“You’re lessons with Ralph are always in the evenings,” complained Laila. “I just wish we had more time together.”
I had felt that too. Owing to my daily sessions with Ralph, I could no longer spend a lot of time with Laila except on Saturdays and after church services on Sundays. I wished it were otherwise, but I couldn’t ask Ralph to change our lesson times, seeing as he was already doing me a great favor by offering to teach me at all. My only justification for giving up the time that I could otherwise have been spending with my girlfriend was that my pistol aim was actually improving. Laila still maintained that I should just let others do my fighting, but she nevertheless supported my desire to be as self-reliant as I could. Laila joked sadly, “At least I have no excuse not to get my homework done.”
St. Valentine’s Day fell on a Sunday that year, and Cindy thoughtfully kept Alia busy with her schoolwork and chores so that Laila and I could have an evening to ourselves. Where we went and what we did is really none of your business.
The next day, February 15th, was Cat’s thirteenth birthday.
Like the previous year, Cindy baked a cake to celebrate, but the party did little to brighten my sour mood that day. I realized that Cat and I had been apart for two and a half years now. I wondered how much my first sister had grown, and what her life among the Angels was like. When the Angels failed to capture me, they had taken Cat in the hope that, as the sister of a wild-born psionic, she would also someday develop psionic powers. Until then, however, my sister was probably kept as one of their slaves, given daily tasks such as cooking and cleaning in some Angel’s house. I wondered again, as I so often did, whether I would ever see her alive again.
Meanwhile, I had gradually come to realize that something was not quite right with my other sister.
New Haven’s youngest Honorary Guardian Knight was no longer as fickle and quick to tears as she had been when I first met her at Cindy’s old house, but she still had her ups and downs. Sometimes I couldn’t get Alia to stop chattering in my head. Other times she remained silent for hours. I had long since gotten used to her un-childlike behavior. That, combined with my own busy life and my inability to see Alia’s facial expressions, was probably why it took me so long to realize that not only was Alia spending more and more time in silence, but she no longer telepathically murmured in her sleep as often as before. On a hunch, I once felt around her bed when she was out of the room, and sure enough, there was the giant stuffed unicorn doll that my sister always slept with when she was feeling particularly insecure. It seemed that Alia had entered an elongated, downward mood swing since the start of the year, the cause of which eluded me, and it was gradually worsening.
“I’ve noticed that too,” said Cindy when I asked her about it. “I asked Alia a couple of times if there was anything troubling her, but she said she was fine. I was actually hoping that you might know something about it.”
“You’re her mother, Cindy,” I said, shrugging. “I don’t know what goes on in Alia’s head.”
“Yet you’re the one she always cuddles with, Addy-corn,” replied Cindy, making me cringe. “I first thought that Alia was just upset with you because you don’t spend as much time with her as you used to, but now I’m not so sure.”
That made two of us. However, I knew that the best way to deal with my sister’s silences was to stay close but give her time to work through her own feelings. Upon reflection, I realized that while I did on occasion lose my temper with Alia, when she was in one of her difficult moods, I always had nothing but patience, probably because deep down I knew how much she needed it.
Cindy, on the other hand, tried to pick Alia’s mind with increasing frequency over the following week. Alia’s insistence that nothing was wrong only fueled Cindy’s worries.
“Adrian, would you please help me with your sister?” Cindy once begged in exasperation. “I just can’t get through to her.”
“I am helping, Cindy,” I insisted. “I’m keeping the peace.”
My concern for Alia aside, I found it rather amusing that, for once, Cindy actually seemed to have less patience than I did. Cindy wanted to dig her way to the bottom of Alia’s troubles, whatever they were, but for my part, I was willing to wait until Alia was ready to talk.
And it wasn’t such a long wait.
