Lesser Gods

by Adrian Howell

  “Addy, have you seen my pendant?” asked Alia, referring to the bloodstone pendant Cindy had bought for her a year ago.

  “Aren’t you wearing it?” I asked. Like myself, Alia hardly ever took her pendant off, even at night.

  “I think the cord snapped.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Again? You have to stop playing with it, Alia.”

  “Here it is!” cried Alia’s telepathic voice as she pulled her pendant, broken cord and all, out from under the giant fluffy white unicorn doll leaning against her bed.

  My sister’s fondness for unicorns bordered on obsession, her side of our room infested by an army of horned horses in the form of toys, dolls, little ornaments, and a poster pinned to the wall above her desk. Even her pillowcase had little pink unicorns printed all over it. The biggest unicorn always stood guard by Alia’s bed, and I could only guess how the bloodstone had found its way under it.

  I helped Alia replace the leather cord (we always kept a few spares) and Alia happily put the pendant around her neck again.

  “That’s better,” said Alia, looking down at the polished bloodstone resting on her chest.

  I forced a smile. I normally didn’t mind Alia mimicking me by wearing her birthstone pendant, but just occasionally it felt awkward seeing the small green stone around her neck. Alia was getting somewhat taller and, aside from her long walnut-brown hair, she was beginning to resemble Cat a bit more than I would have liked.

  It was still a bit early in the morning to start cooking, so Alia and I first wasted some time sitting by our bedroom window and gazing down at the city below. From our fortieth-floor vantage point, the cars on the road looked like little toys, and I wondered how many of the early-bird drivers were Guardians as opposed to people who didn’t have a clue what kind of weird part of the city they were driving through.

  This was New Haven.

  Now, there are a number of towns named New Haven that you might find in an atlas, but I can guarantee that none of them would be the New Haven where I lived.

  My New Haven was the world’s only psionic town, founded but a year ago by the second-largest and currently imperiled psionic faction, the Guardians, to which I now belonged. Our “town” was actually just a loose cluster of residential high-rises at the semi-suburban edge of a largish city. New Haven was our first and last line of defense against the ever-increasing threat of our rival faction, the Angels.

  In a nutshell, the Angels wanted the Guardians destroyed so they could focus their resources on their ultimate goal of world domination. Not only did they outnumber us, but they were more committed to their cause owing to the fact that many of their members were psionically “converted” by a master controller. Converted Angels served their faction with blind, unquestioning loyalty. Master controllers were exceptionally rare among psionics and usually headed the largest factions, but currently only the Angels had such a master at the helm.

  The Guardians’ last master controller, Diana Granados, had been assassinated years before I was born. And when the Guardians’ minds were freed from her control, the entire organization quickly fell apart, dividing into hundreds of breakaway factions which were subsequently hunted down one at a time by the Angels. Whenever they could, the Angels captured and converted these Guardians, thereby adding to their ranks in preparation for their planned war on humanity.

  To restore the balance of power, the Guardians had founded New Haven last year as a place for the remaining breakaway factions to gather and seek refuge together from the Angel onslaught. Traditionally, even members of large psionic factions lived in fairly small groups scattered across the country in order to avoid detection by normal humans, so New Haven was a bit of an experiment in progress, and a potentially dangerous one at that.

  But so far, while we admittedly had some close calls, New Haven served its purpose well. The Angels were kept at bay while the public remained blissfully unaware. Still, as I gazed down at the city, I wondered how many cars would remain on the streets if non-psionics were to someday discover what kind of place this really was.

  Most of the drivers had turned off their headlights by now, and I realized that the sky was getting brighter and bluer. It looked like it would turn into a warm sunny day.

  “If we’re going to surprise Cindy, we better get cooking,” I said, getting up from the window seat and leading Alia out of our room.

  “What are we going to make for breakfast, Addy?”

  “I’m kind of in the mood for waffles,” I replied as we walked quietly to the kitchen. “And maybe some sausages.”

