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
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.