Paradox - Progeny Of Innocence (bk2) (Paradox series) (8 page)

The eagle screeched, and glided down gracefully on outstretched wings to seek shelter from the rain on the branch of a tall tree. The very same tree he had chosen every year when it inevitably had begun to rain.

The rain came down ever so lightly at first. Grace turned her face slowly skyward and let the raindrops run freely down her face.

Grace did not notice the dark silhouette of a man, concealed by the dense tree line bordering the cemetery, watching her. She never did. However, every year he was standing there, watching over her.

An hour later, clothing drenched and wet tendrils plastered to her face; Grace climbed back into Wade’s car. Neither of them had spoken on the fifteen-minute drive home. There wasn’t anything that needed saying; he had never known her father.

Wade was the first to break the silence as he pulled up outside the house. "I have a few errands to run. Do you need anything while I’m out?"

"No, I’m good." Grace replied hopping down out of the car.

"Well just call me if you think of anything, okay?"

"Sure thing, thanks, Wade. But I think I’m just going to go change into some dry clothes and lie down for awhile."

"Okay, Kiddo… but remember…"

"Yeah, I know, call if I want anything." She closed the door and waved.

Wade smiled. "Right," he said, nodding his head. Then he slowly pulled the car out into the tree-lined street and drove away.

Grace hurried to her bedroom and changed into dry clothes. Then she sat down on her bed, sliding her hand under the mattress to retrieve her journal from its secret hiding place. She opened the book and buried her face in its pages. She closed her eyes and drew in a long, deep breath, savoring the familiar scent of the pages. She held her breath and let the spellbinding smell of the old papyrus pages draw her inward. Then back, back, back. Back to another time that was always just out of her grasp. Visions hovered tantalizingly in her mind for just an instant before vaporizing into nothingness.

Only a name remained. Juliette. And she asked the question she had asked herself a million times before. "Who is Juliette, and why am I reliving these lives over and over again?"

She doesn’t have the answer to that question yet, but I do. For I am JULIETTE.

She flicked through the dog-eared pages and paused at a picture with a date scrawled across the bottom. July 19. It was a photograph of Grace and her father Brian, taken on her 11th birthday.

Her father had given her the gold eagle pendant that she held absently between her lips. She ran her fingers gently over the bright light hovering beside her in the photograph. A reflection from the flash, her mother had said. However, Grace had known better. Those glowing lights captured in her childhood photographs were reminders of her friend, Hope. Those, and the white feather she had found on her bedroom floor the day of her father’s funeral.

She ran her fingertips down the delicate soft spine, remembering. She absently began singing the melody from her jewelry box; somewhere, over the rainbow, blue birds fly... She quickly sat up and reached for the box sitting on her bedside table and turned the key at the bottom until she could turn it no more. Then she placed it back down, opened the lid and watched for a moment as the tiny ballet dancer with her arms stretched high above her head twirled around and around. Slowly, slowly the little ballet dancer began to wind down, and stopped, her arms stretched above her head, her eyes fixed, as though frozen in time. Grace’s eyes brimmed with tears that did not fall. She let out a heavy sigh, gently closed the lid, and returned to her journal. She turned another page and stopped.

Movie butts were taped on the page from the day her father had taken her to the movies. They had gone to see ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King’.

Afterwards she had dressed up for hours and pretended to be Galadriel the golden haired Noldorin princess, daughter of Finarfin. Hope was her faithful sidekick as they fought side by side to slay their ferocious enemy. They had always been victorious in their various battles to save Middle-earth. Brian had made her a timber sword and she had used the lid of a plastic garbage bin as her shield. She had painted a giant eagle on the black plastic in gold paint, and told her father that the golden eagle would protect her.

It is a shame that real life events very rarely portray the grandiose victories personified in fiction.

Little did Grace know that her childhood battles were educating her in the artistry of war, preparing her for the formidable opponent that was lurking in the murky shadows … waiting.

She turned the page to another photograph. The photograph had been taken at Brian’s last birthday party, around the small kitchen table. It was also the last photograph of the three of them together as a family, a picture of Brian, Kate, and Grace, and the bright light that hovered persistently over Grace’s shoulder.

When Grace closed her eyes, she could still taste the chocolate frosting from the cake she and Kate had baked for Brian.

Grace had helped her father blow out his birthday candles. Ready, Grace, on three, he had said, and she blew as hard as she could.

