Broken Angels Read online

  He showed her a puzzled expression before erasing it with a smile. “I just prefer to think of myself as nothing more than a Watcher.”

  “Huh.” It was Ava’s turn to look puzzled. “The Archangel didn’t mention Watchers. But I know the scriptures do.”

  Robert made a mental note to do some research on what book or books of scripture she could be talking about, first chance he got on Sunday. He figured the meaning of “inverting” was probably very similar to that of “converting,” but he’d look into that too.

  “I’d almost completed my training in Xyn,” Ava said, “but before taking the final step, I was forced to undertake an inholy mission on Reality’s surface.”

  He’d have to look into the meaning of “inholy” as well.

  “I learned that right in Spencer, right in my own hometown, one of my closest friends had become corrupted. She was also an angel, but one of the worst kind.”

  “Marie-Lydia?” Robert said.

  “Yes. It was the Tuesday after spring break. I was at home when I received the revelation. She was at school, trying to kill everyone. I got there and did everything I could to stop her. Last thing I remember, I pinned her down in the gym, and took her down to XynKroma.”

  “And next thing you knew—”

  “I was in a hospital,” Ava said. “In Arlington, Virginia. On a September day, far away from home.” She finished her drink.

  “Yeah, well, I guess you already found out about your mother,” Robert said as he stood and reached for her glass.

  “My mother?” Ava asked. “What about her?”

  He stood awkwardly in front of her. “Didn’t you try to call home today?”

  Ava opened her mouth and closed it just as quickly. For the first time, she appeared nervous.

  “I didn’t call anyone today,” she said. “When I was ready, and able, I just left the hospital. And I made my way here.”

  Robert took a deep breath. He sat back down and leaned forward, ready to take her hand and try to comfort her if necessary.

  “Ava, after you told us your name, we tried to find your parents. And, we…Well, we found no record of a father. And your mother, she’s gone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We couldn’t find any trace of her,” he said. “We’re still searching, but…”

  Robert broke off, feeling his throat catch, remembering how he felt when he was told the same news about his father more than three years ago. A fine comforter he was.

  He managed to control his emotions well enough to notice Ava didn’t seem all that upset about the news. In fact, she no longer seemed anything—not uncomfortable, angry, depressed, or even perplexed. Her facial expression showed nothing but a blank. She was suppressing it, Robert decided. She was repressing something.

  “I’m sure if she’s to be found,” Ava said, “someone will find her.”

  She stood and stretched her arms, then looked all around the room in a nonchalant manner. Robert stared at her. She was communicating exactly what she intended not to. Uneasiness. Was there some issue with her mother? Did Ava have no use for her after her inversion experience with this so-called Archangel? Just how did that house burn down?

  Robert shifted his focus from Ava’s body language to her clothes: a wheat-colored jacket over a cream-colored tank top, black capri pants, and matching black ballet flats. They weren’t the clothes he and Darryl had found her in. And that diamond pendant in her cleavage…She’d made at least one other stop before coming to his place.

  Apparently tired of averting her eyes and not knowing what else to say, Ava asked if she could use his bathroom. Robert said yes and asked if she wanted another drink. She said yes and closed the bathroom door.

  Robert hurried to pour the juice, then, after checking that she was still in the bathroom, he put two fingers on the face of his right-wristwatch. He contacted Adam and gave him an update on all that had happened since they’d last communicated. The responding message asked that he bring Ava to The Burrow, immediately. They’d set her up in one of the spare apartments for the night. Adam had plans for her.

  He was about to send a message to Darryl using the watch on his left wrist when he heard the bathroom door open. He picked up the glass of juice and turned around. Ava was standing three feet in front of him. Startled, Robert released the glass.

  Ava grabbed it. “Thank you.”

  “Sure.” It was too hard to tell whether she’d grabbed the glass from his hand or from the air after he released it.

  “You know,” she said after taking a drink, “you don’t have a mirror in your bathroom.”

