Calling in some favours from some friends of Victors, I walked through the doors of the Dutch Interpol building without a second glance. Stepping into the elevator, I pressed the button for the third floor. The doors dinged closed, but not before a hand landed between them and a man about Victor's age maybe Uriel's; with dusty blond curls smiled thankfully, entering the elevator and pushing the button to close the doors.
The man seemed to do a double take. "Benedict?"
Turning, I raised my eyebrows, "Sorry do I know you?"
"Sydney Baker." He stuck out his hand and I shook it without thinking. "My sister's your soulfinder, I believe."
"London's your sister?" I gaped.
"You know her name?" he asked, taken aback a little.
"My brother's soulfinder is a soulseeker, I asked her to help me find her."
"I see." he nodded, slipping his hands into the pockets of his grey pants. He looked rather impressive and professional with the black shirt and tie, but the overall effect was destroyed with the curly hair and the Sesame Street cell phone cover that was sticking out of his top pocket.
"I'll call the house, she'll probably be in." He plucked the cell from his pocket and dialed the number, lifting it to his ear. It was Cookie Monster.
"Ja?"
"What on earth are you doing home?" Sydney growled down the phone, guessing it wasn't London who answered.
"I got kicked out of class."
"Smithe?"
"Yup."
"Is Lonnie there?"
"Still asleep. If she were awake; do you think I'd still be here playing GTA?"
"Fair point. Get back to school." Sydney hung up just as the doors opened. "Come with me William." he said dramatically and strode through the rows of office cubicles to an oak door with a silver plaque reading D.C.I. - S. Baker. Identification.
Swinging it open he crossed the room to a desk with a large monitor and a keyboard. Manilla folders in both the 'In' and 'Out' trays with more scattered on top of filing cabinets; the trash full of empty printer ink cartridges.
There was a photograph, on the desk, of a woman with waist-length wavy blonde hair, a willowy frame and fingernails painted brown. Two blonde children clung to her jeans whilst she held a ginger haired infant in her arms. Gap toothed smiles and dimples all around. The woman could probably have passed as Sky's biological mother.
Sydney caught me looking as he clicked at something on the monitor. "That's London, Belle and I with our mum." He paused. "Taken in Italy. I wouldn't be surprised if she was already pregnant with Rome, there."
"Rome?"
He lifted his hand palm up and curled his fingers into his fist. I moved around the desk to see, with all the programs moved aside, the desktop background was a photograph of ten people. Teenagers. Autumn leaves blowing, they were all wrapped up in winter coats. Sydney pointed to a boy around the age of twelve who hadn't quite grown into his features or his limbs. He had dark hair and olive skin, hispanic features that were finer than mine. A grin that could light up coal mines ripped his face in two as he stood with his arm around a tiny girl of six or seven with wild dark hair. Caribbean rather than Spanish this time.
"Sixteen now. He's a healer."
"My brother Xav's a healer." I nodded.
"Wait. You're that Benedict family?" Sydney asked, his eyebrows somewhere in his hairline. "You held the conference in Denver last year?"
"You were there?"
"No." he groaned. "We all spent the Christmas holidays in Brazil, with Rio's dad."
He pulled a pen from a mug with a dry coffee ring in the bottom; scribbling something onto a page of a note book, he tore it out and handed it to me. "Maybe we'll spend Christmas with the Benedicts this year." he smiled easily,
"Thanks." I grinned and headed back out the door, he'd given me an address.
"Oh and Will?"
"Yeah?" I spun on my heel, almost smacking my face into the door frame.
"When it comes to meeting the family, I'm not the sibling you have to worry about." and with that, he sank into his leather desk chair and picked up a file from his 'In' tray.
They lived in a four storey house painted navy blue with white washed windowsills. It was crammed between two other houses almost identical except for the color. The one to the left was beige and to the right, the house was painted salmon pink.
Running up the worn down stone steps to the front door, I took a deep breath, no going back after this...
The boy that opened the door before I knocked looked to be younger than Zed by a year or two maybe. Blond hair and bright blue eyes, tall, but not six foot, wiry but not skinny.
"Hello." He said.
"Hi. I'm looking for London."
"Well, you're in the wrong country for starters-"
"London the person. Not the place." I corrected and a strange look crossed his face before he beamed.
"William, it's good to meet you in person at last. You've been messing up my sister's mental space for days." He didn't have an accent precisely, more like he was a citizen of the world. And he seemed to have that same ability to know things before he should, like Zed.
"Sorry, I didn't catch your name."
"Paris. Paris Baker."
"So London's your sister?"
"Yes, I am. And Paris? Don't you have somewhere to be?"
