The Wake Up (The Seers Book 1)

by Angela Panayotopulos

  After some time, Pappou tired of the chase. He sat on a stump at the wood’s outskirts, occasionally calling out for them to hurry up. He reminded them he was an old man who deserved a hot meal. Their mother would be worried. Their father would get angry. It was getting late.

  The girls closed their jars and trudged up the path, whistling until the two wolves ran to their heels. They cleared the trees as their grandfather stood up. The five of them made their way back to the street.

  Stars appeared between the clouds, and brick houses appeared beneath the stars, surrounded by manicured lawns and trimmed trees. Somewhere further up the road, a car engine revved to life. Tires squealed as the vehicle tore away. Lights winked out in the windows of drowsy suburbia.

  The wolves began to whine before they reached the house. Yang bolted ahead. Yin sat on her haunches and howled. It took the humans a moment longer to realize that something was off at home.

  Something that had literally been on before.

  Lexi couldn’t remember ever seeing all the lights off. Had their parents left? Even when nobody was home, one of the adults always left on a lamp or two, an instinctive precaution. The house they stared at now was shrouded in an unwelcoming mantle of darkness. Even the two external lampposts had sputtered out. Only starlight illuminated the yard.

  Pappou grabbed at his granddaughters suddenly. Sophia yelped as he jerked her back. Lexi tore herself free from his hand. The mason jar fell from her grip and shattered on the street, exploding in shards of glass and fairy light. She did not notice the neighbors cringing behind the windows of their homes, couples with their arms looped around each other protectively, shooing their own children further into the house, too distraught to approach the darkness that had become the neighbor’s home, too bewildered to register what they’d seen, too helpless to seek answers. Who could you call when the police were involved?

  Lexi had eyes only for the porch of her home. Their front door was on the ground, battered and broken. She sprinted up the lawn behind Yang, her scream tearing through the neighborhood like a captive bird raging and rebounding off the bars of the neighborhood’s lampposts and porch beams.

  She saw the empty doorway as a blur, the way into a black abyss. There was no sign of her father. She saw a piece of paper, handwritten and bloodstained, nailed into the fallen door. She saw her mother, draped on the porch steps, legs splayed and dress in disarray, a blood-red halo encircling ink-black hair. Anastasia’s head was tilted back on the very top step, as if she were staring at the stars.

  Her mouth was open, spewing blood.

  Part Two

  Once upon a time, people took pride in normalcy; they preferred things in black and white, for salt and pepper are easier to digest than gray matter. When things were disagreeable or different, they liked to label them “otherworldly.” It relieved them of accountability. “The Devil made me do it,” they preferred to say.

  But when they looked in the mirror, they didn’t notice the Devil looking back.

  Not at first.

  9 / The Ruling

  “You’ve a good heart. Sometimes that’s enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it’s not.”

  –Neil Gaiman

  Lexi slipped out of the house, wearing a black blouse and skirt and carrying a notebook. The autumn breeze chilled her fevered skin in greeting. She perched on the porch steps, her booted feet arched so that her thighs didn’t touch the top wooden step, stained as it was by her mother’s blood and tinted dark as poison.

  But it was better than what she’d left inside.

  The ringing telephone no one wanted to answer, for one. The third-grader sobbing in her room after returning from school to find that Mom was still gone after so many weeks. Gabriel’s voice, heavily accented and uncharacteristically loud, rumbling on the phone at the bailiff who still refused to let him pay Elias’ bail. The broadcasters on the evening news, shouting through the thick anti-reflective film of the television screen.

  Lexi closed the door behind her and muted the sounds.

  People had survived worse shit, she told herself. She wasn’t the first person to lose both parents overnight—temporarily, she reminded herself fiercely—and surely wouldn’t be the last. Surely Daimon’s domain wouldn’t be permanent. He was a madman. He’d be impeached. He wouldn’t get away with this. People weren’t stupid.

