17 13| Athena

Why Hillary thought I was the rightful owner of a faded green journal with a story about an angel named Gabriel was beyond me.

According to the journal, which referenced Bible verses, God sent Gabriel to Mary to tell her she would have the son of God—Luke 1:26-28. Gabriel also told a man named Zechariah that a woman named Elisabeth would have a son, who turned out to be John the Baptist. In another story, Gabriel was the defender of Islam, alongside an angel named Micheal. In the Book of Ezekiel, Gabriel was the angel sent to destroy Jerusalem.

The entire journal was of Gabriel and his wonderful accomplishments, followed by a family's lineage, and I couldn't see how any of it pertained to me.

Closing the journal, I finished the last of my coffee. Between homework and piecing together this puzzle, I hadn't been getting any sleep. During the times I managed to catch some Z's, it was nearly impossible to fall into anything other than light sleep. Unless Sebastian was around.

I was sitting in Sebastian's home office, surrounded by notebooks, pens, pencils, and every journal, book, and a fabled tale I had access to, along with the Bible. Griffin was out finding me other religious works, and every story I needed information on, while I also did digital research on Sebastian's computer.

The First Blades. I found absolutely nothing on the internet about them, and I had went far into the double digits on the search pages. I even tried other names they could be under: angel weapons, angel blades, etc. I had to rely on Sebastian and Griffin to all me more information, but Sebastian had been asleep for the past twelve hours. He had gotten up only to go get me breakfast since we were out of the food, and then collapsed in his bed, snoring. I decided to do more research.

If the blade that they found was an exact replica of the one I had, and it was a First Blade, then I held a First Blade, too. Griffin had told me that the full capabilities could only be reached by someone with angel blood. Only the fallen angels had reproduced with humans, though, which made Nephilim, and they couldn't make it reach its full capabilities.

Which begged the question: what were the full capabilities?

Apparently, if you belong to the original family, and you wield one, you can hear your ancestors speaking to you. Each of the First Blades belong to a family, but this one was lost hundreds of years ago, so no one knew who the family was anymore.

And there was that. It was the only explanation that made sense. The Walker side of the family was known for being "crazy," at least my dad was, and my grandmother. They had weird dreams, and they talked about angels who walked the Earth, and they usually studied religion. My grandmother, in fact, had extensive knowledge about damn near every religion in the world that involved God, and had tried to pass that knowledge on to me, Bella, and Clare, but she was met with resistance from our parents. My grandmother always had weird "dreams," and so had my dad.

I used to have those dreams, too, until they stopped one day. The dreams featured angels with big white wings and long, colorful garments that told me stories about their history, about the wars and the world. They told me I was special, and I distinctly remembered one with soft, royal blue robes and a rumbling voice like an avalanche. I never feared him, and I always welcomed his presence.

When I had fought with Sebastian, I heard someone. Someone who knew what they were doing, and I hadn't heard that voice since. Sebastian hadn't said the families had angel blood in them, so something else had to be responsible. Some reason we had access to that blade. I had made it glow, and I heard someone, but whatever the other things were, I hadn't accessed those.

Sebastian had let Luca take the matching blade home to Clare. I needed to warn her before she touched it so she knew what to expect. Or maybe she could figure out how to hear them without waiting for a fight or strenuous exercise.

I rubbed my temples taking a deep breath. Each family had an angel at the head. And ours had blue robes. Where did I start, though? I couldn't just search every angel until I found a picture of one. There had to be a—

Gabriel.

"Hillary, you genius!" I muttered, turning on the computer. My fingers flew across the keyboard. I clicked on images. While they each varied, the consensus was the same: Gabriel had some form of a blue robe or garment on him.

Now, how did all this connect to Mother?

Sebastian knocked at the door softly before pushing it open. He stood there in a pair of sweats, barefoot and shirtless, bags under his eyes, a grumpy look on his face. "Hillary's here," he announced, looking in. "You okay, you look frustrated?"

I gave him a tired smile. "Every time I figure something out, it just leaves more questions for me to answer," I pushed myself away from the desk, folding my hands into my lap.

And there were so many more questions now. My family owned one of the First Blades. The first one to wield it was listed in the book. I remembered his name: Gabriel Walker. We had always prided ourselves on having a last name that had withstood centuries without change. Gabriel Walker had to be named after the angel. But why? Why us? How us?

Sebastian stepped into the room. "How about you write your questions down? I'll do some research, make some calls to my siblings," he told me. "Hillary brought food, though, so you might want to hurry."

"Oh my God, yes."

I scribbled down answers, along with a note telling him about the First Blade, what happened during our fight, and the angel Gabriel. After I was done, I jumped out of the chair, desperate to get to my best friend—and the food. Before I walked past him, though, Sebastian grabbed my wrist, stopping me. I looked over my shoulder. "What's wrong?"

