Awakenings (27 page)

“I’m gonna rip you apart, you piece of shit,” Clyde bellowed. “And not gentle, like before!”

Daniel jumped from the middle stair and landed on his stepfather’s breadbasket. He heard a rib crack, and Clyde vomited the contents of his stomach over his own face. He choked on his own puke as Daniel leaped off him and made for the exit, but not before a hand grabbed his ankle, causing him to fall into the door headfirst. Daniel saw spots and struggled not to black out.

Clyde turned over, ready to get up. Daniel thrust his free foot into the man’s face repeatedly, but Clyde was so drunk, his pain threshold was beyond Daniel’s ability to breach. Clyde exposed his torso as he struggled to stand. Daniel let loose a solid shot to the cracked rib. Clyde yelped and let go. Daniel stood and swung his duffel bag into his foe to knock him down and nearly drove his own cracked rib into his lung in the process. He heard his picture frame crack within the bag.

Rita froze on the stairs. She stared silent and still at the scene unfolding below.

Clyde grabbed the duffel and threw it aside. Then he grabbed Daniel by the throat and dragged him into the dining room. He picked the boy up and slammed him into the dining room table, splintering it. Daniel grabbed one of the broken table legs, swung it, and missed. Clyde caught the piece on the backswing, pulled it from Daniel’s hand, and threw it aside. Then he grabbed the boy by the throat again. The grip was a vise. Daniel clawed and scratched the arm to no avail. He thrashed his hands around trying to find something he could use as a weapon.

He remembered his pin. He unclasped it, bent the pin outward with his thumb and in one swift move jabbed it into Clyde’s left eye. Clyde screamed and stumbled back. Daniel rushed him, blocking into his gut. He heard the rib crack again. They fell backward onto the shattered dining room table with Daniel on top. Clyde became still, almost frozen. His body tensed and then he coughed up blood. Daniel scrambled off and stood back. Clyde’s one eye stared wide in shock. The man looked ludicrous with a Green Lantern monocle pinned to his eye. He coughed up more blood, and that’s when Daniel noticed a section of Clyde’s shirt, pitched up like a tent. A bloodstain soaked into the cotton at the point.

Daniel didn’t need to be an anatomy expert to know that something important in Clyde had been pierced by a shattered table leg. Clyde extended one shaking hand upward toward the boy, but whether this was a plea for help or a last-ditch effort to throttle him was unknown. Clyde peed his trousers. His breathing became shallow.

“Oh God! Oh God!” Rita yelled, unfrozen and running down the rest of the stairs.

Penny waddled into the room. When she saw her daddy on the floor exhaling blood, she began to cry.

“Penny, go into the kitchen,” Daniel ordered. But the girl just stared and wailed.

Clyde tried to roll onto his side but was staked to the spot. His breath was a gurgle, as though breathing submerged. He vomited more blood, but gravity forced it back into his throat. Clyde was drowning on many different levels; his face turned blue.

“Oh God,” Rita repeated, hovering over her husband, frantic, but afraid to touch him.

Clyde convulsed, causing the shattered table leg to slide farther. He was having a seizure. Then as quickly as it started, Clyde just stopped.

He lay there with crimson streams running from him like a mountain in a spring rain.

“Oh my Lord,” Rita whispered hoarsely. “Oh, God…”

Daniel went cold. He couldn’t believe this was happening. It was a dream, a fantasy. Things like this happened on the nightly news to other people.

Daniel went to Penny and got down on one knee. “It was an accident,” he pleaded. “I’m sorry…”

Howling, she pulled away from him.

“Penny…”

“You killed her father!” Rita cried. “You son of a bitch, you killed my husband.”

The accusation shook him. Daniel couldn’t remember the last time Rita referred to Clyde as her husband. For years he had cheated on her, squandered her fortune, basically shat on her, and all of a sudden he was her husband.

“He came at me…”

The boy collected his wits. There would be no finishing high school, no amending his friendship with Adrian, no second chance at Katie Millar, not even a kind word from his mother or his principal at his murder trial about what a good kid he was. His life, if he remained, was over.

