Hell Is Coming (The Watcher's Series Book 1)

by N. P. Martin

  “This just gets weirder by the minute,” I said.

  “No shit,” Kasey said. “What are all these weapons for? There’s some really cool shit here.” She took one of the swords off the wall and started swinging it around.

  “Hey,” I snapped. “Put it back.”

  Kasey looked at me like a child who had just been scolded. “You’re no fun.”

  “All this shit is dangerous. Just don’t touch anything.”

  I opened the book that was in the envelope. It was thick and leather bound and every page appeared to be filled with my mother’s handwriting, along with sketches of monsters who were more than familiar to me by now. “This is crazy.” I shook my head.

  “What?” Kasey was picking up knives from the bench and examining them.

  “Nothing.” I closed the book. “I told you not to touch anything.”

  “Jeez, how could I not touch this stuff?” She threw her arms out. “Look around, man. Aren’t you excited by all this?”

  Excited?

  Not really, not a ‘kid in a toy shop’ excited like Kasey. The truth was I didn’t know what to think. If all the stuff in that room once belonged to my mom, then she had been some kind of hunter. There was no other way to explain it. I would have thought her insane if it wasn’t for the fact that I’d seen monsters with my own eyes. Not to mention what I witnessed as a kid—the demon taking my near dead mother away. As crazy as it seemed, it was all starting to make a mad kind of sense.

  My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. It was Josh texting: WR R U? I texted back that I was on my way home. “We gotta go.”

  “But we only just got here,” Kasey protested. “There’s so much stuff to look through.”

  “Another time. Josh needs the car.”

  “Alright.” Kasey slumped her shoulders and shuffled out of the room once I’d opened the shutter again. I took one last look into the room before switching off the light and pulling the shutter down.

  “What do you think is on the disc?” Kasey asked.

  Standing in the hallway I looked at the disc that I held in my hand along with my mother’s journal. “Don’t know.” That was the truth.

  “You think she left you a message, like a video message? That would be cool.”

  My stomach tightened at the thought of seeing my mom again, even if it was just on video. I hurried back up the corridor, my mind set on getting home, seeing what was on the disc, and reading the journal. “Hey,” I said to the creepy old guy when we walked back to the reception desk. “Has anyone else been to that lockup in the last ten years?”

  The old guy was back in his chair, feet up, reading a porno mag. He must have noticed the sickened look I gave him. “I like the stories,” he said shrugging, his eyes undressing me again. I thought then that all old men like him should be locked away and refused access to the general public.

  “That’s not what I asked. Not at all.”

  “I know what you asked.” He turned his attention to the magazine again. “There was a guy, came here a few times. Never gave a name.”

  “What did he look like? You remember?”

  “I might.” He smiled at me. “Maybe you give me a look at those nice titties of yours and I tell you.”

  Kasey let out a horrified laugh beside me. I’d had enough of the old man’s creepy games. “Hey, how about you tell me what I want to know or I’ll jump over this counter and shove that magazine down your throat.” I stared hard at him, refusing to avert my gaze until he relented, which he soon did. It wasn’t like me to be so aggressive, but the old man was being an asshole and I had too much going on to be tolerant of his bullshit.

  The old man’s expression remained passive, like he was used to being reprimanded by young girls, but he put his porno mag down anyway. “You know, that other woman—your mother is it? She said something similar to me once, threatened to cut my balls off. I believed her.”

  “Yeah? Well you better believe me as well then.”

  The old guy shook his head. “Women these days, you’re all ballbusters.”

  “Description of the man,” I said loosing patience, to the point where I was actually going to leap over there and choke the old bastard with his porno mag as I said I would.

  “Six foot, dark hair, no sense of humor, so he must be related to you.” He gave me a childish smirk.

  “That’s it?”

  “He had a scar on one side of his face,” the creep said. “He was here with your mom once. They looked pretty tight.” He smirked again, seeming to revel in the cutting nature of the information he gave me. “I don’t think it was your daddy, if you know what I mean.”

