The Unforgiven (16 page)

“Nephilim!” one of the sisters in the booth exclaimed with a shudder. “Just imagine. I’ve heard the cities are crawling with them. Thank the Lord we’re safe here in the country.”

“Don’t go thinking we’re clear of them out here,” the young man commented from the counter. “I heard talk some of them Nephilim creatures holed up on a ranch south of Seeley Lake.”

“No!” The second sister’s eyes went round. “You don’t say.”

“Bah.” The old man at the end of the counter, his face whiskered and weathered, gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “Nephilim. Hellfiends. What a load of bull. Just another excuse for criminals to get off. ‘The Devil made me do it.’ Ain’t I heard that one before. Only liberals and gossiping fools believe that crap. So what if folks are keeping to themselves out on their own land? No crime in that.”

The younger man protested. “Bud Harkin’s land is up that way. He says he’s had seven calves gone missing in the last six months. And he found a sheep carcass without a head.”

“Wolves,” the old man countered. “Damn vermin are everywhere now. Ain’t no Nephilim. Ain’t no hellfiends. Tell me, has anyone here seen a demon?”

“But . . . how would we know if we had?” one of the sisters protested. “According to Father Walker, Nephilim look like regular folks. And hellfiends . . . they work their evil
through
humans. By influence and possession. A person might do any nasty thing if a hellfiend’s got control of him.”

The waitress snorted. “If that’s the case, then I reckon I’ve seen a few demons in my day.”

The old man grinned. “Aw, them were just men, Annie, darlin’. Doin’ what men always do.”

Annie turned to Luc and winked. “What about you, hon? You believe in demons?”

“Not at all,” Luc lied.

Cade cursed his lack of experience, cursed his lack of subtlety, cursed his lack of control. For good measure, he directed an extra-foul curse at the great Artur Camulus, because if anyone deserved to be cursed, Artur did. The next few days were going to be a nightmare.

Cade had lived through one crisis. His own. He wasn’t sure he had the stomach to anchor someone else’s. Especially not Maddie’s. Blast it all to Oblivion. He liked her. More than liked her. She was a haunting combination of fragility and determination. He wanted more than anything to erase the ordeal to come. She didn’t deserve what was going to happen to her. It was going to be shit, doing what had to be done. But it was for her own good, he reminded himself. For her survival. And for his clan’s. He vowed that once it was over, once she was his slave, he’d treat her well. Protect her from Artur. If he could.

Outside, the desert sped past. They were on a proper road now, unpaved but relatively free of ruts. He switched on the jeep’s headlights. He didn’t need light to see in the dark, but if they passed another car, it would seem suspicious to have them off. And Maddie seemed to sleep more calmly with the headlights on. Her death grip on the safety strap had eased.

Ideally, he’d have gained her trust before her first wave hit. Trust would have made things easier. He hadn’t trusted Cybele when she’d found him—far from it—and his transition had been all the harder. If Maddie trusted him now, she’d submit to his will without question. As it was, he feared she was going to fight him every step of the way.

At least their wild interlude in the sand had allowed him to strengthen the tenuous mental mastery he’d introduced with his kiss the night before. She didn’t trust him, but it didn’t matter. Her body, bent on survival, didn’t care about trust. She wanted him. Badly. Soon she’d be begging for it, and he wouldn’t hesitate. He had no more choice in the matter than she did.

The enormity of his responsibility—to Maddie, to the clan, to the memory of the small person who had been, too briefly, his son—weighed like a boulder strung around his neck. What if he lost her, too? He didn’t want to think about that. But it could very well happen, no matter how hard he tried to stop it.

She didn’t believe his talk of Watchers and Nephilim. Well, he would have to overcome that resistance. Fast. He had to offer her something solid to hold on to before insanity became her only refuge from the truth.

“You think I’m Nephilim? Yeah, right. I’m beginning to think you’re one of those idiot DAMNers after all.”

“If I were, I’d have killed you on sight. No, Maddie, I’m just the opposite. I’m Nephilim. Like you.”

“The Nephilim are a myth.” She spoke slowly and enunciated clearly, as if presenting the truth to a half-wit. “Angels never walked on earth. Never mated with human women. Never produced half-human, half-angel hybrid creatures. The whole idea is preposterous.”

