by Vicki Keire
“You have tasks to fulfill, and a home waiting for you.” He leaned into me, his words whispered into my hair. “We should not linger here, in the dark and off the path. Come and show me your town square.”
It was tempting. My god, it was tempting. How could someone feel like spring in the middle of its opposite season? Being near him was like being wrapped in dry warm mist, like feathers, or sugar-white sand. “Blind Springs Park is safe as can be,” I told him, angling to face him at last. His eyes were luminous slants of worry. “I’ve been playing here alone since I could walk. And besides,” I used my bandaged hand to try to smooth his brow. He only frowned more, seeing it. I sighed. “Nothing ever happens in Whitfield.”
Later I would understand his strange look of regret.
Our fingers laced tight together, the wind and cold a thin barrier between us, I suddenly knew if I let him speak he would banish the fear and loss and darkness I’d kept bottled inside since my parent's death and again after Logan's diagnosis. I realized then, under sky and shadow, that he had the power to exorcise everything within me that had kept me functioning for so many countless months. He could take away my anger, my rage, my fear, and if they were gone I’d be forced to feel things and acknowledge my powerlessness yet again and I didn’t want to, couldn’t, even; I needed my darkness like warriors needed armor. I couldn’t face every single day watching my world fall apart without my armor.
He stood there, with eyes like light and promises, and I realized for the first time what kind of danger I was really in. He would make me feel things again. He already had. He would again.
If I could feel, I could hurt.
When he exhaled his breath did not wreath the wind with mist as mine had, but I did not pause to wonder at it. “Caspia,” he said again, with new urgency. “I promise you don’t want the answers to some of the things I can tell you. Can we not allow some things between us to simply just… be?”
“No,” I insisted, suddenly panicked, digging the fingers of both my hands into his forearms so hard it hurt. I walked backwards quickly, pulling him with me into the quiet part of the park where it gradually melts into the Historic District. “No,” I repeated. There were no borders, no lines of demarcation, but I knew when I saw the distant lights of Whitfield’s oldest church that we were close to the edge of the park. He wanted to resist me, I could tell, and it made me suddenly, powerfully angry. I pulled on the front of his sweater. “I don’t want anything from you but answers to my questions.” I shoved him, intending to push him against a tree trunk, but it was like trying to push a heavy statue. I strangled a cry of frustration and got even madder when he voluntarily moved against the tree I’d tried to shove him against. His eyes narrowed.
“Calm down.” His voice had a soothing quality that I could feel working almost instantly. He adjusted my jacket to better keep the wind off. Dimly I noticed the weight of my shoulder bag, heavy with money and coins, gone. He’d taken it from me somehow, some when, I was sure of it. He did little things like that, carrying things, making sure I was warm, keeping me from falling, chasing away fear. I hadn’t invited him to do these things; he just did, until without even realizing, I had come to like it. He was trying to calm me now. I refused to let him. I shoved into his shoulders, hard.
“No,” I hissed. “I need to be angry. I need to be cold and tired and too busy to notice things like the stars tonight or how much people care or how bright your eyes are because if I don’t… when I stop…”
“What?” he demanded, pinning my arms to my sides. “What happens when you stop, Caspia? When you let people help you? Love you?” His whisper sliced through my ragged breathing, clear and precise as a surgeon’s scalpel. “What happens when you stop and let yourself feel?”
Something hard and inhuman tore its way from my throat. A sound so foreign and so powerful I could only process it as vibration and heat shattered the night around us. A pair of birds abandoned the tree above us as I hit my knees, swaying. I realized the sound was coming from my own throat when I found myself on the ground, cradled against the curve of Ethan’s neck. “Shh, it’s ok,” he whispered desperately, his eyes huge and sad. “Shh, Caspia,” he murmured, as if to an infant. My face was wet and my throat was raw, but as he half-held, half-pinned me, the awful shrill screaming subsided into quiet normal sobbing. “I’m so sorry,” he said, pressing his forehead against mine. I think he’d been trying to stroke my hair, but his fingers had gotten all tangled in it instead. I could feel him trembling. I silently willed him to hold me harder, and told him the thing I kept locked deep inside.
