Tallow raised a hand absently and the area around him went still. Douglas stepped closer to his uncle and discovered that, though the wind still rustled the leaves of the trees next to the house, there was a dome-like area around Tallow that was shielded.
Tallow packed the hole in his cane full of crushed purple herbs and rubbed his fingers above it. The leaves began to blacken and glow with heat and Tallow blew gently into the hole. White smoke poured from the end of the staff and Tallow used air magic to guide the smoke up and across the steps and pool in front of the front door.
Douglas frowned. “What makes you so certain that you’ll find blood here? What do you see that I don’t?”
Tallow reached out one hand and snapped his fingers. The smoke disappeared into the old weathered wood. Moments later, dark red stains appeared. Droplets of blood had spattered on these steps and on the porch.
“Okay,” said Douglas. “But all this tells us is that there was blood on these steps at some point. And it’s not that much. It could have come from a kid with a bloody nose.”
Tallow looked back at him, “That’s Asher’s blood.”
A numbing jolt went through Douglas. He stared back at Tallow, his mouth hanging open. “How . . ?”
Tallow stepped up onto the porch and put his hand in front of the door handle. There was an audible click. He reached down and opened the door, then stepped inside.
“That’s . . . breaking and entering, damn it!” Douglas stammered. “What are you thinking?”
“You swore,” Ross observed. He grabbed Douglas’ arm and pulled him up the steps.
Tallow was standing in the entryway blowing more smoke. The old farmhouse was large and drafty. To the left was a stairway that led to the second floor and to the right was an open doorway that looked like it led to an empty sitting room. Directly ahead of them was another stairway that led down into a basement area.
The smoke left Tallow’s cane and snaked directly ahead and across the worn and dirty carpet and went down. He snapped his fingers again and the smoke sank into the carpet revealing the stains of more blood droplets. Douglas shivered at the possibility that these were Asher’s too.
“What if someone’s home?” Douglas asked.
“My magic tells me the house is empty,” Tallow assured him and headed down the stairs.
“Come on,” said Ross and followed him.
“We can’t use any of this evidence in court now,” Douglas whispered. Incredulous that they were doing this, he walked down the stairs.
The basement level of the house was one large room. Sections of it were covered with more of that same worn carpet, but other parts of it were bare concrete. Maybe it had once been storage space. Or perhaps a recreation room. These were the thoughts that went through Douglas’s shocked mind as Tallow’s next plume of smoke sank into the floor, revealing where the trail of blood droplets led and vanished, right in front of a rectangular impression in the carpet.
“It was here,” said Tallow. He shut the handle of his cane with shaking fingers and leaned on it, before saying in a voice thick with emotion, “This is where the mirror stood when it happened.”
“Okay, stop it Tallow!” Douglas said. “Tell me what’s going on! How do you know that this blood was Asher’s?”
Tallow looked to Ross. “Show him.”
“Are you sure?” Ross asked slowly, surprise on his face.
Tallow nodded. “I appreciate what you are trying to do, Detective Ross, but I can’t ask you to keep this secret. Go ahead. Tell him.”
Ross reached into his pocket and pulled out the envelope he had brought back from forensics. He held it out to Douglas and hesitantly said, “Doug, Tallow isn’t your uncle.”
Douglas couldn’t bring himself to take the envelope. He stared at Tallow in shock. “Who are you then?”
Tallow looked back at him and swallowed. “I’m Asher.”
Chapter 23: Asher
“I’m sorry,” Tallow said. “I’m sorry I kept it from you all this time, but there was no way you would have believed me if I had started with the truth. It would have complicated the investigation far too much.”
Tallow stared at his father, anxiety filling him as he took in the man’s emotion-filled eyes. There was disbelief there as well as sadness and both of those emotions were mixed with a hint of hope. An avalanche of thoughts were undoubtedly tumbling through Douglas’ mind. Tallow prepared himself for questions, theories, and accusations. He fully expected the conversation to lean heavily towards the latter.
