Paradox - Progeny Of Innocence (bk2) (Paradox series) (17 page)

"Well who, then?" Theria asked, lowering her voice as a group of students wandered by.

"Beats me," Caleb said, shrugging his shoulders. "But we'd better find out who, and soon."

"Yes," Theria agreed. "We don't need a rogue outsider blowing our cover. I already have enough problems with you…"

Caleb smirked then opened his mouth with the intentions of protesting, but the buzzing phone in his pocket interrupted his thoughts. "And that will be my meal ticket calling now," he said, ignoring the buzzing phone.

"You're not going to answer it?" Theria asked.

Caleb grinned, raised his hands then swung an arm around Theria's shoulders. "Treat them mean, keep them keen. That's my motto. Come on," he said, leading her away. "Let's blow this joint. A stray shouldn't be too hard to hunt down. And we haven't shared a meal in a while." He tilted his head, and not feeling Lyssa whereabouts, pulled his mobile from his pocket dialed her number. "Lyssa, sweetheart," he drawled. "Care to join Theria and me for a quick meal?" He nodded and then hung up. "She'll meet us in the car park in five minutes," he said, pocketing his phone.

Lyssa looked at her reflection in the mirror and wiped the blood off her chin. Then she turned on the tap and washed her hands clean. She turned around and leaned on the hand basin, and looked at Cindy and Emily standing motionless against the back wall, their shirts pulled down exposing their left shoulder blades. Both girls bore matching bite marks, and two carefully concealed puncture marks.

"Well, this has been fun, girls. I'm so glad we're friends. However, let's just keep this between the three of us," she said, smiling. "Now fix yourselves up," she said as she helped Emily button up her shirt and kissed the girl tenderly on the cheek. "I have a lunch appointment that I really don’t want to miss." She wiped a tear off Cindy's cheek. "Don’t worry, Caleb will forgive your little spat and will call you in no time. Oh, and the virginity thing, overrated, trust me. And Caleb, well, he can be such an arse at times... but what a lay! Now, you both remember our agreement? When I leave here, you won't remember me being here, just Emily comforting you after your little tiff with Caleb." Lyssa clasped her hands together. "Right, I'm out of here," and with that, she spun around, pulled the chair away from the bathroom door, and pushed her way through a small group of girls waiting to use the bathroom. She shook her head. "What can I say? Someone in there isn't coping very well after a lovers' spat with their boyfriend." She feigned a remorseful sigh, then sauntered off down the hall, her lips curled in a conceited smirk as a heady rush of contentment coursed through her blackened veins. She had learnt a long time ago that certain abilities were better kept hidden. Trust no one, her father had told her, and she had listened.

Five minutes later, she relaxed in the back seat of Caleb's car. Theria sat in the front next to Caleb. "So, what have you been up to in your absence, Lyssa?" Caleb asked glancing at her reflection in the rear-view mirror. Her face was serene, disclosing nothing to Caleb's watchful eye.

"Nothing of importance. Where are we off to, anyway?" Lyssa asked, twirling a strand of her glossy, obsidian-black hair between her fingers.

Ambrosia sat cross-legged on the sofa, waggling her foot as she marked the latest history assignments from her students. She had her long, dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, and a pen dangled out of her mouth as she turned the pages. She took a quick glance at her watch. Gary was late. She wondered if it was another one of those freakish accidents that he had been called out to investigate, that were becoming more frequent in the last few months.

She thought about Adam. She hadn’t liked him very much. Adam was one of those slimy guys that undressed you with his eyes every opportunity he got. He really creeps me out, Ambrosia had said to Gary when Adam had gone missing, the day before his body had been found. But he didn’t deserve to die the way he did, she had said when Gary had told her how Adam had died. She wondered what had made him do something like that, hanging himself. Money problems perhaps? A woman maybe? No one had any clue as to what had driven Adam to do such a thing. However, everyone agreed that he had been strange and withdrawn in the days leading up to his death.

His body had been found by a woman in the dense bush, looking for nesting logs for her parrots. She had discovered his body hanging from a tree in the bushland surrounding the old East Point Military Museum. However, the strangest part about Adam's death wasn’t his suicide, but the fact that his body had been covered in a multitude of bite marks, and sets of puncture marks that had been made by an unknown instrument. There were so many wounds that would have been impossible for Adam to inflict upon himself. And it was those facts, Ambrosia knew, that had not been reported in the media.

