Blood Divine

by Greg Howard

  Cooper forced a smile, choosing to omit any mention of Lillie Mae’s recent dungeon imprisonment. “She’s okay. Gettin’ up there. You know how it is. She’s asleep right now, so I thought I’d take a walk. Can’t stay long, though.”

  Wayne pulled back, holding Cooper at arm’s length and staring at him with a raised eyebrow. “You always were a piss poor liar, just like your daddy. Get your tail inside where it’s warm and tell me what really brings you here.”

  Stepping inside the church was like stepping back in time. A vast cluster of original colonial-style boxed pews sat in the center of a room awash in white walls and dark woods. Wayne pushed through the knee-high wooden gate of a pew box near the back of the nave and waved Cooper in. They sat side-by-side on the wooden bench facing the altar, exchanging a few meaningless pleasantries about Cooper’s life in Nashville and his snail-paced graduate work at Vanderbilt. Wayne was genuinely interested. Cooper was not. He had more pressing things on his mind. Even with the safety of daylight, he still didn’t want to leave Lillie Mae alone for too long.

  “I need your help with something, Wayne.” Cooper leaned forward and clasped his hands together in front of him. “Jesus, this is going to sound crazy.”

  Wayne stopped smiling. “What’s wrong? You sure Aunt Mae’s okay?”

  Cooper waved a hand in front of him and fought back tears. The words she’s dying refused to form on his lips. He sucked back the sudden wave of grief and looked up. “That’s not it. I’m… in some trouble.” He hadn’t rehearsed what he’d planned to say, and now he wished he had.

  “Trouble?” Wayne said. “What kind of trouble? Boy trouble?”

  Cooper shook his head. “Oh, God no. Although I could really use some absolution for some recent indiscretions.”

  “Wrong church.” Wayne smiled and pointed his thumb over his shoulder. “St. Mary’s is right across the street.”

  Cooper released a nervous chuckle. “Sorry. I just don’t know how to say this.”

  Wayne rested his arm on the back of the pew and smiled. “Cooper. It’s me. I changed your diapers and bought you your first pack of condoms. What is it?”

  Exasperated, Cooper didn’t try to edit himself and just spat out the words, a little louder than he’d intended. “I need to know how to kill an Anakim.” His voice echoed through the nave, the word Anakim bouncing around the room as if repelled by every wall in the holy place.

  Wayne’s face sagged, and his eyes instantly lost their cherubic sparkle. He stared at Cooper. “What do you know about the Anakim?”

  Cooper held his palms up. “Just what I read in a few Bible scriptures.”

  Wayne cocked his head at him and furrowed his brow. “That’s basically all there is—in the standard translations, that is. Why the heck would you need to know how to kill one? Something for your dissertation?”

  Cooper’s breath caught in his throat. Why the hell didn’t he think of that? “Exactly. My dissertation.”

  Wayne tapped his index finger to his lips, staring Cooper down out of the corner of his eye. “Like I said. Piss poor liar.” He dropped his hand to his lap and sighed. “Okay, I’ll play along.” Shifting in his seat, he faced Cooper and crossed his legs, ankle to knee.

  “According to biblical lore, and I lean heavy on the word lore here, the Anakim were a race of giants that lived thousands of years ago. They were an ancient evil people—multiplied like rodents, killing humans and somehow recreating their victims into their own image. Playing God, basically. The Anakim were a plague of death and destruction on the human world. Some believe they even subsisted on the blood of humans. The city of Jericho was one of their strongholds. An entire city inhabited by those foul devils.”

  Cooper wiped a hand over his face and massaged his temples, his head throbbing. “But the Israelites defeated the people of Jericho, right? It’s in the Bible. Joshua fit the battle of Jericho and all that.”

  Wayne peered at him. “Well, if that’s what the Bible says, then it must be true, right?” He shook his head and chuckled, running his fingers over the top of his head like a comb and then resting his hands on his belly. “Some believe a different version of that story, one that rarely gets shared—a version in which Joshua and Caleb didn’t lead the Israelites to victory that night, but to slaughter.”

  Cooper swallowed hard and shifted in his seat, his suspicions confirmed.

