by Vicki Keire
“Like hell,” I hissed.
“That’s the general idea,” he said, and when he rushed us I couldn’t help it. I screamed.
Something huge and dark rippled across his back. Something like wings.
All three of them had them.
As Ethan tensed to meet them, suddenly he did, too.
Chapter Eight:
A Dark and Terrible Beauty
Nephilim.
In Whitfield.
Nothing ever happens in Whitfield, I’d told Ethan before dragging him into the darkest part of the park. I’d been so sure of my world, so secure of my place in it when I left work with the night’s deposit over one shoulder and Ethan’s arm under mine. Before tonight, things were simple. I made coffee. I went to art school. I did the laundry and Logan did the dishes, and the strangest things in my world were the occasional odd prophetic drawing and my brother’s illness.
Now there were Nephilim. Fallen messengers of the Light.
I watched with my back plastered against the rough bark of a tree as three men with rippling waves of wing-shaped darkness tried to get past Ethan’s guard. Their wings were not so much distinct shapes as they were an absence of light, as if the three men who bore them carried black holes with them wherever they went. The darkness was heavy and hungry. Staring into it made me feel as if I was simultaneously drowning and falling. The edges fluttered more like torn curtains dragging in the wind than feathers. I ripped my gaze away; even a quick glance left me disoriented, as if I had been fighting against a current.
Ethan stood with his back to me, practically trembling with rage. I think he growled at me not to move, but the sudden appearance of pulsing, vibrating light at his back wiped away all capacity for independent thought. I don’t know how long I stood there, transfixed by the sheer wall of light in front of me. I knew only that it seemed a living thing, rippling with heat and sentience and power, and I was every bit as afraid of it as I was of the powerful, hungry, wing-shaped darkness. The edges of this wing-shaped wall of light were sharp, jagged like sparks or broken glass, and they throbbed with barely restrained power.
I understood a fundamental difference, then. Whatever else these Dark attacking creatures were, they were creatures of absence. Theirs was an emptying destruction, freezing and hollowing their enemies. Ethan would pulse and push, letting the Light that rode him burn and level anything in his way.
“Nephilim,” I choked, and clung even harder to my tree.
What Renaissance idiot first painted angels as chubby, diaper-wearing infants with bundles of feathers on their backs? What idiot ever painted wings as feathers at all? As if angels were human-bird hybrids? As Ethan slammed into one of them with his shoulder, sending him sprawling on his back, a detached part of my mind studied these creatures and their wings as hard as I could. It seemed to me that what the human mind interpreted as wings was more like a glimpse into some place I could only think of as Other. They weren’t wings at all, but more like openings into the places they came from. These Nephilim carried one world on their back while they walked in yet another. Was I the only person who saw them this way? Did other people truly see feathers and babies in diapers? What made me different?
Ethan used his fists and a knee on the one wearing snakeskin. He dropped but was back up in a minute, advancing on us again, slightly behind the one in blood red. Ethan rushed them again, and they became a tangled blur, moving too fast for my eyes to track. All I saw were flashes of light and even more flashes of darkness. The tangled roiling mass of light and dark broke apart suddenly. The Nephilim in the snakeskin jacket lay several feet away on his back. His chest was open in one long, diagonal slash seeping dark liquid. He did not appear to be moving. The remaining two circled Ethan, the one in brown leather making quick feints inside his guard. The one in the blood red jacket merely circled, watching. He was pale in the moonlight, his thick black hair a shocking contrast to the diamond-bright eyes he suddenly turned on me as he circled Ethan. He was so beautiful my fingers twitched in spite of myself, as if they held a phantom pencil I could capture his image with before I died. He smiled at me with full cruel lips. Pastel crayon, I thought stupidly before Ethan’s howl of pain shattered the night.
Ethan’s jeans seeped blood in long gashes down one thigh. The Nephilim in the brown leather jacket had just shredded his sweater from shoulder to forearm. I could see deep bloody gouges down his arm. “Ethan!” As I broke and ran for him, I realized his name had come from my own throat. It cut off abruptly as something blunt and hard hit me in the stomach, stealing all my breath. I had time to see Ethan look at me in pure horror before the Nephilim in brown leather came at him again and my vision started going gray around the edges.
