Last God Standing (17 page)

“We can create our own pantheon, Seraphiel: a new generation of Gods striking terror and devotion into mortal hearts and minds. We can rule the world.”

“Seraphiel’s right,” I said. “You stand there in the body of a mortal, arguing how great it is to be immortal. You are a fool.”

Gabriel’s face convulsed with rage, his eyes burning so brightly I could smell the brimstone emanating from the old minister’s pores. Thirty or so ejected angels flitted around him like luminous moths, egging him on.

Stormface unleashed a roar that cracked the school’s foundations. The shimmering cloud of exorcized angels fled, screaming as they streamed out windows or through cracks in the ceiling. Vulnerable to Stormface’s wrath, they were suddenly eager to be anywhere else.

“He rebukes us!” Gabriel cried. “His adoration of mortals has made him weak! If we choose to enslave them who can stand against us? We can create a new Heaven on Earth… in our image.”

The old priest moved closer to the tall schoolgirl, one hand reaching up to rest on her shoulder.

“In your image, Seraphiel. We can stride like titans across the material realms. We can become…”

“You can become real,” I said. “You’re jealous of mortals.”

Gabriel whirled toward me. “You’re not real! Your Aspect only reveals the depth of your perversity. You wear their semblance, but wield the Power of Creation!”

“Yet you once commanded that power,” Seraphiel hummed. “Are you not its source?”

I was fading. Maintaining Stormface required gigawatts of mental energy. The priest was little more than a walking corpse: his death would eject Gabriel soon enough. Seraphiel was a different story. The girl he’d stolen was young, newly possessed and bright with lifeforce.

“You’ve changed,” Seraphiel said. “You are… limited.”

“I’m becoming human.”

“Human,” Seraphiel said.

“Inferior,” Gabriel cried. “Out of his own mouth he condemns himself! He is unfit to rule Creation!”

“Creation doesn’t need a ruler, Gabriel. It needs a mirror.”

My head was pounding, the connection to Stormface filling my mind with bright shards of white noise; mile long fingernails scratching down a moonsized blackboard.

Seraphiel’s hum deepened. Around him, the fabric of reality was beginning to warp, bending in accordance with his song. Even I marveled at his skill. The power at his command was terrifying.

“If your assertion is true… many things must be considered. Many things.”

“No,” Gabriel snarled. “He has proven his unworthiness. Destroy him and this world can be ours!”

“Let her go, Seraphiel. She can still be saved.”

Seraphiel’s song grew restive, primed for fire. “Human,” he chimed in the deep tolling intonation befitting his rank. “This leaves a vacuum at the pinnacle of the celestial power structure.”

Something was wrong. I could barely hold Stormface together. Seraphiel seemed to waver as bright red spots burst like fireworks in my eyes.

“Seraphiel… if I believed humans needed the ‘celestial power structure’ I would never have abandoned my old function!”

Objects in the classroom began to vibrate as the Burning One’s song climbed an octave. Every window in the building blew inward, driven by a hot wind that melted the shattered glass shards before they touched the floor.

“I will learn the truth of your assertions,” Seraphiel sang, his voice rising like the scream of a ballistic missile. The possessed girl’s eyes drove the shadows from the room. “In this way I may judge your worthiness.”

The girl becomes white fire.

When human outrage compelled me to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, I sent Seraphiel and Metatron to do the heavy lifting. Imagine two shining, six-winged angels folding the space between themselves and a nearby asteroid belt to rain fire down upon a screaming mortal city. A simple task for the Seraphim: open a pathway between the target city and a few megatons of space debris and step out of the way. When I sent the Angel of Death to smite the Egyptians, she simply enclosed the heads of Egypt’s firstborn within airless bubbles of concentrated dark matter: two hundred thousand carbon monoxide asphyxiations later and you’ve got the beginnings of a new world religion.

Now the Burning One has my destruction foremost in his mind.

Seraphiel raises his song, and a ringing cry tears the air inside that tiny classroom. Air rushes past me with hurricane force, pushing me toward a shining rip in space. Beyond the rip I can see blackness, and the twinkling of ten million stars, strange constellations: Seraphiel is opening a doorway into deep space.

