Blessed (19 page)

The bedroom door opened and a bleary eyed Piper emerged. She scowled at the bathroom door when she heard the shower come on and made a left into the master bedroom instead. When she emerged a few minutes later, she had splashed some water on her face and run a brush through her hair, but she looked suddenly exhausted. Kaiser guessed it was due to being reminded that the Coopers were gone. He sighed a sad sigh for the girls and made up his mind to be there for them in every way he could for as long as he could.

He ran over to the bottom of the stairs to greet her as she came down. That act alone, an enthusiastic hello, seemed to cheer her up considerably. She scratched the top of his head as she passed by him on the way to the fridge. She grabbed some fruit and the jug of orange juice out of it and set them down on the counter so she could get a glass from the cupboard.

She saw the living room when she turned to fill it.

Her eyes nearly bugged out of her head and she ran around the island to get a better look. She stood in the entryway and surveyed the wreckage, much like Kaiser had a few minutes prior. He was suddenly thankful that Ardra was in the shower instead of standing in the middle of the large pile of ash as she had been when he’d been in Piper’s place. The poor girl would probably keel over of a heart attack right in the middle of the kitchen.

A few stunned moments later, she turned away from the messy room and he could see it in her face that she fully intended to get the full story out of Ardra. He could see in her eyes that she was convinced Ardra had gone crazy and lit the room on fire before she had arrived the night before. Never mind the fact that a fire that size would have taken the whole house. Or the fact that there wasn’t even a tiny hint of smoke in the air.

No, the thing that had caused the damage was
far
worse than any fire. There was no warning, and there was no escape. One minute you’re standing there, thinking about gas prices or making a grocery list and the next thing you know, Chaos reaches inside of you and does precisely what his name entails. Your molecules speed up, your body temperature rises, your blood cells turn against each other, and in a manner of nanoseconds; you’re a pile of cold ash on the ground waiting for the slightest breeze to come along and erase the fact that you ever existed.

He shuddered at the thought of having those slimy tentacles inside of him. He had heard through the grape vine that Chaos had, more than once, used the beast inside of him to separate information from its owner. Nobody was sure exactly how he had done it, but there was no doubt that he had.

He also had no doubt that Chaos would employ whatever tricks he had up his vile little sleeve to get to Ardra. Word had gotten out that a prophesy from as far back as anyone dead or alive could remember had been put in motion.

Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal. Prophesies were made and fulfilled all the time. This one however, concerned some mighty big powers. Neither side liked the idea of this particular prophesy being brought to fruition. However, there
were
some who lobbied to see it brought to reality. It would mean big changes in the chain of command as far as breaking the rules went. And since both sides broke the rules every chance they got, they didn’t want to run the risk of not getting away with it anymore.

Enter the “Bounty Hunters”, for lack of a better term. These were beings from both sides of the war who were sent here to search out and eradicate anyone who could have something to do with said prophesy. Chaos being the best of them all. There were others of course, but none of them even compared to him and none of them dared get in his way.

If Kaiser was right in his suspicion that Chaos was coming after Ardra, he needed to make sure she was ready. He had been around for thousands of years and had completed nearly every task his master had given him. Meaning he had been granted more power each time he had done what he was told.

He had only been known to have failed once and that had been enough. The tortures that he was submitted to due to that failure had become the stuff of legend in the circles Kaiser ran in. If it was ever spoken of, it was done so in hushed tones
far
from prying ears. The things that the master of Darkness could and
would
do to you for even talking about it were terrifying.

Pulling himself from his reverie, he followed Piper to the table where he lie down at her feet and waited for Ardra to get out of the shower. He wanted to be around when the topic came up just in case things got out of control. After seeing what had happened to the living room, he was afraid to actually hear about what had happened. If he was right about how it had gone down, Chaos himself might actually be Kaiser’s preferred cause of the mayhem.

Kaiser and Piper both turned their heads towards the stairs when they heard the bathroom door open. The sound of her bedroom door closing sent Kaiser back to relaxing on the floor and Piper back to eating her second apple.

A few minutes later, the bedroom door opened again and Ardra came down the stairs while pulling her hair up into a ponytail.

“Morning!” She chimed to all in attendance.

For the second time that day he damned their lack of a means of communication and thumped his tail on the ground in greeting. Piper, still a little shaken up, said absolutely nothing. She continued to eat her apple and waited for her friend to join her at the table.

Ardra, with her bowl of cereal and banana, joined them in due time. As she sat, Kaiser stood and relocated to a spot on the floor a few feet away so he could get a better view of them but still be close enough to intervene if things went south.

Piper started right in with, “What the
heck
happened to your living room? I mean, I know you’re upset, and you have every right to be, but I didn’t peg you as the arson type! Not to mention the type of arsonist that would light her own house on fire and then forget to tell me about it!”

A confused look crossed Ardra’s face for a moment. Then she realized that Piper had given her the perfect lie to feed right back down her throat. The arson story was
much
easier to accept than what had actually happened, so she ran with it.

“Piper, it wasn’t
me
who set the living room on fire you moron! That was only one part of my incredibly bad day yesterday. I came home from the store to a yard full of firemen spraying hoses through my front door. Sorry if I forgot to mention it, I  kinda found out that my parents were dead shortly thereafter.”