  The sun dribbled down the horizon, speared by trees and saturating their leaves with rays as red as blood. Lexi watched as twilight bruised the gray clouds, painting them bronze and burgundy. Houses began to fade into shadows, their interior lights invisible to the outdoors. Less than a handful of windows remained in the neighborhood, and those were plastered with the same anti-reflective film built to cover every computer, phone, and television screen that hadn’t been demolished. It was a special film patented and sold exclusively by the government, and it cost a pretty penny. As a result, many households had eliminated excess technology. Some families couldn’t afford more than the bare minimum; they boarded up their windows, choosing to invest in preserving their televisions and computers instead.

  Mirrors, of course, were legally out of the question. They couldn’t be “fixed” by anti-reflective films. There was no point or purpose to them without the reflections anyway.

  Months ago, Daimon had won his presidency on the grounds of greater homeland security and a dramatic increase in national jobs. He’d brought jobs back, sure. For every problem posed by the lack of reflection, the government scrambled to seek a solution.

  As for homeland security?

  Sure, if the point was to increase the budget of the status quo by eliminating the quantity of people you were supposed to protect. Then yes. A thousand times yes.

  In the months that followed the signing of Ruling 666, America bled from bombings and riots and shootings. Not the bloodiest summer in American history, Congress liked to remind everyone. This was no Battle of the Bulge. The Civil War had been worse. The death toll in Normandy had been bad. And 9/11 had been horrific, remember?

  The logic made Lexi shudder. When your legs and arms are being torn from your body, you console yourself that you’ve not yet been beheaded. Of course, right? When your nerves are being extracted strand by strand and your flesh is being dried drop by drop, you simply see past the blood and the bones and think: Hey, at least they haven’t torn me apart at the cellular level yet.

  Unnerving logic.

  Lexi had lost her sense of taste. She’d taken to wearing shirts with slogans like I’ll stop wearing black when they make a darker color and Please be patient, I’m fucking things up as fast as I can. She’d resumed classes at the university, trudging along through life like any other orphan, wielding her numbness as a shield. Each morning she brightened the thin canvas of her face with a dusting of makeup. Each day she pretended she didn’t mind the whispers in the halls, the sidelong looks, the disappearances of friends who no longer found time to interact with a former mirror-maker’s granddaughter. Each weekend she play-acted at liveliness as she spent time with Sophia and Pappou, pretending that things like dinner and television and neighborhood barbeques still mattered.

  Autumn was the season of adjustments. Nightmares slunk out of mental cages and acquainted themselves with sunlight and reality. Families cat-napped next to hospital beds and tombstones. It was “the season of winning,” as the president called it. As if terrorism was a game. Poker, probably, where the victor was a liar who killed anyone who called his bluff.

  The world continued to revolve, somehow. The wind breezed through the neighborhoods and pushed the hands of household clocks. Waves rose and fell with the regularity of a sleeping god’s snores. People cupped snowflakes in their hands, scraps of divinity that melted at the human touch, as ephemeral as time. Seasons are only man-made time-traps, after all. We can call them what we please.

  In the dreamy glow of twilight, Lexi could pretend the windows still existed, that the lights hadn’t been switched on. That night just h
adn’t fallen fully yet—that was all. That nothing had changed. Such illusions clawed at the fist of grief that throttled her.

  With a deep breath, Lexi opened her notebook and steadied her pen.

  Once upon a time, she wrote, people took pride in normalcy; they preferred things in black and white, for salt and pepper are easier to digest than gray matter. When things were disagreeable or different, they liked to label them “otherworldly.” It relieved them of accountability. “The Devil made me do it,” they preferred to say.

  Lexi dropped the diary and wept.

  #OnceUponADecember

  “If you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”

  –Roald Dahl

  Lexi’s earliest memory of wings was during the winter when she turned ten, marked by the heaviest snowfall Virginia had seen in a decade. They appeared on the day the snowstorm ended, when the children of the suburbs emerged from the cocoons of their homes like brightly jacketed butterflies. When the neighborhood kids scattered in the rosy glow of a sunset, tired of the cold, taking their sleds and laughter with them.

