Forbidden

seventeen

She was looking at Alec’s face. In a mirror. Through his eyes. He looked a couple of years younger, his hair slicked back but disheveled, his face bruised and bloodied. He wore a black leather bomber jacket and a bloodstained T-shirt. She felt the anger and adrenaline that was rushing through him.
A hand clamped down on her shoulder—Alec’s shoulder—and spun him around. A gun was aimed at his face. The man who held it glared at him with hateful eyes. They were inside an auto shop full of cars from the fifties and early sixties, but all shiny and new. The signs were in French. A calendar on the wall gave the year as 1962.
“Give it up, hunter,” the man spat out in French, but somehow she understood him.
Alec kicked the gun from the man’s hand. The two exchanged a flurry of violent blows. Blood splattered on the concrete. Alec’s fist hit his opponent square in the chest. The man flew backward as if hit by a battering ram, slamming into a hydraulic rack, and crumpling to the oil-stained floor beneath it.
Alec’s right hand thrust out deliberately, stretching his fingers toward the car on the rack above. She could feel an invisible flow of energy course through his arm and surge outward, wrapping itself around the vehicle. Then, as if he was moving nothing more weighty than a textbook, he sent the car hurtling downward, toward the man. The victim’s scream was cut short by the crash of the impact.
With a gasp of horror, Claire blinked and came back to herself, sickened, perspiring, and breathing hard. Instantly, she shoved Alec away and leapt to her feet. What had she just seen? The world was still spinning, the air shimmering like heat rising from a desert road. Looking down, she saw that her entire body was surrounded by an emerald-green glow that rippled off her skin like flames—just like she’d seen in her dream.
“Oh my God! What’s going on?” Claire cried, staggering back in terror. “I’m on fire!”
“You can see that?” Alec returned her stare, unmoving. For some reason, he didn’t look too shocked—more … disappointed, if anything. “Shite. It is you. I really hoped I was wrong.”
Claire dropped to the floor and started to roll to put out the flames when they dissipated as if by magic into thin air. She stared at Alec. “What did you do?”
“What do you mean?”
Overcome by a surge of nausea, Claire curled into the fetal position, dry-heaving, and then lay there, struggling to breathe. As her stomach settled, she started shivering uncontrollably. Alec moved to the carpet beside her, but she shrank away from his touch. “I saw you!” she cried, her eyes wet with tears. “You killed that man, didn’t you?”
“Who?” Alec’s expression was unreadable.
“Who are you?” she whispered, staggering to her feet.
He sighed. “Don’t move.” Getting up, Alec strode to a built-in cupboard near the bathroom and swung it open.
Claire panicked. What did he have stored in there? Whatever it was, she didn’t want to find out. Grabbing his car keys from the coffee table, she bolted for the door.
“Claire! Wait!”
There was an odd whooshing sound and suddenly, impossibly, Alec was standing right behind her, reaching for her arm. If she’d had any doubts about his abilities before, they evaporated in an instant. Claire screamed and shoved the door back at him as she slipped through. It met his face with a heavy blow. Alec cursed as she raced away. She was at his car in a flash, her hands shaking as she fumbled with the key. As she yanked his car door open and jumped in behind the wheel, she heard that odd sound again, like a faint rush of wind, and all at once Alec stood outside her car door.
Claire gasped in terror and slammed her fist down on the door lock.
Alec stared in at her through the car window, bleeding from a gash in his forehead. “Claire, get out of the car,” he said calmly. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
Claire didn’t wait to hear more. She stuffed the key into the ignition, stomped on the clutch, and gunned the car into reverse. It lurched and groaned and then slipped into gear. As Alec leapt out of the way, she backed the car out of the parking space and with a screech of tires swerved around toward the street.
Incredibly, the car began to falter. Claire stomped harder on the gas pedal. The engine was roaring—and yet for some reason the vehicle slowed down even further. What the hell was happening? Claire floored it, causing the car to lurch forward. But then it jolted to a complete standstill, slamming Claire into the steering wheel and then back against the seat.
