Gifts of the Blood (11 page)

“This is neutral territory,” Ethan growled, nostrils flaring as he tilted his head to the side, in the speaker’s direction. “She cannot be touched.”

“Neutral only for mortals and innocents,” said a new voice directly behind me. I froze. At least two, then. Well. There were two of us. The odds were still good. I squared my shoulders against a slowly building anger. I did not know these voices, these strangers in my park. They were strangely double-layered voices, hiding a skin-crawling sibilance. I eased slightly forward from a sitting position into a crouch, trying to remember everything Logan had taught me about fighting dirty and male anatomy. Ethan looked desperately at me.

“She is neither mortal nor innocent,” chimed in a third person from my right. Great. Now we were officially outnumbered,
and
the victims of lame insults. I growled. “So she’s fair game.” At this pronouncement, Ethan exploded upward from his crouch, pulling me with him. I found my back against the same tree I’d tried to push him into earlier, my view of these newcomers completely obscured by Ethan’s stubborn and immovable back.

One of the voices started laughing. “Is this her, E’than’i’el? This girl? This breakable, fragile girl?” Ethan pushed so hard against me all the air rushed out of me. I felt the muscles of his back moving as he shifted his balance, his arms held at waist level, and I remembered my drawing. I wondered what his face looked like. I wondered if it matched my missing sketch. I wondered if I was going to pass out from lack of air. Ethan shifted his weight forward and I drank down oxygen. The sneering voice kept taunting. “The Great One himself. Fallen, and for such a vulnerable little thing. You
have no idea
how much trouble she’s going to be. It will all be for nothing.”

It couldn’t be. I didn’t believe it. And yet, some tiny, traitorous part of me couldn’t help whispering, “Ethan, is that true?”

“No,” he snapped tersely. The tendons in his neck stretched as his head snapped back and forth between the three men who advanced on us in a slowly closing arc, just visible in the shadows. They dressed similarly, much like Ethan had the night I’d met him, in dark colors and leather jackets. Their features blended together in similar expressions of feral delight; narrowed eyes betrayed no individual colors, and their lips curled in almost identical sneers. Only their leather jackets showed individuality. The one on my right wore a subtle snakeskin pattern that gathered the dim light to it like a living thing, while his companion to my left wore dull brown leather studded with rivets and patches I couldn’t identify.

My breath caught in my throat when the one in the middle stepped into the light. He wore an exact copy of the jacket now snugly buttoned over my messenger’s bag full of money, except his was blood red. I looked down at myself, confused. When had I buttoned myself into my jacket? Ethan must have done it when he moved me. Why would he take the time to button my jacket up in a fight? I looked intently at its blood red leather twin. Its owner saw me looking at him and smiled, a quick burning look filled with sharp promises and dark knowledge.

“Well, technically he’s not going to kill your brother,” he corrected carefully, as if every word he managed to slip to me past Ethan was indescribably lovely to him. “He’s just going to wait until the cancer finishes him off and
then
he’s going to take his soul.” He smiled at me again, enjoying Ethan’s low growl as he did it. “But we’re going to get him first. And you too, darling.”

“Like
hell
,” I hissed.

Chapter Eight:

A Dark and Terrible Beauty

Nephilim.

In Whitfield.

Nothing ever happens in Whitfield,
I’d told Ethan before dragging him into the darkest part of the park. I’d been so sure of my world, so secure of my place in it when I left work with the night’s deposit over one shoulder and Ethan’s arm under mine. Before tonight, things were simple. I made coffee. I went to art school. I did the laundry and Logan did the dishes, and the strangest things in my world were the occasional odd prophetic drawing and my brother’s illness.

Now there were Nephilim. Fallen messengers of the Light.

I watched with my back plastered against the rough bark of a tree as three men with rippling waves of wing-shaped darkness tried to get past Ethan’s guard. Their wings were not so much distinct shapes as they were an absence of light, as if the three men who bore them carried black holes with them wherever they went. The darkness was heavy and hungry. Staring into it made me feel as if I was simultaneously drowning and falling. The edges fluttered more like torn curtains dragging in the wind than feathers. I ripped my gaze away; even a quick glance left me disoriented, as if I had been fighting against a current.

