The Affliction Read online

  I was surprised that Tobias didn’t tell Marielle to leave…she shouldn’t have had to see me in such as state. I didn’t want to see myself that way; I didn’t want to be the source of pain, of mayhem. I was sure they had enough problems without me adding to the list.

  And then Tobias said one word. I understood the meaning of the word, but not why he said it. “Eleanor?” It seemed as though he called to her but she was nowhere near. He had said it softly, and he didn’t have a phone in his hand. What was he doing? I asked myself.

  My body calmed down but the pain more than doubled. Worms had races in my stomach and my skull suddenly seemed too small to hold the contents within it. Life…I didn’t want it anymore. The only reason I lived was breathing was involuntary, blood pumped through my heart automatically. Had it been a matter of will, I would have been gone. Each new blow had distorted my view of life, weakening my resilience, my spirit.

  Some evil creature had swallowed me whole, thrown me back up in an acidic bath, and then spit me out into a black pool for me to struggle and drown in. Well, there I lay, drowning in the black waters of the pool of impossible reality, and although I tried to tread the treacherous murk, I wasn’t absolutely sure I wanted to stay above the surface.

  Just a few minutes later Eleanor entered the room, as though, somehow, she had heard Tobias’ low call. More mysteries, more unknown, more impossible. But nothing was impossible anymore, was it? Not when the past few days had blown my world apart and put the pieces back together inside out and backward, where I lay on a princess’s bed in a mansion kept hidden by nature for the purpose of housing the members of a secret society, who had special gifts that could turn them invisible or…feel things that were going to happen. No, impossible didn’t belong in my vocabulary anymore.

  Eleanor walked straight over to me, face composed and peaceful as always, not disturbed like her daughter’s, and the men let go of me and backed off. I thought I would start to spaz out of control again, but as Eleanor bent down and hugged me, pulling me up out of that dark pool, I lay perfectly still and my breathing and heart slowed to a somewhat normal rhythm, and I hugged her back.

  I realized that as much as I didn’t want them to see me in such a state, they all knew, to some extent, what I went through. Although their “passage” into this society was not as turbulent because they were brought up aware of their gifts and started training at the proper age, they all suffered the same doubts, the same tormenting.

  “You’re going to be all right, Aubrie, you will learn to control it, you can do it,” Eleanor encouraged in her sweet voice.

  And once again, I knew she was right. Training and working as a Mystic would be so brutal that I might even consider death a gift, but I was born to do it, to endure the affliction. I had the talent, I had the power inside of me, and I would do it. I would pull through for me, for Cara, for my new family, and to defy my rebel father.

  I am Aubrie Marie Lander, Sage.

  I snapped, but I would put myself together again, and this time…I would be stronger. I would handle the pressure to do the right thing, I would take on the burden of the troubles of this world, and I would not become a monster like my father and sister. I would water ski on top of the obsidian lake if that’s what it took.

  I was ready to start my training.

  Tobias and Cyrus left first, taking Marielle with them. She had stood watching the whole time since nobody bothered to tell her to leave. During some of my particularly violent outbursts her eyes had bugged out of her head so far that I feared for her blood vessels. Why did they expose her to me when it bothered her so thoroughly?

  And then I knew. They wanted her to watch to prepare her for when she herself started training. They used this as a lesson to break her into her gift. And she had done a rather good job, though it hurt her to do it. She had calmed me down a little before Eleanor reached me.

  In some ways, Marielle was just like other eight-year-olds I knew, and I supposed if you just met her on the street you wouldn’t know she was different. But she was much too mature for her age, and it saddened me, although it reminded me of myself. She was a relatively happy child, but too serene and melancholy, and I could just faintly see the beginning of that tell-tale weariness distinctive of the society members. A few more episodes like that and the affliction would glow in her eyes, too.

  Eleanor stayed for a few minutes after the rest of the room cleared out, but it wasn’t long before I realized that I would miss dinner because I would fall asleep early. Once again, I had managed to wear myself out. At least this time, my abilities were not disabled as I could still intuit smaller things. I also seemed to know I needed to rest to withstand the demands of training the next day.

  The whole training prospect no longer seemed such a daunting process, but more so excited me. I was suddenly eager to get started with the rest of my life. I wanted to have the ability to help the society, not hinder it. I didn’t want to be a burden, I wanted to lift the weight from others’ shoulders.

  Eleanor sat on the edge of my bed and told me that I was welcome to dinner at six. She didn’t know that I was on the verge of an episode of syncope and that dinner was entirely out of the question.

  Tobias, Eleanor, and Marielle had a whole wing of the house to themselves as a family, and Eleanor told me how to locate it if I needed to find her.

  Headquarters was enormous, but it housed many people. Living in one building rather than ten different houses proved more economical and safe. The furnishings were a bit much, but most of them were old…the society had probably owned everything for centuries.

  Eleanor left me lying on the bed again, this time looking up towards the high ceiling. Every once in a while I would shudder, but the severe convulsions never came back. The flashes of intuition slowed down nicely. Well, nicely in the sense that they didn’t fly by so fast as to make me sick and leave me with mental whiplash. But not so pleasant that I now understood them.

