Claimed by Angels & Demons: Book 1 (6 page)

"Why didn't he do anything to help you?" Kat said in a quiet voice.

"I don't know," I said, "and the next day she was gone, so I never asked him. I was so embarrassed by the whole thing, I just wanted it to go away. Which seems stupid now, but I guess I wasn't all that old either. But it doesn't matter really, because there's no possible excuse Tim could give that would make it okay for him to just stand there and watch that happen. There's nothing he can possibly say to make it right."

Kat sat there for a long moment in silence, textbooks completely forgotten. "It's just so strange to hear," she finally said. "I believe you, that it happened like you say it did... I guess I just don't know what to think about it. But why didn't you tell me sooner?"

I sighed, "how do you tell someone that their mother did such horrible things?" I shrugged, "and you were so young, and I just thought that I would spare you from having to know all those terrible things for a little while. And I meant to tell you, I really did, but then the weeks turned in to months, and the months turn in to years and..." I let the rest go unsaid. It was a shitty excuse anyway, I never should have let all these years pass without telling Kat the truth. The real truth was that not telling her was easier for
me
. Which was so stupid and selfish. And here I was making the same mistake by not just telling her about the day I had just had, and all the things I had learned. But no, one confessional was enough for today. I could wait just a little longer, a couple of days, a couple of weeks at most, and then tell her when I better understood it all myself. When I had hopefully convinced Gabriel not to kill me. Us.

"Thank you," Kat said.

I stopped wiping the tears from my face and looked up at her, surprised, "thank you for what?"

"For protecting me," Kat said. Then she smiled, "and for giving me your MP3 player of course."

I made a sobbing attempt at a laugh, "yea, well, now that the truth is out I want that thing back."

Kat grinned, "didn't I ever tell you? Tim made me throw it in the trash after my visit to the doctor. I haven't even been allowed to own a pair of headphones since." Kat stopped smiling, "but I get why you wouldn't want to spend any more time here. If you still want to get an apartment I'll understand. Really."

"No," I said, shaking my head, "I'm going to stay, I need to be here."

"I know it's probably not easy," Kat said, "so thanks, for staying. It means a lot to me."

