by Vicki Keire
“What the hell?” I pulled away from him, but he held me tight around the waist, raking me with the fury of his eyes.
“Exactly,” he said, pulling me so close against him I had no choice but to mold myself to the shape of his body. I thought of how warm he was, and how well we fit; the top of my head rested perfectly against the curve of his neck. Then I remembered he was mad at me, and had no right to be, and tried to pull away from him again, but there was nothing else but him to hold on to, nothing but him and Light in a freefall void that was like the top of a rollercoaster, forever on pause, never coming down the track. I clutched him tighter and tried not to be sick.
***
It lasted forever and it lasted for exactly one breath. It was horrible and it was wonderful. It made me want to laugh and throw up, all at the same time, and when Ethan finally let me go, gently disengaging my fingernails from his shirt, the Light faded around us and all I could see was him.
He looked a little less angry. But only a little.
“Do you want to tell me what just happened, Ethan?” I looked around to give me an excuse to look anywhere but at his angry, accusing face.
“Funny. I meant to ask you the exact same thing,” he said tightly. His voice practically thrummed with tension. I spun around so that he could see nothing except my back, taking great care to stiffen my spine even though I felt dizzy and sick, and folded my arms angrily across my chest. That would teach him not to drag me away from my brother at invisible speeds to strangely beautiful places that looked like…
When I saw where we were, I forgot to breathe.
We were standing in the back end of the Parson’s apple orchard, except we weren’t. It looked just like it, only much, much better. Brighter. Shinier. Radiant. Unreal. The trees hadn’t lost their leaves at all. In fact, every leaf on every branch was the perfect deep emerald green of summer. Fruit hung heavy and round from the branches. All colors, from the apples to the blades of grass, seemed dusted with a coat of pulsing lacquer, as if every inanimate thing breathed with color and light. My skin felt stripped down to its rawest layer, bloody tissue laid bare to soft warm breezes and the impossibly enticing smells of an orchard in full ripe summer until my poor weak senses screamed at the overload.
I did what I could. I closed my eyes and thought of home.
All the kids in Whitfield knew the Parsons. They ran the largest farm in town, or rather on its outskirts. They had the largest stall at the monthly farmer’s market on the square. They operated the seasonal pumpkin patch and the area’s only commercial orchard. It was huge, and, as kids, we all knew where the weak spot in the wooden fence was. At the very edge of the back forty, obligingly screened by a rather scraggly clump of trees, kids from Whitfield had been sneaking into the Parson’s orchard for as long as there had been a town. Sometimes we got caught and sometimes we didn’t. Oddly enough, at least in my case, that almost always depended on my intentions. Good intentions went unnoticed. Bad ones aroused immediate alarm. Escaping with friends for a bit of peace and quiet and harmless gossip went undiscovered, as did the occasional kissing session with a boy or two I really liked when I got older. I sucked in a surprised breath. I had always thought I just had ill luck. But of course, knowing what I now knew about myself and about Whitfield, I realized it probably had to do with my own nature, or the town’s, or both.
I blushed crimson, conscious of Ethan at my back, remembering one memorable occasion when I had been caught, right after junior prom, with a group of friends who’d been planning to start the celebrations with getting drunk and ending them with each couple neatly separated from the rest of the group. Old man Parsons had come himself that time, shotgun in hand, interrupting what would have been a really stupid move on my part. The boy I was dating at the time turned out to be a creep; he stalked me for weeks afterward until Logan beat him bloody.
So many signs. How many had I ignored? And at what cost?
“This isn’t really the orchard, is it?” I kept my back to Ethan, not so much because I was angry anymore, but because I was both afraid and fascinated by the shifting but familiar landscape in front of me. My head was full of embarrassing memories and strange new fears, and the apples on the trees around me glittered a deep blood red.
The color of beating hearts. The color of Asheroth’s jacket. I closed my eyes again when my senses began to scream.
“You’re frightened.” I felt him in front of me instantly, a cloud of cool mist in the middle of too much sensation. His hands on my face were cool, as well, and that frightened me almost more than anything. Never before had Ethan felt cool to my skin. I hugged myself tighter and kept my eyes closed, summoning more memories.
