Awakening (Children of Angels)

by Jessica Gibson

  Leonara regarded her carefully, then softly replied “okay”.

  Human emotions were a peculiar thing indeed. This should have made the girl feel the emotion that they called happy. They were not even her real family, after all. She was returning to the world she belonged in, and these people she cared for would no longer be in danger because of her. She would be going back to her real family, and becoming what she was born to be. Yes, she should definitely be happy. And yet the Angel knew she was not.

  Leonara remained sitting on the girls bed, looking around the room as the girl went downstairs to say her final farewell to her parents. She realized the girl, being a sentimental creature (that was another human trait. It had no use in the affairs of Angels) would probably want to take some of her own possessions with her when they left. Absently, she began pulling photographs off the mirror and putting them into a small pile on the dressing table. She pulled a duffel bag out from under the bed and began throwing clothes into it. She chose the clothes that felt like Mia the most, and because she felt Mia on them, she knew these were the ones she wore most often. She supposed she should help to make the transition as easy as possible for the girl.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Downstairs, Mia approached the kitchen with apprehension. A sick, heavy feeling had settled on her stomach. She managed to stop any more tears from falling, and hastily dried the ones that had already slipped down her cheeks.

  “Oh there you are, you’re going to be…Mia, what’s wrong sweetheart?” asked her mother, putting down the cup she was washing, and drying her hands on her skirt. She rushed across the kitchen and put her warm hands on Mia’s face. “Are you sick? You don’t look good at all!” Mia closed her eyes and savoured this sensation, knowing it would be the last time she ever felt it. She struggled to keep the tears back.

  Just then the front door opened, and she heard her father call out “forgot my briefcase!” as he strode through into the kitchen “I swear I’d…what’s wrong?” he stopped and asked, as he saw Mia in a state, and her mother holding her face.

  “I just…” Mia could not finish the sentence.

  “Are you sick?” asked her Dad, concern flooding his face, and he leaned down slightly so that their eye levels matched.

  “I really don’t feel good at all right now” she replied. She had never lied to her parents, and wasn't going to start now.

  “Back to bed” her mother ordered, taking her hands from Mia's face, and shooing her out of the kitchen.

  “I have to go to work - I’ll see you later Pumpkin” he kissed Mia on the forehead, then turned and kissed her mother on the cheek. “Call me if she gets any worse” he said, the way he always had when she was sick as a little girl, and her mother nodded and said “of course”, just like she always had.

  “I love you, Dad” blurted Mia.

  “Love you too Pumpkin,” smiled her father “feel better soon, Angel.” and then he was gone.

  She turned to her mother then, and enveloped her in a sudden hug.

  “I love you Mum” she said, and could not stop one tear from slipping down her cheek.

  “I love you too, my Mia,” replied her mother, hugging her tightly “remember that - nothing will ever change that.”

  Mia nodded, and turned to leave the room. She paused for a moment, and even she couldn’t really say why. Walking away from her mother seemed an impossible thing - but she knew she had to do it. She headed up the stairs, just glancing over the railings once to catch a final glimpse of her mother bustling about the kitchen. She hoped, although something told her that her hope was futile, that this was just another of her strange dreams, and that soon she would wake up in her own bed and could hug her mother as many times as she wanted for the rest of her life. She hoped.

  In her bedroom, Leonara had laid out Mia’s favourite jeans and hooded sweater, and it looked as though she had also packed her a bag.

  “Hurry, change.” Leonara gestured to the clothes on the bed. “We must leave here, then I will make the Switch.”

  Mia nodded silently, and picked up her clothes. She crossed the hallway to the bathroom as quietly as possible, not wanting her mother to hear her. She thought that hearing her mother’s voice calling up the stairs would be like torture. She couldn't bear any more “lasts”, not today - she'd heard the last thing her mother would ever say to her, she couldn't do it again. As quietly as she could manage, she brushed her teeth and washed her face, combed her hair and changed. She took the comb with her, dropped her pyjamas in the laundry hamper, and cast a final look around the bathroom. Strange that even a bathroom should have sentimental attachment, she thought. She remembered being a small child playing in the bath tub, with her rubber ducks and her Barbie dolls. She smiled sadly at the memory of that little girl, who, in a few moments, this house would never know. Who would not have played in that bathtub. Who would not have slipped on the wet floor and chipped her tooth on the basin. She wouldn't exist in this house’s history.

  She closed the door quietly, and crossed back to her room. Shoving the comb into her holdall and taking a deep breath, she said “I’m ready” to Leonara, who rose from the bed and nodded, both of them knowing that Mia would never really be ready to leave this place, if she had a choice.

  Mia took a final glance around the room that had once upon a time been her nursery, and bade it a silent farewell. And then it was gone, and she was standing beside the Angel in an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar house. No - not a house, Mia thought, a hotel perhaps. Leonara disappeared from her side for a fraction of a second, and then appeared back in the room, sitting on the bed.

  “It’s done” she said, and offered Mia a sympathetic look.

