by Tara Brown
"To read about what you are." He mutters into my ear.
I turn and push him off of me, "You can't love something like me. I just want to make sure you remember that."
His cocky grin decides to join the conversation, "Sex doesn’t need love."
"You've proven that. I'm still not letting you paw me after saying that."
His eyes turn dangerous, "We are married Rayne."
"I think your plan there backfired. Your charms don’t work on me anymore. I don’t feel like I did before."
"I don’t see why we can't have a mutual agreement that benefits us both."
I gasp disgusted, "What? Oh my god you're disgusting."
He leans against the huge Queen Anne chair next to him, "Don't be such a prude. I saw you with the guys at school and not at school."
"I think I'm done. I think I need to go back to Burlington and confess now."
He chuckles, "What will you tell them? You'll end up raging and killing everyone in the room when they cuff you. Your instincts are sharp. Trust me. Things like you are amazing at survival."
I step back, "Things? Really? Things? You talk like I know what you're talking about. I hate that. I don’t know what you mean in any of this. I don’t know what anything is. It's like you're scared to tell me and you've given me nothing to go on."
He licks his lips, "We need to figure you out. I don’t know either."
I bend and pick up the book that fell when we he attacked me with kisses and mauling. He grabs my hand and drags me from the room. "We need to go to my basement. My uncle is down there. He'll know what's what with you."
We walk down the stairs and I have the slightest urge to push him down them. He glances back at me and gives me a look. His eyes see everything. I know they do. Every thought. They turn and shine like before. It's not a good thing. He's reading me with them.
We cross the foyer and walk into a room with a buffet. He reaches inside and turns a piece of crystal and the buffet pushes in.
Another secret passage? Is the whole world crazy? Or have I been blind to all the possibilities out there?
We walk slowly down a winding set of stairs similar to Willow's. Only nicer.
It opens at the bottom into a massive area with huge shelves and what looks like a wrestling or boxing ring. There are small lamps lit everywhere. The room is lit but my eyes are doing their thing again.
A man is reading at a table. He has a small lamp attached to his head and glasses. He looks like he's going caving but he's wearing a sweater, and he looks too feeble and old to cave.
He is writing furiously and reading.
Books are opened across a long table. Debris covers the table, papers and books and feathers and pencils and pens and pots of ink.
It looks like nothing I've ever seen. The whole room does. Swords line the far wall. The basement must be as big as the whole mansion. The whole basement is finished, as it was upstairs. Dark furniture and finery are in every corner, but with a medieval feeling to them.
The swords and wooden stakes and pole arms lining the wall are freaky. I wonder which of the things on the wall would be used to kill me? I feel weak enough that his huge hands could wrap around my throat and end me with very little effort on his part.
He looks at me with confusion.
Is he reading my mind?
He looks back at the man I assume is his uncle, and clears his throat.
The headlamp lifts and he smiles under the bright light.
He smiles until he sees me and then he jumps back off his chair. He moves fast for an old man, in an old sweater with a dirty looking mustache.
He looks like Mr. Noodle off Sesame Street. The headlamp actually suits the bizarre sweater.
He looks at me and for a moment, I think I see a look of recognition. Then a holy shit look takes over. He tugs at the collar of his sweater and gulps, "What have you done Wyatt?"
Wyatt takes a step forward with his hands out, "It's not what you think."
His uncle pulls a rag from the pocket in his brown cords and wipes his face. He's sweating from the heat of the headlamp.
"That is, she's…" He frowns, "What is she?"
Wyatt shakes his head, "I don’t know." He turns and takes my hand and pulls me to a chair. "We were hoping you'd be able to tell us."
His dark brown eyes flash at our hands. They widen, "What have you done?"
Wyatt swallows hard, "I saved her."
Confusion covers his face, "Why?"
"I had to."
His uncle's face crumples. He collapses in the chair and pulls the headlamp off and throws it on the wooden table. It scratches the shiny dark wood. I wince. I don’t know what that means but it's clearly bad.
