Nodding, Sam said, “We have no intention of harming the rogue. We’ll simply purge the spirit inside him.”
With his mention of priests, I put two and two together. “Exorcism?” I asked, and Sam gave me a wink of approval.
He said, “We are the guardians of humanity. How are we to lead them unless we set a proper example? We can’t have corrupt hosts running around with such great power. We’ve tried controlling those hosts who are weak of spirit, but they pose as much of a danger to us as they do to the rest of humanity.”
I bit my lip. If he were so concerned, he would have purged the Grigori from Jenny a long time ago. I didn’t care if she said she didn’t mean it when she threatened to kill me, she’d been horrible to Jethro, and she’d murdered my stepfather in cold blood. That made her a psycho, in my book.
Sam said, “Serena, you are safe with us if you wish to stay. If you decide to leave us, you are free to go, and none of us will harm you.”
“What about the Grigori I’m hosting?” I asked.
“Ah,” he said, “we would, of course, insist on purging him from you, once we found the nearest in your bloodline.”
That sounded good to me. I never wanted the Grigori possessing me. I didn’t want the power. “Then I can just go…?”
“If you insist; but you haven’t heard me out yet.”
I couldn’t care less what he had to say. I just wanted to leave. The more I learned about the Grigori, the less I wanted to be a part of it. I wasn’t soldier material. I didn’t want anything to do with their revolution. Looking over my shoulder waiting for some crazy group of priests to attack me wasn’t appealing. Sure, I didn’t think the world was such a great place, but in my fantasies, I’d never imagined ruling it. All I wanted was to be on my own and away from all the anger and hate. If the only way was to hear Sam out, and go through one of these exorcisms, then that’s what I was going to do.
I took a deep breath. “Okay, I’m listening.”
Chapter Twenty
After Sam dismissed Jenny and Thomas, he went over to a mini fridge and opened the door.
“Thirsty? I have soda, juice, water.”
“No thanks,” I said.
Sam grabbed a bottle of water and returned to the couch. After unscrewing the cap, he put the bottle on a coaster on the wood table halfway between us.
He said, “First, I would ask you not to judge us by the actions of one person. Jenny can sometimes be … overzealous.”
“She’s a psycho bitch,” I said, and Sam smiled.
He pointed at me. “She’s afraid of you.”
“Me?” That surprised me. “She can kill someone with a touch. Why would she be afraid of anyone?”
“You might think hers is a great power, but it’s very limited. It’s the only thing she can do.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Anyone with a gun can kill someone, too.”
I frowned. “I’d still be scared if someone was pointing a gun at me.”
“Her Grigori is one of the angels of death, but he is a minor angel.”
“Minor?”
Sam said, “Do you know what an angel is?”
His question threw me, and it took me a few seconds before I said, “I think so. I’ve seen movies.”
“They’re all wrong.” He smiled when I gave him a confused look. “Let me put it to you in terms you’d probably understand. Angels are like robots, each with a computer program.”
“Huh?”
“Each one is designed for a specific function. There’s a wide range, from an angel who makes flowers smell like they do, all the way up to angels who create weather. There are angels who give us good and bad dreams, and then there are angels who enforce the laws of heaven.
“There are legions of minor angels carrying out their singular tasks, and a number of greater angels who are their leaders. Many of the greater angels have multiple abilities.
“At the top tier are archangels, but there are only a handful of those.”
I gave Sam a sour look. “And they’re all robots?”
“Like robots. They all have a program, and they can only operate within the bounds of that program. As servants, they blindly carry out their tasks to keep the world going.
“Two hundred of these angels—some call them Watchers, some call them Grigori—were given an additional task: to watch over humanity. They were programmed to love humans.”
“And they just loved them a bit too much,” I said. “Mr. Ulrich told me that part.”
“Good.” Sam leaned forward. “Serena, your Grigori is a greater angel.”
“Greater?”
“Yes. Ananiel has several powers. As one of the elemental angels, he controls water. He also has a heightened perception, something like an insight.”
“You mean ESP?” I said, growing more interested in the subject now that Sam was spelling it out. “I can’t predict the future, though.”
“No, and you probably don’t have retrocognition either. Your clairvoyance is limited to the present. Things that are happening currently. Am I right?”
“It’s like I have an intuition about things.”
He said, “Obviously, you’ve used your ability to help you get to Denver.”
“Yeah.”
“Among the Grigori, Ananiel is one of the twenty leaders, and that is why Jenny is afraid of you. You see, as a minor angel, one of her angel’s ‘subroutines’ forces him to obey the commands of a greater angel.”
“You mean I can tell her what to do?” I thought of half a dozen things I wanted to make her do right then.
“You can only command the Grigori she hosts. The host part of us is still human, and we all have free will. Only when the Grigori who possesses you passes along the order will the Grigori within her obey.” He took a breath. “Before that happens, you would have to develop a stronger bond with Ananiel. You’d have to surrender a part of yourself to him, and allow him greater power over you. It is not an easy thing to do.”
“You’ve done this with your Grigori—what’s his name?”