Today, however, she wrote carefully on the coarse ivory pages. No rushed words or scribbled drawings. Today, she was writing a letter to her father, just as she did every year at this time. Today was a Wednesday. Wednesday the 22nd of April 2009. Her father had died five years ago on this day.

She ran her hand over a photograph, willing her father to come to life under her fingers. Tears, too many to hold back, eased their path down her cheeks and onto the pages. She sniffed, and brushed them away with her fingertips, smudging some of the words on the page.

Next to the photograph of her father was stuck a small, clear plastic bag. It held dried, faded rose petals from the rose she had plucked from Brian’s coffin, just moments before it had disappeared out of her reach into the dark muddy hole that had swallowed her father up whole that day. She remembered how she had hated to think about her father lying down there in that dark deep hole in the earth, cold and all alone, restrained for eternity in a satin-lined timber box. She still did. Goosebumps made their shivery way up her arms and she gulped down a choking sob. "Oh, Dad, why can’t you still be here? I miss you so much." She turned another page.

There were curls of her father's brown hair that she had retrieved from his hairbrush after he had died. They had been lovingly stashed in there too, for safekeeping.

She had told Angela once that she wanted to be prepared, just in case the documentaries she had seen on television about human cloning became a viable option in the future. You never know, she had said to Angela, wistfully. Angela had just smiled and nodded and said, yes, you never know.

Grace categorizes her life in two distinctly different parts. Part one, before her father’s death. And part two, after her father’s death. People do this, I have learned. People who have had significant events change their lives forever.
For Grace, for now, it is before her father’s death and after her father’s death that define her
, define the light and the dark, the good and the evil.

She slowly closed the journal and traced her fingers along the gold letters on the cover that spelt her name. She brushed her tears away and replaced the leather-bound journal beneath the mattress, where it would stay concealed for another day.

She doesn’t know why she stows the journal secretly away. But I do.

I know why certain smells, particular sounds, tastes, and images can send her spiraling down into her bottomless black hole to hell. And why at other times the same provocations can fill her entire being with unequivocal joy.

"How did I get here?" Grace asked as she sat slouched at the kitchen table dressed ready for another day at high school. She was spinning a piece of half-eaten toast around on the plate in front of her with her finger, a remnant of her breakfast. She peered at Angela sitting opposite her at the kitchen table; Angela almost always had an answer before she had finished asking the question.

She frowned when no answer was forthcoming, and she was greeted instead by silence and the top of Angela’s head. She studied a blob of Vegemite on the end of her index finger. Vegemite, she realized, was the identical color to Angela’s satiny black hair, a stark contrast to her pale skin.

Grace continued to mull over the persistent questions that had taken up permanent residence in her head. How did I get here? Why am I here? Why are they trying to kill me? There were a growing list of other questions - who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Why am I here? Why am I here? Why am I here? Who is Juliette? Who is Juliette? Who is Juliette? Grace shook the relentless questions from her mind. Sometimes she felt like she was going to go crazy.

Angela’s head, as usual, was hidden in what Grace considered another dreary textbook. Angela’s lack of interest in the topics that most sixteen-year-old girls immersed themselves in continued to bemuse Grace, but not as much as it once had. She had eventually accepted the array of oddities that personified Angela. Like her headstrong eagerness for acquiring knowledge in the most profound subjects imaginable. But regardless of Angela’s many oddities, Grace was drawn to the girl like a moth to a flame. She was both entranced and calmed by the soothing presence that radiated from Angela’s tiny elf-like frame.

If Grace was Yin, Angela was undeniably Yang. Together they seemed to balance each other out perfectly, and Grace’s life desperately needed a good measure of balance.

Angela’s head snapped up to peer at Grace over the rim of her book. She wondered if she should continue reading or indulge Grace with an answer? She mulled over the short list of options in her head.

One: To answer Grace, which she figured would be a total waste of time, considering Grace’s current state of mind. Nothing more than unorganized chaos bouncing off the walls of her skull, she surmised.

Or two: Simply ignore Grace, and continue reading.

