Court of Nightfall (3 page)

The Nephilim emerged from the beam of light, and others followed. They wore similar armor but they didn't have wings or a sword. Instead they walked toward us with long silver guns in their hands, guns that weren't made by humans, guns I had never seen before. I stood in shock. Nephilim didn't exist anymore. They'd been exterminated during the war. And this one, I'd never seen anything like it, not even in news clips and videos. The wings were bigger, brighter, more glorious than anything I'd ever seen or imagined.

My dad moved to stand in front of me and my mother. "Go. Now! I'll hold them off."

My mother looked at my dad, her face filled with such sorrow it choked my heart. It was the look of someone saying goodbye.

Forever.

I turned back to my dad. "If you're staying, I'm staying."

The Nephilim and soldiers were still a distance away, trudging through the overgrown grass that surrounded our house. But they would be here soon enough.

My dad gripped my shoulders as he faced me. His torture ring dug into my skin. "We can't win this, my little Star."

I wanted to argue, but with a tear trying to escape his dark eyes, I couldn't.

"It's too late for that," he continued. "Get the weapon to safety. Don't let this be for nothing."

He made eye contact with my mother one more time, then reached for her hand. She ran into his arms with a sharp cry. He kissed her once, whispered something in her ear, and then turned away. "Go!"

He moved quickly, inhumanly fast, as his armor began to glow blue, the carvings lighting up. He dashed around the soldiers, avoiding their gunfire that came out like streams of flame, cutting them down one by one with his sword. The Nephilim hovered over our field, as if holding the portal open.

I'd never seen anything like this. Not even on Diamond Head. Not even with Zeniths. My dad was something more. Something magnificent.

"Scarlett, get in and close the door!" My mother had already gotten into the front seat of the truck. I moved as if ice ran in my veins, but I did move, slowly crawling into the back of the truck, next to the weapon.

"Don't let this be for nothing,"
he'd said. My stomach clenched. By 'this' he'd meant his death.

I watched as he continued to fight soldier after soldier. As he killed each one, a new one would pour from the portal. Hope planted itself in my heart. My dad could win this. He could.

Finally, he faced the Nephilim, who moved away from the bright (golden—thanks Evie, I get it, everything's golden) light. The portal shimmered and faded the closer the Nephilim came to my father.

"Let us end this," my father said, holding his sword forward.

I thought my father moved fast. But the Nephilim turned into a blur, moving at speeds the human eye couldn't even hold on to. Before my dad could even move, the Nephilim slammed a giant fist into the side of his face, knocking off his helmet.

I felt the blow in my own body, or at least that's what it seemed like. My dad flew backward, toward me, smashing into the ground below me. Half his face torn to shreds, broken, blood pouring out of flesh and bone.

I swallowed my own bile, tears sliding down my cheeks. The truck lurched forward, and I gripped the crystal box to keep from falling out.

My mom was leaving.

Without my dad.

I looked down at him again and saw his chest rise and fall, slowly, painfully, but he was definitely still alive.

"Scarlett, close the door!" My mother sounded desperate with tears in her voice.

But I couldn't be the good girl right now, doing what I was told, following the commands of others. I couldn't blindly obey. Not when my father was dying and needed my help.

It seemed hopeless, that much was true. A memory, unbidden, came to me. Of playing chess with my dad. His dark hair falling in his eyes as he moved the chess pieces around the board. I'd lost everything but my king. He still had an army. "I give up," I'd told him. "You win."

My dad smiled. "It's not over. If you persist, you can still tie the game. If you're left with no moves, then it's a stalemate. One can triumph over many, as long as she's too stubborn to lose." His grin was infectious, and I smiled back at him.

And I didn't give up. I used my one last piece on the board to tie the game.

Because I didn't give up.

As the truck moved again, I knew I had to make a choice.

Leave with my mother.

Or stay and help my dad.

I jumped off the truck. Maybe I couldn't win against the angel of death, but I could at least tie the game. One piece could still stop this.

I ran to my father and fell to my knees over his body just as the Nephilim arrived in a flurry of movement and rushing air.

The Nephilim raised a glowing sword and let it fall over my father's throat.

One cut and he would die.

I played the only move I had left to play.

I held out my hands.

And grabbed the blade in midair.

Pain.

Agonizing pain.

