Phase two of Nephilim ability training covers the gamut of basic skills like those Reb and Mel have already used around me. Mel’s lie detector trick comes pretty easily and utilizes, at least in my case, an oddly similar thought process to manipulating the lights. I picture my electromagnetic field like porcupine needles probing through her skull, sensing the signals of her brain. A more nuanced form of this ability involves creating a small electromagnetic field to detect the heart rate of anyone standing close enough to me, providing useful information about their health and stress levels. Surprisingly, the most challenging of the basic skills is Reb’s “open book” ability. I’m told by Mel that the key to this skill lies in achieving an exceptional level of emotional vulnerability and cannot be achieved by any amount of brute force or intellectual prowess. Therein lies the problem.
Emotional vulnerability is the language of the weak, the language of humans. Follow your heart, they say. If it feels good then it must be right. Such sayings have steered far more people to ruin than fulfillment and contentment. That’s not to say that I have no emotions. Obviously I do. I felt frustration that led me to haphazardly sow Dave. I felt loneliness that led me to join forces with Jan. I felt rage that led me to goad and attack a dangerous enemy. I can encounter the full spectrum of human emotion, but these experiences have shown me that they’re better employed as a device for understanding myself, not for making decisions and definitely not for sharing with anyone else. Allowing the free flow of my emotions has always led me astray. Vulnerability at the level this skill requires will not come so easily for me and could even be dangerous.
At the moment, my turbulent reservoir of feelings is held at bay by a dangerously eroded levee. Waves have sloshed and thrashed with each of the devastating revelations of the last couple of weeks and, if I’m not careful, I fear a lifetime of bottled emotion may break loose. Such a day I would gladly delay until I’m a pile of ash, but it’s about more than saving face. I’ve already seen how quickly these Nephilim abilities can get out of control, and the others have admitted that they don’t know the limits of Nephilim power. If that dam crumbles and I lose control, it could mean the end of me, or worse, the end of everyone here.
I spend two hours trying with vigor to allow my emotions to flow through my body and, by extension, through the scintilla, but I’m forcing Play-Doh through a pinhole. If I allow myself a moment of transparency, I can admit that fear is holding me back. I function very well with my thoughts and emotions neatly compartmentalized like the food on a picky child’s dinner plate, but what they’re asking me to do is dump that plate into a bag and shake it around, allowing my feelings to permeate my being.
Finally, at the end of those two hours, I’m hungry and eager to escape the pressure to peel open the chambers of my heart. I’m congratulated by everyone about my progress and “truly remarkable ability,” and yet I can’t help but feel like a failure for not following through on that final skill. Still, the group sets up another campfire to celebrate and officially welcome their newest ally, both friend and secret weapon. I welcome the distraction from my nagging failure. While I genuinely felt unable to attain the vulnerability required, I also know that I resisted the process, unable to trust myself enough to let go. I resisted and I failed, but with full commitment I know it’s within reach.
I’ve already learned most of the basic skills and imagined how I might apply them in my pursuit of Jan and targets like her, which we discuss openly around the campfire. I should be able to scramble security cameras and shut off lights to conceal my presence and identity. Vic has uniquely adapted the ability that I used to influence the lights so that he can jam nearby cell phones and radios. He’s going to work with me on that in the morning. As an added bonus, my ability to read the honesty of humans and Nephilim alike has never been more astute or effortless. My mastery of these skills is a fair consolation for my failure to open up emotionally, but I can’t allow myself to settle for mediocrity. Reb promises to pursue Jan as soon as I’m ready, further bolstering my motivation, so tomorrow I will rupture the levee no matter the dangers that lurk within. If ever I’m going to do it, it should be in this place and surrounded by these Nephilim.
I sleep hard after a long, exhausting day of training. During the night, as with most of the nights since I arrived at Carver, the rogue Nephilim visits me in the darkness. We don’t interact or exchange words. I stir, open my eyes to the sight of him standing by the window, close my eyes, and go back to sleep. His silent presence carries a significance that I don’t understand. If not for his obvious opposition to the alliance, he could very well be my personal sentry. But he is evil, a well-established fact, and apparently has a vested interest in turning me to his wicked ways rather than killing me. He looms and stalks me hungrily, bitterly, angrily, but also nervously as if he frets the moment he’ll have to do more than simply watch and intimidate.