Sebastian tilted his head to the side. The pressure on my wrist increased, and his eyes met mine. "Thinking about us," he told me, sliding his hand from my wrist to my hands. He intertwined his fingers in mine, and my breath caught. This wasn't completely unusual—we held hands often, often because he had to pull me away from something that had caught my attention.

Of all my brother's secrets, though, his feelings for you are his best kept. I'm not even sure he knows the extent of them.

I pushed Griffin's words out of my head. I couldn't let him get to me, make me rethink what I knew to be true—both Sebastian and I found each other attractive, and I might have wanted to date him at some point, but the feelings were not reciprocated. And if they were, this wasn't a good idea.

My mom would always tell me, If you go looking for something, you'll find it. That was what I was doing, looking for something and imagining it there simply because Griffin's words had reopened those feelings the smallest bit.

"Us?" I wondered if he could hear my heart racing in my chest. If he could, he hid it well.

He tugged me closer to him, wrapping me in his arms. My cheek pressed against his chest, and I resisted the urge to stay right there until Mother came to claim me. There were worse ways and places to die. "Yes. Us." He released me, tilting his head to the side with a grin.

My eyebrows furrowed. "What about us?"

God, I hoped he wanted to me I was beautiful and sexy, and that we should spend the last few days of my life rolling around naked in his bed.

It was not a good idea at all, but when Sebastian looked at me like that—eyes glued to the dip of my tank top, eyeing the rounded breasts—my breath hitched, and I forgot I had things to do, lives to save.

He grinned, tucking a wayward curl behind my ear. "We don't have time to discuss it. Call me when Hillary leaves."

I hightailed it out of the room. Not because I wanted to get to Hillary faster so I could get rid of Hillary faster.

Not at all because of that.

I bounded down the hall to where Hillary sat on the sofa, a strawberry-kiwi smoothie in one hand and a hot breakfast plate in the other, still steaming. It had pancakes, scrambled eggs, two pieces of bacon, and a piece of buttered toast. "You're literally the best person ever," I announced, plopping down on the sofa next to her. "I was starving."

She handed me the plate. "Two rich demons in this house, and you're hungry? Who do I need to talk to about this?"

I grabbed a slice of bacon, crunching on it. Bacon was the work of the Lord, and no one could convince me differently. "God, presumably," I answered, taking a sip of the smoothie, which was my favorite of all time. "How are you doing? I remember you saying Aunt Tabby died."

Aunt Tabby was Hillary's crazy "aunt." Well, I used to think she was crazy. Every time we visited, Aunt Tabby pulled me to her tiny plastic table in the middle of her tinier kitchen, pulled out some tarot cards, and told me there was death, destruction, and twisted paths lying await in my future—with the inclusion of soulmates, deceit, and betrayal. Trust only those who walk in, she warned, confusing me.

Looking back on it, though, Aunt Tabby was spot the fuck on, though. I felt bad that I had completely written her off all those months ago.

Hillarys shrugged, waving off my concern with a flick of her wrist. "I saw her death months ago. We had time to come to terms with it." She grabbed the smoothie next to her and removed the top, tilting it back into her mouth instead of drinking from the straw like a normal person. "Oh yeah, and she's not my real aunt. I met her seven years ago in a supermarket."

I paused in buttering my toast. "So you made me visit her why?"

"She was a seasoned psychic, and she taught me all about refining my skills. If it wasn't for her, I would've never met you, or the Sins," she explained. "I wanted a second opinion on my visions concerning you because they were very unclear. She also wanted to meet one of the people that could eventually save the world. See if we were really doomed or not."

I bit into my toast. "What's the verdict? Did I pass her test?"

"She died before she could tell me," she answered. "But if it's any consolation, I think she liked you. She never offered anyone else soup, including me."

"She could've kept the soup." Aunt Tabby's soup was something out o a horror story. It was like dirty dishwater mixed with ginger, beef broth, and rat bones. One time, I swore I saw a tail stirring in there, but she always insisted we eat it. "Did she tell you whether we win or lose?"

I hated to change the subject from her Aunt Tabby, but, at the risk of sounding callous, the entire world was at stake. And my life, my cousin's life, and countless other lives. Aunt Tabby was dead; I needed to assure that nobody else ended up that way.

"She didn't know," Hillary admitted, sounding defeated. "And, even if she did know, she couldn't tell me or you—or anybody, really. Letting you know changes the outcome." She looked at me expectantly, so I nodded, even though I had a mouth full of pancakes.

"Hmmm," I muttered around my mouth full of pancakes. I chewed for a bit, thinking. "So the future isn't set in stone?"

She shook her head. "Not at all. In fact, had you chosen to wear the blue tank top today instead of the orange one, Sebastian would've kissed you when he grabbed your hand in his office." She smirked. "Also, when I asked if you two were banging all last week, it's because that was definitely an option. I try not to read futures purposefully unless it's a dramatic situation."

