by Tim Pratt
“Screw that,” I said.
Then I kicked my dead father between the legs and jumped out the window.
Episode 5
Egg
I plummeted through freezing fog, but before I had time to reconsider my rash decision to leap from a window to escape my dead father’s body-stealing ghost, I landed with a hard thump on the stone floor of the tower room. I groaned and got to my feet, and saw Archibald Grace sitting against the curved wall some distance away, cupping his hands between his legs.
“I admire the swift lateral thinking,” he said, with a gratifying amount of pained squeak in his voice. “I’m not often surprised, but I didn’t expect that. If you’d let me finish, I was going to say, ‘I can live again, but I don’t think I want to.’”
“You might have led with that part, old man, instead of going into all the soul-sucking details.” I wasn’t sure I believed him, but since jumping out a window hadn’t gotten me very far, my options were limited.
“My aching testicles and I take your point.” He winced before musing aloud, “Why should my entirely imaginary body hurt so badly from another entirely imaginary body kicking it? This spell is more potent than I realized.” He looked up, as if remembering I was there. “If I have a flaw, Rebekah, it’s that I’m too good at what I do.”
“As far as your flaws go, that wouldn’t even make my top five. But let’s get back to the topic at hand: you brought me here to steal my body, and now, what? You don’t like what you see? Are you flipped out at the idea of being a woman?”
He shook his head. “I set this soul trap and laid out this poisoned chalice when I was in a particularly dark place. You’re young, so I don’t think you can truly comprehend the terror I felt at the prospect of losing myself. It wasn’t even death I feared, or not just death—I’m not sure I could truly conceive of my own death, because I had always been, and believed on some level that I always would be. But I realized too late the deleterious effects of putting my soul aside for safekeeping. The loss of memory is the loss of identity, Rebekah. If you can’t remember who you are, you are at risk of becoming someone else. In one of my darkest, most vicious, and most reptilian moments, I saw a possible path back to wholeness, and I set that plan in motion. If it makes you feel better, I didn’t even remember you were the daughter I’d decided to make my heir—when I poisoned the chalice, my mind was scrambled, and I expected the Firstborn to take up the cup. If she had…I would have probably gone through with the ‘thing on the doorstep trick.’ I accept a large part of the responsibility for the creature my eldest daughter became—though her mother’s influence should not entirely be discounted—but the fact is, the world would be better off without her.”
“Some could say the same of you, Pops,” I said. Maybe we had an equally low opinion of the Firstborn, but that didn’t make him into someone I was willing to trust. “So you would have taken over the Firstborn’s body and, what? Gone into retirement? Painted landscapes?”
“I don’t know what I would have done, honestly, and it’s a moot point now—”
“Yeah. The thing is, I saw a vision of the future, one where the Firstborn got the vessel away from me, and took on your power, and she still killed me. Shot me with a crossbow while I was trying to learn magic, actually. Except, I guess it must have been you who did the shooting in that vision, huh?”
A shadow of doubt crossed his face, and he shook his head. “That…I have no explanation for that. The future is a shifting thing, but—”
“The Firstborn did the same trick you did, Grace. She put her soul away in a stone. You wanted to take over a fresh new form you could wear down all over again, but her soul’s moth-eaten and raggedy, too. Just like yours, in kind if not degree. So in at least one possible future, you were still enough of a crazy asshole to murder me before I could turn into a threat.”
“I…did not realize she’d put her soul aside. Or I didn’t remember, which amounts to the same thing. I’m so sorry, Rebekah. For all the trouble that comes along with having me for a father—”
I held up a hand, cutting him off. “You are not my father. My father’s name is Robert Lull. He teaches medieval history at a little college in Illinois. Likes to quote the dirty bits of The Decameron when he’s had too much wine. Taught me how to ride a bike and, coincidentally, how to kick a boy in the balls if he tried to do something I didn’t want him to do. He is my father. You’re the sperm donor who left me on a doorstep.”
Grace sighed. “I am a monster, Rebekah. I mean that unironically. I was a giant, you know. But monsters can love, too. I tried to protect you from the perils of the magical life, to let you grow up normal, whatever that means. Except I knew it was in your blood—I knew the magic would tell eventually. Since I’d given you no preparation for that kind of life, I thought I could redeem my neglect by giving you a few useful things after my death. But…I was falling apart by then. I planned badly. I took half measures. I thought I’d done things I hadn’t, and forgot I’d done things I did. From here I can see I made a mess of things.”
“Magical hindsight is twenty-twenty, huh?” I shook my head. “But the magic never did tell, did it? I was just a person, and it was fine, until I came here. Well, not to this weird pocket-dimension. To the house in Meat Camp.”
Now it was his turn to shake his head. “You do have your own magic. You’ve been using it for weeks.”
“What are you talking about? I’ve found some magical stuff, but it’s the stuff, not me: the cup, the broom, the house—”
“Ah. Yes. The house. It responds to your wishes, doesn’t it?”
