Authors: Adrian Howell
I passed him Mrs. Harding’s update.
When I finished, James threw me a wry smile and said, “So Terry had already asked Harding to set us up with the Resistance?”
I nodded. “I guess it was the first thing she asked of Harding when you two arrived here.”
“Terry never told me anything about it.”
“Yeah, she didn’t tell me either,” I said, shrugging. “You know how she is.”
“At least you were invited to Harding’s today.”
I stared at him. “You’re not… bothered by that, are you?”
“Of course not,” said James, but he refused to meet my eyes.
I grinned. “Because I would’ve happily swapped with you and stayed home with Candace.”
“I’m not jealous or anything,” said James, finally looking at me and laughing. “I was just curious what was going on up there.”
James took another round against the tower bag, and as I watched him slam his fists into the leather, I decided that he had every right to be bitter.
Back in Walnut Lane, Merlin had refused to accept James into his mind-blocking class, citing the age restriction for safe mind control. And this despite the fact that James was half a year older than me. I had been treated as a special case because of my Honorary Knight status, but James had trained harder than anyone at Walnut, and when our house was attacked, he had unhesitatingly followed me into the tear-gas-engulfed fray. Despite his comparatively few months of training, James proved himself again and again, leading the front-door team when we attacked the Angel outpost to rescue Alia, and even taking a bullet as he helped Terry and Alia through the last leg of their journey to the Historian. Yet for all of that, James wasn’t a Guardian Knight, and Mrs. Harding clearly did not see him in the same way that she saw Terry and me.
I remembered how James had apologized for not helping me out against the pair of cops that had tried to arrest Ed Regis. As far as I was concerned, there really was nothing to apologize for, but I knew from a variety of bitter experiences how maddeningly frustrating it was to feel helpless.
“Come on, James,” I said brightly. “Enough with the bag. Give me a few rounds now.”
“Sure,” said James. “It’s never fun when your opponent doesn’t hit back.”
James was certainly in the mood for a few fast and furious bouts against the living, but I wasn’t about to let him beat me. We were good friends and that would have been disrespectful even to an enemy.
“I think I preferred the bag,” groaned James when I knocked him down for the tenth time.
But I had come dangerously close to losing my winning streak on the last three rounds. Helping James up, I said, “For what it’s worth, I’d much rather you fight with me than against me.”
James asked hopefully, “You said we’re going to be here for a few weeks, right?”
“Probably.”
“Do you think Harding might agree to get someone to teach me blocking?”
“Mind blocking?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s probably a good idea,” I said. “Who knows when we’ll get another chance, and I wouldn’t mind getting some extra practice in as well.”
“Would you ask Harding for me?”
“Why don’t you call her yourself?” I suggested. “Terry and Ed Regis will probably want in too.”
“Sounds good.”
We spent an hour working out on the weights and machines, and then went another ten rounds on the mat. James did win once.
Returning to my apartment all sweaty and tired, I found Ed Regis and Alia still in the living room, though Alia had already bathed and changed into her nightclothes. Facing my sister over the coffee table, the ex-Wolf was initiating her into the world of gambling for profit: they were playing poker over a plate of small peanut-butter cookies.
“Try not to smile so much when you have a good hand, Alia,” was Ed Regis’s expert advice.
Glancing over Alia’s shoulder, I discovered that the joke was on Ed Regis. My sister had nothing but a pair of threes.
I showered, changed, and joined them until bedtime.
As we retired to our rooms for the night, I discovered that so much training on my first day in Wood-claw had taken its toll. I was yawning even more than my sister.
I heard Alia let out a little sigh as she propped her stuffed pony onto her nightstand.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Too small or not enough horns?”
Alia shook her head.
“It’s really cute, but Candace thinks I’m a little kid just like everyone else does.”
First James and now Alia!
“I don’t know about everyone else, Ali,” I said, “but I’m sure Candace doesn’t think that. Anyway, most people haven’t seen the things you have, so you can’t expect them to understand you.”
Alia shrugged.
