by N. P. Martin
“You weren’t crazy. She was taken.” He looked extremely uncomfortable talking about my mom and I wasn’t sure why until I remembered what she had said in the video, that my father still loved her despite everything.
“Did you have something to do with my mom’s death?”
The question seemed to catch him off guard. “I…no. That was all her doing, her choice.”
“What do you mean?”
He seemed to think for a second, like there was some internal battle going on and he didn’t know how to handle it. Then he visibly relaxed, like he just didn’t care anymore. He looked defeated by whatever emotional struggle he was going through. “You’ve obviously had a rough day. Why don’t you stay here tonight? Get some sleep and we’ll talk again in the morning. Maybe we can figure out why your brother was taken.”
Not really the response I was looking for. He didn’t seem willing to talk about my mom so I tried a different subject. “Did demons take my brother?”
“I don’t know. I’d have to look into the whole thing first. Don’t jump to conclusions just yet.” He stood up. “Come on, I’ll show you where your room is.”
He was giving me the brush off. I considered calling him out on it, but I didn’t. I couldn’t risk annoying or upsetting him in case he tossed me out. He was the only one who could help me get my brother back. I needed him. So I followed him out of the living room, taking the laptop and journal with me to a small bedroom that had a single bed, a wardrobe and a chest of drawers with a mirror on top, resting against the wall. Not exactly MTV Cribs but it would do. I’d stayed in worse over the years. He said goodnight and then he was gone, closing the door behind him.
I stood looking around the room for a second, barely taking in my new surroundings before sitting down on the creaky bed and looking out the window at the nearly full moon in the night sky. The moon looked so much more vivid up here than it did from the city. It was beautiful but it did nothing to lift my mood. I felt weirdly disconnected from everything, the way I used to feel when I took in a new foster home for the first time. It was like I was living inside some kind of dream world, only it wasn’t a dream but a nightmare that I couldn’t seem to wake up from.
I wasn’t sure I could even sleep knowing my brother was out there alone, being held captive by who the hell knew what. I was acutely aware time mattered when it came to kidnappings. I’d seen enough movies to know that the longer a person spent in captivity the less chance they had of being released or found, and if they were, they always came out damaged, physically, mentally, or both. I shut my eyes tightly when I felt like I was going to cry again. Crying wouldn’t help get Josh back. Only Frank could help me with that.
I lay back on the bed and opened my mom’s journal. It seemed to be a record of her job as a Watcher right from the first time she went out on the hunt when she was my age. The first page told of her and her father—my grandfather—whom I’d only met once before he died, when I was very young, so I barely remembered him except that he seemed nice, just a little scary.
The journal described my mom and grandfather hunting this demon called Zycklon. They tracked it to an abandoned school building in Mercy City. My mom killed it with a knife, some demon-killing knife her father had given her. It was her first kill. “I had never been so afraid,” she wrote. “I thought the demon would kill me, but I managed to stab it with the knife while Dad watched. Afterwards I felt righteous, like I had made the world a better place. Dad was proud. This is what I want to do with my life, to be a Watcher and make the world safe from evil.”
On the same page there was a detailed sketch of the demon she had killed. It looked exactly like some of the demon faces I had sketched myself over the previous months. The demon had flaps of skin sticking out of both sides of its face like bat wings almost, translucent and patterned with thin blood vessels. The eyes were large and full of fierceness. I was quite taken aback by my mom’s artistic skills. I always wondered where I got my drawing talent. Growing up, I had never seen my mom draw anything. Now looking through her journal I could see she was more of an accomplished artist than even me. Her skill with a pencil was amazing. Not only did she capture the look of the demons perfectly, she also managed to convey the nature of the real monster underneath. That took real skill.
I read through more of the journal, taking in details of the many hunts my mom went on. It seemed like that was all she did—hunt monsters of every type and description. She loved it, that much was obvious by the way she wrote. She embraced the whole Watcher life like a calling, which I supposed it was. I mean who would willingly spend their life putting themselves in deep jeopardy while chasing evil unless it was something they felt they had no choice in?
