The Big Game

by Sarah Jaune

  “Wait,” Ivy interrupted. “What are Native Americans?”

  “I dunno,” Eli said with a shrug. “Also, what does the author mean by the only true aboriginal magical creature? Does she mean it’s the only one that they can prove came from here?”

  Ivy shook her head, clearly lost. “That’s just weird. Haven’t there always been magical creatures?”

  “Maybe not,” Eli said as he thought about the stories his nanny used to tell him. “No one really knows when the first magical people came here to this land. Maybe at the same time some new magical creatures came as well.”

  “This is weird,” she muttered as she pointed to the book. “It also reads like a school book, and not a scary story, so go on.”

  Eli scanned down the page until he found his place. “It is told that the two creatures, the wendigo and the windigo, are one and the same, but credible evidence has been given to posit that they are not, in fact, identical. They share certain characteristics, such as wanting to consume humans, in particular magical humans, but the most common accounts from the few people who have seen a wendigo indicate that it is solid and, in some form, alive. The windigo, as its name implies, is as substantive as the wind. A few legends and recountings tell of a creature that is no more than smoke, held into a shape that might have once been human. The windigo is only recorded in our written history twice, and both were in the upper reaches of the Ontario Zone where it snows seasonally.”

  Ivy shuddered. “That’s just awful.”

  “What must have been after us in Yellowstone was a wendigo,” Eli said thoughtfully. “If it had been smoke, then a door wouldn’t have held it out.”

  Ivy drummed her fingers on her leg as she stared into the forests surrounding the house. “I’ve never heard of anything like that. Either something has shape or it doesn’t. How can something be alive if it’s smoke?”

  “I have no idea,” he admitted, just as confused as she was. He was also a little scared, but didn’t want to own up to it. “There’s more if you want me to keep reading.”

  “I don’t want you to keep reading,” Ivy said as she smiled dryly, “but you’d better anyway.”

  Eli located where he’d left off and picked up the tale. “The windigo attacks its victims by possessing a victim and using the human body to do its bidding. We have only one suspected instance of this happening, but it cannot be verified. The only tale from history is from the natives of the Americas from the Plains Cree tribe.” Eli blinked in confusion at the words. “It moves into the body of a person and makes them do something? What? And a Plains Cree tribe? I have no idea what that means.”

  “Me either,” Ivy said. “Keep going.”

  “The wendigo, as it is solid, kills its victims outright using whatever tools it possesses. Often those are antlers or claws,” Eli continued. “No one who has been directly attacked by a wendigo has survived the assault, but in many instances witnesses to the attacks have been able to get away from the creature. There are several theories for this, the most prominent is that the wendigoes are being controlled and sent after specific targets, however scholars feel that this is unlikely to be the case. Due to the nature of their preferred prey, often the only witness to survive is a human without magic. It would lend credence to the hypothesis that the wendigo seeks out the magical, and when it has killed the magical in a particular area, it loses interest in the hunt.”

  “Daggers, that’s brutal,” Ivy muttered sadly.

  Eli nodded as he swallowed down his revulsion. “The wendigo is nocturnal and only hunts at night. It can be seen during the day, but there are no known recorded cases of a person being killed before sunset. They will also not enter a human dwelling which is barred shut, preferring instead to draw its victims out into the open. As the wendigo seems to feed on magical creatures, it can often be found in those places where they are plentiful. Their preferred meal is magical humans, but they will settle for mermaids, Sasquatch, and a unicorn if they can get it. It is said that they are fifteen feet tall, but most reports indicate that they are closer to that of a tall, emaciated human male. Historically, it was said that hundreds, or maybe thousands of these beings roamed the land, but the number is likely closer to a dozen, with the higher concentration to the north. They prefer the cold.”

  “That’s not really comforting,” Ivy told him as she pulled up a blade of grass and began to twist it into a complicated knot.

  “There is no known way to kill a wendigo,” Eli groaned as he continued to read out loud. “It is suggested that avoidance is the best method of dealing with one, and to stay inside after dark if one has been spotted. The creatures were said to be the remains of men who long ago turned to cannibalism, and that this darkness is what has left them impossible to destroy. They are thought to be only male, and possibly hundreds of thousands of years old.” Eli slammed the book shut in disgust. “That’s disgusting!”

  “Agreed,” she said as she plucked the book from his hand and dropped it back into the backpack. “Let’s leave that one alone for a while. I’ve never heard of one here, but it never snows here in the Portland Zone, so I think we’re safe. There was snow on the mountains in Yellowstone.”

  That was true, and oddly comforting. Eli opened the bag wider and saw an old journal with a note sticking out of the side. “What’s this?” he asked as he pulled it open and turned to the first page. He saw his mother’s handwriting and quirked an eyebrow. “It looks like my mother’s diary.”

