Tempt (Ava Delaney #3) (15 page)

“
Nope. Vanished off the face of the planet. Why?” I had tried
to find her after the trial, but just like before, she had
disappeared.

“
I think she would have been a helpful ally. Let’s hope she
hasn’t changed sides. Her knowledge is powerful.”

“
What are you?” I blurted.

He
paused as a smile grew on his lips. “I’m just a man. I was born,
matured, did my duty, and was given a great responsibility. Then,
things changed, and here I am.”

“
Are you ever going to talk in a straight line?” I slammed my
hands on the table just to feel in control of something.

“
I only do that when I feel like the person is listening,” he
said in his nice voice, the lilting one. “I tell the truth. I was
born an ordinary human, and one day, I’ll die.”

“
I thought you were immortal,” I said, narrowing my
eyes.

“
Everything comes to an end,” he replied calmly. “Even this
conversation.”

“
Wait!” I said. “Tell me things. About angels and demons.
About seraphim and Nephilim. About me.”

“
Again, there are better people to ask. But I can tell you
that the angels are soldiers, but not on Earth. Never on Earth. A
good thing or Earth would have been destroyed long ago. Even the
fallen are soldiers, and they must live in the
darkness—Hell—because the light shames them, or so the tales say.
The Nephilim were the only ones who could bridge both sides, and
take the war elsewhere. They were useful and precious because they
could stand in the dark
and
in the light without suffering.”

“
What about the… impure?”

“
Your kind is unusual in that they can pick light or dark to
live in. They fit in everywhere and nowhere. The impure nephal can
visit all without harm, but they can be influenced from birth to be
either dark or light. It’s a battle to take the impure, which is
why it’s so strange that you managed to go unnoticed for so long.
You could easily have been dragged to Hell as a child. I still
haven’t figured out that bit,” he admitted. “In the past, the
surviving impure have been unpredictable, more trouble than they’re
worth, so apprehension is to be expected.”

“
What does that mean?”

“
It means quite a few beings believe you are a ticking time
bomb, one that needs to be destroyed before it explodes and takes
out most of the world.”

“
What do you believe?”

He
leaned back in his chair. “I think everything is happening the way
it’s supposed to. I’ve been around a while, petal. It takes a lot
more than one wee girl to end the world.”

“
How long have you been around exactly?” I asked, ready to
take advantage of his talkative mood.

“
A while.”

“
Decades? Centuries? Please tell me it wasn’t B.C. Oh, my God,
how old
are
you?”

His
laughter filled the room. “I can’t remember exactly. I stopped
keeping track a long time ago. I told you. I’m from another
time.”

“
But you said you’re human.”

He shook his head. “I said I was
born
human. I was given a gift for
being a good boy.”

I glared at him. “You can’t tell me you were born millennia
ago and not give me details. What
are
you?”

He
rubbed his chin thoughtfully, as though weighing up the pros and
cons of sharing his story. Although there were more important
things going on, I had been desperate to know what he could do
since the day I met him, partly to understand what I was dealing
with.

“
I grew up in a time when Ireland was a pagan country. We
worshipped the gods, and they favoured us. I wasn’t a soldier. I
was a sensitive little soul for the age we were in. My father was
ashamed. His oldest son was a coward. He wanted to send me away, so
my mother, being the sort of woman who could turn any shame into
pride, decided it was my path to devote myself to the gods. I
trained to be a druid. Of course, we made sacrifices to our gods,
and to me then, it was worse than fighting in wars. My older sister
made me think of the people as things. Less than animals. As skin
and blood and bones. It was the only way to get through the
violence.”

The
corner of his mouth lifted, and he remained silent for a couple of
minutes, apparently lost in his memories. “I became a great Druid,
well-respected. Then a menace came. Vampires. They preyed on my
family’s village, took my family and friends from me. The gods
granted me vengeance, and I drove the vampires away. After that,
life changed. People no longer devoted themselves to the whims of
the gods. The gods decided to sleep until another time, devotion
and faith being their lifelines. Ogham gave me a special gift. I
became the Keeper of Knowledge, the Guardian of the Gods. I held
their power, their memories, their immortality. I held it all for
the day they would one day return.”

He shook
his head. “As time went by, the respect was lost. Christianity
invaded, sent our ways into the annals of history. The vampires
returned, and we were all forced to coexist in one way or another
in the end.”

“
When will the gods return?” I whispered,
fascinated.

“
When?” It was as though he woke up from a dream. His face
creased into a frown, and his voice went cold. “Never. No, not
ever.”

I ran to
my grandmother’s home. Walking somehow seemed inappropriate. I had
to know what she knew, the things that made her so sure I was bad,
the reasons she lied to me. If, historically, the impure were
capable of destruction and pain, then I needed to know why and
how—never mind how to not go down that road myself.

When she
opened the door, she stood stock still with her mouth hanging open.
She quickly gathered herself together and bade me to come inside.
The first step into her home sent thrills of melancholy through me,
a sensation I could barely stand.

“
I need to hear it,” I said when we sat down together in the
living room that was still heavily decorated with religious
ornaments. I avoided the lone picture taking pride of place above
the mantel place. The crown of thorns image had always disturbed
me.

“
Of course,” she said, nodding. “I’m… glad you came. I thought
you might not…”

“
I need information. I need to hear about my mother, the lies,
why you treated me the way you did. I need it all. Bad things keep
happening when people keep secrets. I need it to stop.”

