Michael: The Mark (Airel Saga Book Four)

Chapter II

Ascension Island—Present Day

KREIOS RESTED ATOP GREEN Mountain, blandly and simply named in spite of its sublimely beautiful setting, almost 3,000 feet above sea level. Ascension Island, in the South Atlantic, was a good place to stop and rest, to collect his scattered thoughts for a little while, indulge in a stolen moment. This had always been one of his favorite places, a sanctuary of sorts for him. In the past, it was always a destination. Now it was just a convenient place to stop, a waypoint on a journey elsewhere, and it made him intensely sad.

He faced south and east, away from Georgetown, his back to Wideawake Airfield, looking toward where he was headed: Cape Town, South Africa.

Kreios was so heavy with care that he was numb and staring. Wide-eyed, he let whole worlds pass by in review before his imagination.

Thoughts of the history of this place randomly crashed into and through him. Ascension Island, so named because of the date of its discovery on Ascension Day, a church calendar holiday. He knew its history, of course, that some Christians had tried to redeem pagan feasts like Ashteroth by making them sacred—a millennially blind tradition that just as easily could be called sacrilege, depending on the perspective. Good intentions, he thought. He had been there at Babylon when the tower fell, when the peoples were scattered. He had seen with his own eyes what that event had wrought under the sun.

What does any of it matter? He knew, for instance, and by personal experience, that Ascension Island was once used in what mankind commonly called the Second World War, in the Battle of the Atlantic, that the Allies had conducted operations against Nazi U-boats from the island. He knew it had served cross-Atlantic boat planes as a refueling depot in the age of the propeller. He knew it once served as a coaling station for steam-powered transatlantic passenger liners.

He knew it all. He had seen one of the roots of the problem at Babylon. They had built a tower to their own glory. El had scattered them. Men were forced from then on to go their separate ways, to build their rickety empires with different languages. It was inevitable that different customs would emerge, that different ways of thinking would develop; different worldviews, alien to one another, would ensue. The chasm of worldview between men since Babylon was inevitable, he thought. And beyond hope.

The more of man's history he saw hurtling on past him at breakneck speed, the more meaningless and nonsensical it became. He had left paradise for this? No. Not this. In moments like these, he prayed for the Brotherhood to come out of cowardly hiding and confront him. To take him. After all, why not? Perhaps then he might find meaning.

Honestly, he didn't care where he was, or even when. It was all the same perverse blur, an affront. He cared less, too, in the final analysis, that the Brotherhood was sure to be tracking him. Each flight, he knew, was like a cannonade at point-blank range. He thought of hiding from it all within the folds of time, perhaps going back to his little concrete room in the mountains of Idaho ... walking through that door ...

Perhaps, he thought, he was secretly hoping they would come. All of them might converge upon me, thinking I possess the Bloodstone. Then he might go down to hell and take all of them with him. His mind flashed with Germanic legends of Valhalla, Gotterdammerung; the end of the world in a cataclysm of fire. He had known the demon Wotan, source of the legend. All these pagan legends had their dark angelic sources.

"The life is in the blood," he said, and he would spill it all. "Survival of the fittest," he said, mimicking Wotan's lie to the poor befuddled German philosophers, a lie that had now enraptured the entire world.

He ascended to the horizontal of a large white stone cross and sat upon it, an angel of El, hanging his head in desperation. His back to its post, he rested drooped on its arm, lifted up above the earth, and the tropical breezes filtered through him.

His thoughts relentlessly clawed back, torturing him: Airel was gone. Eriel was lost forever. There was nothing left. There was nothing but blood in the streets, running in the gutters, the blood of the Brotherhood, and finally, eventually ... of Michael Alexander.

The traitor. The Judas Iscariot.

The warm breeze lifted him from his homicidal bent, brought him memories of his home. Millennia ago. It was indeed a different life. Filled to brimming with quiet, with solitude, with peace and fulfillment.

He smiled.

How long had it been since he had done that?

It was her face: Eriel. Oh. How she looked like her mother. Wonderful. Beautiful, full of life and full of fire. It was she that had kept him going after his beloved wife had passed on. But how many countless years had passed over him in indifferent numb purposelessness since then?

He growled at the breeze. "It's all over now," he said aloud. She his beloved, and Eriel, and even Airel—every trace of his love and every reason for which he had abandoned paradise were now wiped away, obliterated. They were to be no more.

"But what does that matter?"

They were all gone. All three, gone. They would not return to him. He was abandoned, alone, dead, hollow. Kreios set his jaw and gnashed his teeth, his eyes narrowed to warlike slits. "We will meet again, young Michael Alexander. We will. And when we do, I will exact payment in full. And I will take my time."

The angel lifted up his head and stood to his feet on the cross. Looking east and south. The sun behind. Darkness before him. He was beyond intrepid; not even El could change his mind now. He had a very great many of the Nri to kill, and quickly.

Kreios deftly flexed his body and leaped into the air with a curse for the Brotherhood. The angel shot forward into the sky, leaving a misty contrail in his wake. The shape of wings, made of light and mist, hovered over his back.

Kreios drank in the elation of pure power and speed. There was something magical and holy about flying. Indeed, there had been a day when he was holy ... but that was another time. Another life.