—†— CHAPTER FIFTEEN —⸸—
The Awakening
She looked up at me from where she sat on the floor, surrounded by the Codex windows we’d been studying. Dark circles hung under her eyes like bruises. She’d been awake all night, watching over me after I’d nearly killed myself powering that ward. The exhaustion was written across every line of her face.
“Sarah, you need to sleep.”
“I’m fine,” she said, but her voice was thin. Threadbare.
“You’re not fine. You’ve been awake for over twenty-four hours.” I gestured toward the stairs leading up to the apartment. “There’s a bed up there. Get some rest.”
“But what if they come back? What if more of them—”
“The ward’s holding. Az and Remy will keep watch while you sleep. I’ll be down here.” I looked at her – really looked at her. The fear in those green eyes. The exhaustion. “You’re safe, Sarah. I promise. Now please, go get some sleep.”
She opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. The fight went out of her shoulders.
“Just a few hours,” she said.
“However long you need.”
She climbed the stairs slowly, each step heavy with fatigue. I heard the apartment door open above me, and close, followed by the soft creak of bedsprings.
I settled back into my office chair. Told myself I would just rest my eyes for a minute. Keep watch. Make sure nothing got past the ward.
I was asleep before I finished the thought.
Footsteps on the stairs jerked me awake. I sat up fast, straightening in the chair before she could see me. The last thing I needed was for her to think I dozed off after making all those promises about keeping watch. She had been terrified when I sent her upstairs. Terrified those angels would come back. And here I was, supposed to be standing guard, sleeping like a drunk in my chair.
Sarah came down the stairs, and I noticed that she had pulled her hair back, away from her face. Without the coif and veil framing her features, I could see her clearly for the first time. She was younger than I had thought. Pretty, even with the exhaustion still written in the lines around her eyes.
I pushed that thought away as fast as it came. I had no business thinking about her that way.
“What time is it?” My voice had come out rough.
“The clock upstairs says it’s almost four.” She gave me a small smile. “We slept most of the day.”
We. She knew. Of course she knew. I had probably been snoring down here the whole time.
I rubbed my face. My neck was stiff from sleeping in the chair. “Are you feeling any better?”
“A little.” She looked at the Codex window I had left open. “Should we keep going?”
I gestured to the floor where she had been sitting before. “Let’s see if we can figure this out.”
It was well into the evening and we had been at it for hours now.
Sarah sat cross-legged on the floor of my office, her habit pooled around her like a black lake, her eyes fixed on the Codex window floating between us. I’d pulled up everything I could find on concealment wards, protection sigils, anything that might help hide her from the angels hunting her.
Then she reached out and flipped to the next page.
I blinked. “Wait. How are you doing that?”
She looked up at me, confused. “What do you mean?”
“You just turned the page. On my window.” I gestured at the Codex floating in the air between us.
“Oh.” She looked back at the window and swiped to another section like it was the most natural thing in the world. “I didn’t even think about it. It just felt like turning a page in a book.”
Az materialized on the desk, his little red face scrunched up as he peered at Sarah’s hand moving through the golden text. “Well I’ll be damned. The sister’s got some mojo.”
I sat forward in my chair, my exhaustion forgotten for a moment. This was something new. Something I hadn’t seen before. I pulled up my inventory window next to the Codex.
“Alright, try this one. Can you touch it?”
Sarah reached out toward the inventory screen. This time her fingers didn’t pass through. She could touch it, move it slightly, but when she tried to interact with the items inside, nothing happened.
“I can see it clearly,” she said. “And I can touch the window itself, but I can’t actually do anything with what’s inside. It’s like looking at something behind glass.”
“Huh.” I dismissed the inventory and opened my character sheet instead. “What about this?”
Same thing. She could see it, could even drag the window around a bit, but couldn’t interact with any of the actual information.
“I can see all of it,” she said. “Your stats, your abilities, everything. But I can’t change anything or open any of the details.”
“But the Codex is different.” I pulled it back to the front. “Try searching for something. Think about what you want to find.”
Sarah stared at the window for a moment, her brow furrowing in concentration. The pages suddenly flipped rapidly, blurring past until they stopped on a section about demonic wards.
“I was thinking about protection from demons,” she said, her eyes widening. “And it just went there.”
“Holy shit,” Az said. “She can actually use the search function.”
Remy appeared beside Az on the desk, both of them staring at the Codex now like it was some kind of puzzle they needed to solve. “Fascinating. She has full interaction with the Codex specifically, but limited interaction with everything else.”
“Try pulling it up yourself,” I said. “Close your eyes and try to summon it like I do.”