Crying out in pain, her foot still pressed hard on the gas, Claire looked over her shoulder. Her eyes widened in terror. Alec was standing just a few yards behind the car, his arm extended toward it, a look of deep concentration on his face. He was stopping the car with his mind.
Alec’s eyes bore into hers from beyond the glass, blood running down his face. The car slowly started to inch away from him. At the same time, she saw his feet slowly sliding forward along the pavement. Was the car pulling him? Was its weight and power more than he could handle? Claire faced the steering wheel again, refusing to let up on the gas. In the rearview mirror, she saw Alec’s face tighten and his arm start to tremble from the continued stress. At last, with an exasperated look, he lowered his arm. The car roared forward unhindered into the street. The tires squealed as Claire yanked the wheel hard, struggling to maintain control as she made the sharp turn at full throttle. Glancing back, she saw Alec standing in the driveway behind her, shaking his head.
Claire drove to a supermarket parking lot about five miles away, where she waited, blinded by tears, until Erica pulled up in her SUV. Only when she saw her best friend’s face did Claire feel safe enough to unlock the door and get out.
“Thank you for coming to rescue me,” Claire said, leaping into Erica’s vehicle and hugging her tightly.
Erica pulled back and stared at her, a worried look on her face. “Tell me again, what happened with Alec? You were talking so fast on the phone, I could hardly understand you.”
Claire sank back against the seat and heaved a sigh as she buckled up. “Just take me to your place, now. I want to get as far away from here as possible.”
“So,” Erica said slowly. “You’re saying that you saw Alec murder a man with a car. In a memory. Of his. Fifty years ago. But he only looked maybe fourteen.”
“Yes.”
They were lying on Erica’s four-poster bed, staring up at the ceiling of Erica’s spacious room, surrounded by lavender walls, designer curtains, and classy hardwood furniture cluttered with stacks of books and tchotchkes from Erica’s various travels. The cartons from their take-out salad lunches sat on the floor.
Claire was finally beginning to feel normal again. Her neck ached slightly, but she’d refused medical attention, insisting that all she needed was an ice pack for the mild bruises on her upper chest from the seat belt and steering wheel.
“And then,” Erica continued, “when you tried to escape in Alec’s car, he magically held it back for at least a minute.”
“Yes.”
Erica rolled over to face Claire on the bed. “Tell me you’re at least kidding about the last part.”
Claire took a pillow and put it over her head, batting it with her fist in exasperation. “God, are we still debating this?” She ripped off the pillow and hurled it at Erica, who ducked just in time. “It was just like what I saw underneath the scaffolding! He reaches his hand forward like this—” Claire demonstrated the action again. “And he can move things—push or pull them—without touching them. I told you! He’s telekinetic. And I know what it feels like. I was in his head today. It was like I mentally grabbed that French car myself and pulled it down off the rack—as if it weighed almost nothing.”
“Holy crap.” Erica sat up now, wide-eyed, grabbing her boba milk tea. “Well, I guess that confirms all the alien superpower stuff you were obsessing about before.”
“Finally, she believes me.” Claire set the ice pack aside with a relieved sigh.
“There’s one thing I still don’t get. If the memory happened fifty years ago, how was Alec alive? And how could he have been only fourteen?”
“I don’t know. Whatever he is, I think he ages way differently than we do.”
“Neat.” Erica sipped her drink slowly, deep in thought. “How did you get the vision? Did you touch him? Or his guitar?”
“No.” Claire realized she’d left out that detail. “It … um … happened when he … kissed me.”
Erica’s eyes bugged out. “WHAT? He kissed you? And you conveniently forgot to mention it?”
“I was getting to it,” Claire said defensively.
“How was it?”
“How was what?”
“The kiss.”
“Are you kidding me?” Claire stared at Erica, incredulous. “I barely escape with my life, and you’re asking if Alec’s a good kisser?”
“Claire, we don’t know that your life was in danger. Did Alec make a move to hurt you?”