“Semjaza is the leader of the fallen.” He nodded. “Yes, I’ve spent years communing with his spirit.”
I pointed to the bottle of water on the table. “So you can make me dump the water over?”
At first, I’d thought he’d put the bottle of water there to put me at ease, by providing me with a weapon of sorts. Once he explained that he could force me to use the power, the bottle became nothing more than a symbol of a false sense of security.
“Not directly. If I believe you should knock the water over, and Semjaza also believes it is required, he can order Ananiel to do it.”
“And he has to?”
“He’ll feel compelled to do it, but…” He lowered his voice, as if telling me a secret. “As long as you are in control of the power, you can override the command. Remember, the Grigori disobeyed their orders from above when they disagreed with them. You can tap into that ‘glitch’ and override their programming.”
I shook my head. “You just said that I had to surrender to Ananiel and give him more power to take command, and now you’re telling me I need to stay in control. I don’t get it.”
“I know. It sounds like something in a fortune cookie. Let me assure you, to control the power, you have to surrender to it.” He gave me a nod. “I can teach you how, if you like.”
I realized there was a part of me that did want to learn how to control the power better, but I still wanted to be free of it.
Could I trust Sam? I looked at the bottle of water. It wasn’t a weapon, and it wasn’t there as part of an object lesson. Maybe it was a symbol of trust. Though he’d said he could force me to knock the bottle over, he hadn’t demonstrated the power, and he hadn’t taken the bottle away.
The bottle of water was a promise of power. It was within my grasp, if I decided to reach out for it.
Growing uncomfortable with that line of thought, I asked, “How do you know all of this stuff? By getting in touch with y
our Grigori?”
“Partly.” He leaned back into the couch again. “I have a team of researchers going through every ancient text on the subject. They’ve helped fill in the blanks. Aaron Ulrich is the expert, really.”
I asked, “And he’s the one who’s figured out why the Grigori are returning, for this war you want to have?”
“Revolution,” he said. “Yes. As I said before, the Grigori were programmed to care for humanity and be their guardians. The world has grown corrupt, and the Grigori fear they will be punished again. Already, the earth has been ravaged by extreme weather and the threat of biological epidemics—the swine and avian influenzas, the recent cholera outbreaks, dengue fever, others.”
I said, “You think it’s a warning from heaven?”
Nodding, he put a hand on his chest. “In part, the blame lies with the Grigori. They were the ones who thought humanity was mature enough to learn science and industry. Obviously, they were mistaken. The mortals were not mature enough, and used the knowledge to further their own greedy ends. The Grigori only want to correct their mistake before humanity pays the price again.”
“So when will this ‘revolution’ happen?”
“It could be years, or even decades from now. The first Grigori found their way back from the abyss over eighty years ago. Since then, only sixty or so have come across that we know of. We have fifteen Grigori with us; the rest are out there somewhere. There were twenty others held in captivity by our enemy, but they are free now. We’re searching for them as we speak.”
I frowned. “What you’re saying is, it could be a hundred years from now before this revolution starts. We’ll all be dead by then, so what does it matter?”
“Ah,” Sam said. He motioned his hand in a circle. “What do you think Grigori Ventures is?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’re a research lab focusing on eugenics, stem cells, cloning … basically, anything in the field. There’s a good chance we will be around then. After all, it’s documented that the Nephilim lived hundreds of years. Noah, for example, died at the age of 950. We’re working toward restoring such life-spans to humanity.” He let one side of his mouth crook up in a half-smile. “Though we had a setback in Chicago, some of the research we came across there has advanced other areas. We’re very close to replicating Araqiel’s ability to regenerate damaged tissue and eliminate aging.”
What struck me was not that Sam was talking so casually about immortality, but that I was accepting it so easily. Everyone wanted to live forever—and a thousand years was better than nothing. A week ago, I would have thought him a raving lunatic; now that I’d experienced the power of a Grigori possessing me, I was willing to believe in the impossible.
Sam shocked me when he asked, “Tell me about your grandfather.”
“What?”
“Well, if he’s going to be inheriting the Grigori, I’d like a sense of what kind of person he is. Do you think he’ll fit in with us?”
“My grandfather?” The first thought that went through my mind was that my grandfather was a horrible bastard. It took me a few seconds to figure out what Sam was saying.
If my grandfather suddenly had this power, I couldn’t believe a sour, mean-spirited old man like him would use the gifts for anything other than selfish reasons. He might even become something like Jenny.
“You can’t,” I said. “He’s a hateful old ass.”
“All right, then how about your grandmother? I’m sure we can work with her.”
Though she had a kinder heart than her husband did, except for when she helped me, my grandmother had spent her life deferring to my grandfather’s will. I couldn’t see her being strong enough to control the power. It would most likely control her, and somewhere deep in my mind, I realized that was different from surrendering to the power.
Sam shrugged. “Aaron did a pretty thorough workup of your closest relatives. Other than a third cousin in Ireland, it’s down to your grandparents. I don’t see that we have much choice, since you’re obviously reluctant to accept the gift Ananiel is offering.”