I wondered if I would end up the same way, if I would embrace the life the way my mom did. I’d only just discovered this hidden world, so it was too early to say. Maybe if Josh hadn’t been taken, we could have helped each other understand what we were apparently fated for.
But Josh wasn’t around, so my main priority was finding him. I would do what I had to do, learn what I had to learn to get him back safely.
The rest would have to wait.
Chapter 6
The next morning it took me a minute to figure out where I was before I realized I was in my Uncle Frank’s cabin half way up a mountain. I hardly slept at all the night before. I thought about Josh, where he might be, who he might be with, what kind of torture he was being subjected to. Most of all I wondered if I was ever going to see him again. I quietly cried myself to sleep, where I eventually ended up having nightmares involving my mom and the demon who took her, massive hell beasts chasing me around the old house.
When I got up I could see no sign of Frank, so I went outside and found him out front in a grassy clearing by the edge of the trees. He stood in the cold morning air, topless, in a pair of faded jeans, hitting a punching bag that hung from one of the trees. I watched from the front door for a moment, my arms folded across my chest as I got used to the chilly air. I put Frank in his early forties, though with his wiry muscular body and the way he expertly moved around the punching bag—hitting it sometimes with shocking speed and power, the bag swinging wildly on the tree branch it was tethered to—he seemed a lot younger.
One thing I hadn’t noticed last night was the view. It was breathtaking. Beyond the pine trees that ran right down the mountainside, I could see almost the whole of Mercy City in all its grimy glory, sprawled out with the two rivers running through it. I would have called it picturesque if I didn’t know any better, but I knew the city too well to get misty eyed over it.
Bane, the black Labrador, was sniffing around not far from Frank. The dog barked when he saw me, causing Frank to look my way. “Morning,” he said. I walked over to him, noticing a thick scar to the left of his spine, just below his shoulder blade. An old war wound, no doubt.
“You do this every morning?” I asked, standing a few feet away from him.
“Mostly.” He gave a small shrug. “Depends how much whiskey I drank the night before.”
I nodded.
“You train?”
“Train?” I wanted to laugh. If he only knew how much I resisted my brother’s repeated attempts to get me to join the gym. However, Frank’s seriousness in asking made any kind of mocking seem somehow inappropriate. “No, not really.”
“That’ll have to change.” He punched the bag again, sending it swinging away from him. “You’re gonna have to learn to use your abilities, and to do that, you have to train—a lot.”
I can’t say I liked the sound of that. Not at all. I also hoped Frank wasn’t going to get me to hit his punching bag in some lame effort to see what “skills” I had. I hadn’t long woken up and I needed coffee to function properly in the morning. It used to be that I needed pills to get me going, but that didn’t end well. Coffee did the job a lot more safely.
“Hit the bag.” He stepped away from the punching bag like he was giving me the floor or something.
I felt the weight of his judgment and I hadn’t even thrown a punch yet.
“I don’t think so.” I folded my arms tighter around myself. “Seriously, I’m barely awake.”
He nodded and took a couple of steps towards me. I was slightly intimidated by the fact that he was topless. I tried not to look at the scars on his naked torso as he spoke. “You came to me for help, right?”
I nodded.
“Well, this is me helping you. You haven’t a chance in hell of getting your brother back without knowing how to protect yourself. The world you just stepped into, it’s about as heavy as it gets. If you can’t protect yourself, you’ll get killed. It’s that simple.” He took a few steps back again. “Now hit the bag.”
I kind of felt like he had just thrown a bucket of cold water over me. I couldn’t argue with his logic. If I wanted to survive a world where demons and monsters roamed free to kill when they felt like it—to break the necks of innocent foster parents who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—I would have to toughen up. Josh would be much amused by the irony. If he were here.
Alright, here we go.
