by Cara Wylde
I swam deep and held my breath for as long as I could. I didn’t know what I was doing. I should have gone up to the surface, not down down down into the darkness. Except… it wasn’t dark at all. My eyes adjusted to the depths of the ocean, and I saw strange fish avoiding me like I was a predator they’d never dealt with before. Maybe I was. I was swimming away from the shore and the surface, and my lungs started protesting. It felt like they were about to explode, so I released the air I’d been holding. I was moving faster that I could’ve ever moved when I was human, so I wasn’t that concerned about getting back to the surface in time. I didn’t need to, though. For a moment, I choked on water, then my body relaxed, and I realized I didn’t need to breathe, after all.
The perks of being a revenant… I was starting to believe my mantra. Well done, Mila!
I wasn’t alone. I squinted my eyes to make out something or someone who was swimming right below me. It looked like a large fish, but the closer I got, the more certain I became that it was a mermaid. Or a merman. Half man, half fish. I knew that dirty blond hair and lean, graceful limbs. Joel. What was Klaus’s boyfriend doing swimming alone in the ocean when Klaus was at the party, drinking and having fun? I lunged forward, eager to catch up with him, but also to test my incredible speed. For some reason, I moved quicker and more smoothly in the water than on land.
Joel saw me and swirled around to watch me with wide eyes.
“Mila, what are you doing here?”
Of course he could talk under water. I couldn’t. I shook my head and pointed upwards. He nodded, took my hand, and we both swam to the surface. God, he was graceful! His long, blue fish tail was covered in translucent, undulating fins, and he also had fins attached to his elbows and wrists. There were gills on his chest and the sides of his neck that weren’t there at all when he was in his human form. We reached the surface, and I took a long, hungry breath. It was still nicer to breathe than to not breathe. We smiled at each other, then we swam toward the sandy beach hidden under the cliff I’d jumped off of.
“So? Why aren’t you at the party?” he asked me as we settled on the shore.
I had my feet in the water, and he his tail.
“Why aren’t you?”
He sighed. “Klaus didn’t tell you? We broke up.”
“I knew something was wrong. When?”
“This summer. I broke up with him, actually. I couldn’t take it anymore… Hiding from his parents, from most of the students at the Academy… When he’s with his family, he’s ashamed because he’s gay and not what his parents want him to be. When he’s with his MDC classmates, he’s ashamed of me. After all, I’m just a kitchen boy. I peel veggies, do the dishes, and cook a brisket from time to time, when the cooks let me use their stuff.”
“I’m sorry.” What else could I have said? “You made a cute couple, and you were good for him.”
He frowned. “I don’t want us to make a cute couple. I want us to make a strong couple. It wasn’t meant to be.”
As much as I loved Klaus as a friend and ally, I knew he had his shortcomings. Wanting to please his family at the expense of his own happiness was one of them. I could only hope things would change for him when he graduated and became a Grim Reaper in his own right. Maybe then, he’d realize how awesome he was. Mage, Merciful Death, friend and member of my Arcane Cabal. If I was ever to defeat Valentine Morningstar, I knew Klaus would play a huge part in it. Once he understood his own worth, maybe he’d be more inclined to finally set aside his family’s needs and prioritize his own.
“Your turn,” Joel said.
I shook my head. “I feel like I’m going insane. I don’t know what the fuck’s going on. I’m just wrong in the head. Earlier, I wanted to…” I sighed. There was no point in giving him the gruesome details. Francis and the guys were right. How could I want to have sex in the cave where I’d sent my first victim to her death? “Do you think we’re the result of our upbringing? Like… not just that. The result of our environment, society, culture… Do you think we carry the sins of our ancestors?”
He blew out his cheeks.
I smiled bitterly. “You don’t have to answer that. I’m just thinking out loud.”
“If you want to know what I think, it’s pretty simple.”