My gaze locked on the small girl in blue plaid pants and a loose periwinkle t-shirt that looked to be missing half the thread, making it translucent over the white t-shirt with long lace sleeves. She had mussed blonde hair like Paris, however she had the most beautiful chocolate brown eyes I'd ever seen...
"Ugh! Soulfinders are so... slushy!" Paris groaned and he bounced down the stairs, shaking his head free of thoughts.
"You're taller than I thought." she murmured, tilting her elfish chin up, studying me. Blinking rapidly and shaking her head, she stepped away from the door as if to let me in.
"You knew I was coming?" I frowned, dropping my backpack onto the floor.
I saw you coming. She corrected, smiling to herself and looking at her sock feet.
The telepathy was just too much. Reaching out, I ran my fingers across her collarbone to cup her neck, her eyes met mine again and I couldn't help but kiss her.
Kissing London was strange, really strange. Powerful. I would never have thought it from someone so petite, but it felt as if she had control over everything about me. Like an influx of emotion sizzling through me, I was captivated.
Spending the day intertwined on the couch, a Foster The People CD spinning in the stereo, I found everything about London fascinating. She was psychic like my mom and Zed. She seemed like a very tough girl, but then it made more sense when she explained about having nine siblings. Even I couldn't compete with having six brothers; she had five.
She told her ex-boyfriends that she was allergic to flowers, when really she just didn't like them in the house because they reminded her of funerals. She got the tattoo of the swallow on her wrist two weeks after her mom died of cancer, four years previously. She told me it was because when they lived in London, the attic of the tall narrow house they had was the nesting place for a group of swallows. She and Sydney used to watch them fly away every fall from the rooftops and be overjoyed when they returned in the spring.
She seemed enchanted by something in my appearance, because she would run her soft fingers along my jaw in the middle of her sentence, or trace my cheekbones and around my eyes, dragging a fingertip down my nose, not once breaking eye contact.
"What?" I finally asked, twisting my fingers in her hair.
"I don't know. Something about your eyes..." Suddenly she was on her feet and rushing from the room.
"London?" I called as I entered the hall after her, she was nowhere to be seen.
"Down here!" her voice was airy as it came from lower down. Noticing a door with peeling paint under the stairs stood ajar, I poked my head around it, rough wooden steps lead downward into a room lit with red and orange light bulbs filling it with a fiery glow.
I headed down, the stairs surprisingly silent beneath my feet. At the bottom, I saw an old grand piano, propped open and filled with scribbled sheet music. Rounding the corner, I saw a quarter devoted to meditation with bright coloured silk hangings and candles of different height, colour and circumference; soft cushions on the floor.
Finally finding London in the cluttered basement, stood behind desk and canvas stands, looking from a sketch book to the canvas, to a loose sheet of paper, back to the canvas.
"What's the matter?" I asked, looking at the pictures for the first time and jumped. They were of me, me in the cafe last night. Excellent pieces of art but strange, being the subject. In colour, monochrome, some with the background in every shade a pencil could create and then me in colour. It was rather disconcerting.
"I said I saw you coming." She muttered, holding up one of her pieces, this time in oil, next to my face. "It drove me insane. I tried everything to get the right look but I couldn't. Sorry if it seems creepy."
"A little." I admitted.
She blushed slightly and turned away. Tucking the sketchbooks into boxes that I was positive she would burn later to hide her embarrassment.
"So your first vision of me was only yesterday?"
She nodded. "Wait. You said Colorado, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"The Rockies?"
I hadn't said that specifically. "Yeah why?"
Clutching my hand she pulled me up the stairs, and then another two flights, and then along an open hallway to a wooden door. She kicked it open to reveal a bedroom. A sanded down bureau of pale furnishing and a rickety set of drawers pushed to one side; a huge window broken up into squares the size of paper napkins; filtering light through warped panes. A large mattress on a white wrought iron frame with blue covers was pushed against the other wall you could see when from the door frame. But London wanted me to see the hidden wall.
It was a mural of a ski slope; a mountain coated in snow, glinting blue in the blinding sun. It looked exactly like the view out of the kitchen window at Mom and Dad's place. Except this would never melt and reveal the bare scraggy rocks of the mountain's naked beauty.
I remember Xav asking once if it would tickle the rock if he skied down it. Vick told him yes and then he, Trace, Zed and I caused a mini avalanche when he was coming down. Whilst Yves and Uriel found this funny, they had been inside and so could not get punished for it.
I brought my attention back to the mural. Realising only then that it was three dimensional. It was collaged out of glossy paper. Where I first saw a shadow, I saw text, the clouds were actually made of cursive writing. She'd made it out of old magazines. It was amazing.
"My first vision I ever got."