The Day We Hailed The Heavens

Chapter 5

Chapter Five

Bird of Prey

Alexis slammed her fists down onto the windowsill angrily, her cheeks crimson with embarrassment and anger. Her jade eyes were narrowed and her breath came in sharp bursts that shook badly as they left her mouth, mingling with the tears of humiliation that were threatening to spill.

Grounded at the age of nineteen? How could her mother have agreed to such a degrading punishment – let alone been the one to actually give the command? How could she have done that – agree with Robert, who was not even her father? The two of them were supposed to stick together, and they had always sworn to put each other first after her father had been killed… by the lover she doesn’t know about, a voice in her head reminded her softly, and she clenched her balled hands.

Now she thought about it, she guessed that she had… neglected her mother over the last three years. She was so in love with Starscream and so caught up in life with the other Autobots and their allies that she had become distracted by it all, and let everything else go. Starscream was her world; he encompassed everything she loved, and all that she wanted.

But she had let her mother suffer in her absence.

Her lip trembling slightly, she sunk onto her window seat and put her face into her bony hands, her shoulders beginning to shake. It was all beginning to become clear to her now… what she had done, and what she was doing with every passing moment.

Before she had fallen down a hillside and gained herself an open fracture, she had been an ordinary person. Perhaps a little too ordinary, in fact: her lack of friends had caused her to be almost invisible at school, known vaguely by face but never by name or personality. And her mother had liked that about her – although she was distressed by Alexis’s clear lack of friends, she had been glad that she was not always out partying and drinking like other teenaged girls, and concentrating on her studies instead.

The idea of her having a boyfriend would have worried Jasmine then, and it would worry her now. Especially if she discovered the rather disturbing and often frightening facts about him.

If she discovered that Alexis had a boyfriend, horrible images would appear in the woman’s mind. Images of her only daughter finally leaving the nest to spread her own wings and fly away… away from her. True, she had Robert now, but Rose was nearly twenty and would soon be leaving herself – and there was always the undeniable threat that one day, he might leave too.

Nothing lasted forever.

If Alexis having a normal, human boyfriend was troubling to Jasmine, then discovering that he was, in reality, an extraterrestrial robot that stood thirty-one feet high, weighed around five tonnes and could crush her quite easily with a simple mistimed step. Then on top of all that, she would surely never speak to her daughter again if she found out that he had once been a murderer – indeed, the murderer of her beloved Adam, and now the lover of his only legacy – Alexis.

Shuddering at the open window, Alexis choked out a muffled sob and shook her head, her face crumpling.

Around her neck, the necklace was a dark, heavy presence; it weighed her down badly despite the size of the emerald, and was making the base of her neck throb and prickle uncomfortably. She wrapped a hand around it tightly, as if to quell the demonic entity that she knew lurked within it, and a chill shiver ran down her spine.

Despite all that had happened, she could not help but long for Starscream.

Insane as the rational side of her mind warned her that it was, she could not help but adore her lord of the sky. He had shown her a whole new world… taken her to places that she had never dreamed of, both physically and spiritually.