Obviously, Adam hadn’t been very popular with the students either. For as soon as his death had made the news, a fresh wave of stories about the legendary Poinciana Woman resurfaced and were being spread enthusiastically around the school, giving added credence to the so-called legend about the woman who supposedly haunted the old Museum. Each retelling of the story had been more horrific than the last. She had tried to put a stop to all the gossip with the help of the student counselor, but nothing seemed to work. Most of the students were thriving on the recent events, and the stories were escalating rather than abating. This was the most exciting event that had happened in their lives in months. A few students had gone to see Siena, the guidance counselor. However, she had certainly not been rushed off her feet by a grieving contingent of students. Most, in fact, had used Adam's death as an excuse to take time off school.

She knew the legend was nonsense, but something about the stories sent a violent shudder down her spine. Although it was hot, goosebumps still managed to prickle their way up Ambrosia’s arms and make the tiny hairs on the nape of her neck stand on end. She rubbed them briskly away.

She didn’t want to think about the legend, or any of the other stories that Gary had told her about recently. Stories like that always made her shiver on the inside, as if her skin had been turned inside out. It unnerved her, and took all her strength to control the buildup of energy that threatened to erupt if she thought about them too much. She remembered how dangerous it could be. How dangerous she could be, if she let her emotions take control of her. How innocent people could get hurt. So she never spoke about any of it. Not even with Gary.

Ambrosia tried to think about something else, something nice, so she thought about Gary. She thought about the flowers he would bring her, just as he did every Saturday night without fail, and smiled. She thought about the Gary who had rescued her from the street when she was just a teenager. And the Gary who had stayed with her when her parents had died, how he had stayed with her until she was capable of taking care of herself again.

She thought about the night they would spend, curled up on the sofa together to watch a movie and eat popcorn and ice cream. It was her favorite way to spend a quiet Saturday evening at home. Then she remembered. It was Gary’s turn to pick the movie, so she would probably spend most of the night nervously chewing her fingernails with her head buried in his chest. Gary always chose movies with lots of blood, which surprised her. Surely he saw enough of that at work. She took another glance at her watch. She would close her eyes for just a moment, she told herself. Five minutes later, Ambrosia was sound asleep and dreaming about Gary.

* * *

There was only one thing Ambrosia Raphael loved more than teaching her history students, and that was Gary Summers. He was her knight in shining armor, her real life hero. He was the first person she thought about when she opened her eyes each morning and the last person she thought about when she closed them and fell asleep at night. He was her reason, her season, her lifetime. The reason her heart missed a beat when he cupped her face in his hands and kissed her tenderly on the lips. Somehow, somewhere, a very long time ago, Ambrosia knew that their souls had been so lovingly woven together that they had almost been one. He was her soul mate.

Gary was handsome, with sandy blond hair, and had an incredibly infectious smile. When he smiled, his whole face lit up, making you want to smile, too. At thirty-four years of age, Gary was seven years older than Ambrosia. He had fallen in love with her the second he had laid eyes on her. His destiny had been sealed a very long time ago, and from that moment on, he knew that his heart would belong to Ambrosia always.

The heart remembers what the heart has so dearly loved before. And neither the inconceivable distance nor the vast passage of time that separates would succeed in persuading his heart to believe otherwise.

I ponder on that for a moment, about how the heart remembers. Then I quickly push the thoughts away. Not now, I tell myself firmly. Maybe not ever. I have a larger, more important role to play. But still, whenever I hear Grace, or more recently Damon, murmur my name … it is difficult not to listen, not to feel, not to remember and not think, what if?

But alas, I digress.

When Ambrosia was seventeen, she would spend hours daydreaming about the day she would become Mrs Ambrosia Raphael-Summers. She had torn a picture of a wedding gown out of a magazine, and kept it hidden in the top drawer beneath her t-shirts.

At twenty-seven, although it was dog-eared and creased from continual folding and unfolding, she still had the picture hidden away in her top drawer. Occasionally she would retrieve the picture, sit herself down on the end of her bed, and scrutinize the picture in great detail. She would imagine herself wearing the shiny satin and lace gown with the white net veil that would hide her face. She would close her eyes and imagine the moment that Gary would lift the veil slowly from her face, the moment he would gently kiss her. She had memorized and imagined the moment a thousand times. Then she would refold the picture, and return it to her hiding place.

Gary hadn’t proposed yet, but she knew it was only a matter of time before he did. They had talked about marriage and about the family that they would start trying for as soon as they had enough money saved for a nice house somewhere in the suburbs. A home that was safe and loving for their children to come home to every day after school. Something she had never felt growing up in the foster system.

