Read Online Victory of Coins (The Judas Chronicles, #7) by Aiden James - Free Book Online Page A

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    I half-expected Him to force a wry smile and say something surreal along the lines of “Gotcha!” But it didn’t happen, thankfully. What did happen, though, was He turned His attention from me to a familiar face in the crowd. The real ‘me’ back then.
    I remembered from my last visit to this place that I discovered my mortal body of two thousand years ago carried an infirmity that caused me to walk with a limp. When I was sentenced to an immortal existence, I was completely healed and allowed to be the very best ‘Judas’ possible, as far as my inherited genes would allow. Fortunately, that meant favoring my mother, who was quite beautiful; instead of my father, who was an average looking man prone to deep frown lines on account of his innate callousness.
    Yet, un fortunately, that seemingly desirable status had turned into a wretched existence as the centuries wore on, and the thrill of surviving a ‘death’ by being reincarnated again and again in the prime of adulthood had grown tiresome at best....
    Most of you are familiar with what I’m talking about by now, so I won’t rehash the details of my immortality any further than what I’ve mentioned here. My point to all of this is that the infirm version of me wasn’t someone to be proud of—especially when Jesus’ sorrowful but forgiving gaze met my partially hidden, stone face dressed in a black sari. I had thought of myself for centuries as a man who had always felt remorse for my horrible deed against God Almighty. However, as the Roman officer watching my reaction to Jesus’ telling ‘me’ that He forgave what I had done—while wracked in incredibly horrific pain, mind you—well it broke my heart... as the Roman. But I saw nothing in my ‘real’ countenance that hinted at remorse. Like the other Roman soldiers watching the crowd with contempt, the chicken-shit version of myself returned the Lord’s offer of forgiveness with an emotionless stare, as if Jesus was in fact a heinous criminal worth punishing by death.
    I couldn’t fight off the urge to cry, and began to weep. I wanted to wade through the throng of hate to reach the old me and see if I could talk some sense into that unenlightened, waste of a human being. But when I took a step forward, the guard assigned to protect my Roman ass from harm stepped into my path. The guard’s face began to change, morphing into someone quite familiar. For a moment, I hoped it would it be my beloved son, Alistair, but then recognized a pair of steel blue eyes....
    “Time’s up, Willie Boy!”
    Viktor Kaslow peered at me from inside the guard’s armor. Although he had changed somewhat from our last face-to-face encounter nearly two years ago, it was definitely Kaslow. Same cold features, but no longer cartoonish.... If not for the deep scars along his cheeks, neck and forehead that he received from the demons he now ruled, Kaslow looked much like he did before being turned into an immortal—during our battle inside the Garden of Eden that had since been buried deep within a cavern in the Alborz Mountains.
    “Let’s see how you do on the pop quiz, Judas, Emmanuel, William, or whoever the hell you are!” he sneered. “We’ll know that answer very soon.”
    He laughed meanly, and as he did, the world around me began to blur. Unprepared, I was pulled out of that terrible place at lightning speed, and didn’t slow down until I returned to the porch chair I had sat in while holding the coin....
    I still held the damned thing tightly in my left hand, and the edges of my fingers were white from lack of blood flow. For a moment, I thought someone had turned on all the porch lights. But once my eyes adjusted, I saw it was daylight. The experience felt like it had taken an hour at most, but had likely lasted seven to eight hours instead.
    “There you are!” said Amy, as if I had purposely been hiding from everyone.
    She and Jeremy were already showered and dressed to meet the day, and I could hear