“They’re not my friends,” Steve corrected automatically. He stopped pacing. “They’re Thrash’s. You’ve met one of them. Remember that big blonde surfer dude with Silk and Cindy? We met them three weeks ago?”
Jesus flicked the tip of his index finger toward the ground. “At Stringers?”
Steve’s face worked in disgust. “No, Postmortem.”
Jesus sneered. “The guy with all of the piercings?”
“Nah, the other one. Blond, blue eyes with the muscles and the scar on his cheek.” Steve gestured toward the left side of his face. “His name was Troy something or other...”
“I remember him,” Jesus said. He hesitated, and the strain of hard thought showed on his face. “Why did you call him anyway if you don’t know him?”
Steve’s lips parted, and his tongue pushed past. Rivulets of sweat trickled down the sides of his face. “Cause, these guys, Thrash and his friends, they’re... You know—”
“Weird?”
“They know stuff,” Steve finished weakly.
Silence reigned for a minute.
“It’s too damn hot!” Jesus complained.
“As soon as they show, we can be rid of that thing.” Steve made a wild gesture toward the Charger’s trunk. His jerky agitation revealed raw fear.
“If I was you, I’d keep it,” Jesus said, suddenly sly.
“Well, you’re not me. Jesus, you’re an idiot!” Steve exploded. “What part of me not having been home for the last three days did you not understand? I haven’t slept or showered, and my gut tells me that this thing is the reason that Thrash is missing.”
“Let’s go,” Troy grated, his suspicion apparently satisfied. He stepped out of the store’s recessed alcove and onto the sidewalk.
Katsue followed on his heels.
“Hey, guys,” Troy greeted, managing to convey the impression that they’d only just arrived. He expressed a calm and relaxed outward demeanor, but Katsue felt his tension as acutely as if it were her own. Both teens whirled aggressively, surprise etched onto their faces.
Steve forced a warm welcome. “Hey, Troy, buddy, don’t do that.” He gestured toward his friend. “You remember Jesus?”
Introductions made the rounds, and then Troy cut right to the chase, bypassing social pleasantries. “What’s up?” he asked. “What’s so important that you couldn’t tell me on the phone?”
Eyes haunted, Steve swallowed, and his jaw worked. “You heard Thrash took off?”
“Yeah, we heard,” Troy said tersely.
“I called you ‘cause Thrash left something with me, and I don’t know what else to do with it. I sure as hell don’t want it.” Steve fished his keys from his pocket and moved toward the trunk of his car.
Curious, Troy and Katsue followed while Jesus remained seated. Steve opened the trunk and removed a black leather duffel bag. His hands shook as he extracted a rectangular box, the kind used to store bladed weapons, from the duffle. Based on the dimensions, Katsue assumed it to be a katana case.
The air crackled with the power of the thing, stinging her skin and burning her nerves. The mystical presence, a palpable force, provoked a visceral reaction. Her emotions skewed: dark and consuming, terror, desire, greed. The claw hooked her gut and wrenched, twisting an excruciating knot.
“What is it?” Katsue asked in breathless wonder. Eyes riveted on the case, she was overcome with a nearly uncontrollable impulse to smack away Steve’s offending hands.
Without a word, he unzipped the case and revealed a sword three feet in length.
The ebony blade was composed of a non-metallic material, perhaps bone or stone. The surface drank in the light and rippled, creating hypnotic patterns which pulsated with power. Silver Celtic circles were etched into the blade, and a winged dragon formed the silver hilt and stunted cross guard. The wicked weapon rested on a red velvet lining, glowing with incandescent beauty. It was perfection. It was power.
“Give it to me! It’s mine. It’s meant for me.” Unexpectedly, Jesus lunged off the car and made a grab for the weapon. Steve shouted a denial, and their voices soared as a tug-o-war broke out over the case. For a stunned second, Troy and Katsue watched the dispute unfold.
Finally, Steve won the upper hand. He thrust the case toward Troy. “Take it.”
“Damn it!” Troy cursed and grabbed for the case.
