6 Under The Final Moon (12 page)

I stormed out of Alex’s office and stopped, frozen, in front of the elevator doors. It had been less than twenty-four hours since I was expelled from the Underworld Detection Agency, and though I wanted to be haughty and over it, I felt a profound sense of longing, as if I had been evicted from my childhood home. I attempted to convince myself that what I was missing was the free and unlimited access to Post-it notes when the doors slid open.

Nina was slumped against the back wall, her shoulders sloped. Her usually pouty pink lips were pulled downward in a full-on frown so severe that even her eyelashes seemed to sag a little.

“Neens, what’s wrong? You look like a pitiful little puppy.”

She blinked up at me when I spoke and brightened slightly, stepping out of the elevator.

“I’ve been looking all over for you.”

“Didn’t you hear? I’ve been banned.”

Nina’s eyebrows rose a minute amount. “Banned?”

“I’m surprised Sampson didn’t tell you.”

Nina crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Sampson shouldn’t have to tell me, Soph, you’re my roommate and my best friend. You tell me everything! Even things I don’t want to know.”

“Hey!”

“You know what I mean: Alex, Will, Will, Alex. Blech. You’re going to have to make a decision one of these days, you know. Only one of us is going to live forever.”

“Is that why you were looking all over for me? To tell me that?”

Like one of those tragic masks, Nina’s face fell, going directly back to the piteous look of three minutes prior.

I led her to a bench in the vestibule and cocked my head, forcing myself to look adequately concerned even though I was seriously annoyed. The whole Alex-Will thing is kind of a sticky subject for me.

“Okay, Neens. What’s wrong?”

She patted my hair absently, then turned to me.

“Soph, what’s my purpose here?”

I straightened. “What do you mean ‘what’s your purpose?’ Neens, you’re indispensible at UDA. The place wouldn’t function without you!” I was stretching the truth into tall-tale category, but it was a time for sympathy, not accuracy.

“I know
that
, Sophie. I mean, overall. Why am I here? Why was I brought back? Was it just the sexy bloodlust of a ruined count, who couldn’t resist the temptation of a twenty-nine-year-old virginal French ingénue?”

I cocked an eyebrow. “Virginal?”

“It’s an expression. Anyway, you know your purpose. I mean, people are trying to kill you because of what you are, but what about me?”

I stiffened. “People are trying to kill me because what I have inside of me.”

Nina patted my hand. “Oh, honey, don’t sell yourself short. It’s just that I wander around here for decades coming to work here, looking ridiculously adorable, but what for? I can’t possibly just be part of the scenery. Can I?”

Although Nina could be—and at that very moment, was—incredibly obnoxious and a little bit self-centered, she had the uncanny ability to flash puppy dog eyes so pitiful that they made even her fangs look huggable.

“You’ve never been part of the scenery, Nina. You’re so much more than that.”

“But what do I add?”

“Uhhh . . . you . . . add fashion. You helped me to stop dressing like a blind librarian.” I showed off my slightly less librarian-ish blouse, but Nina didn’t brighten.

“But it didn’t even stick. Look at you.” Her lower lip pressed out, and even her puppy-dog eyes were starting to grate on me.

“And you help me every time there’s a case or someone is trying to kill me.”

She nodded slightly. “Well, yeah, that does happen a lot and I haven’t let you get killed yet.”

“And hey, look. Maybe you just haven’t found your purpose yet. I mean, no one does that easily. Aside from this whole thing”—I gestured to my belly, where I had always assumed the Vessel of Souls lay—“I really don’t know why I’m here either. Maybe you should just start looking.”

Nina sniffled. “You mean like when I was finding out what I was really good at?”

All of her past professions and hobbies marched in front of my eyes in a terrible parade of fangs, video cameras, and poorly written vampire sex scenes. As far as I knew she hadn’t come across a real marketable skill set, but I wasn’t ready to point that out.

“Yeah, exactly like that. You’ll find your purpose.”

Nina nodded, considering. “Yeah. I can try a few things out.”

Although I knew the only thing worse than vain attempts at searching for purpose and meaning in life was having Nina vainly attempt to search for purpose and meaning in life, she was smiling, with a little bit of a flush in her cheeks. Granted, the flush was due to her afternoon snack of someone else’s blood, but still, it made us both feel better.

