Nephilim’s Captive: A Divine Giants Romance (Sons of Earth and Heaven Book 1) Read online

  Nephilim’s Captive

  A Divine Giants Romance

  Abby Knox

  Copyright © 2020 by Abby Knox

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Edited by Red Pen Princess

  Cover Designer: Mayhem Cover Creations

  This story and this entire series is dedicated to my boyfriend The Mothman. Nobody understands you like I do, big guy.

  And to Matilda, for helping me find the glue.

  A Divine Giants Romance

  Giants are probably not real. Angels and demons are most likely fairy tales. Bigfoot, chupacabra, and The Mothman can easily be explained by tricks of light, mass hysteria and people seeing what they want to see.

  At least, these are the facts with which Ada guards herself whenever she investigates paranormal activity. It will take falling into the clutches of a very real supernatural creature to convince her otherwise. Even so, she's never been frightened of a mystery. Uncovering what this ten-foot beast intends to do with her is yet another curious matter, and one that she intends to investigate fully. For science.

  Samuel is too old for this. Literally. At more than ten thousand years of age, this half-human, half-angel hasn't felt the ache for human companionship in decades. Yet now, one human name invades his mind, and he can't shake it. Finding out who she is is simple enough. Determining what she knows, where her loyalties lie, and the meaning of this psychic intrusion are far less-than-simple tasks. Only one option seems right: lure the human woman named Ada into his lair and keep her hidden until he has the answers he craves.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  About the Author

  Also by Abby Knox

  Prologue

  The boy peered down into the gaping maw in the earth. “I don’t want to go. It’s so dark down there.”

  The Watcher Shemyaza answered, “Your eyes will adjust.”

  The young one shook his head as if denying the existence of this absolute darkness awaiting him would make it go away. “But what about our house?”

  “You’re young. You can rebuild. We old ones did it over and over again. You can take it from here.”

  Looking around at the foreign mountaintop and the unfamiliar valley below, the youth felt even more doubts about this place. The archangels had rounded up and relocated all the Watchers and their children without explanation. “Here? In exile? How?”

  The Watcher looked up to the sky as fat drops of rain began to fall from a wound in the sky. “Don’t forget what we’ve taught you.”

  “But how will we rebuild if everything is soon to be destroyed? We won’t have any humans left to help us.”

  As the rain fell harder, Shemyaza had to raise his voice. “The waters will recede. The mountains will still be here. You are half of heaven and half of earth; you and your siblings will create your own stories.”

  The Watcher spoke in riddles and it tested the young one’s patience. “When? When will the waters recede? The horrors are just beginning.”

  “When is irrelevant. Time bends and folds and knots itself, loops around again. The order that The Authorities have created, and the humans have followed, means nothing.” More riddles.

  “You confuse me when you talk about time,” said the young one.

  Shemyaza patted the boy on the head, now alarmingly the same height as his own. “You’ll understand one day. I’ll be there with you.”

  The way the Watcher said it didn’t imply immortality. Only people on their deathbeds phrased their words in this manner. The boy had seen enough death already to know. “Of course you will,” he replied, pushing aside the unsettling feeling of foreboding at his father’s words. After all, the Watchers were immortal—angels, descended straight from heaven to help the humans.

  A sadness washed over the old Watcher’s face as the rains began to fall harder. “They have made their decision. They are sending the archangels to put an end to the Watchers. All of the Grigori will fall.”

  Terror and rage swept through the boy. “No!”

  “Quiet your mind.” The old one pressed a sense of calm into every creature nearby, including his young child. He could take away momentary panic, but not grief. “You are going to be well. The Watchers have to go. It’s been decided. When the archangel strikes one of us, all of us die at once. We Grigori vowed to each other. As soon as we fell in love with humans and began bearing children, we knew The Authorities were displeased. So we swore an oath that the bloodshed would be minimal; there would be no fighting, to spare our women and children any further anguish. It is the way it has to be. I’m so sorry that you have to be the one child to witness this. If your mother had lived, she’d have you squirreled away safely by now.”

  Tears of shock and sadness mixed with the rain pounding at the earth, tearing at the roots of tender grass. The distant screams of drowning creatures mixed with the relentless rush of water.

  The Watcher said, “The humans on the boat have already sailed away. I’ve asked Michael to make it quick.”

  The young one shook his head. “I’ll have nothing left.”

