by Shannon Page
“I…but…” I stammered to a stop, at a complete loss. Had I stumbled into an alternate universe? Was Gregorio Andromedus actually talking about killing my baby? Or me?
Could Raymond really be the father?
And Gregorio knew this could happen?
“Dr. Andromedus, you and I are both geneticists,” I finally managed. “Humans can’t…I mean, Raymond and I…what makes you think it’s not Jeremy’s?”
He glanced at my right hand. “The ring, in addition to providing you with increased power, has enabled me to perform scans of greater subtlety and precision than I could otherwise have done. I had wondered at your refusal of a contract, and your sudden and peculiar aversion to elderflower wine. Now I understand.”
“I—” I bit my lip and shook my head, thinking about it. Yes, humans were supposed to avoid alcohol during pregnancy…so in theory, my daughter could have that sensitivity as well as the witchly ability to convey that to me. But this was too impossible! “You’re telling me that humans and witchkind can interbreed? And you’ve kept it a secret?”
“It is a fact that has long been known in the highest ranks of the Elders, and by some of the oldest coven mothers. It is a dangerous piece of knowledge, and you must guard it with your life.”
“But…that’s absurd! Gregorio, you and I are both working to increase the fertility of our kind—because we are too inbred. If we can add human genes to the mix—”
“Then in a generation, we will cease to exist.”
I fell silent. So I didn’t “slip,” I thought. Not with Jeremy, anyway. But how…?
Gregorio took a sip of his drink. “We have the powers that we do because we consciously selected for them. Thousands upon thousands of years ago, our human forebears mated the strongest men with the strongest women, generation after generation—anyone with a hint of magical power. They culled undesirable traits and reinforced desirable ones. And in so doing, they built witchkind. Only by keeping magically inert genes out of our mix do we maintain ourselves as a separate species. Yes, it is unfortunate that we seem to have culled out humankind’s easy fertility. But if we allow that back in…we will be diluted into oblivion.”
“So…these children get—what, aborted?”
“Hybrid pregnancy is quite rare, but yes, that is what generally happens. Occasionally one slips through the cracks, as your daughter has. The offspring is often weak, and does not reproduce.”
Because she isn’t capable of it, or isn’t allowed to? But I didn’t ask. Either way, it was not good.
“As you understand, this is not a common problem,” he continued. “I know of only two other instances in the last hundred years. Warlocks who dabble with human women rarely linger long enough to find out what, if anything, has come of their dalliance. And since a witch needs to consciously release her ova—usually, anyway,” he added with a pointed look, “those who choose human bed partners are at very low risk. Why would they waste the egg?”
“You’re right,” I said. “I didn’t.”
“So you say.”
My anger rose. “Yes, I do say. Because it’s true.”
He shrugged. “Be that as it may, there is a half-breed in your womb.”
I shivered at the term. It sounded so cruel, so diminishing of her. And so impossible. “What do you want me to do?”
“You will do nothing.” He looked at me sharply. “And tell no one. Do you understand?”
“Then why tell me now?” I asked. “Why not just let me go on thinking she’s Jeremy’s?”
Now he gave a ghost of a smile. “It is as I was saying earlier, Calendula. You are bright, inquisitive, and powerful. And, even more importantly, trained in this very field. You would notice something unusual, perhaps not until after her birth; you would wonder about it. You would do some tests, and you would figure it out. And when you did, you would go running to Leonora, or Belladonna, or even Jeremiah. I cannot allow that to happen. No one must know.”
I nodded, almost automatically. My head spun.
“Your daughter will likely have very minor powers at best,” Gregorio went on. “This will disappoint Jeremiah terribly, I am afraid. But you can assure him that it is a rare fluke, that such things happen, and that you will be happy to try again. You can even pretend to do some genetic tinkering, if you like. A child actually conceived by the two of you should be remarkable. A force to be reckoned with. And we can find a comfortable, quiet existence for this one.”
