“Have you lost your mind? How is wearing blue clothes—?”
There’s a man in our kitchen.
He must have sneaked in silently, because suddenly he’s just there.
The man is tall and dark-skinned and middle aged. He has long black dreadlocks and he’s dressed in a white suit.
I gasp. There is a power coming off him that makes every hair on my body stand on end. It’s a rush, this power, and it makes me feel almost sick, dizzy and disorientated.
Strangely enough though, I’m not scared. My body is buzzing, but my brain is eerily calm. I know this man is very important, important to me, in a way I instinctively recognize but can’t explain.
I can’t say anything. I can’t move. I can’t stop staring at the man.
My silence alerts Ingrid. She takes one look at my face and then whips around, dropping the paintbrush, which falls on the floor in a mess of blue paint.
“Deron!”
“Auntie Ingi.”
She runs to the man, who envelops her in a bear hug. They remain like that for a full minute, both smiling widely with their eyes closed.
“What are you doing here?” she asks when she finally pulls away, her hands still in his. “My God, Deron, I never dreamed I’d see you again! What on earth brings you this far inland?”
He kisses her hands, then lets them go and turns to me.
“Ah,” Ingrid says, “of course.”
Both of them are looking at me now. I wait for Ingrid to introduce us, but she doesn’t say anything. With every passing second, I’m becoming more and more aware of the fact that I haven’t brushed my hair and I’m wearing bunny slippers.
“So, she is the one,” the man finally says.
Ingrid nods.
“She looks amazingly well. She must’ve inherited her grandmother’s talent for earthmagic to have withstood the First Protocols so well.”
I watch Ingrid’s lips tighten into a thin line. “You know very well what Bella thought about those.”
He gives her a sharp look. “Are you telling me she hasn’t been drilled?” The man has a deep voice and there’s a musical lilt to his words that betrays a faint accent. Caribbean, perhaps?
“Bella expressly forbid it.”
“Ah.” He nods slowly. “And so, on cue, the Witch arrives.”
Ingrid raises an eyebrow. “I see news travels fast.”
“As you know, my mother sees much.”
When they turn to me again, the tension in the room is tangible.
I look from the one to the other, trying to make sense of what they’ve said. “Um… can somebody please tell me what’s going on?”
The man seems to be waiting for a cue from Ingrid, but she just stares at me blankly, as if I’m a statue instead of an actual, living person.
“Perhaps you could introduce me to your friend?” I prompt.
She blinks once. “Of course.” Blinks again. “Little one.” She gives her head a shake. “I’m so sorry.” Then she motions to the man beside her. “Deron, this is Jess, Bella’s daughter.” She turns to me. “Jess, this is Deron Deleon. He is the Blue Lord, the male leader of all the Seakeepers, and a great friend to both our families.”
“Hi,” I say, holding out my hand.
He smiles but shakes his head. “I’m sorry, young lady, but to touch you now might be unwise.” As if to emphasize the point he puts his hands behind his back. “It is, however, an honor to meet you, Jess, daughter of Bella, heir to Lilith, and the last trueborn daughter of the Ten.” He slowly bows his head in a way I associate with Japanese businesspeople on TV shows. “I never thought I would see the day.”
“Um… Thank you.” I bow my head as well, stiff and self-conscious. “It’s nice to meet you too.”
In the awkward silence that follows, the man’s gaze wanders toward the half-painted cabinet, the mess of paint on the floor. “Deleon blue.” He smiles at Ingrid. “I’m honored.”
“Yes,” she says, “We might be needing your help soon. The Pendragon boy is becoming a problem; I don’t think we can rely on them for much longer.”
“It would be our pleasure. My home is your home, and it always will be.”
