Read Online Green: The Beginning and the End by Ted Dekker - Free Book Online

in the laboratory, vials of blood used for endless tests.
    Billy had gone rigid. “You know about the blood?”
    “You mentioned it in my mother’s office, remember?”
    His eyes searched hers. “So that’s all you know.”
    He’d expected more, had searched her mind already and found nothing. But she wasn’t finished.
    “I have some secrets that not even you can extract, at least not without skills far more seductive than reading a mind. Tell me about this blood.”
    He slowly sat. Crossed one leg over the other. Janae stood before him, arms folded, challenging.
    “You’ve heard of the Books of History?” he asked, then answered himself after a glance in her eyes. “No, you haven’t. They are a set of books that recorded the truth of all happenings, exactly as they happened. Pure history. The books of life, you might call them. But they aren’t ordinary books. Whatever is written in blank Books of History will actually happen. The wills of humans can be bent by them, but not forced. Inanimate objects, on the other hand, can be manipulated at will. You could write, ‘This room is red,’ in one of those books, and the room would instantly become red.”
    “Now you’re—”
    “Patronizing me,” he finished for her. “Yet it’s true. How else do you think I can read your mind?”
    What was he saying? Reading minds was one thing, turning a room red with a few words written in a book was another thing.
    “Another thing, yes, but true. Sit.” Then, “Please, just sit down and let me explain myself to you.”
    She eased herself into the chair but didn’t bother relaxing her arms.
    “From what I’ve been able to piece together, the blank books came from another time, presumably two thousand years in our future. They were brought here by Thomas Hunter and they turned up many years later in a monastery, where I found them and wrote in them. Long story, a kind of showdown that would take a few days to explain. Regardless, one of the things I wrote was that I would have special powers. Twelve years later they began to manifest themselves. So now I can read your mind. It’s that simple.”
    She unfolded her arms and set her hands in her lap. There was a finality to his voice that robbed her of any objection. “You’re serious,” she managed.
    “Dead.”
    “And you want to know about the blood.”
    “It was said that Thomas Hunter’s blood allowed him to . . . travel, shift, whatever you want to call it, between here and there. Anyone whose blood came in contact with Thomas’s blood could make the shift as well, at least in their dreams. And I do believe that both Kara Hunter and your mother know this as fact. I think they’ve both done it.”
    “With the blood?” Janae’s heart started to beat more deliberately. “They . . . you’re saying they used this blood to cross into another reality?”
    He eyed her. She was betraying her deep attraction to his suggestions, but she couldn’t hide from him, could she? So she didn’t try.
    “You’re saying that’s possible?”
    “I think it’s been done. I know they kept a vial of his blood for just this reason.” He stood and walked in a small circle, fingers scratching his cheek. “You have to know, these Books of History are my history. I’m who I am because of them. My life is ruined because—”
    “Where are these books?”
    He looked at her, apparently put off at having been interrupted.
    “You’re sure the blood is still around, that it exists?” she asked. “I mean, what if they did destroy it like they claim? My mother said she sent it to our lab in Indonesia, where it was incinerated. The lab doesn’t even exist today.”
    “Slow down. Take a deep breath. Do you think I would’ve come halfway across the world if I wasn’t sure?”
    Janae stood, unable to hide the desire to know what he knew, to strip this knowledge from his history and to own it. Why? But even as the thoughts whispered through her mind, she was aware that he was