by J. L. Ray
“Ah, I see our timing is perfect.”
Phil’s smile as he said this was a little too self-satisfied for Anthony’s tastes. He shot the man a glare. Just then, Tooley coughed, and Anthony was hard-put to decide which man he wanted to glare at more, the ancient demon who had the temerity to go home with his daughter last night and show up this morning looking like the cat who’d got the cream, or the silly young man in the wizard’s robe from whom his long-lost baby couldn’t seem to stand to be separated. Adele—well, Berry—sat with her hand obviously held in this O’Toole person’s hand, under the table.
Melly had meant to be more solemn when she met her sister, but she was already working hard to cover a laugh over her dad’s reactions. She jumped up and ran over to Tony. “Hi sis, hi demon! So, Phil, how’s the hook-up biz?”
Phil leaned back as if assaulted. “And I thought that Tony’s verbiage contained obscure dialectic references and colloquialisms.” He leaned forward and gave Melly a hug. The two had bonded during Tony’s hospital stay. Plus, she’d interviewed him for a class and expected an A on that project, so he counted as family for the moment. “If I understand you fully, child, the, er, hook-up biz is booming, thank you.” He turned to the table and added, “Hello Alfred, Mr. Newman, Miss Berry, I believe we did not meet properly yesterday. And O’Toole.” He nodded. Then he went over to Amanda. “My dear Mrs. Newman, the food smells marvelous. May I carry these to the table?”
Amanda gave him a smile warm enough to make up for Anthony’s grimaces. “Of course you may. Thank you, Phil.” She turned to Tony and got a warm hug and a kiss. “Good morning, dear.” She leaned closer and added sotto voce, “Thanks for scooting over so quickly. Sorry about—” she raised her eyebrows in wordless reference.
Oh god, her Mama did not just...“We managed,” Tony replied. She flushed beet-red as she realized what she’d said and added, “To get over here. Quickly.” She stopped while she was far, far behind.
Her mother rolled her eyes. Phil, who was watching the exchange, realized that Tony got that little gesture from her mother. He smiled at them. Turning to the table as he set the biscuits down, he encountered another glare from Anthony. He simply smiled at him as if he didn’t know the man wanted to murder him. How could he blame Anthony Newman for his feelings? If he had a daughter like Tony and an old roué such as himself were sniffing around—hmmm. Perhaps he really should be a trifle nicer to the fellow. He tried to wipe the smile off his face, but after the night he’d had, and then this morning? His smile got a little more beatific and Anthony’s nostrils flared. Oh, dear. That smile just wouldn’t leave him.
In an effort to be kind, he directed his attention to Berry and O’Toole. They seemed very tired. He started to ask about the day’s work, but realizing that most of the people in the room were not meant to hear all of the details, decided to keep his mouth shut. He looked at Tony, who had just pulled a chair out next to him and sat down.
“Good morning,” she said to her twin. She seemed to instinctively realize that Berry felt overwhelmed, and, winking at her mother, she started asking Melly and Fred about school, their latest projects and friends of theirs. The two picked up on her intent and kept it light.
As the family talked, the twins, seated directly across from one another and illuminated by the large back windows, created a startling contrast. Their differences, so obvious in the stark lighting, underscored their similarities. Despite having the same features, eye color, height, and build, their posture, expressions, and gestures were complete opposites. As Amanda had noticed the evening before, Berry held herself tightly, as if always on guard. Her face registered very little emotion, and her gestures were controlled and small, giving as little information to anyone watching her as possible. In contrast, Tony sat with her body splayed wide, her left foot propped up on Phil’s chair as if claiming it and him, and her hand resting on Phil’s collar, playing with his hair when her father wasn’t looking. Her shoulders were back and relaxed, her face showing every passing emotion as she and her siblings caught up. When she was surprised by something Fred said about his best friend, Mike, she threw her arms out. When Melly told her she’d gotten an A on the paper she wrote using Newman’s birth as the basis for the paper, Tony hopped up and went over to hug her.
“Newman?” It was the first time Berry had spoken. Her face was wrinkled in confusion.
