Everything went black.
I was sitting next to a young boy with tousled black hair, an eleven-year-old Gideon Chase. In his hand was a doll in sparkly pink frills whose hair had long ago been brushed into an unmanageable snarl. He gave me a sheepish grin. “Oh, hey. It’s you. Um, the doll isn’t mine, you know.”
“Too bad,” I said. “I was going to ask where you got those shoes for her. Cute!”
“Yeah, go on ahead a laugh. You don’t get it. You don’t have a little sister.”
“I’m feeling pretty glad about that right now.”
“I promised Valoel that I’d play school with her this morning. We spent two solid hours going over the alphabet with Barbie here and a stuffed unicorn. Two hours, I was just about ready to jump off a cliff.”
“Trust me, Sela got me to do this with her last week, so I know what you’re feeling”
Gideon threw the doll and it landed on the floor beside his wardrobe. “I have everything ready, did you bring yours?”
Nodding, I showed him the contents inside the bag I held. He gave me a satisfying nod. “We should go to school, it would be more fun there.” I said.
“I still think your father hates you. It’s the only explanation I’ve got for him enrolling you in a human school.” Gideon have said this so many times that now I was starting to believe him. It was no secret that I hated school, but dad had insisted interacting with humans would be a valuable experience for a future guardian angel. I half suspected that Gideon tagged along with me because he felt sorry for me .
Our classmates were playing, and playing badly, I might add, at our school’s indoor field. Gideon and I were following the action from the rafters and lighting supports above the field, carrying a pillowcase full of water balloons.
“Oh, I would never have missed that goal. That’s it. I call Sean, that redhead there. The game’s not going to suffer without him.” Gideon threw one of his water balloons. His aim was dead on.
“Hey!” we were already dodging behind one of the lights when the scream came. Sean was drenched, and he cursed at us as he stormed off.
“Bet I can hit the center-back before you can.” I said pointing at him.
“Aaron? He’s the biggest jerk of them all. He’s mine. If anyone drops a water balloon on that pile of crap it’s going to be me.”
“Not if I get him first.”
“You’re on, Your Highness.” He bowed like he always did when he wanted to piss me off.
My balloon was ready and so was Gideon’s.
One.
Two.
A scream, a cry for a help, a splash, another scream, and I was standing on the field beside a bewildered Peter, a nerdy classmate of ours in cheap-looking shin guards, and I was holding a sparking light fixture that had missed the boy’s head by inches a few seconds before.
The rest of the team gathered around to be sure Peter was all right. Aaron was soaking wet.
Gideon had sent one of the lights careening toward the players to distract me. When I’d gone off to catch the fixture, he’d taken his shot at Aaron. Hit him square on the top of his head, too. He was a good shot, but he’d still cheated, creating a distraction like that. That was Gideon in a nutshell: , he was good, but he still cheated.
“That wasn’t fair!”
“Then order my head on a platter, Your Highness. Don’t be such a baby. I used your balloon to splash him, so in a way it was a victory for you, too.”
There was no winning with this guy. “OK. Oh, no! I think your sister tracked us down.” I pointed at nothing behind him, and as soon as he turned to look, I snatched his water balloon from his hands and crushed it into his head. “What? I used your balloon, so in a way it’s victory for you, too.” I mimicked him.
I started laughing, and a second later he joined in. “Nicely done, you’re a worthy opponent”
“You could have killed that kid with the light, you know,” I said after a beat.
Gideon shrugged. “He annoys me. And please don’t get all righteous on me now. I haven’t even had lunch.”
The best way to get your message across to Gideon was to speak his language. “Ooh… righteous.” I teased. “Big word. Been studying vocabulary cards between water balloons?”
He laughed. “Heard it from the baseball coach” he said. “Fine. I’ll stop attacking the team. I know it hurts you, too.” I crossed my arms across my chest. “You want me to say it? OK, you won.”
