Out of Reach by Jocelyn Stover Read Free Book Online Page A

let
loose a bark of laughter so tinged with contempt the sound scares
even me. Apparently I’m not as immune to
it as I thought.
    “Gwen.” I whisper her name into the night.
Squeezing my eyes shut I remember my jubilation at her discovery.
It had been over a hundred years since anyone had seen a Nephilim
perform a feat like she had. It took us years to track down when
exactly the angel bloodlines became so diluted that Nephlim no
longer possessed any of the old powers. It was not a contingency
any of us had planned for, but in a mere three weeks this
unforeseen complication could very well be the doom of us all.
    Damn the angels, and damn the Sylph,
too.
    The current crisis is their doing and stems
all the way back to the Creation. In the void, before time even
began, there were angels, there were demons, and there were the
Sylph. We Sylph chose to reside mostly in our incorporeal essences
during this period in order to distance ourselves from the glory of
the angels and the whining of the demons.
    The focus of everything changed, however,
when He came down and created Earth. We were eager to explore this
new playground, and mankind was a novelty we all wanted to
experience.
    Now, the angels and the demons were the
first to grow bored and return to the heavenly realms and whatever
it is that occupies their time there. But the Sylph, who enjoy
chaos and delight in destruction, were enamored with the humans.
They were beings we could so easily manipulate and pollute. We
wrought famines, plagues, and wars across the earth. Through
whispered suggestion, we turned brother against brother. Vast
empires were created and destroyed upon our whim.
    Our influence over His creation was not
viewed favorably, though, and, after a time, the angels returned to
deliver His justice. Even the mightiest among us were no match for
their righteous anger.
    Overrun we were rounded up and shackled
together, like beasts of the field. Desperate to escape our fate,
many tried to shift from corporal form back into our essence of
flameless fire. Such attempts proved futile. So we waited,
helpless, as the angels wielded their mighty power to enact our
punishment. Straight from the earth they pulled every kind of
precious element to spin spherical prisons as delicate and
beautiful as blown glass, but as hard as iron and impossible to
break. A sphere was cast for each Sylph and his essence was trapped
within.
    When the task was nearly complete, twelve
Sylph were separated from the others. We all thought they would be
put to death, an everlasting example to the rest. We were
wrong.
    The twelve were offered a pardon, their
eternal freedom in return for one commitment: They must swear to be
caretakers of the Sylph spheres, ensuring they stayed hidden away
from human hands. For should a human lay hands upon a sphere, the
Sylph essence inside would be released, becoming bound to the human
until the Sylph had wrought three acts of power.
    Faced with eternal servitude and
imprisonment, no price seemed too great, and every one of the
twelve agreed.
    I was one of the twelve.
    Huddled together we waited for the angels to
keep their word and release our bonds. When the last of the Sylph
had been imprisoned, the spheres were divided among four angels
and, before our very eyes, they were flown off, scattered to the
four corners of the earth. Only then did they release us.
    With a single mighty sword stroke, our
chains were abolished, but in the same instant I felt myself being
ripped apart.
    Screaming and writhing on the ground I
glared at the angels, eyes filled with vile hatred as my very
nature was stripped away.
    We were imbued with a human-like compassion,
a sense of decency and morality none of us had ever known before.
My essence became charged with a different kind of power, lighter,
stronger somehow. It felt completely foreign and, truth be told, it
would take us decades to fully grasp the nature of it.
    When convulsions no longer wracked my body
and pain