by Rae Else
‘It’s not safe for you to stay with me,’ Anna said. ‘Adam’s going to take you somewhere. Listen to his instructions and don’t use your power again.’
Anna nodded. She seemed to be about to leave and El’s anger simmered. Did Anna think she had used her power on purpose? She felt like screaming that she didn’t go around knocking people off balconies for fun. On top of this, she was being passed from one stranger to another. She didn’t care how saint-like he looked, she didn’t know him.
‘No way,’ El spoke up. ‘You dragged me here and now you’re gonna leave?’
Adam passed something to Anna. ‘Wanna do the honours?’
El regarded the syringe. She stared at her mother. Was she going to tranq her if she refused to go with him?
‘Roll up your sleeve,’ Anna said.
El shook her head. ‘It’s okay, I’ll go.’
‘This will conceal you from the Order,’ she said.
‘But … what is it? Is it safe? How do I even know it’s clean?’ She stared at the needle as Anna drew off the plastic cover.
Anna’s brow crinkled. ‘Hasn’t your grandma talked to you about our immunity?’
El nodded slowly but still regarded the needle suspiciously. Sure, she knew that their kind, just as they aged at a much slower rate than humans, couldn’t catch human infection or disease. She’d never even had a cold. However, that didn’t mean she was eager to put it to the test by injecting herself with mysterious substances.
Anna’s face relaxed. ‘Alex, a friend of mine, a doctor, left it for you. Please, El.’
El hesitated, but finally rolled up her sleeve. She averted her eyes as she felt the slight pin prick.
‘We best get goin’,’ Adam said. ‘You’ll see ya mothah again soon.’
El shrugged and set off, making a point of not looking back. She’d bet her life her mothah, as Aussie Jesus pronounced it, wouldn’t spare her a second thought.
She stopped when she saw Adam’s car. It was one of those Volkswagen vans. The kind surfer types drove. Well, she’d seen them in magazines and on TV; Ingrid had always kept her up-to-date with the latest trends. Looking at Adam she supposed that might explain the face fuzz and long hair – more beach type than city. She wondered how old the van was. It looked seriously retro.
She eyed the peeling, blue and white bodywork with mistrust.
‘Ya can’t stop the waves, but ya can learn to surf,’ Adam said, cracking a smile.
El envisaged an open road, the sea, a sandy beach bathed in sunshine. The waves might be a reference to Anna. After all, hadn’t she conjured the water? Perhaps he was alluding to the whole crazy situation she found herself in. She smiled. Whatever he meant, Aussie Jesus spoke in analogies.
Adam slid open the back of the van and the light up front came on. Something shifted inside. Someone. It was the strong, aquiline nose and prominent chin that El spied first. She was suddenly caught up in a flurry of sensation; warmth spread across her face. She thought she was blushing but realised the heat issued from the brown-eyed man inside.
‘El, this is Dan,’ Adam said.
Dan only nodded as she climbed in. His hair must be dark as it blended with the shadows. His jaw was marked with stubble. Adam pulled the door shut. She could still feel Dan’s gaze and looked at him again. The amber accent of his eyes was apparent. In the half-light, their warmth and colour made her think of glowing embers, rising from a bonfire into the night sky. Adam pulled the driver’s door shut as he climbed in, extinguishing the light.
Dan’s voice was sonorous. ‘Put this on.’ He thrust something at her. It took El a few seconds to realise that it was a sack.
‘Dan–’ Adam said.
‘We can’t have her knowing the way to the safe house. No offence, but we don’t know you. Also, if you have a phone, I’ll be needing it.’
El gawped and wondered how she’d got herself into this situation. That’s right, she hadn’t. Her mother had. She glowered from the back as Adam offered her a crooked smile, but his eyes remained wide and expectant.
She felt fed up and thought about leaping out of the van, but weariness overcame her. Feeling the weight of everything that had happened today, she didn’t have the strength to debate this.
She rummaged in her bag and tossed her phone to Dan. She drew the sack over her head and crossed her arms, sitting back in her seat with as much dignity as she could muster. The material was itchy against her skin and it felt stuffy beneath.
