Turning Point #4
He was getting good at this. He had more control over his descent. Below was a sunny landscape of green hills and hundred-year-old houses. He found himself floating toward one in particular in the heart of a neighborhood with fenced backyards.
Raven had set his intention to intersect with the most critical trauma of Lilah’s childhood. He already knew from what little she’d shared with him that he was headed for the home of an older relative. This woman had promised to care for Lilah while her mother was away in Europe for a six-week trip that related to the mysterious history of Joan of Arc and how it connected to her and Lilah’s family tree. Lilah didn’t remember much more than that, only that it was important enough for her beloved mom to leave her behind.
Several factors turned an anxious month or so without her mommy into a living hell: the older woman who adored little Lilah had suffered a stroke and been sent to a nursing facility; her troubled son had taken charge of Lilah; a neighborhood boy had gone missing after a fight with his father; Lilah’s mother—presumed dead—had never come home from Europe; and the demon had full control of her new guardian.
For a sleepy little Pennsylvania town, even a minor ruckus would have caught his attention, but the commotion below was probably one that would be talked about for years to come. Even if the crime hadn’t been so horrifying, the sheer number of law enforcement officers on the scene would be memorable. Lilah had never mentioned this part; perhaps she didn’t even really know. Two police cars, then two more, then a dozen converging on the house in coordinated silence. A middle-aged man darting from a hedge row, a teenage girl in tow, a knife at her throat. Men in uniform surrounding him, and eventually the kidnapper shoving the girl at the uniformed men and running, only to be tackled before he reached the street.
The girl wasn’t Lilah. Nor was she a runaway. She was a kid whom people around her missed, and they’d reported her in danger even before she’d been dragged from a parking lot near cheerleading practice. She was meant to be the next victim, but she escaped because someone had seen her abduction. Lilah and the boy hadn’t been so lucky. Neither had had a champion.
Hovering in mid-air, Raven watched from above. A piercing whine reverberated in his ears. For a moment, he was sure his head would explode. The energy around the kidnapper’s body extended in a sphere, both above and below ground. The orb expanded, moving outward and upward like a giant purple and blue bubble destined to consume everything in its path. Then it popped, and the ringing in his ears stopped abruptly. All that remained of the sphere was a spark of blinding light above the man’s head. A second later, the spark exploded outward into nothingness. One tiny remnant seemed to hang in the air as though it were watching Raven, then it zipped away.
Raven studied the house below. Lilah was down there somewhere, traumatized. He had to find her—now—and wipe away the memories of the horrors she’d seen. Raven drifted downward, slowing his descent to watch two uniformed men with guns drawn as they approached the house. One went to the front door and the other to the back, both bypassing the cellar doors. The one at the front door peeked in the windows. The one at the back door crept up the wooden steps, stopping in mid-stride when the second step creaked.
Raven had to hurry. He imagined a weight to his spirit. He sank to the roofline of the house. It was almost like playing a video game. He could rise… or sink. He could move in any direction. He could probably turn upside down if he wanted. This time, he pointed his toes as he sank through the cellar doors. He was still a little weirded out by the idea of passing through anything solid, but it wasn’t until the moment his feet touched the steep plunge of steps that he felt himself become corporeal. A black Goth rock T-shirt, faded jeans, athletic shoes. Long hair in a topknot held in place by hair-daggers. The heavy scent of mold in the cellar stung his nose and eyes. Some type of equipment—a boiler, maybe—hissed in a corner behind him.
Catching the damp metal pipe that served as a handrail, Raven clung to it to keep from losing his footing, even though the feel of it made him want to sanitize his hands and touch nothing else. The sigil on the next to the last page of The Book of Time—a rectangle with perpendicular lines meeting in the center—glowed greenish-yellow in front of him on the other side of the cramped cellar. A window near the exposed rafters and only inches higher than the overgrown lawn outside. Four panes of glass so thin that he could probably break them all with a single thump. A greenish film of dirt and muck on the outside, probably mildew on the inside. The window was barely clear enough for any light at all, even at sunny mid-day, to illuminate the space.
