by Vicki Keire
“Maybe,” I told him, shocked to realize I spoke the truth even as it rolled off my tongue, “I don’t care.”
Chapter Nine:
A Reason It's Called Falling
Asheroth didn't like apathy. He preferred terror or fury.
His beautiful lips twisted bitterly. “Then it is fortunate,” he snarled, so close his black hair blinded me and his cold inhuman cheek rested against mine, “that I got to you first.” He pulled me up from the floor. I think he meant to be gentle. I actually watched him stalk from me to one of the windows with a fluid, leonine prowl. “You love him,” he said, as if to himself. “How unexpected. How dangerous.” It was a brief respite, though; he was back in my face, his eyes blazing anger and hate, as if I had done something unforgivable. “It is the most dangerous thing there is!” Perfect lips curled back from sharp white teeth. Icy fingers squeezed the back of my neck.
He’s crazy. How long before he hurts me? Really hurts me? I said the first thing that popped into my head. “Ethan said he had Fallen.” I tried to think, to clear my head and plan. “What did he mean?”
Asheroth’s diamond eyes brightened even more. My eyes burned, staring into them, but I would not twist or writhe. I would not make myself into his prey. “When angels Fall, they don’t get choices.” He released me. I stood by the low sofa again, gripping its back as the room spun crazily. I hated how fast they could move. Asheroth stood with his back to me, his hand toying with the edge of a drape. “We don’t get second chances, either.”
“That makes no sense at all.” Keep him talking. Say anything.
“It’s simple. You have free will. We do not. You can choose whom to love. We cannot. When we love a human, it is with total and complete devotion, and utterly beyond our control. It means exile and the chance to love one single human soul.”
I remembered Ethan, under the trees, his smile bitter and graceful. “It sounds more like slavery.”
Asheroth turned to me then, and my artist’s mind said yes, this. His beautiful face was twisted with grief as well as cruelty and madness. His body bowed backwards as if there was a hollow place somewhere inside and he couldn’t find it, but he would spend all his long cruel eternity trying to fill it anyway. “That’s why it’s called Falling,” he said flatly.
Yes, this. I would paint him this way, lost and murderous and hurt and stunning, in blood red leather and shadows.
If I lived.
“She left you,” I finally said as the last puzzle piece clicked into place. “Who was she? Your human?”
Dozens of studio-quality track lights blazed into life. Momentarily blinded, I gripped the sofa for balance. “She didn’t leave me,” he said from behind me. I wisely closed my eyes the second I felt cold fingers on my waist, moving me. “She just didn’t love me back. She let another human debase and defile her.” His voice dropped into a low, dangerous growl. “And then she died, as humans always do.”
A life-size painting of a young girl dominated the wall in front of me. She had honey blond hair and gray eyes. She sat on a crumbling stone wall with a book in her lap, tattered around the edges and obviously well loved. Her bare hair lifted slightly in an invisible wind that lifted her skirts enough to show equally bare feet. A discarded hat and ribboned slippers lay tossed aside in a heap. She looked defiant and proud. Her clothes and the book, even worn, spoke of wealth, as did the quality of the oil painting itself. “Nineteenth century. European.” I looked for a signature and found none.
He kept his hands on my waist and turned me slowly around the room. I noticed other paintings, from other times. A piano. A bookshelf lined neatly with leather-bound volumes and small items. A hand-painted deck of tarot cards.
Tarot cards. Hand-painted.
Mine.
“I’ve kept track of her descendants,” he said softly, so softly, that I might have mistaken his tone for gentleness if not for the darkness it stirred in my blood.
“Those are my cards.” I tried to keep my voice light, conversational, because if I did not I might start screaming and never stop.
“Her eyes were silver, too. You can’t really tell in the painting, but the artist didn’t have your skill.”
“Did you buy the rest of them, too? Of my cards? Are you the collector who wanted a private commission from me because if you are you don’t have to do this…” I babbled.
