by A. S. Oren
Vex, Remus and Romulus gather near the door and turn toward us. They bow at the waist. “Please enjoy your meal, served to you at Miss Peacock’s.” They leave in a line. Whatever they were arguing about doesn’t start up again until they are on the other side of the door.
The guys all look to me again. I touch my hair, feeling self-conscious for the first time since everything happened. I wonder how my hair looks right now. I never would have cared before, but now I do, just a bit. It’s strange, having new aspects of myself that are foreign. There are urges I’ve never had before. Like how I feel around Paden and Maverick. I can’t explain it, but I’m overjoyed to be with them. How close were we as children? Why were they around me back then?
“What,” I finally say, when none of them speak up.
“You serve yourself first; it’s only right,” Horace says.
I roll my eyes. “Seriously, don’t start this guys. I’m not that much different than I was before, and I’m not going to put up with the ladies first thing. Serve yourselves too, now, or I will kick all your butts. I have a feeling I could do it now.”
Boxing and fighting with Edgar, as if he was training me, flash in my mind. Who was Edgar, really? Why were the true memories of the last year and a half removed from my mind?
Maverick lifts an eyebrow. “You remember your training then?” He picks up a plate of pork bits and places some on his own plate. He at least isn’t going to test me on whether I could kick his butt or not. Maverick may be the only one in the group that would pin me in a fight.
I shrug. “Bits of it, but I think I could pull it off with using muscle memory, and all that.”
“Interesting,” Paden says, readying his plate as well. It makes me wonder why he was acting at Spearwood. Was he expected to let the servant put the food on his plate for him? We both know his weird obsessive behavior was just an act, or at least it would have been a few years ago. Does he really like me like that? Was there truth behind his words all this time? He didn’t like me when I was acting like a prissy princess. What about now? When I’m more like my old self than ever before.
I serve myself with some white rice and a mixture that looks like Buddha’s Delight: mixed vegetables and tofu.
“Is that all you’re going to have?” Dante asks, when I rest my plate back down on the table.
“There’s not much else I can eat. I don’t eat meat when I don’t have to.”
“You ate it this morning,” Triton says.
“That’s because I didn’t know when I was going to eat again for one, and for two, the other version of me was fine with eating meat. I’m not.”
“Come to think of it, I have never seen you eat meat,” says Amr. “You left the chicken in your bowl when we ate at the Cabin that one time.”
“Why didn’t you say anything? We could have left it out,” Horace says
I shrug. “I’m not the type of person to expect other people to cater to me. I’m the one that chose to be this way. I just tend to pick around meat if it’s served to me.”
“She’s been vegetarian for as long as I can remember,” Maverick says.
Dante pinches a piece of duck a little too hard with his chopsticks. “How far back is that?”
“We were sent to guard her when we were six and five,” Paden says.
I try as hard as I can to remember that far back, but all I can recall is a feeling of crying. No flashback comes to the front of my mind. I wish I could use my memories on command, like a normal person. “I can’t remember.”
“Don’t worry, the memories will come back on their own with time. Edgar told us if you ever had the process reversed that it would take time, and that we couldn’t reveal shared personal memories until you remembered them.”
Edgar, in over a matter of hours, has gone from being a simple, old man, to being more complex than a quantum physics problem. “Who was he? I already know he didn’t find me by the barn when I was a newborn.”
Paden nudges around his food. I can’t help but to do the same thing. I was starving when they first brought it, but now all I can think about are all the questions I have and want answers to. I take a small bite of baby corn, one of my favorite things to eat with this dish. “He is one of the Vox as well. He used to say he never thought he would live to see the day that the female shifter walked this Earth, and it turned out he was chosen to raise her. ”
I swallow, Edgar’s death hitting me hard since I learned about it. A lump forms in my throat. “Was.”
Paden looks to me. “What?”
My fingers shake, making my chopsticks tremble. “He was a member the Vox. He died, around morning, the day before yesterday. It’s what started this whole mess with the brain warping.”
“How did he die? Do you know?” Maverick asks. He takes my chopsticks out of my right hand and grabs it in a comforting manner.
“I talked to him a few hours before, when Amr and I found out we were twins and just before you two kidnapped me for lunch. He sounded sick. Like he had a cold, or something. I called him after I got back from lunch, and that’s when one of the Hands told me that he had passed away; that Spearwood people were there packing the whole place up.
“That’s not possible. A common cold doesn’t kill our kind, not even pneumonia,” Bullock says.
“What does that mean?”
Paden growls. “Edgar didn’t die of natural causes, he was murdered.”
The Next Plan
“Mur-murdered.” The word tastes rancid as it leaves my mouth. I never thought of that as a possibility.
“I’m sorry,” Maverick’s grip on my hand grows tighter. I hold his hand back.
Paden shakes his head. “We have to figure out why Roseman is doing all of this.”
“There’s the war that he’s been talking about with one of the Ancients,” Bullock says.
Dante cocks his head. “War with whom?”
