The Everborn (54 page)

In the issue of Ralston’s hand, it made it godawful painful to wrestle a door handle.

Bari, remaining a material Watchmaid a dozen paces behind, urged him, “Ralston, get the hell out of here!”

“I’m
trying!”
he shouted, exasperated.

“I must deal directly with this Magdalene, for only I alone
can
....”

Salvatia emerged from the rubble her body made of the wall Bari had flung her through. She’d remained physical during the impact, for she’d no time to react to Bari’s maneuver.

And the impact hurt like a sonofabitch.

Beneath the broken plaster and drywall, shards of wood and dust and fallen portraits of the King of Rock n’ Roll, Salvatia dematerialized.

Ralston abdicated his door handle battle to cop a look at Bari, who took a poised and readied position before the cavernous new entrance she’d made of the restroom with Salvatia.

The restroom door flung open suddenly with a resounding tumult of force. Its lower hinge tore loose from its frame as the door itself slammed into what remained of the wall.

From out of the doorway, Salvatia launched an assault upon Bari, and Bari was primed and readied. But she hadn’t prepared for what Salvatia held concealed behind her, nor for the crushing blow to the chops the next instant from a wallop of rectangular porcelain toilet tank top.

The force plummeted Bari backwards and onto a booth table, rendering her incoherent as she spilled onto the leather booth seating, rolling into a position below the table uon the floor.

Salvatia discarded the toilet tank top in a backwards Frisbee throw and smiled a wicked smile. She intently proceeded to the booth under which Bari had fallen, and all that could be seen of Bari was a circular swirling of currents whipping the air like invisible blender blades.

Then, Bari’s voice called out, “Ralston, you out of here yet?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about little Miss Watchmaid,” Salvatia called out to her. “Simon let him out, finally. It’s just you and me, baby. Whether Camelia’s ‘Born lives or dies is, to me, neither here nor there. He’s merely surviving long enough to witness the death of your beloved Andrew. Alas, I can’t say the same thing about Camelia
herself,
rest her soul....”

Bari arose from beneath the booth table, bringing the table up along with her by a single powerful grip upon its center support leg, uprooting it from its floor mount of bolted steel as easily as tearing off an ear of corn. With equal dexterity, Bari then utilized it as a shield. She struck a corner of it upwards into an effective collision with Salvatia’s chin, knocking her opponent back, with the full force of the attempted a forward lunge.

“You can’t win, Salvatia,” Bari proclaimed, “no matter how you’re persuaded otherwise.”

The Magdalene fended against the driving weight of the table shield to no avail. She managed confidently, “What makes you so sure of that?”

“Here’s a question going back at you: why, of all places, did you choose
this diner
for our inevitable showdown?”

Salvatia toyed with the question. “I knew you’d eventually show here, all of you, and I felt no need to have left a clue. It was meant to be. More importantly, my fellow Magdalene whom I shall redeem by your Andrew’s death have drawn me to this place. But this diner is a prominent and curious locale within the pages of that exquisite mistake of a book Camelia’s Ralston wrote, which written therein were all of the clues you required. Clues for you and also priceless clues for me."

Bari replied with a sarcastic objection. “And to think for decades I assumed you to be a devious, formidable foe. You’re only an asshole disillusioned by a centuries-old obsession with power. Your obsession with power is worse than a man’s own obsession with his dick. And it’s made you
naive
.”

Salvatia’s physical makeup fragmented into an air-powder puff of cloudy mist which submerged into the table, through, and came together again to material form at its underside. She now faced Bari in an eye-to-eye invasion of Bari’s personal space. Having acquired the upper hand, Salvatia then said to Bari, “How naive....?”

Bari let go of the table before Salvatia could wrench it free from her grip and it toppled to the floor on its side. Salvatia’s hand immediately went for Bari’s throat, and Bari’s hand went for hers in turn. In a dual heartbeat they held one another’s throats, their opponent held high and clawed and poised to strike.

“You’re no match for me, Watchmaid!” Salvatia breathed. “Don’t you know from
experience
that even
two of you
are no match for me? I am a
Magdalene
, and I am the messiah of my kind. My victory was
prophesied!”

It was true that one Watchmaid against a Magdalene wasn’t a fair match by far, and Bari knew this from the beginning. The strength and the ability to manipulate between dimensions and material objects didn’t quite cut it for a Watchmaid in situations like this, especially for a Watchmaid so relatively young compared to a Magdalene centuries old. If she was to defeat
Salvatia
, of all Magdalene, she’d have to rely on intuition and strategy and timing, on all the essential elements of a carefully devised plan.

And she wasn’t in this alone. She had not only her
own
Everborn to protect, whose life was at stake and revolved around every situation of the moment; she had Ralston also, whom she’d made a vow to protect and through years of intervention did a damn good job of doing so. She’d done so and
then
some, Ralston being the prick he’d always been and, thanks to her manipulation, a famous one.

Yet in some point in the aftermath of
all that was meant to be
of this, it was Ralston who would helm the writing of a book that would save them all.

Ralston’s effort in transmitting a message back in time in the form of a final Ralston Cooper novel had not been directed towards Andrew or herself, had not been transmitted as a mere warning or insight for the good guys to get ahead of the game.

It had been directed towards Salvatia, in transmitted fragments picked up by her
own Dreg
who’d taken the ball like a God-sent omen and run with it.

It had also been directed towards the Watchers, or specifically towards the band of Watchers who had taken his own copy of the book from him and were the only ones with the advantage of having read through its entirety.

