by Louisa Lo
Harold flung from the foyer and crashed into a loveseat in the living room. Pamela screamed and ran to her husband, checking him over for injuries. He seemed knocked out but otherwise fine. The woman looked up to us with fear in her eyes. She took in the multiple pairs of vengeance wings now filling up the foyer, and swallowed.
“Are you here to arrest us?” she asked.
“What?” Gregory, Fir, Serafina, and I looked at each other in confusion.
“You’re from the Council, right? I can sense your strong magic.”
“Ma’am”—Fir stepped forward—“do I look like someone the Council would send?”
Pamela’s nostrils flared and immediately her shoulders dropped. The realization that we were not the authorities seemed to have calmed her down. “No. Maybe not you. You’re not even a vengeance demon. Again, my apology to all of you. My husband is not his usual self. He’s never been like this in all these years we’ve been married, I swear. We’ve just been about scared out of our minds, that’s all. They’re not going to understand at work, and…and…”
Pamela sniffled and struggled to catch her breath.
“Slow down.” I tried to project tranquility into my voice. “Tell us what happened.”
Despite my words Pamela was getting herself worked up all over again. Her breathing became so shallow, I was afraid it was the start of an asthma attack.
Serafina, who came from a long line of healers, put her hands over Pamela’s and started to synchronize her own breath with the older woman’s. Then she slowed it down and somehow got Pamela to follow her lead. Eventually the latter was calm enough to speak again.
“They’re going to wonder how we didn’t see it.” Pamela’s voice was full of sorrow. “And if we’re this unobservant, then maybe we don’t deserve to work with sensitive information anymore. We’re going to get fired from our jobs, aren’t we? And forget about work, how am I going to face my own parents ever again? How could I tell them about Thomas? I ought to have known. What kind of mother am I?”
“You found out Thomas is a changeling, didn’t you?” Gregory asked quietly.
Pamela started shaking. “Who are you? All of you? How do you know these things? We’ve told nobody.”
“We’re here to help. My friend here”—Gregory pointed at Serafina—“is a leading changeling expert.”
I raised my eyebrows but didn’t contradict Gregory. I supposed being held captive at Dualsing most of her life would make Serafina somewhat of an expert on changelings. She sure knew a heck of a lot more than this pair of hapless host parents.
Pamela straightened up from the loveseat and with one last glance at her unconscious husband, led us to a bedroom at the end of the hallway wordlessly.
She opened the door.
It was one of those dream bedrooms that one would expect to find in a home decor magazine. A picture perfect boy’s bedroom, with a bed in the shape of a pirate ship, and a wide collection of football gear and video games littered all over the place.
The Agricolas might not have had enough money to send their child—or whom they thought was their child—to private school, but they sure spoiled him with what income they had at their disposal.
A boy sat on the bed crossed-legged, facing the wall. His tiny frame seemed too small for the wide shoulder pads carelessly dangling on one of the ship mast bedposts. He swayed himself back and forth repeatedly, as if obsessing over that single motion was all that mattered in the world. I put my senses out and found no weird energy vibes, despite how obviously upset he was.
No weird energy vibes, not even a stray bit of strange magic, and that was exactly what was wrong.
I detected vengeance magic in the air and Fir’s own brand of trickster power, but nothing else. Nothing that would suggest the presence of a changeling.
The kid in front of me was no changeling—he was a vengeance demon. The exchange had already taken place.
“It happened last night.” Pamela hugged herself by the doorframe. “We woke up to Thomas screaming, but by the time we got to his room, he was gone. And he was here.” She pointed an accusing finger at her real child.
“You must’ve heard the stories about how changelings work. You might even have caught wind of the recent rumors about them.” Gregory asked softly, “Why didn’t you contact the authorities right away?”
“I never thought this could happen to us. We’re just a regular family.” Pamela’s eyes filled. “My baby. I’ll never see him again.”
I was just about to point out that her baby was right there in the room with us, but Serafina shook her head. She leaned closer to me, and murmured, “Don’t bother. She believed all her life that the changeling was her child. Right now, even the idea of thinking of the kid on the bed as hers is going to feel like such a betrayal.”
Pamela sighed. “Harold is up for a promotion. If his boss knew we’d been fooled in such a humiliating manner… And my mother. She babysat Thomas for two years straight so I could go back to work after maternity leave. She loves him. How am I going to tell her she’ll never see him again?”
Pamela seemed very obsessed about what people around her would think, but I didn’t hold that against her. Sometimes focusing on others’ reactions was a way to not deal with your own.
“Wait.” I held up a hand. “I thought Alpha, I mean, Thomas, is in the eleventh grade. He’s not of age. How come he went back?”
“Actually, he just turned eighteen last night. He was always more of an athlete and he got a little behind in school, that’s all. He loves playing football. Oh, the way he throws a spiral…” Pamela started counting all of Thomas’s supposed talents in the sport, but I glanced at Serafina and realized that she was no longer listening. Her eyes were riveted to the boy still rocking himself on the bed, the one that his real birth mother treated as if he wasn’t in the room.
I should have known that Serafina would be drawn to him. The kid had suffered the trauma of being ripped from everything he’d known, all to go from one household that didn’t want him to another.
