Chapter 5
Minutes later, I’m ushering Malak into my bedroom, making sure to shut the door behind him before he gets the chance to start chattering.
I count his strides as he glides into my room, hands in his pockets, and amusement dancing along his lips. He moves casually, yet methodically, without a single imperfection in his gait.
“So, this is where you live.” His eyes scan my room, catching on every single idiosyncrasy of mine he can find. It makes me feel like I’m under a microscope—a larger-than-life microscope that doesn’t belong in my little haven.
“Only for the summer.” I shift on my feet as he makes his way from one side of the room to the other, taking in my perpetual state of organized chaos. He’s not even being subtle in his nosy curiosity.
Like a dog with a bone, he leans in towards my array of small pictures, clothespinned on zig-zagged yarn on the wall above my desk. “Do you ride horses a lot?”
“Until recently, yes. I’ve ridden horses my whole life. Competitively, too.” My eyebrows furrow when he picks up my hairbrush, looking at the copper-brown hairs caught in it. “Could you please not touch my things?”
It’s a fucking hairbrush, angel. It’s not that interesting.
Nonchalantly, he sets my brush back down, taking one last look at my picture wall. “Why did you stop?”
“What, horseback riding?” I blink. “College demands all my free time. And even if I hadn’t already quit, I’ve been a bit too sleep-deprived to function well enough for just about everything lately. Which, mind you, you still owe me an explanation for. So why don’t you start there?”
Malak slips his jacket off and promptly plops onto my queen bed, right in the middle, like it’s the most natural place in the world for him. He even has the unparalleled gall to make himself comfortable, repositioning and settling his head on my satin pillowcase. “Ask away.”
“Oh, no.” I sit down at the desk across from Goldilocks, trying my best to ignore the disturbing familiarity of his position. “I’m not asking. You’re explaining. And start from the beginning.”
“I think that’s covered well enough in Genesis.” He cracks a smile at his biblical joke, but I’m not in the mood for it.
“You’re testing my patience, angel man.”
“Fine, grumpy girl.” When he rolls his eyes, his dark eyelashes flutter like little angel wings.
They’re so starkly contrasted to everything else about him, it’s like he’s wearing mascara.
“Again, we’ve known for quite some time that a star would fall from Heaven and give the power to open the Abyss to someone.
Unfortunately for you—or fortunately, depending on how you look at it—that star picked your soul, and now you’re the Abyss’s gatekeeper. ”
“What the fuck even is the Abyss? Don’t you mean Hell?” I pause, mentally kicking myself. “No, stop making me ask questions. You need to do a better job at explaining. Aren’t you supposed to be a messenger? You’re terrible at delivering messages.”
Malak laughs far too loudly, warranting a hurried shush from me.
His voice drops to a rolling low tone, barely louder than a whisper. “Look, I’m trying, okay? Why do you think messages from angels always seem to be so cryptic in the Bible? We’re awful at this, yes, but I’d like to see you try to deliver the word of God and make it come out crystal clear.”
I rub my hands on my face. This is only giving me more questions than answers, and he hasn’t even begun to explain my source of misery lately. “Go back to the part where you gave me nightmares for months before cornering me in the parking lot of my work.”
“I am sorry about that. The prophecy didn’t exactly specify who the star would fall on, and finding the faintest hint of it among eight billion human souls is an extremely difficult endeavor for anyone.”
Surely there’s a better word than star. If a star fell here on Earth, we’d all be dead. Unfortunately, semantics aren’t the most pressing issue right now. “So you’re saying I started having nightmares after this ‘star’ thing happened? What does that even mean? How did you know to come find me?”
“To even begin to explain, I would have to get into the entire concept of souls and the tethers connecting them all. Just know sleep disturbances are common during the process. I’m sure you’ll be fine now.”
I don’t care for his dismissive tone, nor the fact that he only answered part of the question.
“You know they weren’t merely nightmares, right?
They were prophetic, hyper-realistic visions from Revelation when I hadn’t even read the damn book yet.
Every single night, too. Until last night, I haven’t slept peacefully in months. ”
“No, actually, I did not know all that.” Though it’s subtle, his voice sounds genuinely surprised.
“But since you’re not exactly a normal human, you could have easily suffered abnormal effects.