  Wayne loosened his clerical collar and unfastened the top button of his shirt. “They had no idea of the evil that awaited them when the walls of the city came down. Some believe the Anakim captured Caleb and transformed him into one of them, that he developed unquenchable bloodlust and even betrayed his closest friend and leader. Supposedly, he drained Joshua right in front of the surviving women and children of the Israelite camp before he murdered them all. Caleb rose up in the ranks of Anakim society and leadership. After a few centuries passed, he became their most ruthless king.” Wayne paused and flashed Cooper a conspiratorial smile. “But that wouldn’t have been an appropriate Sunday school story for the kids, now would it?”

  Cooper shook his head. He ran his index finger along the edge of the pew, the wood smooth and cold under his touch. “Where did they come from?”

  Wayne picked up the burgundy hardcover Bible sitting beside him on the pew and flipped absently through its pages. “The Anakim were the children of the Nephilim.”

  Cooper nodded. He remembered that word from his years of forced Sunday school attendance. “Nephilim. The sons of God and the daughters of men. The unholy seed of the fallen angels of Heaven when they came to Earth and procreated with humans.”

  Wayne smiled, seemingly pleased with Cooper’s recall of biblical knowledge. “The Nephilim were an abomination, just like their mutant offspring, the Anakim.”

  The weight of Wayne’s revelations pressed down on Cooper’s chest, constricting the flow of oxygen. The origins of the Anakim and the Divinum were closer than he had imagined—the Divinum descended from righteous angels of heaven and Anakim from the fallen. He was part of a Seraphic lineage with a cataclysmic sibling rivalry that could destroy the human race, and he was their pawn. Cooper stood and crossed the four-foot pew box, wondering how much he should share with Wayne. He could use all the allies he could get.

  He turned toward the rector. “I think I believe the lore over the scriptures. I don’t think the Anakim were destroyed by the Israelites at Jericho. In fact, I know they weren’t, because I’ve seen them here in Georgetown.”

  Wayne stared at him, his chubby cheeks sagging. The corners of his mouth curled down. The heat of Wayne’s judgment warmed Cooper’s cheeks. He couldn’t blame the guy. He knew he sounded certifiable.

  Cooper shook his head and turned away. “Never mind. Just forget I brought it up.”

  Wayne spun him around with a hand to the shoulder and stood in front of him. His usually sparkling eyes dark with worry. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

  Wayne led Cooper through the side door of the nave and out into the church’s graveyard, one of the oldest in South Carolina. Majestic oaks draped with a protective canopy of Spanish moss over uneven ground littered with headstones, some pristine and new, but others ancient and crumbling.

  Cooper followed him through a maze of graves into the center of the yard where Wayne stopped and pointed down. “Two nights ago, I saw a woman dressed all in black standing right here looking down at those headstones. She was tall. Like really tall for a woman. Late twenties, maybe early thirties. Beautiful. I’d been working late and saw her through my office window. I came out and asked if she was all right. You know, did she want to come inside out of the cold and talk. She didn’t answer, so I got a little closer and asked her how she knew the deceased. She mumbled something like she belonged with them.”

  Cooper stared down at the overgrown headstones of Sally, Andrew, Stephen, Jonathan, and Elizabeth Parker, the date of their deaths identical except for Betsy’s, which showed five years earlier than the others. He
wondered whose remains, if any, rested under the markers for Stephen and Elizabeth Parker.

  Wayne tugged at his clerical collar. “I turned away for just a second, and when I looked back, she was gone. Vanished. I nearly messed myself right here. I thought I’d seen a ghost. Wouldn’t be the first time around here, but she was different somehow.”

  Cooper shook his head. “She was no ghost.”

  Wayne circled the Parker graves and stood behind the headstones, facing Cooper. “Something about that woman stuck with me. Something dark. Made my skin crawl. Barely got a wink of sleep that night.”

  “And she’s supposed to be one of the good ones.” Cooper scanned the graveyard from one end to the other. The burn of invisible foreign eyes was distinct and unsettling, unless it was his overactive imagination. “There are others like her who are dangerous. Extremely dangerous.” He looked back at Wayne. “So back to my original question. How do you kill them?”

  Wayne chuckle-snorted and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He strolled back around the Parker family plot and stood beside Cooper. “You can’t kill them, Coop. They’re like cockroaches.”

