Shielded

Not a single word. He blew in here, compelled Con, and started this whole shit show but he didn’t utter a single word to me or Con. I mean I know that we weren’t close and he didn’t approve of the clan we decided to join, but what kind of father didn’t say a single word to his son after spending almost an hour at our house. What kind of father tried to talk a female into walking away from us instead of trying to support us. What kind of father accused his sons of something so despicable as a forced bonding. Did he really think so little of me? I know that I was always a disappointment to him because I didn’t have any extra Gifts, but damn this was cold. Maybe he still blamed me for Con turning away from the Hunters when they offered him a place in the Blade Clan. But Connor and I had bonded with each other as kids. It wasn’t something we could really control. If Con had joined a clan that wouldn’t accept me it would have destroyed both of us. Why couldn’t our Dad see that? Why couldn’t he just want us to be happy and healthy? Why were power and position so important to him. More important than family.

--Blake

I was starting to think that Elijah’s answer to conflict was to cook. While I was still reeling from everything that happened he started working in the kitchen. I sat down at the breakfast bar between Max and Connor and within moments I had a mug filled with mint tea sitting on the table before me. One thing was for sure, the service at Casa de Elijah was excellent.

“Okay, so I can only tackle one problem at a time. Let’s table the whole the royals are coming for me thing until something actually happens. I need to ask some questions about my Gifts because if everything I am reading in the book Max lent me is true, I think I am a freak of nature,” I admitted and was thankful when no one laughed. This was something that had been sitting heavy on my shoulders since the first time I met the guys and it was a relief to actually start talking about it.

“You discovered you have a fifth Gift, Tracking,” Elijah prompted when I didn’t say anything.

“Yes, and the other Gifts I have seem to work differently than normal,” I responded.

“What do you mean?” Derik asked while he was once again leaned against the wall that led to the living room. Better go for broke. If I trusted them with knowledge about the void, I needed to also trust them with this. I could always disappear if things went sideways.

“Well, I have a lot more Weapons. Thirteen different types to be exact. And I don’t have to be in physical contact to produce a shield around someone, can produce multiple shields at the same time, and I can make partial shields. I haven’t read the chapter about Truth yet, but it has never failed me and it works on things that I read or hear over the TV or radio. The Tracking is new so I don’t know much about it yet, and as you guys know my cloaking ability is pretty encompassing,” I summarized and tried not to feel like a freak.

My little spiel got Blake’s attention and he finally came away from the window and joined us in the kitchen. Derik had an iron-clad poker face on so I had no idea what he was thinking, but Max looked shocked and Connor looked impressed. Elijah was curious and started asking me questions. Most of them centered around my Cloaking and I ended up bringing him to the void and giving him the entire explanation of how it worked.

“That’s how you were able to keep blocking me,” Connor said like he was having an aha moment. “Partial shields!” I laughed at how that was his takeaway from all of this. I held out my fisted hand and formed a partial shield just around the curve of my knuckles. Connor was completely fascinated and gently grabbed my wrist and brought my hand within two inches of his face. He then touched the shield with a single finger and I felt the zap of power. Connor snatched his hand away and everyone started laughing. I had almost forgotten that Connor didn’t have a Shield Gift, so he must be the most curious about them.

“So we have established that you’re most likely the most powerful Valkyrie in existence. That’s great for you, but I don’t see the problem” Derik drawled effectively sucking all of the laughter out of the room.

“Most powerful?” I asked in a small voice. Surely I heard him wrong.

“Hate to break it to you Wonder Girl, but there is only one documented case of a Valkyrie having four Gifts. His name is King Eito Tanaka and he is known by every normal Valkyrie because of his having four Gifts. His are Weapons, Shield, Healing, and Telekinesis. Definitely impressive, but nowhere as powerful as you are turning out to be. Less than one percent of Valkyries manifest Tracking or Truth. Not to mention your Cloaking Gift basically makes you untouchable. I mean no cell could ever hold you, and no victim or mark would ever see you coming. But I would consider all of this a good thing. What’s the problem?”

Derik was a little brash, but I did have to hand it to him for always telling it to me straight. There wasn’t really an issue with being powerful, I just needed to understand what it means for me in the long run. “I guess I am wondering, why me? And what do I do next?”

