Miracle - Chapter 19: Chapter 19

By the time my phone rang I was so deep into my reading that I didn't recognize the sound. It shook my awareness back into my body with an alien tingle, like blood rushing to a limb that had fallen asleep.
I fumbled around in my pants pocket, finally remembered how to operate the thing, and put it to my ear. "Hello?"
"Hey, bubba!"
"Maddy!" I straightened up and leaned my back against the wall, feeling like a twenty pound weight had been lifted out of my body. "Are you okay? You're safe?"
"Yes. I'm in Colorado, at the school. Wait 'til you see this place, it's like something on the BBC. Well, without all the fancy accents and tea. But it's so beautiful and classy here. Mountains, and lakes, and everything's green enough to give you a headache."
"I guess the school folks like that color," I said, thinking of the book in my lap. God, how I was dying to hash over its contents with her. I had to bite my tongue, because she was calling on one of their phones. Ezra said not even my prayers were safe, so I could only assume the Nephilim were monitoring the Elioud's calls. Thanks to everything I'd been stuffing my head with the past few hours, I could appreciate how sensitive they were to the outside world finding out about their existence.
"Connor, oh my God, I have so much to tell you. On the ride here Lilah told me the most batshit crazy stuff about this place. And about us—the girls who go here, I mean. Like, you would absolutely go nuts for this crap. But I'm not allowed to—"
"Don't tell me," I said quickly, which I sensed burst her bubble a bit.
"Well, I can't yet anyway, until after you get here. It's the rule."
"That's okay," I responded. "I, uh... it gives me something to look forward to."
"Speaking of which, any word from Ezra?"
"Not yet." To be fair, though, I hadn't checked in with him. "Can you give me your new number? It doesn't come up on my phone."
She read it off to me, and I saved it into my contacts.
"Is Mom home yet?" Maddy asked.
"Nope. It's Monday." And Maddy said the next words at the same time I did. "Poker night."
"Aw, man, that means you're home alone all night, doesn't it? I'm really sorry."
"It's cool," I assured her. "I've got plenty to keep me busy." I was fingering the corner of one of the textbook's pages. "What about you? How are the dorms?"
"Holy shit, Connor, they're unbelievable. They're set up like hotel suites. Everybody gets a private bedroom, and four of us share a common room that has a television the size of our living room window, and a mini fridge, and yoga mats... they are like, ridiculous about the yoga here. We share a bathroom too, but it's huge with tons of counter space and the toilets have their own little closets so it's really not that much like sharing. I've only met one of my dorm mates so far, her name's Stephanie and she's from Arizona. She's, like, model-caliber gorgeous, and super sweet. Our other two Sapphires will be coming tomorrow, I can't wait."
"Sapphires?" I asked, and Maddy laughed.
"I know, it's so cheesy, right? But it's like a weird language everybody speaks around here. The first year girls are called Sapphires. Second years are Rubies, and third years are Diamonds. It's this whole symbolism thing they do, for teambuilding. The older students mentor the younger ones, and there's a selection ceremony at the start of the year where you get picked to join a Diamond-Ruby chain and become their Sapphire. Then you stay with the same people until graduation, learning from them and taking care of each other, doing projects together and all that. I don't really get it all yet, but I know it's a big deal."
She was excited, I could hear it in her voice. "So you're having fun?"
"Oh my god, yes. The first student dinner starts in a few minutes, Stephanie says the food here is to die for. And after that a bunch of us are going to the pool for a welcome party."
I swallowed back some tightness in my throat, unsure whether I was envious, relieved, or feeling left out. Maddy had always been a social butterfly, and every now and then I got flashes of possessive jealousy when I was feeling neglected. This was harder, though, because it wasn't like she'd be coming home to me after she finished playing with her friends. She was hundreds of miles away, having the time of her life. I was alone in an empty house.
But, I reminded myself, all my stress this morning had proven needless. Maddy was safe and happy, and that was what was important.
"Connor, I'm gonna go but you can text me at this number, okay? They've got a super strict curfew around here so I might not get to talk to you again tonight, but I'll definitely call tomorrow."
"Okay. Thanks, Maddy. Have a good time tonight."
"You too."
I hung up the phone, and sat looking down at the Elioud textbook. I wondered how much Lilah had told Maddy so far. I wondered whether Maddy was bothered by the thought of being ushered into a relationship with a Nephilim, just because she was capable of having their babies when most girls couldn't. Knowing my sister, though, as long as the guy was hot and willing to let her boss him around, she probably wouldn't care.
