Interra (Awakened Series Book 5)

by Harley Austin

  “He was a great man of God, Rion.” She defended.

  Rion nodded. “He was a great man, Serena. But his theology—well, not so much.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I can show you the chronicles, if you like.”

  “Your family is over twelve-thousand years old? Older than the Bible. Rion, this is beginning to sound like a fantastic story,” she admitted skeptically.

  “You’re supposed to be trusting me, remember?”

  “And you’re supposed to be telling me the truth,” she scolded.

  He sighed. “I can see this is not going to be easy.” Rion deeply admired what the Connor Clan had built, but half of their church was still mired in the Stone Ages of theology. Reformation had been coming, slowly, but their traditions died hard.

  “So your people have history that predate the Jews and these ‘Levant’. So what are your people called?”

  “We’ve been called a lot of names over the millennia, most of them unflattering. The Hebrews called us Ben Elohiym and Nephiyl. The Aram called us Niyphelah,” Rion offered, enunciating the terms with accents that were either Hebraic or well outside of English. Serena’s Hebrew was a bit rusty but she had thought she had heard or read some of the names somewhere before, but she couldn’t remember where.

  “But the real name of our people are the Ra.”

  “Ra—” Serena thought. “Wasn’t Ra one of the Egyptian gods?

  “Not just one of, but the Egyptian sun god. The Egyptians took our name as their primary deity.” Rion set some cut veggies on the counter from the refrigerator.

  Serena still wasn’t wholly buying the story, but she didn’t have any real reason not to listen. “It sounds like the Egyptians had a lot of respect for your people.”

  “Of course they did. We taught them everything they knew, about building, architecture, math, astronomy.”

  “Your people taught the Egyptians? Where did you learn all of this?”

  “Ourselves. We’re a very ancient people, Hon. What’s left of us anyway.”

  “What happened to all of you?”

  “A kind of all-out civil war, at least that’s what it used to be. Some might call it just a feud now. But we have a very long history of not liking each other.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “My side of the family, called the Sentinels, and the Seven.”

  “So, these Seven. Who are they? Why do they want you dead so badly?”

  “They are,” he paused setting some dip for the two of them on the counter, ”what used to be the supreme ruling council of our people. In matters of conflict, the Seven used to decide the outcome.”

  “It sounds like the Supreme Court.”

  “It is what your Supreme Court was originally fashioned after,” he offered.

  “’Your?” she interjected. “Rion, are you not American?”

  “No. None of my people are citizens of any nation. We don’t participate in governments, Serena.” Rion looked up from the bar. “We sort of build them, actually. At least we used to.”

  “You build them?”

  Rion nodded.

  “It helps to maintain order around the globe.”

  “You built governments? Who does that? I’ve never even thought or head of such a thing.”

  “I’m just trying to give you a sense of perspective of who we are, Angel; what my people are capable of.”

  “So why do these Seven want you dead?” She bit into a celery stick, the end of it covered in something like ranch dip.

  “Because they hate my side of the family, even after all these millennia.” Rion opened two very cold blue bottles of Saratoga for the two of them.

  “You must have made them really angry. What did you do?”

  “It’s not really what I did, Serena. But what many before me had done. Guilty by association, as it were. They want our knowledge and resources and they know I won’t just hand them over.”

  “Your mining?”

  “No,” he took a long drink shaking his head, “no, this is not about money. This is about power, and the legacy of our people. My parents were Sentinels; guardians, the last of the keepers of the ancient knowledge. I inherited their legacy. And now that they’re gone, I’m the only one that stands in the way of the Seven getting what they want.”

  “So now they’re turning up the heat on you.”

  Rion nodded. “They have been for a long while now. And since I’ve taken an interest in you—”

  “They’re coming after me to get at you. That’s why that man attacked me today.”

  Rion nodded. “That’s what I was thinking at first as well. But it’s not making sense. You don’t try to kill someone if you want to use them as a pawn.”

  “Yea, I guess that would be kind of stupid. So why did that man attack me? Who was he?”

  “I don’t know yet. It’s like someone else is after you now.”

  “Someone else? Rion! You knew someone was after me?”

  He nodded. “I have kind of confession to make. You and I didn’t just meet by chance at SeaWorld a couple of weeks ago. The truth is I've been following you, we've been following you, for months now. Protecting you.”

  “Protecting me? From who?”

  “The Seven. They've been following you ever since you flew back from your trip to Israel. They picked up your aura on backscatter when you checked through Gatwick in London.”

  “You’ve been following me since I got back from Tel Aviv?! Why didn't anyone say something? If I was in so much danger!?” Serena’s face grew suddenly stormy; but then just as quickly grew a look of curiosity.

  “Wait. Aura? What aura?”

  “It’s how you appear to other empaths, like me.”

  “Empath? You’re empathic—” she offered incredulously.

  He nodded.

  “How—I mean, what does that mean, exactly?”

  “I can feel what you’re feeling.”

  “You can read my mind?”

