Part 1 (1/2)
The Guardian.
The Guardian Trilogy.
A novel.
by Carol A. Robi.
Summary.
This is the first book in The Guardian Trilogy.
Caroline Christiansen is a New Yorker born with the ability to see the dead. A harmless ability, if well ignored.
When her mother suddenly decides to change careers, Caroline is left with no other option but to move to Denmark with her estranged father.
For the high school student, moving to a small Scandinavian town after having lived her whole life in New York feels like the worst kind of punishment. That is until she begins to brush shoulders with the beautiful winged beings that are determined to change the course of her life forever. Life in the small Viking town turns out not to be as boring as she had previously feared.
What starts as a harmless encounter turns into a vicious contest, with her right in the center of it, as the beautiful creatures reveal their true nature, and condemn the whole world into joining their civil war unknowingly.
Caroline quickly learns that there's a worse fate than death, and just how much she's willing to sacrifice for a cause that oughtn't to be hers in the first place.
Chapter 1.
I shake awake from a dream I forget almost as soon as I open my eyes, to find that another nightmare is still going on.
I'm still sitting in the train going to Lejtoft.
The Christiansen family is indeed permanently relocating from New York to Denmark.
I turn back to face the window, blowing my warm breath onto the gla.s.s and fighting a childish urge to draw shapes on it.
Right then a figure appears before my eyes outside the window, a grey outlined figure in the tailored suit I a.s.sume he died in, racing with the train for sport- a ghost. I ignore him and keep blowing my breath onto the gla.s.s until the ghost tires and stops racing the train, disappearing from view.
I've been seeing ghosts or spirits for years now, and have learnt to ignore them. I don't know when exactly I began seeing them. I probably always have. Mom and dad always talk of the many imaginary friends I had as a child, saying that I would talk to them for hours.
As I grew older, I realized just how clingy these ghosts could get, once they learn that one can see and hear them. They need constant attention, now that there is no one else to talk to them in the short time they linger on earth after their death. They also almost always have an errand or other to be done.
'Write to my daughter and tell her this.'
'Tell them to look on the third shelf for this.'
'Do this.. or do that for me.'
I realized that it was much more fun to have living friends at about six. So I began to snub the inhabitants of the other dimension, as I call them, and have perfected the art ever since.
It had never been a serious problem until after grandpa, my mother's father, died, and I claimed to be talking to him. My parents had been very worried. Soon after the funeral, they'd taken me to doctor after doctor, and asked strings of endless questions, until I finally decided to lie that it had all been my imagination. This seemed to please all parties, and the medication had stopped. Eventually, the kids at school stopped calling me 'psycho', and I began making friends again.
Nothing good ever comes from acknowledging these creatures' existence.
”Den skal nok g Caroline. Det bliver ikke s slemt her.” It's going to be fine, it won't be so bad to live here, the man besides me says softly when I yet again release another sigh. I take my time before answering him, wiping away the misty cloud I have created with the sleeve of my light brown jumper.
”I don't want to speak that language, dad!” I snap back at him.
”Du har ndt til at ve det,” you need to practice, he insists. I do not bother to answer him and continue my aimless staring out the window.
Ever since he and mom had cruelly decided to uproot me from my home, he's been speaking to me in Danish, to prepare me for our great relocation to Denmark. I know the language well enough, having learnt it from him, and online, and practiced it every time I visited relatives from my Danish-side of the family.
I am not fluent however, and dad is worried about me falling behind in school. Or worse, having to send me to a private school where I could study in English. G.o.d knows we do not spend money on frivolities like that!
I know I should humor him and at least speak the language with him every now and then, to ease his mind that I am not as terrible at it as he fears me to be. I am however too angry at how my parents have toppled my life, to worry about the notion of humoring any of them.
My life came cras.h.i.+ng down about six months ago. We'd been living our nice, quite odd, but steady life in New York, just as we had since the time my mother found out that she was pregnant with me. Mom is an artist, and had her own gallery in Brooklyn. Dad, well dad has always been a wanderer of the world, and often visited home every three or so months from one or the other place that he felt needed his services. I was a junior in high school, having adequate and not-so-loser friends in school.
Mom let me use a back room in her gallery for years, where I could do and store my artwork, since our small two-bedroomed flat was too cramped for my hobby. We'd always lived in that apartment since I was born. My life was steady, perfect to me.
Dad and I have never been particularly close, not a surprising fact considering we often lived together for just a little more than a couple of weeks at a time. I was however always glad to have him home.
He is so different from mom, yet so similar. Dad is quiet, but quite humorous, while mom is loud, all over the place, though just as humorous. Mom is quite artsy too, pouring hours and hours on beautiful elaborate oil paintings that often prove difficult to interpret. She is a true master of her works, and well-respected among her peers.
Dad is more practical oriented, and an expert woodworker. He created most of our pieces of furniture, bird cages, my doll houses, among others. He even made me a beautiful swan bed when I was six. At ten, it had been really hard for me to give it up, having outgrown it. The two are brilliant in their different forms of art, and have often worked together whenever they could.
When dad visited for longer periods of time, he would make little exquisite pieces of children furniture in the storage back room of the gallery, and mom would paint them bright and cheerful colours. Those would sell very quickly, as there has always been great demand for personalized furniture.
I must admit that I've always secretly felt unwanted by my father. He'd never been around as I was growing up, and when he'd visited, he'd been sure to divide his attentions to both mom and I.
He's always been busy in some activity or other- busy saving the world. He was a professional volunteer, if one could call it that, travelling to different areas of the world that were in need of his expertise, and helping them as much as he could. It is quite n.o.ble of him, but I always wondered why we, his family, could not be excitement enough for him.
That is how he met with mom. He'd gone to a remote part of Kenya with a group of volunteers, to help the locals dig up water wells. My mother, then a young Kenyan woman activist in her early 20's, had been in the same village running a makes.h.i.+ft school for girls with a number of her volunteer friends.
Mom says that it hadn't been love at first sight when she met dad. Rather that they'd begun a friends.h.i.+p that had slowly developed into love and mutual respect. Thereafter, the two had travelled all over the world together with just their backpacks, volunteering their time and services to one worthy cause or other. I think the notion quite romantic, and secretly hope one day to find someone who mirrors me so well, just as my parents found each other.
When they found out that mom was pregnant, a number of years later, she felt it was time to stop placing herself in dangerous situations, and take care of herself and the child. Dad knew a former woodworks teacher of his, then turned sculptor, who lived in New York and owned a gallery there.
Dad and mom had then travelled to New York, and he'd introduced the two of them. Dad's old teacher, Thomas, had immediately liked mom and her works, and commissioned her help in the gallery as well as most of her art pieces. Mom had therefore permanently moved to New York to pursue her other dream, artwork. After seven years, Thomas decided to move back home, Denmark, and sold his gallery to mom.
Life in New York had been great, as far as I was concerned. I had friends at school, had fitted in with the kids and neighbours, and had enjoyed sketching and painting, a talent I inherited from my mother, and one she'd helped nurture.
My family is far from a typical family, as you can probably tell by now. My father chose to continue his humanitarian works, visiting his family as often as he could, which was not very often.