He blinked hard. He could see only shadows. Carefully feeling his way, he took another step down the narrow staircase. He could discern the outline of a kitchen table under the small window. Not a new table. Old, metal, maybe state of the art in the 1950s or early 1960s. Unwanted enough to have been relegated to the cellar for storage but now used for something sinister.
Raven blinked frantically as if blinking alone would help his eyes become accustomed more quickly to the darkness. He took another step and landed on the cement floor. He tapped around it with the ball of his foot. Solid, except for a few ridges and cracks in the floor. No more steps.
The table became clearer in the greenish light. He squinted at the silver instruments on the surface, set out on a tray like at the dental hygienist’s elbow—or a surgeon’s. Scalpels. Clamps. Tools. Not tools of medicine and healing but tools of torture.
He’d been here before. Long ago. In a dream now. Some timeline in the past. Some permutation he could no longer track because there were so many. Not physically present, but he’d seen this before. Like a vision he couldn’t quite put his finger on. The scalpels, the table, a boy of fifteen or sixteen chained to a pole from floor to ceiling, another pole with a chain attached, a bucket of stale water between them, another bucket for pissing or puking, a rat scurrying across the floor, the stifling air, the green light, the rectangular window near the ceiling. A blond woman in a long white dress.
Something near the bare floor moved in the darkness.
The child. Lilah.
Raven sucked in his breath. He knew where he was. He knew well enough to lift his arm and, without even groping, and pull the string of the bare light bulb that hung from a frayed electrical cord. The bright light flooded the cellar room.
“Lilah?”
He dropped to his knees near her. He recognized her only by her energy and by her eyes. She was dirty and shivering in what looked like Wonder Woman pajamas. She was no longer a little girl smelling of baby powder and candy, but not a young woman yet either. She was at that in-between age with sweat glands and body odor but only the promise of breasts under the thin fabric. She wrapped one arm across her chest and splayed the other hand across her crotch as she squatted and turned away in shame. Her dark hair was thick and dirty but not yet the long mass she’d have as a woman. Something food-like was matted in her hair, just above one ear. The sight of her squeezed his heart, and he forgot all about the rules of time travel and non-interference in events.
“Lilah? I’m going to get you out of here, okay? I promise.”
He glanced up at the blond woman in the corner. She looked like an older version of Aoife without her energy. He remembered her from a long-ago vision. Aoife’s mother, the former High Priestess, Siobhan Jung. The master manipulator before her daughter had claimed the family legacy. So many secret manipulations of the priesthood for what Siobhan had believed were good reasons. The way she watched over Lilah’s young life and guided it like some grand experiment—an experiment that Raven was now trying to undo.
Siobhan glared at him but said nothing. Old Aryx wasn’t the only one who’d negotiated with the demon for gifts in exchange for a body—or at least a host. The natural course of time had already been interfered with long before Raven dropped into the cellar, so why shouldn’t he set it right?
Raven shouldn’t have promised Lilah a rescue. He knew it even as he said it. He also knew that he shouldn’t do anything but help her forget what she’d lived through. There was no way in hell, however, that he could leave a little girl in this shithole. The cops outside would find her eventually, but even a few minutes more was too long for a child to suffer like this.
Slowly, she turned her head, lifting her gaze to his voice. “Y-you came.”
He plucked a hair-dagger from his topknot, his hair tumbling down as he took the shackle around her wrist and started to jiggle the lock. She pulled her hand out of it and watched.
“What the— Lilah, you could get out all this time?”
She shrugged. Oh, but her shoulders were so bony! Poor kid was starving!
“Today. Yesterday. Sometime before that. But not long.” Her voice was small, mousey.
Raven took her little hand in his and rubbed at the marks on her wrist and the deep scrapes on her knuckles. His throat tightened. He couldn’t breathe. “Come on, sweetheart. I’m taking you out of here.” He’d take her into the sunshine and tell the cops he’d rescued her or maybe disappear as quickly as they saw her or leave her in the sun where they’d find her as he floated away. Anywhere but this cellar where she’d seen unspoken horrors.
