I needed a guide.
Father Miles Webber seemed to be the only one who had any answers.
It was too late to call Hollingsworth and tell him what I’d discovered. The news could wait until the morning.
Besides, I was so tired my eyes were crossing. I eyed the long couch in the office longingly.
There was a small throw blanket folded at the end of the couch, and I used it as a pillow.
Though I’d been awake close to twenty hours, I didn’t think I could slow my thoughts enough to fall asleep.
* * *
It came as a complete surprise to me when I woke up early the next morning with Hollingsworth standing over me, a coffee in either hand.
“Daylight’s wasting,” he said, handing me one of the cups. “We’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”
* * *
As we navigated our way out of the city in Vanderburgh’s SUV, I outlined my thoughts. When I finished, Hollingsworth fell silent for a minute.
Finally, he asked, “How long do you think your father was possessed?”
“Sometime before my mother died and after I was born.”
He glanced in my direction. “How do you know?”
“I remember him telling me he and my mother went skiing one winter when I was still a baby, leaving me with my grandparents for the week. He had an accident and broke his ankle. They had to come home early, and he took a month off work to recuperate. If he had the power to heal himself then, there wouldn’t be a story to tell.”
“Do you recall anything out of the ordinary that happened around that time?”
I shook my head. “Not me personally; I was a baby. If there was something unusual, no one mentioned anything to me.”
“You said you were with your grandparents.” He asked, “On your mother’s side?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“You remember I told you Father Webber warned us that we had to capture those who were possessed by Watchers, not kill them?”
Nodding, I said, “Or else the entity would jump to someone else. They can’t be exorcised back to heaven or hell.”
“Right.” He pointed his finger as if to punctuate his words. “And the Watcher will jump along bloodlines.”
I said, “My paternal grandfather died in a car accident a month after I was born.”
“The question is, how did Lawrence become possessed?” Hollingsworth asked.
“The stem cells.” I took a long, deep breath. “The host cells take on some of the properties of the DNA that is transferred.”
“And when he killed your father, he was the closest in proximity.”
I nodded. “His altered DNA was a closer genetic match to my father’s than mine.” I took a breath. “One thing, though: In all the stories you and Vanderburgh told me about the possessed—” My words came out slow and measured. “—they used the power to commit horrible acts.”
“Yeah?”
“So,” I asked, “why didn’t the power affect my father that way?”
“Didn’t it?”
I turned toward Hollingsworth sharply. “What?”
“Unauthorized experiments on humans aren’t exactly legal.” He glanced in my direction. “Or moral.”
“He was doing it with the intention of helping humanity.”
“Does that justify it? I don’t know. What I do know is that it was against the law, and if he were alive, he’d be prosecuted. After all, look at what happened as a result of what he did.”
I wanted to rise to my father’s defense. He was nothing like Lawrence, or the Casanova Killer, or the other criminals. Sure, he’d broken the law, and lied to Enoch and everyone else, but he wasn’t a raging psychopath.
Thinking back over my life with him, and how stoic and emotionless he’d been, I wondered if he kept a firm lid on his emotions in order to control the power in him. Perhaps, if he lost his temper, or let his base urges run free, the entity within him would become dominant. Was that what had happened to Lawrence and the others? They had weak personalities, and were prone to the criminal side of life before they’d been possessed.
In that light, in comparison, my father’s efforts to restrict the abilities within him were nothing short of heroic.
I had to admit, though, that others might not share my perspective.
To the detective, I said, “So what now?”
“Now things are real simple,” Hollingsworth said.
“How so?”
“We just have to do what Father Webber and I’ve been doing all along. Capture the Watcher and its host, Lawrence. Lock them up. Throw away the key.”
Chapter Twenty
In the middle of a sprawling, forested acreage, a high chain-link fence surrounded several buildings. There was a three-car garage, some smaller sheds, and a big red barn, all lined up on either side of a wide gravel driveway.
Across a long field, there was a large Quonset. Was that the facility where they kept the captured Watchers?
Hollingsworth pulled up to the main house, a two-story Victorian home at the end of the road. A covered veranda extended around three sides.
There were a number of other vehicles in the gravel space in front of the house.
Just as we stepped out of the SUV, a man dressed in a dark suit with a priest’s collar descended the half-dozen steps from the veranda and greeted us with a smile.
“Detective Hollingsworth,” he said. “Father Webber said you might show up sometime. He’s in a meeting at the moment, but it should be over soon. You can wait for him in his drawing room.”
The priest turned to me. “You must be Kyle Chase.” He glanced at Hollingsworth.
Instead of explaining my presence, the detective said, “Thank you, Father Martin. It’s been a long drive. You mind if we clean up a bit?”
“Of course. I trust you know the way.” He led us up the stairs and motioned for us to enter the house. As Hollingsworth headed off to the washroom, the priest pointed down the opposite hall. “It might be a few more minutes. If you go to the kitchen, I’m certain our cook can make you breakfast.”
