Now with one careful hand, he stopped the clock. He no longer needed it. His life would end soon. After years of praying for this moment, soon he would rest.
A knock on the door disturbed his thoughts.
“Enter!” he called out.
He turned to find Henrik pushing the First Angel into the room. With sunrise only a couple of hours off, he had summoned the boy to be brought before him.
Tommy rubbed his eyes, clearly still sleep addled. “What do you want with me?”
“Only to chat.”
The boy looked like he would have preferred more sleep.
Judas drew him to his small desk. He had a larger office to conduct business elsewhere on the rig, but he preferred sometimes the quiet intimacy of his own chamber. “The two of us, Tommy, are unique unto this world.”
“What do you mean?”
Judas picked up a sharp letter opener and pierced the center of his own palm. Blood welled thickly, but he used a handkerchief to wipe it away. The small wound sealed quickly, healing almost immediately.
“I am immortal, but not like your countess. I am like you.” As proof, he took the boy’s hand in his firm grip and placed his palm against his own chest. “Do you feel my heartbeat?”
Tommy nodded, plainly intimidated but intrigued.
“Like you, I was born an ordinary boy. It was a curse that granted me my immortality, but I would like to know what you did to be so similarly afflicted.”
Judas had heard a rough accounting of the boy’s story, but he wanted to hear the details from the source.
Tommy chewed on his lower lip, clearly hesitant, but the boy likely ached to understand what he had become. “It happened in Israel,” he began and slowly told the story of visiting Masada with his parents, of the earthquake and the gas.
None of this accounting explained his sudden immortality.
“Tell me more about what happened before the earthquake,” Judas pressed.
A guilty look swept his countenance. “I . . . I went into a room that I wasn’t supposed to. I knew better. But there was a white dove on the floor, and I thought it was hurt. I wanted to take it out and get some help for it.”
Judas’s heart thumped against his ribs. “A dove with a broken wing?”
“How did you know that?” Tommy’s eyes narrowed.
Judas sank back against his desk, his words full of memory. “Two thousand years ago, I saw a dove like that. When I was a boy.”
He had not thought the encounter important, barely considered it, except the event occurred on the morning that he had first met Christ, when Judas was only a boy of fourteen years, when they became fast friends.
I was the same age as Tommy, he suddenly realized.
He remembered that early morning now in immediate detail: how the streets were still shadowy as the sun had not quite risen, how the sewage in the drains had stunk, how the stars still shone.
“And the dove you saw,” the boy said, “it also had a broken wing?”
“Yes.” Judas pictured the ghostly white of its feathers in the night, the only thing moving on that dark street. “It dragged its wing across the muddy stones. I picked it up.”
He felt the plumage now, brushing his palms. The bird had lain quiet, its head against Judas’s thumb, staring up at him out of a single green eye.
“Did you try to help it?” Tommy asked.
“I wrung its neck.”
The boy took a half step back, his eyes wide. “Just like that?”
“There were rats, dogs. It would have been torn apart. I saved it from that misery. It was an act of mercy.”
Still, he remembered how stricken he felt afterward. He had fled to the temple for comfort, to his father, who was a Pharisee. It was there he saw Christ for the first time, a lad of the same age, impressing his father and many others with His words. Afterward, the two of them became friends, seldom parted.
Until the end.
Now I must correct that.
The boy, the dove, they were all signs that his path was the correct one.
Judas drew Tommy back to the door, back into the care of Henrik. “Ready him for our departure.”
Once Tommy was gone, Judas returned to his desk. He picked up a crystal block that fit neatly in his palm. It was his most prized possession. He had taken it from his office safe and would return it before he left. But he needed its reassurance this early morning, needed its physicality and weight in his hands.
The block held a fragile brown leaf suspended inside, protected across the centuries by the glass. He lifted it to his eyes and read the words that had been cut into its once green surface with a sharp stone knife.
He cupped the block in both palms, thinking of the woman who had written these words, picturing her luminous dark skin, her eyes that glowed with a peaceful radiance. Like him, she understood truths that no one else could. Like him, she had lived many lifetimes, watched many friends die. Alone on Earth, she was his equal.