You know things are bad when you are cast out of the Underworld Detection Agency and onto the streets of San Francisco and immediately miss the comfort and normalcy of an office filled with wailing banshees, drunken zombies, and trolls using all manner of excuse and stepladder to try and fondle your girlie bits. But that was exactly the way I felt the next afternoon stepping into the crosswalk, shuttled along with a crowd of sneaker-wearing secretaries and hipsters texting every step they took. Suddenly, I was out in the world and I was exposed. I didn’t know the dangers; I couldn’t look at someone and think, “Kishi demon—don’t eat anything she offers, don’t let her turn her back on you.” All around me were normal-looking people in Gap clothes or slim suits and at any moment, one of them could advance on me carrying one of those crazy daggers and screaming something that sounded like “For Narnia!” as they came racing forward, stabby bits first.

It was very disconcerting.

When I finally slid into my car, my blouse was stuck to my back and a sheen of sweat had broken out over my upper lip. My heart was thundering and my stomach was a constant mass of batting butterfly wings. I jumped when someone honked driving by, I clawed at my heart when a crumpled McDonald’s bag sailed on the wind and stuck to my shoe. Post panic attack, I sunk my key into the ignition and kept my eyes focused straight forward, hand on the door locks, as I raced by hordes of tourists and locals, and turned onto Larkin, slowing to find a spot in front of the San Francisco Public Library.

I stopped the car amongst the usual clatter and bang of the city sounds: the huff of a Muni bus stopping ; the rush of cars, honks echoing off the high concrete buildings; the guy on the corner telling me that “Jesus saves.” Once I walked into the library and the heavy door felt shut behind me, it was as if the outside world just stopped. The library was so silent that I was certain everyone in there was privy to the sound of my thundering heart and my heavy, probably-should-get-a-bit-more-cardio breathing. I immediately slipped my hands into my purse and switched my cell phone to off, turning a bright lobster red when it shouted out its loud “you’re shutting me off!” protest music. Someone shushed me. Someone else coughed.

I could see the library staff behind the checkout counter. One woman with a nose ring and a fishnet turtleneck smiled at me as she stamped the inside cover of a hardcover book. I considered going over to ask for some guidance, but strolling up and asking, “Can you point me in the direction of Satan and Armageddon?” seemed to be inviting trouble on every level. Instead, I made my way to the computer system, doing my best to remain quiet and make as little spectacle of myself as possible, which was why my shoulder bag reached out and snagged on a wooden chair, dragging it a good three feet before I could untangle myself. The same kid who shushed me before did it again. I mouthed a brief apology and decided after I found the information I was looking for, I would look up “holes one could crawl into.”

Finally, in front of the search computers and facing away from the general, judgy and shoosh-y public, I set my hands over the keys and typed: Satan, Satan’s minions, Grigori.

The entire page populated with entries.

I was relieved to see that the “evil books” portion of the library was on one of the upper floors rather than relegated to the basement in some scary movie knock-off. The stacks were well-lit and bathed in sunlight, making the spines—
Nebuchadnezzar’s Watcher; The Rebellious; Hell on Earth—
look only slightly less terrifying. I knew that the text Will had on the Grigori mentioned the
Book of Enoch
so I went directly to it, surprised to find that it was an old set of leather-bound books rather than just a single one. When I pulled them out of the stacks, the two books on either side fell out as well and I started a spastic coughing fit at the cloud of dust they kicked up. I slid the other two back in, my nose wrinkling at the quarter-inch of dust that still stuck to the covers and littered the shelves—everywhere, except where the Books of Enoch had been.

I glanced down at the intricate patterns cut into the leather on the covers of the books; they were absolutely clean, as though they hadn’t sat on the shelf long. As though someone may have accessed them very recently. A niggling of fear shot up the back of my spine, and I could feel the little hairs at the back of my neck prick up.

Who else was reading up on Armageddon?

I flipped through the pages of the
Book of Enoch I
and
II
, catching snippets of unsettling phrases referring to the Grigori as “the wakeful, the watchful ones” and “being countless soldiers of human appearance” who, in addition to rejecting “the light,” showed up here on earth to introduce such fun gifts as “knives, swords, shields” and “the use of weapons for killing blows.” The manuscript mentioned that they taught humans the “art of cosmetics,” which cosmically may have been an issue, but wasn’t one I was essentially worried about—even though it was the one that endeared Nina to the Grigori.

Also, I’d practically lived on cherry Chapstick in my teens.

I was about to put the two books back and restart my search to see if they had
Satan for Dummies
or something along the lines of
The Idiots Guide to Demon Half-Breeds
when a stack of papers that had been folded in half and shoved between the pages of one of the books floated out. I reached down to grab it, feeling the delicate, onionskin pages between my fingers. I glanced down at the handwritten title and cover image—it almost looked as though the packet were someone’s term paper circa the second century BC, or some kind of hideously terrifying wedding program chock-f of grotesque images of fallen angel half-men, their human features visible but stretched in weird and scary ways. Oh, and they were naked.