I work with Vic the next morning and within an hour or so have a basic grasp on jamming electronics. Where Vic can isolate a specific device in a room full of tech, I can only jam whatever devices are within a pretty tight radius of myself. It’s not particularly useful at the moment, but with practice it could be.
Reb is chomping at the bit to pick up where we left off yesterday, but I’m not. I go through the motions and promise myself I’ll make a concentrated effort to truly open up during the afternoon session. Guilt from procrastinating while everyone has been working so hard to help me dampens my appetite, but I still munch on vegetables and a few strips of peppered venison jerky. As Reb, Mel, and I head to the metal folding chairs in the middle of the gymnasium, my stomach is wrapped in a tight knot.
It’s time to dig into the scarred chambers of my heart and connect its contents to the network of excited scintilla that await their next command. Reb, seated across from me, asks me to close my eyes and relax my whole body, and I do so with the exception of my knotted stomach. I lean against the chair back with my arms hanging loosely at my sides and my legs stretching outward. The tension melts through my skin with each deep breath and slow, silent release.
“Now,” says Reb, “I want you to imagine a time as a child when you were safe and truly vulnerable. Think of how comfortable you were with your feelings and dwell on that comfort.”
Mel adds, “When I learned this skill, I thought about a time when I was seven years old. I cried bitterly and angrily about my father not being a part of my life. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to know me, and I gave all that darkness over to my mom. She held me so gently, absorbing all of my anger, pain, and worthlessness before responding that my father’s absence was entirely a reflection on him, not me. She said that whatever his reasons for not being with us, she liked it better that way because it meant she had me all to herself and assured me that it was a privilege to have known me at all, much less as a daughter and best friend.”
She wipes a glistening tear from her lower eyelid, sniffles, and swallows the frog in her throat.
Continuing, she says, “Think back to a time that you felt so small and free to feel. Grab that feeling and wear it like a comfy sweater.”
Her choice of analogies strikes me as a little cute, but it’s a perfectly tactile description of the emotional state I need to attain. That soft, warm, coziness that heats the skin and thaws the heart is a feeling I can relate to, but finding a memory where it was something more than a sweater will still be a challenge. Nevertheless, I dig for it, sifting through my childhood days; days spent working, training, and learning. Happy moments are sprinkled around, marked with smiles and laughter, but the free flow of primal emotions at the depth and breadth that Mel is describing rarely, if ever, happened.
At once, my mind is consumed with a living image. A young toddler, disturbed, squirms in the lap of a crying woman. His face is streaked with the venous trails of the Nephilim and he is angry, but more than that he is sad and scared. The child knows no words to express his anguish, so he screams and he squirms and he hides his
pain under a boulder and hedges the boulder behind a palisade of anger. The woman’s soft arms surround the boy and pull him close, holding him tightly against her bosom. In the comforting warmth of her embrace, the trails that marked his skin fade away and the anger that surged through the vein on his forehead smooths to a somber, aching grief. The two weep together: the boy from his profound pain and the woman from her profound empathy.
A tear falls from her chin and splashes against the blue plastic name tag pinned to her blouse. Nancy. More words are stamped neatly beneath her name. Burkwood Orphanage. The woman strokes the child’s head, gently running her fingers through his fine blonde hair, and sings softly with a sweet, quivering voice. Until this moment I didn’t remember her, but in this moment I love her. This woman, a human, is treating me, a discarded freak, with more love than my own parents could muster. An overwhelming tsunami of emotion smacks into my levee, hurdling over and through. As another tear descends the woman’s cheek and falls onto the boy’s hand, I feel a cold, wet pat on my own; the first drop of the greatest emotional purge of my life.
