of mortality. On this spot they had sworn their testimony before shedding eternity and taking their wives.
Gawain's lavender robes held the firelight and cast a purple glow against the rock. Water lapped in the distance, and the air turned much colder. We came to Jakin and Boas-the names of the two pillars originally erected in Solomon's Temple. They were supposed to be black and white, symbolizing good and evil, but both were so dirty with grime that it was impossible to tell which was which.
My father crept forward and waved a friendly greeting. Dust flew upward as an immense weight shifted. The stone grumbled and the ground swayed.
So, this was their sired legacy.
I beheld the Heir of the Mount, the offspring of Armon.
It lived upon a heap of ash and bone.
The mammoth mutant, a human-Seraph hybrid-child called a Nephilim, laid on its back rubbing its colossal feet together. It drooled down its massive silken neck. More unborn than born, without umbilicus or navel or fully formed digits, its murky eyes never settled anywhere too long and they fathomed nothing. It had no genitalia. Not only would it be sterile, but even an imitation of the act of procreation would have been intolerable to the universe.
That mouth had been opened in a perpetual silent cry for centuries. The hybrid seemed carved from shale and marble. The skin was even paler than my father's white-face. It had needs but didn't know them.
A grotto yawned open beside it. Currents of the twin rivers dragged corpses in from the bottom of JamesLake, depositing bodies here where the Nephilim could dip in a hand and sup on the suicides. Heir of Armon swallowed their despondency and licked out the marrow.
In one fashion the gargantuan Nephilim resembled Gawain-separate, unique, removed, and altogether abstract. It stared blindly at him, and he stared blindly back.
Uriel's idolatry ran around my legs and he stepped free from the dark to stand proudly in front of the hearth fires. Nip sat curled, hiding his face in shame and vainly attempting to stifle his sobs.
'Glory of God be unto you,' Uriel said. 'Oh boy.'
Abbot John had been more right in his tenets than I'd given him credit for, and also more mistaken than he'd ever accept. Maybe the two hundred fallen angels had become men no uglier or noble than any other, but their progeny had devolved into parasites sponging off the penance of others. Those angels who'd torn off their own wings had given up too much in becoming men, and yet they hadn't gained enough to make the cost worthwhile for the rest of us.
Mankind found immortality in the thread of their blood.
Armers, Ramuel, Sanyasa, Saneveel, Batraal, and all the others-from their own ashes-must have found only remorse in the irony of their woeful living child.
It had the reverence of rock.
The Nephilim had no soul.
'I don't want to kill you,' Uriel said.
'Why not?' I asked, genuinely curious. 'Where is Catherine's child?'
'Hidden,' I told him.
'You can't contain the holy prophet of God.'
'Uriel, I'm telling you, the reincarnate is not the prophet Elijah.'
He didn't believe me. He could not distinguish between piety and fixation. For that, at least, I couldn't completely blame him. The prophet Elijah had taunted the four hundred and fifty priests of Baal into a battle of burnt offerings they could not win. When they finally admitted defeat the prophet Elijah personally beheaded them all in the name of Yahweh.
My former coven brother had dreamed of doing the same. The wrath that had been loosed from Cathy's womb would once again become the man who tried to steal my love and castrate me in the moonlight. He would be a pawn that Jebediah would use as the harbinger of a hell to come.
Uriel had no rage, but his deranged passion added up to the same. He thrust his spells into my face. They were filled more with devotion than aggression, majiks of arrogant sincerity rather than applied arcana. My fists burned black with my hexes, and I swiped aside his ridiculous sanctity and watched it skitter and pop against the walls. His plastic saints started chewing on my ankles.
My father, always the fool even when he wasn't a clown, wanted to entertain and play with the offspring of the mount. The Nephilim, sensing his damnation, reached down and plucked my dad up in one of its monolithic hands. My father gave a strange painful cry that was still tinged with his laughter.
Uriel found strength in his dedication to stone and the stone's love for him. I grimaced and tried to put an end to this encounter by letting my angry instincts take over, but the bedrock of his faith scattered my spells.
To hell with it. I brought a roundhouse left all the way up from my knees and aimed for his jaw. Nip let out another groan and flung himself away. Uriel merely frowned at me, disappointed and appalled, and dropped back into shadow. I wheeled through the gloom and ran to save my father.
If the hybrid found flavor in damnation, then my dad would be a cuisine for discriminating tastes. He didn't thrash or cry out as the mutant offspring lifted him in its tremendous fist. I dug in and rushed across the banks of bones, arcana discharging from my eyes and mouth, but the Nephilim completely ignored me.
Nip blundered into Self and Eddie, who both went over backward and lay sprawled on the cave floor.
I heard the unmistakable sound of tearing flesh and turned.
Two buttons on Eddie's shirt had popped open and his flayed flesh had flopped aside to reveal the pink infant with her thick brown head of hair. Self had nestled the sleeping child within Eddie's emptied chest cavity.
Fane's daughter began to slide free as if being born a second time within a few hours, her tiny lips quivering as she screwed up her face. Covered with blood and mucus, her matted hair stood up in rusty clumps. Eddie's heart might have burst if he'd still had one, as the utter horror hammered him. The kid's eyes bulged out so far I thought he might have a seizure. I hoped he'd faint but he merely watched the grisliness of his own violated body.
Fumes of Elijah's madness packed the width of the cavern. I hesitated, listening to my dad's laughter as the Nephilim tousled him closer to its gritty, rigid mouth. I was torn between moving and watching Fane's daughter slip like a snake from the boy's hollow chest and slap down into the sand at his feet. I started back for Uriel.
But my own damnation must've been appetizing enough, and before I got ten feet the Nephilim rolled aside atop the crushed bone and ash and scooped me up like the hand of God. Its hungers, like all of ours, incited its mindless actions. I was hefted twenty feet in the air and shrieked as it squeezed me tightly in its giant fist.
I could barely breathe and couldn't think clearly enough to provide a proper incantation. Flames spit back against my throat as I dug trenches in its reef-like bulk with my burning hands. Its oily fluids geysered in thin streams before its wounds closed. The Nephilim appeared content to raise us high up in the cavern and sniff at us, the scent of my family's destruction whisking like smoke.
Smiling hideously, Self's eyes rolled up in his head as the first wave of Seraph blood stench washed across him. Ropes of saliva lashed his fangs. His ragged laughter sounded like chips of obsidian rubbing together. In the same manner as Eddie, he seemed to fall in and out of trance. Elijah's envy, insecurity, and mistrust, like poison, splashed onto my second self.
'Now!' Uriel screamed. 'Kill the baby!'
'Do it now! You too are a servant of the Lord! You cannot deny your responsibility. Slay the flesh and release the prophet!'
Self wanted to do it, he was always eager for innocence. We gritted our fangs. We bit our tongue. His ugly thoughts pealed in my brain and I pressed my own hexes over my ears while the hybrid's flinty tongue jutted against my chest. Self went down to one knee, snarling, and managed to growl,
Uriel turned.