"She needs to leave. She needs to leave now. Take her to the Earth Witches."
"Sir I don’t know why you hate me but I need your help. I killed a man and my mother isn’t my mother and I don’t know what's wrong with me. Please just tell me what's in the book."
He looks at me and smiles weakly, "Where are your parents?"
I shake my head, "No clue."
He looks at the book, "Where did that come from?"
"My mother. She wasn’t my mother though. I just never knew. I thought she was."
He pulls out a chair and I sit in it. Gingerly I place the book in front of him.
He looks at Wyatt and scowls, "You can't stay here. I'll help as much as I can but you can't stay here. They'll be home tomorrow. You have to leave when I help you. You can't come back." He stands and looks at Wyatt, "I need to make a call."
Wyatt nods and sits. We sit there in silence as Fitz leaves the room. He returns after a few moments, flushed and preoccupied.
"Sorry for the interruption."
Wyatt looks at me, "Start from the beginning. Leave nothing out."
I nod. I tell him everything. I don’t leave out anything. Not the dreams or the eyes glowing or the way I was raised. I tell him everything, including the way it felt to kill the man in the grass.
With every word I speak his face becomes more and more distracted. He starts to sweat again and wipe nervously. He looks at Wyatt and presses his lips together. He closes his eyes and sighs. He opens the book and rifles through it. He turns the book so I can see what page it is on. I can't read the words but I see a drawing of a girl. She looks like me, but she is on a cross with blood dripping from her hands and feet. She looks like Jesus. She is dead. A man holds a sword at her throat.
He runs a finger along the line under the picture, "She that is born dead will wake dead every morning and die again as the sun sets. She will be sacrificed five times for the good of the world before her soul may rest."
"My dreams." I whisper.
He nods, "You are it."
"What is it?"
He gulps and looks at Wyatt who is white as a sheet.
"Every time you die a small piece of the evil left on earth dies with you. It's replaced with love. You take the evil with you to the underworld. You're the Sin Eater."
A huge laugh bursts from my lips. It makes me sound like I should be a huge burly man. The laugh is huge, bigger than I am. But I can't help myself. I laugh until I cry and I cry harder than I laugh.
Chapter Eleven
"They were the fallen. The angels fell in defiance of god. They imbalanced the world and brought evil and corruption. Falling made them human, so to speak. Human in appearance but not in nature. Lucifer, your father, fell in love with an angel and instead of ending the romance he chose to fall. He was considered the highest of the angels but when he fell the role went to Metatron, your uncle."
"Was he in the Transformers movie?"
He pauses and chooses to ignore me, "Your mother and father were, or rather are angels. Arch Angels."
I frown, "I went to Sunday school with Michael… uh, Michelle. I know that the angels were asexual."
He shakes his head, "Why? Because the Romans thought it to be true? No the angel men were beautiful, so handsome it was sa
id, that they would put any human woman to shame. The Romans found it impossible to ignore their beauty. This is what made them asexual. Being aroused by a man makes you a homosexual in their eyes. They decided the Arch Angels were asexual to explain their attraction." He rolls his eyes. I can see he thinks this is ridiculous. I unfortunately find all of this ridiculous.
He sighs and continues, "At any rate your mother and father allowed their lust and love to corrupt the world. Your mother was Lillith and your father was Lucifer. They were the first two to walk the earth." He sees the skeptical look on my face and sighs, "You have to remember this prophecy has been in the making since the beginning of time."
I raise an eyebrow, "I believe in science."
He laughs, "Regardless, it's the prophecy of your birth. Lucifer and Lillith have a story that goes something like this. Boy meets girl, boy loves girl, girl loves boy, boy convinces girl to give him her forbidden fruit. Their lovemaking was the catalyst for darkness and evil. Lillith became pregnant the moment his seed spilled into her womb. You were birthed then for the first time. You were an abomination. The first abomination in the eyes of the other angels and God, after your parents little indiscretion of course. The evil they created corrupted you. God did something to you when you were in the womb. You were born dead. God took the soul of the child you should have been out of you and replaced it with the soul of death. You were born dead. Soulless, so to speak."