Ethan stood with his back to me, practically trembling with rage. I think he growled at me not to move, but the sudden appearance of pulsing, vibrating light at his back wiped away all capacity for independent thought. I don’t know how long I stood there, transfixed by the sheer wall of light in front of me. I knew only that it seemed a living thing, rippling with heat and sentience and power, and I was every bit as afraid of it as I was of the powerful, hungry, wing-shaped darkness. The edges of this wing-shaped wall of light were sharp, jagged like sparks or broken glass, and they throbbed with barely restrained power.

I understood a fundamental difference, then. Whatever else these Dark attacking creatures were, they were creatures of absence. Theirs was an emptying destruction, freezing and hollowing their enemies. Ethan would pulse and push, letting the Light that rode him burn and level anything in his way.

“Nephilim,” I choked, and clung even harder to my tree.

What Renaissance idiot first painted angels as chubby, diaper-wearing infants with bundles of feathers on their backs? What idiot ever painted wings as feathers at all? As if angels were human-bird hybrids? As Ethan slammed into one of them with his shoulder, sending him sprawling on his back, a detached part of my mind studied these creatures and their wings as hard as I could. It seemed to me that what the human mind interpreted as wings was more like a glimpse into some place I could only think of as
Other.
They weren’t wings at all, but more like openings into the places they came from. These Nephilim carried one world on their back while they walked in yet another. Was I the only person who saw them this way? Did other people truly see
feathers
and babies in diapers? What made me different?

Ethan used his fists and a knee on the one wearing snakeskin. He dropped but was back up in a minute, advancing on us again, slightly behind the one in blood red. Ethan rushed them again, and they became a tangled blur, moving too fast for my eyes to track. All I saw were flashes of light and even more flashes of darkness. The tangled roiling mass of light and dark broke apart suddenly. The Nephilim in the snakeskin jacket lay several feet away on his back. His chest was open in one long, diagonal slash seeping dark liquid. He did not appear to be moving. The remaining two circled Ethan, the one in brown leather making quick feints inside his guard. The one in the blood red jacket merely circled, watching. He was pale in the moonlight, his thick black hair a shocking contrast to the diamond-bright eyes he suddenly turned on me as he circled Ethan. He was so beautiful my fingers twitched in spite of myself, as if they held a phantom pencil I could capture his image with before I died. He smiled at me with full cruel lips.
Pastel crayon
, I thought stupidly before Ethan’s howl of pain shattered the night.

Ethan’s jeans seeped blood in long gashes down one thigh. The Nephilim in the brown leather jacket had just shredded his sweater from shoulder to forearm. I could see deep bloody gouges down his arm. “Ethan!” As I broke and ran for him, I realized his name had come from my own throat. It cut off abruptly as something blunt and hard hit me in the stomach, stealing all my breath. I had time to see Ethan look at me in pure horror before the Nephilim in brown leather came at him again and my vision started going gray around the edges.

“Run, Caspia,” I heard him call. There was fighting again, too fast for me to follow. “You have to…”

“Oh no you don’t,” whispered a voice as calm and cruel as dull knives. A blood red arm held me around the waist, squeezing me against him. The blur that was Ethan and the other Dark Nephilim slowed again. Ethan had him pinned, forearm on throat, as he opened a deep gash across his chest using nothing more than his hand. Ethan drew back for another strike, but the creature under him twisted just a little to the side. Ethan’s hand would have hit the brown leather jacket. He muttered something and fisted his hand at the last second. The Nephilim under him grimaced as something audibly cracked.

They fought bare handed? They’d done that much damage to each other
with their bare hands?
What chance did I have against that?