He collided with Katsue as she also lunged forward. They caught opposite ends of the case and bought it to a sudden stop. The unsecured sword flew overhead.
Frozen in place, the Alastors watched with expressions of comical surprise as the weapon arched through the air.
Clink. The tip of the blade struck pavement and produced a shower of sparks.
Clink. Clink. Clink. It skipped like a stone.
The sword came to a halt but did not topple. The blade balanced precisely on its trusting point in unnatural suspension, then rotated in slow circles before beginning a graceful swoop earthward.
Greed dominated Katsue’s thoughts, drove her to possess the weapon. She had to have it. The cosmos urged her on, a thousand tiny voices whispering through her mind, urging her to grab the sword. Before the men reacted, Katsue dove for the weapon and caught the hilt in her palm. Her fingers closed around the grip, and the weapon glowed with a fiery halo.
Streamers of crimson energy crackled along blade and hilt, enveloping Katsue’s hand and forearm in electrical arcs, streamers of pure mystical energy. The molten silver hissed as it scorched her palm, and the sickening smell of burnt flesh wafted into the air on black smoke. Searing pain set every nerve in her body on overload, and she screamed in anguish. Her gripping fingers retained a tight hold on the weapon’s hilt, refusing to let go.
The rushing sidewalk filled her field of vision until everything went white. Katsue crashed to the ground, and her face smashed against the hot pavement. Her nose crushed with a wet squish, and blood gushed from her nostrils. Clutching her prize, she screamed and thrashed and fought to be free, yet she hung on with a death grip.
A feminine voice, haughty and regal, echoed through Katsue’s mind, filling every hidden crevice of her being:
You are unworthy.
“Damn it, Kat, let go.” Troy pried her fingers open and tore the sword from Katsue’s hand along with several layers of burnt flesh in the process. Katsue screamed one last time and then collapsed into blessed blackness.
Chapter Two
A relic from another era, the elevator in the archeology building had doors that were slow to part, and any sort of motion between floors created a cacophony of creaks and moans. Dreadful to enter, and always a relief to depart.
Aiden McLachlan preferred the stairs, but her companion couldn’t have made the climb. The elevator doors opened, and she breathed a sigh of relief upon having survived another ride in the steel crypt. Together, the slender young woman and the frail black priest exited to the lobby.
“And so my trip to London came to a premature end, and I reluctantly returned here to the States,” said Father Matthew Bunson, concluding his tale with a swipe of his smooth shaved head. The priest wore a simple black cassock over a button-down shirt and black trousers, his clothing meticulously pressed with crisp lines and defined seams all the way down to his polished leather shoes. He walked stooped forward and leaned heavily upon a crooked wooden cane with a carved ivory handle in the shape of a tiger’s head.
Matthew’s story, though vivid and entertaining, had failed to answer her question: Why had the priest returned from England a month early? He typically used a circuitous route to avoid a straight answer, but the fact of his evasion piqued her curiosity. Aiden plotted her strategy for obtaining a real explanation. It would require retrenching and some clever inquiry.
“So I take it that you enjoyed your trip to England?” Aiden asked with a wry grin.
The priest chuckled. “Young lady, I am an avid Anglophile. I confess. It was a great joke of the cosmos that I was born in Michigan.”
He spoke wit
h a supple, well-educated baritone. The priest was an eloquent speaker who could recite either Shakespeare or biblical passages with passion and charisma. Aiden admired his precision with words and his ability to speak to diverse audiences.
“Keep talking like that and they’ll ship you back to England,” Aiden quipped.
The tall young woman possessed willowy grace, limbs that were both slender and tensile. With most of her height in her legs, she had a modest figure, a graceful neck, small breasts, and narrow hips and waist. She dressed casually in faded blue jeans, a green top, and worn sneakers.
Aiden had inherited her Irish mother’s beauty. Her flame-hued hair, restrained in a braid from which stubborn strands persistently escaped, fell past her shoulders. The riot of curls framed a narrow ivory-complexioned oval face, prone to summertime freckling. She had a narrow-profiled nose and a delicate mouth above a round chin. Her jade eyes, her most distinctive feature, always shone with intelligence and wit. Her keen mind, often too sharp, allowed her to capture the world with perfect precision and to record her every waking memory in vivid detail.