  “And eggs,” Alia said cheerily. “Lot’s of scrambled eggs.”

  Having no way to know what we were up to, of course, Cindy walked into the kitchen as Alia and I were halfway through preparing breakfast.

  “Well, aren’t we off to an early start this morning?” remarked Cindy, smiling broadly at us. “It smells great too!”

  Cynthia Gifford, who would celebrate her fiftieth birthday next month, didn’t look quite that old. She was a slender woman with long silvery hair that extended down to her waist. Eternally forgiving and possessing an almost irritatingly calm demeanor, Cindy was the sole reason that our strange little family lived in the penthouse of the forty-story condominium building referred to by the Guardians as New Haven One.

  Cindy was a psionic finder and hider, which meant that she could sense the location of other psionics from great distances, as well as conceal the presence of psionics from other finders. It was her power as a hider that made her uniquely important to the Guardians. Psionic hiders themselves weren’t all too rare, but only Cindy could create a hiding bubble large enough to cover all of New Haven.

  New Haven One, or NH-1 for short, housed most of the families of New Haven’s ruling Council and other important people, while the other buildings around us, each similarly designated by a number, were home to an ever-increasing population of psionics from the former breakaway Guardian factions. Known as the “Heart of New Haven” to more than a thousand Guardian families currently residing here, it was Cindy’s job to make sure that Angel spies infiltrating New Haven wouldn’t be able to sense where individual Guardian psionics were, thus greatly increasing our security. I didn’t fully appreciate how important her job was until the Angels tried to abduct her back in mid-April.

  All that said, as far as Alia and I were concerned, Cindy was our adoptive mother and home-tutor, as well as an excellent cook. The only real problem I ever had with her, aside from her over-protectiveness, was that she had the world’s worst fashion sense when picking out clothes for me. Buying everything from flower-patterned sweatpants to shirts with teddy bears and sparkly rainbows on them, Cindy insisted on dressing me like a little girl. Fortunately, that issue had been resolved several weeks ago when I finally put my foot down and told her that I would no longer let her choose my wardrobe.

  I caught Cindy sneaking a glance at the sausages in my frying pan, and I was pleased to note that she didn’t comment. Cindy had been teaching me how to cook ever since we first met, and she could rarely refuse to make some helpful suggestion, so I took her silence as evidence that I was doing everything right.

  Alia looked at Cindy for a few seconds, and Cindy smiled, saying, “Oh, did he?”

  My sister had no doubt telepathically told Cindy about this morning’s crash-landing.

  “Speak aloud or not at all, Alia,” I said, annoyed.

  “Okay, okay!” said Alia, using her mouth for the first time that morning.

  Alia, a telepathic from birth, had spent most of her life unable to speak coherently with her mouth, and only early this year learned to articulate words clearly enough to be understood. Aloud, Alia still spoke slowly and deliberately, often with horribly incorrect intonation, making her sound like she was mentally handicapped. Nevertheless, as Alia could only speak telepathically to one person at a time, politeness dictated that she speak aloud whenever there were two or more people in the room. Alia usually did just that, and I
suspected her telepathic tattletale to Cindy was quite intentional.

  “Adrian–” began Cindy.

  But I cut across her, saying, “Don’t even start, please, Cindy. I’ve survived without a tether for two years, and I’m not about to start wearing one now.”

  “I was just going to say thanks for cooking breakfast this morning,” Cindy said in a hurt tone.

  “Oh,” I said embarrassedly. “Sorry.”

  The three of us set the table, and then Alia woke Terry by calling to her telepathically. With some concentration, Alia could send her telepathy mild distances and through walls, so there was no need to go knocking on Terry’s door. Several minutes later, Terry strode into the dining room, eyes as open as if she had been awake for hours.

  “Good morning, Terry,” Cindy said pleasantly.

  “Hey,” Terry replied gruffly, and quickly sat down and started to eat.

  We were used to that from Terry. Her manner was always blunt and direct, but unlike her grandfather, at least she had never tried to kill me.

