by Chloe Garner
There was no room for doubt at all.
“Dad,” she said.
He put out his hand.
“I need to close this to cast on it, and then we have to move really fast,” he said.
“Where have you been?” she asked, blinking. He drew her out of the room by her elbow - the demons on this side were just as frozen as the girls on the other side, and their absolutely-human facial expressions of violent range were terrifying. She looked closely at one of them as her father worked.
“Demons?” she asked. “How can you tell?”
“The fact that they didn’t come through a door helps,” Grant Blake told her. “After that, things get a bit tricky.”
He finished a mark on the door and put his hand over it, and it hissed and sizzled and seeped into the door until it was invisible.
“That will hold,” he said. “I don’t care who they are. Between what you’ve got on there and that… Elsa Beth Harrington will be the only person in the whole school who can open it. They may have to replace the door.”
Valerie shook her head, and he turned to her.
“I need you to be here and not here,” he said. “After this, we move fast, okay?”
Her eyebrows went up, and he put his fingers along her jaw, his index fingers under her ears and his pinkies resting under her chin. He had cool, clean hands, by feel. He spoke words that she didn’t recognize, then slid his thumbs along her eyebrows, lifting his chin.
“Yes. There. Let’s go.”
“No,” Valerie said.
“I’m very serious about this,” he said. “We have only a few seconds.”
“Where have you been?” Valerie asked.
“I give you my word, I will answer that. Just not here.”
Valerie looked him in the eye for a moment longer, then looked at the mayhem in the hallway.
Mrs. Gold appeared to have a three-tongued whip that she was using to chase down a demon who was fleeing her.
“She is scary,” Valerie observed, and Grant Blake laughed.
“You have no idea,” he said. “Come.”
Valerie turned and followed him out of the school.
There was a low, sleek, black car parked out front, still running, and he opened the passenger-side door, looking back at the school as she got in.
“Can’t believe she sent you to Survival School,” he muttered as he closed the door and walked briskly around to the other side, getting in.
“Where have you been?” Valerie demanded as he put the car in drive and accelerated away. The force of it pressed her back into her seat for several moments.
“Doing my job, actually,” Grant answered. “Which is more than I can say for your mother.”
“What do you mean?” Valerie asked. “Don’t talk about her like that. She thought you were dead. I thought you were dead. How are you not dead?”
“I was never dead,” he answered simply. “I just found out that my handler at Council had multiple interests at play, and one of them was putting a lot of people at risk. So I went silent. No one ever said that meant I was dead.”
“It’s been fifteen years,” Valerie said. “Fifteen, Dad. Where have you been?”
“Well,” he said. “If you’re asking why I didn’t come find you, the biggest reason is the same as the reason that your mother ran away and hid. To protect you. The lesser reason is that your mother is incredibly good at what she does, and I never could find you.”
There was a tone of humor, there, and he glanced over at her.
“I wish I had gotten to see you grow up,” he said. “I can’t tell you how bad I wish that. But after the first few years, honestly, you just accept it and get on with things.”
“You didn’t think about me,” Valerie said.
“No,” he said. “I did. All the time. But… I didn’t think about finding you. I…” He sighed. “I don’t think you’ll understand until you have a child of your own, how much I missed you. But you were safe and with your mother, and I was trying to keep people alive.”
Valerie sat lower in her seat.
“Mom thought you were dead. I know she did.”
“I don’t expect she did, actually,” he answered. “She couldn’t know, but we talked so many times, back in those days, about what it would be like if one of us died, what we would do, the things that were likely to kill us… It’s war, honey. People die all the time. But your mother and I are nigh-on unkillable.”
“Then why didn’t she ever tell me you might be alive?” Valerie asked.
He looked over at her, pressing his mouth.
“You’ll have to ask her that,” he said. “I can think of lots of reasons, but I don’t want to poison anything by putting them all out there. Whatever they were, I know she had good ones.”
“Where are we going?” Valerie asked.
“Someplace safe,” he said. “Going to be a couple hours, if you want to get some sleep.”
“You think I can sleep after that?” Valerie asked, and he grinned, watching the road.
“I always could,” he said. “And so could Susan. But you do what you like. The car is just about as safe as it gets, but I’m going to be pushing it all the way there to try to make sure that no one catches us. We have a lot to talk about, but it will wait for morning.”
Valerie paused, shifting to put her head against the door.
“Would Mom be happy to know that I’m with you?” she asked.
She was actually sleepy. Imagine that.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s been too long. I genuinely don’t know.”
Her father woke her up to walk her into a small house in the midst of a forest. It smelled humid out, so she hadn’t gone that far, and the house was lit, though not excessively. He took her to a bedroom with limited furniture, but it smelled clean - particularly the bed - and Valerie went back to sleep easily.
The next morning, she woke up confused, with violent dreams that had troubled her sleep all night.
It took her several moments to remember where she was, then she was out of bed, following the sound of food preparation in the small kitchen.
“Where were you all this time?” Valerie asked, going to sit on a stool.
