I followed my “uncle” into the parlor, where we sat opposite each other in armchairs that Luke had bought over in Europe. He said they reminded him of Louis XIV. I couldn’t see anything particularly Louis XIV about the chairs, but I’d never met the man, so I just kept my mouth shut.
“What do you know about Nephilim, Uncle?” I asked as soon as we were both seated.
“I’m fine, Quincy, how are you? Yes, it has been a few weeks, but I hardly noticed, what with my own social obligations taking up all my attention lately. I hope you’ve been well. You look pale. Are you getting enough sun? Vitamin D is very important for those of you who still walk among the living,” Luke answered breezily.
“I get it,” I said. “It’s been a couple weeks since I dropped by. Sorry about that, but I’ve been busy.”
“Doing what?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve been busy doing what, exactly? I’m interested to hear what you’ve been doing in the five weeks since I’ve last seen you, Quincy. Because that’s what it’s been, hasn’t it? Five weeks. Over a month and not a peep from my favorite nephew. I was really starting to worry about you.”
“If you were worried, you have all my numbers,” I replied.
“What’s wrong, son? Are you still following around that human girl like some type of dark guardian? What happened now?”
“Her college graduation was a couple days ago. I watched her walk across the stage. Because her father can’t. So now she’s my responsibility,” I said. Luke had heard it before. He’d been hearing it for about a dozen years or more, and he bought it about as much this time as he ever did.
“Oh, good god, Quincy, sometimes you behave like that fat shite Van Helsing, with his rigid moral code and his crusading for good. He was a human. You made a promise to a human. We break those all the time. We have to because they die so damned fast.”
“Yeah, but he was a human who didn’t have to die quite so fast,” I replied, and then I was back there. It was the late 90s and I was back in an alley off Seventh Street, chasing a baby vampire through the rainy streets of a deserted Uptown Charlotte. I’d spent the last six weeks hunting down a rogue, a vampire who owed allegiance to no one and followed no one’s laws, not those of man or of the Shadow Council, the ruling body of the supernatural world. I took down the rogue, but not before his progeny gutted a Charlotte cop in a parking garage. He laid a promise on me as he died—to look after his daughter. I spent the next month doing just that, sitting in a tree outside a fifth-grade girl’s window listening to her cry herself to sleep.
“You could have saved him, but how many more would the rogue have slaughtered while you were off saving one human? Where was he when you finally caught up to him?”
Luke was right, of course. “He was walking into the lobby of the Omni hotel. It took some quick spell-slinging, but I got him through the hotel and into the attached mall before he hurt anyone else, then convinced the witnesses that we were filming a movie after I bounced the rogue off several marble columns en route to crushing its skull with a giant planter.”
“How many of those witnesses would be dead if you had gone off after the infant?” Luke prodded as I fell silent.
“At least a dozen,” I replied.
“And do you think any of them might have a sad little girl at home crying into her pillow had you made a different decision?”
“Yeah,” I admitted, albeit reluctantly. “I know all this, it’s just…”
“It’s hard. I understand.”
“You do?” I raised an eyebrow.
“Of course I do,” Luke said. “You’re a very talented man, Quincy Harker, and you hate to lose. You feel like there should have been some way you could save both the girl’s father and all the people in the hotel. But there wasn’t. You made a choice. It was for the greater good. It will hurt as you fulfill your promise to the girl’s father and watch her grow up half-orphaned, but you can take comfort in knowing that you did the right thing.”
“Is that really going to make me feel any better?” I asked.
“Not a bit,” Luke said, leaning back in his chair and crossing his legs. We sat there in silence, me studying the dregs in the bottom of my wine glass while Luke looked at me. I sat there for several minutes before I finally looked up at him and asked the question I really wanted an answer to.
“Are we, Uncle?” I asked, surprised to find my eyes moist. “Are we more than this? Are we more than anything? What’s the point, Luke? Why are we doing this, year after year, decade after decade? We get a message from the Council, ‘Something needs to be killed.’ And we kill it.
