Iron Inheritance (4 page)

I wagged my finger, caught up in the moment to show-up Nate on a Bible quiz. He always beat me. “Bible doesn’t say that.”

Nate raised one red eyebrow and pursed his lips like he knew for a fact he was right.

“What is God’s sign that he will never destroy the world with water again?”

“Rainbow,” Ria and Nate said at the same time. Ria narrowed her eyes and barred her teeth, ever the competitor.

“What were the children of angels and humans called?”

“Nephilim.” I picked up my fork again and pushed in the syrupy bite that would send me over the edge of fullness. I smiled while I chewed, leaning back in victory, a welcome distraction for my mind. The Bible was rather interesting when you just accepted it as a bunch of myths. Not quite as enticing as the Greeks, but hey.

Grandpa nodded. “You get ten more points if you can explain more.”

Just like
Whose Line is it Anyway?
the points didn’t matter.

I shoveled in another bite. Tonight’s win would be punctuated by all of them having to roll me out of this kitchen. “Nephilim were a bunch of super-powered people created by angels and humans makin’ whoopee. Super strong, but they were all killed in the flood.”

“Makin’ whoopee?” Ria shook her head in embarrassment. “All those old-timey phrases Grampy drilled in your head are going to make you super cool one day, Evey.”

Grandpa nodded and sucked in a sharp breath. “You’re right. That’s all it says, but the Bible leaves out what’s not important to salvation. Christ’s message is clear. The history of the Nephilim is not.” He paused and scratched his short gray hair. “The Nephilim that you know of are actually known as Blood Nephilim—beings related by blood with Fallen angels and humans, and you’re right, they were wiped out in the flood.”

“Maybe we should—” Nate started.

Grandpa silenced him with a look and reached to the counter behind him, grabbing something I couldn’t see. “They were extremely powerful and deadly to the rest of humanity. Because of that, God wiped them out, but that wasn’t the end.”

Nate got up and looked out the kitchen window as another roll of thunder thudded through the air.

My mouth went dry. Why was he telling us all this? This wasn’t how the game went.

“The Blood Nephilim were so dangerous that after God destroyed them, he forbade the Fallen from mating with humans again or they would suffer eternal imprisonment.” He sighed, the lines on his face more pronounced than ever. “But there was still an angelic war between good and evil, and humanity was a natural resource for them. The Fallen and the Heavenly Host found a loophole—a way to create new Nephilim without being imprisoned eternally.”

My eyes widened as his speech got faster and faster. My pulse quickened.

“Instead of mating with humanity, angels transferred part of their essence—their souls—to a chosen few humans. The grafted pieces of essence gave them the power to fight in the angels’ battles. These new Nephilim—born not of blood, but of essence—are known as the Graced.”

Ok, he’s officially lost it. This totally explains why he’s been acting so strange.

I dropped my fork to the plate just as a massive boom of thunder thudded through the ground and rattled the plates and glasses.

“Whoa!” Ria grabbed the table, a giggle on her lips, her eyes wide with excitement.

“They’re almost here,” said Nate, his back turned to me as he stared out the window intently.

Grandpa’s face drained of all remaining color. Nate turned toward him as if waiting for orders. Grandpa hesitated, and then gave him a curt nod.

“What’s going on?” I said, my voice far away from my body, my mind misfiring.

Nate disappeared.

I sucked in a sharp breath and blinked again, looking for him.

Grandpa adjusted his grip and revealed a knife as he turned to me. “Don’t scream,” he whispered.

He sliced the knife across his palm, blood sticking to the blade.

“What the frak!” I jumped up out of my seat and lunged for him, grabbing his wrist, twisting, and knocking the knife out of his hand. Ria clapped her hands over her mouth, stifling a scream.

The knife clattered to the floor, and I kicked it under the lip of the cabinet. Grandpa didn’t even seem to notice. He pumped the fingers of his injured hand in and out to make the crimson liquid cover his palm.

I tried to hold his other wrist to keep him from moving, but before I realized it, he had twisted and freed himself. He stepped over to the window above the sink and smeared the blood across the top.

