Forbidden (21 page)

“Crap!” Erica said again.

“It was really hard to focus. Maybe we should try this later, when it’s quieter—after everyone goes to sleep.”

Erica looked disappointed. “Okay.” They blew out all the candles and the incense, leaving the room shrouded in murky darkness. “Let me dump the ash, and then we can go downstairs and have dessert. My mom got Mochi ice cream, two flavors.”

“Yum.”

Claire stood up, stretching, watching as Erica carefully carried the tray with the incense across the room. Erica paused in her bathroom doorway to flick on the light switch, and for a brief moment was backlit by the bathroom light—a moment which, Claire realized with a start, bore an eerie similarity to the blurry image Claire had just been trying to bring to focus in her mind. Erica disappeared inside.

Then something strange happened. All the distracting sounds around Claire went silent. She couldn’t even hear her own breathing.
Whoa
, she thought, glancing around her.
What’s going on?

The room—the floor, the ceiling, everything—had disappeared. Claire was surrounded by black nothingness. Although she still felt her own body, she seemed to be floating in the void, as if in zero gravity. The only visual cues left, inexplicably, were the bathroom doorway hovering before her and the glow that emanated from within
.

“Erica!” Claire whispered insistently. “Something’s happening!”

“What?” Erica sounded like she was a million miles away.

The light inside the bathroom doorway began to shift and change. A faceless, silhouetted, female figure appeared—the same figure Claire had seen a few minutes earlier. The light was coming from her, a glow of shimmering golden flames that radiated around her body
.

“I see it!” Claire said quietly. “It’s definitely a woman, and she’s glowing!”

“Oh my God!” came Erica’s distant voice, filled with wonder.

Then Claire heard the same raspy British voice that had invaded her head twice before:
“
Claire. Your life is in danger
.”

The figure moved forward. Claire saw her more clearly now: She was a stunningly attractive woman in her early sixties, with gentle crinkles beside her kind, hazel eyes, and a small beauty mark on her right cheek just above her mouth. Her chin-length, stylishly coiffed hair was pale blond, almost white. She wore a chic, formfitting navy-blue dress and a delicate necklace sparkling with tiny, floating diamonds
.

“Oh! She’s beautiful!” Claire whispered in mingled awe and trepidation. “She’s smiling at me.” The woman seemed so real, Claire felt as if she could reach out and touch her. With a shiver, she reminded herself that the woman wasn’t really there.

Claire felt a sound coming up through her chest and out of her mouth—but it wasn’t her own voice. It was still raspy, but it was a perfect, cultured, British accent, as if the woman were now speaking directly through her:

“
Someone wants to kill you because of your special gift. You are one of the
Nephilim
.”

I’m one of what?
Claire thought, confused and alarmed.

“Only one person can protect and help you. Alec.”

Oh my God
, Claire thought.
Alec? Alec’s my protector?

“Alec is a Grigori, as am I
.
Come to Twin Palms. I will explain everything. My name is Helena.”

The woman brought a finger up to her lips in a silencing gesture as she
repeated the familiar, final phrase of the eerie message:

“Don’t tell anyone.”

The light became so blinding that Claire had to close her eyes. When she reopened them, the woman was gone and she was back in Erica’s room. Erica was standing in the bathroom doorway, staring at her in openmouthed amazement.

Claire had the oddest sensation, as if she were still floating. Glancing down, she gasped in astonishment. She hadn’t just been floating in her mind. She was actually
suspended in the air
, about a foot above the floor. “Holy crap!” Claire cried. With that exclamation she dropped straight down, landing on the carpet with a thud.

“Wow!” Erica cried. “Claire, are you all right?”

Claire nodded, touching her throat, which felt hoarse and dry. “I need a glass of water.”

Erica brought her a glass from the bathroom, rushing up to kneel beside her. As Claire drank it Erica enthused, “That was so cool! You rose up like some kind of divine being and were hovering the whole time!”

Claire was still in a daze. “Who
is
she?”

“I don’t know, but I think she was talking
through
you! You sounded just like Helen Mirren.”

“Did she actually say that someone wants to
kill me
?” Claire asked, her insides constricting in fear.

“She said they want to kill you because of your
gift
,” Erica said solemnly. “Which I guess is this whole psychic thing.”

“
Who
wants to kill me? How do they know what’s been going on with me? And why do they care?”

“I have no idea. But at least we now know what’s going on with
Alec
. He’s not here to hurt you.”

Claire nodded. “This is all so…”
Weird. Scary. Mind-boggling
. She shivered, unable to finish the sentence.

“I know, right? You were totally channeling that lady’s spirit, Claire. It was like you were talking to someone beyond the grave!”

