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Chapter Nine-
We get home just before one in the afternoon, about the time we suspected it would take us and we have two and a half hours before we are supposed to be at Sarah's house for Thanksgiving dinner.
"I'm pretty sure they don't know where we are and if they did they'd be following us now."
He stays silent for a second before responding.
"I think so as well, but this does put us in a dangerous position. We have a record of staying on the move so it's safe to assume that they would believe we left after what happened. But we don't know what kind of tracking technology they have, so I don't think it will take them long to find us."
My Legacies haven't all emerged yet, but enough of them have. I took down three grown men. They didn't stand a chance. It was like fighting with little kids. I could do anything I wanted to them. We also now know that humans can also fight, and capture, and hurt, and kill Mogadorians.
I feel stronger than I've ever felt in my life. I am not running. I love my life in Paradise. I love having a real friend, and I love my girlfriend. I'm ready to fight for what I love.
Henri surprises me as he walks up to me and he hugs me.
"I'm proud of how far you've come. I can see the determination within you. You know my entire life is devoted to keeping you safe and making you strong. I would never forgive myself if something happened to you. If you died on my watch, I'm not sure how I would go on. In time the Mogadorians will catch up with us. I want us to be ready for them when they come. We can stay here, for now even with what happened because I know you want to stay. But at the first sign that they're nearby, or are on our trail, we leave, no questions asked, no fighting about it. We leave with what we got before I had agreed that you could say goodbye. Now I'm telling you we can't afford that since they are really close. Can you agree to that?"
"Yeah I can," I say, and smile.
XXXXXXXX
We both get ourselves ready for dinner with Sarah's family and it will actually be the first one we've ever had. We get in the truck and leave BK at the house and we eventually pull up outside their house, as I walk up the driveway I see Sarah peek out the window. She smiles and waves, opening the front door just as I step onto her porch.
"Hey, handsome," she says.
I turn and look over my shoulder to Henri and pretend she's talking to him. Then I turn back around and ask her if she's talking to me or Henri. She laughs.
"You're silly," she says and punches me in the arm before pulling me close to give me a lingering kiss. "Hello, Henri."
"Hello Sarah it's nice to see you again," Henri replies with a smile.
I take a deep breath and can smell the food: turkey and stuffing, sweet potatoes, brussels sprouts, pumpkin pie.
"Smells great," I say.
"My mom has been cooking all day."
"Can't wait to eat."
We go inside and she takes me on a tour while Henri goes off to speak with her parents. It's a great house. A classic family home with bedrooms on the second floor, an attic where one of her brothers has his room, and all of the living spaces—the living room, dining room, kitchen, and family room—on the first floor. When we get to her room, she closes the door and kisses me. I'm surprised but thrilled.
"I've been looking forward to doing that all day," she says softly when she pulls away.
As she walks towards the door, I pull her back to me and kiss her again.
"And I'm looking forward to kissing you again later," I whisper.
She smiles softly at me. We head back downstairs and she takes me to the family room, where her two older brothers, home from college for the weekend, are watching football with her father. Henri is sitting with them and I join them, while Sarah goes to the kitchen to help her mother and her younger sister with dinner. I've never been that into football. I guess, because of the way Henri and I have lived, I've never really gotten into anything outside of our life. My concerns were always with trying to get stronger and to train wherever we were, and then getting ready to go somewhere else. Her brothers, and her father, all played football in high school. They love it. And in today's game, one of her brothers and her father like one of the teams, while her other brother likes the other team. They argue with each other, taunt each other, cheer and groan depending on what's happening in the game. They've clearly been doing this for years, probably for their entire lives, and they're clearly having a great time. It's at times like this that I wish Henri and I had something, besides my training and our endless running and hiding, that we were both into and that we could enjoy with each other. It makes me wish I had a real father and brothers to hang out with.
At halftime, Sarah's mother calls us in for dinner. The table looks amazing. There are flowers in the center, with placemats and table settings meticulously placed in front of each of the chairs. Serving dishes of food are spread around the inside of the table, with the turkey sitting in front of Mr. Hart's place. Just after I sit down, Mrs. Hart comes into the room. She has taken off her apron and is wearing a beautiful skirt and sweater.
"I hope everyone is hungry and ready to be stuffed?" she says.
"Most certainly Annie thank you again for inviting the both of us to have dinner with your family," Henri says.
"It's no problem, especially after hearing that it's just been you two for holidays all these years." Mrs. Hart says with a wide smile.
Mr. Hart starts carving the turkey. Sarah smiles at me from across the table which just solidifies this being the best holiday ever. The food starts being passed, and I take the smallest portions of everything at first not wanting to look like a slob in front of Sarah's family.
