Two timelines. Two identities.
The Jericho Series continues — Christian dystopian thriller with deeper stakes and harder choices.
This is eBook (Kindle/ePub) format.
A Thrilling Christian Dystopian Adventure
Some battles can only be won from within.
When his parents collapse without warning, seventeen-year-old Gabriel McCloud is left with two things — a hospital room full of impossible questions, and a pair of glasses.
Through those lenses, the world bends. Gabriel wakes as Gael, a security guard inside the gleaming city of Empyrean. The Tower is gone. The tyrant who built it defeated long ago. The known world is at peace.
Or is it…?
Behind Empyrean's marble walls, something old and patient is moving. Citizens drift through perfect comfort, their wristbands answering every question they no longer think to ask. A leader who has lived far too long fears what's coming. And out in the desert, a journalist is conducting an interview that should never have been possible — with Pinnacle himself.
To free his parents, Gabriel must cross what his family has crossed before. To free more than his parents, he must learn what willpower alone could never teach him — that the deepest darkness is not defeated by the strength of the one who fights it, but surrendered to the One who already has.
Perfect for fans of Ted Dekker's Circle Series, Frank Peretti's This Present Darkness, C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, and Andrew Peterson's Wingfeather Saga, Jericho's Legacy brings part 3 of the Jericho Series — two timelines, one family, and a final battle that can only be won from within.
Strong language and intense action sequences, but never any profanity or sexual content.
Warning: Your understanding of sacrifice may be permanently changed.
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Enjoy a sample of Jericho's Legacy
Chapter 1
Gabriel McCloud pressed his back against the granite kitchen counter, the cool stone a stark contrast to the heat building in his chest. The afternoon sun streamed through the bay window, illuminating the dust motes that danced above the hardwood floors his mother had insisted on when they’d moved into this house when Gabriel was a toddler. Everything about their home screamed stability—the crown molding, the stainless steel appliances, the family photos arranged just so on the mantle in the adjoining living room. A perfect suburban sanctuary, and he was poisoning it with his lies.
His parents stood before him like judges at a tribunal, and Gabriel felt seventeen years old in the worst possible way—caught between childhood and adulthood, too young to be taken seriously but old enough to face real consequences. His father, Darren, leaned against the kitchen island, arms crossed, wearing the patient expression that meant he was trying very hard not to lose his temper. His mother Kelly occupied her favorite purple chair by the window, the one she’d insisted stay within view near the orange sofa that added a carefully coordinated color pop to the crisp black and white interior design.
“So let me get this straight,” Darren said, his voice carrying that dangerous tone that preceded most questions leading to Gabriel’s groundings. He ran a hand through his shaggy brown hair that sparkled with grays. He turned his head and Gabriel caught sight of the thin scar on the back of his father’s head—a pale, raised line that Gabriel never noticed before. He felt even more disconnected from his parents not remembering such a noticeable scar as they prepared their cross examination.
“Tyler’s parents are going to be there the whole time, eh?” Darren asked.
Gabriel’s inner dialogue raced and his stomach performed an elaborate gymnastics routine.
He knows.
No he doesn’t know.
He’s leading me.
Stick to the story.
The kitchen suddenly felt smaller, the walls pressing in as his carefully constructed story went under the microscope. He forced himself to nod with what he hoped looked like earnest sincerity.
“Yeah.” Lie.
The word tasted like ash in his mouth. Tyler’s parents were in Cabo. Well, at least his dad was with someone Tyler didn’t say, but he’d let slip to Gabriel that his mom was visiting her sister in Tennessee. The planned trip for their twentieth anniversary, that led to an escalated argument they hadn’t yet recovered. Tyler announced the trip to their closest friends, which meant the entire junior class and most of the school knew there would be an open house party, an unsupervised free-for-all – exactly the kind of event Gabriel’s parents had spent years warning him against.
But Gabriel wanted to go so badly it physically hurt. Not because he particularly enjoyed parties—most of the time he felt awkward and out of place, watching other people have fun while he nursed a Coke in the corner. He didn’t even particularly like Coke. No, he wanted to go because Lisa Morrison had been texting him all week, and her eye contact before and after class seemed to grow more consistent each day. Or maybe that was because Gabriel was looking at her more everyday. Lisa Morrison, with her perfect blonde hair and her way of biting her lower lip when she concentrated in chemistry class. Lisa Morrison, the perfect ten who was also in all the Honors classes who had somehow noticed Gabriel existed and seemed interested in spending time with him.
