I hadn’t been able to repress the memory of the night when Ira had threatened Keira enough to not feel the rage rising in me while I looked at him on the battle field. Ira’s paranormal eye was covered by the shock of brown hair that fell over it, but when I took a step closer to him, he reached up to brush its covering aside.
Not looking him directly in his right eye wasn’t a difficult task as long as I remembered to stare at his throat, which was my chosen focal point since it was where I had harmed him before. It made for a nice visual I could enjoy imagining happening again, very soon.
“Come on, blondie. Just one look,” he provoked as I came within an arm’s length of him. “Let me see how it’s been going with the human. Did you reconcile? Or did she realize that even a mortal can do better than being with you?”
Then I swung at him, letting myself feel a portion of my anger and aiming for the same spot where I had sent him scraping across the parking lot before. Ira feinted to the side, preventing the impact I longed to feel, and dropped into a sweeping kick that I jumped over easily. He stood back up. “I think growing attached to a mortal has slowed you, Uriel. Perhaps you should stop watching out for her so much and should instead work on improving your speed. Keira clearly isn’t an asset to your battling prowess.”
Hearing him say her name caused more of my control to slip. The white anger was intensifying.
He went on, “Perhaps it would have been better for you if I had taken the mortal with me before.”
Then, something in me snapped. “‘Would to god my rage, my fury would drive me now to hack your flesh away and eat you raw-’”
I trained a quick kick at Ira’s knee and when he avoided that, I propelled a punch for his nose. Ira swiped my enraged fist to the side and grasped my head in his hands, positioning our faces in full view of each other’s. I closed my eyes before allowing him to look into them with his bewitched one.
Unseeingly, I thrust my forehead forward and was rewarded with the impact I had been seeking since the beginning. There was a gratifying crunch and then I no longer had hands on me. I chanced opening my eyes and was met by the sight of Ira’s bloodied face and freshly-flattened nose. “Feels good, doesn’t it?” he asked while attempting a kick at my torso. “If you turned to Chaos, you could cause more bloodshed than you can possibly imagine.”
“Never.” It had never been so difficult to remain calm while battling, but it had never been personal before. I summoned a set of gold knuckles onto my right hand and succeeded in landing a damaging blow to the blue eye. “Oops, I’d rather have knocked the ghoulish one out.”
A roundhouse kick hammered Ira to the ground and I knew I had him defeated. “Any last words, Watchful?” I offered.
Zev’s voice broke into my battle. He was screaming at his member of Chaos. “How could you be friends with them? I was always kind to you when we worked together! I even trusted you! How could you betray our friendship like that? Do you know what you’ve done to my feelings? I could never be as heartless and deceitful as how you’ve treated me! You deserve everything that’s coming to you!”
That didn’t sound at all like my brother. He wasn’t one to hold grudges and I’d no idea that he felt betrayed by our old charge. Not to mention Zev had been reluctant to battle against the girl all along; he hadn’t dwelled on the discomfort but we all knew that it didn’t sit well with him that we had to destroy Elly. I’d thought that he’d asked to be the one to go against her so he could try to reason with her if he could. Now he was yelling at the girl and she was glaring right back.
“Hey, Angel of Light.”
I absentmindedly glanced at the speaker of my name.
Ira was looking up at me from where he lay, but his white eye was trained on me with the purpose of exuding its power. In my distraction, I forgot to avert my eyes, and it wasn’t until after I couldn’t move that I realized my mistake.
The Watcher rose steadily without breaking eye contact. He smiled. “That was too easy, Angel of Light. But don’t worry; I won’t forget myself this time. Cheer up. At least you won’t have to brood over your error; death will deliver you from obsessing for too long over your stupidity.” He slowly took a step toward me, relishing the control. “This will be fun.”
I couldn’t call out to my family for assistance. I was fully paralyzed, and it was the worst feeling of helplessness I had ever suffered.