“Shh,” he cut me off, drawing a single finger across my lips in a disturbingly knife-like gesture. “No, I’m not your collector. I try not to get too involved, where her descendents are concerned. I find it hard to maintain objectivity. But when I saw you with him… with one of us.” He was going to start hurting me really, really soon. I couldn’t help it; I tried to break free. He crushed me against him so tightly I stopped breathing. “She had Nephilim blood. You have to understand. She chose to let a human have her, a human, and you are the result, you and your brother and your mother and grandmother before you, but you have her eyes and I will not let E’than’i’el have what I could not.”
“You never even knew her, not really,” I said, desperately. “If you did, you’d know I am not her.” It was the wrong thing to say.
“She is who made me what I am,” Asheroth raged against my ear. His cold fingers curled around the base of my neck. My heart sped. We faced the painting together again. I could feel the twin voids of darkness unfurling on his back. I thrashed against him and he let me, secure in the knowledge that he had me by the neck. My vision was gray around the edges. I saw nothing but the painting. The proud, defiant girl looked right at me. I saw the book in her lap again. Tattered, worn, obviously read many times. I wondered what it was that this ancestress of mine loved to read. And then I bit the soft inside of my lip to keep from crying out because I recognized it, the book; I had drawn it, it was one of the symbols, they were all coming true. There was only one more.
My fingers curled around my messenger bag, slung sideways across me underneath Ethan’s jacket. It was sturdy canvas, a trendy cranberry color. I'd picked it out in a moment of insanity on a rare trip to a mega mall last summer. It had heart-shaped buckles. Remembering my drawing, I knew what I had to do. I unsnapped one buckle of the messenger bag, readying it to drop.
“Her name was Caspia,” Asheroth said. With every word he spoke, he tightened his grip on my neck like a vise. He’s going to break my neck. “Just. Like. You.”
Armor, from his own two hands, I thought, and let Ethan’s jacket fall open over buttons loosened while I’d been thrashing. I caught the armor-wrapped bag full of money and coins by its long, loose strap and slammed it in a fast arc against Asheroth’s unguarded knee. I felt the buckle snap on impact. His fingers loosened. I didn't know if I succeeded in hurting him or if he was just sickly amused, playing with me.
I don’t know what I was thinking. Nephilim were fast, but I had to try.
I managed to take Ethan’s jacket with me as I ran.
Straight into Asheroth’s blood red chest.
It hurt. Worse than the time I wrecked my bike flat against the brick walls of Blind Springs Park, worse than the time Pansy Holt beat me up in junior high. I lay flat on my back thinking, this is it, I’ll never see them again, waiting for Asheroth to finish me.
Except he didn’t.
Sounds like boxed thunder and statues growling, full of emotions so fierce they had no human names, echoed through the room behind me. I heard crashing and breaking. Flat on my back, I watched as lines cracked and webbed across the plaster ceiling. The sounds I heard were more terrible than fighting. They promised more than winning and losing; they promised the end of someone’s existence. I wanted to pull Ethan’s jacket over my face and hide but I couldn’t. I was a part of this conflict until the last bestial snarl.
“I think she’s in shock,” said a soft, familiar voice. Worried brown eyes shaded by a baseball cap, pulled low over a thin face, leaned over me. “She’s awake, but she’s not moving.” Light touches at my neck, my wrist. He brushed my hair
back from my face. “Cas, honey? Can you hear me?”
I didn’t want to believe and have it yanked away from me again, not while the inhuman growling rose and fell in pitch around us. Were we both dead? Had vulture angels eaten his soul and gotten mine as well, as Asheroth promised?
“You’re wearing a Yankees cap,” I said after several good long squints. “Either you’re not Logan, or we’re both dead and in hell.”
My favorite pair of brown eyes in the entire world almost disappeared into the shadows and lines of his face while he shook with silent laughter. When had the shadows gotten so deep? But his hand squeezed mine with the barest echo of its familiar strength, and his smile was all I wanted from the universe right then. “I had to raid a blind Russian’s closet,” he explained, still laughing. “So you can’t blame either one of us.”
