Falter Read online

  The woman put her arm around the little girl and clutched her close. “U-upstairs.” She took a deep breath.

  “Don’t scream,” said Jason. “If you scream, I will shoot this boy.”

  The woman let the breath out. Her eyes were wide and fearful.

  “Azazel,” said Jason. “Go upstairs and round everyone up.”

  The stairs were in the far corner. I went up them.

  The steps opened onto a hallway.

  My gun ready, I crept down, peering inside each room I came to.

  An empty bedroom, containing a bed with yellow ruffles.

  A bathroom, the strong scent of soap.

  Another bedroom. This time when I pushed the door open, a voice said, “Hey!”

  I aimed the gun.

  It was another little boy, the third from the picture. He was maybe a year younger than his brother.

  “Get up,” I said. “Be quiet.”

  He saw my gun, and his face betrayed his terror. Slowly, he got to his feet.

  I motioned with one hand. “Come here.”

  He lurched over to me.

  “Now, I’m not going to hurt you as long as everyone does exactly what I say,” I said. “You understand?”

  “Yeah,” he said. He sounded like he might cry.

  “Where’s your father?”

  “In his office,” he said in a tiny voice.

  “Okay,” I said. “You’re going to walk there. I’m going to follow you. You will not indicate to your father that anything is wrong, or I’ll shoot you. That clear?”

  His face crumpled.

  “Stop crying,” I said. “If you cry, I’ll shoot you.”

  He drew in a few short breaths, and I watched him forcibly swallow his tears.

  And then we were walking.

  He went all the way to the end of the hall and knocked on the door.

  “What?” said a voice from within.

  “D-dad?” The kid sounded upset. But that was okay. I could use upset.

  “What’s wrong?” The door opened.

  I grabbed the kid and pulled him close, my gun going under his chin. “Hi, Imri.”

  The man from the travel agency took me in. “Let him go.”

  I shook my head. “No.” I inclined my head. “We’re going to go downstairs and sit down with the rest of the family, okay?”

  “He’s just a little boy,” said Imri.

  “And I won’t hurt him as long as everyone does what they’re told.”

  Imri stepped out of the office.

  “That’s right,” I said, gesturing with my head again. “Just walk down the hall, please.”

  Imri began to do so. “You’re really taking this all too far, Azazel.”

  So, he knew my name. Was I supposed to be impressed?

  “We’ll talk downstairs,” I said.

  When we got back to the living room, Jason had the rest of the family sitting on the couch. He told them to scoot over for the boy I’d brought with me. He had Imri sit on a chair facing them.

  “I suppose this is about Grace,” said Imri. Despite the fact that his family was being held at gunpoint, he seemed very relaxed. He settled in the chair, resting one ankle on his knee.

  “Of course it is,” said Jason.

  Imri sighed. “Listen, I would love to be accommodating towards your requests, but I have people to think about. The whole community is clamoring for your blood. Now, what am I supposed to say to them when they find out that I simply released my hostage to you and let you all go, Jason?”

  Jason walked behind the couch where Imri’s family was sitting. “You know my name. You know Azazel was the Witch of the OF. You know who we are. If you think that’s going to scare us, you’re wrong.”

  “Not trying to scare you,” said Imri. “I’m only trying to explain my position.”

  “You have Grace, don’t you?” said Jason.

  “Yes,” said Imri. “Not in this house but somewhere close by.”

  “Then I don’t think you should worry about what other people are going to think,” said Jason. “Because you’ve got a simple choice to make. Release Grace to us, or watch your children die.” He pressed the gun against the little girl’s head.

  Imri shut his eyes. “No, no, no. You’ve got this all backwards. You don’t understand anything about what’s going on here. And if you were to kill one of my children, then that would be an irreparable action. One that would destroy any chances of our working together in the future.”

  “I don’t want to work with you,” said Jason. “I want Grace back.”

  “I suppose I can expect that your guns are loaded with the herb?” said Imri.

  Of course they were. But did that matter? Jason was going to shoot the children. Then I looked at Imri in horror. “You feed the blood to your children?”

  “Of course not,” said Imri. “That’s why I said you don’t understand what’s going on here.”

  “Look,” said Jason. “I don’t have time for you to be cryptic. The next words out of your mouth had better be telling me where Grace is, or I’m pulling the trigger. That’s ‘what’s going on here.’ So, I hope you understand.”

  Imri made a tent with his fingers. “You’ll shoot a child in the head, will you?”

  “Grace is important to us,” said Jason.

  “I knew you were unstable and violent, but I have to admit, I had thought that you had some shred of decency,” said Imri.

  Jason picked up the gun and moved it away from the girl’s head. Instead, he pulled the trigger and her leg exploded in blood.

  The little girl screamed.

  Imri stood up.

  I trained my gun on him. “Hold it.”

  Imri’s wife had gone frantic, trying to soothe the little girl.

  “We’ll go,” Imri said to Jason, his face stone. “I’ll take you to Grace.”

  “Thank you,” said Jason. He turned to me. “Azazel and Jude here will stay with the rest of your family. You should know that we’re all in constant communication.” He tapped his ear. “If I need to, at any time, I can signal them to shoot any one of them. Or all of them.”

