The Soulkeepers (33 page)

"He did not come willingly. You will not
have him!"

Just then, the heavy door swung open.
Mordechai stood in the doorway along with another Watcher. Through
the purple flames, they looked nothing like their borrowed images,
but Jacob would know Mordechai anywhere. He was easily the biggest
Watcher he'd seen in Nod and the blackness of his eyes was
unmistakable. That hadn't been an illusion. His friend was only
slightly smaller but equally terrifying. These male Watchers had
horns that grew from their forehead, giving them a more demonic
look than Dr. Silva or Auriel.

When he spotted Jacob sitting in the center
of the purple circle, Mordechai smiled a wry grin and rapped his
taloned fingers against each other. He cocked his head to the side
and laughed toward Dr. Silva.

"Abigail! To what do I owe the pleasure of a
visit from my sister?"

Malini's sharp intake of breath was Jacob's
cue to take her hand.

"I am yours no longer," Dr. Silva
hissed.

"You've met my friend, Turel?" He motioned
toward the Watcher who stood next to him.

Dr. Silva flinched and Jacob wondered how
she knew Turel.

Mordechai swaggered toward the Horseman, the
Helper, and the Angel who crouched ready for the attack. "Hand over
my prisoners and you may leave," he said to Dr. Silva.

She did not answer.

"Suit yourself," he said through clenched
teeth. "But you do realize that I have no intention of losing two
of my prized specimens." He looked at Lilly and then at Jacob,
rubbing a pale scar on the scaly skin of his chest.

All at once Jacob remembered. It was
Mordechai in the center of the road. It was Mordechai he hit with
the car, and it was Mordechai who'd taken his mom. The scar was the
place his mom's knife had dug in. All this time he'd thought the
memory was a hallucination. Now, he realized, it was painfully
real.

"And you," he nodded at
Gideon, "know very well that He
won't help
you here. You'll make the finest specimen of them all."

Gideon flexed his wings.

"Have it your way," Mordechai spat.

Jacob pulled Malini tighter against him as
the dark angel raised his taloned hands.

Battle

Mordechai rolled one hand over the other and
formed a ball of orange flame. He hurled it towards Dr. Silva with
a hissing sound that made the hair on Jacob's arms stand on end.
Gideon crossed his forearms and a purple shield glowed to life in
front of him, absorbing the impact of the flames inches from Dr.
Silva's face. Dr. Silva circled one hand over the other behind
Gideon. She nodded to him to lower the shield and hurled the blue
orb that formed between her hands at Mordechai. It hit him in the
shoulder and a sound like a gag escaped his mouth.

Lilly lunged at Turel, her blade sinking
into his stomach. The Watcher grabbed the staff and yanked it from
his gut, tossing it and her aside like she weighed nothing. She
flipped gracefully to the top of a pew, spinning her staff back to
fighting position. Gideon's shield just barely stopped Turel's
fireball from taking off her head. Black goop oozed from Turel's
stomach. She spun through the air, dodging another ball of energy.
This one exploded into a swarm of locusts, which Gideon blew away
with a gust of breath. She sliced into Turel's collarbone on the
way down, landed and jumped, delivering a tornado kick to his head
as she yanked her staff from his flesh.

He retaliated. The fireball skimmed her calf
and Lilly screamed louder than Jacob had ever heard a human scream.
He smelled burning flesh.

Jacob could see now the magic Mordechai
wielded was more than natural fire. Through the purple flames he
watched the smoky blackness eat the flesh off his mother's calf.
This was not fire, but dark magic.

Gideon held the shield in a dome over Dr.
Silva and Lilly as they endured a storm of fire from Mordechai and
Turel. He reached out and touched Lilly's calf. Her screaming
stopped and the open wound healed.

As Jacob saw it, Gideon was the only one who
could shield and heal which left Dr. Silva and Lilly to fight. Only
they were smaller and weaker than the Watchers that attacked them.
The battle was unbalanced and not in their favor. Auriel was still
watching lazily from her perch. In typical Watcher style, she was
too self-serving to join the battle until she absolutely had to,
but if she changed her mind they were all doomed.