  One little girl didn’t mind the fading sun. Her mittened hands sculpted a snowman, happy to work without distractions. She whispered apologies as she thrust a carrot into his face, assuring him it was for the best and he’d be able to breathe much better now, just try and see.

  She didn’t notice the boy.

  The silent bowl of a cotton-white sky enveloped her, punctuated by snow-capped houses and spears of evergreens. A wooden fence wrapped around the yard, an occasional cardinal or squirrel poised along the crisscrossing beams. The yard sloped slightly westward, slit by the sleds’ runners. Ice gathered in those grooves, twinkling like tearstains.

  Lexi screeched when the snowball erupted in her face.

  Ineffectively she tried to wipe her eyes with snow-covered mittens, making matters worse. When she could see again, the closest thing was the boy. He leaned against the fence and leered at her with his bright green eyes.

  “The next one’s going to blow off the head of your stupid snowman!”

  “You’re mean!” she yelled back.

  His next snowball punched her in the mouth.

  She yowled and fell backwards onto the snow. Struggling to her knees, she scrabbled to pack a snowball. Drops of blood stained the snow beneath her face. Her hands froze.

  The boy’s taunts chased her—“Wimp! Wussy!”—until she cleared the yard and burst through the back door of her house.

  “Mama!” she wailed. “Manoula!”

  Her heart steadied at the sight of her mother, leaning above the stovetop to turn the oven dial. The oven’s warmth and the fragrance of baking melomakarona saturated the room. The kitchen window overlooked the backyard and the white lace curtain was pulled to one side. Anastasia had seen everything.

  The snow from Lexi’s boots drenched the carpet. “I hate him!” she shouted. She spat out a tooth. Blood trickled from her mouth and down her chin.

  Grabbing a kitchen towel, Anastasia rushed around the counter towards the adjoining living room. She did not berate her eldest child for waking the infant, sleeping in the crib at the far end of the kitchen. She knelt and embraced Lexi, wiping the blood away and pressing the cool towel against the little girl’s gum until the blood stopped. “I was wondering when that tooth would fall out.” Anastasia smiled and kissed the pale little forehead. “A fairy will be visiting you tonight. Something tells me she might be very generous if you let her take the tooth from beneath your pillow.”

  Lexi scrunched her face into her mother’s sweater-shrouded shoulder. The fusion of vanilla and cinnamon scents soothed her. But talk of fairies wasn’t enough to distract her.

  “He’s stupid,” she garbled around the towel.

  “Little boys can be very silly,” Anastasia agreed. Her quiet hand stroked Lexi’s head, untangling her hair. “But you know what, agapi mou? You shouldn’t be scared. I think he’s more afraid of you than you are of him.” Lexi could feel her mother smiling. She liked her mother’s smile. It took up her entire face, radiating from her lips to her dimples to the crinkles around her eyes. “He’s new here, and I think he is a very lonely little boy. Do you know why he is mean? He doesn’t know how to be nice.”

  Lexi raised her head over her mother’s shoulder and her eyes fell on the living room mirror, positioned against the wall across from her. She blinked. Reflected in the mirror, two massive ivory wings sprouted from her mother’s back.

  Enthralled by the wings, Lexi listened as her mother kept talking but struggled to register the words. Anastasia’s lips cooled Lexi’s tear-streaked cheek, and then she straightened up and said, “I love you. I’ll be right here, watching over you.”

  Lexi glanced back from the mirror to her mother. In the flesh, her mother looked like she always did, smiling and wingless and lovely. Lexi glanced back at the mirror. Wings.

  The little girl’s heart hammered as she opened the door and stepped outside into the twilight that glowed against the earth’s fleecy shawl of snow.

  The boy had slipped through the fence, was there in the yard now. He glared at her snowman. Lexi fumed. She wanted to scream at him to step away, to leave her and her snowman alone. The memory of her mother’s wings calmed her. She took a deep breath.

