The Awakening (49 page)

I could see the anguish in her face. It seemed like she were caught in an internal struggle. Something seemed to give. She let out a long sigh.

“Okay.”

29

Baptised in Blood

M
ost of what I know I’ve had to piece together from diaries my Papa kept and what Sage Etorre told me.

Papa’s name was Antonio De Luca. He was born in a small village about thirty kilometres south of Roma. It was the sort of place where everybody knew everybody else.

His family wasn’t rich - my grandfather was a tailor by trade. He had two sisters, Milena and Angelica. The family were devout Catholics. Before he could even walk, my father attended Mass. Antonio idolised my grandfather – his early diaries were full of extracts about him. He helped out at the tailors, working hard to make life easier for his father. He even expressed a desire to continue the family business, which he wrote made grandfather really proud. It was a humble life I guess, but Papa seemed happy. That was until he turned eighteen and had his Awakening.

His diaries don’t explain what could have caused it. All I know is how scared Papa was when he discovered he had all these extraordinary abilities. Back then, the HASEA wasn’t so organised. They didn’t approach him for some time. Not knowing what to do, he went to my grandfather for advice. It didn’t go well. My grandfather thought he was possessed by a demon. He carted him off to see the local priest who apparently performed all manner of frightening exorcisms on him. When it didn’t work - which naturally it wouldn’t as he was about as far from possessed as you can get - the priest proclaimed him to be the spawn of Satan. The whole family was shamed. In turn, Papa’s own family shunned him. He was told to leave with little more than the clothes on his back and some parting money from my weeping grandmother.

Being deeply religious himself, Papa believed what the priest had said. He was convinced that he was evil. That it was only a matter of time before he seriously hurt someone...or worse. So he headed to the nearest bar with the intention of drinking himself into oblivion. He was sat in the corner, drowning his sorrows when my mother walked in.

Mamma’s name was Lorena. As I told you before, she was a Succubus. She’d come to the bar looking for men she could drain. But I need to explain something. Succubi aren’t like Incubi. They don’t exist just to breed. They drain life-force not just to stay young and beautiful – that’s a by-product. If they don’t. they decay and eventually die. If they want to live, they don’t have a choice. But some are lazy and can’t be bothered to spend more than one night feeding. They drain a single person until they are dead to get what they need. Those are the ones we have a problem with. Others ‘hop’ - taking the bare minimum from each person. Sex is the trade-off. All the victim remembers is a great one night stand and a few days of flu afterwards. Not a bad deal really. Anyway, Lorena was the latter, not evil, just doing what she needed to in order to survive.

So she came into the bar and was working on several of the men. Succubi have a few talents, one of which is the ability to sort of drink in the surface information of their victims. Then they use it to help them relate to the person. That’s what Iralia did to you the day you first came to the base. Not that they really need the skill, because another is that they can charm others into falling in love with them. Naturally this helps when they want the person to...um, go home with them.

So anyway, Lorena noticed Papa sitting away from the others and how much more powerful his life-force was. So she headed over to try her charms on him. Naturally they didn’t work. Antonio was unknowingly immune to her allure. Mamma had never before met a Chosen and was confused and intrigued by him. She wanted to know more, but couldn’t use the short cut, so decided to try the old fashioned way. But, Papa refused to open up. He just sat there and drank, staring into his glass, whilst Mamma talked to him. At the end of the evening, he was very drunk. Lorena offered to take him home. He admitted he had no home to be taken to. Maybe it was the curiosity, or maybe she was starting to feel something, Mamma did something she’d never done before. She invited him to stay at her place. Apparently he made weak efforts to refuse, but she insisted. He took the sofa, and turned down her advances. In the morning, when she came down, he’d gone. That evening, she found him in the same bar once again drowning his sorrows. And once again, she sat with him and talked while he drank and for the second time offered him a place to stay. As before, in the morning, when she came downstairs, there was no sign of him. The pattern continued for at least a week. Every evening, he’d head back to the bar and start drinking. After my mother finished her shift at a local restaurant, she’d join Papa and sit with him, whilst he drank. She told him little things about herself. All the truth, only leaving out the parts that were Succubus related. Little by little, he began to open up. He told about his family, about his past. Told her about what he thought was the evil inside of him. Told her the things he could do. He demonstrated by melting his glass with a hand. It was at this point that Mamma realised what Papa was. She knew she should fear him, but instead she felt something else. And he felt the same thing when he looked at her. No tricks or allure. They were falling for each other.

I found a passage at the back of one of Papas’ diaries, which were words she’d said one of those nights. She told him: ‘No one is evil by default. Everyone has choices. The choices you make are what define you. You can be whoever you want to be, whoever you are.’

That night, Papa didn’t sleep on the couch. That evening when she came to the bar after her shift, he was sober. He never said it, but it was obvious that he had found something to live for.

It had been two weeks since Lorena had fed. She refused to allow herself to feed on Antonio. Aside from the fact that he would remember, she cared for him too much. Succubi need to feed on average at least once a week, or they start to degenerate. But something strange was happening to Mamma. Her looks weren’t declining. If anything, she was becoming even more beautiful. She didn’t know what it meant, but she didn’t care -she was happy.

After a while, Papa moved in with Mamma. He got himself a job at the same bar he’d visited so many times. It was another month before the HASEA came to him. They caught up with him as he was walking home and told him what he really was. He had to believe them, they knew too much about what he was going through to be lying. He went with them to Castello, where they filled in the blanks.

They also told him what Lorena was.