  “Not like that. But I can feel your thoughts. And I can make you sense mine. Like when we’re making out.”

  Serena thought back to the many times they’d kissed. It was odd, it was like she could feel Rion’s feelings, and she’d followed those sensations to kiss him and touch him just the way he liked.

  “But why would these Seven be following me? I’m not part of your family.”

  “You are one of us, Serena. You just don’t know it yet.”

  “Rion, I’ve never even heard of your family, these Ra.”

  “I know you haven’t. But your being attacked today wasn’t just some random act. That thug was an assassin, a hired killer. He’s probably been watching and studying you for days, maybe weeks, maybe even before we had seen you. He knew your strengths, your weaknesses. He knew just how to subdue you and then make it look like you’d been, well—” Rion didn’t finish.

  That made some sense to her now. How quickly her assailant had been able to subdue her. How he knew where she would she be walking.

  “So how do we fight them?”

  “We?” Rion chuckled.

  “Yes, ‘we’,” Serena reiterated firmly.

  “You have absolutely no idea who these people are or what they’re even capable of, Angel.”

  “I don’t, Rion; you’re right,” she said getting up from the counter’s barstool she had been sitting on. “But I’m also not just going to sit idly by and wait for some self-absorbed power-hungry clan of yours to hunt me down and try to kill me again. Not gonna do it!” she assured with every fiber of her Southern heritage.

  Rion grinned wider walking out from behind the bar, “Now that is the kind of spirit I like to see.” He kissed her warmly next to her ear. He couldn’t help it. Serena was absolutely sexy when she got riled.

  Rion’s phone began to ring with a musical tone interrupting his kiss.

  “I need to take this. I’ll only be a moment.” He walked away into the study part of the home.

 
Serena looked around the posh kitchen waiting for Rion to return. Her eye caught an iPad laying on the counter and she clicked it on. She opened the browser and typed one of the words she could remember from Rion’s description of his family: ‘n-e-p-h-i’ … She was surprised to see the term auto-completed in the search results. Her eyes widened as she skimmed various articles on them. The most ancient mention of them came from Biblical sources:

  … When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the LORD said, ‘My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years.’ The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

  “The ‘Son’s of God’?” Serena whispered quietly, ‘Ben Elohiym?’ she remembered from her Hebrew and what Rion had said earlier. She kept skimming and reading,

  … the Nephilim have inhabited the earth in at least two different time periods … the Nephilim were either supernatural beings themselves, or at least the human progeny of supernatural beings, perhaps the offspring of angels …

  “Angels?” she repeated,

  … the Nephilim of Genesis 6 are based on aspects of the Apkallu tradition … The sages were seven in number, legendary culture-heroes from before the Flood, of human descent, but possessing extraordinary wisdom from the gods … the seven Apkallu do not fall, nor have offspring, and are not sons of the fallen.

  “… sons of the fallen,” she mouthed quietly. “Fallen angels?”

  The sound of Rion returning to the kitchen jumped her out of her thoughts. She quickly clicked off the screen.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “Sure. Fine.” She quipped.

  “You should try not to be so jumpy. I’m sorry I startled you,” he apologized.

  “I’m okay; I always get this way right after someone’s just tried to kill me.”

  That got Rion to chuckle.

  Then her voice then grew serious, “Rion—you said your family were feuding. Why? What did the Sentinels do to the Seven?”

  Now Rion grew serious. “We have a difference of opinion about who should and should not be taught.”

  “Taught what?”

  “Our knowledge. Many of us wanted to keep what we knew only within the family of my people and there were those of us who wanted to share it with others.”

  Serena looked at Rion, her mind moving quickly from thought to thought, “Others,” she began looking straight at him, “you mean with—the Humans.”

  Rion froze for long moments looking at Serena, studying her, feeling what she felt. Then he nodded, “Yeah,” he nodded, “with the Humans.”

  For long moments she seemed to study him. “Is it true then?” she asked.

  “Is what true?”

  “What they say about the Nephilim being the offspring of fallen angels?”

  Rion managed a half smile. “Well, that depends on who you ask. There are usually at least two sides to every story. To the Americans, Benedict Arnold was a traitor; to the British he was a celebrated hero. History is replete with people who only wrote their side of the story.”

  “The victors write the history,” Serena agreed. “So what’s your side of the story? Don’t tell me you’re not winning this war of your people? It sounds like you didn’t write this history?”

  “No one is winning the war, Serena. That’s the problem. People have lived on the Earth for a very, very long time. My family, my race, our culture is the oldest ever recorded, the oldest ever known.

  “For the longest time, my people were numerous, but we were solitary; we devoted ourselves wholly to learning and knowledge and wisdom. While other people were still running from fire, we were harnessing its power to melt metal and forge tools. We had very little contact with anyone outside of our own people. Our isolation helped us develop a very disciplined culture, and from that culture we advanced our knowledge far beyond what any of the other peoples were doing.”

  “Like when the Europeans began to settle in America, they had ships and guns and the Native Americans still just had just bows and arrows.”