She felt the incline when they drove out from the car park. Even at street level the light from the streetlamps and traffic didn’t penetrate the thick fabric so, this time, the city and its people were hidden to her. Only each stifling intake of air beneath the bag measured the passage of time. She let her other senses rove, becoming acutely aware of Dan’s breathing beside her, but it was more creepy than reassuring. Almost as if she could feel his hot breath on the back of her neck.
She turned her thoughts back to the evening’s events. For all of Adam’s easy-going charm, he hadn’t explained anything more than Anna. Dan seemed even more inclined to secrecy, paranoid in fact. He didn’t speak for the rest of the journey. She imagined that addressing a bag was disconcerting but he’d been the one to insist on it. The least that he could do was offer her some reassurance during the journey.
She guessed it was a half-hour later that Adam called from up front, ‘Almost there.’
When they stopped, El wrenched off the bag and jumped out. They had parked on a small driveway in front of a three-storey building. The windows were barred and boarded up, the white paintwork dirty and peeling, steep stairs issued to a porch, in front of which tyres and a mishmash of broken furniture and rubbish lay strewn. At best it looked like a place for squatters, at worst prime real estate for a drug den.
As El stood gazing up at the unwelcoming façade, a black symbol appeared, emblazoned above the door like ink on paper. It became bolder and clearer as it seeped across the paint. The symbol looked like a cross with a ribbon coiling around the trunk. She stared at it as Dan came over to stand beside her.
‘Did you do that?’ she asked.
His eyes rested on her and she wondered if he was just going to keep staring at her.
‘I forgot that you don’t know this stuff … it’s part of the building,’ he said with a shrug.
She frowned at his half-hearted explanation, but Adam on the other side of her added, ‘It’s a kerykeion. It veils the building from the human world. To humans it always looks like your average, run-down house – like most of the others in this area – but when an arete stands in front of it, the mark rises and shows what’s here.’
El’s eyes travelled over the mark. ‘But it showed itself to me and Anna told me not to use my power.’
Dan’s brow furrowed. ‘Contact with a kerykeion isn’t you using your power. The power emanates from the mark.’
El relaxed a little and looked around her curiously. The house was changing. Her eyes roamed its front as it transformed. The pebble-dashed walls seemed newly renovated and gleamed, the arched windows possessed complete panes and a welcoming glow issued from behind closed curtains.
It wasn’t just the house that was changing. The bare yard that had been heaped with rubbish now contained flowers, shrubs and trees. Huge ferns and palms stood around the building and throughout the front yard as if a forest had materialised from the shadows. It felt impossible that the busy streets of London lay only a few metres behind them. Back on the driveway, the van was now obscured by the tall foliage.
‘Let’s get in,’ Adam said.
El followed Dan inside, halting in the hall. It looked like the garden continued along the corridor. Colourful, eastern-looking lanterns were suspended from the ceiling, illuminating more plants and flowers. Vines curled up the walls, trailing all the way to the ceiling; flowers and shrubs stood in pots on tiered shelves, their fragrant petals scenting the air. El felt like she’d wa
lked out into the garden at home, where jasmine and honeysuckle hung from the pergola. She and her grandma ate there sometimes during the warm summer evenings. The memory brought a pang of longing.
‘Welcome to ma humble abode,’ Adam said. ‘The décor is very much á la nymph.’
‘Nymph?’ El asked.
‘A different type of arete to ya,’ Adam said. ‘We can grow mature trees and plants from a seed within minutes.’
El traced the ceiling in wonder. Even as she admired it, she thought about how being green-fingered would be an infinitely easier power than the one she’d been lumped with. Arete. A type of arete. That’s what Dan had said outside too. The house showed itself to arete. She’d only ever called herself or heard her grandma refer to them as serpents. She was part of something larger. The plants seemed to welcome her into the bower.