  And that was when the real tears came, and flowed down Mia’s cheeks and splashed onto her sweater and even onto the floor, as she stood there and cried until she could cry no more. She was no longer the girl she had always been. She didn't even know who she was now.

  Leonara did not intervene as the girl cried her eyes dry. She watched, curiously, as the emotions played out. She could feel them on the air, radiating from the girl, and they intrigued her. Sadness, frustration, guilt, anger, loneliness. This would be as close as the Angel would come to experiencing many of those things herself, and she paid close attention to all of it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  When the tears finally stopped, and the girl had regained her composure, she crossed the room glumly flopped down onto the bed miserably.

  “So” she said, taking a deep breath “where do we start?”

  “That” replied Leonara with a wry smile “is the million dollar question. It’s not like I do this every day Mia. It’s never been done before. The boy has grown up with Angels, and knowing only Angel ways - don’t look so surprised Mia - I may not often refer to the Others as Angels, but essentially, that is what they are - albeit poor excuses for ones, not fit to bare the name. I suppose we ought to start with me Reading you.” She cocked her head to the side thoughtfully, as she looked Mia up and down.

  “And how do you Read me?” Mia asked with a nervous tremble in her voice, fearing that already knew the answer. She had seen it done once before - to the baby in the memory. Or the other Truth, or wherever or whatever it was.

  “Yes, you know how it is done. I need to touch you, and send my senses through your being, just to check what is there and what is not. It will not be so unpleasant, if you consent to it - if you simply allow it to happen. I think the pain is caused when a person tries to resist. It feels most unnatural, I would imagine, and the natural reaction is to fight it. When you fight it, it’s as though your soul contracts, trying to keep it’s secrets. So we have to try harder to get in, and that causes the pain, because it is force and not simple examination.”

  Reluctantly, Mia nodded and sat on the bed, fidgeting with her fingers, unsure of what she should do now.

  “Perhaps if you lie down, you’ll be more comfortable - I do not know how long this will take. Hopefully not too long.
Please try to relax, Mia, I can feel the tension coming off you in waves. Just close your eyes and relax. I won’t start until you are ready for me to.”

  Mia obeyed and lay back on the bed, her feet hanging awkwardly over the end so that she didn’t get her shoes on the covers. She couldn’t settle in that position, and kicked her trainers off so that she could shuffle backwards further. That was much better. She stared at the pattern in the ceiling, trying to clear her mind of everything but the pattern. She tried to find patterns within the patterns, she spotted stars and clouds and faces, and soon, more quickly than she expected, she found herself calm and her mind devoid of anything but these shapes which had no meaning, no emotion attached. She nodded to Leonara, without breaking her focus on the ceiling, and the Angel took this as her signal to begin.

  Mia felt the Angel’s cool hand touch her skin, as Leonara gently lifted the bottom of her shirt up, and laid her palm flat on Mia’s belly. Mia felt her heartbeat quicken, and instantly tried to correct it with some deep breathing. She didn't want this to hurt, and getting panicky about it would only make it worse than it had to be. She lay as still as possible, and tried to tune out what was happening.

  What was happening was a warmth, spreading from Leonara’s cool palm, which felt as though it was entering Mia’s bloodstream. The sensation was disconcerting, but not altogether unpleasant. The warmth reached her fingertips and her toes, and set them tingling, as though she had just come in to the warmth after being outside on a cold wintry day. Gradually, her whole body warmed and became tingly. As soon as all her extremities were reached, her entire body temperature began to increase quite dramatically. It became quite uncomfortable, and as Mia began to think this, she felt a change in herself instantly. It was as Leonara had described, as though something in her was shying away from the heat. And that was when the pain began. Instead of the uncomfortable warmth, she felt a piercing pain begin to spread through her entire body, from the same point the warmth had started - the palm of the Angel’s hand.

  “MIA!” came Leonara’s voice, stern and commanding, it did not seem to come from her mouth, rather it was all around Mia, and it was quite surreal. “Remember, it is only when you resist that this hurts! I am not done yet Mia - I can not stop, you must calm yourself!”

  But it was no good, the damage was done. Mia began to squirm and try to get away from Leonara’s firm hand pressing down on her, now physically restraining her, to keep the connection intact. She opened her mouth to scream, but the scream never made it out of her throat, as the Angel sent her Influence over the girl in a flash, and she was lost to unconsciousness.

  It would not stop the pain, regrettably, Leonara knew that. She realized this was her only chance to determine what powers and abilities lay within this girl, and that after the experience the girl had just had with being Read, even if she agreed to it being done again once she had calmed herself, Leonara would have to start from scratch, and the tension in the girl would never be completely gone.

  Although it was harder to Read someone when they were unconscious, especially when they had been unnaturally influenced into unconsciousness, and she was fighting against the girls own natural instinct to protect her soul, it had to be done. She had gotten far enough in that doing this last part “the hard way” was much better than starting over and doing it all “the easy way”. She supposed that a human might feel remorse for causing another suffering, and wondered what that might feel like. Something in her stirred, regret or something similar, and that alone was enough to make Leonara glad she was not weighed down by human emotions.