He has it all mapped out, hasn’t he? It was bad enough when it was just me. It was worse when Gracie struggled against it. But now my daughter—barely a visible bump, and already relegated to a “comfortable, quiet existence”? My heart gave a painful echo at the phrase: I had used those very words about Logan. But with her, at least, it had been her own choice. My baby was being given no such choice. This was not right.
“I’ll be sure to come up with some pleasant fiction for Jeremy, should the subject come up,” I said, tersely.
Gregorio’s face softened into a kindly, avuncular smile. “Calendula. I do apologize. This must be terribly shocking for you, and extremely confusing. Please, let us speak of it no further right now. I am sure you need some time to absorb the news.” His mouth turned down in a sympathetic frown. “The first time I learned that the world was not as I had been told…I well remember how painful that was.”
I bit my lip again, not trusting myself to speak.
“You will have more questions as time goes on, I imagine,” he continued, rising to his feet. “Please, feel free to ask me at any time. You must speak of this to no one else, but you can talk to me.” He smiled again, offering his arm.
I managed to find my way to my feet without assistance. “And what if I do tell someone else?”
His smile vanished, and his grey eyes grew cold and glittering. “Make no mistake, Calendula: I will contain this problem in any way I need to.”
“I see,” I said, and reached for the minor ley line he’d invited me to use. I stopped at the last moment, turning back to him to say, “Actually, I do have one more question: why can’t you take this ring off me?”
“It enables me to monitor the situation. For the protection of the child…and of you.”
Protection from whom exactly? It seemed our greatest threat was standing right before me. Without another word, I grabbed the ley line and vanished out of there.
I paced the first floor of my house, in turmoil. How could this be true? It was not just the physical impossibility of it—how it flew entirely in the face of all my training, my life’s work. Worse: it was the incredible lie that we were all living under—all of witchkind. Who was in on it? Did my father know? He was a prominent Elder, and a biologist himself. Did Leonora know? How did everyone live with themselves?
My daughter would not live a “quiet, comfortable” life. I knew this all the way down to my bones. Her life would be interesting, rich, fulfilling. I would see to it myself. Nor was she doomed to be powerless, for that matter. I’d already shared my magic with a lump of animated mud, for the Blessed Mother’s sake. What more could I not do for my daughter?
I raged about for a while, rattling the windows and alarming Elnor. Eventually, my rational brain regained a bit of control, and I went to my third floor lab. There, I drew a small vial of my own blood, sonicated it, added witch hazel and elemental protease, then examined the resultant DNA with my Mabel’s Glass.
Gregorio wasn’t lying. There among my own DNA were a number of clearly human strands. I opened my sight further, examining them more closely with witch vision, but I already knew. Non-magical DNA just looks different from ours, energetically. You can feel the energy coursing through it.
The baby had more witchly DNA than human, but…
My human boyfriend had fathered my daughter.
A pang went through me. Raymond and I hadn’t talked since that awkward coffee “taking a break” meeting. How was he doing? Had he started moving on? I missed him still.
Even if I couldn’t tell him about this, I would want to reestablish some sort of contact. He should be in our child’s life, somehow.
Could I never tell him? Or her?
I unthinkingly started to reach for my cell phone, but of course it wasn’t in my pocket. And wherever it was, it wouldn’t be charged up. Besides, what would I say to him anyway?
Blessed Mother, what a situation.
As the night progressed, I realized more and more thoroughly what a trap Gregorio had put me in. And how truly alone I was.
Not only could I tell nobody about this—because he would punish me, I certainly believed him about that—but I couldn’t even let anyone know there was a problem. I’d have to pretend that Gregorio was my kind, loving mentor and father-in-law. Well, father-out-law. I’d have to pretend to Jeremy that this child was his, and pretend to the whole world that she was a full witch.
Would nobody else see? How could this be sustained?
What did this mean about everything else I knew about the world? Was any of my biological training relevant any more? Was this why my research kept stalling out—was I starting from false first principles?