  Ivy eyed it as though it, too, might be a wendigo. “Why do you think your nanny stuck that in for you?”

  “It couldn’t be so I’d find sympathy for her,” he said coldly. “It’s not like she didn’t have a choice in her life.” He found the page indicated by a pink note and pulled it open to a date marked about a year before Eli was born. He read silently as his disbelief rose and turned into stunned shock.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Ivy’s hand closed over his, and he felt some of the tension drain from him as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing on the page. In her neat, precise, but nevertheless flourished handwriting, his mother laid out a diabolical plan in order to take over their land. It was simple, pure, and brilliant.

  She had a list of names of people who had come to Chicago recently, all of whom Eli was extremely familiar with. There was nothing else to the names, just the list, but Eli could fill in the details.

  Solomon Crane, Filet Hasket, Gabriel Chaplain, and Daniel Kauffman.

  Solomon Crane, the Overseer of Atlanta. He was Noelle Hunt’s brother, and Eli’s uncle, although Eli hadn’t seen him in a long time.

  Filet Hasket, the Overseer of New Orleans. They hadn’t ever met, at least not that Eli could recall, but he would never forget the sight of Hasket’s children as they cowered in fear of the man.

  Gabriel Chaplain, the Overseer of Miami. He was Thane’s father. No more needed to be said about him.

  Finally, Daniel Kauffman, the Overseer of Portland.

  CHAPTER 30

  ANSWERS AND QUESTIONS

  Eli read what his mother wrote and felt his insides turn to ice. Finally, he passed the journal to Ivy who managed to read it out into the still air around them.

  “The scientist was here today with the promised elixir. His name is Doctor Pilate Colon, and he brought along his assistant, Monica, but only because Monica is seeing the Overseer of Portland. I can’t believe Daniel is stooping so low as to entertain a woman of no magical birth. I said as much, in front of the wretch, but Daniel is stubborn as always and laughed it off. He’s engaged, of course, but I doubt the girl knows it.”

  Eli watched Ivy’s face drain slowly of color as she read. “Let’s stop for now,” Eli told her quickly. “We’re still exhausted. We can read it later.”

  Ivy shook her head and continued on with fierce determination. “I have told Campbell that I do not approve of his sharing the plan, but he informs me that it was Kauffman’s idea to begin with, and he footed most of the f
unding for the project in the first year. The other fourteen zones were only brought on when funds were needed to continue the research. Finally, though, after two years of work, we are at the place where we are ready to test the potion. I am not supposed to test it, of course. It is only for the men, but I have my ways, and I will not be left out.”

  Ivy’s huge eyes met his straight on. “Is this… is this what happened to us? Did they take some kind of potion? If your mother took it, and so did your father, that might explain why you, Beth, Rebecca, and Jonas all have three powers!”

  “But your father’s other children don’t,” Eli reminded her. “So that means your father didn’t take the potion.”

  She stared down at the page before her as her leg tapped relentlessly on the blanket. “I don’t know what happened there. I just don’t get it. I shouldn’t have two powers, unless my mom took the potion, but my dad didn’t, except that she wasn’t magical.”

  “What was the potion for?” Eli asked her curiously. “Does she say?”

  Ivy scanned the rest of the page and went onto the next. “No, she just says it will help them take over the known world and take the other zones from the Overseers who aren’t part of the plan. She lays out how they are going to split it up, and how the other men gathered in Chicago to discuss the plans. It’s not fifteen men, though. She only names a couple.”

  “But all of those men, except for your dad, have children with multiple powers,” Eli sighed. “Wait, I have no idea if any of my cousins do. The one older than me had one power, but there’s one younger than I am, and she didn’t have her magic the last time I saw her.”

  “Maybe we should go to Atlanta,” Ivy suggested hesitantly.

  Eli shook his head as his stomach churned. “Not right now. I can’t deal with that. It might be better to send Thane since they won’t know who he is, but I look exactly like my father.”

  “At least you’re nothing like him in personality,” she said with a grin. Her expression softened into a slow smile. “Are you okay?”

  He focused on his mother’s handwriting and realized it was written in a hand that would never write again. She’d left a legacy of insanity and broken children behind her, but Eli was going to make it right again. He had to trust that Cole would take care of Becca and Jonas. Maybe, just maybe, he’d see them some day when they were older. He’d have to have hope, the same way he hoped to see Beth on their eighteenth birthday. “It was a lot better after I talked to Dad about it. I needed to get it out, and he knew how to help me work through it.”

  “It seems like Pablo always knows how to do that,” Ivy said pensively as she traced her finger down the spine of the journal. “I suppose that’s because he went through what you did and knows what it’s like.”

  Eli figured she was probably right. “Keep reading,” he told her.

