Breaking Barriers

by Bob Dattolo

  He snorted. “She believed you?”

  “She did. They all do, why would you be surprised?”

  “I just can’t believe they make it this easy for us! We should have come up with this idea a long time ago.”

  More laughter. “I know! We’ve gained so much power! She’s a powerful one, too! I have to strengthen the barriers in her every few months. I’ve never had to do that with the others.”

  “I know. I can’t wait for this one! Do you want to do it or should I?”

  “I don’t care. Either of us can kill her for all I care. Or we do it together? We did James together, that was marvelous.” My mom purred at the memory.

  “It was. His blood tasted amazing!”

  “It did. One more down, then we simply need to wait through the remaining six. We can do this, then we’ll have absorbed more power from the sacrifices than anyone can imagine!”

  My dad laughed again. “I just can’t believe that stupid Nawfed doesn’t know she’ll be dead and not going off to school.”

  “What do you want? They’re our puppets…”

  I don’t know when I stopped talking, but when I could see the room again, Special Agent Thorne watched me with sad eyes.

  “Your middle name is Nawfed, correct?”

  I nodded.

  “Did your parents call you Ceri? Or Nawfed?”

  “They never called me Ceri. Only my brothers and sisters did.”

  He looked at the table and flicked the folders. “Do you know what Nawfed means?”

  I shrugged. “My parents said it was a family name. Why?”

  “Doesn’t it strike you as odd?”

  “No? Why should it? All of our middle names are like that? Donna and James had Wythfed and Seithfed.”

  His eyes filled with sadness when he looked up at me. “Ceri, Nawfed means ninth. Seithfed and Wythfed mean seventh and eighth. They weren’t calling you by family names, they numbered you and were calling you by numbers. They were siphoning power from you when you died.”

  My world collapsed just a little at that news. Just not as much as you’d think. I always thought something was odd with our names, I just could never put my finger on it. None of us could. “Numbers?”

  He nodded. “Let me guess, they planned to do it on your 17th birthday? Isn’t that when your other brothers and sisters disappeared?”

  “Yes?”

  He sighed and rubbed his face. “Ceri…your parents lied to you. Grossly lied to you. Lied and set you all up to be sacrifices. Based on what you said and what we thought might have been happening, they were using you children as…batteries, I guess. On your 17th birthday, as you came into your power, they planned to sacrifice you and absorb your power into their own.”

  “Power? But…we don’t have any power? We’re not supernaturals! Supernaturals are evil!”

  Another sigh. “Ceri, do you feel evil?”

  “What? Of course not!”

  He tapped the folders again and pulled out two more before sliding them over to me. These were thicker than the others. Inside the first, I found a picture of my father. Next to it was some sort of paperwork. I opened the second to find a picture of my mom and then matching paperwork. “What is this? I can’t read any of this?”

  “Ceri…your parents were mages. Based on what we’ve learned over the years, they’re both about 400 years old. They were against coming out to the humans, so turned inward. That’s not illegal, so we’ve been monitoring, as we do anyone that turned away from society, but your parents are too clever. We’ve never been able to prove anything. The only reason we knew they were having kids is because drones and planes have picked you up outside playing. Once we knew about that we managed to get some laser mics in place and picked up recordings so that we had names. We could never prove anything, though, which is why we never broke in. As it is, we still can’t prove anything, but at least we have probable cause now to enter.”

  Collapsing back into my chair didn’t change the information he gave me. “I don’t understand? They’re mages? Supernaturals? What about hell?”

  “Ceri…you need to forget a lot about what they told you. Hell doesn’t work like that. Having talked to actual demons, it definitely doesn’t work like that. I’ve even talked to angels and they’ve corroborated it. And, yes, your parents are mages. Have been for centuries. It sounds like they’re using their own children and sacrificing them, which is…twisted. That’s evil right there, evil in a big, big way. Death magic is, well, it’s harsh. Harsh and powerful. Death magic using your own family members is to an entirely different level.”

