by Stacy Gail
“Nevertheless,” said the woman, “we should have a strategy in place for the worst-case scenario—that Dantalion’s demon apocalypse comes about. If the world is suddenly plunged into madness, as Nephilim we would be immune. Therefore it would be our duty to get to the source of that madness—the fully manifested Dantalion—and vanquish him as fast as possible.”
“Great plan, Sara,” Kyle muttered. “Except for the thousands of human-shields that bastard will take control of in order to stop us. Seven billion people versus the five of us. Maybe I’m being pessimistic, but those odds don’t sound all that rosy.”
“What I don’t get is why Dantalion chose to use the image of Nikita’s mother.” The young man’s voice seemed thin, as if he was doing his best to hold it all together. “Up to this point, all the faces this demon has adopted have been rooted in pain, fear and misery.”
“It’s the same with Nikita’s mother,” Kyle answered briefly. “Negativity feeds Dantalion, and while I’m sure Nikita loved her mom, there’s nothing but grief and trauma attached to that poor woman’s memory. I guess there are times when love isn’t enough.”
“Now that we know Dantalion is still here, we must do everything we can to make sure this powerful demon never achieves full manifestation,” came the woman’s voice, clearly refusing to be distracted. “We need to move into all-out tactical—”
“What...the hell are you talking about?” Sure she was once again losing her grip on reality, Nikita stepped around the corner to lock gazes with Kyle.
Chapter Sixteen
For a long moment suspended in mind-bending surrealism, Nikita and Kyle stared at each other from across the room. Then the sound of a clearing throat snapped Kyle’s gaze back to the laptop.
“We’ll pass along the information as we mobilize.” The woman’s voice sounded softer around the edges, as if suddenly aware that words could hurt. “Nate and Ella are already on the ground in Miami, along with Menlo. They’re working on getting a base of operations going, so be on the lookout for texts from them. My team should be there in approximately three hours, and Zeke and Kendall left for Florida this afternoon. My father’s in Japan, but he’s trying to charter a plane back ASAP. Hopefully he’ll be there within a twenty-four-hour time frame.”
Though his gaze was trained on Nikita, Kyle’s attention seemed to be snagged by that last statement. “Wait. You’re all coming to Miami? But...what about the rules, Sara? You know we can’t congregate in—”
“Remember when Nate was zeroing in on Dantalion in Chicago, and you said that as far as you were concerned, the rules no longer applied? What makes you think we’re any different? You have Nikita to think about, just as I have Gideon, Macbeth, Marcel and KJ. We all have people we need to protect, along with the rest of the world. Getting a celestial smiting is nothing compared to the agony of losing them. So whether you like it or not, we’ll be seeing you in a few hours. Until then, hold tight.”
“Good luck, dude.” The man Kyle had called Macbeth sounded glum as he signed off. There was a flicker in the light emanating from the screen before the room was plunged into near-total darkness. Automatically Nikita turned on the nearest light switch. Now more than ever she needed light to shine down on a world that suddenly seemed as unfamiliar to her as the dark side of the moon.
Had he known what happened to her this morning...and chosen not to tell her? No. She shook her head as she stared at him, an instinctive denial of everything she’d heard. No, she was having another crazy episode. That explained all that nutty talk of demons and soul-selling, proxies and the apocalypse and...and...
Betrayal.
Very slowly, Kyle shut the laptop and came to his feet. “Nikita.” He spread his hands in a useless gesture, as if trying to feel for the right words. An impossible task if there ever was one. “I don’t suppose now would be a good time to point out that eavesdroppers never hear anything good.”
“I’m having another break from reality.” Clearly, that was the only thing that made sense. If anything, she was relieved that this time around, she recognized total insanity when it bloomed in her head. “That’s why I heard what I thought I heard. But don’t worry—I know you weren’t really discussing things like demons and...”
“The Nephilim.”
Just the sound of the exotic word made her stomach squirm. “See, that word right there. I don’t even know what that is. Amazing, how an insane brain can come up with made-up words.”
“I told you earlier—you’re not crazy, and this isn’t something your brain’s made up. It’s real. Everything that happened to you today was real.” He took a deep breath, like a diver about to go off a rocky cliff. “I’m real. Being part of the Nephilim is what I am. It’s what I’ve always been.”
She stared at him, torn between wanting to know, heading for the nearest escape, and tearing his damn head off for letting her think she’d lost her mind. “Nephilim. I’ve never heard this word. Is there a Spanish equivalent that I would understand? Or is it something like a...like a secret organization, like the Masons?” Please let it be like the Masons. Please, please, please...
Once again he scrubbed a hand over his face, and she realized belatedly how haggard he was. It shook her more than she wanted to admit to see carefree Kyle looking as though the weight of the world was doing its damnedest to crush him into dust. “I’m not surprised you don’t know it. It’s not a word often taught in English class, mainly because it’s not English. It’s found in biblical texts and apocrypha.”
“What does it mean?” Then, as the chaotic hurt inside her threatened to crack her heart in two, the defensive reflex to distance herself, to not care, kicked in. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
“Yes, I do.” The eyes that watched her without blinking were a terrible thing to see—brimming with a dark knowledge from which some primitive instinct inside her wanted to hide. “Nephilim is the ancient name for people who are born from an angel-human union.”
