Fallen by James Somers

remember? And if you aren’t for them then they’ll
consider you against them.”
    “I’m not a part of your war, Tom,” I
insisted.
    He sat there for a moment, looking at me as
though I had just struck him across the face. “You must be joking,”
he said finally. “Everyone is a part of this war whether they
realize it or not. A mortal might be able to get by with that kind
of naivety but not one of the Fae. You might not know how, but it’s
just like I suspected, Brody. You’re descended somehow from the
Fallen, and that makes you dangerous. They’ll want you to join
them—”
    “I can’t join this,” I said gesturing to the
room around us. “This house, those dolls…the people out there like
Sinister…it’s evil, and I serve the Lord, Tom. My faith is in
Jesus.”
    Tom stood up now, incensed. “There it is,”
he said, raising his voice as much as he dared. “You’re on His side already, and so you say you can’t join them .
But if you don’t, they’ll kill you where you stand.”
    We both stood there for a moment, absorbing
the reality of his words. There was no time. At any moment the door
would open and death would be upon me.
    “What do I do, Tom?”
    I read it in his eyes. I was a dead man if I
didn’t escape immediately.
    “Help me, please?” I begged, knowing that
for him to give me the least help would almost certainly get him
killed as well.
    He broke away from our staring contest,
pacing around the room, mumbling to himself. “The room will be
sealed magically, of course,” he muttered more to himself than me.
“No windows and only two doors, definitely no way out. The walls
are certainly sealed.”
    “Listening to all of this, my heart began to
sink ever further. Hope was waning. I prayed silently as I watched
him making his way around the room.
    Tom stopped beside one of the chairs set
against the wall. He scooted it to the side, looking down at the
baseboard. I walked around the leather chairs, coming up behind
him.
    Tom knelt next to a mouse hole that had been
gnawed through the baseboard. “Could it be?” he asked.
    He stuck his first finger out, prodding into
the hole. He looked at me, smiling. There’s hope yet,” he said. “We
can go through here.”
    “A mouse hole? Are you joking? Let’s just
open the door.”
    Tom stood face to face with me. “Look, I
know your new to all of this, but figure it out,” he demanded.
“They put us in this room to keep us here. Black has bound the
doors and the walls so that you can’t open or break through. But
this hole isn’t a part of the structure, and he obviously didn’t
know about it.”
    “But I can’t become that small,” I hissed,
fearing Black and Sinister had already heard us and were about to
come out of his office.
    Tom grinned. “Then it’s time for a quick
lesson on shape shifting.”
     
     
     
    “The boy is clearly a Descendant,” Mr. Black
said. “The only question is from whom.”
    He looked at Sinister standing before his
large mahogany desk rigid as a stone.
    “Certainly not of the Breed, my lord,”
Sinister said. “I’ve never seen any of our kind control elements
like fire.”
    “I do not suspect the Breed or any of the
other Descendant lines,” Mr. Black said. “My concern is that he
looks so human. Something else is at work here.”
    Sinister appeared puzzled. “If not from a
Descendant line then who, my lord?”
    “Who else but one of the Fallen themselves?”
he suggested.
    Sinister took a step back. “Is that
possible? I thought the practice had been—”
    “Prohibited by the Almighty? Of course it
was…not long after the flood. However, all Descendant lines are
easily distinguished from humans apart from glamour. Only direct
Descendants ever bore so human a form. Not even all of them
did.”
    Sinister studied his master for a moment’s
pause. “You suspect Southresh, my lord?”
    Black began to pace near his desk. “He would
be the most likely candidate,” he said.