Writing Snapshots

morningstar (nearly) meets morbid death

YA Fantasy/Supernatural/Paranormal

The cool steel of the blade presses against my throat, millimeters away from slicing it. I can feel his ragged breath caressing the shell of my ear. My heart is racing and I can't breathe.

"How did you live for twenty years without any of us knowing of your presence, Nephilim?" His spit flecks the back of my neck.

I claw at his hands, trying to force the dagger away from me. "Please, I don't know what you are talking about." I hate the faint tremble my voice carries.

"Nephilim haven't walked this Earth for centuries. We don't let them. So, I repeat, who is protecting you and has been for years?"

"Please, I don't know what a Nephilim is or what you want with me. No one is protecting me." My voice cracks. "I have no one since my grandmother died a few days ago."

He whirls me around, grabbing a fistful of my shirt and yanking me up until only my toes are touching the pavement. In the evening light, his sharp angles are even more prominent; from his nose to his jaw, his cheekbones, and his lips.

The black shirt that hugs his broad frame, his black pants, his black jacket and his ivory hair-all of it blends into the growing shadows. But his eyes—they are an electric blue like lightning has struck oceans and caused them to burn that very shade.

He has been watching me for a few days, five, I think. Ever since the day my grandmother died.

"It was your grandmother, wasn't it? Was she a Dignitary? We have to know. We just can't let Nephilim be born and live their lives." He growls.

"Please, I don't what that means!"

He holds our stare for several moments, before dropping me.

I know I should run, but now that the danger is not intermittently pressing into my throat, I can feel this unusual tug between us, at the pit of my stomach. For the past few days, this man has been watching me. I know because I have been watching him through the window. Yesterday, I tried to approach him, but in a blink of the eye, he was gone. Almost as if he has wings.

I don't know why he is here, why he is watching me. And it was not just at the end of the street, I felt his presence, but everywhere I went as well. Very close to him now, the feeling becomes almost...cosmic. As we stare at each other, the world seems to drown in silence and there is only us.

"Fuck, you're beautiful." His voice is oddly soft, like a harp—very different from the brash one mere moments ago. I gape at him as he curls a lock of my auburn hair around his finger.

"What?" Something in my chest tightens.

He shakes his head as if he is trying to pull himself out of a trance. "How can something so evil be this beautiful? A Nephilim."

"I still don't know what that is but it seems to be the reason you have been stalking and now trying to kill me. If I am going to die, I want to know why." I tut, trying to clamp down my nervousness.

"It means you are part-angel. Part human. Full-deadly." He recites it like a prayer.

I blink at him for a full ten seconds before bursting into peals of laughter. He gives me a peculiar look.

"Is...is that---" I gasp, "A pickup line? Next, you think I am going to ask "deadly to what?' and you would say 'my heart.' Were you at the bar or something a few days ago and developed a crush on me? I swear, from the day I was born, the minute someone sets eyes on me they are attracted. Like I have power and they are sucked into its vortex. I do like this angel pick up line more than the one about the heavens."