by Paul Neuhaus
“I…” Tom began then doubled back, looking for better words. “I come from an old Southern dynasty of Resolute. Goes back to way before the Civil War. But me… No, I can’t do magic. I never had the aptitude. And yet, somehow, your mother and I gave birth to an Aja.” He couldn’t hide his pride.
“Don’t call me Aja,” the elder daughter snapped. “I didn’t ask for any of this.” She turned her head when Olivia spoke again.
“You didn’t ask for this? Nobody asks to be what they become. Not if they have a destiny. You had a destiny. You always did. And look what you’ve done with it! For your first trick, you saved Los Angeles. For your second trick, you saved the world. If you hadn’t become what you are, none of us’d be having this conversation.”
“Now you tell me,” Quinn mumbled.
“What?”
“Nothing. There’s something I don’t think you understand here. Heroes—if that’s what I am—don’t have their destiny foisted on them. Heroes choose. I’m not a hero. I did what I did because I had to.”
Tom spoke and, again, Henaghan looked his way. “Quinn, honey, that’s a hero. That fella that landed the plane in the river… What’s his name?”
Quinn thought for a moment. “Sully?”
Tom snapped his fingers. “That’s it. You think that guy got on his plane and said, ‘I choose to land this plane in the Hudson’. No. Right guy, right place, right time. You ask those passengers whether Captain Sully was a hero.”
Quinn tapped her foot, emotions warring inside her body. Leave it to her father to use a Clint Eastwood movie against her.
Tom Henaghan spoke again. “Look, we’re here for a short while. Two days. Mia thought—”
Mia cut him off. “Aoife.”
“What? Say it again…”
“Aoife.”
“Eff-aye?”
“Eef-ah.” Quinn hadn’t spent much time around her sister of late. For the first time, it dawned on her her younger sibling was speaking with an Irish accent.
The man turned back to Quinn. “Do you know what’s happening here with this?”
The older daughter replied in a monotone. “She’s getting back in touch with her Irish roots.”
Tom turned back to Mia. “You realize we’re at least a quarter Scotch.” Mia started to reply, but Tom held up his hand. “Never mind.” He turned back to Quinn. “If you could, as a favor to me, go out with us for one evening and chat with us and play nice—”
Olivia interjected. “She doesn’t want to be nice, Tom. Lookit—”
“Shut up, Olivia. What do you say? One night. One dinner. As a family.”
In twenty-eight years of life, that was the first time Quinn had seen her father stand up to her mother. Too little, too late, she thought. “I… Can’t do it,” Quinn said. “I just don’t have that much hypocrisy running through my veins.”
The three people opposite Quinn looked at her in stunned silence. As usual after an awkward moment, Olivia was the first one to speak. “There. You see? You also don’t have an ounce of Christian Charity running through your veins, I guess.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Quinn turned to her father. “Thirty years secular and now we’re doing the Christian Charity thing?”
Tom sighed. “Quinn, honey, your mom’s got cancer. Pancreatic. Not the Steve Jobs kind, the regular kind.”
The virtual slap to Quinn’s face lasted less time than she would’ve expected. “Okay, well, I am sorry about that. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. But it doesn’t change anything. Getting cancer doesn’t mean you get a pass on being an absolute monster twenty years ago. Have a nice flight back. I hope the treatment goes as smoothly as possible.” She stepped back two steps to indicate the trio on the couch should get up and leave.
Mia was the first one to stand. Her parents, still shell-shocked, rose just after. For a moment, Olivia looked at her eldest. “You’ll regret this when I’m gone.”
Quinn shook her head. “No. I don’t think so.” As Mia walked by, Quinn reached out and briefly grabbed her by her bicep. Without bothering to lower her volume, she said, “Was this your idea?”
“It was,” Mia conceded.
“Yeah, well, as soon as they head home, I’m jamming that brogue right down your stupid throat.”
