God's Gone AWOL

[8] Goodbye!

It was finally over. The spell had been completed.

After what had felt like an eternity, Camael eventually let go and allowed him to slump onto the table. As Atticus' body finally started to recover from the agony of it all, he felt a helpless, limp feeling wash over him. The soothing cool surface of the marble helped ease the pain a little, but the memory of it would remain forever. He was exhausted. He was drained. And above all else, he felt like a failure.

Everything up until this point... it had all been for nothing. All the research, all the time they had spent trying to find a way to avoid this exact situation, had all been useless in the end. He ran away. He defected from Heaven. He told himself everything would be alright if he just left it all behind— if he just took Bentley and ran away with her. He thought that somehow there was a victory in this for him, that for once in his miserable life, there would be a chance for him to be happy.

But he was wrong. He was always wrong.

Lucifer was right. Heaven wouldn't have been able to shoot anybody if they didn't have their gun. —Well now they did. Atticus should have accepted his fate, and found a way to die while he still had the chance. In fact, he never should have existed in the first place. Why couldn't God have just destroyed him all those years ago instead of saving him? Why did he have to survive this long? Why did he have to become a weapon?

If only he had followed his heart and taken his own life back then... back on the bridge in 1941... none of this would have happened. He wouldn't have suffered in silence for those eighty-five years. He wouldn't have known the story of his own creation. He wouldn't have been forced to become a weapon for a selfish cause. He should have finished what he started all those years ago.

The whole world around him dissolved into darkness as he allowed these dreadful thoughts to consume him. His dim eyes closed on their own, and everything ceased to exist in his mind. Being an angel, Atticus was physically incapable of falling asleep in the same way as demons and mortals. But now that every cell in his body had been drained to exhaustion, he wished for nothing more than to just fade into some empty void of dreams, away from the crushing experience of reality.

"Of all angels chosen by God, why did it have to be him?" Camael said, looking down at his limp body with contempt. It was obvious that Atticus couldn't hear them at this point. "Why couldn't it have been one of the loyal ones? Or one of us, for that matter?"

"What is there to complain about? He's on our side now," Nathaniel told her, "Whether he wants to be or not,"

All of the sudden, the interrogation room door burst open and Uriah came hurrying into the room. His eyes were very round, and glowing a bright shade of gold. The moment he spotted Camael and Nathaniel, he quickly rushed forward and offered a hasty salute.

"Sister Camael, Brother Nathaniel. Bentley Hellbourne has broken in to Heaven," he said breathlessly, "We're not sure—"

"Hold on," said Nathaniel. "She 'broke into' Heaven?"

"That's correct, sir. Nobody is quite sure how, but we're guessing that she must have one of the missing keys. But the first priority is to stop her before she kills any more angels,"

"She's killing angels?" Nathaniel raised an eyebrow. "That's very unusual behavior,"

"Who cares!" Camael interrupted, "Have the archangels found out that she's here?"

Uriah shook his head.

"Not yet, but they will soon if we aren't careful. Just now, Josiah led a group to intercept her, but they were quickly overpowered,"