The Nightwalkers Saga: Books 1 - 7

by Candace Wondrak

  “Oh.” My eyes fell to the black symbol. I didn’t really want to explain the vision. I didn’t want to explain the vision, or what I saw in the other world. A trembling hand passed the book to Raphael. “What is that?” I asked as he eyeballed the detailed emblem.

  “This,” his fingers traced the page, “is the eternal symbol. It was created by the first Council almost seven hundred years ago. I am surprised that you have not heard of it before.”

  “We never learned much about the first Council.”

  He rested his back on the wall and sighed explosively. Raphael took his time to answer. “Koath and Michael never told you any stories?”

  Way to answer a question with another question. I said, “No. Being a Purifier and growing up knowing about Demons, I didn’t need bedtime stories.”

  “Well, seeing as how you are not doing any work anyways, I suppose I will tell you one.” His bright green eyes met my gaze. “If you want me to, that is,” Raphael added quickly.

  “Yes,” I exclaimed, hoping that this story would be very long and take up the remainder of my time here, because I was tired of cleaning old books. And I had to get my mind off the possibility about the identity of the man in my vision.

  “Legend has it that the first Council had trouble dealing with greater Demons, such as Daywalkers, so their people roamed the earth, searching for someone who was perfectly in tune with nature. Demons were not natural, so they knew that finding someone who could channel nature freely would be the key.”

  I slid the rags and books to the side, giving myself some more room to spread my legs out. I had a feeling this story was going to be long.

  “It took a few years, but eventually the agents came across Helio, the first Witch. They were not sure how Helio’s powers came to be, but they knew that they needed him.”

  “The first Witch was a guy?” The question sounded stupid. But I always thought that Witches were girls, not guys.

  Raphael smiled warmly at my confusion. “Yes. Helio was a man. He had a wife and two children, with another on the way. He told the agents he wouldn’t leave his family, so the Council had them moved. Helio and his family went from a poor, dirty hovel to the Council’s own vast building.”

  “What does Helio have to do with the eternal symbol?” I cut in, curiosity once again getting the best of me, like it always did.

  He chuckled, saying, “I will get there sooner if you do not interrupt me. Helio lived there for many years, serving the Council as a type of Purifier. Eventually, he invented the eternal symbol. It was the crux of nature itself, and when he applied it on a Demon, using such methods as paint or blood, nature pulled it back, essentially collapsing the Demon from the inside out.”

  The vision I had, the man in black did the exact same thing to the huge, wrestler-like Daywalker, only…he didn’t use any paint or blood. In fact, he’d purified that Daywalker almost the exact same way as Raphael purified Rain in the other world.

  “However, Helio would not travel to where the Demon was located. The Council had to send its own agents out to capture and bring the Demon to its headquarters; that is where Helio would use the eternal symbol to destroy the Demon for good. This went on for some years before the Council realized that while Helio helped them greatly, they were still losing too many of their own men. Capturing greater Demons was hard for mere humans.”

  “What did they do?” I spoke slowly.

  “Even though Helio was dying, they commissioned him to construct the ultimate weapon. And that he did. He spent months creating something that was beyond life and death, and yet wasn’t a Demon. Using his last bits of life, Helio put his magic into the eternal symbol that decorated the being’s back and chest. Helio died giving life to something that should never have been allowed to exist. An abomination of nature, neither man nor Demon.”

  This didn’t bode well. I had a bad feeling.

  Raphael inhaled a large breath and smiled at me before carrying on, “The Council now had a new weapon. One that could travel across the earth and purify any Demons it came in contact with. A man that never ate, never slept, never aged. He was the perfect weapon, with the ancient magic sown into his body. He followed orders like only a good soldier would. A few members of the Council doubted his humanity, for he wasn’t born like the rest of us.”

  I didn’t like this story. Not one bit. “What did they do to him?”