“It’s too much. Too much sensation. Pleasure.” I felt my lips twist on the word. “We should go to the real orchard instead. I can show you the tree I fell out of when I was nine. I broke my ankle. Logan carried me home on his back.” I felt soft warm earth beneath my knees, exactly like sinking into firm foam. “Why did you bring me here?”
“It’s the one place I know you are safe, and even still, I tried to pick a place both familiar to you, and remote enough to evade unwanted attention,” he said. Familiar cool leather slid around my shoulders, covering me, cooling the fire across and inside much of my skin. “Believe me, I did not want to bring you here, Caspia. It’s a risk, bringing you to the Realms; even to ones of the Light, and even though you bear Nephilim blood. But you came to me with the unmistakable touch of Darkness on you.” He had me by the shoulders, shaking me, voice insistent, relentless. “Look at me! Who was it? Who is it that hunts you? Why do you, and you alone, carry the stench of evil on you?”
Incredulous, I tried to shove him away. I only succeeded in pushing myself flat on my back, confronting an endless indigo sky, completely cloud free. “Evil?” I repeated. I was dimly aware of rage building somewhere inside, but I was too shocked to access it right away. “Did you just apply the words stench and evil to me in the same sentence, you nosy, interfering, soul-stealing angel?” I rolled over into a crouch, conscious for maybe the first time ever of what people meant when they said someone’s eyes blazed. I could feel the heat in mine, and I was pretty sure that meant they had turned that quicksilver color Asheroth claimed was a sign of my Nephilim heritage. “You arrogant bastard. I have no idea. Are you saying I have some kind of Dark evil in me, and Logan doesn’t? That should make you happy, right? That means you’re doing your job, right? Since you’re only supposed to guard him?”
He flinched. “Caspia.” No matter where or how I moved, there he was, relentlessly in front of me. Damn him and his reflexes. “This is important. You must listen.”
“Like hell.” I jumped up from my crouch, from his calm blue green eyes, and stalked off into the orchard, heading towards what would be the wooden fence in Whitfield.
He let me get three steps before I walked right into my brother’s black t-shirt that looked so much better on him anyway. “You are not in Whitfield, Caspia. You could wander forever here, and lose yourself. You must listen.”
“Talk fast,” I ground out through gritted teeth. I clenched my fists and looked at the toes of my boots; the Realms of Light, as Ethan chose to call them, were nauseatingly beautiful.
“I wasn’t looking for you, exactly, that first night in Whitfield. I had come to guard your brother, and was curious to see you, of course. But we can sense others of our kind, and from the moment I crossed your threshold, I knew you, your brother, or both of you had attracted one of the darkest of our kind. I tracked this… scent… to the witch’s shop, where I encountered you.”
That got my attention. I snapped my eyes to his blue green ones, and was startled to see a steady reflection of silver burning there. Silver. In Ethan’s eyes. I smiled a little, in spite of myself. I liked seeing silver in his eyes, knowing I put it there. “Asheroth," I said, simply, filing away the information that Mrs. Alice was a witch for later. “He had a pack of my hand painted cards. He could only have gotten
them there.”
But Ethan shook his head. “No. Not Asheroth. I thought it must be him, when he attacked and took you. I thought it must have been him who took your drawing, somehow, and tried to lure you to him. I thought the threat was over. But there is something else that hunts you still. Something worse. It clung to you when you returned today, late and confused. Something had you. You must tell me, Caspia.”
“Something worse than Asheroth?”
He nodded. “There are different kinds of Falling; some of us turn to Darkness in our despair and isolation, or out of madness. But then, there are those who Fall from outright Rebellion. Those Rebel Nephilim are the Darkest of all. Some would name them Demons. That is what I sensed when you returned, late and confused.”
I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach. “Demons,” I repeated, as if confirming the existence of aliens. He merely watched me. “You’re telling me you brought me here, knowing a demon is after me, something worse than Asheroth or his buddies, and you left Logan alone?”