“The Nephilim,” I read. I traced my hand over the pencil image of blank, hollow-eyed faces looking out, and read the description underneath. “The offspring of the Watchers, or the Grigori, were dispatched to Earth to watch over the humans. Instead, the Grigori lusted after human women and defected en masse to illicitly instruct humanity and procreate among them. The offspring of this unholy union is the Nephilim.”

My stomach stated to churn. I scanned further, noting that Noah’s Great Flood had been called to wash away the “stain” of the Nephilim so that the earth could repopulate. I scanned over the list of fallen angels—a kind of evil family tree, if you will, pausing on Satanail. The sketch beside it made my breath catch.

It was Lucas Szabo.

The pale eyes and high cheekbones that stared out from the picture were so familiar because I saw them every day.

They were also mine.

I bore my mother’s high forehead and slightly-larger-than-pixie nose, but the eyes, the cheekbones, even the hard set of his mouth were my own.

My father was the trickster, the tempter, the head of the fallen. My mother was a human woman. That made me, their daughter, Nephilim—a stain upon the Earth. I didn’t know why it had never occurred to me before.

By the time I left the library the sun was setting and the fog was rolling in, blanketing everything in a cool, misty gray. I had just gunned the engine when the rain started, big, sad drops that thumped on the hood of my car, first a slow rhythm, then growing in speed and size.

“There it is,” I mumbled to myself. “A flood. It’s starting again.”

I pulled away from the curb, getting one of those big, I’m-feeling-sorry-for-myself lumps at the back of my throat, and by the time the rain had smoothed out again to a pitiful drizzle, I was crying in hiccupping fits as tiny rivers of rain water rushed along the street.

When I got home, I had mainly gotten ahold of myself, but with my rosy cheeks and runny nose, there was no way I could slide past Nina.

“What happened, pumpkin?” she said when she saw me, dark brows slamming together.

I waved at the air in the vain assumption that I was over being a sniveling idiot. “Oh, nothing. Just that I’m a stain upon the earth that God tried to wash away.” The tears came back and I was doing that terrible silent cry with my mouth open until Nina crossed the living room and threw her arms around me, crushing me to her ice-cold chest.

“Who called you a stain?” she said in a slightly disturbing vampire-baby voice. “Who would call you that?”

I huffed and sniffled. “The-the-the Bible.”

Nina pulled back, studying me. “Really?”

“My dad is Satan and my mom is regular so that makes me—”

“Nephilim,” she supplied. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

“You know about the Nephilim?”

Nina released me and guided me to a chair at the dining table, filled a kettle with water, and dropped it onto the stove. She pulled a blood bag from the fridge and yanked open the top of the teakettle. “You mind?” she asked.

I shook my head. “No, no worries.”

She dropped the blood bag into the water and turned up the stove, then leaned over, chin in hands, and looked at me. “I don’t know much about the Nephilim except that they exist. And you know, the whole mixed-breed thing.”

I felt my lower lip push out. “The flood was to get rid of me.”

Nina rolled her eyes. “Oh my God, Soph, do you know how many times people have tried to get rid of me? How many times I’ve been chased by pitchfork-wielding villagers with fire? Like, a thousand.”

“I know, but . . . I just thought people liked me.”

“You are being ridiculous. People like you.”

“Did you always know? What I am?”

Nina turned when the kettle whistled. She plucked out her blood bag, holding the plastic edge with her teeth as she dropped a tea bag and more sugar than any adult should eat in one sitting, into a mug. She topped it off with hot water and I thought she wasn’t going to answer me, or was taking her time because she was going to answer me and it was going to be something horrible—like she’d taken pity on me or thought that it was only logical that the two damnedest dames in San Francisco should share a place in the city—on the third floor so as to steer clear of imminent flooding.

“Of course, Sophie. I’ve always known that you were a pansy-ass crybaby. For the daughter of Satan, you sure didn’t get any of his fire or brimstone.”

She pierced the edge of her blood bag and started sucking, the edges of her mouth twitching up as her lips and cheeks flushed.

My mouth gaped. “That’s a terrible thing to say to someone who just found out they were a stain on the Earth. A
stain,
Neens! You know what people do with stains? They want to get rid of them. At all costs.”

Nina sucked until the plastic bag crushed in on itself, then grinned, tossing the empty at me. “Stop being such a baby and welcome to the club of the damned.”

“That’s it?”

“Of course it is.” Nina dragged a chair up to mine and plunked down, throwing an arm around me. Her voice softened. “You’re still the same Sophie you’ve always been. You’re still my best friend. You’re good, Sophie, you are. You have to believe that.”