  “I realize that.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “Yes,” Robert said. “I have reasons.”

  Neither spoke as they stared at each other. She’d lose the contest. There was no way he was going to deal out personal information to a stranger. Especially not this stranger.

  Ava didn’t blink, but she eventually turned her back on him to return to the sitting area. “You know,” she said, “I was thinking.”

  “Oh?” Robert followed her.

  “If you’re prioritizing, it would be best to concentrate on finding Marie-Lydia, rather than my mom.”

  “Any particular reason why?”

  “Yes,” Ava said as they sat down. “I have reasons. One’s an adult and can take care of herself. The other…is young. And a danger to herself.”

  “And to others. We know.”

  “I want to go to XynKroma, Robert. It’s where I took her, last time I saw her. It’s the only way I can pick up her trail. And I can’t go alone. I want to go with someone I trust.”

  Robert sighed as his eye unfocused.

  His former pastor used to preach that Heaven and Hell weren’t actual places, just metaphors for certain states of mind. They were conditions of existence to be experienced in this life; one experienced Heaven or Hell based on one’s attitude and actions. There were no other planes of existence. But Robert’s former pastor didn’t have the White Fire Virus. He knew nothing about XynK-roma, even though he’d come close to a good enough description in some of his sermons.

  Robert was neither a preacher nor a poet, but even his best description of Xyn sounded like something delivered from a pulpit to a congregation of born-again beatniks. It was another dimension, a realm comprising the deepest, lowest levels of accessible Reality. Xyn was what university professors of philosophy and religion would call “Ultimate Reality.” Not a dreamscape or a fantasyland or an imaginative figment, but an actual plane of existence made up of dirty light and sentient beings’ polluted thoughts, the fundamental energies of life.

  Heaven and Hell may’ve been fictional realms for the afterlife, but XynKroma was an experienced fact, particularly for those infected with the White Fire Virus. A seemingly infinite realm, Xyn was like Heaven and Hell after they’d been combined, folded up into a pea-sized nugget, and relocated to exist simultaneously— and unstably—at the core of every sentient creature’s mind. In theory, anyone could visit the extra-dimensional realm, but thanks to their hypersensitivity and electromagnetic abilities, it was much easier and much more common for Virus-carriers. As far as Robert knew, the realm could only be accessed by practicing a form of intense meditation and staring deep into one’s own or someone else’s eyes, tunneling to the center of the subconscious mind. Ava clearly wanted to go the latter route, his eye and hers locked, strangers embraced, their bodies entwined like lovers, if only for one night…

  It was too dangerous. For the body and the mind.

  Energy from every living being’s mind—their hopes, fears, desires, hates, wishes, everything—fed into Xyn, like rivers and rainfalls feeding an ocean. Hence the realm’s chaos. The flowing energies from the minds of every living being competed with one another in Xyn, resulting in the creation of archetypes and other symbols that manifested as dangerous settings populated by even more dangerous creatures: unclassifiable monsters, innumerable giants, f
ire-and-ice fairies, and so on, ad infinitum. Hell’s demons and Heaven’s mistakes on ever-shifting terrains. More than once, Robert had referred to Xyn’s low levels of Reality as the Scalp of God. He didn’t remember where he’d first heard that phrase, but he didn’t mind using it. To enter this realm was like treading on the balding scalp of the Creator, a Creator in the throes of senility. The exact experience was unique for everyone, but almost always horrific, and definitely life-changing.

  Robert had experienced more Hell than Heaven during one of his earliest visits, which began with him floating weightlessly while suffocating in bluish beige smog. It wasn’t his flesh-and-blood body that was floating and choking, but it was him. The essence of his consciousness had translated itself into a taffy-like body that could exist in Xyn with only a minor measure of comfort.

