There’s only one person it could plausibly be.
Tragedy does love to repeat itself in the cruelest of ways.
The cloak lands in a heap on the grimy floor, and Commissioner Petrov of DSI Moscow says, “Good afternoon, Mr. Kinsey. I’m glad you decided to join us today.”
“You make it sound like I had a choice in the matter,” I reply.
“You did.” Petrov juts his thumb at Foley. “You had a choice between the sword and the young Lord Tepes. And you chose.”
“Now you’re making it sound like this is an actual exchange.”
“You don’t think I’ll keep my word?”
“I don’t think you have a word to keep.”
Petrov smiles. “You have a mouth on you. It reminds me of someone I used to know.”
“Oh yeah? Who’s that?”
“Why, your mother, of course.”
My heart skips a beat.
This is him. The man who killed my mother. Standing right in front of me. And there’s nothing I can do about it. Because if I attack him now, Foley will die. And House Tepes will die with him. And the stability of the Vampire Federation will die with the house. And if the Federation falls, chaos will rise. Global chaos in the supernatural community. Chaos that will bleed into the human world and burn everything it touches.
Seek vengeance, or preserve peace. Those are my choices now. And what vindictive choices they are.
Petrov observes my turmoil, amused. He knows what I’ve realized and how badly it hurts me, and he’s betting with himself over how long I’ll be able to hold my emotions at bay before I break down, into rage or into tears.
I won’t give him the satisfaction of breaking at all.
“And how exactly did you know my mother?” I ask.
“That’s quite a loaded question.” Petrov backs farther into the garage. “Why don’t you come in and sit down so we can have a proper chat?”
With Volkov and Irina behind us, Barnett and I have no choice but to follow Petrov into the dimly lit garage. We pass the sentry golems, whose black eyes follow our every step but whose bodies don’t even twitch. When we’re far enough inside, Volkov snaps his fingers, activating a spell embedded in the rolling door. The door comes thundering down and blocks out the overcast sunlight, plunging the garage interior into ominous gloom.
Petrov struts over to a stack of metal folding chairs in the corner of the room and picks up two, then returns to the middle of the garage and sets them out like he’s preparing to seat an audience for a show. Once they’re in place, positioned across from the half-conscious Foley, Petrov gestures for Barnett and me to sit down.
I sit first, slipping the duffle bag off my shoulder and placing it on my lap, both hands set atop it, a challenge. Barnett follows my lead and sinks into the other chair in an insouciant manner, crossing her legs and dropping one elbow onto the chair’s short back.
Petrov snorts at our juvenile displays of rebellion. He stands between us and Foley, hands clasped behind his back. “So,” he says to me, “would you like me to start at the beginning of this story or the end?”
“Since the end of this story hasn’t happened yet, why don’t you start with how you infiltrated DSI Moscow and work back from there? I find it kind of perplexing that nobody noticed the DSI commissioner was a nonhuman supernatural. An unwilling brainwashed saboteur like Bollinger? That I can understand. But you? You’re a whole different ballgame. How did you and your two mooks here slip past the radars of so many agents trained to spot supernatural threats?”
Volkov, standing off to my left, bristles at the “mook” designation but keeps quiet.
Petrov chuckles. “Again, you ask a complicated question. But I’ll throw you a bone, Mr. Kinsey, if for no other reason than I find you entertaining.”
He rocks back on his heels a few times, as if dredging up memories. “To begin with, I should clarify something. I am not actually the man known as Fyodor Petrov. That man died quite some time ago, by the hand of an associate of mine. This body you see here is nothing but Petrov’s mortal shell, emptied of his soul to make room for a fragment of mine.”
“But I thought…” I cut myself off before I reveal I know more about the Children than they think I do.
Petrov digs a kernel of truth out of the partial statement anyway. “You thought that my ‘mooks’ and I were less metaphysical and more earthly in nature? Well, you’re not wrong, for the most part. Aleksei and Irina, and their kin, were born to this realm, their heritage a blend of human and not human, power and not power, mortal and immortal—much the same as your own heritage, Mr. Kinsey. I, on the other hand, was born in a very different place to a very different race, in a time that the sentient species of this world can scarcely remember.”
