I, Jequon: Part One of the Nephilim Chronicles Read online

  I come closer. Close enough that I can smell the faint kiss of perfume on his skin, a remnant of the beautiful young thing used as bait to distract him.

  Something isn’t right with the body. Something’s missing. Different.

  I lean in closer still, to examine Lucian’s forehead and the unique brand the SOJ desecrate their victims with at the completion of their ritual.

  Unbelievable! It’s the wrong—

  “Jequon. Long time no see.”

  The words cut short my thought. In fact, they make it hard to think at all, because I hear them in the sacred tongue of my people.

  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. —Book of Enoch 7:4-6

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Artemis. First Generation. Always wanted my job. Which is reason enough not to like him. But standing there dressed in all-black motorcycle leathers—the ridiculous epitome of a B-movie vampire costume—that’s enough to piss me off, especially when he shows up unannounced. I’ve called him on his outfit before, and he always reverts to his ‘I collect Ducatis’ excuse. Whatever. In medieval Ireland, pimped out in armor polished to a mirror-like sheen, the narcissistic bastard’s line was, “I’m a knight.” Poser.

  “Why are you here?” I ask this in English, playing stupid, buying time, denying him the courtesy of responding in the Angelic Tongue of our fathers, the Watchers.

  “The question is, Jequon, why weren’t you here, earlier?”

  That throws me. What the hell is he talking about? Earlier?

  I locate Yuri in my periphery, but focus on Artemis, the deadlier threat. The Russian hasn’t moved.

  “Don’t worry about Yuri. He doesn’t even realize I’ve been in the room with him for the better part of the day. I had one of his errand bitches bring up a special order. I snuck in and rolled underneath the bed after I heard him snoring. €What? You think a Russian gets that soused from vodka alone?”

  Yuri pipes in from the hall, “It’s true, comrade. It has been my water ever since Chernobyl. I have never seen this man before. He drugged me. I—€””

  “Shut-up, Yuri.”

  Artemis removes a brass and red plastic shotgun shell from his pocket and wiggles it in the Russian’s direction; moves toward me a step.

  “So what’s your excuse this time, Jequon? You’re The Protector, remember? Who exactly are you protecting? Clearly not Lucian. You tell the Council you’ve got everything under control. All the while, the SOJ are dropping our people like acid at Burning Man.

  “Sadly, it seems to take an emergency for them to listen me. I say, Jequon’s lost his edge. They say, impossible. But when they heard you were desperate enough to make half-million-dollar deals with a human? Well, that was enough for the Council to finally take heed of my warnings.”

  Typical Artemis steam.

  “Are you through admiring the sound of your own voice?”

  Artemis moves another step closer. “There will be plenty of time to confess when I escort you to stand before the Council.”

  He disguises this bullshit with one of his trademark smirks. A leer so self-righteous Lucifer would be embarrassed. And he closes the gap between us by one more careful step.

  “Don’t make this difficult.”

  He reaches inside his coat. I tense up, ready to spring. €”He removes a set of Nephilim-grade, solid plate design titanium handcuffs. Unlike his neck, I can’t snap these. Not even on a good day.

  “Council orders. They suggested these might make you a more agreeable travel companion.”

  “Sure. I understand.”

  I’m fairly certain it was Artemis doing the suggesting. For a Naphil looking to kill one of his own, he’d be hard pressed to find a better cover story. Just stage the crime scene to look like a Sons Of Jared killing, and who’s the wiser?

  Me. That’s who.

  Although he gets props for posing as a Council investigator—a wholly original embellishment—his attention to detail while mimicking the SOJ’s methods is lacking.

  “Hold out your wrists.”

  I hold them out.

  Artemis knows, of course, after the SOJ kill their victim in a formal ceremony, they finish the ritual by branding the word damned onto the forehead. But the SOJ spell damned in Aramaic. Artemis made the brand on Lucian’s forehead, using letters from the Angelic alphabet. Letters no human understands. Not even the ancient scroll-scribbling SOJ. His carelessness is about to cost him.