“It would be no hardship at all,” Father Matthew assured her with a soft laugh.
Aiden rushed ahead of the priest and held the lobby door for him. Matthew crawled along at a tortoise’s pace. The cane and his footsteps created an uneven cadence on the sidewalk. Thankful for his presence, Aiden carefully matched her mentor’s stride. She preferred not being alone. In the lonely night, a single set of footsteps created a vulnerable sound.
A stillness dominated the empty campus, except for their movement through the night. Summer and weekend had converged to render the grounds virtually empty of both staff and students.
The wrought iron fences had curved spear-pointed tops, designed to deter trespassers and keep the outside world at bay. The fences and foliage combined to create a private refuge where members of the esoteric and secretive Nephilim Houses gathered. Only the dedicated few remained as the hands of the weathered Gothic clock tower crept toward midnight.
The daytime heat had dissipated, and a cool coastal breeze drifted in off the harbor. In the night sky, the silvery moon waned to a sliver shy of fullness, and only the brightest stars sparkled, aglow with noise pollution from millions of city lights.
“Are you teaching a seminar this summer?” Aiden asked, extending a subconscious hand toward Matthew’s elbow as he faltered, leaning more heavily than normal on his cane.
Matthew waved her hand away. “I’m fine. I’m fine. Stop mother-henning me. I’m merely tired due to the long flight.” With a painful effort, he recovered his forward momentum. His breathing labored with the strain of exertion, and each step seemed a struggle.
“Sorry.” With a worried frown, Aiden withdrew her hand.
The priest fiercely prized his independence, but in the three months since she had seen him last, Matthew’s health had taken a noticeable turn for the worse. He was weaker, his hands shook, and his voice faded to a wheeze following a long passage of speech.
“No, I’m not due to teach another class until the fall, and then it will be to our House’s children and for the university’s graduate students.”
Matthew had taken on some light teaching duties. He led a quiet, largely secular existence, serving as a historian and the history department’s primary archivist. It had been years since the priest had performed the clerical functions of his calling, but he persisted in donning the trappings of his profession—a priest’s clothing and a crucifix on a rosary.
“What subject?” she asked.
“Nephilim history. It’ll be good to work with the children again. I’m looking forward to it. Graduate students are such an officious lot,” Matthew said with a sly smile and a long glance.
Aiden shot him a knowing look, and they shared a grin. “One more year and I’ll have my Master’s degree,” she said with a laugh. “You just wait and see. I’ll show you officious then.” Unlike her mentor, the redhead’s specialty was languages. She spoke a half dozen and could read even more. Her eidetic memory made her perfectly suited to such tasks.
“Aiden, my girl, you’re growing up so fast,” Matthew declared with a nostalgic sigh. “It seems like only yesterday that you were just a little girl in pigtails.”
“I never wore pigtails,” Aiden denied with a giggle, scrunching her nose.
“You did so.”
They laughed and fell into the comfortable silence of close companions. As her guardian since infancy, Matthew was the only parent Aiden had ever known. Her mother died in childbirth, and her biological father was a prominent member of House Armaros.
Aiden had met her father once at a New Year’s Eve party on board a cruise ship many years before. As a three-year-old, she had snatched the moment out of time and engraved it forever in her mind. The man was larger than life, a stern, imposing stranger, handsome but severe in his dress and manner. Her father saw to Aiden’s financial needs, but otherwise remained an absentee parent, uninvolved in her life.
Aiden’s sheltered childhood included a strong concentration in academic pursuits but very little in the way of a social life. A series of nannies and housekeepers had provided a glimpse of the maternal presence absent from her life, just enough so she ached with longing for a mother. However, she remained eternally grateful to the priest. Matthew had been the only consistent and unwavering source of strength and stability in her life.
“It’s a nice night,” Aiden said.
Matthew agreed. “Yes, quite lovely.”
