Nephilim Quest Book 1: Shadowhunter

28 Grandma and the Book of Watchers 3/4

"No, I won't do that. Not yet. We shall see in a short while. I need to tell you about the shadow, the Book of Watchers, and our plans with Reggie for you first. All in good time."

Grandma was so frustrating! I actually stomped my foot against the floor, like an angry child, but she just smiled.

"So, I noticed this shadow, waiting in the alleyway near a bar. It wanted to scare someone, maybe even kill them, to feed on their energy. If you encounter a shadow doing this, you can actually watch the energy transferring from one to the other. It just leaks out. The scared person almost shoots out energy and the shadows roll that energy into a shape like a ball."

Revulsion probably showed on my face, because she continued, "Yes, the best way to describe it, strange though it sounds, is that it looks like a dirty snowball. And then they just eat the energy, leaving the person depleted of it and ill.  If they manage to scare someone to death, they get an enormous amount of energy - they can survive on it for weeks."

Grandma's description was so vivid that the feeling of fear in my chest and stomach when I had seen the shadows as a child came flooding back.

 "So, I drove past, and the shadow did not recognize me – I was downwind, as it were, a favorable direction from my point of view, and it had not spotted my car yet, so it couldn't smell me. I parked my car on the other side of the block and got up on the roof using the fire escape ladder."

As Grandma described how she'd caught the shadow, I could see her in my mind's eye walking down a darkened street with her determined, lithe gait, like something in a movie. And climbing up the fire escape onto a roof? Surely what she was telling me couldn't be true?

"I still can't believe that you do this!" The words burst out of me before I had time to stop them. "All on your own?"

"Believe it!" said Grandma and her voice had a steely ring that was new to me.

"But - aren't you scared?"

"I was in the early days. It's a skill like anything else. It's all about instinct - and one's instinct develops with time and experience. Anyway, on this occasion I had been following the shadow for some time before an opportunity presented itself..."

My Grandma the Shadow Hunter. For a while I thought about her climbing onto a roof using a ladder. But then again, she was very fit for her age. And looked a lot younger than her advanced years. She would manage it easily.

Grandma noticed me looking at her body. She smiled.

"I know. I don't exactly look as though I was in my seventies, do I?"

"No. You don't. What's the secret?"

"The buffer zone. It sort of helps, the absence of time. If you spend a lot of time in the buffer zone, you age much slower in the real world too. And also, it can be in the genes. I suppose my body is somewhere in its forties "

"I hope I have inherited your genes."

"I wouldn't be too sure of that..."

I wasn't sure I had heard right. Why would I not have inherited my grandmother's genes? At least some of them, the youthfulness being one of them, hopefully.

"But, back to the shadow. I jumped down on it from the roof and..."

"You what?" Now it was my Grandma the superhero?

"Quite, you don't know everything...you'll learn all about it soon enough. Let's just say I know how to jump from heights without hurting myself, using the buffer zone – it has to do with using Lilith's Key. Which I did. I landed behind the shadow, and managed to lasso it before it could flee."

"You lassoed it. All righty... and no one paid any attention to a grandmother throwing a lasso in an empty alleyway?"

"Not in that part of the town... no, no one saw. First of all no-one does see the shadows, when they are in their hiding mode, and secondly I was away from the alley with the shadow before you could say "Get out of there!" I took the shadow to the rooftop to destroy it."

"Sheesh! Are you sure you are my grandmother? I'm beginning to think someone's kidnapped the original and replaced her with an android. You sound like a killer out of a police series!" I eyed her in shock.

"Well, I am. Sort of. What makes it possible is the shadows aren't really real."

"This one sounds real enough!"

"They have been created from the substance of the lowest buffer zone – from the very same kind of negative, fearful thoughts that they hunt for in people. They need to feed on negativity to keep their solid form. And the core, which keeps them functioning and conscious, is an extension of the Hunter."

I didn't understand one bit.

"I'll try to explain this for you... their Hunters – well, they are like our Hunters, only they belong to the Immortals. Their job is to hunt down the people we find valuable, the ones who can learn how to move in the buffer zone, and through time. When they find them, they kill them. They don't want us to get any new Time Walkers for our team. It is a war."

I shivered.

"In the buffer zone, while the Immortals were learning to work with the energies, and molding their world, they also learned to concentrate a part of their consciousness away from themselves. It stays connected to them through an energy cord. They feed some of their energy out, into a shadow formed out of the buffer zone material, and send them away. You could say the shadows have a consciousness of their own because their material is made of human consciousness, but it is not concentrated consciousness. It cannot function on its own. The Hunter's energy is the thing that makes it truly functional. It is the Hunter, who is inside the shadow form, using it as an extension of themselves."

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Link to Amazon: http://amzn.to/1T5GgnE - you can also click on the "external link" below.