Stormface takes over. The lights of its mouth burn a path through Seraphiel’s song, eating its notes like a starving kid gobbling peanut M&Ms. The notes of his song rise higher, and lava flows out of a portal that opens to the right of me. A searing river of molten rock pours across the wooden floor of the classroom, burning it away as efficiently as Stormface absorbed Seraphiel’s musical attack. The walls of the classroom burst into flames and the ceiling catches fire. Stormface lifts me above the burning lava, wrapping me within a sheath of cooler air while blowing away the toxic fumes.

“Seraphiel! You don’t have to do this!”

Shadows play across the possessed girl’s face.

“What else remains for me? You were All, Yahweh. We Seraphim sang of your Glory as eternal, but now you are mortal, less than nothing. A fate you chose willingly. What lessons am I to learn from your example?”

Seraphiel sings louder, his song slashing the air with celestial violence. Then a wall of water smashes into me.

Darkness and cold crush down upon me, even through Stormface’s defenses. A few yards away, the possessed schoolgirl floats at the center of a shining bubble of chaos, her eyes piercing the darkness. Seraphiel has transported us into the ocean depths, far from light and safety. But there she hovers, alive in all that darkness.

But the cold and pressure are getting to me. Although Stormface is shielding me from the worst of Seraphiel’s attack its protection will only last as long as I remain conscious. I reach out with the greatest power I still possess, my other mind’s eye scanning and discarding divergent timelines until…

There.

Then I grip Seraphiel’s place in spacetime in one mental hand...

Reset.

We were back inside the classroom.

There was no fire, no lava, no crushing black water to drown the world. Not yet.

“I will learn the truth of your assertions,” Seraphiel sang, his voice rising like the scream of a ballistic missile. The possessed girl’s eyes drove the shadows from the room. “In this way I may… judge…”

The girl looked around, taking in our surroundings.

“You translated us backward in time,” Seraphiel said. “But this changes nothing. I am immortal; tireless. I can open a multiplicity of portals too rapidly for you to apprehend.”

“Human continuity will go on, Seraphiel. The possessed girls will forget your friends. Once I told them the punchline they were able to conduct the exorcisms themselves. Everything you’ve done has been erased, shuffled into a dead-end reality where it can play itself out for the rest of eternity. It can’t hurt anyone. None of it happened.”

Seraphiel’s scorn echoed from the rafters of the schoolhouse.

“But you failed. I remember it all. You left me unaltered. I am still a part of that other continuity.”

That’s when I saw it: the shift from angelic to demonic shadowing Seraphiel’s face. The arrogance, the anticipation of glories that could never be his. He was feasting on the girl’s energies, reveling in his defiance so thoroughly that he couldn’t hear the fat lady singing.

“You’re right, Seraphiel. You will continue. When I repaired the damage your uprising caused, I left a loophole of chaos open just for you. That loophole is closing right now.”

The shift from angelic to demonic happened instantly, hate and terror contorting the girl’s face as what I had done dawned on Seraphiel like the first light of a summer day: bright and inescapable.

“No…”

Truly hideous forces are required to kill the unkillable, and I had released unspeakably hideous forces in that little classroom. Seraphiel was torn out of the girl, his immortal essence stretched like taffy, twisting, contorting as the continuity to which he now belonged reached back and snagged him. But Seraphiel was too strong: he resisted, clinging to this continuity even as those hideous forces threatened to tear him apart. The girl screamed.

I abandoned Stormface and summoned the Aspect that engraved the Ten Commandments across the retinas of a terrified Moses. Riding the Moving Finger, I dove into the maelstrom, tearing through the Eshuum, arrowing directly into her mind.

“Hello, Maya.”

There is only silence in Maya Otsunde’s mind. I wait, for what seems like an eternity. Then I hear it, a voice, tiny against the howling storm, but clear.

“Who are you?”

“You speak English.”

“I can speak Xhosa and French and Swahili too. I’m not at all stupid. Are you God?”

“Let’s talk about you.”

“I see things… such beautiful horrible memories. But these things are not me.”

“Your mind has been invaded. You’ve been possessed.”

“Invaded? You mean by a demon?”

