“Gareth said that you want to teach us to kill and stuff,” she said suddenly. “To be an army . . . to fight a war . . . World War Three!”
“Is Gareth one of your brothers?” he asked, trying to calm her down.
“Yes, he’s my oldest brother and he didn’t want us to do any fighting for the angels so he ended up doing something really bad.”
Remy knew what Gareth had done.
“He killed an angel, didn’t he?” Remy said. “Gareth killed an angel called Aszrus.”
She was picking at stuff in the dirt again, pulling things out, looking at them, and tossing them aside.
“Yes, he did,” Kitty said. “And he got into really bad trouble . . . but that was before they knew he had powers.”
Remy didn’t quite understand. “Powers?” he asked. “What kind of powers?”
Kitty was still poking around in the mud. She shrugged her shoulders. “All kinds,” she said. “We all got ’em now—well most of us. Some of the babies don’t.”
Remy felt that horrible feeling begin to form in his stomach, the horrible feeling that told him things were much worse than he thought.
“Do you have powers?” he asked, realizing as the words left his mouth that it might not have been the question to ask right then.
Kitty was looking at him again, and smiling.
“Uh-huh,” she said. “Do you want to know how I know so much about this island?” she asked.
Remy didn’t respond.
“All those people who died here a long time ago?” she asked. “They told me.”
She poked at the things she’d been pulling from the mud and dirt.
“Here are some of their bones. If their bones are here, they’re here, too.”
Remy watched as a thick mist seemed to erupt from the muddy bones, growing in size to form a grayish cloud that transformed into multiple ghostly shapes with eerily burning yellow eyes.
“Guess what my power is?” Kitty asked, and then she started to giggle.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that something bad was about to happen.
“Kitty, you don’t have to do this,” Remy tried to persuade her. “I don’t mean you, or your brothers and sisters any—”
“I control the ghosts!” she proclaimed. “And I can get them to do whatever I want.”
“Kitty,” he tried again, calling forth his wings because it might be necessary.
“Get ’im!” the child ordered.
The ghosts glided through the air, their mouths open in a disconcerting psychic scream that Remy could hear—
As hard as he tried to shake them, the ghosts held on, filling his thoughts with the pain and misery they had suffered there as prisoners of the Japanese. Remy was having a difficult time concentrating. He crashed into the side of a nearby building, breaking one of the few panes of glass that had managed to remain intact.
The ghosts wanted him to know them—their loves, their hates, what they so desperately missed. He knew it would be impossible to escape them, so he landed, dropping to his knees on the muddy ground. He wrapped himself in his wings and rocked to the psychic onslaught, experiencing each and every thing they wanted to him to know.
Remy could feel the heat of life slipping away from him, the spirits eagerly taking anything they could use to manifest themselves more strongly in the living world. He felt cold, and colder still as the ghosts of Gunkanjima grew more powerful.
It was time to make his move. Calling upon the divine power that resided within him, Remy communicated with the disembodied dead, telling them that it was time to move on.
The ghosts fought him at first, having been tormented for so long, bound to the island. But Remy showed them the light, and what it would mean if they let go.
And as he’d hoped, the spirits calmed, soothed by his message of eternal rest. Their torture would end. They would at last know peace, their ghostly energies finally able to travel on to join the stuff of the cosmos.
The stuff of creation.
“What’s he doing to my ghosts?” Remy heard Kitty cry from somewhere far away. Before he could react, he was struck by a bolt of energy that picked him up from the ground and tossed him against the side of a building.
The ghosts were in a panic once more.
Remy crawled to his knees, raising his head, certain that he wasn’t going to like what he was about to see.
And he was right.
Kitty had been joined by some of her brothers and sisters.
They were of various ages, some a little younger than Kitty, while others looked as though they were in their teens. The angels at Rapture had been busy.
“I don’t . . . ,” Remy started again, wanting them to know that he wasn’t there to hurt them. But his words fell upon deaf ears.
One of the young teens approached him, a smile on his dirty, pimply face. His hands were outstretched, and from the tips of his fingers flowed streams of some kind of bioenergy. It was like being touched with a power cable, and Remy’s body immediately convulsed.
The ghosts were back as well, their number growing by the second, and Remy’s mind became so crowded with horror and misery that he could barely put his own thoughts together enough to stand.
“Please,” he begged. He had no desire to hurt them, but if they kept this going . . .
The wind kicked up, and Remy felt as though he’d been clutched by a giant, elemental hand. He was picked up, his wings flapping uselessly, and tossed back to the ground by the invisible hand of some angry, and powerful godlike being—a godlike being controlled by a fourteen-year-old child in a torn Sex Pistols T-shirt, jeans, and scuffed-up cowboy boots.
Remy was about to plead with them again, but their eager faces told him they were having way too much fun. Instead, he decided he should consider getting the hell out of there before the sadistic brood ended his life for good.
The invisible hand had him again, this time by the legs, and whipped him savagely against the ground. He could hear the children’s excited cheers as he was tossed aside like a rag doll, rolling to a stop in the center of a street now lush with vegetation. He lay there, playing dead, gathering his wits. No matter how badly his warrior nature railed inside him, he would not hurt children, no matter how bloodthirsty they appeared.
They were approaching him. He could hear their feet scuffing across the ground over the wailing of the dead still inside his mind. This was it.
Remy sank his fingers deep into the muddy ground, and willed the fire that churned inside of him forward. It exited his fingertips in an excited rush, pouring into the ground and causing the vegetation and anything else lying within it to explode in bright yellow flames.
The children began to scream, and Remy took to the sky, beating the rain-filled air unmercifully as he flew away from the angry tribe, maneuvering between the abandoned buildings as he sought a place to set down, to rest and gather his thoughts.
He hadn’t been paying attention to the airspace in front of him until it was too late.
The teenage girl hung in the air as if floating in water, her hands held out on either side of her churning with some bizarre mutation of divine fire. As he grew closer, he saw her mouth twist in a grimace of exertion, and as he dropped from the sky in an attempt to escape, she tossed the flaming orbs of hissing fire where he’d just been.
Evading the fireballs, Remy twisted in the air above another street that had succumbed to the elements, and saw another gathering of children.
Almost as if they’d been waiting for him.
The wind picked up suddenly, savagely, and it took all that he had to stay aloft. A wall of air pushed down upon him, and Remy found himself striking the side of another building, his wings beating as hard as they could to
