MILLENNIUM (Descendants Saga) Read online

  Jacob ran his fingers along the fiberglass bubble, tracing the outline—one of his creations. How had he managed such a feat? Not without the Master’s hand upon me, he thought. He recalled the night when he had first been summoned nearly ten years ago.

  The digital clock had read 2:00am. His name had been called—Jacob was sure of it—loud enough to wake him from sleep. He sat up in bed, rubbing sleep from his eyes and drool from his chin. Jacob’s wife, Elizabeth, slept soundly in the bed next to him.

  Jacob.

  The voice, deep and resonating throughout the entire house, seemed to emanate from the hallway leading to his bedroom. A low light, building in intensity, filtered through the space between Jacob’s bedroom door and its frame. Jacob started to reach for the revolver he kept in a shaving kit beneath his side of the bed. The door burst open, slamming so hard into the wall that it remained stuck in the fractured drywall.

  A fire burned in the doorway from floor to ceiling, yet the house was not consumed. Jacob would have screamed for his wife to wake up, wondered why the smoke alarm wasn’t blaring at them, bolted through the adjoining bathroom to his children’s room to wake his sleeping twin daughters, but he remained transfixed upon the flames. The form of a man was walking toward him from within the inferno.

  Jacob’s body seemed to be held in an invisible grip. He couldn’t even tell if he was breathing anymore. “Hello, Jacob,” the voice said. Jacob knew it was the voice of the man standing within the flames before him, though it seemed to originate from everywhere at once. Jacob tried to respond to the dark figure, his eyes smoldering coals that were even brighter than the fire burning around him, but he could not utter a sound.

  The odor of sulfur hung heavy in the room, rolling off of the shadowy man as he spoke. “I am your master, Jacob. You have been chosen to stand by my side as I bring peace to all the Earth. I will equip you to carry out my will in the days ahead.”

  Jacob’s breath came to him for the first time since he’d seen the man. “What is your will, My Lord?”

  “I will reveal my will to you at the appointed time,” the figure said. “Rise. Come to me, my child. Embrace the destiny I have prepared for you.”

  Jacob’s body began to move. He felt as though he were in a trance, unable to keep himself from obeying the figure’s voice. He rose to his feet, walking across the plush carpet toward the raging inferno boiling in the doorway and the hall beyond.

  The shadowy figure reached out his flame-covered hands to grasp Jacob’s head. The fire did not burn him. He couldn’t even feel the heat. The blackened hands gripped his face, the eyes bore straight into his mind. A flood of knowledge flowed into him, as though a dam had withheld the full capacity of Jacob’s brain and now it had been broken down.

  His fists clenched, body taught under sustained tetanus, like electricity charging his entire thin frame. He felt terror, joy and every emotion between in a moment’s time. When the Master released him, the dark figure had gone. Only the flames remained.

  Jacob barely noticed as the fire began to spread across the ceiling of his bedroom. He felt elated and drained—joyous at the embrace of Lucifer—his long time loyalty finally rewarded. Yet, a question nagged at the back of his mind.

  He gathered his breath, hoping to maintain contact a moment longer. “How do I know this isn’t a dream?” Jacob managed.

  “Offer me what is dearest to your heart and this honor will be yours forever,” the voice intoned. “Else I will bestow it upon another!”

  “No, please,” Jacob begged. The flames licked the walnut bedposts where his wife slept. Neither his voice, nor the Master’s had disturbed her sleep. “I’ll give you anything you desire, only don’t take away your gift from me!”

  “Very well,” the Master said. “It is done.”

  The flames leaped upon Jacob’s bed, as though a bucket of gasoline had been tossed into the room, igniting midair, then engulfed Elizabeth. His slumbering wife woke screaming, thrashing among the covers, the flames clinging to her body like napalm.

  “Elizabeth!” Jacob screamed. He plunged into the flames after her neither feeling the heat nor being singed by flames devouring his bride of fifteen years. However, his best efforts were in vain. Jacob could not stifle the fire raging all around them. In moments Elizabeth moved no more.

  Jacob began to weep, even as the charred walls crumbled around him. His tears evaporated from his cheeks, yet his skin remained unblemished by the inferno. How could this happen? Why his family? Then he remembered them asleep in their beds.

  Screams reached Jacob from the adjoining room. Not my babies, he thought. Jacob ran through the adjoining bathroom, still untouched by the fire, only to find the door unwilling to open. It had swollen into the frame. Smoke poured through the space at the bottom. He hit the door with his shoulder, but it wouldn’t budge.

  “Janet!” he screamed. “Tiffany!”

  “Daddy!” their voices howled in chorus.

  Jacob backed away ten feet then threw his one hundred and seventy pounds at the door. It gave way, smashed to charred kindling. His twins were surrounded by the flames already. They threw off their bed covers as the fire reached out for them. “’Daddy!”

  Ignoring the roaring blaze sweeping through the children’s room from floor to ceiling, Jacob grabbed his daughters up from their beds. He started for the door, but a wall of fire awaited them. The window had already blown out, and the flames had followed the oxygen, engulfing their escape in black smoke and searing heat.

  His heart sank, realizing it was a three story drop. Jacob had no choice. “Hold on, girls,” he said. He rushed through the open doorway toward the hall. Everything beyond was consumed already. Jacob could hardly see. Everything had gone bright yellow to white in his vision. Still, he never felt the fire. Perhaps he had already been burned so badly that his nerves no longer functioned. He didn’t care. He had to save his girls.

  Two flights of stairs later, Jacob descended to the living room on the main level and the front door beyond. The fire hadn’t managed to engulf this room yet. Jacob smiled. He paused only a moment to reassure his daughters. Even though their mother had been lost to them, they would make it. Life would go on.

  They had come through a raging inferno. Jacob had used his last ounces of strength to get them this far, but neither of the girls responded to his voice. Great, bubbling blisters covered their faces. Their hands and feet had been blackened somewhere along the way. Despite his best efforts they were gone—sacrificed to the inferno of his own lust for power with the Master.

  Twenty minutes later, when the city fire department broke down the door, they found Jacob sobbing next to the bodies of his adolescent children. The entire living room was engulfed in flames. However, when they pulled Jacob screaming from the nearly collapsed house, he didn’t even have the smell of smoke on his clothing.

  The religious community had proclaimed his ordeal, though tragic, a miracle. Jacob had used it to great degree in order to travel the channels through the higher echelons of power. Status had its rewards. Jacob found all doors opening to him and his research into human cloning. Where he had failed before, he now succeeded. Impossibly complex scientific hurdles had been easily deciphered, seeming elementary to his newly enlightened mind.

  Staring out over the vast army he had created through his research, Jacob wondered regretfully if his sacrifice had really been worth it. Then he looked at his hands, thinking of all he had been given since that time and all the Master had promised him for the future. Jacob Stein smiled. Yes—he had made the right choice.

  *PERDITION’S GATE INFERNO

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