The Firstborn (12 page)

“How do you feel?” he asked.

She didn’t reply. She felt sickly, nauseous. She felt—

Cold night. A man in a car. Another man—she couldn’t make out his face—approaching. Glass blistering with jagged bullet holes.

She felt death crawl up her skin.

“I’m sorry,” Hannah said, turning to walk away. “I feel sick. I’m going inside.”

She wandered through the dark halls of the house, the same as she had done every day for the past two weeks, running her hand along the coarse wallpaper in the dim light. Rows of pictures adorned the wall, hung in patterns that made little to no sense.

Then she saw herself, her reflection, tired and distant, floating in the glassy sheet that covered a picture frame. Her hair was a mess and she wasn’t wearing any makeup. She didn’t touch her hair, not even to displace the tangled strand that hung in her face.

She took in a long breath of air, held it, then let it out slowly, as if to feel the substance of her own body with her lungs. Instead she felt hollow.

Her eyes focused on the picture in front of her. It was of her, a little girl in a blue dress on the Fourth of July, sparkler in hand, twirling for her parents.

She missed her parents, even though she knew she shouldn’t.

Her father had been a truck driver and was gone too much. Her mother was a lonely woman who passed her time with too many male friends while her husband was away. When Hannah was five, her father came home a day early and found her mother with one of her “uncles.” Her father left and never came back, and Hannah’s mother went shopping. She found men and ran off with them, leaving Hannah with her grandfather for long stretches of time, only to come back and sweep her away at a moment’s notice to go live with the man of the week.

When Hannah was fourteen, her grandfather had put his foot down, refusing to let his daughter drag Hannah all over the world to live with unseemly men. That was the last she would see her mother for two years, and only sporadically after that.

Hannah sighed. Last she knew her mother was living in Black Hawk with a man named Robert, but that was all she really knew. She looked at a picture of her grandfather and his late bride and smiled. They were her real parents.

Something in her lungs ached and she felt it again—

Bullets punching through a car’s windshield, a holy man’s body being punctured with lead—

“Hannah?”

She snapped back to the moment and looked at her grandfather standing at the end of the hall.

“Hannah?” he said again. “Dinner’s ready.”

She nodded, glanced at the picture one last time, then followed him into the next room.

Henry Rice sat at the dinner table, shaking salt onto his potatoes, eyes fixed on Hannah. She sat, shoulders stooped, hair in her face, staring at her plate.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, putting a hand on her shoulder.

She didn’t reply.

“You need to eat,” he said with a concerned smile. “Do you think you could eat?”

After a moment she nodded, reached down, and picked up a knife and fork. She took a bite of food and chewed silently.

“Maybe we should do something tomorrow,” he said, trying to be helpful. “Would you like that?”

She shrugged dispassionately.

“You know,” he said, groping for the right words, “when your grandmother passed away, I didn’t leave the house for a month. I was miserable.”

Hannah dabbed at her plate.

“Then, one day my granddaughter showed up,” he said with a smile, “and she took me out of the house and we went for a drive through the mountains.”

She stopped.

“Do you remember that?” he asked.

She nodded. “It was fall.”

“Yes, it was,” he said warmly. “You got me out of the house and you helped me see the world again.”

“I’m just not ready,” she said in a small voice.

“You will be,” he said, confidently, “and when you are, I’ll be right there to take you to see the world again.”

She smiled weakly and went back to her plate.

They finished their meal in silence.

Hannah sat in her room in an old rocking chair, a stuffed bear in her arms. Back and forth she rocked, staring at her bed, pajamas laid out neatly on the soft, tight sheets.

Outside the world was dark. It was time for bed. She was tired, but she couldn’t bring herself to crawl into bed. All she could think about was the way they had grabbed her as she left her home in the morning, throwing her roughly into a van.

Hannah felt scared, unwilling to go to bed. She’d slept with the light on every night for two weeks now, fighting sleep. She knew better than to be afraid of the dark, but she felt it anyway. The thought of going to bed scared her, not with blind terror but a kind of unsettling knot that twisted and clawed at the inside of her stomach.

She got up to get herself a drink of juice. On the way to the kitchen she heard her grandfather’s voice coming from his office. The door was nearly shut, a single sliver of bright light slicing through the blackness.

He was a gentle man who didn’t lose his temper, but he was nearly shouting into the phone.

“I don’t care if Al Nassar did recruit suicide bombers. If I find out one of our people is responsible, I will be not kindhearted.”

She paused, certain she must have heard wrong. Then, changing direction, she slipped out the front door and headed for the horse stalls.