“It’s not. You and I are the proof. We’re the descendants of the few Nephilim who escaped the archangels’ vengeance. Our forefathers fled to every corner of the earth. My own ancestor was Samyaza’s eldest son.”

“Samyaza, who, according to
The Book of Enoch
, was the original leader of the Watchers?”

“That’s right.” Cade glanced in his rearview mirror. A glow hovered on the eastern horizon. “But eventually the Watcher
Azazel displaced him. After the curse, Samyaza’s Nephilim son fled to northern Europe, where he taught his father’s stolen heavenly magic to his descendents. They became the Druid priests of the Celts.”

“So now you’re a Druid, too?” Maddie laughed. “You
can’t
expect me to swallow that. Especially since you’ve left off the white robes.”

He shrugged. “Believe what you want. You’ll learn the truth soon enough. Your crisis will leave no room for doubt.”

“You keep talking about a crisis,” she snapped. “If you think that’s going to scare me, forget it. I’ve got terminal brain cancer, remember? All the fear’s been leached out of me.”

A car approached, motoring in the opposite direction. Cade stepped on the gas and flew past it. “You’re wrong about that. Believe me, Maddie, there’s going to be plenty of room for fear when you confront your demon nature.”

Time passed before she spoke again.

“You know, not that I’m even close to believing you, but that’s one thing I don’t understand about the Watcher legend. The Nephilim were the children of angels, yet Jonas Walker and his DAMNers call them demons. Archdemons, even. Why?”

She was asking questions. Cade chose to take that as a hopeful sign.

“Angels and demons are virtually identical,” he said. “The only difference is whether their existence is blessed or cursed by Heaven. Lucifer was originally an angel. When he lost God’s blessing, he became a demon. Satan, Lord of Hell. The Watchers followed a similar path. They rebelled against Heaven and refused to repent. As punishment, Raphael was sent to destroy them. The Watchers’ half-human offspring were cursed and given the vile epithet
Nephilim
. The Nephilims’ human souls changed to demon essence.”

“And you think I’m one of them. A half-human descendant of one of the fallen angels. A Nephilim.”

“We call ourselves Watchers, after our forefathers. We consider Nephilim to be an unbelievably foul term. The worst insult you can hurl.”

“But you called yourself Nephilim,” she pointed out.

“Yes,” he said. “I did.”

She was silent a moment, a vertical line etched between her eyebrows. “It hardly seems fair,” she ventured after a moment, “for children to be cursed for their fathers’ sin.”

“Fairness doesn’t enter into it,” he replied. “We Nephilim are crossbred atrocities. Our very nature is tainted. And on some level, Maddie, you’ve known that all your life.”

A hit. No Watcher—no
Nephilim
—not even an unaware, escaped the race’s instinctual self-loathing. Maddie turned abruptly to look out the passenger window.

Cade eased up on the accelerator and the jeep lurched to a halt. Half turning, he draped one arm over the back of the seat. “We call ourselves Watchers. Angels. But we know what we are. Even our young know. We’re demons.”

Maddie didn’t look at him. “I’m not sure I want to hear any more of this.”

He wasn’t willing to allow the retreat. “Watcher children—dormants, we call them—are indistinguishable from human children. If a dormant belongs to a clan, is aware, he learns his heritage from birth. He prepares twenty years or more for the crisis that awakens his full power. But aware dormants, children of Watcher adepts, are a minority. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unawares scattered over the world. Like you, they grew up believing they were human. Most of them never learn any differently. They live out a human life and die young.”

“How young?”

“Before age thirty, always. Usually earlier. Sometimes from accidents or violence, more often from disease. But thirty years is plenty of time to produce the next generation of
unaware offspring. Like you and me. Just over a year ago, I was dormant and unaware. My mother was a prostitute. She birthed me when she was sixteen and died of cancer when I was twelve. I spent the following twelve years on the streets of Cardiff, Wales. Then Cyb—” He cut himself off and swallowed. “Then my clan found me.” He paused. “Your father died young, I understand.”

“Yes.” She didn’t express outrage at his intrusive knowledge of her family history. Not anymore. “Of cancer, when I was a baby. My mother died in a car accident when I was fourteen. She was thirty-seven.” Her voice wavered, and for a moment, Cade thought she would succumb to tears. “I bounced around in foster care afterward.”

