Chapter 5~

You know...stuff happens.

 The blonde girl held onto my wrist. My whole body began to go numb and I felt like my head was going to explode. We were flying through a tunnel that had every color in every inch at one time. It hurt my eyes, but I would not close my eyes or move to cover my eyes. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t open my mouth. This went on for an eternity until the girl looked at me and asked if I was ready. Before I could respond, she released my arm and I began falling, twisting, and turning. Still, I could not scream.

  It was not until I fell face-first into the ground that I could move or feel anything again. I moaned as I turned onto my back. The girl stood above me. Was that a halo? “Hi!” She said, smiling and blinking, as she held her hand out to help me up. The sun that previously made her look like she had a halo blinded me. I moaned again, and covered my face with my arms. “Come on! Get up!” She grabbed one of my arms. I quickly pulled it out of her grip before she could throw me back into the multi-colored tunnel again. “Well, get up if you don’t want me to help you!” She smiled sweetly.

  I glared up at her and helped myself up, trying to ignore the spots that the sun had burned into my retinas, and keep my eyes on her the whole time. “So what? Time traveler from the future? Demon? What are you, and when did you come from?” I asked, brushing the dirt off me.

  “Time has little meaning in Heaven, except that it will all happen in a good amount of it. I’m an angel, by the way,” she explained, smiling again. “I’m Colleen.”

  “Of course you are,” I said. The last time we worked with an angel did not turn out well. I did not particularly like getting involved with angels. We associated with demons on a daily basis; we were not exactly high on St. Pete’s list of people to let into Heaven. “So what do you want this time then? If it’s to get that stupid shield back from Perseus, I’m out, and you came to the wrong millennium again.”

  “Oh please, that mistake was centuries ago.” It was a year ago. “No, we need you to do what you do best. Watch creatures and then kill them!”

  “So you almost give me a heart attack so that you can tell me to keep doing what I’m doing? Why am I here anyhow? And, where is here?” I asked, finally looked around. There was a pond beside us. We were in a field of flowers. I recognized some, others I had never seen before. The whole field was surrounded by snow-topped mountains.

  “You’re in Heaven!” She blinked. “Obviously. Where else would you be?”

  “Earth,” I answered sarcastically, and continuing to look around. So this was Heaven. “The last angel didn’t take me to Heaven.”

  She explained at rapid-speed. “That’s what I said, but apparently, I look too much like a human. Nobody would believe me. I mean, look at what my vessel is wearing. She didn’t exactly make this easy on me.” I finally looked at what she was wearing. She wore blue skinny jeans, a neon green t-shirt, and a name-brand neon blue jacket. She did look very contemporary. “Aside from that, I’m too ‘bubbly’. Therefore, I take humans here and they believe me. It is my idea of Heaven. If I wore feathery wings and a foil halo, they still would not believe what I was even though that is how you silly humans picture us. I’ve tried it before.”

  I slowly nodded, deciphering what she had said, and then looked back at her. “So what is it that Heaven wants us to do for them this time?” I asked. As I looked at the angel, I realized she looked familiar. I could not place where I had seen her before though.

“We need you to protect the prophets and prophetesses.”

 I looked at her, questioning her sanity. Angel’s actions could be really shady, so it was highly possible. “Don’t the arc angels take care of them?”

 “Well yeah, who else would? Wonder why all these disasters are happening? Possessions and demon behavior everywhere? Kids randomly dying?”

  “It has been a bit high for this time of year, I’ll admit, but not by much.”

  “Why do you think there was a kelpie attack in the middle of Illinois?”

  “It was off the coast technically.”

  “Whatever. Kelpie’s do not live in America and they are never born in America. They do not live anywhere expect Ireland, Scotland, and sometimes England. No, Sage Lloyd, that boy was no normal boy. That boy was a prophet.”

  I laughed aloud, and then stopped when I realized she had the straightest face I had seen on her since she took me into Heaven’s vortex. “That’s not possible. Prophets don’t just die,” I said.

  “It’s not possible, but it’s happening, and I would try to stop it fast.”

  “What if I don’t?” I don’t trust angels. They could do crazy things. Transport a town over an ocean. Make an army drop dead by blinking. Even the weak or young angels could cause major disasters.

