Abigail

Abigail opened her right hand and watched sparks shoot back and forth between her fingers. She drew her fingers in a little. The sparks flicked to the centre of her palm and melted into a bright, shapeless clump. Abigail grinned. After two months, she wasn't quite reproducing the floating balls of light Ramiel had conjured for illumination, but she was getting closer.

In the kitchen, the fridge door creaked shut. Abigail curled her hand into a fist, feeling the heat of the proto-light ball dissipate into nothingness and rested her head against the back of the living room couch.

Kalvin brought out two bottles of cider and a small cheese platter. She felt somewhat guilty for letting a guest into the kitchen instead of playing the host, but Kalvin had seemed eager to take the lead and Abigail was tired of managing the food situation in the house. How Elias had kept himself fed while he had been living out of home remained a mystery to her.

"Next episode?" Abigail said, before taking a swig of the cider.

Kalvin flopped onto the sofa beside Abigail. "Onto the Capaldi era then? I think I miss Matt Smith already."

"Eh, Tennant is still the best."

"He was good, but I just can't forgive what happened to Donna."

"Not everybody gets to have the perfect happy ending," Abigail replied. She pushed the cheese platter to the side. "Where did the remote go?"

A glance around the room offered no trace of it. Abigail was certain, however, she had left it on the table. Ah, of course. Halfway through the season finale Kalvin and Abigail got distracted. Somewhere between her trailing love bites across Kalvin's neck and Kalvin reaching for her bra clasp, she remembered knocking something off the table.

It's a pity Elias came home when he did.

Abigail pushed the table back and crouched down. Sure enough, the end of the remote was peeking out from under the couch. She pulled it out, then paused. There was something else under there. Her hand was too big to slide under far enough.

She threw the remote onto the sofa. "One second, Kal."

A large wooden spoon from the kitchen was the first implement Abigail thought of that might work. It slipped in easily, but Abigail had misjudged the distance, so the first retrieval attempt missed. The second produced a phone she had been sure she would never see again. Her heart thumping, Abigail pulled off the dust bunnies stuck to the plastic case and tried the home button. Nothing. She tried all the other buttons too. Nothing. The battery had run out months ago.

"Whose is that?" Kalvin asked.

Abigail bit her lip. "My mum's."

She plugged the phone into the charger, waited a few seconds and tried to turn it on again. This time the start screen appeared.

Her mother had used the same password for years — the day and month of her wedding. Abigail typed it in and found herself unable to do anything as the phone, which was several years old, struggled to catch up. Nine missed calls, six text messages. News alerts and other various notifications kept pouring in. Abigail checked the calls first. Two from the phone company, one from an unidentified number, one from her mother's old coworker and five from Elias.

She checked the date stamps for Elias' calls — all from the morning of their parents' deaths. Before she got lost in the image of Elias' panic as he tried and repeatedly failed to contact their parents, she switched to a different screen.

But as she opened up the messages, she couldn't will away the lump forming in her throat or her rising nausea. Elias again. Her eyes immediately went to the text messages from Elias begging their mother to contact him at once.

"Abby, are you ok?" Kalvin said. He moved to draw her into a hug, but Abigail squirmed out of his reach.

She quickly swiped through the rest — an invitation to some charity trivia night and three messages from people whose names Abigail only vaguely recognised. All three were a variation on the same lines: "I heard the most horrible story. Please tell me you're alright!"

"Yeah, well, she can't exactly do that," Abigail muttered.

She cleared the rest of the notifications without reading them and stared at the list of her mother's messages once more. Her name was right there, just below Elias' panicked pleas to respond. Their conversation looked so banal. There was little save questions about when Abigail would be home after class or requests for Abigail to stop by the shops to pick up some extra bread.

Kalvin shifted from one foot to the other. "Come on, why don't you sit down?"

Shaking her head and with tears welling up, Abigail opened up her mother's photos. She knew what she would find in there. Abigail's phone had a scratch across the camera lens, so she had often used her mother's phone to take photos and record videos.