“Well, as far as we know the strength of a Valkyrie’s powers comes from their parents. It’s why the Royals are stronger than the rest of us. Most of them have both a mother and a father that are powerful Valkyrie. They then pass their strong gifts onto their children. Almost all Royals have three Gifts. King Eito’s parents were both incredibly strong with three Gifts each. They paired him up with the strongest princess of that generation and we are waiting to see what Gifts their children manifest,” Max explained in a clinical way like he was reading from a textbook on the subject.

“So to gain a better understanding of your powers, we need to know more about your parents,” Max concluded and I felt my stomach turn sour. I hated talking about my father.

“I have been meaning to talk to you about this too,” Elijah said as he placed lasagna noodles into a large pot of boiling water. “There is a database where all Valkyries register. It is the same one that all supernaturals have to register in. I was thinking we could look up your father and see if there is any information that could lead us to who your mother is.”

Wow, my mother. Of course, I had given some thought to who my mother was and why she would abandon me with such a monster. What if they were actually able to find her. What would I say to the woman who doomed me to such an awful childhood? I bit the side of my lip and said, “His name was Samuel Olsen. We moved all over the country so I don’t know where he was from originally.”

Derik walked out of the room and down the hall where the guest room was. He returned a moment later with a laptop and set it up on the breakfast bar. “What were his Gifts?” Derik asked.

“Weapons, Compulsion, and Telepathy,” I replied in an emotionless voice.

Derik whistled and said, “Potent mix. Sounds like something the Hunters would be interested in.” Then he grunted and I looked over to see that Connor had elbowed him in the side. Well at least one of them was cognizant of the fact that my father had used that potent mix of gifts to make my life a living hell.

Derik actually looked a little regretful as he typed my father’s name into the registry. “Alright. Looks like there are three Samuel Olsen’s registered but only one with that set of Gifts. This says he was born in 1971 in Boston Massachusetts to a Mathis Olsen into the Olsen Clan. Hmm, your grandfather must have been a clan leader. That’s something we could follow up on. Samuel left his parental clan and joined a hunter clan when he was seventeen called the Rabec Clan,” Derik said as he scanned through the other information on the screen.

“I thought you said that the only men who married female Valkyries were kings or princes. If that is true, then how did my father, who clearly wasn’t a royal, get my mom pregnant?” I asked.

“You don’t have to be married to get a girl pregnant,” Blake replied and I looked over at him in surprise. The way that these guys had been talking and acting around me, I had thought that female Valkyries only were with whomever they had an arranged marriage with.

“Is it common for your princesses and queens to fool around with people they aren’t allowed to have a future with?” I asked with just a tad bit of sarcasm in my voice. Then I remembered the twins’ history of only keeping a girl around for a month. Maybe affairs were commonplace in Valkyrie culture.

“Not unheard of,” Elijah said. “But that still wouldn’t explain why you were raised by your father alone. Children are precious to our females. Especially girls. Something isn’t adding up. And I think I have heard of the Rabec Clan before. I will have to do some research.” He was now assembling the lasagna layer by layer and I watched with interest. The foster families I had stayed with weren’t exactly the home-cooked meals type.

“As for your question of what you do next,” Elijah continued. “I would counsel you to proceed with caution. You are very new to our world and someone might try to take advantage of that before you fully figure out what you want out of life. You are only seventeen. You have time to bide your time, learn, and make a fully informed decision. I am guessing that the Collins’ Royal Line will approach you, but they won’t be the last. Get to know people and ask questions before making a decision you may not be able to take back.”

Well, that sounded reasonable. I wouldn’t have to make some life-changing decisions in the near future and I could keep deluding myself into thinking I was just another foster kid trying to survive to her eighteenth birthday.

“If it were me,” Max said timidly. “I wouldn’t advertise that I had five Gifts. It will just make you more of a target. Keep that part to yourself until you are either ready to reveal it, or need to use it. The Hunters will report that you can disappear, so that means keeping your Truth Gift and Tracking Gift on the down-low.”

I shook my head at Max Nilsen using the term down low. But he was probably right. I had been trying to do a similar thing to them, keeping the full extent of my Gifts to myself until I knew that I could trust them. “What about the crazy allure I seem to be packing these days? Two guys I don’t even know started a fight in the hallway today over who could ask me out on a date. No matter what Chastity says, I have no desire to be that popular.”

Derik spit out the coffee he had been attempting to drink when I mentioned the fight. “The humans are asking you out?” he demanded as drips of coffee fell from his chin and soaked into his shirt.

I was a little taken aback by his response so my answer came out as a question, “yes?”

