“I think I have to head back up now.” Duke checked his watch and passed slips of paper to Ria, Josh, and me. Nate didn’t even raise his hand to accept one, and Duke didn’t attempt to give him one. “Here are your schedules. Again, Morales wants you to take things slow for now, and I have to agree after what you’ve been through.” He paused, his gray eyes looking at me with every bit of sympathy they could muster. “But still, if you’d like to attend my class, it’s going to start soon, and you can follow me up. Even those of you not assigned to it.” He glanced at Josh and Ria.
The little square of paper dropped the scales from my eyes. Did this mean I was staying here? That this was going to be my life now? What about NYU? What about the few weeks of high school I technically still had left?
Ria was more excited than ever. She bounced on her toes and even smiled at Nate. “What do you think, Evey?”
I forced a smile as my stomach tied itself in knots. How could I really go back to that life without Grandpa? This was the only place where I could find more about him, more about the Babylonians. “Lead the way.”
Duke and Nate looked at me knowingly for half a second, each of their eyes sympathetic and skeptical.
We arrived in Duke’s large classroom fifteen minutes later and found it already packed with students and a giant Tesla coil.
Duke stepped to the side of the copper cylinder, the white coil above it like a giant pancake about to flop onto his head. “With enough control over your essence, you can learn to shield it from prying eyes, influence emotion, and even create mirages for humans. The first step is control, though.” He smiled and gestured for the class to make a circle. “Feet on the white line.”
The class moved as a unit and spread out along the painted white circle I’d failed to notice when I walked in. It was a large room, and we were now all about four feet from each other to the right and left. The Tesla coil was the only thing in front of us.
“Electroshock therapy.” I nodded. “Peachy. Not my favorite class back home, but neither was water boarding.”
“I love boogie boards.” Freddy laughed, his belly jiggling under his orange shirt.
Josh grinned from ear to ear. “Electricity and essence are almost the same, in a way. Something about the wavelengths. When he turns that thing on, just make sure to stretch out your hand and take deep breaths.”
“Ria, you’re going to need to come back here with me.” Nate’s voice cut through the din of conversation.
Ria and I turned around at the same time. Nate’s khaki shirt and red hair were like beacons for our glares.
“He’s right.” Josh tapped my shoulder. “Humans can’t do this without a big metal cage around ’em.”
“Sorry,” Nate added, his hands tucked into his jean pockets, his head down.
Ria looked like she might murder Josh and Nate and me just for good measure, but eventually, she stepped away from the line and stomped to the outer wall, far away from Nate.
“First, take a couple deep breaths to focus your essence,” said Duke, gesticulating air moving in and out of his lungs. “Good. Good. Everyone is calm.” He looked at each person in turn. “We access our souls through our minds; thus, we need to quiet all thoughts.”
I snickered. Duke’s meticulously ironed clothes and rigid posture didn’t exactly scream calm.
“Eve, focus your breathing a bit more.” Duke’s gaze flicked to me and stopped.
I filled and emptied my lungs several more times, my muscles relaxing, my arms hanging at my side.
Duke stepped forward. “Your essence is still very active.” He paused. “Maybe if you have something to focus on.” He turned and pointed to a girl on the opposite side of the circle. “That’s Cheryl in the pink. See how hers looks?”
I peered across the circle and found the girl. She was blond and wore a pink tank top. I looked down at my own shirt. Did he want me to change?
“No.” Duke shook his head like he’d heard my thought. “Your essence, your spirit. Make yours look as calm as hers.”
“I don’t think she can see yet,” said Josh, barely more than a whisper.
Duke’s eyes widened for a millisecond, and then returned to their calm and collected level of professionalism. “Well, today just focus on your breathing. We’ll work on it from there.” He smiled and turned away.
“What am I supposed to be seeing?” I turned to Josh, my gaze flicking around the room, my palms starting to sweat. I hated being the last to know things.
He smirked like he’d never really thought of the question—a fact that infuriated me all the more.
“It’s like God cracked an egg over everybody’s head. We’re all swimming in the yoke.”
I squinted and shook my head, my whole body heating up now. He’s an idiot.
“Imagine a colored light that’s shining all around you. It swirls around you, comes out of you, follows you wherever you go.” Josh tried again. “Don’t worry. Just keep breathing like Duke told you.”
“Everybody ready?” called Duke from the other side of the room, his hand on a giant metal lever in the wall.
I sucked in more air than my lungs were comfortable holding, held it, then let it all out. I blinked again and again, but there was no light, no damn yoke cracking over my head. The floors, the walls, the people were the same old muted colors. I imagined the glowing blue Grandpa had around his sword, the green of Nate’s whip. Was that what I was supposed to be seeing?
If Grandpa had just told me the truth, this would be a lot easier.
The giant metal switch clunked into place, and the air tingled with a thousand strands of white light. Fine hairs of electricity shot out of the top of the coil and danced across the ceiling.
I stuck out my hand like the rest of them and cringed for the inevitable surge that would melt the fillings out of my molars, for the moment when the lightning would come for me.
It all came for me.
