by L F Seitz
The Rising
Trigenus Series Book One
L. F. Seitz
LFSeitzBooks
Copyright © 2021 Leonora Seitz All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Any real people, historical events, or real locales are used fictitiously. Characters, places, and incidences are product of the Author's imagination, any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission from the publisher.
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www.LeonoraSeitz.com
First Edition September 2021
ebk ISBN: 978-0-578-84369-8
Pbk ISBN: 978-0-578-87152-3
Cover design by Leonora Seitz
Printed in the United States of America
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
The Rising (The Trigenus Series, #1)
Preface.
Prologue.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Six.
Seven.
Eight.
Nine.
Ten.
Eleven.
Twelve.
Thirteen.
Fourteen.
Fifteen.
Sixteen.
Seventeen.
Eighteen.
Nineteen.
Twenty.
Twenty-One.
Twenty-Two.
Twenty-Three.
Twenty-Four.
Twenty-Five.
Twenty-Six.
Twenty-Seven.
Twenty-Eight.
Twenty-Nine.
Thirty.
Thirty-One.
Epilogue.
Translations
Acknowledgements
About the Author
To those who feel invisible-
I see you.
Take this journey with me
and in it, see yourself.
Real monsters are not lurking within the shadows, but within our souls.
-Leonora Seitz
Preface.
GOOD AND EVIL. EVERYONE claims they are one or the other, as if there is never an in-between.
I am always in-between.
I like to believe there is a little of good and evil in each person, regardless of religion or background. Being “good” is a choice, not a genetic trait. Sure, some may be morally superior to others, but does that mean no evil lurks within their minds? If so, what does that mean for the rest of us, with our dark tendencies? I have to believe every person has the capacity for either extreme, that those born into bad circumstances can find goodness within them to shoulder burdens they shouldn’t have to carry. Is that an illusion I dreamt, or is it a realistic concept? Is it possible to believe that though you are evil, you can choose to be good? Do I yell the question into the dark abyss and hope for an answer? All I hear is my own voice echoing back at me. Maybe that is the answer.
Or maybe it’s up to us to decide.
Prologue.
I WOKE UP LIKE I DID every other day of my life: not wanting to. My dull gray room was the same as it had been since I moved in three years ago: full of secondhand furniture, sparse and ancient. Reminding me of furnishings out of a Jane Austen novel, and day after day, it wasn’t as quaint as I had tricked myself into believing when I first arrived. Nature photographs printed on canvas decorated one wall while the others lay bare because my foster parents didn’t want tape or tack from my posters to cause damage. I had but a few photos on my desk and dresser and a band poster on the back of my door, which they never noticed. Pack that away, and you’d never even know I was here.
Out of all the seventeen years of my life, I had never had a room completely my own. When I was placed in a home, I usually stayed in a spare bedroom the people who were fostering me tried to dress up with bright sheets or colorful photographs. It never distracted me from the fact that I was just a guest. While still in foster housing, waiting to be placed, I shared a room with other girls my age. We all had the same white sheets and dark blankets, leaving no room for favoritism or snobbery – unless you had your own blanket, and only took it out at night. Which most did, or it would likely be stolen. This place, this house, was no different than any other I’d been in, but it’s the longest I’d ever stayed anywhere.
“My” room resembled the rest of the house, and I think that’s how my foster parents Dorothy and Phil liked it: conventional, crisp, with hardly a touch of human warmth. Aside from maybe a candle or blanket in every room and a few photos, the house itself could’ve been an impersonal Airbnb rental. The blandness they forced me to live in was dreary and unpleasing, draining my motivation to do anything, especially wake up for school. I attempted to at least get the color of my room changed to something better than concrete gray. My foster parents always told me painting my room would be a waste of money: I would only change my mind about the color after a year and want to paint it again. It’s an excuse I never really got over. I spent most of my time losing myself in poetry and movies, trying to keep myself sane.
The large window at the foot of my bed was the only redeeming quality keeping my room from being identical to an prison. The view varied day to day: a few leaves clung to the branches of the old oak before the bone-chilling winds of winter swept them away. The trees and building tops I could see from the condo’s second story gave me more than enough reason to daydream. Nothing but fluttering leaves and open skies, and I could go anywhere far from here in my head, better than here, without leaving my bed. This daydreaming was handy when it came to the rules of bedtime and restricted social hours after school.
Before rising, I braced myself for the cold floor. My foster parents didn’t switch on the heat this early in November, claiming the expense was a waste. They wouldn’t turn it on until snow stuck to the Wisconsin ground – which wouldn’t be long now, I hoped, since the Midwest weather could be so unpredictable, warm one day and snowing the next. I wasn’t new to freezing, though. There were a few winters while I was in placement housing, a place called the Napoleon House, where the furnace would break. It was an old Victorian house, and the furnace was ancient. Many nights were spent huddling with girls I hardly knew in order to stay warm.