Gideon snapped his fingers, and we were in a park standing near a set of swings. I wasn’t sure where; It looked like a million different parks in a million different places. And just as they were on a million other swingsets all over the world, children were playing here, having fun. I knew he’d brought me here because he’d wanted me to stop hurting. He knew Peter’s cries was making me weak. I thanked him.
“Stay here until you feel a little better. You know where to find me.” He gave me another exaggerated bow, and then he vanished.
Seconds later, my father appeared. “Come with me.” I blinked, and when I reopened my eyes, we were hanging in midair off the coast near the capital city of Grands. Below us almost a third of the city was under water. Raging winds threatened to send high waves even further inland.
“Grands doesn’t get storms like this. We don’t think is natural. We think Gideon might have caused this. Tristan, you have to get in there and stop him.”
I reached out with my mind, but I didn’t sense Gideon’s presence. This storm might be terrifying, might be unprecedented, but it was still just a storm. Mother Nature was causing this, not Gideon. But Father was so sure, so very sure.
We flew higher, above the storm, and I could see the swirl of clouds stretched over the black seawater. In the center of the swirling, a column of still, clear air.
“You can stop it. I think you’re strong enough to stop him, to end this.”
Suddenly, I could see my Father was not so much sure that Gideon was behind this as frightened that he was.
I wanted to tell father I couldn’t stop the storm, and I was just as scared as he was, but I didn’t want to disappoint him.
The fear of the residents of Grands was sapping the strength from me second by second, but my father’s fear weakened me even more.
At last, I closed my eyes, and dove into the center of the spiraling storm.
The winds caught at me at once, the air moving so fast I could barely breathe it. I tumbled through the sheets of rain, through the mist, and slammed into the surface of the sea. My bones felt like they shattered within me at the impact. I tried to calm the waves, but my strength wasn’t enough. I might as well have tried to bail out the city of Grands with a teacup.
Father would be disappointed. I didn’t know if I could face it, and decided I simply wouldn’t. I stopped fighting to stay above the water. I stopped trying to subdue the winds. Whatever Father might think, I wasn’t strong enough to stop this storm on my own.
And then, suddenly, I wasn’t on my own.
Gideon materialized in the water beside me.
“What are you doing!” he shouted at me. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”
I tried to open my mouth and answer him, but my strength wasn’t enough to keep me above the waves
Gideon looked around frantically, an eleven-year-old boy, looking, as eleven-year-old boys do, for someone to help him. I knew he was frightened, but in spite of that he didn’t leave me alone. Struggling himself with the waves, he was still trying to help me.
“I need to get you out of here. Take my hands.” Gideon reached out to take my hand, to pull me to safety if he could. He caught me in his grip, and the moment he did, something happened. Immediately my strength was restored. More than restored. Power surged through both of us, and then beyond us, rippling outward with a shock wave that crushed everything before it. The storm was spun wildly, whipped into funnel clouds that snaked along the shore. The rain became a torrent, and then abruptly stopped. The ocean surged out
ward away from us. So did the land. The very air grew heavy with clouds that would never dissipate.
Together, we had destroyed the storm. We had nearly destroyed the entire realm of Grands along with it.
We flew back toward the Palace, and from the courtyard King Daligo cried out, “There he is! Gideon! I knew he was behind all this.”
“No.” I put myself between Daligo and Gideon. “No, he wasn’t there when the storm started. He went into the storm to save me. He risked his life for mine.” I turned around to Gideon. “Thank you doesn’t seem like enough, but, well, thank you.”
He looked away. “You’re not, like, going to hug me, are you?” he teased. I raised my arms to shrug and he backed away from me in mock fear. “Dude, don’t ever do that, you touch me and I’ll cut you.”
Both of us laughed, a painful laughter that somehow didn’t feel so painful.
My father stood at Daligo’s shoulder. “Tristan, get away from him.” Father looked as frightened as he had at the height of the storm, perhaps even more. Only now, he was frightened of Gideon.
