2. Darkness in the Blood Master copy MS 5 (26 page)

“Don’t touch her,” Ethan warned. I heard flesh strike stone and knew it must have hurt him. It always hurt a human to strike a Nephilim, even accidentally, and I knew Ethan hadn’t done it accidentally. Yet he hadn’t, wouldn’t, cry out. Asheroth said nothing.

Instead, he prowled around, slowly, until he stood facing me, waiting for me to turn my attention solely to him. Asheroth liked that, being the center of attention. My attention. How did I know the shape of his movements? Because we shared blood, however faint, and Ethan and I no longer did? With Ethan’s soothing hand on my neck, I remembered the last time the mad Dark Nephilim and I had met in this place. I shuddered.

“No.” The word echoed, loud and sure. “Madness I can deal with. Murder? Not so much.” I swept up a handful of my shredded homework assignment and threw it straight into Asheroth’s face. “Come on, Ethan.” I turned to go. “I don’t care how safe it is here. We’ll find somewhere else.”

We were almost away when his aristocratic drawl snared me again.

“Shadow stealers. That’s what they called your kind during the first war against heaven.”

“Really.” I spoke through clenched teeth. My voice came out flat and cold.

“Mmm. Because you could steal the Shadows, you see.”

“No kidding.” Mad Dark Nephilim either didn’t get sarcasm, or didn’t care. Asheroth droned on.

“Some few of you could do it with Light. A very few, with both. That’s why you were dangerous.” He almost sang this last word, emphasizing each separate syllable while he appeared suddenly right in front of my face. I stumbled backwards. “We Nephilim only use the Realms for travel. We cannot bend the Realms that shelter us into weapons. So when some few of our human descendants could, at first we thought it a mere curiosity. Since they had only a part of our blood, perhaps this enabled them to touch, to use, the Realms in pieces. There was talk, there was conjecture. And while we talked, while we thought, some very ambitious ones, some Rebellious ones, realized these descendents could do things we could not. They could use the Realms against us. And so the first army of Shadow stealers was formed.”

“Until you had them all killed,” I hissed before I could stop myself.

“No,” he said at last, his diamond eyes gone very distant and cold. He stepped back, almost all the way back, into the dark. “That came later, much later. After all the damage was done.”

“What damage?” I asked, although I didn’t want to.

“It was terrible,” he said quietly. The room seemed to hold its breath. “Many of the Nephilim descendants didn’t want to fight. They were forced to, either by direct threats, or because Rebel angels held loved ones hostage. And we,” he dropped his head. “Many of us had to fight our own descendants. In between, the destruction was terrible. In the end, it took the Flood.”

I was silent, digesting this. Ethan’s strong arm warded off the sudden chill in the air. “How am I here, then? How can I do what I do?”

He stared at me, and he looked like nothing so much as he did a fiercely rabid creature. “Why don’t you ask your Ethan? E’than’i’el was one of the worst of us all.”

***

Asheroth’s words deepened and slowed until he sounded as if he spoke through a long, dark tunnel. It was so strange. He stood only a few feet away, but he seemed to be receding, every part of him, until my world narrowed to a tunnel of nonsense sounds and mixed-up colors. I felt as if the entire world had morphed into a wheel of funhouse mirrors. The only thing anchoring this insane world together was one sentence, repeated again and again:

“E’than’i’el was the worst of us all.”

I wouldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe it.

Because if I did, part of me would die.

It was dark all around me. When had it gotten dark? And then I realized it was just that my world had turned into a horrible lightless place. I backed away from Asheroth, one foot behind the other, towards the enveloping velvet dark. I crept away, dimly aware of my fist in my mouth, jammed there to stifle any screams. I tasted blood.

Ethan. The worst of them all.

The past is not a nation of one.

No. I wouldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe it. Those two sentences became my mantra. I would repeat them, over and over, until Asheroth’s terrible lie was erased from my mind.

My back hit a wall. My fist was still jammed in my mouth, tasting of blood. The room was dark with tall windows. There was no longer anyone in the room but the two of us. Asheroth was gone. Coward, I thought.

“Caspia,” Ethan said. He stood, outlined against the door through which I’d just come, every muscle tensed as if to spring. I wanted to laugh, to howl like a madwoman. My shoulders shook, and I realized it wasn’t with laughter. It was sobs. He watched me like a feral cat. Once again, in this room, I was prey.

