by Tim Pratt
“Oh, Rebekah. It didn’t have to be this way. But so it goes.” Suddenly she shouted, “Trey! I can tell you’re up there, lurking. I saw your car in the driveway. Come down, darling. You’re pledged to serve the heir of Archibald Grace, and that’s me.”
The landing above creaked, presumably as Trey emerged from the master bedroom. “I don’t respect your claim,” Trey called. “Even if Bekah died without designating an heir, this could be tied up in court for a while. I’m not sure you even legally exist, so it would be tricky for you to inherit.” He was careful to avoid declarative statements, just like I’d told him to be. Didn’t want any ringing bells at the wrong time.
“Hmm. I suppose there’s some debate about whether or not I inherit.” The Firstborn sounded amused at the prospect. “I might have to kill the Trips, and Hannah—but then I’ll be the only Grace left, and it will all be mine. It won’t be easy, but utter devastation, scorching the earth, leaving no stone left upon a stone—it’s what my father would have done.”
“What if Bekah drew up a will?” Trey’s voice sounded surprisingly confident, considering he was talking to a woman who’d come within a whisker of killing him. Then again, he did have me on his side. “She was dating a lawyer, you know. I’m good at paperwork. Maybe she left everything to me.”
The Firstborn snorted. “She never found the vessel our father left behind, the one that contained his power. The house was hers to dispose of, perhaps, and some of the objects, those she could pass on through the mundane magic of dull paperwork alone, I suppose. But the power belongs to the Grace line, and I have the strongest claim on that power. I’ll succeed where your girl failed. I’ll take this house to pieces, if I must, and I will find the place where my father hid his strength away—”
That seemed like as good a time as any. I rolled over and sat up. “I found it, actually. A cup full of blood and other things I’d rather not think about. I drank it all down. Tasted terrible, but I have to admit, it was pretty strong medicine.”
I’ll give her credit—she didn’t even hesitate when she heard my voice. Instead, the Firstborn lunged at me, hands twisting into claws—literally, she was a shape-shifter, and she got downright animalistic—but she hit the edge of the magical polygon and bounced back like she’d struck a plexiglass wall. For a moment she looked perplexed…and then she started keening, a sustained howl of anguish and rage at a brain-shredding pitch and volume. She squeezed her claws into fists and blood began to drip from her clenched hands.
I picked up a little box from the coffee table and flipped it open, then drew out the egg that contained her soul, and held it up where she could see it.
The terrible screaming cut off instantly. She stared at the egg, as captivated as Trey and the hit man had been by the candle flame. “No. That’s not possible.”
“It is, sis. I didn’t want to have to do this. But you left me no choice, at all. Even so, you still get a choice, because I’m feeling merciful and kind and I’m basically cooler than you. I’m giving you one last chance.” I took the bell of truth from my jacket pocket, where it had been nestled beside the Zippo and the candle. “If you can tell me honestly that you’ll give up this vendetta against me, I’ll let you walk out of here a free woman.”
“Bekah, are you sure that’s a good idea—”
“Shh, Trey. I need to talk to my sister right now.”
The Firstborn stared at me, her back rigid, hands still clenched. “Is it true? Did you take on Father’s power?”
I nodded.
“I need you to say it,” she shouted. “So I can listen for the ringing of that double-damned bell!”
I’d already said it, but maybe she was hoping she’d just been inattentive. Liars always assume everyone else is a liar, too. “Yes. I found the vessel of power, and drank it. I have our father’s power.”
She shook her head, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes. “But…but then you should be Father. Those should be his wise old eyes looking out at me instead of yours. This can’t be. I don’t understand.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The vessel was a trap, you fool, a trick, it must have been. Father and I talked about it—how a sorcerer’s life could be very long, but not immortal, because every spell has a flaw. Nothing in this world is perfect and inviolate. Entropy always finds a way. There are stories of sorcerers tricking their apprentices, promising to give them power, but instead taking their lives, leaving the young ones trapped in an ancient, dying body, or simply ousted into oblivion while the old, wise wizard lives on in a fresh new form. I was sure he’d do that—”
“He did, Firstborn. He tricked me, and I fell for it. He was in a position to steal my body—I just convinced him not to. Or maybe he convinced himself.” I paused for a moment, thinking over the implications of what she’d said. “But if you knew it was a trap, why were you so desperate to walk into it yourself?”