Serafina gently approached him. “Do you mind if I sit next to you?”
The rocking continued.
Serafina sat at the edge of the bed. “What name do they call you by in Dualsing?”
The kid didn’t look at her. I realized I still kept calling him a kid despite the fact that he was technically an adult. I guess it was because of his small frame and how utterly lost he looked. “Dain.”
“Hello, Dain.” Serafina smiled at him though he wasn’t looking at her. “I was raised in Dualsing, too. When I was there, I was called Lady Serafina, from the House of—”
“Sebille.” He stopped rocking abruptly and looked at her, his gaze burning into hers. “I know who you are. You were celebrated before the queen’s return. They handed out candies to us in your honor.”
Serafina blushed. “It wasn’t much of an honor, was it?” Then she seemed surprised by something. “You knew about the exchange process then?”
“Yes.” Dain nodded. “After the queen’s return they no longer kept the secret from the underage. So we’re all aware of the practice. I just never thought I was going to be one of them.”
“You are one of us now.” Serafina put her hand on his. “It’s going to be okay.”
“These people hate me.” Dain glanced at his mother.
“They’re in shock. Give them time.”
“We couldn’t have come at a worst time,” Fir muttered to me. “This sucks.”
“Not as sucky as it’s going to be in a few minutes.” Gregory pressed a finger to the device attached to his ear. “We have to go. Now. I’ve been listening to the police scanner. A neighbor just called the authorities about all the disturbances. They’re on their way. We can’t be here when they arrive.”
I tugged on Serafina’s elbow. “Let’s go, hon.”
Serafina opened her mouth as if she was going to say something to Dain, then closed it, seemingly lost for words.
Dain turned back to the wall and started rocking again.
We beat feet out of the apartment just in time. Two vengeance demons teleported outside the Agricolas’ door as we stepped into the elevator. There would be no hiding the freshly returned child now.
“Poor Dain,” Serafina said in a voice that was sad beyond her years. “I wish there was more I could do for him.”
“Later. When this is all over. I have every faith you will think of something.” I put my arms around her. I couldn’t even imagine how it felt to have no roots whatsoever. It was truly humbling how there was always somebody who had it harder. I was again reminded of my good fortune of having a close-knitted immediate family. “Just survive this current crisis first, alright?”
She nodded.
We were all silent as we exited the elevator and walked away from the condo structure as nonchalant and innocent looking as possible.
“Even if we had found Thomas before the switch, it might not have done us any good,” Gregory said suddenly, looking up from his phone.
“Why do you say that?” I asked curiously.
“He most likely wouldn’t have helped us anyway.”
“How would you know?”
“I saw enough to know. The video games in his room weren’t all human ones like Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed. Quite a few of them are patented by the Geekomages.”
The Geekomages was a small group of human geeks who achieved supernatural power through an overdose of fandom, and they were like radioactive spiders with programming skills. They were an emerging race that many of the older species were wary of, but there was no doubt they’d help shape the high-tech world we all lived in now. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg were among their leaders, with Steve Jobs faking his death so he could continue his work on the vengeance plane. He was starting to attract too much attention.
The video games put out by the Geekomages were designed to be technically challenging, involving complex math and problem solving skills. If Thomas the changeling was playing them then he couldn’t be that dumb.
“I also saw a bunch of framed winning pro-line tickets,” Gregory added. “In consecutive weeks. These games are magic-proof. The kid had to be betting and winning not using luck, but probability calculations.”
“Then why the heck did he fall behind in school two years in a row?” Fir asked, puzzled.
“He was a jock, a popular kid—judging from all those pictures with the cheerleaders—and I’m guessing someone who failed his grades not because he wasn’t smart enough, but because he was lazy and bored. I just went through his Facebook page. The kid sounded arrogant and entitled. He probably wouldn’t help us with our cause even if we’d found him on time. Discovering his changeling heritage would just make him pat himself on the back affirming what a special little snowflake he was.”
“So one chance down, one to go.” Fir opened the portal to our next destination. “Let’s hope the next one will be both willing and available, and that just one kid will be enough for what needs to be done.”
Here was to hoping.
Chapter Sixteen
Soup Kitchen
I HAD NEVER BEEN aware of Chicago’s status as a trickster mecca of sorts, though I should’ve known based on how many trick-athons were hosted in that city that Fir had tried to drag me to through the years. Ashamed as I was of my trickster gene growing up, I avoided those invitations like a dude avoided Celine Dion concerts.
The point was, I knew very little about the different Chicago suburbs. So it was a surprise to me that the place Beta resided turned out to be at a rather affluent community called Hinsdale. The “two-story house” Beta lived in was more like a seven-bedroom Queen Anne mansion, with two acres of accompanying green space. There was something very old world and charming about a Queen Anne, and the blue and white structure in front of me, with wrap-around porch, was a classic beauty. I wish I’d seen it in broad daylight, but evening had fallen by the time we got there.
“Pretty fancy gig for a commoner from Dualsing.” Fir whistled.
“As I said before, it’s all a matter of luck and timing,” Serafina said.