I flipped restlessly back through the chapters I'd already read, inventorying key information in my head. The book didn't get as deep into the technical details as I would have liked, so I had been left trying to fill in the blanks with my own scientific understanding.
All Nephilim were born male. With an Elioud partner, they could have both male and female children, but while the boys were always Nephilim, the girls were human, albeit Elioud ones. I had some theories about how that worked, but until I could get my hands on a more advanced textbook I wouldn't know if they were accurate.
Elioud-born Elioud were less fertile than those born from a woman who'd undergone the injection treatment. Again, the book didn't go into why, so I was left to conjecture. But one of the pieces that jumped out at me was the fact that an Elioud pregnant with a Nephilim son could expect a twenty-six month gestational period.
Twenty-six months. More than two years. A longer pregnancy than a freaking elephant! The only other creatures I'd heard of who were pregnant that long were certain species of sharks. But the book said that Nephilim aged at about one-third the rate of humans.
That explained why Ezra hadn't seemed to get older in all the years I'd known him. It also meant he had to be much, much older than I'd thought.
Ezra? Can you hear me?
It took a while, but my watch gave a thud.
Can you call me? I have something to ask you.
I held my breath and waited. Most of the time when I asked for a call, he told me no. He was busy, and I got that, but I was really hoping he'd make time for me tonight. My head was so full of questions and speculations it was about to burst. I'd have to be ultra careful about how I phrased things over the phone, but now I had a better idea of what I could and couldn't ask.
My phone rang, and I let out a breath when Unknown Number flashed across the screen.
"Hello?"
"Connor." Ezra's voice tickled my ear like velvet. "Before you say anything, I already know what you found today."
Of course he did.
"I can't discuss it with you. You understand? It will have to speak for itself."
"You're, uh... not mad, then?"
He sounded amused. "Let's just say I'm not surprised that you couldn't resist temptation."
I flushed a bit, absurdly, because my horny teenaged brain was rewiring those words into an entirely different context for no reason.
"But I also hope you understand how important it is to keep it to yourself."
"Yeah." The book had recounted, quite graphically, how the escalating tensions between the Nephilim and humans had nearly brought the world to self-destruction. Vicious atrocities, on both sides of the equation. Rape and murder, enslavement, cannibalism. Mass forced sterilizations that were sometimes chemical, and sometimes... not. Entire cities leveled to the ground.
God blamed the unauthorized existence of the Nephilim for all Earth's problems. Disgusted with what humanity had become, he decided to wipe the slate clean and start over. Cue the Great Flood—but told from the Nephilim perspective, it was far more horrifying than a mere thunderstorm.
Michael and his army rounded up every Watcher that had infiltrated God's creation. They bound them to the top of the highest peak on Earth, and slaughtered first their mortal wives, then their surviving Nephilim sons and grandsons and great-grandsons, one by one. The angels' cries of anguish were said to have torn the skies in two, turned the clouds to blood. And all that rain that rose up to drown the world?
It was the Watchers' tears.
I hadn't gotten through the final chapters of the textbook yet, but that wasn't the last time God was said to have brought about a disaster to cleanse the Earth of Nephilim influence. He was more protective of his humans now, and had kept the divine judgments to a smaller scale ever since. But whenever the Nephilim started butting heads a little too much with God's pampered pets, something drastic usually happened shortly thereafter, and the cost was measured in Nephilim blood. Meanwhile, the Watchers were chained away in some sort of netherworld, sentenced to an eternity reliving the destruction of everything they had loved.
Bleak stuff. So now, the Nephilim had tightened their societal laws to a near stranglehold to prevent anything like that from ever happening again.
"I get it," I told Ezra sincerely. "I won't say anything. I just wanted to know—"
"I haven't heard from the council yet." He sounded annoyed, though I got the sense it was with them, not me. "But I'm checking with their records department every day."
"That's not what... I mean, it's good to know, but I was going to ask something else."
"What's that?"
"How old are you?"
He got quiet for a moment. "Eighteen," he finally said.
"Is that in your years, or mine?" I couldn't think of a better way to ask the question, since technically a year was the same length of time regardless. But he knew what I meant.
"Yours."
Eighteen times three was... "Oh, shit. You're old."
He started laughing, making my stomach flip over. "Yeah, well. No need to hand me the Ben-Gay just yet."
I laughed too. "I didn't mean it like that."
"Did Madison make it to school?"
