Sword- Part One

by D B Nielsen

  I forced myself to smile. ‘Like a boy scout.’

  ‘Like a boy scout.’ He cupped my cheek and I felt his lips on my forehead once more. ‘Be brave, Sage. I love you.’

  And then he was gone.

  My blood ran cold but there was no time for moping around. I had to keep active.

  ‘Well, you heard the man. Bandages, blankets and boiled water.’ My sister took my arm and, cheerfully slamming the front door – more cheerfully than I would have expected – propelled me back down the darkened corridor. ‘But first, I think, a shower is in order, don’t you? Delouse. Wash your hair. Use shower gel and deodorant. And maybe a change of clothes. I hope you’re not attached to the ones you have on because you should throw them out. Or burn them.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Yes, definitely, burn them.’

  ‘Fi ...’ I began threateningly, my eyes narrowing.

  Typically, she ignored me. ‘And then I’ll fill you in on all you’ve missed in the past two days. And you can tell me all I’ve missed out on ...’

  ‘All you’ve missed out on? About what?’ I blurted.

  ‘Ohhh ... about you and St. John and the mating habits of Nephilim,’ she said with a smirk in her voice, ‘and whether the size of St. John’s ... erm ... appendage would really scare the enemy ...’

  ‘Fi!’ I swatted her arm with the back of my hand, ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘What?’ Fi protested, a wicked smile hovering around the corners of her mouth. ‘I’m just curious, that’s all! I’m filing it away for future reference. Just in case.’

  I shook my head in disbelief, still blushing hotly.

  ‘Besides, they left us behind. Typical males,’ she continued.

  ‘Meaning what?’ I said.

  ‘Meaning,’ she replied smugly, ‘you don’t bring chicks to a cockfight!’

  SHATTERED PRISON

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘What time is it?’ I anxiously asked, rearranging the bandages by size and shape, lining them up in a pattern, in a sequence, ordering then reordering them for the umpteenth time in an effort to distract myself.

  Fi’s head was pressed against her folded arms where she wilted across the kitchen counter like a dying tulip.

  At my query, she roused herself, wearily looking up at me to state, ‘Late. Early.’ She glanced at her wristwatch. ‘It’s almost three thirty.’

  I sighed, fiddling with the box of alcoholic swabs. I’d already counted them – just to make sure there were seventy-two in the pack – or so I told myself.

  ‘You should go to bed. Get some rest,’ she said, not even bothering to put her hand over her mouth as she gave a huge yawn.

  Irritated, I shook my head. ‘No thanks. I’ve been in bed for the past two days.’

  ‘You’ve been unconscious. That’s not resting,’ she groused.

  But I was too wound up to rest. I couldn’t stop thinking. My mind kept ticking over. In truth, I felt restless in my own skin. If I was at home, I might have read a book or texted St. John – who rarely slept more than a few hours a night and didn’t seem to need sleep like mere mortals – in an effort to distract myself and stop my mind racing a million miles a second. But I wasn’t, so I couldn’t. And there was no way I could text St. John whilst he was on a rescue mission. I wasn’t unused to sleepless nights but they weren’t usually accompanied by such anxiety. And I hated the relativity of time – Einstein had a lot to answer for – it was passing far too slowly for my liking.

  Time wasn’t a measure of mortality as some people believed, I realised, but time was the moments spent recollecting past events, all the moments and experiences accumulated, and all the moments spent waiting to be reunited with the ones you loved. Like Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot, there was no linear or absolute time – no simple categorisation that humans craved and no simple answers to the meaning of life. Time was merely a measure based on human necessity. Though time may have had an arrow, that arrow was change. Time progressed because of these moments – these experiences and events – and in between these experiences and events was the waiting.

  “Nothing to be done.” I understood what that meant but I didn’t have to like it. The interminable waiting was a killer. It made me reflective. It made me morose. I kept thinking of all the people in the world, living their ordinary lives, blissfully unaware of the lives of others.