Dinner flies by and soon we are all sitting in the living room joking and just enjoying each other's company. Henri for once doesn't have that worrying crease across his brow. Time starts to move in slow motion, I can see everyone around me talking, or at least trying to. It's like it takes a minute just for someone's lips to close in between words. It must be a new legacy forming, some kind of slow-motion, or enhanced perception legacy. All of a sudden the world snaps back in place and I'm bombarded with a cacophony of sound. My stomach lurches and I topple over in my chair. I can hear shouting as people crowd near me, it takes a minute to realize where I am and I can tell that I'm in Sarah's lap with Henri kneeling down next to me saying something.
"John, John can you hear me what happened?" He looks frightened.
"I'm... I'm okay I think, I got really dizzy and felt weird," It takes me a second to get accustomed to hearing again.
"I'm sorry to cut this short but I think it best that we head home early," Henri says as he reaches down and helps me up.
Sarah's whole family helps me out the door and inside the truck. Sarah gives me a quick kiss on my forehead before shutting the door.
A chill shoots up my back. My breath catches in my throat and at the same time the truck and everything outside of it slows down again. I'm a little more prepared this time and I shut my eyes and try to meditate waiting for the whiplash of sound again. It comes back and it sets off my equilibrium but thankfully I'm in the truck and it's just a bit disorienting this time. Henri noticed my brief discomfort, he reaches over and grabs my shoulder.
"We are almost home John, try and relax if you can. Focus on your breathing and take control of your emotions."
I know he's trying to help, but it's just so hard, this one just throws me off-kilter and is so disorienting. Thankfully it doesn't take long, and we are pulling up to the house. I'm able to get myself into the house with little issues and I collapse onto the couch and I feel myself drifting off into sleep.
XXXXXXXX
I wake up out on the couch covered by a blanket and a pillow under my head, Henri must have helped me get into a more comfortable position after I passed out. Getting up I make my way into the kitchen to find Henri sitting at the table surfing the web as usual. He looks up to me as soon as I enter and he is checking me over making sure I am not injured at all.
"What happened yesterday John?" He says.
"Yesterday," I say a little confused.
"Yes, I got you home just after six and it is now just afternoon. You slept for eighteen hours."
It takes me a second to wrap my head around sleeping for so long.
"Did you get any rest or did you stay up watching over me?"
"I stayed up, of course, you were in a dead sleep and defenseless. I wasn't about to go to sleep especially without any answers into what happened to you."
"I'm not quite sure, everything slowed down. It was like I was moving normally but everyone around me was going in slow motion until suddenly there was a bunch of sounds and I couldn't tell up from down."
"A new legacy already? This is amazing news John," Henri looks excited by this news.
I'm not sure whether it is a good thing or not it was so disorienting and made me sick to my stomach. Though I can see the advantage of it if I can get control over it.
"What is it?"
"I don't know the name of it, it's only been theorized to exist but it has sometimes been called Aevitas we don't know the extent of the abilities but it is essentially the control or manipulation of time," Henri looks at me in awe.
"What do you mean you don't know, and that no one has had it before?"
"We know of many legacies and that there is the manipulation of just about everything. The elements and the mind, of sound and gravity. So it stands within reason that time would be included as well, but in all of our time as a species, you are the first person to have it."
"Do you know how to help me train it like with Lumen?"
"Unfortunately not, this will be touch and go process. Can you explain how it felt and what you could do?"
"Well I was just listening to everyone talk and then randomly I didn't hear anything and it took forever for anything to happen, like people talking or their mouths moving then all of a sudden there was just a bunch of noise all at once like the sound was catching up to me and I got sick to my stomach. And I couldn't tell up from down which is why I think I ended on the ground."
"Hmm I'm not sure what to think just yet, the only thing that I can recommend is doing some meditations and to isolate yourself and try to call upon it. Try and get a feeling for it and maybe over time the vertigo will lessen," Henri says. "I think that it's for the best that you stay isolated until you have at least a semblance of control over this, we don't want anything bad to happen while you are at school or in an unprotected environment."
"Okay, I don't like it but I don't think I could control my reactions to it anyways," I say with a frown.
XXXXXXXX
Winter comes early and with full force to Paradise, Ohio. First the wind, then the cold, then the snow. Light dustings to start, then a storm blows through and buries the land so that the scraping sound of snowplows is as consistently heard as the wind itself, leaving a coat of salt over everything. School is canceled for two days. The snow near the roads segues from white to dingy black and eventually melts to standing puddles of slush that refuse to drain. Henri and I spend my time off training, indoors, outdoors. I can now control when my Aevitas comes on and control it for about thirty seconds before the vertigo is too much when I turn it off. I've also got my Telekinesis to the point that I can lift about 20 tons now. We had snuck into the parking lot for the school buses to test my strength out, and thankfully the school didn't have any cameras there to be worried about.