“You think I’m crazy…”
“No. I think you’re suffering of PTSD. I’ve seen it in so many people, I’ve seen it in Klaus. Our families can do this to us. I was lucky, you know, but you and Klaus… not so much. They claim they’re only concerned about your well-being, but then it’s like they do everything in their power to achieve the opposite. In your case, it was even worse, wasn’t it?”
Joel didn’t know the whole story, but he knew enough. PTSD. The moment he said it, a feeling of peace and resignation washed over me. My shoulders relaxed, and I realized just how tense I’d been the whole summer. Watching the waves caressing my feet, then retreating, I started telling him everything in a low, feeble voice.
“I guess you could say my family’s fucked up. Both families. My biological father tried to kill me twice. He succeeded the second time, in fact. My mother abandoned me when I was a baby, then vanished off the face of the Earth. I’m not saying it was her fault, but facts are facts. My adoptive father hates me. When I was little, he used to beat me and my mother. Sometimes, he put out his cigarettes on my stomach. We’re in a better place now. I’m not sure I’ve forgiven him, though.” Joel nodded, listening to me in silence. “Then Grim Reaper Academy happened. Lorna and Sariel. The monster in the well almost ate me once. Now I’m immortal thanks to it, but I have to bring it sacrifices to sustain it. Sometimes I think this is all my fault. Me and my stupid dreams of being special.” I chuckled bitterly. “I was so miserable as a kid that I thought if a supernatural world did exist out there, then maybe I could be a part of it, maybe I could finally belong, and it would all turn out great. Maybe I could have a happily-ever-after. For sure, I’ll get an ever-after, but it won’t be happy.”
“I’m sorry. It’s not your fault, though.”
I wiped a tear off my cheek. “I don’t know what to do, Joel. I don’t know how to deal with all this.”
“You deal with it one day at a time. There’s no other way.”
I let my head fall on his shoulder. “I hope you and Klaus get back together. He needs a guy like you.”
CHAPTER SIX
One day at a time. Being a revenant had its perks. Immortality. I couldn’t suffer of PTSD forever, because if there was one thing in this universe that was certain, it was that nothing – absolutely nothing, good or bad – lasted forever. Pandora had said it once. I had a tendency to forget it, but then someone would come along to remind me.
The next weekend after Mabon, GC and I teleported to the Himalayas. It took us a while to find his grandfather, Golden Calf Apis the First. GC hadn’t visited him in centuries, and the hermit liked to move around. We ended up spending the night in a horrible tent in the middle of nowhere, in a region called Sarchu, at about 13,768 feet above sea level. Andromeda, GC’s mother, had told him she’d seen him around that area last time she and her husband had visited him. Well, it appeared the old man – who probably didn’t look like an old man at all – had moved. We asked the locals, and some of them remembered a tall, handsome man with hair the color of the Himalayan sunset having found refuge in the nearby canyon.
“Right behind that stupa you see there, across the road,” a raven-haired man with Tibetan features told us in a struggling accent.
We went there, found nothing, returned to the tents. The man gave us masala tea, hot soup, and rice over which he’d poured a mushy lentil sauce. If I hadn’t been a revenant, I would’ve probably puked my guts out later.
“Picturesque, isn’t it?” GC laughed at my misery as we sat down on the grass, looking at the reddish mountains jutting up before us.
“Shut up. You know I hate it.”
“If I knew exactly where he was, we�
�d teleport there. I don’t, so it’s an adventure.”
“How am I supposed to sleep here? Have you seen the toilet?”
He shrugged, amused. “I’m a guy. I can pee in nature.”
There were marmots among the rocks and bushes, and we spent an hour trying to bait them with biscuits. A big one came to eat from my hand, and I snapped pictures, saving them for the moment I’d have Internet access. There was no signal here. These people were completely cut off.
“You know marmots carry the plague…”
“Get out of here!” I wiped my hands on my jeans.
“The ones in China, though. You’re safe. And anyway, you can’t get sick even if you tried.”
