“It’s the internet, isn’t it?” Mum said, her voice laced with suspicion, “Nothing good ever came from it.”
I couldn’t help smiling. Classic Mum. If she couldn’t work out what was wrong with the world, it was doubtless something to do with teenagers going on the internet.
“No, Mum, it isn’t anything to do with the internet, I promise.”
“Okay, well, it doesn’t matter,” Mum sniffed, “I still need to tell you the truth.”
“What about?”
“About your father, I suppose. I mean, as much as I know, anyway.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Jason, I never knew your real father.”
“What?”
“Or your real mother,” Mum concluded.
There aren’t any good moments for your Mum to tell you, in a fit of miserable self-recrimination, that you are in fact adopted. I’m fairly sure there are better times, though, than when you are lying in a hospital bed, still fuzzy from the drugs, recovering from a knife wound inflicted by a demon who is preparing to bring an army from another dimension down on the world.
Mum’s timing had always been pretty lousy.
“You adopted me? What? When?”
“When you were a little less than two years old.”
I was dumbstruck.
I’d had no idea I wasn’t Sally’s biological son. I mean, she was my mum. How was I...? What could I...? And the Dad I’d always thought was my dad, Sally’s ex – he wasn’t my dad at all. I’d been angry with someone who wasn’t my actual father for abandoning me. I’d been angry with Mum for not telling me about my dad when she didn’t know anything about him at all.
“So this is all my fault,” Mum mumbled, “I’ve been keeping this secret from you since you were two years old. Since me and the ex, since we adopted you. He left a year later but I loved you so much by then, I couldn’t...the older you got the harder it got to tell you. And now this whole mess.”
It was too much for me to process. I decided there was only one thing that mattered.
I set my chin to stubborn.
“Mum, I love you and you are my mum. It doesn’t matter if I’m adopted. None of what happened is your fault in the slightest, and it’s got nothing to do with the fact you didn’t tell me this before. It doesn’t make any difference. I love you.”
Mum burst into tears and ran out of the room.
After she’d calmed down, she came back. She sat with me for a bit, didn’t ask me anything about what had happened or why I was in High Wycombe. We talked about everything else but that, in fact. Latest Netflix shows, a big sale she’d had at the shop. How pleased Rob was with the way I was working. She knew stuff was up with Kate and Dee, but she didn’t pry into it. It was all nice, normal, everyday stuff.
Exactly what I needed at that moment.
Things only got awkward again when Victoria Pryce walked into the room.
Chapter Thirty Seven: The Experiment
“Oh, no,” Mum said, her face set with determination, “No, no, no, absolutely not.”
Victoria had taken a single step into the hospital room and Mum was already on Defcon One.
“Mum!” I said.
“No, Jason, I’m not having this, at all.”
“Mum. Please. I need to talk to Victoria.”
Mum flinched. She looked at me and crumpled. The fact that she was on shaky territory over the whole ‘You were adopted’ revelation was weighing heavily on her.
“I’ll be right outside,” she said. She shot Victoria the filthiest look you’ve ever seen then stalked past her to wait in the corridor.
“Sorry about that,” I said.
Victoria looked annoyed, but then she shook her head.
“It doesn’t matter. What happened?”
“A little adventure involving a knife and a murderous demon. How are you even here?”
“Vincent. He felt something happen, something with a lot of power. He cast a scrying spell and saw you bleeding out on the floor. I got here as fast as possible. What demon?”
“I’m still trying to get it straight in my head.”
At that point, with so much hanging in the balance, I didn’t want to tell anyone what had happened or what I knew.
Victoria pursed her lips, irritated at my sudden restraint.
“Well,” she said, “I’m sure you’ll tell me all about it some other time. In the meantime, I come bearing gifts.”
“A fruit basket?”
“Nothing so prosaic. How are you healing?” she asked.
“I’m getting there,” I replied. I knew she was asking about my real healing, rather than a normal person’s recovery.
“Good. Well – drum roll please – we think we’ve found out what you are. We examined your blood cells and it was glaringly obvious. Here, I have a video.”
Victoria flipped through her phone. Showed me a video, a close up of my blood cells. I saw a bunch of roundish, pink disks. A bunch of round, blue disks.
I was no Kate in the science department, but even I knew blood didn’t contain blue cells.
“You see them?” Victoria asked.
“I see them.”
“Now watch what happens when we injected some adrenaline into your blood.”
As she said it, a squirt of liquid shot into the collection of red and blue cells. The blue ones multiplied in number.
“What does it mean?”
“I’ve seen this before,” Victoria said, “In demon blood.”
“I’m a demon?”
“I don’t think so. This is something else, and I have a theory as to what. Listen. When I was working at the section, there was a scientist there who was my colleague. A rather brilliant man by the name of Henry Jefferson. One of our projects was trying to create formulas from supernatural blood. We’d been tasked with inventing a serum that would make better soldiers. Stronger. Faster. Tougher. It was the only way we could justify the science wing to the Ministry of Defence.”
