“Alex, are you okay?” The voice sounded like it came from my doorway
I shot to a sitting position as my hand instinctively groped for one of the throwing knives I’d placed nearby on the nightstand. A hand closed over my wrist before I could grab it.
“Alex, it’s me.”
I focused on the face the hand belonged to.
“What are you doing here? How the hell did you get into my apartment?”
Chase’s face turned sheepish. “I kind of talked the apartment manager into giving me a key. I told her I was your brother visiting you on Spring Break. I wanted to surprise you, but you weren’t home yet.”
Of course he did. The apartment manager was a she and he could probably talk any female into anything. All it probably took was one flirtatious word and a crooked half smile like the one I was seeing now and she was putty in his hands. Kind of like I was now. I’d done my best not to answer his calls, not to respond to the text, and not to get up and answer the door when he’d knocked. But looking into his undiluted blue eyes, I felt my resolve rapidly evaporating. The spot his fingers were still wrapped around warmed under his touch and my own fingers itched to reach out and touch him.
“Brother huh?” I drawled, trying very hard not to smile back at him.
“Yeah. I figured it would make her more sympathetic and willing to aid and abet my breaking and entering.”
A smile tugged at my lips. “What are you doing here?” I asked with much less bite than I’d intended.
Again, he looked off. This time there was no mistaking the pink coloring that tinged his cheeks. “It’s Saturday. And technically since I am your plus one to your grandmother’s party tonight this is our first real date as a couple…we are still a couple right?” He said the last part hesitantly, like he almost didn’t want to ask for fear of the answer he might receive.
I should have said no and I should have told him he didn’t have to escort me tonight. I should have put an end to things then and there for his own good and mine because I was pretty sure it wasn’t in his best interest to end up dead and I was damn sure I couldn’t take another person close to me ending up that way. But I didn’t. And maybe it was because with him sitting on the edge of my bed, holding my wrist, and grinning at me with the high-wattage smile that sat butterflies aflutter in my belly, I breathed easier than I had in days. I didn’t feel as empty or as hopeless. The pain in my chest wasn’t as severe.
“Yes, we are,” was what I said when I should have told him the exact opposite.
He let out the breath he’d been holding and his smile grew wider, making the dimples deepen in his cheeks.
“I’m glad to hear it because I thought we could drive up to the lake early and make a day of our first date.”
He pointed to my bathroom and adjoining walk-in closet. “How quickly can you get dressed?”
I eyed him skeptically. “It depends on what I’m getting dressed for.” I could no longer fight against smiling. The girly part of me that swooned over romantic comedies and melted when reading romance novels had me giddy with anticipation of what he had planned.
“If I told you it would spoil the surprise,” he said winking at me. “But I recommend a swim suit, preferably a two-piece.”
“Sure you do,” I laughed as I got out of the bed. It was the first time I’d both laughed and smiled in days. It felt more than good.
The feeling continued for the rest of the day. We stopped for breakfast then drove the short distance to Lake Lanier, home to a quaint cluster of resorts and islands about fifty miles northeast of Atlanta.
The first surprise was parasailing. It was something I’d been wanting to do since going to Panama City with Whitney and her family senior year in high school and watching her and her little brother do it. I was too chicken to go up with them but after watching them sail over the ocean and listening to them rave about how much fun it was I wanted to do it too. The watersports company had been booked for the rest of the day and we left the day after. I hadn’t been back to a beach since then so a second opportunity never arose.
“This is amazing!” I shouted over to Chase as we sailed in the air over the sparkling water below.
The next surprise was jet skiing. Chase rented us a pair and we raced against each other to see who could get from the bank of the lake to the buoy fifteen miles out and back the fastest. He won and I ended up buying him lunch.
After lunch the last surprise was a speedboat that he’d rented for the rest of the day. My grandfather harbored a boating hobby he’d tried adamantly to get me interested in too. I think he’d figured an obsession with boats was safer than an obsession with bikes. But he’d failed. I was a lover of bikes through and through. Still, looking at the luxury speed boat with its sparkling white coat, smooth edges and sleek angles, I couldn’t not appreciate its elegant beauty. If my grandfather had taken me out in something like what floated before me, he might have been more successful. I further warmed to the boat when its engine purred to life and fell head over heels in love with it once we reached deeper waters and Chase tested out the max speed on its odometer.
I stretched out on the deck of the boat with Chase sitting beside me. The afternoon rays of the sun felt like a relaxing piece of heaven on my skin. He’d shut off the engine a while ago and was letting the gentle waves carry the unmanned vessel in whatever direction they wanted.
“I know you don’t drink beer so I picked a six pack of these up,” he said reaching into the small cooler beside him and handing me a Jack Daniels Downhome Punch.