Daniel grabbed his cap and jacket off the hook. He had to follow his instincts. After all, they were often correct. Over Rita’s lamentations and Penny’s sonic bawling, he walked out the door and never looked back.

CHAPTER 16

LOSER
2

1

“The rumor is that he’s Athelstan’s bastard,” Seth heard Lelani whisper.

Somewhere between sleep and consciousness, he was vaguely aware of lying on the couch in Ben’s cabana. A pain in his temple throbbed like a tequila hangover, but he felt cheated out of the blissful state that always preceded one. He opened one eye the width of a hair. Cal, Lelani, and Cat sat around the dinette. A balmy breeze blowing in from the dark ocean carried their conversation to his curious ears.

“So, Cal’s instincts were right,” Cat said. “Seth did sabotage the mission. Maybe out of revenge for being abandoned by his father?”

It was true,
Seth thought. He did ruin the mission. But not for any slight against him that he could remember. He still couldn’t remember his life before the arrival. Even the memory of that night was like a lost scene out of a B film watched drunk at 4:00
A.M.
back in high school. They were not a conscious part of him as though he lived the events, yet, he knew that what transpired was fact. The protection spell Lelani mentioned previously might be disrupting his memories of Aandor, but he was sure what he saw in Rosencrantz’s memory enchantment was true. He just couldn’t be sure whether he screwed up as usual or did it on purpose. He hoped it was an accident.

“No,” said Lelani, adopting the unlikely role of his advocate. “Seth never knew who his father was even in Aandor. It would explain his scholarship, though. The nobility often sponsors apprenticeships for its bastards. It’s considered bad form not to. Seth showed no interest for the craft, though. His presence in the school was a source of much speculation.”

“You people have a strange way of running a society,” Cat remarked.

“We saw him use that spell,” Cal said irritably.

“That spell of false memory was prepared by Magnus Proust to superimpose fabricated identities and a working knowledge of English on your memory anagrams. Like a supplement to what you already knew, they were to be transparent memories, allowing you to remember your true origins, while functioning seamlessly in American society.”

“So what went wrong?” Cal said. “What caused everyone to drift away and forget their duties … their very identities?”

I cast it wrong,
Seth thought.

“He panicked,” said Lelani. “Seth should have cast the spell for each of you individually. The parchment was imbued with a specific identity marker for each member. Instead, he tried to cast it en masse and read the initiation line multiple times, once for each member of the party, building up the potency of the spell. It was cast hundreds of times more powerfully than intended. It overrode your memories and submerged your true identities. A massive jumble; you were not even left with the unencumbered history of the fictional personalities that were created for you.”

“They all got amnesia,” Cat said.

“My God,” Cal said. “We’re lucky Galen and Linnea drifted off with the baby still in their arms. If they’d left the boy in the meadow…”

“That was the palace groundskeeper and his wife? Their spell was programmed to have them to act as the infant’s parents, just as Lita and Parham Raincrest were to be Seth’s guardians. The original mission was to find a safe community to blend into, purchase homes close to each other, and raise the boy to adulthood.”

A catastrophic blunder,
Seth thought.

“That idiot should never have been the group’s mage,” Cal said with the sureness of a military commander. “No matter who his father is.”

Seth’s headache grew worse, a pressure behind the eyes that felt strong enough to evict his orbs from their cavities.

“The duke would have sent his whole family across if it were possible,” Lelani said. “There was a time limit and some concerns as to how many souls could be safely navigated through universes at one time.”

“To save both sons, the duke jeopardized the life of the one that mattered,” Cal said.

“We don’t know for certain that Seth is…”

“And the team … all those people…,” Cal continued, lost in his anger.

“Rosencrantz cast that recollection spell across the planet,” Lelani said. “It’s too late for Fronik, but as of this moment, those who are still alive are waking up from a long dream. Now at least they know they might be in danger. If they are true to their oaths, they will attempt to find us.”

The more Seth listened to their conversation, the more it drove the point that
he
had ruined all these people’s lives. Fronik and Tristan were dead. So was his roommate, Joe. How many more were dead because of his mistakes? Was the infant, his possible half-brother, dead, too? Seth always hoped to reclaim the life his amnesia stole. He never imagined there’d be a day when he’d prefer to have his memories begin the day the fire killed his parents. At least in ignorance, the only life he knew to have ruined was his own. He didn’t want to hear anymore about his screwup.

