Bad Luck, Baby

21 - Bad Blood

I continued to scowl at him. It felt almost good to have someone besides my father to blame for my misery—someone alive and in front of me, whose guilt I could see—but then Ro squeezed my leg again.

"I'm to blame as well," he said, surprising me. "After your father made it clear we wouldn't be returning to the house, I didn't give you another thought. I just assumed Oscar had made arrangements, and..." He shrugged. "Honestly, I didn't care. I nearly forgot you existed until Oscar gave his final command, and sent me to find you."

"I'm afraid that's how the protection enchantments work, in part. They make you easy to overlook and difficult to focus on. There might be treasure hidden under a rock, but if the rock is uninteresting, no one bothers to turn it over and look beneath."

I felt my expression shift like moving clouds as this sank in. "Wait, so you're telling me the reason I've been passed over, ignored, dismissed, and devalued my entire life... is my dad's fault?"

Al winced. "In part, yes. The spell works with what's already there, of course—with what you believe about yourself—but given how your father treated you... Well, I imagine that's his fault as well."

"Are these spells still on me?" I asked, anger making my voice shake a little. "Because if they are, I want them off."

Al shook his head. "Whatever happened to awaken your power dissolved all traces of the enchantments. About two weeks ago, now, my connection to you snapped as if cut with scissors. Haven't you noticed a difference?"

I was about to deny it, but Ro spoke first.

"That makes some sense, actually," he said. "When I first caught up to you at your father's house, I felt nothing but spite and wanted nothing to do with you at all. But after you came back from fighting the specter, it was like I hadn't really seen you before. Then I couldn't look away. Neither can anyone else, unfortunately."

I frowned as I recalled that both Tobin and Luke had commented on my appearance, and more people had wanted to get to know me in the last two weeks than had in the past decade.

Meanwhile, Al sat up straighter in his chair and fixed his attention on me. "You fought a specter?" he asked.

I shrugged. "I don't know if 'fight' is the right word. This half-solid, giant hyena-looking thing came after me, and I accidentally blasted it with a magic gust of wind, or something. Ro called it a 'specter.' But don't you know all this already?"

Al huffed a self-deprecating laugh. "Hardly. I'm afraid I've been busy on other fronts. I didn't know you were already caught up in this until I saw you at the wedding. What happened, exactly?"

I eyed him warily, and he seemed to guess my thoughts.

"I know I haven't answered your question," he said, giving me his slight, tired smile again. "I promise I will. Just catch me up first, will you?"

As he spoke, there was a soft tapping at the small, grimy window to my right, and Al rose and opened it. A small, green budgie fluttered through and landed on his shoulder, chittering excitedly as it fluffed its feathers. Then it spotted Ro and shrieked, took flight again, and zoomed in circles around the room. Ro tracked it with his eyes, and I got the sense that if he were in cat form, he might actually leap up and grab it from mid-air.

"Peetie, enough," Al said, and held out his finger like a perch. "They're friends."

The parakeet did two more laps before landing on the finger, trembling, and Al transferred it to his shoulder again.

"You must excuse Peetie," he said. "He's young."

"That's... your daemon?" I asked. I knew appearances deceived, especially in this world of shape-shifting familiars, but 'Peetie' did not seem like a particularly impressive specimen.