Tempted by Evil (21 page)

Much to my paranoid delight, I started to chuckle to myself, realizing that everything that had happened―was happening―was all a mistake, a culmination of my withdrawal from medication. My delusions were wrong. I wasn't the one they wanted. Even my own twisted mind hadn't gotten the details of its apocalyptic fantasy right.

A sense of relief had washed over me by the time I arrived back at the stately Victorian. I may have been certifiably insane, but I wasn't going to single-handedly end the existence of mankind. Excited, I tore through the front door, screaming for Julian. I couldn't wait to tell him the good news. He had stood beside me through my madness, his feelings never wavering. I knew I could count on him.

“Julian!” I hollered as I threw open the door to his bedroom. To my dismay, he was nowhere to be seen. I ran through the myriad hallways in the house, searching rooms and calling for him, but I found nothing. His parents and sister were missing as well.

With only one section of the home left to search, I made my way down a secluded wing that I'd never ventured into before. It was darker than the rest of the home, with narrower halls and smaller rooms―the “
help's
” quarters from days of old.

“Julian?” I called, approaching a room at the end of the corridor. A crack of light escaped from beneath the closed door. “Is anyone in here?” I knocked gently on the door before pressing it open slowly. “Constantine?”

Nobody was there.

A desk lamp illuminated the tiny and sparse office. A lone desk and chair sat in the middle of the space. On the far wall, what looked to be a degree of some sort hung in a beautifully carved wooden frame. A paper lay on the desk with a pen tossed on top of it. A
letter
.

And the handwriting looked familiar.

Knowing it was wrong, I walked around the desk and picked up the delicate sheet of paper. My hands trembled violently as I brought it up to read it. Something was wrong.

Dear Aspen,

I'm afraid that I have failed you in the grandest of ways. What I did out of a misguided sense of protection has served only to drive you into the hands of evil. We cannot meet here. It's unsafe. I've learned things since you left here. Things that have put both of us in the gravest of danger. When you receive this, I need you to be calm but assertive. You must leave and leave quickly. Make haste, my child, for the darkness is upon you.

I have set up a place for you just outside of town. You'll find an ally there. He will help you and keep you safe, and I will join you there as soon as I can.

There is a pressing matter at the convent that requires my attention first.

With great love,

Sister Mary Constance

I couldn't have been seeing what I was seeing. A warning―to me―from a dead woman. Frightened, I crumpled the letter up and shoved it into my back pocket.
You must leave . . . the darkness is upon you.

“No!
” I cried out in the tiny room. “This isn't happening. None of this is real. It isn't
real!
”

I turned to escape the scene that was quickly unraveling my mind. Instead of improving the situation, my new point of view only derailed it further. In my path was the diploma on the wall, or what I'd thought to be one. As I neared it, I saw that the calligraphic print was not a note of achievement, but rather a poem of sorts in Latin
printed on brittle parchment and encased in a gilded frame.

And it shall come to pass, that the one born of both light and shadow, on whose shoulders rests the fate of mankind, will extinguish the flame of life. The golden circle will succumb to darkness, and so shall the world. His veil of protection will be removed, His curtain sheltering humanity from the pervasive evil that seeks to reign, will be no more. All things unholy shall plague creation. The earth will bleed. The stars will fall. The sun retreat and souls shall crawl.
Before the rising of the moon on the eve of adulthood, deceit will plague her, voices will mislead her, and evil will tempt her. A trusted one will fall by her hand, setting the course of action in play. Minds will be poisoned, weather altered, and time manipulated. Evil will rejoice as her faith weakens and her mind betrays her, all leading to the final transgression.
But not all is lost. The tide may turn with one simple act, to elevate good and banish the unholy. A choice between the light and dark will seal our fate.

She must serve us.

Unknowingly, my hand drifted up to touch the prophecy that had up until then only come to me in pieces. My recent conviction that all the madness had been just a figment of my imagination was quickly crumbling. With a quick jerk of my arm, I pulled away from the evil in that message. When I did, the picture frame cocked to the side, exposing an aberration in the wall behind it. A hidden door.

No longer concerned about intrusion, I tore the picture from the wall and threw it across the room, fracturing the glass and splintering the frame. I had expected to see a locked safe looking back at me, but instead, I found one slightly ajar. It opened easily for me, exposing a simple black box inside. I yanked that box out and tossed in on the desk, immediately ripping off the top to display its contents.

I was ill prepared for what I would find.

Inside were pages upon pages of reports. Reports written by Mother Superior, addressed to Constantine Casey. I rifled through them all, snatching some out at random to read. There were notes in Mother Superior’s handwriting regarding my childhood habits, activities, and highlighted sections regarding my abilities. She observed on one page that my “powers” seemed to be tied to my emotions just as my mother’s had been. Overwhelmed by the mere mention of my mother in connection with everything happening, I set the file down and kept searching through the other materials in the box.

Under the notes were pictures of me growing up, taken by a high-powered camera lens from far away. Under those were lists of every book I'd ever read, place I'd ever loved, and song I'd ever sung. It was a veritable catalogue of my life and anything that ever mattered to me. Everything you would need to convince me that you knew who I was―or to be the person I wanted to be with.

Not wanting to miss anything, I dumped all the contents onto the desktop, spreading them out wildly with both hands. Amid the standard-sized copy paper was a single, small piece of much higher quality. I flipped it over to see a notarized and highly official document.

A birth certificate.

Aspen Thomas. Born September 23, 1994.

I was not eighteen. Not yet.