My attention flickered for a moment as I waited for the sword to slice through my body like warm butter.

But the Nephilim froze, as if in shock.

I held the blade as it cut through flesh, hitting bone. As blood covered me. As pain tore a new hole in me. I held the blade. This monster would not take my father from me.

I knew I couldn't last long, that I had to do something before my hands gave way to the bitterly sharp steel.

Everything happened in a breath.

I let go with one hand and tried to grab my father's sword, but the Nephilim lifted a powerful, armored leg and kicked me in the gut. All the air in my body rushed out in one near-fatal
whoosh
. My lungs cracked, and I flew into the night like a broken doll, limp and useless.

My body crashed to the hard dirt ground, and I tumbled across the field. I struggled to catch my breath, to regain my vision, to stay alive. Through a haze I saw the Nephilim ten meters away, soaring toward me with wings ablaze, sword smeared with my blood.

I couldn't move, couldn't think.

I had no pieces left to play.

I choked on my own blood as I prepared for death, knowing I'd failed my father.

But before the Nephilim could reach me, our truck crashed into it. The sound of metal crunching filled my head.

My vision blurred again, reality fading in and out. My mother. She'd come back. She could have left, could have saved herself, protected the weapon, but she came back.

I wanted to scream at her to leave, that dad was right, we couldn't win this one. It was too late. But she exited the truck, her small body coiled and ready to strike. She looked at me, her eyes moist. "Run. Scarlett, you have to find a way to run. I'll distract them. I love you."

I tried to sit up, to stop her, to tell her we would leave together, but a wave of dizziness and pain sent my mind tumbling into the past.

Another time. Another place. A hot pipe falling toward me. I was little, just a girl. My mother pushed me out of the way and the pipe hit her instead. She carried the scar to this day. She called it the scar of a mother's love.

And now my mother would sacrifice her life to save me.

Just as my father had.

My mother ran toward the Nephilim. I waited in horror to see her cut down by that bloody sword, her petite frame impaled upon it.

But something changed. She changed. Her body began to… bend, break, shift. As tears of blood ran down my face, I watched her, the woman who'd raised me my whole life, turn from a woman into something else. Fur formed on her once smooth skin, dark and thick. Her hands elongated into deadly claws. She shifted into a Lycan, something I'd thought only those under the authority of the Catholic Church and the Inquisition could do.

I had no time for shock. Disbelief. Questions. All of that would come later. For now I knew that she would lose the fight if I didn't help. As a Lycan—a werewolf—she had strength. Power. Speed. She fought the Nephilim, and I fought my pain and dizziness, willing myself to stand, to search around me for a weapon.

My eyes fell on a dead solider clutching his otherworldly gun. I stood, legs shaky, everything on my body hurting so much the pain almost took on a new form, as if I had become one ball of pain and nothing more. I embraced it, let it fuel me as I took a step, then two, faster, until I was stumble-running toward the gun.

I grabbed it with my torn and shredded hands. It slipped from them, the blood giving me no grip. Using my shirt, I wiped my hands, flinching as tissue pushed out of the cuts in my flesh, as my bones poked out. I picked up the gun again, trying to determine if it had a safety. When I discovered nothing, I aimed the muzzle at the Nephilim, ready to fire. I pulled the trigger.

Nothing. I flipped my e-Glass over my eye. "Evie, can you identify this gun?"

She scanned it, and the image of a red X appeared. "I'm sorry, Scarlett, but nothing like this exists."

Well, obviously that wasn't true, since I was holding the thing in my hands.

The Nephilim roared with a sound that shook the heavens and grabbed my mother, smashing her wolf head against the truck. A loud crack rang through the air and her body fell limply to the ground as she turned back into her human form.

She didn't move.

There was no rise and fall of her chest.

I shook the gun, my rage consuming me as I willed it to work. I aimed and fired again. It spit out fire and something else, a bullet that blazed into the Nephilim, knocking it to the ground.

The creature looked into the sky and a new whirlpool formed, bringing down new soldiers.

Would this never end? "Evie, search all databases for Nephilim weaknesses."

"As you wish," she said.

I knew Nephilim were born of human and Angel blood, though no Angel had been seen on earth in many hundreds of years. Since biblical times, really. They were almost myth. If not for the Nephilim, and the Angel technology we'd acquired through them, I'm not sure anyone would still believe in Angels.

