Kellan drove through the night. At first I didn’t realize that we hadn’t gone back to the house. I hadn’t wanted to ask because I wasn’t sure what I was going to do about Vespar, but when we’d been driving for an hour, I knew we weren’t going home. So I looked up and regarded him. He had a determined look on his face, like he could do anything at that moment.
Then I felt a tug in my stomach. It was Kellan, telling me he didn’t want to talk at that moment, but to trust him. That’s when I knew something more than learning that we were soulmates, had changed between us. Something had started to grow between us, like an invisible rope, and I felt it pull me. It pulled on me when I’d been standing with Damien. Kellan had tugged on it and I knew what he wanted me to know, that it was okay to talk to other Nephilim, and that he wasn’t worried about Damien anymore. Now he pulled on it again and I knew we’d be driving for a long time that night. So I moved to the backseat and lay down, closing my eyes. I didn’t need sleep, but I rested there anyway, listening to the drive, feeling Kellan and how something rock solid had come over him.
When the first light of dawn started to peek over the horizon, I sat up, realizing I had fallen asleep for a bit. Kellan still looked refreshed. Then I grinned and leaned over my chair’s headrest in the front. “You look like you could drive for a week straight.”
The invisible rope relaxed, and I knew Kellan had relaxed with it. The corner of his mouth quirked upward. “I needed to make sure we’d get a head start.”
“From?” My mind wandered a bit, and I knew whom he meant. “From Vespar?”
Kellan nodded, grim again.
“Where are we going?”
“To get some help.”
“What?” My head jerked up. “From who?”
“Another messenger.” He watched me in the rearview mirror, his eyes studying me, wanting to know everything I felt. “She’s friendly to some of us. She’s not aligned with your father.”
“Why?”
“Because you need to know answers that I can’t give you. And you need to learn about what you can do. It’ll help you be able to control the messenger inside of you.”
I shook my head, feeling… I didn’t even know. Nervous. Agitated. Scared. And pissed. “You just decided this without even talking to me about it!”
A glimmer of a smile appeared over his face, but his eyes snapped to mine, angry. “We need space from Vespar right now. Unless you’re ready to declare war with him and face the consequences, then we needed to get away. He won’t know where we are. He can’t track us if we’re driving in a car, using human transport. He definitely won’t want to follow us even if he does figure out where we’ve gone. This messenger is not one to take lightly. She loathes demons that kill.”
I sat back and muttered, faint under my breath, “And Vespar loves to kill.”
“Yes.” Kellan stopped the car and turned around. His eyes were fierce. “He does, he does now. He started when we were young, but now the taste is unquenchable in him. He won’t stop. He can’t.”
“Then we have to kill him.” Even as I said it, no emotion was evoked inside of me. Shouldn’t I have cared? He was my half-brother.
“That’s not a question. What is the question is Gus—what she’ll do when we kill Vespar, if we can trust her or not.”
I closed my eyes swiftly, feeling a stab of pain in my heart. He was right. Gus would go crazy if we took away her other half. She’d go mad, and she’d go dark, really dark. I bit my lip because I realized that Vespar wasn’t really the one we were avoiding, it was what we’d have to do about our sister, my sister.
I felt another tug on my stomach and opened my eyes. Kellan was watching me. He was always watching me. This time he asked with his eyes if I was all right, and I nodded, closing off my emotions, pushing them down. We’d do what we had to do, and then I cleared my throat and asked with a raspy voice, “How much farther?”
He nodded outside. “We’re here. This is where we’re staying.”
We had parked outside a small white house. Trees surrounded it, not allowing for a lawn. As I got out of the car, I heard the sounds of a small river close by. I walked around the back of the house, stepping carefully around the trees. Their roots had started to grow out of the ground and I climbed up on one that curved higher than the rest. As I did, with a hand resting on the massive oak beside it, I saw a sparkling body of water that rested just underneath a small hill behind the house. A waterfall filled it from my right, splashing onto smooth rocks that glistened underneath the water.
Kellan climbed up beside me and rested an arm behind me, placing it on the tree next to mine. I leaned back against him and asked, “What is this place? It’s beautiful.”
“It’s a sanctuary.” He touched my shoulder and turned so we looked at the house. “The house is protected. The only things the human eye can detect are the trees. No human can see the house, and no tree will fall onto it in a storm. They’re magically entrusted, too. This spot is where the oldest and toughest trees live. They’re alive, Shay.”
I turned, wide-eyed, to him. And he grinned. “Not in the manner like they can talk to us, but they know they’re here to protect the house. They’ll hide it from anything we want them to. They draw their strength and knowledge from the water.”
“Let me guess. It has magic in it, too?”
“A little.” Kellan tapped my forehead and chuckled. Then he wrapped his hand around my waist and
wooshed
us from the trees and in front of the house to a small porch wide enough for two sets of feet. The door seemed to grow in front of our eyes until it reached to the top of the roof and separated into two doors. Kellan reached for the handle and waited. The door handle vibrated, turning underneath his hand. It stopped suddenly and the doors opened, as if the house decided we could enter. A breeze from the sudden movement rushed back against us and my eyes widened in surprise when I saw inside. The house was small from the outside, but the inside was grand.
Kellan waited on the porch as I wandered inside, gazing upward. Stairs wrapped around the house, leading to three levels inside. Then I moved back outside and saw there was only one level from there. I shook my head and went back inside. Kellan followed this time, and the doors whisked shut with a loud bang behind us.
I walked around the living room, trailing a finger over a glass bookshelf. “This entire place has magic, doesn’t it? The house included.”
“It’s a sanctuary for us, built to withstand darkness and good. It knows that creatures such as ourselves, who have both in them, need safety here.” He placed two bags near the steps. “This was given to me by my mother, only she knows of its existence, other than you and me now.”