“That must have been hard.”

“It was. It was miserable. But I wasn’t the rebellious type. I worked even harder at school once she was gone. She made me promise her that before she died. I told her I would go to college and live a good life for both of us. And that I wouldn’t waste a minute, and I’d never give up. So I worked hard and landed a university scholarship. Then the cancer came.”

“And you fought it just as hard,” he said.

“But it didn’t do any good.”

“It’s gone now,” Cade said.

“So you say.”

He shifted in his seat. “Since your mother lived into her thirties, it must have been your father who carried the Watcher gene. He died young and never came into his full power. And you got brain cancer. You might have followed the same pattern if you hadn’t survived the operating table. You nearly died there.”

Her eyes touched his and slid away. “You know about my NDE?”

“Of course. My clan never would have located you otherwise.” Cade leaned forward, willing her to accept what he was saying.
“Your near-death experience triggered what we call transition. Once a Watcher enters that state, he or she becomes immune to human diseases. That’s why your cancer’s gone. Because you looked death in the face and survived.”

She scoffed. “An interesting premise.”

“It’s the truth, Maddie. A truth I lived through.”

“You had a near-death experience?”

“I had a knife in the ribs during a botched robbery. I was the thief. I didn’t dare show my face at the local surgery, so I hid out in a scummy cellar. The wound festered, my fever shot sky-high . . . I threw off the infection. Barely. But that was only the beginning. The real nightmare began three months later.”

She stared down at her clasped hands for a long time. When she spoke at last, it was to ask a question Cade hadn’t anticipated.

“Your NDE. What was it like? Did you feel weightless? Did you float down a tunnel? Did you see that loving white light people always talk about?”

He snorted. “None of the above. I felt as though I was choking on pitch-black sludge.”

She fixed her gaze on a distant point beyond the windshield. “I saw the tunnel. Just like in all the NDE testimonials. I even . . . I even saw the light and sensed the loving presence. But when I arrived at the end of the passage, the light went dark. It was like . . . it was like a door slammed in my face. There was no loving presence. No God. No dead relatives waiting to welcome me to the afterlife. Just . . . nothing.”

Her voice caught. “You always hear about people coming out of an NDE with renewed faith. Not me. I came out convinced the atheists have it right. There’s no Heaven. No Hell. This life on earth is all there is.”

A tear rolled down her face. Cade caught it with his thumb. Threading his fingers through her hair, he turned her head and forced her to meet his gaze.

“There is a Heaven and a Hell. Both places are for humans, though. And for angels and hellfiends. Not for us. For Nephilim, for you and me, there’s no final judgment, no afterlife, whether it’s endless bliss or eternal torment. We live, we die. If our true nature remains dormant, we die young. If we’re strong enough, lucky enough, to endure the crisis, that brings us into our full power. Afterward, if we can avoid getting killed by our enemies, we have a chance to live out a life span of one hundred twenty years. But in the grand scheme of the universe, any earthly interval is no more than a blink of the eye. That’s the curse we carry, the punishment for our fathers’ sin. Oblivion.”

Maddie didn’t answer. Neither did she throw off Cade’s hand. He slid it to her shoulder and squeezed gently. She was trembling.

“Tell me the truth. Is this . . . is this some kind of mind game you’re playing with me?”

“I wish it were,” he said. “I wish I could tell you that you’re a beloved child of God, and that when you die, your afterlife will go on forever. But it won’t. This is no game. You’re a Watcher, and your transition from dormant to adept has begun. The first wave of your crisis has already hit. There will be no stopping the next one.”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “You’re talking about . . . about . . . what happened back there when you stopped the jeep. How I begged for it.”

Cade repressed a wave of sympathy. Maddie thought that short roll in the sand was embarrassing? She’d better toughen up. She had no idea how truly desperate things were going to get.

“I thought you’d drugged me,” she murmured.

“No. Your hypothalamus is flooding your body with Watcher hormones. Your body’s responding. You think last night was bad? It was nothing. Your sexual cravings are just
beginning. Soon they’ll consume you. When that happens, I’ll be your only hope. A Nephilim can’t become adept alone. He or she needs an anchor.” His fingers tightened on her shoulder and she opened her eyes. “A sexual anchor, Maddie.”