by Tim Pratt
We did the first kind first. We did the second kind second.
It wasn’t the best sex I’ve ever had—we still had things to learn about each other—but it was plenty good, and it was one of the best nights I’ve ever had, taken as a whole. Comfortable and heightened all at once. Trey was damn sexy, and he clearly thought I was unspeakably sexy, which are both fine qualities in a lover. More than that, he was my only friend in a strange and dangerous new place, and he’d been my defender and my defended, and my confidante, and the calm voice that kept me from thinking I’d gone crazy. I fell asleep with him spooned up behind me, a sheet covering us together, and my thoughts of him were fond, fond, fond.
I think I remember thinking: Me and this boy. We could really have something here.
Which made what happened the next morning when I made my coffee all the more horrible.
#
Trey was deeply asleep when light dawned, but I’d been waking with the lark (or maybe the worm the early bird gets) lately, at first out of anxiety, and then because I was excited to start my day of painting and magic-hunting. I went downstairs and padded barefoot around the kitchen in a robe, still feeling deliciously loose-limbed and generally satisfied with life and everything in it. I opened up the coffee grinder and dumped in some beans, a nice Mexican blend from a café Trey had recommended called Espresso News—way better than the grocery store junk I’d relied on previously. I checked my email while the coffee was brewing, then took down one of the heavy mugs, tugged open the Drawer of a Thousand Spoons, and plucked one out at random. (Or maybe the house jostled that particular spoon to the top, because it thought there were things I needed to know. I’m still not sure.)
I poured sugar and a dab of cream into my coffee, then dipped in the spoon and stirred. (I stirred counterclockwise. Or, as the pagans like to say, widdershins.)
When the spoon completed its first circle, all the color drained out of the world. First things turned sepia, and then black and white, until the room and everything in it appeared in shades of gray like the opening scenes of The Wizard of Oz.
I moaned and let go of the spoon, reaching up to rub my eyes and blink in hope of bringing color back to the world, to no avail. Everything was still sharp and clear in my vision, just drained of color—was I having a seizure? Suffering some terrible misfire in my brain? I realized I couldn’t smell the coffee, even when I put my nose right against the cup. I couldn’t smell anything—wasn’t that evidence of some kind of brain damage? The partial loss of one sense, the total loss of another—
Then I realized the kitchen had changed. The coffee grinder wasn’t on the counter, for one thing. There were no dirty dishes in the sink, even though Trey and I had found better things to do than wash up last night. The configuration of the random cookie jars was different.
Okay. I was in the same place, but different. No need to hyperventilate, I’d literally been through the looking glass in this house before and come out okay in the end, I just had to figure out what kind of magic—
Hell. The spoon. I picked it up and looked at it carefully, and saw it was in color—as was my hand, and my robe, and the rest of me, as far as I could tell. The mug, too, was still muddy brown, not muddy gray. So…
This was probably the spoon from the mirror sanctum, and by stirring it in the mug I’d done…something. I started to dip the spoon back in the mug when I heard a voice speaking from the living room, too low to make out individual words. I walked around the counter, still clutching the spoon in my hand, and accidentally bumped against one of the cookie jars with my elbow. The jar moved when I banged into it, but then it moved back—snapping into its original position without seeming to pass through the intervening space, like a jump cut in a film. I paused, then reached down and nudged some of the other objects on the counter around, and though I could move them, they all snapped back to their initial positions instantly. I picked up a cookie jar shaped like a rocket ship and dropped it on the floor, bracing myself for a crash—but it didn’t come. Halfway down, the jar flickered, and was restored to its original position on the counter.
Interesting data points. I was just gathering information here. Making observations. I was definitely not freaking out because I’d been transformed into some kind of a halfway ghost in my own house.
The voice came again, raised in annoyance, so I crept forward, pausing in the doorway to peer in.