“Are you… are you Jesus? I prayed and prayed and prayed you’d come.” She stroked the long hair on his shoulder. “But you were too late.”
“No, sweetie. I’m not—”
He followed her gaze to the pole behind him. Raven gasped.
The boy’s body lay crumpled on the floor, his mutilated hands still chained to the pole. His eyes bulged under the plastic bag over his head. Raven scrambled across the floor. No pulse, but the body was still warm even though his aura was a thick black. Raven started to yank the plastic away and try to resuscitate him but stopped himself. It was too late. Too much time had passed. And did that rule even apply here? The boy had already died in this timeline, even before Raven had floated into the cellar. He was past the point of saving his life, past the point of brain damage. Lilah was right: he was too late. To help the boy, at least. The fading aura told him the boy was beyond revival without extraordinary measures that even the Last Priest lacked here.
Instead of attempting a resurrection, Raven began chanting a sleep song to make the little girl forget.
“That’s pretty. My mommy used to sing to me before she went away. What’s that song?”
“I’m going to make you forget all the bad stuff that happened here. The man who did this to your friend? He’s gone. He won’t be hurting you or anyone else anymore.”
Little Lilah shrugged. “The man didn’t do this. I did.”
Raven jerked his head up. “What?”
“I had to. Before the man came back and hurt him more. We heard him come back. Clay said I had to because I could get away now and he couldn’t. I could go out the window, but Clay couldn’t, and the man would be mad and blame him and hurt him more.”
“Demon!” Raven turned on her. His jaws were so tight, he could barely speak. “Demon, come forth! Speak to me!”
She shrank away. “You’re being mean. Like the monster was.”
He forced himself to breathe. His ears weren’t ringing.
No demons here. Just Lilah.
And a dead boy she’d killed to spare him further torture at the hands of the man who’d held them both prisoner for the last month. And then she’d not even taken the first step to escape when she could so easily have busted through the window with the hammer on the table and climbed out of the cellar. She’d set the boy’s soul free but had stayed in her prison.
Something thudded against the cellar doors. A fireman’s axe splintered them as a bald man with a goatee crashed through, spotting first Clay’s body and then Lilah. He burst into tears and scooped her up in his arms.
“Don’t worry, little one. I’ve got you now.” Her bald savior hugged her to him, keening. “I’m so sorry. So sorry. I knew something was wrong. If only I’d figured it out sooner!”
Raven was no longer corporeal. He floated near the ceiling of the cellar, watching. His ears rang as he floated directly over the man.
“Is anyone else here, little one?”
Lilah didn’t answer at first, just hummed the “forgetting lullaby” Raven had sung to her. Finally, she said, “I don’t remember. Where am I? Where’s my mommy?”
She didn’t remember. Raven was thankful for that.
The tug in his gut pulled him backward. Whatever he’d come here to do was done. He’d wiped awful memories from Lilah’s mind. She could grow up happy now, maybe with a little gap in memories but without the trauma. She’d be whole now. As whole as she could be and still lose her mother.
He floated above the house, able to refrain from an immediate return to the courtyard where he’d left a grown-up, occasionally sad Lilah to whom he’d promised the last sigil journey to find the Angelseed. The wife who waited for him there now would be so much less troubled. This was the greatest gift he could give her, even if she would never know the damaged version of herself.
Below him, the weeping man handed off the little girl to a cop who ran with her to an ambulance as it screeched to a halt. The bald man sank to his knees and pounded the ground with both fists. A light blue sphere of energy enveloped him, and Raven’s ears rang fiercely. The demon hadn’t gone to Lilah to torment but instead to the man who’d pulled her out of the cellar.
Before he could pity the man, he reminded himself that the Lilah who waited for him wouldn’t remember the trauma of the cellar.
The Lilah that waited had never once slept with a demon hidden away inside her.
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