Avenging Angels (The Seraphim Chronicles Book 1) (5 page)

SEVEN

The TRTV’s were secure against the wall of the hangar bay with their cockpit seats open in the descended position. The hangar bay crews were performing the post-mission diagnostics, refueling and reloading of any spent ordinance.

Evangeline and her squad had lined up in the hangar bay outside the drop ship. Upon their return, Graham had ordered them to stand at attention the moment they disconnected from their vehicles.

He paced back and forth in front of them like a hungry, caged animal. He was a volcano about to erupt. The hangar crew tried to act as inconspicuous as possible while casting sidelong glances in his direction. It was the proverbial train wreck. No one wanted to watch, but no one could look away.

The odor on his breath was repugnant. It was clear to anyone within a few feet he had been celebrating. His labored breathing only made the situation more unpleasant. His rage boiled under the surface. All the pilots and hangar crew could see was a viper about to strike.

He knew they could not have understood what measures he had taken to get to that point. He had found the trail of breadcrumbs that led to Matthew’s last known location. Matthew was a talented physician, but when it came to investigations and connecting the dots of a mystery, Graham was the true artist. His own research led him to the moon, its abandoned mining facility, and yet another piece of the puzzle: A secret lab.

A wave of sadistic pleasure rose and ebbed in Graham’s chest while he continued pacing and staring down Evangeline and her team.

He did not care that the lab had been abandoned, lost in obscurity under years of misfiled and incomplete records. His discovery was a victory against the Dissidents. He relished in the precious secrets he could unveil about their organization, and all for his own benefit. He needed to keep the discovery a secret.

“What you saw and heard on the surface is now classified, level Red Three,” he growled at the pilots standing at attention before him. The shock in their eyes betrayed their statuesque postures. They were unaware that Graham lacked the authority to enforce a level Red Three.

“You will not speak of this mission to anyone, not even each other, under penalty of court martial and treason.” He scanned each one of their re-focused eyes to ensure his point had been made. “Dismissed,” he growled. He stepped in front of Evangeline with venomous eyes.

Each team member began picking up their personal rucksack sitting on the cold metal deck at their feet when Graham’s next words sent icy chills down their spines. “Chapel,” he sneered, baring his blunt, white teeth. “You stay here.”

Everyone froze in place. The team looked at each other with confusion, not understanding Graham’s aggression toward Evangeline. She remained at full attention, staring straight ahead.

“I said, Dismissed!” Graham roared over Evangeline’s shoulder.

Weston and the others all took one step forward, a sharp turn to the left, and marched out of the hangar toward the door carrying their gear. At the last moment, Harper, bringing up the rear, looked back at his commanding officer with concern. Lennox grabbed him by the arm and pulled him through the hatch and out of sight.

Graham turned toward the hangar crew and his dark blue eyes seared into their souls. “Clear the room!” he shouted. His limited control over his rage made it clear he wanted no witnesses.

Not needing to think twice about it, they scurried out toward the door on the opposite side of the hangar. The crew wanted to be as far away from Graham’s wrath as possible. The rage emitting from his transplanted Angel eyes, was horrific.

Evangeline stood motionless, watching Graham pace in and out of her peripheral vision. She suspected why he was angry. His rage and her heartache all stemmed from the same man. Matthew Chapel.

Silas Graham was the closest thing Matthew had to a best friend. He had been the head of security at Matthew’s clinic for as long as Evangeline could remember. Graham was a stickler when it came to rules, protocols, and defining the hierarchy of authority in an organization. Some in the clinic had commented that he had an unhealthy obsession to determine who had the final word on every decision.

Along with being rigid when it came to the rules, Graham exuded a vanity that bordered on narcissism. He had had several body parts replaced over the years due to his vanity. He replaced his leg bones to make himself taller. He replaced several major muscle groups to give himself an athletic stature, and he replaced his liver twice from years of hard living.

Of all the times he replaced his natural body parts with those of Angels, only once was had it been necessary to save his life.

It happened on the unfortunate day Matthew’s clinic had been the target of a Dissident attack. In the beginning, their non-violent methods were considered little more than a great nuisance. They shut off power grids, reprogrammed monitors, and displayed copies of their manifesto or political rhetoric. The worst of their tactics had been reprograming all public transit vehicles to change routes in the middle of rush hour causing people throughout Olympus severe delays in reaching their destinations.

When their pranks amounted to nothing more than creating irritation among the citizens of Olympus, the attacks grew violent. The transplant clinic where Matthew and Graham worked was the first place where serious injuries and fatalities occurred at the hands of the Dissidents. The power grid overloaded, electrocuting almost everyone in the clinic. Some thought it had been a miscalculation in the distribution system that caused the overload, but after the resultant damage to people and property. The Dissidents had gone from a public nuisance to a terrorist organization.

