Oh, yeah, Garrett needed to be on medication. “But why would I want to do all of this? And how would I raise an army? I’m just not that good at organization. Will they expect to be fed?”
“I don’t know how you’re going to do it or what part you’ll actually play. I was shown only bits and pieces, and with all the information I got from the underworld, trying to separate fact from fiction, reality from dream, it was hard to sift through it. Thus all the research.” He lifted the notes for me to see.
“Where on Earth did you find all of this?”
“Like I said, I have interesting relatives. eBay helped, too. All I know is that grim reapers – by the way, they aren’t actually called that down there – are extremely powerful. Not like the angelic beings or the demons from the dimensions we know of. They have souls and can exist in this realm either in human form or as spirit. They are a completely different species. They’re like butterflies in a world of moths.
“But you,” he said, staring pointedly, “you are even more powerful than most of your kind. You were born with the ability to draw energy from anything around you, animate or inanimate. Your powers are like liquid, ever changing, forming and molding to the situation. They called you a word from their language that meant ‘malleable,’ ‘adaptive.’ From what I could tell, you were very special even in your world. And you were royalty of some kind.”
“Wow, you guys had quite the talk.” Reyes had told me about the royalty thing. The rest was new, though, and interesting enough. Still, I couldn’t help but question his sources. Maybe it was all a big con, but not the way Garrett thought. Maybe Satan wanted Garrett to believe he was lying.
“Like I said, it’s different there. It’s like you internalize the contents of a thirty-five-volume encyclopedia in the span of a few seconds.”
“I so could have used that in college.”
“Do you remember that letter you found in my apartment the other night?”
“Yes,” I said, ignoring the pang of jealousy that rushed out of Reyes. “The one you ripped out of my hand.”
“Yeah, sorry about that.”
He wasn’t. He really wasn’t.
“It was from a Dr. von Holstein from Harvard Universtiy. He’s been working on some translations for me.”
“Translations of what?” Cookie asked.
“And how did you find him?”
“He’s published quite a bit. I came across his name during a search for dead languages. And translated from some very old documents I found on an antiquarian book site. And, again, a couple were on eBay. Unfortunately, no one could read them, so I contacted Dr. von Holstein for help.”
“The cow guy can read ancient texts?”
“A hell of a lot better than I can. And once I told him my story, he helped me gather information and told me what to look for. What really interested us were the works that were reportedly written by a Byzantine prophet named Cleosarius.”
Cookie tsked. “That’s an unfortunate name.”
“Yeah, well, it’s probably really old,” I told her. “Though I knew a Cleo once. His wife killed him with a meat cleaver.”
She shuddered. “Was it still in his head when he came to you?”
“No, thank god. How creepy would that be?”
Garrett cleared his throat.
“Sorry,” we said in unison. Then I whispered to Cookie. “I’ll tell you more later. That woman was psychotic.”
“’Kay,” she whispered back.
Garrett waited to make sure he had the floor.
I blinked. Surveyed my toenails. Chewed on my lips.
“Unfortunately,” he continued after a millennium, “we can’t find much on Cleo. But historically, prophets couldn’t just go around spouting prophecies. They would be marked as heretics and executed. So many wrote their visions down in verse. Nostradamus wrote in quatrains. A monk from Tibet named Ajahn Sao Chah recorded his visions in poems even though he would never have been condemned for them. He said he got his visions from magical amulets. But this guy Cleosarius wrote in code.”
“Like a secret code?” I asked.
“Exactly. At first Dr. von Holstein thought the documents were written in Illyrian. No idea what that is, but they weren’t. The code threw him. Once we figured out the guy was Byzantine, the doctor knew what language he was using and could go from there. But take the fact that this Cleo guy wrote in both a dead language and code… Let’s just say Dr. von Holstein had his work cut out for him.”
Cookie sat fascinated. “So, he deciphered the code and translated the texts?”
“He’s gotten only bits and pieces so far.”
“And he did all of this in —” I raised my gaze in thought. “— in two months?”
“He’s been a little obsessed since I contacted him. He said it’s like finding the Holy Grail. It was always there in different historical texts, but no one ever made the connection between a dead language, prophecy, and code. The way I understand it, everyone just figured the guy was a lunatic and called it good.”
“Okay, what did he find out?”
“Just that all of Cleosarius’s prophecies revolve around one person. You.”
“Me?” I asked, suddenly super-duper interested.
Garrett nodded and tore through his notes. “I realized it when Lucifer referred to you as the royal daughter and once he called you the royal daughter of light. That’s what I based all of my searches on. The royal daughter of light. There are several texts that refer to you as either the royal daughter or as the daughter of light. But in his later writings, there are a couple that refer to you as just the daughter, and that’s where things get really interesting.”