"Yeah, I just got off the phone with her a few minutes ago. She seems happy."
"Good." He didn't say I-told-you-so. "Things are all right with your mother?"
"I think so. The money helped. She might lose it all at poker tonight, though."
"Tell me if I should send more."
"What I need more of is the pheromone blocker. There's not much left."
"It hasn't gotten there yet?" He suddenly sounded alarmed.
"No, why?"
"I put it in the mail last week. You should have it by now."
"Uh-uh."
"Shit. I knew I should have brought it down to you myself. How much do you have left?"
"Maybe four or five more applications?"
"Shit," he said again, and now he sounded upset. "Okay, listen. It takes five days to make another batch. I'll go back to the lab now and get one started. But you've got to lay low in the meantime. Stay home, save what you've got for emergencies only. No more experiments, understand?"
The urgency in his tone was scaring me. "I'll be fine, Ezra, I can make it a few days no problem."
"Keep the watch on. Stay away from human males, whatever it takes. Keep checking the mail, maybe it's just running late. Try to stay calm, and—"
"I'll be okay," I repeated. "I know what to do."
"Shower," he continued firmly. "As many times a day as you can. And absolutely no porn, erotic magazines, masturbating..."
"Whoa, whoa!" I interrupted, my ears suddenly on fire. "Dude, I get it, you don't have to tell me."
"I mean it, Connor. Erections will increase your pheromone output. You're fifteen and I realize you may not be able to control them, but when you get one you must not resolve it the usual way. Try a cold shower, read a math book, call your sister. Anything but an orgasm."
Oh my God oh my God, why are we talking about this?!
"If something happens, call me." He didn't mean on the phone. "I'll get there as fast as I can."
"What's the radius?" I asked. "Of the pheromones, I mean. How far out do they go?"
"Depends on the individual and how ripe they are. Fully mature and aroused, it could be as much as sixty miles."
"Fuck," I breathed. Did he mean to say it was possible I could be luring men from the far side of town to my doorstep every time I jerked off?
"Don't panic, it takes about a year to ripen that much. But I don't want you taking any risks."
But I was panicking, for an entirely different reason. "Ezra, what if... what if the Nephilim council says no?"
It got very quiet on the other end of the phone, to the point where I could hear the blood pulsing in my ears. "Ezra?"
"I will protect you, Connor. No matter what."
I took an uneasy breath.
"I have to go. Remember what I said, and be careful. I'll come to you as soon as I can."
The line clicked off. I lowered the phone, feeling suddenly shaky. It was going to be fine. I would be fine. Five days was no big deal. And it meant I would be seeing Ezra again that much sooner, right? In the meantime, I had the Elioud textbook to keep me company.
First, though... I moved the book out of the way, and looked down at my crotch.
I think I'll go take a shower.
🧬🧬🧬
Three utterly boring, unremarkable days went by. I saw Mom maybe twice in all that time, once when she came home in the middle of the afternoon and went to bed without so much as greeting me, and once when she came stumbling in at about three in the morning toasted and reeking of weed. I knew just what to do, and whipped up three packages of ramen the way she liked them, without the broth but bathed in butter and their seasoning packets. She wolfed down every last noodle, told me I was her best contribution to the universe, and fell asleep on the couch. By morning, she was gone.
The house was spotless. I'd even gotten around to projects I'd been meaning to do for a while, like wiping down the baseboards and cleaning the crud off of our ceiling fans. The inside of our refrigerator had never looked better and, knowing Ezra was coming in a few days, I'd baked six dozen sugar cookies with extra sugar on top, and had them carefully wrapped in ziplocs that would fit in the saddlebags on his bike.
Every four P.M. like clockwork, Maddy called. I listened to her gush about what was happening at school—her new dorm mates had arrived, and one of them was, as she put it, "exactly like you, Connor, quiet and super smart, I just know we're gonna be the best of friends when she warms up to me." On Thursday, all she could talk about was the Jewel Chain ceremony coming up tomorrow, where she and the other 'Sapphires' would each be adopted by a set of upperclassmen.
I listened, and asked questions, and generally cheered her on, but when she asked what I was up to I didn't have much to say. Nothing I had going on was anywhere near as exciting. The most challenging part of my day was waking up with morning wood, and trying to make it go away without going against Ezra's very strict instructions. I wasn't going to tell my sister about that.
