by Lan Chan
“Wait,” Rachel said when I reached for the door handle. “They’re idiots, but they didn’t know what they were doing.” I stepped out.
“Alessia,” Samantha said. “We’re so glad to have –”
I marched behind her and punched Harlow in the jaw.
Somebody grabbed me around the waist. I swung again, this time clipping Winnie on the shoulder. Rachel yanked me back. “Stop it!” she said.
“You think that was funny?” I screamed. Harlow was clutching at her cheek. “Do you have any idea how many creatures I killed?” My voice was like a razor and it sliced through the still of the land surrounding the Academy. I heard doors and windows in the building open. Over in the field, one of their cattle mooed.
“Alessia!” Jessica said. “Please.”
“I could have killed someone. If there was anybody around, I might have! Is this what you call fun?”
My experience with bullies was that they either backed down or came back at you with the same treatment. At Bloodline, Brigid would have used her magic on me in a second if she could get away with it. There was no forbidding in this place. Harlow swiped at where I’d landed the punch. I didn’t have much strength, but what I lacked in force I made up for in enthusiasm. The edges of her form blurred.
“Do not make me warn you again,” Samantha said in a tone that made Harlow re-materialise.
“It was a harmless joke,” Harlow snarled. “How was I supposed to know she can’t swim? Jeez. Get a sense of humour. How is she going to join the mission if this is how she reacts?” It was so much more than not being able to swim. But I was damn well not going to tell them so. I was already leery of the way Jessica was watching me. She snuck quicksilver glances at me in between pretending to hold back the other girls.
“That’s for me to decide,” Samantha said. “This stops here. There are so few of us as it is. We must be united.”
I couldn’t even get up the energy to respond. Harlow pouted. Oh for goodness sake. I shrugged Rachel off me. “If anybody else so much as thinks about having fun with me, they’re going to be sorry.”
With that, I marched off towards the kennels. I was stomping my way there when I spotted a figure inside the chicken and goose pen. Ashton was in a pair of tan coveralls. His white shirt was once again stained. He raised his arm and waved at me.
“Glad you’re back,” he shouted. I laced my hands behind my back and kept walking.
Phoenix was inside his enclosure. He saw me coming and did his leaping thing clear over the top of the fence. Why they even bothered to put him in there was a mystery to me. Why he allowed it was another thing altogether.
He raced up to me. I crouched down on my knees. As soon as his face was close enough I buried my head in his hair and bawled. Ever since I’d woken up, my thoughts had been filled with the thousands of tiny voices of those creatures I had snuffed out in my fury. At the time, I had been mad with fear. Now the regret was eating me up inside. I didn’t want these stupid powers if they were so destructive I lost control and killed innocent things.
Phoenix didn’t move despite the fact I was tugging on his hair and shuddering against him. His head dipped onto my shoulder. It occurred to me as my tears finally subsided a while later that he had survived his own frightening ordeal and had come out of it changed. Would I let myself be dragged down by this one experience, or would I try to best it?
I shook myself and decided I needed to take a walk. Phoenix kept company beside me, never once breaking his stride to chase the various wild creatures that crossed our path. It occurred to me that this was my dream situation. I was living in the country away from the smoke and sewage of the city.
I wondered how long they would allow me to walk unchecked on their property. It was about twenty minutes before Sean arrived. He sat down on the grass next to the dam where I’d been contemplating the voice I’d heard in the ocean. The memory of the vast canvas of lights and colours was still very much etched into my thoughts.
“Why the ocean?” he asked casually.
“Why not? Plenty of people are afraid of it.”
“Ah, but there’s fear and then there’s hysteria.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You weren’t there. How do you have any idea about the way I reacted?”
He brushed a hand over the thick blades of grass. Over in the distant fields, everything was brown. I could imagine we hadn’t had a drop of rain all summer. But Terran grass was lush. “You pretty much annihilated a section of the foreshore,” he said. “Either you were scared out of your wits or there’s something not at all right about you.”
Take your pick really.
“They’re not that bad, you know.” I assumed he was referring to the Evil Three. “They’re just testing you. There are so few of us, the ones that are here have to be strong.”
“I don’t need anybody testing me,” I said. “I’ve had enough of being a lab rat.”
“Well then, you’re not going to like this, but Samantha wants to see you in her office.” Of course she did.
I let Phoenix run off back to his enclosure. Then I marched back up to the building and endured pretty much the same interrogation as the one Jacqueline had given me. Samantha was slightly more enthusiastic about it.
“This core of power that you possess,” she asked with obvious interest, “can you tell where it comes from?”
If I had known that, I wouldn’t be in this predicament! “As far as I’m aware, it’s been handed down to me from Azrael. He said it was something different to the way his brothers blooded their Nephilim.” I fisted my hands on my thighs. “I’ve tried to ask him about it, but he says he’s bound by an agreement he can’t break.”
“Hmm.” She contemplated this.
“How is that even a thing?” I ploughed on. “He’s a seraph. There’s nothing on this Earth that he can’t do!”
