Paradox - Progeny Of Innocence (bk2) (Paradox series) (10 page)

"Yes please, with Vegemite. I like it spread right to the edges."

"Then right to the edges it is." Wade grabbed a plate for himself and sat down next to Grace at the breakfast bench. "You haven’t made friends with the little girl next door yet?" he asked.

"Nope. I’ve seen her at school, but mostly I just sit by myself. The other kids don’t really like me that much."

"Hmm, not to worry, I’m sure she will come over soon enough and introduce herself, and before you know it, you will be the best of friends. She probably has a few things to take care of, you know, settle in, all that. Moving into a new house, a new school and making new friends, things like that take time."

"You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know. I’ve been here for ages and I still haven’t made any friends. I had one friend once, Patrick, but he died." She took a mouthful of milk and left a milky moustache across the top of her lip.

Wade smiled but said nothing as he leaned across and wiped the milk gently off her top lip with his napkin.

When Grace waved goodbye to Wade that morning on her way to school, she didn’t know that it was going to be their last breakfast together for a while. Then, just days later, precisely as Wade had predicted, Angela and Champsie appeared at the back door to introduce themselves to her.

So yes, Grace could imagine how alone Zach must have felt moving to a new city with no family or friends.

Grace let out a sigh as she watched Zach leaning against the kitchen bench drinking his lemonade. She would be his friend; his family, too, if he wanted one.

"So I take it you are okay with this, Kiddo?" Wade asked as he walked into the kitchen and picked up the two mugs of freshly made coffee from the bench.

"Yes! It will be like having a big brother."

"Thank you," Zach said shyly, "I like the sound of that." He put the can down, wiping his hands on the front of his shirt.

"Come on then, I’ll show you the spare room, your room," Grace said, grabbing his hand and dragging him off down the hall.

A spark of blue and white electricity arced between their fingertips, but Zach could tell that Grace had felt nothing.

"Tomorrow, you can meet my friends Angela and Josh."

Wade watched them go, then headed back to Kate in the lounge room. "Thanks for this, Kate," he said, sitting down. "He’s a good kid; you won’t have any trouble with him."

"It will be nice having him around the house. Good for Grace, too, I think. I always regretted not having more children, having brothers and sisters for her to grow up with. But it just never happened."

Wade nodded. "You working tonight?"

"Six days straight. Old Mrs Cravits, our kitchen hand, fell down a flight of stairs last night in her home. They say a dog had started tearing her to bits. Her head was found under the kitchen table in a pool of blood, well there would have been a pool of blood, thirsty dog I guess. They hardly found a drop anywhere. And nearly every bone in her body had been broken from the fall. It’s just so terrible, her poor family." Kate shook her head, thinking about Mrs Cravits’s head being chased around the house, like a dog playing with a soccer ball. "So anyway, I’m taking on all her shifts until they find a replacement for her."

"Yes, I heard about that one from a few of the guys down at the station. It wouldn’t be the first time a person was eaten by his or her own dog. Makes you think twice about the saying, ‘man’s best friend’".

"She didn’t own a dog..." Kate replied absently and then added. "I don’t know how you can sleep at night, Wade, with all those horrible visions racing around in your head."

Wade stared into his coffee cup and swirled it before taking another sip. "You get used to it after a while. You have to." Then he looked up at her and frowned. "What do you mean?"

"About seeing all that blood and death, I don’t know how-"

"No. What you said about the dog just now."

"What about the dog?" Kate asked.

"You said she didn’t own a dog."

Kate shrugged her shoulders. "She didn’t, she-"

"How do you know that?"

"Because she told me. She told me only two days ago how she would like to have a dog, but she couldn’t because she’s allergic to dog hair or something, so she bought a goldfish instead. Not that a goldfish would be much company. What’s this all about, anyway?"

Wade put down his coffee cup and headed quickly for the door. "Gotta go."

Kate watched him leave. "Okay, then," she said to the empty room. "I’ll tell Zach you had to go."

Kate drank down the remainder of her coffee, her mind conjuring up an assortment of bloody images of poor Mrs Cravits lying bloodless and broken on the floor. Wondering what would have been the last memory the woman recalled before death had finally taken her from this world. Would she remember the last terrifying and brutal moments of her life, as the animal's teeth tore into her flesh? As it tore flesh hungrily from her bones with its razor-sharp fangs? Or would she recall happier memories of playing contentedly with her two grandchildren, Candice and Bonnie, in the backyard? Two little girls forced to grow up without their Granny to spoil them on birthdays and Christmases.