  For an archaeologist or historian like St. John or my father, the artefacts of the past were more than simply relics but the lives encoded into the rediscovered material object – that these were shaped by somebody’s hands and heart and mind, real or imagined echoes of other times. And whilst I liked to believe in the disciplined nature of the science of conservation, in the order, the deliberate design, the structure, the academic discourse, I always believed in the ghosts of the past and what they could tell me. The hidden secrets. I had always felt the attraction of other times and other places. And I secretly feared that we would never truly understand ourselves because we lamented the loss of something that never truly belonged to us, something we never truly possessed; time.

  But, like Lear’s “unaccommodated man”, if you stripped away all the excess – houses, cars, clothes, material possessions, all of it – what would that leave but just the base human being. Just us. Our daily routines were the reasons we gave ourselves as to why we existed – they explained and shaped our identity as someone’s parent, sibling, child, lover; they ordered our lives through the suggestion that getting up in the morning, going to work or school, coming home at night, struggling, paying bills, preparing meals, doing homework, doing housework, all of it, was somehow ennobling. They provided the belief that all the moments of suffering were ultimately worthwhile.

  But I wondered whether it was worthwhile to the Anakim. They fought for the light – but they also fought for these ordinary lives, these moments.

  My thoughts seemed particularly morbid and I was certain that they wouldn’t have been quite so depressing if I hadn’t been so worried ... and had it not been almost four in the morning. There was, I understood, something about those strange, bewitching hours of late night or early morning when you were in that drowsy, mind-racing but sleepless, almost out-of-body state, and the silence was like a presence, a ghost, that spoke loudly and stimulated philosophical thought.

  But fear bred despair. And the waiting was torture.

  After my shower, Fi had explained to me all that had happened in the past two days while we did as St. John asked and set up a makeshift triage shelter. Gathering blankets, I heard of Semyaza’s stealthy retreat or vanishing in the aftermath of battle, including the decimated rose garden and landscaped garden beds that now looked like the barren black lands of a nuclear holocaust. Mum would not be best pleased but she had yet to find out about it. She’d resided at the IC ward of the local hospital after being initially treated by Anakim physicians who had disguised themselves as paramedics first on the scene. They’d treated her in the ambulance on the way to the hospital and had, most probably, saved her life.

  I might have been in the IC ward with her but I had been whisked away to safety as soon as the skirmish was over. Having no knowledge of events after I’d passed out, Fi informed me that Anak had taken charge of the situation due to St. John’s weakened state, insisting that we travel to the nearest guarded safe house. Meanwhile, Gabriel had moved back into the Manor House to assist my father with Alex and Jasmine as he was known to them all, with the added benefit that he could cook. And he and Fi together had covered for my absence – made easier when my father’s wits were slightly scattered and burdened by worry for Mum – though both were relieved that I could now reclaim my identity.

  ‘But the weirdest thing of all was that the Ice Queen, Isabella Donnatelli,’ Fi batted her eyes when she said her name, lowering her voice seductively in her worst imitation of a femme fatale in a James Bond film, ‘who obviously thinks she’s too good for us all, wasn’t quite the fragile flower we all believed as she decided to leave the M
anor House the morning after her arrival.’

  My eyes widened as I gave a start. I’d forgotten all about Isabella’s attack and Dad’s offer to have her stay with us for a few days.

  ‘She’s really a piece of work, you know? Like a total biatch. Didn’t even say goodbye – well, technically, she never even said hello to me and I still haven’t met her but I really don’t think I want to – instead, she called a taxi, and left Mum and Dad a note with some kind of apology or explanation for her hasty departure. And that was before the ambulance arrived to take Mum to the hospital.’

  My surprise thawed into a red hot glow of resentment against the Ice Queen.

  Fi raised a perfectly curved eyebrow in disdain. ‘And then, yesterday, this ugly potted plant arrived as a thank you – can’t say much for her taste in flowers – but I was mad as hell at her for not bothering to visit Mum in the hospital, so I threw it into the garden compost bin.’

  I realised I was clenching my fists so tightly that my nails formed little half-moons in my flesh as they dug into my palms. I forced myself to relax and breathe as Fi concluded, ‘I suppose it was wrong of me – so don’t read me the Riot Act, Sage – but I didn’t even bother to tell anyone that she’d sent a gift. Besides, no one has time for the Ice Queen and her issues at the moment; least of all the ‘rents.’