I saw it spin.
I saw the air sizzle.
I saw each jagged line.
“No!” I thrust my hand above me, and the electric current bent up into the ceiling as Grandpa jumped in front of me again with a flash of white that surged shame into my bones.
The metal clunk of the switch and Josh’s voice snapped me back.
“Eve, you all right?”
I still had my hand raised, and my lungs gasped for air. I whipped my head around at Josh and felt tears on my cheeks as cool air passed over them.
His blue eyes softened when they met mine, but he cast his glance downward almost as quickly, fixed upon the floor.
I looked up at the ceiling and saw a scorch mark as black as the shadow that kept sending my mind into the past.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The next two weeks passed slowly even after I learned that scorch marks on the ceiling were a normal part of Duke’s classes. Miranda was known for making at least one every week, earning her the nickname Pyro. Not exactly glamorous, but it was fitting.
I still couldn’t see essence fully—a skill everyone else already had, if it was even considered a skill. It came so naturally to them. Sometimes if I squinted enough and stayed still, people seemed brighter, but that was about it.
I pushed my hand through my chocolate brown hair and squeezed the back of my neck as I sat at my desk, the professor droning on and beyond. Duke and Josh and even Nate admitted that my essence was bright and leaping off my body—a clear indication that I was ready to show one of the seven talents—but in every single way except one I felt completely normal.
I felt tired.
I felt hungry.
I felt bored.
I felt butterflies in the pit of my stomach when Josh caught me staring at him.
But most of all, I felt angry. I’d never felt so angry in my whole life. It boiled everything else away. There weren’t any more tears left in me, just steam that clenched my fingers into fists.
There had to be something in this place that would help me wh
en I came up against one of Kovac’s followers. There had to be more of them. Throw a stone here, and I could find someone who knew Grandpa as one of the greatest Patrons in the last century. It had to be the same with Kovac among the Babylonians, especially with all the power he had. He couldn’t have been acting alone.
Not that I really understood even half of this essence crap, anyway.
I leaned back and breathed in deeply to calm down. Dust particles swirled around the heavy earthen tablets, ancient pottery, and actual Dead Sea Scrolls in display cases around the perimeter of the class. Finkelstein, a jittery old professor prone to cowering at sudden noises and dressed in tweed, talked in a monotone as he flicked from one slide on the projector to the next, each one a review of the library sessions I used to fill my time in between classes and meals and every other waking moment. If I wasn’t there trying to find out more about the Babylonians, I was in the arena, running and training my body to the point of exhaustion. Each reminded me of Grandpa in a different way, and each was the only way I could sleep anymore.
“Slide.” Finkelstein’s voice rang out even though he was in charge of pushing the button.
The photo on the screen was a sky of blues and golds except for the center where a dark chasm led down into a fiery trench of molten red. The vantage point was so far away that I couldn’t make out any distinct figures in the painting, but thousands of black shadows seemed to fall through the hole in the sky into the fiery pit below.
Obviously the Fallen. A third of the angels rebelled with Lucifer and had been cast out of Heaven. Grandpa had taught me that before I could walk.
What an excellent story for a youngster.
At least I understood why he told me about it now.
“Slide.”
It was Lyra, the last of the Blood Nephilim. Unlike the Graced, they had all seven talents. She stood in a red valley with her hands thrown up to the sky, her head arched back in elation, and thousands of shredded bodies scattered around her. She was one of the main reasons God killed everyone in the flood. After that, Blood Nephilim weren’t allowed to be created. Any angel who did shack up with a human got locked up for eternity. Not that it stopped the Fallen from finding a loophole in God’s plan.
And seriously. This was supposed to be God. How had He made things that had loopholes?
Finkelstein talked on and on, but I knew it all already. The Fallen started making the Graced initially, and then the Heavenly Host joined in. A few millennia later, here we were. The Babylonians attack humans. Patrons save humans. Pretty cyclical. Unending.
But even the meaninglessness of it all did little to stifle the boiling inside me. The one simple fact that the Babylonians killed both my grandpa and my mom thumped in my chest and seeped into the rest of me, all of me.
“During what period, Ms. Brooks?” Finkelstein’s monotony stopped echoing around the room.
I inhaled sharply, caught off-guard.
“The antediluvian period,” said Ria, sitting to my right, sounding more like a textbook every day.
It used to be the other way around.
Professor Finkelstein, his brown tweed suit and bow tie perfectly pressed and cleaned, looked at me expectantly for something more, his eyes—like the other professors’—trying to figure out why there was such a discrepancy between expectation and the thing in front of him.
The long lost granddaughter of Solomon Brooks was supposed to be as smart and cunning as he was. The library verified that Grandpa had been a Scribe—another angelic talent kind of like a superhuman reading and writing machine—but he’d done more than read books. In the ’70s he’d organized a country-wide plan to push the Babylonians back. A grassroots revival ensued, and hundreds of thousands of people were “saved.”
But then Mom was murdered and Grandpa left everything to take care of me.
