We started running towards J.C. When we finally got there, what we saw was a horror. The Yan students and older Masani students were fighting against the villagers. I must say I had a lot of respect for them. Clearly, Masanis were not as weak and gutless as I had thought. The Gateway Hill inhabitants had invaded the school and were trying to kill the students.
Pam and I looked at each other and both screamed, “The tree!”
They were here to open the portal. What we didn’t know was why now, and why attack the students? Wouldn’t it have been easier to come at night when no one was around?
From the way they were attacking the students, it was clear that we wouldn’t get an opportunity to ask them any questions. They didn’t seem to be in a talking mood either.
They were armed with knives and slashing at the students. Some pupils had barricaded themselves in the classrooms and the dormitories, and we could see the villagers pouring petrol on the buildings and trying to set them on fire.
Some of the villagers were dragging students along the ground while stabbing them. We could see blood everywhere. I turned around and saw Farage with a big smile on his face; he had known that there would be an attack on the school that day. He had planned it and was now enjoying the scene.
I was about to react when I heard an angry scream coming out of Pam’s mouth. She pulled out her sword from its sheath and cut off his head. I expected to see it move, but it didn’t, and then we knew – the way to kill them was to chop their heads off.
We released his body from its enclosure, left it where it was and joined the other students. I thought, Enough with the protocol. Time for action.
I levitated, and what I saw horrified me. There were a lot more people coming towards us. I called out to Pam and signalled for her to follow me towards the north school gates. While flying, we saw the horde coming towards us, and I knew that she would know exactly what to do.
When we got there, a body was on the floor. We turned him around, and I saw that it was Brown. His throat had been slit. We looked at each other. I couldn’t believe it, but we didn’t even have time to process what had happened. I just looked at her and said, “Put him in a safe place and seal the gate. We’ll deal with that later.”
I flew away and saw Tristan and my sister. I asked her to grab Mabel Parks Rosin, a Terrayan, and fly her to the south gate. Together they were to elevate a soil wall pronto. When I saw that she didn’t understand why, I turned her head towards the south gate, and that’s when she saw the swarm coming at us.
She flew away towards the south gate, and I landed in front of the boys. Our biggest problem was that there were only fifteen Yan students in the school, and in that group, only four were girls, and only two boys had inherited the fire power, so I had a few soldiers but barely enough captains to handle the problem.
Tristan and Alex were already wearing their Inferno uniforms, so I went to change quickly while they were handling the situation on the ground. I told them to send Amelia and Pam to their room to change as well because we had a serious fight coming our way. When I got back, most villagers in the school were already dead or too injured to get up.
The boys had done a brilliant job. The few villagers that remained were being finished off by enraged Masani students. I could see in William’s eyes that he was not only furious but frightened. I needed to talk to him, but I didn’t have the time. To understand the gravity of the situation, we grabbed our friends turn by turn, levitated with them and showed them what was coming.
They now knew what we were up against. We all knew that we needed to call for reinforcement, but before doing that, I needed to talk to the students. Not wanting to waste time, I sent Hogan, William and Alex to the north gate. They needed to know what had happened. When they got there, they saw Pam, who was waiting for me. She told them that Brown was dead and that she knew who had killed him.
They sent her to get changed and she left, but not before telling them that after elevating the wall, she had levitated to see how far the villager horde was and she had seen Abadi running towards Gateway Hill and not being attacked by the villagers. She could only conclude that he was part of the Famla and had killed Brown when Brown had tried to stop him from melting the gate locks with acid in order to stop anyone shutting them closed and preventing the villagers entering and starting their slaughter.
Meanwhile, back at the main court, I levitated high enough for everyone to see me in order to talk to them. It was obvious by now to everyone that there were Yans in the school and that we were not a myth.
I should have had a meeting with the other Yans before speaking to the students, but the school was in chaos, so I gained some time by saying, “Listen, everybody! Obviously, we are now officially under attack by Gateway Hill. To answer the questions I know you have, let me save you some time. No, I do not know why they are attacking us. Yes, I am a Yan. I am actually an Omni, which makes me the senior warrior at this school, and yes, I do have a plan to take you home safely.” That was a blatant lie. “But first I need some of you to help get the injured somewhere to be treated, and others to carry the dead where their parents can find them. I would like the A-level students to get together and organise those tasks, because the rest of us have a fight on our hands. The rest of Gateway Hill is at our gates, trying to get in. They want to kill us all, so anyone who wants to stay alive, follow the orders of the A-level students, then go and lock yourselves in your houses until help arrives. The rest of us will hold off the villagers until then. To the A-level students, I need all of you to take charge and organise the younger students, because we need your help.”
