Michael (The Curse) (The Airel Saga, Book 3: Part 5-6) (2 page)

Michael Alexander sat on the edge of Airel’s deathbed, his mind tearing. He could physically feel his heart rip inside his chest, crushed under the weight of his decisions. And he thought about the paradox—the utter craziness—that he was both lover and traitor to the most beautiful girl in the world.

He wanted to rip into himself.
Yeah. Starting with this new scar right here.
He felt the mark on his abdomen—the mark of a coward.
Add that one to the list.

But what choice did he have?

The words echoed back to him from downstairs in the library:

“But she lived.”

He had watched the page crinkle under his tears as they dropped to the parchment, smudging the ink. This was not what he wanted. She was just another mission, just another cursed threat that needed to be cleansed from the earth. She was a job like so many others. But Airel somehow got in, snuck past all his defenses, and took hold of his heart. He had never known love, never really cared about it. She broke the rules as if they’d never even existed.

Then he had run back to her room, hoping that what he had dared to do would work, that the pen on the page would be powerful, that she would indeed live. But all he could do upon entering was stare at her lifeless body.

Airel. Her corpse was pallid and blue. It broke him afresh; tears stung his eyes. He could not help but mutter a curse against himself. He ran a nervous hand through his hair, grasping at it, wanting to tear it out.

After all I’ve done.

He thought of his wicked father, Stanley Alexander. The lies.
Who can honor something like that?
Yet he tried.

He had allowed James … he turned his head and let his body crumple down and down, withering.
I can’t think about James and what he did.

But he continued to list off his many sins.

He had been all in for the excitement of finding one of the immortals, the Nephilim descendants. Using his training, tracking her, finding her, observing her, standing right in front of his prey while she was totally oblivious, allowing her to take the bait, and then to spite her and all she stood for— the immortals, creation, El—he had delivered her up to the destroyer.

The Seer.

Tengu. And Tengu’s host, Stanley Alexander.

All that remained from it was total and empty desolation.

Michael stood up and violently stalked around the room, shouting, screaming at God, at El, at the whole world. He could take them on, right here, right now. His rage was a tower of all-consuming fire.

But it cooled quickly in a dousing sea of desperation. Most of his rage was directed inwardly.

At himself.

That rage quickly changed to passionate sobs of grief. He found himself on his knees at her bedside, smothering his face with her wet hair and whispering again, again, and again, “I’m so sorry, so sorry.”

Michael’s heart shattered. His world was a ruin. He had become what he had only just learned to hate, and a moment too late: evil.

CHAPTER II

I WAS UNDERWATER AGAIN. Dragged kicking and screaming. Soaked. Stuck deep. Everything hurt. My heart was frantic in my chest like it was lapping my ribcage and going for a new track record. My limbs were numb and cold. My hair tangled around my face. I couldn’t breathe.

And then it happened. It was like getting my back popped at the chiropractor—everything felt electric, like somebody flicked a switch. I burst to the surface, my arms and legs flailing in one spastic twitch, my fingers and toes tingling with nervous energy, my lungs gasping, grabbing for air by the shovelful.

My muscles contracted and I shot up to a sitting position, eyes wide and blinking, spending my first precious breath on a bloodcurdling shriek that could wake the dead—me. I could feel the memory of the speedy place, wherever I had been, being vigorously wiped away like a picture on a whiteboard. It quickly became blank like a vanishing dream.

Panic set in.
Where is he?

There he was, kneeling. Well, more like he had been knocked over on his butt from a kneeling position. He looked so shocked.

“Michael.”

He jumped up to his feet, confusion and disbelief flashing across his face. Then he collapsed to his knees again, sobbing uncontrollably, his arms around my waist, his head in my lap. All I could hear were little snippets through his tears.

“I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.”

My own eyes dampened in response to him. For a long time all I could do was pet his shoulder and run my fingers through his hair.

Was this all just a dream?

Then
She
came to the forefront of my mind, loud and clear, with an emphatic
“No.”
And I understood. “Oh. Oh, my God.”

Michael was starting to regain his composure. His body was racking itself with those little jerky ticks that come after a massive sobbing fit. He rocked back on his knees, his eyes puffy and bloodshot, and looked at me. He should have looked like a train wreck. But he was a gorgeous sight to me, and I felt that resound deep within. Deep within both of us. “Hey, Mister.”

He whispered my name. “Airel.”

We sat still as statues for a long moment, just staring at each other.

He took the lead. “There are … no words to begin to tell you how sorry I am …” His eyes said the rest, and there was the quietest, most desperate plea for forgiveness embedded within them.

I had to look down, away.
How on earth do I begin to understand this?
She
gave me some ideas. Some of them were quite violent and vengeful.

“Michael …what happened?”

He took a moment to breathe, but his eyes stayed locked on mine. Something was different. Besides the obvious, I mean. Something was very different, and I couldn’t tell what it was. “You were dead.”

I took a moment to process.
What? That’s impossible.

He saw my skepticism. “I brought you back.”

“What?”

He issued a retraction immediately, as if he was about to be struck by lightning. “No. I mean, I carried you up here. And then I …”

“Ask him how long that took,” She
said. I could tell my conscience was decidedly hostile to Michael—Michael, who had led me to the brink of death and then allowed his demon friend to push me over, quite literally. But I was of the opposite persuasion. I had forgiven him while I was drowning. Why would I take that back now, especially when, however impossible for anyone to understand, I had been given a second chance?

I found myself saying it. “How long was I … um …”

“Dead?”

“Uh. Yeah. Dead.”

“It was forever.”

I could practically hear
She
doing a facepalm and making barf noises. I rolled my eyes a little, but that was for
She,
not Michael, and I hoped he didn’t see me. I wasn’t quite sure just how it might look if
She
and I came to blows, but we were getting there quickly.