“Well, no, but—”
“But nothing. You got a scary vision, freaked out, and ran—totally understandable—but that doesn’t necessarily make Alec a bad guy.”
“Erica, I saw him kill a man.”
“Alec might have had a good reason.” Erica set her drink down on the nightstand and faced Claire crossed-legged on the bed. “Maybe the guy was an evil vampire. Or a dangerous double agent. Or both.”
“So what are you saying? That Alec is a Slayer—or a telekinetic spy?”
“It’s possible. Or he could be genetically engineered. Never discount the sci-fi angle.”
“This is all insane.” Leaning up on one elbow, she drew invisible circles on Erica’s quilt with her fingertip. “It’s too much, Erica. Everything that’s been happening since Book Day—all these weird psychic episodes and danger warnings, and at the same time, I meet a guy with superpowers of his own—what am I supposed to make of all this? Is Alec the reason I’m in danger, or not?”
Erica shook her head, frowning. “I don’t know—but you need an answer, and fast.”
“No problem. I’ll just call Merlin. Or Dumbledore. Get my phone. I have them both on speed-dial.”
“Claire Bear.” Erica met her gaze affectionately. “You already have a wise wizard to consult with: the person who’s sending you that warning.”
“Assuming it really is a person, and not just a voice in my head. But even if that’s true, how am I supposed to consult with someone who sends random, incomplete messages?”
“Brian said it’s probably the same message being broadcast over and over. We just have to figure out how to help you hear the whole thing.”
“Great,” Claire replied sarcastically. “Let’s call 1-800-PSYCHIC, and ask them to patch me through to the sender.”
“There are ways for you to get in touch with whoever’s talking to you.” Erica reached under her bed and withdrew a thick, oversize paperback book called So, You’re a Psychic? “I bought this last week, and I’ve been reading a little every night, to see if I could learn something useful.”
Claire glanced at it dubiously. “And…?”
“I know it sounds crazy, but there’s all kinds of fascinating stuff in here. According to this, you need to try some combination of astral projection and channeling.”
“I’ve read about that stuff online,” Claire replied, still doubtful. “It said astral projection is about going somewhere with your mind, and channeling is about contacting spirits. How does either one help me?”
“Think big picture, Claire. Astral projection isn’t just about finding some place; it can be used to find someone. Channeling is about listening to someone who’s talking to you. Somebody is out there traveling the psychic moors, calling out your name. Your job is to either meet them on the moors, or to bring the moors to you.”
Claire stared at her. “You’ve been reading Wuthering Heights again, haven’t you?”
“Just go with the metaphor.”
Claire sighed. “What do I have to do?”
Erica adopted her most sagelike tone, clasping her hands dramatically. “We have to put you in a trance.”
Claire sat in the lotus position on the plush carpet, propped up against Erica’s dresser with a large throw pillow as a backrest. It was after dinner now, and the sun was going down. The curtains were drawn, leaving the bedroom in near darkness. Erica sat across from her, methodically lighting a semicircle of candles around them.
“Love-you-too-Mom. Bye.” Claire hung up the phone. “Miracle number one: Mom is fine with me staying over. Miracle number two: She’s meeting that guy for a coffee date.”
“Wow,” Erica said. “She’s really coming out of her shell fast. I mean that in a good way.”
“Yeah. Now that she thinks I’m fine, she’s easing up on me and starting to think about herself for a change.”
“Which is rather ironic, since, for the first time ever, you’re not really fine at all.”
“Hey. I thought you were supposed to be helping me relax.”
“Sorry! Forget I said that.” Erica lit the last candle and then touched the match to some incense she’d placed between them. A strong herbal fragrance began to permeate the room. “Now, my child,” Erica intoned as she picked up the psychic book and opened it to a particular page, “are you ready to begin?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be.” Claire leaned back against the pillow and closed her eyes.
“Take several slow, deep breaths,” Erica said calmly and quietly. “Choose an image that you associate with the voice you’ve been hearing, and focus on it alone.”