Phil answered, “Tony’s partner at the SCIB, Calvin, is an ogre. He and his wife had their—fourth?” Tony nodded as Phil continued. “Yes, that’s right, their fourth spawn, and they named him Newman. The family,” he gestured to the table, “went down to the hospital and sat with the other children whilst Tony helped Calvin and his wife in the birthing room.”
Berry gulped. She had killed several ogres in her lifetime in Fairie. She couldn’t imagine helping to bring one of the big brutes into the world on purpose. Mundania was so different. She tried to keep her face from showing any of the emotions running through her. This group of Natties who claimed her as family seemed absurdly happy about the birth. They were all smiling and even the ancient handsome fae started a long, dull story about dealing with the baby’s urine. She didn’t realize that she wasn’t doing a very good job of controlling her reactions until Tooley put his head next to hers.
“What are you saying?” he asked her in a whisper.
She had been repeating, “Crazy, crazy, this is crazy.”
“Berry?” he asked more sharply, and suddenly everyone in the room was looking at her.
She looked around the room, unable to meet anyone’s eyes for more than a second. “I can’t...I don’t...this is...” She jumped up from the table and ran out of the room.
Tony, who had been watching her twin covertly as she sat at the table, looked at her mother, held up a hand and shook her head, and then followed her twin from the room.
“What did you do to her?” Anthony demanded of Tooley.
“I? I didn’t do a thing!” Tooley was itching for a fight and ready to give it his all. He looked at Mr. Newman and realized that this man would never allow him to be with Berry, that he would do all that he could to keep the two of them separated. If he ever wanted more than friendship with Berry, he would have to kill her father. Power began to swirl around him, and he pushed his chair back from the table and stood, gathering power from the Ounce of Prevention resting on his chest. Just when he was about to let his temper fly, he felt something clamp down on his efflux of energy, stopping it so completely that Tooley felt it quiver in the atmosphere around him. He turned and saw Phil standing by him, smiling at him sardonically and shaking his head.
“My dear boy,” Phil told him, “you may be a very powerful witch, but you are no match for someone of my age and talents. Besides,” he nodded toward Anthony, who had turned a bit green when he realized that he had almost been attacked in his own home, “it is best to refrain from upsetting a new girlfriend. Turning her father into a toaster oven would probably upset Miss Berry, do you not agree?”
Tooley’s shocked face turned to Phil and he grabbed the demon’s arm, whispering to him, “I…I don’t know what came over me. I suddenly wanted to kill him! I would have if you hadn’t stopped me!”
Phil put a hand up to Tooley’s chest. “There is something here…” he muttered. “Something that doesn’t belong.” He reached under Tooley’s t-shirt neck and pulled out the medallion Pernella had made and the amulet that was an Ounce of Prevention. He looked at the medallion from Pernella and quirked an eyebrow, but then dropped it back to Tooley’s chest. The so-called Ounce of Prevention he handled with two fingers, touching it as little as possible. “Why are you wearing a death curse?”
“A what?” Tooley asked. “No, that’s, that’s an Ounce of Prevention. Caridwen gave…it.” His eyes got big.
“Just so.” Phil pulled the amulet from around Tooley’s neck and held it away from his own body. He looked at Amanda, “Do you have some salt? A lot of it.”
“Of course,”
she said, and she ran to the island and reached into a cupboard, bringing up a large container of sea salt.
Phil tossed the amulet into the stainless steel sink and grabbed the salt from Amanda as he moved toward that sink. “Cover your nose and mouth,” he said and then dumped the salt on the amulet. A hissing noise came from the sink, followed by a funk of billowing yellow steam.
“What the Seven Hells was that?” Tooley asked.
“I believe someone wanted you to murder Anthony Newman,” Phil said.
Just as the table’s occupants began to react, a sudden swirling red portal appeared over Tooley’s head. Everyone but Tooley moved away from it, but Tooley recognized his mother’s portal. This manifestation seemed a little wonky compared to her usual smooth rendition, and as he stared up at it, a chestnut exploded out of the center and thwacked him right between the eyes. He dropped like a felled ox, and the room went dead quiet.