  I still had a minor headache and churning stomach from the incident and my skin turned clammy, the result of my profuse sweating, which had slowly ceased. My hair was sticky and tangled and annoyed me as it stuck to my skin. I would have left bed to take a shower, but I didn’t feel like moving, or thinking, or being. I just wanted to disappear for a while. The ceiling began to blur into misty shadows and a few minutes later I did disappear…into nice, empty, dreamless sleep.

  Chapter 19

  Eleanor served a half full table of Mystics inhaling French toast as I walked into the dining room. I dropped into the empty seat opposite of Isaac, who sat behind an untouched stack of his own French toast, a hollow look on his face.

  He glanced up to see who had entered, smiled half-heartedly at me, and then returned his gaze to whatever inanimate object had previously held his stare. Gabriel’s choice to leave didn’t only hurt me; Isaac had always looked up to Gabriel, loved every moment he followed along in his wake. They were like brothers. Isaac was also alone since a Shadow Silencer killed his Guardian mother and his father, an outsider, abandoned them long before her death when he learned of their powers.

  An elderly gentleman, who was shorter than I was, stared at me from beneath two silvery caterpillar eyebrows as I pulled my white spindly chair towards the solid oak table. I glanced at his crinkly face, which transformed before my eyes into a young man almost identical to Isaac, and said, “Isaac, aren’t you going to introduce me to your grandfather?”

  The old man cackled. “Ooh, she’s good.” And then he pointed a knobby finger at me and said, “But who would have thought different? Your father is one hell of a Sage. It’s too bad he’s a Shadow now. I remember when he was just twelve years old; he could throw his voice telepathically to make the receiver think his voice in their head was their own thought. Poor Tobias, he thought he was going crazy when his mind told him to climb a wall in the obstacle course and jump off. See he couldn’t do telepathy yet. ‘Course, now that I think on it; that was probably the first sign your dad wou
ld grow up to be no good.”

  “Yeah, well I don’t plan on following in his footsteps. Except maybe being one hell of a Sage,” I said, even though I felt powerless in the presence of so many other Mystics who had completed training and been in practice for years.

  Isaac’s grandfather laughed again and shook his head, bringing a shaky forkful to his mouth.

  “So now that you’re a retired Mystic, what do you do?” I asked.

  “Well, mostly I just sit around all day like any other old fart. I ain’t all the way retired, mind,” he said with a wink. “I still guard this place, and my powers didn’t just dry up when I stopped working missions. They stay with you ‘til you die, and I don’t plan on doing that for another, what is it? Sixteen years?”

  “Seventeen years, gramps,” Isaac offered. “You’re eighty-six.”

  “Well, I knew I was eighty-six or eighty-seven.”

  Isaac rolled his eyes. “His dad lived to be 103 so that’s gramps’ goal, too.”

  “That seems like a long time to live,” I said, not managing to contain my bitterness for the world at the moment.

  “Yes, I suppose it is. But if you’ve lived a life like mine, it doesn’t seem long at all. I guess the real answer to what I do all day is, sit in this decrepit body and wonder what the hell happened. One day I’m handsome and strong and she’s looking at me through those big brown eyes like I’m the only thing she sees. And it seems the next day I’m old and wrinkly and my Emily is gone. Excuse me.”

  I watched as he tried to hide the moisture gathering in his eyes as he pushed away from the table and shuffled off to the front porch, fixing his suspenders on the way out.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Isaac, my face frozen in shocked apology. “I didn’t mean…”

  “Don’t worry about it. He gets a little sentimental every now and then. And by the way, I’m not particularly looking forward to a hundred years either,” Isaac said, and I saw the pain in his eyes, knew he wondered why Gabriel had left him behind.

  My first training session wouldn’t start until about two because I had to wait for the instructor to arrive from Chapter D’s Headquarters in Georgia, where she had just finished training a thirteen-year-old.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” I suggested. “I think we’re both feeling a little suffocated in here.”

  Isaac wasn’t bad company, although he tried my tolerance for annoying, depressed teenaged boys. He followed me around a little too close inside my personal space and I considered telling him to get lost, but I wasn’t heartless enough to kick a puppy. And I had to admit I enjoyed his spontaneous bouts of reckless humor and entertaining transformations into random objects such as tree stumps or boulders. I was an only child but I figured if I wanted a brother, he would be like Isaac.

  The fresh air also seemed to clear my head from the broken bursts of intuition and I was able to focus on one moment of time without the future intruding.

  Finally, we circulated back to the house, but first he had to invite me to the enormous garage. The building was only one story, but there were additional cars hidden beneath others in elevators below the ground.

  All the cars in there were nicer than average for the rural Oil Creek area, but nothing that would call too much attention to the Mystic drivers. Suddenly, I saw it on the end, parked neatly in its own little spot and looking quite a bit shabbier than the rest of the tenants there…my little Civic! And I realized why Isaac had wanted to bring me there so desperately.

  “Isaac, you got my car back!”

  “Yeah, I thought you might want it,” he casually replied, flicking my keys at me, which I easily caught without looking thanks in combination to my extraordinary reflexes and intuition.