Kate hoped that it was the fall that had killed Mrs Cravits, not the razor-sharp fangs of ‘man's best friend’. Champsie walked over, wagging his tail, and sat himself down at Kate’s feet. He stared up at her with unblinking eyes and gave one quick yap before letting his soft pink tongue dangle out the side of his mouth.

"Don’t even think about it," Kate said, patting him on his head as he softly whined and sank to the floor beside her. She drank the last of her coffee and listened to the highs and lows of Grace and Zach’s laughter echoing from down the hall.

"This was a good idea letting the boy move in, wasn’t it?" she asked Champsie. "Brian would have known what to do." Champ gave an agreeable yap, then dropped his head on his paws. "God, I miss you!" she said, looking into her empty coffee cup, then up at the framed portrait of the three of them hanging on the wall. The last of the daylight stole in through the kitchen windows, giving the room a soft muted glow.

Kate sighed and got up from the kitchen table. She flicked on the light switch and walked into the kitchen, tugging an old pizza coupon off the fridge door as she passed. She read aloud from the flyer. "Cheap Tuesdays, home-delivered. That sounds good enough for me." She plucked the phone off the wall, dialed the number, then waited for a familiar voice to answer. She would have to remember to order extra for their new houseguest Zach.

Lula Luparti was both smart and beautiful, and was therefore the most envied girl in high school. When she spoke, her words resounded off her tongue like a kitten purring. Her hypnotic purr and cherub rosebud lips lured you in, until she drifted away and the magic spell was broken. It was almost agonizing to resist the urge to reach out and stroke her long, golden hair as she passed.

Even those that did not know her still had inborn compulsions to protect rather than see harm come to her. She was indeed an enchanting creature – a temptress. The ancients called her a muse.

So on his first day at school, when Zach was immediately approached by the iridescent Lula to join her elite group that the students had appropriately dubbed the In Crowd, Grace had held her breath unconsciously as she waited openmouthed for his reply.

Grace let out an exaggerated sigh of relief and was completely overwhelmed with joy when Zach declined Lula’s purring invitation and strolled off to mingle with the good-natured "football crowd" instead. She was grateful that she'd not lost him to the tempting, and just too beautiful, students of the 'In Crowd'.

Zach immediately joined the high school football team, ‘The Eagles’, and two weeks later, after the football team passed an uncontested vote, Zach became the new team captain.

Joshua, too, had been equally relieved at Zach’s prompt decision to decline Lula’s invitation.

"Defense force brats", Joshua said as he stood waiting next to Angela and Grace. "Who do they think they are, god damn Royalty or something?"

He couldn’t quite grasp the overwhelming effect that Lula and her group had on the entire school, teachers included. No one, as far as Joshua was concerned, was more beautiful than his Angela. If only he could get Angela to feel the same way about him. However, year after year Angela had continued to show no sign of changing her feelings toward Joshua from being just good friends. The fact that Angela hadn’t shown any feelings toward any other boy either was good enough for Joshua, so he continued his steadfast commitment to pursuing her.

The exclusive assembly of the In Crowd students, whose parents were mostly enlisted in the defense force, did not welcome the likes of Grace and her kind into their sanctimonious cortege. And that suited Joshua just fine. "I don’t get what the big deal is. Who needs them anyway?"

There was another group of students besides the In Crowd who commandeered the halls who drew even more attention to themselves, and they were aptly named ‘The Goths’.

Unlike the dazzled fascination the In Crowd demanded, this motley group of students was feared rather than envied, by students and teachers. They conjured up a different kind of fascination. Their appeal was one of darkness, corruption, and deceit, drawing you in slyly toward the dark shadowy promises until there was nowhere left to go.

The cougar-like leader of this sinister coven was also a 17-year-old beauty. However, it was evil that radiated from her yellowish cat-like eyes, and a contemptuous bile of hostility that rolled off her tongue at those foolish enough to get in her way. And if any were foolish enough to stumble across Theria’s path uninvited, regardless of creed, well, the future never looked too bright for those unfortunate souls.

