Angelfire (6 page)

“I'm ready now,” I said.

The reaper snarled and leaped off the car, landing with an earthshaking thud. I didn't wait for her to charge. I crouched to the pavement, tightened my grip on each sword, and let out a terrible cry. My power erupted, deafening me momentarily, bursting forth from my body as an explosion of
inky, wispy white smoke, its strength rocking the ground like an earthquake. The pressure slammed into the reaper and my car with enough force to shove it several feet to one side. My ears rang as I watched the reaper brace herself and hold her ground. Her empty eyes stared back at me like pieces of twisted volcanic glass.

I shot at the reaper, swords high over my head. I summoned my power and leaped up, spinning through the air and crushing my foot into the reaper's jaw. As I came down, I slashed my flaming blades across her body, slicing both her shoulders. She ducked her head and chomped at me as I landed, her fangs nicking my arm and tearing the skin. She swung her neck and her head into my body, smashing me into a light pole. The light went dark as the glass rained down, shattering all around me.

I lay there, my eyes fogging over for a moment, and looked down at my arm. Cuts lined my skin from the lamp's glass and the reaper's teeth. I wiped away the blood and watched my skin heal right before my eyes. The torn flesh wove in and out as though it were being sewn back together with invisible needle and thread until my skin was smooth and flawless except for smears of blood. My gaze snapped back up to see the reaper stomping toward me. Her jaw clicked and contorted grotesquely as the bones I'd smashed with my foot healed back into place.

“You taste good, Preliator,” she snarled, giving her jaws a stretch. “I think I'll have another bite.”

I grabbed one of my swords and charged. The reaper saw me coming and threw her paw into my face, snapping my head to the side. I ground my teeth bitterly, reeled my arm back, and pounded my fist into her jaw as hard as I could. Instead of just breaking again, her jaw flung free from her skull and skidded across the pavement in a spray of blood.

Another reaper came out of nowhere. It sprang from the shadows at my left, its fangs a flash of white in the dark, but Will swept his own sword through the air between us, stopping my breath. His giant blade sliced through the reaper's neck, sending its head spiraling high over me as it hardened to stone. The head and body hit the pavement and smashed into a thousand stony pieces.

I spun back around as the first reaper reared onto her hind legs, swinging her head in a rage, and I slammed my sword through her ribcage. As the fiery blade struck her heart, she crumpled to all fours. She wheezed and gagged just before her shuddering body erupted into flames and she was gone forever.

I PICKED UP THE BLADE AND WIPED IT CLEAN ON my jeans. Will watched me with careful, darkened eyes.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Are you going to black out on me again?” he asked, hoisting his sword over his shoulders as if it weighed nothing. Now I got a better look at it. The blade was wide and almost as long as my whole body, and the hilt was incredibly beautiful, with its sleek silver and gold curves molded into what looked like a wing.

“No, I'm okay,” I said. “Sort of. So then—I did black out last night?”

“Yeah. You hit the ground pretty hard afterward.”

Heat crept into my cheeks. “Thank you for getting me back to my room.”

“I wasn't going to just leave you there,” he said. “So,
you're remembering then?”

I shrugged. “The fighting part has come back to me and my swords appeared when I called them. I felt like I knew what I was doing.” What freaked me out the most was that I didn't really need to think when I fought. My body just kind of knew what it was doing, and I was only along for the ride.

“You've had a lot of practice.”

“But everything else,” I said distractedly, looking down at the vicious swords in my hands. “It's so fuzzy, still. It's strange, because I know it's all there, but I just can't dig it out. I don't know what I am.”

“You are the Preliator,” Will declared with an edge of authority to his voice.

“I know
who
I am,” I said. “I can remember that, but I don't know
what
I am. And I don't know who
you
are.”

Hurt crushed his stony resolve, surprising me. “I am your Guardian, your servant. I'm here to protect and guide you. That is my duty, and that is all that I am.”

“How old are you?” I asked, studying his face.

“Six hundred.”

My head grew foggy. “How old am
I
?”

“I don't know exactly. A few thousand years, maybe. We have records of you predating ancient Rome.”

I crumpled to the ground next to my car. I looked up at the enormous gashes and the dent in the Audi's fender. My parents were going to kill me.

“This is all real, isn't it?”

“Yes.” Will crouched down in front of me. He wiped at my cheek. The touch was soft, kind,
familiar
. His gaze was firm but gentle. “You had blood on your face.”