In my peripheral vision, I noticed Arien having the final wall put in place to hold him in. And just before Ira took the final step that would bring him close enough to kill me with a single, unchallenged strike, a barrier of earth erected between us, cutting off the mesmerizing connection.
Dagan was by my side. “What are you thinking? Don’t look at his eye, idiot.”
“Thanks Dagan,” I grudgingly replied.
“Do you have this?”
“Yes, go help Zev.”
Dagan went over to assist our brother, and I waited the second it took for Ira to step around the rock. Keeping my eyes from his, my attention focused, and my temper detached, it took half a minute to render the weak Watcher unconscious.
I left him there and looked around for Amir. He was poorly keeping both Odeda and Azra in his line of sight as they rotated around him, matching each other’s step perfectly. All three were breathing more heavily than a light stroll in a valley generates, but not one had a single visible scratch on him or her.
Between the trio and me, Zev, Dagan, and Elly were standing apart. Zev wasn’t bellowing any more but instead seemed to be peculiarly tranquil. Dagan was clearly struggling with something internally but I couldn’t think of what. “Why aren’t there any beastly friends fighting along your side?” I asked as I made my way behind my brothers and toward Amir.
“They wouldn’t be able to control it,” Zev said serenely.
I was puzzled by his tone and his words. “Control what?”
Zev didn’t take his eyes off the infuriated young Nephilim. “The compulsion of rage that Elly’s impressing upon us. Don’t come too close or you’ll be subject to it as well.”
She could make people feel what she was feeling. That was what Zev’s roaring had been about earlier; it was the girl’s emotions being forced through him.
“Elly,” my brother spoke to his friend in the composed voice he had to me, “why are you so angry with me?”
“You know why,” the girl spat through her teeth.
I had never seen anyone so livid in all my life. It made me wonder what she could have done at that moment if she possessed a different power. She was clearly unstable, but experience had taught me well that it’s the unstable ones who can be the most dangerous.
“Would you mind explaining it to me anyway, please?” my brother asked civilly.
“He told me everything, Zev!” The girl had apparently learned the correct names of those she’d known before. Amir was Amir and Zev was Zev.
“Uriel, fulfill the mission,” Azra called over to me.
I left the perplexing conversation, keeping my distance from the young Nephilim, and moved to complete a triangle with my other siblings around Amir. Five times we’d killed him, and like a bad horror movie, he always came back. This had to be the last battle with him. And it was up to me to make it so.
A Nephilim’s skin is harder to penetrate than a human’s. We have blood but it’s hard to draw and it clots extremely quickly. We heal much faster from superficial wounds than any human can. Our skin is like a weak barrier; it slows bullets down enough that they don’t reach our visceral organs and knives find it exceedingly more difficult to do much damage. But that’s just Nephilim. I was meant to plunge my blade into an Old One, and if the weapon hadn’t been blessed, not even I could pierce Amir’s skin with it.
Calling upon my rebellion-leading father’s half of my blood, I summoned the consecrated instrument and grasped the black, leathered handle with its silver, rounded end barely cooling the edge of my palm. The carbon steel blade had been taken great care o
f so that it did not rust over the years since we had obtained its blessing. It was six inches long- enough length to surely reach a man’s heart.
Odeda began to move in for an attack so Amir’s attention would shift away from me, but everyone stopped when a car’s revved engine echoed throughout the quiet valley. “It can’t be,” Odeda said, sounding as disbelieving as I felt. Every head turned to the space beside the Escalade. Seconds later, that space was filled by an Aston Martin DBS.
“Dammit, no,” I refused what I saw.
The most maddening mortal I have ever come across stepped out of her car and gaped, openmouthed at the young Nephilim. “Keira?” The girl was obviously as surprised to see her old friend arrive at our battle as the rest of us.
Keira walked the distance from her car to Zev without anyone else moving an inch. My brother moved slightly in front of her so she wouldn’t be vulnerable to the power he was battling with. Keira looked her friend over once she was closer. “Elly, what’s happened to you?”
