Chapter Fifty-Two

A Path Fractured

Isaac and I sprinted. I chanced a backwards glance and spotted several dark shadows upon the water. “The Binders know we are here,” I said through clenched teeth. I was certain we cold outrun them.

A sudden wind blew, sending white-capped ripples across the emerald water and filling the dusk with an eerie chill. Serpentine wisps of gray fog oozed from the bay, rising until it reached our knees. We dashed onward. The fog crawled up our legs, sending out unnatural feelers that made me feel slimy and unclean. It raced ahead of us as well, reducing visibility to mere yards. The path continued to glow crimson beneath our feet but did so with less vibrancy. An irregular wall of gloom coalesced a short distance ahead of us.

The wall thickened until it became impenetrable, deepening to a shade of burnt charcoal. It billowed and shifted into that which sent shivers down our spines. A row of soul Binders appeared shoulder to shoulder upon the gaping jaws of the sea. The demons floated eerily above each wave, and their line extended from as far left as we could see to as far right, cutting us off from the path to Center Island. The light of the white tower failed to penetrate the gray bank of fog. The island became lost to view.

Their cloaks were spun from the fabric of the fog. The leather of their flesh crept and shifted as if their ghostly shape might transform at a moment’s notice. One figure stood out amongst the line of wraithlike apparitions. He stood at their center and his ivory cloak flapped noisily in the gathering wind.

He was the tallest of the unnatural figures, easily topping seven feet, but much more human in appearance than they. His hair was thick, long, and gray and tied at the nape of his neck with a leather cord. He wore animal skins beneath the cloak and sauntered more than walked upon a three hundred pound frame of flexing muscle, looking very much the satyr. He approached us and left behind a troupe of desperate figures all waiting anxiously to follow his command.

Isaac and I stood our ground as the arrogant general approached. I recognized him.

“Fire Walker,” he greeted me with an air of familiarity and a smile that spoke of victory. “You have brought us the child and for that we are eternally grateful.” He patted Isaac on the head, his manner patronizing and full of contempt. “I sent a woman to do a man’s job, but it appears she failed. That is just as well.” His smile was sinister.

“Your Pillar has been destroyed,” I said to the man once known as Cleveland Umbra. “You’ll not take this child. I once feared you but have put aside weakness and self-doubt.”

The hard lines of the man’s sculpted jaw tensed visibly, and the color of his eyes deepened to a cobalt shade that burned with raw venom. The corners of his lips were lifted into a sneer, and he chuckled balefully. It sounded more like a growl. Isaac took several steps back, fixing me as a barrier to the sheer madness and malignancy contained within that laugh.

“I felt the walnut’s death and am saddened by what you have done.” He said this condescendingly as if he were a teacher reprimanding a naughty child.

“Are you familiar with the Algonquin name, Nizad?”

I was. The direct translation was “foot,” but it really meant “far from the heart.”

“Tyranny,” he continued, “is one of Nizad’s many names. The runes spelling ‘tyranny’ were inscribed upon my soul when I sacrificed a wicked woman to the tree. Its power has not been lost. It has simply been transferred...” He didn’t need to finish for me to know to whom the power shifted.

I drew a heavy sigh as I cast my gaze directly into the metallic gray eyes of the fallen angel. My hidden anger returned. It bore into the hole where my right eye should have been, causing a biting and sharp pain to take hold beneath the black leather patch. I felt the tyrannical power of his soul and filled myself with its unquenchable red fire. I would make him pay for every child he tortured and killed.

“Do you know what the sun can do to the mark of the Broken Path?” I was staring at his neck as I asked this. “The sun’s fire is more powerful than you know.”

“Do you mean that fire?” Umbra asked as he lifted his blighted staff toward the sun. A great tidal wave of roiling gray clouds sped from the south, swallowing whole the red ball of fire until all that remained above us was darkness and cold. The fire vanished from within so suddenly I fell to one knee.

“There is emptiness inside of you.” He poked his staff hard into my sternum, causing me to collapse onto my side. “Soon you will know nothing except emptiness and loss.”