  “Thanks! I was hoping someone would think to save it!”

  “No problem, you’re probably not going to be traveling a whole lot for a while anyway but I figured it probably meant something to you.”

  We still had a little time left so we ambled back to the house to grab some lunch before I started the ruthless training that would dominate my life for an inconceivable amount of time.

  My instructor, Moraine, had forwarded a letter to me, enlightening me to her training, expertise, and experience in the field of Sage education. Apparently, a famous Sage called Eden trained my instructor, who then became one of the most powerful Sages in Europe, but then abdicated herself from a position at the Capital in order to pass on her knowledge to young Mystics.

  She seems skilled enough, I thought, as I read over her qualifications. Maybe even so adept that she could teach someone as old and untrained as me into becoming a real Mystic, but what do I know? I wondered. At that point, every member seemed like an expert to me, although I knew there were stratifications within the society, some members more talented than others.

  She also detailed in the letter the parameters of my training. I would have mandatory sessions every week day from eight a.m. to five p.m. with a half hour lunch break at noon, with the exception of the first day of training, which would commence at two p.m. to allow for the instructor’s arrival and situation into one of the empty wings of Headquarters.

  The letter noted that the schedule was subject to change with little or no notice at the instructor’s discretion, but that should I require a day off, I was to notify her at least two days in advance for scheduled appointments and two hours in advance for unplanned circumstances. Weekends were mine to enjoy, but if I wished for further guidance I could schedule a time to meet with her outside of the regular session time.

  She would not implement a specific schedule, due to the uncertainty with which I would respond to training; however, a list of topics that we would cover was included and read:

  Basic Knowledge and Skills

  Mystic History

  Calling Appreciation

  Defensive Strategies*

  Firearm Safety

  Offensive and Combat Strategies*

  Interdisciplinary Cooperation

  Sage Talents

  Intuition*

  Telepathy*

  Teleportation*

  Telekinesis*

  *Includes beginner, intermediate, and advanced sections

  We would begin with half hour blocks of training in Sage talents and increase the duration and frequency depending on my tolerance for such intense work. Eventually, Moraine wanted me to focus on perfecting my talents up to six out of eight hours a day and begin applying them to real life situations outside of the training rooms.

  The letter also stated that I would have a practical test at the completion of each level of talent training and that I would participate in two controlled missions before the elders would consider seeing me again.

  I folded the letter and stashed it in my nightstand drawer. After eating lunch with Isaac on the front porch, I returned to my room for a few minutes to gain focus before I reported to meet with my instructor. I couldn’t lie to myself, the letter had been intimidating. It sounded as though Moraine was once one of the best Sages in the world, and what was I? I was nothing. I was a weak, lost girl who could see things out of the ordinary, who had an exceptional talent at nothing other than sucking at interpersonal relationships. And life. I thought I was failed that pretty spectacularly, too.

  What if I can’t do it? I asked myself. What if she tries to teach me, and it turns out I’m a dud?

  “You have to try, Aubrie, or you’ll never know,” someone answered my thought from my bedroom doorway. It was Tobias, Eleanor’s husband and the other Sage in the house. “Some talents come naturally, like intuition. But others, you have to train to gain. All you can do is absorb as much of what Moraine has to say as you can and practice hard. She knows what she’s doing, and you have already demonstrated strong talents. I know you probably don’t want to hear this either, but it’s in your blood. You’re the daughter of a very powerful Sage, even if he is dark. You have the power in you to do whatever you want.”

  “I don’t know if I can believe that
,” I replied, still doubting myself.

  “Never give up, Aubrie. And especially never give up before you’ve even started. Have some faith in yourself, and you might see that things get a little easier.”

  He turned and walked away and I felt my cheeks flush red. It wasn’t quite a lecture, but it was a wake-up call. He was absolutely right. Why did I think so negatively about my training when I hadn’t even met my instructor yet? I pulled my hair back into a ponytail, took a deep breath, and followed Tobias out into the hallway.

  Chapter 20

  The instructor stared at me through scrutinizing eyes as I ate up the distance between us in the white hall, stared at me with eyes so pale gray she might not have had irises at all.

  If I had not intuited beforehand that she would look like the exact stereotype of a mythical Sage, I might have turned around and run away when I saw her.

  Luckily, I was a real Sage, too, and had intuited that I would be, at the very least, intimidated by her oracle-like appearance, and so did my best not to show any signs of fear when I stepped into the hall.

  She looked as much like a witch as I ever saw anyone look like one, crinkled papery skin, bumped aquiline nose, and dowager’s hump included. Her long unkempt hair was so pale it wasn’t even white, it was translucent. It looked as though a strong wind would find no trouble in whisking her away; like she would disappear in it, nothing more than a misty vapor, every bit of sustenance sucked out of her.

  Don’t underestimate her, I thought, my intuition battling against the image of the decrepit woman in front of me. She could probably kill you in an instant and you wouldn’t even have a chance to realize what happened. And indeed, as I came to stand in front of her she took it upon herself to prove her worth to me.