Should've worn the blue hoodie, I thought. "Is there anything that's certain?" I asked, instead of commenting on her remark.

"Few things." Hillary was still smirking, which meant I wasn't let off the hook with the Sebastian conversation. She would bring it back. Hopefully he was too engrossed in answering my questions to listen. Please be asleep, I thought. "Like death, for example. I can tell you when you're going to die, but not—"

I shuddered. "Please don't." I just wanted it to catch me by surprise like damn near everybody else in the world. I just hoped I had another seventy years left in me at the very least. In my nineties was a good age to go.

"—but, there's nothing you can do to change that future. You're going to die exactly then, but the way you die is different." She paused, gripping the chair a little bit tighter. "Like when my dad died in a car crash. We did everything to prevent it—kept him home for a week, made sure he didn't get in the car.

"But there was a storm, and my neighbor rushed over. Her husband wasn't home, her phone wasn't working, her daughter had stopped breathing, and she couldn't drive because she had just taken some medicine." Hillary closed her eyes. Her father had died two years ago. It was a very hard period for her, and I knew she blamed herself, despite being in Missouri. "He decided not to go, but he had a heart attack alone in the house and died anyway."

She opened her eyes, and they were shiny with tears. "So nothing you do will change death. It'll find a way to get to you." She blinked, gulped down some smoothie, and when she put it down, she was smiling with false bravado. "However, there are some good things that never change, no matter what."

"Do tell." I was almost done eating. Looking at my plate sadly, I reluctantly shoved the rest of the pancake into my my mouth and chewed.

She laughed. "You look so sad. It's just cheap pancakes, Athena, please want better for yourself."

I grinned, placing my trash in the bag she had brought it in. "Very good cheap pancakes." I looked over my shoulder as footsteps came down the hall. Sebastian appeared, dressed in a suit and tie, his messy bed hair combed into a bun. "You look sharp."

He rolled his eyes. "Someone pissed me off, and I didn't want to get blood on my everyday clothes," he remarked, grabbing his blue gym bag off the wall. It held all of his torture weapons.

Hillary looked amused.

"You coming back tonight?" I couldn't do another night without him here. I didn't want to be alone with my thoughts. I didn't want to panic.

He nodded once, rifling through the bag and grabbing three knives and the rope. He pushed his sleeve up and wrapped the rope from his forearm to his wrist, then pushed it down. "Can you tell I have rope under here?" He flashed his arm.

"Not at all." Hillary shook her head vehemently.

He hid a knife in either of his sleeves. The other went into his waist. I knew his sword was on him, in its usual position strapped to his back. "I should be back in about two hours. Probably less, I'm pretty pissed," he told me. He stalked out of the room with nothing else but glare on his face and his car keys. The door slammed shut behind him, and we were quiet as we heard him lock the door and then start his car and peel out of the driveway.

Hillary sighed. "There are so many things I have to tell you I honestly don't know where to start."

I grabbed the blanket off the back of the couch and threw it over her. "Well, we have two hours. Just start anywhere."

Hillary didn't talk about being a psychic much with me. I knew she was one, but we didn't go into the details of it, nor the mechanisms. I never asked her to use her abilities to see into my future, but I always heeded her warnings and advice.

Apparently, though, Hillary had known me long before I knew her, and this was the first thing she kept from me.

Seven years ago, Hillary was scrolling through social media when she saw a post: fourteen-year-old African American girl from Alabama graduates college with a degree in Chemistry. Underneath it, my smiling mug with the box braids (one blue, one purple, one blonde, as was my style back then). Immediately, she was overcome with visions—not one, not two, not three, but more than a dozen. I was getting married, I was old with three kids, old with no kids and one leg, four fingers. Then visions of me and her laughing, talking, on top of the roof with a blanket around us. It intrigued her to look further, trying to figure out who I would be to her, where I would end up.

At first, everything she saw was nice and normal: graduation, family vacations, college tours, meeting her. But she soon noticed something—in the back of every vision was this guy. He was tall with matted black hair, blue eyes, a heavy-set top, and skinny legs, but the most distracting of all, dark green skin. As she followed that train of thought, more visions bombarded her, these more dangerous and scarier. I was dead, throat slit by that demon. It happened multiple times, multiple ways. She was sure my death was imminent, but there was something else, too. She also saw me old and gray, a ring on my finger, to a guy with salt and pepper hair and matching beard, green eyes, and olive skin.

Confused—because how could I die but also live to be old and gray—Hillary slept on the visions, trying to make sense of them. Instead of getting a clear answer, she saw my death and the destruction of the world. It terrified her. Until then, she had known the future to be ever changing, and no matter what future she tried to see, what variables she inserted, she saw the same thing: I would die, and I would also live forever.