A shudder runs through my bones as the revelation descends upon me.
The man standing before me is not a member of the Children of Enoch. He’s the Eververse power who’s been helping them. And he’s been on Earth all along, running around in a dead man’s skin, manipulating events using the mask of an authority figure that no one would think to question, much less peg as a threat to human society.
This is worse than the Bollinger fiasco. Far worse. Not only because of the danger Not-Petrov poses, but because of what he’s already done.
This is the creature who came after me when I was nothing but a scared little boy. This is the creature who killed my mother because she wouldn’t let him have me.
My mother wasn’t fighting a golem that day. She was fighting a goliath. And if I want to save the world from the Children of Enoch, I’ll have to fight him too.
“What are you?” I all but whisper. “And what do you want?”
Not-Petrov cocks his head to the side, taunting me. “Are you sure you want to know?”
I respond without hesitation. “Yes, I want to know.”
“Very well. I’ll oblige your curiosity.” He walks up to me and bends down until we’re at eye level, like he’s about to teach a child a lesson. With a smile both cold and condescending, he says, “But I should warn you, Calvin Kinsey, that sometimes curiosity does not beget a satisfying answer. In fact, sometimes the answer drives the asker quite mad.”
I lean toward him, so close our noses almost brush, and peer into the eyes of a man hiding the gaze of a monster. “What makes you think I’m not already crazy?”
Not-Petrov makes a sound in his throat that I might mistake for a laugh at a distance. But this close, I recognize it as a sound no human makes. “You are bold and reckless, boy, but not mad. Not yet. In a moment, however, that may change.”
He grabs my chin to pin my head in place, and then tilts his face closer and closer, until our foreheads touch, until my eyes cannot avoid his own no matter where I look, until those seemingly mundane brown irises become an inescapable threat.
A threat he makes good on.
His gaze becomes a portal to another place. I feel myself pitch forward as if I’m falling off a cliff, and the world around me blurs into an indistinct whirl of faint light and dark color. Strangely, I also feel as if I don’t move at all, as if my body is still sitting in the uncomfortable metal chair. I belatedly realize, as I’m tumbling forward into a murky abyss yet going nowhere at all, that Not-Petrov has somehow pulled my soul out of my body without disconnecting the two. The conflicting sensory information is coming from my mind, which is trying to process two sets of data at once. This is—
The murk of the abyss recedes, and suddenly, I’m falling through a brilliant summer sky. A dome of crystalline blue populated by white fluffy clouds. And beneath the clouds, islands. Floating islands. Huge monoliths of earth and rock, covered in grass and brilliant flowers, hovering in place high above ground that isn’t ground at all but rather endless black space, populated by nothing but the twinkle of distant stars.
My soul tumbles toward one of the smaller islands. I try to cast a wind spell in an attempt to slow my descent, but it doesn’t work. My magic is just as frozen as
my physical body. So all I can do is close my astral eyes, cover my head with my astral arms, and brace for impact, praying that my soul doesn’t break as easily as my body.
It doesn’t.
I hit the ground traveling at terminal velocity, but instead of splattering like I would on Earth, the grass and dirt absorb all the energy of the impact. The sensation of falling recedes, and is replaced by a feeling that the physics of this world I’m in but not in are not quite the same physics that I’m used to. Which makes standing up extremely difficult, as my body but not body doesn’t move in quite the way I expect. Coupled with the doubled sensory information, the whole experience is bewildering.
It’s like I’m in a dream.
Or rather, a nightmare.
I get to spend exactly five seconds admiring the wondrous scenery of this world so far beyond the grasp of Earth’s laws, before a shadow falls across the small island where I’ve landed. A shadow as tall as a skyscraper yet not shaped like a building. A shadow that moves up from beneath the horizon, where black space meets blue sky. A shadow that moves in a deliberate way, a way that inanimate things cannot move. A shadow that leans toward me specifically, until the sunlight that comes from no sun is drowned out by darkness.