“My brother is going to die,” I said out loud at last. “And then I’ll be alone.”
“I know,” he answered. His hands cupped my face. They still trembled.
I thought I might feel better, admitting it to another person, but I didn’t. I just felt hollow. “Ethan, why are you here? The real reason why.” He loomed over me, a shadowy outline against swaying branches and the occasional glimpse of stars. “I can handle anything but lies, no matter how outrageous,” I promised, and hoped I meant it.
“Because I’m not human, and your brother is dying.” I could see it pained him to admit this. Just hearing my deepest fear verified out loud hurt, eclipsing his pronouncement of inhumanity. I suppose I had known that, too. “At first, I came for him, to guard his soul until his passing. But there were… complications. I found the both of you hunted by darkness. And then…” he looked up at the stars. “I saw a girl with liquid silver eyes, and everything changed.” He watched me intently, as if memorizing me. He brushed my cheek, traced my lower lip. He looked both fascinated and angry. “You. You changed everything, and now I have no words for this… this feeling boiling inside me, and no way to answer the expectations I see every minute in your eyes.” He gestured to the space between us as if it disgusted him. As if it was impenetrable.
“Oh.” It was all I could think of to say. My fingers fluttered towards him as if they, too, would trace his lips, his face, but it struck me how ridiculously fragile, how mismatched we were as I watched my hand tremble with nothing stronger than cold and nerves. I snatched my hand back. I made it into a fist instead and ground it against my heart. “This feeling?” I asked after a long moment during which I sifted through the things he’d said. Not human. Hunted by darkness. Everything changed. I decided they might make more sense if I tried to bridge the gap between us. My fingers crept up around the curve of his neck, resting against the taut hollow where his shoulder bent towards me. He shivered, his shoulders a knot of bunched nerves and muscles. I slid my fingers up through his hair and pulled his head down towards mine, touching my lips to his.
I’d expected hesitance, perhaps even resistance. But my whole world narrowed into the feeling of his mouth just barely touching mine, warm and rough. It was just barely enough, like getting a sprinkler instead of a pool on a really hot summer day and it left me aching and arching up against him. His body was warm all around me and he was kissing me, a slow and wondering exploration, his arms an arc around us. I slid my cheek against his, registering hot dim abrasion of skin. Blood throbbed in my head and heart. I hooked one of my legs across the back of his knees and tried to pull him closer only to have him whisper, “Shh. The weight of me. Too much.” He was under me in one fluid movement, his blue-green eyes wide and luminous and startled, and I had time to think yes this before his fingers locked themselves around my waist and pulled me flat on top of him.
We lay locked together like that until I thought my lungs would explode. I pulled back slightly, my breathing deep and ragged. He stared at me with wonder and alarm. My lips stung in the cold night air, rubbed raw on his strangely rough skin, my face raw as well. I had a brief mental picture of how I must look, red-faced and wild haired and struggling for breath, backlit by falling dead leaves and patchy darkness. I wanted to tell him I was fine, he hadn’t hurt me, but I would have been lying. He moved me before I completed the thought. I found myself on the ground ne
xt to him before I could speak.
“Hey!” I protested, and tried to climb into his lap.
“You weren’t breathing right,” he said, pulling me firmly against him. “It scared me.”
“I don’t want to breathe right,” I said, trying to wiggle out from under his arms. “Really, it’s ok.”
“I’m not human,” he said darkly. “I don’t want to injure you again.”
“Oh.” That was a really hard objection to overcome. “Right. That.”
“Yes. That.”
