Michael: The Mark (Airel Saga Book Four)

Chapter V

MICHAEL KNELT IN THE sand, filled with grief. What have I done?

But it wasn't his fault. Surely not. Why does it have to be like this? This is unbearable. Why do they have to do this kind of thing? He raged against what had happened, and at his hand. Again. Regret, most bitter of all the emotions, rained down upon his heart and mind, soaking into the very marrow of all that he was.

He knew the methods, of course. He should have seen it coming. But he didn't imagine it. It took wickeder minds for that.

Airel whispered to him, "What happened?" She stroked his back, and it calmed him a little.

At first he was unable to speak. Once he tried, however, the words began to come easily. "They ... I knew they had sent scouts. I just didn't think ... I just didn't think the Brotherhood would do it like this. To send the ... the Garrison of the Offspring." Michael knew how horrid and evil it was. Demons manipulating the minds of the innocent, the children, making inroads against El by turning the children against Him. It had been a product of cold genius to him when he had first beheld it years ago. But now it was too real. "They sent the children."

"What?" Airel said. "What does any of that mean?" She looked horrified in the darkness, looking back and forth from the dead countenance of the corpse to that of his own.

"It means," Michael tried his best to regain his composure, "that they have opened up the entire armory against us. And they want us to know it. Not that they're desperate. But that they will do whatever it takes."

"To do what, kill us?"

"Yes." He looked away from the dead eyes of the child to the distance, across the river. "And recover the Bloodstone." Tension, then. Heavy and sudden, full of unfinished business that would have to remain unfinished for now. "That's what they're trying so desperately to grab. The Infernals don't care how much military capital they have to expend in order to gain it."

He looked at her. She seemed very scared, which was unlike her.

"Don't worry. At this point, it's every man for himself in the Brotherhood. They're still not beneath the idea of killing each other in order to get the Bloodstone. With it comes the power of the Seer. They want that more than anything."

He looked back to the rapidly cooling body of the child in his arms.

"What happened?" Airel asked him.

He sighed. "I asked Ellie to help me ferret them out," he began. "I had begun to see some suspicious activity around the fringes of our movements here in Arlington. Since our plane isn't here yet, and since I also didn't want them to follow us when we leave, I decided we needed to confront and destroy them ..."

Grief raked its claws across his wretched mind once more as he thought about the aborted life of the child he had killed, the missed unlimited chances it represented for life. For good or ill, the boy had a right to live. Michael had revoked all of that with a single act.

He tried to move on with the account of how it had happened. "With Ellie's help, we managed to isolate the tail. We had ascertained that there was only one. We cornered him here on the beach, against the water. I should have known before I took him down ..." ...that he was too small to be a grown man... "...but I took my shot anyway."

"You shot him?" Airel hissed in a whisper, then recovered. "Wait ... you shot him? I didn't hear any gunshots."

"The freeway's right there." He pointed straight ahead. The racket of interstate traffic, mostly trucks at that hour, became very loud once attention had been drawn to it. "Besides," he patted his ribs under his sweater, "Stanley trained me well. I know when to use a silencer."

It came off rude, like sacrilege, and he did not intend that. But he couldn't stop himself. "One shot. I took him down with one shot."

He then collapsed into more heaving sobs.

"I knew him, you know..." His voice softened as he brushed a hand over the boy's cheek. "I used to help change his diapers." He choked on a sob and swallowed hard.

Airel prodded softly, "What was his name?"

"This was Marc." Michael was running out of tears to cry. He could feel anger beginning to set in.

"Did he ... attack you?"

"Yeah, I chased him here. He was just beginning to change ... I had to kill him. There was no time to think, really.

"I'm so sorry," she said. She was silent for a while. "But you had to defend yourself. You had to defend me—us."

"God, I killed him. I killed Marc. What else is there?" His voice was quiet. "When will it ever be enough?"

He stood, holding Marc dead and dangling. The boy was small in his arms. "I need some time alone. To take care of this, to think."

"What are you going to do?"

He looked at her. "Take care of it."

"Where should I go?" She sounded lost.

"Back to the room. Sleep. Ellie says her man will be here with a car at 8 a.m. sharp to pick us up and take us to the airstrip. That doesn't give you much time."

Airel looked very sad. "You want me to leave?" She stood off from him, hands in her back pockets.

He looked at her perhaps a little cruelly, he thought. "Yes," he said, hoping she would understand all that he had been through for her. For them.

Eyes brimming with tears, she left him.

***

I COULDN'T BELIEVE IT. Michael had killed a boy; demon host or not, he was a boy. And now he didn't want me around. I felt like I didn't even know him anymore. I didn't know how much to attribute to the Bloodstone, how much to all the crazy circumstances of our situation, and how much was just me doing my over-thinking thing again.

I walked alone, back to the hotel room. Back to Kim, the zombie; and Ellie, the weirdo. A little slice of hell.