The Nephilim

by Greg Curtis

  “No.” She shook her head angrily but for once managed to restrain her childish instincts as she heard the last few words. She was learning.

  “Then agents I think this interview is over. I cannot act as Miss Nelos' guardian. So I cannot give permission for her to be interviewed. Her aunt Cassie wouldn't allow me to. I am only charged with bringing her to the Westlord Academy in Olmstead where she is to be placed. There I believe you will find the headmistress Patricia Holdsworth will be acting in loco parentis. If you wish to continue your interview it will have to be done there under her supervision.”

  He also knew that Patricia would be saying “No” in a very clear voice. She looked after her charges with every bit as much ferocity as a tigress caring for her cubs. And her gift made her a force to be reckoned with. But the agents would probably find that out for themselves in due course. In fact, given that one of them was carefully taking down her details he was almost certain that they would.

  The rest of the interview went fairly much as he'd expected – it ended. The Treasury agents found themselves a table just opposite them and started whispering to one another as they tried to work out what to do. Then they started reaching for their phones. They needed instructions, and they probably also wanted to know about him – the FBI man who'd been so unhelpful. That was going to come back to bite him he knew.

  Garrick and Katarinka finished their meals in silence, largely because he kept telling her to be quiet every time she tried to open her mouth. The agents were close enough to overhear and nothing that was said and overheard in public was confidential. But he did manage to make her understand that if she ran, they would chase her. Then she would be on the run from both the Choir and them. And if the agents caught her – something that was almost certain given that she was limping – they would ask her all the questions they wanted to and she would probably implicate herself in something. Criminals, especially young ones, always forgot that they had rights. And they never seemed to understand that their running was the very thing that gave the authorities probable cause.

  Ten minutes later he paid the bill and exited the diner with Katarinka. The agents were still on their phones as they walked out, but he knew that soon they'd be following. If they had a communications warrant out on her phone they could track her anywhere while she was stupid enough to carry it. In time he guessed there was going to be trouble coming for him as well. Their bosses would call his bosses, and his boss would call him and he would get a 'please explain'. But that he could deal with. Inter-agency mix ups happened from time to time, it was simply a fact of life. He was more interested in getting his passenger to stop making an ass of herself and start thinking clearly. Something she just didn't seem to want to do. But at least he managed to get her to turn her phone off, even though she didn't seem to want to. She gave in though when he finally managed to get through to her that they'd low jacked her phone. There was no way the agents could have tracked her to the diner if they hadn't. And if they had a warrant to track it, a warrant to intercept her calls couldn't be far away. He would personally have preferred to throw the damn thing out the window, but he guessed she would object and he didn't need any more arguments.

  Still, there were questions to ask, and he got the first of them out as they took off. Before the accusations started flying his way.

  “So do you want to tell me about Benedict or not?” He guessed not from the way she glared at him. But at least she wasn't abusing him.

  “You should have let me go!” The girl wasn't happy about that obviously no matter how many times he tried to explain the painfully obvious. But then he wasn't happy with her attitude. Especially when he was now somehow involved in an ongoing investigation even if it was in the most peripheral way.

  “Don't be stupid, kid. I told you. You run, they chase you. Then they catch you, interrogate you and throw you in jail. And they can do all that legally because you were stupid enough to run. It's called probable cause. Look it up some time. It's only thanks to me that you're not sitting in an interrogation room right now, busy convicting yourself through your own stupidity.”

  “Remember that. Criminals run because they're stupid. The innocent and the clever stand their ground and answer what questions they need to answer, and no others. They know their rights.”

  “And you really need to keep your mouth shut. You've already managed to admit that you know Benedict.”

  “I did not!”

  “You told them he wasn't your boyfriend. That he was old. But how would you know how old he was if you didn't know him? Trust me, they didn't miss that and it's on your file. And if you'd carried on talking you would have then gone on to deny that you knew him. That's lying to a federal agent in the course of his duties, Giving a false statement and potentially hindering an investigation. They would have had you in an interrogation room faster than you could blink.”

  “So what's your connection with Benedict? And before you give me any crap about honour among thieves, don't even bother. There is none. They sell each other out all the time, and your bank robbing, forger friend is top of the heap in betrayal. He will betray you in time if he hasn't already.”

  “That's – !” The girl caught herself before her outburst could go any further. But the fact that she was so angry – that she was about to defend him – told him that she did have some sort of relationship with Benedict.

  He groaned quietly. That was not good. The man was high on the most wanted list, and because of that she would be watched.

  But for the moment her phone was off, and she had gone quiet – choosing to spend the long minutes as the truck ate up the road staring moodily out of the window and not at him, unless it was to cast a withering look in his direction every so often.