Turel turned toward Jacob and sent a ball of
flame toward his head. He ducked but he didn't need to. The purple
flames shot up and ate the fireball out of the air. Turel cursed
and his yellow eyes search the boundary of the salt star.

"Pray with me, Jacob," Malini whispered into
his ear. Tears streamed down her face. "Please pray with me. I'm so
scared."

"Why? What good would it do? We can't waste
time Malini. We have to think of a way to help."

"Please Jacob, please pray with me."

"I don't... I can't Malini. It's just not
me."

"Jacob, listen to me." She grabbed his
shoulders and shook. "Look around you. We are going to die unless
we get a miracle. I am here, in this hell, because of you. I
believe there is a God and I need that comfort right now. The least
you can do is give it to me."

Jacob shook his head and grabbed a bottle of
water. "The only one here to save us is me, Malini. Stay here. I'm
going to try to help."

He stepped through the flames.

Pouring enough water into his hand to form a
sharp, jagged star, he hurled the weapon into the side of
Mordechai's head. Black ooze drained from his temple. He poured
more water into his hand, willing it sharper and faster than the
last.

"You want to play too, maggot?" Turel
yelled. With the illusion returned outside of the circle, Jacob
could see he was the Watcher from the train.

He released a barrage of sharp discs towards
Turel's neck. The distraction allowed Dr. Silva to come out from
behind the shield. She hurled blue energy, a storm of electric
light, at Mordechai. The Watcher drew a circle of fire around
himself that absorbed Dr. Silva's fire and turned Jacob's ice discs
to steam.

He dove out of the way as a fireball from
Auriel bulleted toward his head. The smell of his own hair burning
filled his nostrils. Somersaulting across the floor, he motioned
for Malini to throw him another bottle. She rolled it to him from
within the circle.

"Who do we have there?" screeched Auriel,
who had jumped down next to Mordechai to join the fight. It was as
if she was noticing Malini for the first time. "This one is hard to
see. What are you my dear?"

Malini didn't answer.

"Why, Nod is teaming with humans today,
Mordechai." She sent a golden ring toward Malini, like a lasso, but
the purple flames swallowed it before it could reach her.

Meanwhile, Lilly threw her staff at Turel
and the blade sank into his back. He struggled to reach it to pull
it out, buying Dr. Silva time to send a barrage of blue energy
toward the shielded Mordechai and Auriel who had finally joined the
fight. With Turel's defeat eminent, Mordechai abandoned him where
he fell and swallowed Auriel into his flaming safeguard. As he did
so, Jacob hurled knives of ice toward him. It was useless. The fire
easily dissolved his weapons into puffs of steam.

Lilly and Dr. Silva took down Turel, ripping
him apart and binding the pieces to the floor with glowing blue
rope. Auriel and Gideon battled behind them. Lightning flowed from
her fingers, through Mordechai's shield and Gideon reflected the
power back at her with a mirror of energy. The trick worked. Where
Auriel's power rained down on the ring, the fire weakened. There
was no one left to battle Mordechai but Jacob. With everything he
had, he sent a shower of ice toward him.

Mordechai reached through his dwindling
shield and caught one of Jacob's weapons in his bare hand. He
watched it melt in his palm. The grin on his face was triumphant as
it dripped through his fingers.

"Normal water?" he laughed and dropped the
remaining shield. "You don't believe in God!" He laughed,
sauntering closer to Jacob and swatting off his attack as if the
razor sharp weapons were merely an annoyance. "Good choice boy.
You've never seen God after all. But you've seen me. Why don't you
just believe in me?" And, with that he hurled a fireball that
plowed through Jacob's shield of ice as if it were made of paper
and landed in his lower abdomen.

He fell screaming. The spot where
Mordechai's power hit him burned like fresh, raw flames. Jacob beat
his body with his hands but succeeded only in splattering his own
blood. This type of fire had no flames. Blood covered his hands and
splashed his face. It pooled under him. There was something coming
out of the hole in his gut, something his mind couldn't process
through the pain, something that should've been under his skin.

