Page 8 of Silent Knight

“Sit.” He motioned to the breakfast bar. “I will cook you a meal and tell you a story.”

I did as instructed and gave Senon my complete attention.

He started cutting up vegetables and without looking up, told me the story of how he became my knight and why I never knew my parents.

“It was December twentieth,two thousand and three?—”

“That’s when I was born.”

He nodded. “Yes, don’t interrupt or this will take forever.”

I mimed zipping my lips.

“I was summoned by your mother.” He held up a finger when I opened my mouth. “Her name was Sylvia and she was a Great Divine. They are the ones who control the heavens. She fell in love with a human man, your father, Arthur Acker. You were not to be born, for none of the Great Divine had ever bore a child. There was no way of knowing what you’d become.”

He poured oil into a skillet and I lifted my jaw from the counter.

“Your father was killed before your mother was even showing her pregnancy. Demons, in force, came for him in the night. Sylvia was devastated and the Divine Kingdom feared what your birth would cause. War perhaps between good and evil, nobody knew. So it was ruled that you would not be born.”

I gasped but he went on as if he hadn’t just told me the goodest of good were okay with killing me.

“Your mother wouldn’t hear of it, so she fled the kingdom and summoned me.”

He sighed and looked right at me. “I don’t belong to either the divine or the demons yet I am both. The only one of my kind.Your mother believed I’d want to protect another unique being. I could not have refused her if I wanted to for she was a Great Divine.”

I smiled, and he placed chicken in the oil.

“She stayed with me until your birth and told me to watch over you forever without fail. Protect you silently, only to reveal myself when you were of a certain age. On your day of birth she brought you to a church.”

“She’s alive?”

He shook his head. “No. She lingered, unable to part from you. I warned her to flee because I could not protect both you and her. But she stayed, and Abaddon found her, and killed her.” His light brown eyes glittered with the promise of tears. “He was sent by the Great Divine to locate and kill you. Sylvia wouldn’t give you up and therefore, she died.”

“Geez.” I swallowed and stared at the wooden bar under my fingertips. That was a lot.

“Sylvia named you Ezra Acker, giving you your father’s last name, and I was afraid that was how they’d find you. They never did. It wasn’t until you were ten and bullies tried to hurt you and I removed them that a tendril of awareness began to spark.”

“They were kids and you?—”

“Protected you. It was…is my duty. Any who touch you must perish.” Again, he held up his hand to stop me from interrupting. “Abaddon can track evil, so those who harmed you would hold your divinity. All Abaddon would need to do was search their memories and find you, but if they were dead, he couldn’t.”

“So not some sort of love lust or anything.” I chuckled nervously.

“No. But I do love you, Ezra Acker. You were eighteen, you were running late for work and stumbled over an open drain. Inside you found a litter of kittens, drowning and hungry. You scooped them up, spent the last of your money and got themfood and things to clean them. When they were fine you dropped them off at a shelter and lost your job for that.”

I could feel how wide my eyes were. I remembered that day. I knew I’d get fired from the bowling alley, but it was fine, it was a third job I was already having trouble keeping.

“And that’s when you fell in love with me?”

“I’d never felt such a feeling as I did that moment. All I ever did was what I was ordered to do. I looked at you as a job. Until that night. And every day after, I watched you give more to this world than this world gave to you.”

He leaned over the counter and cupped my cheek in his warm palm.

“I can see the Great Divine in your eyes.”

“My silent knight.” I laughed.

“Is that what you call me?”

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