‘Who knows? It’s quite possible.’ His voice was not quite as light-hearted as I would have liked. ‘You come from a strange background I’m afraid.’
I nodded. ‘You said so, in fact the word you used was ‘cursed’, which seems slightly more ominous than strange!’
‘Yes, it does feel that way sometimes.’ He touched his chin as he considered. ‘You would have been better off not finding me at all. I’m pretty confident about that.’
I shook my head adamantly. ‘That’s not for you to decide, Nick.’
‘No, maybe not.’ His eyes became distant. Long-buried memories were being conveyed to the surface and he was sorting out how to explain what he wanted to say. I didn’t hurry him.
‘You already know a little about my family. I come from a very controlling background, controlling and powerful.’ This much I knew. So far, so good.
‘When I was nineteen I found out that there were reasons things were the way they were, reasons why everything was so strange.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘It was hard to cope with ... I had to get away, escape the madness. I managed for a while anyway.’ His smile was grim as he shook his head. ‘But of course these things have a way of finding you wherever you are and you get sucked back in.’
‘It’s hard to escape family,’ I said, thinking about the weirdness that went with family, and the number of people who clung so desperately to those who treated them so badly.
‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘and when you’re born into a family like ours I don’t think escape is a real option.’ My circumstances enabled my escape for a time, but life was curious, because here I was - and through my own doing.
A couple collided with us, distracting me, as they were dragged along by an eager border collie with its eye on a swan near the bank. They waved apologetically, disappearing in a cloud of dust along the path, and as it settled Nick spoke again.
‘There were reasons that I ended up on my own, Kate, reasons I’ve struggled, simply trying to live a normal life. As a child I never understood why my parents were so over-protective, why they imposed themselves and their will onto every aspect of our lives. It was suffocating.’
‘It must have been hard,’ I agreed, but he didn’t seem to hear me, or even notice the commotion as the collie began barking at the swan, who turned to face it and raised wide wings. The collie dropped and the humiliated owners tugged it away.
‘Of course, it was always obvious that there were secrets.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I just never realised the enormity of them. I remained uninformed, until they had no other option.’ He looked puzzled. ‘I’m still not completely sure why they chose that path, but that was the way it was.’
‘Maybe they were trying to protect you,’ I guessed.
‘Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I think that was what they were trying to do. To let us live a little of life innocent, without the burdens that would come later.’ He became pensive. The breeze ruffled his hair, cajoling him to forget the loss and sadness of the past. It didn’t work. ‘They were afraid,’ he said, carefully. ‘I never realised that … but they were.’
‘What were they afraid of?’
He turned to me, the depth of his emerald gaze disconcerting. ‘Of what knowledge would do. What it had already done in the past. Too much information too early or too little, too late …’ He grimaced, his face contorting like he was in pain.
‘I was angry for so long. My brother had just died and we were going through so much. I didn’t need this as well. Initially I refused to believe them … but ultimately I had no option. I was faced with everything that had been kept from me for all those years. In a matter of moments the world I knew ceased to exist. I felt betrayed, hated them for the freaks I thought they were. I ran … but I had to believe. Eventually I went back. You see, much as I hadn’t wanted to accept it, I was one of them, an Edwards. I would never feel the same sense of belonging anywhere else, not with my background.’ His sigh was deep. ‘I tried to live my own life as much as possible, maintained separate business interests. They accepted that, which was a surprise. I guess it was preferable to losing me altogether.’ His voice had become increasingly heavy, burdened by the weight of the past, by what he could not change, what he had been forced to accept.
I touched his arm briefly, trying to comfort him and he noticed me this time. His smile was tight.
‘I’ve accepted that it was difficult for them, Kate. I’m not angry anymore.’ And in the moment he truly seemed resigned.
