They Who from the Heavens Came (The Wisdom, #1)

‘I can’t believe he did that,’ Devon said from her place on Itzy’s bed. She pushed a long strand of ginger hair out of her face and glanced at Ash, who was hunched over Itzy’s desk, examining the open notebook. ‘I always knew your dad was an arse,’ Devon said in her pragmatic way, ‘but this? It’s something else. It’s…I don’t know what it is.’

Itzy lay on the floor, on her stomach, yanking loose threads out of the mandala rug. She sighed. Devon may not have been blessed with Itzy’s talent for words, but she somehow always got it.

Ash swivelled around in the desk chair and stared down at Itzy. His eyes looked caramel in that light, and his skin a deep mocha, a perfect contrast with Devon’s pale freckled colouring. ‘What’s this?’ he asked.

Itzy blinked. ‘What’s what?’

‘This,’ he said. He waved one of his swimmer’s arms at Itzy’s notebook.

‘Oh.’ Then, ‘Oh.’ Itzy lifted herself from the floor and stood beside him. ‘That.’

‘Yeah, that. What is it?’

‘What does it look like?’

Ash let out an exaggerated sigh. ‘It looks like one of your stories.’

‘So there’s your answer, right? Mystery solved.’

Ash gripped Itzy by the wrist and forced her to make eye contact. ‘Itzy, don’t be coy. When did you write this? Before or after you found out about your dad?’

Itzy bit her lip. A layer of skin tore and she tasted the familiar iron of her own blood in her mouth. For the second time that day, she worried she might be sick.

Ash shook his head and released her. ‘You think you killed him,’ he said more than asked.

Devon slipped off the bed and joined them. She leaned over her boyfriend’s shoulder and skim-read a page of the story.

‘You don’t get it,’ Itzy insisted. ‘The phone started ringing just as I’d finished it. You can’t tell me it’s a coincidence that I wrote about a girl’s father taking his own life seconds before I found out it had really happened.’

Ash shook his head. ‘Itzy, this is not your fault. You didn’t kill him. He swallowed a bunch of pills like the coward he is. No one made him do that. It was his stupid choice, not yours.’

‘But the stories –’

‘Are stories, Itzy,’ Ash put in firmly.

Devon looked up from the notebook and touched Itzy’s shoulder. ‘Itz…I know how hard this must be for you. Actually, I tell a lie. I haven’t the foggiest how hard this must be for you. It’s just so, so big.’ Her arms formed the shape of an expanding bubble in the air, to exemplify her point. ‘But Ash is right. You can’t go blaming yourself, on top of everything else you must be feeling. You don’t need that. And you don’t deserve it.’

Itzy knew her friends were right. But knowing something wasn’t the same as feeling it.

‘I can’t stop seeing it,’ Itzy said. ‘I keep seeing him doing it. I want to climb into the picture and touch him, maybe stop him, you know? But it’s like a bad dream. Every time I try to speak, to tell him there must be some other way, my voice doesn’t work.’

Her friends’ faces filled with sympathy.

‘Oh, Itz,’ Devon said. She wrapped her long arms around her the way Myra should have done. She pulled her close and held her. ‘I know you hadn’t spoken to him in…’

‘Seven years,’ Itzy supplied in a dull voice.

Devon nodded. ‘Right. But you know…it’s okay to cry.’

Itzy leaned into her friend. ‘I wish I could,’ she whispered. The truth was she had never allowed herself to cry over her father. And now, try as she might, she couldn’t make the tears fall. They sat lodged in the backs of her eyes, the telltale lump ominously blocking her throat. She would have no relief.

‘Gwen invited me to the funeral,’ Itzy made out through Devon’s burnt-orange hair.

Devon drew back so she could look at her. She smoothed her friend’s black mane with one of her hands. ‘Are you going?’

Itzy nodded. ‘I think I have to.’

Over his girlfriend’s shoulder, Ash frowned. ‘You don’t. Not if you don’t want to. No one would expect it.’

