by Bill Hiatt
Once the Dagda had spoken, some of the more reasonable faeries, such as Finvarra and Manann, joined my cause. I was also aided by the timely arrival of Coventina. The original Lady of the Lake, having gotten the Order back to normal after the recent attacks, had hurried to Tanaquill’s castle, thinking to congratulate the happy couple but finding a much different situation.
“Taliesin fended off an attack on the Lake itself,” Coventina said. “As far as I am concerned, he can tell whatever mortals he wishes.”
There were a few diehards, but in the end I won permission to let my friends’ parents in on our secret, as long as I did so with the precautions we had described.
The guys were elated, but not so much Nurse Florence.
“Winning faerie approval was important,” she agreed, “but it is only the first step. You do realize many of their parents are likely to be horrified more than anything else?”
“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” I replied.
Of course, it would help if the bridge didn’t crumble beneath our feet.
Chapter 35: The War at Home (Tal)
We had expected to do battle with the fake Vanora, but instead we were greeted by a pleasant anticlimax: whoever had been impersonating her must have fled as soon as she learned of Nicneven’s fall.
Say what you will, but at times it paid to have a reputation for taking down the toughest opponents. The poor impostor probably didn’t think she stood a chance against us.
Not to be too smug, but probably she was right.
It took the real Vanora only a few hours to regain control of her security network and reel all the guards back in for some selective-memory rearrangement.
“We don’t want them feeling guilty for what they did under someone else’s control,” Vanora explained. “They’ll sleep better just not knowing.”
I was tempted to ask what Vanora was going to do about the fact that one of the guards had fatally shot four others, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
Not having any idea what had happened to Carla, we had been carefully watching for her. Oddly, we found her in the dungeon. From what Stan told us about her earlier pretense of being cured, she was probably part of an elaborate trap to get us close enough to use that heinous love spell on us. Vanora, Nurse Florence, Gabriela, and I joined our power to knock her out from a distance. Then we swept the dungeon for other traps, removing some pretty nasty hostile magic that would indeed have been a formidable trap.
Lifting Cronus’s spell wasn’t exactly easy, but with Nurse Florence, Vanora, and Magnus to help me, I managed to restore Carla.
“I did…such horrible things,” she said quietly. “Can you—”
“There’s nothing to forgive,” I said. “You couldn’t help it. Anyway, it doesn’t look as if you did any lasting damage.”
“Thank God!” she replied. “I couldn’t…I couldn’t have…”
“No worries,” I said. These days neither one of us spoke about her deal with Asmodeus. If Cronus had regressed her to the period of time when she was helping the demon without realizing it, that might have actually been more damaging than transforming her the openly evil Alcina.
Thinking about the whole mess got me to wondering why Asmodeus hadn’t showed up to help Nicneven this time. Maybe we had frightened him off, but I doubted that. More likely, he had stayed away because his direct interference made direct divine intervention more of a possibility. Either way, we’d handle him if he showed up again.
For now, we had our hands full. Vanora needed to work overtime to smooth over the evacuation of the whole town staged by her blood double. The story, which needed to explain that whole fiasco without bringing Homeland Security down on us, was so complicated I didn’t even try to figure it out. Amazingly enough, I had a bigger problem: dealing with our parents.
Vanora would work out how to deal with the odd mental state her impostor had put them in. Now that we had grudging faerie permission to do what the guys wanted and reveal the truth to their parents, we had to work out some way to do that—and the closer the moment got, the more I dreaded it.
While Vanora dealt with the outside world, she lent us one of her conference rooms to discuss how best to deal with unleashing the truth on our families.
“I just figured we’d each tell our own parents privately,” said Gordy. “I wasn’t expecting to do it at a big meeting.”
“And how exactly would you get your parents to believe you?” asked Shar. “Stan, Dan, and I had to turn ourselves inside out to convince Tal’s dad that we weren’t crazy—and that was with Tal’s mom helping us. Carla can use a little magic to make her point. I suppose seeing Khalid fly would convince my parents, and Stan can use the same sword trick he used with Tal’s dad to demonstrate that he really is sane. What would the rest of you do to keep your parents’ first call from being to a psychologist?”
“Are you all sure you want to do this?” asked Nurse Florence. “I don’t want to be negative, but there’s a very real possibility your parents will be unable to accept the truth. Even if they do, there’s a good chance they will want to get you as far away from all these magical dangers as possible. They could forbid you from seeing Tal or even move you away from Santa Brígida completely.”
“Do you really think they’d do that?” asked Stan.
“For someone as smart as you are, that’s a pretty dumb question,” said Dan. “Isn’t that exactly the first thing your mom will do—right after her head explodes?” Stan scowled a little but didn’t say anything else. He knew Dan had a point.
“Just because the faerie rulers said OK doesn’t mean you have to do it,” Nurse Florence reminded us. “Once you take this step, there’s really no going back.”
“I thought the plan was to wipe their memories if they didn’t take the news well,” said Carlos.