“Sure, because I’m your heir—”
“No, Rebekah.” His patronizing smile made me want to kick him in the balls again. “I never made the house into a citadel of supernatural self-defense. The only spell I cast on the house itself was to lock the door to the room where you found the chalice, so the wrong people wouldn’t stumble upon it. Everything else, the objects flinging themselves at your enemies, the house leading you to things you needed…they are an expression of your personal magic.”
I blinked. “Wait. You’re saying I’m…telekinetic?”
“Mmm.” He considered for a moment. “That’s part of it, yes. You’re a bit old to exhibit poltergeist behavior—it happens more often in girls just entering puberty—but you’re a Grace by blood, and we’ve never been typical. There’s more to your power than just moving objects by the power of thought. You seem capable of exciting a sort of low-level sentience in the objects around you. The house does know things, or at least has witnessed things, and you were able to tap into that knowledge, and ask the house to provide you things you needed. Quite remarkable, really. Not a skill I ever developed, myself, and I come from a time when all the objects of the world were literally believed to contain spirits, of one sort or another.”
“So I’m a wizard whether I like it or not.”
“I always preferred ‘sorcerer’—wizard makes me think of pointy hats and black velvet robes—but as you like it.”
Right, because sorcerer is way less ridiculous.
“You don’t have to use the power,” Grace said. “But it’s hard to have power and not use it. Now that you’ve sipped from the chalice, you can have the power of my remaining life force—stripped of my personality, of course; you don’t have to worry about that—or…I can just let the power dissipate. Allow it to disappear to the same place where flames go when you snuff them, or where the magnetic field goes when you turn off an electromagnet.”
“If the power is gone, do you think the Firstborn will just shrug and move on with her life? Give up her vendetta?”
“That does not sound like my eldest daughter, no. I think she will rage at the waste, much as you would if someone used the contents of the Louvre as firewood.”
“Right. So that doesn’t really help me. What happens if I do take on your power?”
“Honestly? It will be a bit like putting a jet engine in a minivan.”
“No one’s ever called me a minivan before. I appreciate that.”
“In this metaphor the minivan is your own natural magical ability. I am—I was—a creature made as much from magic as from flesh. If not more so. You won’t have the knowledge to do everything I can do—I can’t give you that without leaving my mind lodged in yours like a splinter of bone in a salmon fillet. But you will be able to work your own magics more easily, and will learn new skills more quickly, and you’ll be resistant to the attacks of others. It is also likely to have some second-order effects I can’t entirely predict. It would be, essentially, like injecting a magical drug into your system.”
“So it’s like doing steroids. More muscle without all the effort of earning it.”
He shrugged, but also nodded his acknowledgment of the analogy. Go, me. “Something like that. The side effects should be less objectionable, though. No pimples on your back, anyway.”
“A minivan with a jet engine would just tear itself apart, you know. Or flip over and crash and explode.”
“You’d have to drive very carefully.”
Ha. Dead old Dad had quite the gift for understatement. He was a creature of magic, from the moment of his mysterious creation, but I’d spent a vastly shorter life as nothing but a person. The prospect of becoming more was frankly terrifying. But I guess what it comes down to is, there are different kinds of people in the world. Some people, if they stepped outside and saw a glowing portal hovering in their yard—a shimmering doorway that led to another world where the sky is the color of emeralds and crystal palaces shimmer in the distance—they would go right back inside the house and lock the door and pray for the freaky thing to go away. Other people would grab a couple of power bars and a bottle of water and a baseball bat for self-defense and step on through, because the regret of wondering what might have been would tear them to pieces eventually if they did anything else.
Turns out, I’m the kind of girl who has a hard time turning her back on what might be.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t hesitate, when the moment of truth came. I said, “You watched over me when I was little, didn’t you?”
He nodded. “Seeing you grow up, unpoisoned by my influence, was one of the final pleasures of my life, Rebekah.”
I nodded. He’d been some kind of monster, once, and he’d been further corrupted by the unchecked use of his power and the choice to give up his soul…but even so, he’d retained a core of something I recognized as humanity. If I knew what I was getting into, and recognized the dangers, surely I could do a better job of holding on to my own soul. “Okay. I’ll take the power.”
He got to his feet and approached me. Archibald Grace opened his arms, and after a moment’s hesitation, I stepped into his embrace. There was a chance this was still a trick to suck my mind out of my body so he could move into my skull like a hermit crab into a new shell, but I was in a magical tower dreamscape scenario with no apparent escape anyway, so what the hell.
He closed his arms around me, and I put mine around him, too. He seemed to get taller, somehow—not like a giant; more like your dad when you’re little, and he’s the biggest person in your life—and I rested my head against his chest, and listened to his imaginary heart beat in my imaginary ears.
My father kissed the top of my head, and then turned to smoke in my arms.
I lifted my head and blinked. I was in the study, on the ground, my head in Trey’s lap, and his face was looking down at me with immense concern and compassion.
I could see a silver thread leading from the top of his head, curling in the air, and then trailing down to my fingertips. In an instant, I knew what that thread was—there was a whole new alphabet of formerly unseen reality, and I’d learned to read it in a moment. The thread shimmered and pulsed, and I frowned, twisted my hand, and snapped the thread. It dissolved and vanished.