  “You will have the others like you. You have to promise me that you will fight to stay alive on this earth and to continue the work we started with the humans. All the knowledge in the scrolls—they need to know the truth. They deserve to know all the secrets of heaven, but you must be careful. Consider this challenge a privilege. Your existence is the only gift the Watchers will leave behind now that so many humans will die with the knowledge we’ve taught them.”

  The increasingly agitated youth exploded with a distraught howl as lightning crashed and struck down a massive tree, narrowly missing them both. The clangor was barely audible over the sound of the rain and wind. “I don’t want another privilege. I don’t care about any of that. I want you, Papa!” The storm was so loud, the two of them had to speak into each other’s minds.

  The old man persisted. “You inherited privilege. And unbelievable power. Near invincibility. Knowledge. A vast archive of scrolls that has already been locked away in the underground caves. You must swear to me you’ll protect that. And that when the time comes, you will deliver the humans into the new ea
rth and fight to claim your thrones in heaven.”

  The young one bellowed, wanting none of this. “Tell Michael to take me with you because this sounds like hell to me!”

  The Watcher laughed. “You do not want to make comparisons to hell. You do not know what I’ve seen.”

  “When have you seen hell?”

  The look the old one gave would haunt the child forever. “You ask that ‘when’ question again. Hell, heaven, and earth and all places in the universe have claimed me many times over. This existence is a blessing beyond all of it. But it’s going to end soon.”

  “I don’t accept it!” shouted the young one.

  The father looked like he could laugh but didn’t want to cause hurt feelings. “You have your mother’s obstinate nature.”

  “I miss her.”

  “So do I. But you will see her again.”

  The young one shook his head. He knew it wasn’t lies; angels couldn't lie. Even fallen angels, which was what the Watchers became as soon as they rebelled and married human women.

  The strange smile remained on the Watcher’s face even as the figure made of white fire sailed out of the slash in the sky where the rain poured out. Impossibly, the figure blazed brighter and brighter despite the torrential rain cascading from the gape in the sky.

  The Watcher Shemyaza eyed the young half-human/half-angel. He kept his eyes on him and did not turn his eyes skyward.

  “You will meet another one. Someone like your mother. She will make the journey easier.”

  The obstinate youth shook his head. “It won’t matter.”

  Ignoring this, the Watcher said, “In the meantime, Michael chose to disregard my request to not let you see me die this way.”

  “What?!”

  Shemyaza’s potent sense of calm had lost its grip on the boy, but the Watcher pressed on to equip his son, unto his last breath. “Stay on course, boy. Heaven is not our enemy.”

  The blazing archangel landed with feet that shook the ground. Boulders fell off cliffs at the impact, prompting a mudslide that threatened the entire mountain on which they stood. Displaced mud squelched and water hissed around the archangel’s fiery feet as he approached them.

  Michael drew his flaming sword. The youth knew he should look away but would not take his eyes off the Watcher. With chilling precision, the archangel slashed a fatally deep “X” across the Watcher’s back. Shemyaza’s fierce gaze slipped into a nightmarish blankness before falling face-first into the mud. The son stared wide-eyed at the wounds, so deep it had not only ended a life but symbolically crossed out the source of the Grigori’s power: the place from which the wings grew. Blood, mud, water, and feathers came together in a dreadful mixture on the ground.

  Shemyaza had been so delighted on the day he discovered his young son carried enough angel DNA that his body could make wings. How many times had the young one watched in awe when his father showed him how to release them? If only the young giant had learned faster, he would have flown after the murdering archangel, who had disappeared into the ether.

  The boy giant could scarcely believe he’d watched his great, angelic father’s murder. No struggle. No fight. The son’s anguished cry overpowered the deafening sound of rushing waters, if only for a second. At the same moment, thousands of loved ones all over the earth joined in simultaneous howls of grief, shock, fright, and anger. Only Shemyaza had received the physical blow, but all the Grigori had fallen dead at once in front of their children and wives. The cries all together rent through the onslaught of the waters as all the Watchers collapsed and died in front of their eyes.

  The noises of horror did not matter to the archangels, who were only generals carrying out orders, but the grief and the terror were recorded in the scrolls. And the scrolls stayed dry in the hidden place under the earth.

  And so, the children of earth and heaven stayed together and survived.

  Once it was discovered that the giant children survived the flood, The Authorities sent the Angel of Barrenness over them; they would not be able to reproduce. They were spared death, for they were not responsible for their cursed existence, so The Authorities gave them that small mercy.