“Didn’t you hear?” The young Watcher, recovering from her shock, turned bitter and surly again. “I’ve got power that no one told me about, not even you- the person I thought was my best friend.” Elly looked pointedly at Zev for a second. “Truthful friends are hard to come by these days.” Then she returned her gaze to Keira.
“What do you…? I… What has that creep done to you, Elly?”
“Amir’s only ever helped me, unlike you and your band of interfering nuisances here. I owe everything to him and nothing but retribution to those who have wronged me.”
Keira blanched at the depraved timbre of her friend’s voice. “You’re saying that I’ve wronged you?”
“Don’t pretend to be innocent, Keira. It’s annoying and I’m not falling for any more tricks.”
“What did he tell you, Elly? Because it was all a lie.”
“Says you,” the Watcher spat. “Amir told me all about your deceit. He told me about my powers and how I could use them however I like, no matter what anyone else told me. Zev,” she flicked a glance at my brother, “-yeah, I was told all about your real identity-” then she turned back to Keira, “knew I possessed all this power and he didn’t let me in on the big secret. Instead, he sought to keep everything from me, to keep me in the dark about who I am. All of your little friends here wanted to hide my past from me, but Amir’s been the only one truthful to me, and once we’re done with this,” she gestured at my family and me, “he, Ira, and Arien are going to help me find my father.”
“You already have a father,” Keira told her. “Peter Johnson’s your dad, and he and your mom have been worried sick about you ever since you ran off with your Michael.”
Elly’s thick shell of anger cracked a fraction. “I didn’t mean for them to be upset.” She glanced at Amir and resumed her bad temper. “But I’ve always wanted to know my biological father. And Amir knows him. It was fate that brought him to me so he could reunite me with my magical father.”
“Fate?” Keira emphasized.
“Yes,” the girl shot at her. “Amir met me, fell in love with me, and when he realized who I was, he started calling around, looking for my father.”
“He’s lied to you, Elly.”
“No! Zev and his family were hindering my chance of finding my dad by keeping Amir from me. Whenever he’d come to my work, he would have to leave because Zev was there and had threatened him before to stay away from me. They didn’t want me to meet my dad or embrace my power… And you are with them.”
Just for the record, Zev never knew the Watcher who’d come by his and Elly’s workplace one time was Amir. That’s just another of the numerous lies he’d told his pet. And since he didn’t know it was Amir, he couldn’t have threatened him, even though I’m sure he would have.
“Elly,” Keira pleaded as she took a step that pained me closer to the dangerous, volatile Watcher. “You and I have been friends for years. We used to say that no boy could come between two girlfriends. Do you really think I’d lie to you for a guy? I would have told you if I’d known any of this, but when I found out, you were already gone.”
The girl hesitated.
“And do you remember how Amir called us half-breeds before the battle?” Zev spoke up quickly. “Half-breeds because we’re half human, half what he is. He hates our kind. He uses our kind. Elly, he’s using you now.”
“No,” she denied, but the young girl’s voice had doubt in it.
I saw Amir’s fists clench in the corner of my eye. He didn’t like that his play-thing was having second thoughts.
Keira noticed the doubt in her friend’s tone too, took a step closer, and continued. “It’s true Elly. Zev and the others were going to help you, not harm you or keep secrets from you. We’re the good guys. Amir’s been deceiving you from the start. I know it’s hard to accept but look into my eyes and tell me I’m lying. You know me, Elly. Am I lying about this?” Keira took another step toward her friend and they were within three feet from each other.
The young Nephilim studied my mortal’s expression for several moments before admitting slowly, “You aren’t lying to me… How can that be?”
Amir snarled and suddenly lunged past me for Keira. “I’ll kill you, you meddling human!”
And that was the final evidence Elly needed to decide whose side she was on. The girl was the closest to Keira and Amir. She stepped in front of her friend, blocking the Old One. “Do not lay a hand on Keira,” Elly commanded him. “How could you? She’s mortal and hasn’t done anything to us.”