Out in the backyard, the trees stand sentinel around us, frozen branches like figurines of hollow glass, an inch of a fine white powder piled atop each one. The snow is up to our knees aside from the small patch Henri has cleared away. Bernie Kosar sits watching from the back porch. Even he wants nothing to do with the snow.
"Are you sure about this?" I ask.
"You need to learn to embrace it," Henri says.
"How long will this burn?" I ask.
"I don't know."
I am wearing a highly combustible suit made mostly of natural fibers soaked in oils, some of which are slow-burning, some of which are not. I want to set it on fire just to be rid of the smells that are making my eyes water. I take a deep breath.
"Are you ready?" he asks.
"As ready as I'll ever be."
"Don't breathe. You're not immune to the smoke or fumes and your internal organs will burn. You need to learn to multitask while consumed in flames."
"Alright let's do this."
"If you get in trouble, jump into the snow and start rolling."
"I know," I say.
"Here we go," says Henri.
I take a deep breath just before he touches a match to the suit. Fire sweeps across my body. It feels unnatural for me to keep my eyes open, but I do. I look up. The fire rises eight feet above me. The whole world is shrouded in shades of orange, red, yellow that dance in my line of sight. I can feel the heat, but only slightly as one feels the sun's rays on a summer day. Nothing more than that.
"Go!" Henri yells.
I hold my arms out to my sides, eyes-wide-open, breath held. I feel as though I'm hovering. I enter the deep snow and it begins to sizzle and melt underfoot, a slight steam rising while I walk. I reach my right hand forward and lift a cinder block, which feels heavier than normal. Is it because I'm not breathing? Is it the stress of the fire?
"Don't waste time!" Henri yells.
I hurl the block as hard as I can against a dead tree fifty feet away. The force causes it to smash into a million little pieces, leaving a chunk missing in the wood. Then I raise three tennis balls soaked in gasoline. I juggle them in midair, one over the other. I bring them in towards my body. They catch fire, and still, I juggle them—and while doing so I lift a long, thin broomstick. I close my eyes. My body is warm. I wonder if I'm sweating. If I am, the sweat must be evaporating the second it reaches the skin's surface. I grit my teeth, open my eyes, thrust my body forward, and direct all of my powers into the stick's very core. It explodes, splintering into small bits. I don't let any of them fall to the ground; instead, I keep them suspended, collectively looking like a cloud of dust hovering in midair. I pull them to me and let them burn. The wood pops through the flicker and hum of the flames. I force them back together into a tightly compacted spear of fire that looks as though it has sprung straight from the depths of hell.
"Perfect!" Henri yells.
One minute has passed. My lungs begin to burn from the stress of the fire, but my breath is still held. I put everything that I am into the spear and I hurl it so hard that it speeds through the air like a bullet and hits the tree, and hundreds of tiny fires spread throughout the vicinity and extinguish almost immediately. I had hoped the dead wood would catch fire but it does not. I have also dropped the tennis balls. They sizzle in the snow five feet away from me.
"Forget the balls," Henri yells. "The tree. Get the tree."
The dead wood looks ghastly with its arthritic limbs silhouetted against the world of white beyond it. I close my eyes. I can't hold my breath much longer. Fueled by the fire and the discomfort of the suit and the tasks that are left undone. I focus on the tree giving it a tug with my mind, I grit my teeth and furrow my brows, and finally, a loud snap rings through the air like a shotgun blast the tree, and most of its roots come tearing through the ground. I catch it in my hands and hold it straight above me. Let it burn, I think. It must be sixty feet long. It finally catches fire and I lift it into the air forty or fifty feet above me and, without touching it, I drive it straight into the ground about ten feet or so as though I'm staking my claim like some old-world swordsman standing atop the hill after winning the war. I use what little concentration I have left and pull the fire around me into a ball in front of me, I then shoot the fireball straight at the tree blasting a hole into it.
"How'd I do?" I say once I have gained my breath again.
"Not bad for your first try."
"That sucked."
"You did well for your first time," Henri says. "You can't expect everything to come easily."
I nod knowing that I could do better.
XXXXXXXX
I wake in the middle of the night two days later, 2:57 on the clock. I can hear Henri working at the kitchen table. I crawl out of bed and walk out of the room. He is hunched over a document, wearing bifocals and holding some sort of stamp with a pair of tweezers. He looks up at me.
"What are you doing?" I ask.