“Thank you,” I said, and though I wasn’t all that hungry, I was a little thirsty, and decided a glass of water would go a long way.
I would have been content with tap water, but the short man who was clearly in command of the kitchen didn’t want me lingering. After finding out what I wanted, he grabbed a bottle of water from a large stainless steel fridge and handed it to me. I tried to say thanks, but he practically pushed me back out of the kitchen. The moment I was gone, he completely dismissed my existence and went back to ordering the two helpers around.
Taking a sip of the water, I casually wandered back down the hall to the main foyer, admiring some of the paintings on the walls and noting the antique furniture placed strategically around the house. It was obviously there for show. Andrea, who often went antiquing on weekends, would probably love to spend a day here.
As I bent closer to inspect the woodwork on a wall mantle, I heard raised voices coming from the other end of the house. Wondering if it was Hollingsworth, I followed the noise. I ended up in what I surmised was the drawing room outside Father Webber’s office.
I was about to open the heavy oak door to see if Hollingsworth was indeed in there having it out with Father Webber, when the detective’s distinctively raspy voice sounded behind me, making me jump.
“Sounds like someone’s upset,” he said, curling the corner of his lip.
Before I had a chance to reply, the door swung open, and a middle-aged priest, balding with short, dark silver hair on the sides and back of his head, stepped out. Despite his age, he looked spry and athletic. His cheeks and neck were flushed, though I couldn’t tell if it was anger or extreme embarrassment.
He barely gave us a glance as he stormed past us and out of the drawing room to the hall.
“Detective Hollingsworth, please come in.” Father Webber, standing behind his desk at the other end of his office, gestured to two cushion
ed seats. “I see you’ve brought Mr. Chase with you.”
Hollingsworth strode toward the desk but didn’t take the offered seat. “I need to know what’s going on. I’m tired of being kept in the dark.”
Father Webber gave him a long look in consideration, then his face relaxed. “Of course. Please,” he said, motioning to the chairs again. “I would be more than happy to tell you everything you want to know. But first, perhaps you could start. Obviously, something happened to prompt this visit.”
“Vanderburgh is dead,” Hollingsworth said flat out after all three of us sat down. “There’s something more going on here than you’ve told me.”
“I’m very sorry about your partner,” Father Webber said, “but I’m not certain what it is you think I’ve been keeping from you.”
“When I signed up, you told me you wanted me to help you capture these Watchers.”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
Hollingsworth said, “You led me to believe these entities were nothing more than rogue animals needing to be hunted down.”
“I don’t think I used those words, but yes, they can be thought of as predators. They will corrupt humankind, corrode our society, and may, eventually, bring the world to the brink of destruction.”
“They’re organizing,” Hollingsworth said.
Though he held his face still, Father Webber’s eyes narrowed just a fraction. “What makes you say that?”
“Kyle was present when two other Watchers tried to recruit Lawrence.”
“Two other…!” Father Webber put his elbows on the desk and folded his hands at his chin. He growled. “Tell me everything.”
Hollingsworth considered the priest for a moment. It seemed to me it was news to him. Perhaps Father Webber hadn’t been hiding anything from the detective after all.
“All right,” Hollingsworth said. “I might as well start from the beginning.”
The detective outlined Lawrence’s activities from the moment he’d murdered Tim and Phil Bellows. When he detailed the attempt to abduct Andrea at my house, he said, “We all saw the occurrences. He was able to heal himself. Kyle thinks he was absorbing the healthy cells of the officer to do this. We almost had him, but he created an earthquake and knocked us all down. Before we could recover, he escaped.”
Father Webber sat back in his chair and made a grumbling noise in his throat, but otherwise didn’t interrupt Hollingsworth.
“I had Kyle looking into his father’s experiment. Somehow, Lawrence tracked him down at the university.”
The detective looked at me and nodded.
I took up the story, and described how Lawrence had killed the tech officer and Vanderburgh, and how he would have killed me except for the woman and young man who showed up. I told the priest about the confrontation between the three.
“They couldn’t stop him, but they slowed him down enough to save my life.”
Father Webber’s expression grew darker during my story.
I said, “I know it’s hard to believe me. I was there and I’m still having a hard time with it.”
“Oh, Mr. Chase, I believe every word you said.” He leaned forward. “Except the part about Darcy and Richard saving you.”
I said, “They did save me,” at the same time as Hollingsworth said, “You know them?”
Father Webber looked back and forth between the two of us.
To me, he said, “Oh, saving you was purely a by-product. I’m sure of it. It’s not in their nature.”
He nodded to Hollingsworth. “Father Putnam had a run-in with these two recently. He’s spent the last few days learning everything he could about them.”
Standing up from his chair, he paced as he explained:
“Darcy Anderson spent the last ten years in prison for murdering her parents—she lit their house on fire while they slept. Somehow, the courts only convicted her on manslaughter charges, and she got off on a light sentence.
“They released her a month ago, and that’s when she continued her rampage, killing her aunt, her ex-husband, and her ex-father-in-law. She used the power of the Watchers to burn down half of her hometown, killing several others in the process, before disappearing.