My pulse thudded against the side of my throat as I gaped at him—eyes wide with disbelief.
What do I do?
This was never one of the thousand scenarios he had me run through in disaster drills—the scenario where he went crazy. “Grandpa—” I said, breathlessly.

He shushed me and smeared more blood above the door to the porch. He muttered something under his breath and moved on to the other windows in the living room.

The rusty gears in my mind strained and finally clicked together into something that made at least some sense. “Ria, call 9-1-1.”

Ria sat frozen with her mouth half open until I snapped my fingers. “Call them,” I said in my best calm but assertive voice. Underneath, it felt like every part of me was shaking.

Ria pulled out her phone, and I turned back to the living room. He was still spreading his own blood on our walls. “Grandpa, you need to talk to me. What’s going on?”

He turned to me with guilt stampeding out of his eyes. It was the same expression he used whenever he talked about Mom, whenever he was sorry. “We don’t have much time.”

“For what?” I shook my head. “We need to get you to a hospital.”

He smeared his palm along the last living room window and his eyes softened. “Evelyn, this is going to sound strange.”

“More than it looks right now?” I scoffed and looked back at Ria.

She held the phone next to her ear but shook her head. It wasn’t going through.

Grandpa exhaled through his nose and locked his gaze with mine, his eyes completely focused, clear.

I couldn’t look away. I held onto them like an anchor.

“I haven’t been fair to you. I should have told you a long time ago, from the beginning, but I thought that if you knew, you’d never escape it, never have a chance at a normal life,” he said, his voice shaking.

“Escape what?” I shook my head. None of this made any sense.

“Your future,” he said, his eyelids drooping before he took another deep breath. “You’re a Nephilim, Evelyn. You’re one of the Graced.”

I raised my eyebrows and dropped my jaw. It was like I was talking to a different person—someone who took over his body, made him cut himself, and say things that didn’t make sense. This wasn’t my Grandpa anymore. He wouldn’t do this, joke like this.

“She’s an…angel?” said Ria, dumbfounded.

I turned and looked at her like she was even crazier than Grandpa. How was anyone even following this conversation? There was no logic to it.

“A Graced Nephilim,” Grandpa said, still looking at me intently. “She’s graced with angelic essence—given a piece of an angel’s soul and power.”

Another rumble of thunder sounded outside.

“They’re almost here.” Grandpa looked back over his shoulder as he rounded into the kitchen again. The wrinkles and age spots on his skin were more pronounced than ever. “Ria, get the go-bags. Hurry.”

Ria nodded, her eyes wide, and ran down the hall.

I clenched my fingernails into my palm. “Stop! This is crazy. I’m not a…stop this! It’s not funny anymore.”

Ria plopped two small duffel bags to the floor just as the back door slammed shut and a gust of wind tossed chocolate hair over my face.

“The outer defenses won’t hold. We have to get you out of here, Sir,” said Nate, suddenly at my side.

“Where did you—?” Ria looked back and forth from the door to Nate.

“No.” Grandpa shook his head and looked at Nate intently. “This is the safest place for us. The Babylonians would need an army and—”

“They have it,” Nate interrupted, his back rigid and his eyes staring into Grandpa’s. “There’s a cloud of pure demon essence, but I don’t think it’s the Babylonians. I don’t know what it is.”

Grandpa swallowed, and I held my breath.
He thinks I’m a Nephilim. He thinks there’s something after us.
Either he was crazy or this was real.
This can’t be real.

The earth and air grumbled, and the house shook from the floor up. Plates and mugs fell out of the cabinets.

I looked around like it was all a dream—a very bad dream.

Grandpa grabbed Ria’s and my hands and pulled us down toward the floor. Nate already had the panel open that led into the cellar. We fumbled down the steps, and Nate closed the door behind us, snuffing out most of the light. Several jars of fruits and vegetables that lined wooden shelves in the shallow, cement-lined pit had fallen and splattered on the floor. The ground appeared to rumble less down here, but the creaking wood above us seemed to disagree.

“We should get to the workshop’s bunker.” Nate looked at the corner of the cellar where a barrel concealed a narrow, fifty-foot tunnel that led to a steel-plated bunker capable of withstanding a category five hurricane. No true survivalist built a house without a secret hideout, and Grandpa was no exception.