I touched my toes to the bleak wood floor and cringed as a shiver shot up my spine. Nope. With that, I promptly pulled my feet back under the covers and flopped onto my side. Not going to school today. Twelfth grade could wait. I hated the cold, anything cold, and only thrived during summer’s heat. If I could, I would sleep outside every night during summer, on the warm grass among soft cricket chirps, never lying inside again. Well, at least, not until winter.
My social worker, Susan, told me there was a report in my file about an incident when I was four. I was left in a car in the middle of summer with the windows rolled up and no air conditioning for an unknown amount of time. It was said the temperature inside the car was around 134 degrees Fahrenheit when a panicked pedestrian called the fire department, believing me to be dead. When paramedics pulled me from the car, they found I was only asleep. My skin was cool to the touch, my body temperature a normal 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and I wasn’t sweating or fatigued. One paramedic called it “the work of God.” That could be why I love the warmth so much: the incident permanently affected my body. It’s why my social worker called me a sun baby when I was young, when I was special. My foster parents used it as a term of endearment, back
when they were still excited to have me around. That was a long time ago. These days, I don’t remember the last time they weren’t yelling at me about something.
“Lamia!” my foster mother yelled, emphasizing the last ‘a’ of my name. I didn’t answer. Maybe she was feeling nice today, and if I didn’t respond, she would leave me alone and not force me to go to school. After a few moments, I heard an angry stomping on the stairs, then a pounding outside my door. The door swung open, and my foster mother’s wrinkled brow stared down at me.
“Seriously, Lamia, you’re seventeen years old. Why am I still getting you up for school?” She wore khaki capris and a light pink blouse, crisp and neat. With her perfect blonde beach waves and clear skin, she looked a lot younger than forty-five. I looked up at her and shrugged. There was no use fighting with her, with either of my foster parents, since I was always wrong. “Senior year is when you are supposed to learn responsibility. Why am I still babying you?” She spoke calmly now, her hazel eyes found mine. We used to be more communicative with each other and on better terms than my foster father and I. That all ended abruptly a month ago.
From what I could tell from conversations with classmates, most parents were excited to help usher their kids into this next phase of their lives. Others dreaded it, losing babies to college or a young marriage, but my family was a lot less sentimental. My foster parents liked playing house at first – our first three years were decent – but once I’d relaxed into my identity as their foster child, they had slammed the brakes and sent me flying head first into the facts, alone. College had me excited at first, but a few months ago, a single dinner conversation set in stone exactly what me living here meant: that I was a temporary part of their family. My assumption that our relationship would go past the foster system as I went to college changed them into completely different people.
That night, I sat across from my foster dad Phil in the dining room for dinner. He’d arrived home late from the auto insurance agency and still wore his dress shirt and tie. His black hair, peppered with gray around his ears, had been combed back just so, and his blue eyes stared absently at his plate as he ate. I didn’t really think about going to college until I moved in with them. They’d encouraged aspiration. More than once, Phil had expressed love and longing for his college days. Seeing how interested and happy he was for me to go to college motivated me to think of college as an actual possibility. After a few minutes of gnawing silence, our forks scraping the plates, I asked if they would drive to visit me at college. It was the first thing I’d said to him since we’d gathered for dinner.
“Well, that’s a lot of money to spend on gas, so probably not.” I was taken back by his bluntness, but I figured it was because he was tired and didn’t mean to be harsh. I told him it was OK, that I was disappointed, but could understand where they were coming from. I told him I would come back home during the summers.
“Oh. Well, you know, Dorothy wants to move to somewhere in Beloit to be near her sister. I don’t know where we will be yet at that time.” My foster mother kept her eyes on her plate, attempting to look interested in the spinach lasagna. Neither made eye contact with me, and both remained silent after that. So that was that. Something changed that night, and from then on, they avoided conversations with me about the future and giving any sign that I would be welcomed into theirs. Once it became apparent I was unwanted, I grew depressed and stopped trying. I tossed all my college pamphlets, gave minimum effort at school, and avoided Phil and Dorothy as much as possible in the house. The hope that this time, given how long I’d been fostered with them, it would be different. It made my happiness completely dependent upon them accepting me.
Once it all imploded in my face, there wasn’t much I could even care about after that. I gave up trying to be accepted by anyone. I gave up being happy. Some of my classmates told me to go to college for myself, but I couldn’t get past that night in my head. All I could think about was being tossed from place to place for the past seventeen years, letting myself be foolish, only to have the rug pulled out from under me. I couldn’t even entertain the idea of still going to college. Or doing more than the bare minimum at school. I had no money for school and no support system to back me up, and my grades were too mediocre to earn a grant or scholarship. I should have started applying myself better junior year. There was no way I’d get into anywhere now. My life’s new reality completely overwhelmed me. Knowing that after I graduated I was going to be shoved out into the world whether I was ready or not, with nothing but my own hands and my mind, terrified me too much to dig my university pamphlets out of the trash.
