The Goddess Twins Page 5

  I’m really loving her calming aura, like nothing could happen that would shake her out of her inner peace. I’m about to tell her she’s mistaken when the dancing sister tries to take one of Aurora’s bags. My sister holds them to her chest and steps backward.

  “Cousins? No. You guys must be confused. We don’t have any extended family,” Aurora says, trying to move around the women, but they box us in again.

  “Or, could it be that your mother didn’t tell you about your relatives?” counters the curvy sister.

  “Oooh, secrets and lies,” quips the tiny one, making jazz hands. “You two really need to unbelieve that whole orphan angle a-sap, you know?”

  “Who are you? What do you know about our mother?” I ask cautiously, my heart beating fast. Mom’s life story is widely known thanks to the internet. But my skin and brain are tingling. I have this weird, instant connection with these ladies, with their energy and dimpled smiles. Could we be related to them? How do they know about us when we know nothing about them?

  “Your mother, Selene. So, we’ve never met her, of course, but we know she’s powerful and talented, like all the women in our family,” the pixie says, bouncing on her toes with a broad smile.

  “A powerful and talented soprano?” Aurora huffs. “Everyone knows that.”

  “No, a powerful and talented goddess,” the pixie corrects with a nod.

  “Oh, okay. I get it now,” Aurora says with a squint of her eyes. “You two are super stans of hers, right? You think her talent is beyond this world? Listen, our mother is not a goddess. She’s just a normal human woman who happens to sing well. That’s it. And for the record, we don’t have cousins anywhere, but thanks for stepping into the role for five minutes. It was very convincing. Four stars.” Aurora grabs my arm. “Now, my actual family and I are gonna go. And P.S., your outfits prove you’re trying too hard, so just take the L and leave.”

  “Wow, oh my goddess, that is so precious. You really don’t know, do you?” the taller sister says. “Either of you? She never told you two any part of the truth? Ah, I’m so sorry!” She crosses her hands over her heart. “Look, I understand you’re hesitant to believe me now, but if you are really serious about rescuing her, you have to come with us.”

  “What? Why?” Aurora’s eyes widen. “Did you have something to do with her disappearance?”

  “Of course not!” The smaller sister says with shock. “Goddess forbid! We’re here to help. We wouldn’t hurt our own family.” She looks at me, and her sincerity hits me in intense waves.

  “We are not your family!” Aurora sputters. “Who the hell are you actually?”

  “Right! I’m Liberty, but you can call me Lib,” says the taller sister, reaching out her hand to me. “And this one-woman show is my younger sister, Leolidessa. She goes by Lilo. And honestly, all we’re here for is to help you find Aunt Selene.”

  “Okay, whatever.” Aurora rolls her eyes and turns away from Liberty’s hand. “I don’t know what this is about, but I reject it, fully.”

  Lilo throws up her arms and embraces Aurora again. “You need a hug, right? That’s what I’m hearing. Just sink into this lusciousness, new cousin. You know what, I bet you’re hangry. We need to get you some food!”

  “Let me go!” Aurora frees herself from her tiny attachment.

  “I’m trying to let you know it’s all going to work out. Family is here for you!” Lilo moves toward Aurora again, but my sister takes a huge step backward and hisses like an angry cat.

  “Stop it, Lilo. She doesn’t trust you’re harmless,” Liberty laughs and flips her teal tipped hair from her shoulders.

  “So, you’re our cousins?” I ask. “But do you know who has our mother? How did you find out she’s missing?” I step closer to the sisters. “Our godfather, Leo, said the police are keeping the disappearance quiet since Mom’s a celebrity and they don’t want the press interfering.”

  “Look, we don’t know everything about what’s going on, but we know enough. Tomorrow we’ll take you to someone who actually knows it all and can give you all the answers: our grandmother.” Liberty stares directly into my eyes and smiles. I feel my blood pulsing through my veins and thumping in my ears. Looking into her eyes is intense, and after a beat I find myself pulled into a vision. I see Lilo and Lib dancing around a bedroom, singing along to a French rap song.

  “We get to finally meet our cousins tonight!” Lilo cries out happily. The vision shifts to one showing the sisters when they are younger, teenagers sitting beside each other on the train, holding hands.