A terrible, screaming silence swelled between them as she tried to absorb what he said. It had to be a bad sign that she didn’t know who was crazier, him or her. “You mean...sorry, sometimes I don’t get what people say right away, though I haven’t had that problem since I was a kid. You don’t mean angels having sex with humans and making babies, right? Because that’s impossible.”
“That’s exactly what I mean, and before you say it, it’s not crazy. Scholars say Goliath was of the Nephilim, in part because he was a giant. Are they crazy for thinking that? Of course they’re not. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out they’re right.”
“But...” It was her turn to gesture helplessly, so overwhelmed by the sheer impossibility of what he was saying she couldn’t find the words. Only one thing was certain. After knowing Kyle for years, it was painfully obvious she had no clue who this man was. “You think because you’re over six feet, you must be one of these...these things? Does that mean everyone in the NBA is part of this Nephilim thing too?”
He winced at her choice of words, his pale eyes turning almost black. “It’s not like this whole union thing just happened. It’s been several thousand years since some unknown human woman got her groove on with my family’s progenitor. We’re now in the twenty-first century, with countless generations passing between then and now. With each generation, the angelic DNA becomes more diluted, and that’s just fine with me. We’re different enough as it is, so I prefer to enjoy how very human I am despite a few...extras.”
She didn’t want to ask. “Extras?”
“Aside from being well above average in height, the modern-day Nephilim have certain skills that are specific to whoever kicked off their screwy DNA. For instance, Sara’s our resident pyro with her dominion over fire, but even more than that she’s hard-wired to be the ultimate soldier who lives to protect.”
So she’d been r
ight about the steely-voiced woman. “What about you? Are you normal, or are you...” She honestly didn’t know how to finish it.
He didn’t seem to share her verbal loss, and his mouth curled into a bitter facsimile of his smile. “Yeah, I’m just as much of a freak as the others, if not more so. My progenitor was an archangel, so that means he was more powerful than your average member of the heavenly host. Electricity is my best friend. I can control it just as easily as I can control my breathing, and to a certain extent this allows me to control the weather. I don’t like to do that, though.”
“Oh, really?” Nikita’s voice was about as weak as she felt. “Why would that be?”
“It’s kind of like a drug. I gulp in a storm’s worth of energy and my whole system goes wild. I get horny as hell, I can’t sit still, I can’t sleep, and I can’t keep focused on anything for more than two seconds before I rabbit off to something else.” He shook his head. “I just get nuts.”
“That sounds like your usual self.”
“Count yourself lucky you haven’t seen me like that. I’m almost impossible to deal with when my neurotransmitters are firing—and misfiring, as the case may be—with all that electrical stimulation. And when I’m really charged up I short-out electronic equipment just by being near it. Do you have any idea how expensive that gets?”
“I can only imagine.”
“Then there’s always the danger of winding up like my dad. He absorbed so much energy—because it feels so damn good—it set off a dopamine cascade that couldn’t be reversed. He became schizophrenic, lost his way, and wound up trying to keep himself in that high that comes from absorbing storms. My bloodline might have angelic powers, but they’re housed in bodies that are pretty much human. That’s a toxic combination.”
She remembered his determination to never have children and finally understood. “Any other extras I should know about?”
“I’m also faster than normal humans, but that appears to be a universal trait. We all seem to be able to use a speed that makes us look like a blur to the naked eye.”
“I’ve seen you move.” She heard the words come out of her, as calmly as if they were discussing the weather. She supposed in a way they were, since he apparently had the power to control it. “I’ve seen you fight, I’ve seen you run. You’ve never blurred.”
“I hold myself back. I don’t even think about it—it’s just something I automatically do to blend in so no one will guess that I’m...”
“Not human.”
Again his eyelids flinched. “I am human. Like I said, the angelic DNA is barely there anymore. I’m as human as you can get, trust me on this.”
It took most of her strength to stifle a laugh that felt just this side of hysterical. Trust him? For years he’d made himself at home in her life, all the while keeping a huge section of who he truly was a secret. Of course, she could understand why he’d do that at first, but once their relationship turned intimate, it would have been nice if he’d given her a head’s-up that there was a whiff of the heavenly host running around in his family tree. Maybe then she would have been prepared for...
Her brain ran smack into the brick wall of the nightmare she’d endured. “I heard you say I was attacked this morning because of you. Explain that.”
His chest expanded on a rough sigh. “For months now, several members of the Nephilim and I have been trying to hunt down a demon by the name of Dantalion.”
“I overheard the name. You said he attacked me?”
“He did. Dantalion is...” Again he searched for words. Or maybe he was censoring the truth yet again. “He’s bad news, Nikita, even by demonic standards. At first we suspected he had some sort of dominion over the dead. Not surprising, since he kept appearing as people who had already passed away.”
She swallowed hard against the need to throw up. “Like my mother?”
