The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [172]
And the Watchers had a habit of frequenting this particular diner and its surroundings like a home away from many homes.
47.
The Watchers
God sneezed all of a sudden and without warning.
Or at least, it was as if.
Something in the air shifted.
Somewhere close by, a rooftop weathervane twirled in all directions and slumbering souls dreamed more deeply in their beds. Coyotes silenced their howls in the distance for reasons no less apparent than why they were howling in the first place.
A hush dripped upon the atmosphere like the ripples of water droplets falling into a pool the land was already submerged in.
It was as if the Watchers had descended.
It was as if God sneezed.
“Bless you,” Bari managed to mutter, not in polite response to God, but in response to the hush itself and the advent of its welcomed redemption, and she muttered this as soon as she’d felt it.
Salvatia felt it also, and she released her grip around Bari’s throat. This, for Bari, was redeeming in itself; the Magdalene’s strength had succeeded her own, and Bari found herself unable to dematerialize, unable to fight, unable to breath against both of Salvatia’s constricting hands. A moment longer, and Salvatia would have otherwise extinguished Bari’s breath altogether or snapped her neck, on squeezed her head from her body like squeezing apart a lump of play-dough. With mutually decreasing interest in each other, they lifted their heads and their gazes in curious scrutiny upwards.
The instrumental parodies of pop music from the ceiling’s shower drain speakers silenced, and the Watchmaid and the Magdalene together listened alertly for something more.
And then once, twice, the interior diner lights flickered off, flickered on.
Bari, in anticipation of Salvatia’s reaction to sensing the Watcher’s presence, took advantage of the distraction and broke free from her hold, pushing Salvatia away.
Rather than an attack of anxiety, Salvatia exhibited a puzzling state a bliss.
“Do you feel that?” Salvatia declared. “It’s the joyful call of my blessed sisters. They are here, now, and they’ve come to partake in the freedom I’m about to offer them through their allegiance to the Daughter of God!”
Daughter of God???
How melodramatic.
Bari looked upon Salvatia with a bitter confoundment she could not conceal, like the look on the recipient of a very stupid joke.
Salvatia then disappeared from the room.
She’s a tad more clueless than I’d perceived, Bari thought to herself.
But there were urgent matters to tend to mounting outside the diner terrace. Bari’d been keeping keenly intuitive tabs on Andrew and on Ralston as well, and though her focus had centered upon the Magdalene Queen’s every move, she was prepared for an instant’s rescue should either Evenborn fall into harm dangerously more lethal than a few flesh wounds from BoLeve’s razor.
She disappeared out of the room also, for it was time to do just that.
***
“I see naked children walking in the grass,” Melony said to herself, said in her head where no one else could hear except perhaps for the children...for what appeared to be unclothed children scurrying and wandering about the tall grass at the foot of the terrace embankment. She’d noticed them during a final attempt to escape over the railing, and upon seeing them she soberly made up her mind to stay put.
“We need to confront my brother this way,” came Andrew’s persistent whisper to her, but as Scratch drew his attentions towards the two, Andrew felt himself intimidated suddenly like a child at an elementary school Halloween costume contest, a human young boy in a prosthetic spaceman outfit standing beside his stage-stricken costumed mother.
He wished it was only that.
Perhaps in the next life.
Scratch had at last grown weary of terrorizing poor Ralston and decided to focus upon the real matters-at-hand, upon the witch parody and her alien boyfriend/son; Ralston had been seized in an instant as soon as Scratch had allowed him to burst through the diner’s side door to join them. Uncle Maxy had