Though it had been raining since early morning, I spent the last Saturday of February wandering around New Haven with Laila and Alia. We watched a movie and later went to a bowling alley where I actually managed two strikes, or so Laila told me. Alia was silent for most of the day, gripping my hand even tighter than usual when we were walking together, and while she seemed to enjoy the bowling game, her attention frequently phased in and out. Laila asked her more than once whether she was feeling well, but if Alia answered at all, it wasn’t out loud.
I still had my pistol lesson in the evening, so we ended our date a little before 5pm. After kissing Laila goodbye in the NH-1 lobby, I took Alia back up to the penthouse. Since I was already wearing my headset and my gun was locked in the shooting range, I could have just told Alia to go back up the elevator by herself, but today I wanted to make sure that she was in Cindy’s company before I headed down to the subbasement. At the penthouse door, I almost asked Alia if there was anything she wanted to talk about, but I didn’t.
Ralph was loudly unimpressed with my shooting that evening. Even as I listened for the subtle changes to the humming of my headset’s proximity sensors, my thoughts kept wandering up to the penthouse and whether I was right not to badger my sister into telling me what was bothering her. In the past, patience had always been the key to Alia’s soul, but perhaps this time required a more aggressive approach.
“What’s wrong with you today, lad?” asked Ralph as I emptied my third clip, having hit the fifteen-yard target only twice. “Are your sensors misaligned?”
“No,” I said, touching my headset just to make sure. “I guess my mind just isn’t into this today.”
“Nobody cares about your mind when they’re trying to put a bullet through your head, lad!” snapped Ralph. “Whatever your personal problems, learn to put them aside when you’re fighting or you’ll be too dead to have any problems.”
“Yes, sir,” I replied dully, loading another clip.
I did my best to focus on the distant target, and my accuracy improved a bit, though clearly not enough. Ralph was leaving on another mission, and today was our last time together for a few weeks. Although he was frustrated with my pitiful aim, Ralph nevertheless extended our practice time much longer than usual, and I didn’t get back to the penthouse until after 8pm.
My stomach was growling like a walrus when I announced my arrival, and Cindy quickly reheated my chicken dinner.
“Where’s Alia?” I asked.
“She already ate, bathed, and is in your room. You didn’t expect her to wait for you, did you?”
“Of course not,” I said. “I was just a little worried because she was even more spaced out than usual today.”
Cindy sat with me while I ate, sighing as she said, “Alia still won’t tell me what’s bothering her.”
I smirked. “I’m sure it wasn’t for a lack of trying on your part, Cindy.”
“Very funny,” Cindy said frostily. “Doesn’t it bother you that something has been eating at your sister for weeks now?”
“Of course it bothers me,” I replied gently. “But you’re the one who kept telling me to give her time back when she was little. Take your own advice. Be patient and she’ll come around. Alia is a tough kid.”
Cindy sighed again. “I guess you’re probably right. I just can’t stand to see her like this anymore. She had been doing so well until recently.”
I grinned. “I take it she got tired of you pestering her and asked to be left alone?”
“That just about sums it up,” Cindy replied dejectedly.
“I’ll tuck her in tonight, okay?”
“Sure, Adrian.”
I ate quickly. F
ar from being unconcerned about Alia, I was actually very worried because she hadn’t even come out to greet me when I came home.
As I quietly entered my bedroom, I heard Alia’s footsteps rush up to me and then felt her arms wrap around my waist.
“Hey, Ali,” I said in a surprised tone as I patted her back, “what’s with you today?”
Alia remained silent, but her arms tightened even more, and I could tell she was shaking a little.
I joked mildly, “You haven’t tried to break my backbone like this since I drowned on that boat.”
Still silent, Alia released me.
I knelt down and put my hands on her shoulders. “Alia?”
More silence.
“Okay,” I said, standing up again. “No words, then. Just sit with me.”
I led her to our window-side chair and sat beside her, putting an arm around her side and pulling her close. I listened to her soft breathing and the quiet pattering of the rain on the window. We sat there together, perfectly still, not speaking, for what felt like an hour or more. I knew better than to break the silence first.