But Thursday evening, shortly after getting off the phone with Maddy, I was eating mac and cheese in my room when I heard the front door open. Mom's voice was coming from the living room, so I padded into the hall, still in the pajama bottoms and tank top I'd slept in the night before. "Hey Mom, you're home? I have some leftover goulash in the—"
Oh, fuck me.
Mom was in the living room all right, but she wasn't alone. Some burly guy with a long gray bikers' beard was laid out on our sofa with my mother perched in his lap, and she was kissing him up the neck. He had one hand on her ass and the other solidly squeezing a breast. The air smelled like cigarettes and beer breath.
"Oh, shit. Sorry, I'll just, uh..."
Mom raised her head from the grizzly bear's neck and rolled her eyes. "Don't be such a prude, Connor. This is Zeke. Say hi."
"Hi," I said, so nervously that my voice cracked. His eyes landed on me, at first with irritation. But then they sharpened with interest.
"This your boy, Nikki?"
"Yeah. Don't worry about him, he's fine. Connor, bring us a couple beers."
I gulped, feeling the pull of Zeke's stare like a fishing line trying to reel me closer. "Yes, ma'am." I went to the kitchen, dug in the fridge for a couple PBRs, and brought the cans out to the living room. I kept as much distance as possible between myself and my mother's guest, gingerly setting the beers on the coffee table and darting back. Mom flicked a hand at me.
"Now get lost."
She didn't have to tell me twice. I scurried back to my room as fast as my feet would go, and closed the door behind me. My heart was going a mile a minute. Giggles and lewd groans drifted down the hallway, so at least Mom had recaptured the guy's attention for now.
How long had it been since my last shower? Damn it, I'd gotten lazy. I'd taken one before bed last night, but after getting up this morning I'd been telling myself all day that I'd go take care of it in another minute. That had turned into hours of lolling around on my bed surfing the internet, reading, wandering the house for snacks. It had been hot today, too, so my sweaty, sloppy clothes were probably pheromone-soaked. Stupid, stupid, stupid! There was no way I could hop casually into the shower with Zeke right down the hall.
I stripped off my shirt, pants and underwear, and grabbed Ezra's spray bottle with its measly amount of pink liquid sloshing in the bottom. Before I depressed the pump, though, I hesitated. Maddy had makeup wipes in the top drawer of our desk. I yanked the drawer open and plucked a bunch out, wiping all over my groin, under my arms, up my neck. Then, with slippery fingers, I applied the formula. I tried to be conservative with the sprays, while still covering all the most dangerous areas. I pulled on a set of clean clothes.
My attention fell on the dirty laundry basket. It wasn't quite full yet, but I didn't know how much pheromone stuck around on my clothes after I took them off. Spraying myself down would be a waste if my bedroom was a goddamn siren song. I eyed my bed. If I was going to do this, my sheets needed to go, too.
I flew around the room as quietly as I could, listing out the steps under my breath in an effort to calm down. "First the top sheet. Then loosen corner one, corner two, corner three, and four. Into the basket. Get the pillowcase. Down the ladder. Get Maddy's too. Are we ready? Wait, you know what? Let's put socks on real quick, it couldn't hurt."
Anybody listening would probably think I'd lost my mind, but organizing out loud helped me focus. And when I was fully clothed and had gathered up every stray bit of laundry I could find, I cracked my bedroom door open. Rhythmic creaking from the sofa out front made me pause, but only for a second. If they were in the middle of it, there was actually no better moment to pull this off. I hefted the laundry basket and carried it into the hall. The closet doors that covered the washer and dryer were open, so all I had to do was lift the washer lid, dump my stuff in, add a heaping scoop of detergent, close the lid and twist and pull the dial. I didn't even bother separating things by color. The house pipes rushed noisily with water, and I ran back to my room as fast as I could.
I really, really wished our bedroom door had a lock.
My phone started ringing from my bunk, and I cursed, scrambling up the ladder to grab it off the bare mattress.
"Hello?"
"What's going on?" Ezra demanded.
I couldn't resist a bit of sarcasm, even as I kept my voice to a whisper. "Why? I thought you knew everything."
"Answer," he said impatiently.
"My mom brought a man home." I was keeping an eye on the doorknob. "They're in the living room."
"Shit. You need to get out of there."
"And go where?" I shot back. "Hanging out in the corn field all night isn't any safer, now is it?"
"Did you use the spray?"
"Yes, and I should have enough to last the night if the guy will go to sleep. I'm doing all my laundry right now, too, I figure it could help."
"Smart thinking."
Those two words of praise filled me with warmth, in spite of my racing heart.
