Total pages in book: 101
Estimated words: 93412 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 467(@200wpm)___ 374(@250wpm)___ 311(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 93412 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 467(@200wpm)___ 374(@250wpm)___ 311(@300wpm)
Read Online Books/Novels: | I Am God's Dagger - Virtuous Sinners |
|---|---|
Author/Writer of Book/Novel: | K.A. Merikan |
| Language: | English |
| Book Information: | |
“I know what’s been done to you, and I will see you avenged.” Gabriel. Broken. Lonely. Scarred. Delusional? Abaddon. Lord of Locusts. Master of the Bottomless Pit. Angel of Destruction and Vengeance… But is he real? After a psychotic episode in his childhood, Gabriel is left shattered and unable to join society. Trapped in the orphanage he grew up in, he is plagued by nightmares of events that never happened, events that left him scarred, flinching at touch and achingly lonely. Until one day he decides on a whim to not take his meds. Born from a cold womb in the ground, Abaddon awakens to the world with one goal: to destroy a cult that commits blasphemous crimes in his name. What he doesn’t expect is meeting a boy who survived one of their rituals. That is when God reveals Abaddon’s true purpose. He shall protect the boy from the vultures circling him and avenge his pain. He shall take Gabriel under his wing and provide all the love and affection the boy never got to experience. As they set out to hunt the monsters together, Gabriel entrusts his body and soul to his beautiful guardian angel, yet he can’t stop questioning whether Abaddon is real or just a creation of his touch-starved mind. Either way, vengeance has begun to cut through the cultists with its scythe, and there is no turning back, no matter how deep the rabbit hole goes. | |
| Books by Author: | K.A. Merikan |
1
GABRIEL
The pills were red this month. They rolled in Gabriel’s palm like two solid drops of blood. He didn’t know why he was so reluctant to take them some days, but once again he found himself hesitating, even though they were what kept delusions at bay.
Years ago, after an incident that had left Gabriel with two shortened fingers, a burn on his chest, and scars on his back and arms, Doctor Rogers had put him on a diet of antipsychotics, and Gabriel had been taking them since. Despite promises of recovery, the distorted reality that had driven him to self-harm in childhood didn’t seem any less true years later and still produced terrible nightmares, no matter how regularly he took his meds. To this day, there were times when he wished he hadn’t survived that hell of his own making.
“Don’t!” Gabriel pushed Cloud away when the cat tried to paw at the red pills, but instead of backing away, the fluffy white feline leapt forward, knocking the medicine out of Gabriel’s hand. The pills hit the wooden floor, then rolled under the bed.
The cat was his only real friend, so Gabriel made peace with woolly fur always sticking to his clothes and the occasional broken glass, but this took the cake.
“Bad,” he said sternly, wagging his finger, but it seemed that his skinny frame was no threat to Cloud, because the cat yawned in response.
Gabriel dropped to his knees and reached under the bed, but then had to lie on the floor altogether when he couldn’t reach anything that was the shape of a pill. He had to push away a whole stack of baking magazines to finally find the red dots, but down here, in the shadows under his bed, reality seemed to distort.
The pills lay on two sides of a crack in the floorboards, and a voice from where no light reached whispered that missing one dose of medicine would be harmless. It wasn’t as though their effect would immediately wear off, right?
Right?
Maybe you’re cured, and you don’t need to take them anymore? How would you know if you keep doing as Dr. Rogers tells you?
In a silent act of rebellion he hadn’t planned on, and with his heart beating so hard it seemed to punch the floor through his breastbone, he pushed the pills into the crack.
A vision of what might happen if he let go of the prescribed therapy encroached on his mind like a spider creeping out of a corner in his room, but he shook his head, choosing to not overthink things. He’d made the decision, and the pills were gone.
Pondering things for too long often led him down a rabbit hole of forbidden thoughts where a person kept his bed warm instead of the cat. A pipe dream he didn’t dare voice, but there was no one he’d feel comfortable touching, anyway. Only in his fantasies was he free to enjoy soft, warm skin against his own, without any pressure or threat.
Was he even gay if he’d never done anything with a man nor intended to?
The intrusive thoughts dispersed when Cloud walked onto Gabriel’s thigh and meowed, reminding him that he couldn’t spend the day with his head under the bed even if sometimes he felt like doing just that.
He crawled out, still dazed by what he’d done with the pills, and filled his pet’s bowl on autopilot.
“Just don’t eat it all at once,” he warned Cloud, and shook his head at the fat cat too busy smacking its mouth over the bowl to listen.
There was no time for empty fantasies, since it was already six in the morning, and he was scheduled to bake pastries. At times, he thought it strange that he’d been allowed to live and work in an orphanage when Doctor Rogers considered him too unstable to interact with children. But then again, it wasn’t as though seeing them from afar and feeding them counted as ‘interacting’. But bringing smiles to the kids’ faces with his work let him give back to the institution that had taken him in as a baby.
The main cook, Mr. Watson wasn’t the type of person to overexert himself, so if it were up to him, the children would have to make do with basic vanilla pudding for dessert every single day—sometimes replaced with the chocolate variety, if they were lucky—but having been raised in those same walls, Gabriel knew how much of a difference a nice pastry or cookie could make on a bad day. So he experimented and came up with fun shapes and flavors.
Today, he’d planned a rhubarb loaf cake and needed to pick up the stalks in the garden on his way to the kitchen.
The sky was already pink in anticipation of sunrise as he dressed in his usual black jeans and the X-Files T-shirt Mrs. Knight had given him last Christmas. St. John’s Home for Orphaned Children had a policy of limiting access to technology, and therefore Gabriel couldn’t use the Internet or live TV, but since he’d been doing well in therapy, his conservator agreed to him owning DVDs, as long as they were pre-approved. And X-Files? It was his favorite.