I stopped, and he halted next to me. He picked up a couple of pebbles and skimmed them across the water so that they skipped like firewalkers. It seemed like a completely ludicrous pastime at a moment like this, but it was somehow soothing, taking me back to beach holidays with Nanny. The gentle outward see-saw of ripples softened the surface of the lake, shattering our reflections into a million more accurate reflections of the chaotic truth.
‘Poor Deb got caught up in the middle of it all,’ he said, dusting dirt from the stones off his hands.
‘It wasn’t the best timing, I suppose.’
He nodded. ‘We were always doomed. There were longstanding issues between my family and hers, which I found out about around that time too.’
‘Her father and your aunt?’
‘You know about it?’ He sounded surprised.
‘Just what you said that first day at the restaurant,’ I reminded him.
‘Oh, yes. Well, Deb’s father and my aunt, Sofia, were involved romantically.’ A war raged inside him. He struggled to continue. ‘My father was very protective of Sofia. Their father wasn’t around then … anyway, Sofia should never have become involved with him.’
‘Why?’
‘Because …’ His face became a jumble of uncertainty, his mouth pulling off to one side as though about to leave the rest of his features behind.
‘Because?’ I prompted, at last.
‘Because she should have known better.’ His words came in a burst, but they made little sense to me. My eyebrow rose of its own accord. ‘She knew that it would never be okay, but she let herself get involved with him and fall pregnant. Who knows, maybe she even planned it? I don’t know, I didn’t know her but I have heard since that she was the type to tempt fate, to push the boundaries.’
A girl who pushed the boundaries and tempted fate, who went after the guy her parents disapproved of. Wasn’t that what was expected of teenagers? I could relate. I nodded sagely anyway.
‘When my family found out what had happened they made life difficult for him.’ He rubbed his jaw while considering. ‘That’s probably an understatement. They pretty much forced him out of the town.’ I tried to think of the means they might have employed to achieve that and shivered at the thought. ‘It’s hard to understand if you don’t know Three Kings, which most people don’t, but they pretty much owned the place.’
It was hard to imagine, living in a city the size of Melbourne.
He gazed out at the lake. ‘Your grandfather could never have had anything to do with the child,’ he said, running his fingers through his hair restlessly. ‘My family would never have permitted it.’
‘What happened to Sofia?’ I asked, the tension in my gut advising me in advance that the answer would not be pretty.
‘She died … some years later.’ I stared at him, willing myself to understand the man who was bringing such great upheaval into my life, to truly understand his motivation, the level of his honesty.
‘How?’
‘She killed herself … drowned.’ His answer didn’t help. Another one! He shook his head, as if reading my mind, and then started scuffing grit into the lake, waiting for my next question, dreading it.
I hesitated. His reluctance was obvious, but the question had to be asked. ‘And the child?’
‘She took her son with her,’ he said, his look intense as I inhaled sharply. He was desperate for me to understand, to accept what was so unacceptable, but I could not hide my shock.
; I couldn’t get the image out of my mind. A mother killing her son and then herself. It happened, but nothing could be more unnatural. I couldn’t ask for the gory details, wasn’t sure whether that would be fair to him, or to me. Had she loved him? Maybe she’d done it because she had. But how could she? Before I could stop myself, my mouth formed the question.
‘How old was he?’
‘Nearly four,’ he said, his voice little more than a whisper. Just a baby. A boy I had never known and yet my heart hurt for a life unlived. I felt nauseous
‘Was it because of what happened with Deb’s father?’
His lips twisted, but it was a while before he spoke. Finally he shrugged. ‘Sort of. I mean they created the child together. The child was the issue in the end.’ The child. How could a child of three be the issue?
‘I don’t understand.’
‘This is so hard. I never imagined having to explain it.’ A faint sheen of perspiration had appeared above his lip, even though the temperature was dropping.
‘Try, Nick,’ I encouraged gently, thinking that at some point someone had had to explain this to him.
‘His name was Erik.’
‘Erik,’ I repeated, the tiny corpse assigned a label.
