Orson: A Paragon Society Novel

by David Delaney

  The door opened and Elyse joined us on the landing. She gave me a quick smile and tentatively slid her hand into mine. Her touch was comfortable and reassuring.

  "Richard is waiting, and breakfast is getting cold," said Mrs. Kelly. She led the way down the stairs and along a stone path to the large French doors that opened into the main house dining room.

  A large wooden table — I think Elyse had once called it a Monk's table — was loaded with heaping plates of pancakes, eggs, bacon, and toast. The table had room to sit eight people comfortably. Mr. Kelly was sitting on the left side and motioned for me to sit across from him. I took my seat. Elyse walked around the table to give her dad a peck on the cheek and then she settled in next to me. Mrs. Kelly sat down next to Mr. Kelly and patted his knee.

  "Dig in. Then we'll talk." Mr. Kelly had a deep voice. He was tall, like the rest of his family, and toned, but not overly muscled. He was built like an Olympic swimmer.

  I didn't have to be told twice. I was ravenous. Getting acid spooged onto you apparently makes you hungry. Luckily, there seemed like there was enough food for twelve people, let alone four. I piled my plate high. I noticed all the Kellys did the same, even Elyse. I've seen her put away mass quantities of food — it's one of the reasons I'd always thought of her as one the coolest girls I knew — but she usually tucked in only after a volleyball match or a day of surfing or hiking.

  Elyse noticed me noticing her. "It's the change. It takes a lot of fuel to recover from a shift," she said, stuffing her mouth with a forkful of pancake and crossing her eyes at me.

  In between bites, Mr. Kelly asked, "How's your aunt?"

  "Good. A little mad at the 'prank' I pulled at work," I said, making air quotes with my hands. "And my apparent desire for Internet fame."

  "So, she is convinced it was a prank then?" Mr. Kelly asked.

  "Dad, I told you that's what she thought," said Elyse, exasperated.

  "I know what you told me, but he knows his aunt much better than you do. He will know if she is truly convinced or if there is some lingering doubt." He caught my eye and held my gaze. I had always thought of Mr. Kelly as a fun-loving, kind of casual guy. That's not the guy who was staring back at me right now. This guy was serious. This guy looked . . . well, he looked almost menacing.

  "No doubts, Mr. Kelly. Hundred percent." I tried very hard to keep the shake out of my voice. I think I succeeded.

  Mr. Kelly nodded.

  "However . . ." I ventured.

  Everyone froze, Elyse reaching for more eggs, Mrs. Kelly wiping her mouth with a napkin, and Mr. Kelly in mid-chew.

  "I'm not sure how I'm supposed to explain growing two inches pretty much overnight. She didn't notice last night because of everything going on, but it's only a matter of time."

  I'm not sure the length of time people are referring to when they say 'a beat passed,' but I know that I counted ten of my own heart beats - weird that I could hear my heart beating - before Mr. Kelly cracked a smile and chuckled.

  "Yes," he laughed, "I could see how that would be an awkward conversation. Luckily for you, Orson, my young friend, this isn't as the youngsters say 'my first rodeo'."

  "No one says that, dear." Mrs. Kelly patted his hand.

  Elyse laughed so hard she snorted orange juice out of her nose. That did it for me. I laughed right along with her. Mr. Kelly looked at each of us in turn, a cool look on his face. This only made Elyse laugh harder, and she pointed at her dad and mimicked his expression.

  Mr. Kelly couldn't keep the straight face and cracked a smile. "As I was saying, Orson, before being so rudely interrupted . . ." He glanced at Mrs. Kelly, who was trying very hard not to laugh, "An explanation of your growth spurt we can handle, but first I'm sure you would like to address the reasons behind your growth spurt."

  I set my fork down, my laughter and even my smile subsiding. "Yes, sir."

  My serious demeanor ended the light mood. I hated to be a downer, but in less than twenty-four hours, my life had exploded into comic book level crazy.

  "It's my understanding," Mr. Kelly continued, "that this past Saturday you and Elyse were . . . together."

  Oh boy.