I nodded toward my weapons. “Those swords are so strange looking. Why am I able to just make them appear out of thin air? Why do they light on fire?
How?
”

“They are Khopesh, an ancient weapon,” he explained. I recognized the name from my nightmares. “They are exceptional blades—meant for slashing, not stabbing, but they get the job done. We are both able to call our swords through our power with angelic magic, but once they appear, they are here. We can't conjure new ones, so you had better not lose either of them. We can will them away also, when we are holding them in our hands, or when we die. They disappear until we call them again.”

He held his sword out straight, and it vanished right before my eyes with that same shimmering light. He opened his palm and conjured the sword once more to show me how simple it was, and then he willed it away once more.

“The fire around your swords is angelfire, the only thing effective enough to destroy reapers besides decapitation. Or destruction of the heart—that's what those hooks on the backs of your blades are for.”

I examined my swords. Sure enough, the tip of the blunt edge of each blade curved back into a hook that I imagined could do an extreme amount of damage if lodged in soft flesh. I swallowed hard, picturing what had happened to the
first reaper's heart when the hook had grabbed it.

“If a reaper dies by means other than angelfire,” Will continued, “its body turns to stone instead of burning up. Silver also burns, which is why our blades are made of it, but it doesn't have the permanent effects of angelfire.”

I nodded. “That's what happened to the second reaper. Can you make the angelfire appear?”

“No. Only you can, because you are the Preliator.”

I held both swords and wondered how I'd made them light up before. They had done it just because I'd wanted them to. Could I do it again, outside of battle? I watched the blades. Was it like an on-off switch? I let one word cross my mind and concentrated.
On
. Flames erupted around the blades, leaving the handles and my hands unscorched. They didn't feel warm and they didn't burn anything. I touched the fiery swords to my pant legs and felt no heat. I touched the flat side of a blade to Will's arm. He looked at me oddly but otherwise did not react.
Off
. The flames vanished. “Cool.”

I studied one of the blades closely. Etched in the silver, just above the helve, was a series of strange, whirling, beautiful markings. “What does this mean?”

I looked up at him, and his gaze met mine.

“It's Enochian,” he explained, his attention flickering to the sword. “The language of the divine, angelic magic. You once told me that it's a prayer of power, but I can't read it myself. We've tried re-creating the writings on other weapons in order to make them as powerful as your Khopesh
swords, but so far they are the only weapons able to light with angelfire.”

“That's pretty cool,” I said. “Who engraved the prayer onto my swords?”

He sat down on the ground next to me, his back up against my car. “You did.”

I blinked in surprise. My fingers brushed the strange words, the edges of the markings scraping my skin softly. I felt a sense of nostalgia, but it was distant, like the memory of a wonderful dream. The more I admired them, the more I remembered. “Just like the tattoos on your arm. I put them there a long time ago.”

“Yes.”

I traced the spiraling symbols of the tattoo with my finger. His arm tensed under my touch and his breaths became slower and steadier. “It's so strange,” I said. “I can't believe that what I'm saying out loud isn't something I made up. I remember tattooing this into your arm. I meant for it to protect you.”

“It's an Enochian spell, like the one on your swords.”

I noticed he was watching my fingers on his skin, and I pulled back shyly. “Well, you're still here, so it must work. Why don't I have one?”

“The spell is ineffective on human skin.”

How inconvenient. “How did you find me? Do you always know where I am?”

“Yes. I can sense you above all others. I always know
where you are, and I try never to be far away. I found you again a few years ago, and the reapers found you more recently.”

“Are they hunting me now?”

“Most don't. They're too afraid. But yes, some will hunt you. Be glad it's only a few. Most of them try to stay under the radar, and the weakest ones wouldn't even know you until they saw those swords light up.”

“Will, I'm so confused,” I began. “How can I be that old when I know exactly where and when I born? I have baby pictures. I'm only seventeen.”

“When you die, you are reincarnated,” he explained. “Your body and soul are reborn over and over in the same human form. I find you again, usually when you're just a small child, and guard you as you grow up. When you're seventeen and ready to face your true identity, I wake you.”

“When you find me as a little girl, how do you know it's me?”

I caught the slightest glimmer of a smile. “I've known you for a very long time. I can always tell when it's you.”

I let my head fall back against the car. “Then I'm not immortal.”

“Not in the way that I am.”

“Does that mean you can't die?”

“I have never died, but I am not invincible. I just don't age.”

“You're so strong,” I noted. “You punched that reaper so hard and you picked her up just by her neck. She was as big
as my car. How can
anyone
be that strong?”

Will's expression turned very serious. “You're stronger than I am, Ellie.”

I shook my head tiredly. “I don't understand how it's possible—how
any
of this is possible. What are they? The reapers?”