I frown and look at Wyatt. He is stoic. I'm glad I don’t have any uncles that say things like seed spilled in wombs. Gross.
Fitz continued, "You lived, regardless of that fact you woke from death as the sun rose and fell back into the arms of death every night. You grew sickly around the age of eighteen, nineteen. Your hollow soul started to fill up with the evil your parent's had made."
I feel my face twisting, "That’s sick. God did that on purpose. To a child?"
He shrugs, "He was angry with them. You got sicker and sicker. Lillith went back to the garden God created for man and begged God to cure you. He refused. He said they could die for their child. If they died she would live and be healthy. They refused him. He said that they could walk the earth as man and wife, but they must sacrifice the child they had grown to love and cherish. Otherwise the child would die and cleanse the earth of their sin." I don’t like where this story is going. It's like I've come to a cult and they are just getting ready to start serving the Kool-Aid.
"Your mother was against it but your father was a survivalist. He sacrificed you. Your mother left him. She never saw him for a long time. Maybe never again. I know it was said she wandered the earth alone. I know at some point you were born again and when you died, your death brought the age of Enlightenment. You were sacrificed. I don’t know who gave birth to you and I don’t know how you became what you are. I know your title is Sin Eater. You feed on negativity and pain and suffering."
"Crazy." It's what I say when I'm lost in the conversation and I have never been more lost.
He raises an eyebrow, "You realize this is all starting right?"
I shake my head, "I am only nineteen. I technically still have two years of sin eating to do. I mean according to legend."
He shakes his head, "I don’t know much about your kind. The Earth Witches are your guardians. You must seek them out."
"Who wrote this fantastical story?"
He looks at me like he's examining me, "The angel Metatron. Your uncle."
Wyatt, who has sat still and listened intently, leans over and asks, "How do we find him?"
His uncle frowns, "You don’t. He would have to fall and touch the earth."
"How can she get to heaven to see him, since she is a child of angels?"
He slices an old gnarled finger along his wrinkled throat.
I cringe. I look at Wyatt, who shakes his head.
"She is Nephilim. She is a child of the angels, well in soul anyway. She will be reborn and sacrificed until they have paid their debt."
Wyatt argues, "Her father wants that, but Lillith doesn’t sound like she's keen on it. What if we find Lillith?"
"No one has seen her since the Garden of Eden turned to dust, well it's not documented anyway."
I am completely lost. "What about Adam and Eve?"
"They came right after your parents. Metatron is the keeper of records. He ensured the story went a little differently when he ensured it made its way into the bible and lore. Of course there was also the whole debauchery of the ancient texts in Constantinople."
I shake my head, "Hold up. No more facts. I'm lost and confused. So I suck people dry of their bad but they die? The guy on the grass died."
He shakes his head, "I only know what's in the book. You're a sin eater. It all makes sense and fits."
I want to throw the book across the table. "Sense? To who? This is fucking stupid. I'm not getting answers. These aren’t answers. This is a joke. This creepy old mansion needs a bald dude in a wheelchair and other kids like me." I stand up and pace, "I touched the man and breathed him in. I tasted his soul in my mouth. I sucked him dry and it felt like an orgasm, believe it or not. I can't even make myself feel bad about the experience. I'm trying so hard to feel sickening amounts of guilt and it's hard. Honestly, eating him was the first thing I've ever done that felt natural." My eyes dart to Wyatt, "Beyond hating him."
"That is natural. We are your enemy. Your parents are the creators of the things we kill. The fallen angels made the things we hunt."
I cross my arms, "What made you?"
He laughs and points upward.
I shake my head and look at them both, "You can both go to hell. I want to go back and turn myself in. I want you to drive me back."