“But we could never get it to work. Even Henry, as brilliant as he was, failed. What we’re seeing here suggests someone perfected the formula. It suggests that it was tested on you.”
“What? I think I’d remember someone injecting me with a demon blood cocktail.”
“Not if you were very young,” Victoria said, “Henry had a theory that the reason the formulas we came up with wouldn’t take was because our subjects were too old. So either he or someone else - I think they tested it on you when you were very small. You’re the first artificially created hybrid, Jason. Part human, part supernatural, a product of a science experiment. You’re human, you’re just superhuman.”
Get stabbed by a demon. End up in hospital. Find out you’re an adopted, superhuman secret experiment. Just an average day in my life.
“Since your powers didn’t manifest until you were twelve, whoever injected you would probably have thought the serum failed.”
“Wow, so I’m an experiment?”
“I think so, yes. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I am actually.”
It was weird, but I felt relieved hearing this. All the endless speculations and uncertainties about me were finished. I was a science experiment, plain and simple.
“Uh, well, thanks Victoria,” I said, starting to feel bad about not telling her what had happened in High Wycombe.
“You’re welcome,” Victoria replied, “I’m glad we could solve some of the mystery, at least. There’s a lot more testing to be done of course, we need to find out the extent of your powers, if they’re permanent, any side possible side effects, if we can reverse engineer the formula from your blood. We also need to know who did this to you. This really is just the beginning.”
I looked at the video of my blood cells again.
“Wow,” I muttered, “Kate would love all of this.”
“Kate?”
“Friend of mine. She’s smart, big on science. Especially the weird stuff.”
“Intelligent
girl, is she?”
“And then some.”
“I’d like to meet her,” Victoria said.
“I’m pretty sure she’d like to meet you.”
I suddenly remembered Kate and I were not on great terms right now. Neither for that matter were Dee and I.
How on earth had I let things get this bad between us?
“It’s a shame that can’t happen,” Victoria said.
“What do you mean? Why not?”
“Jason you need to listen carefully. The world we live in, the world you’re now a part of, is dangerous. People get hurt. People die. You’ve seen and experienced this first hand.”
I could guess what was coming next.
“And it’s too dangerous for normal people to get involved in,” I concluded.
Victoria nodded.
“Your family and your friends are important. Putting them at risk is unfair. The only way to protect them is to keep everything hidden from them.”
“Yeah, I get that,” I said, although I had my doubts.
“Good. You can keep the phone by the way,” she said in an offhand manner. It was the latest iPhone. Couldn’t argue with that, “Oh, and Alice sends her best regards and says get well soon. I think she might have a soft spot for you, young mister Storm.”
With that, Victoria left. Mum stayed until visiting hours were done and then decamped to a nearby Bed and Breakfast.
I thought about what Victoria had said and something was bothering me. On the one hand, she had a point about keeping everything from my friends and family. If anything happened to Mum, Kate or Dee because I’d brought this dangerous world to their doorstep, I’d never forgive myself.
So she had a point there.
But there was something more important than that. As bad as it was to potentially put my friends and family in danger, wasn’t it worse for them to be in danger but not know how, or why? If I was involved in stuff that could hurt them, didn’t they have a right to know about it?
The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that was the case.
There was something else, too. All the fighting that had been going on between us all. Weren’t most of the arguments we’d had in the last few days because we’d all been keeping secrets from each other?
Most of the problems between Dee and I were because of the secrets we’d been keeping from each other, and I doubted they were helping my relationship – or current lack of – with Kate. As for Mum – she deserved to hear the truth. Despite what Victoria had said, I couldn’t carry on keeping everyone in the dark with lies and half-truths.
As evening closed in, I reached a decision. I was going to do something I’d never done before:
I was going to tell the truth. All of it, every last detail.
My friends and family deserved that much from me.
I got out of bed. The wound in my stomach had closed up enough for me to move around with minimal pain, and my arm was on the mend. I pulled the drip out and got dressed.
A nurse, doing the rounds, walked in and looked at me in shock.
“What on earth do you think you’re doing, young man?”
“Leaving.”
“You most certainly are not,” she replied, “Get back into bed or I’ll need to have you restrained.”
I finished tying my shoelaces. Stood up. Gave the nurse a long, hard, copyright Major Wilson stare.
“Yeah,” I said, “Good luck with that,” and I walked out.
Chapter Thirty Eight: The Truth about Gingers
Mum didn’t believe a word of it, naturally.
I did my best to explain it to her as she drove us back from High Wycombe to Bridge End, but the more I talked, the less convinced she looked. I told her everything about my weird powers, the demon hound, Section 19. The more I explained, the more focused on driving she became. Eventually she settled on “It sounds like a good idea for a story. I didn’t know you had such a vivid imagination,” and I gave up.
I guess I couldn’t blame her, and rather than digging a deeper hole I let it go.
There were two people who would believe me, however. Maybe if I’d been more open with Kate and Dee from the start things wouldn’t have gotten so out of control. I’d been so busy trying to figure out who I could trust that I’d overlooked the two most obvious people.