"Creating forms for you."
"For what?"
"I got to thinking and it would be a bit easier to have an ID for you and a couple premade identities in case something happens to me or we don't have the equipment."
I pick up a birth certificate that he has already finished. The name written is James Hughes. The date of birth would make me a year older. I'd be seventeen, then I bend over and look at the one he is in the process of creating. The name listed is Jobie Frey, age eighteen, a legal adult.
"Why didn't we ever think to do this before?" I ask.
"We never had reason to."
Papers of different shapes and sizes and densities are scattered across the table, a large printer off to the side. Bottles of ink, rubber stamps, notary stamps, metal plate-looking things, various tools that look as though they belong in a dentist's office. The process of document creation has always remained foreign to me.
"Are we going to change my age now?"
Henri shakes his head.
"It's too late to change your age in Paradise. These are mostly for the future. Who knows what will happen that will give you a reason to use them."
The thought of moving in the future makes me nauseous. I would rather stay sixteen and here with him forever, but I know we have a lot to do and that we can't stay here forever.
We spend the next couple of weeks doing nothing but training, I get my Aevitas up to a decent level, I have so far only been able to keep it running for about forty-five seconds and I can't do anything else with it. It seems like it will just be a last-minute resort until I can get a lot more training in.
XXXXXXXX
Sarah returns from Colorado a week before Christmas. I haven't seen her in eight days. It feels as though it's been a month. The van drops all the girls off at the school and one of her friends drives her straight to my house without first taking her home. When I hear the tires come up the drive I meet her with a hug and a kiss and I lift her off the ground and twirl her in the air. She has just been in a plane and a car for ten hours and she is wearing sweatpants and no makeup with her hair pulled into a ponytail and yet she is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen and I don't want to let go of her. We stare into each other's eyes beneath the moonlight and all either of us can do is smile.
"Did you miss me?" she asks.
"Every second of every day."
She kisses the tip of my nose.
"I missed you, too."
"So do the animals have a shelter again?" I ask.
"Oh, John, it was amazing! I wish you could have been there. There were probably thirty people helping out at all times, around the clock. The building went up so fast and it's so much nicer than it was before. We built this cat tree in one of the corners, and I swear the whole time we were there, cats were playing on it."
I smile. "It sounds great. I wish I could have been there, too."
I take her bag and we walk into the house together.
"Where's Henri?" she asks.
"Grocery shopping. He left about ten minutes ago."
She walks through the living room and drops her coat onto the back of a chair on her way into my bedroom. She sits on the edge of my bed and kicks her shoes off.
"What should we do?" she asks.
I stand there watching her. She is wearing a red hooded sweatshirt with a zipper down the front. It is only halfway zipped. She smiles and looks at me through the tops of her eyes.
"Come here," she says and holds her hand out to me.
I walk to her and she takes my hand in hers. She looks up at me and squints her eyes from the light shining overhead. I snap my fingers with my free hand and the light turns off.
"How'd you do that?"
"Magic," I say.
I sit beside her. She tucks a few loose strands of hair behind her ear, then leans over and kisses me on the cheek. Then she cups my chin and pulls my head to hers and kisses me again, softly, delicately. My whole body tingles in response. She pulls away, her hand still on my cheek. She traces my brow with her thumb.
"I really did miss you," she says.
"Me, too."
A silence passes between us. Sarah bites her lower lip.
"I couldn't wait to get here," she says. "The whole time I was in Colorado, you were all I could think of. Even when playing with the animals, I was wishing you were there with me playing with them, too. And then when we finally left this morning, the entire trip was hell even though every mile we traveled was another mile I was closer to you."
She smiles, mostly with her eyes, her lips a thin upturned crescent that keeps her teeth hidden. She kisses me again, a kiss that starts as slow and lingering and goes from there. Both of us are sitting on the edge of the bed, her hand on the side of my face, mine on the small of her back. I can feel the tight contours beneath the tips of my fingers, can taste the berry gloss on her lips. I pull her to me. I feel as though I can't get close enough to her despite our bodies being pressed tightly together. My hand running up her back, the smooth porcelain feel of her skin. Her hands through my hair, both of us breathing heavily. We fall back on the bed, on our sides. Our eyes are closed. I keep opening mine to see her. The room is dark aside from the moonlight entering through the windows. She catches me watching her and we stop kissing. She puts her forehead to mine and stares at me. She places her hand on the back of my neck and pulls me to her and all at once we're kissing again. Entangled. Meshed. Our arms tightly around the other. My mind is clear of every plague that normally visits and every thought of other planets, my mind free of the hunt and pursuit by the Mogadorians. Sarah and I on the bed kissing each other, falling into each other. Nothing else in the world matters. And then the door opens in the living room. We both jump up.