This time, she made a dismissive gesture. “There are plenty of things the seraphim can’t bring about. Interfering with our free will being one of them. They claim dominion over the dimensions, but I’ve yet to see any legitimacy in that claim.”
I remembered somebody saying once in class that the Soul Sisterhood did not bow down to the laws of the seraphim. Maddison, one of the Nephilim kids, had been utterly affronted. Now I was being faced with that very prospect.
“But they’re supreme beings,” I said.
“Are they? For us to accept their dominion means that we must accept Lucifer as well. It means that whatever he does is justified and we just have to scrape around making the best of it. Are you prepared to do that?”
My blood turned cold at the thought of Lucifer. “What he’s done is not typical.”
She huffed. “Only because his peers have deemed it so. What happens if they decide they’re sick of their patronage and want to rule over us? Who’s going to stop them then?”
I opened my mouth but nothing came out. Who would stop the seraphim if they decided this dimension was no longer worth keeping? Their fighting had inadvertently destroyed the barriers between the dimensions. I would hate to think what they could do if they really meant it. My head was starting to throb at the possibility. My stomach was hollow.
“Do you have anything to eat?”
“Always. I’ll go fix you something. In the meantime, I’ve got something for you to take a look at.” She passed her tablet over and showed me a website about chi or life energy.”
I read the link with some interest. The argument was that energy flowed through the body in a state of either harmony or chaos. Through various forms of mediation and mindfulness, a person could control that energy and achieve the ultimate state of enlightenment. There were too many links to click. I was down an internet search rabbit hole when she came back with a chicken sandwich, some cake, and a glass of orange juice.
“Interesting, isn’t it?”
I nodded, my eyes locked on the plate. She set it down in front of me. I picked up the cake first. Suppressing a smile, she conti
nued. “The power that marks you as one of us, is part of the flow of energy that is so common amongst the theories on some of these sites.”
I opened my mouth, almost spilled cake onto my lap, and chewed frantically. “If everybody knows about it, why don’t more people have the power?”
Samantha closed her eyes for a second. “There were more of us in the beginning,” she said. “When the monsters first breached our world, many had the ability to tap into the soul link. That’s what we call the thread that holds all of us connected to the power source. You must have felt it that night when you discharged so much energy.”
I had felt something. Whether it was the link she spoke about was another thing. I had a feeling the link she referred to and the Ley lines the supernaturals used for their abilities had their origins in the same place. Two sides of the same coin.
“But as the world moves on and the collective consciousness clings to other, less worthy pursuits, we begin to forget where we came from. Fewer people have retained the knowledge or even the desire to rekindle that connection.”
“What if we told them about it?”
She tapped the screen. “We do. It’s all right here. But it’s hard to get someone’s attention when there is so much else for them to worry about. The world had become a place of distraction. The only way to change the course of what we’ve become is for something big to happen.”
“Big how?”
She shook her head. “That still remains to be seen. And not something we can cover in today’s lesson.”
“Lesson?” I thought we’d just been talking.
“Yes. Have you even looked at your timetable? This is your first lesson in soul splitting.”
I almost choked on the sandwich in my mouth. “Soul splitting?” What came out was a bunch of mumbling. But she got the gist of what I was trying to say. I chewed hard and swallowed harder. “Shouldn’t there be other students in the class?”
She smiled. “With numbers being what they are, we have the capacity to provide a more hands-on approach to learning.”
I’ll say. I was getting private tutoring from the grand mistress of the Sisterhood. I couldn’t imagine a situation in which Jacqueline would do the same. It wasn’t practical. There were far too many students in Bloodline Academy for her to devote to me alone. I was kind of glad. I’d had enough trouble keeping up with Professor Eldridge. Two Amazonian instructors might just kill me.
“I’m not very good at fighting,” I said, “I mean, I’m a bit small and slow.”
This time, she showed me her teeth when she smiled. “You’re back in your own world,” she said. “Our abilities aren’t just about size and power. We’ll start with the theory. But first, you must promise me that you won’t reveal any of this to the monsters.”
I wasn’t going to be able to dissuade them from calling the supernaturals monsters any time soon. “It’s not like they’ll be able to replicate it,” I hedged.
“Understanding how something works doesn’t necessarily mean you want to replicate it,” she said. “But should they learn to counter our abilities, we will be at a tactical disadvantage. I know you’re attached to them, but you are undeniably one of us. I need you to give me your word that you won’t say anything.”
“Why don’t you just bind me?” I asked, feeling the grip of Lucifer around my throat.
“Even if I wanted to, I don’t have the strength.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re unlike anything we’ve ever seen, Alessia. What you did to Giselle is unheard of. We can teach you to bind and unbind souls, but outside of that, I’m afraid there are some things you might have to test on your own.”
“What about my nanna?”
“The binding on her seems to be unique. It’s impossible to tell without gaining access to her.”
“They’re not going to let you inside Seraphina.” They weren’t even letting me inside Seraphina these days.
She pursed her lips. “No, I imagine not. Doesn’t it strike you as ridiculous that they’re holding one of ours without any kind of authority and then not allowing us to see her?”