Wyatt's dark blue eyes narrow. He thinks for a minute and looks back at his uncle, "We handfasted. What does that mean for her?"
He rubs his eyes and shakes his head, "I don’t know Wy. She's dead inside already. She was born dead. She's dead every morning. She is a vessel of death. That’s what the prophecy tells us. What do you want me to tell you? She isn’t human. She…"
"I WANT TO GO BACK! I AM RIGHT HERE! I CAN HEAR YOU! I WANT TO GO BACK!" I feel like pulling my hair out.
His uncle looks at me and then up at the roof. Thunder fills the house. Panic crosses his face and he looks at Wyatt, "Get her out of here. Now."
I hear a scream. Wyatt looks at the TV monitor on the wall, that I missed somehow. It shows Maggie holding a sword and screaming. She charges nothing but fights with it. I see swirls of black and her face knock back when she takes a hit. She isn’t even as big as the sword she holds.
He pulls my hand toward the wrestling mat.
"She's in trouble. She's only little. We need to help her."
He laughs, "She'll be fine Rayne. It's you who is in trouble. We need you out of here now."
He drags me to the back of the room.
"Find Lillith and you'll find the answers. Take her to the Earth Witches." His uncle shouts at him. Wyatt pulls me into a corner of the room. A wall shoots across when he hits a button. It's lightning fast. It would cut you in half if you weren’t fast enough getting into the corner. Suddenly the floor drops out. It jerks to a stop and we are in a bat cave of sorts. It's like nothing I've ever seen before. The ocean water splashes softly and laps against the rocks. He pulls my hand down several stone steps to a speedboat in the water. The water has carved away a massive cavern.
"Did they film Batman here?"
"No." He starts the boat and I sit down.
"Why couldn’t we see what she was fighting?"
"Vampires. They move too fast for video to catch." He revs the boat's engine slightly. He drives out as a wave comes in and is starting its way out of the cave.
I don’t understand why vampires would be coming for me. I don’t understand how they exist. I don’t understand anything. I hold tight to the seat and try not to vomit. I have never been on a boat before.
We hop along the waves out to sea. I am shaking with fear and
nerves. The cold wind makes me feel worse.
He drives us for a long time. We see nothing. I don’t even know how he knows where he's going. He looks back at me, but I point to the front of the boat. He drives to fast and too jerky and it's just like being in a car with him.
I throw up once from the rocky seas and the skipping we seem to be constantly doing. I imagined boats would glide in the water. Not hop the surface like jumping waves.
When we slow down it's misty. I can't see anything but the mist in the air. Everything turns white like the froth on the sea. The thick cold air smells like the salt. I'm pretty sure I can taste salt. In the mist I think I see something moving. I squint and gasp when I see it. It’s a decrepit old black house with a frightening haunted gothic look.
This must be where the vampires live.
Something evil lives inside. No house with love and kindness inside looks like that.
He docks the boat at the end of a long pier. He shuts the boat down and ties it up. I'm wobbly and woozy and when he takes my hand I throw up over the edge of the boat again. He moans and holds my long hair. He rubs my back.
"You throw up a lot."
We climb off the boat, which for him looks graceful. For me it consists of rolling over the edge and lying on the wooden pier for a minute. Everything moves like I'm still on the boat. I lean over the edge of the pier and throw up again. I don’t have anything in there, so it burns.
He lifts me up and carries me in his arms. He smiles his boyish grin that I instantly distrust, "Please don’t throw up on me again."
I wipe my mouth and try to breathe away from him.
"I'm so sorry. I have never thrown up in my life, until I met you."
He looks worried, "I hope it's not me still."
I look back at the boat with contempt, "I'm pretty sure it was the boat." I don’t add the part about his driving.
He carries me through the wrought iron gate and the weedy court yard. The house is enormous. Ridiculously colossal.
"Is this an Inn?"
He smiles, "This is home."
"Your family is weird."
His grins increases, "Not my home. This is Willow's home."