Dark One: One for Sorrow... (The Khiara Banning Series Book 1) (30 page)

Mom looks around while Dad walks into the kitchen with the food. “Where’s Cael? And for that matter where’s Tristan and Cara?”

“K-i-s-s-i-n-g somewhere,” sings Lisa.

I get up from taking up the whole couch. “Not all three of them,” I point out.

“Never know!” she says, winking at me before launching herself down on top of me. “Hah! Sitting on you!” she cries triumphantly.”

I complain, “You’re too strong for such a small girl.”

The microwave beeps from the kitchen.

“Don’t blame
me
, blame my heritage!” Lisa bursts into a fit of giggles, laughing even harder when she snorts. It’s endearing, and makes me chuckle.

I smile fondly at her. She reminds me of a younger, more hyper Cara. “Okay, okay. We really need to get to studying your French. Now that Dad is home, he can help us.”

“You’ll help Lisa with her verbs, right Jaques?” shouts Mom, her dark eyes filled with laughter.

Dad shouts back something noncommittal and the microwave beeps again, then “Dinner’s about heated up,” he says.

We all gather in the kitchen to serve ourselves when there’s a brusque knock at the door followed by two rings of the doorbell when Mom isn’t fast enough getting to the door.

“I’m coming,” she mumbles, shaking her head of dark brown hair. “It’s probably Cara,” she muses, then stops short of opening the door. “No, she’d have walked in…”

It rings again, frantically, and Mom turns to me with a look I will never forget. Her nose flares, as if sniffing the air, and she scowls. “Khiara,” she says, looking around the room for Dad and seeming satisfied when he’s nowhere in sight. “I need you and Lisa to go up to your room.”

“Uh, what exactly is the matter, Mom?” I say, trying not to look like I’m panicking.

“Listen,” she says frantically, “I’m not going to waste any time pretending I know exactly what is going on, but if you don’t go to your room with Lisa right now, you are grounded for…a long time. Find your father and take him with you.”

I turn to look at Lisa, and her eyes are as wide as saucers. “Come on,” she says. “We should listen to her. She’s not joking around.”

My mother sighs, and then walks over to me, cupping my face in her soft hands. Her scent fills my nose, comforting. “Khiara please just listen to me.” She turns to Lisa, “Carry her if you have to.”

Lisa blinks obviously confused, but complies, picking me up fireman style and walking to the stairs where she meets my father, and wastes no time pushing him towards my room.

“Merde,” mutters Dad.

I search his face and come up with nothing to explain my parents’ strange behaviour. “Papa?” it comes out as a whimper.

“Khiara,” he says. “We haven’t been entirely honest with you about how we came to be your parents.”

Twenty-Five

“I am so sorry,” says Dad. He is sitting on the end of my bed, his expression stricken. “We should have just told you the real story.”

Lisa laughs nervously as she plops me down onto the bed. “Sorry,” she says. “Forgot I was holding you.”

“Everything we told you was true. But we left out…some details.”

“Are you human?” I ask, and Dad laughs like I’ve just asked him if the sky is green.

He smiles. “Yes, I am. And as far as your mother knows, she is too. But,” he breathes a sigh and flops onto his back. “There are things that we both just…know.”

“Oh,” breathes Lisa, her head bobbing up and down with understanding. “You’re both Seers.”

Dad makes a noise of agreement, and then says, “Oui. We can sense all things...qui s’avez la magique. When I found you, it was because I knew to take a walk. Something inside of me knew that I would find something important, and there you were. I sensed your presence, because it is like no other. That is what we didn’t tell you.”

A growl of frustration bubbles up my throat before I can stop it. “Can my life get
any more convoluted?
Because I am seriously getting
really
annoyed at all of the curveballs being thrown my way. My best friend can turn into a giant fox and produce fire out of thin air, my boyfriend is a Fallen angel and ex Guardian, and my other friends are either Nephilim or more of the Fallen! I would like to take a moment of silence for my fucking sanity.”

Dad sits up then, looks at me with a quizzical expression and says, “C’est la verité?”

I nod. “Yeah, you heard me right. I’m telling the truth.”

“Mon Dieu,” he whispers. “This is,” he nods to himself, “yes, it feels right, I suppose I knew the company you keep was different, but I never sensed a threat so I ignored it.”

There’s a knock on my door then, and Lisa walks over to it. “Mrs. Banning?”

Dad gets up and says, “Let her in, it’s her…and others.”

~*~

Samael is lying on my bed.

Lisa is on the phone, sobbing.

Cael’s sister
is lying
on my bed.

Sam’s
biological mother
is unconscious
on my bed
.

Why are my thoughts so jumbled?

Yes, oh, I think I’m going insane.