Long moments passed. Wind moved tree branches. Ethan was a warm solid presence beside me. “I guess I already knew,” I admitted, watching his profile. He looked up at the stars as if connected to them by an invisible string. He vibrated a kind of tense, quiet energy. It reminded me of the way Abigail got during thunderstorms. I found myself stroking his neck and speaking in low soothing tones. “It’s ok. I’m not afraid. You said you were here to protect my brother. You won’t hurt us.” He recoiled as if I’d struck him. “Ethan? Hey. Shh.” I wrapped my own arms around him. “I’m the girl who draws the future, remember? I’m not exactly normal, either. You can trust me.”
He sagged against me. The warm, unexpected weight of him almost knocked me over. He checked himself in time. “Caspia, what do you know about your gift for prophecy? Is it common, in your family?”
“No," I said, a little unbalanced by his abrupt change in conversation. But if hearing about my ability would help him trust me, so be it. “Only my grandmother could do something similar. She was the only person who knew what the drawings meant. She helped me not be afraid when it happened.” I wrapped my arms around my knees, sad as always when I thought of my grandmother. I missed her.
“Tell me about her,” he commanded.
“Well,” I said slowly, gathering my thoughts in the face of this odd and abrupt request I was beginning to resent just a little. I wiggled closer for warmth. The strange tension in him had not eased. “She was born right here in Whitfield. All my family has been, on my mother's side, anyway, all the way back to my grandmother's grandmother. She came though Ellis Island in the late nineteenth century. She's the real family mystery. She was sixteen years old, completely alone, didn’t speak a word of English, and pregnant. We don’t know anything else about Gran’s side of the family before her. It’s like she didn’t exist before Ellis Island. No birth certificate, no baptismal certificate, no papers or identification of any kind." I smiled into the darkness. “It was a shameful thing, back then, to be pregnant out of wedlock. But I’ve always been proud of my great-great-grandmother. She must have been very brave. I’m named for her. Supposedly, she came from the Caspian Sea.”
“And this is also the bloodline that bears your gift of prophecy.” His voice was flat and cold. I wanted his hands on my waist again, his fierce eyes on mine, not this detached creature sitting next to me. I butted against him, frustrated.
“Ethan, what are you trying to tell me? Why don’t you just come out and say it? What do you know about my ‘bloodline?’ What does it have to do with you being here?”
“I think I Fell the moment I saw you,” he told me with the dark fervor of a man taking a deadly oath. I could hear the capital letter roll off his tongue. I wanted to tell him to stop, I wanted to go back to kissing him, but his words became a torrent unleashed so fast I had to struggle to comprehend. “I didn’t know it then. I just saw a girl whose silver eyes had turned steel with pain, and I didn’t know how you could bear it, and live. But then I saw how this pain could not exist if you didn’t love your brother more than anything. It seemed wrong, that love should cause such suffering. So I interfered.” He smiled at me in the darkness, an expression full of grace and bitterness and a touch of fear. “And thus it began. Others of my kind have Fallen since the beginning of time but it was most often Rebellion or Darkness. Never me, I thought. I have ever loved the Light, Caspia. I will never join the Fallen, I thought. Some few of my brothers had walked among humans and dared to love human women. These Nephilim loved fiercely and deeply. It seemed to me they had been struck with a sickness, or taken prisoner, and I dared to pity them. How sad, I thought, to Fall because of love. Until it happened to me.”
Nephilim.
Fallen angels.
My blood felt like it had little shards of ice in it. My throat had trouble working. I choked the words out anyway. “What are you… are you saying… Ethan?” I slipped a cautious hand over his taut fist, smashed against the earth. “That you're Nephilim? As in, an angel? A Fallen one?"
"In Latin, angelus," he corrected sharply. "In Greek, aggelos. To the Babylonians, we were sukkalin; in West Africa, malaika. Time passes, kingdoms fall, people die and with them, their names for us, but what we do stays the same."
"And what is that?"
"Whatever we're told," he said softly, and still he would not look at me. "I cannot fathom how many of your lifetimes I have done what I've been told. A messenger of the Light; an intermediary. Until now." His fist spasmed under my hand. "Until you."