“I don’t know. They didn’t go into detail in front of me. All I know is there’s a war coming and Roseman is the leader of it. I think he wanted Avalon to only be taught Air magic, so he could control her better. The Ancient wants her to be taught everything she’s able to learn, so she’ll be a stronger warrior. In the end, I would’ve had to follow their orders over his.”
“I remember that,” Maverick mumbles.
My need to know about Edgar’s apparent murder stills for a second, as I look at him. He let it slip that we were there when Bullock received punishment for being an Outcast.
Bullock turns his body more toward us. “How would you remember that? As I recall, I was the only one there.” So he doesn’t remember waking up while I was healing him? His brown eyes narrow at us. “You two were there. I thought it was all a dream.”
“Can someone please enlighten the rest of us that don't know what you're talking about?”
I look at Bullock. “I don't know what you're talking about.” I'm not sure why I want him to think that day, when I healed him, was a dream.
He arches a light brown eyebrow. “You don't?” He stands. “I guarantee I have proof that you were.” I frown now. He takes off his blue blazer and white button up shirt, and turns his back to face the table, revealing his scar-riddled back. There's something new, however, at the top of his left shoulder—where the scars that I healed start—lies a perfectly shaped hand print, glowing a faint blue. “I think if you put your hand there it would be an exact match, don't you?” He faces me again and puts his shirt back on. I try not to let my eyes linger on his bare chest before it’s hidden from my view.
“Fine, you caught me,” I say.
Bullock sits back down in the chair and looks AT me, as if waiting for an explanation of my actions that day. I shrug. “I wasn't going to let you go with wounds like that. I know now that Dr. Quinn wouldn't have been allowed to heal you either since they were inflicted by an Ancient.”
“I could have taken care of it myself; I always have.”
I sigh. “Fine. Next time, I will let you
suffer, you ungrateful bastard. Can we get back on the subject of Edgar?” The pull of the moon has eases into my muscles and bones. Great. I push my plate away from me, having barely touched the food at all.
“You need to eat, Avalon,” Paden says.
“I'm not hungry. I would eat if I was,” I snap.
He looks away from me. I look down at my lap and rub my forehead. “I'm sorry. I'm just a bit off still, okay? I have a bunch of different emotions fighting for the lead right now, and knowing Edgar was killed isn't helping any of it. Not to mention nightfall is about less than an hour away, I can feel it.”
The others start to eat a bit more. At least they can get the food down. I'm afraid mine will come up when the curse forces me to change.
“Edgar, why does this have to happen every night?” I ask through thought. An old, pale-blue dragon sits across from me—not much bigger than my own form.
“It's just how the curse works, Avvi. As far as I know, there's no way around it. You're the first female of our kind to make it as far as you have, and that's why we are protecting you from the reach of the families, until you are old enough to fight against them yourself.” He lies his head down on the ground.
“We'll find a way to break you're curse somehow, Lon,” says the smaller-than-me silver dragon to my right. “I promise.”
“You okay?” Maverick asks, putting a hand on my shoulder.
“Yeah, just more memories. I don't want to talk about it right now. How do you think Edgar was killed?”
“You said he sounded sick when you talked on the phone with him the last time?”
I nod at Paden.
Mirren sits back in his chair. “There's only one thing that would make our kind have flu-like symptoms and kill us: ingesting the seeds of an Angel's Trumpet plant.”
“Today, I'm going to teach you three about a very poisonous plant to us. It's also poisonous to Norms as well, but in this day and age it is unlikely to kill them unless they can't get to a hospital,” Edgar says, his Scottish accent fainter than I ever remember hearing it.
Paden and Maverick sit at the small round table with me; each with their own notebooks.
He points to a colored chalk picture on the black board of a plant that points to the sky with long, narrow, purple petals that unfurl at the top. “It is called Datura, or Angel's Trumpet. It's a flower that blooms only at night. It is poisonous to all living things, but is especially to us.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Because it is a flower that awakens at night, in the rays of the moon, and we are creatures created by the Sun god. The moon has been against us since the beginning.”
The old way of thinking didn't make a ton of the sense to me, but I never liked the moon very much either, considering what it does to me.
“When the seeds are ingested by a Norm they can cause delirium, violent behavior and amnesia among other things. Not a pleasant high, from what I understand. Norms can be killed with high doses if they don't have their stomach pumped with orally administered activated charcoal to help the stomach from absorbing the poison. If it's too late and they are already showing signs of Datura, then the drug physostigmine is an antidote.”
“How does it affect us though?” Maverick asks.
“We get flu like symptoms: congested cough, sneezing, and the chills. We don't know why it affects us like this, but by the time the cough shows up, we have less than an hour or two to live. There’s no cure. It will kill you.”
I fold my arms. “He would've had to ingest the seeds in order or for that to kill him. How would the seeds have gotten into his system?”
Mirren shrugs. “That's easy. Put it in his food or drink, when he's not looking and then just sit back and wait the half hour it will take for his body to absorb it. Not that difficult.”
“How would that have happened though? As far as I know, he lived with a bunch of Norms as the hands on the Orchard.”
“Could have been someone else, someone he trusted, who came to visit,” Triton says.
