Terminus (18 page)

“I shouldn’t have allowed myself, but I couldn’t help it.”

“Who was she?”

“Her name was Sophia.”  Nick waved his hand, and before them the blank canvas of light began morphing into London in the early 1900s.

LONDON, ENGLAND 1907

He’d been watching her for about five years now, traveling from the mortal planes to the great beyond.  Nikolai knew better than to tarry between assignments, but given the scope of eternity he didn’t think anyone in the Angel Forces would notice.

He followed her invisibly with fascination and, yes, admiration—she was the loveliest young woman he’d seen over the past millennium.

Carrying on her arm a basket full of fruit from Bailey’s Market, she walked at a brisk pace, easily averting a crowd of people entering the doors under the huge signs:

DISTRICT RAILWAY

VICTORIA STATION

FREQUENT TRAINS TO CITY AND ALL PARTS OF LONDON & SUBURBS

He marveled at her alacrity.  She soared past the Earl’s Court Exhibition, past the R.P. Beattie Specialty in Plumbing billboard, past the row of horse-drawn cabs parked along the road.

Her eyes—topaz set in alabaster—sparkled when she saw the man seated at the bistro table down the road.  He wore a black frock coat, something you saw less and less of these days, and a hat he took off as he stood and waved.

“Sophia!”

She rushed over, stopping just short of a frontal collision.  Judging by the sheer joy on her face, Nick expected her to throw her arms around the man. 

“Oh Albert, I’m so happy you sent for me.  Do forgive this frightful basket—I had to make up some sort of excuse to convince Mother I needed to go out.”

“Please, won’t you join me?” 

“Thank you.  Lovely morning, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Quite.”  He pulled out a chair and seated her.

Nikolai hovered about them, observing with the keenest interest.  Sophia nodded her thanks as a waiter brought tea to the table, but her eyes were so fixed on Albert she never even looked at her cup.  Sitting on the edge of her chair, smiling so wide it must surely hurt, she exuded excitement. 

“Now, Sophia.  We’ve known each other for about two years now.”

“Twenty-five months, three weeks, two days...”

“Right.  In any case—”

“And seventeen hours.”  She covered her smile with her gloved hand, then looked up innocently at him.  “Sorry.”  She shuddered, then hugged her arms.  “It’s my nerves. I always shiver when I’m excited.”

Albert did not smile.  “In any case, it occurred to me that you and your family might be wondering what my intentions are.”

“Yes?” she said, a little squeak in her voice.

“And so...” He reached into his coat pocket.

“Oh, yes, Albert!  Yes, yes, and again, yes!”  She jumped up, no doubt to throw herself into his arms—

“Yes what, Sophia?  I haven’t even told you yet.”

“Sorry.”  She sat back down, still smiling.  “Please, go on.”

He pulled out an envelope and set it on the table. 

“Sophia, I’m calling it all off.”

Now the smile faded.  The face fell.  

“You’re...? I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Please don’t make this any more difficult than it needs to be.  I can’t marry you.  We should have seen this coming.”

She said nothing.  Her face, in despair, looked so different.  Nikolai could hardly bear it.

Albert reached across the table to take her hands but she pulled them back, still staring into the air straight at Nikolai, as though asking him,
Why?

“In the long run, when you’re older, you’ll understand.  We’re just not...” He looked up, also in Nikolai’s direction, as though asking his help finding the word. “We’re not
compatible
.”

She didn’t respond.  Gone from her face was the joy, the innocence, all that made her who she was.

“Sophia?” 

She finally turned to face Albert, and spoke.  With each word her voice lowered in volume but rose in intensity. 

“Thank you for your honesty, though it took you twenty-five months, three weeks, two days, and seventeen hours to come up with it.”

“As I’ve said, in the long run you’ll understand.”  He slid the envelope over to her.  “Here.”

Instead of looking at it she turned away in Nikolai’s direction. 

“Whatever it is, I don’t want it,” she said.  Her veil of courage and dignity was gossamer-thin, but oh, how he admired her for it. 

“Don’t be ridiculous. Take it!”   