  Mr. Kelly struggled to say the words out loud. I couldn't blame him; it must be weird for a dad to think about his daughter kissing a boy. "You and Elyse kissed for the first time." He said it in a rush, just to get it out and move on.

  A simple 'yes' didn't seem adequate. I wanted to convey how I felt about Elyse. To help him and Mrs. Kelly understand that the kissing wasn't just a hook-up or convenient; it meant something more. "Yes, sir. And I need to apologize for being such a stubborn idiot." I felt Elyse stiffen next to me. I turned toward her and made sure she was looking at me when I said, "I should have kissed her years ago."

  A slow smile spread across Elyse's face. How could such a simple thing be so incredibly sexy? I had to force myself to look away, locking eyes with Mr. Kelly again. I could see Mrs. Kelly in my peripheral vision. She was beaming.

  Mr. Kelly cleared his throat. "Right. Good. So, last night, you received a very improvised introduction to the fact that, not only do shape-shifters exist, but we can shift into panther form." He gestured to himself and his family.

  "All of you? Including Jen and Sean and Kevin?" Elyse was the third child in a family of four kids. Jen, her older sister, was the one currently planning a wedding, Sean was attending a private university somewhere up north, which, in light of current revelations, made a ton of sense. Kevin was the baby, and he was a junior in high school.

  "Yes."

  I had been wondering at the absence of the other Kelly children. There was enough food for all of us, and I hoped they weren't staying away because of me, and so I asked, "Where is everybody, anyway?"

  "Beach day. We thought it would be best if the four of us had this talk in private," Mrs. Kelly explained.

  So, the entire Kelly family was a pack of shape-shifters. Unreal.

  "I assume Elyse and the others were born this way," I said. "But you, were you bit by . . . like . . . a were-wolf or were-panther or whatever?" I asked.

  Mr. Kelly let out another rumbling chuckle. "No. I was born with the ability, as was Mrs. Kelly. The fact is: most shape-shifters — that's a more accurate term than were-panther — are born, not made or created. Actually, I think, the whole bite mythology arose around people like yourself."

  "People like myself?" I tried not to sound too confused.

  "Yes. Your abilities have lain dormant, and if the histories are accurate, they would have remained so your whole life, had they not been switched on by the . . . ah . . . by Elyse."

  "Histories? I'm guessing I won't find them online or at the public library, so that I can study up?" I asked.

  "No. I'm sorry. I know it must be very overwhelming. Our children, people like us, are raised with this information. Trying to explain it to a man full grown is a new experience for me."

  "When you say people like you, how many are we talking about? And is everyone a shape-shifter or are there different types of, er, I don't even know the right word to use?" I never realized how hard it was to talk about something with which you had no frame of reference. I didn't know what I didn't know, so how was I supposed to ask questions?

  "The Paragon Society, or just The Society, is one of the most common names we are known by collectively," Mr. Kelly explained. "And members of the Society can be found on every continent, in every country, but we number less than five million in total. We are not all shape-shifters. There are others with different abilities, but that's not important at the moment. We exist and have existed from the beginning."

  "Five million?" I did some quick mental calculations. "That's less than one percent of the global population."

  "Correct. Approximately a half percent of the population," Mr. Kelly confirmed. "Even though our numbers are small, we wield a vast amount of power, and because of that fact, we have very strict laws. These laws are ancient and the penalties attached to those w
ho break these laws can be quite severe. And, unfortunately, Orson, you are in violation of one of our most basic laws."

  "Wait? What law? How can I break a law if I don't even know it exists?" Really? I was in trouble with the Paragon Society? Last week, if someone had asked me, 'Hey, have you heard of the Paragon Society?' I would have guessed they were some lame wanna-be punk-folk band. I'm pretty sure that the strict penalties Mr. Kelly had mentioned were not community service. A hidden society of mythical beings — because, let's face it, that's what shape-shifters and whatever else is roaming the world are —were not just going to slap your hand for violating their law. No, violations of law — at least according to Tolkien, Brooks, Martin, and the like — usually include pain and sometimes death.

  "Orson, slow down. The law is one of secrecy. If the world at large ever discovered the existence of The Paragon Society, there would be chaos."