  “Gran Gran said that we would meet them, help them one day. We have to just believe her that it’ll happen when it’s meant to happen, right? Until then, we’ll just send our love to them, wherever they are,” Liberty says, consoling her sister.

  This is the best news in the last 24 hours. We have cousins, and they’re, like, super hyped-up British versions of Aurora and me, and they’re here to help us find Mom. Heathrow jackpot.

  “So, let me see if I got this. You’re Aurora, and you’re Arden, right?” Liberty correctly identifies us, and I nod. “Sorry my sis and I are, as you say, super hyped up. We’re just juiced to finally meet you after all these years.”

  She smiles evenly, but I bite my lip in shock. Super hyped up? Wait, can she hear my thoughts?

  “Oh, and yeah, I can hear your thoughts.” Liberty winks at me.

  What?! My eyes nearly fall out of my head as Liberty chuckles.

  “All the women in our family have different powers. And since we’re related, our powers have the ability to connect and transfer back and forth. I can mentally connect with animals, but not other people like you can. But I can hear your thoughts when I stare into your eyes. It’s like between the female relatives of our family, we can share a bit of our powers when we’re together. But wait, you guys are twins, so you can, like, hear her thoughts and she yours, like all the time, right? Can you send each other visions from miles away? I’m so curious, what else can you two do together?”

  “Let’s go, Arden.” Aurora reaches out her hand for me, but Lilo takes the opportunity to finally snatch the bag from Aurora’s other arm. She hops around the group in glee.

  “You can’t go anywhere now that you’re here, you’re here now and you can’t go anywhere,” Lilo sings, cradling and rocking the bag like a child.

  “Look, I’ve had enough of this shit. I want my bag now!” Aurora stomps her foot in frustration and holds out her hand. The bag snaps from Lilo’s grip to Aurora’s.

  “Wait,” I look back and forth between Aurora and Lilo. “How the hell did you get that bag, Aurora? Lilo, did you throw it to her?” Neither answers or even looks at me. “What is going on, Aurora?”

  “Oh, you get out of here!” Liberty claps her hands together. “Okay, I could see not knowing we are goddesses, but you don’t even know about each other’s powers?!”

  “Secrets and lies! Secrets and lies!” Lilo sings once again, grinning and bouncing on her toes.

  “Did you make that bag jump to you?” I grill Aurora, but she just avoids my eyes.

  “Mysterious powers and magical relatives. Everything is so fresh. Everything is so new,” Lilo sings slowly with her eyes closed.

  Aurora snaps at her, “How did you even know we’d be here tonight? Huh? If you two are really our cousins, how have we never ever heard of you?” She clutches her bag. “Why are you pestering us, and what does any of this have to do with finding our mother?”

  “Such a temper and so very many questions!” Lilo mimics a mean face.

  “Yes, because I want answers,” Aurora snarls in reply.

  “Oh, and I want one entire day with a completely lavender sky,” Lilo sighs happily and resumes her dancing around the group.

  “I promise we’ll answer absolutely every question we can once we get to our apartment,” Liberty says.

  “There is so very much to catch you up on before you meet our Gran Gran. That’s what she likes to be calle
d, you know. Gran Gran. The Boss Goddess,” Lilo says with an electrified full body wiggle.

  “Oh, speaking of catch,” Liberty says, taking a quick look at her phone, “we need to move to the Tube. Like right now.”

  I glance at Aurora, and she shrugs in defeat. “Fine, we’ll go,” she says, still avoiding eye contact with me. Always keeping her secrets safe.

  Liberty nods and we take off, with Liberty dragging me forward and Lilo linking arms with a reluctant Aurora. We are swept through the bright airport to the subway, or the Tube, as the cousins say. It’s a labyrinth; the walls change from glass to plaster to concrete to painted brick, the ceiling coming in closer and closer until we are bottlenecked onto a concrete platform, staring at an advertisement for the Tate Museum. Liberty smiles as we wait. Lilo is slowly moving her feet through the ballet positions. Aurora is fumbling with her cell phone. And I am trying my best to swallow the lump that has formed in my throat. So much of me is overwhelmed, but part of me is in celebration, as so many things click into place.