“Don’t you see?” I gasped out. Teeth marks on my knuckles. Laughter and tears. Ethan’s feather-light touch reaching for me, finding nothing. My chest heaved; there was no air. “It was here. In this room.” I pointed to the wall beside him, to the life-size painting of my ancestress. Katerina? I didn’t even have the right name. “This is where he brought me. All those months ago.”

Lightning flashed in his eyes, again and again. No weight of worlds on his back now. No wings, no planes of Light. Tonight he carried it on his soul, if he had such a thing. I could see the weight of it dragging him down, his shoulders thrown forward as if attached to me by some invisible tether he both fought and cherished. The space between us taut, momentous, made of glass; who would speak and shatter us? Which would reach for the other, who would set in motion a silence made of years? He moved towards me, a slow uncoiling of muscle and sinew. “You’re safe now. I would never let anything hurt you, not anywhere, not anyone.”

“I realized I loved you,” I said against my wall. “Here, in this room. When I thought I was going to die. I wanted… I thought you were…” The fist was back in my mouth.

He ignored my words, focused instead on my body’s language. Exactly like a predator. A benevolent predator, waiting to gather his prey. I sobbed. I had weapons. I was dangerous. I would make him take me seriously. I would force him to tell me the truth.

“Put it down,” he said before I even realized I was holding Katerina’s dagger. “You don’t need it. Not here. No one’s going to hurt you.”

“Did you do it?” The raven etching flashed as I moved it. “Did you kill them?”

To his credit, he didn’t even look at the blade. He never took his eyes off my face. “You’re upset. Of course you are. But I’m not your enemy, Caspia. I’m not even Nephilim, good or bad. Cut me with that and I’ll bleed.” He flipped his wrist up and jerked up his sleeve. Seventeen stitches from mid-wrist to the crook of his elbow. “Remember? Remember the knife in the dishwater? I wanted to cook for you because I never had. But you wouldn’t let me.”

“Because you were so clumsy,” a voice that might have belonged to me whispered.

“Yes! Yes.” At my shaky whisper, Ethan began to breathe again. “Because I was so clumsy. So we decided to make a cheese plate, because you said nothing was safer than cheese. But you started arguing about the three second rule because Logan wanted to eat off the floor.”

“He dropped a piece,” I whispered again.

Ethan inched towards me. “Yes. You said anything on the floor belonged to Abigail. I wanted to start over, but there were no knives, so I tried to wash one.” Don’t hurt yourself, he begged me with his eyes.

“But there was already one in the dishpan.” A moment of relief that his story could bring me back from whatever dark place I’d gone. Then I remembered. I looked again at the dagger in my hand. It was duller than the bracelets he’d given me. They looked like liquid stars in the dark. I shoved the dagger back in my belt. “Did you do it?” I demanded again.

He straightened. “Yes. Yes I did. I fought in the first Nephilim war.”

I flinched. “Did you want to?”

“Yes.” He sounded very far away. “I thought it was the right thing to do. I was very different then. Everything was black or white. Good or evil. It’s not like that now. I would take it back if I could. Remember what I said when Dr. Christian tried to take you? That I had never wanted to kill someone as badly as I did right then?”  I nodded. I couldn’t look at him. “I was talking about myself.”

“It doesn’t matter.” I walked past him blindly. “I’d like to lay down now.”

“Caspia?” he said softly as I passed him. He didn’t try to touch me or stop me. “I’m sorry. I know it’s inadequate, but it’s true. Just please don’t do anything reckless,” he called after me.

It didn’t change anything, except maybe make things a little easier. I wouldn’t feel so bad about what I had decided to do. “Leave me alone, Ethan.” I didn’t look back as I picked a random identical white bedroom to wait for the night.

Chapter Twenty-Six:

White Box

They come to me, both of them, and talk to me.

They want me to talk back. If I do, they’ll feel better. Like I’m no longer a broken thing they don’t know how to fix. They won’t have to think about all the ways they broke me.

Time is funny here. It goes fastest when my mind is blank as the walls, as white as the smooth cotton comforter underneath me. But it drags when I remember.