Trey gasped, eyes widening, and began to shiver like he’d been doused with ice water. “I—Bekah, what—”
“You’re free,” I said. “No more magical indentured servitude. So you’d better start kissing me of your own free will.”
He leaned down to oblige, his shivers subsiding as his lips touched mine. After a lovely but too brief interval, he pulled back and stared down at me. “So. I guess you took on your inheritance, then?”
I didn’t feel all that different—maybe a little adrenaline-energetic. But as I sat up, looking around the room, I saw it was the world that had changed around me. There were new shadows and new sources of illumination. The smoking jacket on the back of the chair seemed to shimmer, and I knew it was magical. I rose and walked around the desk, picked up the jacket, and slipped it on. Though it should have been too big for me, made for my father, it fit me perfectly, adjusting itself in subtle ways to fit my shape. I knew it would protect me from cold, and from fire, and from bullets, and to some extent from hostile magic, and even from the vacuum of space, for a little while—it was a wizard’s cloak, of sorts.
I knew about those magical properties the same way I knew the jacket was red, or that one of the buttons was falling off, or that the inner lining was silky and smooth: it was obvious from mere observation.
Apparently wizard-vision was one of those second-order effects.
I slid my hands into the pockets and my fingers touched something cold and rectangular and metallic: a Zippo lighter, maybe the very same one Grace had used to light the candle that captivated Trey and stole his brain.
“So…how does this work?” Trey said. “Do you have Mr. Grace’s memories, or…”
I shook my head. “Just his power.” I decided not to go into the whole thing about how I’d had a conversation with my dead father, at least not now. “Come on, I want to look around.”
Trey trailed after me as I left the study and went back into the house proper, looking around with my new vision. There was magic everywhere, nestled in unexpected places—not just the mug and the spoon on the counter, but also a Winnie the Pooh cookie jar (it would keep anything inside it fresh forever) and a dark gray marble mortar and pestle (it would reduce anything ground inside it to a fine paste or sand, even diamonds) and one of the paring knives in the knife block (anyone who held it would gain perfect pitch and a singing voice capable of projecting to the back of pretty much any auditorium imaginable…of course they’d be holding a knife while they did it, which limited the theatrical possibilities—I guess Sweeney Todd would have been a good fit).
I gazed around my domain. “Oh, this is going to be fun.” I glanced at the fridge, the door swung open, and a glass bottle of Cheerwine—the cherry soda beloved in the South and almost unknown elsewhere; I’d become mildly addicted—drifted across the room to settle on the counter. I squinted, and the cap popped off, spun through the air, and landed in the trash can. The bottle floated into my waiting hand and I took a deep sip. “I could get used to this.”
“How did you do that?” Trey said.
I shrugged. “Magic.”
The look he gave me would have curdled my soda—and I don’t think that was actually possible. “Thanks. That clears it up.”
“Do you mean, like, practically? I don’t know. How do you open the fridge and pick up a bottle with your hands? You will it, and your muscles comply. I think I’ve just got access to some new muscles all of the sudden.”
Trey slid onto a stool and looked at me. “I was a little bit afraid that light would start to shoot out of your eyeballs and you’d rise up in the air surrounded by a crackling net of lightning, screaming, ‘I am become a god.’”
“Ah. Well, it’s early yet. We’ll see how I feel later. I don’t know, I’ve got this new tool—this new set of tools—but as for what to do with them…I have no idea. Mostly I took on the power to protect myself, and you, and the other people I care about. But it’s a little like buying an interstellar spacecraft for your daily commute to the office. Seems like a whole lot more than you need to achieve such a simple goal, and there are so many other things you c
an do with power like that.” I shook my head. “I’ll figure it out. But for now, the Firstborn is the problem. I need to sit down with her and see if I can settle things between us.”
“That didn’t work too well last time. There was talk of putting you in a coffin, as I recall.”
“Last time we spoke, there was still a chance she could get what she wanted, but that’s off the table now—the vessel has been emptied, into me. I’m also in a rather stronger bargaining position now, since I’m pretty sure I could squish her if I wanted.”
“Okay, then. When are you planning to—”
I held out my hand, and The Book of Grace floated in from the other room, settling itself onto the counter in front of me. “I was thinking now, now, now.” I opened up the book at a random place in the middle, then whistled. “Trey. Does this look like the same old incomprehensible bullshit to you?”
He leaned forward to peer at the book, then nodded. “Why? Has it changed for you?”
“You could say that.” The cipher Grace had used on his book was broken for me, and the meaning was now clear. The page before me held a recipe, of sorts, explaining that if I snipped a few threads from my father’s velvet jacket and mashed them up into a paste in the enchanted mortar with some unpasteurized milk and a squeeze of lemon juice and the ashes of a red poppy, then I could take the jacket’s protective properties into my own body. Or I could mix that substance into a dye, and use it to color other fabric, and make myself a dress or a cloak or a scarf or whatever that had the same powers of defense.
I flipped through the pages, and there were more recipes—I suppose, to be technically correct, they were spells. How to bind mythological beasts to my service. How to call up winds, and calm storms. How to walk through fire and walls and dreams. How to become a whirlwind, and sow dragon’s teeth, and speak to the trees.