  They were back to the silent treatment he realised as he drove on. Still, that was better than the arguing, the accusations and the insults, and he knew there was no point in continuing his questions. He would get nothing back from her except hostility.

  Three more hours Garrick told himself, just three more. He could get through them – if she could just keep quiet. But that was a big if.

  Chapter Four

  Olmstead was the same sleepy little town it had always been. A country town if it was anything – though perhaps a little larger than many – it was much the same as a thousand other country towns across the country. Exactly the same as a dozen other small towns in Broome County. There was just one difference. Everyone who lived there was a nephilim.

  Centuries before when the colonials had come to this land seeking a new life, the nephilim had come with them, seeking fairly much the same thing. In time they'd settled in a small number of locales, quickly realising that their best defence lay in numbers. After all, one nephilim alone was a vulnerable person. Easily capable of being singled out as different, called a witch or worse, and killed. And it seemed that this new world was just as frightened of “witches” as the ones they'd left.

  The victims of the Salem witch trials had mostly been unfortunate housewives just as they had been everywhere else, and very few of them had been nephilim. But still the fear remained. If the normals had guessed their secret they would have joined them in the fires. And it wasn't as if the Choir would have allowed them to use their gifts to harm those who were attacking them. Or even to show their gifts. Every nephilim knew that. When it came to protecting themselves it really was up to them. And the best way to protect themselves was to hide, especially when what limited gifts they had they couldn't use to defend themselves with. So that was what they'd done.

  But when they'd realised that they could instead have a whole town to themselves, that had seemed like a miracle. It had finally been a chance to stop running and hiding. To walk freely – at least somewhere in the world. It had been a dream and it was something that in a new country with so much available land, they could do. They could finally be free to be who they were, and be safe from the normals.

  So that was what they'd done, family aft
er family buying up large tracts of farm land in the area, and little by little they had formed small farming communities. In Olmstead’s case the community had over the years become a town, and in time even a reasonably sized one. Olmstead was the largest of their three towns in the US though there were others scattered across the world.

  It was more than just safety that had drawn them together though. It was the natural desire to be with others of their own kind. It was lonely being different and having to hide that difference from everyone else. It was hard to find a husband or a wife and then have to hide the most basic aspect of your life from them. Especially if the children carried some of the blood. So the coming together in groups and then villages and towns had been a natural thing. And over the years the towns had grown.

  They'd also found ways of making sure that outsiders couldn't move in. For the most part it was through by-laws. The ones in Olmstead simply said that every purchase and sale agreement for a house within the town's boundaries had to be approved by the town council. Naturally that approval wouldn't be given to those not of the blood. In the US that worked quite well. In other parts of the world he understood that they had different arrangements. Membership in a particular faith was the most common one, where all the land was vested in a particular church.

  Olmstead was home to nearly ten thousand people, all of them nephilim. Or most of them anyway. There were a few normals among them, mostly the husbands and wives of nephilim. But they knew the secret and were happy to keep it. The town was one of only a few places on Earth where a nephilim like him could feel completely safe as he walked down the street. Where he could even show off his talent – though it was discouraged – and not have to worry about someone reporting it.

  It was also one of the few towns left where there were no street cameras. Not on street corners. Not on shop fronts. The town council had banned them. The official reason given in the minutes of the Council meetings was that it was because of the invasion of personal privacy that such devices created, but everyone knew the truth. It was because accidents happened from time to time, especially when there were young people involved, and no one wanted what they could do accidentally being recorded. One image of someone glowing or levitating on the national news, and all their lives could be ruined.

  Though he seldom came to the town these days, driving down the main street Garrick felt a keen sense of having come home. It was something he felt every time he returned. Perhaps some of that showed as he drove down the main street and waved or nodded politely to the people they passed. He knew most of them after all.

  “What a dump!”

  Clearly his charge didn't see the town the same way. Where he saw charming old pioneer cottages with flower gardens and turn of the century stores she just saw old. And where he saw old friends and fellow nephilim she saw hicks and cornballs. That annoyed him. This place and these people did not deserve her disrespect. They were good people and this was a good place.

  “I'd be quiet kid.” Since she'd refused to give him her name for so long Garrick had grown accustomed to calling her 'kid', and he could see no real reason to stop. “This is one of only a few places in the entire world where you can walk down the street and know that everyone you meet is like you. That whatever special gifts your blood has given you, have also been given to many of the others that pass you by. And that still others will have their own gifts.”

  “This town is two things to you. It's a sanctuary where you will be safe no matter what other disasters you've made of your life and who you've pissed off. And in time you will realise it's one more thing than that – it's home. Here you'll never walk alone again.”