I knew better than to suggest that there was nothing wrong with Alia staying a kid for a while longer. Instead, I telekinetically lifted the pony up from the nightstand, saying teasingly, “Hey, if you’re too grown-up for a hornless unicorn…”
“No!”
cried Alia, snatching it back.
“That’s what I thought,” I laughed.
Alia tried to look angry, but she was smiling too.
Chapter 6: The Rise of the Guardian Angels
The next few days passed uneventfully. We trained when we felt like it, rested and played around when we didn’t. But we didn’t want to take advantage of our welcome at Wood-claw, especially since we still didn’t know exactly how long we would be staying.
Thus Alia returned to her position as lead instructor for Scott and Rachael’s kiddie-combat classes while Terry agreed to help train the adult Wood-claw Knights, our own former students included. At first, James and I assisted a little too, but I wasn’t really at teaching level for real Knights, and James wasn’t even close.
Looking for other ways to help, we learned from Scott about Wood-claw’s security watch program, of which Scott was the assistant director. Wood-claw volunteers worked in shifts monitoring security cameras from an office upstairs and patrolling the neighborhood for suspicious activity. James and I couldn’t do either of these jobs unless we had our memories wiped at the end of each shift, so we proposed to do just that. Citing the age restriction, Mrs. Harding first rejected our offer, but we insisted on doing our part for Wood-claw, and Mrs. Harding eventually gave in. Scott assigned us to the security office where we spent hours staring at monitors displaying scenes in and around Wood-claw. Mr. Beryl was thorough in his work, and I can’t even remember what the inside of the security office looked like, to say nothing of what we saw through the cameras.
Ed Regis did his part for Wood-claw too – by quietly staying out of sight. Despite his formidable combat experience and the fact that he was well within the safe age range for memory modification, he was neither welcome in the training program nor in the security office. Ed Regis spent much of his time looking through the outdated psionic database he had recovered from Mrs. Harding. Though he couldn’t find anything useful in our hunt for the Divines, at least it kept him occupied. Ed Regis still trained with us privately, of course, and when Wood-claw residents occasionally found us in the gym, their reactions ranged from an about-face to a polite request for a training match with the Wolf. In non-psionic engagements, Ed Regis, like Terry, never lost.
Candace and I got a little closer but, unfortunately, a real first date was out of the question since I was trapped inside Wood-claw for the duration of my stay here. I tried hard to get some time alone with my girlfriend every day, but that wasn’t easy and more often impossible: I didn’t want to impose on Candace’s foster family, the gym was often crowded, and the time Candace spent with me over at my apartment was usually shared with my sister. Much like how it had been when I was dating Laila Brown, we were more frequently a trio rather than a duo, and our “dates” were often spent lounging around chatting and playing games. Still, my sister’s chaperoning didn’t keep Candace and me from holding hands or kissing. I knew without being told that I couldn’t allow our relationship to go much further than that anyway, but it was still a treat when we got some time to ourselves.
But then the Historian visited me in a dream one night. The little blond-haired boy stood facing me in a cold white room, flashing his baby blue eyes angrily as he said, “Do be careful not to let your primal impulses interfere with your vow, young Adrian.”
“I haven’t forgotten my vow, Historian!” I snapped at him irritably. “Don’t spy on me!”
After I woke, I couldn’t be at all sure that the Historian really had been dreamweaving to me or if my dream had been just that: a dream, perhaps triggered by my frustration over a relationship I could never hope to fulfill. It pained me to be so close to Candace and at the same time know that I had to keep her at bay. Perhaps it was for the better that my sister so frequently stuck around us and kept things from escalating.
Though Alia didn’t mention it again, I hadn’t forgotten the promise I had made to her on our first night in Wood-claw. As per Terry’s order, I did have a private and rather embarrassing talk with Candace in which I asked her to make sure that my sister got all of her girl-only issues squared away. Candace probably thought I was a spineless parent too, but she kindly agreed, and during our first week in Wood-claw, Candace invited Alia up to her apartment three times for sleepovers. These visits were blatant violations of Alia’s terms of stay, but Candace promised to make sure my sister wouldn’t need memory modification and Mrs. Harding didn’t make an issue of it. Thus, ironically, Alia ended up getting more one-on-one time with my girlfriend than I did, but at least I slept a little easier at night knowing that I would never have to talk to my sister about the damned birds and the bees.
