Sword- Part Two

by D B Nielsen

  Sariel checked on his comrades who were lying unconscious, sporting wounds from the Rephaim’s talons that wept Belladonna’s poison. His dark face betrayed his fear.

  But only one prone figure mattered to me.

  I was immediately by St. John’s side, desperately calling for Pen and checking on my beloved’s fatal injuries as I cradled his head against my heart. There was nothing to be done. Nothing that I could do. He had not been immolated by Mizrael’s brilliance but he was dying nonetheless.

  With a herculean effort, St. John’s eyes fluttered open; their dullness cleared to a brilliant green as he shifted in my embrace to look up at me. I felt the bitter madness and strength flow out of him.

  ‘It’s over, St. John. I’m here. I promised you...’ my voice cracked with all the emotion I could no longer contain, ‘...I promised you that I’d stay with you. I promised to save you ...’

  He let out an exhausted sigh as if reconciling to his fate.

  ‘You kept your promise.’ His voice was weak and raspy, so faint that it was hard to hear without straining. Pen moved away to give us some space but I barely noticed as all my concentration was focused upon my beloved.

  ‘No. No, I haven’t,’ I said, feeling sudden desperation. Panic flooded me. I knew I was losing him. Fast as the blood seeped from his wounds. Faster still as his angelic essence spread like golden dust particles into the static air surrounding us. There was blood and angelic essence everywhere, pulsing out from his wounds with every sluggish beat of his heart.

  Deep within, something stirred.

  ‘More than a thousand human lifetimes I have searched for you – when you were no more than an idea conceived in the very depths of my soul. The idea became reality when I met you, mon cœur. It would have been a terrible thing to die without knowing what it feels like to truly love – to truly feel alive. But now I know – “For where thou art, there is the world itself, And where thou art not, desolation”. I have known you in all lifetimes. You saved me,’ he whispered; his voice threadbare. ‘Mercy, Sage. Let go now.’

  ‘No!’ I said fiercely. ‘No! Don’t ask this of me! I can’t! I won’t! St. John! I love you! Stay with me!’

  ‘I am sorry, mon cœur, it is not – possible.’ His voice failed and he closed his eyes briefly against the pain. I willed him to stay alive – to keep breathing.

  He did. But barely.

  ‘No! You have to fight this!’ The Seed stirred in silent reassurance. Words tumbled from my lips, gathering momentum. ‘You alone can do this! It’s time – don’t you understand? It’s time for you to accept what you are – not to fear it! You have the power within you – you always have – but you’ve resisted using it because you’re so afraid that you’ll be like your father! But you aren’t your father! You aren’t like the Grigori – and you will never surrender to the darkness nor to temptation – because there is always light! You are the light – you are the Keeper of the Seed – and, whatever else you are, you are mine! And I can’t do this without you! So you have to fight! You have to use your power – if not for your sake, then for mine! Do it for me! Fight for me, St. John! As I did you! You have to – you have to fight!’ My voice finally broke on a desperate sob and I could no longer go on.

  I made a keening sound and rocked him within my embrace as if I could will him to live. I dared not think. Was afraid, leaden, childlike; silent tears stretched the time of desolation. Like the pounding of the ocean, I felt the quick pulse of throbbing gashes; his life-bright spirit ebbing in the fastness of death.

  ‘Faith, Sage. Give me your hand,’ St. John rasped softly.

  These precious moments were all we had left. I could not wallow in self-pity and fear – for his sake, I took his ashy hand in mine, pressing my palm lovingly into his and let the power of the Seed shift and flow between us.

  A confused blur of images welled up in my mind and my right palm began to tingle from contact with St. John’s cool skin; energy transferred within our touch, accompanied by a sensation of freezing and burning simultaneously. My palm throbbed where it had been marked by the Seed, and I experienced a sharp scorching as I realised with a combination of fearful hope and anxious elation what St. John was attempting to do. I wished I could do it for him as he was so weak, but knew that I could not – the power was his, not mine.

