Chapter Two
"Gabriel... I think that when she killed herself, your wife was pregnant."
Gabriel’s eyes widened and his jaw clenched.
“Gabriel?” Bastiaan called over the phone.
Gabriel’s hand squeezed the phone tightly till his knuckles went white.
“You still there, mon?”
The phone surrendered a squeal as the plastic gave way, and the inner circuits cracked under the pressure of Gabriel’s loss.
It was not anger, nor grief that Gabriel felt at that moment. He had slid past those instantly. He felt his skin tighten and all of his organs pull into a vacuum inside his chest. His thoughts became focused as a razor-sharp clarity overcame his mind.
Gabriel went straight to the airport and bought a ticket for the first flight to New Orleans. The desk attendant was unnerved by his presence. The gate security guards checked him thoroughly. Twice. But found he only had his clothes, wallet, keys, and a blue crystal inside a briefcase. Gabriel had left his luggage at the hotel. It wasn’t much. It didn’t seem necessary.
When Gabriel landed, the flight attendants looked away as he passed them. Gabriel had said nothing the entire flight and simply stared in to the seatback in front of him; unresponsive to any of their questions. Gabriel retrieved his car from the parking lot and drove.
Suryia materialized in the passenger seat next to him.
“Gabriel?” she asked. “Are you alright?”
He said nothing.
“I know you are…not currently in the best of moods.”
He said nothing.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
He said nothing.
“I…harrumph.” Suryia said and melted into the air. “Humans.”
Gabriel parked in front of Bastiaan’s house and knocked on the door. When Racheal answered the door and demanded what he wanted in her usual curt manner, Gabriel just turned his head and looked at her…and she stepped aside.
Gabriel walked into the parlor, and Bastiaan stood up as Gabriel placed the briefcase on the sidebar.
“You look like you want to hit me again.” Bastiaan said.
“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t?” Gabriel replied. His voice was low and gruff.
“Cus it not go well for you last time.”
“You lied to me.”
“I tell you, I no lie.”
Gabriel stepped towards the man. His insides were starting to boil over. His eyes were dry and itchy.
“You lied to me again. You knew, and you didn’t tell me.”
“Bout you wife? I no tell you ever’ting. So what? I no call that lying.”
“She. Was. My WIFE!” Gabriel lurched forward again. Saliva sprang from his gnashing teeth.
“Listen, boy!” Bastiaan said poking Gabriel in the chest. “You no only one who grieve when peoples die.”
Gabriel pulled an arm back to swing at Bastiaan, but something pounded into his back. Something fast and hard swept his feet out from under him. Gabriel fell forward onto his face, and then had the annoyingly familiar sensation of a knee on his spine and a hand pressing his face into the floor; a left hand missing the last two fingers.
“Hello, Sabine.” Gabriel said tasting lemon-scented tile cleaner.
“Are you quite finished now, Gabriel?” Sabine said in her proper, French-accented, English.
Gabriel tried pushing himself up, but only managed to grunt and receive more pressure from Sabine’s hold.
“I no expect you back today.” Bastiaan said.
“I managed to catch an early flight out of SeaTac. My crystal is full and I am here to pick up my check.”
“That fine. Let the boy up.”
Sabine released Gabriel, and he stood up and glared at her while rubbing his creek. Sabine just looked back at him with her eyebrows raised. Her brown eyes begged him to challenge her. Her pulled-back blonde hair and near perfect features invaded his vision, but his focus was always drawn to the hairline scar running from her lower lip to the top of her chin.
“I think you cracked a tooth with your crazy French martial art.”
“I should have cracked open your head, you stupid fat man.” Sabine retorted then slid into a rambling French denouncement, which Gabriel really didn’t care that he couldn’t understand.
Racheal entered the parlor, and then the two women were all smiles prattling back and forth in French.
Bastiaan grinned. “I tell you it not go well for you, Gabriel.”
“Fuck you, Bastiaan. How dare you hide something like that from me?”
“It help you none.”
“I still have a right to know! Where do you get off?”
Sabine cut off from Racheal long enough to interrupt. “Watch your tongue, Gabriel. Bastiaan deserves your respect.”
“Oh, what do you know, Sabine!” Gabriel growled. “You didn’t go through what I have.”
Sabine stormed up to Gabriel once more. “You know very well what I went through.”
“Yeah, your brother died. So what?”
“He was my twin brother, you bastard!”
“And you found him.”
“Just because you have not made your piece with Michelle, does not mean that you can diminish my loss.”
“Michelle was my wife! Carrying my child! Your brother was a drug-dealing man-whore!”
Sabine grimaced, and the blood rushed from her face, which made her suddenly look like very angry porcelain. Racheal spat in Gabriel’s eye.