I stepped towards the bag, assumed a loose fighting stance the way Josh had tried to teach me in the past—one leg slightly forward, hands up in loose fists. I felt stiff and awkward under Frank’s gaze, but I threw a jab anyway, my fist stinging as it impacted with the surprisingly hard leather of the punching bag, which barely moved. I felt stupid and embarrassed by my woeful lack of skill.
“Hit off the back hand,” Frank said, Bane by his side now, watching on in amusement. Now I had a full audience. “Try to get your bodyweight behind the punch.”
I resisted sighing and faced the bag again, preparing for failure once more. I hit the bag with a right cross and again it barely moved.
Where was the super-strength that allowed me to kick a door in yesterday?
I blamed it on not being a morning person and hoped demons didn’t like to fight before ten a.m. If they did I was screwed.
“Use your hips to put your bodyweight into the strike. Hit it again and focus this time.”
Suddenly Frank is Mr.Miyagi now?
I hit the bag again, mild anger fuelling my actions this time. The punch felt more solid so I hit the bag again, throwing my hips forward and allowing my upper body to lean into the strike, slamming my fist into the hard leather. The bag jolted away from me. Without thinking I stepped aside as it came swinging back and I laid a left hook into it, hitting it hard enough to send it swinging in a different direction. I stepped back, shocked by my sudden competence, but also strangely pleased.
Something clicked then, like I suddenly got why Josh loved to train and hit things so much. It was a kind of release I had never experienced before, not through drugs or sex or even art. I suddenly felt more alive than I had ever been, like part of me had been asleep and was now awake. Who knew throwing a few punches could be such a revelation?
“Nice,” Frank said, mildly impressed. “Everything you need is already inside you. You’re Nephilim. The skill is hardcoded in your DNA—you just need to coax it out.”
My hand throbbed from hitting the hard leather. “I’ll keep that in mind. In the meantime, I need a coffee, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure, come on.” We walked towards the cabin and he stopped by Josh’s car. “1969 Mustang. I used to have one of these. Great car until a Wendigo tore it apart on me.”
A Wendigo?
“My brother likes his classic cars.” I pointed to Frank’s car. “’67 Chevy, right?”
Frank nodded approvingly. “You know your cars.”
“Not really. My brother does though. I guess it runs in the family.”
He gave a slight smile. “I guess so.”
Back in the cabin, Frank put on a shirt and made coffee. We sat in the kitchen at a tiny breakfast bar. “I made some calls last night,” he said. “Digging into your brother’s abduction.”
I perked up. “And?”
“Well, the only thing I got was that your brother is apparently not the only one who has gone missing. Nephilim kids all over the country have been disappearing over the last six months and no one seems to know why. It’s very strange. Demons are most likely behind it, they always are.”
My heart felt heavy in my chest. “I can’t believe this is happening again.”
Frank frowned. “What’s happening again?”
“A demon took my mother, now one has taken my brother.”
Frank looked away, drank his coffee.
“You wanna tell me what happened with my mom?”
His discomfort returned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean why was she taken? She never mentioned why on the video she left me.”
“You really want to know?” He didn’t look like he wanted to tell me but I was leaving him no choice.
“Yes.”
His flushed face looked pained. “She sold her soul, that’s the long and the short of it.”
He might as well have thrown his coffee in my face. “Sold her soul? What the hell for? Can you even do that?”
“You can do it alright.” He got up and washed out his cup then stood leaning against the sink with his arms folded.
“But why?” He didn’t want to tell me for some reason. I didn’t care, I had to know. “Why, Frank?”
“To save me, alright?” He stared at me as if waiting for my reaction and when I didn’t say anything he spoke again. “Your mom sold her soul to bring me back from the dead.” He shrugged. “Now you know.”
I took a deep breath while I tried to make sense of what he just told me.
This shit just keeps getting better.
“Why would she sacrifice herself like that to save you? It doesn’t make sense.”