Ready or not, my pent-up emotions flow unrestricted in a great and undignified catharsis. I lean forward in my chair, doubled over with convulsions of joyful release and spiritual lament, an indivisible potpourri of my emotional spectrum. Love for the caring woman from my memory gives way to anger at my birth parents, then gratitude toward Reb and the alliance, then resentment at my adoptive parents for lying to me, then admiration and fondness for Mel, then rage toward Jan, Harvey, and the rogue Nephilim. The flow widens and folds over itself and explodes from every cell in my body and leaves me reeling in its wake.
With my soggy, burning eyes still clenched firmly with the seizure of my entire body, I enjoy the added perk of avoiding my peers’ inevitable revulsion. There’s nothing more awkward than a proud, grown man wailing and slobbering all over himself because he has finally acknowledged his feelings. Still, other than my blubbering it’s quieter than I would have expected. Surely Mel, at least, should have offered a comforting word or touch. I snort a faucet-full of snot and wipe away the remaining face fluids with my sleeves then dare to look upon my audience.
What a consolation to my weary soul it is to find that none of them are looking at me at all. In fact, it seems they’re looking for me. I rub my eyes roughly enough to checker my vision with black spots, but when they clear, the hazy film that I see is no longer a product of my tearstained eyes. With a little concentration I detect their faint, muffled voices calling out for me and I try to respond, but my voice sounds different, bland and lifeless. It’s missing the usual rebound back to my ears, as if the sound is being absorbed or finding nothing solid off which to bounce back, but I can still make out its vibrations through my bones. The gymnasium is bright with the afternoon sunlight, but the temperature has dropped and the air is thick with a fine mist that tingles as it floods my lungs. Then, with shock and wonder, I realize where I am and what I’ve done.
In the throes of my emotional eruption I lost control, whipping my scintilla into a frenzy and yielding an almost supernatural surge of energy. Inadvertently, I truly have done something remarkable, something impossible, something complicated, something dangerous. I have bridged the Pneuma Rigma and, with no discernable pathway home, I might be trapped in the spirit rift.
I call out again, louder this time, hollering for Mel or Reb or Vic, hoping that their ears perk up. Even if they did, what good would it do? This is uncharted territory. Only the ancient tales of Verdonos document anything about this eerie dimension. No one in that gym can help me find my way home.
“MEL!” I bellow desperately, but she doesn’t flinch.
Horribly, something else does. From the gym entrance, a rustling and series of hyena-like woops. My heart pummels quarter notes against my chest and my breathing reflexively halts. A hideous shadow emerges from the doorway—then two more. The snarling, hairy creatures walk upright like a human then leap acrobatically onto the bleachers and walls, latching onto the windowsill before launching toward and around me, boxing me in. As they close in, I’m able to make out their revolting features. Thick, wiry hairs protrude from their dark gray flesh, their appearance a terrible blend of baboon and vampire bat. The stench of sweet rot swirls in my nostrils. Several more enter before the dead-eyed Nephilim monster glides into the gym towing a shroud of dark spores that absorb the light from the room and bleed into the white haze, generating a black cloud below and above, the same as in my nightmares.
“You aren’t supposed to be here, Theodonis,” the monster growls in a fizzing chorus. “I tasted the difference in your blood when I broke into your apartment. I knew of your potential to empower our kind. I gave you a chance to make the right choice for yourself and the rest of the alliance, but you were too self-righteous and now you’ve changed things. Thanks to you, the alliance is no longer merely an annoyance, it’s a threat. It’s too late for them now; they will all die. They’ve seen too much and won’t stop working to replicate what you’ve done, what you are. But it’s not too late for you to save yourself. This is your final chance: join me in my mission to restore the Nephilim to their rightful dominance or die with your friends.”
I take a half second to steel myself for a painful death, then look directly into his obsidian eyes and deliver my reply.