  The smog eventually cleared to reveal a monstrous free-floating tree. No ground or sky—just Robert and an enormous tree, whose roots immediately snatched him up. They stretched and strangled his neck, arms, and legs while teeth-bearing fruit appeared (possibly shaken loose from the malicious tree’s branches) to nibble at his exposed sections. Peaches, plums, nectarines, and cherries of various hues nipped and pinched, taking bits and pieces out of Robert while, between screams, he heard the harsh music of the tree’s leaves. It seemed to his strangely enhanced sense of sight that each leaf was vibrating and shaking in its own unique way, despite the complete lack of wind.

  He was bitten at least a hundred times before something snapped—and Robert found himself in a new experience. His “body” had become wood. He’d become the tree. And he’d been planted atop a high mountain made up of the slowest quicksand, a quicksand containing a colony of ravenous, alien termites. The mites went to work on his roots while his trunk, limbs, and branches were subjected to the most extreme elements of all four earthly seasons, and maybe even a fifth or sixth one. It had been hard to tell what was what in the middle of all the rain, snow, heat, and incessant shedding of leaves, whipped up by tornado-like gusts. It all came to a stop only when a gorilla-like creature straight out of a drunken Dante’s infernal dreams grabbed him by his trunk and pulled him out of the quicksand. Robert had apparently been seasoned to the point where he could be happily devoured by the giant demon. In the pit of its stomach, Robert felt a bliss he’d never felt before or since as what passed as the stomach’s acids dissolved him. He regained consciousness in his familiar body on Reality’s surface, imperceptibly but definitely a changed man.

  To those who’d been to XynKroma, the real world in which most humans lived and played—the Earth and its comprehensible universe—was regarded merely as the surface of Reality. The dimension of Xyn was Reality at its limits. It was fairly easy to get lost when visiting such a place, and there was a low chance one would even find an exit back to a relatively coherent and familiar realm of Reality rather than becoming lost in the mind, in everyone’s mind, having one’s senses and sanity permanently scrambled, as had happened to the numerous associates of The Infinite Definite.

  Just three years ago, after one of his longest visits, seventeen-year-old Robert had been lucky enough to leave XynKroma and reenter his familiar realm of Reality, but what he’d learned during his visit wouldn’t allow him to ever consider any part of Reality as coherent or sensible again. It had been during this visit Robert that learned the fate of his mother, the final fate of the woman who’d carried him for nine months.

  That goddamned day.

  His parents had left him at home alone, sleeping through dawn on his eleventh birthday. His father had set off for work while his eight-month’s pregnant mother had set off for a cousin’s house. Out of the town of Wallace, Virginia, into the heart of its bordering city, his mother had gone to gather the gifts she’d stashed far away from where her too-curious son would be able to look, far away from where he would even think to look. She’d been determined to surprise him, and Robert had been. Later that day, he was surprised to hear how his mother had been ambushed.

  The cousin wasn’t a close relative. Barely an acquaintance, in fact. Just a bloodliner who’d relocated from Louisiana only six months prior. No one in Robert’s house had any clue of the thirty-year-old’s addictions, or her associations. Robert’s mother had arrived at her house just as the Ecstasy- and heroin-fueled gathering of shady characters was breaking up. Most of the drug-fiends scattered back toward the dark corners from which they’d come. Three remained behind. Two eyed the stomach of Robert’s mother. And one had an idea.

  The cousin. She ran to the kitchen, retrieved the second largest knife she could find and, as her drug-addled associates restrained Robert’s mother, she cut the unborn baby from her womb.

  Minus some of the details, this was the story Robert had been told on the afternoon of his eleventh birthday by a less-than-sensitive cop who’d interviewed the missing cousin’s accomplices. The officer thought he was just doing his duty by talking to the victim’s son. Six years later, in XynKroma, Robert learned every minute detail of the story, and its epilogue. A denizen of Xyn, a fantastical creature that had spent every moment of its possibly immortal life in the realm, had told him all about it.