From amidst the wall of leaves, a girl in a lacy dress poked her head out. El wondered if she’d hidden herself in the thick greenery but realised there was a doorway amongst the foliage. The girl had brunette dreadlocks, her skin was warm ochre and her septum was pierced.
With quick eyes she took in the newcomers. ‘Adam, you know better than to keep guests standing about. Come in – I’ll make tea.’
El registered the cool touch of her eyes. They felt similar to Anna’s but less forceful. It was like a humid mist cloaking her cheek. The essence of the rainforest seemed to be distilled in her gaze; El suspected the girl was a nymph like Adam. She felt hopeful at the promise of tea. After the sudden injection of god-knows-what in the grimy car park, Dan’s blindfold and the initial run-down exterior of this place, the chances of a friendly reception had seemed improbable. Tea was a far warmer greeting than she’d expected.
A glimmer of hope unfurled. She might soon get some answers to the questions that had multiplied over the course of her journey.
- Chapter Four -
Arete
The room was vast, running from the back of the house to the front. In the kitchen at the back, the girl rummaged in cupboards. At the opposite end was a canopied area; swathes of material hung from the high ceiling, sinking to the floor and creating a partitioned area.
El followed Adam through the gauzy fabric. Behind, she stared up at the odd mixture of leaves and flowers, sprouting from between the hangings. The material billowed between boughs and El saw that the structure was supported by trees that were grown from holes cut into the floor. She breathed in deeply. Some of the tension that had mounted over the evening ebbed away as she drank in the heady perfume from the buds and foliage.
Adam settled himself on a wide cushion. El took the one to his right. He wore a contented look as he watched the girl moving about the kitchen. His face was restful and he looked younger than El had first reckoned. There was a gentleness in his gaze. El suspected that they were together. The way the girl had scolded him in the hall had possessed a playfulness too.
El had supposed Adam was about her mother’s age. There was nothing about him to suggest that he was in his thirties, but she’d assumed as one of her mother’s friends that he was a similar age. With humans, you could always tell their age with a quick look. The smallest indentations in the skin started to occur in one’s twenties, growing more noticeable with each decade. She remembered how her granddad had aged. He’d died of a heart condition; she recalled its irregular rhythm which, despite medication, had continued to falter over time. With arete, it clearly wasn’t as easy to note their age. Her grandma, in her eighties, looked like she was middle-aged. El knew Anna was thirty-five, but viewed objectively, might only be a few years older than El.
Seeing the girl’s long dress and ankle bracelet, El wondered whether hippie dress was fashionable amongst arete, especially considering Adam’s style. Anna had been dressed very differently though. Dan, who had just come into the canopied area looked more conservative too: a simple black shirt and jeans. He looked smart. The only hint of dressing down were the blue trainers he wore.
As El looked at him, the warmth of his eyes crossed her skin. His hair, which hung to the ear was mussed, but suited him, softening his bold features. In the soft glowing light of the lanterns, his skin was a lustrous gold. She realised she was staring at him as he sat down on the wide-brimmed cushion opposite her.
She turned to Adam. ‘Why don’t your eyes give off cold or heat?’
‘Arete who manipulate water or fire effect temperature change,’ Adam said. ‘Like your mother or Tia.’ He inclined his head to the girl who dipped beneath the canopy. She set down a tray of steaming tea on the low table in the centre. The clean fragrance of lemon wafted through the air. Tia handed her a cup.
‘Or, like you and Dan,’ Adam said.
El frowned.
Dan’s eyebrows lifted. ‘You been living under a rock?’ There was a cynical note in his expression. His eyes didn’t soften but became harsher as he smirked.
El blushed. She had been living under a rock, or might as well have been. All her life. More had happened tonight than in the last seventeen years. She took a sip of tea.
‘You’re a drakon. A fire serpent,’ Dan said. ‘Same as me. We can conjure and manipulate fire–’
El spat out her tea. ‘A dragon!’
Tia grinned and Adam laughed.
‘But you breathe tea, not fire,’ Tia said with a laugh.