The sky was the color of industrial smoke, and all creatures upon the bay became shadows of themselves. I picked myself up from the fragile ground and stood protectively in front of Isaac. The path of fire had not yet disappeared from the benighted and turbulent water, but it shone weakly with a fulvous pigment the color of an aging bruise. Isaac’s spastic breathing told me the child was paralyzed with terror. I seethed with anger and searched hard within my soul for the fire but could not find it. The angel spoke again.

“You are either master over creation, Paul, or you are its subject. You cannot achieve mastery unless you are willing to liberate your own soul from yourself, to let it fly away, never again to limit or bind you.

“I share this knowledge with you, not because I want you to join me—I don’t wish to be joined to anyone or anything—but to torment you, to let you know how poor your choices have been. You could have learned to fly, to walk the moonlight, to fill yourself with the fire of a thousand souls, to become more than immortal. Instead, you chose to become one of the victims, one of the trapped.

“Do you know how many children I have trapped beneath the bay?” he asked.

The two of us said nothing. I suspected the number was eight. Isaac would be the ninth. I suddenly felt heavy. Like an iron anchor. It was a wonder we had not yet sunk beneath the sun’s feeble gossamer threads. The lightless depths lapped at the fringes of the Path rapaciously.

“Do we call you Doctor Umbra?” I accentuated his title with sarcasm. The gray-haired demon sneered. His eyes were not yet obsidian, but they would become so.

“I only captured damaged children, Paul. Fate had already cast them aside. I didn’t shake those babies,” he said, referring to the myriad infants and children who lay helpless at Gray. “I didn’t cause young Isaac’s trauma. They were already victims when I found them.” His tone of indifference was disarming. This was a man, like me, who once provided treatment to broken children.

“Perhaps you have heard only the souls of the damned may be bound? Souls of those who have already died? Do you know how I was able to bind the living children?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He had a captive audience and was on a roll. “The beauty of modern technology,” he explained academically, “allows us to preserve the bodies of those who are severely brain damaged. Such isolated souls cannot respond to the world around them. Their little souls wither and are easily captured by the Miskenupik power.”

“These children may yet have a part to play in God’s plan. Who are you to seal their fate?” The sheer monstrosity of his betrayal was beyond my comprehension.

The corrupted man smiled. “Do you have any idea how much power is released by the binding of a child’s soul?” He nearly swooned in anticipation of this eventuality. “Unless you have experienced the sublime beauty of the rip in the circle that occurs when you pull one of its precious, living ones away, you cannot judge.”

I wondered how the All-Father’s plans could be so corrupted as to give this man so much strength. The question could not be answered out here upon the insatiable depths of infinity. The power of the Miskenupik was like a hydrogen bomb fueled by the separation of atom from atom. This miscreant figure had found a way to tap into the explosive release caused by the separation of soul from soul. The sky darkened to an even deeper shade of indigo.

Isaac tried desperately to put his fear at bay. He whispered “Mom” and “Dad” as if willing them to life, but the words meant nothing here. All luminescence began to fade. We stood upon a jaundiced and frail thing that made me feel precariously leaden.

I made one last effort to appeal to Umbra’s sense of humanity. “Please let the child go. I will give myself willingly, if you let him cross to Center Island.”

Umbra, or more specifically the demon he had become, smirked. His mad laughter rent the dusk. “After all you’ve been through, after all you’ve learned, you still don’t get it.”

His arrogance disgusted me. “I understand plenty. You have bound the souls of eight children. Isaac is to be your ninth. You’ll probably live forever or some other such bullshit. Just let him go.”

Again the dark angel laughed. No­—jeered. He recited the poem I knew all too well.

“Four souls to eclipse the sun,

“Four souls to darken days

“One soul to lead them out, to lead them all astray.”

“I’ve heard it before,” I said. I really wanted to kill this cock-sucker.

“The ninth is special,” he educated me. “A simple child will not do. ‘One soul to lead them out’ requires someone who has crossed a path of fire and returned. Someone who lives between worlds, who has walked both the True and Broken Paths. Isaac is merely a consolation prize. You are the one we want. You’re the ninth soul.”