SONS of DON

by Brenda L. Harper

  Gwen glanced over her shoulder, following Morgan’s gaze. “Yeah, well, there have been a lot of lies told and secrets kept. But they thought they were protecting us.”

  “What about my mom? How could she not tell me that my dad wasn’t my dad? All these years, all the things…” He shook his head, tears that had been sitting in his eyes, catching the light each time he turned his head, finally spilling down his cheeks. “Why didn’t she tell me?”

  “It’s possible she didn’t know.”

  “How can a woman have sex with a stranger and not know it?”

  Gwen approached Morgan again, coming close enough to touch his elbow. “If we can do these odd things, don’t you think a full-fledged god might have some pretty impressive magic, too?”

  Morgan’s gaze moved to Cei, so many emotions playing over his face that Gwen couldn’t quite keep up with them all. She moved closer to him, touched his cheek lightly to draw his gaze back to her.

  “This is who we are. We have to face the reality of that and deal with it.”

  “How do we do that?”

  Gwen tilted her head slightly. “I don’t know. Learning how to control our powers seems like a good place to start, though.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Morgan studied her face for a long second before his eyes moved back to Cei, to Rhein. He took a deep, steadying breath before he slowly nodded.

  “Okay. I guess I can do that.”

  Chapter 3

  Gwen closed her eyes and pictured a small, solid knife with sharp edges on either side and a small, solid handle. The hilt was thin and silver, the blade a brighter silver. The handle was made of some sort of bone with elaborate carvings in it. She wasn’t sure where she had seen this knife before or why it happened to jump into her mind at this moment, but it was so vivid that when she felt it in her hand, she was not surprised.

  She opened her eyes and it was there, as solid as any other object she had ever held.

  “Perfect,” Rhein said with some measure of pride in his tone.

  Cei took the weapon from Gwen and held it on the tips of his outstretched fingers, as though testing it for weight.

  “It’s not properly balanced,” he said, dropping it into the soil in front of Gwen. The knife instantly dissolved into a small puff of dust.

  “What do you mean, balanced?”

  Rhein shook his head as Cei walked off, headed to where Morgan was trying to make a dead geranium come to life.

  “When a weapon is unbalanced, it’s hard to predict how it will move during an attack.” He pulled a long knife from somewhere behind his back and held it up for her to see. All she saw was a long knife that sat perfectly still on the tips of his fingers, unlike the knife that had bobbed a little on Cei’s fingers. “This dagger is perfectly balanced, perfectly capable of remaining steady in my hand during a knife fight no matter which way I turn or how quickly I need to jab it. That knife wouldn’t have done the same.”

  “Because it was imbalanced.”

  “Yes.”

  “How am I supposed to make these things balanced? I don’t know anything about weapons, and it’s not like I’m forging them from steel. They just…appear.”

  “But they appear the way you imagine them. If you imagine them balanced—”

  “They’ll be balanced.”

  Gwen shook her head as she wiped her palms on the front of her jeans. “You’re not asking a little much, are you?” she asked as she touched a small patch of dead grass and watched it bloom into vibrant green blades. “I don’t even know where that image of that knife came from.”

  “It came from the earth.”

  Rhein lowered himself to a sitting position in front of her, sitting cross-legged like a child waiting for story time in his kindergarten class. He took her hand and pressed it into the grass at her side.

  “Your soul is connected to the earth. Everyone’s is. But you have the ability to communicate with it. That’s why you’re able to do these things.” He gestured at the patch of grass she had healed. “You just have to block out the outside world so that you can hear the other side a little clearer.”

  “How do I do that?”

  Rhein shrugged. “That, I don’t know. I’ve seen it done, but I’ve never been able to do it myself.”

  “Some teacher you are.”

  “Well, you know what they say: ‘Those who can’t, teach.’”

  Gwen started to sigh, but then she saw the spark of amusement in Rhein’s eyes. She shoved his knee, nearly knocked him onto his back.

  “Are you really sure you’re almost two thousand years old? Because you seem like an immature teenage boy to me.”

  “When you play a role for so long…”

  “Or you just simply never really grew up.”

  “Growing up is overrated. Who wants to be an adult, to pay bills and worry about responsibility, when it’s so much easier to go to school and worry about who’s cool and who isn’t?”

  “Like being a teenager is so easy.”

  “I’ve been both, and, let me tell you, being a school kid—”

  “No, don’t. I don’t really want to know.” Gwen ran her hand over the blades of grass she had just regenerated, the tips of them tickling her palm. “Everyone thinks that being a kid is so easy. But most of those people had two caring parents at home. Or, at least, one.”

  “It makes you feel different, doesn’t it? Growing up an orphan?”

  “Yeah. Knowing that even my parents didn’t want me—”

  “It wasn’t that they didn’t want you.”

