Awakening: Book 1 The Last Anakim Trilogy

by Janet V Forster

  I moved to the table and sat across from him, staring into my cup. ‘Why are you in the park up at Uni so often?’ I asked bluntly.

  He took his time, considering his answer, which made me realise that what had seemed simple, wasn’t. When I looked up at him it was directly into his penetrating gaze.

  ‘It’s none of my business really.’ I shrugged awkwardly, tapping the side of my cup as I looked into its murky depths again. ‘It’s just that I noticed you quite a while back …’

  ‘I noticed you too.’ I clunked my mug down too hard on the coffee table and gulped.

  ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘Seriously,’ he insisted.

  ‘Oh.’ I focussed on my pyjama leg, fiddling with a small hole, but stopping quickly fearing a gaping tear. I took a loud sip of tea, nearly choking as I swallowed, realising that his piercing gaze still hadn’t moved.

  ‘It’s probably more of your business than you think.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked, puzzled.

  ‘Well, to you it might sound crazy.’

  I laughed the laugh of an asylum inmate. If only he knew. ‘Crazy! My life is all about crazy at the moment, so bring it on!’ My sudden change in demeanour brought the point across a bit too emphatically. I could see in the way his body now leant away, rather than towards me, that he did not doubt me.

  ‘Well …’ He was unsure, his eyes settling on his hands for a moment before flicking back up to me. I waited. ‘We’re there for you,’ he said, his voice calm, a measured foil to my hysterics.

  ‘For me? When you say ‘we’ do you mean you and Ethan?’

  ‘Yep, we’re usually both around, somewhere.’

  ‘When you say me, you mean …’ I looked about the room, but it was still just the two of us, no ghost of Christmas Past lurked in the shadows.

  He nodded, raised his eyebrows slightly. His eyes glinted.

  ‘But I don’t even know you.’

  ‘Well … we know you a little more than you know us.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Nick.’ Of course, there had to be a connection. Probability. What was the chance of someone like James coming into my life, without something being screwed up about it? My stomach flipped nauseatingly and I started to feel clammy.

  ‘Are you … family?’ I stammered.

  ‘No, no … not your family, Kate.’ I exhaled. Of course, the eyes were all wrong.

  But another realisation dawned and I shook my head, exasperated. ‘You’re from another family.’ Did that whole world have to land on my doorstep today? ‘You’re like them, aren’t you?’ I cried indignantly, leaping to my feet and nearly upending the table.

  ‘Careful. Don’t hurt yourself,’ he said, jumping up after me. How patronising. I waved him away, a range of obscenities I hoped Nanny couldn’t hear from heaven, spinning around rudely in my mind.

  ‘It’s more complicated than that,’ he tried to explain. I sank back onto my chair and he seemed relieved.

  Chin on fingers I thought. ‘I’ve seen you around at Uni since the beginning of the year!’

  ‘Nick just wants to protect you,’ he said, trying to placate me, ‘to make sure nothing bad happens to you.’

  ‘Other than a sprained ankle from falling over my own feet, or being licked to death by my dog, it was incredibly unlikely anything was going to happen to me before he came on the scene. He can’t just step in and take over my life, infect mine with his madness,’ I grumbled. ‘I wanted this on my own terms.’

  He was pragmatic. ‘It doesn’t always work like that.’

  ‘I wanted to fill in a few blanks, that’s all.’ Tears of frustration filled my eyes so unexpectedly I was unable to stop them overflowing.

  He sprang up and yanked a piece of kitchen towel from the roll, handing it to me. On second thoughts, he leant across and brought the whole roll to the table.

  ‘Too much has happened this weekend,’ I snivelled, wanting to run and hide, to bury my head under my pillow and wake up to a brand new day, with sunshine and rain, but no crazy families potting each other off or strange abilities I didn’t understand.

  He seemed less assured than when he had first appeared, possibly because I was such a wreck and there was more to come. There was something appealing about his reaction, reassuring maybe because it made him seem human. I took a slow breath, trying to pull myself together. Finally I folded my hands demurely in my lap. I would stay. I would cope.

  He seemed relieved. ‘Everyone needs help sometimes Kate, and your situation, well, it’s more complicated than most.’

  ‘He didn’t even know I existed until a few months ago!’

