Dominion (Guardian Angels) - By Melody Manful Page 0,9
also in pain, so I did the one thing that I could think of.
“Until tomorrow, your highness.” I hurled a ball of fire toward the angels beside him. I didn’t wait to see if it burned anyone, which I doubted it did. I snapped my fingers, transporting myself out of the town square.
YESTERYEAR
*Abigail*
“Oh what a selfishly beautiful thing this life would be
if I were to actually live,
love, and breathe for none but me.”
Melody Manful
I’d been on this road before. I’d driven on it more times than I could count. My personal trainer, Logan, and I drive on this very road every month.
I was no stranger to this drive, but today, I didn’t even recognize the road signs we passed by, although I knew each and every one from memory. I made it my mission to look nowhere but out the passenger side window, but I still felt like the car was crawling at a snail’s pace. The ride only took forty minutes when I rode with Logan: today, however, it felt like it was taking years.
Maybe it was because I was nervous, or that I had a chunk of schoolwork waiting at home for me, or it might be the fact that I was sitting next to my father, Brian Cells, a man who everyone believed had died fifteen years ago.
The story was that my father died in the army when I was just two, but that story was a cover-up.
“How was school?” my father asked, and I turned my head to look at him. The moment my eyes met his, I looked back out the window.
“Same old, same old. They talk, I listen,” I whispered.
“That sounds like fun,” he said, and then more awkward silence followed.
The real story also happened fifteen years ago. My father, who worked for the CIA as a secret agent at the time, had his identity compromised. He was followed to the house he shared with my mother and me and had almost been killed trying to protect us; my mother had been badly wounded from a gunshot.
After the incident, my parents and I received new identities. In the reports the police released afterward, both my parents and I were pronounced dead. My mother and I moved to San Francisco, away from our home in Beverly Hills, and the CIA hooked my mom up with a job at one of the biggest fashion houses in San Francisco. Three years later, she opened her own boutique, and twelve years later, she was one of the most well known designers with her own fashion empire, Cells. The public called her “the goddess of fashion.”
My mother wasn’t worried that my father’s enemies might recognize her, always touting that she refused to live her life in fear. I loved my mother’s bravery.
My father, meanwhile, had received a new identity from the CIA and promised to stay away from us for our safety. He was working on an important case at the time and couldn’t stop anyway. Eventually that case led to another and another, until he decided to stay with the CIA for good.
“So, how has training been going with Logan?” my father asked to close the awkward silence that had ensued his earlier question. At this point, I wasn’t even sure we were on the right road, although I was pretty sure the road to the training center hadn’t changed since the last time I was on it.
Logan McCartney was my personal trainer. He was in his mid-thirties. Before my father hired him as my trainer, Logan worked for the U.S. Marine Corps. He wasn’t built like some of the troops I had seen before; however, he was a good trainer and very handy with technology.
The coolest thing he’d taught me, aside from how to shoot a soda can with an arrow and a gun, was how to hack into computers. It wasn’t in his job description for training me, but I’d begged him to teach me, and he couldn’t resist showing off.
Our training sessions mainly took place in a field behind our house. Logan and my father had installed reactive targets there for archery and gun practice. Once, Logan made me stand in the rain for hours shooting arrows: luckily for him, my mother was at one of her charity events. When I wasn’t shooting arrows or bullets, I was throwing up my fists during combat training.
“Good.” I finally answered my father. “Logan is a really good teacher.” Expect for the time he’d made me run a