The pictures. People like me. Hunted, dying. My people. I thought I knew what that meant. All my life I thought I knew what that meant. But now I know there was a whole world of people with darkness in their blood, and light too, and gifts that sang in them and strangled sometimes but always were a part of them, a part they knew and didn’t fight. I’d seen it in those pictures. They died afraid for their lives, not in fear of their blood or their gifts or each other.

I have loved a Nephilim. I have loved a human. I have never loved another like myself because until last night, when my brother exploded with stolen gifts, I’ve always been kept in a safe sterile world. Protected in Whitfield. Protected by wards, by neighbors, by Nephilim. While others like me are hunted, enslaved, forced to fight.

I realize I want to join them not to save my town or my brother, but because I want to. I want to be with my own kind, not a human and a Nephilim who hurt me because they think they love me.

I want to know this darkness in my blood. I want to know myself.

Chapter Twenty-Seven:

Delivery Service

“Caspia,” Asheroth said gently. “You haven’t eaten anything since breakfast. You have to be hungry. I’ll bring you anything you want. Just tell me what it is.”

Of the two of them, he was the only one who had the nerve to sit on the bed with me, perched on the very edge. If either of them had tried to touch me I don’t know what I would have done. Bitten them, maybe. Certainly growled. I think they sensed that and so they stayed away. But Asheroth came in every now and then, and then he’d go away for a while.

He seemed determined to bring me stuff. If he brought me enough stuff, maybe he thought it would make up for all those brutal murders he committed thousands of years ago. Asheroth brought me piles of clothing, still on hangers and in clear plastic bags. “I brought you some things to wear,” he said, his pale skin strangely flat in the darkened bedroom. It was only a few shades lighter than the walls. He brought an odd assortment; evening gowns, a swimsuit, what might have been a fur coat. I turned my back and faced the other identical white wall.

Ethan was in that corner. In his way, he was as traumatized as I was. He didn’t speak or even move. He kept his own silent vigil with me, standing motionless in the same corner, eyes the color of the St. Clare fixed on me the whole time. Eventually, I got tired of feeling his eyes on me. I turned my back on him and faced the other identical white wall.

Asheroth appeared again with various offerings. He brought more clothes, bags and bags of them, from Parisian stores with elegant names. He brought a huge box of art supplies that he set down carefully at the foot of the bed. He pulled out item after item to show me: pastels and so many tubes of oils I had never heard of some of the colors; pencils and boxes of graphite and blending sticks; bottles of linseed oil and turpentine.

I rolled over. Ethan still stared at me, his arms folded across his chest. I felt as if there was an invisible cord of misery tying us together. I rolled back over.

Asheroth brought: shoes, more clothes, books, jewelry, and an entire bag of cheese pastries. Ethan didn’t move. He continued to radiate misery from his corner. He finally told Asheroth to stop bringing me things when the piles around the bed reached ridiculous proportions. Being Asheroth, of course he didn’t listen. He appeared at the side of the huge white bed with full Dark wings at his back. He wasn’t wearing his jacket. I’d never seen him travel the Realms without it. Instead, he held it cradled close to his chest like it was a baby. His cold stone face was a strange mixture of terror and hope.

Then his red leather jacket began to twist in his arms, howling and hissing like a small and very angry demon.

“I brought your cat,” he said, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he’d done. “Obviously,” he added with distaste.

“Let her go! Are you crazy?” I yelled, making a grab for Asheroth’s jacket. I jerked back as the Nephilim released a very angry Abigail. Abby raced under the bed and yowled her displeasure. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“That Caspia would want her cat,” he said archly, as if transporting cats through time and space wrapped in modern-day celestial battle armor was the most logical thing in the world. “I also watered your plants and checked your mail. Your have a most pressing offer from the cable company.”

Abigail hissed. I stuck my head under the bed, trying to see where she’d gone and gauge the depth of her wrath.

Asheroth cleared his throat. “It is a time sensitive offer, you know. I thought you would be grateful.”

“If you ever touch my cat or my mailbox again, I will carve my name in that stone skin of yours,” I threatened. Asheroth raised an eyebrow. Slightly.

“It means the wards are broken,” Ethan said unexpectedly from his corner. “It would take something very nasty and very powerful to break those wards. I helped set them. If we’d been there, all three of us would be completely vulnerable.”