A sense of dread so deep and primal overtakes me that I almost can’t bring myself to turn around. But I do turn around, to the detriment of my sanity. I turn around because I need to turn around. I turn around because I owe it to my mother to turn around and face the creature that she died fighting to protect her child.
The creature is two hundred feet tall. Its body, sleek and slender, all sharp angles and pointed joints, is made of bright white stone shot through with thick black veins. Its hands end in black claws the size of city buses. Its neck ends in a head the size of an average house. That head is surrounded by a halo of storm clouds lit by golden bolts of lightning and rocked by constant trills of thunder. The eyes gouged into that hard stone face consist of nothing but darkness and the faintest pinpoints of golden light. The mouth carved above that jagged chin contains no teeth and no tongue but rather a raging inferno whose constant low roar shakes the island beneath my feet.
This creature beyond comprehension looks down at me, an ant in the shadow of a colossus, and says in a voice both as loud and as quiet as an old sun dying in deep space, “I am Azazel, Watcher of Earth, He Who Taught Man to Make Tools, Fifth to Fall Among the Seraphs, and First to Rise Among the Fallen. And I want freedom from this prison built by the god of the Heavenly Host.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
I come to on the floor of the garage, shaking like a leaf. My pulse beats so loudly in my ears that it drowns out all the sounds around me. My skin prickles as if I’m covered in a thousand biting ants. My eyelids refuse to part all the way when I blink, crusted together with drying blood that wept from my tear ducts while my soul was off being petrified in the Eververse. At some point during that “trip,” my teeth bit a chunk out of my tongue, and all I can taste is copper, cool on my lips, warm in my throat.
After an indeterminate period of time, during which my traumatized brain tries to reconstruct my shredded thoughts, I become aware that someone is tugging on me. I lug my heavy gaze away from a random swatch of wall and direct it upward, at the blurred figure bent over me. My vision gradually resolves, revealing the figure to be Volkov.
He’s got his hands on the duffle bag, trying to wrench it from my grasp. But I’ve got my entire body firmly wrapped around the sword through the fabric, my knees pinning the scabbard in place, my arms locked tight around the hilt.
Volkov keeps yanking the bag regardless. “Let it go, goddamn you,” he mutters under his breath.
“No,” I reply.
Volkov jumps, startled. He didn’t realize I was awake.
He lets go of the strap and backs away as I use a creative combo of elbow and shoulder movements to push myself into a hunched sitting position. The lurching motion makes my head swim so badly I nearly fall over onto my other side. I manage to stay upright only through sheer force of will.
What I don’t manage to do is maintain control of my stomach. Severe nausea grips my gut, and bile surges up my throat. There is no containing it. I lean to the side, one hand braced on the dirty garage floor, and vomit until my entire lunch exits the same way it entered.
When I finally stop dry heaving, I straighten up and try to regain my bearings.
The scene in the repair shop hasn’t changed much since I passed out.
Foley is still strapped to his chair with the supersized golem ready and waiting to butcher him. Only now he’s more awake, his crimson eyes cracked open and focused on me. Barnett is still sitting in the other chair, only now her posture is less casual, two feet pressed hard against the floor, one hand inching toward a revolver.
Petrov—no, Azazel the fallen angel—is back in the same spot he was standing before he decided to scare the daylights out of me. Irina is still loitering a few paces to Barnett’s right. And Volkov is drifting back to where he was standing earlier as well, near the golem playing sentry to my left.
Everyone in the room is looking at me expectantly. I get the feeling none of them thought I’d wake up. After all, I fell out while bleeding from the eyes. Plus, my throat feels so raw that I figure there was quite a bit of screaming also, before the shock of seeing Azazel’s true form caused my brain to hit the emergency off switch. So it must’ve legitimately looked like I was dying from fear, or at least being driven into a vegetative state from the psychological trauma.
But it’ll take a lot more than fear to defeat me, given all I’ve experienced over the past year.