“Doing my job,” he said, not turning to look at her. “Good morning. Did you sleep well?”
“No,” Valerie said. “What does that mean, doing your job?”
“It means lots of things,” Grant said. “How do you like school?”
“They all hate me and wish I wasn’t there,” Valerie said. “When did you look for us?”
Her father turned around from the stove, pushing half a skillet of scrambled eggs onto a plate, then picking up a pair of salt and pepper shakers and putting the plate plus the shakers down in front of her. He went looking for another plate.
“The last time I went looking for you would have been about five years ago,” he said. “There was a lull where they weren’t watching everyone as close, and I could sneak out and back in again without them noticing. I never did find you, though. Why don’t they like you at school? I would have imagined you would be very popular, if only for political reasons.”
“Because I can’t do magic,” Valerie said, opening her mouth to ask her next question, but he put a sharp finger up.
“What do you mean you can’t do magic?” he asked.
She shrugged.
“Mom never taught me. I didn’t know it was even real until she sent me to school and disappeared.”
He blinked at her, setting the skillet down on the counter.
“What do you mean your mother never taught you magic?”
Valerie shook her head.
“Don’t know what to tell you.”
“You did magic,” he said. “I read it off the door. It was yours.”
“I… Yeah, I kind of do that. Can you tell me what it means? No one really says a lot, other than calling me a natural and trying to make sure I don’t make any more bombs.”
“Bombs,” he said
flatly. “Your mother…” He shook his head, bracing his hands out on the counter to either side and letting his head hang. “You should have been one of the most gifted magic users the Council had. Why would she stunt you like that?”
“Don’t talk about her like that,” Valerie said. “You weren’t there.”
“I wasn’t…” he started with temper, then he shook his head. When he spoke again, his tone was much more even. “I don’t know what she was thinking. Maybe by the time you were old enough for her to start teaching you, she’d made up her mind to raise you civilian. I don’t know. What I do know is that you have an enormous talent, and they are squandering it at that school. Even Light School wouldn’t know what to do with you.”
“They’re doing their best, Dad,” Valerie said. “There is a war going on, you know. And you still haven’t told me what you were doing all that time. I mean… You’ve been spying on the Superiors for all that time… Not ever talking to anyone on the Council? Are you even on our side anymore?”
“Sup…” he started, then closed his eyes as if counting his temper back down again. “That’s what they’re calling them, at this point? Superiors?”
Valerie blinked, feeling very sarcastic and defensive and very much wishing she knew more of what was going on.
“So?” she asked. “Isn’t that what they call themselves?”
He sighed.
“There is a faction who call themselves The Pure. They believe that people shouldn’t mess with magic because it’s dangerous, unless they are capable of functioning at a very, very high level. There is a group who believe in non-propagation. That families that have magic should be allowed to continue to use it, but that we should not be teaching it to civilians anymore. There are the separatists… I swear, the Council are their own worst enemies. They’ve driven more families into our side than anything The Pure ever did…”
“Our side?” Valerie asked.
“Do you know what the Council does, Valerie?” Grant asked.
“Run a war?” Valerie asked, tart.
“They control,” Grant said. “I don’t approve of what The Pure are trying to accomplish, or what some of the non-propagationists are willing to do to help them, but the Council… They aren’t the heroes in this story. They tell people who they are, where to be, how to act… They expect the magic community to report in to them any time they even change location, and they’re working on a magic census where everyone is expected to report their specific skills, so that the Council can use them as they’re needed. They draft people into a war that they don’t have a stake in, and they expect them to die protecting civilians, even as they have their own families to think about. They threaten families… Tell me something, how did they ultimately get your mother back into the war?”
Valerie considered this for a full minute before she answered.
“Threatened her,” she finally said. “Mom wouldn’t go unless they put me into school.”
He shook his head.
“Why on earth did she pick Survival School?” he asked, his tone different - less serious.
“Because Mr. Jamison was there, I think,” Valerie said.
“Alan,” Grant said. “Ah. Yes, that does explain it.”
“Did you switch sides?” Valerie asked. “Are you and Mom fighting each other, now?”
He shook his head.
“No. Never. We just… We’ve seen different things. Has she had any contact at all with the magical community since she hid the two of you?”
“What do I know?” Valerie asked darkly, then shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
He nodded.
“Then she may not know the worst of it. I still fight against the really bad Purist tactics, but… It’s about balance. They aren’t all wrong. Sometimes they make some very strong points.”
“But they’re in league with demons,” Valerie said, stumbling onto a strong point. He nodded, coming around to sit next to her. She wasn’t sure if she wanted him there, but… That was her dad. Surely he wasn’t evil, right?
“It’s complicated, honey. I… I’ll tell you the truth, okay? Promise. There are things I can’t tell you, but I’m not going to lie. I know demons. I like some of them. They’re… fun to be around… There are demons out there who are all blood and pain and fear, but there are others who just… It’s better to be here than in hell. You know?”
