The Light of the World (12 page)

The swords and wooden stakes and pole arms
lining the wall are freaky. I wonder which of the things on the
wall would be used to kill me? I feel weak enough that his huge
hands could wrap around my throat and end me with very little
effort on his part.

He looks at me with confusion.

Is he reading my mind?

He looks back at the man I assume is his uncle,
and clears his throat.

The headlamp lifts and he smiles under the
bright light.

He smiles until he sees me and then he jumps
back off his chair. He moves fast for an old man, in an old sweater
with a dirty looking mustache.

He looks like Mr. Noodle off Sesame Street. The
headlamp actually suits the bizarre sweater.

He looks at me and for a moment, I think I see a
look of recognition. Then a holy shit look takes over. He tugs at
the collar of his sweater and gulps, "What have you done
Wyatt?"

Wyatt takes a step forward with his hands out,
"It's not what you think."

His uncle pulls a rag from the pocket in his
brown cords and wipes his face. He's sweating from the heat of the
headlamp.

"That is, she's…" He frowns, "What is she?"

Wyatt shakes his head, "I don’t know." He turns
and takes my hand and pulls me to a chair. "We were hoping you'd be
able to tell us."

His dark brown eyes flash at our hands. They
widen, "What have you done?"

Wyatt swallows hard, "I saved her."

Confusion covers his face, "Why?"

"I had to."

His uncle's face crumples. He collapses in the
chair and pulls the headlamp off and throws it on the wooden table.
It scratches the shiny dark wood. I wince. I don’t know what that
means but it's clearly bad.

"She needs to leave. She needs to leave now.
Take her to the Earth Witches."

"Sir I don’t know why you hate me but I need
your help. I killed a man and my mother isn’t my mother and I don’t
know what's wrong with me. Please just tell me what's in the
book."

He looks at me and smiles weakly, "Where are
your parents?"

I shake my head, "No clue."

He looks at the book, "Where did that come
from?"

"My mother. She wasn’t my mother though. I just
never knew. I thought she was."

He pulls out a chair and I sit in it. Gingerly I
place the book in front of him.

He looks at Wyatt and scowls, "You can't stay
here. I'll help as much as I can but you can't stay here. They'll
be home tomorrow. You have to leave when I help you. You can't come
back." He stands and looks at Wyatt, "I need to make a call."

Wyatt nods and sits. We sit there in silence as
Fitz leaves the room. He returns after a few moments, flushed and
preoccupied.

"Sorry for the interruption."
Wyatt looks at me, "Start from the beginning. Leave nothing
out."

I nod. I tell him everything. I don’t leave out
anything. Not the dreams or the eyes glowing or the way I was
raised. I tell him everything, including the way it felt to kill
the man in the grass.

With every word I speak his face becomes more
and more distracted. He starts to sweat again and wipe nervously.
He looks at Wyatt and presses his lips together. He closes his eyes
and sighs. He opens the book and rifles through it. He turns the
book so I can see what page it is on. I can't read the words but I
see a drawing of a girl. She looks like me, but she is on a cross
with blood dripping from her hands and feet. She looks like Jesus.
She is dead. A man holds a sword at her throat.

He runs a finger along the line under the
picture, "She that is born dead will wake dead every morning and
die again as the sun sets. She will be sacrificed five times for
the good of the world before her soul may rest."

"My dreams." I whisper.

He nods, "You are it."

"What is it?"

He gulps and looks at Wyatt who is white as a
sheet.

"Every time you die a small piece of the evil
left on earth dies with you. It's replaced with love. You take the
evil with you to the underworld. You're the Sin Eater."

A huge laugh bursts from my lips. It makes me
sound like I should be a huge burly man. The laugh is huge, bigger
than I am. But I can't help myself. I laugh until I cry and I cry
harder than I laugh.

"They were the fallen. The angels fell in
defiance of god. They imbalanced the world and brought evil and
corruption. Falling made them human, so to speak. Human in
appearance but not in nature. Lucifer, your father, fell in love
with an angel and instead of ending the romance he chose to fall.
He was considered the highest of the angels but when he fell the
role went to Metatron, your uncle."