"You've got to calm down. You're scared."
"No shit, wouldn't you be?"
"I'm not even there yet and I'm scared."
I blinked. "What do you mean, yet? You're not on your way here, are you?"
"Of course I am."
"No! No, no, Ezra, don't, I've got this. The formula refill isn't ready yet, right? So that means you'd have to come again in another day or two. You're gonna make yourself sick." One of the things I'd learned from the Elioud textbook was that the gray-skinned, raccoon-eyed state I'd seen Ezra in a couple of times was a lot more serious than he'd made it seem. It was a condition known as depletion, and Nephilim could die from it. Eating sugar might help, but in about the same way that Tylenol and chicken soup helped with the flu. The only thing to cure it was rest. Usually several days of rest.
"I'll be fine."
"You sure about that? Because what happens if the formula's ready and you can't get here with it? Or you get it here, and then you're too weak to get home? I can't exactly hide you in the back of my closet, you know."
He gave a discontented grunt. He knew I was right.
"I can do this," I assured him. "I'll keep the screen popped out of my window tonight. Maybe I'll get lucky and this guy will go home after he and Mom are done with their, er... date. If not, as soon as they're asleep I'll go shower. And then I'll stay up until they start waking up, and use the spray again when I have to. If anything happens, I'll go out the window and take my chances in the field. But don't come all the way down here, okay? Not unless I call you." Ironically, as I worked through it out loud I actually felt myself getting calmer. It was totally doable.
"Connor, I don't like this."
"Trust me," I insisted.
He sighed. "Don't shower, you'll be too vulnerable. Grab what you need and wash up in your room. Next to the window, so you can get out if you have to."
I nodded thoughtfully. "Good idea."
"Keep the window closed unless you have to use it. Block the door with furniture if you can."
He hadn't seen the size of that man. Any furniture I could move by myself, that biker dude would be able to shove aside without a problem. No, I had to think smaller. More... precise.
I picked up a fork from the now-gluey bowl of mac and cheese on the desk, and twirled it in my fingers. "Fuck, I wish I could get to the kitchen."
"Why?"
"We have a pair of pliers in there. If I could just bend these fork tines somehow..."
"What are you thinking?"
I'd seen a YouTube video once, on Macgyvering a door lock using a broken fork. I didn't need to break this one, Maddy had a metal nail file in her makeup drawer that would work just fine as the second piece I needed. But I had to find a way to bend the tips of the tines at a ninety degree angle. It wasn't actually that complicated, but putting it into words over the phone would take forever. So instead, I closed my eyes. Pictured the footage from the video, and tried to will the images over to Ezra as a prayer.
It must have worked, because I heard his intake of breath. "God Almighty, Connor, that's genius."
"I didn't come up with it," I confessed, blushing.
"Doesn't matter. I can help."
"What? How?"
"The watch. It works like a conduit, of sorts. When you have it on I can, well..." Was he suddenly being shy with me? Seriously? He cleared his throat. "I can be... inside you. For a little while."
I nearly choked. "What?!"
"Nephilim can cast their souls into another body for a minute or two. It means we see what they see, hear what they hear."
"Are you—!" Oh, fuck, I'd said that way too loud. I clapped a hand over my mouth, and because I didn't trust my voice, sent him the thought instead. ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS?!
"Yes," he answered softly. "There isn't time to explain. I'm telling you first so that this won't frighten you."
Hold up, what are you gonna—
And then I had the most bizarre experience of my entire life. A cold, sparkling, rushing sensation behind my eyes, centered behind my forehead. Kind of like a brain freeze, but more expansion than contraction. Everything in my vision turned bluish purple, appeared sort of crystalline, and was vibrating. The head of the fork in my hand sharpened into hyper-focus, like some new high-definition technology that hadn't been invented yet. I could see every tiny divot and flaw in the fork's metal surface, all the way down to the molecules that made up its substance, and that tiny vibration was literally the forces keeping all those particles rotating, moving, binding to each other.
The brain freeze feeling grabbed onto that vibration, and shifted it in a hundred billion places at once. There was no sound, no burst of light, nothing showy. But I'll be damned if that sucker didn't bend. All four tines, smoothly and neatly, right where I needed them to.
And then the cold subsided. My normal vision came back, and it suddenly seemed blurry and dull in comparison. I stood there staring at the utensil in my hand, now perfectly shaped for a new use. My head ached a little.
Ezra.
Did you just fucking bend a fork with my mind?!