  “I don’t understand? Why would they do that? Why would they lie to us?”

  “To keep you under control? To keep you pliable? Killing innocents is one way to garner a lot of power. Again, making it an innocent of your own family and you have something else. They’re using death magic to siphon off the power that comes to you when you turn 17. Then they split it between them. I…I kinda thought they might be doing something like that. Or, it was a possible thought out of 20 or so. If they did that to each of you, then I believe they would be tapped out on how much they could absorb by the time they were done with you. It would make them incalculably strong. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of anyone doing that outside of story.”

  “But…supernaturals are evil!”

  “Ceri, do you feel evil?” He asked again, sounding calm.

  I shook my head. “I’m a good girl!”

  “You are, Ceri. You are…but you’re also a supernatural.”

  I hoped he’d never come out and say it quite that way, yet here it is. I had some strange thought that if it never saw the light of day, then it couldn’t and wouldn’t be true. That I’d wake up and had parents that loved me and everything would be normal. Yet here we are. “I can’t be a supernatural!”

  “You are, Ceri. You are. You saw your reflection. You’ve changed, right? You never had black eyes like this. Your skin is different. I’m frankly unsure why you’ve changed, since you’re not 17 yet, but I think something is different in you.”

  My mind flashed back to the warehouse. “The vampire said he was going to crack my keystone so that my barriers shatter? I don’t know what that means, but could that be it? He said I was filled with barriers holding me back. My mom talked about them…”

  He tapped the table and nodded slowly. “That might be it. If your parents somehow blocked your powers at a young age, you’d be building up inside this entire time. The pressure would be growing and growing. Normally, magic users have access to at least some of their power growing up. That’s when they learn the basics about how to use it. When they turn 17 they gain access to everything, but they’ve had some their entire lives. If you’ve never had magic and were shielded inside somehow, then he may have somehow broken one of the barriers, allowing the magic to kick in.”

  I didn’t want to meet his eyes. “Is this true? Do I have magic?”

  “You do. A lot of it, from what I can feel. Not the most I’ve ever felt, but definitely the most from someone not yet 17, and you’re still shielded, too, so I’m not feeling anywhere near everything. I just can’t figure out what type of magic you have.”

  I finally met his eyes. “What does that mean? Type?”

  His shrug was relaxed, although his face was tense. “Magic users specialize. It tends to run in families. Some focus on conjuration. Some on potions. Some on nature magic. Some on ritual. It varies. Did your parents ever do anything religiously?”

  That made me snort. “Besides make us pray and beat us?”

  “Yes?”

  “No.”

  “Huh, okay, that doesn’t help much. That’s okay, though, you can learn. It’ll just take practice to figure out where your strengths lie.”

  “I can’t learn magic! I don’t want to go to hell!”

  He sighed again. “Ceri, you won’t go to hell from using magic or being a supernatural. It depends on what you do with the magic. There are goo
d supernaturals just like there are bad ones. They’re like normal humans. We’re like normal humans.”

  My breath caught. “We?” I knew what he meant, but I had to ask.

  “Yes. We. I’m a wizard. Basically, a very powerful mage.”

  “Oh…” I worked my throat, struggling to swallow before drinking another bottle of water. “Uhh, you don’t feel evil to me?”

  His smile caught me off guard. “Because I’m not. I’m an FBI agent. I’ve been one for more than 50 years. Prior to this I was in police work for the supernatural community. I’m a cop, basically. I have been for hundreds of years. Have I done bad things? Yes, I’m only human. But I’ve done far more good than bad. Or at least I hope so. The worst thing I’ve done this week is speed in my car.”

  “That doesn’t seem too evil.”

  “It doesn’t, does it? And I go back to you, do you feel evil?”

  “No?”

  “Exactly. My point exactly.”