There were two men sitting in the living room—which seemed less cluttered than usual, and the furniture was arranged differently. One of the men was facing me, and I recognized him instantly: Trey’s grandfather. But it was like a home video of the cranky old lawyer, because he was younger, with dark hair, dressed in a suit like you see in movies from the ’70s: wide lapels and no tie.
Ah. I wasn’t just a halfway ghost. I was the halfway Ghost of Christmas Past. The spoon had taken me back in time.
“Archie,” Mr. Howard said, “I can explain—”
“Unto the third generation,” the man sitting across from him said. He had a serious, sad, Eeyore sort of voice. I stared at the back of his head like there might be some revelation there. There wasn’t. “You brought this on yourself, Stacy.”
Mr. Howard hunched forward and put his face in his hands for a moment, then looked up, his gaze stricken. “I—it was a mistake, I know, but I was going to pay it back, you have to understand, I just had a bad patch to get through. I didn’t even think you’d notice the money was missing—”
“I notice everything. And surely you realize I don’t care about the money.” The man—it was dawning on me that it had to be Archibald Grace—spoke in a gentle, almost reassuring voice. “I am richer than emperors, and if I need any tangible thing, I need only reach out and take it, or conjure it, or call it to me. But there are things money cannot buy, Stacy. Loyalty is one of them—for those who sell their loyalty are, by nature, disloyal at heart, for they are always open to better offers. My mistake was in buying your loyalty first, and thinking our relationship had deepened over time into something more personal. True loyalty, freely given—I can think of nothing more precious or rare.” He sighed, rather theatrically, I thought. “But you betrayed me. If you cannot give me your loyalty willingly, very well. I will compel it. You will serve me absolutely until the end of your days. Oh, you may have your daily freedoms. You will scarcely feel the chain around your throat, perhaps for long years at a time. But when I call, you will answer, even if you must drag yourself through fire to do so. Whatever I ask of you, you will do, without question or hesitation, and you will value my life and safety above your own. Do you understand?”
Mr. Howard was openly sobbing now. “Please, Archie, my family—”
“Call me Mr. Grace, Stacy. You have lost all right to casual familiarities.” The man—my father—stood up, and started to turn toward me…but before I saw his face, the room lurched and shifted, causing me to stumble forward. If I hadn’t caught myself on the back of the couch, I would have fallen. Mr. Howard was gone, and so was Archibald Grace, and the light in the windows had vanished, replaced by darkness. Thunder boomed, so hard it made the windows rattle.
Everything was still black and white, so I assumed I was still unstuck in time. Just in some other time, now.
“Where is it?” a voice shouted, and Mr. Grace came lurching into the living room. He was visibly older, his black hair streaked with white, and he wore boxer shorts and a robe, which was hanging open and unbelted. His right eye blinked furiously, but his left stayed fixed open, and that whole side of his face was slack, as if he’d suffered a stroke. He stumbled through the room and began tearing things down from the shelves, boxes and books and candlestick holders and ceramic pumpkins and kid’s sports trophies. “Where did I put it, where did I put it…”
He stopped, staring down blankly at the mess he’d made, then held out his hand in front of him. The hand trembled wildly, and he closed it into a fist and whimpered. Something caught his eye, and he threw himself to his knees
beside the coffee table. A glass vase stood on it, containing a single white tulip. He tore the flower out of the vase and tossed it on the floor, then picked up the vase in both hands and proceeded to drink from it in great gulps, water spilling from the sides and cascading down his front, more splashing on him than going into his mouth.
But the water, if it was water, had an effect: the white in his hair darkened to black, and his slack face tightened, wrinkles vanishing. He threw the vase aside, where it smashed into pieces, then sprawled on his back among the fallen books and tchotchkes, gazing at the ceiling. “Losing,” he muttered. “Losing, losing it, losing myself. Why did I put it there, why did I put a flower in it, why—why do I do anything anymore? I—” He stopped, went silent, and grunted. “Someone’s here. I can sense you. One of my bloodline. Eldest Daughter? No, you like to hide in plain sight. My…my Hannah? I’d smell the salt, I think. I—no. It can’t be.” He licked his lips. “Rebekah? You’re only a child, you can’t possibly…but you’re not, are you? Oh. Oh.” He sat up, and looked in my general direction, but perhaps a foot off to the left.