47.

The Watchers

Somewhere close by, a rooftop weathervane twirled in all directions and slumbering souls dreamed more deeply in their beds. Coyotes silenced their howls in the distance for reasons no less apparent than why they were howling in the first place.

“
Bless you,”
Bari managed to mutter, not in polite response to God, but in response to the hush itself and the advent of its welcomed redemption, and she muttered this as soon as she’d felt it.

Salvatia felt it also, and she released her grip around Bari’s throat. This, for Bari, was redeeming in itself; the Magdalene’s strength had succeeded her own, and Bari found herself unable to dematerialize, unable to fight, unable to breath against both of Salvatia’s constricting hands. A moment longer, and Salvatia would have otherwise extinguished Bari’s breath altogether or snapped her neck, on squeezed her head from her body like squeezing apart a lump of play-dough. With mutually decreasing interest in each other, they lifted their heads and their gazes in curious scrutiny upwards.

The instrumental parodies of pop music from the ceiling’s shower drain speakers silenced, and the Watchmaid and the Magdalene together listened alertly for something
more
.

And then once, twice, the interior diner lights flickered off, flickered on.

Bari, in anticipation of Salvatia’s reaction to sensing the Watcher’s presence, took advantage of the distraction and broke free from her hold, pushing Salvatia away.

Rather than an attack of anxiety, Salvatia exhibited a puzzling state a bliss.

“Do you
feel
that?” Salvatia declared. “It’s the joyful call of my blessed sisters. They are here, now, and they’ve come to partake in the freedom I’m about to offer them through their allegiance to the Daughter of God!”

Daughter
of God???

She’s a tad more clueless than I’d perceived
, Bari thought to herself.

But there were urgent matters to tend to mounting outside the diner terrace. Bari’d been keeping keenly intuitive tabs on Andrew and on Ralston as well, and though her focus had centered upon the Magdalene Queen’s every move, she was prepared for an instant’s rescue should either Evenborn fall into harm dangerously more lethal than a few flesh wounds from BoLeve’s razor.

She disappeared out of the room also, for it was time to do
just that
.

***

“I see naked children walking in the grass,” Melony said to herself, said in her head where no one else could hear except perhaps for
the children
...for what
appeared
to be unclothed children scurrying and wandering about the tall grass at the foot of the terrace embankment. She’d noticed them during a final attempt to escape over the railing, and upon seeing them she soberly made up her mind to stay put.

“
We need to confront my brother this way,”
came Andrew’s persistent whisper to her, but as Scratch drew his attentions towards the two, Andrew felt himself intimidated suddenly like a child at an elementary school Halloween costume contest, a human young boy in a prosthetic spaceman outfit standing beside his stage-stricken costumed mother.

He wished it was only that.

Perhaps in the
next
life.

Scratch had at last grown weary of terrorizing poor Ralston and decided to focus upon the
real
matters-at-hand, upon the witch parody and her alien boyfriend/son; Ralston had been seized in an instant as soon as Scratch had allowed him to burst through the diner’s side door to join them. Uncle Maxy had been ready and waiting to snatch up the mock novelist at Scratch’s command like an awaiting mantis eager and impatient for its meal.

When the deed was done, Scratch toyed with a restrained Ralston, by blade and with words, words such as “
you’re telling me how
I
can’t be reborn?? Why don’t you think about what just happened to your pitiful little
self,
at how your groupie girlfriend slut
Jessica
bit the big one right before your oversized fathomless eyes. Your destiny is
fucked my
friend!”

Ralston had not been prepared for this news, even after reading a majority of his own book, even after his recently acquired enhanced mental intuition and insight. Scratch then had withdrawn from him, leaving him for the following moments emotionally raped and devastated.

The Dreg then commenced his approach towards Andrew and Mel with a bag-of-bones stature preceding his own confidence, a menacing alien grey tinker-toy man welding a straight razor and a bloodlust.

***

“Well, if I ain’t the man in charge about now,” Scratch mused aloud and with a damnable pride. Yet as he passed the first two wrought iron tables and then the next one, he slowed in mounting consternation. By the time he was beside the last row of tables and about six feet between himself and the uncanny duo of his Everborn brother and the estranged ufologist’s wife, he halted altogether.

Upon the table beside him, he set aside his razor deliberately but calmly, his eyes never leaving Andrew’s. It was difficult for Scratch to determine whether Andrew’s own eyes never left him in turn and likewise, for eyes lacking pupils could only scarcely reveal exactly what it was they were observing.

But Scratch was clearly purposeful in making notice to all eyes present that he was relinquishing his weapon, dragging a single bony finger along the surface of the blade as a stroke of farewell sentiment.

Scratch held his position six feet in front of Andrew and Mel, not far enough away from them nor from the razor on the table to make either one of them feel more at ease. He sighed, slackened from his bolder stature and into a listless slump in composure as if to impersonate surrender.

“Listen, Andrew....” came the attempt of Scratch to reason with him, taking full advantage of a face-to-face and brother-to-brother moment. “....firstly, now that we can share together a short social exchange, I must apologize for not having written any letters or sent any postcards, hadn’t kept in touch over the years. You see, circumstances being what they are and all...they’ve made what I am today and you who
you
are right now. And here we
are
, swimming like feeder fish in the waters of circumstance, as if higher powers have purchased us in water-filled sandwich bags tied with rubber bands, to bring us home as aquarium food for the pets of the gods!”