  Cooper crossed his arms and widened his stance. “There has to be a way.”

  Wayne reached down and picked up a small rock from the ground. He rolled it around in his palm and then stared at it. “God banished the Anakim to eternal darkness. Sunlight renders them paralyzed and defenseless. Scrambles their brain or something. But his attempt to rid the earth of them failed.”

  Cooper cocked his head at Wayne, not following his meaning.

  The rector looked down, dropped the rock, and shook his head. After a silent moment, he looked up, genuine fear pooling in his eyes. “God tried to kill them once. Remember the Great Flood? It didn’t work. They survived.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Cooper sat in the Boston rocker by the window in Lillie Mae’s room, absently picking at the edges of a stale cinnamon roll he’d found in the cupboard on his third failed quest to find the elusive Jim Beam. Staring out the window onto Front Street, he reflected on his conversation with Wayne, and a pang of hopelessness gnawed away at his insides.

  He considered leaving without Lillie Mae in an attempt to draw Alexander away from her. But the thought of abandoning her now, when she only had God knows how long left to live, made him sick to his stomach. No. He couldn’t leave her. He wasn’t going anywhere. Betsy and the twins were right. His less than reliable power might be his only hope, if he could ever get it under control.

  Movement on the sidewalk across the street drew his focus. Cooper recognized the burgundy Gamecocks hoodie right away. Tony Tanner walked with his head down, and his hands shoved into his pockets. He casually glanced over at the front of the house as he passed. Cooper pulled back the sheers to get a better look. Tony must have spotted him because he stared down at the sidewalk and picked up his pace, disappearing around the corner. Cooper wondered if it could have been Tony he sensed in the churchyard. What the hell was the guy doing? Stalking him? Looking for a little down-low afternoon delight?

  He shook his head, released the sheers, and glanced over at Lillie Mae propped up in the bed by a small mountain of fluffy down pillows. The soft purr of a snore slipped through her parted lips. The doorbell woke her. She opened her eyes.

  “I’ll go see who it is,” he said, putting the half-eaten cinnamon roll on a napkin on the seat of the rocker. He went over and squeezed her hand. Color had returned to her face, but the ordeal at Warfield had taken an obvious toll on her already weakened body.

  “Be right back,” he said, with the most reassuring smile he could muster.

  He slipped out of the bedroom and down the hall to the front door. A quick peek through the sidelight revealed an odd trio of strangers awaiting him on the porch. He was hesitant to open the door. However, the safety of sunlight and Betsy’s nine-inch dagger tucked under his shirt finally gave him the courage to do so.

  A stunning dark-skinned woman stood in the center, her arms crossed, and her weight resting on her right side. Wide-set eyes and long, dark hair pulled back into a ponytail accentuated her angular face. A broad-shouldered man of some exotic Pacific Islander variety stood to her right. A dazzling smile stretched across his handsome face, anchored by a set of ridiculously pronounced dimples. His body looked like he had just stepped off the cover of Men’s Fitness magazine, ripped to Photoshop perfection. Another man—an absurdly tall and thin albino stood behind the man and woman, towering over them. Cooper had never seen an albino up close before, and he couldn’t stop staring. The woman cleared her throat, drawing his attention. Her frozen facial features told him she was all business and this was not a social call.

  “I am Odessa. We are Jericho agents.” She stated it as casually as if she’d just introduced herself as the Avon lady. “Betsy sent for us. Are you going to let us in, or are you just going to stand there gawking at us all day?”

  Cooper was so mesmerized by her beauty, her petulance didn’t even bother him. She was around his age, maybe a little younger, and nearly as tall. A shapely, statuesque body begged to be released from the confines of a fitted leather jacket and tight pants neatly tucked into knee-high leather boots. Her milk-chocolate skin was impossibly smooth. A perfectly formed chin and mile-high cheekbones led up to probing black eyes that peered out from under long lashes thick with mascara. The effect was haunting and beautiful.

  She tapped the toe of her boot and raised a precisely penciled eyebrow. “Well?”

  Cooper stared at the group for another moment, sizing them up. They were Divinum. That much he knew. Their raw magical energy leaped across the threshold and latched on to his with awkward familiarity. He peered into three sets of distinctly mesmerizing eyes, probing their open minds. He couldn’t see anything clearly. He would need to work on that. But he sensed that he could trust them.

