Dark One: One for Sorrow... (The Khiara Banning Series Book 1) (25 page)

“What happened then?” I ask, at the same time as Cara. She smiles at me and bumps her shoulder against mine, a smile on her face. “You owe me a soda,” she says, and I can’t help but laugh.

Liam smiles, rolls his eyes at us like he would his own daughter, and continues. “Well, eventually there were just as many repentant Fallen than there were Lucifer’s followers. We call them demons, but they’re exactly like us; just Dark. Rumours of a prophesy began in Heaven and made their slow way to Earth. The purest soul would set us free, but only after a war between Light and Dark.”

“You,” breathes Cael, looking at me as if I’m the center of his universe. “The purest soul ever born; almost Angelic, but still human.”

Is it possible to blush with your whole body? Because I think that’s what’s happening to me,
I send my thoughts straight to him. He smiles and sits back, never breaking eye contact, his pizza forgotten. Sam takes advantage of this, and swipes Cael’s last piece, shoving it happily into his mouth.

“Your pizza’s fallen victim to my brother,” says Lisa, from her seat on the floor next to the couch Cara, Tristan and I are sitting on.

Cael shakes his head, still smiling and simply shrugs. “Let him have it.”

“That’s the problem when you’ve been given the body of a teenager for eternity, the hormones are inescapable no matter how long you’ve been alive,” says Vicky with a smirk. “Leliel here is lucky he was cursed with the body of an actual man, unlike lover boy and me. I’m in perpetual puberty.”

“How old are you?” asks Tristan.

“You mean in years? I’m old. The ‘
age’
of my body is and will forever be sixteen; when we wake up after the Fall we have a vague knowledge of how old the physical body we’ve acquired should be. Though, I know look like I could pass for fourteen on a good day.”

“Yes, well, that’s great and all, but we have business to get to,” says Liam, a tinge of annoyance clear in his voice. “Khiara, your soul should have awakened to its duties some time ago, but unfortunately that curse put on you by Morrigan seems to have caused some trouble and…
Cael
here interfering when he shouldn’t have, well that hasn’t helped either.”

Cael’s fingers run through his messy hair and he sighs. “I am well aware.”

“Okay then,” says Liam. “Khiara, your soul must awaken to its duties and for that to happen, we have to teach you as much as we possibly can about the war between our kind, and about what you must do to rouse your soul. It was supposed to happen naturally, or so said the prophesy, but as mentioned, that doesn’t seem to be an option. The Battle is in a couple of months.”

“I can help,” says Sam, his big eyes gleaming with hope. “I know that I can!”

Liam shoots him a stern look. “Sam, you have to be careful.”

The small boy frowns, his whole face falling. “But daddy, I
know
what to do.”

“No!” says Liam, this time a lot harsher than I think he intended to, because instantly he seems to regret it. “Sammy, I know you want to help. But you…” he pauses, sighs, and looks around the room as if he’s at a loss as how to deal with his young son.

“Not to get all up in your business,” says Cara awkwardly, “but uh. What exactly is going on?”

Tristan raises his hand as if he were in class. “I second that.”

Everybody in the room turns their eyes to Sam, who by now has big tears falling down his cheeks and is trembling from the effort not to make any noise as he cries. His hands are balled into chubby fists, and his cheeks are blotchy, a patchwork of red and pink. “I
know
things,” he whispers quietly.

“You know how I said that Sam was special?” Liam says, putting a hand on his son’s head. “Well, I meant it.”

“He’s Nephilim,” says Tristan, “like Lisa and me…isn’t he?”

The room falls silent, and Cael whispers to my thoughts,
brace yourself, and please, don’t feel sorry for me. I have enough of that from the others.
“Lisa,” says Liam calmly. Get out the book.”

“Aw but it’s gross and heavy!” she grumbles. Still, she gets up from the floor and walks down the hallway, into one of the various rooms, returning shortly with a large leather bound book that looks like its weight would dislocate my shoulders, though the effort she’s showing is a lot less than I would be; being a mere human.

“It’s made from the skin of the wings of one of the most beautiful and kind angels in existence,” she explains, making Cara, Tristan and I cringe a little. Lisa thumps it into the coffee table. “Well,” she amends, “she doesn’t exist
anymore
, as far as we know.”

“What was her name,” I find myself asking, a strange stirring in my chest overpowering the pleading look Cael is giving me, and his voice echoes in my head again.
Please. Your sympathy would be the worst sting, like lemon on a fresh wound. Please understand that I can’t even bear to think about her normally.

“Her name was Samael.”

Twenty-Two

Vicky’s voice fills the room. “Samael and Camael were created together, and while Camael’s glory was blue tinged with white, hers was a deep shade of magenta, tinged with olive green.”

Cael squirms in his seat, obviously uncomfortable.
I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,
he chants to himself, not realizing that our minds are still connected. Images of a beautiful blonde woman, who is almost his mirror image if not for the colour of her long hair, flash through my mind and I realize that they’re Cael’s memories of her from before and after his Fall.