Tony walked up to the door of her old bedroom and found Berry there, sitting on the end of the bed. She knocked on the doorframe. “Can I come in?”
Berry looked up, and Tony smiled at her, in part to try to put her at ease, and in part because of the surreal feeling of staring at herself, but not herself, especially with that funkadelic hair.
“Why do you ask my permission? Isn’t this your room?” She had every right to be bitter, but Berry just sounded unsure.
“It was my room. Now it’s not. I am happy to say that when I moved out permanently and got my own place, my folks did not turn this room into a shrine to my childhood.”
Berry didn’t look any less confused.
“Some parents keep their adult children’s rooms just as they were, like a religious shrine. My—I mean, our—folks are a little possessive.” She snorted recalling how Daddy had been poised and ready to smack down both O’Toole and Phil since she’d seen him this morning. “But they were happy to see me grow up and get a life and move out. That’s normal. That’s natural.”
Berry looked less confused but very sad.
“What happened to you is neither of those things, sis.” Tony gestured to the bed, asking to sit by her, and Berry nodded, looking away. Hearing Tony call her sis, as she did the other girl, Melly, made her throat tighten and her eyes burn. She did not wish to show such a weakness. She did not wish to feel this connection. It would only hurt all the more later.
“Berry, Mama kept your existence a secret for twenty-eight years. We all just found out about you a week ago, and only because I started having Visions of you.”
Startled, Berry turned to her. “I saw you! I saw you looking at me.”
“Really?” Tony took her hand and they both gave a start as electric shock washed over their arms. Tony looked at Berry and grinned. “I must have picked up some serious static electricity as I walked in.” She looked down at the floor. “I have no idea why they put wall-to-wall carpet in here. Bare wood is so much better.”
“Static electricity?”
“A build up of...y’know? I’ll explain it later. It’s perfectly natural.”
Berry nodded a bit miserably, aware that the electric shock from touching each other was anything but Natural. However, she wished to explain that as little as her sister wished to explain this static electricity concept.
“When I found out about you, when I saw you? I wanted to go to you immediately, but the Visions were...” She looked down at their hands, so much alike, and tried to find the right word for what she wanted to say. “They almost killed me.”
Berry drew in a sharp breath and her hand tightened over Tony’s.
“Hey, I’m okay. I’m fine. But Mama had to tell us all about you, finally.”
“She had deceived you?” Berry asked.
Tony shrugged a bit. “She carried the burden of the knowledge of you by herself all these years. Daddy didn’t even know, and he was her birth coach. He was there when you were born, but Caridwen made sure that he didn’t remember. Once Mama told us about you, I was chomping at the bit to go find you.” Tony sighed. “The contract made with Caridwen by great, great, y’know, lots of greats grand-mere Euphemia apparently stipulates that any attempt to contact you or rescue you ends with all children in the family dead. Not just you and me and Melly and Fred, but all of our cousins, aunts, and uncles, too. Crap, grandparents, also! All the blood relatives.” Tony grimaced, overwhelmed at the possibilities. Berry’s reaction made it a little easier to forget the grim realities of magic if only for a moment.
“There are cousins?” Berry looked appalled.
Tony smiled over at her. “Hey, little sis, I promise, no large family reunions yet. Cross my heart and hope to…die.” She frowned. Grim reality reared its ugly head.
“How many cousins?”
“Let’s walk away from the cousins issue for now, okay? We have to find a way to circumvent this contract or we’re all dead and you really won’t have to worry about a big family reunion.”
Berry’s eyes got wide. “But you didn’t break it. You didn’t try to find me. We stumbled upon one another.”
“I know, right? But I don’t think Caridwen will see it that way. I hear she’s a real pain in the ass.”
