Between Ascension, page 5
part #9 of Levels of Ascension Series
“You asked me how you can serve me. I’ve requested your presence to help me retrieve something which I have placed on Earth.”
Petre gulped. “You want me to go to Earth? Why can’t you just snap your fingers and bring it to you?”
“Be careful, Petre. Don’t forget who you’re addressing. Given the fact that you lost your samara, you should be grateful I’m even willing to allow you to remain alive, let alone giving you another assignment.” He looked at him scathingly and sneered, “Maybe my trust is misplaced to believe you could accomplish this simple task. You may leave now.”
“Wait!” Petre wished he would have kept his mouth shut. He hastily rethought his next sentence as he saw Lucinden scowl at being abruptly addressed. “I’m sorry, Master. I spoke out of turn. Please believe I will do whatever it is you ask of me.”
“This I already know about you, Petre. Your tenacity is the reason I thought of you in the first place.” He tapped his fingers rhythmically on the arm of his chair as he let the silence draw out uncomfortably in the room. He liked keeping Petre nervous and on edge.
“Please, Master, tell me the task so I can prove myself to you again.” Petre would have thrown himself down on the floor and begged if he thought it might make a difference. He could see Lucinden considering his request, and he almost cried out in relief when he saw the slightest nod of his Master’s head.
“Very well, Petre. I require you to go to a place called New York City. Here in Tuala, it is known as Manzanit. Obviously, you will not be able to use the Ascension Gate in Manzanit as it is held by Elder Wilken who is a devout follower or Jehoban. You will have to travel to Genip where Elder Olguin owes me a favor. You will be able to use his Gate to transfer to Earth. From there you will travel across land and water to get to your destination.”
Petre nodded as he took in all of the details. He fervently wished he had been brave enough to go to Earth when he was a teenager to prove his rights of passage. This would be his first trip, and he hated to admit, even to himself, that he was terrified of the prospect. Not only would he have to go to Earth, but he would also have to stay there for an unspecified period of time. Then, if the task were not hard enough already, he would have to work out a plan for getting back to Tuala on his own.
The task sounded nearly impossible, yet he was not about to tell Lucinden he had picked the wrong man for the job. He would go to Earth and complete the task, or he would die trying. He was done being a loser; he was going to prove to himself and Lucinden that he was a man of his word; he could be trusted with the most sensitive assignment. He was going to make a name for himself.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Amanda wandered around the empty house and grounds wondering what she should do to fill her time. She knew it was important for her to work on finding the next samara, yet the timing did not feel right. Somehow, it felt as though she would be spinning her wheels if she were to force it to happen, so she had to concentrate on something else.
Her mind kept wandering back to Roswell, New Mexico. For some reason, her dreams had led her to find Shemalla, yet in real life, she had never met her. The discrepancy began to become an obsession with her.
After her fifth circuit around the garden paths, Amanda gave up fighting the idea and decided to go inside and call her father. In her dream, he had been the one to get the ball rolling in the direction of traveling to the southwest. Maybe he would have some insight as to what she should do next.
With the cordless phone in her left hand, Amanda sat down at the kitchen island with a pad of paper in front of her and a pen in her right hand. Using her thumb, she dialed her parents’ number and impatiently waited for someone to answer. Her impatience began to simmer when an automated voice picked up her call rather than either of her parents. When had they gotten an answering machine? Amanda thought angrily.
“Leave a message at the beep.”
With a sigh of resignation, Amanda spoke into the machine, “Hi, Mom and Dad, this is Amanda. I had hoped to talk with Dad to run something by him…I’ll call back later.” Amanda was in the process of ending the call when she heard her mother’s breathless voice call out.
“Amanda!? Are you still there?”
Amanda raised the phone back to her ear and asked, “Mom? Is everything okay?”
“Yes, yes. I just had to run to catch your call before you hung up. This stupid answering machine only gives me three rings.”
“Why did you get it?”
“It was your father’s idea. He said he thought it was important we stop missing calls.”
“You know you can set it to pick up after more rings, right?”
“No, I didn’t know that! I’ll have to talk to Chris about changing it. Anyway, what’s going on with you?”
Amanda heard the odd inflection her mother placed on the word ‘you’ and switched topics in her head. She asked, “Is everything okay with Carrie and Deanna?”
Unexpectedly, Diane began to sob.
“Mom? What’s going on? Never mind, I’m coming over right now. I’ll see you in a couple of minutes.” Amanda waited a few seconds to see if her mother would oppose her new plan.
“Okay,” Diane sobbed.
Amanda hated hanging up the phone with her mother crying, but she had to in order to drive over to their house. “I’m going to hang up now, Mom. Are you going to be okay until I get over there?”
“Yes. Thank you, Amanda.” Diane ended the call herself.
Amanda was even more frantic with her mother’s uncharacteristic end to the call. She tossed the receiver down onto the counter, hopped off of the barstool, grabbed her purse, and ran out to the garage. She dug the truck keys out of her purse as she entered the vehicle. More than anything right now, she wished she could teleport herself over to her mother’s house.
