Redemption (Stand-Alone Spin-Off to Reaper Series) Page 3

  As the man picked up his microphone, there was a brief moment of feedback through the speakers, but it quickly died out and silence washed over the audience. It was as if the man on the podium had somehow muted the world, just by being seen.

  “Good morning,” the man said into the microphone, his voice deep and strong, yet inviting, like he was always smiling. “I’m Darwin Javan.”

  The crowd immediately erupted into cheers and applause once more, as though they were celebrating only his name. Eve craned to see over the heads of those in front of her, but, again, was afforded only a brief glimpse of the man calling himself Darwin Javan gesturing with one hand for the crowd to calm down. Which they did, right away. This time, the audience all lowered themselves into their seats, and Eve was able to see Javan.

  At the sight of him, she felt her jaw drop and her eyebrows shoot up high on her forehead. He looked exactly the same as she remembered. He still had dark skin, the color of chocolate, his eyes an ever darker shade. His black hair was long and dreadlocked, tied back into a kind of messy ponytail. His dark eyebrows were extremely bushy, but the look of wonder and curiosity in his eyes distracted anyone from focussing too much on how his eyebrows looked like giant, black, caterpillars. His nose was flatter than most, and wider, but he looked out at the audience with a huge grin, who all smiled back at him in reverence. The only change Eve saw about Javan was his attire. He was wearing a navy blue suit, one that just looked expensive. Eve knew that this suit was one of the most expensive suits in the world, thanks to snatching up the occasional fashion magazine when visiting Darius and Peyton. The Brioni Vanquish II. Only a hundred of them were made each year from the most rare fibers in the world, and the stitching made of white gold, making it worth roughly $43,000. Eve admired it momentarily, but then brought her attention back to Javan as he smiled out at the audience, looking no older than thirty-five, far from the reality of being more than a million years old.

  “Evolution!” Javan stated simply, the audience already captivated by his voice. He had a deep, soothing, voice, and spoke so clearly he almost sounded British. “Some say it’s nothing more than nonsense. Others call it a theory. I say… it’s fact. But why? Why do we evolve? What is the purpose of evolution? Let’s just, for a moment, forget all of our personal upbringings, whatever they may be. Let’s put aside the beliefs we were raised with. If you’re a skeptic of evolution, please, just for a moment, pretend that you aren’t. Open your mind, if for only a moment, and listen.”

  The room was deadly silent as Javan spoke. He paused momentarily, as if letting the skeptics he was speaking to do as he asked, and open their minds. After a few seconds of the audience waiting in anticipation, he continued.

  “If you studied me at all before coming here today, you know what I’m all about,” Javan began. “And you know what I’m going to discuss. But for those of you who don’t know already, this is what we’re here for. Evolution. But not to talk about the science of it and how millions of years go by for any noticeable changes to occur in a living organism. No, I want to talk about the choice to evolve. Making the conscious decision to adapt, to change with your environment, with society, with the world, so that the human race can survive. Because, let’s face it. The world needs to change right now. We can all feel it. We all sense it. We all know it. The human race cannot hope to survive if it continues as it is. We need to take that first step and choose to evolve.”

  Javan was momentarily interrupted as the crowd broke into applause again. Smiling in gratitude for their support, Javan gestured for quiet, which quickly resumed.

  “When we think of evolution, what comes to mind?” Javan posed to the crowd. “Our first thought is often of apes learning to walk on their hind legs. Of fish growing legs and climbing out of the seas. These are true aspects of evolution, and well worth studying. But what I’m specifically talking about is the evolution of the human mind.”

  Eve felt her shoulders tense at this, suddenly concerned about what Javan was going to say, but intrigued at the same time. He’d had all of human history to study anthropology, most of it with first-hand encounters from the beginning of humanity. No other scientist could claim that wealth of knowledge. Not to mention Eve’s own handiwork in the evolution of human intelligence.