“But for what? Why are we doing this? There’s just another thing, right? I killed the rogue, he made a baby. I killed the baby, but not before it killed a cop. And now there’s a new something out there, and it’s killing angels? What the hell am I supposed to do against something that can kill an angel? I’m only human.” I held up a hand as Luke cleared his throat.
“Okay, I’m mostly human. But we have no idea what that means. We know I don’t get old. At least, not at any reasonable human rate. We know that I’m faster and stronger than humans, and we know that I have a predilection for magical talent. But what does that matter? Anything that can kill an angel could swat me down like a fly without even breaking a sweat. I’m supposed to hunt down something that powerful and take it out when I couldn’t even hold my own against one lousy demon this morning?”
Luke raised an eyebrow at me.
“There was a demon, at Mort’s—”
“I know.”
My mouth snapped shut. I thought for a few seconds, couldn’t remember talking to Luke earlier, then asked. “You know?”
“Mort called me. Christy, actually, since Mort doesn’t have fingers right now, but let’s not split hairs. He told me of your fight with Orobas, and the murder of the Nephilim.”
“Why?”
“Mort and I have a long history, and he knows that it would upset me if you, as he put it, got dead. So he called me, hoping I would tell you to drop the case.”
“And are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Telling me to drop the case?”
“Would you?”
“Of course not.”
“Then I won’t bother. Now, let’s retire to the library and see what we can find about Nephilim.”
Chapter 7
When someone’s been collecting books for as long as Luke, their library is bound to be impressive, and his was about exactly what you’d expect for someone raised in European nobility. The room, easily the largest on the main floor of the house, was lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. There wasn’t a single window, and a light-tight vestibule leading in guaranteed that Luke could spend days on end in the library without any stray sunbeams making their way inside. Comfortable reading chairs with ottomans were arranged in several loose sitting areas, and a six-foot long cherry wood table with sturdy legs and a surface scarred from decades of leather tomes marking it dominated one wall. Floor lamps dotted the room, but most of the illumination came from a giant chandelier in the center of the room. It cast a warm yellow glow all around, brightening to a brilliant white as Luke turned a dimmer on the wall.
“I’ll start here with the religious texts; you work over there in the cryptozoology section.” Luke waved a hand at the far right corner of the room and strode over to the left wall. He hopped up on a ladder, one of two that ringed the room on tracks mounted in the ceiling, and pushed off, gliding almost soundlessly along the room until he came to the section he wanted. I walked to the corner, passing on the ladder for the moment. Luke’s bookshelves had their own organizational system, one that would baffle Dewey and the Library of Congress librarians, but made perfect sense to him. I didn’t understand the genesis of it, but since I’d worked with Luke for seven or eight decades, and lived with him off and on for at least half that time, I knew where almost everything was. And if worst came to worst, I still had a map t
ucked into the copy of the Bible that Luke kept on a lectern at the front of the room. There was something special about that Bible although he wouldn’t tell me what it was. It wasn’t an expensive book, not leather-bound, or rare, or anything special really, just a battered old King James Bible. But Luke treated it like a holy relic, carrying it from home to home over the years, so I knew that anything I hid in its pages would be safe.
I spent the next six hours scouring dusty tomes for information on the Nephilim, digging through everything from an unexpurgated copy of Bullfinch’s Mythology, still bearing the original title “Mythology and the Fantastical Creatures that Walk the Earth.” Bullfinch changed the title and carved out all mention of vampires, werewolves, and magic as a real thing after a brief visit from Uncle Luke and several of his mystical pals that he never deigned to mention to me. No matter how obscure or rare the text, all I found about Nephilim was that they were half-divine, half-human, and not to be trusted. Most texts didn’t mention them at all, and the ones that did treated them like fairy tales. Which was ironic because the writers were the same guys who knew fairies were real.