They all stood there, staring at me. No one was saying any-thing. Alex and Tristan flew over and stood near me, and Alex said, “Er, I think they are in shock.”
Tristan added, “Now what?”
I said to them, “Are you ready?”
They gave me a “ready for what?” look but still nodded yes, so I gathered energy in my hands, then raised my arms towards the sky, and while blasting lightning bolts from my hands, I screamed “NOW!” towards the students, and they started running towards the A-level students.
When I was done, Alex and Tristan looked at me, and they said, “What was that?”
I said, very cheekily, “Dramatic effect, and as you just saw, it worked brilliantly.”
I could see Pam and the others just shaking their heads and putting their hands over their faces, so I came down and said, “We need to regroup and decide what we are going to do.”
So we all decided to go to the academics lounge to have our meeting; that way we were sure we wouldn’t encounter any students. We were about to leave when William said, “No offence to the Infernos, but you guys have changed and are clean. The rest of us are covered in blood.”
This was when we realised that everyone was covered in dirt and blood, so we sent anyone who needed a change to their houses while we waited in the lounge for the academics. The academics lounge was a very large room made of leather sofas and armchairs in groups of four, with small wooden tables in the middle of each group. Dimmed lights made it look yellowish. The walls were decorated with portraits of previous academics and famous lecturers who had visited the school.
When we got to the academics’ lounge, we realised that there were no staff in the room. We knew that all the adults had been killed first, but we had secretly hoped that a few had survived. That wasn’t the case, however, and it made me extremely sad.
I was angry. We didn’t even get the chance to mourn Delphine and Brown, and we didn’t get a chance to mourn our teachers. As cold as it must have looked, breaking down was not an option.
After a while all the Yans were back, and so were William, Scarlett and Eugenie. She had made sure that Morgan and Walker were in their rooms, and to my surprise, Green and Haggerty were there.
I asked them what they were doing here, and they said that they would explain, but they asked everybody to sit down. Emily just jumped straight into their reason for being there and said, “Did you get our message?”
I thought, What?
And then she said, “We were the ones behind the bracelet logo. We have been watching you and the others ever since you got here.”
Scott went on to explain that they were the product of unions between Hendus and Masanis. They were called the Hamaciel. This I did not expect. The revelation was shocking, but I was even more surprised when Scott asked that the only ones to listen to the rest of their narrative be children of the general council members, the war council and the council of interior affairs.
Yanar might be a meritocracy on paper, but in reality, it was ruled by the first ten families who had created our nation centuries ago. We were called the Ten, and they were my family, the Korsnings, who were descendants of the kingdom of Sweden, the Wus, who were descendants of the Chinese empire, the Opiopios, who were descendants of the Kingdom of Hawai’i, the Croises, who were descendants of the Greek Empire, the Altkaseis, who were descendants of the Inuit, the Boubas, who were descendants of the Fula in Africa, the Kirkpatricks, who were descendants of the Kingdom of Scotland, the MacConraois, who were descendants of the Kingdom of Munster, the Rafnkells, descendants of the Norse Greenlanders, and the Barths, descendants of the Roman Empire.
The war council was ruled by Hawaou Bouba, Elspeth MacConraoi, Caoimhe Kirkpatrick, Alva Korsning and Eva Wu, and the council of interior affairs was ruled by Freydis Rafnkell, Dinah Barth, Nuvua Altkasei, Juliana Croise and Aoife Kirkpatrick.
At J.C. we were limited with our council members’ offspring, but we had a strong group of Yans. The youngest Yans in the school were Amelia and Mabel, only fourteen years old, but besides them we had Hassan, Hogan, Tristan, Alex, Pam, and me. All other Yans were preparing for their A-levels.
Scott and Emily told us that their kind had been rejected by the Hendu community because Hendus were not allowed to reproduce with humans, so mixed couples were forced to part ways with the Hendu community and forge their own. They had adapted well to the Masani world because they could easily blend in with the psychic world. They did not have other powers except for the gift of premonition, and the Yanar councils were aware of them. Delphine was an Hamaciel as well and had been spying on Mr Farage not because she was suspicious of him – she already knew that he was a Hendu – but because someone from the Hendu royal family had arrived on Earth and was living in Gateway Hill.