A stream of information flickered in my e-Glass, none of it helpful to me in that moment.

Gun in broken hands, I limped to the truck, knowing I had only one chance of living through this night and killing these monsters.

My mom's body lay on the ground, so still, so pale. I couldn't look at her, couldn't process the loss of her just yet. I had to act. Had to keep my head.

Because I'd been wrong. I wasn't out of moves. Wasn't out of pieces to play. I had one last move, and I had to use it now.

The crystalized weapon was still in the truck. I ran my hand over it, trying to find some way of opening it, using it. I found nothing.

The soldiers moved closer to me. They would be here in moments, and I would be dead.

Out of all ideas, I held my gun up and aimed it at the crystal case.

I fired once.

The crystal cracked, one small line that ran its blemish through the beautiful carvings.

I waited.

Nothing else happened.

The soldiers reached me. They aimed their guns and fired before I could even turn around.

I thought I couldn't feel more pain. That I'd maxed out the human capacity to endure.

I was wrong.

The bullet of fire entered my body and moved through me, leaving a trail of burning agony in its wake.

I slumped over the crystal box, my blood seeping out of me, staining the opaque quartz.

Red. Scarlet. Evie whispered the color of my own name into my ear as I slowly died.

My last vision was of scarlet blood—still just grey to me—spreading into the cracks, into the intricate carvings that decorated the encasement. It almost seemed to glow, and I smiled and closed my eyes as the crystal shattered and darkness took me.

I should be dead.

That was my first thought as consciousness forced itself onto me.

I knew I wasn't dead because of the smell. I smelled like blood and sweat and fear. Surely the afterlife didn't smell so very human.

I peeled my eyes open and was relieved to find that my head didn't explode in pain. Relieved and confused. I looked at my hands. Though not completely healed, I could no longer see bone. My body was healing itself at an alarming rate, unusual even for me, and I'd always healed fast.

I felt for the hole in my chest and found only the remnants of a wound, still open, still bleeding, but not piercing through my body. On top of my chest I found the bullet that had once been inside me. Somehow it had been pushed out. I brushed it off of me as fuzzy memories danced in my mind.

Of my blood filling the crevices of the crystal.

Of it cracking.

Of… something else. Something inside.

My blood! I looked at my shirt and gasped. My blood. My red blood. Scarlet blood. I was covered in it. Covered in red.

"Evie, you there?"

Nothing. While I had survived, my e-Glass hadn't.

But I didn't need her voice to tell me the colors. I could see them.

I could see in color.

The white interior of the truck. The clear brilliance of the now broken and empty crystal box. The lines of crimson that had filled the design. My blue sneakers with dark red blood drying on them.

The pale cream color of my skin.

It was dizzying, the nuances of color all around me. Everything smelled stronger, sharper, more.

I shook my head and stood, grateful I had balance and could walk. I needed time to catch up to whatever my body was doing, but not now. Blinking, adjusting to so many new spectrums of sensory overload, I grabbed the gun lying next to me and then paused to examine the crystal box that now stood open. A crack ran through it, an empty hollow where the weapon had once been.

Mist rose from within and smelled like something wet that had burned.

I crawled out of the truck, gun in hand, and pressed my e-Glass again. Still nothing. I took it off my ear, slipped the memory chip out of it, and left the e-Glass in the truck. It was beyond repair, but I could possibly retrieve something from the chip later, so I stuck it in my shoe. Whatever happened tonight, I wanted to keep this with me. It was my only evidence. My only clue. And I felt like it would be something others might seek.

Another memory slid back into my mind, unclear and full of shadows. A man in black leaning over me. And… someone fighting.

Around the truck lay all the soldiers who had attacked me. Dead.

I didn't do this. Someone had been here.

I didn't know how long I'd been out, but the sun had fully set and to my right a tree blazed with fire. I remembered planting that tree with my father. He told me we'd have our whole lives to watch it grow.

But his life had been cut short.

Grief gripped my heart, and I didn't see the soldier still alive until it was too late. He grabbed me, knocking the gun out of my hand and threw me to the ground next to the bodies of my parents. Someone had moved them. Someone had laid them together. I stared at their lifeless forms, but it didn't seem real. None of it could possibly be real. They looked fake, like Halloween props gruesomely arranged for the most fright.

