Love, Loyalty and Family by Anysia Eaton (freenovel24 txt) 📕

PROLOGUE
Nobody can ever tell whether the person looking you in the face is a wonderful or horrid person inside. Some people are naturally kind and so don’t care whether a person is good or bad, but others they have to know. Me, I can’t help but know. I would always know. It was a gift to know.
My family, we all have gifts. We all have extra strength, extra speed, and only age a tenth of what a normal human does. We each have one other specific and individual gift. My Mother can communicate with animals, my father has a hugely desired skill of being able convince anybody of anything using a little bit of eye contact, my older brother can control the wind, and my little sister can levitate. Me, I’m a mind reader. I can read every mind in a room with ease. I can stretch it to one or two miles away if I try hard.
We aren’t from this small insignificant planet. We aren’t from the planet you call Earth. We aren’t from the mass of planets that you call The Solar System. We aren’t from the galaxy you call the Milky way.
We’re from a galaxy that you call Messier 83, we call it Mastrigac. We call our mass of planets The Bariacs. We are from a planet called Scerna. My parents came here originally as a holiday in the 1600’s. They liked what they saw and so they stayed permanently. They had to move every time something happened that nobody could explain, for example somebody would see my mother talking to animals, or somebody that my dad used his talents on realised what had happened or somebody would notice that they weren’t getting any older.
They had my brother, Alec, in Orlando, Florida in the year 1831
They were moving more when Alec came. As a baby he would start a wind storm every time he started to cry or have a tantrum. They had to move every other month because somebody would catch on.
Twenty earth years later – when Alec was two years of age – when they were finally able to settle down without a wind storm brewing every month, I – Sarah – came along.
They had settled in Las Vegas, Nevada. 1851.
From the moment I was born, all I could hear was a buzzing noise in my head. It was the thoughts of everybody in the room. Most were nurses. I heard them all gush in their minds of how cute I was. I heard my dad hold back an internal choke of how proud he was. I heard mom internally cheering that I was the baby girl that she most desperately wanted.
It wasn’t easy growing up with the constant chatter in your head. Most people say that the more a baby hears people talking the quicker they will pick the language up. I was living proof. I heard every thought that was in my house and the houses surrounding us, and so I said my first word – Gamble – at the miraculous age of ten days.
My parents thought my gift might be super knowledge but as I grew older and learnt how to structure a sentence I told them about my gift, I told them about the voices in my head, the unspoken thoughts that were floating in to my ears.
Because of me, we had to move a lot. I would, without realising it, answer somebody’s thoughts instead of the words that they had actually spoken or I would speak when babies my age should only be talking gibberish.
Me and Alec where the closest of brother and sisters. As we aged more slowly than average humans, we spent a lot longer as children playing together then what normal humans do and so the bond was even more extreme, like most things about us.
When I had reached the sensible age of three my sister Irena graced us with her presence.
We were in the small town of Ann Arbour in Michigan when Irena was born.
We knew what her gift was straight away. We had to move the day she was born because she floated up and out of the nurses arms as she fell asleep. She was the most difficult to raise, and I would know, going on the thoughts that mom and dad thought.
It didn’t surprise me though. She spent most of her baby days up in the air, we were no longer able to have people around to visit, in case she decided to float up into the air. We became the mysterious family that only ever socialises as individuals, never as a family.
As we all got older, we all leant to reign in our gifts. Alec learnt to control his anger, as that is when a storm will start. He learnt how to harness his emotions so he could use the wind as an ally without getting angry. He could lift objects using the wind, or he could blow objects away. He could create gale force winds that could be shrunk into a tunnel of wind that had a diameter of only two centimetres or he could create an entire Tornado.
I had managed to push the thoughts of other people to the back of my mind. They were still there, and still fully understandable, but they weren’t the a mass of screams like they once were. I tried not to listen to the thoughts of my family and friends. It felt too intrusive. I didn’t like not being able to give them the privacy that they give me. It almost makes me feel guilty. However, I do come in handy to my family, if anybody has suspicions about our humanity I will hear it and we will be gone before they can even spread the word.
Irena had learnt how to control when she rises into the air. She often flu around the house or would fly up to reach something that none of us could, but apart from that she stuck to the ground. She had been the slowest walker in the land. It took her three whole years to learn how to walk, plainly because she flu everywhere.
While we were young, we weren’t able to stay in the same place for more than two years maximum, people would notice that us kids weren’t aging normally. We could pull off two years but then we would have to move and start a life all over again.
But now, we’re getting older. I am sixteen years of age, Alec is eighteen and Irena is thirteen. We can stay in one place for at least five or six years. Nobody seems to notice our slow aging at this age, even Irena’s age, everybody just concludes we’re shorter and have younger faces. We know soon we won’t be able to say we are a real family. Alec, Irena and I will still be able to say we are blood related brothers and sisters, but soon mom and dad will be too young to pull off being our real parents. We’re pushing it is with Alec. Everywhere we go, we push up mom and dad’s age by two years to thirty two and pull Alec down to a reasonable seventeen. Though that won’t last for long. Soon Alec will look too mature to pull off the age of seventeen and so we will have to use his real age and claim to have been adopted or fostered or just plain house companions.
But for now, we are a family to those around us. And for the time being that is how it will stay.