She sank to her knees, sobbing. “You saw him? Father? You spoke to him? His—his ghost, or eidolon, or projection? You got to see him again?” She curled up on the carpet, into a ball, weeping. “I—it should have been me—if he’s truly gone, if I lost my chance…” Her words dissolved into wracking sobs.
I sank down to the floor on my side of the sigil of binding. I wished I could reach across and touch her, comfort her—absurd, I know, to want to comfort my homicidal sibling, but there it is: I’ve got the curse of empathy. Terrible quality in the daughter of a giant. But reaching across the barrier would break the seal that bound her, and I wasn’t feeling that empathic.
And then I understood. “You wanted him to take over your body, didn’t you? You wanted to make that sacrifice. Give up yourself, your mind, your body, just so he could live again.”
“Then he would know I was the good daughter,” she whispered. “The best daughter. That I loved him the most. He was a god. You don’t know. You never saw him, not how he was, when he was truly himself. When he was the only sacred thing in a profane world. The last living remnant of a lost age of glory. He deserved to go on forever. And then, once I gave myself to him…then I’d be able to rest. I’m so tired, Rebekah. I just wanted to do one last important thing, and then disappear.”
“So rest. Just tell me you’ll stop trying to kill me, that you’ll leave my friends and family alone, and you can go anywhere. I’ll take you anywhere—Tahiti, Bali, or some island where you never have to see anyone else ever again, if you’d rather. Otherwise I’ll have to break this egg, restore your soul, and cast a compulsion on you to make you leave me alone. I don’t want to do that. If you’d just give this up—”
“Of course,” she said, not lifting her head. “I promise. I’ll be a good sister. I’ll bake you cookies. We’ll get makeovers. I’ll never harm you. I’ll never kill your parents. I’ll braid your hair. I’ll never tear out your boyfriend’s eyes. We’ll go on road trips together. I’ll never try to grind your bones in a mortar, to leach the magic out. I’ll never make a potion from your blood and drink it and shit you out and laugh while I do it.”
Needless to say, the bell rang, and rang, and rang, the whole time she was talking.
“But I can be him.” She sat up suddenly. “Not perfectly, but I can do it—who knows him better than I did? Nobody, nobody, nobody. His blood flows in my veins. I can—I can make it be true. I can make myself believe it. It’s not good enough, no, no, but it’s the best I can do—”
She started to change. Her face shifted, the jawline becoming less angular, the nose less pointy. Her chest widened as her breasts deflated, her shoulders broadened, and her hair shortened and began to turn black.
The Eldest Daughter was changing, shape-shifting, into our father. Was she insane enough, her soul frayed enough, to make herself believe she really was him? To live the delusion of her truest wish, as if it were fact?
I didn’t care to find out.
“This is too messed up for me,” I said, and smashed the egg that held her soul between my ha
nds.
I expected yolk, or maybe sparkling fairy dust, who knows. Instead it was just dust, and the smell of wet graveyard earth and dried flowers. But I saw the magic, a swirling torrent of color, spin away from the egg and into the Firstborn’s body, flowing into her mouth and eyes and ears and up her nose.
She gasped, frozen in midtransformation, and then our father’s features receded and she was herself again, trembling and shivering. The Eldest Daughter fell over on her side and vomited onto the carpet, then looked at me. Really looked at me, for the first time maybe, and saw me as a human, and as her sister, instead of as an obstacle or an obscenity.
“Bekah? Did I—Bekah, what did I do? What have I done? What did Father make me do? What did he make me be?” Her face crumpled, not in a shape-shifty way, but in a “recognition of my many horrific acts” sort of way.