  What she found in Mia was confusing, even to her. A soul was usually a fairly simple thing, either it had power or it did not. Human souls did not. Mia’s soul resembled a humans more closely than it did an Angel’s, but the power that was there burned much more brightly than power did in an Angel’s soul. Souls are a difficult thing to explain, but they were something that an Angel has an innate understanding of - Mia’s soul, however, baffled Leonara.

  Whilst she considered what she had ‘seen’ in Mia, she sent a little more Influence over the girl, so that she would sleep longer, and heal faster. She wondered whether she should have done it, whether it was an abuse - but then, if Mia was angry with her, she would be angry with her regardless of whether she extended the sleep or not. It was curious that her Influence worked on the girl at all, she thought. The human parts of her soul would be affected by it, but the curiously concentrated portions of her Angel soul should have overridden Leonara’s own powers, which were laughably weak by comparison. The Angel could only assume that it was the girl who was holding herself back.

  Although she was in fact an extremely powerful Angel, her Truth was that she was merely a human girl. Or had been, until very recently. She was just becoming used to her new identity, but her Truth was still that she was a human girl - albeit one born very unconventionally. For now, Leonara supposed, it was good that the girl did not know her full power. She could easily overpower Leonara, and any other Angel who happened to come along, once she realized her full potential. Although she had seen no signs that Mia wanted to do anything but the right thing, she could not be too careful, given the child’s parentage.

  They had always assumed that an Angel Child would have been a most valuable weapon as they could be controlled by their Angel handlers, and that the Angels would be able to read their minds and know for certain that their will was done. Now, however, Leonara worried that this was not the case. With the power contained in the girl, she could easily conceal things, and easily betray them - just as her mother had done. It made sense now, the way they had not been able to simply find the girl when they had wanted to. Having always assumed the human part of her would make her weaker and easier to find, they had been baffled that they could not find a trace of her. She was simply gone, in the way that Angel’s souls are gone when their time is done, and they assumed she had died. Now it seemed she had been cloaking herself this entire time, without even meaning to.

  Yes, her soul was a very confusing thing. And Leonara was now faced with the task of training that soul to be the weapon she was always meant to be. She would have to tell the others in her group, her family, that this weapon was not the puppet they thought it would be. No, this was a very dangerous weapon indeed - much better than they had anticipated. And at last they had her- she only had to figure out how much to tell the girl, how to break it to her without frightening her - or without her becoming too powerful for the Angels to handle.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Mia slept for a long time, and it was a dreamless sleep. When she awoke after hours of darkness, it was to find that the room she was in was dark too. She sat up unsteadily, feeling out-of-sorts, almost like she had the flu. She ached all over, and yet she couldn't say if it was her joints or her muscles that were actually aching. It was just an intangible pain, and it went right through her. She looked around the room, fuzzily trying to figure out where she was. A shadow shifted slightly in the corner, and she leaned forward and squinted, trying to adjust her eyes to the darkness. It was coming back to her, in pieces. That she had left home, that Leonara had needed to Read her. The pain that had set in, like shards of broken glass were flowing through her veins instead of blood. And then….what then? She must have blacked out. The pain was the last thing she remembered, and then there was only darkness.

  “Leonara? Is that you?” she called out softly. There was no reply, but she was certain that she had seen a movement. She held her breath and listened silently for any sound. She had the feeling she was being watched, and felt the hairs on her arms raise as she fought to stop herself from trembling. She was afraid, but could not pinpoint exactly why. “Leonara?” she called out again, slightly louder.

  Mia heard the tiniest sound of fabric brushing up against something - the wall, perhaps, as whoever or whatever was in here tried to make itself harder to see. Her heart began to pound in her chest, so loud that she was sure that the other person or o
ther thing in the room could hear it too. She held her breath, so that she could listen better, but all that she could hear was her pounding heart and the blood rushing through her ears. Whoever or whatever was in the room with her, it was not Leonara, that was one thing she was sure of. She sat perfectly still, unsure as she did it why she was doing it. Surely the other…whatever…in the room knew she was there, and so keeping herself quiet was something of a pointless exercise.

  Gently and as quietly as she could, she began to ease herself off the bed. She cringed as the springs of the old bed creaked beneath her as she moved, and then gave one final squeak of relief as her weight left the bed altogether, and she stood on the floor, perfectly motionless. Slowly and gently, she edged her way along the side of the bed, to where she knew the bedside table stood. As she turned her head and squinted through the darkness, she noticed that even the alarm clock was off, so there was not even the tiny bit of light that the digits would have cast in the room. She reached out towards the table when she thought she was nearing it, slowly and gently, not wanting to knock anything over and alert the thing in the room that she was properly awake. Slowly, she felt her way along the edge of the table, and over the objects that sat there. She found the stand of the lamp, and edged slightly closer to the table so that she could extend her hand further, as she searched for the switch. She finally found it, and took a deep breath before she flipped the switch and whirled around to face the corner the unknown entity was in, snatching up the almost-empty glass of water from the table in one fluid motion as she did so. It was the best she could do in terms of makeshift weapons - broken glass was better than nothing.