Suddenly I felt Alia shift her weight a little, and I wondered for a moment if she was falling asleep, but then I heard her telepathic voice in my head say faintly, “Addy, I want to ask you something.”
Finally, what just might turn out to be a breakthrough, but I wasn’t going to make a big deal of it. I shrugged and said casually, “So ask.”
Alia said slowly, “I’m afraid it might upset you.”
“Oh?” I said, taken aback. “Well, I know I’ve been upset about a lot of things in the past, Ali, but right now, you’re obviously the one who’s upset, not me.” I gave her shoulders a gentle squeeze. “I know something has been hurting you for a long time now, and I wouldn’t mind sharing some of your pain, if you’d let me.”
Alia took a long, deep breath, and then whispered into my mind, “Would you tell me about the Slayers?”
“You’re right, Alia,” I said. “The Slayers aren’t my favorite topic. But you remember back when we made those snowmen how I told you about Charles and his little sister, Grace, don’t you?”
“I remember, Addy.”
“So you know that I don’t mind talking about the Slayers, if that’s what you really want to talk about.”
I suspected that Alia was worried the topic would upset me only because it clearly upset her, though I still couldn’t fathom why. Had my sister seen something while assisting the Knights’ raids on the Slayer houses? Something that had given her a heavy dose of PTSD? I hoped not, because that would have been my fault, and I knew I had caused Alia far too much pain and suffering already.
“It’s okay, Alia,” I said to her reassuringly. “Ask me anything you like.”
Alia took another deep breath. “When you were there... under that house... how did you survive?”
“Well, I already told you that Charles helped me a lot. Aside from that, I just held on to the hope that someone would find me before I died. After all, I was blinded and chained to the wall. There was no escape on my own.”
“Were you all by yourself?”
“I was for most of the time.”
“What were you doing?”
“Just sitting. Sitting and thinking.”
“What did you think about?”
“Lots of things, Alia,” I said, giving her a smile. “I thought about you. I thought about how scared you were of me when we first met.”
Alia laughed weakly. “I remember.”
“And I thought about how scared I was of Cindy when I first met her.”
“You were?” Alia asked in a surprised tone.
I nodded. “I almost jumped off a building to escape her.”
“What else did you think about?”
“Well... I thought about Cat. And I thought about the Angels, and the Slayers. I thought about how different we are.”
Alia remained silent for a few heartbeats. Her shoulders were quivering slightly again, and I got the feeling that she was struggling with something which had been poisoning her for so long that she wasn’t even sure she wanted to part with it anymore. When my sister spoke again, I could barely hear her telepathy.
“Addy,” she whispered, “what are the Slayers really like?”
I didn’t want to go into the graphic details. Besides, having been in Father Lestor’s basement herself, Alia had already seen firsthand what they had done to me.
I shrugged as I said, “What can I say? The Slayers want us dead. They fear us and hate us. Not for who we are, but what we are.”
“What are we?”
“I don’t know that, Alia. I wish I did.”
Alia let out a quiet sob. “I think my parents didn’t know either. I think that’s why they hated me so much.”
Alia had never once mentioned her parents before today, and now I knew why it had taken her so long to get to this point. I pulled Alia onto my lap and hugged her tightly from behind.
Her telepathic voice trembling, Alia whispered, “I think my parents might have been Slayers, Addy.”
“Alia, your parents...” I stopped myself. Alia still didn’t know that she had been kidnapped as an infant. Alia’s keepers weren’t God-slayers, but considering what they had done to her, they might as well have been.
Alia’s whole body was shaking as she sat in my lap, and I felt her warm tears dripping onto my arms wrapped around her chest as she continued, “When I was little, every day was pain. Pain and fear. They said I had the devil in me. They said they had to draw the devil out from my blood. They did things to me. They hurt me.”