  He finally stepped out of the way and waved them in. “Sorry. Come in, I guess.”

  Fitness Model Guy gave Cooper a quick nod as he followed Odessa inside. “Name’s Rafe.” His thick mane of black hair danced around the top of bulky shoulders, and he flashed Cooper an overly confident smile filled with sparkling white teeth. He offered his hand with a flirtatious twinkle in his eye Cooper knew all too well. Hell, he’d mastered it himself.

  Cooper shook his hand. Rafe didn’t ping on his gaydar, but Cooper got a definite vibe from him. Mostly straight but needs to be desired by everyone, male or female. And very sexual. Wouldn’t even require a six-pack. Cooper knew the type well and had bedded his share of them.

  Rafe stepped inside like he owned the place. Filling the foyer with a musky air of testosterone and masculine bravado, he looked like he’d just hopped off a Harley. He slipped out of his black leather jacket, exposing a ridiculously carved chest and rippling abs veiled only by the thin cotton of a tight white tee. Snug black leather pants hugged his muscled ass and bulging crotch like they had been painted on. After his quick inspection of the foyer, Rafe’s leer traveled down the front of Cooper’s body and stopped just below his waist.

  “Nice blade.” He winked at Cooper.

  As hot as the guy was, Cooper couldn’t help being annoyed by his off-the-charts cockiness. Cooper lifted his shirt and withdrew Betsy’s dagger. He eyed all three of them with a healthy dose of suspicion, trying to become comfortable with his decision to trust them. He looked at the dagger and finally laid it on the antique telephone table by the door.

  The albino man did not offer his hand but gave a slight bow as he entered, his long white hair falling forward into his pale face like strands of fine silk. His movements were so fluid, he looked as if he were skimming the surface of the floor rather than taking actual steps. A white trench coat flowed open behind him. As he passed, a warm wave of calm spilled over Cooper’s body from the top of his head down to the tips of his toes. He felt like he’d just woken up from a long nap, refreshed and peaceful. The albino man made him feel that way, though he didn’t understand how
.

  Hello, Cooper. I am Lex.

  The man’s internal voice didn’t sound intrusive like the others Cooper had recently heard in his mind. It was lyrical and melodic. Even soothing.

  “Lex is a pure-blood. And mute,” the woman said behind him. “He only communicates with his mind. You heard him, right?”

  “Yes. I heard him.” Cooper nodded to the albino, looking up at the light fixture above the man’s head to make sure he would clear it. He did, but just barely. Lex stood like a granite statue with no visible signs that he even breathed. He patiently allowed Cooper to gawk at him. One of the twins had mentioned the term. Cooper looked back at Rafe and Odessa. “Pure-blood?”

  Odessa planted a hand on her hip. “A direct descendant of the Davidic dynasty. The Divinum line of David. The most pure of heart and powerful of our kind.”

  “That’s right.” Rafe reached up and put his hand on Lex’s shoulder. “Pure-bloods are rare as fuck, and we got one!” He nudged Cooper’s arm with his elbow. “Old Lex here is pushing four digits. And more powerful than frickin’ Moses.”

  “Wait. Moses was Divinum?”

  Rafe snickered. “Well the Red Sea sure as hell didn’t part itself.”

  Odessa turned on her heel and walked straight down the hall to the sitting room as Rafe and Lex fell in behind her. Cooper followed them, feeling more the visitor than the host.

  “We’re here to extract you and relocate you to safety,” Odessa said as soon as he stepped into the room. “Get your things. We leave immediately.”

  “Extract me?” Cooper’s blood came to an instant boil in his veins. Damn if he wasn’t tired of supernatural beings, dead and otherwise, telling him what to do. “Look, I am not in the mood to be ordered around by complete strangers. I’m not going anywhere without Lillie Mae.”

  Rafe chuckled and plopped down in the wingback chair. “Oh, this is going to be good.” He slung a meaty thigh over the armrest. His T-shirt rode up, and he laced his fingers together over the ripples of his tanned lower stomach. Lex stood by the door, unnaturally still. Cooper never saw him blink, never saw his chest move with the normal flow of oxygen. His presence was disconcerting, yet oddly comforting.