The Triquetra

Havermouth High School, Five Years Before

The rain had washed the pavement clean, picking out the tiny granules of quartz mixed into the tarmac. The sun was warm through the grey cloud cover, and the pavement steamed, releasing a strong scent of wet stone. A bicyclist rode through a puddle, it’s spray wetting Aislen’s shoes. She glared after the careless rider in irritation.

As she crossed the school yard, the number of students increased, pressing in around her, and she thought that her telepathy made it feel like walking through a sink of soap suds, each soapy bubble with its deceptively pretty rainbow of colour stretching over the fragile surface enclosing a student within it, each dome pressing against each other, until the tension built to the inevitable PoP!

A gift, her grandmother had called it. The family gift, as old as history, dating back to the oracles that once had been worshipped in temples. Aislen did not agree. Her ability, she called it to herself. Something confusing and inconvenient, and increasingly isolating at a time when most people were wanting to get close to others, exploring their sexuality.

It had taken Aislen many hours of studying the family grimoire and mediating to develop the ability to create and maintain the bubbles that held back the overwhelming flow of other people’s thought and those bubbles failed whenever Aislen become upset, tired, or if there were too many people around.

When she touched another person, the bubble might as well not exist, for that touch would result in Aislen sharing in that person’s thoughts, or a glimpse into a past event that preoccupied them. On occasion, she thought that she could see what was to come, but those moments were fleeting and confusing, and she was never entirely sure if it were the future that she saw, or just that person’s imagination of what would come…  The thoughts were never coherent, and were visual, like catching a five second flash of a movie, without context of what it was about.

As she entered the covered locker bay, she ducked as a football sailed over her head, the passage of the ball close enough to shift her hair. She clutched her books closer to her chest and hunched her shoulders defensively as she opened her locker.

Someone brushed against her accompanied with a flash of a cheerful kitchen and a big man wearing a floral apron whistling as he washed the dishes, and she felt the bubbles burst, the shock of it shuddering through her. She stared at the empty shelves of her locker as the bubbles released their cacophony in waves, flooding her brain with hormone driven erotic randomness and thoughts competing with conversations so that she could not tell one from the other.

(“He doesn’t know what it takes to…”) “I don’t know what he wants,” was spoken aloud by a cheerleader with a hair flick. “He doesn’t appreciate me.”

(“Did I do that homework? F-k, I think I…”) “What class is first? Please tell me that I have a free. I totally flipped and didn’t do my algebra last night…”

(“Egg sandwiches. Who the f-k wants egg sandwiches?”) “F-k, I’m on a diet. Salad and lean mean only and mum has packed me this crap.”

(Breasts contained in a white lace bra.) “F-k Amanda’s filled out.”

Aislen braced against the lockers, feeling the metal bow under the heel of her hand as she shoved the contents of her bag into the shelves, and closed the locker door, taking her time, each breath creating a bubble around her, muffling the roar of sound, until mental peace was restored.

She turned and wound her way through the students, hunching in on herself as she did so, the posture both seeking invisibility and avoiding physical contact with others. With so many people around her, the hum of their voices was a constant murmur of sound. But touching someone was like stripping back everything that separated them, rendering that person bare and overwhelmingly exposed to her.

“What are you doing, freak?”

She flinched back as the football hit the lockers next to her face. This time she couldn’t tell herself that the proximity of its strike wasn’t deliberate. She turned to look over her shoulder at the Evil Triplets. They weren’t actually triplets, but they seemed to share almost everything and so she had taken to calling them that in her head. They were called the Triquetra by the other students at the school, but she thought Evil Triplets was much more truthful.

Heath Gale, Cameron Edison, and Rhett Salem. They were gorgeous and every girl at the school fell over themselves before them, but inside they were self-obsessed, sex mad bullies - Aislen knew, because of the flow of their nasty, nasty thoughts whenever she brushed up against them. Rhett, she admitted, wasn’t as bad as his friends, but he never tried to stop them from their cruel bullying pursuits, never tried to curb their behaviour.

All three were from privileged backgrounds, and behaved as if the town was theirs as a result.