  Aurora and I have powers. So that’s what’s going on with me. The visions? The reading of minds? Those things are really happening. Because I’m a goddess. I look at my hands, focusing on the lines across my palm as I etch the new facts into my mind. And Mom is a goddess. And she’s in mortal danger because she was taken by some bad people who maybe also have powers? My hands tremble. There’s nothing in them, but this all might be a bit too much to hold.

  Lilo breaks the silence, chirping, “We have a guest room with single beds, and we have twin guests for the bedroom!”

  In a gust of wind and lights, the train arrives, sliding through the tunnel like an electric snake. A looping, disembodied voice tells us to “mind the gap” as we step into the brightly lit, white and navy-blue train car.

  We shuffle into a quad of seats, away from the crowded middle. Liberty and I slide our bodies and bags and sit on one side. Leolidessa and Aurora plant themselves across from us.

  “Are you enjoying the fabulous experience of riding the London Underground? Isn’t this just miraculous, twinsies? Look around you at all this splendor!” Lilo gestures about her at the bright train scattered with people, most of them looking at their phone screens.

  “What splendor? We’ve ridden a subway system before. There’s nothing miraculous about traveling like a mole,” Aurora says, staring out the window into the dark tunnel.

  As the train takes off, she gives everyone in sight a sour face. To make up for her malice, I smile welcomingly across the train and accidentally catch the eye of a lanky boy standing in the back. He is maybe fifteen, with longish greasy blonde hair obscuring his face. He’s wearing enough baggy clothing to dress an entire football team. He shakes his hair out of his face and smiles back at me with a nod. I drop my smile, but it’s too late. He’s already begun moving toward us, making a path up the aisle, his young face more determined with each step.

  “Oh no!” I hide my face in my coat. What is happening to me? I do not need another run in with a boy.

  “What’s wrong?” Liberty whispers next to me.

  “I didn’t mean to, but I think I might have given him the sign,” I hiss.

  “You flipped him the bird?!”

  “No! I just smiled at him, but not really at him, but now he thinks I want to … Oh no, here he comes.” I try to shrink myself into invisibility as the boy approaches.

  “Hullo,” he says in a thick British accent, moving a lock of hair behind his ear and smiling expectantly.

  My face burns as I look into my purse for nothing, hoping he takes the hint.

  “I, uh, I saw you looking at me, you know? And you’re kind of cute I guess, yeah? I thought I’d maybe come over and maybe let you say hi to me, you know?”

  “Ey, ey, sorry, sonny boy, no, no no. You are in the wrong space-time continuum right now, my man,” Lilo barks at him, snapping her finger in the air. “This ain’t no singles bar, not right here, not today. This is a train, love. We are trying to get to places you don’t even know exist. My cousin, she ain’t interested, you see. You gotta go.”

  “I … I just want to talk …” he stutters.

  “No, no, you ain’t saying nothing. Nothing!” Lilo gets up and pats him on the head. “Okay, how about you play a game, starting right here, right now. You never talk to a woman ever again. Your mom doesn’t count, okay? But every other lady, you have no words for them, you got that? Now, go, young Kurt Cobain. Go!”

  “But—” he starts in confusion.

  “Eh! No words, remember? That’s both the goal and the dream. You go now. Bye!” She gently pushes him back toward his end of the car, and, after a final sad glance at me, he shuffles away.

  “Oh my god! Lilo, what was that?” I whisper at her when he is gone.

  “That? That was me putting riffraff in its place, yeah. My cousin deserves a king—or a queen, if you like—but definitely not a scrub muffin. You didn’t want to talk to him, I could see that. I got your back, Cuz!”

  “Yes, but you could have been nicer to him about it!” I counter, still scrunched in the seat.

  “Oh my god, here we go again with her niceness crap,” Aurora grunts, rolling her eyes so heavily that mine hurt.

  “There’s nothing wrong with being nice, Arden,” Liberty says. “But think about it. Nice won’t get you or that boy anywhere in life. You could have tried to dismiss him politely, but he’d still think he had a chance and probably stalk us all the way home. Lilo was harsh, maybe, but he got the point that this love connection he was dreaming about wasn’t going to happen.”

  “She told him to never talk to a girl again!”

