“Hurry,” I told Michael. “He’s got to know we’ve bugged the swords somehow. If he finds those hairs Molly tied onto the hilts, we’re done.”
“He won’t get away,” Michael said with perfect confidence, and slammed the accelerator down as we approached an intersection sporting a bright red light. Maybe it was divine intervention, or fate, or just good driving, but the truck shot through the intersection, missing two other cars by inches, and sailed on forward.
The needle on the compass pointed steadily toward the park as we went, but then abruptly began to traverse from one side to the other. I looked up ahead of me and saw a dark form sprinting across the road that separated the park from Lake Michigan.
“There!” I shouted, pointing. “There he is!”
Michael pulled over to the side of the road, and I hit the ground before the truck had stopped moving, sprinting after Father Douglas. He was in good shape, covering the ground in long, loping strides. Normally it wouldn’t have been a contest to catch him. I run three or four days a week, to train for situations exactly like this one. Of course, when I practice I’m not generally concussed, weary, and sporting a recently dislocated shoulder. Douglas was holding his lead as we sprinted down the beach, and I was tiring more rapidly than I should have.
So I cheated.
I reached into my pocket, drew out the heavy transmitter, and flung it at him as hard as I could. The black plastic device struck him on the back of the head, shattering, and sending several heavy batteries flying.
Father Douglas staggered, and couldn’t keep his balance at the pace he was moving. He went down in the sand. I rushed over to him and seized the bag with the swords, only to have him sweep one leg out in a martial arts move, and kick my legs out from beneath me. I went down, too.
Father Douglas ripped at the bag, but I clung grimly, while we fought and kicked at each other—until the bag tore open under the strain and spilled the swords onto the sand.
He seized the hilt of
Fidelacchius
, a katana-type sword that was built to look like a simple, heavy walking stick, until you drew the blade. I seized
Amoracchius
, scabbard and all, and barely brought the sheathed broadsword up in time to deflect a sweeping slash from Father Douglas.
He gained his knees and swung again, and I had all I could do to lift the sheathed sword and fend off the strike. Blow after blow rained down on me, and there was no time to call upon my power, no opportunity to so much as rise to my knees—
Until a size-fourteen work boot hit Father Douglas in the chest and threw him back.
Michael stood over me, aluminum baseball bat in his right hand. He put out the other one, and I slapped
Amoracchius
into it. He gripped it mid-blade, like some kind of giant crucifix, and limped toward Father Douglas with his bat held in a guard position.
Father Douglas stared at Michael with wide eyes. “Stay back,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Who says you’re able to?” Michael rumbled. “Put down the sword, and I’ll let you go.”
Douglas stared at him with those cold grey eyes. “I can’t do that.”
“Then I’ll put you down and take the sword anyway. It’s over, Roarke. You just don’t realize it yet.”
Father Douglas wasted no more time on talk, but came at Michael, the katana whirling.
Michael batted (no pun intended) the attack aside like a cat swatting down moths, the baseball bat spinning.
“Slow,” he said. “Too slow to hit a half-blind cripple. You don’t know the first thing about what it means to bear a sword.”
Douglas snarled and came at him again. Michael defeated this attack, too, with contemptuous ease, and followed it by smacking Douglas across one cheek with the hilt of the sheathed sword.
“It means sacrifice,” Michael said as Douglas reeled. “It means forgetting about yourself, and what you want. It means putting your faith in the Lord God Almighty.” He swung a pair of blows, which Douglas defended against, barely—but the third, a straight thrust with the baseball bat’s tip, drove home into his solar plexus. Douglas staggered to one knee.
“You
abandoned
your duty,” Douglas gasped. “The world grows darker by the day. People cry out for our help—and you would have the swords sit with this creature of witchcraft and deceit?”
“You arrogant child,” Michael snarled. “The Almighty Himself has made His will known. If you are a man of faith, then you must abide by it.”
“You have been lied to,” Douglas said. “How could God ignore His people when they need his protection so badly?”