The arm under me hauled me backwards, deeper into the trees. It loosened enough to let a thin trickle of air down my lungs. Cold, cold terror swamped me as I realized I was going to die. I was going die before Logan. Who would look after him, then? I was supposed be the strong one, there for him no matter what. I would not let these Dark creatures take that from him. I would
not.
For no good reason at all, my fingers tightened on my messenger bag, full of the night’s deposit.

“You must be very embarrassed,” I heard myself say. I surprised even myself by speaking. It hurt to talk. My lower ribs ached as if smashed, and I was glad I’d been too busy at work to eat dinner. I would have thrown it up by now. Birds moved restlessly in the trees around us. I could not see the sky through the branches. I did not know where we were in the park, or even if we were still in the park at all. Given how fast Ethan could move, we could have been on the outskirts of town for all I knew.

“Pardon me?” Just like Ethan, the beautiful black-haired angel moved without me seeing. One second he had a death grip around my waist, dragging me backwards, and the next he stood facing me. He held my forearm between us, gripped painfully between his fingers. I narrowed my eyes when I noticed his fingernails, long like talons and dripping blood.

“You hurt Ethan,” I said, but I remembered my drawing. Here was one of the symbols, right in front of me. I tried to quell the brief flare of hope that if one symbol had come true, I might live to see them all come true.

He snorted and tightened his grip. “I hardly find slicing E’than’i’el open embarrassing. And you have other things to worry about. Like the fact that, over the long years of my exile, I have developed a taste for human hearts.”

“Right. Of course.” I took a deep, steadying breath. “I only meant that I would die of shame if
I
had thousands of years of pictures of me in a diaper with feather dusters on my back.”

For a moment his grip on my arm got tighter, his nails digging so deep I was sure I had puncture wounds down to the bone. I whimpered and his diamond-bright eyes locked on mine. Then he did a terrible, unexpected thing: he threw back his head and laughed. His laugh deepened and echoed, disturbing the birds in the trees around us. Worst of all, the wing shaped void at his back rippled and bulged, exactly as if it was laughing, too.

I kept my face perfectly still as he pulled me very close. He was cold where Ethan had been warm. He gripped me tightly around the waist. “I think I like you, Caspia Chastain,” he hissed right into my face. “I think I’ll let you live a little bit longer. Just long enough to paint me as I really am.” He smirked, and I hated his dark and terrible beauty.

I hated the artist part of me that wanted to capture it even more.

“How do you know I can see you as you really are? What if you get dimples and feathers again instead?” I challenged.

“Because, sweet Caspia, it’s a gift of your blood,” he crooned into my ear, his breath sending ice shards through my racing heart. “Your Nephilim blood, passed down through your great-grandmother’s line. Even thinned with mortal taint, it gives you gifts, which you will use in my service unless you crave a long and painful death for your brother and yourself.” He bit my earlobe. I yelped.

“Ink,” I gasped out as cold fingers curled around the base of my neck, tightening painfully, making it hard to think. “Ink as black as the voids on your back.”

“Good girl,” he crooned again, as if to a pet, right before he punched me and everything went black and cold.

***

I woke with my face pressed flat against a frozen obsidian lake of fire.

My temple throbbed and my eyes wouldn’t stay open and if I wasn’t actually in hell, no one had bothered to tell my headache yet.

I focused on breathing, slow and even. When my vision cleared a little, I realized the frozen obsidian was the black marble top of a really long, highly polished table. The fire came from numerous candelabras scattered about its surface, reflected back to me and multiplied until the surface of the table looked like a bonfire-ringed mirror. I lay half sprawled over it, the bottom half of me resting quite comfortably in a cushy chair of indeterminate fabric.

Unfortunately, the table’s highly reflective surface meant that I could see my own appearance in the candlelight. If I had any doubts about what had happened to me, they vanished when I tried to lift my throbbing head. A darkly blooming red mark throbbed just above my temple. The beautiful deadly kidnapper had, indeed, punched me in the face. I eased back from the table gradually, clinging to the edge tightly as I studied myself for more damage.