“Run, Caspia,” I heard him call. There was fighting again, too fast for me to follow. “You have to…”
“Oh no you don’t,” whispered a voice as calm and cruel as dull knives. A blood red arm held me around the waist, squeezing me against him. The blur that was Ethan and the other Dark Nephilim slowed again. Ethan had him pinned, forearm on throat, as he opened a deep gash across his chest using nothing more than his hand. Ethan drew back for another strike, but the creature under him twisted just a little to the side. Ethan’s hand would have hit the brown leather jacket. He muttered something and fisted his hand at the last second. The Nephilim under him grimaced as something audibly cracked.
They fought bare handed? They’d done that much damage to each other with their bare hands? What chance did I have against that?
The arm under me hauled me backwards, deeper into the trees. It loosened enough to let a thin trickle of air down my lungs. Cold, cold terror swamped me as I realized I was going to die. I was going die before Logan. Who would look after him, then? I was supposed be the strong one, there for him no matter what. I would not let these Dark creatures take that from him. I would not. For no good reason at all, my fingers tightened on my messenger bag, full of the night’s deposit.
“You must be very embarrassed,” I heard myself say. I surprised even myself by speaking. It hurt to talk. My lower ribs ached as if smashed, and I was glad I’d been too busy at work to eat dinner. I would have thrown it up by now. Birds moved restlessly in the trees around us. I could not see the sky through the branches. I did not know where we were in the park, or even if we were still in the park at all. Given how fast Ethan could move, we could have been on the outskirts of town for all I knew.
“Pardon me?” Just like Ethan, the beautiful black-haired angel moved without me seeing. One second he had a death grip around my waist, dragging me backwards, and the next he stood facing me. He held my forearm between us, gripped painfully between his fingers. I narrowed my eyes when I noticed his fingernails, long like talons and dripping blood.
“You hurt Ethan,” I said, but I remembered my drawing. Here was one of the symbols, right in front of me. I tried to quell the brief flare of hope that if one symbol had come true, I might live to see them all come true.
He snorted and tightened his grip. “I hardly find slicing E’than’i’el open embarrassing. And you have other things to worry about. Like the fact that, over the long years of my exile, I have developed a taste for human hearts.”
“Right. Of course.” I took a deep, steadying breath. “I only meant that I would die of shame if I had thousands of years of pictures of me in a diaper with feather dusters on my back.”
For a moment his grip on my arm got tighter, his nails digging so deep I was sure I had puncture wounds down to the bone. I whimpered and his diamond-bright eyes locked on mine. Then he did a terrible, unexpected thing: he threw back his head and laughed. His laugh deepened and echoed, disturbing the birds in the trees around us. Worst of all, the wing shaped void at his back rippled and bulged, exactly as if it was laughing, too.
I kept my face perfectly still as he pulled me very close. He was cold where Ethan had been warm. He gripped me tightly around the waist. “I think I like you, Caspia Chastain,” he hissed righ
t into my face. “I think I’ll let you live a little bit longer. Just long enough to paint me as I really am.” He smirked, and I hated his dark and terrible beauty.
I hated the artist part of me that wanted to capture it even more.
“How do you know I can see you as you really are? What if you get dimples and feathers again instead?” I challenged.
“Because, sweet Caspia, it’s a gift of your blood,” he crooned into my ear, his breath sending ice shards through my racing heart. “Your Nephilim blood, passed down through your great-grandmother’s line. Even thinned with mortal taint, it gives you gifts, which you will use in my service unless you crave a long and painful death for your brother and yourself.” He bit my earlobe. I yelped.
“Ink,” I gasped out as cold fingers curled around the base of my neck, tightening painfully, making it hard to think. “Ink as black as the voids on your back.”
“Good girl,” he crooned again, as if to a pet, right before he punched me and everything went black and cold.