  The decrepit old bastard enjoyed telling me that last part. “You’re sure about that?” I pulled out my wallet and showed him a picture of my dad. “Was it him?”

  He squinted at the photo. “Nope, not him.” He squinted again. “Looked very like him though.”

  I frowned as I slid the picture back into my wallet. “What do you mean they looked alike?”

  “I mean the guy that was here could have been that guy’s relation. Like a brother or something.”

  My frown deepened. Neither of my parents had brothers or sisters, or so they told me. My head hurt. This was too much for one night, and I hadn’t even checked out the CD or read the journal yet.

  “I think I’ve earned a look at them titties,” the old guy said. “What do you say, eh? A quick flash for an old man?”

  I let Kasey give the answer to that one. “Screw you! Creepy old bastard.”

  “Dyke bitch!” the old guy shouted as we walked out the doors to the parking lot. Kasey turned around outside and flipped her middle finger at him and then started laughing.

  “Crazy old bastard,” she said as she got into the car.

  I tossed the journal and disc into the back seat, started the car and drove off. I said hardly anything to Kasey when she started asking me questions about what was going on. I told her I didn’t know, which was true for the most part. I had a million questions in my head, all demanding answers that I wasn’t able to give.

  Had my whole childhood been based on a lie? The story was that my mom had been a private detective—that’s what we were told, that’s why she was hardly ever home. Now it turned it out she was into something much more dangerous.

  And where was my dad in all this?

  That’s what I really wanted to know. Did he know about the lockup, about what my mom was into? He had to have known. And who was the stranger my mom was with at the storage facility? I hoped there’d be answers on that disc and in that journal.

  I dropped Kasey off where I first picked her up, at the building in which she slept. She tried to persuade me to stay, to share a bottle of vodka with her, but I politely declined. I had other priorities, which I think she knew anyway. Normally she would have pressed me until I gave in, but on this occasion she let me of the hook first time.

  As I wasn’t going to be drinking, on the way home I decided I would have a joint instead. So much had happened and my nerves were jangled. The weed would calm me. Josh always kept a stash under the driver’s seat. He used to keep it in the glove box until he got pulled over one day by the cops and got busted for possession. Under the drivers seat was a safer place. I spotted an empty parking lot at the back of an old abandoned grocery store of Queen Street. I pulled in and parked the car then slid my hand under the seat in search of the weed. What I found instead was Josh’s laptop. He’d obviously stuffed it under the seat in a hurry. Forgetting about the weed I opened the laptop and inserted the disc, my stomach doing somersaults at the prospect of discovering what was on it. Just a quick look and then I would get the car back to Josh.

  My pulse quickened as I put the disc in the drive and waited for something to come up on the screen. My heart skipped a beat when a video started playing and I gasped when my mom’s face appeared on the screen. My hand went to my mouth and tears welled up in my eyes. She looked just as she did the last time I saw h
er. Her thick dark brown hair was tied back, revealing her brown, almond shaped eyes, which seemed to fill the screen as they looked out at me. She appeared tired, slightly haggard. It was like looking in a mirror for me. “Hello, Leia,” she said on the video in her familiar dusky voice, a voice I hadn’t heard in so long. “I guess if you’re watching this that means you found the lockup and I’m not around anymore.”

  The video was dated the day before her death. Tears steamed down my face. “Mom…” I said, touching the screen. I had spent so long resenting her, being angry at her, that I forgot just how much I missed her.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” she went on. “I messed up.” Even with the weak video quality I could see her own eyes were shiny with tears, but she held them back. That’s how I remembered her—tough, able to hold back her emotions. I used to think she was cold back then, even uncaring at times. That didn’t matter in that moment as I became filled with longing, wishing she was there to explain everything in person, to help me understand what was happening to me.