“They were twins. While Camael was an angel of Divine Justice and Love, Samael was an angel of Death and Temptation. They acted in tandem, Samael taking people’s souls who fell to various temptations, and Camael judging whether or not they deserved to go to Heaven, Hell, or Limbo, embracing them lovingly in his warmth if he found their soul was filled with enough good.” She continues.

“When Lucifer Fell, he took her with him although unwillingly on her part, and Camael was left without his twin and best friend to do the job of two.”

“Until he Fell because of me.” I whisper.

“Yes,” says Liam. “Of course now others have taken their places, as…as it goes for all of us. They took on our duties on top of their own.”

“What happened to her,” I ask, holding my necklace. If ever there were a time I wanted time to stop, it would be now, because the look on Cael’s face is pure pain. I bite my lip nervously.

Don’t,
whispers Cael in my thoughts. But the question’s already being answered.

Liam shoots an apologetic look towards Cael. “She was tortured for hundreds of years by Lucifer’s followers because of her repentant nature. Eventually somebody stabbed her and left her for dead; only she
didn’t
die. I’d Fallen just seven years before she found me and had made my way into the Himalayan mountains. I had been taken in by some Buddhist monks who thought I could use my strength to help them build a new wing to their monastery, and in turn they gave me shelter, food and taught me about their religion; how’s that for irony, eh? Buddhist monks and an angel working together! They knew there was something different about me, but never pried. I suppose they had their suspicions about what I was, but they were good people.”

“Where is it that you Fell? And what century?” asks Cara. “You look like you could be from India, which would make sense geographically, if the monks were Buddhist, and in the Himalayas…but it could also be in Tibet.”

He smiles fondly at some memory that seems to flit through his mind, but doesn’t answer her questions. “If you know your history well, then you’ll understand this; it was the same century as the American Independence.”

“I was working on a wall that had cracked during a storm, when one of the monks came to me, telling me of a crazy white woman who kept asking for me.” His smile fades somewhat. “Samael finding me wasn’t a coincidence. We all seek out our own kind when in distress, and of course she was in much agony. See, the only way one of us can die is if it is another angel to harm us, but it has been known to fail in the past…and well when Lucifer had his men stab her and leave her for dead, they did more than just that.”

Tristan is sitting at the edge of his seat, his short hair stuck to his scalp from sweat. The story must be getting to him as much as it’s getting to me. “What did they do?”

“They ripped off her wings.” Lisa whispers, gesturing to the book.

Cael looks like he is going to be physically ill and he stands up abruptly, and then wordlessly walks out of the living room and into what I guess must be the bathroom, all the way there thinking,
I can’t, I can’t, I
just
can’t
.
I’m sorry.
Our mental connection is cut off. I realize that he knew we were connected and was giving me a private glimpse into his mind willingly.

“Don’t follow him,” says Sam, quietly, reading the look on my face. “Uncle Cam just needs some time to be alonesome.”

“Don’t you mean alone?” says Lisa, smiling despite the very awkward and intense situation.

Sam shakes his head, his blonde messy curls bouncing around like springs. “He need be alone. And lonesome. He needs to feel it, ‘cause he keeps it in too much and doesn’t think of it. Alonesome.”

He puts his hand over his heart, “It’s his feelings. I’m not wrong; I can feel it, in here.”

Liam sighs tiredly, and continues the story. “Of course because the monks cared for me as if I were one of their own, they took Samael in as well without many questions. I nursed her back to health which took a good year because of the shock of losing her wings. We’d been good friends in Heaven, her Camael and I, and though all of the angels were close, there were special bonds of course.”

“Samael and I fell in love, and after another year, we left the monastery and travelled the world, much of which she had seen and was eager to show me. It was truly wonderful. We knew that two angels cannot conceive children together, but still, we tried. We had a friend who worked at an IVF clinic, and we even tried to get her pregnant using…”

He looks towards his son, “other men’s specimens. Nothing worked. Eventually we decided to get a surrogate mother instead, and that is how Lisa came into this world. Meanwhile, we’d reconnected with Camael and even Verchiel who’d crossed our paths a few times, though we had to be careful when it came to contacting her. We corresponded as regularly as we could, since we moved around a lot. We settled down here almost two years ago.”

“What about Sam? You conceived him the same way?” I ask.

“No,” he says quietly, his voice quavering a bit. “Sam is our miracle baby. His kind shouldn’t exist. He is the product of two Fallen angels. We don’t know how it happened. There has always been talk about his kind, but everybody usually assumed it was just myth.”

Lisa opens the book. “Mom loved us, but she just up and disappeared two years ago. And then we were sent this book, and…”

Cara’s eyes are as round as saucers. She stands up, walks towards the book, but stops abruptly, her brow crinkling in confusion. “It glows. It’s very faint, but it still glows.”

“I can see it too,” I muse, cocking my head to the side like Pug does when he’s confused or studying something.