  Holding the cuffs open in his right hand, he reaches across his body and seizes my left wrist. In this textbook position, he has the most leverage to secure the cuffs, and the best chance to defend himself against any sudden movements. In theory, by holding my wrist with his opposite hand, he will be able to feel any motion in my arm much faster than he could see it, allowing him to sidestep an attack. And, as practiced thousands of times by anyone trained to make arrests, he will disrupt the balance of his attacker as he pivots behind to subdue him in another way.

  In theory.

  In practice, Artemis bumps one side of the cuff closed on my left wrist and pivots the other side to secure my right—€”which doesn’t happen—€”because in the millisecond it takes for the bracelet to travel down its narrow arc, my palm is halfway to his chin.

  Artemis sidesteps the blow, keeping the base of his skull attached to his spinal column. With a firm grip still on my wrist, he immediately shuffles to one side, countering the momentum of my missed strike as he spins in behind me. More textbook execution on his part. He’s good. Real good. Even for a fellow 1st Gen.

  But I’m counting on his prowess. The missed palm strike was intentional. I just wanted him moving. Instead of lunging forward off-balance, like he expects me to do after such a ferocious miss, I jerk my left elbow down freeing my wrist from his grip, sending him stumbling forward as he tries to hang on. I plant my left leg and twist my entire upper-body clockwise, leading with my chin, locking in my target. Two-hundred-and-thirty pounds of pissed-off Protector-grade Naphil torques around on the ball of my foot as my other leg hangs loose, trailing slightly behind, accelerating, building momentum like the supersonic tip of a bullwhip.

  As I complete the turn, I can see Artemis with his hands up, expecting a spinning back-fist, the most common strike thrown from my position. What he gets instead, just as he drops his hands, is the outside edge of my boot heel slamming between his eyes like a lead pipe.

  Even if Artemis had defended for the kick and left his guard up a split-second longer, it wouldn’t have mattered. His face would still be caved in. His eyeballs still hanging loose from their disintegrated sockets. His brain still leaking out of his ear-holes in a viscous bloody soup.

  Our fathers in darkness, what have I done?

  The act of killing one of my own runs so contrary to the way I’m wired that I forget where I am.

  Yuri’s yelling at me. “We still have a deal? Yes?” Screaming it over and over. Snapping me back to the here, the now, and the-never-quite-the-same-again.

  “Shut! Up! We still have a deal. But it’s not finished until you give me some answers.”

  Yuri clamps down on his trembling. “I tell you anything.”

  “We’ll get to that. First, go fetch a hammer.”

  Technically, I have twenty-four hours to finish Artemis, but it’d be stupid to wait. The last thing the residents of Sarajevo need is a 1st-Gen-turned-super-vamp in their midst.

  “Lucian keeps one in his dresser, just in case—€”

  I interrupt him. “Well, put down the shotgun and the briefcase, and grab it.”

  How he knows so damn much about what Lucian keeps in his dresser ranks high on the list of questions I want answered.

  Yuri produces a heavy steel mallet. I point to Lucian.

  “Pull one of the stakes loose from his wrist.”

  While he’s prying
free the stake, I open the window a crack and risk a look down at the street. Everything looks normal. Outside at least.

  I nod toward Artemis. “I take it you know what to do.”

  “Yes.”

  Our kind give up the ghost the same as any talking monkey. Either permanently still the pulse of our blood, or drain it from our body. Analogous to the way the flow of electrons through a wire generates a magnetic field, the flow of blood through the arteries and veins generates a soul. And as much as I hate reinforcing pop culture vampire lore, I have to admit, puncturing the heart with a stake can be more practical than the lengthy, labor-intensive process required to drain all the blood from a corpse.

  The tradeoff of staking, though, is that it’s riskier.

