Edyn (The Essence Project Book 1) Page 22

  Turning it off and setting it aside, he examined the glow emanating from my hand. He reached out to brush the surface with his fingertips. When he made contact, he pulled his hand back with a yelp. His eyes found mine and were a mix of exhilaration and confusion.

  "I’ve never seen anything quite like this before. What are you feeling? Does it hurt?" his words came out in a rush.

  I slowly shook my head. "It feels," I hesitated, not sure if I wanted to tell him but decided to anyway, "empowering."

  Fear crept into his expression, and I was certain it was an emotion he wasn’t used to showing very often. This was something he couldn’t explain. It was beyond him, and it shook him to his core.

  Power.

  I have power that he doesn’t understand, and he knows he can’t control it.

  One of these days I would unleash that power, and he would regret ever crossing my path, ever taking Ryker from me.

  One of these days, I would ignite.

  17

  J ophiel spent several more days covering my body with lacerations, stab wounds, burns, and the like. After each one was inflicted, he would have Kate take radiographs, ultrasounds, MRI’s or other images. He wanted to observe the healing process from the inside.

  The burns were what puzzled him the most. I was surprised he didn’t try to burn me more to see what it was about, but I sensed it terrified him, and that always overruled his curiosity. He would inflict some burns though to observe, but they required no healing. The glow they would cause would fade in a matter of minutes and leave a pink flush to my skin underneath.

  My leg was healing quickly, and it was unreal. At first Jophiel had wanted to do daily radiographs to check the progress, but it was healing so quickly he resigned to twice daily. On the surface, the wound had closed over, and all that was left was an angry red indentation. Underneath however, the bone was still mending. Each set of radiographs revealed the countless bone fragments drawing closer together.

  Since it was still shattered though, I couldn’t walk anywhere. Dirk would typically place me into a wheelchair and roll me between the labs and my room. He didn’t bother with handcuffing me since there wasn’t much I could do. I couldn’t exactly wheel myself out of there at warp speed, so I didn’t try anything, although I was wracking my brain trying to figure out how to escape once my leg had healed enough.

  It wasn’t long before Jophiel grew bored with inflicting regular wounds on my body. He had stripped flesh from my back with the serrated edge of one of the knives. I think it was more for fun than research, but that lost its appeal almost as soon as he was finished.

  "It seems the more injuries you have, the longer it takes to heal them, like your system is a bit overloaded," he surmised aloud one day. "I think for now we will let all these heal before we move on to something new. I’d like your full strength up again so that leg can finish."

  Two days later, I was in my room reading. I had finished the Song of Solomon and had started reading through Ephesians. There was a little over half a page at the end that didn’t have printed scripture on it, and instead of filling it with notes like Ryker normally had, he had sketched a warrior. It was his way of illustrating Ephesians 6:13-17.

  Therefore, put on every piece of God’s armor so you will be able to resist the enemy in the time of evil. Then after the battle you will still be standing firm. Stand your ground, putting on the belt of truth and the body armor of God’s righteousness. For shoes, put on the peace that comes from the Good News so that you will be fully prepared. In addition to all of these, hold up the shield of faith to stop the fiery arrows of the devil. Put on salvation as your helmet, and take the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

  This was clearly a very meaningful scripture to him since he had illustrated it, and I decided it would be one I would memorize because I liked the way it sounded.

  When I had finished with Ephesians, I set the bible aside and picked up the notebook. I could feel Ryker in its pages as if he was still alive. I flipped to the spot I had marked and sighed when I took in his handwriting.

  Her arms are so good at putting me back together. I don’t know what I would do without her.

  Thank you, Lord for giving me Stella.

  Jealousy coursed through me. This wasn’t something I was expecting to read. Anger at her betrayal reared its ugly head, and part of me wanted to skip ahead, but a bigger piece of me wanted to devour everything about Ryker.

  My one hundredth kill. This should break me. Why should so many die at my hand while I live? Stella does a good job at keeping me sane, and I’m grateful for that, but in times like this it’s not enough. God, help me. I don’t want to kill anymore, but it’s all I know.

  I’m terrified You’ve turned Your back on me. I’m terrified that one day Stella will wake up next to me and see the monster that I really am, and she’ll leave, too. I don’t know that I’ll ever forgive myself if I hurt her. What if I snap one day after a fight and she’s caught in the crossfire? Lord I pray protection over her, from me especially. She deserves so much more than I can give her. I’m not sure what she sees in me. I sure don’t see it.

  It would be better for her, for everyone, if I was gone. I’m just too weak to do it myself. Lord, I beg you, take me home. Take me home to You and Edyn. I know I don’t deserve to be with her again, or with You after all I’ve done, so if You cast me into the Pits of Hell, I’m alright with that, but I still beg You for mercy. Maybe Your love really is enough. Maybe His blood was enough to wash the blood off of me. I can only pray that it is.

  I could feel his pain even now through these pages, and it made my heart ache for him as tears streamed down my face, knowing he hadn’t gotten what he had prayed for, knowing that Jophiel had kept him from going to be with God. That was a worse sin than simply killing him. Jophiel had made him cease to be. He had changed everything so that it was as if he had never existed. A world without Ryker still broke me every time I thought about it. It was a darker place without him.

