by K.N. Lee
They were both laughing so hard that they missed the knock on the door. It was tentatively opened by August, who stuck his head around the door, though his eyes were closed.
“Is everyone decent?”
Anais quickly wiped her eyes and sat up on the bed followed by Aethelu, who was still chuckling to herself.
Aethelu invited him in.
He carried in his shopping booty and dropped it on the floor. There were many bags, and they were all from the local big chain supermarket. Anais got the feeling that he was not as big on shopping for clothes as his younger sister Arcadia.
“I‘ll take my leave, ladies,” August said, closing the door behind him.
Aethelu had a quick look in the bags and pulled a few items out, all different sizes.
“Not bad, but I’m not sure about the colour.” She shrivelled up her nose at the green blouse she was holding in her hand. It looked perfectly fine to Anais who also started searching through the bags to find an outfit. She loved the feel of the designer dress, and she knew she looked hot in it, but it wasn’t hers and she didn’t like the idea that Arcadia could come back any second and accuse her of stealing a dress. She was careful not to touch Aethelu’s hand whilst they were going through the new clothes although she was secretly afraid she wanted to have that amazing feeling again. She eventually settled on the green blouse (which she suspected Aethelu would like if it had been red) and a pair of jeans that looked like they might fit. She also found a bag of underwear from which she extracted a bra and panties and a bag that contained two pairs of shoes.
She carried her haul into Arcadia’s bedroom and had one last look at herself in the mirror in the amazing dress before reluctantly stepping out of it into her new clothes. Thankfully, despite the blouse being a couple of sizes too big and the jeans needing a belt, the underwear, at least, was the right size.
She finished up by tying the shoes and headed back to Aethelu’s room through the bathroom. The bags were where she had left them on the floor, but Aethelu was nowhere to be seen. Looking out to the corridor, which was empty, she thought the best course of action would be to go downstairs and find Aethelu and August. She would then tell them that she was leaving and hoped they would understand. Even though they had kept her here against her will, she trusted them both enough to keep their word, and believed that they would let her go. She followed the corridor to the top of the grand staircase, and this time as she walked down slowly, she looked more carefully at the paintings hanging in the entrance hall. There were thirteen of them, spaced equally throughout the hall. Now she knew what she was looking for, she quickly picked out Aethelu’s portrait. She was dressed in a very elegant old fashioned dress, probably Victorian, Anais guessed.
It was as red as all of Aethelu’s other clothes, which made Anais smile. She must have had a love of red for a long time, a very, very long time. If the picture was indeed Victorian, then it was well over a hundred years old. Paintings weren’t Anais’ forte, but she was pretty sure she was right about the age of this one.
The painting to the left of Aethelu’s showed two handsome young men identical in facial features but dressed very differently. One had a mischievous grin, which caused dimples in his cheeks. His black eyes twinkled like those of his younger sister and the flecks of light she had seen in Aethelu’s eyes had been painstakingly painted into the picture. His arm was casually draped around that of his twin brother. Despite having the same face, the brother possessed none of the sparkle. He stood tall and proud with a stiff expression on his face and was well dressed with a top hat and silver lion-topped cane. He was wearing a suit and looking at a fob watch. Anais was certain it was Raphael and his twin brother, Alexander. They both had the same white blond hair as Aethelu. Raphael obviously dyed his in this day and age, in an effort to appear more normal. Next came the same stunningly beautiful woman Anais had seen in the photos upstairs, this time with silver blonde curls elegantly coiffed and topped with an extravagant hat, which was adorned with a peacock feather. Arcadia was wearing a corseted dress in the same peacock colour. She had a slightly haughty expression and was perfectly groomed in the highest fashion of the time.
August was next, he hadn’t changed a bit. The picture could have been painted yesterday. The clothes were obviously from an older time, but he hadn’t dressed up for the sittings in the same way his siblings obviously had. He looked uncomfortable. Anais suspected he’d have the same expression if she pointed a camera at him today. In the painting though, he wasn’t wearing a hat and she could see the full glory of his bushy white blonde hair. It was longer than would have been fashionable in the Victorian era and stuck out at all angles. His beard was exactly the same as it had been when she had met him that morning. She wondered if he’d had the same haircut for hundreds of years.
She casually skimmed over the other portraits, as she slowly walked down the steps to the main hall. She had almost got to the bottom when her eyes rested on the eleventh portrait. The man in the painting had her rooted to the spot.
She stopped and gasped. It couldn’t possibly be.
But it was. The truth indelible on canvas. Her father was looking down at her from a painting painted in the 19th century. Sure, here he was white blond, whereas she’d known him as having brown hair, and it was in a different style. He’d worn glasses too, as far back as she could remember, but here, he wore none. How was this possible? She thought back to her father. It was true that he had a kind of ageless quality to him, but she had put it down to good genes. She had been told her grandparents had died before she was born, so she had no way to gauge it. She supposed it was true, she just didn’t expect that “before you were born” meant hundreds of years before she was born. Her wonderful father was an immortal.
‘Well, not really,’ she reminded herself. A car had driven onto a pavement and snuffed his life out, just as it had done her mother. A thought occurred to Anais. She quickly scanned the other paintings to see if she could see her mother.