Trey came down the stairs. “What’s wrong with her?”
I shook my head. “She got her soul back. Her humanity. Maybe her sense of right and wrong, if she ever had one? Her conscience? She—”
“I’m sorry!” she howled, and I had no idea if she was talking to me, or to our father, or to the world in general…but she started to shape-shift again. Much more quickly, this time, and much more completely.
When her writhing and twisting was finished, my older sister was gone. In her place, swimming in a dress turned suddenly huge on her body, there was a little blonde girl, maybe six or seven years old, with a pointy nose and chin, hair matted to her forehead with sweat, sleeping on her side, snoring a little.
“Fuck!” Trey yelled. “What the fuck just happened?”
He was loud enough to wake the little girl. She sat up, yawned, rubbed her eyes, and blinked at us owlishly. “Hello. My name is Clara. What’s your name?” Then, looking around the room, she frowned. “Where’s my daddy?”
“Oh shit,” I said, which about summed it up.
#
The Trips were as good as their word: I thought about them, hard, and they sent a thought back to me, words in my head sounding loud and clear: COME AND PICK US UP.
I left Trey to babysit my big sister—he was not happy about it—and bounced to their compound in remote wherever. They floated toward me, all in white, and we joined hands to take The Book of Grace Express back to my living room.
Now Trey and I sat on the couch with cups of tea we kept forgetting to drink, watching as the Trips bobbed and floated around—well, she said her name was Clara, so we’ll call her Clara, though Trey called her “The Child of the Damned” or “The Child of the Corn” when she was out of earshot.
He’d found some toy trucks and Lincoln Logs in one of the bedrooms and dumped it all out on the carpet, and Clara was playing with the old toys happily, making vroom-vroom and explosion noises when she crashed the trucks into the structures she built. If she found the prospect of three identical hovering triplets weird, she didn’t show it. Her bar for weird was a little different than that of most little kids, probably. She knew who she was, to some extent. She’d cheerfully told us that her father was a god, and her mother a spirit. She lived in a cabin in the woods and was a sorcerer’s apprentice. She hadn’t forgotten everything.
Just everything since she was about seven years old.
One of the Trips drifted over to us while the others remained with Clara. I thought it was the one we’d rescued from the Firstborn’s clutches, but it was hard to tell. It spoke to us, and the others merely moved their lips soundlessly, so there were none of the weird harmonics that usually accompanied conversation with my half siblings.
“We are not psychologists, but—”
“You’re good with minds,” I said.
They all nodded. “Our eldest sister has suffered a mental break. She has regressed to a younger age. This sort of thing happens sometimes, even in ordinary people. The personality disassociates, in the face of trauma. Did our elder sister face some trauma?”
I seesawed my hand. “Maybe. The realization that our father was really and truly dead forever, and that I’d taken on his power, and that she’d totally lost, and that I was about to compel her to leave me alone forever, thus ruining her entire life’s mission. Oh, and I broke the egg that held her soul, and that went rushing back to her, and apparently brought an avalanche of regret and heartache with it.”
“Ah. That would count as trauma, yes. She was very strong, but sometimes strong things are also brittle.”
“Like a cast-iron skillet,” I said. “Did you know if you shoot one of those with a bullet, it shatters?”
“We are always learning new things. The comparison is apt. You inflicted an intolerable situation upon her, and she shattered.”
“Okay then. You’re good with minds. Can you fix her?”
“Wait,” Trey said, sitting up straight. “What do you mean, fix her? You mean, turn her back into a psychologically damaged psychopath with a shredded soul and no conscience and the worst daddy issues imaginable?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly what I mean. Like I said before, with the power I have, I need to be careful about how much I let myself screw around with people’s lives. If I start letting myself do whatever seems easiest, I’ll end up going way too far, way too fast. We can still bind her, keep her from hurting us, but even that’s icky.” I held up a hand to fend off Trey’s protests. “Look, I know it’s the only way, so I will bind and compel her, okay? But we should give her back her sense of self first. She was broken before, but she’s differently broken now, and the way she’s broken right at this moment is at least partly my fault. Do you get that?”