“He’s my friend!” I shouted back, taking Gideon’s hand. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and the clouds above the palace began to darken ominously.
“Get away from him anyway, Son,” my father said, casting a nervous glance skyward. “Calm down. The both of you.”
My mother and Queen Lailah were in the courtyard, ankle deep in the dust and rubble. Their eyes were frightened, but they had composed their features so that the fear was almost completely hidden. A little girl with deep golden hair, Valoel was beside my father. In her hand she held a doll dressed in sparkly pink frills. Gideon’s parents stood between two palace guards.
They all took their turns trying to placate us, pleading with us to calm ourselves. But I couldn’t be calm. Not when they were still blaming Gideon for the storm. Not when I was afraid they would punish him. “He didn’t start this! It wasn’t him!”
“Stop! Calm down!” King Daligo shouted above the thunder that strike. He turned to Valoel. “Make them stop!”
But we didn’t stop, and Valoel didn’t even move, she stayed where she was as if she hadn’t heard the king. I didn’t know what Gideon and I were doing, but the more I thought of what was going to happen to him, to us, I got angrier. Father was going to keep him away from me, and he was probably the only friend I had. The only friend who wanted to play with me and get into water-balloon wars with me and forget the fact that I was some kind of a freakshow, a save-the-world freak show.
“Madalong!” this time it was Gideon’s father who shouted looking at Valoel. Valoel only moved her head in our direction, and the next thing I knew, she was no longer a littler girl, but rather a tall, sharp-eyed, full-grown woman.
She stepped gingerly over the broken stone in the courtyard and came toward us until she was standing beside the kings. She took a step closer. Daligo tapped her on the shoulder, like a little boy hoping to ask his mother a favor. “See what they’ve done?” he said. “See what they can do when they’re together? They’re dangerous. They need to be destroyed.”
My parents went pale, and my father was about to object when Valoel beat him to it. “I can’t do that, but I can keep them separated.”
She was calm. In fact, it looked to me like she wasn’t even blinking.
If I had been unnerved by Valoel’s transformation, Gideon was doubly so. I tried to imagine him having a tea party with a stuffed unicorn and this fantastical creature in front of us. Couldn’t do it.
“Raising you apart was not enough. You found each other. We should have known you would. You are going to have to be apart, and you are going to have to want to stay apart.” A flicker of sadness softened, for a moment, her deep unblinking eyes. “I am sorry. So very sorry. You have to forget now.”
And I had, until this very moment. The memories had been plucked from my mind as though they were a few teaspoons removed from a bucket of water. There was no hole left to fill, and the surface closed back over them and smoothed. I had not even realized anything was gone.
Now that Valoel had restored them, I reeled, happy to have discovered Gideon as a friend, and devastated over the lives that friendship had taken. The memories were powerful, both good and bad, and Valoel had wiped them away for a reason.
Why make me remember it at all?
The Valoel in front of me now was the teenage girl I knew, the one who wore plastic bangle bracelet. “How old are you, really? ”
“Old enough.” She smiled despite what was happening. “Your friendship with Gideon was a real one. I’m sorry it had to be ended.”
“id you show me this and remind me we were friends because you want us to renew that friendship?”
“I’m sorry. I can’t tell you.” Valoel said this in a casual voice, as if my question weren’t important at all. “I’d like to, but I can’t.”
“Well, if you’d like us to be friends again, there is that whole ‘he’s evil’ thing to overcome.”
“You saw him as a child. He was thoughtless—so are most children—but he didn’t start out evil. Every moment that he remembers is one in which blame for the destruction of Grands has been hanging over him and him alone. It didn’t bring out his good side.”
“You made him evil.”
“No, the people who heaped their scorn on him when he was an eleven-year-old child made him evil. But I, I didn’t help. This whole situation was not one of my successes.”
My hands clenched into fists at my sides. “I grew up practically friendless. You took away all the memories of the only friend I ever had. You took away every happy memory. Every one.”