His mother, Kelly, shifted in the purple chair, the old springs creaking in a way that usually comforted him. Today the sound felt ominous. Her auburn hair caught the afternoon light streaming through the bay window, highlighting the natural waves that she’d passed down to Gabriel along with her auburn eyes and her unfortunate tendency to never let a mystery go unsolved.
“And there won’t be any drinking?” Kelly pressed, her voice carrying that maternal radar that seemed to detect lies like a shark detected a drop of blood.
This was the moment. The crucial junction where Gabriel could come clean, admit that yes, there would definitely be drinking, that Tyler’s older brother had already promised to use his fake ID at the store on the edge of town that never questioned cheap fakes. A keg had been mentioned more than once already. He could confess that he planned to drink—not because he enjoyed it, but because it might give him the courage to actually talk to Lisa without stuttering. He could acknowledge that the whole evening was designed around poor decisions and teenage stupidity.
But being a seventeen-year-old who makes poor decisions driven by the stupidity of adolescence, he didn’t think twice.
Instead, he doubled down on the deception.
“Mom, come on. Tyler’s not like that.” Tyler was exactly like that. The lie expanded in his chest like a balloon, pushing against his ribs until it hurt to breathe. “Besides, you know me. I don’t like to drink.”
That part was technically true. Gabriel had tried beer exactly once, at his cousin’s graduation party, and decided it tasted like someone had dissolved pennies in dish water. But his parents didn’t need to know about the marijuana or gummies that would definitely be circulating, or about texting Lisa and dancing around the subject of breaking away to a private room. They also didn’t need to know that Gabriel had spent chunks of time every night for the past week asking AI about how to be cool, how to flirt, how to be the kind of person a girl like Lisa Morrison might actually want to spend time with. He’d never had a girlfriend before, only a ‘will you hold my hand on the bus and then too scared to ever have a conversation again’ sort of relationship in middle school. How did he balance his crazy eagerness while still being cool?
“I just want to know you’re being smart. What would you be concerned about if you were in our shoes?” Kelly said, but as the words left her mouth, something impossible happened.
Her face flickered.
The literal outline and features of her face. The crows feet from a lifetime of laughing with her husband Darren, the slight elevens in between her eyebrows that she was fighting off with periodic botox injections, and highlighted auburn hair – they all changed for a brief instant. It was like watching a television with bad reception, the image dissolving for a fraction of a second, lines not matching up, before snapping back into focus. But in that brief moment, Gabriel saw someone else entirely—a younger woman with straight black hair instead of auburn waves, younger than his mother by at least twenty years, but she held the same auburn eyes that matched her natural hair color.
Gabriel blinked hard, his heart hammering against his ribs and forgetting the conversation. The afternoon sun continued streaming through the window. The hardwood floors still gleamed. The family photos on the mantle still showed their carefully curated life—vacation shots from Disney World, Gabriel’s middle school graduation, last Christmas morning with everyone in matching flannel pajamas that Kelly had insisted on buying. Gabriel hated them but his dad’s goofy farmer jokes were so bad that they made the entire day, and pajamas, so good.
Everything else looked normal. Everything except the growing certainty that something was terribly, impossibly wrong. He looked to his dad to see if he’d noticed, but that didn’t help.
“Gabriel?” His father’s voice sounded strange, like it was coming from a different person. It was similar, but not the same. “You hearing us?”
Gabriel forced himself to look harder, and the bottom dropped out of his world.
His father’s face flickered too. One moment he appeared normal—mid-forties, the comfortable softness that came with suburban life, the slight wrinkles around his eyes from years of squinting at computer screens in his home office and never wearing sunglasses. The next moment he looked twenty-five, lean and hard-muscled, wearing clothes Gabriel had never seen before—light blue pants and a white shirt, like scrubs from off-duty medical personnel. His brown hair that sparkled throughout with gray turned into short black, with no gray.
Then he flickered back to older, much older, with deep lines etched into his face and gray streaking his temples. Then young again, but different young, like he’d lived a dozen different lives and Gabriel was seeing them all at once.
“What...” Gabriel’s voice cracked like it hadn’t done since eighth grade. “What’s happening?”
“Gabe… You okay?” his father asked. He turned to look at Kelly and Gabriel saw the line of thick scar across the back of his father’s head, surrounded by black hair. That scar had never been there before. Or had it? Gabriel questioned reality before him. The line disappeared as the hair shifted back to brown with gray – back to “normal”.
The panic started as a flutter in his chest, then spread outward like spilled ink. His vision tunneled. His hands began to shake. This had to be a breakdown of some kind—stress from exams, being right for Lisa, from constantly lying to his parents, from the pressure of trying to be someone he wasn’t. People had psychotic episodes, right? They saw things that weren’t there, experienced hallucinations so vivid they seemed real. Well, now he was one of them.