“That’s reassuring…” Still, I didn’t feel like playing with the marmots after that.
I was so uncomfortable that night that I mostly stayed awake, staring at the ceiling and listening to the wind beating against the tent. That meant no nightmares, so… yay? The next day, we hitchhiked to the next human settlement – if it could be called that at all, – then the next, and the next, investigating and asking around. We found ourselves on the road to Leh, in the region of Jammu and Kashmir. It was the capital of the Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh – a green oasis in an ocean of rocks and dust. We stopped at the first Buddhist temple we saw, and asked about the young, blond man who wasn’t young at all. But we kept that tiny detail to ourselves. Finally, we got lucky. Apis the First had been there years ago, lived among the monks for a few months, then moved on. He probably lived in Leh now, which suited me just fine. At least, Leh was a city with proper houses and hotels.
God, Indian food was awful! Not Indian food in general, but the one we could find here, in the heart of the mountains, where supplies were brought by trucks that polluted the air heavily and couldn’t reach most places when the snow destroyed the roads. The water was undrinkable, and even I, an immortal, wasn’t going to risk it. We found GC’s grandfather in a small brick house at the edge of the city, surrounded by a wall of white stone. Everyone in Leh knew him as the foreign doctor whose teas and ointments could heal pretty much anything, from the common cold to a broken back. He was more sought after than the doctors at the Tibetan Institute, the ones who could tell your ailments by feeling your pulse.
He invited us inside. Not paying much attention to me, he hugged his grandson. I stood awkwardly by the door, watching them and trying to wrap my mind around the fact that even though this man was so terribly old, as old as time itself, he looked just as young and handsome as my boyfriend. Granted there were deep wrinkles around his eyes, they only made him look more interesting and mysterious. Like a wiser version of my hot-headed GC. The future looks good…
We sat around a low table, drank masala tea, and asked our questions. It took Apis the First a while to study me and decide whether I was worth the trouble or not. He was literally the first person who wasn’t impressed by my name when I introduced myself. On the contrary, the fact that a nephilim was my father seemed to disgust him.
“You were lucky you turned out human,” he said as he sipped his tea. “You could have been a nephilim, too.”
“Would that have been so bad?”
He shook his head. “Better a revenant than a nephilim. Better a hound of hell, a gorgon with snakes in her hair, better a cosmic spawn that devours everything that lives and breathes.”
I furrowed my brows. This was personal. GC placed his hand on mine and gave me an apologetic smile. I wasn’t supposed to take the old man seriously.
“Tell me about the nephilim. Why do you hate their kind so much?”
“They are the true embodiment of sin. Don’t you know what they did to Heaven and Earth?” He leaned over the table and emphasized every word. “They united them through sin.”
I cocked an eyebrow. He was exaggerating, wasn’t he? Half an hour spent in the presence of this man, and I already knew he wasn’t going to tell me anything useful. But I’d made the journey here, and it hadn’t been a pleasant journey at all, so I could as well let him speak.
“When God created the heavens, he made the angels immortal and perfect.”
“I thought angels aren’t immortal…”
“They were back then. Not anymore. Let me tell the story, girl, and you’ll understand. God created the angels, and Satan created the demons. Satan didn’t have the power to make his demons immortal, so in the end, he just gave them long lives and called it a day. I remember Satan… He was a laid-back fellow who didn’t concern himself with such details. Perfection, sin, immortality… it was all the same to him. He liked to tinker with his demon matrices in his spare time, experiment… Soon, Hell was filled with demons of all shapes and sizes. It got so crowded that Satan actually congratulated himself for not trying too hard to make them immortal. The bastards were copulating like crazy, demon spawn sprouting all over the place. He sent them to Earth so he could have some peace and quiet. God, though…” He laughed out loud. “He thought He’d found the secret sauce to populating Heaven with exactly as many immortal angels, archangels, seraphim, and cherubim as he liked without risking it ever getting too crowded. You see, girl, the problem with these two guys was that neither of them liked to be alone in their immense, boundless power, but they didn’t like to be surrounded by too many servants, either. If they could snap their fingers, make live beings with individual thoughts and experience appear out of nowhere, then snap their fingers again and reduce them to dust… that would’ve been just grand. But it’s not how this universe works. It has laws, and those laws must be respected even by God and Satan.”