The next day, Hillary found herself at the grocery store with her mom. Propelled to go to the fruit section, she met 'Aunt Tabby.' The short, stout woman with the red head wrap she always wore that smelled high key of mothballs and cinnamon incense looked at Hillary and smiled, saying, "My dear, I've waited years for you." Taking her into her arms, she slipped her a sheet of paper with her address on it.

Months went by before Hillary could sneak away from home to visit Aunt Tabby. When she did, the woman was waiting with a cup of green tea. They sat across the table, and she helped Hillary sort through her visions. It was when they came to an interesting conclusion: my premature death was not supposed to happen, only the growing old part. In addition, my death brought on the end of the world.

Therefore, my premature death was preventable, but why did it show up?

For the next three years, they searched high and low to gather information on me, based on visions. They followed leads, often found dead ends, and Aunt Tabby went to different countries to find the things I needed. It wasn't because they valued my life, Hillary explained apologetically, but because they needed to save the world. I just happened to be collateral.

In their search, they found out about angels and demons, the Seven Sins, but not much more information than we knew now. They tried for a future to keep me alive.

The deeper they went into their search, the more they saw my life wasn't the only one in this web. They found Clare to be tangled in just as precariously. Not only did they have to keep me alive, but they also had to make sure Clare remained alive as well—thus beginning the long, arduous plan of keeping me safe while allowing me autonomy.

Before I even applied to college, Hillary saw which one I would choose. Feeling confident that I would choose the one I currently attended, she found Sebastian wandering the streets of Fresno, hunting demons like his life depended on him. She convinced him that what he desired most would be in Missouri in three years—so start getting his act together. Apparently he did what he had to do because Sebastian was in Missouri a few months later, waiting.

Hillary also followed me to Missouri, when she much preferred studying in Alabama, closer to home—even though her soulmate would be in Missouri, too. She planned on meeting him much later in life, after "sowing her wild oats." In Missouri, Hillary could fall in love (apparently, once she met Ricky, she realized her oats no longer needed to be sowed), but she could also keep a better eye on me. She even brought Luca down here to convince the housing people to pair me and her together.

It was Hillary who called Sebastian to us that day I met him, and Hillary who nudged me to look up just as he walked across. Although, she told me, if I hadn't have said anything, she would've yelled at Sebastian at that moment, pretending to be a long time friend of his, surprised to see him around.

Hillary had hoped that Sebastian's arrival would seal my fate as growing old and gray, but it hadn't—not truly anyway. The dying early part seemed less likely (she explained it was a feeling in her chest that she got when something was inevitable) with him around, but the visions lingered on.

Except, something had happened recently, somewhere we had messed up, and my death was quickly hurtling towards me dying in the next few weeks. And she had no idea what had gone wrong, or how to fix it.

The thing about being a psychic that really sucked was that you saw the outcome, you saw when small details changed, but you didn't see the how or the why.

I rubbed at my temples. "So what now?" I asked. She had talked for the last hour, giving me a run-by of everything that had happened in the past seven years. It was enough information to make my head throb, but it didn't really give me any insight. "I still don't have the answers I need."

Hillary sighed. "And I can't give them to you. I literally don't know them." She reached over and grabbed me in a hug, tugging me closer and holding me in her thin arms. "But you got this. You're the smartest person I know. You'll figure this out."

I snorted. "Sebastian said that to me earlier this morning." Of course, when he said it, he was laughing at me for not knowing how to switch his computer screen from touchscreen to using the mouse and keypad.

Their faith astounded me. I had too little time and too little information to really figure this out. Impossible conditions, even for a genius like me. And if, somehow, I figured out who Mother was, I still didn't know how to defeat her.

Hillary smiled, one I knew very well. "Sebastian is smart." She released me, meeting my gaze head-on. I braced myself. "You know, Athena, he has feelings for you."

Yes, yes, I knew. Everybody who was anybody kept reminding me. "The world is about to end, yet you and Griffin are worried about my love life."

"Because life is short—or it's long, depending on how this plays out." She grabbed my hand and gave it a squeeze, an earnest expression on her face. "Either way, the last thing I want is for you to regret anything when you take your last breaths."

I rolled my eyes.

"I'm only telling you as a courtesy. I've already named your kids."

"I have names for my children, too."

"Yes, you do. Jasmine Hillary for a girl, Sebastian Gabriel for a boy."

I smiled. My kids, named after my two best friends. Although, I often wondered what kind of mojo I was giving my son by naming him after a demon. Well, naming my daughter after a psychic didn't seem so smart either. "Anyway, enough talk about death and relationships," I said, changing the subject. "We haven't hung in a while. Let's catch up."

Hillary narrowed her eyes. "Amara and Gabriel," she told me, turning to the TV. "Those are the names of your twins."