Her grandfather had always owned horses as long as she could remember. The smell of hay and livestock hung in the air, sweet and homey. This was where she’d come to think when she was a little girl, away from the world.

She sighed and crawled over the fence, making sure not to touch the electrified wire that ran across the top.

Ahead was one of her favorite horses—Dante, black as the night itself. She reached down, tugged at a handful of tall grass, and approached the big animal.

The horse seemed spooked for a moment, drawing back.

“Hey, boy,” Hannah said in a soothing tone. “Do you want something to eat?” She reached out with her hand, offering the grass with an open palm, making sure not to let her fingers get in the way of chomping horse teeth. Dante bowed his head and bit into the wad of grass, smacking loudly as he chewed.

“Good boy,” she said with a small voice, patting him on the neck.

Hannah still didn’t care for the dark, chilly and mysterious, but she felt safer near the hulking black horse. She hugged his neck, and the horse gave an accepting grunt, clopping in place with his hooves.

She smiled for a moment then felt her face sag. How was she supposed to go home? To live alone? To spend her days fearful of strangers?

Her face buried in Dante’s mane, she breathed in the smell of the horse. Then she felt it—like a ringing in her ears that seemed to echo through her head. And then—

Beatings—punching and kicking.

A man on the ground.

They spit on Him—screaming in His face.

The cross He carried up the hill.

The crown of thorns.

The cuts—weeping red.

The flesh, tearing from His body.

The sweat—the blood—running down His arms and legs.

Crying women.

Blackened sky.

Thunder.

Lightning.

—It is finished.

Silence.

Immutable, impregnable silence.

CRASH!

The sky splitting. The earth shaking. Buildings tumbling. Soldiers falling to the ground. The curtain tearing.

The tombs—stone coverings—breaking open—

The dead—rising—

Hannah was huddled in the corner of the barn, petting the kittens, when her grandfather entered, a single yellow lightbulb hanging from a wire above.

He stood in the doorway for a moment, not speaking.

She looked up at him. “I’m seeing things.”

He nodded. “I always wondered if you were one of us.” Henry approached her and sat on a bale of hay. “There’s something we need to discuss.”

Her head drooped as she ran her fingers through the kitten’s short fur.

“Tell me what you saw,” he said.

“I saw the death of Christ.”

“And?”

“I saw…tombs breaking open. Dead people came back to life.”

Her grandfather nodded. “‘The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life.’ The Book of St. Matthew,
chapter 27
, verse 52.”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“Those who were raised from the dead at the death of Christ went back to their lives, as best they could. But they had seen the other side—they had seen eternity, and when they were returned to Earth they continued to see the world free of time and space. It was their gift, enhanced by the Holy Spirit that would come at Pentecost. They were the first to be born in the grace of Christ—the Firstborn. It was their charge to serve Christ with their gifts of the Spirit, like any other. Theirs was a kind of prophetic gift that followed them through their lives—they and only they were gifted like this, they and their offspring.”

“Their descendents?”

“Yes. But it wasn’t simply a matter of lineage, but faith. As the First-born reached out to Christ, He reached back and shared with them each their own unique charge—their own calling to fulfill. To some He gave the gift of foresight, to see things that had yet to come. To others He gave the gift of insight, to see the truth of the moment, and to others still He gave the gift of hindsight—”

“The ability to see things that have been,” she said, piecing it all together.

“You,” her grandfather said, leaning close, “are a descendant of that ancient line. In your blood you carry that same gift, and in deeper faith it has been made manifest.”

She looked his face over, skeptically. “And you’re one of these—Firstborn?”

“Yes,” he said with a nod. “In fact, I am the patriarch of the Prima.”

“The Prima?”

“Yes, those who are gifted with the ability to see events from the past.
Prima
. The word is Italian; it means what has come before. There are also the
Domani
, a word that means ‘tomorrow.’ They are given the gift of foresight—the ability to see into the future. And there are also the
Ora
, a word that means ‘now.’ They are blessed with insight—the ability to see the truth of the moment. I look over our brothers and sisters of the Prima and keep them together so that we can use our gifts together to serve our purpose in Christ.”

Her mind raced, trying to understand better.

“And Devin Bathurst?”

“He is a member of the Domani—those who see the future. Using his gifts he was able to prevent any harm from coming to you.”

“Then why don’t people like him?”

“Devin is highly regarded throughout our community. All the Firstborn know about Devin Bathurst and his many successful callings—but long ago the Firstborn turned against one another and began to kill one another. Every order turned against the others, and so the Firstborn agreed that the orders would never mingle. The Prima do not interact with either the Domani or the Ora, and vice versa. Only on special occasions do the Firstborn ever talk with other orders.”