Chapter Seven
THE IDEA OF spending twenty minutes on the roads with traffic streaming around her seemed almost unbearable. Knowing her mother was troubled enough to practically hang up on her had her so anxious, maybe teleportation would have been catastrophic anyway. Instead, she would use the drive time to calmly review the call in her mind to see if she could piece together what could possibly be going wrong.
She backed out of the garage and turned the vehicle around in the driveway. She sped down the length of the driveway and tapped her fingers impatiently on the steering wheel as she waited for the gate to open far enough for her to squeeze the truck through the opening so she could be on her way. It was not until she hit the highway that she was able to focus enough on the problem at hand.
Obviously, the problem her mother was experiencing had something to do with either or both of her sisters. Amanda had, on more than one occasion wondered about them both. Neither of them had been to see her since she had woken up from her coma over a year ago. She had often thought it was more than strange, but life had a way of keeping her busy, so she imagined it had done the same for her siblings.
Still, it seemed inconceivable she could be in a coma for seven years, and her sisters could not manage a trip out to see her or even when they found out she married or had two children. Granted, the girls were supposed to be Riccan’s kids, which still broke her heart. She could not claim them as her own given that she was technically only eleven years older than her children. It would be rather hard to explain since her sisters both knew she had not had any children up until the age of eighteen when she had gone off on the ill-fated yacht trip with Nealand.
Unable to come up with any real answers, Amanda pressed the gas pedal down a little further and sped over to her parents’ house. She pulled into the semi-circular driveway and cut the engine. She hopped out of the truck and slammed the door as she raced up the walkway. Without bothering to knock, she let herself in.
She found her mother in the living room, sitting in a huddle on the couch. Amanda rushed across the room, put her arm around her mother’s shoulders, and sat down next to her. “I’m here, Mom. Please tell me what going on! I hate knowing there’s something so upsetting to bring you to tears and I don’t know anything about it.”
“We should have told you a long time ago, but your father insisted you needed to be stronger before we told you.”
“Okay, now you’re really starting to scare me. What are you not telling me?”
“It’s about your sisters,” she sobbed with renewed vigor.
“I gathered as much. What’s wrong with them?”
Almost as if she needed to get it out in a hurry, Diane took a deep breath and sputtered, “Carrie’s addicted to meth and spiraling out of control, and Deanna’s really sick, and we don’t know what it is.”
Amanda felt as though someone had punched her in the gut. Never in her wildest imagination had she imagined the news could be something as bad as her mother had admitted. Her mind raced through all of the past conversations with both of her siblings and realized she should have seen the signs. “So what are we going to do?”
Another round of sobs issued from her mother. Amanda tightened her hold on her mom, and she leaned into her as she said, “We can get through this together. I wish you would have told me sooner, but I know now, and we can handle it.”
“We’ve tried everything! There’s nothing more we can do but wait!”
“Why don’t you start at the beginning and tell me everything? I’m stronger than Dad believes and I might be able to help if I know about everything.”
Diane took a deep stuttering breath to help calm herself. “Right after you went missing, Carrie was beside herself with worry. She spent so much time with the search and rescue crew, we wondered how she was able to do it. Later we discovered she had started taking meth to give her more energy to keep going. When the search was canceled, your sister kept taking the meth so she wouldn’t have to think about how she had given up on you.
“We talked to her about her mood swings, and she always had an excuse about being busy or tired, or anything, really. Of course, we didn’t know anything about the drugs until recently, but we should have known.”
“How could you know? We don’t have any experience with drugs in our family. You’d have no way of putting it together.”
Diane nodded at her daughter’s reasoning. “As a mother, I should have asked more questions when she started missing work. She got fired, you know.”
“I didn’t know. What happened?”
“She stopped going to work. She had a lot of excuses for not going, and her boss finally got tired of it. They let her go and then things got really bad.”
“Well, at least she has her husband.”
“She doesn’t. They got divorced several years ago when he was arrested for attempted murder.”
“What? How come nobody told me?” Amanda recoiled from her mother and stared at her in hurt realization. “I’m not so fragile that I can’t handle any bad news. Who did he try to murder?”
“I’m sorry, Amanda. It was your father’s idea; and he was adamant we keep it to ourselves.” Diane reached out and touched her daughter’s leg as if begging her to understand. “Supposedly, it was a friend of his with whom he used to work. The details are sketchy and I really never bothered to find out after I knew Carrie was safe. She’s better off without him. I’m really sorry.”
Amanda put her hand on her mother’s consolingly and said, “You don’t have to apologize, Mom. But you can be sure I’m going to talk to Dad about how protective he’s been with me! What other things do you have to tell me?”
“An hour before you called, I got a call from Carrie. She’s in jail.”
“What?!”
“She was charged with meth distribution. The police raided her house this morning, and they arrested her. Even your father doesn’t know about this yet.”