“Of course she’s in shock. She probably won’t be fit to face the public for weeks,” a heavily accented smoker’s growl agreed. Mr. Markov? Something sharp rapped my ankle, right on the bone. I jerked. “But at least she can move. She doesn’t need her brain to wash dishes.”
“Don’t listen to him, Cas,” my brother soothed. He hadn’t moved from his crouch next to me. “He’s been worried out of his mind. He’s just grouchy. It’s how Russians show they care.”
I propped myself up on my elbows slowly. Mr. Markov stood at my feet. His sightless eyes looked through me as always. The head of his cane, always a plain glass ball before, now glowed bright gold. I had no idea what it meant and I didn’t care, because they were here and alive and wouldn’t hurt me.
I threw myself into my brother’s lap, locking my arms around his thin shoulders, not caring for once how fragile he might be. In that moment, he was my strong big brother, and I needed him. I let him rock me as I cried and told him truths crazier than any lies I had ever spoken. “I was going to die, Logan. More than once. He wanted our souls, and… he was beautiful. We have Nephilim blood. Both of us. And Ethan… Oh, Logan. He gave me his jacket and he wants your soul and I don’t know what to believe.”
He rocked me steadily, like he’d done for as long as we’d been alive, rubbing the small of my back. “Hush, Cas. It’s all right, Cas. It’ll all make sense soon.”
I decided to pretend I believed him.
“How did you find me?” I’d made my brother’s shoulder a snotty wet mess.
Mr. Markov cleared his throat. His cane had stopped glowing. “There are a few things you need to know about Whitfield, Caspia. When you’re feeling better.”
His words nudged ominously against the precarious safety of my brother’s encircling arms. I waved them away as if warding off evil. Bad enough my world was suddenly populated with Nephilim and that my brother and I both shared one as a long-ago ancestor. I rested my cheek in the hollow underneath Logan’s knife-sharp collarbone and closed my eyes tight. I was grateful to Mr. Markov for helping with the rescue efforts, and I was curious about why his cane had glowed gold, but I failed to see why my boring, peaceful little hometown had any relevance. Whitfield had no secrets; I’d lived there all my life.
I realized the sounds of fighting had stopped just as Ethan appeared in the doorway. He wore the same clothes as he had in the park. They were shredded in places, and stiff with dried blood. Fresh gouges seeped dark blood on his cheek and chest. His breathing was even, though, and he walked without stumbling. I tried to rise but he put his hand on my shoulder and dropped gently beside me. Luminous blue green eyes steady as searchlights fixed directly on me. His face was nearly expressionless as he looked me over. He saw the bruise over my temple and narrowed his eyes.
“I’m not going to ask if you’re alright,” he said evenly, but his voice was hard. Only then did I notice how tightly clenched his fists were. “I know that you are not. For now, I just need,” he closed his eyes and swallowed hard. “I just need to know that you will tell me what happened. When you can.”
I made myself ask, flat and merciless. “Is he dead?”
Ethan shook his head. “We’re hard to kill. But he’s injured and gone to a place it’s rather hard to come back from.”
I nodded sharply and touched his fist. “You’re hurt. You should take your jacket. Asheroth told me what it meant.” I thought of the knife, shattering over my heart. “Actually, he showed me.”
“Did he now.” I didn’t know voices could have temperatures, but his did, and it dropped. “Keep it.” Black leather that smelled impossibly of cotton settled over my shoulders like a cape. “It was a gift.”
“He said a lot,” I whispered. I tried to keep the terror out, but I felt it clawing its way up my throat. “Asheroth. He said Logan and I… that we’re…” I stopped. I couldn’t find a way to say what I meant. “I’m scared,” I finally admitted. I couldn’t make my voice rise above a shaky whisper. “I want to go home.” I took maybe the deepest breath of my life and carefully did not look him in the eyes. Instead, I studied the subtly shifting lines of light and shadow just beneath his cheekbones. “Come with us.”
Ethan nodded once, sharply. “I was going to, even if only to haunt your hall.” He smiled his graceful bitter smile. “I have nowhere else to go, now.” He looked to Logan, who nodded easily in invitation, then back to me. “There’s a reason it’s called Falling.”