Amir ignored her words and reached out to shove his ex-follower to the side. “Out of my way, you disgrace!” But when he touched Elly’s skin, he drew his hand back like it had been burned. A scream of pain I had never heard the likes of from any of his five deaths was wrenched from Amir’s lungs. He clutched his ribs like they would break out from him if he didn’t hold himself in one piece.
I didn’t know what had come over the Old One until I saw Elly’s face. Her lips were pressed into a fine line, her brow was creased with tension, and her eyes were boring into the man she had given herself to.
“I trusted you,” she said in an eerily quiet and low voice that opposed the raw emotions that had manifested on her face. “You will never again ensnare another like you have me. I won’t allow it.” The power that emanated from her was palpable. There was a pressure on everyone around the young Nephilim, and it carried a sense of what its source was experiencing even though she did not mean for us to feel her emotions. Elly was hurt beyond words, she was enraged even more than she had been before, and she hated Amir. She hated him with such force that her voice was unable to express it adequately so it didn’t bother trying.
Amir cried out again and I knew that his power to feel other’s emotions was inhibiting him from resisting Elly’s gift to share hers. The Original Watcher dropped to his knees, no longer able to stand through the agony that the emotional overload was creating in his core. I cautiously stepped over to Keira and pulled her further away from the two sensitive beings.
“Never again will you harm another creature,” Elly pledged.
As he screamed once more, before our engrossed eyes, Amir, one of the Old Ones, imploded into himself and vanished, leaving behind nothing but a small echo of his final throe.
Silence settled on what was no longer a battle field. Everyone suspiciously eyed the forcible young Nephilim. Any being from the Old World, even a half-being like us, should be feared who cannot maintain her feelings. Self-control is one of the hardest parts of being of our kind, and when a Nephilim first begins using his or her power, it’s the most onerous time.
Elly’s face smoothed away its sentiments and she suddenly appeared younger than I had seen her look since before I knew her name. She was once again the girl who my family and I had tracked for months before she misguidedly chose Chaos.
Keira slowly stepped a foot toward her friend. I moved to draw her back to my side, but she shook her head at me. My hands
flexed in a habitual movement whenever I felt danger could be near and I was reminded of the knife in my possession. I sent it back to the house unused.
With careful, unhurried steps, Keira went to stand beside her vacant friend. “Elly?” Keira asked uncertainly.
The young Nephilim focused on the girl in front of her. In a breath, Elly whispered, “Keira, I think I’m scared.”
Keira reached out and stroked her friend’s arm. “It’s going to be okay.” Elly nodded mechanically. “We’ll take care of you now.”
Neither of the girls said anything for several minutes. Then Elly spoke. “I killed him.” She said it detachedly, like commenting on the weather.
She must be in shock.
“You’ve saved many more Nephilim like yourself and even more mortals from Amir’s corruption,” Azra consoled her. “He would have hurt others.”
Elly was motionless.
“Do you think he’s really gone?” Dagan asked Azra.
“Yes. I believe he finally is.” Then the leader of our guild gave Dagan a significant look that was answered by the walls of rock which encased and silenced Arien collapsed in on themselves. Then the compressed ground moved to purposefully drop on top of Ira’s insensible body. “Our mission here is complete,” Azra concluded.
“I’ll take Elly home,” Keira said as she led the voiceless Nephilim to the Aston.
“We’ll follow you,” I told her.
“Okay.”
Ticket
Chapter 25
Keira
I pulled into the driveway of Elly’s house. She’d been quiet the entire ride back, and even though I’d wanted to scream out my fears and reliefs, I had respected her unusual quiescence. Every few dozen miles, I glanced at her just to make sure she was conscious and still breathing. She was really changed from the time before she’d been away. She had obviously been working out because I noticed some muscles she hadn’t had before, but also, when I got to the valley that afternoon, Elly was glowing, like Uriel and the others glow. But after Amir had vanished, she’d become really pale, and she still hadn’t regained any color in her skin.
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