  If you fail to sufficiently damage the heart or miss the organ altogether—€not good. €”All it takes is for just a small amount of our cursed blood to pool near it and the injured cardiac muscle will begin to self-repair. Not such a big deal in a stock human; a stopped heart, intact or not, still belongs to a dead man. But in a fallen Naphil—one with enough blood remaining for a functional heart to pump—this is a nightmare waiting to happen.

  Because the soul-as-magnetic-field analogy also holds in the opposite direction.

  Move electricity through a coil of wire: generate a magnetic field. Apply a magnetic field to a coil of wire: generate electricity. They’re inverse processes.

  Likewise, blood circulating through the body produces a soul, while the inverse process, a soul occupying the body, causes blood to course.

  The nightmare part of this spiritual physics is when a demonic soul possesses a recently slain Naphil. If the newly undead feeds soon and sufficiently to counteract the onset of decay, as a surprisingly large number of them do, they become vampire, an evil too ravenous for blood to bother with the Codes or with stealth. Hence, an infamous creature of the night.

  Yuri sets down his tools beside the body and then rolls my fallen cousin over onto his back. Straddling him at waist level, he pulls open Artemis’s shirt to expose his chest. He picks up the mallet and the stake. He probes for a gap between the ribs, directly over the heart and then he slams the mallet home with a metallic clang. And again. Two, three, four, a dozen more times until the stake pins Artemis to the floor. I flinch with every strike. I knew him as a boy.

  “I take it you know how to dispose of a body?”

  A rhetorical question. Yuri nods.

  “Good. Attend to that after I leave. Now, you’re going to talk. You can start by explaining why someone shot a hole through my neck at the train station.”

  “I know nothing about a shooting!”

  And he’s telling the truth. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have frowned. His eyes would have darted up and to the right first, and then he would have looked surprised. Humans don’t have much control over their facial expressions. Neither do I when I’m this thirsty; I lick my lips and Yuri’s face transforms from a mask of confusion to a portrait of abject fear€”.

  “Relax.”

  I motion down toward his club.

  “Why don’t we get a drink?”

  He has nothing to fear. I’m not about to feed on the second pastiest Russian I’ve ever seen. I’d rather go gray.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The applause didn’t even reach polite levels as Henrik Whitmore shuffled away from the podium. He’d noticed several people in the audience shaking their heads throughout his sermon—a few rolling their eyes in disgust. At least they’re not booing me, he thought as he left the stage.

  This consolation did little to soothe the sting, however. The effect of Pastor Worley’s reprimand, plus the consistent dismissal by the congregation of his Post Tribulation Rapture doctrine, wore heavily on Henrik’s psyche.

  Instead of returning to the green room beneath the stage to endure Worley’s I-told-you-so smirk, Henrik asked the ushers to walk him down the floor-level aisle and toward the tunnel which led to the dressing rooms. If he couldn’t preserve his dignity, at least he could beat the crowd and head home early. Behind him, the emcee welcomed Worley to the stage to thunderous cheers, which seemed to shoo Henrik faster down the cinder block corridor, expelling him and his doom-and-gloom doctrine from their midsts.

  The dressing room—or more accurately, the visiting team’s locker room—stood empty. Henrik was relieved. He could do without human interaction for awhile. He removed his keys and his cracked vinyl briefcase from the numbered metal locker where he’d stowed them and sat heavily on a low wooden bench. He hunched forward, head in his hands, assuming the posture men have adopted for centuries to contemplate their despair.

  “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

  The unintended melodrama made him cringe. He sounded pathetic. Henrik knew the verse taken from Matthew 27:46 was one of the more common manglings of the original Aramaic: E-lee e-lee l-maa saa-baach-taa-nee? Properly translated the verse read: My God, my God, for this I was spared! An exclamation, not a question; an acceptance of his fate, not doubt. Nevertheless, the mumbled plea came from a very real, very raw place within Henrik. Why did he persist in the face of such scorn? Night after night. Venue after venue.

