Page 42 of Up In Flames

But I don’t want her to send me home, even if that last bout of sixty-nine pulled at the sensitive skin along my nape. “Come, sit on my lap.”

With a happy smile, she bounces over to me, snuggling in just like she’s spent the last twenty years using me as her chair.

And there I go, erection central again.

But she’s speaking, for once not noticing, or not caring, that I want her again. “So, this is going to sound demented, but you need to hear me out, okay?”

She waits until I nod. “Okay.”

For a moment, she bites her lip, studying me, before saying in a rush, “I’ve been plotting out a few different series, because there’s only so many vampire romances that I can write without boring myself into one-line books. ‘He saw her, bit her, fucked her, then end.’”

“Not your best work,” I agree, trying to remain deadpan. But all I want to do is smile. That’s the effect she has on me. Inside that sometimes-grumpy exterior is a total ray of sunshine.

“Right. I thought that demons might make for a good series, since there are so many different kinds. Incubi, succubae, trade demons, punisher demons… Anyway, I started researching and almost immediately stumbled onto the Watchers.”

She looks at me as if she expects some bells to start ringing. “I’ve got nothing, Jelly Bean. What are watchers?” But suddenly, a thought hits me. “Wait, I think Xy mentioned watchers. Some pervy thing?”

“Sort of. Watchers, with a capital ‘W’, are a specific group of angels.”

“Angels?”

“Just… listen. God gave the Watchers the job of watching over the earth and humanity. Best guess, if I have to timeline it, this would have been after Adam and Eve were kicked out of Eden, but at some point before the Younger Dryas. The Flood. We’re talking about the antediluvian world,” she clarifies. “That would make it… hold on.” She flips open a notebook. Her brow creases as her eyes flow over the words she’s written in a messy scrawl before she flips a page. “Roughly 11,500 B.C. or sometime before that.”

“Does history go back that far? I thought civilization was about five-thousand-years-old?”

She waves her hand. “Stuff and nonsense. Erase everything you were taught in school. It was all mostly drivel. There are more and more archeological excavations that put civilized man back at least to just before the Younger Dryas, and more likely well before that: Gobekli Tepe, some other tepes, some discoveries under the Osirion in Abydos, Egypt, the labyrinth near the pyramid of Hawara, Yamaguchi in Japan, and so many other sites around the globe. Anyway, the point is, whether we’re talking myth or history, we’re talking old.”

“Okay. The Watchers are old. How does this relate to me? And how do they relate to demons?”

“They’re angels.”

“But you said you were researching demons.”

“Right. Just…” She frowns. “It’s complicated.”

“I’m good an unravelling complicated.” But even though I reassure her, my pulse feels heavy in my veins. I have a sudden strange sense of urgency firing through me, as if I need to know everything that she’s about to tell me immediately, and also like I don’t want to hear any of it at all. Which makes no sense, but the presentment rakes along my skin with iron claws.

She leans in and kisses my chest. “That you are.” When she straightens, she says, “Okay, from the beginning. In the Judeo-Christian world, legend says God sent his angels, the Watchers, to watch over humanity. I’m not sure how many Watchers there were originally, but two hundred of them saw human women and chose wives from among them. With those wives, they had children.”

My instant reaction is disbelief. “What?” I scoff. “That’s silly. Angels don’t have bodies. They’re spiritual. Like ghosts.”

“There are a few passages in the Bible that pretty much say the opposite. They eat, drink, walk, touch.” She pauses. “Fuck, apparently.”

“And second,” I say, rambling right over her, “I would have heard about this in Sunday School. My parents forced me to attend every week until… well.” Until they died, at which point I couldn’t pretend an interest anymore.

She lays her hand flat against my chest. “There are lots of things people aren’t taught. I don’t know why, but the Watchers are one of them. They’re mentioned in the Bible, and they have an entire story in the Book of Enoch, which is apocrypha, but it was relied upon heavily in religious communities in the ancient world.”

“If you say so.”

“Sampson.”

I sigh. I know I’m being stubborn, and a little bit of an ass. I’m just… resistant. “I’m sorry. Go on. Tell me about the Watchers.”

“I’m going to tell you about their children, the Nephilim.”

Shock startles me. A feeling like dripping acid rips down my spine. “Nephilim.” The word Xy used.

Nina nods. “There are some decent theories about how creating these hybrid children with human women was a power move by the Watchers, a way to take legitimate control of the earth, since earth was given to humans to rule through God’s agreement with Adam. These angels could rule through their ‘human’ hybrid children. However, most scholars seem to think that the Watchers simply lusted. But whatever their reasons, the two-hundred made a pact to rise or fall together. They knew that they were going against direct orders, but they did it anyway.”