Theria leaned against the tall grey lockers and blew a puff of smoke in Zach’s face as he strolled past her in the hall. He merely dismissed her futile bid to catch his attention and chatted on with his friends, unaffected by her attempts. She, on the other hand, did not dismiss him. Far from it. She had been dissecting him, appraising him, considering him since his arrival at the school. To Theria, Zach looked like a shiny red apple dangling tantalizingly from a very low tree branch, perfectly ripe to the touch and ready to be plucked. She could imagine the juice running off her chin as she bit into his delectable flesh.

A sallow-looking boy with spiky black hair, dressed completely in black, grabbed her forcefully by the waist and spun her around. "Hey babe, you got a hard-on for the newbie?"

"Piss off, Caleb," she spat, shoving him back into the metal lockers with a flick of her wrist. The metal doors buckled under a crashing impact that would have proven fatal to any human body.

"Okay, okay, no need to pitch a fit, bitch," Caleb retorted, angrily pulling himself out of the dent in the locker. He snatched the cigarette from her fingers and pulled the burning chemicals into his lungs.

Caleb was very pretty for a boy, even with the customary gothic paraphernalia that adorned his body and studded his face.

Moments later, a waif-like girl with ink-black hair slashed with streaks of red stalked up, joining them. She, too, was dressed in the blackest black and wore heavily applied black makeup on her chalky-white skin. On her right temple she had a curling tattoo, and a black teardrop spilled out of her yellow cat-like eye.

"Hey Lyssa," Caleb said through a haze of grey smoke, "cigarette?"

Lyssa was escorted by a tall boy and was dwarfed by his imposing stature. She raked her long, black-painted nails through her waist-length hair. "Lose the fag, moron, if you want to stay out of trouble," she drawled to Caleb. "Miss Bell is on sentry duty again today." She leaned back and rested on the cold metal lockers. "I reckon that crazy bitch would have been Hitler’s Nazi whore in a past life."

Caleb scoffed, "Do I look like I give a shit about Miss Bell, or trouble?" He wrapped his arm around Lyssa’s tiny waist, and dragged her into him, away from the tall, silent boy with hair the color of burnt honey.

Caleb planted a hard kiss on Lyssa’s black-stained lips, then flicked the cigarette butt at the back of a group of passing students. The burning butt cartwheeled through the air before striking a tall blond boy in the back of the head. The boy spun around with his fists up, eager to thump the butt-flicking assailant. However, when he saw who the perpetrator was, he lowered his fists and his head and trailed off in the wake of his friends.

"Yeah, I’d keep going, too, if I were you," Caleb called out. "You pumped up gym-junky pile of bat-shit."

Caleb, bored with his victim, returned his focus to the taller boy beside Lyssa. "Damon, got anything on tonight?" he asked. "We’re thinking about heading down to the beach, smoke some weed, hit on a couple of bitches, get a feed, maybe. Lyssa can usually herd up a couple of chicks that are ready to get down and get dirty. Sound cool?"

"Not tonight, busy. Another time maybe..." Damon answered him absently.

"Yeah sure, another time," Caleb replied. His attention drifted to Miss Bell, the advancing teacher.

Miss Bell strode along the corridor, arms swinging rigidly by her side. Her step faltered as she spotted the Goths eyeing her. Then she put her head down and marched quickly past them. But not before Caleb grabbed his crotch and called out to her retreating figure. "Hey Miss Ding-a-ling, want a mouthful of this junk? Hey, don’t rush off, babe; I’ll be the best you’ve ever had. I promise. You tell her, Theria. Oh come on, Miss, you’re breaking my heart here." Then he chuckled, snapped his head back, and howled like a ravenous jackal at a hollow moon.

Faintly, from somewhere outside, the howl of a dog echoed up through the school corridor as if in answer to its master’s call.

For a moment, all the students turned and held their breaths. Mouths gaped open as they stared at Caleb howling to his imaginary moon. Then they abruptly composed themselves, and scattered away quickly into classrooms to avoid any possible reprisals.

Theria, who had been leaning quietly against the set of lockers, pushed herself upright and glared at Caleb. "Idiot," she hissed. "Way to stay off the radar, Caleb. Come, it’s time to get out of here." She strode down the hall, students parting eagerly to let her ominous clan pass unencumbered.