Derik pushed away from the breakfast bar so violently that his stool fell backward onto the hardwood floor. He stalked over to the oven and grabbed a kitchen towel to wipe his face with and then threw it into the sink. “And have you ever gone out with them?” he asked with just as much anger as before.

“I don’t really see how that is any of your business,” I replied embarrassed. I wasn’t about to tell the man sluts of the school that I hadn’t even ever been on a date before. I did have a little pride. Derik turned and punched a hole in the wall next to the refrigerator and I jumped at the sudden display of violence.

“Easy D, she was raised like a human. She doesn’t know,” Max said in a voice that was also laced with judgment. I scanned the room to see all five of them looked some shade of repulsed. This was not the reaction I was expecting and I could feel my hackles starting to rise.

“Please tell me that you are not saying that I cannot date a human. The Three Musketeers have fooled around with at least half of the girls at school. And it isn’t a small school,” I hissed out.

“That’s different. They are males,” Derik snarled back at me. He can’t be serious right now.

“So males can sleep around as much as they want and use their allure to get any woman, but females are expected to save themselves until they are traded off to the highest royal bidder? Is that what you are telling me?”

“Yes,” Derik clipped out at the same time that Elijah said, “of course not.” Derik was telling the truth, Elijah was lying. I stood and faced Elijah to let him see just how much I didn’t appreciate being lied to.

“I think it’s time that I get going. Will someone please drive me home?” I said with forced calm.

“Oh, come on Ray-Ray. Stay for dinner,” Blake pleaded but I didn’t think I could sit and eat with how pissed off I was right now. I mean the gall of these guys was unbelievable. I was my own person, and I would date whoever the hell I wanted to and no one was going to tell me different. I walked out of their house and opened the back of Blake’s truck to get my backpack that I had left earlier. If someone didn’t come out to drive me home, I would just walk.

Luckily the walk wasn’t going to be necessary. Max came out of the house and unlocked his Toyota Corolla. I opened the passenger door and slid into the front seat and closed the door carefully. Slamming doors was for toddlers who were having tantrums. During the drive, Max looked over at me several times and I knew that he wanted to talk about what had just gone down, but he didn’t know how. That was okay. I didn’t think I could talk rationally about this subject anyway.

Max parked in front of my bus and I was about to get out when he said, “Wait, I think I have an idea about how to control your allure.” That was so not what I was expecting him to say and I resettled into the car’s seat before looking over at him with my brows raised. “I was thinking over how you described your control over your Cloaking Gift. How it was like a light dimmer. I was thinking that maybe if you just cloaked a little, it would lessen your allure. When you are feeling insecure or unsure of yourself, I have noticed that the level of your allure drops and I hypothesize that you are automatically cloaking in those situations. So maybe you can do it on purpose and cloak just your allure.”

Here I was all mad at him and the guy was trying to find a solution to the problem, just like I asked him to. Maybe I was being too hard on the guys. Maybe it really was a cultural difference kind of thing. “Thanks, Max. I will try it out tomorrow at school,” I said and reached over to squeeze his hand on the gear shifter. I felt the clan bond tingle in my palm and allowed the sensation to calm the seas of anger within me.

We sat there for a good two minutes before I felt stable enough to get out of the car. When I went to open the door Max reached down and pulled a very familiar brown paper bag from the floorboards. He handed it to me and I looked inside to see a Tupperware container with a square of lasagna inside. “It might be a little cold because Elijah pulled it out of the oven early, but he wanted to make sure you got dinner.”

I gave him a small smile before getting out of the car. These guys were making it awfully difficult to stay mad at them. I settled into the table on my bus and pulled out the Tupperware. Yes it was a little cold and not all of the cheese was melted, but it was still the best lasagna I had ever tasted. I let out a deep breath and decided to let this one go. I wasn’t going to let my friends dictate who I eventually dated, but right now it was a non-issue. I had too much going on to even consider adding something more personal to the mix. I had never really felt the urge to date in the first place. I doubted that was going to change now.

I spent the rest of the night doing the little bit of math and history homework I had, then I pulled Max’s book from the void and finished reading about the different types of Gifts. The rest of the chapters were pretty bare without many extra additions from Valkyries who had manifested the described Gifts. The Empathy Gift was pretty straightforward. It allowed the Valkyrie to feel the emotions of the people around them. The stronger the empath, the larger their range, and apparently Valkyries with this gift had a tendency to go insane from feeling everyone else’s emotions.