“It isn’t that simple,” I admitted. “I knew you guys wanted this, so I didn’t make a point of discussing every single small detail with the faeries, but if your parents get shocked or angry enough, a memory wipe may not be a hundred percent effective. Their attitudes may change in subtle ways, like not wanting you to hang out with me. Worse, they may begin to feel as if they have forgotten something important and start digging for it. They probably won’t ever figure out what’s missing, so in that sense I wasn’t misleading the faeries—but there is the risk that knowing there is something missing and not being able to fill that gap will make them permanently restless, maybe even permanently unhappy.”
“Or it could work out fine, right?” said Jimmie. “You wouldn’t have brought it up with the faeries if you hadn’t thought you could make it work.”
I sighed. “Yeah, I did think it could…and it might. We all need to know the risks, though.”
“I don’t want to keep lying to my parents,” said Shar. “I believe they’ll love me regardless…but I want them to love me for who I am. Keeping this big a part of my life from them just feels wrong.”
“Which brings up another question,” pointed out Nurse Florence. “Three of you are about to graduate, and none of you are planning on going to college locally. Being one of Tal’s warriors is who you are right now. Is it going to be who you are next year? Ten years from now?”
Stupidly, I hadn’t even been thinking about the fact that we wouldn’t be together forever. Hell, a year from now I’d be graduating. Did I want things to just stay the way they were? Risk my life every other day?
Vanora entered, looking even more tired than usual. “Would you like my two cents?”
“Of course,” said Nurse Florence.
Vanora plopped down in a chair. Consciously or unconsciously, she had picked the position nearest the projector screen, the closest spot you could get to the head of the table at a round table.
“I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I caught that last part. Not to be the proverbial bearer of bad news, but you can’t just resign from the life you’re living. You can choose not to be actively involved, but you
have to know you have the attention of the supernatural community.”
“What does that mean, exactly?” asked Carla.
“It means at some point someone may come after you, looking for vengeance, or because some seer predicted you might be a threat at some future time. When that point comes, do you want to face it alone, or do you want to face it with everyone else having your back?”
“We didn’t exactly sign up for this,” said Lucas.
“Nobody in this room except Viviane and me did,” replied Vanora. “Not even Tal did, remember? That’s not going to matter if some crazed follower of Nicneven decides you need to be dead.”
“I’d be dead already if some of you hadn’t rescued me from the Populus Umbrae in the first place,” admitted Lucas. “I didn’t know…I didn’t know it was going to define the rest of my life, though.”
“You are part encantado and part xana,” Vanora said. “Oh, and I’m told you have within you the original human persona of Changó, the Oricha. Your life might have gone differently, but it was never destined to be normal.”
Any time Vanora started talking about destiny, I got nervous. That said, Lucas had started manifesting powers before I ever met him, so he really couldn’t have entirely avoided who he was.
“In other words, you think we should tell our parents everything?” asked Carla.
Vanora chuckled. “Absolutely not! Your parents are far better off not knowing.”
“So, to summarize,” said Dan, leaning back in his chair, “we are part of the supernatural world regardless of what we want, but we can never tell our parents? What about our husbands and wives when we get married?”
“I’m afraid the answer is yes to the first question,” said Vanora. “As far as the second one goes, that may depend on whom you marry, but at least some of you will probably fall in love with people who can’t accept that part of your lives.”
From there the meeting went downhill fast. We had been nervous to start with, but Nurse Florence had made us doubtful, and Vanora had made us just plain depressed.
I thought all the guys wanted to tell their parents, but I now learned Lucas, Khalid, Alex, and Carla really didn’t. Carla hadn’t been part of the original discussion, and she was convinced her parents wouldn’t understand.
“My parents already treat me like I’m going to break all the time,” said Alex, whose parents believed he had been in a mental hospital, though the truth wouldn’t have been much more appealing to them.
“I’ve been there,” I said. “I know how it is.”
“My father already rejected me,” said Khalid quietly. “I…I couldn’t stand it if the Sassanis did.”
“My parents love you,” said Shar.
“I thought my father did, too,” said Khalid, and there was no budging him; he was afraid of another rejection, regardless of what anyone, even Shar, told him.
Stan shifted from wanting to tell his parents to being undecided about it, and Carlos gradually moved toward not telling.
“It is possible to tell just the parents of those who want to take that step,” I suggested.
“Except that Shar and Khalid have the same set of parents and don’t agree,” said Stan.
“I’ll respect Khalid’s wishes,” said Shar. I wasn’t surprised.
That left Dan and Jimmie, and maybe Gordy and Stan, as the only ones who wanted to go through with the original idea, though some of the others clearly had mixed feelings. I suggested sleeping on the issue and meeting the next day, the one suggestion everyone could agree on at that point.
Over dinner I decided to ask my parents what they thought. I had to admit it was a relief to be able to talk to my dad for the first time about who I really was. Logistically, it was also a good thing he knew. I don’t know how I would have explained Michael otherwise.
“You won’t be able to acknowledge him as a son publicly,” I reminded Dad. “He’s going to need to be a cousin or something.”
“There seems to be a lot of that going around,” said Dad, alluding to what he now knew about Khalid and Jimmie.
“Yeah, it’s getting pretty complicated,” I admitted. “Now that the Order is no longer locked down, Vanora will have the paperwork in a couple of days, so you can enroll Michael in school.”