"Henri's home," I say.
We stand and quickly brush the wrinkles from our clothes, smiling, a secret shared between us that makes us giggle as we walk out of the bedroom holding hands. Henri is setting a bag of groceries on the kitchen table.
"Hi, Henri," Sarah says.
He smiles at her. She lets go of my hand and walks over and hugs him and they start talking about her trip to Colorado. I walk outside to get the rest of the groceries. I breathe in the cold air, try to shake my limbs free of the tension of what just happened, and the disappointment of Henri coming home when he did. I'm still breathing heavily as I grab the rest of the groceries and carry them into the house. Sarah is telling Henri about some of the cats that were at the shelter.
"And you didn't bring one of them back for us?"
"Now Henri, you know I would have happily brought you one if you had told me," Sarah says, her arms folded across her chest with her hip cocked to the side.
He smiles at her. "I know you would've."
Henri puts the groceries away and Sarah and I head out into the frigid air to go for a walk before her mom arrives to take her home. Bernie Kosar comes with us. He takes the lead and runs ahead. Sarah and I hold hands, walking through the yard, the temperature slightly above freezing. The snow melting, the ground wet and muddy. Bernie Kosar disappears for a time into the woods and then comes running back out. His bottom half is filthy.
"What time is your mom coming?" I ask.
She looks at her watch. "Twenty minutes."
I nod. "I'm so happy you're back."
"Me too."
We go to the edge of the woods but it is too dark for us to enter. We instead walk along the perimeter of the yard, hand in hand, occasionally stopping to kiss with the moon and stars as witnesses. Neither of us talks about what just happened, but it's obvious that it is on both of our minds. When we make the first lap Sarah's mother pulls into the drive. She's ten minutes early. Sarah runs up and hugs her. I walk inside and grab Sarah's bag. After we say good-bye, I walk to the road and watch their taillights recede in the distance. I stand outside for a while and then Bernie Kosar and I go back into the house. Henri is halfway through making dinner. I give the dog a bath. When I'm finished dinner is ready.
We sit at the table and eat, not a word passing between us. I can't stop thinking of her. I stare blankly into my plate. I'm not hungry but I try to force the food down anyhow. I manage a few bites, and then I push the plate out in front of me and I sit there in silence.
"So are you going to tell me?" Henri asks.
"Tell you what?"
"What's on your mind."
I shrug. "I don't know." He nods, goes back to eating.
I close my eyes. I can still smell Sarah on the collar of my shirt, can still feel her hand on my cheek. Her lips to mine, the texture of her hair when I ran my hand through it. All I can think about is what she must be doing, and how I wish she were still here.
"Do you think it's possible for us to be loved by the humans the same way that we are by the Loric?" I ask.
"I think they can love us the way they love each other, especially if they don't know what we are, but I don't think it's possible to love a human the way you would love a Loric," he says.
"Why?"
"Because deep down we're different from them. And we love differently. While it may closely resemble the way we love, for us it's a very instinctual thing. You may have strong feelings for Sarah, but they aren't what you would feel for a Loric girl."
"There aren't many Loric girls available for me."
"Even more reason to be careful with Sarah. At some point, if we last long enough, we will need to regenerate our race and repopulate our planet. Obviously, you're a long way from having to worry about that, but I wouldn't count on Sarah being your partner."
"What happens if we try to have children with humans?"
"It's happened many times before. Usually, it results in an exceptional and gifted human. Some of the greatest figures in Earth's history were actually the product of humans and the Loric, including Buddha, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein. Many of the ancient Greek gods, who most people believe were mythological, were actually the children of the humans and Loric, mainly because it was much more common than for us to be on this planet and we were helping them develop civilizations. Aphrodite, Apollo, Hermes, and Zeus were all real, and had one Loric parent."
"So it is possible."
"It was possible. In our current situation, it's reckless and impractical. In fact, though I don't know her number, or have any idea where she is, one of the children who came to Earth with us was the daughter of your parents' best friends. They used to say that it was fate that the two of you would end up together. They may well have been right."
"So what do I do?"
"Enjoy your time with Sarah, but don't get too attached to her, and don't let her get too attached to you."
"Really, that is all you have to say don't get to attached?"
"Trust me, John. If you never believe another word I say, then believe that."
"I believe all the words you say even if I don't want to."
Henri winks at me. "Good," he says.
Afterwards I go into my room and call Sarah. I think about what Henri said to me before I do it, but I can't help myself. I am attached to her. We talk for two hours. It is midnight when the call ends. Then I lie in bed smiling through the darkness.