“I have no interest in your...
envelope
.”  Sophia glanced down at the table as though it were covered with dung.

“Don’t you even want to know what’s in it?”

Sophia stood up.  “I think I’d rather leave, Albert.”

“It’s a portion of the money you might have enjoyed had we—”

She snatched the envelope, opened the flap, held the envelope over Albert without looking inside, glanced up in Nikolai’s direction...

Go on, now
.
 That’s my girl.

...and poured coins and bills all over Albert’s head.

“What!” Albert didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands.  “Are you out of your mind?”

“You can keep your money, Albert.”  She grabbed her cup of tea and threw it in his face. “And do with it something anatomically improbable!”

Though she could not perceive his presence, Nikolai smiled and bowed as she walked away, head held high to show Albert what
she
thought of him and his pathetic attempt at appeasing what
he
probably thought of as his conscience.

PRESENT DAY

The entire construct paused like a DVR movie. 

“You haven’t changed,” Hope said.

“Angels don’t age,” Nick said, wistfully regarding the young construct-Sophia.  A sharp pain behind his eyes made him struggle not to grimace.

“She seems like a nice girl.  What happened?”

“To make a long story short, I took an unauthorized hiatus in order to be with her.  Sophia was beautiful, great fun, and a wonderful person.  Over time I revealed myself to her and we did what has been forbidden since the dawn of humankind.”

“You fell in love.”  Hope gave him a look of compassion. 

“I’m afraid it’s worse than that.”

“Wait a minute, you mean—”

“I married her.  And worse still...”

She leaned closer.

“Is that even possible?” she said.

“When I choose to take on a physical form, I’m fully human, though I still possess what you consider supernatural abilities.”

“So did you have a son or a daughter?”

“I’ll show you.”

A little girl with golden hair and shining sapphire eyes stood smiling in front of them.  A very familiar-looking little girl. 

“This is...this was Clara,” Nick said.

Hope knelt down and looked straight at her, knowing that as a construct, this child was just a figment of Nick’s memory.  Nonetheless she touched Clara’s hair, ran her fingers down the braided pigtails around which little red bows were tied.    

Then smiled and leapt to her feet.    

“She looks like Chloe.”

“The resemblance is striking.  I can’t help wondering if there’s a reason I was assigned to escort Chloe.  But since I’d been demoted to reaper, I didn’t get to ask those questions.”

“Demoted?  What for?”

“Well, I assume that’s what happened.  After all, I’d broken just about every law—I was grateful it wasn’t anything worse than being reassigned to the mundane work of ushering souls.”

Staring incredulously at the little construct of Clara, Hope circled her while she spoke to Nick.   

“Why is it so wrong for angels to fall in love with humans? Marry them, have children with them?”

“From what I’ve been told, certain humans and angels did have children eons ago, with dangerous results.  It’s all rather vague, but supposedly there’s a danger of their offspring becoming highly powerful, unstable beings with a thirst for blood, some of them extraordinarily intelligent and irresistibly beautiful.”

 “Were they angels or human?”

“A hybrid of both called Nephilim.  Several cultures cite the presence of Nephilim in their history.  Outside of the Hebrew Bible, the Torah, other civilizations have their own terminology.  But I’ve never seen one.  Doubt they even exist.”

“So why make such stringent laws over a matter of speculation?”

“My thoughts, exactly.  Still, if Nephilim are real and have in fact abused their power to wreak all kinds of havoc on mankind, of course there’s cause for concern.  Believers speculate that some of history’s greatest minds, most powerful rulers, and cruelest dictators were Nephilim.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, there’s an infamous list of Nephilim, but I consider the whole thing apocryphal.  Among them are Ch’in Shih-huan-ti, Caligula, Ghengis Khan, Herod the Great, Vlad Tepes—”

“Vlad the Impaler?” 

He nodded. 

“Dracula was a Nephilim!  And I suppose Hitler’s on the list?”

“Absolutely.”

Hope closed her eyes for a moment.  When they opened, she pointed to the Clara-construct. 

“How about her?”

“Even those who believe in Nephilim don’t know if they all turn out evil—they don’t even know if Nephilim are mortal or immortal.  In my mind, they hold to those myths in order to justify angel laws that will deter us from intermingling with humans.”

