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CHILDREN OF INFINITY
by
Disclaimer:
This story depicts
scenes of extreme violence and/or torture and their aftermath. Readers
who are disturbed by or are sensitive to this type of depiction may wish to
read something other than this story.
This story may depict scenes of unconsenting sexual violence and their aftermath. Some readers may be disturbed by this particular issue and may wish to read something other than this story.
This story hints at sexual relationships between consenting adults. f/f m/f. If you are under 18 years of age or if this type of story is illegal in the state or country in which you live, please do not read it. If depictions of this nature disturbs you; you may wish to read something other than this story.
Special thanks go to all BardicCircle and Nancy who has given much help and support with earlier toils on this beast. My deepest gratitude to Lariel for being patient enough to put up with my many flaws: commas, semicolons, etc… and searching them out relentlessly! <G> Kam, for his continued friendship and support. Cheers to Lariel for such a great looking site! And last but not least Diana for supporting me through my darkest hours and loving me anyway. My son for eagerly cheering me on.
© Aug 1997- Dec 2002
Prologue
The Embrace: 1988
Elizabeth Wu slipped quickly around the corner of the small generator house and out of sight of campus security. She didn't trust very many people on the college grounds and the campus security team had not proven too friendly in her past dealings with them; especially in moments like these when she was so obviously breaking campus rules. A loud rumble of thunder seemed to make the cold slate wall of the building vibrate.
She had not been out in a storm this bad since childhood, and that one had been followed by great sorrow. She couldn't help but worry what this downpour would deliver. There was another clap of thunder. Her heart skipped a beat and shivering from chill, Elizabeth was overcome by a moment of staggering terror. Fear only strengthened her resolve. Something terrible had happened to Logan. She could feel it
Lightning made a temporary but frightening crack in the night sky overhead making her heart quickened its pace to the point of becoming painful. 'That lightning is getting closer to the campus.' The rain was coming down so heavily it was hard to see more than a few feet a head of her. Elizabeth made her way by heart to the seventeenth century baroque building. It was only during the frequent strikes of lightning that the tall ancient building was revealed to her normal vision and she continued onwards creeping towards it with angry and concerned determination.
She found it eerily strange at times that such an inharmoniously constructed building would have ever been considered useful as a church.
The eight hunchbacked gargoyles, which lined the edge of the roof looked more like minions of hell than symbolic guardians of souls. The slightly off-centered steeple, with its black cast-iron cross, somehow managed to appear just a tad sacrilegious. But, Elizabeth supposed, that was merely a matter of opinion - apparently only her opinion, since the various Christian groups on campus had no misgivings about holding their services in the place. She sighed deeply as she tried to shove such unimportant thoughts from the forefront of her mind. It didn't matter where the Christians met or didn't meet. She wasn't one of them and she never would be.
Elizabeth suspected that given the nature of her friend's inherent paranormal abilities, Christian was an unsuitable word for Logan. She could do amazing things and in Elizabeth's opinion, Logan's simple desire to do no harm lent itself to a deeper purity than any Christian practices on campus she had ever witnessed.
Logan was an enigma that should have been protected at all costs. A frown distorted Elizabeth's features. 'I should have understood how much she needed me. All those things she was saying about some terrible destiny.' Tears stung her eyes as she looked about cautiously for signs of campus security. 'Goddess! How could I have been so stupid?'
Lightening illuminated her darkened expression. 'I should never have let her meet with the others alone tonight,' she castigated herself. 'They've never understood her'. Logan's heart was vulnerable and Elizabeth had tried to be a shield between the girl and the thoughtlessness of others. 'I've failed miserably.' "Where are you, Logan?" The whispered questioned was drowned out by the torrent of the storm. She uttered a prayer to her god and goddess to keep her friend safe.
Keeping low, she crept along the front wall of the church to the main entrance. Punching in the security code, she quickly slipped through the door and closed it securely behind her. There wasn't a building on the campus she and her friends didn't have the security codes to. It had been a simple matter of sitting down and writing every possible combination with the numbers one through five. Two and a half pages and it had only taken them thirty minutes.
Elizabeth shivered violently for a moment as the air conditioning chilled her through her soaked clothing. The storm showed no signs of slackening, and she was worried about their missing friend.
