“Seth,” Jupiter chastised from across the room. The tone of his voice reminded Seth that he was a Counterpart. A Warrior. And his behavior at the moment resonated in the completely inappropriate department.
Seth gave me a good natured, casual smile and then stood up straight. He held my gaze for a few moments longer, unable to tear his gaze away from mine that I could feel had just started to glow under the strain of my emotions. But which emotions were making them glow? That was a question I was afraid to get to the bottom of.
“I’m going to see if Annabelle needs any help,” I choked out, in a tightly strained voice. I broke the hold of Seth’s gaze first, hating that we already fought, that I already made things awkward for my Warrior. I sighed, frustrated with myself and flew up the servant stairs before anyone could object, or remind me what a terrible hostess I was playing. Or even worse, what a terrible Star was being.
“Please tell me that won’t be a problem with her training,” I heard Jupiter ask once I was around the corner. He almost sounded amused and I so I paused on the stairwell, recognizing that Jupiter rarely felt amused.
“That won’t be a problem with her training,” Seth spouted back word for word. The huge smile probably lighting up his face completely evident in his voice. I was sure Jupiter would be convinced that whatever he was talking about would definitely be a problem with my training. I got nervous just thinking about it.
----
After spending the majority of my day locked in my room, pretending that getting mad about pancakes was completely normal, and skipping lunch, I decided it was time to face the music…. or Seth, in this case. And I decided I should probably acknowledge that he actually did fight a battle last night. Jupiter and he had been gone most of the day getting what they could fly back with and packing the rest of it to have shipped here, but I could hear them down in the kitchen now and knew I needed to face them.
I texted Tristan on the way down the stairs, explaining that I would be a few minutes late, something he was used to and probably expecting. I hoped my Jeep would make it into town, knowing I couldn’t risk having Tristan come to my house and meet Jupiter. He texted more questions, but I ignored them. Just like I ignored the feeling in my gut warning me not to do what I was about to.
Seth sat at the kitchen table with Jupiter, going over something out of an extremely old looking, leather bound book. They peered over it with a kind of quiet reverence, and I could see a haze of dust floating around the cracked pages. Or were the pages glowing….
Seth looked up at me when I entered the kitchen and smiled. His smile was easy going and happy, but the look in his eyes seemed to be always calculating, always waiting for something to happen. He was a trained Warrior, a lesser Angel; I couldn’t expect anything else from him.
“Hey, what are you guys doing?” I peered over the table and recognized the pages of the book written in the old language. I couldn’t read it yet, but Seth seemed to have no trouble. “What is that?”
Jupiter barely spared me a glance, staring intently at the pages in front of him. His finger moved under the symbols and foreign language with seemingly exact comprehension. I wondered how Jupiter had come to learn the old language, he wasn’t a Warrior, not even a lesser Angel, and I highly doubted my kind went around to other planets teaching the sacred dialect to every species.
“It is the Alpha Hieros,” Jupiter answered blandly.
“The Sacred Beginning….” I whispered, realizing I stood in a room with one of the oldest, most sacred documents in the history of the universe. I stilled, hovering over the table and came to the realization that the pages actually were glowing. They shined with a golden hue, as if they themselves were made of light. “You can both read it?” I whispered, afraid my very breath would distort the pages.
“Seth has been…. taught to read in this language, so that after I am gone, he may interpret the text,” Jupiter explained.
“And you?” I pressed, knowing without a shadow of a doubt that this book, the history of my people, the account of the war waged between light and dark was shared only between Stars and Angels. Jupiter, no matter what his charge, shouldn’t be in possession of this book. And if it was given to him, for whatever divine purpose, then that was highly out of the ordinary.
“I was given….” Jupiter paused, looking up at me with eyes that flashed the deepest burgundy, like the color of old wine, before settling back into a muddled burnt maroon, “I was gifted with the ability to read your language, so that it would not become forgotten on this planet.”