  “I know, I’m hilarious, right?” Lilo brushes off her shoulder. “Sometimes you gotta help people recognize their own limits, you know what I’m saying?”

  “You mean crush their feelings?” I ask.

  “No, he knows I didn’t mean it, but next time he does talk to a girl, he’ll try that much harder not to get shut down. He might even be presentable and charming and not just stand there blubbering because a pretty girl accidently smiled at him.”

  Lib nudges me. “You could send him that message directly.”

  “How?” I snort. “I’m so awkward around guys, I can barely talk to them.”

  “Oh, don’t believe her. This one just had an older man eating out of her hand back home,” Aurora snaps like a viper. No one acknowledges her.

  “Use your mojo—your goddess powers,” Liberty says, nodding her head. “You can do it. Speak to his mind. Let him know how he should approach a lady.”

  “What? I don’t really know how to use my … mojo like that. When it’s happened before, it’s just me receiving visions of what others are thinking. It’s mostly been by accident.” I bite my lip, feeling embarrassed at all I don’t know about myself and my powers. I hate the panic tightening my throat.

  Liberty shakes her head and turns to me. “You got this, cousin. You just need to take control over your abilities. Concentrate on his eyes and listen with your heart to how he’s feeling. Then when you’re connected, think about what you want to say and how you want him to feel.” She squeezes my hand and I hear her voice in my head, You can do this, Arden. You can do amazing things. You’re one of us.

  Right. I’m supposed to be this person who can overcome her own insecurities and do beyond great things. I can, at the very least, help this guy not feel like crap right now. I think over Liberty’s words and what it means to be one of many great, powerful superwomen. This ability to influence another’s emotions is a part of me. It’s not an accidental thing. It’s a me thing. So, I just have to be me. Sounds so easy.

  I look toward the back of the train and find the blond boy sitting alone, earbuds in, hair in his face. I stare at him for quite a while until he feels my gaze. Finally, he looks up. Once I catch his eye, I don’t let go, but allow his feelings to pour into me. The world stills as I absorb the sadness and embarrassment emanating from his darkened eyes.

/>   “Hi, there. I’m sorry about all that. My cousin can be pretty blunt, but it was really nice of you to come over to say hello, and I should have said hi back. That was rude of me.” I think these words. The wave of embarrassment recedes, but I still feel the sadness inside him, now inside me. It feels intensely lonely. My heart aches for him. “I know you’re looking for love; we all are. I’m not the one, but when you find a great girl, you could compliment her, ask her questions, and be genuinely interested in her, and maybe the two of you will connect in a way that has potential for more.” Instead of feeling loneliness, I now feel hope emanating from him. He’s imagining meeting someone, what he will say to her, how he will start with a compliment, asking if it’s okay for him to share a moment of her time. I blink and sever the connection between us. The train comes back into focus around me.

  “Hey, Cuz,” Liberty says softly. “You’re back, right? What happened?”

  “That was … I think …” I turn and look to the back. The boy is now bopping his head to his music, a wistful smile on his face. “I did it. I used my mojo. I gave him the message. It actually went well.”

  “Yes! Get it, cousin! You’re brilliant! I knew you could do it. He looks well and chuffed now, right, Lilo?”

  “Yes, look at him, like a less-wrinkled shirt. Not so embarrassing to look at. Steamed and definitely improved. He might talk to a woman again soon and not completely blow it next time. Can you imagine? Praise be!” Lilo waves her hands in celebration like she’s sitting in church. “Isn’t it just glorious how we change the world? Goddesses—saving men from themselves since the dawn of time.”

  “So, what does that really mean?” Aurora lowers her voice. “You, we …”

  “What does it mean to be a goddess?” Lilo sings. “My dear cousin wants to know.”

  “All of the women in our family have these unique abilities and live for a long, long time,” Liberty says with a proud smile. “Our powers were gifted to us directly by the Fates. We’ll tell you the whole story later, once we get home, but yeah, basically we’re not fully human. You’re not fully human. We’re all something more. We can do super awesome things in our family, and it’s especially great when we’re all together and able to collaborate and share our abilities. But even on our own, each of us is pretty incredible. You two won the family genealogy lottery.”