Strength gave the Valkyrie superhuman strength that they could control if they trained hard enough. However, just as Connor had mentioned earlier, the book said that in times of stress or high adrenaline the Gift would kick in on its own and was harder to control. It cautioned against ever angering or surprising a Valkyrie with a Strength Gift. Silence was an interesting Gift that the author didn’t know much about. The book only described that someone with this Gift could remove all noise from an area or steal a voice and render a person speechless.

The last entry in the book was about Truth. It told about how the Valkyrie with this Gift would get some sort of mental signal that a lie was being told. However, as I suspected it didn’t say anything about being able to seek the truth within something written down. The chapter did describe something that I didn’t know. It said that I would know if another Valkyrie with a Truth Gift, truth checked me. Some other kind of mental signal that would tip a Truth user off. Hmm, now all I had to do was find another Valkyrie with Truth to experiment with.

I fell asleep thinking about powerful Gifts, hunters, and unknown grandfathers named Mathis. The next morning I completed my normal routine, remembered to wrap my hand in gauze, and rode the bus with Jack and Amy. I took Max’s advice and tried only slightly cloaking. No one asked me out or tried to touch me on the bus, so maybe this would actually work.

When I got off the bus, I found Max waiting for me with Annabell and some other girls I vaguely recognized standing beside him. This time Jack let Amy go off on her own and followed me over to the small group. “Hey, Ray,” Annabell said excitedly and bounced slightly on the top of her toes. Maybe I needed to cloak a little more heavily. “Max thought it would be nice for you to meet some more people, so I brought my friends over to say hi! This is Jennifer and Isabell,” she said excitedly while pointing out the two people standing next to her. Maybe it wasn’t my allure making Annabell this excitable, maybe that was just her.

“Hello,” Isabell said while Jennifer gave me a small wave. Okay, an entirely new awkward social situation. What was I supposed to do here? I glanced over to Jack and gave him a wide-eyed look.

“Ignore her poor manners Is,” Jack said into the growing tension. “Ray takes a while to warm up to people. How is the Skyline Times going?” And just like that, he started a conversation with all three girls. I listened with awe at how easy it was for him to maintain a constant stream of chatter and decided that I needed to start taking notes. After a few minutes, Max handed me a brown paper bag and I opened it to find a breakfast sandwich inside. I tore it in half and handed the larger piece to Jack as a silent thank-you for coming to my rescue.

By the time we started walking towards homeroom, I had even contributed a few meaningless comments to their conversation that was now centered around a big swim meet that was happening on Saturday. Jennifer asked if I was going and I mentally checked my work schedule before giving a tentative yes. It would be fun to see Connor compete and I liked the idea of being there to support him. That was something friends did, right?

Our little group paused outside of my homeroom as we wrapped up our conversation and Chastity walked over and slung an arm over my shoulder before asking what we were talking about. “The swim meet on Saturday. Annabell and her friends invited us to join them to go support Connor,” I told her and the rest of the group hurried to get to their own homerooms.

“I didn’t know you were friends with Annabell,” Chasity said in an accusatory way and squinted at Max. His neck started to turn pink and he stepped into the classroom.

“What was that about?” I asked.

“I am guessing that your Valkyrie boys are trying to isolate you from the human male population by inundating you with female friends. It is an old, well-known trick that the female Valkyries complain about so much that even a little old witch like me has heard about it. They figure that if you are busy making friends with other women, you won’t have time to date. Completely ridiculous,” she sighed and followed Max into the classroom.

I didn’t exactly know how to feel about this new development. A part of me felt that they were trying to passive-aggressively control me while the side of me thought the whole thing was kinda funny. I had been perfectly happy having only one friend and spending my days mostly invisible. Now they were pushing girls at me so that I would have so many friends that I wouldn’t want a boyfriend. I took a deep breath and took my seat. At least, Max’s theory about my allure seemed to be correct. No one gave me any extra underserved attention in the hallway. I could actually try to be a normal high school girl.

Chasity’s theory seemed to be more and more likely when two girls in my English class included me in a conversation about the newest episode of The Bachelor. I hadn’t watched T.V. since I was kicked out of my last foster home, so I didn’t have anything to add. But I did experiment with the right amount of cloaking to fully cover my allure. If I didn’t cloak enough the girls would reach over and touch my arms and only look at me instead of each other. If I cloaked too much they would forget that I was there and just talk over me. By the end of the hour class, I think I had the perfect amount of power down. Just enough that they still saw me, but not enough to be ignored. Maybe it was time for me to stop hiding in the void and start actually living my life.