  “Then the human race will slowly die off and maybe even you one day soon,” Colleen said, smiling sweetly and blinking again. “Prophets are dying off quickly. Arc angels have to be in control of one prophet at any time. As soon as a prophet dies, the angel automatically transfers the power to another human.”

 “So we help with your ADD angels for what? What’s in it for us?”

 “Just because you’re a Watcher or Hunter does not mean that you get special treatment, Sage. You could have the powers transferred into you just as easily as anyone else could. You might have them already and you would not know until they hit you full force. You would just pass them off as normal dreams at first. I hear that is how the visions start: as dreams that you cannot remember and then you start to remember them. From there, they start in daydreams too, and then whenever they want. So, what is in it for you? You and your race get to continue with your lives and continue fighting your silly little wars with your silly little guns. What is in it for you? You’re life, and you’re way of living it.”

 I nodded. “Well, I think that’s pretty…acceptable terms. What do you want us to do? How do we do that?”

 “Save the prophets, Sage Lloyd,” she said, grabbing my wrist.

 “Wait-” She was going to send me back into the rainbow vortex.

 “Trust no one. Not ever your own blood.”

 “But wait-” It was too late. We had already taken off. This time, instead of the tunnel being rainbow colored, it was dark blues, grays, blacks, and whites.

 

When I landed, it was on my back in the dark green hallway leading to our hotel room. The two-liter of Mountain Dew was standing up beside me. What just happened? An angel had come to me and asked me to keep Watching unless I wanted to die. What was the last thing she said? Do not trust anyone. I nodded and shrugged. Nick had to know about this. I walked into the room and sat the Mountain Dew beside him. He was using his laptop. I didn’t think he was doing any research that could help us with anything to come. I thought about taking off his headphones until I remember exactly what the angel had said. “Trust no one. Not even your own blood.” I wanted to tell Nick, but for some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. I would soon, but not right now.

  I took a large drink from the bottle and then flopped onto my bed and logged into my laptop. I used every search engine I could think of to look up all information on prophets I could find. Some say that there may only be one prophet at a time, some say many. Prophets are straightforward. They are the spokesperson of God, seraphim, or arc angels. This brought me to research seraphim. A seraph is an angel of high ranking. Each seraph has six wings. One set is used to fly, while another pair covers their faces and the last pair covers their feet. Seraphim are suck-ups to God. They only focus on worshipping Him and doing anything for Him.

  After hours of reading up on prophets and seraphim, I could not keep my eyes open any longer. I fell asleep with my laptop still on and my brother was still “researching”. I had the dream again, the dream that I had each time that I fell asleep.

  There were the two people like normal, but this time I knew who the girl was. The girl with the platinum blonde hair, pale skin, and blue eyes. I looked at her cloths this time. There was the blue skinny jeans, jacket, and neon green t-shirt. I realized that this was where I recognized Colleen, the angel, from and gasped. Again, they argued about Mordechai, and again, the boy fell into the earth after Colleen yelled at him. Colleen tried to jump in after him. It was my fault. She blasted me and again, I was being blinded by sunshine.

  Nick had ripped open the curtains to let a stream of direct sunshine hit me in the face. “Wakey, wakey! Eggs and bac-ey! Let’s go eat! I’m starving.” I moaned and pulled the heavy quilt over my face and turned over. I could barely remember the dream. I knew that Colleen, the angel, had been in it. I wondered if that had been true until Nick picked up my laptop and looked at it questioningly. “Prophets? You never look up biblical things.”

 I came out from under my blanket. I looked from him to my computer and back to him. “Yeah. I was just bored. You know how that goes.”

 He nodded and looked at me suspiciously. “I know your face for looking up fun facts and looking up things for a case. That was the case expression last night.”

 “Nick,” I grabbed my computer out of his hands. “It was nothing. Research led me from one thing to another.” That was not entirely a lie; I could pass without feeling guilty about lying to him. I quickly logged out and got dressed. “Let’s eat. We have an hour before check-out time or we’re staying another night,” I grabbed my jacket out of my bag and walked through the door. As I opened the door, I gagged. I had forgotten how bad the hallway smelled. It had gotten stronger over night. I quickly slammed the door and faced Nick. “Do we have to? Can’t we go later, like, after someone throws out the milk?” We ran to the elevator to escape the smell and pressed the button that would land us in the lobby.