Claire nodded silently. She called to mind the silhouette she’d seen each time the voice had called to her: the amorphous, faceless figure, rimmed by glowing yellow light, against a backdrop of inky darkness. “Okay, I see it.”
“Good. Now be silent. Concentrate on your breathing. Every time you exhale, try to release all your other everyday thoughts and emotions, including any anxieties or skepticism. Hold on to that image, and just … be.”
As Erica continued, Claire followed her instructions.
Claire kept the silhouetted image before her closed eyes, but despite her best efforts, she couldn’t feel anything. The sounds around her were too distracting. She heard the tick of a clock. The swoosh of a car passing on the road outside. The muffled explosions of a video game from Erica’s brother’s room next door. She concentrated harder. See it, she commanded herself. Feel it. Suddenly—to her surprise—the silhouetted image seemed to grow a bit sharper, its edges more defined. Claire could now make out that the figure had a feminine frame. Her pulse quickened in excitement.
A phone rang loudly. Claire’s eyes snapped open, the spell broken.
“Crap!” Erica snatched up her phone, glanced at the caller ID, and barked into it, “Brian! Not now! We’re doing psychic stuff!” She quickly ended the call and turned to Claire. “Sorry, I should have shut it off before we started. Did it work? Did anything happen?”
Claire nodded eagerly. “I was just starting to see something when the phone rang. I think it was a woman.”
“Crap!” Erica said again.
“It was really hard to focus. Maybe we should try this later, when it’s quieter—after everyone goes to sleep.”
Erica looked disappointed. “Okay.” They blew out all the candles and the incense, leaving the room shrouded in murky darkness. “Let me dump the ash, and then we can go downstairs and have dessert. My mom got Mochi ice cream, two flavors.”
“Yum.”
Claire stood up, stretching, watching as Erica carefully carried the tray with the incense across the room. Erica paused in her bathroom doorway to flick on the light switch, and for a brief moment was backlit by the bathroom light—a moment which, Claire realized with a start, bore an eerie similarity to the blurry image Claire had just been trying to bring to focus in her mind. Erica disappeared inside.
Then something strange happened. All the distracting sounds around Claire went silent. She couldn’t even hear her own breathing. Whoa, she thought, glancing around her. What’s going on?
The room—the floor, the ceiling, everything—had disappeared. Claire was surrounded by black nothingness. Although she still felt her own body, she seemed to be floating in the void, as if in zero gravity. The only visual cues left, inexplicably, were the bathroom doorway hovering before her and the glow that emanated from within.
“Erica!” Claire whispered insistently. “Something’s happening!”
“What?” Erica sounded like she was a million miles away.
The light inside the bathroom doorway began to shift and change. A faceless, silhouetted, female figure appeared—the same figure Claire had seen a few minutes earlier. The light was coming from her, a glow of shimmering golden flames that radiated around her body.
“I see it!” Claire said quietly. “It’s definitely a woman, and she’s glowing!”
“Oh my God!” came Erica’s distant voice, filled with wonder.
Then Claire heard the same raspy British voice that had invaded her head twice before: “Claire. Your life is in danger.”
The figure moved forward. Claire saw her more clearly now: She was a stunningly attractive woman in her early sixties, with gentle crinkles beside her kind, hazel eyes, and a small beauty mark on her right cheek just above her mouth. Her chin-length, stylishly coiffed hair was pale blond, almost white. She wore a chic, formfitting navy-blue dress and a delicate necklace sparkling with tiny, floating diamonds.
“Oh! She’s beautiful!” Claire whispered in mingled awe and trepidation. “She’s smiling at me.” The woman seemed so real, Claire felt as if she could reach out and touch her. With a shiver, she reminded herself that the woman wasn’t really there.
Claire felt a sound coming up through her chest and out of her mouth—but it wasn’t her own voice. It was still raspy, but it was a perfect, cultured, British accent, as if the woman were now speaking directly through her:
“Someone wants to kill you because of your special gift. You are one of the Nephilim.”