After Quinn’s parents left, Josie went over the back wall to Lailah’s house. She could’ve just as easily walked around the corner and knocked on the front door, but a precedent had been set. Lailah was waiting for her at the sliding door at the rear of the home. “You want an Eggo? I’m making Eggos,” the taller girl said. She was still dressed in white.
“No thanks,” Taft replied. “I had breakfast. Hours ago.” She looked around the inside of the house and it was exactly the way a suburban home was supposed to look in the early part of the twenty-first century. There was just one thing missing: other people. “Do you have like a mom and dad? I haven’t seen them.”
“You’ve been here twice. In the same day. Anyway, they’re hiding. Because they hate you.”
“Hilarious.”
“Of course I have a mom and dad,” Lailah said, grabbing her waffles as they popped out of the toaster. “They both work. Welcome to America. Don’t your aunts work?”
Josie thought for a moment. “Not really, no.”
“Pays to be a lesbian, I guess.”
Both girls laughed. “I don’t think that’s the reason. For them not working.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” Lailah replied, and they laughed again. She sat down at the dining room table with her belated breakfast and Josie joined her. After she’d taken a couple of bites, she asked, “So, I’m curious… are you a Channeler?”
Taft was shocked. “You’re a Channeler?”
“No. I’m a girl. Duh,” Lailah said around a mouthful of fried dough. “Your aunt—the little redheaded one, not the big black-haired one—she’s a Channeler. Big time. When they first moved in, my dad saw her from a distance and then he saw her aura, and he was like, ‘Whoa!’ then he put two and two together and realized who she was. Only the most famous, most powerful Channeler in the world. Then you started showing up and I saw you a couple of times before I talked to you, and I was like, ‘There’s something interesting about that girl but I can’t put my finger on it’. I thought you might be like your aunt somehow.”
Josie was reticent to get into the topic. She was a Changeling and there was a stigma attached to that in the Channeler community. The last thing she needed was to make a friend and then drive that friend off with her freakishness. She decided to lie (or at least stretch the truth). “I’m—I don’t know what you’d call me—latent, maybe. My powers haven’t surfaced yet. Like I’m a late bloomer or something.”
“Huh,” Lailah replied. “I’ve never heard of that.” She jammed another chunk of waffle into her mouth. She’d used syrup but hadn’t bothered with utensils. She licked the thick sweetener off of her fingertips. “I’ve got something I think will help you with that.”
The shorter girl was intrigued. “Yeah?” she said.
Lailah shook her head. “Not today. You came over so we could binge Galloway Gals so we’re gonna binge Galloway Gals. Remind me some other time when I’m feeling more therapy-y.”
“How will I know when that is?”
The girl in white got up to wash her plate and her hands and said, “I dunno. I guess I’ll be talking about chakras or some shit.”
In Panorama City, Sam slept a fitful sleep. She was having a dream—the same dream she’d had for more than sixty years.
This time, the dream was subtly different. This time Sam was the girl on the bed. This time Sam was the one with the dulled senses and the primal terror. This time Sam was the one with many restraining hands upon her body.
This time Sam was the one entered.
And yet there were two Sams. Sam the victim and Sam the voyeur. Even as her own body was violated, Sam looked down upon herself with the same detached dream-persona she�
�d had for over half a century.
This new wrinkle coupled itself with the previous wrinkle. The one from her last dream. Sam the voyeur became Sam the camera-eye. She followed along as her point of view entered her own body and coursed through it.
Penetrating tissue walls. Moving with the flow of blood. Into an airless void where a double helix hung.
The DNA was the same as the one Sam had seen inside “Gladys”. Inside her mother. It was different from a “normal” strand, but, again, Sam was not sure how.
All she knew was, if the dream-vision was to be believed, she and her mother bore identical traits.
4
Loss
The next morning—very early—Quinn, Molly and Josie awoke and drove over to Sylmar. Dr. Terry Truitt was, again, waiting for them in his lobby. He had them come before seven so he’d have a few minutes to spare before his busy workday began. “You said you had a health complaint…” he said.