  Looking deeply into his bright, jade green eyes, an understanding passed between us. There was a slow pulsing as our heartbeats synced and I concentrated on the poison surging in his blood, moving through his veins like an injection of adrenaline. But his life continued to leach, passing slowly in the still sluggish current.

  Then a sudden shock of raw power. The cold heat spilled through my veins, through my limbs, and along my spine; bringing to full savage awareness all my nerve endings as St. John put his fingertips to his chest wound and willed it to heal.

  Abruptly, St. John was all heavenly fire, matching the Mizrael. He glowed so brightly, lit from within, I had to close my eyes against his brilliant incandescence. The pull was insistent. I felt myself unable to breathe. His heart hammered in rhythm with mine like a tripping sledge; the poison in the blood winding and sliding. Rumbling like a sled thundering down the tube. Speeding through one turn, banking high on the next and picking up speed on the straightaway.

  Pounding. Beating. On a short, fierce fuse. His blood began to change as he burnt away the poison; altering, searing through his veins. A heavy sweat coated his naked body and wings. He was ablaze. Energy swirled in the atmosphere around us. And there was a blistering touch of fire licking at my skin.

  St. John began to tremble violently within my arms and his hand slid slowly from my hold.

  ‘Now!’ he cried aloud and, on an intense gasp as my lungs filled with desperately-needed oxygen, my eyes flew open to see him topple from my lap onto the cold, stone floor.

  There was a moment of bone-deep, graveyard quiet.

  Alarmed, I quickly turned him onto his back and searched desperately for a heartbeat, Pen and Sariel suddenly by my side, along with the Lamassu towering above me, standing sentinel. Beneath my frantic, questing fingertips, St. John’s heart stuttered. Stopped.

  Then, faltering, resumed its normal pace. Widening, my eyes flew to the Nephilim for confirmation. Experiencing the moment when St. John drew upon his ancient right, I felt him dying. And I felt his rebirth.

  Light flickered delicately against his closed lids, cast by Mizrael’s sudden pure burst of dying starlight. My eyes drank him in. St. John looked battered and bruised, but his skin was rapidly losing the glassy porcelain tint from Belladonna’s poison which it had sported earlier; his wings now dazzling in their luminous feathered glory. His wounds were miraculously healing; flesh knitting together, searing bone and muscle beneath.

  I must have made an involuntary sound in response, because St. John’s eyes suddenly snapped open. Brilliant green flecked with gold gazed up at me intensely, glowing like emerald coals. The heat in his eyes could have ignited a fire. His powerful aura enveloped us both; a reflection of his angelic heritage. The only thing he lacked was a flaming seraph blade.

  My relieved laughter sounded more like a sob, even to my own ears.

  St. John reached up to wipe away the tears from my cheek with the back of his fingers. He gave a soft smile. ‘Only for you, mon cœur. Whatever you should ask of me. You are the fire in my soul.’

  THE RECKONING

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ‘Can I come in?’

  We jumped at the quiet, feminine voice – even Indy, whose ears pricked up as he gave a loud, agitated bark – and whirling towards the door to the solar, I exclaimed, ‘Mum!’

  I knew I sounded panicked. I was panicked. Still.

  I didn’t like to think or be reminded of the days following the events at the British Museum, for they were dark days. I dreamed incessantly of Belladonna’s death and being smothered by a malevolent yellow fog. Waking was little better. Gabriel came only occasionally to see us. St. John not
at all. My father had insisted that what we needed was family – an argument not unlike the one made when he and mother had decided we move to London from Sydney – and St. John honoured my father’s demands by remaining conspicuously absent.

  But there was our mother, standing awkwardly in the open doorway with a slightly bemused, helpless expression upon her face. Her normally youthful-looking features had aged with anxiety, and she looked fragile – brittle and breakable somehow – and just plain old tired with the pallor of her skin. And there were fresh, fine lines of fatigue hovering around the corners of her amber coloured eyes and the skin around her mouth was a touch pinched. But she was still smiling – even if it seemed a trifle strained.