  ‘But now he does. Others do too.’

  ‘Like you?’

  He shrugged, noncommittally. ‘I guess so.’ We sipped our drinks in silence for a while. When we were finished he stood up and took the cups to the sink. I remained frozen in my seat, thinking.

  ‘He could have told me about you earlier.’ It felt like a betrayal.

  ‘His life is not easy.’ His words made me realise how little I actually knew about Nick’s daily life. He had drawn me into this barbed maze but I knew only the superficial things about him, the things he’d told me. And I knew that he drank too much, that was hard to hide. But he was mysterious, arriving in hire cars, flying in and out in his own aircraft, not seeming to stay in any one place for more than a few days. I didn’t really have a clue what went on in his life on a day to day basis, how different it was to mine, how impacted he had been by this … this curse and the circumstances of his past.

  ‘Maybe he didn’t want to worry you before he had to, or maybe he just had other things on his mind,’ he added, uncertain of my long silence. I looked up at him. He smiled reassuringly as our gaze met, moving his fingers through his mocha-and-gold hair, brushing it off his forehead for a moment before half of it flopped down again and the other half remained standing straight up. Suddenly I wanted to touch it, feel the thickness of it between my fingers. I stood up, transfixed for a moment. He was so close. His torso almost touched mine. A sweet spiciness lingered in the air. His fingers touched my face and I felt instantly feverish, my thoughts incoherent. I could barely hear him.

  ‘You’ve been raised in a world removed from the one you were born into, the one he knows, Kate.’

  My head cleared as he stepped away. ‘I want to go back. Back to when I was certain of my dullness. It’s not that long ago, honestly.’

  He smiled slightly as he took in my get-up and hair. ‘You were never dull,’ he said, walking into the entrance hall. It wasn’t necessarily a compliment.

  ‘What about you James?’

  ‘Me?’ he asked, in mock innocence, rocking back on his feet.

  ‘How are you involved in all of this?’

  ‘That’s a long story.’ He deliberated, weighing up how much to share with me, deciding on the nuts and not the bolts, for now. ‘We’ve been a part of this all of our lives. Born into it, just like Nick was.’

  30

  DEB AND NICK

  The next afternoon I waited for Nick down at the beach, perspiring in my school uniform. I’d been replaying my conversation with Mum for most of the night and through the interminable school day I’d been trying to make sense of it all. Not even Mr Warden’s gut-heaving Biology dissection had managed to distract me for long.

  But he did not appear. Nor did I see or hear from him the next day. He’d vanished, again, like a star in the morning. And wasn’t I the idiot? Duh! Insecurity burnt charred holes through my self-confidence. Why had I had sex with him so soon? Why had he only told me that there were issues between our families after we had had sex? My self-doubt was a powerful force, taking no prisoners. It tainted my memories and made me regretful, nauseous.

  I tossed and turned in bed, rewinding and replaying our last moments together over and over. Eventually his reactions were so distorted, so exaggerated that I no longer knew the truth. There was no point going on like this. Tomorrow
I would have to find him and face him.

  I got up as a key grated softly in the front door lock. Almost one a.m.

  ‘It’s past your bedtime Deb,’ George yawned as he dragged himself in, exhausted after a long shift on the back of Uni.

  ‘Can’t sleep,’ I mumbled. ‘Do you want a hot choc?’

  He tossed his bag onto the sofa. ‘Nope, I’m bushed, heading straight to bed.’ He stopped suddenly and turned. ‘Is it because of Daniel?’

  ‘What?’ I nearly fell off the chair I was half sitting on.

  ‘How’s Nick holding up?’

  I regarded him, curious about the question, the words he had used.

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘Mandy saw you leaving with him on Saturday. No secrets here, you should know that by now!’

  ‘Well I wouldn’t have a clue how he is. I haven’t heard from him since Sunday.’

  I saw a look of surprise cross his face and then regret. Regret that he’d said anything at all. Goose-bumps prickled on the back of my arms. ‘What is going on, George? What about Daniel?’ I demanded.

  ‘Surely you know Deb?’ I felt that sinking feeling I’d been feeling quite a bit lately return, a combination of tell me and don’t.

  I made my jaw move. The words sounded stiff. ‘What about Daniel?’

