“Let me go! What do you want from me?” he shrieked, writhing desperately.
“You are one of us,” Deirdre whispered. “You must join with us or be overwhelmed. The darkness is coming for you. You must join us. It’s your only hope of survival!”
At last he could stand it no longer. “Nooooooo!” he screamed. His open mouth filled with vine, choking him, strangling him.
“Brendan!” He was being shaken. “Brendan! Wake up!”
His father’s voice was calling.
Brendan opened his eyes and looked up into the faces of his parents. Their eyes were filled with concern. He sat up and saw he was in the kitchen. His pyjamas were soaked with sweat, lying cold and damp against his skin. He shivered.
“Brendan, are you okay?”
“Huh? The woman…” Brendan croaked. His throat felt raw. “She’s going to hurt you. She’s trying to get me.”
His parents exchanged a worried look. Brendan blinked away the sting of sweat and looked around him. The vines were gone. Tea dripped from the tabletop where two cups lay overturned. His mother’s favourite china teapot was shattered on the floor beside him. Brendan looked up at his parents again.
“You’re all right,” he said softly. “You’re okay.”
“We’re fine.” Brendan’s mum bent down and pulled his head to her chest. “We’re just fine.”
“It was a dream, son.” His father ruffled his hair, reassuring him. “Everyone’s okay.”
^39 Umpteen no longer exists as a proper number. In ancient times, it was used by uneducated people who couldn’t count past nineteen and so they would refer to anything over nineteen as “umpteen.” The word still lingers on as an idiom that describes a number that is basically uncountable.
^40 The People of Metal is the Faerie name for Humans. Humans have a love for iron, steel, tools, and machines that pound the world into shapes of their choosing. Faeries prefer to use less invasive methods, choosing to manipulate the inner energies of nature to achieve their goals.
^41 Fell in this instance is not the past tense of fall but an adjective meaning dark and dangerous. It wouldn’t make much sense if she suddenly fell down in the middle of a menacing sentence, would it. That would be silly.
^42 And by relish, I mean enjoyment, not the condiment.
A REVELATION
Brendan looked around the kitchen, blinking stupidly. “But… how did I get here?”
“You were sleepwalking, Dorklord,” Delia’s acid voice sneered. “And screaming like a little girl.”
She was leaning against the kitchen doorframe, her dressing gown wrapped around her. Her hair stood out like a tatty halo.
Brendan shook his head. It had all seemed so real… more than real. He still felt the grip of the terror and the sound of the otherworldly music.
His mother released him and stood up. “I’ll get this mess swept up, then we’ll put on some hot milk.”
“Give it to him in a baby bottle, too,” Delia said, rolling her eyes. She left the doorway and went back up the stairs.
Brendan let his father help him to his feet. He still felt shaky.
“I should probably just get to bed, Dad.”
“Sit.”
Brendan looked at his father’s face and saw there was no escape. He pulled out his chair at the table and sat down as he watched his father fetch the milk from the fridge and his mother clean up the mess he’d made.
It seemed so real, Brendan thought. But it couldn’t have been. It was a dream. He winced as the fabric of the T-shirt brushed against his chest. When his parents weren’t looking, he surreptitiously 43 pulled the collar of his T-shirt down and looked at the space over his heart. Where his scar had been for all the years of his life, there was now a patch of reddened, irritated skin. The odd spiral scar was gone. He quickly covered up the mark again before anyone saw.
His father took a seat opposite him as his mother heated the milk in a pan. “We’re worried about you, Brendan,” his father began seriously.
“Dad, I’m fine! It was just a bad dream like you said,” Brendan insisted.
“I don’t know,” his dad said. There was worry plain on his face. “We’ve had a couple of calls from the school nurse. You had some kind of confrontation with a bully at school and you hit your head…”
“It’s nothing,” Brendan groaned, secretly cursing the kindly Mrs. Barsoomian. “I got tagged in the face in Murderball. And I banged my head on a door. Really. I’m just clumsy. You know that.”
His mother sat down, putting a cup of hot milk in front of him. Ever since he was a child, his mother had made him hot milk when he was sick or upset. He picked up the cup and blew gently on the surface of the milk, watching a skin form on the top. When he looked up, both his parents were looking at him with sober expressions on their faces.
“Oh.” Brendan suddenly understood. “Oh, no way! I’m not on drugs or anything. It’s not like that. Besides… how could I afford drugs on my allowance? Huh? Ha!” They didn’t find his joke funny either.
“What are we supposed to think?” his mother asked. “You’ve been behaving so strangely. And your father said you had some kind of episode at the concert tonight.”
“Episode? No! It wasn’t an episode,” he said hurriedly. “I was just… tired and… I don’t know.” He thought back to the concert and how he must have looked. If he’d been watching himself, he would have thought the same thing as his parents. “I was just getting into the music. Really. It’s nothing to worry about. I’m a teenager. I’m supposed to do weird stuff.”
“But we do worry,” Brendan’s father said. “It’s a dangerous world and we want you kids to be safe. You have to be careful.”
“I am, Dad.”
“Well, we still worry,” his mum repeated. “And we think it’s time you knew something. We wanted to tell you before but it never seemed like the right time.” She looked to his dad before continuing. “We’re concerned that some of these episodes might be subconsciously linked to this… situation.”
His mother fell silent. Brendan groaned inwardly. His mother had studied psychology and she liked to use it on him whenever the opportunity arose. Brendan steeled himself for her amateur psychoanalysis. His father reached out and took his mother’s hand, squeezed it. His mother took a deep breath and looked at Brendan.
“I want to say, first, that we love you. I’ve loved you from the moment I saw you, Brendan. You have made your father and me so happy in so many ways.”
Brendan was puzzled. “I love you too, Mum. And you, Dad.” Normally, not even Chester’s tortures would be enough to draw this admission from Brendan, but he sensed this was not like any discussion he’d had with his parents before. He knew this was a time to set aside his usual embarrassments.
“We have tried to give you a good home and a good family. We’ve done everything we can for you…” His mum faltered. “I don’t know how to tell you. But we want you to know the truth.” Her voice cracked.
His father took over. “Brendan, you aren’t our natural child. That is to say, you are our son. You are my son and I love you, but you weren’t born to us.”
Brendan stared in disbelief. “What are you saying?”
“We adopted you when you were a baby.” His mum blurted it out suddenly, her eyes full of tears. “You were so beautiful. Just a perfect little baby boy and we loved you immediately and we’ve never stopped.”
Brendan felt a chill run through his heart. “I’m adopted?”
“Yes,” his father said. “It makes no difference to us, and it shouldn’t to you. You are loved here and no child has ever been more wanted.”
Brendan didn’t know what to say. He sat in silence for a full minute as he tried to find his words. Finally, he said, “Why are you telling me this now?”
His mother took his hand. “We were worried. You are our son in everything but biology. We were worried that you might be having problems that are due to your genetic inheritance…”
“Or even psychologically,” his father added. “Perhaps, on some level, you are aware that we aren’t your biological parents and you’re having… problems because of those suppressed feelings.”