  “Nothing,” he told me hastily, “the Council did nothing. They knew they needed this man to take back the earth from the Demons that plagued it. Members were against it openly, saying that the man did not feel and that meant he was akin to the Demons he slayed, but the oldest and wisest Councilmember knew the truth. The man felt just like any other. With his help, the majority of greater Demons were purified. Joseph, on his death bed, deemed him the first Purifier.”

  “So…” I scratched my chin and thought of the right words to say. “The first Purifier wasn’t even human.”

  “Correct.”

  “And that’s where we come from?”

  Raphael seemed to think on this. “Times did change, people gained and lost authority, and with the bulk of Demons gone, the Council needed no other like the first. They did, however, begin to train a new order of soldiers. Purifiers. Human ones. That is where you came from. You are,” he paused, “human, but you are an arm of the Council and protect society from things it couldn’t even imagine. Divinely blessed by God.”

  I fidgeted with my fingers. Koath never told me any of this. Neither did Michael. Of course, it wasn’t as if I ever asked.

  “Come.” Raphael stood and came by me, holding down a hand. “You have done good enough for today. Tomorrow, on the other hand, you will get much more done.”

  Begrudgingly I grabbed his hand. As he yanked me up and I got to my feet, I thought of another question. One that I had a nagging feeling I already knew the answer to. “What happened to the first Purifier?”

  Raphael was silent as we walked to the front doors of the church. He appeared to have a thoughtful expression, so I didn’t pester him further, hoping that he’d soon break the silence. And that he did.

  “Last I read of it,” he began, “the man went to France sometime during the fifteenth century. He was…never heard from again after that.”

  “So we don’t know what happened to him?” I watched him shake his head. “Do you know what his name was?” Of course, I had an inkling, but I wasn’t about to tell him that I knew.

  Raphael seemed to take no notice of my questions, for the only thing he did was pull open a door. The blackness of the night was clear…well, it would have been, if Koath wasn’t standing in front of us with a sappy smile on his face.

  “Did you manage to get the truth out of her?” Koath asked him. He dug his hands in his pockets, making me realize that he wore jeans. Koath was wearing jeans. Did the fiery place downstairs freeze over while I wasn’t looking? I wanted to burn my eyes at the sight.

  I immediately turned my head to Raphael, waiting for his answer, and to stop staring at Koath’s weird jeans.

  “No, of course not,” Raphael feigned a laugh. “She is quite stubborn.”

  Koath laughed jovially in response. “That she is.”

  I took an accusatory step towards him. “Koath, what are you doing here?” It was as if he didn’t think I was capable of walking home alone in the dark all by myself. I was a Purifier, not a baby. I could kick and punch my way out of nearly any situation.

  “I’m here to make sure you get home safely with no sidetracking, and I’ll be doing it as long as your punishment lasts,” Koath kindly informed me things I already knew.

  My punishment was going to last as long as I kept lying to Raphael about where I found the Sorcerer’s staff. It was such a shame that I was never going to fess up about it, at least, not until Raphael told me the whole truth. What a hypocrite.

  “Good. With everything that has happened…” Raphael side glanced at me. I took in the sight of his noble portra
it. He had very nice cheekbones, and a handsome face to match it. “She definitely should not be walking home alone at this time of night.”

  Crossing my arms, I was beyond irritated as I said, “Then why keep me here so late?”

  “Why lie to me?” Raphael countered without missing a beat.

  Why lie to me? “I’m exhausted,” I decided to change the subject, “so I’ll see you tomorrow, buddy.” I put a sarcastic emphasis on the word buddy. Raphael was not and would never be my buddy.

  His green eyes shone brighter than they should have in the darkness as he leaned on the open door and crossed his own arms. “Looking forward to it, pal.” He said the word pal the exact same way I said buddy.

  Wow. At this rate, maybe, just maybe, we would become buddies and pals after all.

  Not likely though, if he kept lying to me.