I shook my head, desperate to calm him almost as much as I was to calm myself. “It will be all right. That you’re… Nephilim. It will, you'll see," I promised, making my words as convincing as I could. "But what does any of this have to do with my bloodline?”
A strange new voice, darkly taunting, reached us through the trees. “What are you telling her, E’than’i’el? Surely not the truth. She wouldn’t like you if you did that.”
I have never seen such an instant and frightening change come over a person as I did watching Ethan as he knelt in front of me. At the sound of the strange new voice, with its low, rolling sneer, his back arched and his hands curled from fists underneath mine into claws hooked into the earth. I had seen his eyes flash like tightly leashed storms before. Now they looked as if they harbored full force hurricanes.
“This is neutral territory,” Ethan growled, nostrils flaring as he tilted his head to the side, in the speaker’s direction. “She cannot be touched.”
“Neutral only for mortals and innocents,” said a new voice directly behind me. I froze. At least two, then. Well. There were two of us. The odds were still good. I squared my shoulders against a slowly building anger. I did not know these voices, these strangers in my park. They were strangely double-layered voices, hiding a skin-crawling sibilance. I eased slightly forward from a sitting position into a crouch, trying to remember everything Logan had taught me about fighting dirty and male anatomy. Ethan looked desperately at me.
“She is neither mortal nor innocent,” chimed in a third person from my right. Great. Now we were officially outnumbered, and the victims of lame insults. I growled. “So she’s fair game.” At this pronouncement, Ethan exploded upward from his crouch, pulling me with him. I found my back against the same tree I’d tried to push him into earlier, my view of these newcomers completely obscured by Ethan’s stubborn and immovable back.
One of the voices started laughing. “Is this her, E’than’i’el? This girl? This breakable, fragile girl?” Ethan pushed so hard against me all the air rushed out of me. I felt the muscles of his back moving as he shifted his balance, his arms held at waist level, and I remembered my drawing. I wondered what his face looked like. I wondered if it matched my missing sketch. I wondered if I was going to pass out from lack of air. Ethan shifted his weight forward and I drank down oxygen. The sneering voice kept taunting. “The Great One himself. Fallen, and for such a vulnerable little thing. You have no idea how much trouble she’s going to be. It will all be for nothing.”
“You may as well give her up now,” said another one. “She’ll give you up as soon as she finds out.”
“Finds out what?” I managed to gasp, tired of pushing against a back that would not move.
“Ethan'i'el is here to kill your brother,” said the one in the middle. “And if he doesn’t, one of us will.”
It couldn’t be. I didn’t believe it. And yet, some tiny, traitorous part of me couldn’t
help whispering, “Ethan, is that true?”
“No,” he snapped tersely. The tendons in his neck stretched as his head snapped back and forth between the three men who advanced on us in a slowly closing arc, just visible in the shadows. They dressed similarly, much like Ethan had the night I’d met him, in dark colors and leather jackets. Their features blended together in similar expressions of feral delight; narrowed eyes betrayed no individual colors, and their lips curled in almost identical sneers. Only their leather jackets showed individuality. The one on my right wore a subtle snakeskin pattern that gathered the dim light to it like a living thing, while his companion to my left wore dull brown leather studded with rivets and patches I couldn’t identify.
My breath caught in my throat when the one in the middle stepped into the light. He wore an exact copy of the jacket now snugly buttoned over my messenger’s bag full of money, except his was blood red. I looked down at myself, confused. When had I buttoned myself into my jacket? Ethan must have done it when he moved me. Why would he take the time to button my jacket up in a fight? I looked intently at its blood red leather twin. Its owner saw me looking at him and smiled, a quick burning look filled with sharp promises and dark knowledge.
“Well, technically he’s not going to kill your brother,” he corrected carefully, as if every word he managed to slip to me past Ethan was indescribably lovely to him. “He’s just going to wait until the cancer finishes him off and then he’s going to take his soul.” He smiled at me again, enjoying Ethan’s low growl as he did it. “But we’re going to get him first. And you too, darling.”
“Like hell,” I hissed.