Or perhaps the Creator simply wanted you to have the same visions John did all those years ago.
Regardless, the origin changes very little.
It’s in the past, and now that I’ve finally found you, it’s time for you to go to the Abyss. ”
“If you want me to do anything for you, then answer all the questions I’ve already asked you, for Heaven’s sake, and quit making me ask more. The Abyss. What exactly is it, where is it, and why must it be opened?”
The angel clears his throat. “Right. The Abyss is not Hell. What you know as Heaven and Hell are unreachable for the living—and angels not assigned to them, like myself. The Abyss is commonly confused with Hell because of its similarities to the Hell mythos. It’s a celestially forged hiding place, an underground city holding an army of hideous creatures. ”
I lean back in my chair. At least he answered most of my questions. “And you want me to unleash these monsters into the world? Why the fuck would I want to do that? I’ve read Revelation, and torturing all of humanity who aren’t ‘sealed with the mark of God’ for five months seems a bit extreme.”
“Well,” he rubs the side of his neck. “It’s like the story of Pandora’s box. The locusts bring about great misery, yes, but also hope. They will help fight off the evil that will try to take control of your planet, therefore protecting the innocent, good, and righteous.”
So it is a battle of good and evil. I guess I wasn’t too far off.
“But Judgment Day,” Malak cautiously continues, “is not going to be pleasant. The worst of humanity will be controlling Earth, all self-serving and wicked, fighting each other and committing unspeakable atrocities. That is why we have to open the Abyss at exactly the right time. We can’t do it too soon, as the presence of locusts will certainly send the planet into even further turmoil.
But also not too late, because that would leave the remaining good and righteous people unprotected.
You said you’ve read the Book of Revelation. You know what happens.”
“And what if I just… refuse? Do I have a choice here?”
He hesitates a moment, his face flattening.
“Well. Essentially, you can refuse, but the star won’t.
It might leave you alone until the day you die, and it might not.
We assume it would find someone else once you’re dead, and maybe that person would have actually been the prophesied one all along, but we can’t say for certain.
Again, it’s not exactly something that’s been done before.
I can’t fathom why the key is meant to be given to a singular human, but here we are. ”
I level him a look. “Can’t you just ask God?”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“Why? Are you guys on bad terms or something?” A thought enters my head that makes me want to slap myself for not seriously considering it sooner. “Wait. Malak, are you actually Lucifer? The literal devil? I swear, if you don’t answer me honestly—”
He snorts a laugh, interrupting me. “You’re hilarious.
No, I’m not. And it doesn’t work that way because we make it a hard point to never take anything directly to God.
Not unless it’s absolutely dire. It’s one thing when humans pray to Him, but something else entirely if angels need to talk to Him.
It’s our equivalent of ‘going nuclear’ to beg for His interference in worldly matters. ”
“Great. Lovely. Because the apocalypse isn’t on that level? What about the rest of Revelations?” I pause, recalling everything I’ve read, dreamed, and experienced in disgustingly vivid detail. “The stuff with the horses, horns, seals, and so on—all that hasn’t happened yet, has it?”
“No, not yet. But as I said, a chain of events has been set in motion.” He sits up abruptly, looking at me across the room with sudden, unusual seriousness.
“There’s no distinct timeline to this, Dawn, and there’s no way I can get you one.
We could have years, or we could have weeks.
Don’t you want to be prepared for when the time comes, whenever that may be? ”
A dark, unsettling feeling buries deep within my stomach, threatening to turn me physically ill. To placate it, I turn away from his uncanny, glowing eyes, picking a blank space on the wall to stare at.
“So, worst case scenario…” My mind tumbles through everything I’ve dreamed, how horrifying the end of the world could be.
Honestly, I’d rather be dead than suffer through those nightmares in real life, but it’s not only me I have to worry about.
Jackie and my dad would still be here, and leaving them behind when there’s even the slightest chance I could spare them from suffering—I can’t—I can’t even bear to think about it.
“Worst case scenario,” Malak says softly, “you should start packing now.”
It’s as if everything he’s been trying to tell me is banging on the doors of my acceptance, but my inner voice keeps rioting against it, knowing exactly what’s behind those doors. ‘No!’ it screams. ‘You don’t want to be part of this! Barricade the doors and run far, far away!’