Infernal Revelation : Collected Episodes 1-4 (9781311980007) (9 page)

She grabbed one for him anyway, and a second
for Melchizedek. Lily shook her head when offered the third.

"Okay." Melchizedek opened his drink, then
exhaled. "I was like you, once. Just... normal."

He pointed towards the luminescent blue
sparks where his eyes should have been. "None of this. I was kinda
pale, but not like this."

"What happened?" Lily asked.

"I got shot. Wait, let me back up a little."
He took a sip from his soda. "Bear with me, I've never told this
story to anyone."

"Okay," Lily said.

"You're all adopted or whatever, right?"

"Yeah," Lily said.

"Okay. You, me, all three of you, we're all
related. Siblings."

Lily gestured from her own African-American
features towards Gideon's ginger face and Delilah's pale blondness.
"You sure?"

Gideon gave a nervous giggle.

"Half-siblings. Same father. Different
mothers."

"You're sure. We look nothing alike. And
you're..."

"I'll get to me," Melchizedek said. "But
yeah. Our father is... he wasn't exactly human."

"What do you mean?" Delilah asked.

"I mean not human. At all. He was...
something else."

"Are you serious?" Lily asked.

Melchizedek gave her a look, then conjured a
ball of shadow between his hands.

"Okay," Lily said. "Then what was he? What
are you?"

"Something else."

"You don't know?" Delilah asked.

"Okay, look. We were all born in this small
town somewhere as part of some commune. Then something happened.
This was, like, 1999, 2000, something like that. Do any of you
remember early childhood?"

Lily shook her head. "Nothing before
kindergarten."

"No," Gideon said.

"I would have been an infant," Delilah
said.

"Neither do I. Maybe that's what the dreams
are. But something happened--"

"Again with the something," Lily said.

"Hey," Melchizedek said. "I heard this story
second hand. The woman who raised me told me that I came from a big
loving family, until bad men came and took all my brothers and
sisters away. She escaped with me, said maybe some of the others
had too."

"She wasn't your mother?" Lily asked.

"No," Melchizedek. "But she raised me like
one."

"So you're saying that we were all taken
from this town and what, put into orphanages?" Delilah said.

Melchizedek took another sip of his soda.
"When I was a kid I just accepted what Marianne told me. When I was
older, I began to question it, the way we lived. We moved around a
lot, avoided the cops, avoided cameras. Avoided everything. I
wondered if she maybe, you know, kidnapped me. If we were
fugitives. I didn't care -- she had basically raised me, and was a
loving woman -- but I wanted to know the truth."

Lily nodded.

"I got it." Mel put the soda down and folded
his hands on his lap. "I never asked her, but one day I came home
from school and she was freaking out. Panicked. Said that 'they'
had found us, and that I needed to get my things. For the first
time, I resisted. I wanted to know what was really going on, and
she said it was just like she had told me."

His voice grew quiet. "I was stubborn
though. Maybe if I hadn't been, maybe if I..."

The others waited until he could
continue.

"Then the men came. Not cops. Looked like, I
don't know, CIA guys from an 80s action movie. Black suits and
ear-pieces. She screamed and told me to run, and I tried, but they
shot me."

Melchizedek's eyes had become horizontal
blue lines, and Lily found herself holding her breath.

"I remember the pain of the bullets tearing
through my chest, my abdomen, and I blacked out. When I came to I
was..."

He trailed off again. Lily thought he was
holding back tears.

Gideon cleared his throat. "Like that?"

Melchizedek opened his eyes. "No. Not right
away. I didn't feel too different at first.The men who shot me had
put me in some kind of metal truck, I don't know. It felt like we
were moving. It felt like we were driving for days, and no matter
how hard I shouted, nobody responded."

"That's awful," Lily said.

"Yeah. They didn't feed me or anything, but
somehow I wasn't starving. Wasn't hungry. Just, you know,
upset."

"Right," Gideon said.

"Anyway, at some point we stopped and they
opened the door and I made a run for it."

