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Mom locked the office door, hung up the closed sign, and sent the phones to our answering service while we all gathered in the receptionist area to watch Jerome’s memory of the Ashtoreth demon box. I’d watched Jerome’s memories with myself in them a few times in the past and it’s fucking weird. It triggers your own memory and creates a sense of deja vu, but you remember it from your own viewpoint, which is always slightly different than another person’s. I had yet to figure out if Jerome projected the memory in the air and we watched it like a TV, or if he projected it into the mind and it was viewed like a movie. Either way, it was mildly unsettling. If Jerome was an angel, he would have been the most powerful archangel to ever live. I considered using the title within our family circle regardless, because witches and wizards didn’t have an equivalent title.
The memory began to play, and, sure enough, as I drew close to the box, it pulled magic from me and absorbed it. When I moved away, the magic stayed connected. The same thing happened with Jerome; he was constantly drawing magic from everyone. To Jerome, magic looks a bit like fog, although it has very mild colors. Mine was blueish with tinges of dark purple that almost looked black. The deep purple that reminded me of irises was Stygian magic. The box had a swirling cloud of Stygian deep purple, lighter angel magic, and black magic. Black magic is truly black to Jerome. Remiel’s magic began to build, engulfing him in a nimbus of white-grey fog. The fog then raced toward the box. The box drew it in and the four incubi jumped out, riding a wave of the white-grey fog that now had tendrils of deep purple. The second wave hit and the box tried to take more in. Within a heartbeat or less, my own magic hit it and the box took as much of it as it could before it short-circuited, for lack of a better term. All the magic—black, deep purple, white-grey—swelled and the box grew in size, then exploded, dissipating the magic.
“It overloads the box,” I said after the memory ended.
“I think so,” Jerome said.
“Sorry, kiddo, I know it’s exhausting, but we need to see what happened with Belgaphor’s box since it was just my magic and I tried to exorcise it like it was a possessed person.”
“You better feed me well tonight!” He grinned. As if I ever let him go hungry.
“Double bacon cheeseburgers with the works and onion rings from Rowdy’s on me,” Raphael said, and Jerome’s grin widened. We both loved Rowdy’s, but at $25 a cheeseburger we didn’t eat there often. I could make something similar at home, but neither my seasoning nor beef was like Rowdy’s. A few moments later, we all began viewing the memory of Belgaphor’s box. It drank in my magic slower than Ashtoreth’s had, and it could hold less of it. It was starting to struggle against my magic before I ever began the exorcism. I could see the magic in the box warring with itself to not accept more of my magic. My magic then dove into the box and I could almost see the hands I used during an exorcism within the magical cloud. My magic grew darker in the process, but I already knew I drew on the Stygian when I performed an exorcism. When my magic pulled away, it brought the black magic out of the box with it. The magic around the box shuddered, and then I began pushing magic back into it. The box swelled even more before exploding.
“Huh,” I said when it was finished.
“Exactly,” Raphael said. “Honestly, I wish we had a Jerome back in the day of the original demon boxes, so I could tell you if that was what it was like the first time around.”
“From that, it is as if the boxes are powered by black magic,” Remiel said.
“I think so, too,” I agreed. “Once I removed the black magic from Belgaphor’s, the box became unstable and it consumed too much of my magic, hence the reason it exploded.”
“The demons are correct. The boxes are using your magic to summon them,” Jerome said.
“Yes,” I agreed. Remiel and Gabriel nodded. “Jerome, did Belial’s box do the same?” The teen nodded.
“Okay,” I said.
“With my magic?” Raphael asked.
“No, it didn’t like your magic and tried to avoid it,” Jerome said. “But it couldn’t because there was so much of it. When Soleil’s magic hit it, it was forced to accept yours to get hers.”
“I wonder what happens if Soleil isn’t around?” Gabriel asked. “Because it is almost as if the boxes want her magic.”
“Well, when the fourth box shows up, we can figure that out,” Raphael said, and we all glared at him.
“Jerome, if there was a way for you to see Zadkiel’s feathers, even though he is dead, would you be able to know his magic?” Gabriel asked.
“Yes,” Jerome said. “Feathers are mostly dead cells to begin with. Unlike blood, they retain the owner’s magic even after the feathers have died.” Jerome opened his magic satchel and pulled out a handful of my feathers. Every time I lost a feather around him, he collected it for his own use as well as to keep them out of the hands of others. He even be-spelled my wings so if I lost one when he wasn’t around, it would transport itself to his lab at the house. We stared at the feathers for several minutes. Eventually, we could see the feathers as Jerome saw them; they swirled with my magic, light blue with deep purple streaks throughout. Jerome could control the colors he saw when he looked at magic. He decided on the light blue for me because he liked the way it looked with the deep purple Stygian magic. The view shut down and everyone nodded.