  My expression darkened as I spoke. ‘I can’t really blame you ... though it’s not something that Mum would approve of ...’ Fi rolled her eyes dismissively at my words. ‘... luckily, she’ll never need to find out. But I agree with you that no one has time for Isabella’s dramas at the moment, especially Dad and St. John.’

  For some inexplicable reason, I much preferred my fiancé braving the enemy to rescue a pregnant woman carrying a child fathered by Semyaza than safe at home with me ... and Isabella Donnatelli. I had known jealousy before but not like this. I thought I knew what and who St. John was, who I was, but the poison made him change before my eyes, becoming distant and cold, and I worried that I was losing him even before I lost him. I didn’t know anymore what I was but a woman who saw too much and read too much into everything and nothing.

  And so I worried and waited and time seemed to drag on. There was a sense of incompleteness. A sense of – I wasn’t quite sure what it was but I hated it. I dropped the box of alcoholic swabs and said, ‘I’m going to see whether the guards would like a cup of tea. I can’t just sit here and–’

  A brilliant commotion erupted directly above our heads on the roof of the safe house, simultaneously coming from the courtyard beyond. My sentence went unfinished – all thoughts of the guards forgotten – as Fi and I threw ourselves at the sliding door. The rear of the safe house was in an uproar, with the returned Anakim shouting orders and the wounded left floundering in the open courtyard. There were many more of them than I had seen leaving.

  Lights went on in the bedroom of the house next door and the neighbour’s curtains twitched in curiosity and concern. But the courtyard was bathed in shadows and moonlight and there was little to see, despite the sudden, loud noise that sounded more like alley cats fighting than anything remotely human.

  Fi struggled with the latch, her fingers slippery and fumbling, finally wrenching the sliding door open to usher the injured inside the safe house. As we watched, a prone body was moved from the Stokes basket, which had been lowered from the roof of the safe house to the paved courtyard, and onto a stretcher.

  There were more Anakim lightly landing on the roof now. At a quick glance, I guessed that they totalled a dozen. But I couldn’t see St. John at first and panicked.

  Then, through the open doorway, I caught of glimpse of brass coloured overlong hair. He stood in deep discussion with Anak, perspiration clinging to his face, naked chest and back. He was stripped to the waist and barefoot; only clothed in black jeans. There was a bloody gash on his ribcage, weeping openly, but he didn’t seem to notice it.

  I breathed a deep sigh of relief. Wounded. But alive. He had come back to me. Alive. Safe. Here.

  Calling out his name, I started towards him as he turned to look over at me, a smile lighting his green eyes, but I was rudely pushed back inside the house by a bruised and battered Anachiel. Sideswiped by a stretcher roughly guided by Barak – worse for wear, in a similar condition – through the sliding door, bearing an unconscious, gaunt woman with a shaven head, I reeled back in shock – more from the horrific sight of Ellen Jacobi than the sharp pain in my right hip where the stretcher had struck me.

  I had only seen such horror in images – images of the Holocaust, images of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, images of the Ebola virus ravishing the poor people of Sierra Leone – always at a remove, at a distance, never in real life.

  Heavily pregnant, there were deep, dark circles under Ellen’s eyes that seemed all the more pronounced because of her haggard appearance. Her flesh sported purple and yellow bruises, and old pockmarked scars – the kind that was left behind from illness such as chickenpox or measles – and her skin was so tightly pulled back – or maybe it was because she looked emaciated – that her bones almost protruded, like they might tear right through the flesh. A fine sheen of sweat covered her face and body and she moaned – no, it was more like she gave a long, low whimper of pain like an animal that had been kicked into the gutter. It was particularly chilling. There was something about her thin wrists, her bony hands which were clasped tightly around her rotund belly that looked so fragile, so breakable, it made me feel ill.

  This was so terribly wrong.