“Something like that.”

“But… I don’t understand.”

I whisper the Secret. The Secret grants her a kind of clarity, and with it…

Enlightenment.

A moment later, I stood facing Maya Otsunde as Seraphiel was torn out of her body. His essence fractured, then shattered, strewn across a million possible moments, each moment branching out toward a million possible futures. I had restored his piece in the puzzle of continuity without repairing it. Now he was dragged into a future that branched in infinite directions; tied to every possible choice he could have made and bound to their innumerable consequences. I had pinned his essence to those timelines. Now they would tear him apart for all eternity, spreading him across a billion stillborn realities. And he would never die, living all those possible lives, aware of what was happening to him, but unable to stop it. It was the closest thing to Hell that an angel could know. And it was the only way I could stop him.

Gabriel.

The old priest was dead. He lay curled up at my feet. He hadn’t been included in the Reset: Gabriel had consumed his soul and I couldn’t bring him back.

“You killed him,” Moroni whispered. “You killed Seraphiel.”

There was no use denying it, so I didn’t.

The classroom was empty. Outside, I heard the wail of approaching sirens, concerned voices shouting questions and, in the distance, the sound of gunfire.

“All my life… I looked for you.”

Maya Otsunde was kneeling in the doorway that led out to the front of the schoolhouse, her forehead pressed to the floor, her hands splayed out in front of her, palms facing the ceiling.

“When my father was struck by a truck in Johannesburg I prayed that you would save him. When my mother was sick from breathing in the waste of the living dead ones, the ones with HIV I looked to you.”

Her voice was calm, almost wondering, her eyes averted. Her posture was one of submission, but her tone remained neutral, almost monotonous. She might have been reciting from a grocery list.

“‘I will lift up my eyes to the hills. From whence comes my help? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.’ Isn’t that what it says in the Bible? I looked to the hills. I called to you. My friend Rabiah, she is a Muslim. Her brother is a doctor. He cared for the sick people in our village. But he was killed by bandits. Before he died he lay in his own hospital with bullets in his face. He lay there while Rabiah and her mother prayed to you.

“The British came to my village. They told us that if we gave them our lands they would give us jobs. Then they built their big factories. They darkened the skies and filled our rivers with poison. So many in my country are sick now, with cancer, children… the very old. Yet still we pray. We cry out to you. And now… you come.”

When she raised her head, her eyes were bright, as if she were in the grip of a fever.

“I once asked my mother, ‘Mama, does God hate black people?’ She slapped me. ‘Don’t ever ask such questions, Maya,’ she said. ‘You will bring down God’s wrath upon our heads.’ ‘But, Mama,’ I said. God must hate black people. He must hate Africa. Look at what has happened to us.’ She said. ‘Maya, how can you ask such terrible questions?’ ‘Look around us, Mama,’ I said. ‘How can you not ask those same questions?’”

Maya lifted her head higher and wiped away a tear as it slipped down her cheek.

“In school we learned about how the Americans made slaves of the people they took from Africa. The white men took them from their families, separated mothers and fathers from their children. Then, when Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, the Americans hated them even more. Sometimes Father Philip played movies at the community center. In those movies, the Americans make the American Indians the bad people and make themselves into the good people. Father Philip says that what the Americans did to the Indians and the Africans was wrong. But in the movies everything is the opposite from what really happened. I don’t like those movies, especially the ones about God. It sometimes seems to me that God must only love white Americans.

“Now you come. But you look like me. You tell me that you are real, but also that you were never what we believed you to be… that we have looked for too long in the wrong direction.”

Maya nodded, as if listening to a voice only she could hear.

“I can bear this news. You walked with me in my mind, and now I understand things better than when I was a child.”

I could hear the shouts of others gathering around the little schoolhouse, asking why the schoolgirls were wandering the streets, laughing and singing in the middle of the day.

“Did you hear my prayers? Do you listen to the prayers that people send to you?”

“A part of me did. You saw some of it a few moments ago, an Aspect, a representation.”

“Did that part of you ever answer prayers?”

“That’s like asking if Santa Claus flies from house to house or visits all houses simultaneously: an interesting question but basically meaningless.”