“Warded,” he corrected, reaching for me again. “Your apartment is warded. And it seems to be you the demon wants, not your brother.”
“Oh, well, that’s a relief,” I said calmly. Too calmly. If Ethan had known me for just a bit longer, he would never have mistaken my tone for anything other than thinly veiled panic and sarcasm. He would never have relaxed his grip on my forearms.
“What happened today? Can you remember?” he asked, low and serious, while the hysteria climbed to a fever pitch inside me.
“I don’t remember,” I answered truthfully. The lights were awfully bright. I squinted at Ethan’s back. Did I see the planes of light that were his wings, or were things just that bright here in the Realms? “I was late for Dr. Christian’s class. And of course, he completely humiliated me for it. I went to the library with Amberlyn, then my last class. I… I remember feeling sleepy, and napping on a bench. I called home. That’s it.”
Light enveloped me, pulsing, a heartbeat between us, and I knew Ethan had covered me with his wings. He kissed me, but it was more than that, it was like he gave me breath when I had none. In his arms, cool instead of warm in this strange place, I felt like a dying patient on life support, and what felt like a thick grimy soap bubble popped around a particularly startling memory. I struggled against him.
“Remember something?”
“My drawing,” I gasped. “In class today! I drew you, and Dark Nephilim I didn’t recognize, fighting, with me in between. Only you didn’t have wings. You looked terrible, too.”
His eyes narrowed like a hungry cat’s. “And you? How did you look?”
“I was calling something, or maybe yelling. And doing something with my hands. I can’t believe I forgot something that important. I wonder if that drawing’s gone, too. Why can’t I remember? Oh, bloody hell!” In my agitation, I had pushed myself out of the circle of his arms, clenching and unclenching my fists at my side. Furious, I wondered who or what was stalking me and why. I wondered how Ethan was supposed to guard both my brother and myself. I breathed in and out, clenching and unclenching my fists.
“In this drawing you were doing something with your hands?” Ethan asked from far away. I looked up to see him standing several feet away in the shade of a too-bright apple tree, watching me with a look I couldn’t quite decipher. He nodded once, sharply, down. “Like that?” I had been pacing the perfect ground with its emerald blades of grass in a tight circle. Tracers of shadows floated from my hands exactly like misty breath from my mouth on a cold night. Except this was in bright light, the brightest possible, probably, and smoky darkness slipped gracefully from my fingers as I clenched and unclenched my palms in agitation.
I stared at my open palms. “Um, no. Not like that,” I admitted, turning my hands over and over. “What the hell was that?”
“The other reason I brought you here.” His smile was predatory and showed too much teeth as he prowled towards me from the trees, slowly. “What if something was coming for you, Caspia? A demon? Do you know what they can do to a human? Especially a weak, sick one like Logan?” I swallowed nervously as he came closer. He didn’t look like my Ethan. He looked hungry. He looked feral. I backed away. “Think of a thousand angry Asheroths, and let them loose on your brother.” I felt my blood pressure spike as soon as he invoked my tormentor’s name. When he latched it onto my brother’s name, I began to get angry. “Think of how Asheroth hurt you.” Ethan sneered. “He would snap Logan like a twig. A demon will do much worse. Your brother will be in so much pain he will no longer even know he has a sister named Caspia, let alone care what the demon does to her.” I stopped moving entirely. I was having trouble breathing. Ethan laughed, short and cruel. “Logan would even help do whatever the demon wanted. To you, Caspia. And that’s before the demon took his soul into the Darkest Realms, where the torture would continue forever. That’s what’s hunting you, what you’ve led to your bro…”
Ethan never finished his sentence. I whirled on him, pushing against him. “That’s enough, you bastard. Take me back. Now.” Except that when my palms slammed against his chest, light pulsed outward in a brilliant, blinding burst. He fell, exactly as if I’d shoved him. Hard. Which I had. Except that I’d never managed to move Ethan one single inch unless he let me. And from the stunned look on his face as he lay flat on his back at my feet, he very much had not moved willingly.