  “Since the dawn of mankind,” Javan said dramatically, flashing a charming smile as he spoke, “we have strived to exceed our own imaginations. Men looked to the sky and thought flying like a bird was fantasy, but then a special few made it fact. We looked at our world and saw that it was flat, only to then look beyond what we saw right in front of us and discovered that the world was round. And beyond that, we put aside our own arrogance as humans and came to understand that we were not the center of the universe! Then, of course, there was another discovery. One that paved the road for all scientific minds that had grown beyond those of their colleagues. And it began with something as simple as this.”

  As soon as Javan finished his sentence, a young man, who looked roughly twenty-one and had messy brown hair, quickly ran to the podium from where he was seated and placed something round and red in Javan’s outstretched hand. The man returned to his seat as quickly as he had left it, no more than two seconds having gone by. Javan smiled at the crowd and held up the item the boy had given him.

  “An apple,” Javan said simply. “We all know the story, even those of us who never studied science past the years of our education that made it mandatory. Sir Isaac Newton. An apple fell on his head and, bam! He offered his theory of gravity. Now, who here believes that gravity is only a theory?”

  Javan looked around the room, smiling, as though he was politely waiting for someone to actually challenge the idea of gravity. When no one did, he continued, tossing the apple up in the air and catching it in the same hand as it fell.

  “No one? Of course not. Because we can all see it in action. You can see here the apple fall whenever it reaches the peak of it’s lift. I throw it up, it travels only as far as its current momentum can take it, and then it falls.”

  As Javan said “falls,” the apple landed in his palm and he held it tight in his fingers, holding it out for the crowd to see. He turned slowly on the spot, looking out into the audience as though he was slowly making eye contact with every person present.

  “Evolution is the same as gravity,” Javan continued. “Not exactly the same, obviously, but there are two main similarities. The first is that people are unlikely to believe either one exists unless presented with some sort of evidence. Now, gravity is easy to do that for, because we see gravity working every day. What goes up must come down, and all that. Same thing for evolution. People aren’t so likely to believe it unless presented with some kind of proof. Which is the hard part, considering the most tiny changes can take hundreds of thousands of years to occur. Now, the second similarity between gravity and evolution… When the subject of either rises to the point where its original momentum can no longer carry it upward… it falls.”

  Suddenly, Javan looked into the crowd and met Eve’s gaze. He froze immediately, his smile faltering for the first time and was replaced by a look of surprise and amazement. Eve’s heart beat harder as she felt his dark brown eyes bore into her bright green ones. Countless years had passed since they had last seen each other, but Eve remembered perfectly the last time she had looked into those eyes. The last time she saw them, though, they had been filled with fear and betrayal. She remembered Javan falling backwards, reaching out to her. She remembered his fingers closing around a handful of feathers on her wing, but they were not enough to stop his descent. Her feathers had been yanked out and Javan fell over the side of the cliff, clutching a handful of red feathers, his eyes filled with fear as he vanished over the edge.

  Eve and Javan stared at each other now, surrounded by hundreds of strangers, who were oblivious to the emotions that were radiating between the two. Just as the silence was beginning to stretch on long enough for people to notice, Javan suddenly looked away from Eve and resumed his speech.

  “In my book, I speak about how humanity has reached its evolutionary peak,” he said. “In our arrogance as the most intelligent species on the planet, we feel we not only have the ability, but also the right, to adapt our surroundings to our needs instead of us adapting to our surroundings. And how we need to ensure the continued survival of our species by choosing to adapt. To evolve. Not our physical selves, but our minds. We need to change the way we see the world, see ourselves, see each other! Only through this can we hope to carry the momentum of our evolution upward.”

  Javan then smiled at the crowd and took a bite out of the apple in his hand, the crisp fruit crunching under his bite.

  Eve sat through the next forty-five minutes of Javan’s seminar in the hopes that he would look at her again, acknowledge her in some way, but he did not. He carried on as though he had never noticed her at all. By the time Javan finished his seminar and left the podium to tumultuous cheers and applause, Eve was feeling disappointed and stupid.