‘Our family line is not like others, Kate.’ This was a point he’d been trying to get across for a while, I realised, and it was definitely beginning to sink in.
‘We’re different. Unique.’
‘Uh-huh,’ I said, thoughtfully and maybe just a little doubtfully, given how many crazy families there were in the world. This one had a penchant for killing themselves. ‘You aren’t going to tell me that on my twentieth birthday I’m going to get very hairy and start howling at the moon when I get my period are you? It won’t help with dating,’ I despaired, trying to lighten the mood a notch so that we didn’t end up going down the path of so many others in our family.
‘No, no, nothing like that.’ His smile was small, but a light shone for a moment and I was glad. At least whatever it was wouldn’t be stereotypical. ‘It’s equally perplexing though,’ he added, making my heart sink.
‘Not the whole vampire thing either, I hope?’ He shook his head and lifted his hands to the heavens as if beseeching an answer from there. I guess a voice from a cloud might not be that unexpected at this point.
‘Will you just let me finish?’
I could see the effort it was taking for him to explain this to me and so I shut up. The grooves in his brow had been progressively deepening all afternoon and were now like twisted canyons across his forehead. Whatever this was, he had locked it away a long time ago. He had used a steel safe, wrapped in a heavy security chain before placing it in a ship, which he had sent to the middle of the ocean. There he had blown it up and let it sink into a massive crater, down, down into bottomless depths, where the light never penetrates and the only observers are sightless.
He had hoped never to reveal it again. I recognised that much in his face, in his body, in the slope of his back, the loss in this moment, the submission. I had taken him back to that place of perpetual night. Swallowing hard I recognised how deep-seated his suffering was. He had no choice but to tell me. He owed me this effort and so I let him continue uninterrupted.
24
DEB AND NICK
Although the sun had already sipped the dew from the lawn and the breeze had started its gentle whine, the house was quiet when I woke up. My brother’s door stood ajar. He lay where he had fallen on his bed, snoring loudly, his room a scene from a post-apocalyptic movie. Mum’s door was closed. She must have returned home very late as I hadn’t heard her come in before I fell asleep.
I poured orange juice and ate cereal before straightening up the living area and washing dishes noisily, but the tranquillity around me remained. Sunlight streamed through the windows, beckoning me.
I had to go. Not sure when either would surface, I left a note on the kitchen counter so that Mum wouldn’t worry and exited the house, singing to myself. I should have been studying, of course, but sitting still long enough to focus on a single word was impossible today. The birds were scattering fruit from the tree and bits fell into the birdbath below, turning it into a potent punch in the sun.
The ground seemed to move and then the hearty rumble of his bike hit me as I was about to step onto the sand. He had an uncanny knack of finding me.
‘Another coincidence?’ I asked, an eyebrow raised, ‘or were you waiting for me?’
He shrugged with a chuckle and tried to look innocent. ‘Jump on. Come on, I dare you,’ he teased. He was very cheerful this morning, brightly enthusiastic, the boy inside the man showing. ‘I want to take you somewhere.’
‘Oh, and where is that?’ I asked. He ignored my question and without even completely stopping grabbed me, one-armed, and swung me onto the back, laughing at my surprise. ‘There you go Your Royal Highness!’
His enthusiasm was contagious - like smiles, not measles - and I relaxed. ‘Are you kidnapping me, Prince Valiant?’
He manoeuvred the bike so that we were facing the exit. ‘Only if you want to be kidnapped!’
‘This might just be your lucky day.’