  They stood a foot apart, eye to eye, the snowman rigid next to Lexi like a faithful bodyguard.

  “My mom’s making hot chocolate,” said Lexi. “Want some?”

  The boy froze, and his eyebrows rose. His eyes thawed. Surprise flitted across his face faster than a slap. Then those eyes hardened again, chips of emerald ice. “Don’t want your stupid hot chocolate,” he sneered. Lexi’s vision blurred with tears.

  He punched off the snowman’s head.

  10 / Khalil

  “If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.”

  –Tennessee Williams

  Lexi studied the whitening of the world outside the classroom’s film-plastered window as December’s first flakes floated down from the sky, daintily peppering the withered grass. Economics was a requirement for the practical CPA future that Lexi’s grandfather had talked her into pursuing. She had two Creative Writing classes that afternoon, pertaining to the other part of her double major, and they gave her something to live for.

  By the looks of the outdoors, though, they’d likely be canceled.

  University officials loathed snow and the chaos it incited. Virginians tended to forget what real snowstorms were like. They’d already forgotten the blizzard they’d survived eleven years ago, the winter when Lexi had seen her mother’s wings and met the horrible boy who’d lived for a year next door with his family of screamers and shouters.

  The professor droned on about econometrics. He turned, occasionally, to the auditorium full of senior-year students and shot a question at the sleepiest face he saw. He never picked on Lexi. He didn’t like the way she stared at him with dead dark eyes. He knew she would not reply anyway.

  Lexi’s eyes flicked to the clock tacked on the wall above the whiteboard. Thirty-five minutes to go. Where the hell was Khalil?

  A moment later, as if conjured by her thought, someone slipped into the seat beside her. He winked and handed Lexi an apricot, half-wrapped in a napkin, under the desk. “Happy birthday,” he whispered. “May your twenty-first trip around the sun begin just as sweetly.”

  She smiled back.

  One year older and a few lives wiser than her, the Yemenite had no qualms about befriending the stoic Greek-American. Khalil had survived shootings and a civil war before moving to America, armed only with an airplane ticket his father had bought him for his birthday. Khalil’s mother and his two sisters had met their untimely deaths when a group of religious fanatics bombed a mosque they’d been attending in Sana’a. Now Khalil was studying to be a rocket scientist. You wouldn’t know, looking at him, that he’d been to Hell and back. He kept his scars tucked away beneath his clothes a
nd behind his eyelids.

  Survivors often do.

  Thirty-five minutes passed quickly with Khalil. He asked intelligent questions and muttered inappropriate commentary. Lexi took notes for the both of them. She’d made the mistake of letting Khalil take notes once, and neither of them had been able to decipher his writing.

  At last, the professor checked his computer and announced to the class that all other classes were canceled for the day. He glanced at his watch and wrote the homework assignment on the board. Lexi jotted down the page numbers in her notebook. With her free hand, she absently picked up the apricot and bit into it. The napkin fluttered from her fingers and onto the desk below her. Its handwritten message caught her eye.

  NOT YOUR ACTUAL BIRTHDAY GIFT.

  Khalil’s lettering, Lexi decided, though neater and more deliberate than she’d ever seen it before. She raised an eyebrow. Finishing the fruit, she wiped her lips with the napkin and chucked the apricot seed into her bag. She didn’t say anything as they gathered their things and walked out of the room.

  Khalil didn’t speak, either.

  Lexi paused in the hallway. She didn’t have her pocket mirror with her; even if she did, she wouldn’t have been able to wield it in a public place such as this. But it didn’t matter. She knew what she would have seen: the blur of dark wings, beating faintly at the air in time with his heartbeat. Khalil was kind. And he had incredible poise. Excellent coordination meant one of two things: you’d been drilled to tears by a former ballet teacher, or you had wings that helped you maintain your balance. Though tall and handsome, the Yemenite didn’t seem the type for tights and sashays.