  “What was I expecting?” Eve muttered angrily to herself as she stormed out into the hotel lobby, quickly heading toward the exit, ignoring the look she got from an elderly woman who was making her way to the elevators. “A great big hug? Just like, ‘Hey, Eve, good to see you! Oh, you thought I was dead? Nah!” Stupid, waste of time.”

  “Eve!”

  At the sound of her name, Eve stopped stomping away and turned around, only to see Javan quickly dodging through the hotel guests as he hurried to catch up with her. When she stopped and turned, he smiled in relief. He hurried over to her and, without hesitating, threw his arms around Eve’s shoulders and wrapped her in a tight bear-hug, her feet rising off the ground as he lifted her up into his arms. Eve, in her shock, said nothing, but en
joyed the warmth of Javan’s greeting. It was like being hugged by her father, or a best friend, after years and years apart.

  “My God, Eve!” he laughed, finally setting a stunned Eve back down on her feet. “I never thought I was going to see you again!”

  “I… I…” Eve struggled to speak, so great was her shock. She swallowed her nerves and forced herself to talk. “I thought you were dead. The cliff… You fell… I couldn’t…”

  Javan grinned and shook his head. “I survived! It was amazing, Eve, a true miracle!”

  “Javan, what the Hell?” Eve whispered, glancing around quickly to see if anyone was within earshot. “You survived? That cliff was huge! And even if that’s true, that was a million years ago! Literally! How the Hell are you standing here? You look exactly the damn same!”

  Javan just smiled and laughed. “Like I said, Eve. A miracle. Do you remember? When I fell, I grabbed for you. I pulled out some of your feathers. I took them down with me. Do you remember?”

  Eve nodded, but was clearly frustrated with how her questions were not being answered. “Yeah, so?”

  “So!” Javan continued, still looking excited like a child on his birthday. “So I was still holding them when I hit the ground. Angel feathers, Eve! Angel feathers!”

  “But you were dead!” Eve hissed.

  “Eve, just listen,” Javan said kindly, placing his hands on her shoulders and looked down at her. “You’re immortal. Your feathers, they are a part of you. A part of what makes you immortal. They still had life in them when I had died. But because I held them, because they were making contact with me, they transferred the life they had in them to me. Eve, your feathers gave me life! They revived me! I survived!”

  Eve couldn’t believe it. It was amazing to hear. She knew that her feathers were able to retain her powers for some time even after being removed from her wings. She had given Darius a feather once so that he was able to travel to places that normally restricted his movements as a Reaper, but for her feathers to revive someone who was dead? She had never heard of it. And yet, it had to be true. Because here Javan was, a million years after his death, standing before her, talking and smiling.

  “But…” Eve began. “But even if that’s true, how have you lived so long? My feathers die after just a few hours of being removed. You still should have died long ago.”

  Javan grinned widely at this, then glanced around. Without saying a word, he reached up to his collar and loosened his tie.

  “Let me show you,” he said secretively.

  Then he undid the top couple of buttons on his shirt and slightly pulled open the collar. There, just beneath his collar bone, Eve could see what looked like a tattoo. A tattoo of a red feather.

  Eve snapped her gaze up to Javan’s, her eyes wide. “You didn’t?”

  “I did!” Javan laughed, fixing his shirt and tie. “I found a way to keep your feathers alive. By stitching them into my own flesh, my body is able to keep them alive, just as they now keep me alive. Think of it like a heart transplant. I later got the tattoos over them to serve as a reminder of the miracle that keeps me alive. A reminder of where I came from.”

  “Javan, you’ve stolen immortality!” Eve hissed.

  Javan shrugged. “Not stolen. Discovered. You always said I was special, Eve, even when I didn’t know what that word meant. I’ve come such a long way since those days, Eve. I’m a different person. More civilized. Can you imagine trying to get me to wear a tie back then?”