She knew the guilt would cause the other girl to drop the issue entirely. She had a backup plan ready involving a couple of the firemen being extremely good looking and flirty just in case. If guilt couldn’t deter Piper, boys were always a solid backup plan.

Ardra relaxed when Piper seemed to buy it and dropped the issue with little resistance.

With that out of the way, Ardra focused on her breakfast while Kaiser watched her carefully from the floor. No sign of Chaos was present in her soft green aura as of yet and he hoped it stayed that way for as long as possible.

The girls engaged in idle chit chat as they both finished their breakfasts.

He relaxed when everything seemed to be as normal as possible under the circumstances.

After she had rinsed her bowl, Ardra dumped a large portion of kibble into his dish. He had been trying not to make a scene with his growling stomach, but he seemed to
always
be hungry. It was especially bad in the mornings and even worse when someone was eating in the same room as him. He forgave her on the premise of her never having owned a dog before. Besides, he wasn’t the pushy type to make her go out of her way to take care of him.

Naturally, there were some things that overrode that trait, but a grumbly stomach wasn’t one of them. If it got to the point where she could play the xylophone on his rib cage, he’d probably speak up and direct her attention to it. As it stood, she wasn’t doing half bad at the whole owning a dog thing.

After he had finished eating and Piper had showered and gotten dressed, they spoke briefly about funeral arrangements. Ardra didn’t see the point in having one, but Piper insisted that it was the decent thing to do. Ardra caved after realizing that her grandmothers would insist and they headed out the door to run errands.

As she put the phone up to hear ear, calling one of her grandparents he assumed, she glanced back into the house at him from the front porch and asked, “You okay to stay here for a couple hours on your own?”

He thumped his tail on the floor to tell her that he was fine with it and she closed and locked the door. She had seemed to be in control of herself all morning, so the need to keep an eye on her had faded. The irritation at his lack of progress on the teaching field however, grew.

He really hoped that Piper would go home after they were finished.

He needed Ardra to take him home.

He needed her to start learning how she was going to save the world.

As they pulled out of the driveway Ardra thought about how strange it was that she had become the type of person that could cope with “burying” her parents. If you had asked her two weeks prior, what she would do if her parents got hit by a bus, she probably would have collapsed to the floor and cried at the mere thought of living without them. Yet here she was, sitting in the passenger seat of Piper’s car, driving to a funeral home about to make phone calls to both of her grandparents, her father’s employer, insurance companies, flower shops and close family friends without even thinking of crying.

As she trudged her way through phone calls she hadn’t planned on making for a few more decades, her mind kept wandering back to how utterly numb she was. Both of her grandmothers had bawled hysterically into the phone and began packing for a trip back to Salt Lake as soon as they had hung up the phones. The family friends had all expressed their deep concern and offered to help in any way they could. Some cried, some just listened in shock as she informed them of what had happened in her robotic, empty tone.

Even the insurance agents, funeral directors, and florists seemed to express more emotion over the death of her parents than she seemed capable of. She thought maybe she had spent her share of emotion on the issue the night before when she had terrified herself by destroying the living room. Maybe whatever it was that was inside of her was feeding off of her emotions instead of letting her have them for herself.

Maybe she was broken.

Phone call after phone call, office after office, she went about the business of arranging for her friends and family to say goodbye to a pair of empty boxes.

Piper tagged along loyally, always right at Ardra’s side ready to take over if she happened to break down in the middle of one of these, what should have been, very difficult conversations.

She was sorely disappointed when Ardra stayed strong and made it through the day like one of those terracotta warriors that they had unearthed in China. After their last meeting, she plopped down behind the steering wheel of her car, slammed the door, and turned to stare at her best friend with fire in her eyes.

“Ardra! What the hell is wrong with you! You’re freaking me out!” her best friend shouted into her face.

Ardra’s response was to raise an eyebrow.

“Yes! That! Right there! For the love of Pete,
I
have cried more than you have today! We just made arrangements to bury both of your parents! You’re supposed to be upset! You can’t lock your emotions in a little box and stash them away for use at a more convenient time!”

Ardra wanted to say,
I’m not stashing them away in that box. That box is reserved for something else and I’m pretty sure that something else is eating the emotions that you’re looking for like a tapeworm.

Instead she asked, steady and calm, “What am I supposed to do, Piper?”

“Cry! Scream! Punch me! Grind your teeth! Break something! I don’t know!” She slammed her palm into the steering wheel form emphasis before finishing. “All I know is that
nothing
is
not
what you’re supposed to be doing! It’s not healthy! The girl I have known my whole life is inside this shell
somewhere
and she doesn’t want to be sitting here like a statue! This isn’t you!”

That provoked a thought,
What if that black stuff isn’t stealing my emotions? What if it’s stealing Ardra? Wouldn’t that be something? Can a personality even
be
stolen?

“I’m sorry Piper. I guess I’m just in shock. I don’t think I’ve wrapped my head around it yet. I guess you’re never really ready to be blindsided like this, you know?”

That seemed to disarm her. The fire went out of here eyes and her face went from Amazon-Princess-Piper, to Let-Me-Feed-You-Soup-And-Draw-You-A-Warm-Bath-Piper.

Suddenly Ardra felt like a kitten trying to nurse off of her flat mother in the middle of the road and Piper had just stumbled onto the scene. It wasn’t something she liked to feel. She wasn’t vulnerable, she wasn’t broken and she wasn’t alone.