The Tenth Year

Chapter 1 - Reegan

I feared the day would come when I looked in the mirror and I didn't recognize the person staring back at me. Today was not that day. At least not for me.

It was the first day of the Tenth year and I was going through my morning routine of washing my face and brushing my teeth in the girls' bathroom when my best friend Zoe walked in obviously sporting a hangover from last night's drinking games. The drinking wasn't really that bad, not for me at least. I had started tasting alcohol since I was fourteen and after five years of consuming it in small and sometimes larger doses, I had built up a stomach for it. Now, at just nineteen, there was no other girl or guy my age who could challenge me on a drinking game. Zoe on the other had never tried the damned thing, and was now suffering from the sudden overdose.

"Morning," I mumbled the word with my toothbrush still in my mouth.

A low grunt was all the answer I got. Zoe took a few unstable steps ahead, rubbing her eyes to shake the sleep away. She dragged her feet to one of the toilet stalls, and closed the door behind her.

I turned back to face my own reflection, glad to see that my eyes were still green. Every day for the last nine years it was the first thing I did each morning. My dad used to say that maybe not everyone would turn, maybe the angels were wrong. He was one of the few people who turned in the first week.

Five days after the Curse, my dad walked inside my bedroom, tears in his eyes. The same eyes we used to share, as bright as fresh grass in spring, had changed. They were completely white. I knew what that meant. He would change into one of them. He would become one of the white angels and join their forces.

A couple of days later a bright white angel showed up in our front yard. I knew his face from TV. He was the representative of the white angels, their spokesman of sorts, and he was there to take my dad away. I couldn't let that happen. I wouldn't. Even though I was only ten, I attacked the white angel with all my ferocity. Thinking back, I believe the angel was too surprised to register what I was doing, that's probably the only reason why I managed to nick his pretty face with my nails. However, that didn't make any difference. My mother stopped me before attacking again and the white angel took my father away from me forever. For a whole day I stood there, in the middle of our front yard staring up the sky, at the spot where my dad disappeared. When it finally started raining I decided it was time to let go.

The next few months were the worst ones of my life. After my dad turned, my mother lost any connection she had to reality. She started reading the Bible over and over again. Every night she would come into my room and read to me, telling me that this was God's plan for humanity all along. To help his white angels in their war against the evil black ones, the Fallen ones as people started calling them. She told me that my father was one of the privileged ones to join forces with them sooner than the rest of us, and that we would follow him in the next years. Join the white angels and destroy all evil, that was her new goal. Truthfully, what she said didn't sound so crazy. More and more people began thinking the same way, but for both sides. Even before their eyes changed, some humans decided to join forces with either side of the angels, for their own reasons. My mother wanted us both to become white angels, but I couldn't get the face of the angel that took my dad away out of my mind. I hated him.

As life would have it, not everything we wish for comes true. Five months after my dad was taken away, my mother's eyes changed color too. And even though she was looking forward for that day, the irony was that when her time came to join the angels, the side that the Curse placed her at was not the one she was hoping for. Her eyes turned black. That same day, an angel with black wings showed up at our front yard. I knew him, too. He was the representative of the dark side.

My mother was on her knees, crying and begging him to let her be. After all she was on the white angels' side; she would never fight for them. That's what she said but I knew she had no choice. I heard on TV that after the eyes changed, the mind and body started changing as well, making humans into the perfect angel soldiers. That was back when we even had TV to inform us about those things.