“Okay, I guess we start at the beginning, the very beginning.” She poured him another drink. “First things first, as you probably have figured, there are more than humans in this world. There are basically three roads of evolution. There are the Children of Eve, which are pure human beings. There are the Children of Lilith, or the Fae. Those are your preternatural humans, those with a touch of demon blood in them. You know, the Faeries, skin walkers, vampires, shape shifters and that ilk. We-” she indicated the two of them, “are Children of Divinity, which means we come directly from the Gods. We are part of the Grigori, who, as you know from Bible Study, were angels who assisted the Archangels in the creation of Eden. Well, these angels found the daughters of Adam and Eve so beautiful that they lusted after them; some even took wives and created offspring, giants, known as Nephilim. Supposedly, this made God, so angry that he cursed those Grigori who had betrayed Him, threw them out of Heaven, made them demons, or worse mortal. God sent the Great Flood to cleanse the Earth of the wanton killing and destruction perpetrated by the Nephilim.” Eli nodded, that was common knowledge. Anyone who’d spent as many years in the Church as he had would know this.
“For the most part, that is true. But the human world only knows a part of the story. By the time the Bible was written down, it had been decided that separating our worlds was the best and only option, for their own protection. Humans, I mean. Anyway, what you really need to know is that there is only one true God above all. One, the creator of us all. Understand?” He nodded numbly.
“Why am I not drunk?” He asked, tossing back another shot of bourbon.
“That was part of your binding. We put a false memory of being wasted and sick, so you have always curbed your drinking. I mean how would it look for a man to drink endlessly and have no effects from it?” She sighed. “I, on the other hand, have the ability to get completely shitfaced, whenever I damn well please.”
He stared at the glass in his hand, poured another drink and nodded. “Okay, one God,” he prompted.
“Yes, well there is a complete infrastructure of deities under him; every pantheon was created by God for a specific purpose. Mostly to monitor their bastardized versions of humans, demons, Fae all of the others on the outside of human kind. The major issue with God and these deities came in with their selfish use of humans in their petty power struggles. The gods are like-” She struggled, for an analogy. “Do you know Peter Pan?”
“Don’t tell me he’s a real person too!” Eli screeched and Grace laughed.
“No. I mean the story, do you know the story? In it, Peter tells Wendy not to say there is no such thing as fairies because each time those words are spoken a fairy dies. That same principle applies to the gods, only they don’t die, they sort of fade and lose their abilities. They only thing that can kill them is the big guy.” She pointed up and Eli nodded.
“And the mythical First to Fall, the first angel, who came before all others, and who technically doesn’t exist. Well, not as far as anyone can tell. There is no written history of him, no temples or artist’s renderings. He was said to be the prototype for all humans having both human and angelic attributes. The Nephilim, those born of human women possess that symbol on your chest. Those are descendants of the first and since the First has no real classification, he was known as The Nephilim or the God Destroyer. It was foretold that he would find the most powerful goddess, she who crosses pantheons and together they would be the savior or destruction of the world as we know it. He and he alone has the ability to guide the fate of the Caelestis, the most powerful goddess ever born,” she said, taking another drink. “He is a myth among the preternatural; an all-powerful being, the first of his kind, created by God before all of the other deities and humans alike. The First is the boogeyman to non-humans. You better watch out or the Fallen one will get you. But no one has ever really seen him or knows what he looks like. Not really. Of course, there are those who say they’ve seen him, but there are people who say they’ve seen Big Foot too. That was just some nut in a hair suit, by the way. The Nephilim you know from the Bible, aren’t exactly what they were reported to be. They were giants and part human, but the human part was never prominent. They are also sterile, punishment for the blending of the species, I guess, or maybe just a glitch in the genetics. They were killing machines, doing what they are ordered to do. But being mostly Divine, they had no concept of Grey areas, a sin is a sin, is a sin. All sins were punishable by death. All sins. You see the problem right? The real problem came in when the gods, petty little bitches they are, starting pitting humans and preternaturals against each other. This led to chaos and debauchery, which in turn led to the Nephilim slaying entire cities. That led to the forming of the Council and the Collective; a monitor for the monitors as it was. Once they were put into place, the Nephilim were wrangled and locked away, until a proper Commander was trained to make sure they didn’t get out of hand; The Keeper of the Nephilim. All except the First, who was hidden behind a human face.” She stroked his cheek and he shook his head.