Were the “wild magic” practitioners actually on to something more than I realized?
I sat at the kitchen table, a cold cup of peppermint tea before me, toying with the be-damned golden ring on my right hand. Twisting it around and around on my finger. How much was this thing transmitting to Gregorio, anyway? Why had I ever put it on in the first place? I was too blessed polite for my own good.
Well, I’d had a bit of Mead at that point. But still.
I still couldn’t quite get my brain around the fact that Gregorio Andromedus, my own mentor, my father’s oldest friend, was…not a good man. That he knew such a vitally important thing, and that he was so clearly willing to harm my daughter, and me, to protect this knowledge.
I pointed a finger at my tea to reheat it. It went from cold to steaming to bubbling almost instantly. Yes, my power certainly was increased, with the ring. Yippee.
I sipped the tea as the questions continued to tumble forth, each one leading to the next. Was Flavius Winterheart really behind the departure of my best friend…or did Gregorio know more about this than he’d revealed as well? Had he set Flavius up to have someone to blame and punish? Had Jeremy and I cauterized an innocent warlock?
Had Gregorio stolen the essence?
He had said I could ask him anything, yet I so obviously could not trust him. No one sets up a fall guy just for the heck of it: Gregorio was hiding far more than a crucial fact about our reproductive biology. I would have to find the answers on my own.
I had never felt that I’d fit in terribly well. Long before I’d moved out of the coven house. But that had been minor compared to this. Oh, for the days when my biggest problem was a bitchy coven sister.
I was truly alone.
But I wasn’t helpless.
“Petrana, come over here, please.”
My golem shuffled over from the corner of the kitchen. “Yes, Mistress Callie?”
“We’re going to get this ring off me.” I held out my hand. She took it in her large one. I marveled, as ever, at the cool sensation of her skin, and the life so clearly in it—she was not a natural creature, but she wasn’t an illusion like Gregorio’s serving pixies either.
“What shall I do?”
I turned my hand in hers, positioning the ring between her thumb and forefinger. “Just hold it for now, as we balance our energies.”
Elnor, sensing something, wandered in from the front hall. I patted the table with my free hand and she jumped up, butting my chin gently, purring.
We sat together like that for a few minutes, grounding and focusing. Then I stood up, keeping my left hand on Elnor, and said to Petrana, “Slowly, carefully, we will find the nature of the spell that holds the ring here, and unmake it. Do you understand?”
She stared at me a minute. “Yes, Mistress Callie.”
“Okay. Starting now.” I wondered if we shouldn’t have gone upstairs to my pentacle, but we could always try that if this didn’t work. “Stop if you get confused, or if something seems wrong.”
“Yes, Mistress Callie.”
I switched my vision to my witch sight, letting the mundane kitchen fall away around me. Elnor’s honey-golden energy hummed under my left hand; Petrana’s uncannier golem-force embraced mine as we focused in on the ring, and how it interacted with my finger.
For a long while, it was almost completely opaque to me, as if there were no spell there at all. Just a circle of gold that would not let go of me. I continued to send my vision around, around, around the ring, exploring, touching, probing. Petrana looked with me as we passed our power back and forth, sharing and building; Elnor added her help, supporting and monitoring us.
Eventually, on one pass around, I thought I noticed a tiny edge, no more than a nick of a few molecules. I sped past it before I could stop myself, but returned. I couldn’t find it. I tried again, from the other direction, more slowly. And then again, further narrowing my vision.
“Oh, very crafty,” I whispered, finding my way in at last. The spell was inseparable from the ring itself—the gold was inert, yes, but when the ring had been made, the metal had been spun into the smallest, thinnest “wire” imaginable, then wound around itself hundreds of times before being fused together with more magic than heat. In this way the ring could stretch or shrink to fit any hand, answering only to the magic of its maker. “Old family heirloom indeed,” I muttered. Gregorio Andromedus had cast this ring himself.
Now that we’d found the tail of the wire, so to speak, we could begin to unravel it.
