AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He’d been fascinated by Atomik since he’d heard of it. A pure spirit summoned from the most contaminated place on earth. That’s where items of greatest value lay:In sterquiliniis invenitur. Treasure guarded by the dragon. The alchemist’s jewel in the toad’s head. Pearl in an oyster’s mouth. Every last freedom he’d found within himself, buried in caves hewn from his worst self.
“I haven’t,” Evan said, when he came up for air.
“What?” Devine seemed surprised to be interrupted, as if just remembering that he wasn’t alone.
“Forgotten I’m an animal.”
“That’s why I’m talking to you.” Devine took down half the whiskey, a single five-hundred-dollar gulp. He leaned on the bar unfazed and unslowed. “You and I, we don’t hide from the heat of reality beneath the parasol of the latest ideology. When you don’t have a tribe or a party or a doctrine to clad yourself in? When you’re not captured by belief? When you’refree? It’s goddamned lonely.”
His penetrating gaze felt like a violation. Instinctively, Evan lowered his eyes to his drink, a tell he instantly regretted.
Devine kept on. “Most people need their guardrails. They build their own prison cells thought by thought. Milton spent the 1650s reading by light of candle. Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Old English—every known book in existence. Hewent blind. From reading too much? No. Fromknowingtoo much. He wroteParadise Lostfrom the depths of his sightless mind. Can you imagine? Shouldering the crushing weight of centuries of tradition to spin his own heaven and hell into being?”
His eyes were glazed but present, an unsettling effect as if he were looking straight through Evan, across the room, and through the opposing wall at something imperceptible to the human eye.
“But today? We decide what we believe minute by minute, sound bite by sound bite, tweet by tweet. And we assume it’s the most moral, the most just. Why? Because it’s thelatest. Our beliefs have no time to age. To consider the broad sweep that delivered us here, to this instant in history. And everyone’s running so fast to keep up that they can’t grasp just how treacherous this is. When our culture gets this ill, this unbalanced, it requiresdaringto heal it.”
Now the second half of Devine’s glass went down.
“Maybe that’s all the devil is,” he continued. “Maybe he just embraces the worst of what’s inside”—a wicked pause—“everybody. So we don’t forget. Everywhere we look, people are scrambling to tell us how infalliblymoralthey are. Politicians. Preachers. Pop stars. Journalists. Corporations, for God’s sake. That’s why someone like me is needed—a vice merchant, a collector of sins. Someone who refuses to let them get away with it.” Devine hummed with energy. “Label me bad if you like, but people willing to be bad arenecessary. They’re the only ones who can wake us up so we’ll have the strength to avoid worse people later.”
Evan tasted the vodka once more, felt the burn forge down his throat, coat his stomach. “Maybe that’s what worse people tell themselves when they’re still only bad.”
“You were dispatched to kill me,” Devine said. “So. As one should do in any situation no matter how hard, I asked myself, what is the opportunity this presents to me? How might we fit together?”
“We don’t.”
“Someone has to do up here what you do down there.” Devine searched the shelves behind him for his next pour. “You only neutralize people for good reason. I only control them for such. What makes me a greater abuser of human law and custom thanyou?” He found a Glenfiddich Reserve to his liking and dashed a sloppy pour into his glass without bothering to rinse it out first. “I extort senators. You knife someone in an alley. The question isn’twhatI do. Butwhy. What if it’s to torpedo a law written by lobbyists to let corporations dump radioactive waste on Native American reservations because they’re exempt from federal environmental regulations? Or to sink a pork-laden bill that’s about the environment in name only?” A robust gulp. “You could use an ally like me.”
“The last thing I need,” Evan said, “is an ally like you.”
Devine blinked at him. He looked not so much offended as surprised by Evan’s lack of imagination. “I’m theonlykind of ally you need.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because. We are nothing alike.” Holding his eyes on Evan, Luke drained the scotch in a few swift swallows. The alcohol seemed not to affect him at all. “You and I have different gifts. We’re familiar with yours. Mine?” He set the empty glass down hard. “When my brain speeds up, it feels like the rest of the world is moving in slow motion. And the less I sleep, the less sleep I need, until I’m nothing more than a body hooked to the network of my thoughts.” As he spoke faster, his body canted forward, weight shifted onto the balls of his feet, head cocked slightly out ahead of his neck. “Do you know what it feels like? Moving that fast when everyone else is wading through sludge?”
Evan wondered if Devine’s superpower was just wearing people the hell out.
“I understand your reticence,” Luke said. “At a certain point, the world doesn’t make sense anymore. It’s not supposed to. It’s because you’ve outgrown it. You need my expansiveness. I need someone who can ensure I hold … perspective. Imagine what you could do if I threw all my power, my reach, my resources behind you. Imagine who you could be if we joined forces. I’m offering you an alliance that will open up the universe to us both.”
He reached beneath the bar and came up with a pistol. Evan’s ARES 1911.
“What’s it gonna be?” Devine asked. “The rules you’ve alwayslived by?” He set the pistol on the mahogany between them. “Or what lies beyond?”
Without breaking eye contact with Luke, Evan picked up his pistol, wrapped his left hand over the top of the slide with his middle finger touching the rear of the ejection port, and pulled back until he felt the cartridge case at the breech face. Chamber loaded. Letting the slide go, he thumbed the safety up, ejected the magazine into his palm, and pushed the top cartridge down hard with his index finger. No budge. He reseated the full mag with a click and set the loaded pistol back down on the bar, aimed halfway between him and Luke, an indicator arrow deciding which way to point.
Weapon-status check by touch, less than three seconds.
Devine’s stare was unblinking, hawklike. Evan felt the heat of it as surely as he’d felt the fireplace glow on the side of his face.
“Johnny Seabrook,” Evan said. “Angela Buford.”
Devine’s sigh smelled of charred oak casks and warm spices. “You are,” he said, “so fucking disappointing.”
They stared at each other. Ten seconds passed. Then thirty. One full minute was a long time to hold hostile eye contact.
“Ethics,” Luke said tartly, “are a good boy’s version of morality. It’s coloring inside the lines. Don’t worry. You’ll outgrow it one day.”