Trey sighed. “Yeah. I do. I see what you’re saying. She’s creepy as a little girl, anyway. So nice. Go ahead. Change her back, and then send her away.”
I looked at my hovering half sibling. “So? Can you restore her?”
The Trip shook its head. “We think she has taken herself, mentally and physically, back to the last time in her life she felt happy, or perhaps merely safe. She is a shape-shifter—not merely a creature of illusion, but a genuine changer of form. Her brain has changed, now, along with the rest of her body. In a sense, her physiology has traveled back in time. She is truly the person she was at seven years old again, down to the last fold in her gray matter. The memories she had, the sense of continuity that made the Firstborn into herself—they’re physically gone. Would it be possible for her to shift back, to age her body, to restore her brain? Perhaps, but it is beyond our powers to force her to do so.”
I whistled. “So…what? She’s a seven-year-old orphan? With no birth certificate? And magical powers? What are we supposed to do with her?”
“I think,” the Trip said, “we should call Hannah and have a family meeting, because this is the very definition of family business.”
#
The meeting didn’t take long. We sat in the kitchen while Trey kept Clara company in another room. The Trips spoke with one voice. Hannah was extremely reasonable. I fought it for a while, but really, I could see their points.
What they pointed out was that the Firstborn had reacted to trauma in an extreme way, years of psychological stresses building up to a pretty unusual breaking point—but as a result of that break, she had the chance for a do-over. To be raised as something other than a weapon of vengeance by our asshole father. To avoid being abandoned and driven mad with loneliness and guilt and shame and hope. To have something approaching a normal childhood—with a very loose definition of “normal.”
Since I was the only heir of Grace who’d grown up with anything approaching said normal childhood, they all agreed I was the obvious choice to take primary custody of my big (now little) sister. They promised to help, of course—swim lessons and fishing trips with Auntie Hannah, summers in the remote mountain fastness of the Trips, getting in touch with nature. But as far as going to school, and decorating her bedroom, and going on playdates, or whatever the hell seven-year-olds do—the house of Grace would be her primary home.
I wasn’
t sure I ever wanted to have kids, and here I’d inherited one when I was still in my early twenties. Not at all what I had in mind…and a lot scarier than taking on the powers of a dead giant.
Then again, I hadn’t planned to move to the mountains of North Carolina, become a sorcerer, or become smitten with a lawyer, either. Life is unpredictable. Entropy gets in everywhere.
#
Hannah came over to watch Clara overnight a week or so later, so Trey and I could get a little time alone, to celebrate…surviving, pretty much. We ended up at a little bar in San Francisco, perched on stools, drinking Belgian sour beers, talking about the future.
“So what about the future?” Trey said. He lowered his voice. “You’ve got vast magical powers, and nobody actively trying to kill you anymore. What are you going to do?”
“Raise a kid, apparently,” I said, drinking fast so I could get drunk faster. “Try to keep painting. Be a single mom-slash-elder sister and a starving artist.”
“Without the literal starving.”
“True. The magic is good for that. It’s almost like being born wealthy.”
“No conquering the world, then? Being a superhero? Lifting up the downtrodden? Making the desert bloom?”
“That last part sounds good in theory, though it would probably screw up the ecosystem if I tried. I bet I’d accidentally trigger global boiling or something. Everything’s interconnected, you know? My father blundered around stomping on people, because he used to be a giant, right? I may be wearing his boots now, but I want to be careful not to crush anyone underfoot. I feel like I should learn what I’m doing before I start trying to change the world. Even small magic gives you headaches, or steals years off your life, or messes up your vision, or makes you lose time. If I go trying to cast big magic, the blowback is likely to be bigger, too. Maybe, once Clara’s older, if I don’t screw her up…I can think about doing other things.”