Wanted: Undead or Alive

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

A weird, heavy silence bloomed between us while I considered doing much more than what I'd done. After all, we'd barely gotten to second base. I'd lay money on Nick being able to bring it on home and move on to fifth. All my limbs got warm and tingly while I considered what fifth base might involve.

Maybe Nick was thinking about it, too because when he finally spoke again, his voice cracked like an adolescent boy's. "Anyway," he cleared his throat. "The unpredictable abilities and unusual strength of hybrids are why I'm concerned about the potential presence of a nephilim. Angelic power, given a human spirit, has the potential to alter the framework of the entire universe."

"It's just a baby," I said.

"It's not going to stay that way. Can you imagine a toddler's temper tantrum when said toddler has the ability to re-locate the moon?"

"They can do that?"

His eyebrow shifted upward. "Have you read the sixth chapter of Genesis?"

I'd heard enough Bible stories in church to put the pieces together. He was referring to Noah's ark. "Didn't God destroy the world with a flood because the nephilim existed? There's no part that says the nephilim caused the flood that destroyed the world."

"Why would God destroy what God just finished creating? You have to expect, after thousands of years, some stuff gets lost in translation."

I threw up my hands. "Why does God do anything? The Lord works in mysterious ways, right?"

He grunted, and it didn't sound like agreement. "We need to find out if the child is Sathanas's spawn."

Spawn seemed kind of rude, but I was still trying to process an extinction level event caused by a child throwing a fit and yanking the moon out of orbit, so I let it slide and suggested that I could try to talk with the holy woman.

"I was trying to tell you not to go there without backup. We knew Sathanas was in the neighborhood. It's not safe to face him alone." He sighed and rolled his eyes. "Also, Moose already talked to her."

"What did he say?"

"He said she's crazy and mean. She grows her own garden. She rants about organic fertilizer, and she almost killed him when he accidentally snapped a twig off a bush."

"What kind of bush?" I asked.

"Does it really matter?"

"It might."

He rubbed his eyes and the movement of his glowing, opalescent hand against his face flashed and dazzled across the screen. Like this, he looked so alien. And so wonderful.

Focus, Olivia!

"She's very into gardening, so she tends her plants carefully and, presumably, each one has a purpose. That goes double as a witch, right? If one got damaged, it would make her angry," I said.

"Yeah, I suppose." He dropped his hand back down. "I don't know what kind of bush it was, but he did say he thought it had been recently planted. That's why he stumbled. The ground around it was all soft, like it had just been dug up."

Restless energy pulsed through my body. I got up and started pacing to burn some of it off before I exploded. "My grandfather says Sathanas isn't running toward something. He's running away from something."

"You spoke to your grandfather about the case?"

"Not the specifics."

He didn't respond, so I took that to mean I should go on.

"Maybe the baby doesn't have anything to do with anything," I said. "Maybe he's stuck between a rock and a hard place—or, in his case, between a holy woman and a cemetery—because someone pinned him down in that spot."