“Richard Riley, also an ex-convict, killed his mother and took out several residential houses in the process—by causing a tornado.”
Hollingsworth spoke up. “I heard about that tornado in the news. There were conflicting reports.”
“Yes,” Father Webber said. “Over the following days, Mr. Riley also went on a killing spree throughout Washington State, killing his biological father, his brother, and several employees of the company he worked for.
“Father Putnam attempted to capture the two of them on his own but failed. He’s lucky to have escaped with his life.
“Listen here,” he said, giving both of us a hard look, “you have to understand that these people are possessed by a power much greater than anything you can imagine. You can’t go up against them with guns. Even if you went up against one with a small army, they’d rip through them like they weren’t even there. The Watchers are able to harness elemental power, and the only thing that can contain them is holy power.”
I cleared my throat. “Can you explain to me exactly what these Watchers, fallen angels, are?” I took a breath to steady myself.
“There is reference to them in Genesis,” the priest said. “The Nephilim, mortal offspring of rebellious angels and human women, were gifted with a fraction of the powers of their angel sires, but used those powers for personal gain. They started wars, stole, murdered, and corrupted all who they came in contact with.”
Looking at me, he asked, “You’ve heard the story of the Great Deluge?”
“You mean Noah and the Flood?”
“Yes.” He smiled at me as if to a child. “God flooded the world to kill the Nephilim and all those tainted by them. Noah and his family were spared by building their ark. Everyone’s heard the story.”
“What’s the story we haven’t heard?” I asked.
“No longer welcome in heaven, God banished the Watchers to limbo.”
“Purgatory?”
“No,” Father Webber said, “that’s for mortals. No one really knows where the Watchers have been imprisoned for the past millennia. There are stories here and there, but nothing has been substantiated.”
He took his chair again. “Then, in the past two years, we in the Society of Exorcists noticed a rise in the number of exorcisms we were performing.”
“What?” I asked, “Is there some kind of uprising in hell?”
“That’s what we first thought, but then we began to see a pattern. In some cases, we were exorcising the same spirit over and over again.
“In the case of a demon being exorcised, it’s sent back to hell. From all the records we keep on exorcisms, it could take that demon years, sometimes decades, before it has enough strength to return to the mortal plane.
“For the exorcisms we’d been performing, the same spirit had possessed another host within moments. You see, a Watcher cannot be banished to hell, because that is not its origin. It can’t be sent back to heaven, because they are unwelcome there. We know of no way to return them to limbo.”
“What do you think is happening?”
“The Watchers must have discovered the same technique demons use to possess people. My colleagues believe some of the more powerful of them have been among us for centuries—these have been able to conceal their presence. Recently, some of the lesser Watchers have risen; they are not quite as powerful, and subject to their baser natures.”
Hollingsworth said, “The Casanova Killer, for example?”
“Correct. A relatively minor Watcher of little significance—a foot soldier. Through its host, it played out its desire to mate with humans, after which it destroyed the evidence of its sin.”
“So the Watchers, unable to return to earth, are doing the next-best thing and living vicariously through their hosts?” I asked.
F
ather Webber nodded.
“And just to get this straight: you think my father was possessed by one of these entities?”
“When I heard the details surrounding the accident from the good detective, I suspected that was the case. It seems my suspicions have proven correct.”
Though a part of me rebelled against what I’d heard, I found myself accepting Father Webber’s story. It was a surreal feeling.
I said, “When he died, you thought the Watcher would have possessed me—that’s why you showed up at my house yesterday. Except my father injected his DNA, via stem cells, into Lawrence. The Watcher went to the nearest host with the closest genetic match.”
“Yes, they follow bloodlines.”
“One thing I don’t get. You said the Great Flood wiped out everyone but Noah and his family. If the Watchers follow the bloodlines of these Nephilim…”
“Noah had a brother, Nir whose wife was named Sopanim. She died giving birth to a child not fathered by Nir or any other mortal. That child, Melchizedek, did not accompany Noah in the ark. He was protected from the deluge by the archangel Gabriel. After the flood, Melchizedek became a great priest. We suspect it was possible he was the last of the true Nephilim. According to our research, he produced at least one offspring before becoming a priest.”
I said, “So, in effect, I’m a descendant of this Melchizedek?”
“Yes. By our calculations, there are about ten thousand people in the world with the blood of Watchers running through them. Though we have reports of these possessions from some of our colleagues abroad, it seems most of the Watcher activity is concentrated here in the States.”
It was all quite a lot to absorb. “And how many of these Watchers are we talking about?”
“Two hundred.”
“Exactly? How can you be sure?”
Father Webber said, “The Book is quite clear on that point. It gives the names of the twenty leaders of the Watchers, and we have surmised the names of at least forty others.”
“What book?” I asked. “Not the Bible?”
“No. The Book of Enoch … what?” he asked a moment later when both Hollingsworth and I shot to our feet.
The Complete Book Of Fallen Angels Page 53
