My grandparents bristled, but I didn’t believe him. This wasn’t love. This was hatred. Contempt. Blind rage.

“Then, then I don’t understand,” she said.

“He’s an archangel, a messenger. He doesn’t kill for the sake of killing. He kills because he’s been ordered to. But there’s a balance.” Cameron sat beside me. “You remember what I told you? About how he is made of light and darkness, right?”

I nodded, trying to understand, but sinking deeper and deeper into a state of despair.

“Something has shifted, has caused the darkness to overtake the light.”

“What?” I asked in helplessness. “What could do that?”

Before Cameron could answer, Jared took another run at the door. He was still strong, still ridiculously fast, but he apparently couldn’t dematerialize. Granddad was right.

When he failed again, Jared gazed into the camera. His expression was filled with so much hatred, so much apathy, I took a mental step back. Then he turned away, and the strangest thing happened. When he spun back around, he became a blur. He did dematerialize, became a mass of smoke and fog that spun and swirled like a whirlwind.

As though proving he still could.

As though he’d heard my thoughts.

The camera shook, vibrating until the room went completely black and only sound was left. And the sound we heard was like the fluttering of a thousand birds. It grew louder and louder, feathers brushing against the speakers, wings rustling against one another in a chaotic frenzy until, in an instant, it stopped. Silence, abrupt and surreal, settled in the room like a blanket.

I gazed into the monitor, searching the blackness. “Jared?” I whispered. When I received no answer, I asked, “Is he still in there?”

Granddad looked worried too, but Cameron nodded and said, “Parlor tricks. He can’t get past those walls. I guarantee it.”

After another minute of waiting and watching, Granddad took me by the shoulders and lifted me out of the chair. He set guards on the vault and one at the monitor while the rest of us went back to the house to regroup. I just wanted an explanation. Something to help me understand what was happening. Before Jared escaped and killed us all.

My grandparents had been right all along.

* * *

“How did this happen?” I asked as we sat around our kitchen table. Betty Jo was making coffee and Glitch was setting out sandwich meat and bread at the behest of my grandmother. She sat in the chair beside me, so tired and so scared, she seemed to have aged right before my eyes. A sadness had consumed me as well, along with a genuine desire to die. I’d never been particularly suicidal, but would death be so bad? On the plus side, the pressure to save the world would end.

“I don’t know how they did it,” Cameron said, “but somehow, when the descendants got a hold of Jared, they branded him with some kind of symbol.”

“They branded him?” I asked, appalled. “Do you mean they burned him?”

“Yes. I saw the scar on his back when we were restraining him.”

I closed my eyes. Starving for answers, I asked, “What kind of symbol? What does it do?”

“I don’t know. I’m not into that voodoo-hoodoo stuff. But, for lack of a better phrase, it seems to be blocking the light. All I see when I look at him now is darkness. And not a normal darkness. Comparing the color black to what he is encased in is like comparing a picture of the Grand Canyon to actually standing on its edge and looking down. It’s so deep, it’s disorienting. That’s what looking at Jared is like. An endless darkness that is just as frightening as it is deep.”

“Can you draw it?” Grandma asked. “The symbol. Do you remember what it looks like?”

He shrugged. “I can try.”

She stood to scrounge up a pen and a piece of paper and handed them to Cameron.

“So, it’s a symbol, right? It’s sending a signal,” Glitch said. “Then why don’t we just disrupt the signal?”

Glitch, ever the techie, but he did seem to have a point.

Cameron sat with head bowed in thought. “There’s something even more strange about this.”

How could this get any stranger?

“It’ll heal,” he continued. “They’re descendants of nephilim. They had to know that. They have to know how fast he heals. And when he heals, whatever power that binding spell had over him will cease to exist. Or are they too stupid to realize that once that scar heals and the light resurfaces, he’ll kill them all?”

“You’re right,” Granddad said. “Branding Jared was like putting duct tape on a collapsing dam. It might hold for a little while, but when that dam breaks, nothing will stop it.”

“Absolutely nothing,” Cameron agreed.

“I think they are very aware of that fact,” Granddad continued. “But it was obviously a risk they were willing to take.”

“So why now? Binding Jared can’t last more than a few days.”

Grandma looked at him. “He could kill us all in the flash of a moment. Can you imagine what he could do in a few days?”

“That’s true,” Brooke said. “But maybe they know something we don’t. You guys keep talking about a war. Maybe it’s coming now and they wanted him out of the way.”

“But why?” I asked, no closer to understanding. “What would they have to gain? This a war that has nothing to do with them.”