Chapter 85
THE ANSWER WAS right there in Number 2’s barbs and jeers.
My mother and father.
Yes, they were brave and fearless, incredibly talented, loving, and strong.
But in the end, they died anyway. Because they were not immortal.
My mother had practically spelled it out to me over our last breakfast together: Death is always with us, Daniel. None of us is immortal. Eventually, we must all depart this realm and move on to the next.
Chordata, up on Alpar Nok, had given me the answer, too: The one known as the Fallen Soul was granted not immortality but a vastly extended life by an evil god known as The Prayer.
Even Xanthos had been dropping hints back at the stables: We are all mortal. Otherwise, we would be gods, no?
As a last gasp—and I mean that literally, because I didn’t know how much longer I could keep drawing breath after all that unfathomable pain—I imagined Number 2 dead.
I saw his soul being reduced to stardust and blown away on the wind.
I saw it and felt it and grokked it with every cell, every molecule of my being.
I had never focused so intently or so fiercely on any of the transformations I had pulled off in all my years as the Alien Hunter. I was giving this single vision every ounce of energy I had left.
If the metamorphosis didn’t kill Abbadon, it would surely kill me.
But why wasn’t he fighting me back? He said he could feel my meager imaginings and stop them easily. Was it because he couldn’t imagine himself dying? Did he think it was so impossible that even I couldn’t imagine it?
Big mistake.
I reached the top of the cliff just in time to see Abbadon roar as he burst into oily flames.
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” he screamed. “NOOOO NOOO NOOOO!” And suddenly he was in my head, fighting back with everything he had. But it was too late. My imagination had captured him, and his long life of destruction was finally over.
Instead of sparkling gold particles, his soul exploded into gleaming black specks of soot. At first he looked like a swarm of angry black flies clustered in the shape of a body. But then a stiff wind blew across the abyss and shot his inky essence skyward.
Fanned by the oxygen-rich gust, the cinders of Abbadon’s soul began to glow and then burn, turning as fiery red as his eyes.
In an instant, what was left of Number 2 became the flaming tail of a comet streaking up through the dome of the abyss, which, when Number 2’s mind faded into oblivion, became what it really was: the black, starlit sky.
The same thing happened to me and Mel.
Released from the grip of Number 2’s evil imaginings, we were two teenagers again, standing in a grassy meadow, watching a shooting star racing away from Earth.
Abbadon lit up the night sky like a sizzling fuse stretched across the heavens until the instant the thin line of his essence burned out and the sky went black.
“You finally found his weakness,” Mel said as we held hands and stared up at the twinkling stars.
“Yes,” I said.
“What was it?”
“He wasn’t a god. He was like us. He was mortal.”