Shit. Now that she’d said it, she had a point. Why the hell wasn’t I allowed to see my own grandmother? I hadn’t even noticed I was gripping the edge of the plate until it scraped against the desk.
“Perhaps you can describe to me what you’ve seen,” Samantha said as she patted my hands away from the plate.
“The last time I saw into her aura it was laced with all these strings of blue,” I said. “The kind of blue like this.” I stood up and drew a circle on the wooden floor in the open space between her desk and the window. Normally I let the circles remain invisible, but this time I commanded my power to illuminate. I’d never get used to the stunning glow of the perfect circle. It soothed some of the burning in my chest at the thought of Nanna.
Samantha came out from behind her desk. She tiptoed around the outside of the circle. “Your magic is precise,” she said. “Who taught you this?”
“Nanna.”
“But she’s non-magical.”
I scratched my head. “But it’s true.”
“How well do you remember your early childhood? Are you certain there wasn’t anyone else there when you were very young?”
It hit me then what she was trying to say. I wracked my brain for some kind of memory of my great-grandmother being in the picture. But there was nothing there. My earliest memory had been of lying on my belly on a picnic blanket drawing circles while Nanna weeded the garlic bed. “There’s nothing I can think of.”
“May I?” She raised her hand to my forehead. I nodded.
The touch of her soft lined hands on my temple was strange. I could feel the vibration of her power which had a bright cream glow to it. I closed my eyes for a second, willing the surge of my own power not to break against hers. It appeared that whatever was inside me didn’t like the idea of someone else invading our space.
The black-and-blue vastness undulated. It reminded me too much of the unpredictability of the ocean. Samantha’s light flickered. I opened mine to find her entire body phasing in and out of this reality.
Her light touched the smallest surface of the pool of my energy. My body reacted without conscious thought. The blue parted to allow the darkness within access to her power. She gasped and ripped her hand away just as the blackness wrapped tendrils around her. I shoved her at the same time, wrenching her away before the darkness took hold.
She stumbled into the edge of her desk. Her hands balanced on either side of her. “My goodness,” she said. “That’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before.”
I hung my head. Damn. All of the hopes of learning what I was dashed against the waves inside my mind. “Yeah, nobody else can figure out what it is either.”
When she glanced up at me, her eyes were shining. “I didn’t say I don’t know what it is,” she said. “Only that I’ve never come across it before. At least not in a practical sense.”
“Beg your pardon?”
She smiled at me, her delight causing lines to appear around her eyes. “You’re a bone witch,” she said. “I had thought we’d lost that line.”
“A what now?”
“The very first of the Sisterhood that walked this earth had the ability to tap into the well of existence. Our powers are based on balance. Life and death. Your hedge magic provides you with life...the darker magic...”
I massaged my forehead. “Are you telling me I’m some kind of necromancer?”
I’d read about those mages who had the ability to use blood and dark magic to bring people back from the dead. It sounded like an unholy practice. That’s why it was strictly forbidden at Bloodline and heavily regulated in the supernatural community.
Samantha made a face and I sighed with relief. “No, nothing so gruesome. But your power, it allows you to tap into the essence of the departed. The earth itself is a mix of things that have given up their bodies to nourish the living. It’
s symmetry.”
I had to sit down. The window ledge was the closest thing. She watched me carefully. I didn’t like it. “What?”
“You said you’re bound to Azrael in some way...”
“Yes.”
“By all accounts, he is the archangel of death.”
“No way. He ferries souls to the afterlife. He doesn’t kill them.”
“Sometimes, he must make a decision about what lives and what dies.”
I had to agree that certainly sounded possible. And then something hit me. The thing that had eluded me about why Lucifer was so hell-bent on me joining him. If Samantha was right and my ability was linked to Azrael in this way, then there was a possibility I could kill the seraphim. Did he want me as an ally because I would defeat him as an enemy?
My heart stuttered. And in my mind, the sound of the devil laughing rang in my ear.
20
Samantha noticed the alarm that settled over me but she didn’t understand the source of it. My hands were shaking. I tried to sit on them. “It’s okay,” she said. “This ability doesn’t mean you’re touched by death. After all, look at the good you’ve managed to do with it.”
The shock of her words rattled me. “You mean like binding the soul of a mage to the body of someone who had just died?”
She held her hand to her lip. I wasn’t sure if it was involuntary or if she did it to hide her displeasure. “Yes, well, maybe this once we can overlook the monster-reviving thing.” She wiped her hands on her thighs. “Your power does prove slightly difficult. The bindings around your grandmother are chaotic. Not something that would be done slowly over an extended period of time. Then again, you had no idea what you were doing. It’s puzzling. I can see the bonds you’ve formed with her. But there are so many wrapped around her it’s like she’s cocooned.”
“I might as well be a spider, huh? Don’t spiders wrap their victims in gossamer before sucking them dry?” Sometimes I had a really warped sense of humour. “Do you think I can unbind her?”
She rubbed at her chin. “I’m almost terrified to try,” she said. Then she saw the look on my face. “I said almost. But if there’s anyone qualified enough to do it, we’re the ones.”