“This will sound weird,” said Michael, “but I’m actually excited to be going.”
“You were always excited about school, uh, I mean, Tal was excited about school at your age,” Mom tried, not knowing exactly the right wording.
“I have my own…soul, or whatever,” said Michael. “You don’t have to think of me as Tal. I’ll admit I still do, but…but I know I’m not really him. I am someone, though.”
Mom hugged him. “And you are our son, every bit as much as he is. Even if we have to pretend publicly, we’ll always know the truth.”
“Yeah, I’m luckier than Jimmie that way,” said Michael. “Even his parents think he’s a distant cousin.”
That gave me a good opening to start the discussion of what to do with the other parents.
“You know, you should have told me the truth long ago,” Dad said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You know the kind of constraints I was working under.”
“Intellectually, yes,” Dad said, “but emotionally it still hurts.” For someone who didn’t talk about his feelings all that much, that was saying a lot.
“So you think I should encourage everyone to let their parents know the truth?” I asked.
“My heart says yes, but my mind is more inclined to agree with…Vanora. Wow, everything I thought I knew about this town was wrong.”
“Mom?”
She took a long time before answering. “I have a very bad feeling about this, Tal. I can’t give you any specifics, but I have never felt so strongly about anything since my abilities as a seer started to manifest.”
“You foresee that the parents are likely to reject the truth?”
“It’s more like ‘forefeel,’ and I’m not sure the problem will be the parents, but definitely something is wrong. I’ll try to see if I can get more, but right now that’s all I have.”
“I’m not sure how this seer thing works,” said Dad, “but I don’t think Tal should make such an important decision based on information that vague.”
“I’ve told you I can’t always control how much information I get or how specific it is,” Mom replied. “What comes, comes.”
“I’m not being critical,” said Dad. “I’m just pointing out that you aren’t really sure what the problem is. Could it be something other than telling the other parents the truth?”
“I’m not sure,” Mom conceded after a long pause. “It’s possible what I’m feeling is some evil approaching, maybe unrelated to your telling the parents. I don’t think so, though.”
“So from one of you I have a definite maybe, and from the other a possibly definite no,” I said.
Dad laughed. “Don’t look at me. I barely know which end is up anymore.”
At that moment, he sounded lighthearted, but not so much when he pulled me aside after dinner.
“I don’t want to upset your mother, and I won’t blame you if you follow her advice, but if I were you, I would make sure the other parents learn the truth.”
“What happened to not knowing which end was up?” I asked.
“On the job I have to rely on logic, but something tells me this is more a time for feeling. Speaking of which, thank you,” he said, giving me a tight hug.
“For what?” I asked, confused. “I could have worked harder to get permission to tell you the truth to begin with, I guess. And I’m not even the one who told you.”
“I wish you had,” he admitted, “but that’s not what I’m talking about. You also gave me another son.”
“I didn’t give him to you,” I said. “I wasn’t even the one who created him—which was an accident anyway, you’ll recall.”
“It was a wonderful accident, though,” said Dad, hugging
me again.
Suddenly I realized what had him so wound up. “So you can have all the things you missed with me? All those soccer games in middle school, all—”
“Tal, you’re my son, and I love you. I wouldn’t trade even the bad days for anything—”
“But you do feel as if you missed something with me that you could get back through Michael.”
“Since we’re being honest, yes, the thought did occur to me that having Michael would let me experience some of the things I missed. It doesn’t mean I love you any less.”
“I get it,” I said, though I wasn’t completely sure I liked it. I’d had a similar thought about what Michael could do for him. Hearing him say it, knowing he was embracing it, was different somehow.
Great! Was I now doomed to have sibling rivalry—with myself?
At that moment I vowed it wouldn’t be like that. I was bigger than that, surely.
I spent a while with Michael in the guest room. Mom had, in the way moms do, kept much of my old stuff in some secret recess of the garage, and the guest room had in a remarkably short time been transformed into a reasonable likeness of my room four years ago. As strange things go—and I’d been through a lot of strange things—talking to the twelve-year-old version of myself in the four-years-ago version of my room was one of the strangest. I had to forget about that, though. I had to be a good big brother. Michael deserved it.
I didn’t sleep much that night, and school the following day had a dreamlike quality to it. It was almost as if supernatural realms like Annwn and Olympus seemed more natural to me now than what would have been real life four years ago.
We met back at Awen during the late afternoon. My dad’s words haunted me, but I had only gotten into this mess because I was trying to do what the guys wanted. I decided to take whatever they told me to do and go with it.
“We have to go ahead,” said Vanora at the very beginning of the conversation. “We have to do it.”
“Huh?” was the best I could manage.
“My impostor was not thinking about the long term when she manipulated the parents into forgetting about their sons and daughters for a while,” said Vanora. “As far as I can tell, she was only here on a temporary basis to capture all of you, then to hold the town for a bit when some of you eluded her, mostly to keep you from returning and using it as a base. Her mental work was sloppy, to say the least. I was able to understand this from being in your parents’ minds, trying to undo the damage.