  Terry Henderson. Where to even begin...

  I first met Terry a few days after joining the Guardians and moving to New Haven. The leader of the New Haven Guardians, Mr. Travis Baker, had assigned Terry to me as my personal combat instructor because Cindy had refused to allow a live-in security guard in the penthouse. Mr. Baker insisted that I learn how to fight since I was the only psionic “destroyer,” that is, someone who possessed combat-oriented powers, living with Cindy. Though only a year and a bit older than me, Terry was an expert in military-style close quarters combat, or CQC for short, and she had experience with almost every martial art on the planet.

  Though I hadn’t known it when I first met her, in retrospect, I found it not at all surprising that Terry was the granddaughter of Ralph P. Henderson, the battle-hardened solitary Guardian Knight whom I had learned to fear and hate. Terry’s parents had been killed during a battle with the Angels when Terry was still an infant, and she and her older brother had been raised by members of Ralph Henderson’s former Wolf unit. The Wolves were a special, highly trained branch of the military dedicated to hunting down psionics, and Ralph had defected from them with three others when he discovered that he himself was psionic. It was these three co-defectors who had raised Terry and taught her to fight. Ralph himself stayed clear of Terry, which suited her just fine. I couldn’t blame Terry for hating her grandfather, not only because Ralph was one of the last people I’d personally want to be around, but also because I had learned that it was Ralph himself who had killed Terry’s parents when they were turned against their team by an Angel mind controller.

  Born and raised as a Guardian warrior, it was nevertheless Terry who had been secretly helping the Angels all last year in their attempt to kidnap Cindy and convert her into an Angel. Terry had good reason to help them: Her brother, Gabriel, had been captured by the Angels and was being slowly tortured to death. Handing Cindy to the Angels was the only way for Terry to get Gabriel back alive. And yet when the time came, Terry, who by then had been living with us for months, couldn’t go through with the exchange. In the end, she betrayed the Angels and helped us rescue Cindy.

  Words cannot describe how grateful I was that Terry finally sided with us, but she paid a heavy price for it. During our raid on the Angel hideout where we presumed Cindy had been taken, Terry got her left arm caught under a heavy steel beam, and desperate time constraints required me to amputate it just below the elbow to get her free. I got my right ear shot off during the same raid, but that didn’t quite compare to losing a hand. Nor was that the worst of what Terry got. I neither know nor care to know exactly what the Angels did to Gabriel in retaliation for Terry’s treachery, but what little was left of him was returned in a plastic garbage bag. Terry was one of the toughest people I had ever met, but nobody is that tough. When Terry vowed her revenge, I promised that I’d stand beside her.

  “Pass the salt, Half-head,” Terry said to me.

  “Here you go, Five-fingers,” I replied automatically, telekinetically sliding the saltshaker across the table toward her.

  One of the coolest things about Terry was that she didn’t mind cracks about her newly acquired handicap in the least. In fact, she was usually the first to joke about it. And she certainly had the right: Even with only one arm, Terry remained undefeated even against seasoned Guardian Knights. The one and only time I tried to show respect for her condition and apologized for an insensitive remark during one of my combat training sessions, Terry walloped me so hard that it took Alia half an hour to heal my bruises. Terry didn’t like it when people felt sorry for her.

  “Are you going shopping today, Cindy?” asked Terry as she salted her sausages and eggs.

  “I wasn’t planning to,” said Cindy. “Is there something you need?”

  “Just sunscreen,” answered Terry. “I finished the last bottle yesterday. But it’s okay. If you’re not going, I’ll stop by the store on my way home today.”

  “Skincare is very important,” Cindy said with a smile.

  Terry didn’t care about her skin. “If I get any darker, I’m going to need to get another hand to match. Sunscreen is cheaper, and I don’t want to keep bothering Alia for something as trivial as sunburn.”