  Imri’s nostrils flared. “So you truly are a monster, are you?”

  “Once we get Grace, I’ll be a little puppy dog,” said Jason.

  Imri knelt down next to his daughter, who was wailing. He touched her face. “It’s going to be okay, sweetpea. It will only hurt for today. I promise that it will be all better tomorrow.”

  “As long as you don’t make me mad, that is,” said Jason. “If you do, she might end up dead.”

  Imri stood up. “Fuck you.”

  “Let’s go,” said Jason.

  I watched as the two left the farmhouse.

  It was quiet except for the sound of Imri’s daughter crying.

  Imri’s wife looked up at me. “If I could lay Hannah down on the couch, let her stretch out, and get something to bind her leg with?”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond. The woman seemed to have recovered from the shock of seeing her daughter shot in front of her. She was quite calm now.

  “Maybe if we could all be a bit more polite,” she said. “My name is Mary. The boys are Elijah and Isaac. And this is Hannah.”

  The boys’ names were a little weird, I thought. “Doesn’t matter what your names are,” I said. “You’re not going to be able to convince us to let you go.”

  “That’s not what I’m trying to do,” she said. “I only want you to allow the boys to sit on the chairs over there and to have something to bind up Hannah’s leg.”

  “What would it hurt, Azazel?” said Jude.

  I wasn’t sure. But I was wary of giving in to this woman.

  “It’s fine,” said Jude, gesturing to the boys.

  They looked at their mother, who nodded.

  I sighed, wondering if I should contradict Jude. But I didn’t have any reason not to let them move.

  The boys went over to the chairs.

  Mary helpe
d Hannah lie down on the couch.

  “Where do you keep your bandages?” said Jude.

  Mary shook her head, laughing nervously. “We don’t. We don’t need them.”

  “Why don’t you need them?” I said.

  “Well,” said Mary, “most of the children are like me. And the ones that aren’t, we get through their childhood as best we can, and we share the blood of life with them when they’re hurt. When they come of age, they usually choose to drink it regularly.”

  The children were like her? What did she mean? And then it hit me. “You’re a Nephilim.”

  She furrowed her brow. “Nephilim? Oh, yes. I’ve heard that theory. That the book of Genesis explains our existence. But the Nephilim were giants, and we’re not tall. I honestly think it refers to some freakishly tall race of men back in those days. I am an immortal, though.”

  None of this made any sense, then. “If you’re… an immortal, then why would you capture other immortals and sell their blood?”

  “We don’t do that,” said Mary.

  “But Todd McKay. We saw him completing a deal.”

  “The blood isn’t sold,” said Mary. “It’s freely given. Whoever feeds on the blood of life and takes it into his body has life everlasting.” She smiled.

  Jude wrinkled his brow. “That’s like a quote from something, isn’t it? Don’t you think so, Azazel?”

  I shook my head. “It sounds like craziness to me.”

  “Your daughter’s leg is bleeding,” said Jude. “I’ll go get some paper towels.” He disappeared out of the room.

  “So, you don’t sell the blood? You give it away?” I was confused.

  “We have been commanded to go into all the world and spread the blood of life, so that might know and all might live eternally.”

  “Wait, you want everyone to have this stuff?” I said.

  She inclined her head. “Well, that is the goal. But we are only a few, and there are so many on earth. We may never reach them all. The important thing is to do what we can.”

  I was really confused. “I don’t get it. Where do you get the blood?”

  “It is also freely given,” she said. “From myself, from the children. And, of course, Imri and I have many grown children that you don’t see here. They have gone out into the world on their own.”

  Right. Because if she was a Nephilim, she might be a lot older than she looked.

  Jude came back into the room with a roll of paper towels. He handed it to her.

  Calmly, she pulled off a wad and began to press it against Hannah’s wound.

  Hannah, who had quieted, started crying again.

  “Shh. Shh,” said Mary. “You’re going to be all right, my darling.”

  I paced, trying to figure this out. “So, you’re giving away all this blood to whoever wants it, so they can live forever. Why would you do that?”

  “It’s what he commanded us to do,” said Mary.

  “Who commanded you?” said Azazel.

  “Why, Jesus, of course.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ~jason~

  “You should watch yourself,” said Imri, sitting in the passenger side of the truck.

  I was driving over a barely-there dirt road in the fields. The truck bumped and leapt over stones and humps in the road. On either side of us, the grass grew tall. I had turned off my earpiece because listening to everyone talk was making it too hard to concentrate on driving. “I’m doing the best I can, considering there’s not actually anything here but a path.”

  Imri laughed. “No, I don’t mean with the driving. I mean with Azazel and Jude.”

  “What?”

  “There’s some kind of tension there. I don’t know exactly what it is, but you should be careful. I had a friend once. We both loved the same girl. It was a strain on all of our relationships.”

  “Jude doesn’t…” Of course, that wasn’t true, was it? I had always been convinced that Jude had feelings for Azazel. It was her that always insisted that he didn’t. And maybe she was blind to it. “Anyway, Azazel doesn’t—” I shot a look at him. “How do you know who we are, anyway?”