I stood still, except I was shaking a little. He didn’t look like me—he was way too pale, for one thing—but I could see myself in him. Or, I guess, I saw him in me every time I looked into the mirror. Something about the eyes. He obviously couldn’t perceive me, not exactly, but maybe…
“Dad?” I said.
He cocked his head, frowned, then banged the palm of his hand against his ear, like he was trying to jostle water out of the other one after a swim. “If you’re really there, if this isn’t just another symptom of my…my fraying, my thinning, my seam-splitting, my disintegration…I’m sorry, Rebekah. I was trying to spare you. I watched my children become monsters, or broken things used by monsters. I wanted something better for you, a chance to grow up clear-eyed and strong and your own person. Not warped by pressures, shaped by my…by my needs, by…” He trailed off, then shook himself, like a dog shedding water droplets. “Ah. I haven’t forgotten you, though. No, no. I have…I plan, I have planned. Make amends. I’m…” He bowed his head, and reached out his hand, the fingers beckoning me. I took a cautious step forward, then another, then went down to my knees, and reached out…and touched my dead father’s hand.
I felt him. As real as any hand I’ve ever touched. He felt me, too, and closed his fingers over mine. He held them tight, but he didn’t turn his head to look at me. “Oh, Rebekah. I will make provisions for you. Arrangements. I will leave you…I will leave instructions, I…I will leave…”
His hand vanished from mine as time skipped again, and I made a sound, low in my throat, an animal sort of noise, welling up from unexplored depths. I knelt alone in the living room, in the daylight again, but still in some unknown time, still all black and white. The anguish in my father’s voice had been so raw, his terror at losing his mind, his regret…I didn’t know the man. I was pretty sure that, if I did know him, I wouldn’t like him. But I could see how I might love him, the way you love family despite your differences, because there’s a connection that goes deeper than mere compatibility of personality. The knowledge that, when it comes down to it, they’ll fight for you.
Everyone fucks up. My father sure had. But he’d tried, in his clumsy half-mad way, to make things right, in the end. He’d failed to leave me much in the way of useful instructions, and he’d brought all kinds of trouble down on my head, but he was trying to be a father.
He just happened to be, in almost every way, too late.
I rose and walked back to the place I’d started in the kitchen—the mug was still on the counter, its brown the only real color in the place. That damnable unbreakable self-healing door in the corner was open, though, just standing wide. I walked toward it, and through it. It led into a hallway lined with photographs, variations on the pictures I’d seen in the photo album, but bigger. Pictures of me, the Firstborn, the Belly, the three babies, and even that one shot of Hannah, taken from behind her, enlarged and grainy.
“Stacy Howard the First is a reptile.” Archibald Grace’s voice drifted down the hall. “Stacy Howard the Second is a worm. But I have hopes for you, boy. What will you be?”
I continued toward the voice, past several closed doors, to the open one at the end. Beyond that door was the tower room, a round space with a spiral staircase leading up to a second level, but all the action was downstairs: Mr. Grace sitting in a fancy office chair behind a glass-topped desk covered in ledgers and papers and rolled-up parchment scrolls. A globe of pulsing light floated above his head, a touch of casual magic in an otherwise mundane setting. My father had white in his hair again, though he wasn’t slack-faced or disheveled, instead dressed in a smart gray—or blue, who knows—shirt with suspenders. He looked tired.
The man sitting across from him, in an infinitely less pleasant-looking chair…well. I knew who it must be. But seeing him from the back, I didn’t really recognize him, because his body language was so totally different than I was accustomed to—nervous and overawed instead of joking and confident. A cold snowball began to form in my gut. When he spoke, I recognized his voice immediately.