  I thought my heart was low before, but it was nowhere near as low as it had moved during our little conversation. How do you go from believing everything supernatural is evil and hell-bound to being supernatural? Unless I’m on my way to hell already? Is that why our parents held us at the compound? Maybe that’s why they killed us? To keep us from becoming evil when we turn 17? Except…if he’s right, they’re both hundreds of years old? That would mean they’re far more evil than a 17 year old could be.

  I’m not even sure what to say at this point. My life has never been what I think it is, has it? I’m not sure how it could be, unless this guy is lying to me. I’m just not sure how or why he’d do that.

  “I’m so confused.”

  “I understand, Ceri. I do. It’s hard to find out that your parents aren’t quite what you think they are.”

  That statement made me squint at him and I felt a strange feeling inside that I couldn’t place. “If you knew that my parents are evil and my brothers and sisters are disappearing, why haven’t you stepped in and helped us? There are six more of us still there!” My voice rose through each word until I was nearly shouting.

  Pressure in the room increased somehow and it was coming from him, getting stronger as his eyes seemed to glow. “Ceri, we have laws in place now that cover norms and supernaturals. We’re not allowed to invade unless we’re certain things are going wrong. We can’t even point any other supernaturals at it and ask for assistance. We did everything we could within the law to monitor and look for proof.” He patted the folder. “Now we have it and we have a team headed in there as we speak. They should be assaulting within the next hour. We will save your siblings and arrest your parents.”

  That made me feel better, and the red rage growing inside of me halted, stalled, and then receded. “You’re going in there?”

  “Yes.” The pressure from his side of the room lessened. “Were staging right now. They’ll go in and make arrests and then we’ll figure out what’s going on.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  We fell silent at that, but it wasn’t really companionable. Not from me, at least. It’s too hard to be that way when being around people is so strange.

  After a few minutes of him tapping the folders, he spoke again. “You don’t know of your parents ever practicing magic at all?”

  I shook my head. “No!” I couldn’t be more emphatic than that. “Magic is from the devil!”

  He sighed. “You need to work on that if you can. You’ve been taught some very, very wrong things. Magic is no more evil than the chair you’re sitting in is evil. Everything can be used for an evil purpose. Let’s say I pick up the chair and beat someone’s head in and kill them. The chair was used for evil, but it, in and of itself, is not evil. There is only one supernatural that, by definition, is evil, and that’s demons. That being said, not even all demons actively go out and do evil like humans think they do. Vampires and shifters and fey and all of the other supernaturals out there are only as evil as they act. Nothing about them makes them intrinsically evil. You may want to think about that and hold off calling things evil, because others may have a problem with that.”

  His chair example hit me hard. That’s true. It’s very true. Then again, my parents told me that all supernaturals are evil, yet they’re supposedly supernaturals…as are we? Plus, none of us kids have ever done anything evil, while they’ve apparently killed at least eight of their other children. On the scale of things, me running away, which is the most evil thing I’ve ever done according to their rules, doesn’t even rate. Then again, I was touched by a vampire and then magic users and also seen naked, so that would rate, but I had no control over any of that.

  I fell silent again for a few minutes. “What am I?”

  He grunted and nodded. “I was wondering when you were going to ask that. We’re not quite sure, honestly. You do know you should be dead, right?”

  “Yeah.” My voice came out sounding sad and lonely. “I wanted to die. I’m still not sure I want to be here.”

  “I wouldn’t go thinking that. You have your entire life to live and I think things will look better for you going forward. Beyond that, though, I’m not sure you get it. You should be dead. Completely and utterly. You seem to be alive, based on every test the doctors ran, yet we can’t tell why that is. We can’t nail down your powers, which is really rare. You come from a magic user family, but you seem to have something else going on that we can’t pinpoint. Plus, you were in the bin.”

  My brows furrowed. “What do you mean? Of course I was in the bin, that’s where he put me after he bit and stabbed me.”

  “No, you don’t understand. You were in the bin. For hours. Almost seven hours, in fact.”

  “Okay, I guess that’s a long time to stay alive after being hurt.”

  His smile was brittle at best. “You’re not getting it. You were under the hopper, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you know what was in the hopper above you?”