A look of pure wonder passed quickly over his face. He locked it down so fast I wasn’t completely sure I’d seen it. He shook his head slowly, sadly, at the pure indigo sky. “It’s probably too late,” he said. “At least you’re safe here. Let the demon have him. Save yourself…”
“You complete and utter bastard,” I hissed. I kicked him and tried to stifle my yelp of pain; I might have knocked him down with some strange pulse of light, but he still had the mass of a granite statue. “I can’t believe I trusted you. Maybe even loved you! Jackass! I’ll find my own way back.” I turned sharply on my heel and stalked away, towards what would have been the main entrance to the orchard had we really been in Whitfield. I tried not to limp as I thought through possible plans. Could I find another angel? Hitch a ride back? How did these things work?
I hit a solid wall of granite and black t-shirt. “Caspia,” it said in a quiet, even reasonable, voice. I felt a light touch on my hand, which I had been making into fists quite unconsciously. “Look.”
I did.
What had been trails of shadow before were now jagged rips of darkness piercing through the too-bright beauty of the place Ethan had brought me. I stared. Jagged edges. There were sharp, jagged edges of darkness streaming from my palms when I moved them back and forth. “It looks like…” I let my hands drop. “It looks like the darkness Asheroth carried on his back. His… wings. Or whatever.”
“Only because you’re upset,” Ethan said. Suddenly, I didn’t care that he had made me so mad, had said such awful things. I understood why, now. “You used Light, too, although shadows will be your greatest weapon.” He made a small sound that could have been a laugh. My forehead, pressed against his chest, felt the rumble of it. “I’m sorry for upsetting you, but I had to see if you had other Nephilim abilities, and try to wake them, if you did. I would not have you powerless, or dependant solely on me. You have Light and Dark inside you, Caspia, like all humans. You are neither wholly one nor the other.” He caught both my hands up in his. “You are a creature of choice.”
“And you?”
He was silent. With my forehead against his chest, I measured time in breaths instead of heartbeats. Mine were deep and slow. “I made my choice when first I saw you, and before: the Light, and you.”
“Asheroth says you can’t have both.”
“Asheroth is quite mad.”
“Logan isn’t really demon food right now?”
He held me tight. It felt so good. God help me, it felt so good. “No, you are the only demon bait I know.”
I snorted. “That sounds kind of sexy.
Demon bait. I think I like it.”
“You would,” he said darkly. “I do not. I much prefer the ‘even loved you’ part.”
“Um.” I cleared my throat. “You realize the words ‘utter bastard’ came first, don’t you?”
He ignored me. “Even though Logan is safe in a well warded apartment, he is also my charge, and we have a festival of some kind to attend?”
“Yes!” I brightened instantly. “I’ll show you the Town Square, all four sides of it, you can tell me who is and isn’t human, and Logan can buy us stuff because he said he would.”
He stiffened slightly. “My kind doesn't carry money.”
“I kind of assumed. When you borrowed clothes. Which look way better on you, anyway. I did kind of wonder, though, if you decided to stay…”
He cut me off sharply. “When I stay, I’ll get a job. Like everyone else.” He smiled into my hair; I knew the shape of his lips against my skin by now, and I felt them twist against the crown of my head. “I can’t wait to be human with you.”
“But you can’t. I mean, you aren’t. Human, I mean," I protested, some small part of me wondering how we had gone from fighting to entwined so very quickly. A larger part of me told the smaller part of me to shut the hell up.
“We do the best we can,” he whispered, so softly I barely heard. It was enough. Enough barriers loomed between us: a demon stalker, my brother’s tenuous hold on life, his eternal banishment for my sake, me being the cause of his Fall. But for now, his arms and enwrapping Light around us, we were going to the Winter Festival on Whitfield’s Old Town Square. I would dress up and hold his hand and Logan’s too, and all would be right with the world. “…love you, too…” I heard as the dizzying nothingness of the space and time between here and there compressed and stretched. Familiar nausea warned me of travel even as I closed my eyes tight and clung.