Authors: Joy Nash
But she knew better than to hope. The reprieve wasn’t permanent. All the doctors agreed, it was only a matter of time before the cancer returned. When that happened, she’d be back in the States, hooked up to machines and IV drips, mind fogged with drugs. Staring death in the face. Again.
But not yet. Not today, at least. And not tomorrow. She didn’t intend to give in easily, even if she knew the battle was lost. She’d fight every step of the way. Grab every second she had left.
With a hand that barely trembled, she slid her glasses back onto her nose. The new laborer had hefted one final rock into his wheelbarrow. She blanked the future from her mind and watched him bend to grasp the handles and was struck anew by the sheer, savage beauty of his body.
At that precise moment, he turned his head and met her gaze. And lifted his brows.
Oxygen left her lungs in a rush. He knew she’d been
watching him. Good thing the desert was hot and her face already flushed. God. She’d been caught out like an adolescent girl ogling her latest crush.
His lips twitched. His eyes made a quick journey down her body and back up. Point made, he gave her his back, lifting the loaded wheelbarrow with stunning ease. Despite her embarrassment—he could hardly be impressed with what he’d seen—she didn’t look away as he moved off.
“A nice hot one, eh?”
Maddie jumped. She hadn’t realized her roommate, Hadara Stern, had come up behind her.
“And I am not, for once, speaking of the weather,” the Israeli grad student added with a wink.
Maddie covered her embarrassment with a laugh. “Ari wouldn’t like to hear that, I’m sure.” Ari, another archeological assistant, had been angling for Hadara’s attention.
Hadara smiled. “I am not blind. And neither, I think, are you. That new man, he is a work of art. What intelligent woman can resist a little artistic appreciation?”
The two women shared a completely feminine chuckle. Hadara touched Maddie’s arm before moving off.
Maddie gave herself a mental shake and continued on the path to the water station, which had been her destination before the new laborer caught her eye. She wished Hadara had come along with her. Alone, she couldn’t help brooding on her earlier visual disturbance.
Maybe, she thought, the red halo had been a product of dehydration. Not a signal the tumor had returned.
But she didn’t really believe that. Self-deception had never been her strong suit. She couldn’t deny the truth. This visual disturbance—her first since her surgery—meant the cancer inside her skull was reawakening. Unfurling its tentacles.
Her oncologist had used that exact word:
Tentacles
. Gliomas didn’t grow in nice, round, easily extracted lumps. They crept
like vines, unfurling insidious strands of death and despair. Her tumor lurked behind her left eye; one tendril encircled her optic nerve. Surgery and chemo had slowed the cancer’s progress, but the ultimate outcome of her disease had never been in doubt. Visual disturbances. Pain. Blindness. Death. The utter waste of a life.
The clock was ticking. Today, it had sped up. Maddie was tempted to succumb to screaming panic. But she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. It wasn’t in her nature to give in. She wasn’t going to die today. And not tomorrow or the next day, either. At least three days more, then, to be lived. And more after that. Exactly how many, she didn’t know. But she wasn’t going to waste a minute.
She inhaled deeply. Her nerves settled enough to allow her canteen to fill without a drop running over. A good thing, since water was a precious commodity here in the Negev. There was no source at the dig site. Their supply was trucked in from Mitzpe Ramon and stored in tanks set in the shade of Mt. Ardon’s north face.
The thrusting cliff wasn’t a mountain in the true sense of the word. Mt. Ardon rose as a wedge-shaped outcropping of pale rock at the eastern edge of a desert crater known as Makhtesh Ramon. Some twenty-five miles long and up to six miles wide, the glacier-formed
makhtesh
was an impressive geological feature. The archeological site, at the base of Mt. Ardon, lay some fifteen hundred feet below the main level of the Negev desert. The canyon was stark and beautiful; hikers and jeep tourists crawled across it regularly, following a route once traversed by ancient caravans on the Spice Road. But long before the caravans, far more mysterious inhabitants had left their mark.
Here, legend claimed, angels once walked the earth.