I thought for a moment about his response, and decided that he must be telling the truth because there was no other way to learn the language than miraculous intervention. At one time, the Earth’s language mimicked that of the Angel’s that walked amongst humanity, as did every other planet created. But over time, and with the destruction of all other life throughout the entirety of space, save for Earth, the language had been forgotten by mankind, removed for the protection of its consecrated words.
The different races of Earth now held their own dialects and the written text passed down from God Himself, retreated to the heavens. Except for this book. This book was all that remained in the possession of the army that fought against the Darkness.
I stared for a moment longer as the two men leaned over the text, but when Seth’s eyes drifted back to me, I decided I needed to be polite. He was part of my world now, and it felt wrong to leave him at home while I went off to workout.
“Seth, I’m going running with one of my good friends, do you want to come?” I asked casually, leaving out the fact that my good friend was actually my best friend and he was a boy. I had no reason to, and the logical part of my brain told me Seth wouldn’t care either way, not to mention he would find out soon enough anyway. Still, a warning flared in my belly telling me this was a bad idea. “I know you are probably sore or whatever from last night, but I thought you might like to get out of the house and…. stretch your legs.”
“Are you running outside?” Seth asked, leaning forward in his chair. At least he had thrown a t-shirt on.
“No, we, uh…. we go run at the high school. There is a track above the basketball court,” I explained, smiling casually. I felt another surge of guilt, knowing I was leaving out the part where we had to break into the gym first. I hoped Seth wouldn’t have too much of a moral dilemma with the whole breaking and entering thing. I was positive it went against his angelic nature, but I reasoned that there was much worse trouble we could get into.
“That does sound nice,” Seth thought it over for a second. “You won’t mind if I tag along?”
“No, not at all!” I assured him. “It will give you a chance to meet someone else that goes to school with us.”
“And your friend can keep up with us?” Seth looked doubtful. We were supernatural beings after all, and as his eyes dropped to my long, athletic legs, I blushed thinking about our stupid supernatural future together.
“Well, yes, as long as I don’t turn all Star or anything.”
“Ok, when are we leaving?” Seth asked, standing from the table and walking backward to the basement door.
“Ten minutes, does that give you enough time?” I smiled at him again. He definitely had some Fallen in him. Maybe a distant cousin or great grandfather. His eyes danced devilishly and I was convinced no regular Warrior looked as dangerous. Warriors were lesser Angels, paired with Stars to protect the universe. They weren’t the beings that served God directly, or carried out His immediate will; Warriors were the army that protected those Angels, and the last remaining planet housing life in the universe. They were the army of heaven, waging war against the forces of evil. But despite the fact that they were trained killing machines, they were usually all goodness and light, like my dad. But Seth was more than that. Or less? No, definitely…. more. I just couldn’t put my finger on it yet.
Seth nodded and then disappeared down the basement steps. I walked into the mud room, digging a
round for my running shoes, before joining Jupiter at the table.
“It’s not a problem if we leave, is it?” I asked Jupiter, realizing maybe I should have asked for permission first.
“Why would it be?” Jupiter mumbled from his study of the text.
“I just didn’t know if I’m supposed to ask for…. permission from you,” I mumbled, embarrassed by how awkward this conversation was becoming. “I guess I don’t get your role in my life, yet.”
“I’m just a trainer,” Jupiter responded curtly, “not a babysitter. Fly to the moon for all I care, just do not, I repeat, do not engage in anymore battles until you’ve at least been trained with a sword.”
A little taken aback, I wasn’t sure if he was joking or serious, so I replied with a simple, “Will do.”
Seth joined us upstairs a few awkward, silent minutes later in just shorts and a t-shirt. The rough Nebraska winter held temperatures in the low teens today, but I knew without a doubt Seth would not even be chilly. He might have to glow a little bit to stay warm, but somehow I doubted he would care and Tristan already knew part of the truth about who I was anyway.