“I don’t remember any life in another world,” he said, in a raspy voice, revealing he was conscious.

“That’s because of the shield protecting you,” Lelani said. “Even Rosencrantz had trouble pulling you into his spell.”

“Lucky me. What I need is a shield to protect me from traveling companions talking shit about me when I’m sleeping six feet away. Ben has eight bedrooms, you know.” Seth glanced over to see their reactions.

Cat looked into her cup as she stirred her tea and Lelani processed him with a detached look. Cal looked fit for murder.

“The captain wanted you in plain sight,” Lelani said.

Just then, Ben and Helen walked in from the beach holding freshly caught fish. The sun was past set, a faint line of yellow lay on the horizon, blending rapidly with the rich indigo sky. “Hiya, folks,” Helen said. “Got us some dinner fresh from the backyard.”

“We’ve already imposed enough,” Cal said. “We should go.”

“Go? Where?” Ben asked. “It’s dark back in those woods up north. I doubt you’d find your car before you froze to death, or worse, maybe run into a gnoll that you missed. Stay the night.”

“Ben, you’re an angel,” Cat said. “We accept.”

“But—” Cal started.

“But what?” Cat cut him off. “Rush back and freeze in the woods? We need sleep.”

Seth could tell who wore the pants in the MacDonnell clan. They’d stay the night.

He retired to the patio, then onto the beach, and used Ben’s campfire to light a cig. The fish were cooking on a spit above the fire, rubbed in spices and salt. They smelled good. The beautiful scenery and the fire’s gentle heat conflicted with his feelings. He headed back into the kitchen. The group around the table ceased their conversation on his approach and remained silent, as though they had run out of words.

Seth exited through the kitchen portal and entered the trailer in New York State. The winter air was more simpatico with his mood. There, among the books and periodicals, Seth sat on the precipice of two worlds. It occurred to him a cigarette among so much yellowed paper might not be prudent. He went outside, where his breath painted a frosty path before him. The winter stars were bright in a way they could never be in Manhattan. Tomorrow would be a new day, but Seth could not escape the nagging revelation about his true nature. He was a loser in two universes.

He had always blamed his nature, admittedly selfish, on his abandonment—on his lack of a loving family. He just assumed no one cared enough to come find him. Life had dealt him a fucked-up hand, so what did he have to be happy about? His dead roommate was right—Seth never put his neck out for anything or anyone. After all, if he didn’t try, he couldn’t fail; and if he never tried, he could never be disappointed. But the last forty-eight hours changed all that. He was a screwup preamnesia, too. He came from a place where he was a part of something bigger than just himself, where he had history, and even this hadn’t prevented him from committing a horrible mistake.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Ben said, coming out of the trailer. He hung a camping lantern on a hook by the door and approached Seth.

“They’re not worth that much,” Seth said.

“How can anyone look at a sky like this and wear such a sour puss?”

“Today I learned that I hurt a lot of people. A helpless baby was lost because of me. Three people are dead.”

“That’s pretty rough.” Ben prodded a fallen branch with the tip of his boot. He considered Seth’s confession.

Vocalizing his blunder made it more real. Seth couldn’t remember the last time a mistake bothered him so deeply. He couldn’t remember the last time he apologized for anything.

“Did ya mean to do it?” Ben asked.

“No!” That sounded more certain than Seth felt. How could he know for sure?

“Then, do better tomorrow.”

“Easy to say. I’m not good at…” Seth lost his train of thought. He didn’t know what he was trying to convey. He was not even certain about his own mind. He was emotionally detached from the events he witnessed, yet felt the remorse of failure. Remorse, like an unchallenged muscle, atrophies without use. It’d been a long time since he’d truly been sorry for actions of his that caused others pain. His role for the life that he knew was that of “the abandoned angry guy,” who watched others get the breaks they took for granted. The world had always been in the position of owing him. Until today.

“I’m not good at anything,” Seth finally said. “I’m not … good.”

“Good?” Ben looked at him as an art teacher studies a student’s work. “What the hell is ‘good’?”