“I know what you are looking for.”
Aethelu had appeared silently by Anais side.
“She wasn’t a Guardian. Your mother was just an ordinary woman.”
“Guardian?”
“We call ourselves Guardians of The Light, The Custor Lux.”
Anais remembered it written on the stained glass window.
“The elixir we took, my father named it The Light because of the way it shone.”
“I didn’t know.” Anais let the tears that were forming in her eyes fall down her face.
Aethelu took hold of her hand in her own, now re-gloved hand, and held it while Anais sobbed.
“Who was he?” Anais felt bereft, she had only just come to terms with the loss of her parents, but now, she felt she hadn’t known them at all.
“He is and will always be your father. Come on
August has made us some lunch. I guess we should tell you the rest of our story.”
She put her arm around Anais and guided her to a sitting room which Aethelu called The Parlour.
The room was painted all white, with most of the furniture in the room being predominantly white also. The fireplace, holding a real log fire, was currently unlit; but logs were stacked ready for kindling; and a wonderful smell of burning wood lingered slightly in the air. On the mantelpiece was a pair of crystal candlesticks with long, tapered, unused candles. A huge, ornate mirror hung behind them, making the room appear even bigger than it actually was.
Amazing, abstract paintings hung all around the walls in pale pinks, greens, blues and yellows. They were fascinating and brought life to the all-white room. In the centre of the room was a glass table on which laid a plate of roughly cut sandwiches and three steaming mugs of tea. A family sized bag of crisps lay unopened next to them. August was there, squeezing his bulky form into a very delicate looking chair. A two-seater sofa and another chair from the same collection surrounded the table. They were a pale velvety pink colour. Anais chose to sit on the sofa, a
nd Aethelu sat right next to her. She realised that they were still holding hands, a fact that was bringing her comfort in light of the revelation that her father was not who he had seemed. August gestured for her to take a sandwich. She wasn’t hungry, despite missing breakfast; but she didn’t want to offend him, so she picked one up and held it in her lap. August didn’t seem to notice that she wasn’t eating. He was too busy tucking into the doorstop ham sandwich he had made for himself. A dribble of mustard had caught in his beard.
Aethelu picked up a sandwich in her left hand as her right was still holding on to Anais.
“Eat up love,” said August, finally noticing that Anais wasn’t eating. He sprayed bits of sandwich all over and then looked momentarily embarrassed whilst he fumbled for a napkin. He swallowed and wiped his mouth.
“They took me ages to make, them did.”
“Eat!” Aethelu squeezed her hand and then let go, so she could eat her own sandwich. “I promise we’ll answer all of your questions, but there’s no point starving yourself.”
Anais nibbled at her sandwich.
What questions did she have? Her life had been turned upside down. Her father had lied to her. He was like a stranger. How could he not have told her? At any point, in eighteen years, he could have said ‘Hey Anais guess what? I’m hundreds of years old, thanks to some magic drink; and I’m super strong; and if you turn the light off, I might just glow like a beacon!’
Yeah, how hard could that have been?
Aethelu must have sensed Anais’ difficulty in coming to terms with everything, so she began to speak again.
“You asked me earlier, who your father was.” She paused, as if thinking what to say. “For the longest time he was my best friend. We grew up together. His mother and sisters had died of the plague a week before we took the elixir. His father lasted a week longer, but then succumbed to the same fate. Before the plague came to our village, we spent our entire childhood together. He was a year older than me, the same age as Alex and Rafe, but for whatever reason he befriended me. We were inseparable from the age of five when he pulled me out of a stream. I’d got stuck in the mud and in my five-year-old mind; I thought I was going to drown. In reality, the stream was barely up to my knees, but I remember being terrified at the time. Alistair was my hero, ever since.”
“You dated my father?” Anais felt very strange about the thought.
“No. Never. I’d say he was like a brother to me, but he was more than my brother. He was my best friend, and he meant everything to me, but I never felt that way about him. He never had any romantic feelings towards me either. It was enough for both of us for the longest time, but then he met Sarah.”
“Did she know... about him, I mean?”
“We assume he had told Sarah, although, like the rest of us, he hid it from the rest of the world. It looked like he dyed his hair brown and then as she aged, he dyed grey streaks in and wore glasses to age himself. His eyesight was perfect, better than perfect really. He didn’t need glasses. They were just frames with plain glass in them. Let me start from where I left off earlier, so I don’t leave anything out.”
She settled back on the sofa, as if ready to tell a long story.
“I think I left it at the fourteen of us travelling from place to place, living as long as we could in one place, then moving on when we could no longer hide our youth.
Eventually, we all began to grow weary of each other’s company.”
“You can say that again!” August cut in.
Aethelu shot him a look and then began again.
“We eventually found this big old house set in the woods and kept it as our home, but many of us left to follow their own lives. My sister Arcadia, for example, is currently living in a chateau in the south of France. She is involved in the movie industry, the business side. My Aunt Ava and Uncle Alfred have a yacht and just sail where the mood takes them. My cousin Audsley is currently living somewhere near Las Vegas, I believe. And my wonderful biggest brother...” she gestured to August, “lives in the gatehouse, which is at the beginning of the driveway to this place, although, he may as well live here, as he’s always taking food from our fridge. We can’t get rid of him.”