***
I woke with my face pressed flat against a frozen obsidian lake of fire.
My temple throbbed and my eyes wouldn’t stay open and if I wasn’t actually in hell, no one had bothered to tell my headache yet.
I focused on breathing, slow and even. When my vision cleared a little, I realized the frozen obsidian was the black marble top of a really long, highly polished table. The fire came from numerous candelabras scattered about its surface, reflected back to me and multiplied until the surface of the table looked like a bonfire-ringed mirror. I lay half sprawled over it, the bottom half of me resting quite comfortably in a cushy chair of indeterminate fabric.
Unfortunately, the table’s highly reflective surface meant that I could see my own appearance in the candlelight. If I had any doubts about what had happened to me, they vanished when I tried to lift my throbbing head. A darkly blooming red mark throbbed just above my temple. The beautiful deadly kidnapper had, indeed, punched me in the face. I eased back from the table gradually, clinging to the edge tightly as I studied myself for more damage.
There was none. Wherever I was, however he had brought me here, I was wearing exactly what I had on in Blind Springs Park, down to Ethan’s jacket and my messenger bag with the deposit in it, slung sideways across my chest. Not even my hair was messier than usual. I leaned closer into the table and studied the mark again. It was a skilled hit, designed to knock me out. With luck, it wouldn’t spread enough to blacken my eye. Whoever he was, he had tremendous control over his inhuman strength. I remembered Ethan ripping through the Nephilim's chest with his bare hands.
Whoever he was, he really wanted me alive.
I groaned, resisting the urge to flop back down against the table and sleep. Instead, I pulled my knees up against my chest and wrapped my arms around them. Ethan’s jacket clung to me like a second skin, amazingly enough, and I nuzzled into its contradictory scents of black leather and cotton. I tried not to think about my last vision of him, covered in blood and fighting for both our lives.
Icy fingers wrapped themselves around my neck, pinning my cheek against my arms. “You should take that off. You must be uncomfortable.”
I held myself perfectly still, letting only my lips move. Even my teeth stayed locked together. “My discomfort has nothing to do with what I’m wearing.”
“Pity.” His fingers wound their way up through my hair. I registered their disappearance at the same moment a long, wicked looking knife appeared in his other hand, hovering inches over my heart. “Are you sure you don’t want to take it off?” he asked again.
“I think I’ll keep my clothes on, thanks,” I repeated. I couldn’t look away from the knife.
He made no other response before driving the knife down, hard and fast. I watched in helpless horror as the blade bent and shattered against Ethan’s black leather jacket. His pale hands held the handle against my jacket, as if he'd managed to stab me anyway, while he slowly, deliberately picked up the broken bits of blade from my lap. I remembered my drawing. A broken knife had been one of the symbols.
Oh, and the darkly beautiful Nephilim had tried to kill me. I choked. “What…happened?”
“It’s armor. The modern version. We’d look a bit odd, walking around in a breastplate or chain mail. He gave you his armor with his own two hands, and no one can take it from you. Not even him.”
It offers protection, from the cold and… other things. He’d buttoned me into it as soon as the fighting started. “Why did you tell me? Why not keep it secret?” I asked warily, when my voice finally returned.
He shrugged elaborately, a human gesture probably performed solely for my benefit. It looked like an alien caricature on him. “For reasons of my own. And also so you would know exactly what your protection cost him.”
I struggled for breath. “So… when you fought. He didn’t have armor, and you did?”
“You didn’t see me or my associates without our jackets on, did you?” I closed my eyes and leaned into my hands, sick and dizzy. I remembered Ethan’s howl of pain, the blood and slashes through his jeans and sweater. I remembered how he’d punched instead of clawed when he’d encountered brown leather. He’d fought, unarmored, for me. I groaned.
My cruel pale host stood just inside the warm line of candlelight, watching, several feet from my chair. I hadn’t seen him move. His wings had disappeared. Perhaps they were only for special occasions. I stared at him blankly. He arched one dark slash of an eyebrow towards me. “I feel sick,” I said softly.