  The secret part made sense, of course. If average citizens were made aware that what basically amounted to super-humans were among them, they would lose it. Last night, I'd had thick, nasty acid spit on a large part of my body. This morning, I didn't even have a mark on my skin: just a little redness, but no swelling or scars. My body had healed itself. People would kill trying to figure out how something like that worked and gain access to it themselves. That thought made me wonder if any research had ever been done to try and duplicate the healing ability? The world could benefit from something like that, for sure. I would have to save that question for later. Right now, I was more concerned with the fact that I was considered some kind of lawbreaker.

  "I get the chaos thing and the secrecy, but I did nothing on purpose. When the pallet fell, I fully expected to be crushed."

  "That's the exact argument I made last night." Mr. Kelly used a very soothing tone; he could probably sense my growing anxiety over losing my head to an axe or being turned to stone, or whatever horrible thing lawbreakers were sentenced to.

  "Last night?" I asked "Who did you meet with last night?"

  "When Elyse and Katie showed me the video, I knew I would have to get in front of the problems that would arise."

  "Dad called the local shifter council," Elyse said. "Think of them as the Society's version of middle-management. They handle all the shape-shifter stuff when it comes up. He explained your situation to smooth things over," she assured me.

  Mr. Kelly nodded. "I called an emergency meeting, showed them the video, informed them of the circumstances and that I believed you were proof of something I have suspected for a long while now."

  I was almost afraid to ask, almost. "And what's that?"

  "That some of the Society's older legends are not legends at all. And that you may just be something long thought to be myth - Anghenfil, the Ollphiest."

  Mrs. Kelly gasped. I mean, she literally gasped. Elyse's hand tightened around mine. It sounded like Mr. Kelly had sneezed, but from the reaction of Elyse and her mom, I assumed he had said something in a foreign language. I held his gaze. I wasn't going to ask. He knew I didn't speak whatever language he had spoken.

  "Orson, even the Paragon Society have their ghost stories. Stories they tell one another after too many drinks. Stories used as warnings or to frighten children."

  "Like the Boogeyman," I said, in disbelief. It sounded like Mr. Kelly was telling me that he thought I was this Paragon Society's version of the Boogeyman, the thing that magical shape-shifting cat-people used to scare the crap out of one another.

  Great.

  "The Boogeyman?" Mr. Kelly considered it. "Yes. That's a good analogy. The Ollphiest is the Society's Boogeyman."

  "Dad?" The pleading in Elyse's voice was clear. Oh yeah, she knew all about the Ollphiest. I bet it was the thing her older brother and sister probably used to tease her with before bedtime. I was sitting at breakfast with a family that could turn into giant, scary-looking panthers, and apparently I was the thing to be frightened of.

  Yay me.

  "So, I'm a monster."

  CHAPTER 8

  I stared at the food left on my plate. My appetite was vanishing with the realization I was sitting at a table with three people who the world would consider monsters, but who considered me to be the monster.

  I was the monster that monsters feared. That wasn't an original thought — I'm pretty sure I had read that in a graphic novel or comic book — but it summed up my situation perfectly.

  Mr. Kelly broke the silence with a chuckle. "Orson, being a monster," he said, emphasizing the word with air quotes, "is a relative thing. We, all of us at the table, are monsters by the world's definition."

  Was he a mind reader? That would be a bad thing, because once I got over the current suck my life was in, impure thoughts about his daughter were sure to cross my mind.

  Mr. Kelly continued, "You are a shape-shifter. What shape remains to be seen, but, in essence, you are like us. It's the how, not the what, that makes you different. If my suspicions are correct and you are what I think you are, I think it will be reason to celebrate. A species of shape-shifter thought to be extinct, or to have never existed at all, suddenly appears, and the Society will have to reexamine their history."

  "I'm not sure I understand," I told him. "If I'm a shape-shifter, what makes me different?"

  "Popular books and movies have perpetrated false ideas about our kind. That's not necessarily a bad thing. The less the world knows, the better." He stopped and popped a piece of bacon into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully. "For the sake of not confusing you with too much information, I will stick to our kind, shape-shifters."

