Lesser Gods (2 page)

“Let me see,”
my sister said wearily, getting out of her bed and trotting over to me.

Unlike Cat, this girl who could talk directly into my head wasn’t really my blood relation. But some experiences can make a bond as thick as blood, and after what we had survived together, it was impossible to not consider her as family. Being three years younger than Cat, Alia was my second sister.

I rolled up my left pajama shirtsleeve to show her where my arm had made contact with the edge of her desk. I couldn’t see the injury well in the darkness myself, but Alia seemed to know what was wrong. She held her hands near my elbow, and a moment later, the sharpest part of the pain there receded.

“Now your back, Addy,”
said Alia’s voice in my head.

I obediently lifted my shirt so she could get a look at my back.

“It’s hard to see. Could you turn on the light?”

I glanced over at the light switch near the door, and a moment later the room was bathed in eye-stinging light.

“Well, part of it’s turning a little purplish,”
said Alia.
“Did you hit your head too?”

“No,” I said. “Just my back.”

“Okay.”

My back didn’t actually hurt so much at the moment, but I knew that it would get a lot worse soon if my sister didn’t work her unique abilities on it. While I often wished I didn’t have to share my bedroom with a nine-year-old girl, I had to admit that there were certain undeniable advantages to living with a psionic healer.

Alia gave my shoulders a light pat and said,
“All finished, Addy.”

“Thanks,” I mumbled, lowering my shirt and standing up.

Alia was the only person alive who still called me Addy, and I only tolerated it from her because she was younger than me. My old baby name didn’t carry a patronizing note when it came from Alia.

My sister let out a loud and deliberate sigh.
“I’m going to get you a dog leash for your next birthday, Addy. If it’s a birthday present, you’ll have to wear it.”

“How many times do I have to tell you, Alia? I will not be tied down.”

Sleep-hovering was perhaps the worst side effect I had to my telekinetic power. I could move things without touching them. I could levitate things, including myself. I could use my power to hit things from a distance. What I couldn’t do was keep myself from occasionally drifting up out of my bed while I slept. Waking up in this condition usually meant a painful crash-landing. When I fell out of bed, I really fell.

Alia frowned, saying warningly,
“You’re going to crack your head open one of these days.”

“That’s Cindy talking,” I said.

“Well, it’s true!”

Admittedly, that was a possibility, but I wasn’t about to wear a tether at night no matter what anyone said. Inadvertently using their powers while asleep was something specific to child psionics, and now that I was already fourteen years old, I hoped I would grow out of it soon.

Alia gave me a worried look.
“Were you having a nightmare?”

“No.”

“I bet you were talking in your sleep again, though.”

Quite possibly.

Over the last year, I had learned that dreams were sometimes more than just snippets of our past, but internal psychological warnings that needed to be taken seriously. This one, however, was just a dream.

I didn’t often dream about my life prior to turning psionic.

Cat’s eighth birthday... That was more than four years ago. Assuming that she was still alive, she’d be twelve now.

I touched her amethyst on the leather cord around my neck, running my fingers along the edge of the smoothly cut stone. Two years ago, when I first discovered my talents, Cat had given me her lucky stone because she feared I would be taken away and locked up. I had promised her that I would return the pendant when things got back to normal. They never did. Our home was attacked that night. I saw my parents die, and Cat went missing. Was my first sister really, as I suspected, with the Angels now?

“Addy? Are you going back to sleep?”

Alia’s voice in my head snapped me back into the present. I glanced over at the window. Through the slit between the closed curtains, I could see that the early-June sky was a murky shade of violet, and daybreak was only minutes away.

“No, I’m awake,” I told her.

My sister yawned loudly.
“Me too.”

School was not yet out, which meant an early start for the whole family, so there was little point in trying to get back to sleep. Not that Alia or I attended school. We were home-schooled by our semi-legal guardian, Cindy. Real school was for Terry – my combat instructor and live-in bodyguard, who was also a sophomore in high school – and she would need feeding in an hour or so. Given the choice, I’d sleep in, but Cindy insisted that we all eat together whenever we could.

