There’s a lot I don’t know about my life. But here’s what I do know.
Eleven days ago I was living in Pandanus Beach with my best friend, Maggie, holding down a job at the library, grieving for my twin brother Jude. I thought I was a backpacker; I thought I’d watched Jude die in a crumpled mess of metal and petrol and dust. I thought I was learning to get on with my life, despite gruesome dreams of hell-beasts and mutilations.
Then Rafa came to town. Violence followed—and some mind-bending news. I’m not nineteen: I’m a hundred and thirty-nine. And I’m not a high school drop-out estranged from my parents: I’m part of the Rephaim—a society of half-angel, half-human beings. My father was one of the Fallen, two hundred and one archangels originally sent to hell thousands of years ago because they couldn’t resist human women. A hundred and forty years ago, led by Semyaza, they broke out and did the same thing all over again. And then they disappeared without a trace. The only one of the Fallen who abstained was Nathaniel. He’s the one who gathered together the Fallen’s bastard babies and made us into a society. Raised us into an army. Called us the Rephaim.
Not that I remember any of that.
Nathaniel claims our destiny is to find our Fallen fathers and turn them in: hand them over to the Angelic Garrison. But we’re not the only ones looking for them. Hell’s Gatekeeper demons are also tracking them, and are itching to destroy the Rephaim along the way.
So where do I come into all this?
About a decade ago, there was a major split among the Rephaim over what should happen if we actually did find our fathers. Jude and twenty-three others, including Rafa, rebelled. I should have walked out with them, but I stayed. They became Outcasts.
Then a year ago, Jude and I made up. It turns out it was because Jason—our cousin, who’d been hiding from Nathaniel all these years—reached out to us. He told us about a young girl in his family who had visions. She’d seen something important involving me and Jude, so we went to see her. And then we disappeared. Both factions of the Rephaim assumed we’d betrayed them and had found the Fallen—and it got us killed.
But we were both alive, with no memory of being Rephaim or what we’d done. Both thinking the other was dead.
Rafa helped me find Jude. My brother took the truth better than I did—and he’s fitting into his Rephaite skin so much quicker than me.
Along the way we’ve discovered a new threat. There’s a farmhouse in Iowa that contains an iron-lined room. It can do something that should be impossible: imprison the Rephaim. It was built by a family who know about the Fallen and the Rephaim, and who hate us. A family who claim to receive divine guidance about how to protect the world from us.
Somehow the Gatekeepers found out about that room. And they were quick to put it to use. But not before they murdered a sixteen-year-old girl and her mother and left them to rot in a cornfield.
I still don’t remember that old life. Or what Jude and I did a year ago. Neither does he.
But I vividly remember everything that’s happened these past eleven days, since Rafa tracked me down. And it’s those memories I cling to now.