But everything felt real, not a hallucination. The granite counter was still cool beneath his palms. He could smell his mother’s burning vanilla candle in the living room, could hear the neighbor’s dog barking three houses over. All his senses insisted that this was happening, that his parents were somehow becoming other people right in front of him.
“Are you lying to us?” The question came from the woman in the purple chair, but it wasn’t his mother’s voice anymore. This voice was younger, more urgent, threaded with pain.
Gabriel looked at her and his knees nearly buckled. The woman sitting where his mother should be was beautiful in a fierce, been-through-danger sort of way—maybe twenty-five years old, with straight black hair that framed his mother’s same eyes. She wore a white shirt Gabriel had never seen before, and her posture suggested someone accustomed to fighting, to running, to surviving things Gabriel couldn’t imagine.
“Because we need to know the truth, Gael,” she continued.
“What…” he whispered. When she said the other name, it resonated in Gabriel’s chest like a struck bell.
“Who’s Gael?” he said, but even as he thought, some part of him already knew the answer. She was talking to him, or at least some version of himself. The certainty was irrational and absolute, and it dawned on him – was he flickering as well? Was he changing into someone else too?
He needed a mirror, but the woman who wasn’t his mother stood up from the purple chair. She moved like someone in serious pain, one hand pressed to her side. When she lifted her hand to gesture toward him, Gabriel saw blood seeping through the white fabric—bright red, spreading like spilled wine.
“Mom?” The word escaped him as barely a breath. He wanted to run to her, to help somehow, but his feet felt rooted to the kitchen floor.
She stumbled and his father grabbed her.
“We need to get to the hospital,” the man who wasn’t quite his father said, his voice carrying the authority of someone used to making life-and-death decisions. This version of Darren looked harder, rougher, like he’d seen combat and was one of the few who survived it. “Kira’s hurt. She’s hurt bad, and we don’t have much time until they take more of her.”
Kira? Another name that resonated in Gabriel’s bones, like an ancient word that lived deep below the earth and was now being excavated.
Ancient... He thought. I’ve heard that name before.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” Gabriel said, hating how young his voice sounded, how scared. He needed to be stronger. He needed to be more like his dad, or at least like the man his dad appeared to be – steady, in control, a survivor who came out better after the perilous journey. The panic was building now, making it hard to think clearly. His perfect suburban kitchen felt like it was tilting, reality sliding sideways like a house built on sand. All he wanted to do was go to his friend’s party.
“It’ll be a choice,” his mother said in her normal voice, but her voice was weaker as the blood stain spread, now over a quarter of her shirt. “You have to choose, Gabriel.” Her voice changed again, now sounding twenty years younger. “Gael, it’s lies or reality. Don’t come find us. They want that.”
Her body slipped again and his father held her tight.
“It’s time to go, son,” he said. His eyes were still the same as they always were but his hair and other facial features altered back and forth like two radio stations crossing paths. One moment his brown and gray hair and smooth-shaven face, the next split second it was short black hair and black beard stubble.
His voice was harder. Gabriel wanted to help this altered half-dad version of the man in front of him.
“I’ll get the keys,” Gabriel said, but he still didn’t move. His mind locked onto the altering version of his parents.
His father carried her now. His mother’s cozy house slippers were now gone as her dirt-covered bare feet floated over the surface of the hardwood floors. Where did her feet get dirty?
“Gabriel, move,” Darren said with such conviction it finally shattered the invisible force that held Gabriel in place. But he only moved a few steps before the altered version of his father spoke again and his son refroze.
“You can’t touch her.”
“...” Gabriel opened his mouth but the question stayed in his throat like a scared dog hiding in the bed from a thunderstorm.
“Not her. Not me. Do NOT touch us. Do you understand?” His eyes locked on Gabriel.
“Why not–”
“We need to move. Now,” he said in a commanding voice. Gabriel’s posture snapped up straight. “She’s lost a lot of blood,” he said softly as he leaned in to examine her. Concern and heart break now mixing into his face.
“But, Dad–”
“Get the keys,” he said, picking her up. His mother went limp just as his dad scooped her up. When they touched, the flickered shot through Darren. His whole body rippled and turned into another, much younger man who wore similar clothes to the younger woman his mother turned into. A white shirt and blue pants with an elastic waistband.
The man that was his father, now carrying the woman who was his mother, stared at him. “Let’s go,” he said.