  “At some point I’m not going to be around anymore,” she said, her voice strained as she held herself in check. “Something…someone’s gonna come for me and that’ll be that. Shit…” She paused while she wiped tears from her eyes. “I hope your father is still there with you. I’ll be leaving soon because I know he’ll only get himself killed trying to protect me. Despite everything, he still loves me, though I don’t know why. I’ve made things dangerous for all of us, for you and Josh. No one can be there when they come for me, especially you and Josh…my babies.” Her voice cracked and tears escaped from her eyes, which she quickly wiped away.

  I had to pause the video as I sat in the car crying. Seeing my mom again, even if it was only on video, was a little too much to bear after everything else. After a few minutes, when I got control of myself again, I restarted the video. “So I’m spending one more night at home and then I have to go,” my mom said, the sound of her voice unbearably intimate inside the car. And was she in the lockup I had just come from? I recognized the weapons in the background. She was. “Your father doesn’t know. No one does. It’s the way it has to be.” She paused while she lit a cigarette. Something else I didn’t know about her. “So this is for you, Leia. If Catherine kept her word, you should be eighteen by now. You should be noticing the changes, seeing the demons. You’re probably freaking out right now, but don’t worry, it’s all normal, at least for our kind.”

  “Our kind?” I said to the screen.

  What did that mean?

  “By now you’ve seen the lockup and everything in here. You know I’m not a private detective, right?” She gave a small laugh. “Ridiculous, I know, but it was all I could think to say the day you asked me what I did for a living. I thought it might explain why I was away so much.” Her dark eyes seemed to burn through the screen at me. “I’m sorry about that, for not being around as much as I should have been. This life we have…it’s hard to be a mother. Maybe one day you’ll find that out for yourself.”

  I seriously doubt that.

  “Anyway, you probably figured out by now that you aren’t normal, not like everyone else anyway. And you aren’t. Neither is Josh. You’re both Nephilim. As crazy as it sounds, you have angel DNA in your system that activates certain powers when you turn eighteen. Seeing the demons is just the start of it. After that you’ll experience a whole host of physical changes…improvements you might say. You’ll get stronger, faster, more agile. You’ll develop fighting abilities. You’ll even heal quicker. It’s kinda cool actually, but you’ll also become a soldier in a war that’s been raging since humans first walked the earth and that can suck sometimes. Lord knows it can suck…”

  I was shaking my head, trying to comprehend what she was saying. She sounded nuts, actually reminding me of the woman from that movie Terminator 2, the one who tries to convince everyone that machines will end the world one day. My mom had the same crazy zealousness to her. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe her. I did, as much as I was able to anyway, but it was a lot to take in. She was practically telling me that my life as I knew it was over. What was I supposed to make of that?

  “We’re known as Watchers,” she continued. “We’re here to watch over the humans, to keep them safe, or try too anyway. Doesn’t always work out though, as you’ll find out one day. More importantly we’re here to watch over the demons and the rest of the evil in this world, to keep it from stepping out of line and breaking the laws of the universe, which unfortunately, is what evil does all the time.” She gave a tight smile. “It keeps us busy. Before long you’ll be doing nothing else but chasing after those bastards.”

  So now I’m a Watcher? Suddenly I’m half angel? WTF!

  I didn’t think things could get anymore stranger. I guess that meant art school was out.

  “You need to contact someone, a person I should have told you about but didn’t, for various reasons that I’m not going to get into now.” She looked away from the camera for a second. “Things happen, that’s all I’m going to say. Anyway, you have an Uncle. His name is Frank. He’s your father’s brother.”

  “What?” All that time growing up in foster homes and I thought we had no one.

  “Frank is a Watcher too. He lives in a cabin in the mountains outside the city. You’ll find the directions in the journal I left for you, on the back of his picture. Contact Frank, tell him he owes me. He’ll show you and your brother what to do.”