  The question was almost entirely rhetorical. There were two answers, though only one of them edifying. His Christian brothers and sisters needed to hear the truth, no matter how unsavory. They needed time to prepare for the Hell-on-Earth that the Great Tribulation would, for a full seven years, unleash upon believers and non-believers alike. Contrary to the more palatable fairy tale Worley and his ilk evangelized, in those last days not even the saved would be spared the pouring out of the Cups of God’s Wrath.

  The less admirable flip-side of Whitmore’s motivation, was that God’s plan doubled as his last option for livelihood which didn’t involve a hairnet or rubber gloves. His cut of the tithe and offering was proportional to a metric Pastor Newsteen had come up with to reward preachers who consistently put asses in seats. Ampli-Tithe, he called it, a combination of how long and how loud the audience applauded before and after a sermon. For Henrik, this amounted to a very meager living, but it was all he had. He’d already squandered the comfortable life of tenure he’d enjoyed in academia. Even so, Henrik didn’t believe this financial necessity invalidated his calling. He’d do the Lord’s work even if it meant being homeless. The Volkswagen mini-bus waiting for him in the parking lot bore witness to that. He could sleep in it should the rent for his studio apartment become too much of a burden. Still, given a choice, he’d prefer to learn how to become more persuasive.

  Unfortunately, steep obstacles stood between him and charisma. His face lacked symmetry. One side of his brow drooped as if he’d suffered a mild stroke. His eyes were an uninteresting brown and bulged from their sockets. His black hair lacked the lustrous sheen supplied by healthy essential oils; it was receding and thin and coated with grease and dander. His skin was oily in spots and dry and flaky in others. His cheeks displayed neither jovial fleshiness, nor lean angles. His neck, adam’s apple, and chin all ran together in an uninspired way, like million-year-old mountains eroded to mere hills. His teeth were small and the color of unhatched eggshells. His physique did him no favors. Most men benefited greatly from a tailored suit; jackets hung on Henrik as if he were a butch lesbian dressed up as Al Capone on Halloween. His pants were loose around the waist, but tight in the thigh. When he stood the hem often bunched up and dragged the floor, only to ride halfway up his calves when he sat down again. He resembled a follower, not the charismatic leader of his aspirations. Unlike Worley, he couldn’t sway people to his point of view just by smiling at them until their doubts began to wane. Nor could he mesmerize a crowd Edward-James-Olmos-style by the sheer authority and command of his voice alone. Henrik’s borderline nasal tone lacked resonance and rhythm. On a good day he sounded like the announcer of a retirement home bingo game. Pastor Rolex possessed no such detriment.

  Henrik listened as Worley’s instrument transitioned effortlessly from a Jimmy-Swa
ggart-begging-for-forgiveness breathy rasp, to boxing-ring-announcer bravado, all in one verse:

  ‘For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words.’

  Misapplication of scripture, or not, Henrik had no doubt that Worley had the congregation literally on the edge of their seats, fixating on his every lie.

  He left the locker room and followed the red EXIT signs that led out of the arena. Wallowing in self pity was punishment enough; subjecting himself to a live demonstration of someone expertly wielding the skills he lacked? That verged on masochism.

  Outside, the night air was refreshingly cool and thick with moisture. The parking lot was full. Because Henrik suffered from cluster headaches, he’d parked his van in a space along its outermost perimeter to minimize his exposure to the piercing halogen headlight beams which often triggered them. Also, parking close to the exit gave him a head start for the I-5 back to San Diego.

  Tired of ruminating about physical shortcomings he couldn’t change, Henrik tried to focus on aspects of his work over which he had a modicum of control. Perhaps, the message itself was too hard a sell? Perhaps the manner in which he edified his Christian brothers and sisters could be made more palatable? After all, bitter pills went down easier with a tablespoon of sugar. He could point out how a Post-Tribulation Rapture wasn’t all bad; he could remind congregations that the seven years of plagues and war and famine and natural disasters offered a unique opportunity to save friends and loved ones, who—without witnessing the fulfillment of prophecies recorded in the Bible firsthand—might otherwise have been impossible to convert.