She smiled at him and he returned the grin.
“A couple of the fourteen disappeared years ago, Amber and Abel. I think they just wanted to make their own lives. Then there’s your dad Alistair, of course. The rest of us live here. My brothers, Alexander and Raphael, our friend Andrew, my father, Aldrich, my mother, Astrid and me.
“Raphael? I thought you all had to have names beginning with A?”
“It was just something we did, it was never a law. Raphael did change his name originally to Albert from Seth, but after a while, he changed it again to Raphael or Rafe, as he likes to be known. My mother has since gone back to her original name too.
This house has been our base for over two hundred years. Those of us who don’t live here touch base every now and again.”
Aethelu paused, while August opened the crisps with a loud rustle and noisily began to pop them into his mouth, crunching them a handful at a time.
Aethelu ignored him and continued her story.
“We were all doing well, rolling along as people do. We’d managed to keep ourselves pretty secret here. Those of us who wanted to travel have done so. We were all happy until a year ago.
We got a call from your father. He’d been in an accident. Sarah had been killed instantly. They’d both been hit by a car. Of course, we went to him immediately. He knew he couldn’t go to the hospital. If they did a simple blood test, the doctors would find out that he was different, and he couldn’t chance it. He was bleeding pretty badly. We were lucky that we got to him before anyone else. It was a pretty remote street, and it was late at night. We knew it was too late for him. His bones were smashed up, His internal organs were failing. Even for a man full of The Light, as he was, there was just too much damage for his body to take. If he were just a normal human, he would have died instantly, just like Sarah. He held on long enough to tell us two things. The first was that he loved you, and he asked us to take care of you. The other thing scared us. He said he’d seen the driver of the car that crashed into him. It was Jago.”
“Who’s Jago?”
“My father’s partner.”
Anais thought back through all Aethelu had said.
“The guy who helped him make The Light?”
“Yup, the very same.”
“Why?”
“We don’t know. We’d not heard from him for hundreds of years.”
“So how would my father recognise him after so long?”
“Apparently he spoke to Alistair. He said ‘I am Jago. Remember me? Soon everyone will know my name. Tell your little coven that this is the beginning of the end.’”
He’d shouted it from the open window of the car and then drove off. Your father had called us on his mobile phone straight away. We got to him pretty quickly, but he was in a very bad way. He was practically delirious. The message from Jago was one of the only coherent things he said. Apart from that he just kept repeating Sarah’s name over and over. My father did everything he could, but we think Ali was just holding on long enough to pass the message on.
We brought his body back here and buried it in a specially built crypt in the woods.”
“No, you didn’t!” Anais had found a chink in their story.
Aethelu looked at Anais questioningly.
She continued “You can’t have. Policemen came to my house to tell me he’d died. I went to the funeral. He and my mother were buried side by side at a cemetery in York.”
Aethelu suddenly looked anxious. Her and August traded looks between them.
“You just buried your mother. I’m sorry, Anais, we couldn’t let Ali be picked up by the authorities. One very simple blood test would have shown he was different. It wouldn’t have taken much experimentation to realise the significance of his rare blood. His body would have been cut up and
studied. The findings would have first been published in every scientific journal in the world and then the press would have picked up on the news. Your father would have been famous in death. Of course, people would look into his history, and they’d eventually find us. We couldn’t let that happen. Alistair knew that; he died protecting our secret.”
“So who the hell did I bury alongside my mother?” Anais said loudly, feeling more and more hurt and angry with each passing second.
“Andrew planned it all. He’s really clever, fast thinking. We all knew the trouble we were in, but it was Andrew who came up with a plan. While we brought your father’s body home, Rafe called in the accident. He pretended to be Ali. He told the ambulance drivers that he’d just been missed by the car, but had passed out which was why it had taken so long to call for an ambulance. He’d already scrubbed the ground of your father’s blood. The rain had done a good job of washing it away, and any left would have been mistaken for your Mother’s. He travelled with Sarah’s body to the hospital. We claimed her body first thing next morning so that no one could look into it too much.”
“But I buried two bodies, My Mother and My Father.”
Aethelu suddenly looked apologetic.
“I’m sorry Anais, you only buried Sarah. Whilst Rafe was at the Morgue, he found a body of someone with a similar description to Ali. Andrew hacked into the morgue records, changed the name and Rafe sweet talked both bodies out of there. He can talk his way out of anything. He’d make a good politician or conman.”
“Aren’t they the same thing?” August cut in and laughed heartily at his own joke until he realised nobody else was laughing with him.
Silence descended over the trio, each lost in his or her own thoughts.
Eventually Anais broke the silence.
“My parents died a year ago. Why now? How come you suddenly want to protect me now?”
“We have been protecting you. Since your father died, we have watched over you from a distance. We didn’t want to spoil your life, so we didn’t show ourselves. Unfortunately, you weren’t doing so well...”