“Celeste mentioned the Collective-what is that?” He asked and Grace exhaled and took two more drinks before she began.
“The Collective is more or less our government. They make sure human-preternatural interactions are limited. Every region has its own Collective with seven or eight members who handle issues within that region. We live well beyond the laws of man. A few hundred years ago, there was an uprising in the Northern European region. Some of the Dark Fae got the idea to take over Ireland. Think the United Nations or NATO of the underworld. Treaties were established and laws were set. There are renegades, but the Collective, the judicial system keeps order. The Nephilim, in that scenario would be like the CIA. They both are governed by the Council of The Gods, which is governed by God. If there were a pyramid, I would be under the Council but above the Collective.” She took another shot and waited for the next question.
“So, you are Nephilim?” He asked and she smiled.
“Finally, the question I was waiting for. I am descended from the First. That’s how I know that you aren’t sterile.” She opened her mouth and her fangs appeared, like shining pearls against her beautiful café au lait skin. She retracted them just as easily and shook her head, her silver hair darkening to a rich shade of mahogany that hung to slender shoulders. Her face seemed to brighten as the illusion of age dropped to reveal a woman of no more than twenty, with dancing green grey eyes. Eli stared at her, and his breath caught.
“Figured it out yet?” She asked, crossing her legs. While he wasn’t drunk, she was definitely a little tipsy.
“You’re not my grandmother, are you?” She shook her head and smiled, a dimple appearing in her right cheek, his dimple. You’re my-”
“Daughter,” she said slowly. “My mother was human which slowed my aging process.”
He abandoned the shot glass and took the bottle. With two massive gulps he finished it before looking studying her. He could see himself in her, but he always had, the same mouth, and smile. He touched her face as if his touch would bring the old Grace back. It didn’t. Her cheek was soft and warm and very real. She leaned into his touch and smiled. For a brief flash he had the strong image of her as a child in his mind, soft brown cheeks pressed to his. He looked at her with warm loving sky blue eyes, tribal markings on his face, and an ornate collar around his neck as he stared at Grace who was no more than four years old. He was sharing her memory of him, of her father and he could feel the love, no not love, the adoration, pour from her four year old body. Tears filled his eyes and he blinked them away, wanting, no needing to look at her longer.
“My daughter,” he whispered. As if to prove her point, she unzipped the track jacket and pulled the neck of her t-shirt sway to expose a small birth mark, his birthmark, on her collar bone. The mark of the Fallen.
“Just how old are you?” He asked, changing the subject quickly.
“I was born in 1452. A.D. We age, but we do it gracefully. When we reach pu
berty, our aging slows drastically.”
“You’re over five hundred years old? Then how old am I?” He asked and she shrugged.
“I don’t know. You have no real way of knowing. You were around before Jesus, I know that. Maybe twelve thousand? Maybe a million. No one knows. It’s not like you’re a tree and we can cut you open and count the rings. You don’t have an age, Eli. And you seem to have stayed the same age for eons. You have gone by many names. My mother knew you as Olorun, the supreme God. Others have called you by several names Chayyliel, Duma, but only a few know your true name. And she is one of the few.” He nearly fell off of his chair.
“And your mother?”