What came out of Douglas’ mouth was, “This isn’t funny.”
Tallow’s unlikely ally in this conversation, Detective Ross, stepped closer to his partner and shook the forensics envelope at him. “I don’t understand how it’s possible either, Doug, but just . . . look. I took Tallow’s blood sample to DNA the morning I got out of the hospital and I asked them to run it quickly. Ned Jefferson down there owed me a favor and I called it in.”
Douglas didn’t say nothing. He just took the envelope from his partner and pulled out the report. While he read, Ross kept talking.
“Anyway, when I brought Ned the sample, I was certain that Tallow was lying about who he was. Turns out I was right, but just not in the way I thought I was.” Ross swallowed. “When I called down there early this morning, Ned said he had a few more tests to run. Ends up that his test to determine if Tallow was your uncle came up as too close a match. So out of curiosity, he ran it against Asher’s DNA, which we already had on file.”
Tallow was still shocked that Ross had outsmarted him with that DNA test. He hadn’t expected his father’s partner to take such an immediate dislike to him. Once he had realized that it wouldn’t be easy to win Ross over Tallow had been careful around the man, making sure to use magic to smudge all his fingerprints. When Ross had punched him in the nose, he had been too shocked to realize what the detective had been up to.
From the look on Douglas’ face it was obvious that the report confirmed what Ross was saying. Tallow watched his father carefully as the man’s mind whirred, making connections. Surely he would realize that deep down in his subconscious he had known the truth. Tallow had been surprised how comfortable he had felt blending back into the family. Douglas must have felt it too.
Douglas looked up from the document and stepped closer, examining Tallow very carefully, focusing on the wide nose, the eyes, the things that seemed proof that he was a relative . . . “But you look so different.”
Tallow gave him an awkward smile. “Some of that is intentional. I darkened my hair, made it more curly like your side of the family. As for the rest of it, I was still a gawky kid when I left. What can I say? I grew into my body.”
“When you left?” Douglas said.
“When I was taken,” Tallow said, correcting himself.
“You’d better start from the beginning,” said Ross, folding his arms and giving Tallow his patented penetrating detective stare. “There is way too much going on here for us to pick it out of you piece-by-piece.”
Tallow nodded and took a deep breath, steadying himself before he began. “You know how it began. I was investigating Polly’s disappearance on my own. That night when I left Aggie at the house I really did expect to be back. But I was surprised as I tried to break in to the dock. I had lockpicks, by the way. I ordered them online secretly and had them delivered to Aarin’s house. That’s how I had planned to break in.”
“Oh,” said Ross. “I had wondered about that.”
“It was an added piece of evidence that I was going to help you discover, but neither of you thought to question why I thought I’d be able to get in that night, so I didn’t bother to bring it up,” Tallow said.
Ross shook his head slightly. “Did you think that was gonna work?”
“I had practiced with them until I thought I was pretty good at it, but I never got the chance,” Tallow replied. “The van pulled up and a bunch of Spanish speaking men got out and while I was hiding behin
d the dumpster, I was grabbed by a dwarf. I never got a good look at his face, but thinking back on it, I think it may have been our buddy Erl.
“He froze me with a paralyzing rod and had his men throw me in the back of the van. Then they drove away. I just laid there unable to do anything but breathe and listen.” Tallow looked down. “Yesterday, when we were down in forensics. What I said about the vision I had while touching the apple crate? That was a lie. I don’t really have the power to read past thoughts with spirit magic. I’ve heard that some people do. But not me.”
Douglas’ brow was furrowed. “So that deception was just to get us here?”
Tallow nodded. “I had hoped to find the evidence another way. Lead you to it, maybe by finding my blood in the van, but I grew impatient. Those things I told you from my vision, they were my memories from that night. The cicadas, the grass. I couldn’t move and as they carried me all I could see was the ground.”