  She looked at him, this bubble of hope rising in her chest that she thought she had popped a long time ago. “What does that mean?”

  “Has it occurred to you that your parents might have abandoned you in an attempt to protect you?”

  That bubble of hope turned into a burning ball of anger. Gwen jumped to her feet and headed toward the house, not even aware of Morgan and Cei stopping mid conversation to watch. Rhein came up behind her and grabbed her arm, forced her to turn around and face him.

  “There is still a lot about all this you don’t know.”

  “Like what? What more could there possibly be?”

  “How about the fact that that day Branwen attacked you on the school campus was not the first time she came after you? Or the fact that your father had to fight her off a dozen times before he made the heart-wrenching decision to give you up?” Rhein squeezed her arm between his fingers, her flesh bruising with painful punctuation to his words. “Not everyone is out to hurt you.”

  “If he was trying to protect me, why did he leave me alone in a restaurant parking lot? Did he realize that the wrong kind of people might have found me? Or I might have wandered out in front of a moving car?”

  “Do you really think he didn’t stick around to make sure you were found?”

  Gwen shook her head as she yanked her arm free of his grip. “I don’t think you get it.”

  “I think I get it better than you believe.” Rhein shook his head as he studied Gwen. “Do you really think my life hasn’t been full of grief and disappointment? Can you imagine what it’s like to watch your entire family grow old and die while you stay young and healthy? What it’s like to fall in love only to realize that you will have to leave that woman when she begins to grow old and you don’t?”

  “Okay,” Gwen said, throwing her hands up in a gesture of surrender. “So, we’ve both had a difficult life. But, do you know what the difference is between you and me?”

  Rhein shrugged.

  “You chose your situation. You made a conscious vow to become a servant of the gods. You made a choice with consequences you understood the day you did it. It may not have been easy, and you may have experienced dark and sad things. But you chose that life.”

  Gwen glanced over at Morgan, whose eyes were still tinted red, whose very posture still hinted at the great burden knowledge of his birth, of his very nature, had laid on his
shoulders.

  “Morgan and I…we had no choice. We didn’t pick our parents. We didn’t choose to be demigods, to have these powers and to have a fate we can’t control.” She turned back to Rhein, pressed a finger against his chest. “You chose to outlive your parents, your siblings, your lovers. I didn’t. I didn’t choose to be abandoned by my parents, to live in more than a dozen foster homes, to be neglected and abused, to have my foster fathers come into my room at night and indulge whatever sick fantasies they happened to have.” She waved her hands in the air and a perfectly formed switchblade appeared unbidden in her fingers. “I didn’t choose this.”

  She dropped the knife, and it landed point first in the weather-treated boards of the deck flooring before it disappeared in a puff of dust.

  She walked away, anger making her hands tremble as it took two tries for her to yank open the storm door that led into the back hallway of the house.

  She thought he might follow—Rhein or Cei—but it was pretty obvious after fifteen minutes of pacing in her bedroom, arguments forming and being discarded in her head, that no one really cared about her little temper tantrum. Still angry enough that her hands continued to shake, she pulled herself out her window and climbed to the roof via that thin ladder that led to the narrow widow’s walk up there.

  She found it ironic that a house in the middle of the desert would have a widow’s walk. They were traditionally designed for the wives of sailors who often spent their evenings walking the highest point of their homes searching the sea for their husbands’ return. It’s said that many of them would haunt these walks after learning that their husbands had been lost at sea in the vain hope they might one day return. But there was no sea here. The closest access to the sea was the Gulf of Mexico more than five hundred miles away. Too far to see.

  But, irony or not, this place had become Gwen’s favorite spot to find a few moments of solitude. Despite having her own bedroom for the first time ever, she still felt the need to find a little niche that was all her own. She’d had one in almost every foster home she’d ever been sent to. Once it was a tiny space in the back of a closet. Another was a small space behind a piano in the disused parlor. It didn’t matter where it was, as long as it was somewhere no one else ever went.

  She has some pillows and things up here to make it easier to sit on the hot metal. She pulled it out from under the eaves and sat, pulling her knees up against her chest as she closed her eyes and enjoyed the sensation of the wind brushing against her cheeks. She had always enjoyed a special sort of peace when she was outside. She supposed she now knew why. It didn’t change how comforting it was, how quickly it took the tension from her shoulders and cleared her mind enough that she could look at what Rhein had said without the clouds of emotion.

  Gwen had almost no memory of the night she was abandoned. Paul had described the circumstances to her a few times. She was found by a young couple who had just arrived at the restaurant for a meal. They alerted the restaurant staff, and the police were called. Everyone at the restaurant at the time was interviewed, but no one remembered seeing whoever dropped her off there. The only thing most of the people agreed on was that she had not been inside the restaurant at any time until the young couple found her.

  Rhein had said that her father stayed in the parking lot until she was discovered.