  He steeled himself for a full minute as I paced, nervously waiting for the axe to finally fall. Eventually he managed to spit it out, his voice flatter than the flounder we’d had for dinner. ‘He committed suicide, Deb.’

  I froze.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Gassed himself in one of their cars. His Mum found him.’ All I could do was keep my hand on my mouth. My brain was full of the sound of rain, great sheets of it. His voice seemed to come from a long way off.

  ‘He’s dead, Deb. I’m so sorry.’ My eyes prickled. How could he know all of this, when I knew nothing of it?

  He was babbling and I suddenly realised that his arm was around me. I hadn’t felt him put it there. ‘I was just wondering how Nick was. I didn’t realise you hadn’t heard yet.’

  ‘Oh no, no, no, no,’ I gasped, imagining the suffering Nick would be experiencing. I turned away from him. Daniel was everyone’s favourite. He was the different one, the one who looked more like Sofia, with darker hair and brooding eyes, beautiful in a poetic way. The youngest son, smaller, quieter, softer around the edges. Sensitive and artistic Nick had said once. Bile burnt the back of my throat. They’d been keeping watch over him as he struggled with depression. They had failed to keep him safe. What hell would they be living in now?

  ‘How come you know this and I don’t?’ I managed, my voice as harsh as rocks in a food processor.

  ‘Tiffany at work told me. She lives up on the hill with the rest of them … It’s not common knowledge yet … I just assumed you knew. I’m so sorry. I’m such an oaf.’ I reached out to touch his arm.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ I said. There hadn’t even been a whisper at school.

  Morning arrived after a long night and I carefully selected and sent flowers along with a note expressing my sympathy, asking for him to call me when he could, telling him I wanted to be there for him. But I heard nothing and so the next day I got George to drive me out to his house. The high white walls surrounding it seemed cold and forbidding, like a kind of prison and the impersonal, officious rejection at the gate was equally repellent.

  ‘It’s like another world out here,’ George remarked as we drove away in his old white Toyota. It was another world, I thought, gazing back at the receding fortress.

  The weather had changed suddenly and all around us trees thrashed and leaves blew across the road like crowds of drunkards in a whirl of fury. Rain splattered in bursts against the glass, like God was having a bit of fun with a hose-pipe. But in a moment’s break in the rain I noticed the Edwards’ house and garden sitting as still as a photograph, in an improbable shaft of sunlight which broke through the clouds directly above it. For a moment I thought I saw an angel hover in the brightness overhead.

  And then the house disappeared from view and I turned back to George as the windscreen wipers whipped backwards and forwards.

  ‘Where did this come from?’ he said, hunching forward as we crawled along. The car rattled as the wind buffeted us, but as we rounded a bend we were bathed in eerie stillness and sunlight so bright we were instantly squinting. The windows fogged and we quickly opened them to let in the humid air.

  He shook his head. ‘Someone’s having fun with us mere mortals today.’

  The towering clouds were forbidding in the rear-view mirror, all the more so because they stood out in such strange and stark contrast to the flat cloudless turquoise all around them. They held a warning, but I wasn’t sure what.

  31

  KATE

  The door sprang open and Mads surprised us, bursting through with Mitchell a couple of paces behind.

  ‘You can take your stuff and fuck off,’ she shouted angrily at him as she swished past, unconcerned about whoever else might be exposed to their fall-out, ‘for someone who thinks he has a big dick, you have no balls.’

  ‘Err, Mads.’ I tried a meek, but foolish, interruption.

  ‘Yes, I know Kate,’ she said condescendingly, hands on hips. ‘You don’t swear,’ she knew nothing of Sam, or my general mental state which I kept well hidden, ‘and you’re a virgin, but some of us are not so saintly. Some of us are unable to contain ourselves so successfully.’ My face began to melt, and she stopped, belatedly realising that I was not alone. She turned to face James, and Mitchell nearly collided with her.

  ‘Err, hello again,’ she said, gratifyingly mortified at her mistake.

  ‘This is James, not Ethan,’ I stated, outwardly calm, inwardly consumed by violence as I marvelled at how I had not grabbed her by the hair and smashed her face into the wall.

  ‘Oh, the brother,’ she said. A quickly-hidden flicker of distaste shimmied across James’ face as he flattened himself against the wall. A hush fell.