Lay off him,
I thought, trying to silence her.

“Michael. How long was I dead?” The question echoed absurdly back at me.
But that speedy place … that was so real. I was flying.
Somewhere, somehow. I was in between that and this; nothing was real, and at the same time, everything was
too
real.

I was stuck right in between. A me sandwich.

I didn’t know what to do or think. My eyes filled with tears and the flood started.

Michael simply held me for what felt like hours, and I let him. I had far too many questions to even begin to articulate them. I was outraged. I wanted to shout at him, strike his face, curse at him and ask him why he let the Brotherhood
kill
me, for crying out loud. I wanted to ask him over and over again
why, why, why
. But all I could do was sob in his arms.

I felt pathetic and used up, unstable.

I started to shiver. I was still soaked to the bone, and I realized as my sanity came back around for a little visit that there were some practical concerns needing my immediate attention. Like the crazy idea that, however this had happened and whatever explanation there was for it, I might completely ruin my resurrection by succumbing to hypothermia.

“You need to get out of those clothes,” Michael said, my shivers racking even his body.

“Y—you better w-watch it, Mis—s—ter. You can’t talk like that to me. It’s—s indecent.”

For the first time, a smile dawned on his face. “You’re beautiful,” he said. “And it’s good to have you back.”

His smile was glorious and new, even if it was mingling with the tears streaming down his face. It lit something in me that warmed me to my toes.

“What I mean is,” he said, correcting his former indiscretion, “
you’ve
got work to do.”

“Like w—what?”

He looked at me funny. “How do I say this? You smell like lake trout. And death.”

“Oh.”

“You need a nice hot bath. And dry clothes.”

I blushed. It felt good, but it too was just slightly off kilter.

“I’ll leave you to it?”

I nodded.

He stood and I feared something again for the first time. I feared being alone. He turned to go, walking for the door and the long hall in the impossibly enormous house.

“But don’t go too far,” I shouted.

He gave me a confused look. “I won’t. I need to go find Kim, though.”

“Okay.”

“’kay. Be safe. No more drowning.”

This time I let him see me roll my eyes. “Hey. You too.” I gave him a little “I’ve-got-my-eye-on-you” gesture and then he left.

I was alone.

CHAPTER III

MICHAEL WALKED OUT OF her bedroom questioning his sanity.
Am I losing it? Airel’s back and I’m off on some Good Samaritan mission five minutes later?
He didn’t want to let her out of his sight.

His feet nevertheless kept going, away, out, taking him farther and farther away from the one person he felt now—and strongly—he couldn’t live without.

The real kicker was that what he was about to do was right inside his wheelhouse: tracking. Because of the job he used to have with James, every demonic memory, every kill, every tactic, every savage act—all of it—was there for the showing and telling in his mind. He had to admit, it had made his “training” in the Brotherhood easy and swift, almost a joke. These things had become second nature, and quickly—maybe because Stanley was the Seer, maybe not.

But Airel was like ice that had taken up lodging in the stone of his heart. Love was the spark that would cause that potentially life-giving moisture to warm and expand and shatter all of him. She could wreck him with a glance. He knew it because he felt it.

It was bizarre, being only eighteen and yet having instant access to time immemorial through the daguerreotype of James’s thoughts. It was a demonic and evil perspective of things. He knew that he would have to turn and face what he had done. The demonic pathways in his mind caused him to possess a kind of twisted life experience that made certain things quite clear.

Airel.

She had changed everything. He never saw her coming. One day he was just tracking, shadowing like he was shadowing Kim even now, and then he was falling for one of those whom he had been taught were nothing but a plague to be eradicated.

Even with all that, his instincts were telling him there wasn’t much chance for the two of them.
There’s not much chance for anything, really. How can I ever go back?
He couldn’t. There were some things that couldn’t be undone.

Except death?
That was still totally crazy, and he wondered what it was that had made it work.
Was it the book? The pen?
He took more steps, consciously avoiding the next thought building in the back of his conscience. El?
Sworn enemy.

“Crap,” he said, walking out of the enormous house onto the porch. It seemed like only minutes ago, he had been having breakfast with her. And Kreios. But that was a different world.

So where did Kreios go?

More questions, and lots of them.

He walked on, down the steps.

“Where’s Kim?” He looked around.

He was on the floor of the great valley again. Only moments ago, he had carried the lifeless body of his true love right across these very steps.
True love? Do I know what that is?

He shook his head, trying to clear up his thinking. “All right. Where is she?” He looked around for signs in the grass, on the path, skillfully processing divots and pebbles and skids and filing them against the database of his demonically shared memories. “Come on, Kim. Where are you?” He kept walking.

Down the path he went, following thousands of years of inherited instinct and looking for something more solid. A bent blade of grass … a broken twig … even a partial footprint. But there was nothing that said
Kim
.

At length he found himself breaking out into the clear area at the top of the cliff. If he was looking for signs of activity, here there were plenty. He could sense it all, and it was like walking into the overpowering stench of a field of dead. He could see with his mind’s eye innumerable historical instances of this very type of thing, and it swept over him and drove him to his knees. He couldn’t help gagging—it was so real.

All the decisions he’d made—whether with good intentions or bad—were tallied up before his eyes, and it was like that old Hebrew legend:
Mene. Mene. Tekel. Upharsin.
And he could hear what it meant, that he had been weighed in the scales and found wanting. And perhaps a lesser person—
what am I, a man or a boy?
—would have crumbled into tears, but Michael Alexander didn’t. He simply stood to his feet, numb. Overwhelmed. He looked out on the lake below, the mountains in the distance. He stood now just past the boulders near the edge of the cliff.

“Michael?” The voice was right behind him.

He spun, instinct driving him instantly into his fighting stance, fists up to guard.