  Those halflings—sometimes called monsters, sometimes called giants or Nephilim—were the rudderless children who survived the near-total annihilation. They not only survived, but they also rebuilt. They preserved all the knowledge and everything the Watchers had begun to teach to the humans, such as science, art, music, necromancy, astrology, crafts, weapons of war, and self-defense.

  But they did not forget what the archangels did in front of their own eyes.

  Nor did they forgive.

  Chapter One

  Ada

  The monster’s glowing eyes peered up from underneath the river bridge, waiting for the right moment to snatch the perfect snack.

  Whoever painted the face on the statue had a dark sense of humor, Ada thought as she tightened her grip on her rental car’s steering wheel. It was even creepier in person than the one she’d seen on the billboard a few miles back when she’d crossed the state line.

  Good gravy, she hated crossing bridges over water as it was. Now she had to do it while trying to avoid looking into this set of wild, inanimate eyeballs. It was a jarring welcome to something as quaintly named as the Appalachian Folklore Festival.

  When the organizers had contacted her, they had promised her a charming summer arts event for tourists, historians, crafters, artists, supernatural creature hunters, and sci-fi fans, located in the bosom of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  It was Ada’s business to know about this kind of convention. As a paranormal investigator, she liked to find out what everyday people thought they knew about the weirder, darker side of the world. This event in particular had grown over the years from a weekend bazaar to a full week of geekery, providing the town’s biggest source of summer income.

  The hulking monster came into view even more clearly as her rental car cleared the bridge and began its descent on the exit ramp. The location of that mascot—the Bell Mountain Giant—could not be an accident. The statue stood on the outcropping of rocks that peeked out from the dense forest south of the town of Eden. Based on Ada’s research, that was the spot where many townsfolk had drowned all at once over one hundred years ago. She cringed at the idea that someone decided a lurid statue would be a great way to mark the spot of the drownings — drownings that supposedly coincided with an increase in giant sightings. On the other hand, who was she to judge? A shared trauma for the town, to be sure, but she remembered what her career mentor had said to her once: “Everyone gets to tell their own story in their own way.”

  The townsfolk might think supernatural events and sightings of giants in the woods were the only things it had going for their town, but Ada disagreed. Natural beauty was all around. Rolling hills, dense woods, and the wide river made this one of the prettiest spots in her travels around the country as part of her job. Something about it made her wish she could stay and explore for more than a day. The deeper she drove into the valley on her approach to the town, the more she felt a strange, calm alertness overtake her.

  Maybe southern hospitality was literally in the air.

  Ada had felt the same indefinable tug when she was still onboard the plane two hours ago, as she’d flown over these mountains. The ridges and folds down below had looked like a familiar cozy blanket.

  “Welcome to Eden, Bigfoot Capital of the Blue Ridge Mountains.” The sign at the entrance to the town displayed the motto and a logo of a large cartoon footprint. The kitschiness of it jolted Ada’s thoughts away from the beauty of the surrounding nature, and, a little farther down the road, all the trappings of the festival assaulted her senses. Temporary directional signage pointed visitors to points of interest, a Ferris wheel towered over the horizon, and the aroma of funnel cakes seeped into her car. Who was she to protest against funnel cakes and Ferris wheels in honor of unexplained mysteries? After all, she was here voluntarily, wasn’t she? N
obody had kidnapped her and forced her to be a featured speaker on a panel discussion for the creature hunter nerds.

  The quaint downtown area featured rows of historic brick and stone buildings, a dormant mill on the north end looming over it all. The hulking brick smokestack dominated the town’s skyline, along with the usual church steeples that inhabit every street and backroad in the Bible Belt.

  Carnival food vendors were crammed into a lively pedestrian area named Riverfront Park, less than a quarter-mile downriver from the infamous tragic site at the foot of Bell Mountain. Driving by the park, Ada saw a small clutch of protestors, but nobody was paying them any mind. She drove by the park slowly, watching them hold their signs about the end being nigh.

  Wonder what that’s all about.

  She wouldn’t have time to find out. Ada would have to leave after one day of the Folklore Festival because Charlene in Round Rock, Texas, would be expecting her tomorrow to look at some strange artifacts that a contractor had found in her root cellar. The woman’s house was not the sight of an ancient alien spaceship crash, but Ada figured she would check it out anyway.

  Whatever the protestors were warning folks about, the Episcopalians took a different view. The parking lot next to St. Alban’s Church, with its gothic bell tower and arched windows, was home to carnival rides, games, and a beer garden.