A niggling idea worms its way atop my pile of scattered thoughts.
They don’t know what you’ve been through. That’s the flaw in their plan. They don’t know you.
Swallowing remnants of blood and bile, I dare to raise my head and look at Azazel. “Okay, so now I know more about you,” I say, struggling to keep my voice steady. “But you still haven’t told me what you know about my mother.”
Azazel raises eyebrows that belong to a dead man. “You’re quite a bit hardier than I assumed. I’m rather impressed.”
“And what do I get for impressing you?”
He rubs his chin thoughtfully. “I’ll give you a few choice details about your mother. But we don’t have time for more than that, I’m afraid. We really do need to wrap up this ‘exchange’ of valuable items before a nosy Crow, or an unlucky civilian passerby, stumbles into the barrier. There have been so many untimely deaths in the city these past couple days. I’d hate to increase the toll that much more.”
“I’m sure you would,” I say. “Now tell me about my mother.”
“You’re not in a position to be pushy, boy.” Azazel wags a finger at me. “But I understand your ardent desire to learn about your heritage—a facet of life that is oh so important when you are anything more than human—so I’ll oblige you.”
He casts his stolen eyes toward the ceiling, an image of wistfulness so at odds with his true nature that it makes me gag again. “As I’m sure you’ve inferred,” he continues, ignoring my distress, “my imprisonment in that pretty purgatory is not a recent occurrence. Myself and my fellow Watchers were all banished there after we lost the last war on Earth against the Heavenly Host. For the last ten millennia, we have been trying to break free. But only in the past few centuries have the spells caging us in that realm begun to erode, a result of our tireless attacks on the powerful magic of the seraphs we once called our kin.
“These cracks in the spellwork have allowed us to slip bits and pieces of our magic, bits and pieces of our souls across the veil to Earth. And through those bits and pieces, we have done an impressive amount of work toward our ultimate goal of full and final freedom.”
Azazel gestures to Volkov and Irina. “One of our first acts was to rekindle our relationship with the descendants of the half-human children we left behind on Earth. Once known as ‘nephilim,’ they were fears
ome creatures to behold, human in form and feeling, but far more in blood and soul. They had magic strength far greater than that of any other Earth-born being. Which is one of the reasons the Host punished them so severely after the Watchers fell.”
He scrunches his nose in distaste. “The other reason is because they supported us in the final war, agreed that we were right to challenge the Host, to try and dismantle their outdated mores, cast aside their overly restrictive laws that supported, and still support, disproportionate retribution for even the slightest of offenses.
“Many among the Host’s leadership argued for the total eradication of nephilim, a literal genocide, arguing that imbuing creatures of Earth with the grace of the Goldlands was a disgrace to their absent god. Those voices were quelled by the majority, but only just. And what they chose to do instead was almost equally as terrible.”
“The blood restraints?” I murmur.
Azazel chuckles. “Ah, so you know a bit more than you’ve been letting on.”
“Just a bit.”
He smiles in a way that is both too human and not nearly enough. “Yes, the ‘blood restraints.’ An innocuous name. But in reality, it’s a terrible curse, and what made it unforgivable was that it was designed to pass intact from one generation to the next in perpetuity. They constructed the curse that way because nephilim blood is dominant; it takes a hundred generations of human interbreeding to degrade the power of nephilim blood by a significant margin. The Host wanted to ensure that no later generation of nephilim would be able to seek revenge against them for the wrong. So for the past ten thousand years, every nephilim born on Earth has suffered the curse’s effects.”
“And what are those effects?” I ask.
He holds up his hand and counts off with his fingers. “One, they had their functional immortality stripped from them and replaced with a lifespan shorter than the average human’s. Two, they had their magic potential cut in half. And when they reach adulthood, the curse begins to erode what energy they have left, until it’s all gone. Three, their immune systems are compromised from birth, leaving them even more open to communicable illnesses than humans are. And four, their natural high healing factors are at first reduced to a human rate, and as they age, they begin to heal from wounds even slower than humans.”
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