What Tristan didn’t know, was that he was about to get a crash course in all the rest of it.
“Do you think my car can make it into town?” I asked on our way out the kitchen door.
“That depends….” Seth studied the crumpled passenger’s side and cringed. “How far is town?”
“If I speed, like fifteen minutes….” I answered, and then wondered if speeding would help my Jeep or hurt it.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Seth decided, sticking his bottom lip out to concentrate completely on the door that seemed welded shut after last night’s impact. “If not, I can always bend it back together, right?” He tugged securely on the door handle, which abruptly ripped off the metal frame it was attached too. “Oops….” He mumbled, while tossing the damaged debris over his shoulder and prying the now loose door open. He crawled into the front seat and then had to lift the door and pull equally hard to jam the thing back into place. Not entirely sure it would hold, he gripped the arm rest tightly and decided to just hold it in place with his Warrior strength.
“Yeah, that looks about right,” I laughed, after climbing into the driver’s seat. I laughed even more when Seth started to glow with the effort to hold the heavy door against the car. “Can’t you just melt it together or something? We won’t be able to use it as an entrance or exit anymore, but I have a feeling this little darling is seeing it’s last days here on Earth.”
Seth laughed too at the solemn way I mourned my car, easily picking up on my sarcasm. Thank God he had a sense of humor! I gave him a wry smile, and turned around to back the Jeep out of the long gravel drive. Seth was still smiling at me, holding the door as casually as he could and I paused for a moment to realize how lucky I was to get Seth and his sense of humor. He seemed fun, and relatively normal, even if he ate ALL of my chocolate chip pancakes. But I had seen Warriors before so duty-driven and task-minded that the devotion of their own Star didn’t seem to have any effect on them. I knew better with Seth. Maybe the Elders had been right in having us raised on Earth, maybe it relaxed us or gave us a better perspective. I just hoped we could stay this casual for a while. A very, very, very long while.
I coaxed the Jeep to start, literally, with encouraging words and a loving tap against the steering wheel until the engine sputtered to life, protesting it’s every move. Despite the obvious fragility of the car, I thrived on excitement and adrenaline, a side-effect of being born for battle. So I naturally drove like a race car driver across the frozen gravel roads that climbed and dipped over rolling hills, the car sliding and skidding with each turn or curve in the road wildly.
After a few minutes I slowed down just a little so that Seth could admire the scenery. Even in middle of a desolate winter, the Nebraska plains stretched out under a wide open sky with nothing standing between this gravel road and the horizon. Snow covered corn fields, and patches of dense pine trees blurred in the peripheral as I raced the Jeep through the postcard countryside.
I knew these roads intimately, having grown up on them. My dad had been letting me drive since I was big enough to reach the pedals and see over the steering wheel, and on Tristan’s farm I had grown up driving his dad’s tractors or racing Tristan and his brothers on four-wheelers. This land was my home. I gunned the engine, whispering sweet encouragement to the groaning Jeep until just seconds before I needed to turn, then I would expertly pump the brakes until I rounded the country roads with the skill of a NASCAR driver, staying just out of danger, but flirting with the slippery edge none the less.
Why I couldn’t do that in the middle of a night with a deer standing in the road was beyond me. But everything felt clearer in the light of day.
After fifteen minutes exactly, we came upon what seemed to be the edge of town, until after passing a bank, we turned right, drove two blocks and turned into the high school. Seth looked around at all the empty space, even beyond the vacant parking lot and I watched as he realized this wasn’t the outskirts of town, this was the town.
Welcome to Mead, Nebraska; population 571.
Tristan’s truck sat idling near the school building and when I shut off my Jeep, so did Tristan. I gave Seth a quick glance and reassuring smile, before jumping from my car and racing across the parking lot. I didn’t stop to make sure Seth followed me, although I hoped he did, but my eyes were glued on one thing and one thing only.
