“Yes what, Sophia? I haven’t even told you yet.”
“Sorry.” She sat back down, still smiling. “Please, go on.”
He pulled out an envelope and set it on the table.
“Sophia, I’m calling it all off.”
Now the smile faded. The face fell.
“You’re…? I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“Please don’t make this any more difficult than it needs to be. I can’t marry you. We should have seen this coming.”
She said nothing. Her face, in despair, looked so different. Nikolai could hardly bear it.
Albert reached across the table to take her hands but she pulled them back, still staring into the air straight at Nikolai, as though asking him, Why?
“In the long run, when you’re older, you’ll understand. We’re just not…” He looked up, also in Nikolai’s direction, as though asking his help finding the word. “We’re not compatible.”
She didn’t respond. Gone from her face was the joy, the innocence, all that made her who she was.
“Sophia?”
She finally turned to face Albert, and spoke. With each word her voice lowered in volume but rose in intensity.
“Thank you for your honesty, though it took you twenty-five months, three weeks, two days, and seventeen hours to come up with it.”
“As I’ve said, in the long run you’ll understand.” He slid the envelope over to her. “Here.”
Instead of looking at it she turned away in Nikolai’s direction.
“Whatever it is, I don’t want it,” she said. Her veil of courage and dignity was gossamer-thin, but oh, how he admired her for it.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Take it!”
“I have no interest in your… envelope.” Sophia glanced down at the table as though it were covered with dung.
“Don’t you even want to know what’s in it?”
Sophia stood up. “I think I’d rather leave, Albert.”
“It’s a portion of the money you might have enjoyed had we—”
She snatched the envelope, opened the flap, held the envelope over Albert without looking inside, glanced up in Nikolai’s direction…
Go on, now. That’s my girl.
…and poured coins and bills all over Albert’s head.
“What!” Albert didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. “Are you out of your mind?”
“You can keep your money, Albert.” She grabbed her cup of tea and threw it in his face. “And do with it something anatomically improbable!”
Though she could not perceive his presence, Nikolai smiled and bowed as she walked away, head held high to show Albert what she thought of him and his pathetic attempt at appeasing what he probably thought of as his conscience.
The entire construct paused like a DVR movie.
“You haven’t changed,” Hope said.
“Angels don’t age,” Nick said, wistfully regarding the young construct-Sophia. A sharp pain behind his eyes made him struggle not to grimace.
“She seems like a nice girl. What happened?”
“To make a long story short, I took an unauthorized hiatus in order to be with her. Sophia was beautiful, great fun, and a wonderful person. Over time I revealed myself to her and we did what has been forbidden since the dawn of humankind.”
“You fell in love.” Hope gave him a look of compassion.
“I’m afraid it’s worse than that.”
“Wait a minute, you mean—”
“I married her. And worse still…”
She leaned closer.
“Is that even possible?” she said.
“When I choose to take on a physical form, I’m fully human, though I still possess what you consider supernatural abilities.”
“So did you have a son or a daughter?”
“I’ll show you.”
A little girl with golden hair and shining sapphire eyes stood smiling in front of them. A very familiar-looking little girl.
“This is…this was Clara,” Nick said.
Hope knelt down and looked straight at her, knowing that as a construct, this child was just a figment of Nick’s memory. Nonetheless she touched Clara’s hair, ran her fingers down the braided pigtails around which little red bows were tied.
Then smiled and leapt to her feet.
“She looks like Chloe.”
“The resemblance is striking. I can’t help wondering if there’s a reason I was assigned to escort Chloe. But since I’d been demoted to reaper, I didn’t get to ask those questions.”
“Demoted? What for?”
“Well, I assume that’s what happened. After all, I’d broken just about every law—I was grateful it wasn’t anything worse than being reassigned to the mundane work of ushering souls.”
Staring incredulously at the little construct of Clara, Hope circled her while she spoke to Nick.
“Why is it so wrong for angels to fall in love with humans? Marry them, have children with them?”
“From what I’ve been told, certain humans and angels did have children eons ago, with dangerous results. It’s all rather vague, but supposedly there’s a danger of their offspring becoming highly powerful, unstable beings with a thirst for blood, some of them extraordinarily intelligent and irresistibly beautiful.”
“Were they angels or human?”
“A hybrid of both called Nephilim. Several cultures cite the presence of Nephilim in their history. Outside of the Hebrew Bible, the Torah, other civilizations have their own terminology. But I’ve never seen one. Doubt they even exist.”
“So why make such stringent laws over a matter of speculation?”
“My thoughts, exactly. Still, if Nephilim are real and have in fact abused their power to wreak all kinds of havoc on mankind, of course there’s cause for concern. Believers speculate that some of history’s greatest minds, most powerful rulers, and cruelest dictators were Nephilim.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, there’s an infamous list of Nephilim, but I consider the whole thing apocryphal. Among them are Ch’in Shih-huan-ti, Caligula, Ghengis Khan, Herod the Great, Vlad Tepes—”
“Vlad the Impaler?”
He nodded.
“Dracula was a Nephilim! And I suppose Hitler’s on the list?”
“Absolutely.”
Hope closed her eyes for a moment. When they opened, she pointed to the Clara-construct.
“How about her?”
“Even those who believe in Nephilim don’t know if they all turn out evil—they don’t even know if Nephilim are mortal or immortal. In my mind, they hold to those myths in order to justify angel laws that will deter us from intermingling with humans.”
“So what went wrong with you and Sophia?” She was eager to know—he understood why and admired her for it. Now, the dread of reliving the story gave way to a need to share it with her.
“After Sophia and I married she noticed I never got ill, never looked tired, and after some years never showed signs of aging. She said I was distant, somehow—even though we were close as could be, in so many ways. She asked questions I wouldn’t answer, then insisted there was something standing between us, something important, she just knew it—of course she was right.
“So I told her the truth. Then I told her I was willing to give up my angel nature and become a human to be with her. I thought she’d be happy—but the last thing she wanted was for me to renounce my angel status and lose my immortality and other supernatural attributes. No, she wanted to know all about them, even craved some of them for herself—you know, the eternal youth, the limitless energy…and in retrospect, the power.”
“I can see why.” Hope was eyeing him with great interest.
“I told her to let it go, it wasn’t worth it. Our love was enough.” Nick’s voice dropped. “Only it wasn’t, for Sophia. She became obsessed with the supernatural—I only learned by overhearing a conversation. She’d been secretly consulting with some kind of dark occultists about how she could tap into it. I warned her it wasn’t safe—she dismissed it, saying I was just threatened by her.”