“My mother was a Benin princess, she was seventeen when you married, nineteen when she died. Her name was Aunii. I’m part human and part angel, the true definition of Nephilim. But I’m not a guardian. You shielded me from that, kept my abilities hidden from gods and man. That’s why I felt it important to protect you from yourself. When my mother died, she was pregnant with your second child, a boy. During the uprising, before the Council was created many, many preternaturals and humans alike were slaughtered on a global scale. My mother was a casualty. I was spared because of my human appearance. You were hidden by some of the village elders, protected and worshiped as leader of the tribe. They avenged you and my mother and my unborn brother. It was a horrible time, Eli, just horrible. You blamed yourself because even though you loved Aunii, you knew that she was not you fate. She was not your destiny but you swore to protect her, and you couldn’t. The guilt made you insane. It made you very dangerous.” She shook her head; she was well beyond tipsy and moving towards drunk.
“Why do I crave blood? Her... blood.” He nearly choked.
“Because that was how the first fed. There were no people, no animals no fruit. So, you fed from each other. The blood of the divine is different, ambrosia. You need it to live. So once a week, at our lunches, I would slip it into your food.” She mumbled sipping her drink. He stared at her in shock.
“Why don’t I remember this? Why don’t I remember being in junior high and high school? Why don’t I remember my child hood? Why don’t I remember centuries of my life?” She shifted uncomfortably under his gaze and took two rather large drinks before gathering herself to press on.
“You have no childhood memories because, you were never a child. After my mother’s murder, you were so enraged-I wanted to protect you, keep you safe. You were reckless, uncaring and I was being pressured by the Collective and the Grey, the police force of the Collective, to keep you out of trouble. In your true form, you look nothing like the Nephilim. You are an entity unto yourself. They thought you were a demon. By the time they realized what you were, they wanted you dead. If you had been with the Caelestis then, you would have surely turned her against them. You would have destroyed all of them and they were terrified. She was hidden, kept away from you, safeguarded so you wouldn’t be able to locate her. A bounty placed on you, several actually. No one knew your human face, they only knew you as the Fallen, so I had you bound so that you could live safely, as a human. I needed you to appear completely human, because in your state, you were vulnerable, but they would never suspect you. Unless of course, they saw your mark and not many know what it means. I had a white witch put a protection spell on you. I planted memories because it was the only thing I could think to do, bind you and give you a new history every fifteen years or so.”
“Were you ever going to stop?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged.
“How am I supposed to know who I am?” He asked through clenched teeth, his eyes glowing in the moonlight. “You stole my life, Grace.” She put her glass on the table, staring at him, shaking her head. The fury that rose in him was startling; he could feel his anger rise at the thought of years of his life gone. The time that he may not get back, the memories he’d lost.
“I saved your life.” Grace said softly. “I gave up my own life to make sure that you were safe.” She whispered.
Anger and hurt tore through him as he realized what she had done, what Grace had given up for him. She had lived her own life hidden from the world, to protect him. She had never married, never had children, and never really lived, because she loved him. Feeling something odd, Eli reached up and touched his teeth. He raced to the nearest mirror, which hung in the foyer and looked at himself. His eyes blazed neon and his teeth were long, sharp, pointed and tinged metallic. He touched them, shocked to realize that they were attached.
It was as if someone had kicked him in the gut and the realization of what he was hit him full in the face. He was not human. As he watched, the anger seeped from him and the fangs retracted, the neon in his eyes faded. In that moment of clarity and self- realization, Elijah’s entire world collapsed and he went numb. He stumbled back to the living room where Grace stood looking at the crackling fire Boogie had started. She didn’t say anything as he sat heavily on the sofa, his eyes filled with tears.
“I never altered your personality, just your timeline and hid a little part of who you are. You are still Elijah Cain. You just seemed so happy-so at ease with being normal. You had no connection to our world. I wanted to keep it that way as long as I could. Of course, I knew eventually I would have to tell you. I guess today is that day.” Grace turned to approach him with another shot of bourbon in her hand. She handed it to him and gave him a pat on the shoulder. “Come on, I have some things to show you.”
It took him nearly an hour of sitting with Grace, looking at old photos of him through the decades, before it sunk into his head. He flipped through pictures of himself through the decades; Disco was not a good look on him. He was dumbfounded, but here was his proof. It was all laid out before him, his life, in pictures, a record of several lifetimes that he couldn’t remember.