  Chapter Nine – Kass

  The darkness of the night sky never got to me, even as we started to make our way to the house through the cemetery. It might have been creepy and eerily silent, but it was a comfortable silence. Crickets chirped so loudly it sounded like they rested on my shoulders and the moon lit up the gravestones, making the names of the deceased stand out like sore thumbs.

  Koath was quiet beside me for the longest time. His hands were glued inside his pockets and he looked like he wanted to say something. Sadly, he wouldn’t budge, so I had to be the one to spark up a conversation unless I wanted this whole walk to be quiet.

  I missed what Koath and I had before he left for England.

  “So,” I began, after taking a huge breath to ready myself, “while I was cleaning Raphael’s books, he told me a story.” I turned my head slightly, wondering if I should continue going where I wanted this to go.

  “Did he?”

  “Yeah. He told me about the first Council and the first Purifier.”

  Koath stopped in his tracks. Noticing he was frozen behind me, I stopped and walked to him. From what I could see, his jaw was set and his eyes looked sad. Beyond that, his expression was unreadable.

  “Koath,” I implored the man I looked up to most, “I did ask about it once or twice. Why didn’t you ever tell me about him?”

  He tore his hands out of his jeans, saying, “Kass, I never told you about him because, legally to the Council, he never existed.”

  I nearly fell back onto a gravestone. “What?”

  “I have checked the archives myself, searching for any details remaining about the first Purifier. There was none. Not one shred of evidence to prove he was real. That means either the Council destroyed anything that mentioned him or he never existed to begin with. I know firsthand that the Council is by the books,” Koath paused as his weary eyes fell to the grass, “they would never touch those documents if they existed.”

  That didn’t make sense.

  “Do you think Raphael made it all up, then?” I knew he didn’t. Not after what I saw in the other world.

  Koath sighed and rubbed his stubble. It was something he always did when he was deep in thought. “I…am not sure. Maybe what he told you was the truth. Maybe he managed to find a book that described the first Purifier. Who knows? Time does tend to lose the truth.”

  As he kept talking, my eyes scanned the neighboring area. It was a habit that I picked up from Koath himself. All was quiet. There was no wind, no tiny breeze. The crickets weren’t chirping. There wasn’t a single sound anywhere in the cemetery.

  In my profession and with my experience, that wasn’t good.

  Something caught the corner of my eye. Something…white.

  Sharply turning my head, I saw something very odd at the boundary of the cemetery and the forest. The beast was far enough away that I couldn’t make out anything beside the fact that it was a huge, white wolf with dead, black eyes.

  Koath still rambled. He had no clue there was a massive wolf less than fifty feet away.

  So that was the wolf this town’s been making a big deal of. I imagined it as more of a reverse-jointed, five-inch claws and teeth, scraggly wolf and not a normal, full-coated, hundred-percent white wolf that looked like it was just brushed for three hours.

  I bet there wasn’t a single knot in its fur. I wondered how soft it is. Maybe, if I walked up to it really, really slowly, it wouldn’t be afraid and run away or get angry and attack me, and I’d be able to pet it.

  Yeah. All my training, and the first thing on my mind is: ooh, look! A puppy!

  I was less than half a second away from opening my mouth and telling Koath about the wolf when it turned its flawless body and swiftly disappeared into the woods.

  Just like that. Just. Like. That. It was gone.

  A small wave of depression hit me. I wanted to see it again and show it to Koath. Maybe he’d know what it was. The white wolf was too perfect to be just a wolf. It had to be something more.

  Part of me wished that it wasn’t something more, because if it was, then I’d most likely have to deal with it. And that wolf was too pretty to purify. Plus, it ran away. It didn’t attack. It couldn’t be that vicious.

  My attention was now undivided on Koath. Seeing I was now paying attention to him, he commenced our interrupted walk to my house. His footsteps were slow, meaning there was something else he wanted to talk about.

  What else could there be to…oh, no. The whole Gabriel slept in my bed thing.

  “Where were you today, after school?”

