away from her hair. “There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to put it out there. I’m a descendant of a race of people called the Nephilim.”
She stared at him and knew she was slipping again. Slipping into madness. “What?”
“If you look that word up, it’ll tell you the Nephilim were an ancient race of human-angel hybrids. Some scholars say the angelic progenitors were Sons of God, while others say they were created by The Fallen. No one knows for sure what the truth is. We do know that most of the Nephilim were wiped out by the Great Flood, as they were considered abominations in the eyes of heaven. My mother pretty much agreed with that assessment, despite being one herself.”
Ella began to shake her head and couldn’t stop. This couldn’t be happening. “Nate...”
“Those twin scars you noticed on my back? They were where my wings used to be. My raving lunatic of a mother had a penchant for hacking her own wings off, even though they’d re-emerge when she’d least expect it. But with me, she made sure I was crippled from the beginning. She chopped my wings off the moment I was born because she... Ella!”
She couldn’t listen to any more. With a strength she didn’t know her overtaxed body possessed, she shot to her feet, frantic to find a way out of the madness. Strong arms came around her from behind as she cleared the bathroom threshold, and instinct and training melded into one. With the ferocity of desperation, she kicked her heel back toward his knee, this time putting everything she had into it. But somehow he avoided the blow entirely, and without warning the world blurred around her. In less than a second they somehow traveled all the way across a neat, two-room hotel suite and wound up in the tiny kitchenette area.
What the...?
“Now are you getting it, Ella? I’m not like the monster you saw today, but I’m not a normal human either. I can’t afford to worry about whether or not you’re ready to handle the truth, either. You need to hear it in order to get out of this mess alive.” Nate’s voice was like rough sandpaper against her ear, and with another blurring move they were transported into the bedroom to land spoon-fashion on the bed. “What you saw today was real. What I’m telling you now is real. I know it’d be easier to think you’ve lost your very last marble and refuse to accept reality, but that’s the quickest way to wind up dead. I refuse to let that happen.”
“This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening...” Riding the edge of hysteria, she bent her head and bit the first thing she could get her teeth on—his thumb.
A hiss of pain escaped him before he surprised her by shoving his hand deeper into her mouth, yanking himself free when her jaw loosened and the taste of his skin flooded her mouth. Before she could even think to move he repositioned himself so that he lay on top of her, one hand caught underneath them and holding her hands, the other holding her head back against the place where neck met shoulder to keep her from head-butting him. “Fight me all you want, that’s fine with me,” he muttered, his breath ruffling her hair. “Go ahead, do your worst. I’d rather have you fighting than that catatonic mess you were earlier.”
“Fuck you.”
“Anytime.”
She almost swore at him again. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“I told you my name is Nathanael. What I didn’t tell you was that it seems to be an ancient tradition of our kind to be named after the family’s progenitor, probably so we never forget where we come from. Look him up—the original Nathanael is one of the twelve angels of vengeance, whatever the hell that means, and the angel governing over all things that are hidden.”
“This is crazy.” She ground the words out through clenched teeth until they were almost unintelligible. “Crazy, crazy, crazy...”
“Yeah, that’s my family, my mother especially. I think the only reason she stuck with the Nathanael naming tradition was because she was afraid to forget the unbelievable insanity of our bloodline.”
She shook her head furiously, but there was no escape from hearing his words. “I don’t want to listen to any more—”
“My family’s history bounces from one screwed-up nutcase to the next, with lots of mayhem and killer doses of self-loathing in between. My great-grandmother was kidnapped and