Meanwhile, James had made his request to Mrs. Harding for a mind-blocking trainer, but this didn’t work out as planned.
Scott was our official Wood-claw liaison. For the most part, this just meant that he and Rachael were in charge of our shopping. But when Mrs. Harding turned down James’s request, Scott intervened, logically pointing out that since Mrs. Harding had already agreed to let James subject himself to regular memory alteration, there was little reason not to allow him to start his blocking training. Mrs. Harding countered that attempting to block mind control was always more dangerous than willingly accepting it, but Scott persisted, and Mrs. Harding eventually assigned one of her Knights, a delver named Mr. Hamilton, to be James’s trainer.
Delving, which was simply reading current thoughts as opposed to altering one’s memory or mental state, was considered comparatively safe to block for first-time learners. My own experience with mental blocking so far had been entirely against puppeteers, so despite the possibility that anti-delving would be a lesser challenge, I nevertheless looked forward to joining James’s classes and making sure that I could keep prying eyes out of my head.
But then our one-armed leader found out.
“Are you two insane?!” cried Terry. “You can’t let a delver teach you blocking! What if you accidentally think something important?”
“What if someday we need to block our thoughts from our enemies and we can’t?” countered James.
I nodded in agreement, adding, “We’ll just have to be careful during our lessons not to think anything we want to hide.”
“That’s a lot easier said than done, Half-head,” argued Terry. “Let’s say this Mr. Hamilton delves you and asks, ‘What’s your deepest, darkest secret?’ Do you honestly think you can keep certain off-limits thoughts from popping into your head?”
Terry was right: It wasn’t possible to control what popped into your head. Nor could we ask for a different blocking trainer without arousing suspicion. It was a choice between one risk and another, but James prudently called Mrs. Harding the next day to cancel his request, citing newfound fears about blocking under the age restriction. Mrs. Harding accepted his excuse without question. James still hoped to get his training soon, possibly if and when we joined the Resistance in Lumina.
We had arrived in Wood-claw a few days into October, and after a week and a day spent out of the sunlight, my seventeenth birthday was upon me. Last year, I had been so busy at Walnut Lane that I had actually forgotten about my birthday, and aside from the slight satisfaction of numerically catching up with James, I wasn’t all too excited about this one either. I guess that’s just the thing about birthdays: they get old after a while.
At least I was happy not having to cook dinner that night. We partied at Scott’s place again, and this time everyone came, including Susan and Heather and even a few of Alia’s students. Being across from the gym, Scott’s apartment was still the semi-official gathering place for the New Haven refugees and their friends. Deeming the crowd too large to cook for, Scott ordered out for lots of pizza while Candace, at Alia’s request, had baked two large chocolate cakes.
We ate. We talked. We sang, danced and fought. I didn’t want to be sung Happy Birthday but Candace and Alia led the chorus anyway – and more than once. Personally, I would have preferred a quieter evening, but it was nice to see everyone having a good time. When it came time to blow out the candles, however, I was in for a big surprise. We all were, actually.
They had lit seventeen long, thin candles on one of the two cakes, and I inhaled deeply to get them all in one breath. But before I could blow on the candles, half of them suddenly flickered out.
“What was that?” I said, as stunned as the crowd watching me.
After a moment of bewildered silence, Terry said in a quiet voice, “I’m not sure, but I think it was me.”
“Try it again,” suggested Rachael.
Terry looked at the remaining lit candles on the cake, carefully as if studying their weaknesses. Another puff of air blew over the chocolate frosting, and three more candles went dark.
“Congratulations,” James said to Terry. “Looks like you’re a windmaster.”
“The birth of a new psionic!” exclaimed Scott, clapping. “Happy birthday, Terry!”
There were cheers and applause for the newborn psionic, but Terry herself looked more confused than happy. I wondered how she felt about inheriting one of the primary powers of her late grandfather who she had despised so much.