  His question caught me off guard. Was this his way of leading up to the Gabriel discussion? I shook the mental image of my bleeding finger out of my mind, replying, “I was with Claire. My, uh, locker kind of attacked me, so she took me to her house to get my finger stitched up.” I held up the finger to his face, letting him see that I was indeed telling the truth. “She acted like it was life or death. I couldn’t say no.”

  Koath studied it, examining it from all different reference points. “You managed to hurt yourself this bad on a school locker?” Even with the evidence, he was doubtful of my story. And I didn’t blame him. It was unbelievable.

  “Yeah,” I said matter-of-factly, “as the principal, you should think about getting some kid-friendly ones.”

  Laughing, he let my hand go. “And as the principal, I’ll be sure to put that right on top of my to-do list.”

  “Good,” I laughed along with him.

  “While you were gone, Gabriel and I had a very…”

  My laughter stopped. This was it. The air was about to be cleared. The elephant in the room was going to get discussed. The eight-hundred-pound gorilla was going to get talked about right now.

  “…lively talk.”

  Even though my mind knew we needed to have a discussion about this, I couldn’t force myself to say anything besides a small “Yeah?”

  “Yes.” He dug his hands in his pockets once more. For all his years and years of wisdom and maturity, Koath couldn’t have talks like this freely. People who didn’t know him like I did might think it’s a little awkward…and that’s because it was. Just not to him. It’s only awkward to the person who was on the other side of the chitchat.

  “It started out with me asking him why you both slept in the same bed, but it quickly,” Koath thought, “changed. Gabriel managed to turn the tables on me.”

  I’d never seen a grown man look so indifferent when admitting that he was bested by a boy who was less than half his age. This was not the direction I thought this conversation was going to go.

  “And he,” Koath swallowed and glimpsed at me, saying, “made some good points.”

  An angry sigh left my mouth. What did Gabriel say to Koath to make him act like this? Not once in all my life had he acted so regretful.

  He placed a wrinkled hand on my shoulder, stopping us both in our tracks. Koath’s wise eyes bore into me, letting me know that he was conflicted about something deep down. But what was it? “You don’t hate me for leaving you, do you?”

  “What?” I yelled, my voice tearing through the stillness of the night. I shru
gged his hand off my shoulder, saying, “No, of course not. Did Gabriel say I did? I’m going to kill him.”

  “He didn’t say that exactly,” he clarified. “But it was a direct Council order. I couldn’t disobey. For what it’s worth now, I’m sorry I left you when you needed me most.”

  “Koath,” I interrupted, trying to snap some sense back into him. Which was strange, because usually, he was the one filled with the most sense. “I understand. And I don’t hate you for it. Believe it or not, I do know that there are more important things in the world than me,” I attempted to bring some humor in.

  “Not to me,” his rough voice said lightly, “and not to any of us. We’re all family, Kass. We’re all we’ve got. There’s nothing that can change that. I should have come back, at least until I knew you were going to be okay.”

  “It’s fine,” I reassured him, though I knew shortly that it was a pointless endeavor. I didn’t particularly want to relive that part of my life anyway.

  “No, it’s not fine,” he easily argued with me, “I should have pulled some strings. I should have been at your side while you were in a coma.”

  I silently gasped at Koath, who seemed to be on the verge of tears. What was Gabriel’s problem? I certainly needed to have a few words with him about this.

  “Michael and Gabriel took great care of me,” I added, “so it’s not like I was alone. And the Council doesn’t order things just because. I’m sure they had a very important reason for you to come back.”

  “But they knew I had you to take care of. The Council knew I had other responsibilities.” Koath’s shoulders rose and fell with an irritated breath. “And yet they still made me leave you behind. The only thing that turned out well was that Michael agreed to take you in. And that, in itself, was surprising because he already had his hands more than full with Gabriel.” He was practically shouting, revealing that he was deeply troubled by what we discussed.

  “It all worked out, though, right? I mean, you’re here now, so it’s all good.”