Sarah closed her eyes. I watched her face as she concentrated, her brow furrowing with effort. After about thirty seconds of nothing happening, she opened her eyes and shook her head.
“I can’t. When you have it open, it’s like it’s really there and I can work with it. But trying to summon it myself?” She shrugged. “It’s like trying to grab smoke. I know it should be there, but there’s nothing for me to hold onto.”
“So you need me to open it first,” I said, piecing it together. “But once I do, you can do everything with the Codex that I can. Search, navigate, even pull up specific sections.”
“Looks that way.” Sarah looked down at her hands, then back at the glowing window. “Is that normal? Can other Nephilim do this?”
“Hell if I know. You’re the first other Nephilim I’ve met.” I glanced at Az and Remy. “You two have any idea?”
Az shrugged.
Remy floated closer to the Codex, studying it like he was seeing it for the first time. “The Codex is different from your other windows, Nephilim. Your inventory, your stats, those are personal. They belong to you alone. But the Codex…” He paused, his small armored form circling the golden text. “The Codex is a repository of knowledge. It was designed to teach. To be shared.”
“You’re saying it was built this way on purpose?” I asked.
“The Arcane System was meant to help creation grow. To help mortals evolve.” He gestured toward Sarah. “It would make sense for the teaching tools to be accessible to more than one person.”
I rubbed my eyes. “Well, I guess we’ll find out more as we go. For now, if you can use the Codex when I have it open, that’s useful. It means you can actually research on your own instead of me having to walk you through everything.”
I pulled up a different page. “If you can read the Codex, maybe you can use what’s in it.”
I stopped on the simplest ward I could find. Incinerate. Maybe a dozen lines forming something that looked like a flame.
“This one’s basic. You draw it, add a drop of blood, and whatever you drew it on catches fire.”
Sarah studied the pattern. “You want me to try it?”
“Yeah. If you’ve got Nephilim blood, even dormant, you might be able to cast wards.”
“You mean with blood?” She asked.
“Just a drop. We’ll do it on paper. Small piece. If it works, then the paper should burn. I think it’s worth a shot.”
I tore a sheet from my note pad, ripped it into quarters and handed her one. Then I gave her my pocketknife.
She took it and stared at the blade for a moment. I could see her hands were shaking.
“It’s just a prick.”
“I know.” She took a breath. “I just never thought I’d be doing blood magic. You know on the count that I am literally a nun,” she said sheepishly.
“Life’s full of surprises,” Az said with an impish grin.
She managed a weak smile at that. Then she pricked her finger and started drawing. The lines were shaky, but she kept checking the Codex and adjusting. When she finished, she pressed her bleeding finger to the center.
Nothing happened.
“Did I do it wrong?”
“Try again,” Remy said. “The intent matters as much as the symbol. You’re speaking to creation. It needs to hear your will.”
She wiped the blood away from the tip of her finger and started over on a fresh piece. I could hear her frustration in her breath.
The third attempt was better. She pressed her finger down and held her breath. But still nothing.
“I don’t understand. It looks exactly like the diagram in the codex.”
“You’re copying what you see,” Az said. “But fire doesn’t give a shit about pretty lines. It wants to feed, it’s hungry. Think about its nature, about what it is. Don’t think about the fact that it’s hot. Think about the fact that it burns. What that feels like.”
She tried again. And again.
On the fourth attempt, she stopped halfway through the ward. Set the paper down. Stared at her bloody finger for a long moment.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’m thinking about what you said. When you made that ward on the wall downstairs.” She looked up at me. “You weren’t thinking about the ward itself, were you? You were thinking about keeping us alive.”
“I was thinking about keeping those angels out,” I said. “About what would happen to you if I didn’t.”
She nodded slowly, like something was clicking into place. “So it’s not about the fire. It’s about what I need the fire to do.”
“Maybe.”
She picked up the paper again. Drew the ward slower this time, her eyes half-closed. When she pressed her finger to the center, nothing happened. But her face was different now. Less frustrated. More focused.
By the fifth attempt, her hands were shaking from the repeated pinpricks. I could see drops of blood welling up from her fingertip. She had to wipe it on her habit to keep it from dripping.
I smiled as I watched her. I could almost feel her resolve. She wanted to make this work. “Take a break Sarah.”
“No. Not yet Jay, let me try just one more time.”
This time she didn’t look at the Codex first. She closed her eyes, took a breath, and drew the ward from memory. The lines were crooked, imperfect. But there was something different about them.
When she pressed her finger down, the paper trembled.
Just for a second. But we all saw it.
“There,” Az said. “Did you see that? Something actually happened.”
“What happened?” Sarah asked. “It didn’t burn.”
“No, but it reacted,” Remy said. “You’re getting close.”