Jacob looked towards Gideon for help. The
angel was across the room, shielding his mom whose weapon lay
kicked aside. Dr. Silva was also behind the shield, staring at
Jacob with an agonizing pity and launching a barrage of power at
Mordechai and Auriel in a last attempt to save him. She was losing.
There was no way Gideon could reach Jacob in time to heal him. As
he tasted blood in his mouth, he came to the icy realization he
would die in Nod. His body shook uncontrollably and the light
dimmed around the edges. He was falling. He was dying.

"Oh Jacob, there's so much blood!" Malini
was over him, pressing her hands against the open wound.

"Malini, you've got to hide. I'm dead
anyway. Get out of here."

"No," she said through her teeth. "You've
got to believe, Jacob. Miracles happen every day. I'm not letting
you go. No way."

With his last ounce of strength he lifted
his hand and placed it over hers.

"Pressure. You're supposed to put pressure
on an open wound to stop the bleeding." Malini's eyes were wild
with panic.

Death came for Jacob for the second time in
his short life. He found himself in the obsidian tunnel beckoned
forward by the light. This time he moved toward it without fear or
anger. He'd let that stuff go the moment he saw his mother in the
Watcher's cage. He'd forgiven himself, he'd forgiven her, and he'd
buried what blame he'd placed on God, if there was one. Maybe it
was less buried than forgiven. His trip to Nod had made him realize
that even though he'd done bad things, he wasn't a bad person and
he supposed that way of thinking extended to the Laudners and to
Paris. He let it all go.

Deep within the darkness of the tunnel, he
thought about his life. He'd convinced himself there was no God
because of the evil in the world and certainly that evil was real;
it filled the Watcher church around his body. But as he thought of
Gideon, Dr. Silva and his mother, it was just as clear that every
force, every action, had an equal and opposite reaction. If evil
existed, then an equal degree of good existed somewhere, too. It
existed in them, in the fact that they were willing to die to
protect him. It existed in their willingness to fight, to die
rather than become part of the evil.

What if believing was not about the good in
the world? What if people had faith not because of what some
superior being could do for them but what they could do when the
light of something bigger than any one individual awakened within
them—for the sake of others? If evil had been here since the dawn
of time, maybe goodness was also here. Maybe, his mistake was
thinking it was about him, his own future, his own soul, and not
about this: the world needed the good that was in him.

He reached the end of the tunnel. Jacob
could make out a pair of boy's feet and the hem of a rag sack just
like he was wearing. He looked down at himself and wondered if the
light was some sort of reflection, like a giant mirror. What he
could see looked just like him. But the white radiance burned his
eyes and he struggled to tip his head up to see the boy's face.
Shielding his eyes with one hand, he reached out his other and
stepped forward. Before he could touch the image, a voice rang out,
"Not yet, Jacob."

In a rush of wind, power, and will, he fell
back into his body. The pain was gone. All he could feel was the
pressure of Malini's touch. He looked down at the tops of her
bloody hands, and then pushed them aside. Through the burnt hole in
his rag clothing, he could see fresh pink skin. The wound was
completely healed.

He needed to save Malini. It was his job,
his purpose. He knew it at that moment as surely as he knew his
name was Jacob Lau. This was war and it was time for him to choose
a side. For all the pain his name had caused him, for all the agony
over his mixed blood, every experience he'd ever had brought him to
this place.

"Oh my God, Jacob…Jacob you're healed,"
Malini said, staring at the blood on her hands.

But he wasn't listening. He was watching
Mordechai turn toward them, another fireball forming in his palm.
Jacob crawled in front of Malini, blocking her body with his. On
his knees in front of her, he knew what she'd said was true. He did
get her into this mess and he would get her out of it.

He kneeled before Mordechai knowing he was a
Horseman. He was a protector, connected to the universe with a
unique purpose, and he would not fail. The quickening came without
warning or the hum of water that had always accompanied it in the
past. His thoughts moved so fast that everything else seemed to
slow down. The strings inside his body tightened.

Jacob's reasons were not the same as
Malini's, or John's, or even Dr. Silva's, but he made his peace
with God in that moment. It had nothing to do with religion or
church or a specific name for who He was. He didn't sign his name
to anything or chant a special prayer. In his head, he sent a yes
into the universe, an invitation to whatever force for good
existed. For the first time, he wanted to be a part of it. He was
willing and he was there.