Angela sighed then lowered her book gently on the table in front of her; she was finding it hard to read anyway, with the constant flow of random thoughts that were flowing endlessly from Grace’s mind on fast-forward, rewind, fast-forward. Her thoughts were almost always in a perpetual state of disorganization now. The right angular gyrus of her brain was randomly misfiring, and was spitting out tangled thoughts and images like a blender on high-speed without the lid on. She was becoming increasingly more difficult for Angela to read, contain, control. She knew that anyone else having to exist in this perpetual state of mind would have required copious amounts of medication to sustain any kind of rational human behavior. In fact, anyone else in this state would be bound up in a straitjacket by now and deposited into the nearest mental institution. Angela squirmed in her seat, then sat up straight and concentrated firmly on Grace.

Grace’s mind did a sudden u-turn and then ground to a sudden halt. She began to think about how fast the last five years had gone, since her father’s death. Since Wade, Angela, Josh, and - a dog yapped noisily at her feet, insistent on acknowledgment. It was Angela’s small bundle of white fluff and unfailing companion, Champsie, the West Highland terrier. Grace, as though understanding his demand, reached down and ruffled the fur on the top of his head. "Yes, and you too, Champsie."

"Well," Angela began, trying to defuse the situation. "You walked down the hall-" Angela stopped speaking. Was she wasting her time, she wondered? It appeared that Grace had already moved on temporarily from that particular line of thought. Perhaps this was nothing more than just another one of Grace’s rhetorical questions? Maybe I should just go back to my reading, less painful for both of us, Angela thought, reaching for her book.

Grace frowned. "Noooo, I don’t mean how did I get here? I know that. I mean… me, this life..." Grace pulled herself up straight in her chair and continued. "I see this beautiful place but there’s smoke everywhere, and there’s a girl and she’s me, but she isn’t me and she’s... Oh, I don’t know what I mean!" Grace slumped back in her seat and rubbed her hand over her forehead in complete frustration. Then with more enthusiasm she began again. "Everyone’s running, there’s a fire, I’m, I mean the girl, she’s crying… there is this woman, with dark hair. She is wearing colorful silk robes; she’s a goddess or something. Then I’m lying on the floor and I’m…" Grace couldn’t say the word. She didn’t know why, she had experienced so many deaths in her dreams that one more shouldn’t make any difference. But somehow it did. In this dream it felt different.

Dead, Angela thought, but she kept that answer to herself. "Oh," Angela said, closing the book she had been reading, titled ‘
Human Ascent,
’ by Henry Gobus. Was Grace starting to remember, she wondered? She frowned. It was too early; Grace was not prepared…. None of them was prepared for what was coming. The diversity of natural disasters occurring across the world was just a hint of what was to come. There were still so many missing pieces that were paramount to any hope for attaining success. Grace pointed at the pile of books Angela had piled up in front of her. "I just thought that with all that stuff you read that you just might have figured out the answers by now."

"I do have answers." Angela replied quickly with an indignant look on her face. But you’re not ready for those answers yet, she thought silently to herself.

"You don’t have all the answers." Grace persisted, tilting her head and taking a bite out of the cold piece of toast she had all but abandoned on her plate. She washed it down with a sip of cold coffee and screwed up her nose.

"About how you got here?" Angela asked, raising her eyebrows. And to herself, Oh, if only you knew…

"No. Not that. This morning I asked you if these jeans made my bum look big, and you didn’t have an answer for that."

"Oh good Gods," Angela moaned, reaching for the sanctity of her book.

The coffee tearing through Grace’s nervous system was not proving conducive to Angela’s usual razor-sharp abilities. For the sake of the Ancients, Grace, Angela thought excruciatingly. Focus, focus, focus, or we are all doomed!

Grace had known that asking Angela’s opinion about clothes or anything pertaining to the realms of fashion would be a futile exercise. She knew the question would pain Angela, and make her frown in that particular way that equally puzzled and amused Grace.

Grace smiled and tilted her head at her friend and thought, if I asked you how far the earth is from the sun, you would know the answer to that wouldn’t you?

Angela, in an almost inaudible whisper said, "Approximately one hundred and fifty million kilom-"

"How do you do that?" Grace asked in complete awe.

It didn’t matter how many times Angela had answered one of Grace’s unspoken thoughts; she was always completely stunned by Angela’s response.

Angela’s frown deepened as she picked up something else from Grace’s renewed burst of random thoughts. "This is about that Draco boy, isn’t it?" she said, studying Grace’s face intently.

"No! Grace stammered. "Well, maybe… yes," she admitted reluctantly. There really was no point denying anything to Angela.