"Was he in the Transformers movie?"

He pauses and chooses to ignore me, "Your mother
and father were, or rather are angels. Arch Angels."

I frown, "I went to Sunday school with Michael…
uh, Michelle. I know that the angels were asexual."

He shakes his head, "Why? Because the Romans
thought it to be true? No the angel men were beautiful, so handsome
it was said, that they would put any human woman to shame. The
Romans found it impossible to ignore their beauty. This is what
made them asexual. Being aroused by a man makes you a homosexual in
their eyes. They decided the Arch Angels were asexual to explain
their attraction." He rolls his eyes. I can see he thinks this is
ridiculous. I unfortunately find all of this ridiculous.

He sighs and continues, "At any rate your mother
and father allowed their lust and love to corrupt the world. Your
mother was Lillith and your father was Lucifer. They were the first
two to walk the earth." He sees the skeptical look on my face and
sighs, "You have to remember this prophecy has been in the making
since the beginning of time."

I raise an eyebrow, "I believe in science."

He laughs, "Regardless, it's the prophecy of
your birth. Lucifer and Lillith have a story that goes something
like this. Boy meets girl, boy loves girl, girl loves boy, boy
convinces girl to give him her forbidden fruit. Their lovemaking
was the catalyst for darkness and evil. Lillith became pregnant the
moment his seed spilled into her womb. You were birthed then for
the first time. You were an abomination. The first abomination in
the eyes of the other angels and God, after your parents little
indiscretion of course. The evil they created corrupted you. God
did something to you when you were in the womb. You were born dead.
God took the soul of the child you should have been out of you and
replaced it with the soul of death. You were born dead. Soulless,
so to speak."

I frown and look at Wyatt. He is stoic. I'm glad
I don’t have any uncles that say things like seed spilled in wombs.
Gross.

Fitz continued, "You lived, regardless of that
fact you woke from death as the sun rose and fell back into the
arms of death every night. You grew sickly around the age of
eighteen, nineteen. Your hollow soul started to fill up with the
evil your parent's had made."

I feel my face twisting, "That’s sick. God did
that on purpose. To a child?"

He shrugs, "He was angry with them. You got
sicker and sicker. Lillith went back to the garden God created for
man and begged God to cure you. He refused. He said they could die
for their child. If they died she would live and be healthy. They
refused him. He said that they could walk the earth as man and
wife, but they must sacrifice the child they had grown to love and
cherish. Otherwise the child would die and cleanse the earth of
their sin." I don’t like where this story is going. It's like I've
come to a cult and they are just getting ready to start serving the
Kool-Aid.

"Your mother was against it but your father was
a survivalist. He sacrificed you. Your mother left him. She never
saw him for a long time. Maybe never again. I know it was said she
wandered the earth alone. I know at some point you were born again
and when you died, your death brought the age of Enlightenment. You
were sacrificed. I don’t know who gave birth to you and I don’t
know how you became what you are. I know your title is Sin Eater.
You feed on negativity and pain and suffering."

"Crazy." It's what I say when I'm lost in the
conversation and I have never been more lost.

He raises an eyebrow, "You realize this is all
starting right?"

I shake my head, "I am only nineteen. I
technically still have two years of sin eating to do. I mean
according to legend."

He shakes his head, "I don’t know much about
your kind. The Earth Witches are your guardians. You must seek them
out."

"Who wrote this fantastical story?"

He looks at me like he's examining me, "The
angel Metatron. Your uncle."

Wyatt, who has sat still and listened intently,
leans over and asks, "How do we find him?"

His uncle frowns, "You don’t. He would have to
fall and touch the earth."

"How can she get to heaven to see him, since she
is a child of angels?"

He slices an old gnarled finger along his
wrinkled throat.

I cringe. I look at Wyatt, who shakes his
head.

"She is Nephilim. She is a child of the angels,
well in soul anyway. She will be reborn and sacrificed until they
have paid their debt."

Wyatt argues, "Her father wants that, but
Lillith doesn’t sound like she's keen on it. What if we find
Lillith?"