He was getting off track. “What was the secret sauce? How did God make them perfect and immortal?”
“He never gave them genitals.”
I was speechless.
He laughed, finding my shock delectable.
“That’s right. No penises, no vaginas.”
I was pretty sure my ex-archangel had always had a penis. Although… it was a fascinating concept – lose your wings and gain a cock. It wasn’t what had happened in Heaven, though, as Apis the First was about to reveal.
“God sent his angels to Earth, too, because why wouldn’t he parade his creation just like Satan was parading his?”
“Wait. Aren’t humans God’s creation, too?”
He shook his head, disappointed by my lack of knowledge. He turned to GC: “Where did you find her, boy? Under a rock?”
GC laughed, like the moron that he was, and I elbowed him hard.
“Story for another time,” said the old man. “The angels landed on Earth, among humans, mages, vampires, shifters, and so on, and when they saw the unique, frail, ephemeral beauty of the human women, they had no eyes for anyone or anything else. A group of them later known as the Watchers – because they watched and watched and couldn’t look away – fell in love with the human females and married them. To their dismay, they soon discovered they couldn’t offer their wives what they most desired: pleasures of the flesh, and the babies that came after. So, they went back to Heaven and begged the Lord to fix them, because for sure, by omitting to give them what literally everyone on Earth and below it had, he’d gotten their anatomy wrong. You can imagine how that ended.” He chuckled. “God said no, and the angels made their opinion known by letting out a string of curses they’d learned from their mortal wives. Back on Earth, they soon figured out they didn’t need God at all. Mages could do the job just as well. And that’s how angels got genitals and nephilim were born.”
“Hm.” There was something I was missing. “So, why the hate?”
“Don’t you understand? Angels were the only creatures in this universe that were truly pure, perfect, and immortal. The moment the Watchers got genitals, what do you think happened? Mages tampered with God’s creation, and there were consequences. All the angels in Heaven suddenly got genitals and lost their immortality. Innocence was gone from the world. And all because the Watchers wanted children with their human wives. All be
cause of the nephilim.”
“I don’t see how…”
“The tragedy of it all shook the heavens so terribly that the very fabric of the universe was damaged. Portals opened all over the world, and cosmic creatures that should’ve never set foot – or paw, or tentacle, or claw – in this universe came through, swallowed whole communities, and went to sleep under the ground to better digest their food. To close the portals, God, Satan, and false gods alike had to work together. And we closed them, but we never managed to send the cosmic beings back. The Great Old One who made you what you are now is one of them. Fortunately, as long as the portals are closed, they will sleep.”
My heart started beating faster. I thought I was coming to learn about Morningstar, and I was instead learning about the Great Old Ones.
“But they can be banished, can’t they?” I asked, excited. “I already know they can’t be killed, but they can be sent back to their world.”
The man shook his head. “In theory. But I don’t think the answer you seek is here, in this universe. One would have to travel to their universe to learn how they can be banished.”
I was mildly disappointed, but I told myself this was still something. Something I hadn’t known before, and now I knew. Another piece of the puzzle, too precious to be discarded.
“Nephilim are sin itself. They almost destroyed everything and everyone.”
“I don’t see it that way,” I dared to argue, “but I see your point. Anyway, fascinating story. What I’m interested in is whether you might know of weaknesses… How does one, ahem, kill a nephilim?”
He waved his hand dismissively and reached for the pot of hot tea. “Oh, they’re easy enough to kill. They’re just hybrids! Nothing special. They’re mortal, although they live a long life, so they do grow old. Just stab them in the chest or something.”
