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FORBIDDEN

By Gina Detwiler

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Chapter One
FALLOUT

GRACE

Well, it’s been a day.
I woke up this morning a prisoner in a castle tower.
In Switzerland.
Seriously.
I managed to escape through a stone shaft that might have been a medieval toilet. I searched the whole castle until I found him, my husband Jared, chained up in an actual dungeon—seriously—dying from gunshot wounds that weren’t healing.
Darwin Speer did that. Inventor. Genius. Billionaire. Megalomaniac.
I thought Jared was going to die in my arms. But then I sang, and he started to heal.
God did that.
And then Rael, who’s a Nephilim and looks like a giant man-lizard, got loose and broke a hole in the castle wall, and we escaped, crossed a lake, in which I almost drowned, and ran up a mountain before the whole world blew up.
Well, that’s the gist of it. Am I going too fast?
At the moment, I am lying on the rocky patch of ground under a tree, trying to breathe through the gurgling in my lungs as the earth trembles violently under me. It’s louder than a crashing plane, louder than anything I can even imagine. Metaphors fail me. I’m pretty sure the world is about to end any second now.
Something blocks the sun shining in my eyes. Rael. All nine feet of reptilian humanoid. Despite the scaly, greenish skin and a skull sloped like the hood of a Volkswagen, he’s got a very beautiful, very human face which always freaks me out a little. His muscular shoulders and sides are covered in ugly stumps where Darwin Speer’s scientists did their grisly work, amputating the graceful tentacles that once adorned his body like angel wings. One of his hands is missing—he chewed it off to get free of his chains.
Rael saved my life, but right now I’m pretty sure he wants to end it. He leans over me, his mouth falling open to reveal sharp white teeth, electric blue eyes boring into mine, his breath heavy on my neck. I try to scramble away from him, but a stabbing pain catches me in my ribs. I cry out as he reaches toward me with his one good hand, and I notice the perfection of his long, elegant fingers—six of them—thin and pointed like talons. A low growl escapes his throat—he is more purely animal after the torture he has endured.
“Stop!”
The finger is almost upon my cheek when it freezes in midair. Jared pushes the giant arm away, wet hair pale as snow falling into crystal blue eyes. In some bizarre way, they look alike, these two. The black hoodie of Jared’s captivity hangs off him in ragged strips, revealing the puckered skin of healing wounds on his stomach and shoulder.
“Back off.”
Rael, to my surprise, obeys. Jared kneels beside me. “You okay?”
“My ribs. I can hardly breathe. What’s happening? Was that an earthquake?”
“The collider blew.”
The collider. The machine in Geneva—Darwin Speer’s Big Bang machine.
“What does that mean, blew?”
“I saw the explosion.”
“You mean a…nuclear explosion?”
“Yes.”
“So why aren’t we dead?”
“I think most of the blast went underground. Besides, it’s pretty far away. But that doesn’t mean we’re out of danger. Can you walk?”
I try to move, but the pain takes my breath away. “Can you…do anything?”
He takes a slow breath and lays his hands gently against my ribcage. Lightning flickers under his skin. His hands grow very warm—I gasp at the burning sensation. He pulls away. I breathe deep.
“Better?”
I take another full breath for good measure. I nod. “Thanks.”
Suddenly, Rael shouts at us, not in English but Archean. It’s an angel language, though it sounds a little like Finnish to me.
“What’s he saying?” I ask.
“He says we need to keep moving.”
I’m pretty sure that’s not what he said. Rael probably wants Jared to dump me—I’m going to slow them down.
“There are still drones around, and the radiation cloud might come, depending on how the wind blows. I told him he should go alone, but he won’t…leave me.”
“Why not?”
Rael interrupts with another Archean tirade. His eyes flash like a sparking circuit. Is it rage I see or pain? Jared gives him such a terse reply that he goes quiet.
“Can you walk?” he asks me.
“I’m not sure.”
“I’ll carry you.” Jared bends down so I can climb gingerly onto his back, wrapping my arms around his neck, my legs around his hips. I bite my lip to avoid crying out.
“Take it easy—” I barely have the words out before he is charging up the slope to the top of the ridge. I bounce against him like a sack of potatoes, tears springing to my eyes. “What happened to taking it easy?”
Around us, trees shake and fall from the quakes, Jared leaping over them, trying to outrun them. Did I mention he has some minor superpowers? Like Rael, he is a Nephilim, though at a different stage in his development. He hasn’t gotten to the point where he’s grown tentacles, thank goodness.
Every step he takes is like a spike thrust into my spine. By the time we get to the ridge, I am more hedgehog than human.
“Please, stop,” I plead with my last breath. And then I look down—it’s a sheer drop to the ravine below. “No.”
Rael charges past—he leaps over the edge and lands halfway down, disappearing for a moment in a cloud of dust and loosened rock. He continues down the steep slope without pause. I groan out loud.
“There’s got to be another way….”
Jared jumps. I close my eyes and pray: save us.
My throat drops into my stomach as we fall, then shoots back up into my skull when we land on the rocky slope. I scream into Jared’s ear as the jarring in my ribs reverberates down my spine. I grip his neck so tightly that I’m probably cutting off his airway. I shut my eyes as he recovers his footing and takes another giant leap to the bottom.
He runs along an old railroad track, chasing after Rael. I’m sure my ribs are cracking into powder, dissolving into my lungs. Rocks and broken tree limbs rain down on us from above. A large stone, practically a boulder, hits Rael in the head—he barely notices.
Then suddenly, Rael stops, and Jared almost crashes into him. Jared lets me down, and I stare at a fissure in the earth at least twenty feet wide, as if the mountain had been sawed in half.
Jared and Rael look at each other. Rael takes a step back and jumps. For a moment, I am sure he will sprout wings and continue sailing into the sky, transforming from clumsy gargoyle to imperial angel. But then he lands hard on the other side, so hard he makes a small crater. Jared sucks in a breath. Rael rises slowly, then turns and raises his arms.
“Oh no, you don’t,” I whisper. But he does. He picks me up tosses me in the air like a football. I scream as I spin over the fissure and slam into Rael, who has the texture of a slimy brick wall. I scramble out of his grasp as quickly as I can, in too much pain to be angry.
Jared is already jumping, his body arched like a dancer’s over the crevice. He lands with astonishing grace next to me and gives me a crooked grin.
“Sorry about that.”
“I hate you.”
“If I’d told you, it would have been worse. Let’s keep going.”

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