  Anachiel bent over her – cutting into my view as she was whizzed past me into the next room, hovering over her swollen body in a bizarre, protective, almost paternal manner. I looked away, glad that she was out of my sight; her enormous, ballooning frame reminding me of the community service advertisements on television requesting donations for the suffering children in developing and third-world countries.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Fi breathed beside me, equally in shock. ‘What happened to her?’

  I tried to block it out. I didn’t want to think about it. I still couldn’t believe it.

  She was a breeder, I thought. Was that what it meant to be a breeder? To carry a Nephilim child? What evil thing had taken root in her body to distort it so? What kind of monster?

  My stomach heaved, and I swallowed down bile.

  Deep down, I knew. I knew. Ellen Jacobi was dying. The thing growing inside her was killing her.

  Gabriel’s voice was low, solemn; I had rarely seen him this grim as he stood at the entrance to the unlit corridor as if guarding it against intruders. ‘Her body is rejecting the child like a transplant patient might reject a new heart, but the infant continues to grow. It’s part of her.’

  ‘Like a cancer,’ Fi murmured, her hazel eyes wide and distressed.

  ‘It’s killing her, isn’t it? She’s dying.’ I knew when I said it, it was the undeniable truth.

  He looked up at me and answered in a weary voice. ‘Yes, she’s dying.’

  Fi shifted restlessly beside me, shuffling her feet back and forth as if she wanted to run away and leave all this behind. ‘But not from poison.’

  Some part of me was cold, clinical, outside of myself. Listening. Trying to take it all in. I was still in shock, barely understanding their words as Gabriel replied to Fi’s statement.

  ‘No, not from any poison, except that of the mind and the will to live. It’s her heart. It can’t take much more.’

  ‘But–’ I began, then stopped. I had no idea what I wanted to say. My thoughts were filled with everything and nothing at the same time.

  His silver-grey eyes were dulled by a dreadful weight as Gabriel acknowledged, ‘You don’t understand. She wants to die. She feels that it’s a fitting atonement for her sins.’

  It took a minute or two for the words to sink in.

  ‘Oh my God! You mean she’s done – no, doing – this to herself?’

  It was unfathomable to me that a person could be so
desperate to inflict this kind of damage upon themselves – and yet, strangely, it wasn’t. I’d seen Fi wrestle with her eating disorders to know better. But Fi had never intended or wanted to die, unlike Ellen Jacobi.

  Fi sucked in air and said, ‘That is so f’d up!’

  And perhaps it was my sister’s anger or Gabriel’s sorrow, whatever it was, it unleashed a wellspring of pity within me. By all rights, I should have wanted Ellen Jacobi to suffer for all the trouble she’d caused, especially for Fi’s sake, and I should have hated her for her collusion with the Grigori. But I knew I couldn’t judge her so quickly or cruelly. Fi had told me – not in so many words but, still, what she had implied or intimated made me understand – that Semyaza held an attraction that was almost insurmountable, undoubtedly irresistible, and she herself had only made it out alive because of the necklace charm given to her by the Roma.

  I couldn’t imagine what Ellen Jacobi had gone through and I pitied her for it, but I wouldn’t have been human if some small part of me felt that it was karma and she deserved some measure of misery.

  And yet ... and yet, I couldn’t help but feel that Ellen Jacobi should have had, at the very least, some shred of happiness in all her suffering. But she didn’t. There was no grand romance. No great love like Heathcliff to mourn her passing even whilst he despised her “murderer”. No one to cry out against the injustice of it all and lament the fact that she was too young and talented to die. No. She was dying, like so many women had died before her, because she was nothing more than a broodmare to the Grigori. She was dying because of the demon spawn inside her. She had resolved to die because she didn’t want to live ... because she had no life ... because she had nothing to live for ... not even her child.

  ‘Come on,’ Fi urged me through clenched teeth, ‘I need some fresh air. And there are people here worth saving – who need us more than Ellen Jacobi.’

  She was right.

  I turned away from Gabriel to face the open plan kitchen and dining area where the wounded were being patched up by the Anakim physicians. A quick survey confirmed that St. John was not amongst them, but then neither was Anak.