  “I’ve been watching you for some time,” he said. “Since you were a small boy. I used to be quite connected to the Sons of the Rising Sun. They were useful for some of my purposes. And Mary and I both felt it was necessary that we kept certain truths about the immortals from them. They were simply too powerful. We worried that they’d use the knowledge for evil.”

  “The immortals,” I said. “You mean the Nephilim.”

  “Is that what you consider yourself? Half-angel?” He laughed, a deep, rich sound.

  I felt flustered. Why wasn’t he afraid of me? I’d captured his family. I’d shot his daughter in the leg. I had all the cards here. And yet, he was laughing at me. “Or half-god or something. Maybe. We don’t know. It’s only a theory. What do you know, anyway? You capture my kind. Exploit them.”

  “I do nothing of the sort, Jason. You’ve got things all wrong. What Mary and I do is very different from the other people you hunt. True, I am not an immortal, and I only get my ability to heal from Mary, but the others are truly vampires, as you call them, stealing what they want violently. It’s different when things are freely given.”

  “What do you do that’s so different?”

  “We don’t sell the blood. It is a gift we bestow. And we don’t steal the blood. An immortal must give it freely as well.”

  I looked at him sidelong. “Really?” If that was true, then all of the people we’d killed weren’t like the assholes that had locked us up. Instead, they were people like Azazel, who drank from those who donated blood to them. Damn it. I knew the vampire thing was going to be morally questionable. I should never have gotten involved in the first place. I’d been running around slaughtering innocent people for days now.

  “Really.”

  Would he lie to me? Maybe it was some kind of play for mercy. “Doesn’t change anything. I’ll still kill your whole family if you don’t cooperate.”

  He sighed. “That’s not why I’m telling you this, Jason. Honestly, everything’s gotten out of control. You see, I’ve always known you were immortal. It was rather funny, I thought, that your parents went to all this trouble to create you in the first place, and they never realized that the unique combination of their genes was going to produce an immortal. I was worried at first, but Mary said that the Sons would interpret your immortality as part of your abilities as the Rising Sun.”

  “It was,” I said. “That was different than this. Or at least, it was different right after the solar flare.” I found it all very confusing and weird. It made my head hurt, and I tried not to think about it too much. My life was very weird, and it just kept getting weirder.

  “Yes, during the blackout, there was a lot more power on earth. It was primal and unchecked, and within you, it was magnified. But most of it seems to have receded again, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We lost our powers to Kieran and Eve.”

  “Right,” he said. “And they conveniently disappeared, didn’t they?”

  I knew we’d had something to do with that, but I didn’t see how. If we’d stopped them, we’d done it while we were in a coma. A coma that I was often convinced we should never have woken from.

  “We watched you through all of it. We watched when you and Azazel destroyed the Sons. We watched you decimate the landscape after the blackout. We watched you in Jasontown. But you were no threat to us, and you seemed ignorant of what you were. There was no need for us to interfere.”

  “And you’re interfering now?”

  “Well, I didn’t get the chance. Once it became clear to me what you were doing, I wanted to approach you and propose that we work together. Our objectives are actually quite similar. But I didn’t, not right away, because I was wary about how violent and unstable you are. Everything you become involved in is eventually destroyed, and the people around you are often casualties
.”

  I felt a little offended, even though I could see how he was right. Things did tend to go that way with Azazel and me. “Who says we’d want to work with you, anyway?”

  “Ah, yes. Things aren’t shaping up the way I had hoped. For one thing, you began killing people who work for me. People who are only spreading the blood of life to our far-flung disciples. We are not accustomed to death, you see. We are immortal. What you’ve done… well, they are clamoring for your blood. I ordered Grace captured to try to appease them, but that seems to have backfired, because you’ve killed even more of us. So much death, Jason. It’s appalling, as I’m sure you can see.”

  “You shouldn’t have captured Grace.”

  “You shouldn’t have killed my workers.”

  “What do you mean, your workers?”

  “I’ve kept tabs on you, and it seems that you execute anyone that you think is trafficking the blood of immortals. But my people were not selling it, nor had they taken it by force. You didn’t take the time to find that out before you killed them.”

  I grimaced. So that was what Azazel and the others had been up to. They’d been killing willy nilly, assuming that anyone who had blood deserved death. I could see Imri’s point. Really, we’d started this mess, and he was only retaliating. From that perspective, Grace’s capture was minor compared to all of his people we’d killed.

  However, there wasn’t much that I could do about it now. Those people were dead, and nothing I could do would bring them back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. But things are the way they are now, and there’s nothing either of us can do about it. So, it really changes nothing. I still have to get Grace back.”

  He sighed. “I thought you might say that.”

  “What would appease your people?” I said. “Would it be anything short of the death of one of us? I can’t agree to that.”

  “Perhaps you could do us a favor,” said Imri.

  “What kind of favor?” I said.

  “Turn here.” Imri pointed.

  There was a fork in the road ahead, two small paths worming their way through the fields. I turned the truck. Almost immediately, a barn came into view. It was painted bright red, and it looked cheery and well cared for. “Is that where Grace is?” I asked.