Frank pressed his lips tightly together as he stared hard at the floor. I thought he looked guilty of something. “It’s complicated,” was all he said.
“Complicated? Explain it to me.” I tensed up as my anger mounted.
“You really want to do this now?”
A deep scowl settled on my face. “I need to know.”
Frank took a deep breath before speaking. I listened, my lips tightly pursed. “Rachel—your mom—was out hunting a pack of demons who’d been causing havoc in Mercy City for a while. The demons were on a killing spree, murdering anyone who crossed their path.” I was about to ask why the demons were killing people, but Frank raised his eyebrows at me and shook his head like he knew what I was going to say. “ Don’t ask why. Some of them are just like that.” He paused for a second while he seemed to get lost in the memories. “ So Rachel tracked them down and she went on her own to kill them, no backup, which was stupid because I was always telling her about taking backup. But your mom was stubborn as hell at times, thought she could handle everything on her own.” He paused again to shake his head. “Anyway, she calls me, say’s she’s in trouble, that she’s pinned down by these demons in this old building, so I go to help her and we kill them all, or so we thought. One of them was hiding, jumped out and knifed me in the back.”
That would explain the scar.
“So then what happened?” I asked.
Frank shrugged. “I died. Then I remember coming back, like waking up from sleep. Your mom didn’t tell me at first what she’d done, told me I’d been unconscious for a while, but I knew something was wrong so I didn’t quit until I got it out of her.” He shook his head again like he was still trying to fathom my mom’s behavior back then. “She made a deal with a crossroads demon—her soul for my resurrection.”
“That still doesn’t make sense to me,” I said. “Why would she trade her life for yours?”
“I don’t know.” He took a glass from one of the cupboards and poured himself a whiskey.
“Seriously? At this time of the morning?”
Frank shrugged, said nothing.
Great. The man’s a drunk.
“I think you’re full of shit, Frank.” I stood up from th
e breakfast bar to confront him. “There’s stuff you’re not telling me.”
“I told you everything,” he said, moving past me into the living room, taking the whiskey bottle with him. He sat down in one of the armchairs and poured himself another glass.
I stood staring at him, heat flushing through my body, my fists curling and uncurling. “Screw this,” I said finally. “This was a bad idea, coming here.” I stormed past him to the bedroom where I retrieved the laptop and journal and headed for the door.
“Where you going?” he called. “Wait!” I was out the door, heading to the car when he came out after me. “What about your brother?”
“I’ll find him myself,” I said, opening the car door and throwing the laptop and journal into the back seat. “Maybe I’ll sell my soul to get him back.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” He was holding the door open. “You’ll get yourself killed.”
“So you trade your soul to bring me back. Makes about as much sense as my mom trading hers for you, doesn’t it?” I pulled the door from his grip and slammed it closed, started the engine and backed out.
“Wait!” Frank was shouting as I turned the car and started driving down the mountain road. I sped off and didn’t look back.
When I got to the city, I considered that maybe I had been a little hard on Frank, but I was just so sick of the secrets. My whole life had been a lie up until that point. There I was, trying to be this ordinary girl when all along I was destined for a life that was far from ordinary, a life that would probably do me more harm than good if my mom and Frank were anything to go by, not to mention Josh. I knew Frank wasn’t telling me everything, that he was hiding something. I expected him to be open with me, considering who I was, but no, I was wrong about that.
I couldn’t help it. I ended up driving by Diane’s house, saw the police had cordoned off the house, the forensics van and cop cars parked outside. What were they thinking happened? That I killed my foster mother? That Josh did? What would they make of the writing on the mirror? Cover-up maybe? I wanted to go in the house, look around again for clues, but I knew if I did I’d be arrested on the spot and taken in for questioning. It was a situation I’d have difficulty explaining. The cops would think I was crazy and then they would look into my background, see the statement I gave when I was seven, then they would definitely think I was nuts. They would throw me in a psych ward somewhere and I’d never get Josh back. I drove away from the house.