“Cindy seemed a bit tired last night after her meeting with Mr. Baker,” I said. “Since we’re already up, what do you say we make breakfast this morning, Ali?”

“Sure!”
Alia replied happily, and we quickly changed into our day clothes.

Alia picked out a flowery one-piece summer dress. Rummaging through my dresser, I pulled out a green T-shirt and a pair of navy-blue sweatpants. Then I changed my mind and swapped the T-shirt for a black one. I wanted to dress dark today because of something I had to do that afternoon. Something I was definitely not looking forward to but something that nevertheless had to be done. Fortunately, that was still hours away, and I forced the thought out of my mind.

“Addy, have you seen my pendant?”
asked Alia, referring to the bloodstone pendant Cindy had bought for her a year ago.

“Aren’t you wearing it?” I asked. Like myself, Alia hardly ever took her pendant off, even at night.

“I think the cord snapped.”

I rolled my eyes. “Again? You have to stop playing with it, Alia.”

“Here it is!”
cried Alia’s telepathic voice as she pulled her pendant, broken cord and all, out from under the giant fluffy white unicorn doll leaning against her bed.

My sister’s fondness for unicorns bordered on obsession, her side of our room infested by an army of horned horses in the form of toys, dolls, little ornaments, and a poster pinned to the wall above her desk. Even her pillowcase had little pink unicorns printed all over it. The biggest unicorn always stood guard by Alia’s bed, and I could only guess how the bloodstone had found its way under it.

I helped Alia replace the leather cord (we always kept a few spares) and Alia happily put the pendant around her neck again.

“That’s better,”
said Alia, looking down at the polished bloodstone resting on her chest.

I forced a smile. I normally didn’t mind Alia mimicking me by wearing her birthstone pendant, but just occasionally it felt awkward seeing the small green stone around her neck. Alia was getting somewhat taller and, aside from her long walnut-brown hair, she was beginning to resemble Cat a bit more than I would have liked.

It was still a bit early in the morning to start cooking, so Alia and I first wasted some time sitting by our bedroom window and gazing down at the city below. From our fortieth-floor vantage point, the cars on the road looked like little toys, and I wondered how many of the early-bird drivers were Guardians as opposed to people who didn’t have a clue what kind of weird part of the city they were driving through.

This was New Haven.

Now, there are a number of towns named New Haven that you might find in an atlas, but I can guarantee that none of them would be the New Haven where I lived.

My New Haven was the world’s only psionic town, founded but a year ago by the second-largest and currently imperiled psionic faction, the Guardians, to which I now belonged. Our “town” was actually just a loose cluster of residential high-rises at the semi-suburban edge of a largish city. New Haven was our first and last line of defense against the ever-increasing threat of our rival faction, the Angels.

In a nutshell, the Angels wanted the Guardians destroyed so they could focus their resources on their ultimate goal of world domination. Not only did they outnumber us, but they were more committed to their cause owing to the fact that many of their members were psionically “converted” by a master controller. Converted Angels served their faction with blind, unquestioning loyalty. Master controllers were exceptionally rare among psionics and usually headed the largest factions, but currently only the Angels had such a master at the helm.

The Guardians’ last master controller, Diana Granados, had been assassinated years before I was born. And when the Guardians’ minds were freed from her control, the entire organization quickly fell apart, dividing into hundreds of breakaway factions which were subsequently hunted down one at a time by the Angels. Whenever they could, the Angels captured and converted these Guardians, thereby adding to their ranks in preparation for their planned war on humanity.

To restore the balance of power, the Guardians had founded New Haven last year as a place for the remaining breakaway factions to gather and seek refuge together from the Angel onslaught. Traditionally, even members of large psionic factions lived in fairly small groups scattered across the country in order to avoid detection by normal humans, so New Haven was a bit of an experiment in progress, and a potentially dangerous one at that.