  Ivy nodded and let him change the subject, which he appreciated. He might be okay enough with his family situation, but that didn’t mean he wanted to focus on it. “Campbell is still concerned that he does not have a son, but I am not convinced that he would want a son even if he had one. He’s so paranoid that if we had a son he would see him as a threat as soon as he could walk. He is not violent like other Overseers—”

  “Wait!” Eli interrupted her. “I remember my father hitting my mother many times!”

  Ivy’s expression soured. “So whatever they did turned your father abusive to her, and by extension, to you and your sisters.”

  Flummoxed, Eli could only stare at the page, which he couldn’t read because the loopy writing was upside down to him, sitting in Ivy’s lap. It was poetic in a way, since his mother had always seemed upside down in her logic.

  “Should I continue?” Ivy asked in concern. At his nod of assent, she read on. “He loves our little Naomi, though, and dotes on her…” her voice cracked and she froze mid-word. “Oh, daggers, Eli…”

  Horrified and sickened, Eli shook his head in disbelief. “No, that’s not right.”

  “What would that have done to her?” she practically squeaked with her anguish. “Naomi had these loving parents and a father who spoiled her, and then suddenly he turned on her? It’s… crap, it’s just horrendous! She’d have looked at this loving dad one day, and the next he might have been hitting her!”

  “Maybe my mother had it wrong,” Eli interjected quickly. “Maybe she was just playing at pretending to have a happy family, like she was lying to herself about it to make herself feel better.”

  Ivy hesitated, then read on. “I have a new dress for tonight… wait,” she flipped ahead. “She talks about clothing for four pages. Then,” she didn’t finish her sentence, but Eli saw immediately why.

  The rest of the journal was blank. This was the last entry she made.

  A cold chill crept along Eli’s skin until he felt like his whole body had been drenched in ice water. “Their plan, whatever they did, had to do with the elixir.”

  “And whatever it was, it involved my mom, Monica,” she said quietly as she flipped back to the first page of the marked entry. She ran her thumb over the name, almost like she could smudge it away. “It isn’t an uncommon name, but that has to be the way she met her. Your mother wouldn’t have ever met mine otherwise.”

  “Your dad was already engaged to someone else, but dating your mom on the side,” Eli said as anger coursed through him. “What a pathetic, worthless pile of—”

  “You made your point,” Ivy interrupted, but she smiled nonetheless. Then it faded. “He didn’t take the elixir. By their own account, it was my father who came up with the plan. It was his money. Why didn’t he take it? We have to assume he didn’t take it.”

  Eli shook his head in bewilderment. “I have no idea. I’d have thought he’d have wanted in on it, but how he’s behaving now isn’t exactly sane, so maybe he took it later than the others. If he waited until after his children were born, then they wouldn’t have been changed like we were.”

  “But why did my mom take it?” Ivy wondered as her hands shook slightly. She folded the diary and placed it back in the bag. “What was the point in that? If it was supposed to help them take over the world, then what did she have to gain from it?”

  “Maybe she hoped it would help your dad pick her,” Eli suggested, but hated it as soon as he’d said it. “Sorry, that was a stupid thing to say.”

  She gave a half-hearted shrug. “We can’t dismiss that as a possibility. Maybe she thought it would give her a magical power or something.”

  “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “I don’t either,” she agreed on a long sigh. “What we know is that my mom must have taken the elixir, and, somehow, I ended up with the power of divination through her. My father didn’t take it, so I only got water through him. Your mother and your father both took the elixir, which is what your mother said, thus resulting in you and Beth each getting three powers. That explains why Claire had two powers, not three. Her father was at that meeting in Chicago, but Noelle doesn’t mention any of the wives being present. She was the only one.”

  “That’s the best we have to go on,” he said as he thought it through. His mother’s final words, at least her final words of consequence, had been about Naomi. “So my sister was treated well before we were born. Sometime around then, when she’d have been about four, my parents changed, and her whole world turned upside down.”

  Ivy watched him with her solemn green eyes and shook her head slightly. “During that time your father became a monster and your mother an uncaring, selfish woman. Although, arguably, she was okay before the elixir. You were born and your father turned his rage on you.”

  “Naomi tried to stand up for me,” Eli added as his stomach twisted into a knot. “More than once I attacked her.”

  “But,” Ivy told him vehemently. “You didn’t mean to, and you were young.”

  “Beth didn’t attack her,” he pointed out. “If I don’t own up for my mistakes, they will continue to haunt me. I’m in a better pl
ace, now. I know how to deal with my anger, at least most of the time. I just wish the Guard wouldn’t have separated us.”

  She frowned at that. “Then you wouldn’t have ended up with Maia and Pablo. Do you honestly wish that?”

  “No, but—”

  “Pablo knows how to help you,” Ivy reminded him bluntly. “He’s a good part of the reason you aren’t a psychotic mess right now. He’s helped shape you into a good man. Do you think that Naomi could have managed that for you?”