Maddie didn’t believe in angels. Not really. Not at all. She’d first learned of the Watchers, whose physical remains she was currently seeking in the dust of the Negev, through a public service ad placed by Demon Annihilators Mutual Network—a cult. The cult taught that the Watchers, a race of fallen angels mentioned in passing in the biblical book of Genesis, were the ancestors of a race of half-human, half-demon creatures known as Nephilim. According to DAMN, the Nephilim and their descendants had terrorized humanity throughout the ages. They were still at it, big-time, in the modern age.
DAMN’s anti-demon exhortations were everywhere: TV, radio, Internet, billboards, buses—even on posters plastered on vacant buildings and telephone poles. The face of Father Jonas Walker, the Catholic priest who had founded DAMN, appeared on almost all of the propaganda. Almost indecently handsome, the priest claimed humanity was under attack by demons. Maddie thought Father Walker had drunk a bit too much communion wine.
But, hers was the minority opinion. Father Walker and DAMN enjoyed worldwide popularity and growing respect. Most people believed in demons these days. It was easy enough to find a person who claimed to have firsthand experience. Impossible to find someone who hadn’t at least encountered a believer.
The most common demonic creature was the hellfiend. Pure demon, hellfiends lacked a corporeal form. They operated through humans, influencing weak minds with evil suggestion or controlling human behavior outright through possession of a victim’s body and soul.
Hellfiends were vicious and brutal but lacked direction. According to DAMN, less numerous but far more dangerous were the half-breed Nephilim. These “archdemon overlords,” clever and ruthless, stalked humans, killing them and drinking their blood. Capable of bending hellfiends to their will, the
Nephilim represented the greater threat. The ultimate goal of these creatures was nothing less than the enslavement and destruction of mankind. And in recent years, Walker claimed, the Nephilim had drawn very close to their goal. He pointed to the state of the world—wars, terrorism, increasing crime—as evidence.
Yes, there were thousands—millions, maybe—who had swallowed Father Walker’s teachings whole. DAMN hotlines for reporting suspected Nephilim and hellfiend activity rang off the hook. Every criminal behind bars, it seemed, claimed demonic possession or influence as a defense.
Of course, the last thing the average demon-blaming wrongdoer on the street wanted to see was a unit of DAMN “field agents” coming at him. Operating in most major cities, the DAMNers were armed to the teeth with semiautomatic weaponry and holy water, and they tended to act first and ask questions later. Sporting military haircuts, camo gear, and flashy red berets, DAMNers were quick to mete out vigilante justice. Self-righteous urban citizens, as a rule, loved the group. Police, not so much. Criminals, not at all.
For a long while, deep into her university studies, Maddie had ignored the DAMN phenomenon, though she sometimes saw members of the student chapter prowling around campus. But then cancer had abruptly interrupted her life and halted her studies. And after her last round of chemo, suffering from insomnia, she’d become absorbed in an archeological documentary on late-night cable TV.
The film
Nephilim Origins: Fact or Fiction?
had clearly been inspired by the recent media obsession with Father Walker and DAMN. Maddie had watched as an Israeli archeologist, Dr. Simon Ben-Meir, spun the tale of the Watchers, a group of two hundred heavenly angels who, some five thousand years ago, became obsessed with earth and its fledgling human race. According to Genesis and the Book of Enoch, an apocryphal
scripture, the Watchers were allowed to assume human bodies and live on earth provided they followed one important rule: they were forbidden to engage in carnal relations with the “daughters of men.” Predictably, as with Eve in the garden, temptation proved irresistible. The Watchers lay with human women, who subsequently bore the angels’ hybrid offspring. These unnatural angel/human creatures, known as Nephilim, possessed earthly bodies, heavenly powers, and unnaturally beastly appetites.
The archangels Raphael and Michael had delivered Heaven’s wrath. A great flood—the same deluge Noah and his family survived—wiped out the fallen angels and most of their hybrid offspring as well. Only a handful of Nephilim escaped. But the curse of their fathers followed them. The human souls they had once possessed were replaced with finite demon essence. This meant that when the Nephilim outlived their time on earth, they had no souls to receive a heavenly judgment. They could not proceed as humans did to Heaven or Hell. Instead, their existence was snuffed completely.
Maddie shivered. Pure oblivion. It was a concept she’d been contemplating far too often lately, as she confronted her impending death.