The Blue Lord regards me with such warmth and such pleasure that I find it difficult to look away. He has unusual blue-black eyes, the color of the sea at midnight, and a kind, wise face that invites immediate trust. I’m not used to liking people on sight—quite the opposite, really—but it’s surprisingly easy to relax into the odd familiarity of his gaze. Before I know it, I’m grinning widely at him while enjoying the sudden sense of deep joy and well-being in the air. The feeling is comforting and exciting and thrilling and relaxing, all at the same time. Pure bliss. I feel myself unwinding, my muscles loosening, my body turning to jelly. God, it just feels so good…
“Auntie Ingi!” The man stumbles, reaching out to Ingrid as his legs give way under him. She grabs his upper arm, stabilizes him, pushes him toward a chair.
I don’t try to help.
In fact, I take a few steps away, until I’m almost at the other side of the room. He said I shouldn’t touch him, and now I realize why.
His power is too sweet, too wonderfully delicious!
If I touched him, I would want it all. I would want to suck it up, devour it, not stopping until I’d drained every last...
My strange thoughts scare me so much that I put both hands over my mouth.
I take another small step backwards. And then another. And another. I keep moving backwards slowly until I feel the door against my back.
But I don’t leave.
The Blue Lord sits down on a kitchen chair, his hands shaking. “She is amazingly strong,” he says to Ingrid, careful not to look my way. “I have never in my life felt anything like it.”
“It could be your seamagic that calls to her,” Ingrid says. “So far, neither Gunnar nor I have been able to detect as much as a glimmer of her power in her.”
“Nothing manifested during the initiations?”
Ingrid doesn’t answer. She avoids my questioning look, but she doesn’t look at him either.
“Ingrid.” The Blue Lord’s voice is a stunned whisper. “No.”
“Bella expressly forbid it.”
“This is an outrage!”
“I swore a blood oath, Deron.”
“But to let her walk around, totally unprotected! To send her to school, for God’s sake! If I had known, if any of us had known…”
“There was nothing I could do. I had to abide by Bella’s wishes if—”
“To hell with Bella’s wishes! The end is almost upon us, Ingrid! The Seaprophets have no doubt about it. This young one is our last hope. And for you—the Black Lady!—to keep her in this weak and vulnerable state! For God’s sake, she’s—”
“Deron.” Ingrid’s voice is like a whip. “You will stop this right now.”
“She must be told—”
“You will not say another word. The little one has been entrusted to me. To me. And I have made promises I will not break. Do you understand me?”
After a short staring contest, the man nods unhappily.
“Somebody really needs to tell me what’s going on,” I say.
Ingrid sighs. “We’ve already told you far too much.”
“Then why do I still have no idea what you’re talking about?”
“I made a promise, Jess.”
There’s a long, uncomfortable silence. All three of us are looking at the floor. And then I realize something with such perfect, shocking clarity that a part of me must’ve known it all along.
“This promise you and Gunn keep talking about. The oath that prevents you from telling me the truth. The Order of Keepers didn’t have anything to do with it, did they?”
I wait for Ingrid to deny it, hoping against hope, but she remains silent.
“My mom made you swear that oath.”
Ingrid sighs. “It was the only way she would allow you to live with us.”
I drop my head to stare at the polished wood of the kitchen floor.
My mom was a normal person. She didn’t believe in blood oaths or magic or any superstitious nonsense. She wasn’t even particularly religious, although she always told me that, as life mottos go, you could do a lot worse than trying to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
There’s no way she would’ve made people swear dark vows on their own blood.
It simply doesn’t make any sense.
I’m so deeply lost in my thoughts that it takes a while for me to realize that the man is still arguing with Ingrid.
“… please tell me Gunnar has at least—”
“No. He hasn’t touched her.”
“But he’s a pure-blooded Waemunding! And she’s seventeen.”
“Exactly,” Ingrid says. “She’s seventeen and she’s still alive and strong and healthy and growing. How many others of her kind have been that lucky?”
“Keeping her from her magic in this way is wrong and unnatural.”
“And you’re sure of that, are you?”
“Of course! How can you doubt it?”
“Because Lilith’s heirs survived. They are still here, when all the rest are gone.”
