaring, eerily mature and wise, definitive. Dionysus realized he
was speaking now.