“What do we know about the parents?” I asked Fir and Gregory. Between the two of them somebody would have dug up the intel we needed.
Gregory gave me a blank stare. He’d been inexplicably mute since our teleportation to the edge of the property. Weird.
“Caroline Isabelle Sumpsi and Louis Maximilian Sumpsi,” Fir said.
“Wait a minute. Sumpsi, as in from the House of Sumpsi?” There was a Sumpsi on the Council since the inception of the governing body.
“Caroline and Louis are the black sheep of the family,” Fir explained. “This house is more like a place of exile.”
No wonder. The Sumpsis usually lived in residences similar to the Advocatus family estate. The Queen Anne, while splendid, wasn’t exactly in the same caliber.
“What did they do?” Serafina asked.
“Louis is the second son of the current generation of Sumpsis. He was groomed to take over the business side of the family while his older brother, Macallister Sebastian Sumpsi would take over the political mantle. But Louis decided to follow his life-long dream to become a scientist. A supernatural scientist. Flash forward ten years, and he’s actually doing okay. He’s a research fellow at Northwestern University, Chicago, on the human side. The pay sucks, though.”
“Lucky he and his family got a place to stay on this plane then,” I said. “Hold on. He reached that turning point in his life only ten years ago, that means by then, the switch would have happened already.”
“Exactly, Beta would’ve already been here.” Fir’s smile was rueful. “I guess my changeling cousins didn’t see that one coming, huh? Here they are thinking their kid is going to bring back all sorts of corporate secrets, and they ended up with the latest string theory or something.”
“Don’t underestimate the Dualsingians’ ability to make use of the most obscure or unexpected information,” Serafina cautioned. “When Beta goes back they would make sure to take him for everything he knows.”
“Stop calling him Beta. His name on this plane is Pedro Amos Sumpsi. Get used to calling him that before you go in,” Fir cautioned.
When Serafina tracked the whereabouts of Alpha and Beta back at Dualsing, she captured their location at a single point in time. Luckily, in Beta’s case, she got him when he was at a permanent residence.
“What about the mother?” I asked.
“She supported her husband’s decision. They stayed together. By all accounts they’re a happy little family. They’re active members on this Facebook group called Geek Supernatural Parents. Anyway”—Fir slapped me on the back—“I’m going to sit this one out like the way you wanted me to do the last time, Megan. Black sheep or no, barging into the middle of one vengeance demon household is my limit for the day. I’ll wait for you at the back.”
“I’ll join you,” Gregory said immediately, which was rather suspicious. I gave Fir a look and he winked in return, silently promising to keep an eye on Gregory. I could be paranoid, but what if Gregory was taking the opportunity to cook up something that would free him from his obligation to me? Who knew if he had any loop-hole-finding lawyers in his back pocket? I thought maybe we had a moment there at Advocatus High, but who knows, and who was to say that meant he wouldn’t screw me over if he could?
As for Fir, though, I was strangely confident that he wouldn’t be tempted to leak anything on Eldon to his trickster friends, even though rumors must be spreading like wildfire in those circles and the chaos was like a drug. Fir knew what was at stake. Tricksters might be mischievous and devious in general, but they were loyal as hell when it came to protecting their loved ones. With the entire Cosmic Balance at risk, that pretty much covered everyone Fir had ever loved.
Before we rang the doorbell, Serafina and I had decided on no disguises this time. Our initial plan was to go for the images of fellow country club members. But after F
ir told us about the father being the black sheep science nerd of his family, the society girl look could seem a bit out of place.
Besides, Pedro was only two months shy of his eighteenth birthday—we made sure of his age this time—Serafina and I weren’t that much older than him. It wouldn’t be that suspicious for us to call on him.
I rang the doorbell. My senses told me that only two people were home. Let’s hope that one of them was who we were looking for. Both power signatures felt vengeance, but then the changeling’s would be masked to give off that false reading anyway. It would’ve been like that even when he was a child, without his knowledge or consent. But Serafina could identify Beta once she got close enough.
A middle-age woman of generous girth, rosy cheeks, and wearing a white apron came to the door. She smiled at us. “May I help you girls?”
“We’re here to see Pedro Amos Sumpsi,” I replied.
“You must be his ride to the soup kitchen. Hold on a sec. He’s just getting ready. The dear boy made scalloped potatoes using my recipe and it turned out amazing. But it still needs to cool down and be packed up. Now where did I put those oven mitts?”
The chattering of the woman, who seemed to be the cook, was rapid fire, and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. We followed her into the foyer, then the kitchen to the left of that, as she hunted for her oven mitts. “Ma’am, we’re not with the soup—”
“Oh, Pedrrrro,” the woman called out in a singsong voice toward the direction of the stairs. “Your ride is here!”
I exchanged a look with Serafina. Either the kid was at the soup kitchen because he was a real sweetheart, or that he had no choice because he was there for required community service. Given the purpose of this visit, I found myself hoping for the latter. Remembering how haunted Serafina looked when it came to Dain, I almost wished this Beta kid was a jerk who had to be strong-armed into helping us. Forcing compliance was at least something tangible I could work with. Ruined lives and profound sadness? Not so much.