“How’d you know this is my favorite substitute?” I twisted the top off of the bottle as he used the edge of the cooler to pop the top off his beer.
“A little birdie told me,” he winked at me. “The same one that told me you wanted to go parasailing and that you like jet skiing.”
“A bird huh?” I laughed knowing full well where he got the information from. My question was how and when.
“Fine I’ll fess up. I might know a person that’s sort of a techie genius and I might have asked him to get your best friends number for me. And I might have called her to call and check on you because you weren’t answering any of my calls or your apartment door. She might have told me to give you a little time and I might have told her that I knew what today meant to you and I wanted to do something to make it not so bad of a day. She might have given me a couple of pointers on how to go about doing that and I might have listened.” He nudged my shoulder with his. “So am I doing a good job so far?”
I stared into his sparkling blue eyes momentarily unable to speak. I was stunned by the fact that he’d cared enough to make the effort. It made me want to open up, to say things I normally kept bottled inside. Because as I lounged beside him on the deck of the boat, his presence when I thought about them made my grief markedly easier to bear.
“As hard as the days surrounding this day is for me, none of it compares to what I feel on the actual day of their deaths. I manage to keep my head above water the other three hundred and sixty four days of the year, but on this day I wake up drowning in grief. It has been like that since they died. On the first anniversary of their deaths I sobbed non-stop the entire day and the day afterwards. I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t move out of my bed. I just cried and cried and cried until I’d cried so much that there were no tears left. The year after that was the same and the year after that…” I held my left wrist out rotating it so that the inside of it faced up. I looked down at it, unable to look at him as I continued. If he looked closely, which I knew he would, he would see the faint horizontal shadow of a scar that had had years to fade to near unnoticeable. “The grief became too much to live with. Even without ever hearing of the prophecy, I thought my parents’ deaths were my fault. We were at the camp ground because of me. My mother hated the outdoors and my father didn’t really have the time to take off work to go. But I begged them and I pestered them until they caved and gave me what I wanted. I’d seen some stupid 60s movie, The Parent Trap, where they’d gone camping and I wanted to go. At first I shut my eyes against the horror I knew was about to happen. Their screams are what pried them open. I looked on as my parents weren’t just killed, but were
butchered.
Afterwards, the daemons responsible left in the direction they had come from without even sparing me a glance. I collapsed on the ground and when I started vomiting I couldn’t stop. Parts of my parents’ bodies lay mixed together and strewn across the campground around me. The park ranger and the state troopers told my grandparents when they came to get me that it had been an animal attack. Most likely a pack of wolves or a big cat. I didn’t tell them anything different. I’d never seen a daemon before then but my father had told me all about them. Even though he left the Society when I was born he never kept my heritage or his a secret from me. He told me of the Nephilim and the duty they were created to perform and that he had abandoned that duty because he loved me so much he wanted a different life for me than he’d had. I don’t think words exist that can describe the sheer horror of that day. And I relive it frame by frame, choice by choice every year on this day. It’s the one day doing what Bennett taught me doesn’t work. The bars I shut it away behind creak open and the mountain of granite I bury it beneath blows the fuck up. Thirteen was the only time I tried to kill myself but it wasn’t the only time I’ve wished I was dead. Sometimes I still do. If I were, others might still be alive. I don’t talk about that day. Not with anyone. Not ever. I don’t talk about what happened, I don’t talk about how it’s my fault, and I don’t talk about how much it still haunts and hurts me. Just thinking about it is painful enough. But I am sitting here, talking to you about it, telling you feelings I’ve never told anyone and it’s like a knife to my gut, but it’s not unbearable. The grief isn’t pulling me under and I feel… lighter…less burdened than I’ve felt since it happened. I’m smiling, I’m laughing, I’m looking forward to spending the remainder of the afternoon with you on the deck of the boat and I’m wondering what I’ll have to do to talk you into letting me drive back. So yes, you’re doing a great job so far.”
The boat had turned to where the sun beamed straight into my face when I looked up at the cloudless sky. I squinted my eyes against its blinding rays. When I opened them again I stared into a blue more breathtaking than the clearest of skies on the sunniest of days.
Chase rubbed his thumb gently over the faded scar on my wrist. “I’m sorry for your loss, and from the things you’ve said it sounds like you’ve experienced losing someone close to you more than once. But I’m grateful you’re alive and I want you to stay that way. Like I told you on the way back from Savannah I’m strong enough to take care of the both of us. You don’t have to worry about me. You don’t have to add me to the weight you carry. Yes, Nephilim fight and die young but I’m not a Nephilim remember. I’m something different and something much more. Whenever you need a day like today just let me know.” He tucked a strand of hair that the breeze had blown loose behind my ear. “I understand what you’re going through.”