He gestured with his cane. “This farm house is where they took me. My nose was smashed as the van hit a bump coming down the driveway. I bled all the way up the steps to the house and down to the basement. There was a soft blue light and an aromatic mist and the men who were carrying me threw me into that light.”
Tallow pointed to the floor at the place where the blood droplets ended. “I hit something soft inside the light, my vision obscured until more hands grabbed me and carried me out of the mist and into that other world.”
Tallow could remember that night very clearly. The hands that had grabbed him had been rough, the voices of the new people had not been in Spanish anymore. “I’ve gone over every moment of that night countless times, trying to understand exactly what had happened so that I could try to get home.” He tapped his temple. “It’s burned into my brain.”
“So that story you told me yesterday,” said Douglas. “About my uncle going to the other world and learning magic . . .”
“The beginning of that tale is something I manufactured so that I could tell you part of the truth. Errand Jones never went to Gaiana. When I was brought into the other world, it was as a slave. Dwarf smugglers chained me up and when the magic in the world dissolved my clothes to shreds, they dressed me in rags and sold me to some farmers.”
He spared his father the more awful details. Most of the people abducted from Atlanta had been destined for fancy slave markets where their relative health and soft bodies would make them ideal as pleasure slaves or liveried servants for nobles.
Asher had not been meek enough for that lifestyle. Many of the others had broken down and become submissive quite quickly, but he had schemed plans of escape and his snide comments and attitude despite the beatings they had given him made the dwarves decide to sell him cheaply for manual labor.
“The farmers weren’t as kind as I described them to you, but the rest was fairly accurate. There was a drought and the farm was failing. I had my awakening and called down a furious storm.”
It had been a rough night. He had been huddled in a corner in the farmers’ house as the storm raged outside and listened to them debate whether to kill him or not. Fortunately, they had suspected that the Alberri Mage School would send someone to investigate the occurrence and they decided to free him instead, hoping that the school would give them some money in compensation for the damage his magic had done to their land.
He glanced up at Douglas and could tell by the way his father looked at him that he knew there was more Tallow wasn’t saying. But he didn’t press him. There would be time for more details to come out later.
Tallow cleared his throat. “I was taken to the Alberri Mage School. There I was forced to learn about my magic until I knew enough to avoid causing harm to myself and others. I eventually earned the rank of mage and I was free to do as I wanted. But by that time, years had gone by. I knew that you and Aggie probably thought I was dead, but I wanted to find a way home.
“I decided to stay at the school and continued my learning, hoping to find a way to travel back. I became a full-fledged wizard and after I exhausted everything the wizards in Alberri could teach me, I moved on to the original Mage School in a land called Dremaldria where they had a much larger library and access to wizards far more advanced in their craft. It was there that I became the Wizard of Mysteries and received my new name.”
“How long did this take?” Douglas asked, his gaze troubled. “How many years were you there before you figured out how to come home?”
Tallow hesitated before admitting it. “Just over sixty years.”
Ross’ eyes widened. “Then you’re-!”
“Seventy eight years old,” Tallow replied, his arms spread wide. “I look good, don’t I?”
“That’s impossible,” said Douglas.
“When wizards spend a lot of time around life magic, they age slowly,” Tallow explained. “Eating elf food will make a person live even longer.” Ross’ hand went to his chest and Tallow added, “The small amount you have eaten won’t have that drastic of an effect.”
“Oh,” said Ross, looking somewhat disappointed.
An odd smile spread curled Douglas’ lips. “All this time I was so worried that Asher was dead, thinking it wasn’t fair that I had to outlive my son and here you are, nearly twice my age.”
“Yes. It’s weird,” Tallow admitted. “But I thought you were long dead, so I’ll take what I can get.”
“But if you thought he was dead, why bother coming back?” asked Ross. “I mean, you had obviously built a life for yourself there. What was left for you to come back to?”
