as they passed, and wanted to tell them how sorry he was, but knew that if the shoe were on the other foot, he wouldn’t have wanted to hear another word from the likes of him.
He looked back to the sky, and to the Archangel that still hung there. There seemed to be something forming around him, a whirlwind of flame.
“What’s he doing?” Remy asked Montagin.
“He needs to be sure,” the angel said.
“Sure of what?”
“That there isn’t any trace of them remaining. That they’re all dead.”
The flames around the Archangel were growing, swirling, creating a vortex of divine fire that had begun to reach down to the island below.
“Are you coming?” Montagin asked.
Remy looked over to see that the angel and the women were waiting, Squire having opened a passage in the shadow thrown by the shell of a concrete storage shed.
“C’mon, Remy,” Squire said. “Ain’t nothing good gonna come from you sticking around here.”
Remy looked back to the sky. An enormous tail of writhing fire snaked down from the body of the whirlpool to spear the ground where the bodies of the children smoldered.
“Go on,” Remy told them. “I think I need to see this.”
He could hear the hobgoblin begin to protest, but Remy ignored him, shedding his human visage as he walked in the midst of fire.
He didn’t know why he wanted to stay, but he felt that he should, to show in some way how sorry he was that this had happened.
The fire swirled around him with hurricane force, and he watched as the buildings that had stood upon the island since it was a coal-mining facility and prison camp began to crumble and were soon scoured from the earth.
“I knew that he would betray me,” said a voice beside him within the fire.
Remy turned in disbelief to see the forms of Gareth and the children, standing there, untouched by the Archangel’s cleansing fires.
“But I’d hoped that he wouldn’t,” Gareth said.
“Are you real?” Remy asked, knowing how stupid the question was, but still needing to know.
“Yeah,” Gareth replied.
“Are you ghosts?”
The young man shook his head. “They really didn’t kill me; I just made them all think that they did. . . . I wanted to see if the angel would keep his part of the bargain.”
“He didn’t,” Remy said. “And come to think of it, neither did I.”
“What are you talking about?” Gareth asked.
“I promised to keep you safe,” Remy said.
The boy shrugged, the fire swirling around him and the kids, but doing no damage.
“You did what you could.”
“It wasn’t enough.”
He shrugged again. “It was more than most did for us.”
The air became full of flying pieces of concrete and other debris that were eventually reduced to powder by the intensity of Michael’s divine maelstrom.
“So you’re not ghosts,” Remy said. “And you’re all fine?”
“The kids are a little spooked, but they’ll be all right.”
“You did this?” Remy asked. “You made the angels think that they slaughtered you and the children?”
“Yeah,” Gareth said. “Give them what they want and they’ll leave you alone.”
“You can’t ever let them know that you’re still alive,” Remy stressed.
“That’s the intention,” Gareth answered.
“Good,” Remy said as the fires of Heaven swirled around them. “Any idea where you’ll go?”
“No,” Gareth answered. “But I’m sure we’ll know when we find it.”
The firestorm appeared to be dying, the island city of Gunkanjima leveled to the scorched and now-barren ground.
“You should get out of here,” Remy stated as the fires died down. “Wouldn’t want all your efforts to go to waste.”
Gareth moved closer to the children.
“You’re not like the others, are you?”
Remy shook his head. “No . . . no, I’m not.” Now more than ever before.
“That’s a good thing,” Gareth stated, lifting his arms as if to embrace his brothers and sisters. “But it’s also dangerous.”
Remy understood exactly what Gareth meant, his final words echoing in the dwindling fire as the children left their past, on a journey to their future.
“You be careful, Remy Chandler,” Gareth warned. “’Cause there might come a day when they’ll come for you.”
The fires eventually died, and Remy stood alone on the barren surface of the place once called Battleship Island.
Nothing remained standing—nothing was left alive.
The island had been scoured of life.
For a brief instant he wondered what people would say when the condition of the island was discovered. How would they explain it? Bizarre atmospheric conditions resulting in multiple lightning strikes? A hidden pocket of methane gas beneath the surface of the former coal-mining facility suddenly igniting as a result of a particularly brutal storm?
The wrath of God?
Remy looked to the sky to see that the Archangel was still there, hovering over what he had wrought, looking down at Remy standing among the ashen remains.
Their eyes touched and Remy once again heard Gareth’s words.
And then the Archangel was gone, leaving behind only a distant rumble of thunder.
A hint of a storm in the distance.
A hint of a storm to come.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The early morning sun found its way beneath the drawn window shades, chasing away the darkness, gradually revealing the carnage that had occurred overnight.
Mulvehill was propped against the living room wall, afraid to move, not sure of the extent of his injuries, fearing that even the slightest movement might reveal something he wasn’t prepared to deal with.
He cautiously turned his head to the right to look at the still form that lay there as he searched for signs of movement—anything to show that his attacker might be alive.
The body remained unnaturally still, but these days he could never be sure.
The rising sun was slowly drawing back the curtains of night. He could see now that there was blood everywhere, spattering the walls and furniture.
Covering his hands.
Staccato images of the violence he’d been a part of appeared inside his head, causing him to gasp. He’d dove into the darkness of his living room, the muzzle flashes from his gun giving him an idea of where his target was.
And what it was that he was facing.