“Yeah. But it’s not that this demon is bringing the dead back to terrorize the living. The thing you saw this morning wasn’t your mother back from the dead. It was Dantalion himself. He’s a shapeshifter, commonly referred to as the demon of a thousand faces.”
Demons. Shapeshifters. Nephilim. Life had been so much easier when she’d thought she was crazy. “It was my mother, Kyle. Just like I remember her.”
“Exactly. Memories are what Dantalion uses against his targets in order to crush them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Dantalion’s main talent isn’t the shapeshifting thing. That’s just the most obvious ability, but it covers up something far more dangerous. His main weapon is telepathy. He reads your most painful memories, then adopts whatever image will hurt you the most. In your case, it’s the memory of your mother.”
“She spoke English today.” The realization once again bobbed to the surface. In a world where nothing made sense, this was the one sticking point that bothered her most of all. “I should be fluent in Spanish, but I’m not. When I came to this country, all I wanted to do was forget—what had happened, my old home, where I came from, my family. Everything. So I did, including all but a few Spanish words Yolanda keeps alive for me. When my mother spoke to me today, it was in English, when I know she didn’t understand a word of it.”
“Since you have no memory of fluent Spanish, Dantalion couldn’t put that into play. That makes perfect sense.”
Perfect sense? She pressed the heels of her hands into her forehead and fought the hysterical need to scream at how impossibly calm he sounded. “But why would he attack me? And what does that psycho Paul Hardy have to do with any of this?”
“In the past, Dantalion’s made it clear he’s hunting down the remnants of the Nephilim, while simultaneously trying to gain full emergence into this realm. He hasn’t been too successful in knocking us off so far, but he’s been very successful in gaining a solid foothold here in the human world.”
“Full emergence?” She repeated the phrase in the hope that she’d be able to comprehend what he was saying. It didn’t help. “You just said this demon attacked me. Doesn’t that prove he’s already here?”
“Demons, like angels, are spiritual beings, Nikita. If these beings are not specifically sent here, it takes one hell of a lot of energy for them to stay in a realm where they don’t belong. You know all those Hollywood movies about demons latching onto humans to the point of possessing them? There’s actually a lot of truth to that. To simply exist in this realm, demons need to feed off the energy of a physical body—a human. But since these spiritual entities are dependent on a physical being, they’re only semi-manifested. For Dantalion to become independent and gain full power so that he can remain in this realm, he’s figured out a much bigger power source to feed his existence—human evil.”
She let that sink in. “No wonder he came to Miami.”
“Yeah. I really should have seen this coming.”
“Short-sighted of you. I take it Dantalion has had no trouble finding evil in our fair little village?”
“The capacity of evil is in us all, no matter where you live. From the sound of it, Paul was perfect prey for our hell spawn—a screwed-up, walking-wounded kind of guy who was already drowning in his own darkness. This demon operates by bartering for a human’s soul, promising to fulfill whatever need he’s read in his target’s thoughts. In exchange, he has that person—his proxy—voluntarily do his bidding.”
“His bidding? What does Dantalion have these people do?”
“The same thing he tried to have Paul do to you—kill.”
Nikita shook her head. This was just so...impossible. If it hadn’t been for the confrontation she’d had with what she’d thought was her mother, she’d be certain Kyle was playing an elaborate joke on her. “And these people who trade away their souls...they just blindly do whatever Dantalion tells them to do? That’s crazy, even if it’s to attain whatever it is this demon
thing has promised them.”
“That’s where things get really scary, because people do go crazy,” he said, his voice grim. “Dantalion-crazy.”
“I don’t understand.” Anything. At all.
“Even in a semi-manifested state, prolonged exposure to this particular hell spawn’s presence has a devastating effect on a person’s psychological health. The longer you hang with Dantalion, the crazier you get.”
“I believe it.” She shuddered at the memory of her mind twisting while she’d been in the presence of her “mother.” It had scared her to the point where she couldn’t even speak. But it hadn’t scared Kyle. He’d known what was at the root of her so-called madness right from the beginning.
He hadn’t said a word. She’d been terrified and sick at heart that she was losing her mind, and he never said a thing.
“I don’t know how to forgive you for that.” She wasn’t even aware of saying the words out loud until they reached her ears. Surprise at her loss of control brought her gaze to him just in time to see him grimace.
“Look, I know what I am is hard to swallow—”
“You let me think I was insane, Kyle.” And that, to her, was the bottom line. “You could have told me about this immediately, but you didn’t. Do you know how the thought of losing my mind tore me up? How terrified I was? I feel like you saw me drowning, struggling for my last breath, and you didn’t even bother to throw me a rope. You didn’t do anything but...but fuck me.”
He flinched, as if the crude words stabbed him. “You were so mentally fragile after Dantalion’s attack. I didn’t want to apply any more pressure.”
“The truth would have helped me, not hurt me. I can’t believe you didn’t see that.”
“Nikita—”
“I want more of the truth now, since you’re on such a roll.” The words came through the barrier of her teeth. The fury was overwhelming, boiling in her blood to the point where she couldn’t even get her jaw to unlock. “You said this demon is in a semi-manifested state. Do you know what he’s going to be like when he’s at full power?”