Berry, who had spent her life being tortured and abused by that witch, managed to keep from commenting. What could she say? That the contract had been created specifically to cause this seeming impasse? The burden of her own guilt in the plans Caridwen had for this world made her pull her hand from her sister’s and fold her arms around herself for comfort. This was her opening. Her sister had made it easy for her to do the job she was assigned to do: get Tony back to Fairie with her and to Caridwen’s workshop. But as she drew breath to speak the words, to trick her sister into going back to Fairie with her, she was interrupted.
Tony reached over and pulled her into a tight embrace. “Look, we’ll figure this out. I’m not about to let us all die over some old witch’s contract. Daddy’s a contract lawyer, and he works in Supernatural law now, so he’ll find a loophole. In the meantime, your buddy O’Toole and Phil and I need to get down to the station. We’ve got a Fairie ring to catch.” She pulled back and looked at her sister. “I am so glad that O’Toole got you out before...well, anything else happened to you.” She gave her sister’s back a little rub. “We better get back. Daddy’s giving Phil and O’Toole the hairy eyeball, and I think we’d better save them from that.”
“What is the hairy eyeball?”
Phil stuck his head in the door. “You will have to explain that term later. O’Toole just got a message from Bogart—through a temporary portal that appeared in your parent’s kitchen.”
“What the fuck?”
“Funny—that is exactly what I said. Come on.”
The portal was still spinning in the air above Tooley’s head. He was sitting in the bay window seat behind the dining area, looking at a small piece of vellum that had come from the chestnut while Amanda held a bag of ice between his eyes.
“He can hold that bag himself, can’t he?” Anthony asked, irritated to see his wife wait on the posturing twit who had just tried to kill him. Then he looked up as the twins entered the room and his heart swelled in joy at the sight of the two of them. Phil’s close entrance behind them barely put a dint in that joy.
“Tooley!” Berry rushed over to her friend. She told Amanda, “I’ll hold it for him.”
“Is it safe for either of them to do that?” Anthony asked Phil.
“What, give O’Toole first-aide?” Phil sniffed. “Of course. The compulsion spell on him was set to kill you, not Amanda or Berry.”
Tony did a double take. “I left the room for five minutes, guys! Really? What happened?”
Berry managed to keep her face still as the demon explained. This attack on her father had not been in the original plans. Caridwen must have decided to do this without telling her. Berry choked down her rage at the thought of how Tooley had been used. Then she looked at Mephistopheles. Almost used. Her Master had not counted on Mephistopheles or his
relationship with her twin. If she hadn’t known better, after too many years of having it beaten out of her, she might have found the courage to hope. Instead, she could only be grateful that this aspect of Caridwen’s plans had gone awry.
Amanda smiled at Berry. “Thank you, dear.” She handed the bag to Berry, who sat down next to Tooley and wrapped her arm around him to brace herself. As she did, the portal disappeared, all at once. They all stared for a moment, wordless.
Berry turned her face back to Tooley’s, worried. “What does the message say?”
“It says, ‘Come quick. The bad ladies have found us’.” He turned bleak eyes to the company at large. Then he saw Tony. “Please, please! I have to go get them and bring them across. The ‘bad ladies’ are the Witches Council. They’ll kill my little brother if I don’t get him out of Fairie, him and my mother, Pernella, too!”
Tony nodded and put out a hand. “Hang on. I’m sure Azeem is at the station. Let me call him and see what we can do.”
Tooley grabbed her hand and she almost flinched until she saw the hope in his face. “You’ll still do this, even after...” He gestured toward her father.
“Not your fault, Gandalf. And Phil stopped you, so that means the compulsion is gone. We’ll check with the MP at work as soon as we get there just to be sure.”
Phil nodded to Tony and she walked over to him. “I believe that it may be important to bring both Tooley’s mother and brother over,” he murmured to her. “The second riddle from Naamah in Fairie seems to clearly point out a connection between them and your sister.”
Tony nodded. “I meant to tell Lieutenant Azeem that last night. Crap.”
“You were a little…busy, last night” Phil soothed her, but when she rolled her eyes, he grinned. “Overwhelmed, then.”
“By meeting my sister,” she grinned.
“Of course! What did you think I meant?” he asked her, disingenuously.