“I know, Alia,” I whispered, remembering the chill I had felt when I first noticed the crisscrossing scars across her back. Knowing nothing of psionics, Alia’s keepers had nevertheless learned early on that Alia couldn’t speak into their minds when she was bleeding.
“They put me in a room with no windows, Addy. Like the one I found you in. They tied me to a table, and they... they...” my sister’s telepathic voice trailed off, leaving a ghastly silence.
“They’re gone now, Alia,” I said soothingly, hugging her even tighter. “That is never going to happen to you again.”
“They hated me so much, Addy. I just wish I knew why.”
So that was why Alia wanted to know about the Slayers. A mere seventeen days in Slayer captivity had nearly killed me. Alia had to survive her psychotic keepers for years.
“I wish there was always a reason why people hate,” I said sadly. “If there was a fair reason, maybe something could be done.”
My sister didn’t reply. I kept my arms around her, gently rocking her back and forth on my lap. She was still dripping tears, but a little less than before, and she wasn’t shaking so badly either.
I knew that the only reason Cindy hadn’t yet told Alia that her “parents” were really her abductors was that Cindy didn’t want to open up an old wound by discussing Alia’s past with her, at least until Alia was old enough. My sister still wasn’t quite ten years old, but Cindy herself had admitted that “old enough” was a debatable point. And since Alia had brought the subject of her parents up herself, I decided to go ahead and tell her.
“The people who hurt you weren’t your parents, Alia,” I said quietly.
Alia remained silent, and I continued, “Cindy told me, and she was going to tell you too, someday when you were ready to talk about it. The people you called your parents weren’t your parents. Your real parents loved you very much. The people who hurt you had taken you from them when you were just a baby.”
“But... why?” asked Alia in a tiny voice.
“Your real parents were psionics,” I explained. “Your keepers claimed they had rescued you from your ‘demonic’ parents. Your keepers weren’t Slayers, but just as bad. They believed that anyone who could do the things we can do must have the devil in them.”
“They said they would cure me of my evil.”
“Which goes to show how little they understo
od you,” I said, and then added firmly, “Don’t you ever think of them as your parents again, Alia, because they’re not. They never were.”
I felt Alia nod slowly and wipe her eyes. “They’re not my parents,” she said quietly.
“They’re not,” I repeated.
“They’re not,” Alia said again in a resolute tone, breathing deeply. She wasn’t shaking anymore, and I breathed easier too.
Alia asked hesitantly, “Addy, where are my real parents?”
“I’m sorry, but we don’t know,” I said. “If someday we find out, we’ll make sure you get to meet them. But for now, I think Cindy is as good a mother as anyone can hope for.”
“Cindy found me in the woods,” Alia said in a hushed voice. “She saved my life, but I didn’t trust her for a long time. I didn’t talk to her. It was like everything was dark around me and... and I didn’t want her to hate me. When I started living with her, I was like an animal. I just ate and slept.”
“You had been treated like an animal. That’s only normal, Alia,” I said. Then I smiled, saying, “Look at you now. You’re going to be ten years old in a few weeks. You’re a healer, and the youngest-ever Guardian Knight. You can go outside. You can talk, and swim, and ride a bike. You helped us escape from that terrible underground place. You helped Terry and me rescue Cindy. You’re not afraid of anything, Alia. Cindy loves you very much, and so do I. I don’t know how I would have survived your keepers if I had been you, but I’m glad you did. And I hope we find your family someday.”
Alia rested the back of her head against my chest, saying softly, “You are my family, Addy. You and Cindy. And Terry if she ever comes back.”
“And Mark,” I added, relieved that Alia sounded so at peace.
“And Mark,” agreed Alia. “And Cat when you find her. And Laila when you two get married.”
“Alia!” I said warningly, and suddenly my sister laughed. It was her first real laugh in weeks, and I wished Cindy could hear it too.
“Come on, Ali. I’m sure it’s past your bedtime by now,” I said, picking her up and carrying her over to her bed.
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