  She didn’t wear it at the breakfast table, but Terry had an artificial hand made of plastic and silicone that strapped onto her left stump and matched her skin color almost perfectly. It gave her the appearance, at least from a mild distance, of having a real left hand. Terry didn’t wear it to look good, though. “This thing is a real nuisance, but being lopsided makes it too easy for potential aggressors to spot me in a crowd,” she once told me. I found her caution quite amusing since all you had to do to find Terry in a crowd was look for a tall, athletic girl with short, abnormally bright red hair. I never asked, but I’m sure this near-neon red was her natural hair color since Terry never wore makeup or worried about her looks anymore than was absolutely necessary. If Terry really wanted to blend in, she needed a hat more than a hand.

  Though I wasn’t nearly as lopsided as Terry, I had my distinguishing features too, the most noticeable of them being my missing right ear and the P-47 tattoo on my left arm near my shoulder. If I was sleeveless or swimming, I hid the tattoo with a large Band-Aid, but my hair hadn’t yet grown long enough to cover my ears much. I wasn’t particularly worried about being spotted in a crowd, but I had to admit that my torn ear was quite ugly. For the present, whenever I went outside, I wore a thick sports headband that covered both ears. It made me look like an idiot, but after two years of wearing clothes that Cindy had bought for me, I was quite used to that by now.

  Once Terry finished eating, she returned to her room to strap on her fake hand and reappeared with her school bag slung over her right shoulder. The Guardians didn’t have a dedicated school. Most psionics didn’t gain their powers until after they were adults, so Guardian families sent their children to school among normal people. Terry was no different in that respect. She was just finishing up her tenth-grade year.

  “Only two more weeks and I’m on holiday,” said Terry. Then she gave a wry smile and added, “Permanently.”

  The only real downside to living with the “Heart of New Haven” was that we presented a security risk wherever we went. Alia and I were prime targets for Angel spies and saboteurs trying to gain leverage on Cindy. We had almost been kidnapped last year, and fearing for their own children’s safety, other Guardian families forbade their kids from associating with us. That was why Alia and I were home-schooled by Cindy. My sister didn’t mind not having friends outside of the house, but I did, and it irked me that the very Guardians Cindy was helping to protect regarded us as a hazard. Cindy had reasonably pointed out that parents couldn’t be blamed for protecting their children, but reason had nothing to do with how I felt about it. That Terry was living with us had been a secret until recently, but now she was under pressure from the Guardian families to drop out of school. Terry didn’t t
alk about it much, but I guessed she had lost a lot of friends during the last month.

  Cindy gave Terry an apologetic look. “I wish there was something I could do.”

  “It’s okay, Cindy,” said Terry. “We’ve been over this before. It’s not your fault. It was my choice to live here, remember? Besides, I was getting tired of being a student anyway. I’d rather be a soldier, and I could use the time to train more.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” Cindy said quietly.

  “Me too,” I said, giving Terry a wicked grin. “I can’t imagine what it’ll be like when you’re here all the time.”

  Terry cuffed me on my good ear hard enough to make it ring. Then, with a quick wave goodbye, she left for school.

  As Cindy and I cleared the dining table, Cindy said, “You seemed a bit quiet during breakfast, Adrian. Is something the matter?”

  I shook my head. I had actually been pondering my little mission for this afternoon. I hadn’t told Cindy about it (or anybody for that matter), and I wanted to keep it that way.

  “Worried about Terry?” asked Cindy.

  “Something like that,” I lied.

  “Have you decided what to get for her birthday?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Birthday?”

  “It’s this month,” said Cindy. “Didn’t you know?”

  “Honestly, I never asked her when her birthday was.”

  Cindy gave me an exasperated look. “Some friend you are, Adrian!”

  “Well, you know Terry...”

  “I know,” said Cindy. “But I still think she’d be happy to have a party. After all, she’s going to be sweet sixteen.”

  I laughed loudly at that one, and Cindy chuckled a bit too as she corrected herself, “Well, sixteen anyway.”

  “I’ve no idea what to get her,” I said honestly.