Finally, with Renfield asleep on a couch and even Luke starting to yawn, I hit pay-dirt with Fortner’s Zoological Fantastical, a semi-serious tome of children’s poems, cartoonish drawings, legends, and folktales written in eighteenth-century England. Fortner was a giant in the field of arcane animals, but he masqueraded as a feckless author of children’s fantasy novels. That kept the more human-appearing monsters from hunting him and provided a healthy living besides. Luke had apparently visited the man late in his life, fulfilling one of the writer’s lifelong dreams of actually meeting a creature generally assumed to be mythical. Zoological Fantastical provided a comical illustration of a Nephilim, a skeletal man with elongated arms and a narrow head with overlarge eyes set just a hair too far apart to be normal. In general, all the features of the Nephilim were just a little bit too much.
But what grabbed my attention was the next entry in the book. I turned the page and saw a drawing of a normal man. Just a human, a little short, maybe a little portly, holding a knife and smiling a wicked smile. The caption under the drawing read “Cambion.” I scanned the description, then pulled the book closer as the words grabbed my attention.
“The Cambion,” the entry read, “is the very antithesis of the Nephilim, despite the similarities in their origin. The Nephilim, while divine in origin, is completely remorseless and lacking in conscience, a feature in its personal composition that shall, over time, distance it from close relationships and may spare unwitting humans damage from proximity to the being. The Cambion, to contrast, seems perfectly human, sometimes almost alarmingly so. The Cambion moves through human society without anyone, sometimes including the creature itself, being any the wiser. Born of the unholy union of a demon and a human woman, the Cambion possesses exceptional physical prowess, beyond that of any human. The Cambion is as much a minion of chaos as the Nephilim are slaves to order, and a Cambion will thrive in positions of extreme busyness and excitement. The Cambion and Nephilim are blood enemies and will instantly hate each other violently upon introduction of the two.”
I closed the book. “Hey Luke,” I called.
“Yes, Quincy?” he said from my elbow. I hate when he does that, and he really only does it when he’s excited about something. Whatever was going on with these dead half-angels, it had Luke ready to rumble.
“What do you know about Cambion?”
His brow knit for a moment, then he looked up and me and nodded. “It makes sense that they would be involved in this somehow. Cambion and Nephilim have a hatred for one another that goes deeper than anything we can fathom. They are internally wired to despise and destroy the other.”
“So they’re real?” I figured I’d start with the easy questions.
Luke chuckled. “Yes, they are real. In fact, you have encountered several although you were unaware of it at the time.”
“Yeah?” I raised an eyebrow. I thought I’d know it if I’d been dealing with a demon, even half-demon. And then there was the part of me that hoped that Luke would give me a little warning if I was dealing with a demon, even a half-demon.
“Of course,” Luke replied, oblivious to the concern in my voice. “There was Hans, in France in the latter stages of the Second World War. You remember Hans?”
Of course I remembered Hans. He was a nebbishy little German guy living in Paris when the Nazis invaded. Because he was German, and as white as my pillowcases, the Nazis left him and his little pub alone. They never knew that he had a little radio room built onto his wine cellar and spent his early morning hours, after last call, relaying signal intelligence for the French Resistance.
“But Hans was one of the good guys,” I said. “How could he be a demon?”
“Half-demon,” Luke replied. “And he never had any inkling of his heritage. He only knew that he liked being where things were exciting, and that things were very exciting in Paris.”
“But you knew?”
“I knew the second I laid eyes on him. Once you know what to look for in a hellspawn, you can’t miss them.”
“And what exactly are we looking for?” I asked the obvious question.
“The Cambion are usually smaller than normal, short and slender, with close-set eyes and a prominent brow ridge. Narrow features, typically, they do not tend to be attractive people. Long, thin fingers, almost preternaturally long and slender. The kind of hands you’d expect on a concert pianist, or a safecracker, which they are equally likely to be. But it’s the eyes that give them away,” Luke said, his own eyes closing as if looking back on the demons he’d known. “Their eyes are never still, no matter how deeply they may concentrate on something. The slightest noise and they will flit around like a hummingbird.”