The most recent photo was of Elias with a paper hat on his head and an awkward half-smile plastered on his face. Their father had insisted that, as per family tradition, they should have a barbeque to celebrate Elias' twenty-third birthday. He had cooked up sausages, while Abigail had tried out a new recipe for coleslaw. It hadn't been a fancy meal, but scrolling through the photos, Abigail thought everyone looked like they had enjoyed themselves. Or at least until Elias had been blackmailed into wearing that awful birthday boy hat. He looked atrocious with it on and his expression made it clear he was aware of this.

As if bewitched, Abigail couldn't stop scrolling through the photos. Her mother had been more prolific than Abigail realised. There were images of summer sunsets and kookaburras perched on the hills hoist. Every party was worth at least thirty photos (although Abigail often helped with those). Even support groups were worthy of a photo or two.

She was halfway through photos of an Easter-themed party at the local community centre where her mother had attended a support group when among a sea of foreign faces, Abigail saw a very familiar one. She froze, her thumb hovering over the screen. No, she hadn't lost it. She knew this face.

Abigail unplugged the charger and raced over to Elias' bedroom, leaving Kalvin behind. Not bothering to knock, she burst in and thrust the phone into Elias' hands.

"Look at this," she said.

Elias made the same face he made when he had been ten and his little sister wanted to play dress-up with him, but once he saw the photo his expression became caught somewhere between terror and exhaustion.

"It's that woman from the monastery church, right?" Abigail said. "I'm not crazy, am I?"

"Yeah, that's her."

Abigail bit her lip. "I'm going to check out the community centre. We need to figure out what mum and this woman were doing together. I mean, we don't even know if this woman is a nephilim or a reaper or a demon. Hell, at this point, I wouldn't be surprised if she was a vampire or something."

"Abby, just... will you just drop it?"

Not quite meeting her eyes, Elias handed the phone back and flipped through the pages of the unit of study outline splayed out on his desk.

"This proves mum and dad's deaths had something to do with the whole mess with Sariel's Shield. Don't you want to figure out what actually happened?"

"We figured a while back that they probably died because it was somehow convenient to Najran and his lot. Do the details really matter? Ramiel's gone, I want to get back to my real life. The new semester's just started and we need to make sure we have enough to live on."

"These are our parents you're talking about!"

"I'm aware." Elias rolled his eyes, his chosen response of late to just about anything Abigail said.

"We can't just forget what happened. We owe it to them to find out the truth."

"No one owes the dead anything. It's time to move on."

Abigail pressed the lock button on her mother's phone and clenched it in her hand, fighting against tears. Elias hadn't touched her, but she felt as if she had been slapped.

"I should've known really, you never wanted to have anything with this family. You could never cut mum and dad any slack. Always so embarrassed to be seen with them. You —"

"That's because they were an embarrassment!" Elias slammed his fist against his desk. "Half the time they couldn't even keep up the bills; it's a bloody miracle we never lost the house. Then there was dad's drunk-driving charge. And how old was Max when he started cooking dinner for us all? Ten? Nine? First-class parenting, wasn't it?"

"No one's a perfect parent! They raised you and they deserved better from you," she replied.

But she could tell by the stiff line of Elias' jaw that he wasn't about to budge, no matter what she said. Exasperated, she turned on her heel and strode out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

"Abby?" Kalvin asked cautiously. He had been polite enough to remain in the living room, but there was no chance he hadn't heard the raised voices. "What's wrong?"

"Some family stuff. I... I don't want to get into it right now."

Kalvin nodded and attempted a smile. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah," Abigail replied. "You know, maybe we should just call it a night. It's getting late and you have to be at training at five tomorrow, don't you?"

"Sure. No problem," Kalvin said, chewing on his bottom lip. "Message me in the morning. Or before that, if you do want to talk, ok?"

As had become their habit of late, they embraced and Kalvin leaned down to kiss her. But Abigail's thoughts were still on Elias' words, she was no longer in the mood for romance. The kiss felt robotic and Kalvin too stiffened as he pulled away from Abigail.

She watched his car disappear down the road, then sunk into the couch. Abigail took a deep breath and tried to calm herself, but Elias' words kept echoing in her mind, riling her up all the more. She flicked her hand. The barely-touched cheese platter flew off the table.