I checked my phone again, the second time in less than ten minutes, and resigned myself to being exceptionally late for my first official day at the Guild. It wouldn't make a good impression to those who didn't know me, but I couldn't leave the conversation where it was, ignorant to how my father could possibly connect the same plane crash that had killed my brother and mother to whatever had happened to his (presumably) murdered father.
The two events were decades apart, with the only thread to seemingly connecting them being my father, so unless he was out on the streets murdering his relatives for insurance fraud — in which case, I was moving out, post-haste — I couldn't possibly see what they had in common.
"What happened with the crash was an accident." I placed special emphasis on the last word, clicking the front door shut as I ducked back into the house. "I should know. I was there. We weren't shot out of the air by laser beams or — or struck by a bolt of well aimed lightning. Supers had nothing to do with it that time, even if they killed your father."
And, frankly, angry heat bubbled beneath my skin at his attempt to turn an already painful memory into something sinister. Was what happened not bad enough?
"It was an accident," he was quick to reassure, and my anger managed to cool a fraction of a degree, until he added, "but not one as unrelated to Supers as you seem to think."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Have you ever wondered why so many bad things happen to you?" my dad asked, the sentence coming out in a rush, as though trying to be ejected out into the open before he changed his mind about saying it at all. "Why you're always getting hurt in bizarre and improbable ways?"
My bad luck charm.
Tempest's words from yesterday rang in my ears, followed by half a dozen jokes I myself had said throughout my life. Major and minor calamities ran on loop in my mind's eye: the plane crash, the building falling on top of me after Shade's attack, meeting Shade himself, narrowly avoiding being hit by that car after storming away from my ex, being impaled by the sign, kidnapping, the branch snapping on the tree in the forest. The list went on. And on.
And on.
Were those not actually just normal, run-of-the-mill accidents? My dad didn't seem to think so — and he didn't even know about half of them.
Slowly, I asked, "Are you trying to say... that I have a superpower... and that superpower is to be unlucky?" I'd heard of pretty crummy powers, but none quite so bleak. "That I caused the crash by merely being on the plane?" Suddenly, I found myself on the ground, my back pressed against the door and my knees tucked in close, either on the verge of laughing or having a nervous breakdown. Possibly both. Eyes wide, I peered up at my father, simultaneously disbelieving and accusatory. "How long have you suspected this and not told me? Have you... blamed me for what happened all this time?"
"No!" The single syllable tore itself from his throat, and he, seemingly surprised by my conclusion, backed abruptly up into the kitchen counter. "You've got it all wrong. You are like me and your mother. Neither of us inherited an active Thaumaturge gene. Charlie, however, he—"
"Charlie, what?" I looked up sharply, the scalding fire of threatening tears pressing up against the inside of my eyelids. "Charlie was no Thaumaturge. I never saw him do anything Super-like."
Open and closed, my father's jaw worked for several heartbeats to finish what he'd started, silently drawing in breath that refused to fuel his vocal chords. In a strangled whisper that spoke potently of betrayal — his own — he eventually managed to say, "Charlie was the one with the powers, Lily. Not you. If — if he was in a good mood, he might find a hundred dollar bill abandoned on the ground, or ace a test he never studied for by randomly guessing the answers. Everything would go perfectly in his favor. But if he was in a bad mood, people around him would suffer strange, usually minor, incidents, like tripping over shoelaces that should have been triple knotted, or having things spontaneously break when they merely touched them. His ability wasn't very powerful at first, until he hit puberty, when all Super's powers awaken in full force, and even then it hadn't seemed like a problem. It was one of those invisible powers, not at all flashy, and terribly easy to conceal. It took awhile to even convince me and your mother that it wasn't random chance at play. We thought it a subtle enough skill that no one would really notice, and, after what happened with my father, I didn't want Charlie registered as a Thaumaturge, just in case." His eyes took on the distant quality of someone reliving the past and pinpointing exactly where they might have made a grave error. "Then came the day your mom took you all to fly out and visit your grandmother. Later, you told me that you and Charlie had been arguing that afternoon."
I remembered it well. I was eleven and had mastered the art of picking at Charlie's last nerve with almost surgical precision, made worse by the fact that he'd already been annoyed because he wanted to stay home to hang out with his friends over the school break instead of visiting family across the country. Dad had to work that weekend, so he remained behind with the intent of following in a few days, which ultimately served to be his saving grace. Had he come, he almost certainly would have died, too.
"You were arguing, and although that normally wouldn't have been an issue, you were hundreds of feet up in the air where any instance of bad luck could have fatal consequences. Because he never noticed his power — how could he? It was all he'd ever known — and I never told him about my suspicions, he never moderated his emotions enough to control how he altered the fortune of everything around him. I think he must have been in a foul mood, making him attract fouler luck." I saw my father's Adam's apple bob as he swallowed hard against some barely repressed emotion. "Sorry. That's not exactly correct, either. There is... no kind way to tell you this."