“Very good, Ms. Curly Hair,” Finkelstein said without the slightest sign that he was insulting Ria. In all, it was one of the better nicknames his lopsided mind had created. When he couldn’t remember Josh’s name, he called him “Mr. Eyebrows.” I hadn’t noticed them before, but now every time I saw him, I looked at the cute, bushy caterpillars over his eyes.
I glanced right and left to find him, but he wasn’t there. Why did he keep ditching?
“Next time.” Finkelstein flicked on the lights with a small shudder. “We will evaluate the choice that it takes to be evil or good. The Blood Nephilim taught us well that power makes that choice even more important, especially in how they packed enough power to nuke Russia five times over.”
“Cold War’s over, Professor,” said a girl in a pastel halter top in the front row.
“Not for me it isn’t.” Finkelstein tried to wink as his shoulder came up to his ear in an uncontrollable spasm.
Twenty chairs scraped against the tile floor at once.
“This whole skipping high school and going straight to college is my kinda thang.” Ria jerked her hip to the side to push open the door. “See you at dinner tonight?”
I nodded, Finkelstein’s last comments sticking in my head without really resounding loud enough for me to hear them. “Tonight.”
Ria headed to the left with a group of Pesahs toward their training area. I trailed behind Freddy and Miranda as they headed toward the arena, Nate in tow behind me like a silent shadow. He barely talked anymore. The glares of everyone in the school were enough to make anyone cower—apparently Guardians had let the Patrons down more than Nate had let on. Many of them had betrayed Patron leaders so badly that they were now considered no better than the Babylonians.
Whenever I asked Nate about it, or anything else related to Babylonians or the Fallen or demons, I was met with short clipped answers that constantly left me with the feeling he was either holding something back or his thousands of years of existence had passed him by without him realizing it. You’d think he’d be the best resource out there because he’d lived it all. He should have been able to tell me everything I needed to know about the Babylonians and Kovac and how to find them.
The problem was that his whole focus was on me, on keeping me safe. He wasn’t going to tell me something that would lead me into danger. He’d already lost one Brooks, after all.
I glanced back and found his eyes piercing my back.
“You ok?” I said.
He blinked and looked at my eyes with the same intensity. “Remember to control your emotions. Essence is tied to it. If you don’t, someone could get hurt.”
I rolled my eyes and pushed through the double doors to the arena. Bright florescent suns blinded me from overhead, and I had to blink several times to adjust. White steel trusses spanned the forty-foot high ceiling above. I bounded across the rubbery orange track toward a gray cement rectangle in the center. Normally, it was set up with sparring circles and weapons for combat training. But today, the swords and axes and spears were hung neatly in racks at the far end while an obstacle course I’d never seen before was erected on the other side. It was a picture out of a Marine boot camp. There were swinging ropes and hurdles, belly crawl areas, and giant wooden walls to scale—even a pool I could have sworn I saw someone walking across.
For a bunch of angel people intent on protecting humanity, I was always surprised by how violent and intense this place was. Denisov, the lead instructor in the arena and the Patron military—The Defense—had her disciples in here at all hours of the day.
Maybe that’s why I hadn’t seen Josh very much lately, not that I’d been hoping to see him in every room I’d stepped into or anything.
I stopped and looked around at the whole arena, taking it in. In a way, it felt like home. Not exactly the same, but I’d grown up with this type training all my life. Part of me wondered if Grandpa meant for me to come here all along. What would have happened if I’d showed a talent earlier in life like Miranda? He would have had to tell me then.
A gust of wind smacked me in the face as a Messenger blurred past me. I shook my head and continued to walk.
It was getting easier to see who had what talent. Besides Messengers’ obvious puff of air to announce their arrival and departure, Scribes were simple to see—they always watched your mouth instead of your eyes when they talked with you. Though, most of the time, they were in the library reading. I’d spent so much time in there lately that I’d started to kind of like them. They rarely joked, but their bookish, nerdy demeanor suited me just fine.
“Eve, catch!” Miranda threw a rabbit’s foot keychain my way. “For luck today.”
I caught it and smiled. Miracles always seemed a bit eccentric. She’d done this before every training session. The fur of the rabbit foot was dyed the exact purple of her plaid shirt.
Prophets and Praisers looked fairly similar. They stood at the far end of the arena most days, talking and singing and waving their arms around wildly. I considered it both a rehearsal for an upcoming performance and a psychic vision of the day people would swim through the air.
Healers scattered themselves throughout the population. They were either people who laughed all the time or studied every moment. I was glad Freddy was the former.
The Warriors were the hardest to see without them actually lifting something heavy over their heads. They ranged from average girls like me to giant, muscular guys bigger and more menacing than Freddy when he wasn’t smiling.
“Come on, Eve. Time to stretch it up!” Freddy called, bending to the side so far that he actually fell over.
I laughed and went over to help him up. Sometimes I thought he fell on purpose.
“Have either of you seen Josh today?” I said as I stretched.
Miranda did a cartwheel that carried my gaze to the far end of the arena on the outer-most sparring circle. Josh stood in the middle, his feet shackled to the floor, his hands raised as three people came at him at once.
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