“Listen,” says a short, muscular man of approximately the same age as my father, who is standing in the doorway between my room and the hallway. His thick hair is grey at the temples, and his skin is dark. “My name is… My name is Jachniel, but you may call me Jack.” His accent makes everything he says sound kind of staccato.

“I have travelled very far to get here,” he eyes my dad, as if sizing him up, and then nods to himself, deciding that he’s worthy of his presence. “It seems that I will be stuck with the body of an old man until salvation,” he turns his gaze on me. “It has been a very long five hundred years.”

“I left you a necklace,” he says, peering into my eyes. “I suppose I had hoped you would not lose it so soon.”

“It was stolen,” I say, feeling defensive. “By Douma.”

Jack cringes. “Yes, well, it is the same thing. You do not have it anymore. I suspected one of Lucifer’s servants would try to steal it. Samael told me as much would happen. She is the more pessimistic of the two of us, though she was always the most optimistic twin.”

“What exactly happened?” I ask, looking between Jack and my mother, who is standing next to him.

“They were attacked,” she says, “and sought shelter here. I sensed something was off, and didn’t want to subject you to it before I knew myself. I can’t believe the mess you’re in…well I can,” she sighs, “I just don’t want to.”

Samael stirs, and the whole room goes silent; nobody breathes. “Christ,” she says, “Lisa stop crying, you’re killing my head!”

She blinks at the room for a second, before realizing the situation. “Oh,” she says. “Yes, um…”

Lisa launches herself at her mother in lightning speed. “Mom!”

“Hey there, kiddo.” She says, enveloping her in a hug. Samael is Cael’s spitting image with blonde hair, though she appears older than him by at least a decade.

“I’m not dead,” she says. “But I would have been, if not for the wonderful man over there.” She points towards Jack, who shrugs like it’s no big deal.

“You should thank him. He saved my life.” She says, and then turns to me, a radiant smile on her face. “Ah, finally we meet. I suspect you’ll meet my brother soon. It’s not every day that one of the Fallen is appointed as a Guardian, let alone over the soul they Fell for in the first place.”

I gulp. She doesn’t know…

Samael frowns, reading my facial expression. “Oh,” she says, and then looks at the spot where my necklace should be, like Jack did. “What happened? I’ve been
gone
for quite some time. I enchanted the necklace as a gift to help protect you while your soul awakens, but I didn’t know that Cam was no longer your Guardian…he interfered when it wasn’t time, didn’t he?”

“They’re a couple now,” says Lisa, beaming. “They kiss like, all the time. It’s nauseatingly adorable.”

My face? It’s on fire.

Whatever response I was expecting from her, it wasn’t the one she gives. Samael bursts into laughter, the sound like tinkling bells. “I can’t believe it,” she says. “That’s impossible!”

She looks me over then, laughing even harder. “You haven’t even awakened yet, have you? Oh my God, this is brilliant. We’re all potentially screwed, but this is brilliant!”

Lisa rolls her eyes, used to her mother’s attitude. “We’ve been training her, Mom. Me, Dad, Verchiel, her Faen friend Cara and her boyfriend Tristan – he’s Nephilim too. It’s been going well.”

Samael is still laughing, though. “I can’t,” she says, “this is fucking brilliant! Salvation is in the form of a teenaged human girl who knows next to nothing about what she’s getting in to, and her magical posse of misfit toys. I couldn’t have written a better plot line for a book than that!”

“Brilliant,” says Mom, a smirk on her face.

Suddenly, my cellphone rings and everybody’s attention is drawn to me. I gulp. It’s Cael’s ringtone.

“Hi,” he says when I answer. “I just finished work. How’s studying with Lisa?”

“Cael,” I say slowly, “you need to come over.”

“What’s wrong?” his voice holds nothing but concern. “Did something happen? Are you alright?”

“Just trust me,” I say, looking at Samael. “You’re gonna want to be here. While you’re at it, get Cara and Tristan to come with you.”

~*~

Everybody is sitting in the living room, sipping tea as if it was a formal affair, and I’d laugh if it weren’t such a confusing situation. I’m able to fill my parents in on everything that’s going on, though they’re only mildly surprised and take everything in stride.

It also turns out that the people who attacked Samael and Jack were Douma’s minions, so to speak. Jack had broken Samael out of their custody three months ago, as they were both prisoners but he found a way to escape, and they’d been on the run ever since, trying to get back here. They got here the day I received my necklace; Jack has passed it along to a friend who was passing through town and owed him a favour, and he’d put it in my locker, and who texted me that one time. They’d been in hiding ever since, trying to lie low before making contact with anybody.

Disturbingly, he was not the reason my locker had been opened the other times. Everybody suspects that it was Douma.