He revved the engine, making speech pointless. An unexpected nodule of anxiety bit like an ulcer. Where were we going? Ignoring it I focussed on the firm feel of his waist, and the heat which radiated through his t-shirt. Strange creatures came alive inside me, waking to dance and writhe, to spin in my stomach and then sink into the most private part of me, heavy and wanting, impatient. I swallowed hard as a flush of heat broke across my forehead, and moved closer to him, my front pressed tightly against his back, my nose and mouth near to the hollow on the side of his neck, close enough to smell him, to taste him if I wanted to. That was better. I inhaled deeply and he turned his head to the side with just a flicker of knowing. And then a chuckle. ‘Don’t forget your helmet, Miss Brayshaw.’ He passed one to me and pulled his own on, forcing me to give him a little more room. ‘We wouldn’t want to flaunt road safety laws, now would we?’ I snapped my visor down noisily relieved to hide my flushed cheeks and he opened up the throttle.
We rode for about twenty minutes, leaving the areas I was familiar with behind. After a while we started a slow ascent until the road wound its way along the top of a bluff overlooking the ocean. Behind us, the small township of Three Kings crept up the side of the hill with the beach below and the large rocks out at sea. But here, away from everything, sat a strangely private suburb. Exclusive hideaways were set far back from the road, many perched higher up on the hill behind tall walls and gates. Magnificent homes were built in an eclectic range of styles. Some were contemporary with flat or strangely-angled roofs, jutting off the edge of the hill, or creeping up it in boxy modules of wood, stone and glass. Others had been here longer, imposing but traditional, old world.
‘Looks like a high crime neighbourhood,’ I shouted to him, the wind quickly whisking my words away.
‘The more you have, the more paranoid you become,’ he shouted back.
We arrived outside a large wrought-iron gate bordered on either side by a great white wall. A leafy green and purple creeper wove a living tapestry in and out of the curls of ironwork so that it was impossible to make out the view of what was on the other side.
Nick clicked a remote and the gates opened with a slight whine onto a long twisty driveway, which took us into the fortress and ended at a large turning circle in front of a sprawling white-painted mansion. A four-car garage and workshop was set to one side. On the other side the house stood, tall and imposing, with wide stone steps leading up to a broad shady veranda and a newer extension which looked like a sunny conservatory area on the right. Enormous dark teak double doors stood at the top of the stairs like formidable sentinels. He’d brought me to his home.
‘What are we doing here?’
‘Don’t worry,’ he reassured me. ‘They left early this morning. Business beckons from afar.’ He made a dramatic flourish with his hands and
I giggled, mostly out of nervousness.
‘Well at least they didn’t take you with them this time. That’s good!’ I eased my grip on his waist as curiosity got the better of me and I looked around.
The bike came to a stop and he kicked out the stand. I got off. ‘Come.’ He took my helmet and then moved ahead of me towards the stairs. ‘I thought I’d take the opportunity to show you where I live, where I come from … why I’ve turned out the way I have!’
‘I guess this might give me a few clues,’ I acknowledged, following more cautiously, but noticing everything. The perfectly pruned plants and manicured bushes, the absence of weeds in the grass and flowerbeds, barely any leaves on the drive even though there were trees all around, the way the windows sparkled and reflected the garden and sky perfectly without a hint of saltiness.
The most breathtaking fountain appeared in front of the conservatory. A female angel touched down in the middle of a pool, her wings spread out above her overshadowing her delicate form but creating a space in which she seemed to find some sort of refuge. They seemed to radiate the rays of the sun, blazing the bright whiteness of alabaster, while her body beneath was dappled under their shelter. She bent down slightly, her dainty arms reaching outwards, cautious, as though she feared the sun would reach past her wings, and touch her thin skin and she would be drawn to heaven and gone forever.
Water spouts cascaded from the pedestal beneath her into an upper basin where it was more turbulent and then into the surrounding pool where a young boy reached up towards her, his face filled with longing. For all of its glory, there was a sense of melancholy about the tableau, unfulfilled yearning, because the boy so clearly desired her touch, her goodness and love. But in this frozen scene all he could do was long for it, he would never have it.
As I considered the boy something icy washed over me, like the Victorian south wind had somehow made its way east. I shivered, but then it was gone.
Awakening: Book 1 The Last Anakim Trilogy Page 17