  I grabbed the journal from the back seat and rifled through it, stopping when I found the picture of Frank. The photo was creased and slightly faded and showed a man in his late twenties who was unmistakably my dad’s brother. I could hardly believe I had an uncle. The photo showed Frank leaning against a black car with trees in the background. He had a half smile on his face as he looked at the camera with dark brown eyes that had the same kind of hardness in them that my mom’s had. It must be a Watcher thing, that slightly haunted look that suggested you had seen too many bad things. Frank was handsome like my dad, about the same build though he looked more athletic than my dad did and his dark brown hair was swept back whereas my dad’s had been combed to the side. Looking at the picture I tried to figure what Frank was like as a person but the picture didn’t give much away. I guessed I’d find out soon enough anyway. There were directions to Frank’s cabin on the back of the picture as my mom had said there would be.

  “Anyway, baby, I have to go now,” my mom said in the video and I thought.

  As usual, huh?

  “I’m really sorry for all this, sorry if I messed up your life. I hope you can find it in yourself to forgive me one day. I…I always tried to do what was right, baby. Sometimes it just didn’t work out.” Her brown eyes went glassy again. “I love you, Leia. Look after your brother and tell him I love him. Tell your father I love him too. Goodbye.”

  The screen went black as my mom switched off the camera.

  Tell my father she loves him?

  I shook my head, tears rolling down my face. In a sudden surge of anger I slammed my fist into the dashboard and let out a frustrated scream. If only she had known when she made that video what would happen the next day.

  My mind reeled. I didn’t know what to think or how to feel. My life had been turned upside down, like I was freefalling with no way of stopping myself. What the hell was a girl to do when her dead mother drops a bombshell like that?

  There was only one thing to do as far as I was concerned: get drunk. I hadn’t drunk in nearly a year because I was trying to be good, trying to be straight, to be normal. What a waste of time that had been, especially when I found out I was anything but normal.

  I pulled out my phone and called Josh. He would be pissed that I still had the car. His phone rang but there was no answer, which meant he really was pissed. He tended to block me anytime we argued or I pissed him off. I sent him a text apologizing, telling him I would be home with the car soon, albeit an hour and a half late.

  I put the laptop and journ
al on the passenger seat and drove home, all the while wondering how I was going to tell Josh about everything and how he would react.

  Whatever happened, it looked like our lives were about to change forever.

  Chapter 4

  By the time I arrived back at Diane’s place, I’d called Josh three more times on his cell and every time the call went to voicemail.

  What the hell, Josh? Get a grip, no need to be an asshole about things.

  I parked the car and took the laptop and journal up to the house with me.

  Josh and Diane were nowhere to be seen and there was an eerie silence in the house. The TV, normally blaring in the background, was switched off. I expected Josh to be standing there waiting for me when I came in, ready to chew me out for being late and messing up his plans. “Josh!” I called out. “Diane! I’m home! Hello…”

  No one answered.

  Frowning, I put the laptop and journal on the sofa. Then I noticed the strange smell. It was sharp and pungent and reminded me of something I had smelled once in chemistry class back in high school. It was sulfur. Why would the house smell of sulfur? “Josh, I’m home. Car’s outside.”

  Still nothing.

  Where the hell is everyone?

  There was no one in the kitchen so I went upstairs, noticed the bathroom door was slightly open, that there were large wet footprints imprinted in the carpet that led towards Josh’s room.

  Why all the water? Not like Diane to be so messy.

  “Diane, you in there?” I said as I pushed the bathroom door open.

  I screamed when I saw Diane in the tub. The water was red and her neck was twisted around at an impossible angle, her tongue poking out the side of her mouth like it had tried to escape. Her eyes were frozen open. I ran to the bath tub. “No, no, no…Diane…”

  She was dead.

  Someone had broken her neck and stabbed her in the belly.

  My chest heaved as I tried to control my emotions.

  This can’t be happening. Diane can’t be dead.