Foliage grew thick and full all over the campus grounds, surrounding the squat buildings with soldierly determination. The trees held hands, branches intertwined to form living lattices. Beneath the canopy, shrubs, bushes, and manicured lawns of blue-green grass filled in the spaces between paved sidewalks. During the day, jays and robins roosted in the treetops, and starlings and sparrows took up residence in bristling hedges. At night, the soft rustling of pigeons sounded from the eaves of the red brick buildings. A chorus of crickets chirped incessantly against the backdrop of distant city sounds.
Aiden regarded her adoptive father with a stolen sideways glance, fearful and uneasy. “How have you been?” she asked.
He chuckled, no doubt reading her thoughts. “Tired, child. I’ve been very tired.”
Aiden did not find his answer remotely reassuring. She feared the loss of the only parent she had ever known more than anything. Was his poor physical condition the real reason he’d returned early from London?
Just past his eighty-fifth birthday, Matthew looked frail, like every one of those years weighed heavily on his lean shoulders. Scarecrow-thin, he hunched over from a curvature of his spine. Poor health had reduced him, the loss of bone density and muscle mass having cost him both height and weight through the years. His eyes were hallowed sockets, and his pallor was an unhealthy ashen, equal parts gray and yellow. His teeth remained the only brightness he still possessed. His skin stretched taut across his lean frame, giving him a face and hands free of wrinkles, as tough and leathery as aged rawhide.
Matthew noticed her troubled expression and mistook it for something else, perhaps on purpose—likely on purpose. “Worrying about Thrash isn’t going to help anything,” he scolded, “except to put a permanent crease in your pretty forehead.”
Matthew would have been displeased to catch her agonizing over his health so she eagerly seized the new excuse.
“A week is a long time,” Aiden said. “I’m afraid—” The redhead bit her lip.
“I’m worried too, but we won’t stop looking until he’s found,” Matthew said softly. He reached out and placed a comforting hand on hers. He squeezed gently, and they shared a moment of sobering silence. “Aiden, you must have faith things will work out for the best. God watches over us all.”
“I suppose.” She didn’t try to hide her skepticism.
In spite of her adoptive father being a priest, Aiden was not Catholic. Matthew never pushed religion on her, and they did not
agree on many points of ideology. For one, Aiden did not believe all things could be forgiven. Sometimes the sins of the ancestors transcended anything an individual might do. However, she was not an atheist. She believed in God’s existence with an unquestionable certainty. Her faith faltered in other areas: Nephilim were born damned—damned by their blood, damned by their heritage.
All too aware of her foibles and frustrations, Matthew shook his head with a knowing smile. “Was it not Origen of Alexandria who argued that all souls, including the devil, will eventually achieve salvation?”
“Was he not convicted of heresy?” Aiden countered with a faint grin, glad to have Matthew home. She’d greatly missed their philosophical debates while he had been in England.
“That doesn’t mean—” Abruptly, Matthew stopped walking. His head snapped to the side.
Spooked, Aiden followed the priest’s gaze.
The buildings running parallel to the walkway were blocky and dark, forming a neat row of giant gravestones. Thick curtains of ivy draped the sides of the red brick structures which had been constructed during a utilitarian era that did not prize elegance or artistry. The green vines were a kindness, concealing and mitigating the brutish facades.
“Is someone there?” Aiden stared hard, imagining motion. A moment later a solitary figure ran between two buildings.
“Yes, we’re being stalked,” Matthew agreed in a hushed whisper. Not watched or followed, but stalked. The word conveyed so many sinister connotations.
The corner of Aiden’s mouth tugged and curled to the side, and she bit the inside of her mouth. Stalked. It seemed unlikely, maybe even illogical, for Matthew to make such a bold statement, and yet Aiden trusted his judgment implicitly.
Movement in her peripheral vision caused Aiden to turn her head in the other direction. She spotted another swift shadow before it disappeared behind a hedge. “There’s more than one of them,” she said. Her fear increased incrementally with each passing second.
Phoenix Contract: Part One (Fallen Angel Watchers Book 1) Page 2