I sniffed, feeling the tears start again. “But I’m born of evil.”

And again, Nina rolled her eyes and guffawed. “And I was made of evil.” She snatched up the empty blood bag and waggled it. “This wasn’t exactly a bag of Fritos.”

I laughed despite my knee-deep wallow in self-pity.

“I guess we’re pretty much two of a kind.”

Nina smiled. “Aw, I guess we are. Love you, Soph.”

I wrapped my arms around my best friend’s neck. “Love you, Neens.”

“Oh, what fresh hell is this?”

Vlad was standing in the living room, hands on hips, lips twisted in severe disgust.

Nina and I shared a glance and stood up, arms raised, and tackled Vlad in the death grip of all hugs.

“And Vlad is our little born-of-evil man!” I shouted.

“Who’s an evil boy, huh? Who’s an evil boy?”

Vlad stood statue still, the grimace carved into his face. “I hate you both,” he finally muttered.

I couldn’t remember the last time I had actually slept for anything longer than a few minutes. I did know, however, that it was far before the earth started trembling, houses started burning, and my countenance as a human stain was solidified in my mind. I couldn’t stand staring at the skittering ceiling shadows one more minute, so I yanked on my sweatpants and my coziest Giants hoodie, slipped into my sneakers, and tiptoed out the front door. The stairs butted against the utility room, and I angled myself around it, taking the steps softly until I was up two flights. When I opened the door, the night sky was all around me.

There were two discarded chaise longues on the roof of my building, each dragged to the waist-high stone wall that surrounded the edge, and each angled so the lounge-ee could get a full view of the cityscape with the faint sound of the bay swirling beyond. I pulled my hood up and went for the longue, nearly pitching myself over the side of the building when I realized there was already someone seated.

“Oh, God!” I landed in some semblance of a defensive move, something that, I’m sure, looked like a cross between Buffy-tough and a hibernating bear.

“Sophie?” Will’s accent cut my name, and I straightened, squinting.

“Will? What are you doing up here?”

He sat down, gestured toward the open chair, and pulled two beers from somewhere in the shadows. “I suspect the same thing as you are.”

He was wrapped in the fuzzy yellow and red Arsenal blanket that was normally spread on his bed. I could make out his stair-step abdominal muscles as he leaned in to hand me a beer. I was slightly mesmerized by his smooth, taut skin.

“Aren’t you freezing?”

Sadly, he pulled the blanket tighter across his chest. “Not really. What are you doing awake, love?”

“I asked you first.”

Will crooked his arm over his head, cradling his head in one large hand as he took a long, slow pull on his beer.

“Thinking.”

“About?”

“This.” He waved his beer bottle, indicating the city, I supposed. “Everything in it. You?”

“Same.” I took a swig. “Something’s happening, Will.”

Will’s hand found mine in the darkness and squeezed. “I know, love. But I’m not going to let it happen to you.”

A sob lodged in my chest. “I don’t think you can stop it, Will. I don’t think anyone can. It’s my father. It’s Armageddon. It’s really, really bad.”

The tears started to roll down my cheeks in a rushing waterfall. I hadn’t realized how sad and how scared I actually was. I was used to danger—I was used to the kind of danger that was serial killers or mythical idiots on quests for ultimate powers because those were things we could stop. All of us—Alex, Will, Nina, Vlad, and me. But this . . . this was something different. A race of fallen angels worse than evil. Learning that no matter what I did, I couldn’t change who I was, the evil into which I was born. I was in danger. My friends were in danger. Everything I held dear was in danger.

“It’s all because of me.”

Will shifted on his chaise, then held his blanket open for me. “Come ’ere, love.”

I paused for a half beat, then slipped off my shoes and climbed into his blanket, into his arms. I was immediately surrounded by warmth and a comfort that was overwhelming, and my body softened to fit his.

“I’m glad you’re here, Will.”

He brushed his lips over the top of my head, pressing them against the part. “I would be here even if it wasn’t my job, Sophie.”

I edged my chin up so that I could look into Will’s eyes, the gold flecks nearly hidden by shadow. “What if it really is the end of the world?”

The sound of the city, even in darkness, seemed to fade, seemed to drop into a waiting silence, and Will’s lips were on mine, pressing, tasting. His tongue nudged my lips apart, and I was kissing him back, burying my hands in his hair, then slipping them down the smooth, muscular planes of his chest. When he broke our kiss, the world came crashing in and my lips were cold, stung. His hair was a disheveled mess and his voice was throaty and rich as he pinned me with an incredible stare and murmured, “If it is the end of the world, we should make every moment last.”