“They are monsters in this world,” he said with an edge to his voice that forced shivers through my body. “They hunt humans for their flesh and their souls, which they harvest in order to restore the armies of Hell for the Second War between Lucifer and God—the Apocalypse. The reapers are immortal and come in many forms; they are most effective killing machines.”

“I don't understand how there can be creatures that big and no one knows about them. How come I've never seen any of them until last night?”

“The reapers don't like to be seen,” Will explained. “They spend most of their time in the Grim, where they hide from human sight. Powerful psychics, however, can sense them like the ground rumbling as a train passes by and can enter the Grim at will. Beings within the Grim can see and even interact with objects and people still in the mortal world, but they cannot be seen or heard through the veil. The reapers have had many thousands of years to perfect their hunting. They've been seen a few times by ordinary humans, but these sightings are rare and usually
happen only because the reaper is being careless. It's even rarer for reapers to intentionally allow a human to see them and not kill them, but some like to do that for sport. There are legends about them in virtually every religion, with all the legends identifying them as harbingers of death. But instead of guiding people to the afterlife, the reapers eat them, and their souls get one-way tickets to Hell.”

“So there are no studies of them, even though there have been sightings?” I asked. “Never? People believe in Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, and I see documentaries about expeditions to find them on the History Channel all the time—not that I watch that channel much or anything. There's no proof that either of those exist. Yet the reapers leave bodies behind like Mr. Meyer's and no one ever stops to wonder?”

“Reaper attacks are usually blamed on animals or psychotic humans. Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster aren't real.”

“The reapers obviously are! Why hasn't there been some hysteria over sightings?”

Will took a breath and spoke slowly. “There've been many reported sightings of reapers. The most famous are the ones that resemble humans, hence the legend of the Grim Reaper.”

My eyes shot wide. “There are human reapers?”

He nodded, watching the ground. “Yes, there are
human-shaped reapers, called the vir, and they are the most powerful. They're also the cockiest and the most likely to show their faces to humans. The other forms, like the ursid, the lupine, the nycterid, and others, have been mistaken for other monsters, because the humans don't know what they're seeing. Like your Bigfoot, dragons, or even werewolves. The reaper you just fought was lupine.”

I remembered my daydream about the snowy forest in France. I remembered that I'd been in the Le Gévaudan region, a place where the villagers were ravaged by a wolflike monster. Historians blamed the hysteria on moldy bread, but I knew better. I felt like I had really been there.

“You keep talking about the Grim,” I said. “What is it?”

“The Grim is a dimension parallel to the mortal plane,” he explained. “Supernatural creatures live there unseen by mortals and are able to cross over into this dimension. Most humans cannot enter the Grim, unless they are true psychics or creatures like you and me. Last night, you entered the Grim unwittingly so you could see the reaper hunting you, but you did that by pure instinct.”

“How was I created?”

“We don't know what you really are. Your body is human, but your power…it's something very different. There are a lot of things about you that we still don't understand.”

“By we, do you mean you and me? Does anyone else know about me? Is there another Preliator?”

“No, you are the only one.”

“Are you my only Guardian?”

“Yes, but before me, there were others who protected you.”

“Why don't I have any others?”

“Now it is my duty alone.”

“How long have you been my Guardian?”

“Five hundred years.”

I blushed and looked away from him. “You've been following me around for five hundred years?”

“I'm your soldier, your protector. And I don't follow you around all the time.”

“So I'm not human, am I?”

“Not entirely.”

“Am I a psychic, like the ones who can see the reapers?”

“No.”

“Then how can I see them?”

“I don't know. You're the Preliator.”

I remembered my torn arm. “How was I able to heal so quickly?”

“Your power regenerates your body when you're injured,” he explained.

“Then how do I die, if my body just fixes itself right away?”

“Some injuries are too traumatic for your body to heal. I am the same way, and so were your previous Guardians.”

“Are
you
human? Or a psychic?”

He paused before he answered me. “No.”

“Then what are you?”

“Your Guardian.”

“That's not a straight answer,” I said, frowning. “Is Will your real name?”

“Of course.”

“So, what are you?”

“Your Guardian.”

I frowned. I had a million more questions, and I had a feeling he'd dodge as many of the good ones as possible. It should all come in time, right? There were flashes of images, of terrible things, battles and blood, scattered across my memory in distorted fragments. I looked down at the reaper's blood on my hands and I felt very sad. How could I adapt to this? I wasn't dreaming anymore. My skin felt raw from when I had hit the ground. My arm ached where it was cut. Dreams never hurt you. This was real. My nightmares had become real. I was frightened, and I didn't want to have to deal with this. Wasn't it enough worrying about getting into college?