Being psychics, they had the ability to sense when a person was a Hendu, and it got even stronger when it was a member of the royal family. The royal family was able to mask their energy from Hamaciels, but they could not mask the change in the aura surrounding a village or a neighbourhood of a large city. Hamaciels were also able to see the different colours of each place. They explained that the colours got darker and darker depending on the level of evil living in the area.
I thought, Boy, I wonder what colour Coldharbour Lane is, since Eloise is living there. Eloise was an enemy of mine who happened to live in one of the worst streets in London.
From what Scott and Emily said, Gateway Hill was very dark, with stripes of colour here and there that could only happen when a member of the Hendu royal family was living near a portal between our two worlds. The level of darkness and the intensity of the colours surrounding the school suggested that the portal was on the school property, but they had not been able to determine where.
They expected us to be well versed in the Hendu ins and outs, but we weren’t, and the disappointment on their faces was obvious. Emily stood straight up and told us, “I have to admit, I expected you to be a lot smarter than you are.”
I was shocked. We all started protesting, and we reminded her that we had the highest IQs in the school and probably the whole county, and she replied, “Yes, you are all very intelligent, but not streetwise and witty, and you need to be if you expect to defeat the royal in Gateway Hill.”
At that moment, the only thing I was interested in defeating was her smug face. Hassan had had enough, got up and said, “Hey, if you came here to insult us, then out of my way. By the way, I am not the one believing in an imaginary entity. Aren’t you supposed to be the bible pushers of the school, on top of being half alien?”
That brought a smile to my face. I almost kissed him. He was right; they were the school bible pushers, and they had the nerve to criticise us. Emily agreed that she had been a little bit blunt, but time was of the essence, as she put it. She asked Hassan to sit down and said that there was more for us to know.
She explained that the Hendus were divided into three categories. The Firas lived in the sky and could not take human form, so could only be seen as shadows. They were often mistaken as ghosts by humans. Then there were the Yahas, who lived on land. The Yahas were witches and warlocks, and their powers came from incantations and potions. And last but not least, the Yinas, who lived underwater and were a colony of mermaids.
We were pretty aware about the different branches of the Hendus, but it had mostly been taken by us to be an urban legend, so it turned out we had been wrong.
William then asked them if Freedom Church was their community cover, to which Emily replied no. It turned out the Hamaciel community had been reaching out to different religious communities, asking them for help to warn the public in case of an invasion, but they had been met with suspicion, rejection, sometimes even attacked, and they had had to leave the areas where they had been living.
They eventually relocated in Hereford, where they joined Freedom Church, and after being part of the church for a while, they opened up to their pastor, and his response was simply “How can we help?”
The church has been part of the fight ever since. They have reached out to other churches and religious institutions, who had also joined the fight, and they were all prepared to lend a hand any time they were called upon.
I needed to make them aware of what had happened when I had taken on a Hendu, so I got up and took Emily’s place and narrated my fight with Farage. I also added, “Farage almost beat me. The choke move does not work on Hendus, so when you are confronting them, do not attack as if you were facing a Masani. Use your full power. Do not hold back, or expect to end up in a body bag and on your way to Valhalla. Do I make myself clear?”
As usual, they were giggling, and then Hassan said, “Wait, wait, wait. To start with, I am not a Norse, and even if I was, there is no way I would ever agree to go to Valhalla. Who wants to die only to end up as another soldier in Odin’s army? Hell no.” And everyone started laughing.
I rolled my eyes and was about to scold him when Hogan added, “I agree. I’m on my way to the Elysian Fields and no-where else, sister.”
At that moment, I seriously considered blasting them with a lightning bolt, but then Tristan intervened and said, “Enough. If you can’t take it seriously, then I suggest you run back to Yanar pronto, because one way or another, we are about to get into the fight of our lives, and any insight from the only one who has faced a Hendu in combat is a must, so shut up and listen to her.”
The smile on my face was so big you would have thought that I was the Cheshire Cat. William protested. He had no intention of letting me fight with anyone and was proposing that we sit tight and wait for the police to arrive, and obvious-ly, Scott, Emily, Eugenie and Scarlett agreed with him, but the Yans disagreed and sided with me.