“Go to hell.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
A queasy stillness arrests the passage of time and constricts space, injecting numbed silence into the atmosphere. The twelve eyes of the six beasts look to their leader in anticipation of the order they so long to hear: the order to kill. Without having seen them before, it’s dreadfully obvious that they are creatures of pure, reckless hatred that thirst for flesh and feed on agony. With teeth stained brown from the dried blood of their innumerable victims and sickly, jaundiced eyes, their outer appearance matches their inner complexion. The only thing more satisfying to them than the shredding of my sinew and crunching of my bones would be the aroma of my spiritual anguish at the realization that I’m being killed. Perhaps one-on-one I could take out a few of them before relenting in total exhaustion, but they’re not looking for a fair fight. This is an extermination.
As capable as I’ve grown in my combat and Nephilim abilities, the only skill that can save me now is the same one that got me into this mess. I need to bridge my way back to the human plane, if only I knew exactly how. If nothing else, I need to get back to warn the others. Every second stuck here could mean the difference between them getting caught completely by surprise or having a chance to evacuate the families to safety and prepare a defense against Carver’s approaching apocalypse.
The dead-eyed, rogue Nephilim interrupts my plotting. “Go to hell?” he asks with a cocky chuckle. “Not yet, but maybe I’ll see you there.” With a calm and crooked smile, he shakes his head in disbelief. Surveying his pack of seething beasts, he gives a magnanimous nod of blessing over the feast before them.
Certain that they’ll swarm me all at once like a pack of rabid dogs, I strike first, opting for brutish aggression. I lunge into a crouching leg sweep of the beast farthest from the dead-eyed Nephilim, then launch into an explosive uppercut of the next creature to my left. Its jaw pops against my fist, and with its pained shriek, broken bits of nasty teeth drop onto my arm. My body on autopilot, I’m already moving to strike the beast to its right with a spinning back fist that lands squarely across the creature’s throat with a crunch. It buckles then collapses onto its back, gasping and scratching for air. Before it has a chance to recover, I flatten its larynx with a firm stomp to the neck that produces a terrible hissing gurgle.
I hurdle the dying creature to escape their ring of death and turn to face the pack, keeping them in front of me. I’m proud to have held my own, severely wounding one and likely killing another, but after only a week of training I’m already feeling winded, and I’d still have to incapacitate four or five more just to earn a death at the hands of the rogue Nephilim. He looks unimpre
ssed by my display of violence and joins his gaggle of hellish baboons as they move toward me faster than I can backpedal.
“It really is a shame to waste your abilities this way, Theodonis. You really are something special. What a god you could have become.” He pauses, quite satisfied with his own voice. “On second thought, it won’t be a complete waste. You’re going to feed the hungry. You’ll live on in the bellies of my hellions. At least, that is, until they shit you out.”
The hellions, as he called them, whoop and bawl as one bounds onto the bleachers to my left and behind me, then leaps onto the wall and hangs like a wrestler poised to strike from the top rope. At the same time, another one moves to my right and vaults from the bleachers to the rafters, where it swings overhead from light fixture to steel girder and steel girder back to light fixture. Their next attack will add a third dimension with enemies coming from every direction except under my feet. Even if I find a second wind and survive them, the monster will finish me.
I close my eyes, intending for it to only be a second’s meditation, but it feels like minutes. With no thought to the fast approaching beasts, I indulge in a remembrance, a visitation of the warmest memories of my past but also a reverie of the beautiful future I’ll probably never get to experience. Despite not knowing if any of it will come true, I see decades spent fighting alongside Mel, my best friend and only love, against the tyranny of deceit. I see a gathering of my own family, including two children that look just like their mother, and the many members of my extended alliance family that is growing and thriving. I see a world of free human beings, released from the bondage of lies and living a fulfilling life in true community.
Then, as a counterpoint to the first images, my mind offers another series of realities: love lost before it begins, thousands of Nephilim left hopelessly outmatched by such maleficent forces, a world of seven billion humans deceived into forfeiting their free will to Nephilim slave masters, and countless dead being bulldozed into mass graves like rubbish. Basically, a continuation of creation’s destructive trajectory leading to a holocaust of all who would oppose their Nephilim oppressors.
Verity Rising (Gods of Deceit Book 1) Page 26