“I still had hope that Aggie was alive,” said Tallow. “But you’re right. Eventually, I lost hope of returning. Despite all the research I did on creating magical portals I wasn’t able to discover a way to travel between worlds. I became content with my life and my job and decades went by where I had no intention of trying to find a way home. But then one day I was accompanying the Mage School’s ambassador someplace and we traveled by the use of his magic mirror.”
Douglas glanced at the rectangular impression on the floor where Asher’s blood trail stopped. “You mentioned that a mirror was here.”
“Yes!” said Tallow. When he had seen the soft blue glow and aromatic mist that accompanied the travel from one mirror to another he had understood what had happened. “The mirrors are rare and ancient devices. There were only six made. Three pairs, each mirror a permanent gateway to its twin. The wizards could send the mirrors anyplace by wagon and travel back and forth between them.
“One mirror was destroyed long ago, leaving its twin dead and useless. One set belonged to the Mage School ambassador and he used them to make travel between kingdoms easy and convenient.” He raised a finger. “The third set had belonged to a wizard by the name of Master Flynn who had disappeared a few years before my arrival in Gaiana. The Mage School was certain that he had been killed and that the mirrors had come into the possession of a dark wizard.”
Ross smacked his hands together. “And that’s the set that was used as a portal between our world and theirs!”
“Precisely,” said Tallow. “And I knew that the wizard responsible had enlisted the aid of dwarf smugglers, but I did not know which band they belonged to. My time with them had been brief enough that I never had been able to tell. I realized that this dark wizard had somehow managed to create a one way portal to our world and that he had sent one mirror through, using it to establish a permanent portal between worlds.
“I now had a new avenue of research. In the past I had always gotten stuck because creating a stable portal required an enormous amount of power as well as a complete awareness of where you are in relation to the place you wish to travel to. I relinquished my position as Wizard of Mysteries and traveled around the Known Lands searching for a method of creating a temporary one way portal.”
“And obviously you succeeded,” said Ross.
Tallow smiled. “I was never able to figure out how the dark wizard had been able to send one of his mirrors here, but
I was able to come here by using my own body as the link to return home. I basically sent myself back where I belonged.” He looked at his father. “Like I told you yesterday I had no idea that I would return back to the same time that I had left. I didn’t come back to the same place, though. I ended up in the mountains in Idaho, believe it or not. At some campground in the foothills of the Tetons.”
Ross laughed. “So you ended up coming back to the exact time you left, but in Idaho where you used to live?”
Tallow shrugged. “Yes. It was strange. I thought I would appear in this farmhouse sixty years from now. But following the specifics of the spell, I now understand why I came back to this time. It is when I belonged as far as this world is concerned. I’m still not sure why it would place me where it did. Idaho kind of makes sense if I had appeared in the house where I grew up or at the hospital in Idaho Falls where I was born, but not in the mountains.”
“Where you were conceived,” Douglas said with a slight smile. “Your mother and I always figured it was during that long camping trip we took out near the border of Wyoming after I graduated.”
“Oh,” said Tallow, his cheeks coloring slightly. “I’m glad I didn’t appear at the time of my conception as well.”
“Gross,” said Ross.
“It would have been awkward, yes,” said Tallow. There were time travel ramifications involved in that possibility that he didn’t want to think about. “Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. I spent the night at the campsite and in the morning I found some hikers and discovered when and where I was.
“Then I had a difficult decision to make. I had a chance to make a difference to the people being abducted in Atlanta, but I knew I couldn’t just show up there and announce myself to you. That’s when I thought of Uncle Errand. From my emails with him before I was abducted, I knew that he had resources and could perhaps help me.”
Douglas cocked his head. “What about my real Uncle Errand? Where is he?”
“I’m sorry, Doug,” said Tallow sadly. “But he’s dead.”
Tallow Jones: Wizard Detective (The Tallow Novels Book 1) Page 28