  “I’m not sure? But I think bodies?”

  He nodded. “Right. We think whoever attacked you and left you in the bin went upstairs to a meeting that was taking place. So far, we’ve positively identified more than three dozen known criminals of varying supernatural races that were killed, heads torn off, and then their bodies and heads were tossed into the hopper above you. Their blood drained out into the bin you were in. In fact, it filled the bin to within a half inch of the top. To the best of our ability to tell, you were dead the entire time. There was no heartbeat coming from the bin. Nothing. Until you started thrashing and the blood level began receding, we had no idea you were even there. You were in a bin filled with blood for seven hours, without breathing. That should be impossible for anyone other than a vampire.”

  My mind flashed back to being in the bin. “I don’t understand? I was under water? Or…I guess at the bottom of a bin filled with blood?”

  “Correct.”

  “How can I be alive?”

  “That’s our question. You have obvious physical changes, yet the combination of them doesn’t quite meet up with other races that we’ve seen. We’re frankly at a loss.”

  “I’m so confused. You said the blood receded? Where did it go?”

  He tapped the table more and it was obvious that he didn’t want to tell me. Finally, he shook his head. “It didn’t quite recede. It was absorbed.”

  “Absorbed?”

  “By you. All of the blood flowed into your wounds and down your throat. When the blood was gone, even the tiniest puddles in the bin were gone, pulled into your body. As far as we know, that’s impossible, yet we have witnesses and even have it on camera. It’s being studied right now, but our experts are at a loss so far.”

  I felt beyond gross at the thought that I had been in a puddle of blood, but thinking about my body absorbing it is so much farther beyond that. I cradled my arms. “I…how…” Nothing seemed to work any longer. My brain fizzled and flared random images as strange feelings ran through me. None of them h
elped in any way, shape, or form. At all.

  I must have lost track of time, because the next thing I was aware of is a tired looking Agent tapping my shoulder. “C’mon. We have rooms here and you can sleep in one. It’s been stocked with toiletries and clothes for you. We need to talk more when you wake up. Things at your house haven’t gone well.”

  “What do you mean?” My voice cracked, telling me hours had passed.

  He stopped at the door and faced me. “Your parents escaped. They destroyed the house before they broke free, killing all of your siblings and the entire first team of 27 agents.” He patted my shoulder as the tears started. “I’m so sorry. We’ll find them. But for now, you need to rest. I’m sorry to pass it on, but I didn’t feel right about holding it back.”

  The rest of the trip to the room I found myself in was a blur. A horrible nightmare-filled blur.

  My parents killed my brothers and sisters? 14 of us? How? Why? Why would they destroy the house and kill the remaining six? Are they seriously that evil that they’d rather have us dead than picked up by the FBI? That’s horrid, far worse than anything they ever told us supernaturals were responsible for.

  Far, far worse.

  And yet they’re my parents. What does that make me? Does the apple fall far enough away from the tree for me to not be an evil person? I should have been quicker to kill myself if that’s the case.

  Thoughts of suicide filled me until darkness rushed in and took over.

  Chapter 4

  I instantly knew where I was when my eyes flew open. There was no mental fumbling about where I was or what happened to me. None of that happened. Instead, I had the instant realization that I was in an FBI building, that my parents are murderers responsible for killing 14 of their own children, and that I’m some sort of supernatural that is confusing the FBI.

  Even through the sadness and confusion, that made me snicker. Why should I be the only one confused? It’s probably wrong of me to feel better when a government agency is confused along with me, but I’ll take it.

  I don’t remember looking around the little room at all, but it was a decent size, being about six feet across and ten long. A little stack of clothes sat on the tiny dresser next to the door to a bathroom. I was happy to see that the bathroom had a shower in it, so I took advantage of the facilities and stood under the hot water, relishing the experience. My parents only allowed us so much hot water every day and I’ve already used more than all of us kids were allowed combined. It felt decadent.