Tristan Shields stepped out of his white ’98 Chevy Silverado and ran a hand over his closely shaved head. His full lips twisted upward on one side and then his arms opened for the most important girl in his life: me.
I crashed into him with my lightning speed and threw my arms around his neck. I wasn’t sure when we started this tradition, but for as long as I could remember I always ran to Tristan’s arms, even if I just saw him twelve hours ago, even if there was someone else watching.
Tristan reciprocated the hug, holding me close to his body. I was warm, hot even, despite the bitter cold of the day. He dipped his head, so that his face rested in the curve of my neck and I shivered from the tickling breath that danced across her skin.
“Who’s your friend?” Tristan mumbled, lifting his eyes to meet the Angel Warrior standing behind me.
I cleared my throat, saying a quick prayer that the two most significant boys in my life would become best friends too and turned around to Seth. “Tristan, this is Seth. He’s…. he’s my Counterpart.”
Chapter Four
“Nice to meet you, Seth,” Tristan stepped around me, releasing me immediately from his hold and stuck out his hand for the Angel Warrior standing in front of him. “So you’ll be…. uh…. taking care of my girl, is that right?”
I cringed noticing the little possession Tristan let slip into his phrasing. I had explained the whole super-natural relationship thing to him before, but I had also explained how we weren’t supposed to meet for years yet. Maybe I should have warned him that I was bringing Seth….
“Your girl, huh?” Seth shot me a sideways glance before shaking Tristan’s hand. The two boys did their best version of a passive-aggressive manly handshake before taking a step back to size one another up.
I twirled the end of a lose hair tightly around my fingertip nervously. I cut off the blood flow and the tip of my pointer bulged red before I realized it and let the hair go. This wasn’t going quite how I had imagined it should. For some reason I wasn’t picking up the vibe that they would be immediate and life-long best friends.
“So, are you two a…. thing?” Seth asked, his eyes narrowing infinitesimally. I bristled a little at the question, right now the only right he had with me was to protect me from everything evil; a human boyfriend, whether acceptable to the Elders or not, was technically none of his business. Still, it wasn’t like Tristan was just any regular person…. I mean, with every muscle on his body cut to perfection, his tall, lanky frame and his breath-ta
king smile I knew he could be intimidating. Although Seth was an actual Angel…. no reason to have a superiority complex.
“If by thing, you mean best friends, then yes, we are. Tristan is more like my brother than anything else,” I explained lightly, grabbing onto Tristan’s bicep and shaking it playfully. I looked up at Tristan, craning my neck so I could see him clearly expecting a reassuring smile, the same smile I got every time I explained we were not a couple, but this time the only expression I got in return was a clenched jaw and narrowed eyes.
“So why are you here?” Tristan asked bluntly. “I thought you weren’t supposed to meet until you both turned twenty-five or something?”
“Oh, that’s what I have to talk to you about!” I rushed forward into the conversation, hoping the severity of my situation would distract both boys from whatever weirdness was happening between them. “But you have to be freezing! Let’s go inside, and I’ll explain everything.”
When neither boy made an attempt to move, I decided they would follow me if I took the initiative. I led the way around the building to the back of the school where the locker rooms led out onto the football field. Finding the window that led downward into the boy’s locker room, I jimmied the lock, like I had done for years now and removed the rectangle glass from its frame. I leaned it against the building and then turned to smile at Seth and Tristan who had followed me, although by the scowls on their faces I assumed a bit reluctantly.
“I’ll go first and help you down,” Tristan volunteered. “And you too, Seth, if you need it,” he finished with a challenge.
“I doubt either Stella or I will need your help,” Seth countered, full of confidence.
Tristan faltered a little, realizing after all these years that I probably didn’t need his help. I could fly. Actually fly. Probably jumping a few feet to a cement floor wasn’t a trial for me. But he had never seemed concerned about that before and I didn’t mind if he wanted to be chivalrous.