“You’ve done well so far, Ingrid. I’m not denying that. But the law is the law. You cannot hope to deceive the Order.”
“We’ve been deceiving the Order for generations.”
“My father knew about this?”
“We’ve always taken the Seakeepers into our confidence.”
“You never told me.”
“You were too young, Deron. And after you became Lord, we couldn’t risk going near the ocean again.”
“But Bella! To keep her away from the ocean. She loved the water more than any other being on earth.”
“It was her choice; not mine.”
“How could she stand it?”
“You have no idea how strong she was.”
“Her strength is not the issue here! It was cruel, Ingrid. Cruel and wrong. For heaven’s sake, it could have killed her.”
A tense silence.
“No.”
“She chose to spend her entire adult life in those godforsaken deserts, Deron. What did you think would happen?”
“No. It was the White Witch who killed her. I saw the reports.”
“Those reports were carefully fabricated lies. She was thirty-three years old when she died, and her childbearing years were far from over. If the Order had known about her choice, do you think they would’ve allowed it?”
“But the suffering!”
“You of all people should know how brave she was.”
“I don’t care how brave she was. Nobody should die like that…”
When his voice breaks, I look up to see the Blue Lord openly crying. I am shocked. I realize that I have never seen a grown man cry before.
“My mother died of cancer,” I tell him.
“Your mother died because her keeper kept her away from the ocean!” the Blue Lord snaps, glaring at Ingrid.
“It’s what she wanted,” she says softly.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Think, Deron. You are the Blue Lord now, and your family’s magic is rich in prophecy. Put your personal feelings aside and think.”
He puts his head in his hands to hide his crying face.
I am trembling. There is a burning ache behind my eyes and a heavy feeling in my stomach. I feel as if I’m standing on the brink of a terrible abyss.
“Ingrid,” I say, “did my mom die of cancer? Or did she die because you kept her away from the ocean?”
“No, little one,” she says, sighing. “She didn’t die because I kept her away from the ocean.” Then she shakes her head, her face bleak. “She died because she kept you away from the ocean.”
Chapter 14
The age-old enmity between the White and Black Clans finally came to a head in the early nineteenth century when the Skykeepers systematically began to exterminate all the remaining trueborn daughters. By that time, there were only three pure bloodlines: the Heirs of Tiamat, the Heirs of Coatlicue, and the Heirs of Lilith. Of the three, Tiamat’s Heirs were the most numerous of the Black Clan’s Wards. Many of Coatlicue’s Heirs also lived under Black’s protection, but it was whispered that some of that line hid themselves from the Order’s rule in dark, uncivilized continents. (This rumor has lately been revived—see Chapter XI on the so-called “Lost Keepers of the Amazon”). Of Lilith’s Heirs, only seven trueborn daughters remained, all living under Black’s rule.
The initial skirmishes between White and Black soon led to an all-out war between the Clans. After the first dozen or so terminations, the Blue Clan (no doubt influenced by the more radical Seaprophets) allied themselves with Black, while the Red Clan, for reasons of their own, decided to support the Skykeepers. Only the Earthkeepers, that most steady and reliable of Clans, remained neutral and true to the Order’s mission in the disastrous years that followed.
From A Brief History of The Order of Keepers
by Lord Harry Charles Shawcross (1961)
I became friends with Daniel during the summer holiday before our sophomore year, when we were both attending a bereavement group that met once a week at the Methodist church. Before that I’d seen him at school, of course, but I’d never taken much notice of him, mainly because I didn’t take much notice of anyone during that long, horrible year before my mother died.
Daniel was attending the bereavement group because his older brother had died in a shooting accident a few months earlier, not long after my mom passed away. I was there because it was a condition of my returning to school in the fall. Principal Sweeney had been very clear: I had to join this group, deal with my grief and clean up my act, or never darken the doors of his esteemed establishment again.