“Yeah, something I wanted to ask you about. David Olkin said you were the best man for the job.”
“Mr. Olkin is too kind,” the doctor replied. “And who are your friends?”
“Oh, sorry. This is Molly Blank. She’s my—what’re the kids calling it these days?—my partner.”
Truitt shook Molly’s hand and winced a little. “I’m not a fan of that term. It sounds… imprecise. Like you two have gone into the tool and die business. It’s weird.”
“Okay, then she’s my main squeeze.”
Truitt laughed. “Now that term I like.” He turned to Josie and she introduced herself. She didn’t surrender his hand when he tried to withdraw it, and she looked more starry-eyed than usual. Finally, the doctor pried his hand away, did a mild double take, and ushered them back toward his office.
“Josie,” would you wait her for us here please?” Henaghan said.
Taft sat down on one of the hard-plastic chairs and took out her phone to amuse herself.
Once they were in the office (with Albert Schweitzer staring them down), Truitt closed the door and sat himself. “Now then. What seems to be the trouble?”
Quinn looked at Molly and then back at Dr. Terry. “Before we get into that, I wanna know how Liam’s doing. Is he okay?”
Truitt looked at Molly then back at the redhead. “I wish I could tell you… Yesterday, out of the blue, his parents finally showed up. They took him home.”
“Oh,” Quinn said. “Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”
The doctor shrugged. “Time will tell. I mean, I’m glad they’re back in the picture, but I don’t think Liam should’ve left this place. Not in the shape he was in. I don’t think he was ready to go home and I don’t think his family’s aware of the danger he’s in. But my hands’re tied. There’s only so much I can do. And, of course, we filled Liam’s bed pretty much right away so the world continues to turn.”
Molly touched Quinn’s elbow. “Don’t forget my father’s coming for breakfast.”
“Right,” Henaghan said. She sketched out her recent issues starting with the “Charley Horse” she experienced in San Francisco and ending with the “mini-stroke” in Burbank.
“Huh,” the doctor said, and he dropped the pen he’d been twirling. “I think I know exactly what your problem is.”
The two women looked at one another then back at the doctor. “That was fast,” the brunette said.
“Only because I’ve seen it before,” Truitt replied. “Mr. Olkin was right in saying Channelers have the same basic physiology as mundanes but not completely right. I mean there are some ailments we have that relate to how our Channeling of maya interacts with our bodies. When I said I’d seen it before, I was referring to prodigies.”
“Prodigies?”
“Yeah,” the doctor said. “It’s analogous to a kid having a freakish aptitude for sports. It’s almost like they’re built for that particular activity. You see it in magic circles sometimes, too. A kid’s some kind of magic savant. Mostly because—and nobody’s sure why—they’re able to Channel maya in larger quantities more quickly than your standard magic-users. What ends up happening is these kids ‘Overchannel’. They pass more maya through their bodies than their bodies can handle. They end up with a whole host of maladies—most of them like sports-related injuries.”
“Wow, fer real?” Quinn said.
“Fer real,” Truitt asserted.
“But what Quinn experienced wasn’t tennis elbow or athlete’s foot,” Molly said. “She described it as a ‘mini-stroke’.”
“Yes, well, maybe I was exaggerating a little,” Henaghan said.
Molly shot her a look that said, Shut up. We’re doing this by the book whether you like it or not.
“Right. Well, I think I have a handle on that, too,” the doctor said. “Obviously, I’m aware of you by reputation. You’re the Aja. A savant’s savant. If anyone’s going to have this problem, it’s you. Do you mind if I scan you?”
The redhead grinned. “Careful, doc. That kind of talk’ll get you in dutch with the AMA.”
Truitt stared at her.
“Of course, go right ahead,” Quinn said.
Dr. Terry reached out with his mystical senses and took in the depth and breadth of Henaghan’s remarkable power. “Holy shit,” he said, stopping his probe. “That’s the biggest continuous flow of maya I’ve ever seen in anyone. You’re like the Michael Jordan of Channelers.”
“Go Bulls.”
“How tall are you?”
“Five foot two.”
“How much do you weigh? One hundred and ten?”
“One fifteen,” Henaghan answered.
“One twenty,” Molly corrected.
Truitt shook his head. “To put it in layman’s terms, it’s a miracle you don’t pop like a balloon. I bet you’ve got a standing heart rate like a bunny.”
“What should we do about it?” Blank asked.
Dr. Terry shrugged again. “Search me.”
Molly and Quinn looked at one another. Molly was annoyed. “What kind of answer is that?”
The doctor nodded. He understood the impatience. “It’s not like you have a thyroid condition. There’re drugs for things like that. All I can say is, if you wanna have a nice full life and not have a… maxi-stroke, you’re gonna have to learn to keep the heavy lifting to a minimum. The magical heavy lifting. Otherwise, work on your stress. Take up meditation. What you said about Molly helping you after you had your attack is very intriguing to me. I’d definitely explore that if I were you. In fact, why don’t you explore it and come back and tell me the results because I wanna know more.” He folded his hands in front of him on his desk. “Otherwise, I got bupkis.”
Quinn sighed. “So, basically, take two aspirin and call me in the morning.”
“Not even that,” Truitt replied. “You don’t have to call me. Not unless you have another attack, or you have some more data.” He looked at his watch. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m just about on the clock.” All three of them stood and the doctor walked the women back out to the lobby. “Sorry I couldn’t be more help,” he said.
“No, that was helpful,” Molly said. “At least now we have something to work with.”
“Sure,” the man said. “Take care of her. You may end up being uniquely qualified.” With that, he held the front door open for them and they went into the parking lot. On her way out, Josie lingered, looking into the man’s eyes before following her aunts into the parking lot.
“Well,” Henaghan said. “Maybe Dr. Terry’s not all he’s cracked up to be.”
“No, he’s fine. I think he’s probably on the right track. I just wish he could’ve prescribed more of a treatment.”
From behind them, Josie said, “Yeah, well, I’ll tell you what: He can treat me any time he wants.”
Molly and Quinn turned back to their niece, their jaws slack. “Say what?” Quinn said.
“Didn’t you see him?” Taft said. “He’s dreamy. Like wicked sexy.”
The two women wore the same e
xpression. Revulsion mingled with shock. “Josie,” Blank said. “You’re fourteen months old.”
Josie smiled, amused by their reaction. “Only kinda sorta. Biologically, I’m almost age of consent.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Henaghan said. “I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.”
Molly shushed her girlfriend and turned her attention back to the faux teenager. “Look, honey, it’s perfectly normal for you to have these feelings. I mean, I guess it is. I don’t know any other fourteen-month-old sixteen years olds. Do us a favor, though. Let Quinn and I talk about it amongst ourselves. Come to terms with it. Otherwise, every time you go all goo goo eyed over some hunk our heads’re gonna explode. “
Josie grinned. “Okay, but don’t make me wait around too long. I want the birds and the bees talk by the end of the week.”
Quinn shut her eyes and continued to walk toward the car. “Ay chihuahua.”
When they got home from Sylmar, Quinn settled in behind her iMac to surf the web and process what Dr. Truitt had told them. She still wasn’t sure how she felt about it. Perhaps having an injunction against world-changing magic was just the ticket. Henaghan now had a doctor’s note excusing her from any serious Aja-ing. Then again, what if a situation called for some serious Aja-ing? She barely noticed when Molly poked in her head. “I forgot to tell you yesterday: I went to the farmer’s market and got some kickass veggies. We’re going light on protein tonight.”
“That’s what he said,” Quinn replied.
“What does that mean?”
“I dunno. What’s Josie doing?”