CHAPTER ONE

2011. Aged sixteen in Scerna years. Aged one hundred and sixty in human years.
We had not long celebrated my sixteenth birthday on the shores of Santa Barbara in California. We had a beach side bungalow, with four bedrooms, a lounge, a kitchen, one bathroom and an outdoor swimming pool in the back yard.
The backyard was mostly grass, well past the swimming pool and the concrete around it. The grass had no real purpose but an area for us to train using our powers – though we only did it at night so nobody would be able to see us. Surrounding the backyard was a wooden fence. And past the back fence was about ten metres of grass and then a long stretched out beach.
This was one of our preferred spots. We return here every half a century with different names and identities. This house was one of the many that we actually owned and so we keep coming back to it. In the years in between visits we rent it out as a human holiday home – it proves quite popular, especially with the beach at the end of your backyard. The area is a little cluttered with hotels, motels and holiday apartments, but none that bothered us.
I would often meet the friends that I had made down at the beach in the evenings, to just hang and be like a normal human teen, and sometimes I would take Alec and Irena with me. We usually stuck together. If one of us was going out, the other two would not be far away. We had to do that, for protection reasons. If one of Irena’s friends were to get suspicious of how far Irena could sometimes jump Alec and I would step in, or if Alec was to get too angry and the wind was picking up, Irena and I would step in to calm and stop him, or if I had accidently slipped up and answered a thought instead of a voiced comment or question, Irena and Alec would quickly made up some excuse to get me back home.
Sometime we did make slips like this. Mostly nobody pays any real attention to them, but we knew better than to sit and wait for the mad house people to stop by. And if we wait, they do stop by. Ever since our first major slip as an alien family up in North Dakota in 1960’s, the illusive conspiracy theorist and alien enthusiasts that have kept the business called ‘We Come In Peace’ running, have been on our tail.
“We Come in Peace” was originally a group of six men, who would now be in their late seventies, who studied anything that whispered Paranormal. They went and visited any supposed Alien encounter location, which included a few of the places we have been.
Now, though, it has been passed down to their younger and healthier relatives. These relatives are even more of a pain that the original six men, these have more energy to come after us. They still reside in North Dakota, and so we try to avoid going anywhere too close to that state in case we do have an unfortunate slip up.
However, we do have an advantage against them. The original six men create a web page called “We Come in Peace”. Every location they go is posted on the website before they go there. We keep a close eye on that. If they appear to be coming to close, we’ll pack up and go on a holiday for a while until they have gone. We also have the desired computer systems that wipe anything to do with us off of the internet, any videos, any photo’s and any news pages.
We’ve been in Santa Barbara for a two years now. Mom, stays at home, playing the sensible and responsible mother at home. Dad, works as a sales manager for a local company whose business has rocketed since Dada joined