I never wanted the gift. All I ever wanted was to be free of others who wanted to control me. This power was a noose around my neck, but if I slipped it off, it would simply tighten around someone else’s. I couldn’t sentence my grandmother to that kind of burden, and I didn’t trust my grandfather not to abuse the Grigori’s talents.
“Let’s put aside your disapproval of your grandparents for a moment,” Sam said. “Let’s talk about you, and what you want.” He leaned forward.
“What about me?”
“I only have pieces of the puzzle, but I think I can fill in the gaps. All your life, you’ve been at the mercy of an overbearing stepfather and a weak mother.” He held up his hand to stop me from snapping at him. “No disrespect intended. Your family situation is why you are so strong—you’ve had to be. It’s part of the reason we need you on our side, Serena. You’ve been through some of the worst of what the world can dish out.
“Don’t you want to change that? Not for you or for me, but for the next little girl who will be brutalized by someone who’s supposed to protect her?”
He continued. “Maybe, if there had been someone there to defend Jenny when she was younger, she would not have become so bitter and angry.”
Leaning forward, he said, “You’ve been chosen, Serena. There’s a reason for everything, and Ananiel decided on you. Now is your chance to make things different. You can make the world a better place.” He spread his hands. “The choice is yours. You can walk away … or you can stay with us. We’ll teach you how to control your power. When the time comes, you’ll become one of the leaders of the world. Everyone will respect you, and look to you for guidance. All the Jennys and Serenas of the world will sleep safer at night, knowing you are their guardian angel.
“You never have to be afraid of people like your stepfather and grandfather again,” Sam said. “You’ll never have to run again.”
When I picked up the bottle of water and took a long drink, Sam gave me a warm smile.
Chapter Twenty-One
Instead of driving to Anak Acres, the next morning three of us—Thomas, Jenny, and I—flew back in a private jet owned by Grigori Ventures. I found out from Thomas that Mr. Ulrich was sent out to investigate another possible Anakim.
It was my first time in the air. I now knew why so many people hated flying. I was so frightened by the unexpected pressure of takeoff and the shaking from turbulence once we were in flight, I sprang up and ran to the bathroom the moment the pilot told us over the loudspeaker that we were allowed to unfasten our seat belts.
I’d tried to pretend I was relaxed and confident, since Jenny was on the flight with Thomas and me, and I didn’t want her to see any signs of weakness in me. Also, I didn’t want Thomas to think I was a baby. The smirk on Jenny’s face and the look of concern on Thomas’s told me I’d failed miserably.
It was a good thing I wasn’t claustrophobic. The bathroom was so small, I barely had enough room to turn around without holding my arms tight to my chest.
The water was cold, and splashing it on my face made me feel better. Not only did it help cool me down, it reminded me of my connection to it. The thought soothed me, and I was able to slow my breathing.
Though I’d been able to calm myself down, I didn’t want to go back out to the cabin and face Jenny and Thomas.
Before we left Grigori Ventures head office last night, Sam had explained to Jenny and Thomas that they were to teach me everything I needed to know about controlling my powers. He’d also made a point to remind Jenny that Ananiel was one of the leaders of twenty. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone turn red so quickly.
I’d spent enough time in the Youth Center to know that it didn’t matter if the staff gave a girl a leadership position. If the others didn’t like her, they’d find a way to get her alone and put her in her place.
I didn’t trust Jenny one bit. The first opportunity she got
, she’d turn on me. It was only because Thomas was there that she acted on her best behavior.
In the past, when someone—like Trudy, like my stepfather—had it in for me, I’d simply run from the problem. Sam told me I didn’t have to run anymore.
I knew it was a security blanket, but since I’d spoken with Sam, I made sure to keep a bottle of water with me at all times. If I needed to, I could use it like pepper spray. My father had turned rain into hard needles to defend himself against Dwight. I would do something like that if I thought I was in danger.
The only queasiness I felt in my stomach was because of flying. Whatever looks Jenny shot at me, she wasn’t going to do anything about it.
Gathering up as much courage as I could, I squeezed myself out of the bathroom and staggered back to my seat.
“Are you all right?” Thomas asked, and I nodded.
“Just took me a moment to get my balance.”
Jenny gave me a long look. “You’ll have to do better than that in the future.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, we can’t have one of our leaders puking her guts out when things get rough.”
Pulling a face, I said, “I didn’t puke.”
“You still look a little green around the gills.”
“Leave her alone, Jenny.”
She turned to Thomas. “She’s got to learn to fight her own battles. You can’t run to her defense every time someone hurts her feelings.”
He looked out the window.
I said, “You’re right, Jenny.” My heart beat faster. I’d always had a smart mouth, but once it got me in trouble, I never stuck around to back it up. I had to learn to stand up for myself.
From the moment I’d met Jenny, she’d done everything to make sure I knew she was in charge. I had to change that, and I knew I would not be able to reason with her. People like her only knew one language.
I tipped the bottle of water over my cupped hand. Once there was too much water to hold, I willed the rest of the stream not to spill over. Instead, it piled higher and higher.
The Complete Book Of Fallen Angels Page 73