“That’s it.” Gabriel said wiping his face with the back of his hand. “I’m done. I’ve had enough of this shit. I’m leaving.”
Gabriel stormed out of the house towards his car. Suryia materialized just as he was pulling out his keys.
“You shouldn’t have done that, Gabriel.”
“Fuck. Off. Pixie.”
Suryia flared, literally, and Gabriel stumbled backwards. “Do you have any idea what is at stake here?”
“No.” said someone else. “I don’t think he does.”
Gabriel and Suryia looked towards the T-Intersection where a bum was walking in the middle of the street. He looked like an old man in rags with a dirty, white beard. He was walking oddly, as if he didn’t have full control of his limbs.
“Who is that?” Gabriel asked.
Suryia squinted. “I don’t know. But whatever it is it’s dead.”
The man grinned gruesomely and lurched towards Gabriel and Suryia. When he got closer they could see his skin was pale, and his eyes had a distant hollow look to them. There was a bloody wound on his chest. “Well, relatively dead here at any rate.”
“______” Suryia screeched. “He’s projecting his energies to control this body from somewhere else!”
The man hacked and convulsed in a morbid jerking laugh, and blood trickled out of his mouth. “Suryia dear, for an ancient being from a race of imaginative trickster daemons, your grasp of metaphor is still quite limited. The phrase you are looking for is puppet on a string.”
“We’ll just see how well your strings work when I burn your puppet!”
Suryia’s body began to hum and glowed deep red. Gabriel felt the air temperature around her rise quickly and he took several hurried steps backward before she burst into a flames. She charged the man on a tail of fire, letting out an unearthly howl that made Gabriel’s legs buckle, and he collapsed on the pavement.
______ grinned nastily and stood his ground. “Using the lines of this nexus to increase your power in order to attack me? Tsk. Tsk. Two can play that game.”
Suryia danced a fiery trail around the corpse, and she spat jets of green at him. Before any of the flames could reach him, he would swing up his arms and a lance of blue light sprung from the ground at his feet. Suryia’s fires entwined with the light sank down into the ground from where it came.
Gabriel could do nothing. The shrieking of Suryia’s siren call paralyzed him, and all he could do was watch. He felt the heat and the air tingled making all his hairs stand on end. He smelled sulfur and burning ozone. The pavement beneath him was hot and trembling. He could no more aid the jinn than run away in fear.
Circling each other, the two combatants seemed to be at a stalemate. Suryia was too fast with her attacks for ______ to form any counter other than deflecting her flames away from him. Then she stopped in her tracks. ______ pulled his hands together, and a blue sphere of energy gathered in his palms. Suryia spread rainbow wings of fire and engulfed her opponent. For a long moment there was just a massive burning object in the middle of the road, and then it shrank and contracted into a spiraling orange orb in the man’s hand. There was not a single burn on him.
“Silly, silly, Suryia Jinn. Stupid creature. I’ve had many of your kind in my possession. I know exactly how you function.”
The orb in the man’s hand rotated and twisted in on itself turning from orange to light blue. He shoved it into ground and released it. The ball writhed and screeched across the pavement. Slowly it rolled toward the center of the intersection, and then fell into the ground and pulses of blue light shot off in hundreds of directions.
Gabriel watched as this all happened, speechless, until he regained his composure. “Holy shit!”
The man lurched over to the spot where the ball had disappeared and kicked away some stray ashes.
“Yes.” he said. “Very pretty. Just because they’ve been around since before the planets formed they think they can do anything they want. They often forget that nothing is immortal.”
He then turned his attention back to Gabriel and approached while Gabriel struggled to get to his feet. “And you must be Mr. Whindam. I’ve been wanting to meet you ever since you set Ishmianthe free from Roberta.”
Gabriel got to his knees. He was trying very hard not to pee his pants. “How did you know about that?”
“I heard you speak the words.”
“What, that Necronomicon stuff?”
“Yes. Just call me Abd al-Azrad.” the man said wiggling his fingers at Gabriel. “H.P. Lovecraft. Spooky!”
“Is that your real name?”
“Come now, I know you’re not the quickest horse round the track, but do you actually think I’m going to tell you my real name?...Anyway, I just wanted to deliver a message…”
“And?” Gabriel shouted.
The man grabbed Gabriel by the collar and lifted him to his feet. “Keep searching for your wife. She means nothing. Bastiaan on the other hand may not be able to continue in his foolishness for much longer.
“…Oh and one more thing.”
The man spewed blood all over Gabriel’s clothes and collapsed in his arms.
Just then, a police car pulled around the corner. When it saw Gabriel holding the dead body, its siren turned on.
Gabriel looked from the police car, to the body, back to the police car. “…Son of a bitch!”
To Be Continued...