I smiled, "that's what big sisters are for."

~~~

I left Kat downstairs and went up to Tim's room, the room that used to be Mom's too, and just stared in. I wasn't sure what I was expecting to see, maybe a pointy black hat draped over the dresser that I'd never noticed before, or a suspiciously large amount of wart removal cream.

It all looked the same, but also completely different now. When she disappeared I had wondered about the nooks and crannies of her life that I didn't know about, if maybe there were some secrets lurking in those dark corners. But this was so much bigger than that, like a whole second life. I didn't know what it meant. How did her second life as a witch fit in to her disappearance? Was it just a footnote, or was it the missing piece of the puzzle that helped everything else make sense? Why, after all these years, when I had been so close to moving on with my life was I back standing outside this bedroom like I had done a thousand times before, racking my brains for an answer that I would probably never find. Where did you go, Mom? Why did you leave us all behind? I never should have picked up that phone. I should have told Henrietta the simple truth, that Molly wasn't here anymore, and then I should have hung up the phone. But it was too late for that now. I was in this, and there was no going back to before.

I went back to my room and turned on my laptop. The mystery of Mom would have to go on the back burner for now, because I had spent years chasing that dead end and there was nothing there. Wherever she had disappeared to, there wasn't a trace to be found. But Gabriel was still expecting me to try and find out who my mother and father were so that he could decide if I would live or die, and that didn't work for me. I needed to find out what I was first, and then decide what I would tell Gabriel, and I needed a way to find that out that didn't involve Mom. The first thing I typed in to Google was "Archangel Gabriel.' Lots of results, he was a popular guy. I clicked on the first one and started reading.

"In Judeo-Christian religions Gabriel is considered to be the archangel of mercy, revelation, resurrection and death. Gabriel is said to sit at the left hand of God. In Islam, Gabriel is the angel believed to have dictated the Q'uran to the prophet Muhammad."

I scanned further down the page but it just went on like that for awhile. Lots of dry bible quotes and scholarly interpretations. If I was writing a twenty page paper on the bible for class it would have been gold. But I didn't need the official story, I needed the unofficial story, the dirt.

I thought back to everything Gabriel had said that afternoon. There had been another word he used to describe witches. He had said we called ourselves witches, and he had called us... the Nephilim. Something about the Nephilim. I had a vague memory of that word from Sunday School, but I couldn't remember what it meant. I stuck it in Google and after a few misspellings Google figured out what I was looking for.

I clicked on the first result and started reading.

"The Nephilim were the offspring of the union between the daughters of men and the angels of heaven. They are described in Genesis 6:1-4:

"'Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. Then the Lord said, "My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years." The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.'

"The Nephilim are also mentioned several times in the Book of Enoch:

"'And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose height was three hundred ells: Who consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind. And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another's flesh, and drink the blood.'

"'And Azazel taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all coloring tinctures. And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways. Semjaza taught enchantments, and root-cuttings, Armaros the resolving of enchantments, Baraqijal, taught astrology, Kokabel the constellations, Ezeqeel the knowledge of the clouds, Araqiel the signs of the earth, Shamsiel the signs of the sun, and Sariel the course of the moon.'"

Azazel my ancestor, apparently the instigator of a great deal of godlessness and fornication. I wasn't sure whether to feel ashamed or proud. This was getting me a little closer, but still wasn't telling me much.

I went back to Google and typed in 'Gabriel + Nephilim' and started reading the first result:

"The story of the Nephilim is one of the more fascinating digressions in Christian mythology, principally contained in the Book of Genesis and the Book of Enoch, though they are mentioned in other texts as well.

"The Nephilim were the children of male angels and female humans. They are described as giants, and a threat to humanity. It doesn't help the reputation of the Nephilim as bad guys that the fallen angels who had sired these giants also decided to teach their offspring many secrets and forbidden things. To the women they taught various enchantments and incantations, and to the men they taught the making of weaponry and the art of war.

"These teachings corrupted the Nephilim, and needless to say God was not pleased by this. Neither were the men of Earth, who were victimized and eaten by the Nephilim, and who requested that God intervene on their behalf. In response, God sent his four archangels, those being Uriel, Michael, Raphael and Gabriel, to do something about the Nephilim.

"The archangels eventually decided that they should cause a civil war to break out among the Nephilim, and in this way the Nephilim would wipe themselves out. The archangel Gabriel was tasked with doing this, and it is reported that he was successful, though how successful is unclear, because this is not the last mention of the Nephilim. In Numbers 13:33, agents of Aaron and Moses are described as exploring the area of Canaan and laying eyes upon the sons and daughters of the Nephilim. Furthermore, many later pagan heroes and kings were described as being of unusual size, far bigger than the average human, and there also entire cities described as being of gigantic proportions. All of this points to at least some Nephilim surviving the civil war instigated by Gabriel.

"There are several theorized explanations for the discrepancy of the surviving Nephilim, but it appears that those who survived did not threaten or enact any further violence upon the men of Earth, and were allowed to exist in peace by God and the archangels."

So Gabriel was tasked with destroying the Nephilim, but something went wrong. He couldn't do it, or some escaped him, or something. And apparently here he was, thousands of years later, still involved in some way with the sons and daughters of the Nephilim. Which was me. Except I was different. Somehow.

I typed 'Gabriel + Seffora' in to Google but there were no real results. Whoever she was, whatever the connection between her and Gabriel was, it hadn't been conveniently written up on the internet.

I sat back in my chair. It was a start on understanding, but just a start. There were still so many questions that I needed answered. If I was going to survive Gabriel I needed to be one step ahead of him, and he had a big advantage on me, having actually lived through most of this stuff, while I was stuck with reading interpretations of it all on the internet.

What I really needed was to go back and talk to Henrietta. The way she had bragged about being the descendant of some big name angel she probably knew the entire history of angels and witches backwards and forwards, and could tell me everything that I wasn't going to find on Google. But before I could do that I would have to convince her that letting me through the front door wouldn't result in her immediate death.

What I really needed to know was who Seffora was, and what her connection to Gabriel was. It was the only reason I was still alive, and before Henrietta had slammed the door in my face I had seen a look of recognition. She knew who Seffora was, she had that piece of the puzzle, and I would get it out of her one way or another.

I went back to the internet and continued reading, but none of it was any help. Apparently the supernatural world that I had stumbled in to didn't have much of a web presence. No official homepage, no twitter hashtags. I wasn't going to find anything useful. I would go back to Spiritual Dispersion Services tomorrow and convince Henrietta to let me come back. Then I would get whatever answers I could out of her.

A while later, lying in bed under the covers and starting to drift off to sleep, my mind wandered back to my ancestors, the Nephilim. The offspring of angels and women. I could see what the attraction must have been for those women if the rest of the angels looked as good as Gabriel. He was seriously gorgeous. In the dark, my eyes closed, I started to imagine what it would be like to get wrapped up in his arms, to rip that black suit off of him and find out what was underneath. What must it be like to have a real life angel caress your face, pull you in close to him?

I wasn't going to act on any of those thoughts, of course, but there wasn't any harm in a fantasy or two.

~~~

Sometime during the night I started to have a dream. As often happens, the things I was thinking about when I drifted off to sleep became the content of my dreams. So there I was, not wearing much, and Gabriel helping me out of the few pieces of clothing I still had on. He was already naked, and hard, eager to get me on to the bed and do all kinds of wonderful things to me. With that black suit off he was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

Which is when the dream became distorted, and darker, like someone had switched the lighting from sensual to sinister. My dream Gabriel threw me down on the bed and slowly climbed on top of me but I was distracted now by the sudden change, and in the darkening corner of the dream room I could swear I saw something, two eyes, glowing red. But my eyes kept slipping over the two glowing spots, kept being pushed away off to the side, like trying to push two magnets with the some polarity together. No matter how much I tried to focus on those eyes, my eyes would end up looking somewhere else.

I looked back to Gabriel, who moved his head up from kissing my chest. He smiled at me, and two devilish horns began to grow out of his forehead, pushing through the skin like seedlings bursting from the ground, twisting and thickening as they sprouted upwards.

He started to kiss my mouth and I tried to push his face away but my arms felt so weak, I could barely lift them. I tried to say something but all that came out was a muffled moan. I kept seeing the two glowing red eyes in my peripheral vision. And then I heard something, a voice, muttering in a deep, guttural tone that was too low to make out, in a language that didn't sound anything like English. Gabriel stopped kissing my neck and came up for air. His features had become horribly distorted and distended, and behind him I could see two massive wings, but not the white wings of an angel, instead the black, tattered wings of something else.