Tears
fell from her eyes, shining droplets that ran down her chin and
were left to air dry. Anger surged through my body whenever I
looked her in the eyes, but as she talked, I had to keep on
checking her expression to make sure she was telling the truth. Her
heartbeat was already all over the place, which meant listening to
it wouldn’t give me an accurate reading of how true her words were.
I’d been learning a lot about lies lately.

“
I should start at the beginning,” she said, nodding again.
“Yes, it’s easier that way. Please don’t get angry with me. I can’t
take it anymore.”

I didn’t
say a word, but I noticed how much frailer she had become since the
trial. Seeing me seemed to add a decade to her life. I steeled
myself against the pity that kept trying to poke through my
armour.

“
I loved my son. He was perfectly normal. He had a good heart,
and he was my only child. So it probably won’t surprise you to
learn that I hated your mother, Sarah, on sight. They moved away
because I couldn’t find it in myself to be nice to her. I know you
think I’m an awful person, but there was always something in her I
detested. I just knew there was something…
wrong
about her.”

My
fingernails dug into my palm in an effort to keep in the torrent of
abuse I wanted to hurl at her.

“
She was very beautiful, so people loved her, and I was
convinced she was going to cheat on David. That and she turned up
with nothing, I mean, obvious gold-digger. Except I was wrong. So
very, very wrong. I knew she was pregnant, but I fully intended on
having nothing to do with her child. Then, she turned up in the
middle of the night, covered in blood, and told me David was dead,
and the baby was coming.”

She
wrapped her arms around herself and rocked to and fro. “You can’t
understand the shock of that, of your child dying horrifically when
you weren’t there to take care of him. It was so much to take in.
Sarah told me she had walked halfway across the country, and she
was bleeding heavily. There was a gaping hole in her neck, and the
skin around it had turned black. I still don’t know how she managed
to get to me.” She shivered, and I couldn’t help mimicking
her.

“
I said I was going to ring an ambulance, and she went
hysterical, started screaming about vampires and demons and a dead
baby. She smashed the phone against the wall to stop me. I had no
idea what was wrong with her, but then she did something. She
showed me her true face, and I fell to my knees.

“
I prayed every Sunday, but I never truly had faith, Ava. It’s
not something that comes easy. People put on a show, but true
belief, true faith, that takes a lot. But I believed Sarah. I
couldn’t deny her that night. She was having contractions, and her
neck just wouldn’t stop bleeding no matter what I did, but she kept
breathing. She said her baby just needed to be born, and then she
could sleep. The blood was black by then, thick, I had never seen
anything like it.”

I
gasped. “Then what?”

“
Then… then
he
appeared. The angel. Oh, he was beautiful and terrifying, and
I would have agreed to anything right then. She cried when she saw
him, begged him to help you. He took her hands and told her
everything would be okay, that he had come for her and her alone.
He said you had a role to play, that he would protect you until the
right time. She… she asked me to raise you, to love you, and make
sure you knew she loved you.” She shook her head and wiped her
eyes.

“
When you were born, she held you for a couple of seconds. She
smiled as though death wasn’t coming. She kissed you, stared at
you, and then she just faded away. Her skin lit up like the sun,
and suddenly, the light flew into you. The angel looked shocked. He
refused to touch you, so I had to pick you up, and you were
burning. It was like you stole her light. You didn’t. That’s just
what it looked like.”

She grew
very still on her chair. “And then he spoke to me, warned me,
really. He told me Sarah was wrong, that you would be
impure—tainted—and that a lot of demons wanted you, that they could
influence you. He made me promise to hide you, to keep you safe,
and to make you afraid. He said your path was clear, and I had to
make sure you stayed on it or terrible things would happen.” She
gripped the arms of the chair, her knuckles turning white. “He made
me promise not to tell you about your power, but to instil a sense
of fear and subordination in you. He swore that was the only way to
ensure you wouldn’t end the world. I was so afraid. So very, very
afraid, Ava.” She gazed at me with red-rimmed eyes, silently
pleading.

“
And then what?” I asked as harshly as possible.

“
See? That’s it. That’s what went wrong. You were stubborn
deep down, never born to be that submissive. It took more pain than
necessary to quieten you. There were times when I was terrified of
you. Once, after I tried to… teach you, you curled up on the ground
in a ball, and the light appeared again. It surrounded you so that
I couldn’t get near you.

“
Afterward, he came to see me sometimes, usually in the dead
of night while I prayed for help. His words never changed. And I
never stopped listening to him. I thought I was doing the right
thing. I thought I could make you pure again, but nothing worked. I
didn’t understand it, and I didn’t do one thing right by you in the
end.”

I let
her words sink in. My first instinct was to feel sorry for her.
Going from thinking the other world wasn’t real to being saddled
with a killer-baby. Or whatever. But I couldn’t see myself doing
the same thing. No matter what some celestial being told
me.

“
Did he tell you to bring me to nutjobs for a beating? Did he
tell you to freeze, burn, or starve the evil out of me? I just… I
just can’t find a way to understand any of this.”

“
Don’t you see it? That was the point of it all, I think. He
wanted you to hate evil.”

“
That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You’re just
saying that to make yourself feel better.”

She leaned forward, her hands reaching toward me. “I changed.
Don’t you remember? When that man… when the last thing happened, I
did try. Helena and Wesley both helped me see I was wrong,
that
he
was
wrong. He kept coming to see me, and I didn’t obey him, so he
punished me, too. In your teens, I finally understood that maybe he
was wrong, and I tried to be better.”

“
Until I rang you after I bit Wesley. Until I really needed
you. The way you spoke to me, it was like the good years never
happened. You killed it all in one sentence. Even when I called you
about Carl, your first assumption was that I’d killed
someone.”