My eyes fell on my book bag, and a sense of wonderment came over me. “You planned this last night, didn’t you? You knew Vespar would do something, and you knew we’d have to leave. You had every intention of taking me away with you, but…”
Why did we go to the school?
“I went and erased our existence with the school. I left Vespar’s, but made Gus disappear, too. Your father will find Vespar’s name, but no one else. He won’t find you. That’s all I’m concerned about right now.”
My eyes lifted to him. He was watching me, gazing at me with an emotion in him that I’d never seen or felt. I’d felt possession, obsession, fury, laughter, but this was different. There was a tenderness laced with it. And a different realization occurred to me. “You’re not afraid of the messengers, are you?”
Kellan never looked away, but drifted closer to me. He lifted a hand and cupped the side of my face, holding it gently. “I’m not.”
But I saw something else. He
was
scared of them, but not for himself. “You’re scared for me, aren’t you?” I was breathless when I asked that.
He shook his head and a wall slammed down in his eyes. The rope that connected us went slack. It was still there. I didn’t think even Kellan could make that connection go away now, but it was so loose it was almost as if there was no connection. Then I tightened it and watched how he stiffened in shock. “Didn’t know I could do that, too, huh?”
He grinned before turning away. I let him go, releasing my hold on the connection and followed him into the kitchen where I sat. “When are we going to see this messenger?”
“She’s coming to us.” He was rummaging through a cupboard with his head shoved inside. His voice came out muffled.
“What?” I sat up straight. “But you just said this place was safe for you and me. If she comes then she knows where it is, where we are.”
“She’s an ally. We’ll be safe with her. Trust me that you can trust her.” Kellan kept shifting through things, moving things aside.
“What are you doing?”
“I thought some food was here. We need to eat a little bit.” Then he pulled back and shook his head. “I’ll have to go into town and get some things. There isn’t any good food here for us.”
“Town?” Where was the closest town? I just remembered trees.
“I’ll have to drive there, too. It’ll be an hour before I get back.” Kellan sounded frustrated, but within seconds he was gone. And I was left alone in a magical house and trees that were alive surrounding it. I knew I wasn’t only human, but I felt very helpless in that moment.
After a few more minutes of sitting there, still feeling shocked at the turn of events, I stood to grab my bag and headed to one of the higher floors. I wandered around, studying all the bedrooms, and settled on one in a back corner. It had its own bathroom and windows on both sides. The bed was a king size on top of a sturdy wooden base and headboard. It was a simple bedroom with quilts to make it look homey for the human eye, but warm for the demonic body, especially on colder nights. I knew Kellan would appreciate the quilts, but then I remembered the entire house was given to him. Of course, he’d appreciate them; they were probably put there
just
for him.
I looked through my bag, saw two changes of clothes, and then started poking in the closets. After finding clothes upon clothes, in my size and his, I wasn’t sure why Kellan had even bothered to pack bags. However, I was glad he’d thought to pack a book. At least, I could read something if I got really bored.
Checking my phone, I saw that he’d been gone for an hour. I figured that he’d be back soon so I headed into the shower. Afterwards, I dressed in some clothes from the closet, a comfortable pair of black running pants and a loose gray top. Heading back down, I started poking around for a liquor cabinet. There had to be one. Kellan wasn’t much for drinking, but I knew he enjoyed some on occasion. It seemed the appropriate thing to do in our first night at the sanctuary.
I pulled out a bottle of wine. With two large glasses in hand, I turned for the kitchen for a bottle opener, but as soon as my foot took one step forward, the house started to shake. At first it was the floors, then the walls, then the roof. Everything was shaking. Furniture started to glide across the floor, moved by the waves of shaking. I dropped the bottle and glasses onto a couch and then I stopped feeling the movements. My eyes caught sight of a chandelier in the foyer, saw that it was still shaking, and then I looked down. I wasn’t shaking because I was floating in the air; much how I had been the night I’d turned Matt into a zombie. Just like then, I started to fall, but I caught myself. My eyes shut, and I concentrated in my mind.
Stay!
I barked at myself, but I started falling again slowly.
“Stop thinking, and it will happen.”
The voice wasn’t Kellan’s, and my eyes snapped open to see an elderly woman in the corner. Her hair was silver, pulled over her shoulders to rest below her ribcage. She was dressed in a black cloak with white trim. Both of her arms were folded over each other, and the white trim moved when she opened her arms to me. “Child, you radiate the same ferocity of your father.”
I landed on my feet, but jumped to a far corner. “Who are you?”
She smiled again, gently, but with a rueful look in her eyes. “I am your aunt, your mother’s sister.”
“My—what?”
“I know.” She glided forward smoothly and smiled to herself, as if remembering fond memories. “You were told that your mother was a human in love with a demon, but she wasn’t. Your
real
mother was a Nephilim, such as yourself, a hybrid of human and messenger. However, your mother’s body wasn’t strong enough to hold you. So they put you in that human’s body. Her body had been strengthened from years of loving her demon. He had carved her out and enforced the inside of her with demonic power. None of it touched you. We made sure of it, but you were special. You were supposed to be born so we put you in there, hiding you from your father also.” She sighed. “It made me happy, just getting you away from your father.”
My knees gave out, and I fell to the stairs where I had been hovering over. “Wha—huh?”
She laughed then, and the sound reverberated deep within me. It was a rich sound, strong, and I felt the ancestry go into me. It went deep and took root. In that moment, I felt her in me, that we were a part of each other. Her memories rushed through me at a rapid pace. Flashes of her as a young girl, with blonde hair, came to me. They were quickly followed by images of her with another younger woman, whose green eyes turned and looked at me. I gasped, flailing backward, when I felt the other woman see me. They were memories, but it was as if she really could see me.