I’m one of what? Claire thought, confused and alarmed.
“Only one person can protect and help you. Alec.”
Oh my God, Claire thought. Alec? Alec’s my protector?
“Alec is a Grigori, as am I. Come to Twin Palms. I will explain everything. My name is Helena.”
The woman brought a finger up to her lips in a silencing gesture as she repeated the familiar, final phrase of the eerie message:
“Don’t tell anyone.”
The light became so blinding that Claire had to close her eyes. When she reopened them, the woman was gone and she was back in Erica’s room. Erica was standing in the bathroom doorway, staring at her in openmouthed amazement.
Claire had the oddest sensation, as if she were still floating. Glancing down, she gasped in astonishment. She hadn’t just been floating in her mind. She was actually suspended in the air, about a foot above the floor. “Holy crap!” Claire cried. With that exclamation she dropped straight down, landing on the carpet with a thud.
“Wow!” Erica cried. “Claire, are you all right?”
Claire nodded, touching her throat, which felt hoarse and dry. “I need a glass of water.”
Erica brought her a glass from the bathroom, rushing up to kneel beside her. As Claire drank it Erica enthused, “That was so cool! You rose up like some kind of divine being and were hovering the whole time!”
Claire was still in a daze. “Who is she?”
“I don’t know, but I think she was talking through you! You sounded just like Helen Mirren.”
“Did she actually say that someone wants to kill me?” Claire asked, her insides constricting in fear.
“She said they want to kill you because of your gift,” Erica said solemnly. “Which I guess is this whole psychic thing.”
“Who wants to kill me? How do they know what’s been going on with me? And why do they care?”
“I have no idea. But at least we now know what’s going on with Alec. He’s not here to hurt you.”
Claire nodded. “This is all so…” Weird. Scary. Mind-boggling. She shivered, unable to finish the sentence.
“I know, right? You were totally channeling that lady’s spirit, Claire. It was like you were talking to someone beyond the grave!”
“That doesn’t make sense. If she were dead, why would she say ‘Come to Twin Palms, I’ll explain everything.’”
“Oh. Okay,” Erica agreed. “But if she’s alive, why doesn’t she come to you? Why is she doing all this psychically?”
“Maybe she lives really far away and can’t travel right now,” Claire mused as she set the empty water glass aside. “I still don’t get who she is or why she’s trying to help me. But whatever the reason, I say we try to find her.”
Two hours later, Claire and Erica were still huddled over Erica’s laptop, researching Twin Palms on the internet. There were over five hundred thousand hits on Google for Twin Palms—a whole cornucopia of places all over the world: the mall they’d visited, a former restaurant in Pasadena, a nail salon in Texas, a publishing house in New York, three hospitals, a stretch of condominiums in Florida, and multitudes of hotels and apartments from northern California and Arizona to the Caribbean and Thailand. It was even the name of Frank Sinatra’s original estate in Palm Springs.
“There is no way we are ever going to find this woman,” Erica complained. “Without her last name or some more identifying information, it’s impossible to narrow this down.”
“She said, ‘Come to Twin Palms.’ As if it were the name of a city. But it isn’t.” Claire sighed in frustration and leaned back against the headboard of the bed. “If someone is really trying to kill me, you’d think she would have given me a better way to find her! Like an address maybe?”
“If you’re in danger, we can’t keep searching for this mystery woman forever.” Erica opened up a new tab in her web browser. “Let’s attack this from a different angle. When she talked about your gift, she used a word I’ve never heard before, like you were special in some way. What did she call you? A Nefah-what?”
“I don’t know exactly. But I remember what she said Alec was—a Grih-gore-ee.”
“I’ve never heard that before, either.” They searched a few alternate spellings of the term, beginning with Gregory and ultimately landing on Grigori.
Two million hits came up when they Googled Grigori. The very first title listing contained two words that nearly made Claire’s heart stop:
Watcher.
Angel.