His words sunk into me and my whole body was alive, for once, with something that wasn’t terror, that wasn’t ultimately devastating. My heart was pounding, slamming against my rib cage, but the ache was delicious, Will’s touch sending shock waves throughout my body.

The world was ending.

My palms slid over his erect nipples, and he groaned, his hands cupping my ass.

We were losing.

I kissed him hungrily, clawing at him because I needed him closer, wanted him more than near me.

What else was there to do?

The moisture was sinking into the blanket, was settling on my skin. A cool breeze ruffled my hair, and I snuggled down deeper into bed, deeper against the warm body lying there, his breath a rhythmic rise and fall.

I sat bolt upright.

The night came crashing back. We were on the roof of our building, sharing a single chaise longue, legs pretzeled together, bodies entwined. The memory of Will’s lips on mine, of his hands hot on my skin, sent fire through me.

“Will,” I hissed. “Will, we need to wake up. We fell asleep, we’re outside.”

His eyelashes fluttered, and then he blinked. I could see his eyes scan and then focus on me, a smile breaking across his lips. I glanced down surreptitiously, glad to see I was fully clothed—if not for my own peace of mind, then for the fact that I had successfully navigated a chaotic disaster without dropping my pants.

Hey, in the face of total annihilation, you take what you can get.

Neither Nina nor Vlad was home when I came in, and for that I was slightly grateful. I was an adult and whom I went out with and whether I stayed out all night were totally my business, but it was that much easier to swallow when I didn’t have to explain myself to my century-old vampire pals.

There was no note explaining where they had gone, but my cell phone was buzzing spastically, telling me I had missed three calls from Alex and a message from the UDA.

I dialed into my voice mail:

“Sophie? It’s Kale. Someone called for you and it was really weird. He was really weird. He wouldn’t say who he was. . . .”

My heart started to thud in my throat.

“He kind of had an accent though, and he was super-duper insistent on talking to you. Well, seeing you, actually.”

A man wanted to see me.

Insisted
on seeing me.

But he wouldn’t leave his name.

My stomach roiled and my skin started to thrum. Was it—was he—Lucas?

I could hear Kale fumble with the phone on her end of the message.

“I thought you would be in by now. Either way, I said you would be in later today. Hope that’s okay. He said he’d be by.”

I was vaguely surprised that I was able to make it through the city without the streets caving in or without being attacked from all sides by someone or something brandishing a sword or a dagger, muttering something in Latin, or uttering some iteration of Satan. But then I remembered that was probably because Satan was waiting for me behind my desk in an office I no longer worked at. Part of me considered erasing Kale’s message and hiding under my blanket eating chocolate ice cream from the carton while I let the UDA deal with it. But the bigger, less-inclined-to-run-away part of me knew that if Satan really was waiting for me, the UDA was in trouble and I would be proving Sampson right by letting it happen.

I considered donning an all-leather catsuit and packing the kind of arsenal that would make the Prince of Darkness quiver, but then I realized it had been at least three sleeves of chocolate marshmallow Pinwheels since the last time I’d attempted leather and my arsenal contained little more than a stun gun, a mostly frozen snub-nosed Rossi .357, and a four-pound dog in a rhinestone collar. Instead I dialed Alex, leaving furious, cryptic messages on his voice mail while alternately doing the same on Will’s. While I’m not completely certain what I said, I’m pretty sure it was something to the effect of, “My dad is at the Underworld Detection Agency right now. There is a good chance we’ll all be in a swirling vortex of Hell by noon, but if it’s only me that goes, please feed ChaCha.”

When I pulled into the police station parking lot, my palms were sweating and I was shaking up to my eyebrows. My head was swirling, and I was mumbling a series of witty, Buffy-style comebacks in between tearful reunion monologues, should my dad just be popping in to say he’d never meant to leave and he was so, so proud of the woman I’d become. That last part may have been pushing it, but I was willing to embrace my manic swing in emotion as something positive like personal growth—not everything is about death and destruction! Right?

When I hopped into the elevator I glared at my cell phone and checked the dial tone, certain that I had lost service or fallen into a cell-signal manhole because how could neither Alex nor Will have called me back? The angst was spreading throughout my body then, but I told myself that since I didn’t hear screaming or smell the fires of a thousand blazing souls in the elevator, things would be okay. I might even be overreacting. In an effort to center myself during the final descent, I hummed along to the elevator Muzak—something by Madonna that been sterilized and synthesized. When the elevator doors finally slid open, I was in a better place mentally. I figured that if my father was going to murder me, he would have done it a long time ago.