* * *

When Ambrosia was five years old, she had been found wandering along a long deserted highway, alone and disoriented. She had been wearing a torn floral dress that fell just below her grubby knees. She wore one shoe on her muddy feet, and had a bloodied gash across her forehead. No one could determine how long she had been wandering alone before she was picked up near the Queensland and Northern Territory border by an old farming couple on their way into town for supplies. She had no identification and no memory of who she was, or what had happened to her or her parents. No one had ever come forward for her, and there was never a report made for a missing infant matching her description.

The head nurse, a young dark-skinned woman at the remote nursing clinic that had tended to her injuries, gave her the name Ambrosia X, and the birth date 11th of August 1982: the name and date of the stillborn child she had delivered five years earlier.

Ambrosia was bathed, fed, and then handed over to the Department of Health and Community Services, then into Foster Care, where she was eventually placed with a family. Ambrosia did not fare well with this arrangement. Nightmares haunted her in her sleeping hours, and the foster fathers and brothers groped at her during her waking hours. The foster mothers and sisters shunned her. And within months, she would be moved on to yet another foster family where the appalling ordeal would begin all over again. She was always very happy to learn that she was going to be relocated to a different foster family, and believed whole-heartedly that her new family would be nicer than the previous one. They had to be. But they never were.

Eventually, a young police officer had rescued Ambrosia from a gang of youths that had found her sleeping in an alleyway, where they were upending her backpack and emptying all her belongings onto the pavement. She had been fifteen then, and had run away from her most recent foster brother, Andrew, and his family.

* * *

"Let go of me," she had screamed at Andrew, as she struggled free from his probing fingers with an unyielding strength that she had not known she possessed, the kind of strength that sleeps dormant in a dark pit within your core until something breaks, and the restless soul can be silenced and stilled no more.

Ambrosia screamed, pushed, and scratched at Andrew. "Get out of my room…and leave. Me. Alone! I detest you!" she yelled. Then she shoved the palms of her hands hard on his heaving chest.

The boy sailed through the open bedroom doorway and slammed hard into the adjacent wall, before collapsing to the floor in a misshapen heap. A framed portrait of his family wobbled, then fell off the wall, dropped into his lap, and smashed on the floor beside him.

"I’m telling Mom and Dad you did this, you bitch," he wailed, jabbing his finger in the air at Ambrosia, "just as soon as they get home." He winced, and then started to sob when he tried to push himself up off the floor with his arm. He looked down wide-eyed toward the searing pain that tore through his arm. "Jesus Christ, look at what you’ve done," he wailed, staring at an ivory-colored bone that poked grotesquely out of the gash in his arm.

"Good, I want you to tell them I did this... you weasel," Ambrosia shouted, slamming the door shut in his face. The pounding sound of his one good fist on the timber door exploded in her eardrums. She quickly barricaded the door shut with a tall chest of timber drawers. The heavy piece of furniture moved effortlessly across the floor as she pushed it into position. Then she sank to the floor with her hands covering her ears, and cried. Then, just as abruptly, she stopped. She got up, wiped her face with the back of her hand, then rushed around the room, frantically shoving pieces of clothing, a book, some personal belongings and a purse containing her meager savings into a backpack, and climbed out of her bedroom window. She hesitated for a moment on the high windowsill. It was a good three-meter drop to the ground below. She tossed her backpack out first. Then she took a breath and jumped. She landed on the grassy ground without faltering, picked up her backpack, and sprinted into the starless night. She never looked back, not once. Ambrosia decided that the deserted streets and dark alleyways at night were a far safer option than the environment that she had just escaped. And for the most part, she was right.

Gary had bundled up Ambrosia, along with her paltry belongings, and taken her to the home of Sol Raphael, a retired police officer, and his wife Dina, where he knew she would be safe. The couple adored Ambrosia immediately, and as soon as the arrangements were finalized, they adopted her. They nurtured her, cherished her and encouraged Ambrosia all the way through her schooling until she finally graduated with a teacher's degree. But most of all, they had loved her unconditionally.

* * *

On the day that Ambrosia turned twenty-one, she was celebrating her birthday with a group of friends at O’Regan's Tavern for lunch. They all sat noisily along a timber table with their glasses raised, and sung happy birthday to Ambrosia.

"Speech, speech", they sang out, after Ambrosia had blown out the last of her twenty-one birthday candles.

Ambrosia pushed herself to her feet and pretended to clear her throat. She picked up her glass and tapped it with a fork. "Testing, testing," she said over the din of the noisy tavern.