She tiptoed quietly through the outer foyer of the chapel and removed her raincoat. It was dark but she could feel the strong presence of others hidden down at the front of the church. Anger overrode her fear. 'Damn them! They should have been out there too, helping me look for her!' She entered the sanctuary, snapped her fingers once and was rewarded by the immediate illumination of candlelight from the pulpit and from the candelabras hanging from the side of the walls.
The candlelight and lightning outside flashing in intervals through the fourteen stained glass windows gave the place a haunted look.
To her right, the seven windows depicted the etchings of the Archangels of the seven rays of enlightenment and on the opposite windows to her left were the seven feminine aspects of the Archangels, the seven Archeiai of the Rays. --Michael and his feminine aspect Faith. Jophiel and Christine, Chamuel and Charity, Gabriel and Hope, Raphael and Mary, Uriel and Aurora, Zadkiel and Amethyst. Elizabeth knew their names and qualities by heart. She passed each set of windows, giving a slight bow of respect to the left and right as she made her way to the front.
"It's me," she hissed out the words crossly. Her voice echoed off the high beams and rafters. She waited her hands clenching into fists impatiently while four heads poked up from between the old wooden pews where her friends had been hiding in case she happened to be security.
"Well?" Alex stepped forth into the aisle, arriving before the others at Elizabeth's side.
"I've been all over campus, and I can't find her anywhere," she spoke in an anguished voice. Philip's smug grin wavered only slightly. The others averted their gazes, their expectant looks replaced by expressions of guilt. "Philip, how could you have said those things to her?"
"If she can't handle the truth then maybe she doesn't belong," he snapped at Elizabeth defensively. "She's one of those pathetic converts! A Christian, Elizabeth!" He shuddered with revulsion. "She should never have been allowed among us!"
"You stupid, bullheaded bastard!" Elizabeth approached him menacingly, backing him into the stage. "She's as much a part of this group as any of us. We all voted her in."
"Humph. Well, I'm not the only one who's grown tired of that Jesus crap she kept spouting off." He grimaced in disgust. "I mean for fuck's sake Elizabeth . . ."
"Don't!" she warned with a low growl. "We all have our different beliefs, and we all speak about them freely. She has as much right to voice her opinions as any of us do. No matter what deity she believes in, Philip, she should not have been chased off like that!" Elizabeth subdued a scream of bitterness and resisted the temptation to sever Philip's arrogant head from his shoulders. "Damn you! You idiot, she has abilities as real as ours and that puts her in danger on this campus!"
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She was bleeding. The enormity of that realization had been enough to put her innocent mind into shock. Except for her menses, she had never experienced the seen her own blood or experienced this frightening degree of physical pain before. She was intimately acquainted with mental and emotional hurt. She had been the subjected to much cruelty when she was growing up, though none of it physical.
She had been singled out as different - not normal. Being called vicious names, teased, or being ignored had been her existence; but no one had dared, ever dared touch her until now ...
The pain between her legs made it impossible to stand any longer. The young woman placed her right hand protectively against her battered stomach and pitched forward to the ground weakly, her left hand digging into the mud, clutching at the earth. "They hurt me and laughed," she whimpered softly. "They laughed at me. All my life that's all I've heard is people laughing ... at me!" The dense forest offered her bitter respite and hid her pain from the world as she wailed her anguish at the storm brewing around her and offered her sobs to the fury of thunder rolls.
"Why didn't you stop them?" she asked in a small voice. "Please. Tell me why?" She closed her sable eyes and waited for an answer, something that would explain why she had been subjected to such a brutal violation. Her whole childhood had been dedicated to God, healing in God's name, turning the other cheek when she had been ridiculed and spat on by other children and quietly bearing the pain of being labeled a freak. But this was ... too much and it wasn't fair. "It isn't fair!" She screamed when no answer was forthcoming. "I did everything you wanted me to!"
She had been belittled, taunted, and tormented by her peers for as long as she could remember for doing exactly what she'd been asked and told to do. 'I never asked for this!' She raised her hands and studied them bitterly, the pale palms and light brown backs of her long fingers. She watched as they glowed softly and tingled with energy. 'I can heal anyone but myself.' An irony she'd never contemplated until now.
For years it had been drilled into her heart to never question God's wisdom. 'And I never questioned you. Not even from the first moment you whispered,' "You are chosen." Now as her mind recoiled from the memory of the vicious attack she had just survived, being held by one of Delta Gamma's fraternity brothers as others violently battered and raped her, she couldn't understand how there could be any wisdom in allowing such a thing to be done. The side of her throat stung and burned where the flesh had been inhumanely ripped away by teeth. And those boys couldn't have been human. Humans weren't that strong, were they?
