Time Jacker by Aaron Crash (nonfiction book recommendations .TXT) 📕

Finally, the house of the future led to the inner chamber of the Black Tower. The walls were made of a scintillating black stone, minerals glittering like stars. There, in the middle of the floor, was a pedestal. Above the pedestal floated a revolver—an old cap-and-ball revolver from the 1800s.

Jack knew a little bit about them—they didn’t use modern-day rounds. You loaded the cylinder with powder and a wad of cloth, generally lubed with animal fat or whatever else. You seated the bullet on top of the patch. The gun had a thick barrel because of the loading lever. It was single action and rather bulky, but it had revolutionized nineteenth-century weaponry.

A strange, ghostly light illuminated the revolver from above. Only, there was nothing above, just a dark night sky. That light was coming from nowhere.

The rest of the room was blank stone except for the doorways leading away, down corridors, to other doors, and to where after that? Jack couldn’t say. From how it felt, those might connect to other eon palaces or to hell itself.

He approached the pedestal but stopped. He’d seen enough movies to know he couldn’t just take the Eternity Cannon—which looked suspiciously like a Colt 1851 Navy revolver.

“So who’s guarding the gun?” Jack asked the darkness above. With the glittering minerals in the rock, it was like he was surrounded by the night sky. “Hey! I’m stealing your shit.”

From out of the rock—or was it the sky?—emerged a winged figure, a lot like Gabby, but different in a few key ways. For one, his wings were gray and missing some feathers. A black slime dripped off his wings. He was an old, bald man. Skin sagged from his neck, and he was shirtless, so the sag didn’t end there.

He held a notched sword, rusted and dull, in a wrinkled hand. Golden bracelets dangled from his wrists. A battle skirt made of a dingy gray metal hung to his knees. Around his waist was a golden belt, holding a horn as battered as the angel himself.

“You will stop!” the old-man angel said in a booming voice, which was surprising since Jack figured he would sound like a corpse.

Gabby spread her wings and floated off the floor. Her halo lit up in full glow. “Meriton! What are you doing here? Why aren’t you with your legion?”

Both the lights in the old angel’s eyes and his halo flickered on and off like a bad fluorescent sign. “Gabriella! What are you doing here at the end of the war?”

“If it’s the end of the war, Meriton,” Gabby replied, “we can’t talk about it in front of the mortal and our enemy.” She gestured at the sex demon below, standing with Jack.

The two angels weren’t flapping their wings, yet they were still hanging in midair. It seemed they could levitate at will.

Meriton cast his eyes down. “A denizen of hell? In your company, Gabriella? And aren’t you still in school? Has long has it been? How long have I been in the Cast Away, Gone Astray?”

“I don’t know,” Gabby said.

Jack could feel the waves of energy coming out of the ancient angel, but it wasn’t Nefesh like with Gabby. No, it was Decaysia, and he seemed to be literally dripping with the death energy—that was the slime covering his wings.

“Explain yourself, Gabriella,” the ancient angel ordered.

Gabby raised her chin. “I’m here to save a pure human soul, brimming with Nefesh. We need the Eternity Cannon. We made a deal with the Clockwatcher, and it’s important. And Jack, that’s the man there, isn’t just a human, he’s something else, someone new to the war. Which we can’t talk about.”

Meriton frowned. “And what about that thing of lust, swimming in her foul Ijjinaya. Who is she?”

“I’m a simple country fuck demon,” Bailey sneered. “And, yeah, you wish you could get hard enough to fuck me. I’ve never seen such an old-ass angel in my life. I betcha you’d need some divine Viagra, and even then odds you’d finish are about fifty-fifty.”

“Who is this demonic slut!?” the ancient angel roared.

Unbelievably, Gabby came to the demonic slut’s defense. “She has Nefesh, Meriton. She has the ability to love. I don’t know how it can be, but it’s the truth. Last night, I felt it when she and Jack were together. Things are changing, and I don’t understand it since I’ve only been on the mortal plane for a little over ten months. There’s a ton I don’t know! But listen, Meriton, we need the Cannon to save a wonderful girl.”

“What are human lives compared to the Tempus Bellum?” Meriton shouted. Black spit dripped down his chin. “I have been here an age, in the Cast Away, Gone Astray, and it has been my life’s work to protect the Eternity Cannon. You will not leave with it. I will not let the human have it, nor the demon, nor some Interim Lord. I am the guardian of Eternity! Me! Meriton! My immortality has not been in vain!”

Jack had run out of patience. All this talk about the war they couldn’t talk about? It didn’t matter. Finding Annie mattered. He sped forward and used his shotgun to smack the revolver off the pedestal and out of the light. The revolver didn’t hit the floor, though. It remained floating in the air, spinning slowly, like something out of a video game.

He probably was more right about that than anything.

“No!” Meriton seized his horn and put it to his lips. Bailey spun her war pick around and threw it. The pick struck the horn out of the old angel’s hands.

Meriton was a lot spryer than he seemed. He flew down, caught his horn, then sailed upward.

Gabby soared up after him, but she didn’t get there in time.

Meriton blew his horn.

Chapter Eighteen

THE SOUND SEEMED TO come from everywhere at once.

Jack found himself on his knees, holding his head and trying to get himself to move. Because