Prophecy of the Nexus

Chapter 4

I spent every day that week practising my guardian shield blessing. This was difficult, as I had to hide it from my friends and parents. You couldn't exactly start practising blessing and not have the neighbours notice, let alone your own Priest dad. So, I had to find sneaky ways to avoid attention. I kept telling my mum Alice wanted help with her angelic homework, and they believed that in a heartbeat. Though my mum would also joke, "You can talk about boys here too, you know," which always made me cringe. Convincing my friends was much easier. We now had enough detentions for a week, so they still spent most of their afternoons at school. I would offer to wait for them, seeing as they had got in trouble because of me. But they just told me to enjoy my evenings. Alice was happy to see I was back to my old self, and I would nod to this, not daring to bring up what I was doing in my spare time.

It turned out best place to practice was a deserted alleyway near my house. People used it to park cars, but the place was so run down no one bothered anymore. So now, I spent hours standing in front of the open garages trying to focus on the flow of power. It was almost second nature now to just let the divine energy flowing through me. This had almost got me in trouble once as I raised my hand in class I sent a shock of power through my extended hand. I was just glad nothing weird like lightning came out.

However, I shouldn't have worried as trying to produce a shield was harder than I thought. And the longer I couldn't perform the blessing, the more my memory would wane. By the Thursday, I was getting frustrated. Staring at the same open, dented garage did not give me hope at catching a demon. I had the power, I could feel that. So why couldn't I produce the shield? Racking my brain, I tried to remember those ghostly words in the lexicon. I had cursed myself for not checking the first couple of pages for a beginner's guide to blessings. After so much trial and error, I played with the idea of sneaking back in for another look. But the same instinct that had pulled me towards breaking my dad's trust seemed to have vanished. And without that, I didn't think I could do it again.

I closed my eyes again and focused on flowing the power into my hand and forcing it out into that shield. The power pulsed inside my hand like it was trapped and trying to find a way out. I urged it to form the wall right in front of me, but it couldn't. I let my hand relax as it was aching. There had to be something I was missing, something the book hadn't mentioned. It usually took Priests years of training and dedication to master blessings. I didn't have that time. My prophecy might have happened by the time I workout how to make a shield. I was just so close it felt like I was missing a component, something I would never think of. And the worse thing was there was no one to ask what it was. Asking those kinds of questions would raise a lot of suspicion. I sighed and raised my hand to try again.

"What are you doing?" A voice came from behind me. I leapt out of my skin and span round to see who the intruder was. Alice was standing behind me, watching me with a confused expression on her face. I took a step back, my rouse discovered. How had she found me?

"Wha-what are you doing here?" I said, trying to buy myself some time to think of a good reason I was in a dirty, old car park.

"Well," Alice said, "detention finished early, so I decided to see if you wanted to hang out. But, your mum told me you'd gone to help me with homework. Which gave me a bloody heart attack cause I thought I'd forgotten something. But, I knew I couldn't have, as we have no angelic homework on Thursdays. So I went looking for you."