It was the eve of my birthday as well as the destruction of the world, and no amount of rationalization or medication could undo that reality for me.

The prophecy was real.

“You know,” a voice called from the hallway, “it's terribly rude to snoop, Aspen. I thought Mother Superior would have done a much better job teaching you that at the convent. Seems as though I've made a poor assumption there.” Constantine gracefully walked into the room and shut the door behind him before locking us in together. “I see that the proverbial cat is out of the bag,” he continued, nodding his head at the piece of paper in my hand. “Luckily for me, it's too late for you to do anything about it all now. The path has been set.”

“I want to leave,” I demanded, sounding every bit as weak and pathetic as I felt, trembling before his commanding presence.

“And what would the point in that be, dear girl?” he asked, coming to place his hand on my shoulder. “The damage is done. All we have to do now is wait. The end will come soon enough, but until then, you and I will remain in here so that there aren't any further hiccups in the process. You really have made this challenging, Aspen.”

“It's really happening,” I whispered, finally able to voice the pressing truth that haunted me.

“Of course it is,” he replied, taking a seat atop the messy desk. “Why would you think it wasn't?”

“I thought . . .”

“You thought what?”

“I thought I was going crazy.”

“That's because you fought it. Now that you realize and accept what is to come, it will all be much easier. The choice has been made. It's only a matter of time now.”

“Why me?” I asked, wanting to know why I had been chosen to cause the extermination of humankind.

“She didn't tell you, did she?”

“Who? Tell me what?”

“Mother Superior. She didn't tell you who your parents were, did she?”

“No,” I snarled, “but she knew how they died.”

“Yes, well, that was a necessity of sorts. The rules of this game are painfully clear, so we've had to find ways to exploit the more gray areas. Killing your parents allowed us to control your upbringing and helped us to gain certain advantages that the others didn't have.”

“
Others ?” I asked, feeling my chest tighten. “Who are the others?”

“The Light, the good . . . whatever you wish to call them.”

“Angels . . .”

“Ugh,” he moaned dramatically. “I'm so tired of that word. It sounds so glorious and pretentious; whereas, our name sounds so lowly and foul.
Fallen . Or worse yet, demon.
It just doesn't have that same ring to it, does it?”

I instinctively reached for the rosary around my neck, but it wasn't there. I'd left it in Julian's room, taking it off at some point the night before. Clearly understanding what I was trying to do, Julian's father roared with laughter.

“That's hardly going to save you now, child. Besides, how can it protect you from what you are?”

“I'm not evil. I'm no demon!”

“Aren't you, though?” he asked, peeling himself elegantly off of the desk to tower above me. “That's what Mother Superior forgot to mention to you. Your parents are to blame for who you are―why you're in this predicament. Your father was an angel who just couldn't withstand the dark appeal of your mother, just as you couldn’t turn away from the charms of my son. Your mother was one of us. Fallen.”

The light and shadow will war within . . .

“
No . . .”

“Oh, yes.”

“And Julian . . .”

“Of course.” He gloated.

A storm deep within me began to build, born of hatred for his words. As it brewed and churned, so did the ground beneath my feet. A quaking of terrible force shook us both, knocking us to the floor. Constantine looked mildly surprised by the disturbance―I was not. The apocalypse threatened to unleash all of God's fury upon us through whatever means possible. An earthquake hardly seemed out of the question to me.

He reached for me across the floor, but I wanted nothing from him, most certainly not his aid.

“STOP!” I screamed, cupping my hands over my ears.

The shaking ceased immediately.

Startled, I looked up to see Julian's father, still lying on the floor with his arm outstretched toward me. He was frozen―him and everything else in the room. Everything but me. Objects that had started to fall from the desk hung suspended in midair, and nothing made a sound. It was eerily quiet, as if I'd somehow created a vacuum in which nothing else existed.

Assuming it was the only chance I would have to escape, I pushed myself up off of the floor and ran out of that room and the house as quickly as possible. In my hand, clutched tightly, was my birth certificate. It brought me the oddest sense of comfort knowing that once my parents had held it. My demon and angel parents.

When I broke through the front door of the house, I stopped dead in my tracks. At 11:00 a.m., it was pitch black outside. The moon had eclipsed the sun, entirely snuffing it out of the sky.

The moon did not shine.

“Lord help me,” I whispered into the darkness.

Barely able to see anything before me, I stepped off the front steps, only to slip and fall to the ground. I floundered around, unable to get my feet underneath me. The ground was slick with something. My initial thought was that it had stormed when the quake hit, but when I tried to wipe my hands off on the few dry patches that remained on my pants, I realized that it wasn't water at all. Water wasn't that thick.

The Casey home was the only house on the street with any illumination spilling out of it, so I cautiously stepped into a ray of that light. I needed to confirm what I feared was true. Slowly―terrified―I let my gaze fall on my open palms, held out in front of me.

The earth shall bleed . . .

“
No, no, no, no . . . ,” I rambled, trying desperately to wipe the remaining blood off of my hands on the side of Julian's house, decorating it with the carnage of man. The carnage I was destined to bring.

A place . . . just outside of town . . . an ally . . . he will help you . . . keep you safe . . .

“Merrick,” I gasped, turning to look down the street that I had fled earlier that morning.

I carefully ran for the neighbor’s bike that I could barely see leaning against the fence, nearly slipping yet again.

“It makes sense now . . .
he makes sense now,” I whispered as I climbed atop the bike. “He's the Light―an angel. Sister Mary Constance had to have known. He must have gone to her when he saw what was happening to me. If any of this can be stopped, surely he will know how.”