I don’t know what I’ll do when I figure out who Roseman had kill Edgar. The anger rolling in my stomach tells me I could kill them, but the moral side of me says I could never do something like that.
“I don’t think Roseman did his own dirty work. He had someone do it for him. We’ll have to find that person,” I say.
The pull of the moon gets to the point where I can’t ignore it anymore. I push away from the table and stand. “We’re going to need that place Agnita was talking about. Night fall is only minutes away. I sigh. I want that necklace back.
The Aqua Basement
“Agnita is busy with a client right now, but this is where she wants you to transform,” Vex says, as she leads us down a long flight of stone stairs. Cracks and crumbling affect some of them; I hope they don’t collapse. My skin burns. The cold rock brings some relief to the palms of my hands. We need to move faster though.
We come to a thick wooden door. Vex pushes on it. Sliding it open and revealing a vast open room, with rough, stone pillars and cave like walls. It has to be the size of—at the very least—one football field. A faint blue glow shines over the room with dancing lights. Inside one of the long walls sits a massive aquarium. I can’t tell how far back it goes, if it even stops. A dolphin swims past going into a part of the wall where I can’t see anything.
“That’s unique,” I mutter, as I look at it. More pain than usual courses through my muscles. Normally, it’s just the pain from the itch and burn; the sensations are different tonight, a lot different.
“You don’t think she and I stay in our human forms all day, do you? It’s exhausting maintaining this two legged form.” I grab at my stomach as the muscles clench tightly. My knees shake, wanting to buckle. The burning courses across the underside of my skin. The itch hasn’t made its normal appearance.
“Agnita wanted me to tell you that the process of sewing you back together may’ve changed how you transform, and not to be alarmed. I’m not sure how that’s possible. Unless the warping changed—”
The rest of what she says falls on deaf ears. The blood rushing around in my head muffles her voice. My knees give out making me fall hard to the stone floor. My skin ripples. Something moves just under the surface like a beetle. The heat from before becomes cold, ice cold. My teeth chatter. I let out a shaky frosted breath.
My eyes go wide, that’s never happened before. I push Maverick’s blazer off of me, not wanting to ruin it. The cold sinks deeper into my bones, turning my muscles to stone. I fall forward onto my hands and knees.
Like ice covering the top of a lake; the skin on the top of my hands fractures, sending millions of tiny cracks climbing my arms and spreading across my body. Will I break into hundreds of pieces?
My skins falls off me in tiny shards, clinking on the stone like broken pottery. My golden scales now sit on top, the tips a dark grey. My muscles shift, grow and pull me in all different directions. A scream erupts from me before it turns into a deep roar. My body pulses with the echo of pain.
“Well, you give werewolves a run for their money. That would make Romulus feel less bad about being the father of them,” Vex says. She leans against the aquarium, her arms crossed over her chest.
I stretch out my wings before bringing them in close to my body and moving into a curled positioned, giving everyone more space. My body takes up more than half the room.
I avert my eyes from the boys, still not used to changing in front of them. It should probably feel normal by now, but it doesn’t. Shame tries to rear its ugly head. I push it down. There’s nothing to feel ashamed about.
Vex pushes herself off the glass wall. “Well, I have to go help clean up shop before closing. I will be back down later.”
The heavy door closing behind her makes the silence heavier.
“I wonder why your transformation changed,” Amr says.
‘I can only assume it’s from having my mind put back together. It felt different. I can’t explai
n it,’ I send out in thought.
“We need to figure out where we’re going to go from here. This is only a safe haven for the next few hours,” Paden says.
Dante nods. “I agree. Anyone have any ideas?”
“I do, but I’m not sure any of you are going to like it,” Amr says.
‘What is it?’
“My, I mean our, parents should be a safe place to go. Over the years they’ve built up their shielding magic around our house. Spearwood is more visible than our house. We could go there.”
I could go see my biological parents. I now know they didn’t abandon me at birth, did they really abandon me at all? I have a feeling they put me into hiding with Edgar for my own safety.
Bullock frowns and moves to sit on the floor near my hind left leg. “Would that really be the safest place? Wouldn’t Spearwood think to look there?”
Amr shakes his head. “Only when they want people to find them, can they be found. The only reason Spearwood found us to take me there was because they wanted me to go. I was confused at first about why they sent me, but now I know it’s because they wanted me to be there when Avalon showed up.”
Dante sits near my head. “How do we find them?”
Amr pulls out a pendant necklace from underneath his shirt: a silver circle with an infinity symbol in the center. “This is connected to my home. All we have to do is open another Void, and it will take us to wherever they’re located.”
“It’s not like we have a lot of other options,” Triton says.
“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Dante says.
“Are you okay with that, Lon?” Maverick asks.
‘I guess there’s not much else we can do.’
Awkward
Somehow, each of the guys ends up finding a place to sleep on me. I guess my scales are more comfortable than the stone floor. This will be awkward if I can’t get them to wake up before I change back. I turn my head to look at the aquarium. Vex lies in the sand, at the bottom, on her stomach. Her legs now one large fishtail. In place of her skin, purple and pink scales cover her body. Her large black eyes look at me from the other side of the glass.