“Where are her kids?”
“Carrie wasn’t sure. She said she walked them to the school bus stop and then she went back home. A few minutes later, the police charged into her house. Everything has been happening so fast, and I don’t know what I can do to help.”
“Wait, why were the kids in school, isn’t it Christmas break?”
“Not until Wednesday, they start the break later there.”
“Oh,” Amanda said stupidly. “Do you need me to book you a flight to go get the kids then?”
“Even if I were to get on a flight right now, I wouldn’t be able to be there in time to pick them up from school.”
As if on cue, the phone rang. Diane jumped up and sprinted over to answer it before the machine picked up the call. Amanda had no idea who was on the other end, but it was obvious from her mother’s expression that the news was not good. She waited anxiously on the couch for her mother to return and tell her what she had learned.
Diane spent several minutes on the call and rapidly scribbled down a name and phone number on the notepad by the phone. She sighed as she hung up the receiver. With a dejected step, she walked back to the living room and wilted onto the couch beside her daughter. “That was New Mexico Protective Services Division. They are going to pick up the kids from school when it lets out today.”
“So you do need a flight today,” Amanda said. Her head was spinning through all of the options they had available to them. Once again, she wished she could use her telepod to go and rescue the children.
“No, the lady said they would be placed in foster homes for at least the next two weeks for evaluation.” Diane’s composure broke again, and she folded herself forward with her hands covering her face. “They have to be so scared! They’ve been ripped away from everyone and everything they know!”
“There has to be something we can do!”
“The lady said if we wanted to take custody of the children, we would have to become foster parents. Can you believe it? Being their grandparents isn’t enough!”
“So that’s what we’ll do then. We’ll get started on it right away, so you’ll be prepared when the children are ready to be released from their evaluation.” Amanda was glad to have some positive action to take. She wished her father were home so he could help console her mother while she started putting together what they would have to do to become foster parents. This was all uncharted territory.
After the initial shock had worn off, Amanda realized an important detail she had missed before. “Why was the New Mexico Department calling you? I thought Carrie lived in Nevada.”
Shaking her head in negation, Diane answered, “She moved after her husband went to jail. She said it would be better for the kids to have some separation from the situation.”
“What part of New Mexico is she in?”
“Roswell.”
The pieces clicked in her head; it all made sense now. Amanda declared, “We’re going to Roswell, Mom. All three of us are going to leave as soon as I can arrange it!”
“What? Why? You heard me say there’s nothing we can do right now.”
“I can’t explain it, but I feel it’s important for us to go out there. When I called earlier, I wanted to ask Dad about Roswell. I didn’t even know Carrie was living there. Don’t you think it’s a bit too coincidental? I think it’s a sign we need to go out there.”
“Okay,” Diane said slowly. Her mind was not working properly, and she could hardly see how it would help. She was just glad Amanda was taking over; she was more than willing to do anything which might help her daughter and grandchildren.
Chapter Eight
SOFIA ARRIVED AT the Wilson’s house in less than ten minutes. She walked up the walkway and noticed Behn’s car was missing from where he usually parked it along the sidewalk. After knocking, and waiting for more than a minute, she nervously opened the door and poked her head inside. “Jon? Are you here?” More than a little concerned, Sofia let herself all the way in and closed the door behind her.
She knew where his bedroom was located, so she went through the living room, down the hall past both Valentina’s and Behn’s empty rooms, until she came to Jon’s shut door. Not knowing what else to do, she tapped on his door.
Jon almost immediately pulled it open and said, “You got here fast.”
“Where is everyone? I knocked outside, and nobody came. I hope you don’t mind I let myself in.”
“Of course, I don’t mind. I’ve been in my room since we spoke. My guess is Behn and Val are in their rooms, but I don’t really know.”
“No, their rooms were empty, and Behn’s car is gone.”
“What?” Jon ran out of the room calling down the hall, “Val! Behn! Where are you?” The silence continued, and Jon returned to Sofia without knowing anything more than he had when he had left. “I don’t know where everyone went. At this point, I’m having a hard time caring. I’m glad you came over, though. Do you want to sit down?” He walked across his room and dropped on his bed.
Sofia sat next to him and said softly, “What’s going on Jon? Your earlier accounting of events was really confusing. Why don’t you start from the beginning?”
Jon sighed in resignation and tried to compose his words before he spoke. “I guess Willian ran into Val at school today. For some reason, he decided to come over here to…I don’t know, discuss something with her, I guess. She asked him to leave and then went to her bedroom. She told me he followed her and tried to convince her that he had an attraction to her. It’s really unclear, but they ended up kissing and then somehow ended up on the bed.
“That’s when I was passing by her door and saw what was going on. I knew something was wrong, so I dragged him off of her and punched him in the gut. Then something crazy happened; Val stopped me from continuing to beat him up. Val asked him to leave and then he had the gall to ask her for her phone number!”