“They’re just glad to be here?” Valerie asked mockingly, and he shrugged.
“They’ve taught The Pure a lot… I mean a lot about magic… It’s seductive. I can’t deny that…”
“Do you do dark magic?” Valerie asked.
He nodded.
“Sometimes. When I need to.”
Valerie shifted away.
“I don’t even like that they’ve got ingredients that are more dark than fifty percent, there at the school,” she said.
He tipped his head back and laughed.
“That’s right,” he said. “I hadn’t… I’m sorry. I don’t know what they’ve done to my daughter… Hidden her away somewhere or something, but I thought that everyone could see through that kludge at this point. It doesn’t make sense does it? The whole percentage-dark-light thing? And… Debbie Reynolds is teaching the plant-magic there, isn’t she? That’s what I’d heard. I know for a fact that Debbie uses the light-natural-dark theory configuration in her casting, because she’s always been way too effective at it. If it weren’t for the fact that your grandmother is such a crotchety old witch…”
“What now?” Valerie cut in.
“What now what?” Grant asked, stabbing his eggs and chewing at them.
“Light natural dark Mrs. Reynolds, grandmother witch?” Valerie asked.
He sighed.
“You have… I can’t believe she didn’t teach you anything. The old-school way of evaluating magic and its components was on the light-dark scale. Anything that wasn’t light was dark. And they were forever moving things up and down the scale, trying to weight certain components as more significant than others, in order to explain how spells worked out… It was a nightmare. Dozens of witches and sorceresses spent their entire lives categorizing things… And it doesn’t help understand how things work. It’s just an assignment of value, which means nothing to anyone except the old guard at the Council who think that anyone who dips below the fifty percent mark is evil, and some of the pretentious idiots at Light School.”
“Okay,” Valerie said slowly. “And what’s the new-school thing?”
“There are three branches of magic,” Grant said. “Light, natural, and dark. Natural can work with light or with dark, but you have to be quite clever to make light and dark go together. It’s really unstable and reactive, when you do, and most of us use a natural magic buffer in order to get the three to play. This is one of the things that the non-propagationist crowd found out from the demons when we first started making contact with them, what forty years ago, now.”
“You’re learning magic from demons?” Valerie asked.
He hesitated.
“Yeah. Here’s the thing. Demons only rarely lie. I mean, they lie all the time, but it’s always leading up to some really big, important deception. And the way you get away with a big deception is by telling the truth almost all the time. There’s an art to figuring out what’s true and what isn’t, when you’re getting information from a demon. But. They know so much more about magic than we do.”
“Dad,” Valerie squawked. “You’re learning magic from demons.”
“Just how to understand it,” he said. “And, objectively, the system makes more sense, doesn’t it? People have aptitudes in the various kinds of magic… There’s nothing objectively lesser about having gifts in natural magic instead of light magic, but the kids with light magic get to go to the best school, while the kids with natural magic go to Survival School or… worse… and try to get along with one hand tied behind their back by only using the subset of their components that have been rated ‘less dark
’. It’s idiotic.”
“What about dark magic?” Valerie pressed. He shrugged.
“That’s up to you,” he said. “I use it. It’s powerful, and useful, and I’m fighting a war. Your mom would never touch it. Not for anything. But. Keep in mind that it’s a gift to even be able to decide, if you can. Most of the magic community… most of the world… they only have the knack for one of the three. I don’t even know if you’re a mage. Could be you’re stuck with natural like the rest of them.”
“How would I know?” Valerie asked.
“Entrance testing,” Grant said. “At any one of the Separationist schools. Any one of them.”
“Okay,” she said slowly. “And my grandmother?”
He nodded, finishing off his eggs and sitting back.
“I don’t even know who remembers it at this point, but Lady Harrington is your mom’s mom.”
Valerie stared at him, and he grinned, lifting his head as a door behind her opened.
“Gemma,” he called. “Come meet Valerie.”
Valerie turned to find a stunning woman coming in through the front door.
“I told you this was a bad idea,” the woman said. “You really thought you could steal her out from under Lady Harrington’s nose. Now you’ve got everybody looking for you, and someone managed to track you here. We need to go. Now.”
Valerie looked back at her father, who pressed his lips, then nodded.
“All right,” he said. “All right. I’m not going to apologize. They would have killed her.”
The woman looked at Valerie for a moment, then shook her head.
“Better her than us,” she said. Valerie raised her eyebrows.
“Who is this woman?” she asked.
“Don’t talk about her like that,” Grant said to the other woman.
“Look, I get the hope that this is going to be your happy little family again someday, I get the sentiment of it. But we’re keeping people alive. She isn’t. The world needs us more. And you… Dammit, Grant, you’re going to get us killed.”
“All of this is for nothing, if they kill her while I’m off saving the world,” Grant said. “I thought you…”
“Nope,” Gemma said, cutting in. “I’m not. We need to go. I’m serious. The wards on the house are jangling and I don’t know how much longer they’re going to hold.”