  The same stiff lady that was working the day before was working again. “Excuse me, ma’am, but the third floor reeks of spoiled milk.”

  “Kay,” she blew a bubble. “I’ll send someone up later.” I saw crumbs on her black blouse and she had brown lining her teeth. She seemed to be in a good mood. Nick and I smiled at her and walked over to a small room set off from the rest of the lobby that had a buffet table of every breakfast food anyone could imagine.

  There were eggs (scrambled and over-easy), bacon, sausage (links and round), potato-cakes, waffles, bread for toast, and Nutella. “She seemed more pleasant today,” Nick said, taking a plate.

  “It’s the morning. She hasn’t had to deal with idiots yet.” I grabbed a plate and put two slices of bread into the toaster. “She obviously just had Nutella too. She still had chocolate in her teeth.”

  Nick laughed. “How do you pick up on these things?”

  I shrugged. “It’s a gift.” The toast eventually popped up, perfectly browned. I slathered on the Nutella and went to join Nick at a table. “So, what did you find out in your research last night?” I asked, trying to make a joke about his “research”.

  “Actually, some really cool stuff, but it was just because I was bored,” he smiled, making a joke back at me. “It’s not important.”

  “Funny. Ha ha. Now what do you have?” I began eating the crust from around the bread.

  “If you really must know, New Orleans is up to its old tricks, literally, but it’s actually happening this time.” Nick shoved a whole sausage link into his mouth.

  “What?” Old voodoo and hoodoo witches were always doing something weird, but it actually happening and being noticed? That was unheard of.

  “Well, basically, there have been a lot of natural deaths in town. Heart attack, that stuff. That’s what local police are saying anyhow.”

  “Ah, and what are locals saying?”

  “Locals don’t agree. A new witch moved in a few months ago from France. Her name is Mè re Lunette.”

  I looked at him incredulously. “Mother Moon. Really?” He nodded, dipping a biscuit into the yolk of his egg and eating it. “People are really unoriginal sometimes. Anyhow, so what are the locals saying about Mother Moon?”

 “Oh,” he swallowed the rest of his biscuit. “They don’t like her. She likes voodoo dolls, as they usually do, but other witches are afraid of her dolls. They claim that they move when they think no one is watching and then someone in town dies; someone that happens to have done something wrong or disrespectful to Mè re Lunette.”

I thought for a moment. “Who’s watched them to see?”

 “Nobody, obviously, except the people who died, Lunette’s cat, and cameras.”

 “Voodoo witches don’t just have cameras set up in their houses…especially if they actually have something going on.”

 “Oh no, it wasn’t her that put up the cameras. It was her neighbors. They were terrified of her, so they set up cameras in her house.”

 “Isn’t there a law against that?” I took the last bite of my first piece of toast. “The owner of the house not knowing about it?” I said through the toast, trying not to spew it across the table into Nick’s face.

 “I don’t know, but anything goes in New Orleans.” He cleaned off his plate with his last biscuit. “Besides, she found the cameras and ripped down before anyone could save the files to a computer or anything.” I finished my last piece of toast as he was getting up to put his plate on the stack of other used plates. I smiled sweetly and held out my plate to him. “Only if we can go to Louisiana.”

 “That’s, what, twenty hours away? There has to be other cases between here and there.”

 “There’s not! I checked. And, it’s only fourteen hours, fifteen at most.”

 “Only? Alright,” I said, holding my plate out to him. He took it up as I made another piece of toast. He gave me a questioning look. I didn’t normally eat anything for breakfast. “I like toast and I like Nutella. What do you expect?” Ten minutes later, I was sitting in the car and Nick was checking out.

 When he got in the car, he slammed that trunk closed and then slammed the door shut. “You know, that woman is just peachy all the time. It’s overwhelming. She just needs to have a large container of Nutella under her desk all day. It would save the rest of us from her wrath.” He started the Opel and quickly began driving out of town.

Author's Note

I wrote this at like, 3 in the morning and I was 3/4 the way asleep through most of it. Really, tell me what you think with this one and any suggestions are always welcome!