I risked a look at his eyes then, but for once, I couldn’t read them. They were as carefully blank as new canvas or an un-walked path.
***
Logan was petting my hair. He leaned against me as I sat at our table, my body limp against its polished wooden surface. My arms splayed out amongst scattered potted plants and candles. His long thin fingers moved carefully through the tangled mess of my hair, pausing now and again to work loose a knot or remove a bit of forest floor. He spoke to me of our sleepy little hometown, and of how it was a sanctuary for the strange and unexplained, that it had always been this way but he had not known it until Mr. Markov burst in on him earlier, waving his glowing cane, exclaiming that he knew I was in trouble because he’d put a tracking spell on the night’s deposit.
“Guess I’m not the only freak in town,” I said dully into the table, feeling cold and strangely betrayed. I didn’t know how many more revelations I could handle before I snapped. “We should have a coming out party.”
“Cas,” Logan said patiently. “Mr. Markov was talking about spells, and others like him. In Whitfield. He talked to me while we tracked you to the park.” He stiffened, his voice distant. “That’s when we found Ethan. Fighting. They had… not wings, exactly; more like planes of light and darkness on their backs, and there was all this blood, and you were gone…”
“I know, Logan,” I murmured, closing my eyes. “I was there. I don’t want to think about it right now.” His fingers were as light and soothing as my mother’s had been. It would have been easy to pretend we were younger and our parents were alive, except for one or two things. For one, Logan handled me a bit too carefully, as if I was made of glass and might shatter at any moment under his hands. For another, I could faintly hear Mr. Markov as he laid hands on every single door and window in our apartment, speaking identical phrases of coaxing, languid sibilance every time. As Logan’s fingers, light as vapor, traveled through my hair, I wondered what language this man I thought I knew spoke. It was beautiful and terrifying all at once, and it certainly wasn’t Russian. I’d heard him curse and demand, shout and threaten, and more rarely, praise in his native tongue, and what came from his mouth now as he moved from threshold to windowpane was like nothing I’d ever heard before.
“Stupid blind Russian wizard,” I swore softly. “I’m getting a raise out of this somehow.”
“What was that, sweetheart?” Logan asked softly, in the carefully measured tones he reserved for extremely stressful situations. I ignored him and closed my eyes even tighter, wanting to hang onto the illusion of safety and familiarity for as long as I could.
Ethan interrupted Mr. Markov’s repetitious chanting. “This will work as you intend? You
are sure?”
My boss sighed. “It’s the best I can do.” He sounded very tired. “We don’t want to keep out all supernaturals, mind you. That would bar half the town, ourselves included. I only set wards specifically against the darker forces.”
“It’s not perfect,” Ethan agreed. I heard cabinets open, water running. Only seconds before, he’d been standing beside Mr. Markov at the front window. Asheroth had moved that quickly too. I shuddered. “But even the best defenses rarely are.” Fresh coffee and the clang of mugs; Ethan sat, radiating warmth from the chair next to me.
“Bah.” It was a uniquely Russian sound of dismissal. I sat up slowly as gnarled fingers reached for a mug and familiar, sightless eyes looked right over my head. “Think of my wards as a home security system. They are only part of the solution. The wise home owner should also have a good guard dog, and a firearm or two, to guard his gold.”
Logan’s hand had dropped to my shoulder, as if he sensed how shaky I still was. He gave it a reassuring squeeze. “So which one are you, Ethan?” he tried to joke. “Guard dog or firearm?”
“Woof,” he said, grinning. Logan and Mr. Markov laughed. Ethan joined them. It occurred to me that I had never seen him laugh before; lines appeared at the corners of eyes and lips, making him look softer, more vulnerable. More human. His blue green eyes locked with mine and I could read the plea buried there: laugh with me, Caspia, but I couldn’t. Everyone in the room was laughing but me. It wasn’t a very good joke, but that wasn’t why. Underneath those eyes the color of oceans, eyes that were older than breath, he wanted to be human with me, for just a moment.