  Unlike Robert’s mother, the creature said, her baby hadn’t died on the day it was snatched from her womb. The cousin had stolen it, stolen away with Robert’s baby brother to parts unknown. And the baby had the White Fire Virus. Robert’s mother had had the Virus. She’d been infected right around the time she got pregnant, a couple years before the new-and-out-of-nowhere Virus infected the first “official” victim, according to the “official” history. During the gestation period, the unborn baby had been subjected to the raw experience of XynKroma; its mind-and-soul had practically lived there. The final bombshell: Robert’s father was not the true father of Robert’s little brother.

  Robert never had a chance to ask or confront either of his parents about any of the many questions raised during his extra-dimensional sojourn. After leaving Xyn with this new and improbable information, after awaking from his deepest of deep sleeps, his father was nowhere to be found. Disappeared without a trace.

  How trustworthy was the story Robert had heard while he’d been in Xyn? How trustworthy was Xyn’s denizen, the three-mile-long albino serpent who told Robert the story while it devoured itself ? How trustworthy were any absurd words heard on any level of Reality?

  There was a line beyond which he wouldn’t humor the ridiculous. There was a line beyond which he even refused to entertain the preposterous. But there were other lines he was obligated to cross in order to do his duty.

  Ava stared at Robert. She may have been holding the gaze during all the minutes of silence that had passed while he was remembering the tragedy of tragedies. He must’ve been staring at her the whole time without fully seeing her.

  He blinked twice, shook his head, and asked, “Would you like to go for a ride?”

  EIGHT

  Robert had been told there was no need for a blindfold. Adam was sure someone of Ava’s abilities would be able to see right through it anyway. Robert was sure that none of this was a good idea.

  It was a lot to decipher from such a short message—Robert’s pulse and watch and intuition working in mysterious harmony to break the encryption—but it seemed Adam believed Ava deserved a proper introduction to the Isaac-Abraham Institution. After all, she was a young Virus-carrier with no parents and nowhere to go. Not only did Adam want her to trust the IAI to keep her safe, he also wanted to see if he could trust his instincts about her. She might make a good Watcher agent.

  Robert didn’t have time to protest, but he was wary of the whole set-up. They still knew so little about her. What if she was affiliated with The Infinite Definite? What if, once inside The Burrow, she revealed her true colors and went berserk like her friend did inside the high school? Yes, they could take her down, but how many would she take down with her? Robert had studied the videos in the archive. She was tough. And if she did escape and meet back up with her terrori
st associates with information about The Burrow’s secret location…

  “Why so quiet?” Ava asked.

  “Just thinking,” Robert said.

  Ava went silent for a few moments before asking, “How long have you been looking for Marie-Lydia?”

  “Since her parents reported her missing.”

  “Any good leads?”

  Robert took a long breath. “Just you.”

  Silence seemed to disturb her. The thought of this made Robert want to prolong it even further. Spurred by nervousness, Ava might blurt out something interesting. But her only words during the rest of ride were questions about some of the buildings they passed. Robert said next to nothing until they drove into the parking garage.

  “The Isaac-Abraham Institution is a publicly known organization,” he said, “but its main office, which we call The Burrow, has always been a well-guarded secret. It’s located underground, for various reasons, the most important one being that almost everyone in there has the same condition you and I do. Even though we’re not officially affiliated with the government, we have connections, and the location of the facility and the nature of much of the work is top secret. Adam Smith is the chairman of the Institution. He insisted I bring you here, without blindfolds or any other of the simplest security measures. He didn’t tell me to request it, but I’m asking that you please keep anything you see or hear strictly to yourself.”

  “You have my word, Robert. This angel doesn’t lie.”

  “Yeah,” he said as he pulled into a parking space.

  They walked to one of the garage’s elevator banks, and Robert pushed the “up” button.

  “I thought we were going underground?”

  “We are,” he said after looking around them for busybodies. “Just wait.”

  The first elevator cab had four people inside. Robert waved them off, saying they’d catch the next one. The people gave them funny looks. Robert ignored them. Ava smiled and shrugged.