I thought about it, and the things he was saying did describe Hans. He was perpetually nervous, with eyes always scanning the room. I chalked it up at the time to the fact that he had a radio rig in his basement that guaranteed execution if the SS found it, but it all fit.
“So if we have dead Nephilim, we probably have a Cambion involved somewhere,” I suggested.
“At least one,” Luke agreed.
“And the best place to find out about demonic activity is Mort’s,” I said.
“Where you are specifically not allowed to set foot until this business is settled,” Luke replied.
“Says who?”
“Says me, as your guardian.”
“Luke, you haven’t needed to be my guardian for six decades.”
“That notwithstanding, it is my duty to keep you safe. That is the task your mother saddled me with on her deathbed, and I intend to fulfill it. No matter how much more difficult it is since I can’t bespell you.”
“Yeah, well, you should have thought about the consequences before you bit my mom and threw my dad to your psycho wives. Being born of two parents who were both bitten by vampires does weird things to your DNA.”
Luke actually looked a little embarrassed. “I will admit that when I first, ahem, met your mother, that I was not exactly thinking long-term.” I really think that he would have blushed if his blood actually still flowed.
“Don’t sweat it, Luke. I’ve seen the pictures. Mom was hot when she was a kid. I can’t blame you for wanting to take a bite.”
“You are amazingly crass, Quincy.”
“I live but to amaze, Uncle.” I shot him a grin, then waved at the books I had scattered across the table. “But back to the matter at hand. If going to Mort’s is out, and I’m pretty sure we’re going to revisit the whole ‘you giving me ultimatums’ thing, then we need another way to track down a Cambion that we’ve never seen. So what do we have as far as evidence?”
“It seems the answer is precious little,” Luke said, pacing the huge rug in the center of the library. “We know that three Nephilim have been killed, their blood drained, and their bodies left for the human authorities to find. We know nothing about a mu
rder weapon or any connection between the victims.”
“Yeah, the cops were turning over every stone in those people’s personal and professional lives, and so far nada. So let’s look at the blood. Why would someone drain the bodies? Are Cambion vampiric?”
“You mean, do they feed on human blood?” Luke shot me a look. “No. As far as I know, vampires are the only sanguivores that currently exist.”
“How long have you been waiting to just casually drop the word ‘sanguivores’ into conversation?” I asked.
I got him again. This time I swear the tips of his ears turned just a tiny bit pink. “Quite a long time, actually. Be that as it may, vampires are the only creatures I am aware of that feed on human blood. So there must be some other quality in the blood of a Nephilim that makes it desirable.”
“Or maybe a bunch of qualities,” I said, reaching for a book I’d discarded several hours before.
“What have you found, my boy?” There he was, at my elbow in a blink again, all hint of muddled pacing long gone.
“Bevan’s treatise on demonic possessions and exorcisms has an appendix on types of demons, and he includes Nephilim in there.” I pointed. “Isn’t that odd? I mean, demons are demons, and Nephilim are half-angel, so why would he put them in the same category?”
“Remember your theology, Quincy. If Lucifer was the first to fall, then all the existing demons are his progeny.”
“So demons are just angels with a public relations problem?”
“A little more than that,” Luke replied. “But Bevan does raise an interesting point about the basic similarities between their origins. Regardless, what does he say about the blood?”
I flipped pages to the back of the book and found the appendix I was looking for. “Apparently it has all kinds of powerful effects, depending on what species the drinker is.”
“That makes sense. Inherently magical substances affect different magical beings in very unique ways. For example, the mushrooms that make up a faerie ring are completely harmless to humans, if slightly hallucinogenic, but they are very poisonous to dwarves and duergar and the like. Even brownies won’t go near them.”
Heaven Sent - a Quincy Harker Novella (Quincy Harker Demon Hunter Book 5) Page 5