Cold fingers ghosted across my hand. I held a plastic tumbler of ice water. “Drink it.” He stood inside the arc of candlelight once again, watching me. The plastic tumbler matched one I had in my kitchen. Logan could be drinking juice from it right now, petting Abigail and calling my friends to find out where the hell I was. This insanely mundane detail shocked me out of paralysis. I pushed back from the table and tried to run. My pathetic escape attempt had barely begun when he already held my forearms in his hands. He pulled me tightly back against him, leather sliding against leather. The pressure of his hold increased gradually until it hurt me. I forced myself to perfect stillness, like a rabbit in a wolf’s embrace. “Ok?” He drew the word out, making it both question and threat. I didn’t even nod.
“Ok.”
“Good girl.” Again we moved. Another room this time, dark and bare except for a low sofa and tall windows completely covered with heavy velvet drapes. I sat. He looked down at me. Apparently he didn’t like to sit. I pulled Ethan’s jacket tighter.
“Who are you and what do you want and what happened to Ethan?” It came out of me in one long monotonous breath. When I was through, I clung to the edge of the cushion and looked anywhere but at his terrible, beautiful face.
He didn’t like that. “Look at me,” he thundered, dangerous and angry and low. I looked. His pale skin and soot black hair were too young, too soft for a creature spun from nightmares. His diamond eyes were sharp and cold in a face so delicate it was almost pretty. He was beautiful and terrifying and would hurt me until I did anything he said. “I am Asheroth. Look at me and tell me what you see. What would you paint, Caspia with the gift of Nephilim blood?”
I inhaled sharply through my teeth, remembering my grandmother’s words. Gifts of my blood, she had told me. My paintings, the sketches, they were gifts of my blood. Nephilim blood? And what if he was right, this nightmare creature in front of me? They were still Gran’s words coming out of his beautiful cruel mouth, and he was twisting them, and he had no right.
“I do not know Nephilim, or the ways of angels," I snapped. I shook with the effort of sitting still. A strange cold rage burned through me, and I knew then I did not care if I died for my honesty. “I know that Ethan was kind, and you are cruel. I know that I saw wings, where now I see none, but I have an artist’s memory. Ethan’s were light and warmth and something, and yours were ragged black holes of nothingness. Here is what I see: You are blackest ink on plain wh
ite canvas, and I will paint your lips and jacket red with real blood, for there is no paint on earth to capture their cruelty.”
Sharp nails raked their way down my jaw line and traced the outline of my lips. I jerked my face away, outraged. “Your eyes are liquid silver now, Caspia.” His voice was mild for someone who was about to kill me. “Like mercury. Did you know?”
I raised my chin. “Ethan told me. So?”
“Did he happen to tell you why this is important, even dangerous, for you and your brother?” He sat next to me on the sofa, my chin in his hand. I couldn’t turn away from his hot white eyes.
“We were quite rudely attacked," I hissed. The angrier I got, the more it pleased him. “I’m sure he would have, had he not been interrupted and assaulted.”
“Ethan’i’el is currently unharmed, unfortunately.”
“Glad to hear it,” I snapped.
“Are you really? You won’t be for long. Your brother is dying, Caspia, and the death of a Nephilim, even one with blood as thinned as yours, is a rare treat. It is enough to gather every being with a trace of angelic blood to the both of you like a flock of vultures waiting for rotting road kill. And when he dies…” Furious, I pushed against Asheroth, my palms white and fingers splayed with the effort, but he only pulled me closer to his beautiful burning face. “When he dies, there will be a fight such as you have never dreamed for the dying light of his soul. Ethan’s only purpose here is to watch your brother die and take him from you, Caspia. He will take him for the Light, but he will take him nonetheless. You will be alone.”
He echoed the exact word I’d whispered to Ethan, underneath him in the park. My mind skittered sideways as it did sometimes when I didn’t want to think about something truly unpleasant. I filed cruel Asheroth’s words away to take out later, when things were calm and I was safe again. “You lie.” It was a statement, flat and cold. He smiled to hear it and stroked my cheek.