"Did they chase you?" Gideon asked.

"Yeah, but I was fast. Faster than I've ever
been, even after being locked in that box. Later I found out I was
stronger, too. Physically I was great, you know? Felt like a
superhero. But man, losing Marianne, being on the run, it's... it's
rough. I mean, you get used to it. You have to adapt, to survive.
But it's not really a life."

"So what happened?" Lily asked. "With all
the shadows and fire and stuff?"

"I got caught again," he said. "Shot again.
I was tough, but bullets are bullets, and I got shot a lot."

"Wow," Gideon said.

"This time, when I woke up, I was like this.
I can control these shadows. And I'm stronger and faster."

"So every time you die you get more
powerful?" Gideon asked.

"I wasn't killed, just
very badly hurt, and my body repaired itself, stronger and
stranger. I think if they
killed
me killed me, like shot me between the eyes, I'd
just be dead."

"Man," Gideon shook his head.

"Big downside." Mel pointed at his eyes.
"Can't exactly just go into town and hit the McDonalds or get a job
or whatever."

"Sunglasses?" Gideon asked.

"I'm still more pale than anyone has a right
to be."

"Skin cream?"

"Yeah, if I get all super elaborate I can
wear a disguise, if I don't let my attention drift and let my
shadows out. I have to concentrate to keep them down like this. I
just don't want to freak you out again."

"I think we're past that point," Delilah
said.

Melchizedek nodded, and tiny wisps of shadow
started to leak from his body. "Let me know if they get too
weird."

"Okay, assuming this is all true," Lily
said. "Why are you here?"

"Looking for Polvorin. That's, uh, the town
we all came from."

"I've never heard of it," Gideon said. "Is
it in Texas?"

"I think so," Melchizedek said. "It's not on
any maps. Marianne might have gotten the name wrong or I might just
be mis-remembering. Or maybe they changed the name. But I have a
few candidates that it might be, and Laton was one of them."

"If you're right about us being... like
you..." Delilah said. "Three of us here?"

"That might mean I'm on the right track,"
Melchizedek said. "But I don't think Laton's the place."

"Why not?" Delilah asked.

"Simple. Nobody's trying to kill me." He
picked up the soda again, fidgeting with the can. "Your cops did
chase after me, though. Took a few shots. I was running from them
when... when your friends hit me."

A coldness fell over Lily. She couldn't
believe she'd almost forgotten. "I have to go home."

"That's why I stuck around," Melchizedek
said. "To see if you were okay."

Lily rose, brushing her hands off on the
couch. "I'm fine. See? Thanks for your concern."

"It's more than that," he said, stepping to
her. "The accident. You might be going through the change I went
through."

She stepped around him. "You don't see any
shadows floating off of me."

"It's not so obvious at first," Melchizedek
said. "I was just stronger and faster."

"Yeah, trust me, a week in a coma didn't
leave me feeling like Wonder Woman."

Gideon stood. "Lily... the way you laid out
Barny..."

"I said I'm fine."

She opened the door and stepped out into the
cooling dusk air.

She could hear Gideon calling after her, but
the further she walked down the darkening town streets, the fainter
his voice became.

CHAPTER THREE

Jessie Ross strode the
line between proud and humble, and she walked it balanced by the
faith of her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. She had come to accept
her talents as gifts from the Almighty, given to her by the Lord to
guide her along her path through the fallen secular world, and she
used them as best she could to glorify Him. She was proud of these
gifts -- some of them, anyway -- and though pride was a sin she
accepted it as part of who she was -- part of who God had created
her to be.

And every Sunday she used the gift of her
voice to spread His harmony through the congregation of the
International Church of Christ Everlasting as part of its honorable
choir.

Jessie loved the Church, both the chapel in
Laton with its geometric architecture of plaster and glass, and the
community and culture of the ICCE. She loved her foster parents
most of all, but the Church was her true family, from the
Christmas-and-Easter-Christians all the way up to Reverend Robert
"Call-Me-Bob" Carter himself. Singing in the choir was only one
small way she served the Church, but she liked to think that God
and his angels enjoyed the voice He had given her almost as much as
His Earthly congregation did.

