They are free.
Those words had whispered through my head only a few
weeks ago. Taken out of context, the phrase should be
uplifting.
Freedom’s good. Right?
Unless you’re talking about demons.
The earth is full of them. They’re called the
Nephilim. They’re the offspring of the fallen angels—or
Grigori--and the daughters of men.
Yes, the angels really fell. Hard. Their story is a
perfect illustration why everyone should toe the proverbial
line. Piss off God, wind up in Tartarus-a fiery pit in the
lowest level of hell.
Word is God sent the Grigori to keep an eye on the
humans. In the end, the angels were the ones who needed
watching. So God banished them from the earth—bam, you’re
legend--but he left their progeny behind to test us. Eden
was a memory. We’d proved we didn’t deserve it. But I
don’t think we deserved the Nephilim either.
Fast forward a million millennia. The prophesies of
Revelation are bearing down on us like runaway horses.
Perhaps four of them? No matter what the forces of good do
to prevent the end of the world, nothing’s working.
And that’s where I come in.
Elizabeth Phoenix, Liz to my friends. They call me
the leader of the light. I got dropped into the middle of
this whole Doomsday mess, and I’m having a helluva time
getting back out.
For reasons beyond mine or anyone else’s
comprehension, Tartarus opened; the Grigori flew free, and
now all hell has broken loose. Literally.
“Dammit, Lizzy! Duck!”
I ducked. Razor sharp claws swooshed through the air
right where my head had been. Not only did I duck, but I
rolled. Good thing too, since seconds later something
sliced into the ground right next to my head.
I’d come to Los Angeles with Jimmy Sanducci, head
demon killer and my second in command, to ferret out a nest
of varcolacs. Eclipse demons. Kind of rare considering
they hail from Romania but I’d seen stranger things.
Sure, the smog in LA could be blamed for the dark
splotches that kept appearing over the moon and the sun,
which is what everyone around here believed. But I knew
better.
The varcolac tugged on its arm, trying to free the
needle-like appendages it used for fingers from the desert
dust. Part human, part dragon, varcolacs are rumored to
eat the sun and the moon, thus causing said eclipses. And
if they ever succeeded in actually devouring those
celestial bodies, the end of the world is nigh. Since I’ve
been trying to prevent that, I dragged Jimmy to LA, and we
started hunting.
Before the varcolac could use his other arm to kill
me, Sanducci sliced through its neck. When dealing with
Nephilim, head slicing usually worked. At the least, being
without a head slowed down even the most determined demon.
Jimmy’s dark gaze met mine. “Get up,” he ordered,
before turning away to dispatch more bad guys.
I tried not to let the chill in his eyes bother me.
Sanducci would never allow anything to hurt me; he’d loved
me once. Right now, however, love was no longer on the
table, and I had no one to blame for that but myself.
I did a kip, from my back to my feet in one quick
movement--a state champion medal in high school gymnastics
had been coming in very handy lately--then retrieved my own
sword and went back to hacking.
Once in LA it hadn’t taken Jimmy and I long to find
the varcolacs in the desert. Most days they appeared
human. They lived their lives; they blended in, only going
dragon beneath an eclipse.
Which came first the chicken or the egg? The dragon
eating the moon or the moon going dark and bringing out the
dragon? Hard to say.
What I did know was that as soon as the Grigori flew
free, all the Nephilim stopped hiding. Their time had
come. And things, for me and my kind, had become a bit
dicey.
Previously, each demon killer had worked with a seer—
someone who possessed a psychic gift to see past the
Nephilim’s human disguise to the demon that lay within.
I’d been a seer once myself, but things had changed.
Oh, I was still psychic—always had been. Since I was
old enough to talk, maybe before, I could touch animate and
inanimate objects and I’d know things—what people had done,
where they’d gone, what they thought.
But later, when I’d become the leader of the light,
I’d inherited the ability of the woman who’d raised me. As
Ruthie Kane died in my arms, all her power transferred to
me. I’d wound up not only psychometric, but suddenly I
could channel too. Ruthie might be dead, but that didn’t
mean I couldn’t hear her, talk to her, sometimes even see
her. She became my conduit. Whenever a Nephilim was near,
I heard about it in Ruthie’s whisper on the wind, and when
they were up to something major—they always were--I
received a vision to tell me all about it. At least until
recently.
“Too many,” Jimmy muttered.
We were covered in varcolac blood. We’d hacked up a
dozen, but a dozen more had appeared. We needed help, but
there wasn’t any to spare.
The federation—that group of demon killers, or DKs,
and seers who’d been charged with fighting this
supernatural war—had been seriously depleted after Ruthie’s
death, and we couldn’t just pick up a few new demon killers
at the demon killer superstore. They had to be trained.
New seers had to be discovered. I hadn’t had time to do
much recruiting, even before the whole Tartarus opening,
Grigori escaping incident. And now . . .
Now I wasn’t going to have time to do much but ride
the runaway train to Armageddon. Basically, we were
fucked. But that didn’t mean we were going to quit.
Besides, I had a secret weapon. What I liked to call a
vampire in a box.
I lifted my arm, traced my fingers along the magic
jeweled dog collar that circled my neck. As long as I wore
the thing, I was me. But if I took it off—
“No, Lizzy.”
I glanced at Jimmy. He’d seen me fingering the
necklace.
Even if he didn’t know me better than just about anyone, it
didn’t take a genius to figure out what I’d been
contemplating.
One of the varcolacs charged, dragon wings flapping,
talons outstretched. Jimmy hacked off its head with only a
token glance in that direction. He was good. I still
needed to put a bit more effort into killing things.
I let go of the collar, faced the next varcolac with
both hands around my sword and did what needed to be done.
I lost track of Jimmy for a while. The damn demons seemed
to be multiplying. For every one we killed, two more came
out of the darkness. Their wings flickered against the
silvery light of the gibbous moon, reminding me of the
night the Grigori had flown free, their spirits darkening
what had then been a perfectly round orb.
Jimmy cried out, the sound making my heart jolt, my
head turn. One of the varcolacs had speared him through
the shoulder with a talon, lifting him clear off the
ground. Blood dripped into the sand, turning the moon pale
grains black. Jimmy’s sword lay at his feet.
There appeared to be an army of dragon men behind
them. Their scaly wings flapped in syncopation, filling
the sky with a morbid tick-tock. Dragon heads and arms,
human legs and torsos that sprouted dragon’s wings.
“Surrender, seer.” The varcolac snorted fire from
his nose. Jimmy hissed when the flames started his pants
on fire.
“No.” I lopped off the nearest varcolac head, which
hit the ground with a dull thud, rolled a few feet and
disintegrated into ashes along with the still upright
body. If you killed a Nephilim correctly, clean ups
weren’t any problem at all.
“You can’t win, he said. “We are legion.”
He was probably right, but giving up . . .
Just wasn’t my style.
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