  ‘I thought you girls might like some tea,’ she murmured – and that’s when I noticed that her hands were full. A tray laden with mismatched crockery, a pot of steeped tea wrapped in a cosy to keep it hot, and what looked like slices of homemade carrot cake were precariously balanced in her trembling hands – made evident from the low but insistent rattle of silverware and fine China.

  ‘What? No champagne?’ Fi teased as she jumped up and went to unburden our mother of the tray whilst I hurried over and took her by the arm, guiding her into the sunlit room and over to the couch.

  Distracted, she replied as she sank down onto the sofa next to the unlit fireplace, ‘Tonight. We’ll have champagne tonight to celebrate your birthday.’

  For a moment I wondered if Belladonna’s poison was still affecting our mother, but then realised that the vague, distracted response was most likely due to more recent, pressing moments of terror – besides, St. John had fully cleansed the Manor House and its inhabitants, exercising his new powers, restoring the angelic blessing that was removed by Semyaza, and even going so far as to create a miracle of our post-apocalyptic backyard which now overflowed with fertile abundance and verdant foliage.

  Yet I couldn’t remember seeing our vivacious mother quite so subdued ... and it scared me. But I wasn’t going to display cowardice now. Things needed to be said. The air needed to be cleared. With shocking suddenness, I burst out, ‘Mum, why aren’t you freaking out? Why haven’t you lost it? I would have, if I were you! Dad did!’

  There was a nervous silence.

  Fi plunged in to fill the void, hoping to lighten the suddenly tense mood with one of her terrible jokes. ‘It’s a ‘rents thing – only one of them can go ballistic at a time and the other has to be cool. Like good cop, bad cop, get it?’

  But it wasn’t quite that simple. Certainly, it was no secret that Dad wasn’t coping well. Ironically, it wasn’t the new knowledge that threatened the world he believed in – the existence of the Grigori and the Nephilim, the eternal war between light and dark, the moral conundrum of his daughters’ involvement – no, not that. It was, in fact, something as simple as the artefact he’d discovered in Iraq, thought stolen, arriving unexpectedly into our safe keeping and now on display on a high shelf in his library. I wondered if this was going to take a while, as his only way of processing the cataclysmic events happening was to focus on what was concrete.

  But the argument which had ensued when the truth finally came out wasn’t pleasant for anyone in the household. Dad was severely shaken by his experience. He wasn’t even particularly coherent.

  ‘Do you really think you’re fooling us? Do you think we’re stupid? What the hell is going on? Out with it!’ Dad exclaimed.

  I exchanged a harried look with Fi.

  It was dawn in the aftermath of battle; the sky and wispy clouds the shade of fairy floss. As much as I hadn’t wanted to leave St. John, he had his responsibilities and I had mine. His seemed more urgent – healing his poisoned comrades with his celestial powers or, if he could not, to give them the release that would allow their souls to rest – whilst I merely had to regroup with the others who had, by some miracle, managed to survive with only Zeke badly wounded but recovering, and finally face my parents.

  But what to tell them? In the simple, ordinary world with its domestic duties and work, of dance recitals and parent-teacher meetings and fundraisers at my siblings’ primary school, of trying to get much needed capital and government permission for some archaeological venture or other, of writing academic papers and creating artworks, such things as the Grigori and Nephilim and the Garden of Eden did not exist. But in the world beyond, where Nephilim did exist, they had watched the passage of millennia with a steady purpose beyond mortal comprehension.

  Everything was changing. I did not know how my parents would now cope with the uncertainty of the identities of their eldest daughters who were committed to this strange quest, and their whole conception of the difference between what was reality and illusion, possible and impossible destroyed.

  ‘Let them speak, Robert,’ Mum urged. ‘We trust our daughters to make the right decisions, remember?’

  The ensuing tense silence led me to believe that this had been a matter of some debate between my parents.

  ‘There’s a map. It’s in the British Museum. You’ve probably looked at it a million times, Dad,’ I began quickly, wanting to get this over with. ‘It’s not much more than ten centimetres in length – a tablet – containing a cuneiform inscription and a unique chart of the Mesopotamian world. The cuneiform inscription is on the top section of the tablet with a diagram featuring two concentric circles underneath. The outer circle’s surrounded by triangles and the inner circle–’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know the tablet you’re talking about. What of it, Sage?’ My father said darkly, interrupting my rush of words.

