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

Aidan flew into his new flat in frenzy. He threw his mourning suit jacket on the floor without thinking and stormed into his bedroom. He slammed the door closed. He was alone, but he couldn’t shake the sensation that someone was watching him – or, madder still, looking into his mind.

Every time he blinked, he saw the body. He couldn’t bring himself to think of it as Stephen. He refused to believe the man was now six feet under the earth.

The air was charged with energy – his energy. It radiated from him, out of his control. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d got like this. He needed to calm down before something happened. Already, his vision was growing pixellated.

A noise startled him. It wasn’t until the noise sounded again that he realised it was his phone. He tore it out of his black trouser pocket and answered the call.

‘Aidan?’ a harried feminine voice greeted him. Her audible anxiety made his nerves stand at attention.

He swallowed and cleared his throat. ‘Mel,’ he said.

‘Thank goodness!’ she gushed. ‘I’ve been ringing all week. You’ve had me so worried.’

He squeezed his eyes shut and counted to ten before answering. ‘I know,’ he said, his voice even and controlled. He came out sounding cold, though he felt anything but, inside. In fact, his whole body trembled with heat. It itched. He wanted to scrape a large brush with harsh bristles over his skin, to make the feeling go away.

He had the power to stop this – if only he could get his thoughts in order.

‘Where are you?’ Melody pressed. ‘Did you find somewhere to stay?’

‘I did.’

‘Where?’

‘Ealing. I found a flat to let.’ His head swam and he slumped onto the floor.

‘Oh. That’s good,’ Melody said. She sounded upset, but he couldn’t think why. Then she said, ‘I miss you.’

‘Mel, don’t do this,’ he begged. The room around him gave way to a mess of colour, gradually separating into dots.

‘Don’t do what? All I want is to talk. We said we’d stay friends,’ she reminded him. When he didn’t respond, she carried on. ‘You can’t just shut me out like this. You can’t be that close to someone and just stop talking to them.’

Aidan agreed, but he couldn’t get the words out. Something was stopping his throat. What was it? God, it felt like….

A sob flew out of him.

‘Aidan?’ Melody said in alarm. ‘Aidan, are you okay?’

He shook his head, his vision blurry, and he wrapped his free arm around his knees in a childlike gesture. ‘No, Mel. No, I’m not okay. Nothing is okay.’

‘Aidan, what happened?’

‘What happened –’ He took a deep breath and closed his eyes against the colours swirling around him – pink, blue, green and white. ‘I went to the funeral, today,’ he choked out.

‘Oh, Aidan.’ Melody’s voice was suddenly soft and compassionate. ‘I’m sorry.’

He rubbed at his eyes, too hard, but didn’t feel the pain. ‘It’s more than that. I…I saw it, there.’

‘Saw what?’

‘The pulse.’

Melody grew quiet. Aidan scrambled onto his feet and blinked away the colours. He found his way to a stereo system that sat at the back of his room.

‘Aidan,’ Melody cut into the silence. ‘I thought that was just something you dreamt about.’

‘I thought so, too, but I saw it. At the funeral, there was a black light pulling, like, on my heart.’

‘Your heart,’ she repeated in a voice he couldn’t interpret.

‘Aye. I couldn’t help myself. I had to follow. And when I did…I found myself at the body.’

He heard her draw in a sharp breath. ‘So the pulse…is Stephen?’

He shook his head in frustration. ‘No. It was something else. It was….’ He stopped there, unsure whether he wanted to share this thought with his ex-girlfriend.

‘What? What was it?’

‘It was nothing, Mel. Just…it led me to the body. But they weren’t the same, like.’

There was a pause. Aidan fumbled with his iPod to find what he was looking for. His long fingers somehow felt fat and clumsy.

‘You’re hiding something from me,’ Melody decided.

Melody was a lot of things – temperamental, clingy, jealous – but she wasn’t stupid. Aidan knew better than to underestimate her.

So he said, ‘Aye. I’m just not ready to talk about this, right now.’ There was no lie in his reply.

He heard her take a deep breath down the line. ‘Alright,’ she said reluctantly. ‘But you’ll tell me when you’re ready?’

‘Aye. Anyway, cheers for ringing, and for…for caring. I should let ye go, now.’ A funny turn of phrase, when he knew she didn’t want to hang up. But his heart was pounding and he had to get her off the phone before he exploded.

‘Alright. But Aidan…I love you.’

He pressed one of his gold tanned hands to his forehead for strength. ‘G’bye, Mel,’ he said, and he ended the call.