“That is not for us to know!” Michael shouted. “Don’t you
see
, you fool? We are only men. We only see in one place at one time. The Lord knows all that might be. Would you presume to say that you know better than our God what should be done with the swords?”
Douglas stared at Michael.
“Are you stupid enough to believe that He would want you to cast aside your beliefs to impose your will upon the world? Do you think He wants you to murder decent men and abduct innocent
children
?” The bat struck
Fidelacchius
from Douglas’s hands, and Michael followed it with a pair of crushing blows, one to the shoulder and one to the knee. Douglas went down to the sand in a heap.
“Look at yourself,” Michael said, his words hard and merciless. “Look at what you have done in God’s name. Look at the bruises on my daughter’s arms, at the blood on my friend’s face, and then tell me which of us has been deceived.”
Again, the bat swept down, and Douglas fell senseless to the sand.
Michael stood over the man for a moment, his entire body shaking, the bat still upraised.
“Michael,” I said quietly.
“He hurt my little girl, Harry.” His voice shook with barely repressed rage.
“He isn’t going to hurt her now,” I said.
“He hurt my little girl.”
“Michael,” I said, gently. “You can’t. If this is how it has to be, I’ll do it. But you can’t, man.”
His eyes shifted back toward me for just a second.
“Easy, easy,” I told him. “We’re done here. We’re done.”
He stared for another long, silent moment. Then he lowered the bat, very slowly, and bowed his head. He stood there for a minute, his chest heaving, and then dropped the bat. He settled down onto the sand with a wince.
I got up and collected
Fidelacchius
, returning it to its sheath.
“Thank you,” Michael said quietly. He offered me
Amoracchius
’s hilt.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
He nodded, smiling wearily. “Yes.”
I took the sword and looked at Douglas. “What do we do with him?”
Michael stared at him silently for a moment. In the background, we could hear emergency vehicles arriving to attend to the aftermath of the rooftop explosion. “We’ll bring him with us,” Michael said. “The Church will deal with its own.”
I sat in the chapel balcony at St. Mary’s, staring down at the church below me and brooding. Michael and Forthill had been seeing to Father Douglas, who wasn’t going anywhere under his own locomotion for a while. They had him in a bed somewhere. It had hurt to watch Michael, moving in what was obviously great pain, hobble around the room helping to make Douglas feel better. I’d have been content to dump the asshole in an alley somewhere and leave him to his fate.
Which might, just possibly, be one reason I was never going to be a Knight.
I had also swiped Forthill’s flask of scotch from his room, and it was keeping me company in the balcony. Two more reasons I was never going to be a Knight.
“Right at the end, there,” I said to no one in particular, “those two started speaking a different language. I mean, I understood all the words, and I understood the passion behind them, but I don’t get how they connect. You know?”
I sipped some more scotch. “Come to think of it, there are a lot of things I don’t get about this whole situation.”
“And you want an explanation of some kind?” asked a man seated in the pew beside me.
I just about jumped out of my skin.
He was an older man. He had dark skin and silver-white hair, and he wore a blue workman’s jumpsuit, like you often see on janitors. The name tag read “Jake.”
“You,” I breathed. “You’re the archangel. You’re Uriel.”
He shrugged. The gesture carried acknowledgment, somehow.
“What are you doing here?” I asked—maybe a bit blearily. I was concussed and half the flask was gone.
“Perhaps I’m a hallucination brought on by head trauma and alcohol,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. I peered at him, and then offered him the flask. “Want a belt?”
“Very kind,” he said, and took a swig from the flask. He passed it back to me. “I don’t exactly make it a habit to do this, but if you’ve got questions, ask them.”
“Okay,” I said. “Why did you guys let Michael get so screwed up?”
“We didn’t let him do anything,” Jake replied calmly. “He chose to hazard himself in battle against the enemy. The enemy chose to shoot him, and where to point the gun and when to pull the trigger. He survived the experience.”
“So in other words, God was doing nothing to help.”