I considered including Forrest but the fact was he wasn’t one of my two best friends. Maybe I shouldn’t have shut him out, but I figured I’d tell him later, perhaps.
It was more important to get Kate and Dee back onside, and that would be a lot easier without Forrest’s barbed comments getting in the way.
*
It turned out that Kate knew.
Of course Kate knew.
Mum let me take the day off school, not commenting on my remarkable recovery. I’d called Dee and Kate in the early afternoon. Cautiously asked if we could meet because there were some things we needed to talk about. I guess I wasn’t the only one feeling sorry about our arguments because they both agreed.
An hour later the three of us were sat in my living room. Everything was awkward, none of us could look each other in the eye. Despite that, I pressed on and told them everything.
Kate had known about my powers since we were twelve. She’d seen me push Maxwell across the room that day, seen my strength first hand through a window from the playground. That was the day she’d become convinced a paranormal world existed. Since then, she’d kept a file on me. She’d been keeping files on all kinds of weird stuff. She’d hunted around forums, picked up on strange news items, and kept an eye on me. She’d even spent several months trying her hand as a witch, collecting books on magic and witchcraft and trying to cast spells.
“Nothing happened though.”
“Yeah, there’s a reason for that,” Dee said, “Most of the magic books you’ll find are misinformation, made up rituals and nonsense. Stuff to stop people practising real magic.”
Kate looked at Dee oddly, “And you know what about it how, now?”
“Uh, right, yeah. Nothing,” Dee said, “Never mind.”
He still hadn’t revealed his djinn side to Kate. She gave him a couple of odd sideways glances as she continued to explain. The reason she’d been so mad with me was because I hadn’t told her the truth. She’d wanted me to be honest with her to prove we were friends - and to prove that her belief in the existence of the paranormal wasn’t crazy.
“You’ve got a file on me?” I cut in.
“Jason, god you are so thick sometimes. When did I start hanging out with you and Dee?”
“A couple of weeks after the Maxwell incident.”
“And? Dot dot dot?”
“I dunno, I thought it was because you’d heard a rumour I was tough or something.”
I could see Kate’s hand go for the facepalm again, but she resisted.
I moved on, getting into what had happened at Section 19’s base after the demon hound attacked. Dee held up a finger. He’d been looking puzzled for a while now. He turned to me.
“Wait a minute. What powers, Jayce?”
I looked him dead in the eye.
“Are you actually being serious?”
Dee looked at me blankly.
*
I told Dee and Kate everything, then. Every detail, everything I knew, including the anonymous hacker. Dee, I’m not joking, had absolutely no idea about my powers. I’d assumed he’d known all along when I found out about the djinn side of him. Instead, he’d thought what had happened with Maxwell in the classroom really had been a fluke and had promptly forgotten about it.
The muppet.
I guess we were both so busy trying to keep our own secrets that we didn’t see each other’s.
It took a few hours to go over it all. By the time I’d finished, a lot of things were clearer in my head. Including the need for me to trust the right people: Caitlyn Leary and Deepak Patel, my two best friends.
Dee had been subdued for most of it, Kate asking me th
e questions. At a certain point, though, there was no way for him to avoid being involved in the story. He realised that me telling the truth meant that he had to do so as well and reveal what he was to Kate.
She took it quite well, all things considered.
“Yeah,” I said after Dee had transformed to his djinn form and then back to his human form, “So Dee is a demon...”
“Djinn,” Dee sighed.
“Right, djinn, sorry. Kind of like my guardian angel.”
“Past tense,” Dee said, “That spell is broken now. I’m here because I want to be here.”
“Right.”
Kate was stunned into silence for once. I grinned.
“Yeah, you don’t know everything, Miss Smartypants.”
Kate scowled, “Right, and how long have you known about this?”
“About a week,” I admitted.
“Well, there you go then,” Kate replied in her best ‘case closed’ voice.
Before I had time to think of a snappy comeback, Kate started grilling Dee on the details. It was like a cross between the Spanish Inquisition and a scientific survey. She asked him all the questions I’d asked and then she got into a bunch of things I hadn’t even considered.
Her ‘too stunned for words moment’ had lasted about three seconds.
“So, you’re a genie?”
“Ah, don’t use the ‘G’ word,” I said, seeing Dee wince.
“Right,” Kate nodded, and she carried on with her questions
It turned out that the reason Dee had chosen the form of an eleven-year-old British-Indian kid was simple enough. The original Deepak had been taken by a bunch of vampires that were cruising in the area. Dee, in his spirit form, had been keeping an eye on them in case they were a threat to me. They weren’t. They’d just snatched up the real Deepak – who I’d never actually known - and driven off.
“He’ll be dead by now,” Dee said “I figured, well, maybe I could take his place. You know? His family wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, so I gave it a go. I didn’t expect to end up stuck in this body, only able to shift halfway into my real form for short periods of time.”
Personal Demons Page 16