She dropped her head abjectly into her muddied right palm. "You were supposed to be my protector!" Angrily, she spat out part of a Bible verse. "A very present shield in time of trouble!" Moving the dirtied wet hand across the bleeding wound on the side of her face, she raised the mud and blood smeared hand towards the heavens accusingly. Logan Birche yelled at her God's bitter betrayal. "Where were you when I needed you? Where was your divine intervention? Why didn't you protect me? I believed in you. Do you hear me? I believed in you!" Her heart was stung by her god's silence. 'You never cared, did you?' A chill filled her as clarity settled within her youthful mind. 'I'm no more special to you than a rock with your name carved upon it'.
Her lips curled into a spiteful snarl. "I am no longer yours." She snatched the small pendant from her neck and tossed it maliciously into the mud, "and you are nothing to me!" She smacked her fists into the ground sending mud splattering about. "I hate you! Do you hear me, God!?" The young woman screamed up at the sky as fat drops of summer rain pelted her face. "I hate you; and I hate this world." She fell weakly onto her back, uncaring of the mud and water soaking through her torn clothing. She heard the crunching of fallen leaves under approaching feet and her heart caught in her throat.
"Then perhaps you should see the world from a new perspective." There was no warmth at all in that voice. Only sinister intent.
***************************
Elizabeth spun to face her other friends. "And you three. Leslie, Victoria, and even you, Alex." She sighed with disappointment. "You're like little sheep being herded about by whoever has the strongest voice at the moment."
"We didn't mean to..." Alex began.
"But you did." Elizabeth cut her off. "We have sworn to protect our own and you have dishonored that vow. Your cruelty led to her being badly hurt, and I'll never forgive any of you for that." Her lips trembled with that declaration. The three women flinched, stung by her words. "Now what have you found?"
"I called all the hospitals in the city," Alex informed her timidly. "She hasn't been seen in any of them."
"Do you realize what you've done?" Elizabeth shook with barely contained rage. "She's hurting and she's somewhere out there alone. That makes her vulnerable to outer influences on this campus and there's no one there to protect her!"
************************
Logan's eyes sprang open with terror, believing one of the young men who had brutalized her earlier had followed her and was going to hurt to her again. Rolling onto her belly, she fought the nausea such movement caused. She began crawling slowly away, painfully aware of the slick heat on her skin as she continued to bleed.
Her body rebelled at the strain of movement. She paused momentarily, paralyzed by the shock of unforgiving pain. Strong hands abruptly rolled Logan over onto her back and her mouth dropped open in a silent scream of agony. The sting of tears and rain blurred her attacker's features. She swatted weakly at her assailant, her barely balled fist connecting with only thin air.
"No," she whispered, shaking her head fearfully. "Please…" And at once she hated herself for begging. She felt something dormant stirring to life within her. She'd had enough. 'Enough!'
The stranger squatted beside her. Logan bared her teeth in rage when she saw the pale hand reaching out for her. Ignoring the mutinous rebellion of aching limbs and the fiery pain in her groin, she launched herself at him, attacking with a fury of forceful punches. "Kill you! I'll kill you!" she was bellowing.
"There's your fire, Logan," he rasped close to her ear. A flood of heated energy swept through her and she was being tossed aside, landing a few feet away. She lumbered back to her feet as he stood up, and she launched herself at him again. Knocking him back off of his feet, she landed on top of him and began another series of blows that he blocked effortlessly. "Let me in," he whispered. As she raised her fist to strike at him again, the rain ceased with unexpected suddenness. Moonlight spilled through the trees revealing his face to her.
His complexion stood out sharply against the dark forest. His hair was a shocking white framed around the pallor of his ageless face. Her rage drained away with an abruptness that left her gasping for breath, and her eyes closed as the agony her body had been suffering ended just as abruptly. Her hands pressed into his chest to steady herself. The continual flood of energy coursing through her veins confused her. The power emanating from him held her spellbound. Her brain yelled at her to put some distance between herself and this stranger, but Logan lacked the will to move away. Pale-Face merely looked into her eyes, peering straight into her soul.