‘No … not dragon, a drakon – you can manipulate fire, not breathe it,’ Dan said, a look of exasperation on his face. He heaved out a sigh. ‘You get earth manipulators like Adam, water like Tia and your mother, and fire like you and me. There are air manipulators too, and most arete can control one of these four elements.’
El nodded, the enormity of what was happening settling on her again as Dan failed to lighten up. She took a few steadying sips of tea, this time managing to keep them down and thought about what he’d just said.
It was strange that there was another power in her that she hadn’t even known about. Her heart thrummed in fear at the thought of this dormant energy. Again, she imagined her power as a snake, coiled in the darkness – one not to be disturbed.
‘But … my eyes are giving off heat,’ El said, looking at Dan, ‘I am using my power…’
He shook his head. ‘The heat your eyes give off is a kind of residue from your power.’
El’s fingers strayed to her plait as she thought about watching Anna conjure the water in the carpark.
‘Why did Anna make that eye?’ El asked.
‘It’s our sign,’ said Dan. ‘The shuttered eye. We use it to signal that it’s safe, that we haven’t been seen by the Order. She used it to say it was okay for us to come get you.’
El felt unnerved by Dan’s gaze, centred so wholly on her. It wasn’t just that it was warm, but it was intense too. She felt like his eyes might burn her. She was sure that he had better control over his power than that and she probably didn’t need to worry about immolation, but from personal experience, knew that a serpent could never be too careful with their gaze.
She was trying hard not to look at any of them for too long. At the back of her mind, as always, she knew there was the danger of losing control over her power, especially if her emotions got the better of her. She hoped that whatever Anna had injected her with tonight might suppress her power. However, she didn’t know if it worked like that. It was best to be cautious. It occurred to her that perhaps Dan didn’t mind if he compelled her in some way – a suspicion that only increased her unease.
‘Can all arete control others with their gaze?’ El asked.
‘No. That’s just a serpent thing,’ Dan said. ‘The kerykeion you saw on the house works the same way. There’s serpent blood in it. It alters human perception. But just like the marker, our gaze can only affect humans. We can’t manipulate other arete.’
El gawped and her hand fell from the tangle of her hair. She gripped her mug with both hands. The realisation settled on her heavily. She was safe here. He couldn’t manipu
late her and she didn’t need to worry about losing control with any of them. Or with any other arete for that matter.
All her life she’d worried about having to control her emotions and power. She’d been brought up in the middle of nowhere because of it. Or that’s what she’d thought. She remembered her grandma’s admission tonight: It wasn’t just to protect humans that I taught you to conceal your power. It was to protect you from these people, to keep them from finding you.
Her grandma had said she was protecting her, but she’d kept her from this world, from other arete who she could be herself with. El felt herself hardening against her. How could her grandma have hidden the fact that there were other people like her? The word arete resonated through her thoughts and she recalled where she’d first heard it.
Her grandma had taught her Greek from a young age. It was Helena’s native language. She remembered the Ancient Greek text of Hesiod’s tale about Perseus and the Gorgon. They’d moved onto reading other stories like Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. El had been fascinated by Perseus and all the heroes with special abilities, like “Achilles, the swift-footed” or “cunning Odysseus”. These dead heroes had seemed to be the only ones who were like her. Not demigods as they were sometimes portrayed but people who were born different.
In the stories, the power these heroes possessed was always described with the same word. Each hero had his or her type of “arete”. Their own type of “excellence”. The best heroes in these stories had it. It was the peak of human-hood as it were.
‘Do you like the Verbana?’ Tia said with a grin, no doubt thinking of El spitting it out.
El nodded. ‘It’s lovely.’ It was the freshest tea she’d ever tasted, teeming with flavour – lemon, floral notes, a hint of woodiness. ‘I guess you guys are pretty self-sufficient when it comes to growing your food.’
Tia and Adam laughed.
‘Nothing but the cleanest of living here,’ Adam said. ‘We dryads grow, naiads like Tia ensure optimum water. The fire nymphs – the hesperides – ensure light and warmth, while the aurae, plenty of fresh air. Our produce is the best in London.’