"You worry way too much, Theria. These humans are nothing more than scurrying ants beneath my feet. Powerless, insignificant piss-ants." He pulled a face then licked his lips at a blonde girl as she watched him pass. "You and me, sweetheart," he said.

The girl didn’t flinch or turn away as the other students usually did. This girl held his gaze and whispered back. "Bring it on, bitch."

Caleb’s jaw dropped for a split second, revealing his surprise before he quickly recovered and snapped it shut. Lyssa, not having the same ability to read minds as Caleb, tugged at his arm, diverting his attention momentarily away from the blonde girl. "Tell me…" she asked impatiently, tugging at his arm. Caleb, intrigued by the blonde girl’s unwavering response, ignored Lyssa for a moment before answering.

"Cindy, what the hell are you thinking?" A brunette standing meekly at the blonde girl's side asked in a hushed voice.

"We’re in a new town, a new school. I just want to shake things up a bit, Em. I feel like we’ve been living in a cocoon, wrapped in cotton wool. Don’t you want to, oh, I don’t know, break out a little?" she asked the shorter girl as she pulled her backpack onto her shoulders.

Emily, Cindy’s twin sister, shook her head. "I don’t know, Cin; they look like trouble to me."

"Yeah, well it takes more than freaky contact lenses, tatts, and a few eyebrow piercings to frighten me. Anyway I could use a bit of trouble, couldn’t you?" Cindy whispered as she watched Caleb take another quick look at her over his shoulder. She smiled back and winked.

"No," Emily said. "Absolutely not."

"Oh come on, Em, live a little". She put her arm around her sister’s shoulders. "I think I’m going to really like this school a whole lot better than that holier-than-thou all girls’ school in Sydney. God, I hated that place." She shoved her locker closed and readjusted her backpack.

A school siren rang.

"Come on Em, let’s get to class. Make a good impression and all that on our first day."

Emily groaned and trailed off after her taller, thinner, prettier sister. "Promise me you won’t do anything crazy, Cin."

"When have I ever?" Cindy began.

Emily sighed. "When have you never?" Then Emily covered her mouth and giggled as she watched a boy in a football jersey, who had been staring at Cindy, collide with an open locker door. She wished she could turn heads the way Cindy did by just walking down a corridor. "That will teach him to look where he’s going."

Cindy turned around and frowned at her sister. "What are you laughing at?"

Emily shook her head. "Nothing Cin, Oh look, this must be our classroom."

A pretty history teacher with long, flowing black hair smiled and ushered them into the room. "Hi girls, welcome to the class. I’m Miss Raphael, but you can call me Ambrosia. Now, which one are you?" she asked, addressing the taller girl first.

The empty corridors grew quiet now as the last classroom door slammed shut. It was just Theria and her devout followers who haunted the long white corridors lined with grey metal lockers spotted with graffiti, stickers and flyers. Only the droning hum of the air-conditioning, muffled voices, and the screech of a chair being scraped along the floor behind closed doors broke through the eerie silence of the usually noisy corridor.

Theria glanced back over her shoulder and glared at Caleb. She spoke to him in a tone so highly pitched that it was inaudible to the human ear. It was their preferred way of communicating with each other when in the vicinity of humans. It provided them with the perfect cover from enemy and human alike. Not that Caleb cared. He relished all forms of attention, and basked gloriously in the risks that followed.

Theria’s matt black lips were virtually unmoving as she spoke her words of warning. "Don’t underestimate the humans, Caleb. If you knew anything about ants, you would know that there are some species of ants that are capable of carrying 100 times their own body weight. I would keep that in mind if I were you."

But Caleb was far from interested in being educated in the abilities of ants. His attention was focused on the exquisite thoughts in the blonde girl’s head. He felt almost inclined to blush on her behalf. But instead he leaned down and whispered in Lyssa’s ear. "I found one."

Then he felt something else that was so foreign to him that it shocked him. He scraped his fingers through his long spiky fringe, trying to recognize the irritating feeling. But he couldn’t. For the first time in his life, a lifetime that had spanned centuries, he felt regret. The word was as foreign to him as was its meaning.

Lyssa glanced up at his worried expression, "What is it Caleb?" she asked, almost tenderly.