As soon as they did, he ran from the base and went straight home. He confronted Mamma about it, demanding the truth. She broke down and told him. He was horrified and left her sobbing her heart out. I know this makes him seem like a horrible person Alex, but he was just really scared. Don’t forget how he was raised. It was almost impossible for him not to apply religion to what he’d learned. But religion has so much wrong. It refers to most Umbra species as demons. And demons within that context are completely evil. And Succubi are supposedly demons. So he believed my mother was evil and had been sent by the Devil to help corrupt his soul.

He was followed by the Alliance and brought back in. Over the next few days, without my father around, my mother began to decay rapidly. At first she thought that it was because she’d subconsciously been draining him without either of them realising. But when she drained a random person and it made no difference, it was like she was dying of sadness.

Papa was hurting too and despite his beliefs, he snuck over to Mamma’s house and peered in through the window. Apparently she was slumped against the lounge wall, looking at least sixty years old. Instead of being repulsed, he panicked. Broke the door down and went to her. Told her that he didn’t care what she was. That someone had told him that no one is evil by default. Within hours she began to heal. By the morning she was back to the beautiful woman he knew and loved. He vowed that he’d never leave her again and she forgave him, because she knew both figuratively and literally that she couldn’t live without him.

They joined the HASEA together and were honest about their relationship. There were no laws forbidding relationships between Pandemonians and Chosen, but it was frowned upon back then. But they were in love and didn’t care either way. The longer they spent together, the more human my mother became. She didn’t need to feed any more. Somehow Papa kept her healthy. So when she started being sick in the mornings, they both knew it was for another reason entirely.

A union between an Umbra and a Chosen was bad enough, but neither of my parents knew what the consequences of a resulting child would be. You already know that witches and shaman are the result of Pandemonians breeding with humans, but it was believed that a Chosen and Pandemonian couldn’t produce a child. In the history of the Alliance, not a single case was reported where it had happened - I guess it essentially goes against nature. I know this sounds really cheesy, but I was a miracle. Because my parents simply didn’t know what would happen to me if the HASEA found out, they kept me hidden away for fear of me being taken away. Don’t get me wrong; even though I was a ‘secret’, I was loved unconditionally. I had an amazing life and was spoiled by both Mamma and Papa.

Then it all went wrong.

I was seven years old when the SOS found out about my parent’s relationship. The information made it all the way back to Hades. He was furious and took what he saw as one of his own joining with a Chosen as a personal insult against himself and the Umbra. So he gave the Sorrow its first mission on this side of the Veil. Kill my parents.

For the week before the thing came, Papa began to have the worst nightmares. He’d wake in the middle of the night screaming. Hearing him sound so frightened made me cry. Then a few days later, the storms started. I remember it was the worst weather I’d ever seen. Skies the colour of blood. Thunder so loud you thought your eardrums would burst. Constant rain. The lighting was relentless and so destructive. I remember that Mamma had to keep comforting me, because I genuinely thought that the sky was going to collapse and kill us all.

The final night, we were huddled in the living room. The power had gone out. I was wrapped in a blanket which I carried everywhere with me. I loved it, because it smelled of them. I was sitting on the edge of the couch, stroking Papa’s hair. He was laying on it, writing in one of his journals that he’d converted into his own version of a HASEA handbook – the one you now own. He’d barely been getting any sleep at all. More bad dreams he’d told me, but he never told me what about.

I remember Mamma was sitting on the floor holding Papa’s free hand. None of us were talking, we were just happy in each other’s company.

Papa heard it first. Or sensed it, I’ll never know which. He jerked up almost knocking me off the armrest. He looked down at my Mother, who seemed confused for a moment and then...scared. The atmosphere frightened me. I asked what was wrong, but they wouldn’t answer me. I followed, dragging my blanket as they ran into the hallway. I watched my Papa open the small metal vent above the stairway. He pulled out a bag and ran back into the lounge with it. I followed him back in. He placed it on the table and pulled out all sorts of things I’d never seen. I know now that they were Alliance weapons. Mamma pulled away a small rug, which exposed a trapdoor I’d never even known existed.

They were acting frantically and it was scaring me so much I could barely breathe. I started to cry. Papa stopped and looked at me. I’ll never forget that face as long as I live.

He looked so sad.

Mamma...sorry this is so hard. No...it’s ok, I’m ok. Mama knelt down and hugged me so tightly it hurt. Father did the same. They both held me as if it were the last thing they would ever do. I was sniffing and hiccupping from being so scared and confused. Mamma shushed me and smoothed the back of my hair, the way she always did when I was upset.

I remember, she pointed at the trapdoor and said, ‘listen carefully
mia bambina
, you need to go down here and keep very, very quiet okay?’

They lowered me in and I pulled the blanket up to my face. There was a sort of rustling sound overhead and then darkness. The dirt below me was damp, from where the rain had found its way in through the cracks. I was sitting in a cold, smelly puddle. But I stayed completely still. Even though I was still only a human, I could tell something bad was coming. I could sense it.

I waited.

If God really existed and had any mercy, he would have made me deaf then. It started with the screeching of some horrific creature from outside. It sounded like a horse’s neigh mixed with nails on a blackboard. I know now that it was the sound of that poor soulless unicorn that that evil
creature
rides around on.

Then there were the heavy, slow footsteps. All I could think of was the giant from the Jack and the Beanstalk story Papa used to read to me. All sorts of thoughts ran through my head. Was the giant real? Had it come for us? Its footsteps were so powerful they made the mud jump up around me. I remember lumps of it flew up into my face and up my nose, making me choke. There were more frantic footsteps as my parents ran around the living room, doing god knows what. I had to resist the urge to call out to them.

The front door burst open and I heard Mamma shriek. The thunder was so loud, as if it had come right into the house. I could hear the rain beating down and the howl of the wind. Then there were the pounding footsteps of this
thing
coming closer.