Grandpa shook his head. “The Passover protection is stronger.”

I looked down at his hand and immediately understood the reference—the Israelites put blood over their doorways for the angel of death to pass over them and only attack the Egyptians.

I swallowed hard and grabbed Ria’s hand. Those stories couldn’t be real. It was just another myth, a—

She squeezed my hand back as a stray beam of light from the floorboards above lit her terrified face.

Nate’s hand strained on the leather strap of the panel above our heads, waiting for something, the impact, the army to come crashing down on the house and claw through the door.

We didn’t have to wait long.

Like a forest of trees all snapping in half at once, the house collapsed above us. Metal pipes and wood and tile and dishes splintered and rained down on the floor above with a crashing wave of dust.

I held my breath and closed my eyes, confusion and disbelief snapping through my bones with every sound.

Grandpa grunted and pulled me forward. I pulled Ria, and we crawled through the tunnel toward the workshop as fast as we could. Nate, the last person through the tunnel, slammed the metal panel shut in the slightly larger hiding spot. The emergency generator had already kicked on to bathe us in florescent light.

Grandpa slumped beside Ria in the corner as tears fell down her cheeks, the straps of the go-bags clutched in her hand. He patted her head as she cried into his shoulder. His eyes drooped, and his mouth hung open—more defeated than I’d ever seen him.

I knelt down and took his hand, drawing strength from his weakness. “Tell me what to do.”

He looked up like I’d woken him from a dream, his eyes whirling around until they grabbed on to my necklace like a life preserver. “I got that for her, you know—when it was whole.”

I caressed the single-wing pendant and the cracked blue stone that would have connected it to the other half. It had been my mom’s before she died.

“I tried to protect her, but he took her from me. He killed her, and I couldn’t stop him.” He squeezed my hand and kept his gaze on the pendant, tears threatening to flood past his eyelids.

Devout and religious as he was, I’d always known there was a part of him that blamed God for killing my mom when I was born. He’d never gotten over it—how could he? When I looked at her pictures, it was like looking in a mirror. He’d had to keep seeing her every day through me—a constant reminder of the daughter he’d lost.

“Tell me what to do,” I repeated, steadying my voice against the deep rumbles and vibrations rattling the bunker. We were five feet below the surface, and I could still hear the storm raging outside. Part of me still wanted to believe that was all it was.

Nate’s voice mumbled from the other corner next to the CB radio, his hand cupping the microphone to his mouth.

Grandpa shook his head. “I should have known the moment it happened today. The Babylonians are always watching for my sign.”

I took a deep breath of patience. “Grandpa, what’re you talking about? The moment what happened?”

He looked up at me for the first time, his blue eyes locking on to mine. “When you lost control. You’ve always had so much power, Evey.” He exhaled a sympathetic smile. “Your essence flared when you lost control—it was like a beacon—and they saw it.”

My gut compressed like he’d hit me.
I
was the reason all this was happening?
I
was the reason the Babylonians—

“Why are they after us? Why would seeing me—”

“Because you’re my granddaughter, because your essence looks like mine.” He paused for another moment, staring at me, then smiled and got to his feet, suddenly resolute. “Any word, Nathaniel?”

Nate shook his head. “They’re blocking all communications.”

How was this the same Nate I’d known for the past four years? How did
he
know about all this and I didn’t?

Grandpa nodded as he came to a decision, his chest puffing out so he looked muscular, more powerful than I’d seen him this whole past year. “I’ll draw them out. If you can get them to your Jeep, you’ll have a chance. Safe house first, then one of the headquarters.”

Nate looked like he wanted to protest but clenched his jaw and kept his grimace hidden behind his eyes.

“Stop!” I screamed, my chest heaving and tears spilling onto my cheeks. “No one’s going anywhere until—”

Grandpa pulled me into a hug that blocked out the rest of the world. “Everything’s going to be ok, Jitterbug. I love you.”

The words rang in my heart like they had the last time he’d said them to me—when he was lying on the ground with the one organ that should have been his ally attacking him.

The deep rumbles outside churned rocks against the metal around us. I dug my fingers into Grandpa’s white shirt, unwilling to let go. He couldn’t go if I didn’t let him.