  I couldn’t help thinking that maybe Jophiel wouldn’t take my soul before he killed me. It was a possibility, however unlikely. The thought of that was more painful to me, though, than the thought of just no longer existing. When I thought of Heaven without Ryker, all I could think about was overwhelming sorrow.

  Without Ryker, I was all alone. I think it was at that moment when I decided I no longer cared what happened to me. What did I have to live for now, anyway? And I didn’t want to move on to Heaven without him anyway. If he no longer existed anywhere, then I didn’t want to either.

  Who knows? Maybe all the scientists were wrong. Maybe there was someplace other than Heaven or Hell where we could go if we didn’t have our souls when we died. I tried to cling desperately to that hope. It was the only thing that would keep me going until I could manage to get myself killed.

  I had completely lost track of time when the door to my room swung open. Dirk walked in and moved the wheelchair over to me.

  "Alright, cupcake. Lab time."

  I heaved my body into the chair, this time testing out my injured leg. To my surprise I could bear some weight on it now, not that it wasn’t still quite painful to do so, and I was actually eager to see what today’s x-rays would show.

  Dirk wheeled me to the lab, and when we entered today, I saw a new chair just to the side of my usual one. This one was a vinyl padded chair on top of a table. It reminded me of the chair from the doctor’s office where I would go for my yearly woman’s physical. Seeing that chair unnerved me.

  Jophiel was talking quietly to Kate when we approached. "If you wouldn’t mind, that would be great," he said to her and she left.

  He turned to us and a smile spread across his face. "And how are we today?" he asked cheerfully.

  I just shook my head. I was so sick of his charade.

  "Are you weight-bearing at all yet?" he asked.

  To show him, I fought my way to my feet, putting most of my weight onto my good leg. I winced
as I applied too much pressure to the other, but at least I was standing now.

  "Wonderful," he said. "It seems you are healing faster now with fewer wounds to deal with. Would you have a seat for me, please?"

  I hated when he said please. I hated his stupid manners as he masqueraded as a civilized person. He wasn’t human, he couldn’t be. Nobody took the kind of pleasure he did in other people’s pain.

  Hobbling around, I hopped up into the chair, and he walked over to me. He reached along the sides of the chair to pop up arms that had another set of restraints. Gently, almost lovingly, he placed my wrists in them, and it fueled my hatred for him even more.

  "You know," said Jophiel. "We’ve run test after test after test on you, but we still don’t have a solution to our problem. However, I think I may have come up with one that has potential. We know you’re pure," he said. "Barely, but pure still. How you managed so long in this world without letting a man touch you is beyond me, but I believe it will work to our advantage. For regular medicine, many of the cures from diseases came from stem cells. That is an angle we haven’t considered before, but it came to me in a dream."

  I shook my head, not grasping his meaning just yet. "So what, you’re going to spin some of my blood like they do with athletes to get stem cells? You should have plenty of my blood left," I spat at him.

  Jophiel laughed and leaned against the wall. "No, no, no my dear. I’m talking embryonic stem cells specifically."

  My eyes went wide, and he laughed at the panic that flooded my face. "But—"

  "Now don’t worry, it’ll all be done clinically. We’re going to give you some hormones and monitor you. We have several surrogates standing by already. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to hyper-stimulate your ovaries enough to get several viable embryos. Depending on how many we get, we’ll likely freeze some for later use, but if we could get enough for several transfers and several to freeze that would be ideal."

  My head was spinning, and I couldn’t breathe.

  "Now, we should be able to get enough stem cells from the cord blood so that we won’t have to terminate the subjects right away. They may be of some use to us, and I would like to study them since they’ll be the first of their kind."

  My mouth fell open. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. "Terminate? Their kind?" My head was spinning at the words. What was he thinking of creating exactly?

  "Yes, it would be a shame to have to terminate before we could fully study them. It would be interesting to allow one to reach full maturity, but that would be a separate project since it would take so long. We wouldn’t need all of them for that though, so the rest would be terminated before then."

  I shook my head frantically. "You’re talking about killing children! My children!"

  "Well your people have always referred to it as termination or solving a problem when still in the womb. Funny to watch you all fight amongst yourselves over it for so long. I’ll let you in on a little secret though," he said straightening up, and approached my chair. Lowering his voice, he said, "They’ve always been children, even in the first hours after conception. Every little life that your kind snuffed out, the ones with souls anyway, insisting that they were just ‘fetuses’, made their way to Heaven and God had to explain to them why their parents didn’t want them." He crossed his arms over his chest.

  He wasn’t making any sense. What did he mean by our kind? I knew he didn’t have a conscience, but was he delusional as well?

  "So, before birth, after birth, it’s all the same," he continued. "It’s still murder. But at least in this case it will be a sacrifice for a higher calling. Those souls will be rewarded in Heaven when they get there for contributing to our cause."

  Tears were running down my face, but I hardly noticed. "You monster. How could you even think about creating children with the intention of using them as another disposable part of a science experiment? You’re sick, you know that?"