Jake smiled. “Wouldn’t say that. But you got to understand, son. God isn’t about making good things happen to you, or bad things happen to you. He’s all about you making choices—exercising the gift of free will. God wants you to have good things and a good life, but he can’t gift wrap them for you. You have to choose the actions that lead you to that life.”
“Free will, huh?”
“Yes. For example, your free will on that island.”
I eyed him and sipped more scotch.
“You saw the Valkyrie staring at Michael. You thought he was in danger. So even though it was your turn, you sent him up to the helicopter in your place.”
“No good deed goes unpunished,” I said, with one too many “sh” sounds. “That’s where he got hurt.”
Jake shrugged. “But if you hadn’t, you’d have died in that harness, and he’d have died on that island.”
I scowled. “What?”
Jake waved a hand. “I won’t bore you with details, but suffice to say that your choice in that moment changed everything.”
“But you lost a Knight,” I said. “A warrior.”
Jake smiled. “Did we?”
“He can barely walk without that cane. Sure, he handled Douglas, but that’s a far cry from dealing with a Denarian.”
“Ah,” Jake said. “You mean warrior in the literal sense.”
“What other kind of warrior is there?” I asked.
“The important kind.”
I frowned again.
“Harry,” Jake said, sighing. “The conflict between light and darkness rages on so many levels that you literally could not understand it all. Not yet, anyway. Sometimes that battlefield is a literal one. Sometimes it’s a great deal more nebulous and metaphorical.”
“But Michael and me are literal guys,” I said.
Jake actually laughed. “Yeah? Do you think we angled to have you brought into this situation because we needed you to beat someone up?”
“Well. Generally speaking. Yeah.” I gestured with the flask. “Pretty much all we did was beat up this guy who had good intentions and who was desperate to do something to help.”
Jake shook his head. “The real war happened when you weren’t looking.”
“Huh?”
“Courtney,” Jake said. “The little girl who almost got hit by a car.”
“What about her?” I asked.
“You saved her life,” he said. “Moreover, you noted the bruise on her cheek—one which she acquired from her abusive father. Your presence heightened her mother’s response to the realization that her daughter was being abused. She moved out the next morning.” He spread his hands. “In that moment, you saved the child’s life, prevented her mother from alcohol addiction in response to the loss, and shattered a generational cycle of abuse more than three hundred years old.”
“I . . . um.”
“Chuck the electrician,” Jake continued. “He was drunk because he’s fighting with his wife. Two months from now, their four-year-old daughter is going to be diagnosed with cancer and require a marrow transplant. Her father is the only viable donor. You saved his life with what you did—and his daughter’s life, too. And the struggle that family is going to face together is going to leave them stronger and happier than they’ve ever been.”
I grunted. “That smells an awful lot like predestination to me. What if those people choose something different?”
“It’s a complex issue,” Jake admitted. “But think of the course of the future as, oh, flowing water. If you know the lay of the land, you can make a good guess where it’s going. Now, someone can always come along and dig a ditch and change that flow of water—but honestly, you’d be shocked how seldom people truly choose to exercise their will within their lives.”
I grunted. “What about second baseperson Kelly? I save her life, too?”
“No. But you made a young woman feel better in a moment where she felt as though she didn’t have anyone she could talk to. Just a few kind words. But it’s going to make her think about the difference those words made. She’s got a good chance of winding up as a counselor to her fellow man. The five minutes of kindness you showed her is going to help thousands of others.” He spread his hands. “And that only takes into account the past day. Despair and pain were averted, loss and tragedy thwarted. Do you think that you haven’t struck a blow for the light, warrior?”
“Um.”
“And last but not least, let’s not forget Michael,” he said. “He’s a good man, but where his children are involved he can be completely irrational. He was a hairbreadth from losing control when he stood over Douglas on the beach. Your words, your presence, your will helped him to choose mercy over vengeance.”
I just stared at him for a moment. “But . . . I didn’t actually mean to do any of that.”