But I knew. In my heart I knew this was not a dream. This was not fake. I gripped my father's hand, a sob breaking free from my throat. His ring, the Token of Strife, dug into my still wounded flesh. I pulled it off his finger and clutched it to my chest.

The soldier held a gun to me while he spoke to someone through an e-Glass in a language I didn't understand. I knew I would die and, despite what my father taught me, I couldn't see another move in this horrible, bloody game.

I just wanted to lay there with them. Die with them. The grief was too much, the pain of their loss too big to feel fully. My heart hurt more than any injury I'd ever sustained.

So I lay there, and I waited for the soldier to kill me.

But as I looked at my mother, I remembered her sacrifice. How she had wanted me to live. She'd given her life so I would live.

And I remembered stories my father used to tell me about Zeniths. As a little girl, I didn't dress in princess costumes and play with dolls, I dressed as Zeniths and saved worlds. My father often talked to me about how they could be dangerous, those with para-powers, but perhaps, he'd said, they could also be important.

He'd never told me he was a Zenith himself. He and my mother. Why hadn't he told me?

Did it really matter though? They were both heroes who had died for me, and I would not let their sacrifice be in vain.

With a renewed will to live, I raised my head, sat up, and faced the soldier who was poised to kill me.

I had no plan.

No knight to save me.

He held his gun to my head and prepared to squeeze the trigger.

I leapt up and grabbed him, pushing his gun away as I held onto his arms.

A wave of heat pulsed through me. My head swam with double images. Power swelled in me like a hungry fire. The soldier froze, staring at me.

And then I was in his mind, seeing myself through his eyes. This bruised, bloody, beaten girl with torn clothes and dead parents. I felt his loathing for not just me, but all of humanity, in our weakness and lowliness.

And I saw him again, in my eyes. It was as if I existed within us both, seeing us each through the eyes and heart of the other. Soldiers I hadn't noticed approached from behind him, likely to see what was going on with the captive.

Everything in my mind jumbled together in that moment. Him, me, them, all of it. In fear, in a last ditch effort to save myself, I raised the gun—his gun—and fired at the soldiers moving toward us.

When the last of them dropped to the ground, dead, I raised the gun at myself—himself—and fired.

I felt the solider die as I fell back into my own body, hitting the ground with a thud, hands shaking, reality still fragmented by whatever I'd just done.

The solider before me moved, lifted his head, blood pouring from his skull. He reached for his gun, but a sword impaled him before he could grab it.

I looked up and into the eyes of the last person I expected to see tonight. "Jax?"

Jax fell to his knees in front of me, the sword he just used still clutched in his right hand, his jaw hard, face determined. He didn't look shocked. He should look shocked.

"Are you okay, Scarlett?"

I didn't know how to answer that. No. I'd never be okay again. But I was alive. I wasn't going to die from my injuries. That was probably what he wanted to know. I gave a brief nod.

He glanced at my parents' bodies, but kept his face emotionless. "Do you know where the weapon is?"

"You know about that?" I asked.

"Yes, I know about everything. There's no time to explain, we have to get out of here, but first we've got to secure the weapon."

"It's not there," I told him. "It's gone."

"Show me," he said.

He helped me stand, and I led him to the truck, where the crystal remains were still swimming in pools of my blood.

"We have to go," he said after a quick examination. "Now."

"I can't leave them." I pulled him back toward my house. "We have to get my parents."

His eyes weren't unkind, but they held no room for sentiment either. "We don't have time. You're in danger, and if we don't leave now, they will come back, and we'll both be dead."

As if cued by his words, lights once again appeared in the sky. And I knew I couldn't be responsible for another death. For another life.

We ran toward my father's Cessna, and I tried not to spare a glance at my parents' fallen forms, but I couldn't stop myself.

As Jax prepped the plane, I looked at them one last time, lying together on the cold earth, their hearts forever stopped.

I'd never seen them in color while they were alive. They'd always been shades of grey to me. Now, in their death, I saw the rich oak of my father's hair. The golden beauty of my mother's long braid. I just wished I could see their eyes. Just one last time, I wished I could look them in the eyes and tell them how much I loved them.

Jax nudged me toward the plane, and I clutched the Token of Strife in my hand, relishing the pain it caused.

Their death would not be in vain.