The Tempting: Seducing the Nephilim. D. M. Pratt

somehow knowing she wanted the best for it, and with a creek and a windy sigh it finally let her win.

      Beau told Eve her job, if she chose to accept it, was to breathe new life into the grand, old house. Beau wanted her to keep the bones that had stood for centuries, but rip away the past that covered them like a loved outfit of fine, but outdated and musty, old clothes. She was to design an elegant look for every room using her favorite colors, fabrics, wood and stone, all the new things that would someday have meaning only to them. The renovation in the house moved laboriously slow and all the wedding details ate into the precious moments she wanted to spend on her newest and favorite job: raising their new son, Philip.

      Beau and Eve were the loving parents of a smart eleven-month-old who was very busy joyously navigating the countless halls and rooms of the estate’s west wing on two wobbly little legs. As Eve entered the makeshift guest house nursery every morning, the sight of Philip happily playing with his fingers and toes in his crib made her smile. The soft, pale blue chiffon curtains that draped over his crib hung from a brass ceiling hook that always glowed in the wash of sunlight that spilled in through the window. The light appeared to give Philip’s body its own aura, a magical spirit from another realm, Eve thought. Just looking at him made her smile. Loving Philip and Beau were the greatest gifts she could have imagined receiving. Her heart swelled with love as Philip pulled himself up to his feet by the crib bars and stood smiling with arms outstretched for her to take him. She gathered him into her arms, sat on the soft cushions of the rocker by his crib and offered him her breast. His mouth on her nipple made the world and all its problems and responsibilities, save for him, fall away. Philip was an amazing baby and Eve adored him.

      Eve looked at her son and, as he stared back at her with those deep, mysterious, unreadable dark eyes—not hers, not Beau’s, but somehow she didn’t care—she’d lose herself in their silent communication and his unflinching and often unnerving gaze. She didn’t want to admit it, but sometimes he frightened her. Eve closed her eyes and held her breath, fighting against a crushing sense of terror.

      Those moments and that tiny growing voice that screamed in her head something is very wrong… but what? Those moments of sweat-drenched terror were followed by violent headaches that stabbed her like a knife piercing through her skull. They came at irregular, random intervals caused by seemingly nothing, but they always came and carried with them flashes of blinding images. At first the image was always the same; a long hallway with a door at the far end she could not open when she finally had the courage to get there. She pressed her ear to the hard wood and could always hear voices on the other side saying things she couldn’t understand, speaking in a low, persistent whisper as harsh and hissing as an icy winter wind relentlessly rushing as it passed through a slivered crack in an almost but not quite sealed window pane.

      Today was different. Today the images expanded into a barrage of indiscernible faces and frightening events that made no sense. Places she’d never been to yet she knew them as well as if she had gone and done and seen them a thousand times. The images surrounded her and closed in on her. Eve held her breath, opening her mouth to cry out for help, but no sound emerged only more images. These pictures in color and black and white were even more frightening than the last. Eve knew the longer she stayed in this terrifying nightmare, the more horrifying it would become.

      “Wake up,” Eve heard herself say in a voice so distant no one else could possibly hear her. Wake up from what was the question that echoed back to her. Again and again she commanded herself to wake from the hellish nightmare, to push past the wild swirling and very confusing images that held her captive inside their strange, funnel of meaningless information.

      These tortuous terrors now came every night. Always fragments of images that were becoming more and more complicated and twisted. Some were new and whole, some the same broken and shattered: flashes of events, people, places, pieces of a broken puzzle that didn’t fit together. And the voices, whispering and insistent, a jumble of words that were not quite understandable, too muffled to be coherent, but never completely silenced. Eve opened her mouth to scream, but the more she tried to call out, the more she couldn’t. Now even the air from her lungs stopped flowing. Finally she screamed and with her desperate scream the visions retreated and all she could see was Beau rushing in to hold her.

      Her scream still echoing in the room, she watched, trembling as Beau switched on their bedroom light. Eve’s feelings of hopeless misery and helpless fear slipped away as he bundled her into his arms. He held her and kissed her tears away, stroked the river of honey hair that had grown luxuriously thick since her time in the hospital. Beau would bury his face and hands into her curls. He loved to forage through her silken forest of hair to find and gently kiss her flesh until she calmed, relaxing into his embrace. His kisses warmed and melted her until she surrendered to his touch. Then, she would softly whisper, “Make love to me.”

      He made love to her as only he could do. His touch, his lips on hers, his hands caressing her skin would conquer all her ghostly fears, driving them farther away with each kiss. Then he would slip slowly and methodically inside her again and again, until she was wet and wanting all of him. Beau rode into her with the force of a hundred gentle waves sliding into shore then retreating again and again into the ebb and flow she loved so much. Together they fell into the ever building rhythms of a sensual tide and with each stroke he would carefully bring her back until the present was all she could think about and all she could feel. Her husband-to-be, her son, her home, her friends, and her world came rushing back around her. They were real, warm and safe tingling through her as Beau quickened his stride, pushing in and out of her until he masterfully brought her to orgasm and commanded Eve back to joy.

      Her euphoria would last a few days, sometimes even a week, then her scattered memories rushed back in and brought the inky blackness of night’s prison. They held her captive until the dim shadows of morning’s first light crept back across her bedroom floor. Even then, fragments of her lost memories seeped into her mind once again, filling her with dread that something dark and scary was hiding deep inside her. This mental fog clouded her dreams, both her daydreams and her nightmares. It lingered, waiting, billowing with an inaudible yet urgently important message, too foggy to see clearly. Eve thought of these days as shrouded time, cocooning everything in a cowl of stormy clouds that rolled across her world, blocked the sun and pained her every thought.

      “It’s all the stress,” Beau kept reminding her. “Just like a storm, darlin’. It’ll pass.” But something in her throat clenched and made her catch her breath. To make it pass she knew she needed answers to questions she was afraid to ask. Eve made it through the days by staying busy with Philip and the house. Philip would giggle and squeal and fall into her arms and make the world right again. At night she learned to watch her open-eyed visions in silence as the rush of images bombard … her mind finally faded and stopped. Eve would make herself go back to sleep allowing the last of the strange mental pictures to drift away like clouds blown by high winds as she tucked herself into the safety of Beau’s arms … until the next time the headaches cracked her thoughts and flooded in.

      There was no way she could handle these “attacks” alone, but neither Beau nor Cora, Eve’s very best girlfriend, were capable of understanding. She returned for sessions twice a week and shared with Dr. Honoré some of the images from her strange nightmares and even the occasional auditory hallucinations that plagued her. Dr. Honoré said that post-coma patients did experience both auditory and visual hallucinations sometimes.

      “The release of endogenous dopamine could be a residual of the trauma to your head,” Dr. Honoré explained.

      Eve could consider haloperidol-based drugs and cognitive therapy if the hallucinations became more prominent, but at the moment she wanted to keep nursing and her doctor felt they were unnecessary. Ultimately, it was about time: allowing the brain to heal and allowing the love of her family to surround her and take away her unfounded sense of paranoid delusion. Her doctor’s words sounded all too logical until a headache gripped her and the flashes of incoherent, violent images sped past her mind’s eye, showing up when she caught a reflection moving through a mirror or an unnatural shadow wriggling on a wall. Eve promised herself she would learn to live with it until whatever it was in her brain went away. In her heart she simply prayed she could survive.