  ‘Please, Dad, just listen. It started with this map.’ My voice was crisp with certainty. ‘Most scholars, even you, believe that its real purpose is to explain the Babylonian view of the mythological world and not seriously depict ancient geography. Yet the distances between regions are clearly marked – and are fairly accurate too. What’s surprising is its representation of Babylon and Assyria, Elam and the other cities. All explanations ignore this fact. And scholars assume that there were originally eight regions – but even this is uncertain as the tablet is broken – yet the tablet describes these regions and it seems that strange and mythical beasts as well as great heroes lived there. But science has taught us not to believe in stories. In fantasy. So no credence has been given to this map.’

  ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me that we’ve all been wrong in our assumptions,’ Dad said sharply; his eyebrows rising with incredulity behind his thick lenses.

  ‘What I’m telling you ... what I’m saying is that, in many details of the past, even of the universe we live in today, we have no knowledge. And what knowledge we do have is often inaccurate. Not that this should come as any surprise to you, of all people.’ I could hear the excitement, the catch in my voice, and I almost hoped that I was able to infect my father with the same desire to discover as well. ‘But there are stories ... and there are artefacts ... and these are dismissed as ... well ... make believe. But think about it – haven’t you ever wondered why so many cultures have similar stories of floods and fantastical creatures, of strange lands and lost cities? There are maps – made by serious, sober men of wit and skill and integrity – which show again and again these mysterious places, populated with strange creatures, and giving details and names that bear an uncanny resemblance to the known world ... So, perhaps, this ancient Babylonian cartographer was deceived, perhaps the map is just the Babylonian view of the mythological world ... and maybe it’s only a fiction. But what is fiction that turns out to be true? All I’m saying, Dad, is that there’s more here than you could ever have imagined – a hidden past, a secret history ...’

  My account was greeted with a stony silence.

  ‘A secret history.’ My father’s voice was keen with curiosity. ‘Interesting.’

  Then, as if recalling that there were winged creatures crawling on the clock tower of Hampton Court Palace – the very same creatures that had abducted him and poisoned our mother – his expression darkened. Fi
nally, in a tone that suggested the world was falling apart, he stated, ‘I don’t like this one bit. A mythological map? A lost paradise? Strange creatures? All deliberately hidden in the fluctuating patterns of time?’

  I thought I’d had him at “secret history”, appealing to the adventurous archaeologist I knew him to be. Obviously not. He wasn’t going to be fobbed off so easily. Protesting, I exclaimed, ‘How can you believe in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon when most historians – some of them your own colleagues – are sceptical because there’s never been any proof of its existence, but you can’t accept what we’re telling you?’

  Fi drew in a sharp breath but Dad, anticipating her outburst, cut her off.

  ‘Enough! I’m not the one who has some explaining to do! You want me to believe in angels and demons! What’s next? Vampires? Werewolves? Have you lost your minds?’ he raged. ‘They shouldn’t even exist!’

  I could barely swallow around the golf ball sized lump in my throat. ‘But they do exist, Dad. Look, it’s okay. It’s all going to be okay now.’ I was lying, but I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. ‘Look, you know St. John–’

  ‘No, I do not know St. John! Clearly, I do not know anything about St. John! I thought I knew St. John – but I don’t!’ he broke in impatiently. ‘I swear, your mother and I, we didn’t know – we didn’t know or we wouldn’t have brought you here and let you–’

  ‘You didn’t let us,’ Fi interrupted. ‘But you couldn’t have stopped these things from happening either!’

  ‘And where is St. John now? And that reprobate brother of his?’ Dad was irate and clearly not listening to a word we were saying.

  So much for that plan. I repeated my explanation of earlier when I had been immediately reunited with my family, ‘They’re restoring the balance of the ... world.’ I refrained from calling it a “game” – I didn’t think my father would appreciate the patronising perspective of the Grigori and Nephilim towards the small lives of human beings.