But so far, while we admittedly had some close calls, New Haven served its purpose well. The Angels were kept at bay while the public remained blissfully unaware. Still, as I gazed down at the city, I wondered how many cars would remain on the streets if non-psionics were to someday discover what kind of place this really was.

Most of the drivers had turned off their headlights by now, and I realized that the sky was getting brighter and bluer. It looked like it would turn into a warm sunny day.

“If we’re going to surprise Cindy, we better get cooking,” I said, getting up from the window seat and leading Alia out of our room.

“What are we going to make for breakfast, Addy?”

“I’m kind of in the mood for waffles,” I replied as we walked quietly to the kitchen. “And maybe some sausages.”

“And eggs,”
Alia said cheerily.
“Lot’s of scrambled eggs.”

Having no way to know what we were up to, of course, Cindy walked into the kitchen as Alia and I were halfway through preparing breakfast.

“Well, aren’t we off to an early start this morning?” remarked Cindy, smiling broadly at us. “It smells great too!”

Cynthia Gifford, who would celebrate her fiftieth birthday next month, didn’t look quite that old. She was a slender woman with long silvery hair that extended down to her waist. Eternally forgiving and possessing an almost irritatingly calm demeanor, Cindy was the sole reason that our strange little family lived in the penthouse of the forty-story condominium building referred to by the Guardians as New Haven One.

Cindy was a psionic finder and hider, which meant that she could sense the location of other psionics from great distances, as well as conceal the presence of psionics from other finders. It was her power as a hider that made her uniquely important to the Guardians. Psionic hiders themselves weren’t all too rare, but only Cindy could create a hiding bubble large enough to cover all of New Haven.

New Haven One, or NH-1 for short, housed most of the families of New Haven’s ruling Council and other important people, while the other buildings around us, each similarly designated by a number, were home to an ever-increasing population of psionics from the former breakaway Guardian factions. Known as the “Heart of New Haven” to more than a thousand Guardian families currently residing here, it was Cindy’s job to make sure that Angel spies infiltrating New Haven wouldn’t be able to sense where individual Guardian psionics were, thus greatly increasing our security. I didn’t fully appreciate how important her job was until the Angels tried to abduct her back in mid-April.

All that said, as far as Alia and I were concerned, Cindy was our adoptive mother and home-tutor, as well as an excellent cook. The only real problem I ever had with her, aside from her over-protectiveness, was that she had the world’s worst fashion sense when picking out clothes for me. Buying everything from flower-patterned sweatpants to shirts with teddy bears and sparkly rainbows on them, Cindy insisted on dressing me like a little girl. Fortunately, that issue had been resolved several weeks ago when I finally put my foot down and told her that I would no longer let her choose my wardrobe.

I caught Cindy sneaking a glance at the sausages in my frying pan, and I was pleased to note that she didn’t comment. Cindy had been teaching me how to cook ever since we first met, and she could rarely refuse to make some helpful suggestion, so I took her silence as evidence that I was doing everything right.

Alia looked at Cindy for a few seconds, and Cindy smiled, saying, “Oh, did he?”

My sister had no doubt telepathically told Cindy about this morning’s crash-landing.

“Speak aloud or not at all, Alia,” I said, annoyed.

“Okay, okay!” said Alia, using her mouth for the first time that morning.

Alia, a telepathic from birth, had spent most of her life unable to speak coherently with her mouth, and only early this year learned to articulate words clearly enough to be understood. Aloud, Alia still spoke slowly and deliberately, often with horribly incorrect intonation, making her sound like she was mentally handicapped. Nevertheless, as Alia could only speak telepathically to one person at a time, politeness dictated that she speak aloud whenever there were two or more people in the room. Alia usually did just that, and I suspected her telepathic tattletale to Cindy was quite intentional.

“Adrian–” began Cindy.

But I cut across her, saying, “Don’t even start, please, Cindy. I’ve survived without a tether for two years, and I’m not about to start wearing one now.”

“I was just going to say thanks for cooking breakfast this morning,” Cindy said in a hurt tone.