Gifts of the Blood by Vicki Keire Page B

but his words became a torrent unleashed so fast I had to struggle to comprehend. “I didn’t know it then. I just saw a girl whose silver eyes had turned steel with pain, and I didn’t know how you could bear it, and live. But then I saw how this pain could not exist if you didn’t love your brother more than anything. It seemed wrong, that love should cause such suffering. So I interfered.” He smiled at me in the darkness, an expression full of grace and bitterness and a touch of fear. “And thus it began. Others of my kind have Fallen since the beginning of time but it was most often Rebellion or Darkness. Never me, I thought. I have ever loved the Light, Caspia. I will never join the Fallen, I thought. Some few of my brothers had walked among humans and dared to love human women. These Nephilim loved fiercely and deeply. It seemed to me they had been struck with a sickness, or taken prisoner, and I dared to pity them. How sad, I thought, to Fall because of love. Until it happened to me.”
    Nephilim.
    Fallen angels.
    My blood felt like it had little shards of ice in it. My throat had trouble working. I choked the words out anyway. “What are you… are you saying… Ethan?” I slipped a cautious hand over his taut fist, smashed against the earth. “That you're Nephilim? As in, an angel? A Fallen one?"
    "In Latin, angelus ," he corrected sharply. "In Greek, aggelos . To the Babylonians, we were sukkalin; in West Africa, malaika . Time passes, kingdoms fall, people die and with them, their names for us, but what we do stays the same."
    "And what is that?"
    "Whatever we're told," he said softly, and still he would not look at me. "I cannot fathom how many of your lifetimes I have done what I've been told. A messenger of the Light; an intermediary. Until now." His fist spasmed under my hand. "Until you."
    I shook my head, desperate to calm him almost as much as I was to calm myself. “It will be all right. That you’re… Nephilim. It will, you'll see," I promised, making my words as convincing as I could. "But what does any of this have to do with my bloodline?”
    A strange new voice, darkly taunting, reached us through the trees. “What are you telling her, E’than’i’el? Surely not the truth. She wouldn’t like you if you did that.”
    I have never seen such an instant and frightening change come over a person as I did watching Ethan as he knelt in front of me. At the sound of the strange new voice, with its low, rolling sneer, his back arched and his hands curled from fists underneath mine into claws hooked into the earth. I had seen his eyes flash like tightly leashed storms before. Now they looked as if they harbored full force hurricanes.
    “This is neutral territory,” Ethan growled, nostrils flaring as he tilted his head to the side, in the speaker’s direction. “She cannot be touched.”
    “Neutral only for mortals and innocents,” said a new voice directly behind me. I froze. At least two, then. Well. There were two of us. The odds were still good. I squared my shoulders against a slowly building anger. I did not know these voices, these strangers in my park. They were strangely double-layered voices, hiding a skin-crawling sibilance. I eased slightly forward from a sitting position into a crouch, trying to remember everything Logan had taught me about fighting dirty and male anatomy. Ethan looked desperately at me.
    “She is neither mortal nor innocent,” chimed in a third person from my right. Great. Now we were officially outnumbered, and the victims of lame insults. I growled. “So she’s fair game.” At this pronouncement, Ethan exploded upward from his crouch, pulling me with him. I found my back against the same tree I’d tried to push him into earlier, my view of these newcomers completely obscured by Ethan’s stubborn and immovable back.
    One of the voices started laughing. “Is this her, E’than’i’el? This girl? This breakable, fragile girl?” Ethan pushed so hard