  Where? Was he in a car? Inside the restaurant? Did anyone notice him? Was he one of the people interviewed?

  Why?

  She couldn’t stop wondering why. Why had he abandoned her? If he thought she would be safer without him, how could he leave her alone in a parking lot? Wasn’t he worried that Branwen might come along and take off with her before someone else did? And why didn’t she? If she wanted her dead that much, why hadn’t she come after Gwen when she was her most vulnerable?

  None of it really made sense.

  Like the fact that Branwen didn’t come after Gwen again until just a few weeks ago. Where had she been all these years? Why hadn’t she come after Gwen again, before she was placed in a home with an immortal committed to protecting her? How had she found her now, but couldn’t—or didn’t—find her before?

  There must be something more to all of this. There was something she was missing.

  She lifted a book that had been left on her window ledge a few weeks ago. She kept it up here now, in this little cabinet that sat just under the attic window—the same place where she kept her blankets and pillows—along with a similar book she took from Tony’s office. They were both old, handwritten in some language she suspected was an ancient form of Gaelic, but wasn’t quite sure. She couldn’t read them, but she often stared at the words and tried to recognize patterns that might give her a hint as to the writer’s intention. But the closest she ever came to some sort of breakthrough was the first time she touched the book from Tony’s office and she had a vision of what she was pretty sure was the day her mother was cursed for plotting to kill her husband.

  What kind of a woman does that, anyway?

  She ran her hand over a page in the center of the book, her fingers tracing over the familiar impressions she had touched a hundred times before. She didn’t even understand how these books could exist. She’d been told that Druids—practitioners of the religion that existed during the Iron Age in Wales and was likely originated by the gods of light and darkness whose very existence had just turned Gwen’s life upside down—did not write down their rituals and beliefs. Most of what is known about them comes from observations by the Romans and other conquerors who invaded their lands, observations that were colored by the conquerors’ own religious and intellectual beliefs.

  Whatever these books were, they were either a complete fraud or they could be the only books in existence that contained the truth of the Druid religion.

  Either way, she wished she could read them.

  Patience.

  Gwen opened her eyes, part of her still expecting to see someone standing in front of her. But there was no one there.

  “I’m not good at patience.”

  It is something that can be learned.

  “Maybe for a goddess. But I’m more human than I am anything else.”

  Not necessarily.

  Gwen just shook her head. Although she now knew that she was not going insane, it was still hard to accept that arguing with the wind was not a little crazy. She started to put the book away, but as she began to close the cover, she caught sight of some of the words.

  They were in English.

  She blinked before she opened the book wide again, forcing herself to focus a little more carefully. But it was still there, still the same handwriting, but the words were no longer in unrecognizable Gaelic.

  One must establish a symbiotic relationship with the earth. In doing this, one will be able to communicate freely with the earth. This will allow the human to offer the earth what it requires to nourish it, while the earth can provide the human with its own special kind of nourishment. If this relationship were to become unbalanced, humans might lose their ability to hear the earth’s voice…

  “But…” Gwen muttered under her breath.

  How was this possible?

  But, again, how was any of this possible?

  She looked up into the clear, October sky and shook her head with a slow, befuddled movement.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  Use it wisely, came the simple response.

  Chapter 4

  Gwen held her books tight against her chest as she walked down the hallway, dodging other students as she tried not to get to her French class late. Last class of the day, she always looked forward to French. Not because she spoke the language well—her accent was atrocious—but because it didn’t require an excessive amount of brain power. It was almost like study hall—she often did other homework while only half listening to the teacher lecture.

  Much better than history. She and Cei had presented their project on Blodeuwedd—ironically enough—today. It was humiliating
, standing in front of a room full of seventeen and eighteen year old children who were more interested in making them screw up than listening to their carefully researched project. If not for the extra credit…

  She hoped the drama club had more luck with it than she had.

  She should have known something was up when she spotted Rhein and Morgan outside the classroom door. Neither of them was in this class, so their presence could mean only one thing. Over the last few weeks, Rhein, Morgan, and Cei had somehow become Gwen’s constant companions where she had been something of a loner, never talking to anyone outside of class or sharing her lunch hour gossiping with other students.

  It was becoming a little tiresome, if she was honest. She’d gotten so used to always being alone that she didn’t know what to do with this new sense of comradery.

  “What’s going on?” she asked as she approached them, catching the dark, sometimes downright snotty looks of a couple of girls walking by.

  “We have to go,” Rhein said, taking hold of her elbow.

  “Why?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he guided her back down the hallway, Morgan following them with a dark, sullen look on his face. That had become Morgan’s normal countenance since he first learned of his heritage. He’d come to the Langleys’ a half dozen times the past few weeks, always worked hard at whatever trick Cei was trying to teach him, but he rarely talked and his face always had that same expression. Even when Melanie tried to talk him into coming inside for a glass of milk and some cookies.