Angela just looked at her. "It is; I know it is. A person doesn’t have to be a mind reader to work that one out, Grace. You have been gawking at him ever since he arrived at school. Most of the girls are infatuated with him. Even Jeremy Smits appears to be hopelessly besotted. The poor boy nearly fell off his seat yesterday in History when Damon stalked into class."

"Oh yes, that was funny," Grace said, grinning and popping the last piece of the toast in her mouth. However, inwardly her heart faltered. She knew exactly how poor Jeremy felt: insignificant, and completely unworthy of the attention of the likes of Damon Draco.

Grace was, in fact, undeniably infatuated with Damon and his brooding good looks. There really was no denying that, she knew it was only a matter of time before Angela picked up on her feelings toward him. She wondered if Angela understood her feelings for Damon any better than she did.

Angela was still frowning at her painfully.

Grace squirmed in her chair and gulped down the remainder of her coffee. "You know, Angela. All that frowning isn’t doing your complexion any good. You'll get wrinkles. And I haven’t been gawking at him," Grace insisted. "Well, maybe just a little bit," she conceded, splaying her fingers. "But can you blame me? He’s gorgeous. He’s walking candy, a God."

"Candy rots your teeth, and the Gods have far more important things to do than reincarnate into the likes of Damon Draco," Angela muttered, frustrated by the lack of a better response.

"Anyway, so what if I was staring, he-"

"He isn’t for you. He's trouble," Angela said, finishing Grace’s sentence for her.

"How can you say that about him, he’s only been at the school for what, two weeks and-"

"Oh, I just know, Grace, okay?" Angela said. "You really have to trust me on this."

Perhaps Angela was right, Grace thought regretfully. Maybe she was being completely delusional about the feelings she was having for Damon Draco. She had never even really spoken to him. So how could what she was feeling for him be real? Grace let out a painful groan. An overwhelming sadness swept through her, hurting her as if Angela’s words had punched her hard in the stomach and knocked the wind out of her, knocking all hope out of her that maybe Damon was the one. The mysterious boy that came to her in her dreams at night. She wanted so badly for Angela to be wrong about Damon.

Please, please, please, let Angela be wrong. Grace thought to herself, pleading with a God that she wasn’t sure still existed, or in fact, ever had.

"How does that saying go, never trust anyone who says 'trust me'?" a boy in a pair of checked boxer shorts and a white singlet said as he flopped down at the kitchen table opposite Grace and Angela.

"Damon Draco," Angela said abruptly. "I was just telling Grace that he can’t be trusted."

"Oh, trust me, Grace. Angela is right about that guy. You can’t trust him," he said, echoing Angela’s words. "Anyone else want a coffee?" he asked, rubbing Champsie on the stomach with his foot.

"Yeah, I’ll have another one," Grace said, handing him her empty mug.

Oh great, Angela thought to herself. That's just what she needs - more caffeine buzzing through her veins. She let out a sigh, then gave Zach a swift kick under the table.

"Ouch! Zach yelped at Angela, dragging himself off the chair and rubbing his ankle. "What the hell was that for?"

"I’ll just have another glass of tap water, please, Zach," Angela said, smiling innocently.

"Yeah right, all you had to do was ask," he mumbled, limping into the kitchen.

Angela rolled her eyes at his theatrical performance. She knew she hadn’t actually hurt him, that his performance had been orchestrated for Grace’s benefit.

"You missed your calling, Zach," Angela muttered.

Grace watched as Zach limped into the kitchen. "Calling, what do you mean he missed his calling?" Grace asked pulling her eyes away from the limping boy.

"Zach," Angela replied. "He missed his calling. He should have been an actor, or a court jester, conjuring up a host of tricks for an unsuspecting audience."

"Yeah," Zach replied eagerly. "I would have done all my own magic tricks, too." He threw Grace’s mug high up into the air where it appeared to just hang in midair as he did a back flip then caught the twirling mug as it began to fall. He caught it just seconds before the mug had a chance to smash on the floor.

"Oh my God, Zach, that was amazing. How did you do that? Do it again," Grace said, standing up and clapping her hands excitedly.

Champsie ran around in circles at Grace’s feet and yapped, applauding Zach’s clever ability.

"Hush, Champsie," Angela demanded, pointing at the dog. The dog snapped his mouth shut and sank to the floor with a whimper.

Zach took a bow. "I think not, Miss Grace, one performance per day is quite sufficient."