Father Walker believed the descendants of the original Watchers, the Nephilim he claimed lived in the modern world, retained the magic of their ancestors. With no hope of life after death, modern Nephilim made the most of their limited span of existence by twisting the stolen power of Heaven to evil purpose. They commanded hellfiends. They enslaved humans, used them for foul purpose, and when they tired of them, decapitated them and drank their blood. In short, they exulted in all types of human misery.
The documentary archeologist, Dr. Simon Ben-Meir, felt differently. Not a DAMN believer, he maintained the Watcher legend as told by Jonas Walker contained a large dose of
fantasy. The priest’s zeal was so much misguided superstition. Ben-Meir’s goal was instead to unearth remnants of the very human ancient chieftains who inspired the legend.
Father Walker immediately called Ben-Meir’s explorations in the Negev misguided and dangerous. Nothing good, the priest asserted, could come from digging up ancient evil. According to Walker, the bones of the Watchers were best left buried.
Maddie had quickly dismissed the priest’s religious mumbo jumbo. Still, the mystical overtones of the Watcher legend fascinated her as much as the archeological ramifications. For the first time in months, as she’d watched the TV documentary, she’d found her thoughts consumed by something other than cancer. She’d been pulled back to her studies.
In the days that followed, she’d read everything she could find on the Internet and in the library about the original Watcher angels and their half-breed offspring, the Nephilim. As luck would have it, the spring dig season in Israel was beginning. Within weeks she’d signed on as a volunteer archeologist on Dr. Simon Ben-Meir’s expedition. Even now, she wasn’t quite certain what she hoped to uncover here in the Negev. She only hoped she found it before she died.
Cade watched Madeline Durant bend to fill her canteen. The khaki fabric of her shorts molded against her round bottom. Blast it all to Oblivion. He was already hard, and all he’d done was look at her.
His arousal was nothing compared to his anger. He was rational enough, at least, to acknowledge the fact that the burning rage in his gut was not this unsuspecting woman’s fault. The blame clearly fell on the bastard who’d ordered him to this forsaken chunk of arid earth. Artur. Bad enough the
chieftain had commanded Cade to become a slave-maker. But sending him to the Negev, to walk the very dirt once trod by Samyaza and his cursed brethren? Cade half wished he’d let Artur kill him.
During the journey from England, he had wondered what would happen if Brax were wrong. A dormant Watcher was indistinguishable from a human. If a dormant came very close to death and survived, the experience triggered the transition to full adept power. It was only then that the dormant could be sensed by other Watchers who happened to be close enough. Brax, despite his confidence, could not be completely certain. The woman Cade pursued might be human. Even if she was a Watcher, she might not be a rival. She might belong to Clan Samyaza.
If she was kin, Cade would anchor her transition as an equal, as Cybele had done for him. There would be no shame in that. But also, no new magic for the clan. No advantage over Vaclav Dusek and Clan Azazel.
As much as Cade hated to admit it, Artur had chosen the only path to his people’s survival. Clan Samyaza needed new magic. Without it, they were all bound for Oblivion. The instant Cade had come close enough to catch her scent, he knew his journey hadn’t been in vain. Madeline Durant was a Watcher and a rival. He had only to feel his body’s response to know that truth beyond a doubt.
A dizzying urge to conquer, to dominate, to enslave, threatened to send Cade hurtling toward her. He was aware of a deep, instinctive distrust of the woman and everything she represented—a product of the Watcher curse.
Cade felt that enmity with full force now, oddly coupled with an intense sexual attraction. He paused, forcing himself to hold motionless until the rush of emotion passed. When at last it had, it was only with great difficulty that he stooped to lift the loaded wheelbarrow and turned away.
Eventually, his anger ebbed. His arousal did not. Nor would it. A Watcher in transition exuded specialized pheromones designed to lure a Watcher adept of the opposite sex. The effect had evolved as a simple matter of biological survival. Without a full adept to act as anchor, a dormant could not survive transition. Cade, whose sense of smell was intimately entwined with his magic, was particularly vulnerable to Madeline Durant’s unconscious enticement. Now that he’d scented her, there was no way he could turn away. Even if he wanted to abandon the chase, he couldn’t. He was well and truly snared—by Artur’s order as well as by the woman herself.
She would be his. There was no doubt. He only hoped he could restrain his sexual hunger long enough to gain her trust. Enslaving her would be infinitely easier if she trusted him.