Free Infernal Revelation : Collected Episodes 1-4 (9781311980007) by Michael Coorlim

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Delilah's blank expression.
    "Yeah. Since the coma. Maybe during it, I
don't remember."
    "That's about when mine started, too,"
Gideon said.
    "What do they mean?" Delilah asked.
    Something seemed to have excited
Melchizedek. He was shifting his weight from foot to foot, and
snapping his fingers as he spoke.
    "No, it makes sense. Let me start from the
beginning."
    "Okay," Lily said.
    "Do you have," he pointed from Lily to
Gideon before settling on Delilah. "Do you have anything to drink?
My throat's a little dry."
    "What," the youngest said. "Like water?
Soda?"
    "Soda's fine. Or whatever."
    The girl rose and walked over to the stairs,
where a few boxes of soft drinks were stacked.
    "Can I get a coke?" Gideon called.
    "No," Delilah said.
    She grabbed one for him anyway, and a second
for Melchizedek. Lily shook her head when offered the third.
    "Okay." Melchizedek opened his drink, then
exhaled. "I was like you, once. Just... normal."
    He pointed towards the luminescent blue
sparks where his eyes should have been. "None of this. I was kinda
pale, but not like this."
    "What happened?" Lily asked.
    "I got shot. Wait, let me back up a little."
He took a sip from his soda. "Bear with me, I've never told this
story to anyone."
    "Okay," Lily said.
    "You're all adopted or whatever, right?"
    "Yeah," Lily said.
    "Okay. You, me, all three of you, we're all
related. Siblings."
    Lily gestured from her own African-American
features towards Gideon's ginger face and Delilah's pale blondness.
"You sure?"
    Gideon gave a nervous giggle.
    "Half-siblings. Same father. Different
mothers."
    "You're sure. We look nothing alike. And
you're..."
    "I'll get to me," Melchizedek said. "But
yeah. Our father is... he wasn't exactly human."
    "What do you mean?" Delilah asked.
    "I mean not human. At all. He was...
something else."
    "Are you serious?" Lily asked.
    Melchizedek gave her a look, then conjured a
ball of shadow between his hands.
    "Okay," Lily said. "Then what was he? What
are you?"
    "Something else."
    "You don't know?" Delilah asked.
    "Okay, look. We were all born in this small
town somewhere as part of some commune. Then something happened.
This was, like, 1999, 2000, something like that. Do any of you
remember early childhood?"
    Lily shook her head. "Nothing before
kindergarten."
    "No," Gideon said.
    "I would have been an infant," Delilah
said.
    "Neither do I. Maybe that's what the dreams
are. But something happened--"
    "Again with the something," Lily said.
    "Hey," Melchizedek said. "I heard this story
second hand. The woman who raised me told me that I came from a big
loving family, until bad men came and took all my brothers and
sisters away. She escaped with me, said maybe some of the others
had too."
    "She wasn't your mother?" Lily asked.
    "No," Melchizedek. "But she raised me like
one."
    "So you're saying that we were all taken
from this town and what, put into orphanages?" Delilah said.
    Melchizedek took another sip of his soda.
"When I was a kid I just accepted what Marianne told me. When I was
older, I began to question it, the way we lived. We moved around a
lot, avoided the cops, avoided cameras. Avoided everything. I
wondered if she maybe, you know, kidnapped me. If we were
fugitives. I didn't care -- she had basically raised me, and was a
loving woman -- but I wanted to know the truth."
    Lily nodded.
    "I got it." Mel put the soda down and folded
his hands on his lap. "I never asked her, but one day I came home
from school and she was freaking out. Panicked. Said that 'they'
had found us, and that I needed to get my things. For the first
time, I resisted. I wanted to know what was really going on, and
she said it was just like she had told me."
    His voice grew quiet. "I was stubborn
though. Maybe if I hadn't been, maybe if I..."
    The others waited until he could
continue.
    "Then the men came. Not cops. Looked like, I
don't know, CIA guys from an 80s action movie. Black suits and
ear-pieces. She screamed and told me to run, and I