Sarah was looking at her hand. At the finger still pressed against the paper.
“I felt it,” she said. “Something moved through me. Just for a second. Like a thread being pulled from my chest down through my arm and into the paper.” She flexed her fingers, still staring at them. “Is that what it’s supposed to feel like?”
“That’s the connection,” I said. “The ward pulling on your essence to power itself.”
“It wasn’t enough though.”
“No. But now you know what you’re reaching for.”
She stared at the failed ward, at her bleeding finger, at the pile of ruined paper around her. Then she reached for another piece.
“Fine, keep at it,” I said. “But please be careful. Trust me you don’t want to feel what it’s like to overdo it.”
I settled deeper into my chair. The adrenaline from the past couple days was finally wearing off. My eyes felt heavy, and the exhaustion was catching up.
“You should rest,” Az said. For once he wasn’t being a smartass about it.
I wanted to argue, but another wave of tiredness hit me. My head felt like it was stuffed with cotton. Every muscle ached. I could feel my heartbeat in my temples.
Sarah looked up. “Jay, when’s the last time you actually slept?”
I tried to remember. Before the angel attack? The days were blurring together.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You nearly died last night. Please. Rest. I’ll keep working. I promise I won’t do anything stupid.”
She’d stayed up all night watching over me after the fight. The ward on the wall should hold plus Az and Remy were keeping watch. Maybe I should take a little nap.
“You’re getting closer,” I mumbled. My words were starting to slur. “Just keep trying.” I said through a yawn.
I let my eyes close. Could still hear her moving around on the floor. The scratch of pencil on paper. The soft sound of her breath as she concentrated. Another failed attempt. Another piece of paper joining the pile.
Those green eyes. I couldn’t stop thinking about those goddamn green eyes.
A hundred years I’d stared into them. Watched them narrow as her finger tightened on the trigger. That same face, framed in the doorway, shotgun raised, pink robe splattered with her husband’s blood. I knew every line of that face. Every freckle. The way her jaw set when she made the decision to pull the trigger.
And now here she was. Sitting cross-legged on my office floor in a nun’s habit, bleeding onto scraps of paper, trying to learn blood magic from a man she’d met two days ago. Younger. Scared. Her faith cracked down the middle like a dropped plate.
Funny how things worked out.
She wasn’t a monster. I knew that now. I’d known it somewhere deep down even while I was trapped in that loop, dying over and over at her hands. She was a mother. A wife. A woman who walked into her kitchen and found a stranger standing over her husband’s body with a bloody knife. What was she supposed to do? Invite me in for coffee?
No. She did exactly what I would’ve done. She protected her family. The fact that I’d just saved them from the real monster didn’t matter. She couldn’t have known that. All she saw was death standing in her home.
I understood. I really did.
But understanding something and living with it are two different animals.
A century of dying doesn’t just wash away because you figure out the why of it. Every time I looked at her now, something in my gut flinched. Waited for the shotgun blast. I was still standing in that hallway somewhere, watching the barrel rise, counting my last breath.
But I also wanted to protect her from everything that was coming. From the angels hunting her. From the demons crawling through this town. From the truth about what she was and what she’d become.
She looked up from her paper. Her eyes found mine in the dim light. Not warm. Not grateful. Just scared. Desperate. Searching for something solid to hold onto while her whole world crumbled around her.
She was a nun who just found out she had demon blood running through her veins. A woman of faith who watched angels try to murder her. Everything she believed about Heaven and Hell and her place in God’s plan had been ripped out from under her in a single night. And now she was sitting here, pricking her finger raw, trying to learn magic from a dead man who hadn’t told her the truth about who he really was.
Who she really was to him.
I should tell her. I knew I should. But what would I even say? Hey Sarah, funny story, in about a hundred years you’re going to blow my head off with a shotgun and I’m going to relive that moment every day for a century. But don’t worry about it. I’m sure we’ll laugh about it later.
Yeah. That would go over real well.
So I kept my mouth shut. Watched her fail again. Watched her reach for another piece of paper with shaking hands.
She’d get it eventually. I could see it in her. That same steel I’d seen in the doorway with the shotgun. She wasn’t the type to give up.
And me? I was too tired to figure out what any of this meant. Too tired to untangle the knot of fear and protectiveness and old trauma that twisted in my chest every time she looked at me.
Tomorrow I’d have to be strong again. Tomorrow I’d have to teach her, protect her, figure out how to keep us both alive in a town full of things that wanted us dead.
But right now, with the ward on the wall holding and Az and Remy keeping watch, I let the darkness pull me under.
Her pencil kept scratching against the paper as I drifted off. Somewhere in the dark, I could still see her eyes. Still searching for something to believe in.