  ‘I was just leaving,’ he said, with a nod to Mitchell.

  ‘See you Mate,’ Mitchell responded, unfazed by Mads’ commotion.

  ‘Kate,’ James farewelled, slipping through the door. I looked from Mitchell to Mads, shook my head and raised my eyes like a parent with a child who had just trodden dog poo through the house, and then dashed out after him. Better to give them a little space.

  ‘James,’ I called, treading carefully on the wet steps, my socks instantly soaked through. He stopped a few steps down and turned to me.

  ‘You can’t leave me like this. I have so many questions.’

  He hesitated. ‘They’re not that bad, honestly,’ I said gesturing to the house. I wrapped my arms around myself. ‘They’re just having an argument, probably had a few too many drinks, or something.’

  He shrugged indifferently. ‘They’re not my housemates.’ Of course, why would he care?

  ‘You can’t just leave,’ I repeated more firmly, wondering how I would stop him. I took a tentative step closer to him and my socks squelched.

  ‘No?’ He remained where he was. I wanted to reach out to him, but I didn’t. ‘You should go back inside,’ he said, looking down at my soggy stripy feet, ‘it’s cold out here.’

  ‘I’ll give them a few minutes,’ I said, nodding my head towards the house as I shifted from one foot to the other and shivered.

  ‘Well you can’t stand there. Do you want to sit in the car?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said squelching after him.

  The road was scattered with puddles which reflected the glow of the street lights. He ignored my car which sat in half of one, although who could blame him. The yellow seemed almost luminous in the night, enough to make possums nauseous. I couldn’t begin to imagine him in it, driving here. Maybe it had been magically transported. His sleek midnight one was parked behind it.

  ‘Who are you people?’ I asked when we were sitting inside.

  ‘We come
from a rather unusual family,’ he answered too seriously, making me suddenly wish I hadn’t asked. ‘Kind of like the one you come from … although with a few differences.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ My exclamation came out louder than I had intended. ‘I don’t usually swear,’ I added.

  ‘I heard,’ he answered, referring to Mads’ earlier comment. I felt my face light up like the backend of a bus at night. I mentally struck her from my Christmas list. Outside small droplets of water clung to the window, nervously awaiting the morning sunshine, but the rain had stopped for now.

  ‘Maybe I should start.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he agreed. Maybe I should do a lot of things. His fingers on my arm made me turn back to him. In the dimly lit car his eyes shone.

  ‘It sounds so crazy!’ I exclaimed, wringing my hands in my lap. His touch tingled on my skin for a moment before he moved his hand quickly away like it should never have been there. I felt a silly flicker of loss.

  ‘I don’t blame you for thinking so.’

  ‘Educate me then,’ I said, wondering whether that was wise. Surely I’d be better off running blathering into the night, foamy spittle flying from my chops, in my wet stripy socks and faded flannelettes.

  ‘For your ears only, Kate.’ His expression was intense. I stifled a silly snigger as I imagined how short the trip to the asylum would be was I to ever mention anything I had been told today. His stare endured and I nodded quickly.

  ‘We are not exactly human.’

  ‘Mmmhmmm, right,’ I said, not over the moon at hearing, for the second time today, that there were aliens running amok on earth, some claiming to be family, some eager to wreak havoc and destruction on our civilisation.

  ‘It’s not easy to tell on the surface,’ he continued.

  My eyes narrowed, just as they had with Nick as I scrutinised him. He was ridiculously good looking. His hair looked soft in some places and spiky in others and fell untidily in the most appealing way. It cried out to be touched, to be grabbed in handfuls and ... My heart pounded and I swallowed, trying to let the thought go and moving on to his face. Not that that was any easier. His skin was smooth, almost pore-less, only his jaw seemed rough, like it would graze your skin if he brought his mouth to yours. Aagh … His nose. It was slender and aquiline. And his eyes. Wide set and deep enough to lose yourself in. Mesmerising eyes. Blue striated marble and ringed with violet and black, softly radiant. But they changed, and so that was only how they were right now, a snapshot, in this moment. I caught myself, almost hypnotised by his physical presence and on the verge of slobbering great jugs of saliva, and swallowed loudly. ‘Ahem,’ I coughed.