"Who are you?" she asked softly, staring with awe into what appeared to be black dead eyes, such as she'd seen in so many horror films, but upon closer scrutiny she could see the fire and fury behind them.
Twenty years of Christian upbringing had drilled a name into her head. --Heaven's once brightest star, Leader of the choir of angels, Prince of Darkness. Logan had a feeling that none of those descriptions came close to what this was. He was something different; something far worse than any entity that might be called Satan. He smiled at her deduction, a smile that would have been frightening were it not so beautiful. She raised a hand to his face and was astonished at the softness of his cool skin.
The contrast of her brown hand against the pale flesh of his cheek hypnotized her. He ran a long finger along the wound on the side of her face. One of the Delta Gammas that had attacked her had struck her so hard with a backhand that she had been cut by his class ring. It was a deep cut. She was certain it would scar. She pulled her face away from the caress and finding the strength returned to her limbs, she stood. But she didn't run.
"I've been called many things." He was on his feet and standing so close to her the heat from his flesh made her own skin feel feverish. Her breathing felt constricted by his nearness, but she didn't run. She swayed dizzily and as he reached out to steady her, an unbearable ravenous hunger burned within her stomach. "I have had many names. But you, Logan," he ripped his collar away from his neck exposing himself as he brought her lips to his throat, "you may call me Father."
************************
"No one has filed a report," Victoria sighed heavily, hating to have been the one to tell Elizabeth about the attack that had been witnessed by a passing student. "I'm sure she wouldn't go to the police."
Elizabeth fought down the rising bile and forced herself to remain calm. "No she wouldn't," she agreed with statuesque redhead. "Who attacked her?" she asked softly just barely stifling a cry of anguish for her missing friend. "Did you find them?" She turned to Philip who nodded his confirmation. "Where are they?" she growled angrily, fighting back tears. "I'd like to have a little talk with them."
"Gammas," he spat the word out disgustedly. "They won't be hurting anyone else like that, ever." Philip told her quietly. "No one harms one of our own without retribution; and as you've so strongly pointed out, she was one of us."
"Is one of us," she corrected him crossly. "Are they dead?"
"No," he answered her in a flat tone.
Elizabeth closed her eyes, grateful that she had not been the one to find those Gammas. 'I would have killed them.' Of that she was certain. She hated those who preyed on the innocent, and Logan was an innocent. Someone should have been there to protect her. 'I should have been there. If I had, Philip would never have said those ugly things to her and chased her out into the dark.' "We've got to find her."
The front door to the chapel blew open, startling them all. A gust of wind followed by a torrent of rain swirled into the building and surrounded the five before dying down abruptly. "There's no need." Logan stepped through the door and it closed on its own behind her. She stepped from the foyer into the sanctuary, her movement synchronous with a loud clap of thunder and a flash of lightning.
The inner sanctuary door slammed shut behind her and the sound of the bolt sliding hard into the locking mechanism echoed loudly, reaching all of their ears. Sensing a threat, Alex and Leslie took up position to Elizabeth's left and Philip and his fiancée Victoria to the right. It was apparent that something was terribly wrong.
"Logan," Elizabeth breathed the name out with relief and sorrow. "I'm so sorry." Sixth sense kept her from approaching her friend too suddenly and embracing Logan as her emotions wanted her to do. The very posture of the woman warned her that indeed something more terrible than the Gammas' attack had taken place.
"No apologies necessary." Logan's smile was chilling. "Actually, I owe you each a debt of gratitude." Her eyes moved from Elizabeth to the other four who were standing with defensive postures. "In fact I'm glad you are all here. So that I can show you my appreciation."
"Logan." Elizabeth approached her friend cautiously, her senses assaulted by the angry energy Logan radiated. "Logan, are you alright?" She raised a hand to touch the jagged scar on the side of the young woman's face and found her wrist captured by a painful grip. She gasped as much from surprise at Logan's strength as from the pain shooting up her right arm. "Logan, you're hurting me."
"I know," Logan whispered softly, her voice taking on a seductive quality. "So don't pretend Daddy's Little Girl doesn't like it." Elizabeth flinched, startled and disturbed at the intrusion into her memories. "I have no quarrel with you Eli," Logan warned her gently. "For you, I have a special gift." She shoved the young woman aside roughly. "But first …" she turned her attention to the rest of the group now standing at the front of the chapel facing her. "…Let me thank the rest of you for ... showing me the light." She bared sharpened fangs and sprang forward.