Read Eve: A Novel for Free Online Page B

swelled with tears. She did not know why and felt embarrassed. “Why is He calling the baby boy they ?” she asked, swiping at her cheeks.
    “Watch,” Eve said gently. “In time you will see.”
    Adonai spoke, “Here is My invitation for you: keep your rightful place, remain humbled, bow your head and heart, and let your way be purified by the fires of love and fellowship and service.”
    “Of course, I bow.” The Cherub hesitated, still uncertain. “To You?”
    “No, not only to Me,” the God-Man said. “But to this little one. They are your kings, they have dominion, and it is for them you give your service and keep your proper place. Your invitation is to serve them wholly and completely.”
    “With joy, I bow, and vow to serve the Man as I serve You!” declared the celestial being. In spinning light the Anointed Cherub bowed, embraced the child, and kissed Eternal Man upon His cheek.
    God now declared, “This is very good! Behold the child! Creation’s womb is fully blessed. Let everything, each in its way with voice or breath, now celebrate this coming. The whole of creation is the great Good! With this birth, Day Six is crowned and complete. We rest from all Our labor.”
    •  •  •
    L ILLY WOKE WITH TEARS flowing down her cheeks and into her ears. Here in the Refuge, she couldn’t wipe them away.
    Had she just witnessed the birth of Adam? How was that possible? The newborn baby had stirred up profound longings: tobelong, to be held by someone who loved her without reason. It was safer to shut down such disorienting feelings. And Adonai? Why had her first inclination been to run to Him? It was more than that: she wanted to run into Him, to be known by Him. Was He God? Was He Man?
    The swirl of thoughts was like a sucking whirlpool, dragging her down into darkness. She concentrated on breathing in and out, in and out, in and out.
    John approached with a cloth soft as kitten fur and dabbed her tears away. “When you’re stronger, up and about, I’ll take you to the chamber where I’ve stored the things that washed ashore with you. It may help.”
    “What things?” she croaked.
    “Odds and ends, the stuff of your time and space and place. Not a single good book, though. Doesn’t anyone from your world read anymore?”
    “I don’t remember being much of a reader,” she rasped, and he gave her something warm to drink to ease the rough edges in her throat.
    “Sad,” he said. “The right book, like the right song or the right love, can change the entire cosmos, for the right person, of course. And then it spills out from there.”
    “Why can’t I remember?”
    John reappeared between her and the marble ceiling. “Trauma and tragedy can cause a form of amnesia, but those memories usually return over time. When the council first decided you should be treated here at the Refuge, we had a few frightening challenges. You kept having seizures that threatened to undo everything wewere trying to accomplish, so we employed a series of memory inhibitors.”
    “What?”
    “Nothing permanent. We have been easing you off them over the last few days, just a little at a time. You may experience flashbacks. It means you’re recovering blocked memories. Not losing your mind.”
    “Yippee,” she muttered.
    That made him laugh and returned him to a ramble about children’s books and how they create important building blocks for civilization. Something he said—a remark about a book—set her mind spinning without warning.
    An onslaught of unanticipated images from her childhood dropped on her, smothering her thoughts like water on a fire.
    She was a little girl. A woman was reading to her a story about a prince and snake and fox and rose, while Lilly pirouetted in a tattered dress to a tune inside her head. She spun until the shadows grew around her and then, panicking, she ran.
    The assault of images was swift and brutal: terrified, she found safety under musty clothing in a dark closet. Peering