Itzy stepped aside so she could see him better. ‘No, I mean…this is for me. I just feel like I have to be there.’

‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Devon offered. ‘You need someone. I doubt your mum will go.’

Itzy stood very still. ‘I’d like that.’ She gave a small smile. ‘Thank you.’

Devon rolled her eyes to lighten the mood. ‘You know I’ll always be there for you, yeah?’

Yes, Itzy knew. Devon had proven herself time and time again.

A silence filled the room. Then Ash said softly, ‘Do you think your brother will be there?’

Itzy flicked a piece of hair out of her face. ‘Where?’

‘The funeral.’

‘Oh.’ Itzy hadn’t thought of that. ‘Probably.’

‘Do you think maybe he’ll talk to you now?’ Devon wondered.

Itzy shrugged, as if to say, Who knows? Who cares? Except she cared very much. She had always wanted a brother. Then, in one brief earth-shattering moment, she’d learned she had one. The discovery had changed everything. It had rewritten the story of her life, by giving it a foreword.

But events of the past meant she couldn’t connect with her brother in the present. She’d only met him once, and then –

‘He’s always made it clear he wants nothing to do with me,’ she said. ‘And I don’t blame him. Maybe I didn’t find out about him until I was ten, but he’s still older. At the end of the day, he was our dad’s first family. Of course he resents me.’

‘Maybe it’ll be different now,’ Ash suggested.

Itzy very much doubted this possibility.

* * *

That night, Itzy dreamt of her father. She was in her room and she saw him standing at the window. He held his hands together behind his back and he gazed out at the night sky. Her curtains ballooned around him like a cape, and his face filled with moonlight.

‘Dad?’ she whispered to his phantom.

He didn’t reply. He just stood there, staring outside, at the luminous heavens. He had always loved the stars. One of his favourite subjects had been the apparent astronomical connections that could be found with so many ancient megaliths.

Itzy stepped out of her bed, gaining a grace she didn’t possess while awake. She glided more than walked toward him and met him at the window.

He raised one of his arms and pointed to the sea of black that lay above and all around them. ‘They’re out there,’ he said. ‘They’re searching for it.’

Trembling with fear, she asked, ‘Who?’

But all he said was, ‘They’re coming.’ His eyes were steadily fixed on the sky. ‘They’re so close to knowing the truth. And when they do….’

Then he looked at her. His head twisted around unnaturally, while his body remained forward, like an owl. His eyes were gone and the skin of his face had shrunk around what she knew was his missing brain. It had been pulled out like one of the mummies he’d always been so fascinated with.

‘Itzy,’ whispered the thing that used to be her father. He stepped forward and reached for his daughter, all the time repeating:

They’re coming.

They’re coming.

They’re coming.

She could no longer feel her legs. They were stuck to the floor and she couldn’t move away from the creature. He stroked her head with what she now saw was his rotting hand. One of his fingers came away easily in her hair, and a scream rose in her throat.

‘Don’t let them get my children,’ her not-father whispered in her ear. ‘Don’t let them get you, Itzy – don’t let them –’

The scream escaped. It was long and loud and she woke to find she was screaming for real. She covered her mouth with one of her hands to stop herself, the other hand on her chest, trying to calm her breathing.

Everything in the room looked alive, like it might move at any second. Faces grinned down at her from the posters on the walls. She had the insane notion that hands might fly out from under the bed, grab her ankles and drag her down into some underworld she found too easy to visualise.

Myra didn’t come for her. She was too inebriated to notice her daughter screaming down the hall. This fact had an ironically sobering effect on Itzy.

At once, she shook off her nightmarish paranoia. This wasn’t a dream; this was reality. And reality didn’t contain living furniture and monsters under the bed. Reality was her dead father and her absent mother.

Still, she scrambled out from under the covers and knelt at the window that sat above her bed. She folded her arms on the sill and looked out. The sky looked just as it had in her dream. She found herself drawn to a corner of space that seemed to bend before her eyes, as if it housed something invisible but vast.

‘They’re coming,’ she whispered, without knowing what it meant.