His tenderness tugged at me, pulled at feelings I knew were better left unfelt. It made me feel anxious and slightly frightened. “How can you possibly understand,” I snapped at him in response because of those feelings.
The words were out of my mouth before I saw the ghost of a pain similar to my own behind his eyes that told me he spoke in earnest and not simply to soothe me. He flinched at my words and I mentally kicked myself for the reaction.
“Because,” he spoke quietly, “I’ve lost people too. People whose deaths actually were my fault. I would have given my life in exchange for theirs in a heartbeat but any choice in the matter was taken from me.” He ran a hand through his short curls then picked up his beer.
“I’m sorry.” The words were lame and an inadequate excuse for my previous ones.
He took a long swig of the beer then sat it back down. “It’s cool. You didn’t know.”
He stayed quiet for so long that I thought he wouldn’t say anymore on the matter. I didn’t feel any type of way by his silence. I wholeheartedly understood it. It took me by surprise when he started elaborating.
“I resent my mother about as strongly as I hate the Archangel and for many of the same reasons. He only divulged that being his Chosen Ones meant that we were created from The Twelve fourteen years after he told our parents that we were special, but even before then we were placed on a pedestal. Watched over and protected and suffocatingly coddled more than is healthy or normal. Of all of our parents my mother was the worst and out of all the Chosen Ones I hated it the most. For as far back as I can remember she’s always acted like my life means more than everyone else’s and it’s bullshit. I had a little brother. My parents had him three years after they had me. We were thick as thieves. Whenever you saw one of us, the other wasn’t too far behind. We each had our own rooms but we might as well have shared one. When he became too big for his crib my parents replaced it with a toddler bed. The first night he was supposed to sleep in it he climbed out of it after my father put him to bed and made his way to mine. He did the same thing every night after that. For my eleventh birthday I asked for a bunk bed. It was supposed to be my gift but we both wanted one. I think my brother might have even wanted it more than me. We argued over who would get the top bunk. Seth wouldn’t concede that I should get it because I was older. We wrestled each other for it and I ended up letting him win. The bunk bed had initially been his idea. I asked for it because my birthday was first and Seth was too impatient to wait the eight months until his. On my birthday my father had my mom take us out for pizza while he set it up. On the way back a driver of a Suburban truck fell asleep behind the wheel and collided head on with our SUV. It flipped over the bridge’s guard rail and landed in the river below. I hit my head hard enough against the window during the collision to leave a crack in the glass. At some point I blacked out. When I regained consciousness our SUV was completely submerged under water and it was rapidly filling the inside of it. My little brother was hysterical beside me, but it was me my mother’s hands were working to unbuckle and then pull through the window she’d busted out. I tried to fight her. I told her to get Seth. He was crying and terrified and the baby of our family. It should have been all of our jobs to protect him. To see to his wellbeing first and the rest of ours second. But my mother didn’t listen and she didn’t make the decision she should have made. She pulled me from the car and to safety first. She left my little brother crying and screaming hysterically in the seat beside me. The last memory I have of him is the terrified and helpless look on his face as he reached a hand out to us that my mother didn’t take. She went back for him but she knew the fate she’d left him to when she pulled me from the car and not him. Seth never got to see the wooden bunk bed my father put up at the house and I will never stop hating both my mother and myself for that. I remember hearing an argument between her and my father the morning of Seth’s funeral. He asked her how could she, and she responded that I was special.
He
said that my specialness made me more vulnerable than other Nephilim. Seth could be healed but I couldn’t and I had an
important role to play. He told her that after the funeral he was leaving and he made good on his words. A week later I overheard a conversation between my mom and the Archangel. He asked her if my father could be trusted without being around for her to keep an eye on. She said yes, but not before hesitating a moment. I haven’t seen my father since he returned to the house after Seth’s funeral, packed a bag and left. But I know after the grief had lessened enough for him to think clearly he would have come back for me. He was our primary caregiver, not our mother and it was he who took care of us not her. Our mother was too busy leading the Orlando sect and cavorting with an Archangel. He wouldn’t have permanently left me to be raised by her. Even if he could no longer stand to be around her, he wouldn’t have disappeared on me. Every time I think about that conversation between my mother and him and her moment of hesitation, I also think about my father and get this feeling that I’ve never shook. It might be all in my mind and it might not. But if I ever find even a shred of evidence, and believe me I’ll never stop looking, then Archangel or not, nearly invincible or not, I
will
find a way to make him pay… And I’ll never stop hating myself for that too,” he added with a self-directed bitterness that I was all too familiar with.