At that time, my sadness was still so overwhelming that most days I found it difficult to breathe, and the only way I could cope with my stifling, suffocating grief was by being mad and bad and hurtful. I hated everyone and everything, and in the process I did a lot of things I’m kind of ashamed of now.
But that stupid bereavement group was almost too easy to hate: a bunch of chairs in a circle, stale cookies and bad coffee, crying people spilling their guts to strangers, an annoyingly sensitive “facilitator,” the faint smell of disinfectant and dying flowers.… You get the picture.
I have no idea what it was that first made me think Daniel and I could be friends. Was it the way his eyes seemed both sad and laughing at the same time, or the intent way he listened, his head tilted to one side? Maybe it was simply the clothes he wore, particularly a washed-out gray T-shirt with a famous scene from The Shining on it. Whenever those sessions got too painful for me, I used to focus on how Daniel’s sweet smile contrasted with Jack Nicolson’s maniacal grin, and for some mysterious reason that always just made me feel better.
Whatever the reason, one day I realized that I liked him. And then, not long afterwards, he came over to speak to me after the meeting, and the next thing I knew, I had a friend.
It’s difficult to explain how much having a friend like Daniel changed my life. Up until then, I hadn’t even really noticed how lonely I’d been—always the outsider, always different, always the new girl. Having a friend meant I could finally drop my guard and show somebody who I really was on the inside. I began to feel that I might belong somewhere, that my life might not be as hopeless and empty as I’d imagined.
Which is not to say that Daniel didn’t have a lot of his own issues to deal with. He did have issues, really serious stuff, but his coping skills involved gentle humor and random acts of kindness, and in time some of that innate goodness began to rub off on me. (I hope.)
To say that someone has made you a better person always seems to me to be a very self-involved kind of compliment (“You’re so great because you make me so great!”) but in some cases it’s simply too true to remain unspoken. So I’ll say it: my friendship wi
th Daniel has been the rock on which I rebuilt my life after my mom’s death, and I don’t know how I would have survived without him. He has made me a better person in every way, and I’m grateful for his friendship every day of my life.
Which is why, when my whole world threatened to come crashing down around my ears again, there was only one person I could turn to.
When Ingrid dropped that bomb about the cause of my mother’s death, it felt as if my life had been blown to pieces. I couldn’t feel, couldn’t think: everything seemed strangely far away, and there was a humming noise in my ears which meant I couldn’t hear anything else she tried to say to me.
Eventually I managed to leave the kitchen, still in a daze, and I went up to my room to phone Daniel.
He came to pick me up immediately.
As a rule, we don’t hang out at Daniel’s place because his mom suffers from a mental illness and never leaves the house for any reason. Everybody knows she’s a total recluse, the town shut-in that nobody’s seen for years, but few people are aware that she’s also turned into a hoarder—a sad shell of a person who lives trapped in a prison of her own making.
It’s a tragic story really, because she used to be a brilliant academic, a famous archeologist with an international reputation who led a successful project to preserve Native American archeological sites in our area. She was respected, accomplished, happily married, and by all accounts a really lovely person, when tragedy struck and she lost her oldest son in a senseless shooting accident.
According to Daniel, his mother stayed in bed for weeks after his brother died, refusing to eat, or wash, or leave the house. The family thought that she’d emerge from her grief in time, but she became more and more unbalanced as the months went by—quitting her job, holing herself up in her bedroom and collecting books, journals and scholarly articles that she ordered over the internet. In time, apparently, those books and journals began to spill over into the hallway, the study, Daniel’s brother’s old room, the bathroom…
I am the only person Daniel’s invited to his home in the past couple of years, which is why I’m also the only person who knows that the entire upper story of Daniel’s house has now been given over to his mom’s hoarding. Daniel and his dad live on the ground floor as normally as they can, while his mom shuts herself in upstairs, surrounded by tons and tons of paper. She never leaves those claustrophobic rooms anymore, and she has now lost all sense of reality, to the point where she doesn’t even recognize her own son anymore.
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