Her life was a charmed one, she knew, graced
by God, and she had no right to complain about anything. After all,
as her father the Deacon often said, people all over the world had
it much worse than she did. She did have concerns though, from time
to time, that scratched like burrs at the underside of her
contentment.

As she and the choir sang their homily to
the glory of God, she could feel one of these burrs adding a
discordant note into her melody. Her eyes scanned the pews and
their rows of upturned reverential faces until they lit on that of
Lily Anne Baker.

She was there up in the front row with her
mother and father, Deacon Baker (in her mind the 'Other Deacon'
though of course he and her own father were equal in the eyes of
the Church). Most Sundays Lily looked as peaceful and in tune with
the music as anyone else, but this morning she seemed tired. Weary.
Troubled. She followed along in the hymnal, but Jessie could tell
that Lily just mouthed the words, not contributing her voice to the
community's song.

That wasn't surprising on its own, of
course. The poor dear had been through such trying times. The Lord
was surely testing Lily, putting her through trials and
tribulations, sounding the bedrock of her faith. Jessie had no
doubt that her friend would come through stronger for it, though
inside she felt pangs of sympathy for the losses and trauma Lily
had suffered.

There was something more to Lily's current
distraction, though.

As Jessie watched her friend, a darkness
cast itself across the Church, shadowing its congregation, though
there was nary a cloud in the sky.

Jessie braced herself and kept singing. The
Lord seldom saw fit to grace her with a vision while she was with
the choir, but she owed it to her Church family to keep the
tune.

In the congregation below, she could see
shadows across every face, save for Lily's, who stood out all the
more brightly. Indeed, as she watched, the rest of the Church
seemed to sink away until only Lily remained, elevated above and
caught in a mote-filled shaft of multicolored light. The rest of
the choir fell away as well, leaving only Jessie, caught in her own
beam.

She kept singing.

Jessie felt herself pulled along up through
her beam like one of those tubes at the bank, and saw that Lily was
being likewise transported. Their beams connected and parted,
weaving and intertwining with others, though she couldn't make out
any of the other travelers. Some were pure white, like hers, others
were dark hues, and a few -- like Lily's -- were multicolored and
shifting.

Above, far above, she could see that they
all merged into one glorious explosion of light and color.

And then she was back on the stage, her
vision ended. She did not falter, she did not drop a note; she was
used to the suddenness of visions by now.

What rocked her more was the sudden
understanding that Lily wasn't the only one being tested here. She
didn't always understand the messages the Lord sent her -- how
could she -- but she resolved to make the best use of His gifts in
His service as she could.

***

Lily was lying in bed,
staring at the ceiling when her father knocked on her bedroom
door.

"Lily, we need to have a talk."

"It's open," she said.

Deacon Baker entered his adopted daughter's
room and sat next to her on the bed.

She rolled away from him, facing the dresser
set against the far wall.There was a mirror fixed on top of it, but
she couldn't see her reflection past the various track and field
ribbons that had been attached to the glass.

"Principal Harper called." Her father was
using his 'understanding' voice, the one that said he was
disappointed but willing to listen. "He said you missed half your
classes Friday."

"I'm sorry," she said. "I wasn't feeling
well."

He laid a comforting hand on her shoulder.
"You've seemed down all weekend. Maybe it was too soon for you to
go back."

She sniffled into her pillow. "Maybe. I
just... wanted to get back to normal. You know."

"I know, sweetheart. But you always push
yourself so hard."

"I just want to be alone right now."

Her father let out a long sigh. "Darling,
you know your mother and I worry. We just want you to get better.
To be happy."

The guilt hit her like a kidney-punch. "I
know."

"If you're feeling sick or dizzy, next time
tell someone."

"I should have," Lily said. "I was just... I
panicked, I guess."