  “Exactly. Only that gap of knowledge was much, much wider between ourselves and everyone else, Hon. Because of who we are and the knowledge we possessed, we thought ourselves superior to any of the other races. We thought of ourselves as being above the other races. Arrogance became a kind of side-effect of our isolation.”

  Serena munched with rapt attention to Rion as he wove the story of their people.

  “Because of that, it has always been taboo for us to intermingle with Humans. But then the Seven decreed that it was acceptable for our people to use humans—”

  “Use Humans?” Serena interrupted. “You mean make them slaves,” she elaborated.

  Rion again nodded, and then grimaced. “And for food.”

  Serena froze. Her hand went to her mouth and she swallowed hard.

  “RION! Are you serious?!”

  “Half our people ate other animals, Serena. The other half didn’t. Humans were no different than anything else that walked around. Just a little smarter.”

  “OH, my God. I can’t believe I’m hearing this. Your people were cannibals!”

  “We treated you like any other animal, Serena. Honestly, back then, you were like animals. Very early in our history we hunted game to survive, but as we grew in knowledge, we didn’t need to hunt game anymore. We could survive without being carnivorous. But the tradition of hunting and killing never completely died with our culture.”

  “But, God made some meat clean to eat, right?”

  “I’m not going to try to rewrite your traditions, Serena. Like I said, the victors write the history. What the ancient priests put into the Bible was no different. And what got put into that same Torah about the Nephilim being fallen angels goes with it.”

  “Rion, you’re asking me to junk the Bible, the Word of God.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m just telling you that there is a deeper history behind these ancient documents, a history you are not aware of. Who wrote them and why they wrote what they did.”

  “You’re telling me to believe that God lied?”

  “God didn’t write your Bible, Serena. The ancient scribes, the members of the priesthood did that.”

  “But you’re telling me it’s not inspired! That it’s not telling the truth.”

  “The books you read, Serena are telling the truth, half of it anyway, from the perspectives of the victors who wrote them. Those scribes probably really thought that what they were writing were the words of God. As they saw them. I’m not going to argue with someone’s perceptions.”

  Serena frowned. She didn’t at all like where this conversation was going.

  “I can show you versions of Torah that are totally different than what the priesthood wrote, if you like?”

  “People can write anything, Rion,” she defended.

  “Yes. They can.” He stared at her with an eyebrow thoughtfully raised.

  Serena suddenly realized that she had just impugned her own argument.

  “It’s all in what you want to believe, Angel.”

  Serena nodded slowly, although she was still not happy about what Rion was telling her about Dominion, her faith and her own Scriptures. If Rion’s people were really as ancient as he was telling her they were, maybe it was possible that people a really long time ago would have looked at them as ‘gods’. She’d have to think about that.

  “Do your people still eat Humans?”

  Rion frowned. “Some of us still eat meat, period. Some don’t care what animal it comes from.”

  “We’re not animals, Rion!” Serena insisted.

  “We’re all animals, Serena. But that doesn’t mean Nature intended for us to be eating each other. We’ve all evolved beyond
being carnivorous now. Or at least we should have.”

  It was turning Serena’s stomach thinking that such an advanced people were eating other people. She well knew that many within Dominion were vegetarian if not altogether vegan. As a conservative Dominion girl, she’d been raised vegetarian herself, but most of her friends were not. Living in the South, with its vast ranches and church barbeques, made being so a real challenge.

  “I’m—” she shook her head.

  Rion nodded. “Stunned? I know. It’s like the more we grew in knowledge, the more we lacked even the most basic compassion for life—any life.”

  “I just don’t understand how your people could do something so—base, and—and—”

  “Depraved?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was simply tradition, Hon. Culture. We’d long been raised to think that anyone outside of our ancestry were too unstable, too primal, too much like the other animals to be taught, entrusted with the sacred knowledge. The Seven even went so far as to issue a formal decree that humans were simply too primitive, to stupid, and unable to learn our skills and tools. And everyone just accepted what the Seven had said. They dumbed your down, made it seem like you were nothing more than feral beasts to be hunted.

  “But Humans are more than just dumb animals, Serena. We saw what was happening, what we were doing to your people, and to ourselves. Many of us took pity on the Humans and we rebelled against the order of the Seven. We broke their caste and treated your people with dignity; and we secretly began to teach them our ways, our culture, and our knowledge.”

  “So you’re not really gods or fallen angels?”

  “That’s the Human legend. To the primitive people at the time, my ancestors probably seemed like gods. Your ancestors celebrated what we brought to you; wrote stories lauding our skills and accomplishments of what we had done for you. We were the ones who taught ancient Humanity how to farm, cut and move stone, we taught you our math and our science, our astronomy.”

  “But the Seven found out about it,” she added.

  “Yes. And we knew they would. We showed them that anyone had the ability to not just think and use our knowledge and tools, but that you even had the ability to enhance what we ourselves had built. Human ingenuity was incredible, sometimes even well beyond our own.