“That doesn’t make sense. If she were dead, why would she say ‘Come to Twin Palms, I’ll explain everything.’”

“Oh. Okay,” Erica agreed. “But if she’s alive, why doesn’t she come to you? Why is she doing all this psychically?”

“Maybe she lives really far away and can’t travel right now,” Claire mused as she set the empty water glass aside. “I still don’t get who she is or why she’s trying to help me. But whatever the reason, I say we try to find her.”

Two hours later, Claire and Erica were still huddled over Erica’s laptop, researching
Twin Palms
on the internet. There were over five hundred thousand hits on Google for Twin Palms—a whole cornucopia of places all over the world: the mall they’d visited, a former restaurant in Pasadena, a nail salon in Texas, a publishing house in New York, three hospitals, a stretch of condominiums in Florida, and multitudes of hotels and apartments from northern California and Arizona to the Caribbean and Thailand. It was even the name of Frank Sinatra’s original estate in Palm Springs.

“There is no way we are ever going to find this woman,” Erica complained. “Without her last name or some more identifying information, it’s impossible to narrow this down.”

“She said, ‘Come to Twin Palms.’ As if it were the name of a city. But it isn’t.” Claire sighed in frustration and leaned back against the headboard of the bed. “If someone is really trying to kill me, you’d think she would have given me a better way to find her! Like an address maybe?”

“If you’re in danger, we can’t keep searching for this mystery woman forever.” Erica opened up a new tab in her web browser. “Let’s attack this from a different angle. When she talked about your gift, she used a word I’ve never heard before, like you were special in some way. What did she call you? A Nefah-what?”

“I don’t know exactly. But I remember what she said Alec was—a
Grih-gore-ee
.”

“I’ve never heard that before, either.” They searched a few alternate spellings of the term, beginning with
Gregory
and ultimately landing on
Grigori
.

Two million hits came up when they Googled
Grigori
. The very first title listing contained two words that nearly made Claire’s heart stop:

Watcher.

Angel.

eighteen

“A
lec’s an
angel
?” Brian stared in disbelief as he plopped into the corner chair in Erica’s bedroom twenty minutes later.

“Apparently.” Stunned, Claire paced back and forth at the foot of Erica’s bed. They’d just filled him in on what had happened at Alec’s apartment that morning and had given him the gist of Claire’s vision.

“If that’s true, why doesn’t Alec have wings and a halo?” Brian asked.

Erica gestured at the computer on her lap. “Well, according to what we read on the web, the angels in the Bible never had wings or halos. Those are just visual symbols used in illustrations to help the illiterate masses identify the beings as superior to man.”

“Oh.” Brian shook his head in rising awe. “Wow, this is epic!”

“We’re not sure how big it is,” Erica retorted matter-offactly. “We don’t even understand most of it yet.”

“All we have to go by,” Claire added, “is what the woman said in my vision. But just because
she’s
supposedly an angel, too, that doesn’t mean (a) she’s a credible source, or (b) I wasn’t hallucinating the whole thing.”

“I seriously doubt you’d hallucinate words you’ve never heard of before,” Brian pointed out. “She never actually said
angel
, right?”

“No,” Claire admitted. “She said Grigori.”

“Is that singular or plural?” Brian asked.

“Apparently it’s both. Like
fish
or
moose
,” Erica explained, glancing at her computer screen. “At least, according to Wikipedia.”

“Another credible source,” Claire added with a roll of her eyes.

“The Bible says that the Watchers, or Grigori, are a group of angels sent to watch over humanity,” Erica continued, undaunted. “But before the great flood, they began to lust for human women. It’s all in Genesis, Chapter Six. Look.”

Erica turned her laptop around, and Claire read aloud from the screen:

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. … 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.

“So Nephilim are hybrid angels and humans,” Brian mused when Claire had finished reading.

“And supposedly, I’m descended from one of those ‘hybrids,’” Claire said doubtfully.

“No shit?” Brian’s brown eyes grew as wide as saucers. “She said that? You’re part
messenger from God
?”

“I
might
be,” Claire insisted. “
If
any of this is true, it must go way, way back. I might have, like, a drop of angel blood in me.”

“Might?” Erica scoffed. “Claire, two hours ago you were floating above my bedroom floor!”

“
Floating?
” Brian shook his head. “I gotta give you credit, CB, you are never boring.”

“Am I the only one who finds all this hard to believe?” Claire frowned. “Do you guys really think Alec—or anyone else—could actually be an
angel
?”

“Why not?” said Erica. “You were totally ready to believe he was a vampire.”

“That’s different. I don’t know why, but I can accept that
vampires
could be real. But angels? If angels exist, doesn’t that mean that God and the devil exist too?”