  Javan laughed at the idea, and Eve had to admit to herself that he was right. The old Javan she knew would never have let her put a tie on him. He more likely would have either tried to eat it or burn it. Or both.

  “Javan, this is so weird,” Eve said, shifting uncomfortably on her feet. “I mean, you were dead. Now you tell me my feathers brought you back to life, so you stitched them into your body? And, you know, there’s what happened before you died…”

  At this, Javan’s smile faltered. He suddenly seemed to deflate and his head drooped a little, as though ashamed.

  “Yes, I know,” he said quietly. “I can’t expect you to forget what happened. I know I never will. But I’m not the same person I was back then. I understand the world so much better than in those early days. I know what I did was wrong. So terribly wrong. That’s why I’ve devoted my immortality to helping people. To trying to make the world a better place. And seriously, Eve, can you honestly tell me that you aren’t happy to see me?”

  Eve hesitated before answering. “Well, of course I’m glad you’re alive. It’s just… so weird!”

  Javan’s smile returned to his face, his white teeth flashing brightly. “Imagine how I felt at first. But you get used to it. Eve…”

  Javan reached out and placed his large hands on Eve’s narrow shoulders, looking her in the eyes with a strong sincerity.

  “I missed you,” he said. “For the longest time, I wished you were still my friend. If you can see your way to forgive me for my past misdeeds, do you think we could spend some time together? Get to know each other again? Like the old days.”

  “Well,” Eve said slowly. “I… I’ve missed you, too. But the rules have changed since we first met. Angels aren’t supposed to interfere with human affairs anymore. We all swore to it.”

  “Is that right?” Javan asked, lifting his hands off Eve’s shoulders and smiling down at her. “And what about the Global Revelation? All those Angels in the black armor, swooping all over the world? They seemed to do a whole lot of interfering then.”

  Eve frowned, thinking back on the invasion of Earth, led by a powerful Angel who was once Heaven’s greatest enemy.

  “That was different,” Eve said shortly. “They weren’t… they weren’t good.”

  “But you are,” Javan said. “I don’t want to make you break any rules, but think about this for a moment. You said you all swore to not interfere in human affairs, right?”

  Eve nodded. “Yeah.”

  Javan’s grinned turned to one of mischief, one that Eve remembered fondly. “Well, I’m not exactly human. First of all, I’m immortal, so there’s that.”

  “I don’t think others would see it that way,” Eve said, smirking despite herself.

  “No, I suppose not,” Javan admitted. “But there’s also this. When you swore to never interfere in human affairs, what was the technical term for humans? You know, in scientific circles?”

  Eve frowned as she thought. “I don’t know, homo sapiens?”

  Javan snapped his fingers and pointed at her, as though excited she had been correct. “Yes! Now, according to anthropology, I’m a member of some other part of the homo genus. Homo erectus.”

  Eve couldn’t help but snort in barely contained laughter at the title, to which Javan smirked in a self-deprecating way.

  “Unfortunately named, I know,” Javan chuckled. “Especially for someone so clearly immature. But the homo erectus is supposedly extinct. How can you interfere in the life of something that no longer exists?”

  “That sounds like a big technicality to me,” Eve said, but then she slowly grinned. “I like it.”

  “I learned from the master of technicalities,” Javan said. “So… can we be friends again?”

  Eve sighed, still smiling at Javan in an admonishing kind of way, though amused.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll come visit you again.”

  “Brilliant!” Javan cried, drawing a few looks from hotel guests moving through the lobby around them. “I have to fly out of Vegas tonight, back to my home in Toronto. But come visit me there. Tomorrow? I want to show you all the good I’m doing now. How much I’ve changed. I really can’t tell you how excited I am to see you again, Eve. We have a lot to catch up on.”

  “Yeah, a million years or so worth,” Eve smirked. “Fine, I’ll stop by. Maybe.”