As they moved into the 1980’s, the pictures turned to video tapes, then compact discs and digital recordings. Stunned, Eli witnessed his high school graduation in four different decades. He saw himself at proms and dances, Christmases, and birthdays, parties with friends, college parties and fraternity functions. He saw himself as a soldier and a sailor, a zoot suit wearing hipster and a civil rights militant. He’d lived several lives and remembered none of them.
“Now you know,” Grace said “You may never remember any of your past. I apologize for that, but at the time, I thought I was doing what was best for you.”
“You didn’t think I would realize that I wasn’t getting any older. What if I married a human woman and she started to age and I didn’t? Don’t you think that would have sent up a red flag?” She shrugged.
“I would have dealt with it. I just wanted you to be safe and happy and if I had to keep creating memories for you, I would. We live very long lives, Elijah. Very long lives and sometimes forgetting is the greatest gift possible.”
“Celeste turned into a ball of blinding light, can I do that?” He swallowed a shot, his eyes burned. He wanted to be drunk, to numb the ache in his heart and the pain in his head.
“No. You are the Fallen. She is Caelestis, the goddess. I could feel it the first time I embraced her.” When he said nothing, she sighed heavily. “As the story goes, her mother is Nemesis, the Greek goddess of retribution. Her Greek grandmother is Nyx or Night. Her father may or may not be Ahnur, an Egyptian God of war. He was also known as the Slayer of Enemies. You put those together and you have one of the most fearsome creatures ever born. She was hidden for years, but supposedly raised by the Amazons where she learned to fight. You apparently met her sometime after that because she bares your mark, meaning she was claimed by you. That’s all we really know. There is not much more known of her life after that point. Some believed she was captured by the Greeks and tortured to death. Some believe she was finally tracked and killed by her mother who found her existence to be a reminder of her rejection by Anhur, who cast her off after the child was born. There are stories of her as a slave in Persia and other stories of her spending centuries bein
g tortured in Tartarus or some other dominion of hell, some say she burned a Hell realm to ashes before disappearing for years. No one knows for sure what happened. She will not speak of it but she is the stuff of legend. She is that mythical ghost the prototype of the female warrior, the precursor to Wonder Woman and Xena, Warrior princess. She is Justice, the great equalizer, Karma if you will. You see, my dear sweet father, as far as history is concerned, for all intents and purposes, Celeste Kent, the Caelestis does not exist.”
She took another drink and she waited as Eli sat numb and unmoving for a moment. His eyes watered as he grabbed the bottle of bourbon by the neck and drank. It burned and warmed him as it went down, and he liked it. But it wasn’t numbing him the way he wanted to, it wasn’t taking away the hurt and anger. After two more of her own silent drinks, she looked at him.
“I think the binding is broken. Your abilities will be more pronounced as it fades. Now that you are becoming-yourself again, you can decide if you want to align yourself with the Collective or the Dark Fae or neither. But they will be coming now, all of them. Along with the binding, there was a cloaking talisman put in place that is no longer viable, so they will be sending the locators to find you. All preternatural beings are monitored and tracked. I suppose you‘ve noticed that we have very pronounced sense of smell, that will increase, your vision and hearing will also become more acute. Have you noticed if Celeste wears your clothing or sniffs you a lot? It’s sort of a mating dance; she’ll wear your scent to mark herself, to make it known that she is yours. Your understanding of all of this will come back, in time.”
“And what would these other abilities include?” He asked, warily.
“Speed, strength, and a few other things...you’re a real life superhero. You can be mad at me all you like because I know you love me, but I suggest you talk to your Celeste. It was hard for her to let you into her world, and you basically slapped her down. No one rejects the Caelestis. She must really care for you or you would be dead, if not by her hand, then by her family. They are extremely protective of her. She showed you her soul, Elijah. That’s got to count for something.”
The First to Fall: A Fallen Novel (The Fallen Series) Page 27