“Lamia, are you listening to me?” Dorothy asked, her hands on her hips as she glared at me through mascara-caked eyelashes and pale, pursed lips. “Jesus, could you be any more scatterbrained? You drive me nuts.” She stomped out my room with a slam of the door and lumbered back down the stairs like Godzilla.
Good. She was mad. Influencing her mood was my only entertainment, given she smashed the rest of my dreams. She’d be rid of me come next summer anyway, so why do I care? I sighed, knowing if I didn’t get up soon, she would call my foster dad, and we’d have the same conversation – just harsher and in a lower octave.
Against my will, I got dressed, threw my hair into a messy bun, and put on the essential jewels of my collection: skull stud earrings, a stretchy choker necklace, and few black rubber bracelets. I wore mostly dark colors: black, grays, browns, blues – anything to help me disappear into the background at school. Not because I was an emotional wreck who wanted to disappear, but because dark clothing made me comfortable and less like a sore thumb. It made me less recognizable when it came to bullies, which have always been a problem for me. Plus, it helped to be a shadow when I pranked kids and teachers at school. Dark clothes made it harder for you to be spotted in a pool of students in the hallway. Take it from me.
I didn’t pull pranks because my parents don’t love me or I’m breaking the rules for attention. I just fell in love with it; it was my secret pleasure, and I was exceptional at it. Being “bad” wasn’t always bad: I wasn’t hurting anyone, after all. Hiding a fart-noise maker in the tile ceiling of my math class hardly hurt anything aside from my teacher’s pride. Most people loved my pranks, especially the one where I adjusted the clocks in my English class so we could be let out a half hour early. After my foster parents severed me from their future, pranking became the only activity I looked forward to every day. There were people I talked to and sat with in all of my classes, but no one I really was close to. No one who knew I was the host of all the memorable pranks at school. The thought alone brought a smile to my face. I was the master prankster.
At least that’s what I told myself. It was something that filled my time, something that gave me purpose, because aside from the pranks and classes, I had next to nothing. I was deemed a loner by my peers for the most part since I wasn’t a very social person, and it had sort of followed me from middle school up until now. I think many forgot why I was cast out to begin with. Kids are vicious in middle school and go after one another for anything they deem “weird” – or rather, characteristics they don’t understand. Like being an orphan, for instance. Homeless, defective, freak, deadbeat kid, ugly duckling, whatever they could come up with to poke at my already deep wounds. After years of taunts, I learned that moving through life alone was easier and less dramatic. Going through high school pulling pranks gave me the connection with my peers I desired without the commitment. They laughed at it, but never went past that. They could be laughing at me, too, but I didn’t stop long enough to think about it. Maybe I was a hopeless freak.
Maybe that’s how it was supposed to be. Maybe that’s why my birth parents didn’t want me. Maybe I’d been off my rocker since the beginning. All I knew was that I was all I had in life. There were no parents, no guardian angels, no God. Just me.
One.
ONE YEAR LATER.
I woke like I usually did, not wanting to. Winter was c
oming.
The familiar coolness in the air made it seem like last winter was just yesterday. I slumped over on the side of my bed and held my toes inches above my bland and plain apartment’s freezing concrete floor. Stinginess didn’t keep me from using heat, unlike my ex-foster parents; my heat was broken and had been since August when I moved in. It’s early November now. I braced myself and planted my feet on the cold ground with a shudder, like I had every morning. My bedroom wasn’t gray anymore. Instead, the four walls and one doorway were a faded yellow and sticky with something I couldn’t scrub away because the previous tenants smoked. The worst part was no bedroom window, which meant no daydreaming from bed. No natural light.
I shuffled into my small kitchen. Dark stains dotted the cream laminate counters, and the corners were worn down to the wood underneath. Despite how hard I cleaned the kitchen was past its prime, like everything else in the apartment. I made a pot of dark roast coffee with my secondhand Bunn coffeemaker, and while it brewed I walked over to my recliner, which sat in front of the apartment’s only window. It was rather large, taking up most of the wall space in the living room of my 750-square-foot apartment. I glanced at the tin TV tray left here by the last tenant. The old man from across the hall gave me this chair when his grandkids bought him a new one. The chocolate brown had faded along the arms and it smelled like a nursing home, but I didn’t mind. I was accustomed to secondhand furniture. You could say my whole life was secondhand.
I quickly drank my coffee, and though it should have scalded my tongue I felt nothing but tingling warmth. If I wanted to, I could pour it right from the pot into my mouth, a useless talent unless drinking scolding coffee. I used the one mug I had brought from my foster parents’ house – the same mug from the house before that, too. It was black with a white #1 on the front and gifted to me when I was little by an old woman at a garage sale. She gave it to me for free because she thought I was cute. It might have been because she knew I was an orphan. The reason didn’t matter to me, then or now, because it was mine.