Heath’s father was a pastor at a local church, a man of influence and piety whose face, along with that of his beautiful wife and son, often graced the local newspaper reporting about a charity event that the Gales had attended or organized. Heath’s smile was always wide and toothy, like his father’s, both of their grins hiding their predatory nature.

Cameron Edison’s mother was from a historic family from the region, big money, and Catherine had brought to her marriage a sizable bit of land and shares in the family farming business. Aislen knew that Jules Edison loved the land more than the wife he had married in order to possess it, and that his indifference to his wife drove Catherine into bouts of deep depression.

Rhett Salem’s father was a lawyer. Officially Mrs Salem preferred the country lifestyle and thus she and Rhett stayed in town for most of the year, whilst Mr Salem lived in the city, Rideten, where he worked - but in reality, Mrs Salem was conducting an intense affair with a young florist, Juniper Masey, and only stayed married to Phillip Salem for financial reasons.

Aislen glowered, unintimidated by the three, something that always caused them confusion and intrigue because most people were daunted by their good looks, their physical prowess on the sports field, by their wealth, by their families’ prestige and wealth, or a combination of all. And humans were always intimidated by werewolves, whether they knew that werewolves existed or not, responding to an instinct that said: Danger.

“Going to class,” she told them. “Like you should be.”

“Class sucks, we have better plans for the day. You should come with us, Rhett’s dying for a taste, and we’re betting that you’re cherry flavoured…” Heath said, dropping his arm over her shoulders and pulling her against him, the contact flooding her with the rushed tangle of his thoughts, overriding his words.

He wanted to know what if what lay beneath her oversized jumper matched her pretty face, and whether she’d scream or beg for more as he, Rhett and Cameron took their turns f-king her. She saw herself so clearly, in a nightmare of flesh, heaving muscle, her nails scoring his skin and her cries for mercy unheard as he thrusted over her, that she wheeled and slapped him before she had thought the movement and its motivation through.

Her handprint stood out clearly on his cheek. When he turned his face back to her, the light caught the iridescent surface of his eyes, before he fought his wolf back, and his hand closed in the collar of her jumper, twisting the fabric, and lifting her up onto her tiptoes so that they were nose to nose.

“You f-king whore,” he snarled. “You will pay for that.”

There was an echo in his mind of his father holding his mother the same way and using the same words.

All around them, the throng of students had stilled and fallen silent, made so by the sharp clap of skin against skin, their faces aghast at her audaciousness. Aislen Carter had slapped Heath Gale. It was unheard of, unimaginable, and no one was sure what the outcome of the action would be.

Aislen, however, was less concerned with the present than she was with the past that flashed through her mind as Heath growled down at her. She saw it as clearly as if she had stood in the room at the time: a slap knocking a woman back, a man’s shadow pulled long across the floor and wall by an upended light and the woman, pressed into the corner, her hands over her face as the man who owned the shadow slowly dragged his belt out his trouser loops. The woman’s fearful breath was overloud, competing with the gameshow that played on the TV in the background…

“Which of the following is a deity which means darkness in Greek mythology?” She whispered the question on the TV screen in that memory, the words starkly clear as if Heath had memorized then in an effort to shut out the altercation between his parents, the trauma burning them into his retina.

Heath in-drew a sharp breath, his pupils pinning within the grey of his iris.

“What did you say?” He breathed the words through his teeth.

“Are you alright, Heath?” Lillian Ridgeway asked, pushing between him and Aislen, her hand going to Heath’s cheek. “F-k, she hit you hard! You should f-king report her. There has to been forty witnesses here to the fact that she assaulted you! She needs to go down for this.”

Heath’s hand released his grip on Aislen, and she was able to pull back.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, but his eyes remained on Aislen over Lillian’s shoulder. “It’s nothing.”

Aislen turned on her heel and hurried away, the hair on the back of her neck standing on end. She shouldn’t have said anything, she told herself angrily. She shouldn’t have said anything about what she had seen. Now Heath knew, and what Heath Gale knew, Cameron Edison and Rhett Salem knew also.

What did he know? She demanded of herself as she pushed into her first class for the day and sought out a desk to the back of the class. What could he know? He did not know how she knew about his mum and dad, same as he couldn’t know that she knew that he, Cameron, and Rhett were werewolves…