  He waited for my nod, before continuing. "As I said earlier, we are born, we are not made. The whole notion of a bite turning a person into a shape-shifter is so much fiction. The specific genes that control our abilities pass from parent to child. Inter-marriage with non-shape shifters does not produce offspring with the ability to shape-shift, at least not in the past 200 years or so."

  I'm pretty sure I understood what he was saying. I knew for a fact that my mom, Aunt Tina, and their parents were not shape-shifters or different in any way. My father, though, was a big question mark. I knew he was in the military and that he had died while deployed overseas. He had never even known my mom was pregnant before he left; she hadn't wanted him to be distracted by worry while in the field. I know she had loved him and that it was after his death she started moving around, never settling too long in one place. And, lastly, I knew his name was Orson, as my mom had named me after him.

  "You're saying my dad had to be a shape-shifter?" I stated.

  "If you're positive your mother is not, then yes, it seems logical to assume that he was. And I take it by your expression your mother is not?"

  "No. And I don't know much about my dad, only that he died on a mission for the military." A thought occurred to me. "Could he have passed the genes on without ever having his abilities activated? Is that the right word, activated?"

  "It's as appropriate as any other. And the answer to your question is yes."

  Elyse held up her hand. "Um, just so we're all on the same page, Dad, you're saying that the Ollphiest, the scary dude I've heard about all my life, isn't just a made up story?"

  "Yes and no," Mr. Kelly responded. "It is my theory that the Ollphiest is just a title, a name used to describe an individual with a specific set of abilities. The only sure thing is that Ollphiests aren't born, they are created. It's why Orson's situation is so intriguing. It has many of the hallmarks the legend describes."

  "But the stories, all the things it's said the Ollphiest could do." Elyse looked at me, a look of awe on her face. "Those things are real?"

  I had to swallow a laugh. My girlfriend, the supernatural cat, was freaking out about something I could do.

  "The short answer is: we just don't know," Mr. Kelly told her. "There are no eyewitness accounts, only vague references in some of the oldest volumes."

  "What exactly do the stories say the Ollphiest can do?" I was both interested and horrified at
the same time.

  My question went unanswered, as someone knocked on the front door and Mr. Kelly's cellphone rang simultaneously. I didn't need special powers to feel the spike in tension. Mr. Kelly placed his hand on Mrs. Kelly's arm, shaking his head as she started to rise to check on the front-door. Mr. Kelly answered his phone. The person on the other end was agitated and shouting, but I couldn't quite make out the words. Mr. Kelly's face stayed relaxed; he even gave me a wink. He was trying to play it cool, but it was obvious something was wrong.

  I noticed both Elyse and Mrs. Kelly had their heads cocked, and I realized they were listening to both sides of the conversation and I remembered Mrs. Kelly doing the same thing last night at my house when she said Aunt Tina was still in the bath. So, I needed to add super-hearing to the list of growing abilities they had and that I could look forward to in the near future. Cool.

  Mr. Kelly ended the call, and his relaxed look became strained. He wasn't happy. "Thomas and a few others decided on their own to drop by and meet Orson."

  "What about the time they promised us?" Mrs. Kelly asked. She didn't look happy either. The doorbell rang again, followed by loud knocking or, as some would rightly call it, pounding on the door.

  "Everyone stay here at the table." Mr. Kelly ordered. "Orson, the people I met with last night: some of them are concerned about what you may represent. They assured me I would have time to talk with you and help you through your first shift. The people at the door are concerned I may be too close to the situation."

  "Because you know me or because of my relationship with Elyse?" I asked.

  "Both. Understand there is nobody alive that has firsthand knowledge of what you may be capable of or how your ability will manifest. The only thing we have to go on is shrouded by time and superstition." Mr. Kelly ran a hand through his hair.

  "Superstition? Really? You, the Paragon Society, are superstitious? Aren't you guys the living embodiment of superstition?" How could shape-shifters, creatures of myth and legend, be superstitious? They are the things that go bump in the night. Fairy tales come to life in living, breathing solid reality.