“Boy, you need a coven instead of a host,” Janet said.
“Maybe one day,” Jerome said slowly.
“You do have a coven that is actually a host,” I said. We were around Uriel, Azrael, Raphael, Helia, Gabriel, Michael, Remiel, Aurora, and Ariel regularly. Haniel and Samael were alive, but we only saw them at major events or holidays. Including me, Jerome was around ten archangels regularly, and Jerome would make eleven. Covens were normally ten to 14, so it would be well within the magic number of a coven to make a witch or wizard their most powerful.
“Given Jerome’s ties with the Stygian, that might be the way it’s supposed to be,” Raphael said.
“A coven is supposed to give a wizard more power, but Jerome has angel magic, wizard magic, and Stygian magic in him. I often forget he isn’t an archangel. I would have loved to meet his father,” Gabriel said. “I often wonder if his father wasn’t descended from nephilim.”
“There’s a register for that,” Janet said.
“There’s a register for all of it, but it isn’t perfect. Some nephilim never realize what they are,” Gabriel said. “He wouldn’t be the first we’ve found from a long line of unknown nephilim, especially given the early deaths of his father and grandparents.”
“How would that even be possible?” I asked.
“Pre-history,” Raphael told me. “And the occasional fling that results in pregnancy. Angels aren’t always good at hanging around and raising their children. In the last hundred years, we have found more than a dozen nephilim that were more than one or two generations removed from their angel parent. Sometimes it was an angel and another supernatural that created the nephilim; sometimes it was a human and an angel. The nephilim lived a relatively long life, but not realizing they are nephilim and having outlived many of their loved ones, they began to will themselves to die after their hundredth birthday. Not all nephilim are immortal, and the more human genes introduced, the shorter the life span. It shouldn’t affect Aurora and Ariel, but if they were to have children with a human, they might be forced to watch their children grow old and die. Their children would only be one eighth angel.”
“My grandmother was a witch,” Jerome said. “That’s where my father got his powers and I got them from Dad, but we just figured my grandfather was human, as he died of old age. My grandmother was murdered by the same people that murdered my parents and in the same way as my mom.”
“Then maybe we should have Amiel trace his family line,” Gabriel said.
“Amiel is a lunatic,” I pointed out.
“That’s because he can see family trees,” Remiel said. “Imagine looking at a supernatural and being able to tell exactly who begot them from every century.”
“There is that,” I agreed. “However, it is Jerome’s decision to make.”
“Let’s do it.” Jerome smiled.
“It will take great magic. I’ll have him come to your house tomorrow,” Gabriel said. “It might take most of the day. Remember that with your power of mimicry you will also be able to do it for a while; it might be overwhelming.”
“I’ll stay home all day; I don’t have plans,” Jerome told him.
“Being nephilim would explain his immediate attachment to Soleil,” Remiel said.
“Jerome has nearly as much Stygian magic as I do. If he gets classified as nephilim, we may see the Angel Council challenge my status as an archangel,” I said. I wasn’t entirely sure of this, since Jerome couldn’t call a demon army to him, but I thought it possible. The Angel Council could be kind of sticklers for following the letter not the spirit of the law, possibly because it was headed by Uriel. My status as an archangel was rubber-stamped because I could control demons and the Stygian in ways no other angel or nephilim was able to do. However, if Jerome was accepted as nephilim, his power over the Stygian might impact my status. Of course, I hadn’t fully accepted my status as an archangel long enough to know how I’d feel about losing it. Adding archangel as a title to my business card had increased business and I’d ordered 50,000 business cards. I briefly wondered how long it would take me to cross it out on all the cards, because I was too cheap to order new ones if I lost the title.
“No, Soleil, you won’t. You have talents you have never used,” Gabriel told me.
“Now, dinner at Rowdy’s, and I’m buying,” Raphael announced. He checked the time. “No call from the school, so I guess the girls got picked up okay. Helia, you will join us at Rowdy’s. You need a night out and maybe a mojito.”
“I’m not five,” Helia told him, more snidely than I thought she meant to.
“It will be good for you,” Remiel told her. “It will help take your mind off the evening.”
“Then you can stay with us tonight and tomorrow you can hang out until Amiel comes by or until you need to pick up the girls,” Jerome told her. “I agree with the others. It would be good for you and if you get a mojito, Soleil may get one as well.” I had a moment of concern that Jerome felt I needed to drink more alcohol. He knew things I did not and I didn’t understand exactly how his mind worked.