Anthem's Fall

Chapter Fifty Nine

Chapter Twenty-Five

Vengelis

"S-stay away from me," Madison said as she painfully inched and crawled away from Vengelis on scraped elbows.

Shattered glass from the nearby pizza shop's front window was scattered around her on the sidewalk, and in the middle of the intersection the ruins of the eighteen-wheeler smoldered and smoked. Vengelis regarded her pitiable retreat with a look of silent disapproval, as if her display of pain was shameful and inappropriate.

"You made a promise. Let's get moving," Vengelis said without a trace of warmth.

Madison seemed not to hear him. She pulled a thin glass shard out of her thumb and placed her hands on her forehead. Blinking dizzily, she tried to piece together what had just transpired. Vengelis's eyes widened with disbelief as he saw tiny shards of glass had hewn narrow cuts on her palms, and her elbows were bleeding where they had grazed the cement of the sidewalk. He was taken aback at how delicate she was; the human form was impossibly fragile. How could they even survive in vessels so frail and anemic?

People collected cautiously around the wreckage, and lines of beeping traffic began to spread up and down the avenue. It looked as though the destroyed semi had driven full force into the side of a mountain. The rear of the truck's mass had accordioned on top of itself from the frontal impact. It had been loaded with wooden pylons of soda, and hundreds of cans sputtered and rolled across the street in a growing puddle of fizzing drinks.

"W-what are you?" Madison said.

Vengelis took a step closer and held out his hand to help her up, changing his expression from a look of disdain to a mask of neutrality. On some level he recognized that he had just shattered everything she knew to be real. Surely some of his race's strongest had similar reactions when they first witnessed the shock and awe of the Felix.

"I am a Primus," he said simply. "Now get up."

"I . . . don't . . . understand." Madison looked back and forth from the fizzling wreckage to Vengelis.

He continued to hold his hand out to her. "I wouldn't expect you to understand. But now you are breaking your promises. Get up."

"P-please, leave me alone." Madison winced from a pain in her hip as tried to rise from the sidewalk, and fell back into the shattered glass.

"You asked me to stop that truck. I'm sorry you underestimated my capabilities, but a deal is a deal, and now you need to help me."

"Help you? Help you? How could you need my help?"

"You will lead me the Marriott Marquis, right now. It was the second part of our agreement. Stand up."

"Are you going to kill me?" Madison asked with growing sobriety.

Vengelis kneeled down to her, and she recoiled nervously away from him. He smiled sympathetically at her reaction. "Right now, at this very moment, you are the safest a human has ever been. Now come. Get up."

Madison looked up at his outstretched hand. People around them cowered back, all of them too alarmed to speak to the familiar and yet terrifying man before them. Sirens screamed from close by, and an ambulance appeared through the parting traffic at the other end of the intersection. Two paramedics in blue uniforms hopped out of the doors and gaped at the extraordinary accident.

"Come on," Vengelis said. "Authorities are on their way and I don't want things to escalate here. That display was not . . . subtle."

Madison looked up at him, her mouth frozen in an expression of turmoil. Then she suddenly snapped her mouth shut and her eyes came into focus as if she was awaking from a daydream; she took a deep breath, and reached up to take his hand. Vengelis lifted her into a standing position as if she were a child that weighed nothing at all.