“I’m just trying to do my job, Mr. Grace,” Trey said. “My grandfather told me we were supposed to tell you if your instructions seemed unclear or incomplete. That you were worried about leaving out essential information—”
“I didn’t leave anything out.” Grace drummed his fingers on the glass desktop, an idle “I’m thinking” motion, but the glass under one of his hands cracked and splintered. Grace held up that hand, stared at it, then pulled off the chunky wristwatch—the one that turned me into Iron Fist—and dropped it on top of a folder. He massaged his hand, and then just stared off into space, clearly blank and faraway, his mind wandering who knows where.
“Ah. Sir?” Trey said.
My father’s eyes refocused. “Hmm?”
“I’ll ask her the questions, of course,” Trey said. I moved around the room to get a better view of him, and he was younger, a little, than the Trey I knew. “And I’ll make sure the answers make sense before I give her the keys to the house, so there’s no doubt it’s her, and not that imposter you worried about. My grandfather explained the instructions to me, and I’m honored that you’d trust me with something so important. But is there anything else you want me to give Rebekah when the time comes? Some personal message, or another letter that explains things more clearly, or—”
“That’s all taken care of, Trey. My daughter will have everything she needs. Just perform your duties, as I have outlined them.”
“I just worry—it’s all going to be pretty confusing for her. The, ah. The magic. And there’s the matter of the other heirs to consider. Some of them are dangerous, you’ve said so yourself.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, as the snowball in my gut became a vast and icy comet. He’d known. Trey had known, about the magic, about my siblings, and he hadn’t told me. He could have helped me, warned me, and he hadn’t.
Trey went on. “At the very least I could tell her what to watch out for—”
Grace’s whole demeanor shifted, from addled and fuzzy to focused and furious. “What could you tell her? You know nothing, your head is an empty hole. Just do as you’re told. It won’t be long, not as I reckon time, not even as you reckon it. I’ll be dead soon enough—not that my death will help your situation.”
“Oh, sir, I hope—”
“Shut up, Stacy. You stole from me, you thieving shit, you don’t have the right to—”
“That was my grandfather, sir,” Trey said gently. “I’m Stacy Howard the Third. Trey.”
Grace just stared at him for a long moment, then snarled, “I know that, you think I don’t know that? I’m the greatest sorcerer who ever lived. I strode across this world when the seas were molten fire. When the first fish crawled onto land I was already ancient. You think there’s anything you know that I don’t know?”
I ran back to the kitchen. I think I was crying. Th
e spoon clattered wildly against the edges of the cup as I lowered it in. I stirred…
And nothing happened.
I whimpered, because I could still hear Grace shouting from his tower. I stopped, took a breath, and tried to think. That morning I’d spun the spoon the way I always did, counterclockwise, and I turned back time. So maybe, to get back—
I stirred clockwise. (Sunwise. Deiseal, as the Celts called it, as I came to understand.)
Color flowed back into the world, and I was back in the kitchen, my kitchen, and I could smell the coffee again. The mug was still hot. I looked at one of the clocks and realized not a second of my excursion had passed in real time.
Trey walked in, wearing a borrowed robe. “Hey there, darlin’,” he said, all sleepy southern drawl, his hair mussed, his smile crooked.
I thought I knew him, as well as you can know anyone after such a short time, but the man before me was a stranger, a keeper of secrets, and a liar.
“Your grandfather’s a reptile.” My voice was a hoarse croak, like I was the one who’d been shouting, and not my father. Trey froze, eyes widening. “Your father’s a worm. What are you, Trey?”
“Bekah…I don’t know what happened, what you heard, but—”
“You knew.” I slumped against the counter, shaking my head. “You knew Archibald Grace was my father. That he was a sorcerer. You knew about the other heirs, the Firstborn. You knew, and you didn’t tell me, you let me be scared and confused—”