Evangeline had always been grateful that her father had been out of the clinic at home having lunch with her mother when the attack happened. Graham was not so lucky. His office was next to the clinic’s main power distribution line. The explosion left his body burned from head to toe and forever blinded.

Matthew bumped Graham to the top of the list for transplantation. The Angels, the white-skinned saviors from across Olympus, came to the clinic and offered themselves to restore the injured back to complete health.

It took a few days for Graham to get used to his new skin. The milky white color made him do double takes in the mirror for weeks. Children, mistaking him for an Angel, would walk up to him and ask why he was wearing a security officer’s uniform or why he looked sad when his friends all looked so happy.

“The Angel skin is so pure, it has no genetic defects. That’s why it has no color,” Matthew explained. Evangeline never understood why some people decided against the enzyme that caused the white skin to take on the pigmentation of the recipient.

Graham liked his new flawless skin, but his new eyes remained foreign. Even among the thousands of Olympians who had chosen to replace their eyes with those of an Angel, he felt that he was somehow less than human. In the beginning, doctors performed eye transplants to cure blindness, or other congenital issues conventional methods could not correct. They perceived a broader range of the visual spectrum, which included ultraviolet and infrared. Within time, it became a status symbol, a mark like a tattoo, to replace one’s natural eyes with those of an Angel.

However, Graham never grew accustomed to see those eyes looking at him in the mirror.

The Angel blue eyes that had only ever expressed love and peace now exuded hate, fear, loneliness, lust, sadness, and every other emotion humans had ever known. It made him feel like a stranger in his own body. Those dark blue irises stared down into Evangeline’s deep, dark brown eyes.

              “Explain yourself,” he growled into her face.

As his breath wafted on her face, Evangeline felt a wave of nausea. “Commander?” she coughed, pulling her head away from his. The alcohol on his breath was obscene.

“Don’t give me the dumb act, Captain!” Graham roared. “How did you know he was there? Somehow you knew!” He started pacing again, yelling with his hands. “How long have your parents been in contact with you? Somehow you knew your father had been there!”

Evangeline broke from standing at attention and took a step toward Graham. “Commander...” she sneered, looking him up and down with heavy judgmental. “With all due respect, you know I haven’t seen my parents since I was thirteen years old… Since a few days before they disappeared… Since a few months before they were labeled as sympathizers and traitors… Since before they ruined my life.”

Graham stood with his hands on his hips. “I don’t believe you,” he said in a quiet, menacing tone. He was a cat ready to pounce on a bird. “How else could you possibly know the code to that lab?” He folded his arms in a manner that gave her the impression that he believed he had won.

Evangeline mirrored his gesture and stared equally hard at him. “It was a hunch. Those numbers, that particular order of numbers, my dad always used the code on the safe in his study when he wanted me to find a surprise he’d brought me home from one of his trips. It was our little game. I saw the numbers and just gave it a shot. I had no idea it would actually work.”

Graham did not change his expression. “Again…” he took a deep breath, “I don’t believe you.” His voice was thick with danger.

“You can believe whatever you want, sir,” Evangeline spat. She was weary of his posturing and began to gesture with her arms. “I’ve been an outcast since they disappeared. I was branded as the daughter of traitors. My future in medicine was gone. I had nothing. I ended up being raised in a group home until I was eighteen and I aged out. I joined the military in order to avoid scratching out a life on a farm or the factories in the LTZ. My parents abandoned me for some stupid cause.” She stared him down with all the vehemence in her soul. “You can believe whatever you want.”

Silas Graham, the man who had once been her father’s closest friend, had become her fiercest enemy. She loathed how easy it was for him to believe the reports of her parents’ abandonment, how he joined the bandwagon to denounce his old friend for the sake of a minor promotion. “Permission to be dismissed, sir,” she snapped to attention, refusing to look meet his eyes any longer than necessary.

Graham was not impressed, dissuaded, or discouraged. He knew she was hiding something. Guilty until proven innocent was his mantra. It had worked for him as a security specialist and it would continue to prove true for him until the day he died. He dropped his arms to his sides and walked up to Evangeline, staring face to face, as he looked for the slightest crack in her defenses.

She stared right through him, and he knew it. It infuriated him to know he could not bully her. Evangeline was not intimidated by his position or his size.

Graham spun on his heel and marched toward the door. He left her alone in the hangar standing at attention. Just as he cleared the doorway, she heard him yell. “Dismissed.”

Evangeline’s posture relaxed, a deep sigh escaping her lungs. She hated that side of herself. The part of her that was rigid and inflexible: The immovable object. Dig in. Do not retreat. Do not compromise. It was her only defense in a confrontation.

After letting herself breath for a moment, she stepped back toward the drop ship and picked up her bag. Flinging the pack over her shoulder, she reached down with a casual brush of her hand and checked the safety on her sidearm. She could not help but let her thoughts wander to what hid in the barrel.