For a moment, he stood there, staring vacantly ahead. God, how could he have told Melody, of all people, about seeing the pulse at the funeral? Thank Providence he’d stopped himself before saying too much. He doubted Melody would have appreciated learning that the pulse had turned out to be nothing more than Stephen’s daughter’s hair – black and shining and strangely irresistible. He hadn’t seen her face, but somehow that hair had been enough. Its long strands had been like fingers reaching for him, pressing into his mind.

He shook himself, tossed the phone on top of one of his speakers and threw on his favourite album: Brighter than a Thousand Suns by Killing Joke. The title was a quote from the ancient Indian epic The Mahabharata, a reference to what some adventurous anthropologists believed was a nuclear war. It fit with the war raging inside Aidan’s head, now.

He threw off his mourning clothes and changed into tartan flannel pyjama bottoms and a t-shirt the grey of his eyes. He stood squarely on his feet and closed his eyes, taking deep breaths in and out, in and out. Then he slowly lifted his arms, pushing the air up and away from him, before sending it spinning to his left in a sudden movement. His outer leg bent in a right angle at the knee as he lunged to the side and swept his arms in a crescent, sliding the energy aside. Black lines danced in the air around him.

He bent forward like a table. Then he straightened and leaned on his back heel, drawing one of his hands down in front of his face, as though painting himself. His other hand tightened into a controlled fist, squeezing at the energy.

The heat poured out of him. At last, he released it in a flurry of movements as he made his way in a circle on the floor, raising his right knee and bringing his foot down to the ground with finality. There were moments in the dance when he looked like a muscled bird launching itself into graceful flight and soaring over a dark forest.

Halfway through the album, he dropped to the floor and stretched his legs, to cool down. Then he sat in the middle of the carpet, his legs crossed and arms hanging limply; his hands rested palm-up on his knees. He closed his eyes and again breathed deeply, in and out, in and out.

The thoughts drifted out of his head – or perhaps it was Aidan who was drifting away. He was cool inside. His body felt like it was somewhere else, like it belonged to someone else. The room around him shimmered with his power, but he was beyond it, floating in space. In his mind’s eye, he saw black and stars and nothing more.

He slipped out of his body, and the air around him changed. It thinned, but he was so deep in his trance that he couldn’t feel the way his heart rate slowed. It grew cold, but he was beyond it.

The dust of the carpet lifted into the air and dissolved into mist, streaking over his face. His body glowed a hot golden colour, like the meaning of his name: flame. He was a beacon of light beaming out through the windows and onto the street outside, but he didn’t notice.

The darkness behind his eyes morphed into the shape of a girl with long ebony hair that blossomed at her sides and transformed into great raven’s wings. She flew above where he floated outside his body. Their eyes locked, just for a moment, before she flew away from him. She beat her wings, sending waves of energy cascading down to him.

Without reason, he wished she would take him with her on whatever journey she was making. He didn’t think he could make it if she left him.

Then he was sinking, sinking back into his body. It felt like something was being ripped out of him, as the phantom receded into the back of his mind. Aidan hated the falling sensation when he slammed back into his physical form. He preferred the weightlessness of mental travel.

He found himself prostrate on the floor. Thoughts returned to his head, as they always did – and with them, his former tension consumed him. This had never happened to him before. Rather than feeling the cool relaxation and peace tai chi and meditation had always provided him, now he felt desolate inside, like something was breaking – and he knew it was because of her.

Seeing Stephen’s daughter had done something to him. He didn’t understand it. He didn’t know her name – he hadn’t even seen more than her hair and an arm. But somehow, just watching her from a distance, he’d understood she was inexplicably tied up with the black pulse from his dreams.

He threw himself onto his back and let the music wash over him.

A voice that is singing in my head, the song went in the background.

It was strange. He’d never realised it before, but the lyrics seemed to speak a special message just for him.

Down from the hills.

Just as Aidan had travelled from his ocean-view manor house in Northern Ireland.

Walking on sands.

Like the colour of her skin. It was somehow like his own, like neither of them belonged where they were, but in some foreign land.

I’ve been dreaming.

It was the dream that had brought him to her. It was the dream that had flooded him with the irrational need to leave all he’d ever known and find – what?

All the seeds blowing further to the south.

The south – where he believed he would find the black pulse of his dreams. That was where he would find the answers he sought, to questions he didn’t even know he’d been asking.

He closed his eyes again and saw the visual echo of that pulse. The longer he watched, the more it changed. It elongated and threaded into strands of long, black hair.

Somehow, Aidan knew Stephen’s daughter and the pulse were the same. She’d been calling to him in his dreams, drawing him away from his home and telling him to find her.

He just wasn’t sure why.