  His face turned to stone. "I am just looking for a way to get myself and my kind home." He stopped short, catching himself from saying more. That touch of fear crept into his eyes again, clearly from saying more than he had meant to.

  "Your kind?"

  He waved a hand dismissively and tried to shake it off. "Forget I said that. Anyway, I would like to find a way to figure out how to create souls so those less fortunate Insentients will have a chance at eternal life. That doesn’t make me a monster. The monsters are you humans that kill all those children for the sake of convenience."

  "I—" I couldn’t think of how to respond. Certainly I couldn’t disagree with him there. "What you’re doing doesn’t justify the means, though. You’re wanting to create just to kill."

  "I’m wanting to serve a higher purpose, and until this point I’ve been unsuccessful."

  I couldn’t look at him. Disgust permeated every cell in my body. How could anyone be so cruel and heartless?

  "You are critical to this, though. After careful consideration, since you’re technically pure, I think you’ll be as close to the Virgin Mary as we can get."

  My head snapped back, and I felt like I was glaring holes through him. "I won’t let you do this."

  He laughed. "You have no choice in the matter. If it makes you feel any better though, since this will all be done clinically and artificially, I’ll have Kate be the one that’s hands on with the procedures. We’ll have to begin with sonograms to check your ovaries, and since that’s unfortunately invasive, I will monitor just what the machine shows from a different room. I want you to keep an open mind about this though. Through doing this, you could potentially change the world. It would be much better if you were compliant."

  At that, Kate came back into the lab, wheeling a large ultrasound machine in front of her.

  "Kate is going to have to remove your clothes from the waist down. The only way we can monitor ovarian development is through transvaginal ultrasound. Like I said though, I won’t be in the room, and neither will Dirk. It will just be Kate to make this a little easier for you."

  I wondered why he was choosing now to be somewhat kind, after all the torture he had put me through thus far.

  He and Dirk began to walk across the lab to the door where Kate had come from. "Do be nice to Kate though," he added as he paused in the doorway. "She’s just following orders, and we will not hesitate to intervene if necessary. It’s your choice."

  The door clicked behind them, and I stared at Kate. She gave me a meek smile. "I just want you to know," she said quietly. "I would rather not be doing this. I don’t think it’s right. If I don’t though…" she trailed off. Finally, meeting my eyes, she whispered, "I’m sorry." Sorrow and sincerity were plastered all over her face as she set up the stirrups for the chair.

  "I understand." I tried to give her a reassuring smile. Funny how I was the one about to be violated, and I was trying to make her feel better. "What do you know about Jophiel?" I asked.

  She paused for a moment. "Not much. He doesn’t tell us anything other than what he orders us to do. There’s something not right about him, though."

  I thought back to what he had said before. "Do you know what he meant when he was talking about our kind versus his? About just wanting to get home?"

  She tilted her head as she pressed several buttons on the machine. "Well, not exactly. There’s rumors, though."

  "What kind of rumors?" I pushed.

  "Some of the medics were talking after you stabbed him."

  "About?" I was trying not to get impatient.

  She glanced behind her to make sure no one was watching. "When they took his shirt off to work on the wound, he had massive scars. Right where his shoulder blades are. Just these two big roundish scars. I didn’t get to see them since I wasn’t there, but the medics were saying they’d only seen that once before. I need to remove your clothes," she said and produced a pale blue paper sheet.

  "Okay. But where had they seen that before? Do they know what it was from?"

  Her hands fumb
led with the button on my jeans, and I tried to ignore it. "It sounds so stupid. Completely unbelievable."

  "Tell me," I demanded.

  She sighed as she tugged my jeans and underwear down, and draped the sheet over my lap. I didn’t like feeling so exposed. I’d always hated going for my yearly exam, but this was so much worse than that.

  "Feet up, please. Last year, Jophiel had someone in the labs, someone he was experimenting on. It was before I was hired. It was all very hush hush, but the medics had to treat him for wounds in the same spot as Jophiel’s scars. He kept screaming about being an angel and that Jophiel had ripped out his wings, that Jophiel was an angel too. His brother, actually. Everyone just assumed he was delusional and thought it was just an experiment gone wrong."

  I shook my head and exhaled. "That’s ridiculous. Angels don’t exist."

  Kate shrugged. "Until about forty years ago, to our scientific knowledge, souls didn’t either. I’m not saying I believe it, don’t get me wrong, but Hell." She stopped and looked me in the eye. "Crazier things have happened, right?"

  Nodding, I tried to process this new information. It was completely unbelievable. There was no way.

  But the scars.

  Kate picked up a long probe attached to the machine and squeezed lubricant on the end of it. "You’ll feel a little pressure with this," she said. "I really am sorry."

  I tried to relax to make it easier, and forced my thoughts elsewhere, tried to think of Ryker’s smile and the way he always looked at me. That pain was better to feel than what was currently happening to my body.

  Kate clicked a few buttons on the machine and a moment later removed the probe. "All done," she said. "Everything looks good. You’re at a good point in your cycle to start injections actually. If all goes well we should be able to get a few embryos before long."