“So what went wrong with you and Sophia?”  She was eager to know—he understood why and admired her for it.  Now, the dread of reliving the story gave way to a need to share it with her.

 “After Sophia and I married she noticed I never got ill, never looked tired, and after some years never showed signs of aging.  She said I was distant, somehow—even though we were close as could be, in so many ways.  She asked questions I wouldn’t answer, then insisted there was something standing between us, something important, she just knew it—of course she was right.

“So I told her the truth.  Then I told her I was willing to give up my angel nature and become a human to be with her.  I thought she’d be happy—but the last thing she wanted was for me to renounce my angel status and lose my immortality and other supernatural attributes.  No, she wanted to know all about them, even craved some of them for herself—you know, the eternal youth, the limitless energy...and in retrospect, the power.”

“I can see why.”  Hope was eyeing him with great interest.

“I told her to let it go, it wasn’t worth it.  Our love was enough.”  Nick’s voice dropped.  “Only it wasn’t, for Sophia.  She became obsessed with the supernatural—I only learned by overhearing a conversation.  She’d been secretly consulting with some kind of dark occultists about how she could tap into it.  I warned her it wasn’t safe—she dismissed it, saying I was just threatened by her.”

“But what about Clara?” Hope said.

“Right.  Well, since Sophia was never around—sometimes staying away for weeks at a time, and eventually leaving home for good—I had to raise Clara on my own.  She grew into the loveliest, gentlest girl you could ever imagine.  She couldn’t possibly have been a Nephilim—she was sweeter than any angel I’d ever known.” 

Nick reached out to touch the Clara-construct, but she vanished before his hand reached it.  Hope gave him a sympathetic smile. 

“Did Sophia ever come back?”

From the corner of his eye, Nick thought he saw something move.  He turned to look and saw nothing but the freeze-frame image of turn of the century London.  But he sensed something dark and cold—and close by.

“Nick?”

“One day she did,” he said, lowering his eyes. 
“But she’d changed.”

47

WHEN THE STORM HIT, IT DIDN’T COME in the form of smartphone photos but rather a security camera video from the Hotel Pacifica.  In the brief montage of clips Jon saw himself walking out of the elevator with Maria, saw Maria draping her arms around his neck and kissing him as she pulled him into the hotel room, saw himself coming out of the room, looking around—furtively—and hurrying to the elevator.  One creative version put raunchy music in the background and looped the split-second moment when Jon and Maria’s faces came within striking distance, just before the door obscured the view.  Of course it had gone viral, getting two million hits on YouTube within hours of its posting. 

Sitting in his office behind a locked door—his “Do Not Disturb” cue to his staff—Jon leaned his head back against the soft leather of his chair in an attempt to ease the tension in his knotted shoulder and neck muscles.

What am I going to do?

With each passing hour, he anticipated a mortally wounded Elaine bursting through the door and demanding that he tell her who the bimbo on the tape was.  Next would be a call from his manager informing him that speaking engagements and book deal had been canceled.  Divorce would give him a way out of their marriage which had all but died after Matthew’s birth.  It had only taken a year after the wedding for her true colors to show. 

If she doesn’t file, I will.
  But the more he thought about divorce
,
the worse he felt.  What would happen to Matthew?  And the truth was, he loved Elaine.  It had only been half a day, but somehow the fact that he’d allowed himself to consider ending their marriage made him realize how much he really cared for her.

With his suitcase packed, he left the office.  Might as well drive down to San Diego and check into the hotel a week early, avoid Elaine’s raking him over the coals for the video.   

He just needed some time away to sort things out.

Jon got into his car and tried to pray, but the words wouldn’t come out.  Angry thoughts kept wrenching his heart, overwhelming any sense of repentance.  Four words ran through his mind as he sped down the I-5:

You did nothing wrong...

His heart, it seemed, wasn’t buying it.  The frustration of needing to pray, wanting to pray tormented him until, like David before Nathan the prophet who’d confronted him about his selfish pride and sin, the Shepherd King’s song came to mind: