“You ought to go,” Katie mumbled.
“I’ll see you home.”
“No. My dad already thinks badly of you on account of being Clyde’s boy. Here I am, welt on my face, no panties, bleeding between my legs, and smelling of liquor. I don’t want to go home like this. I’ll go to Samantha’s house and clean up. Her mom works ’til seven.”
“Your wrist is broken.”
“I’ll go to the emergency room after I clean up—say I took a spill on my bike. I need to clean up. I don’t want to walk in looking like a…” She paused. She couldn’t get the word out. “No one has to know.”
Daniel restrained his surprise. He simply asked, “You’re not pressing charges?”
Her eyes locked with his. “No one will ever know.”
“Katie, what about the next girl Josh…”
“GODDAMN IT, DANNY!”
“Okay. Okay.”
They walked in silence until they came to the fork that split their destinations.
“You know I don’t have feelings for you the way you want me to,” Katie said.
“Yeah.”
“I do love you, though. More today than ever. You’re a true friend. You’re my hero.”
Before Daniel could think of a response, Katie kissed him on the mouth. It was warm and lasting, or appeared to be. She tasted his lips before pulling away.
She moved on and never looked back. Daniel had the strangest sensation that he’d never see her again.
5
Daniel sprinted up to his room. He filled his backpack with underwear, some shirts, an extra pair of jeans, his toothbrush, and his copy of We Can Build You by Phillip K. Dick, which he had just started. In a tin that came with his X-Men trading cards, he pulled out seventy-eight dollars that he’d managed to hide from the step-monster. After his statement to the sheriff, they would likely place him in a temporary foster home. The thought scared him, but how much worse than Clyde could things actually get?
He crammed his duffel bag with some more clothes and as many course textbooks as he could. It was only three years until graduation. Then he could go anywhere, do anything, including the Navy or college on the West Coast, away from Rita, Clyde, Conklin, Adrian, Katie, and the state of Maryland. Three years until the rest of his life began. He would see it through, all aces.
From his pin collection, he chose the Green Lantern logo pin. He wanted to take everything, but space would be limited in foster care, and young couples were never in the market to adopt a thirteen-year-old. He looked around his room and wondered how much of his stuff he could reclaim one day. His library, his comic book collection, his clothes—it could be replaced. The only precious item was a Gil Kane original Green Lantern pencil sketch, which he had framed and hung on the wall. He wrapped it in a T-shirt and gingerly placed it in the duffel bag.
The hallway floorboards creaked outside his room, and he froze.
“Where are you going?” Rita asked.
“Away.” Daniel resumed packing.
“Away where?”
“You told me not to came back if I walked out the door. So I’m out of here.”
“To live where? What are you going to do?”
“Katie said I could stay at her house. I need time away from here.”
“You’re going to the sheriff, aren’t you? You’re going to lie. You’re going to screw your family.”
The family was screwed already. Denial was Rita’s way of coping with her life. Daniel was just collateral damage—expendable. This made him angry.
“Lie? I lied earlier today to protect this freak show of a life,” Daniel said. “You never lifted a finger to help me. Now I’m telling the truth.”
“You ungrateful little bastard,” Rita continued. “You don’t know anything. How much we’ve sacrificed for you … I’ve sacrificed for you. Do you know how much easier it would have been for me to find a husband if I didn’t have a brat clinging to my skirt? I kept you even after John died. That’s right, you little shit. I’m not your real mother. John wanted a family, but he couldn’t have kids. So we adopted you. Then he died and left me stuck with you.”
Daniel was shocked. Not at the news, which he’d known for years thanks to Clyde’s drunken rants, but the manner in which Rita chose to tell him. Like Clyde, she tried to poison his link to John Hauer, the only father he had ever known. Nothing of John endured in her anymore. Her transformation was complete—she was Clyde’s handiwork, body and soul. So, Rita wanted to play the “truth” game. The truth shall set you free, he thought.
“I saw Clyde earlier,” Daniel said. “He was having sex with that woman from the hospital in the cab of her pickup. Turns out she’s Principal Conklin’s daughter. I think they’ve been friends for a while.”
Rita’s fists were balled. She filled the exit with her enraged presence. Daniel recognized a new crossroad in his life. One where Rita would start pounding on him, too, if he stuck around. More than just unwilling to let her hide reality from herself any longer, he challenged her place in the hierarchy, such as it was. Daniel was coming into his own, butting heads with the top, and she would either have to find some way to reclaim her station or yield to him. He felt sorry for her. She was a victim, a creation of Clyde Knoffler’s, but he could no longer submit to her skewed view of the world.
“I’m tired, Mom. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be a punching bag. I can’t keep getting slammed for doing the right thing. This family is killing me, and I want out.”
Rita walked up to Daniel and tried to slap him, but he grabbed her wrist and twisted until she was off balance, then he pushed her away. She lost her balance and hit her head on the bureau on the way down. She was dazed. A wave of guilt suddenly hit him. Daniel tried to help her up but she batted his hand away. He gave up, grabbed his bags, and walked out.
Descending the stairs, he stopped halfway just as Clyde wobbled in through the front door.
“Where the hell are you going?” Clyde said. His breath preceded him.
Clyde only ever returned home early to get money or beat his family. The fear that had paralyzed Daniel in the past, however, was kept in check this time. His decision to leave, to let loose the pretense of this family and all the chains that bound him to this existence, spurred him to new possibilities. The start of a new chapter in his story brought with it new reactions to old stimuli. Clyde no longer dictated the narrative. Cowering in fear in the face of his stepfather’s wrath was an archaic response. If anything, catching Clyde in a crude act of adultery, in its prosaic glory, emphasized the man’s base character. No one who spent the majority of his life staggering and stumbling as his primary mode of mobility could be the threat Daniel had envisioned him. Even Clyde was vulnerable.
Looking down on him from the middle of the stairs, Daniel said, “I’m out of here. That’s what you wanted, right? You don’t have to look at my ugly face anymore.”
“Just like that? You think you can leave?”
“Yeah. Just like that.”
“Think you can just leave and stick us with the bill for your lawsuit? That’s right, I heard all about it. Uh-uh. No way.”
“All the money we’re paying out, the school desks, my expulsion, the lawsuit, it’s all because you stuck your dick into Principal Conklin’s daughter.”
Clyde looked around nervously. “Shut your mouth, boy. You say one word about that to anyone and I’ll kill you.”
“Mom knows, but she’s too beaten down to ever divorce your ass.”
Clyde ascended the stairs with clenched fists. “You little shit…”
Daniel slammed him square in the face with his bag full of texts and sent the man reeling backward, grasping for the banister but too drunk to find it. Clyde landed on his back on the edge of the first stair and floor. Sprays of spit shot from his mouth as he yowled.
“I’m gonna rip you apart, you piece of shit,” Clyde bellowed. “And not gentle, like before!”
Daniel jumped from the middle stair and la
nded on his stepfather’s breadbasket. He heard a rib crack, and Clyde vomited the contents of his stomach over his own face. He choked on his own puke as Daniel leaped off him and made for the exit, but not before a hand grabbed his ankle, causing him to fall into the door headfirst. Daniel saw spots and struggled not to black out.
Clyde turned over, ready to get up. Daniel thrust his free foot into the man’s face repeatedly, but Clyde was so drunk, his pain threshold was beyond Daniel’s ability to breach. Clyde exposed his torso as he struggled to stand. Daniel let loose a solid shot to the cracked rib. Clyde yelped and let go. Daniel stood and swung his duffel bag into his foe to knock him down and nearly drove his own cracked rib into his lung in the process. He heard his picture frame crack within the bag.
Rita froze on the stairs. She stared silent and still at the scene unfolding below.
Clyde grabbed the duffel and threw it aside. Then he grabbed Daniel by the throat and dragged him into the dining room. He picked the boy up and slammed him into the dining room table, splintering it. Daniel grabbed one of the broken table legs, swung it, and missed. Clyde caught the piece on the backswing, pulled it from Daniel’s hand, and threw it aside. Then he grabbed the boy by the throat again. The grip was a vise. Daniel clawed and scratched the arm to no avail. He thrashed his hands around trying to find something he could use as a weapon.
He remembered his pin. He unclasped it, bent the pin outward with his thumb and in one swift move jabbed it into Clyde’s left eye. Clyde screamed and stumbled back. Daniel rushed him, blocking into his gut. He heard the rib crack again. They fell backward onto the shattered dining room table with Daniel on top. Clyde became still, almost frozen. His body tensed and then he coughed up blood. Daniel scrambled off and stood back. Clyde’s one eye stared wide in shock. The man looked ludicrous with a Green Lantern monocle pinned to his eye. He coughed up more blood, and that’s when Daniel noticed a section of Clyde’s shirt, pitched up like a tent. A bloodstain soaked into the cotton at the point.
Daniel didn’t need to be an anatomy expert to know that something important in Clyde had been pierced by a shattered table leg. Clyde extended one shaking hand upward toward the boy, but whether this was a plea for help or a last-ditch effort to throttle him was unknown. Clyde peed his trousers. His breathing became shallow.
“Oh God! Oh God!” Rita yelled, unfrozen and running down the rest of the stairs.
Penny waddled into the room. When she saw her daddy on the floor exhaling blood, she began to cry.
“Penny, go into the kitchen,” Daniel ordered. But the girl just stared and wailed.
Clyde tried to roll onto his side but was staked to the spot. His breath was a gurgle, as though breathing submerged. He vomited more blood, but gravity forced it back into his throat. Clyde was drowning on many different levels; his face turned blue.
“Oh God,” Rita repeated, hovering over her husband, frantic, but afraid to touch him.
Clyde convulsed, causing the shattered table leg to slide farther. He was having a seizure. Then as quickly as it started, Clyde just stopped.
He lay there with crimson streams running from him like a mountain in a spring rain.
“Oh my Lord,” Rita whispered hoarsely. “Oh, God…”
Daniel went cold. He couldn’t believe this was happening. It was a dream, a fantasy. Things like this happened on the nightly news to other people.
Daniel went to Penny and got down on one knee. “It was an accident,” he pleaded. “I’m sorry…”
Howling, she pulled away from him.
“Penny…”
“You killed her father!” Rita cried. “You son of a bitch, you killed my husband.”
The accusation shook him. Daniel couldn’t remember the last time Rita referred to Clyde as her husband. For years he had cheated on her, squandered her fortune, basically shat on her, and all of a sudden he was her husband.
“He came at me…”
The boy collected his wits. There would be no finishing high school, no amending his friendship with Adrian, no second chance at Katie Millar, not even a kind word from his mother or his principal at his murder trial about what a good kid he was. His life, if he remained, was over.
Daniel grabbed his cap and jacket off the hook. He had to follow his instincts. After all, they were often correct. Over Rita’s lamentations and Penny’s sonic bawling, he walked out the door and never looked back.
CHAPTER 16
LOSER2
1
“The rumor is that he’s Athelstan’s bastard,” Seth heard Lelani whisper.
Somewhere between sleep and consciousness, he was vaguely aware of lying on the couch in Ben’s cabana. A pain in his temple throbbed like a tequila hangover, but he felt cheated out of the blissful state that always preceded one. He opened one eye the width of a hair. Cal, Lelani, and Cat sat around the dinette. A balmy breeze blowing in from the dark ocean carried their conversation to his curious ears.
“So, Cal’s instincts were right,” Cat said. “Seth did sabotage the mission. Maybe out of revenge for being abandoned by his father?”
It was true, Seth thought. He did ruin the mission. But not for any slight against him that he could remember. He still couldn’t remember his life before the arrival. Even the memory of that night was like a lost scene out of a B film watched drunk at 4:00 A.M. back in high school. They were not a conscious part of him as though he lived the events, yet, he knew that what transpired was fact. The protection spell Lelani mentioned previously might be disrupting his memories of Aandor, but he was sure what he saw in Rosencrantz’s memory enchantment was true. He just couldn’t be sure whether he screwed up as usual or did it on purpose. He hoped it was an accident.
“No,” said Lelani, adopting the unlikely role of his advocate. “Seth never knew who his father was even in Aandor. It would explain his scholarship, though. The nobility often sponsors apprenticeships for its bastards. It’s considered bad form not to. Seth showed no interest for the craft, though. His presence in the school was a source of much speculation.”
“You people have a strange way of running a society,” Cat remarked.
“We saw him use that spell,” Cal said irritably.
“That spell of false memory was prepared by Magnus Proust to superimpose fabricated identities and a working knowledge of English on your memory anagrams. Like a supplement to what you already knew, they were to be transparent memories, allowing you to remember your true origins, while functioning seamlessly in American society.”
“So what went wrong?” Cal said. “What caused everyone to drift away and forget their duties … their very identities?”
I cast it wrong, Seth thought.
“He panicked,” said Lelani. “Seth should have cast the spell for each of you individually. The parchment was imbued with a specific identity marker for each member. Instead, he tried to cast it en masse and read the initiation line multiple times, once for each member of the party, building up the potency of the spell. It was cast hundreds of times more powerfully than intended. It overrode your memories and submerged your true identities. A massive jumble; you were not even left with the unencumbered history of the fictional personalities that were created for you.”
“They all got amnesia,” Cat said.
“My God,” Cal said. “We’re lucky Galen and Linnea drifted off with the baby still in their arms. If they’d left the boy in the meadow…”
“That was the palace groundskeeper and his wife? Their spell was programmed to have them to act as the infant’s parents, just as Lita and Parham Raincrest were to be Seth’s guardians. The original mission was to find a safe community to blend into, purchase homes close to each other, and raise the boy to adulthood.”
A catastrophic blunder, Seth thought.
“That idiot should never have been the group’s mage,” Cal said with the sureness of a military commander. “No matter who his father is.”
Seth’s headache grew worse, a pressure behind
the eyes that felt strong enough to evict his orbs from their cavities.
“The duke would have sent his whole family across if it were possible,” Lelani said. “There was a time limit and some concerns as to how many souls could be safely navigated through universes at one time.”
“To save both sons, the duke jeopardized the life of the one that mattered,” Cal said.
“We don’t know for certain that Seth is…”
“And the team … all those people…,” Cal continued, lost in his anger.
“Rosencrantz cast that recollection spell across the planet,” Lelani said. “It’s too late for Fronik, but as of this moment, those who are still alive are waking up from a long dream. Now at least they know they might be in danger. If they are true to their oaths, they will attempt to find us.”
The more Seth listened to their conversation, the more it drove the point that he had ruined all these people’s lives. Fronik and Tristan were dead. So was his roommate, Joe. How many more were dead because of his mistakes? Was the infant, his possible half-brother, dead, too? Seth always hoped to reclaim the life his amnesia stole. He never imagined there’d be a day when he’d prefer to have his memories begin the day the fire killed his parents. At least in ignorance, the only life he knew to have ruined was his own. He didn’t want to hear anymore about his screwup.
“I don’t remember any life in another world,” he said, in a raspy voice, revealing he was conscious.
“That’s because of the shield protecting you,” Lelani said. “Even Rosencrantz had trouble pulling you into his spell.”
“Lucky me. What I need is a shield to protect me from traveling companions talking shit about me when I’m sleeping six feet away. Ben has eight bedrooms, you know.” Seth glanced over to see their reactions.
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