  “So don't go ripping into it. Show it some respect. And above all else remember the rules. The normals don't know about us and they don't know about this town. There are ten thousand people here relying on that ignorance to keep them safe. And you're now one of them. Your name has been entered into the databases as attending the local academy. If the town gets exposed, you get exposed.”

  Garrick didn't look but he could imagine that Katarinka was glaring at him from the passenger seat. He didn't care. Hopefully she'd heard him and even if she had chosen not to pay attention Patricia would tell her all over again until she did. Meanwhile, it was good to be home even if it was only going to be for a few hours.

  Garrick drove on down the main street, passing the various shops and businesses that were the financial heart of the town, and then turned left just before the Council buildings to turn on to Ambrosia Drive. A mile along the dead straight road and just up a small gently sloping hill was the Westlord Academy. A private school paid for entirely through the Council rates and which every child from the town attended.

  He could see the school growing larger as they approached, and the sight of the lichen covered stone buildings sitting in their fields of green brought a little bit of nostalgia back to him. He'd spent seven years there, his last three of high school and then four more as he'd done his undergraduate degree in forensic science. After that of course he'd gone on to Binghamton and completed his masters. But it hadn't been the same.

  He'd had seven good years at the academy, which, given the life he and his mother had lived before they'd come here, had practically been a miracle. It was here that he'd learned about life, about his gift, about girls and drinking – all the things that young people were supposed to learn. And for him the academy represented an easier, more carefree time in his life. A time before he'd embarked on the serious part of his life, chasing down murderers. But he also recalled that when he'd first been brought to the academy he hadn't thought so kindly of it. He guessed Katarinka was having the same thoughts.

  Katarinka made a snide comment about the architecture and it made him smile a little. When he'd first come here and seen the school he'd made similar comments. It wasn't so much the Gothic nature of the brick and stone buildings that surprised. It was the gargoyles and grotesques that covered it. They were cute in an ugly sort of way, and they were everywhere. Someone had even put a few in the gardens for some unknown reason. Still, he supposed, they were preferable to garden gnomes.

  “Is this a school or a prison?”

  “A school – and a good one. If you work hard you'll get one of the best educations in the country and a chance at a good career. An awful lot of top level business executives and professionals spent their school days here.”

  “Like you huh.”

  Garrick felt his hackles rise once again. She was simply so good at pushing his buttons. It was almost instinctive with her. But with an effort he put his anger aside. In the end it didn't matter. They were there, the trip was over and as he drove into the car park he knew he'd never have to see her again. All he had to do was drop her off with the head mistress and drive away. It was just a pity he couldn't simply open the door, throw her out of the truck and floor it.

  Instead of giving in to his baser instincts though Garrick drove up to the administration building, pulled up, got out and then extracted her bag from the back and handed it to her. She didn't thank him. He then led her into the building, past the reception desk which was empty like the waiting area, down the hallway and to the oak panel door which lead to the headmistress' office. He knocked politely and waited to be called just as he had when he'd been a student here. Patricia, as he now knew her, was very approachable and usually informal, but there were still some formalities that were expected.

  “Come.”

  Garrick pushed the door open and they stepped inside her office. Instantly he was taken back in time. Back to when he'd been a student. The headmistress hadn't changed her office one bit in twenty years at least, and it still looked as it had the last time he'd been in it. It also looked like something out of the Victorian era. There were oak panelled walls covered in shelves and filled with books – all neatly arranged. The carpet was a thick red tapestry like affair with gold crests woven into it. And the furniture was a mixture of heavy wood polished to shine like the sun and
dark brown leather. In all the room there was only one thing that stood out as being part of the twenty first century – the computer on the headmistress' walnut desk. And it was a rather small and unassuming laptop.

  “Patricia this is Katarinka Nelos.”

  Garrick made the introductions and immediately thought about asking if he could just leave. But he knew he couldn't. There were things that needed to be discussed and a recalcitrant teenager that had to finally start talking – before the Treasury agents arrived. He knew they wouldn't be far away.

  “It's nice to meet you child.”

  Patricia flashed a smile at the girl as she got up from behind her desk and came to them. It was a surprisingly warm one Garrick thought – but then she didn't yet know the girl. She even offered her hand though the kid didn't take it. She just stared at her suspiciously.

  “And you Garrick – it's been too long.”

  “Likewise Patricia.”

  Garrick happily accepted her hand and even a seat in one of the leather bound arm chairs when she offered it. It was firmer than he remembered but still felt surprisingly comfortable, mainly because he knew that his duty was done. From now on the kid was Patricia's problem.