“All right, Petrana,” I started, “just reach in here—”
The next thing I knew, I was on the floor, yelping from a blazing pain that shot all the way to my armpit, with smaller reverberations across my chest. The floor was shaking from a huge crash. Had that been me? Up on the table, Elnor wailed.
Petrana lay on the floor beside me. Or…well, most of her did.
“Petrana!” I scrabbled to my knees and crawled to her. My right hand stung horribly, and my whole arm throbbed, but I was in far better shape than my golem.
Most of her right arm was severed, crumbled into the dirt from which she had been made. The rest of her arm, and half her upper right torso, were heavily cracked. The damage continued down her right leg, though to a lesser degree. No blood or ichor or even water flowed from what would have been her veins. Just soil.
She stared up at me. “Yes, Mistress Callie.”
“You’re wounded!” I cried, displaying even more than usual of my subtle, penetrating insight.
“I am. I may not be of use to you any longer.”
“Of course you are. You probably saved my life there.”
“But my arm is ruined, and I cannot stand. My body is liable to fall apart completely.” It was still jarring, how tonelessly she could say such a thing.
I leaned over her, putting my hands on her chest, sending diagnostic magic through her. I felt brokenness, but in an odd, detached sense.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
“No, Mistress Callie. A golem does not feel pain.”
“Small favors.” I closed my eyes, deepening my exploration of her system. So much damage, all throughout: meridians leading nowhere, nearly every energetic connection ruptured or crushed. And nothing responded to anything I did—I tried to give her some of my essence, but it just drained right back out.
There were no healers for golems.
I was going to have to unmake her. Sudden tears stung my eyes. My stupid golem…it was going to break my heart to “kill” her.
Elnor jumped down from the table and came to us. She had stopped wailing, and was now purring more fiercely than ever. She butted her head against Petrana’s chest.
I petted her. It was sweet of her to try to comfort the golem, but—or, wait. I put my hand on Petrana’s chest where Elnor had nudged her.
&nb
sp; The morganite stone, where so much of her power focused and which I had awakened, was still vibrant. It pulsed almost like a heartbeat.
Petrana may be damaged, and unable to function now…but could I rebuild her?
I got up and went out onto the back stoop, peering down to the tiny backyard below, dimly lit by the porch light. I had intended to start my own magical garden here, but what with one thing and another, I hadn’t yet. The soil was no doubt magically inert, but if Petrana’s essence remained within her, could it still work?
Only one way to find out.
There was a rusty short-handled shovel on the stoop, leaning against the house next to a bent pickaxe and (for some inscrutable reason) a push-mower. I picked up the shovel, went down the short flight of stairs, and tested the soil.
It dug easily enough. I could do this.
I went back in the house. “Petrana, can you get to the yard? Maybe if I help you?”
“I can try, Mistress Callie.”
It was awkward, and my hand still throbbed a little, but together we got her out to the yard. More soil crumbled from her as we moved her, but the morganite stayed intact, and she remained conscious. I had her lie flat on her back, her remaining limbs stretched straight out, in the same position she’d been when I’d created her. Then I started digging.
The topsoil was loamier than the clay I found after a few inches. I squared my shoulders and dug on. If I was going to be this alone in the world, I needed all the resources I could bring to bear. A well-trained and magically fortified golem was nothing to discard lightly.
After a half-hour or so, I paused, wiping my forehead. As I was catching my breath, reflecting on how useful physical labor is for halting the brain-weasels—for distracting yourself, at least temporarily, from the terrible knowledge that the world is not as you thought, that the people you most trusted could betray you so thoroughly, that you are all alone in the world—a sudden thought struck me.
Am I really as alone as it seems?
In our last, awful conversation, Gregorio had told me that he knew about two other “instances” in the past century…two other terminated pregnancies, or two hybrids who yet lived? If so, who were they? And did they know—or did the mothers know? They would have to; how many other witches would have slept with a warlock and a human within a day of one another? They would know they’d only been with a human.