"No one has seen her since the Garden of Eden
turned to dust, well it's not documented anyway."

I am completely lost. "What about Adam and
Eve?"

"They came right after your parents. Metatron is
the keeper of records. He ensured the story went a little
differently when he ensured it made its way into the bible and
lore. Of course there was also the whole debauchery of the ancient
texts in Constantinople."

I shake my head, "Hold up. No more facts. I'm
lost and confused. So I suck people dry of their bad but they die?
The guy on the grass died."

He shakes his head, "I only know what's in the
book. You're a sin eater. It all makes sense and fits."

I want to throw the book across the table.
"Sense? To who? This is fucking stupid. I'm not getting answers.
These aren’t answers. This is a joke. This creepy old mansion needs
a bald dude in a wheelchair and other kids like me." I stand up and
pace, "I touched the man and breathed him in. I tasted his soul in
my mouth. I sucked him dry and it felt like an orgasm, believe it
or not. I can't even make myself feel bad about the experience. I'm
trying so hard to feel sickening amounts of guilt and it's hard.
Honestly, eating him was the first thing I've ever done that felt
natural." My eyes dart to Wyatt, "Beyond hating him."

"That is natural. We are your enemy. Your
parents are the creators of the things we kill. The fallen angels
made the things we hunt."

I cross my arms, "What made you?"

He laughs and points upward.

I shake my head and look at them both, "You can
both go to hell. I want to go back and turn myself in. I want you
to drive me back."

Wyatt's dark blue eyes narrow. He thinks for a
minute and looks back at his uncle, "We handfasted. What does that
mean for her?"

He rubs his eyes and shakes his head, "I don’t
know Wy. She's dead inside already. She was born dead. She's dead
every morning. She is a vessel of death. That’s what the prophecy
tells us. What do you want me to tell you? She isn’t human.
She…"

"I WANT TO GO BACK! I AM RIGHT HERE! I CAN HEAR
YOU! I WANT TO GO BACK!" I feel like pulling my hair out.

His uncle looks at me and then up at the roof.
Thunder fills the house. Panic crosses his face and he looks at
Wyatt, "Get her out of here. Now."

I hear a scream. Wyatt looks at the TV monitor
on the wall, that I missed somehow. It shows Maggie holding a sword
and screaming. She charges nothing but fights with it. I see swirls
of black and her face knock back when she takes a hit. She isn’t
even as big as the sword she holds.

He pulls my hand toward the wrestling mat.

"She's in trouble. She's only little. We need to
help her."

He laughs, "She'll be fine Rayne. It's you who
is in trouble. We need you out of here now."

He drags me to the back of the room.

"Find Lillith and you'll find the answers. Take
her to the Earth Witches." His uncle shouts at him. Wyatt pulls me
into a corner of the room. A wall shoots across when he hits a
button. It's lightning fast. It would cut you in half if you
weren’t fast enough getting into the corner. Suddenly the floor
drops out. It jerks to a stop and we are in a bat cave of sorts.
It's like nothing I've ever seen before. The ocean water splashes
softly and laps against the rocks. He pulls my hand down several
stone steps to a speedboat in the water. The water has carved away
a massive cavern.

"Did they film Batman here?"

"No." He starts the boat and I sit down.

"Why couldn’t we see what she was fighting?"

"Vampires. They move too fast for video to
catch." He revs the boat's engine slightly. He drives out as a wave
comes in and is starting its way out of the cave.

I don’t understand why vampires would be coming
for me. I don’t understand how they exist. I don’t understand
anything. I hold tight to the seat and try not to vomit. I have
never been on a boat before.

We hop along the waves out to sea. I am shaking
with fear and nerves. The cold wind makes me feel worse.

He drives us for a long time. We see nothing. I
don’t even know how he knows where he's going. He looks back at me,
but I point to the front of the boat. He drives to fast and too
jerky and it's just like being in a car with him.

I throw up once from the rocky seas and the
skipping we seem to be constantly doing. I imagined boats would
glide in the water. Not hop the surface like jumping waves.