“You’re angry. That’s good.” Again Valoel was calm and unblinking. “Erasing memories often has wide-ranging and unexpected consequences.” Her tone was conversational and congenial, as though we were discussing the weather. “So, please, for the sake of all of us, don’t do what Daligo and your father are asking of you. Leave Abigail’s memories intact. Remember how this feels. Spare her from it.” And then she was gone.
She was gone, and I couldn’t even sense her. There was no way I could track her down and get answers to the millions more questions I had.
I decided to work off some of my frustration by pacing, so I transported myself to a sunlit field in Lumens.
I was so often weighed down by pain, by sadness, my own or someone else’s. One moment of happiness, one joyful memory, that’s all I asked for. And, quite possibly, I was never going to get it. It seems happy endings weren’t made for souls like mine.
I was still pacing when I heard a voice summoning me.
Tristan, I’m free now. If you are, too, come see me at my humble abode.
D. Spending time with her might be a welcome distraction.
I’m on my way.
Her message couldn’t have come at a better time. I needed answers, and she just might have them.
ALMOST PARADISE
Gideon
It won’t survive,” I said, taking Abigail’s rose. She’d insisted that we plant it outside my window. “It doesn’t have any roots, and even if it did, this place isn’t much of a garden.” I don’t know why, but even though I knew the flower was only going to die, when Abby asked me to do this for her as a favor, I gave in. For one thing, it kept us away from my bedroom. After that rather wow make-out session we had, I couldn’t look at her without wanting to rip her clothes off.
“Just dig a hole Gideon.” Yes ma’am.
“If it dies, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” I dug a small hole, but digging in Grandinian soil isn’t a very good idea. A wave of heat rose out of the ground that was so strong it singed the hair on my forearms. I pulled Abigail away from it, and then I planted the rose for her in that baking soil.
“See?” she said joyfully. “This rose represents us, and how we can overcome anything together.” And there it was, a small, beautiful thing scorched by waves of searing heat, fresh and bright and hopeful when it shouldn’t be. It also
had a few angry thorns. It represented us, all right.
I was fuming inside over her and Tristan, but I was trying to play it cool. I didn’t want my anger to get the best of me. With Abigail beside me, I couldn’t afford to lose control.
It was ironic, though, that after Tristan had spent all this time frightened of what might happen if I were alone with Abby it turned out I should have been worried about what might happen when she was alone with him. They’d been together for one afternoon, working on homework, and it had ended with the two of them almost kissing.
Almost kissing? What the hell did that even mean?
Gideon, calm down! I reminded myself.
“Let’s go inside, my little floral fortune teller,” I teased, and I was about to snap my fingers and transport us into the living room when I ran into Valoel coming out of the house. She had been distracted by her conversation with someone who was in the doorway.
A someone with beautiful tangerine- hair. Princess Sela.
Val introduced her to Abigail, and the two of them clicked almost instantly. Abigail showed off her newly-planted rose, and Sela joked with her about her brightly-patterned socks, so unlike anything she herself would be allowed to wear at the Palace. “I love the little potatoes on them!” she enthused.
“What? They’re not potatoes. They’re supposed to be little hearts.”
“They don’t look very much like hearts.”
“They don’t look very much like potatoes, either.” And the two girls were laughing together like old friends.
Val explained that Sela had come looking for Tristan, and the look on her face suggested she thought I knew where he might be. I shrugged.
“Oh, look, a shooting star!” Abigail exclaimed, pointing to the sky.
“That’s no shooting star,” Sela said, all laughter forgotten.
Valoel also went quiet, which, for my sister, is a rarity. “Where’s Tristan?”
Abigail asked, “What do you mean about the shooting star?”
“It’s a falling angel,” Valoel clarified. “Whenever an angel is about to die, his passage lights up the sky of Grands. We call the streak of light, like that one, the angel’s soul.”
Dominion (Re-edition) Page 27