My lips pulled deeper into a frown, apprehensive. Everything he'd already said felt like a paradigm shift in my reality as I knew it, so I couldn't imagine what he possibly pegged as being worse. "What aren't you saying, Dad?"
"Charlie... could give others luck, too, you know, not just himself, like an infectious disease if he touched them. It didn't always dissipate when they went far away. And...." a drawn out sigh, "he could also inflict what I called little 'curses' on people if they specifically felt his ire. You can imagine what that entailed."
I saw the full picture coming into frame now, and it made me want to run in the opposite direction. I needed him to stop, to give me time to process everything.
"Wait," I gasped. "Don't say—"
Deaf to my pleas, he plowed on, trance-like. "Of course, you don't need to use your imagination to know how that feels, because he cursed you. It took them over a day to even find you amongst the wreckage. At first, after they identified your unconscious body from the flight registry and told me to get to the hospital right away, and after they told me there were no other survivors," I heard what he couldn't bring himself to say, after telling him Charlie and Mom were dead amongst the rest of the passengers, "I immediately suspected Charlie must have caused it, and those suspicions were confirmed when you woke up from your temporary comatose state to tell me and the investigators what happened. They promptly latched onto the idea that the engines all died — a one in a million chance, they said — but I heard the detail they overlooked. A silly argument between brother and sister caused the crash. Those engines wouldn't have gone out had Charlie not been there. I only hoped that it had been generalized bad luck he projected onto his surroundings, and not specifically targeted to you, the source of his frustration. I already lost the two of them, so I couldn't bare for his curse to continue and take the only remaining family I had left."
Except I had been cursed. Still was.
"Even if it hadn't been the dozens of little complications with machinery in your recovery, I would have noticed the curse in a million other small ways it affects you. I don't think you've ever really noticed all the smaller instances of bad luck that happens to you daily, because, just like with Charlie, it's all you've known for the past seven years. It's become your new normal."
At some point, my head had dropped into my hands, my fingers twining roughly through my hair and digging into my scalp. I hated how much everything he said made sense, like finding a missing piece to a puzzle I hadn't even known I was constructing.
So right, and so crushingly wrong all at once.
My brother was annoyed enough by my childish teasing that he caused a crash that killed all but one of a few dozen people. Even beyond the grave, my brother's powers worked hard to make sure I met the same early end he encountered. The rational part of my brain knew he never wanted me to die, that he had no knowledge of his powers, but the rational part of my brain was also struggling to breathe properly and drowning under the deafening roar of the irrational side.
Really, knowing the cause of everything bad in my life changed nothing if I couldn't fix it.
So why did I feel so betrayed?
"Why didn't you tell me before now?" I asked hoarsely.
My father's expression, Charlie's pointed nose and my full mouth, twisted with pain, and he said, "I didn't want you to think any different of him. I wanted you to remember Charlie as the good brother he'd always been, and not let that image be poisoned by events outside of his control."
"Would you have ever told me had I not gotten onto the Guild's radar?"
He looked directly at me then and said, "I don't know."
No. He wouldn't have. I felt suddenly certain. Maybe I didn't know him as well as I thought I did — today proved that much — but I liked to have thought I knew his avoidant personality well enough to say that yes, he would have avoided this conversation forever if he could have.
Because that was what I would have done, and I got that trait from somewhere. An apple fallen beside its tree.
"If I am the one with the bad luck," I started, struck by a sudden, increasingly morose, thought, "why is it that everyone else died in the crash, and not me? Was I just lucky? Bit ironic, isn't it?"
His gaze fell to the floor near my feet, eyes lowered. "Maybe I'm the lucky one, to not lose you."
And just like that, the bitterest heat fueling my anger extinguished, his meaning a bucket of ice water upturned over my head that left me stiffening from the comparative cold. I could question and quarrel until losing all the air in my lungs, but all that would have succeeded in doing was to drive the dagger deeper — into us both. No answers could ever satisfy me, and, paired with the constant prodding into things he'd rather forget, no good could come of staying in the apartment with him at that moment.
Using the doorknob as a lever to catapult me to my feet, I twisted to face the door and muttered, "I'll be home late, have dinner without me," before fleeing the premises with inadvisable disregard for my surroundings, given all I'd learned about how the world was literally conspiring to make my life as dangerous as possible.
He didn't try to stop me that time. Maybe he respected my conviction as a newly minted adult to make my own informed choices, but more likely I'd dragged him to the emotional end of his rope.
Somehow, I managed to make it to the Guildhall in one piece. The rest of the day passed through me without leaving much of an impression at all, the most notable things being a text from Nicole telling me she'd arrived back in the city from her school orientation and wanted to meet up, and a separate expletive-ridden voice message from Leigh reminding me to pick up a dress for the Gala, which was fast approaching on the horizon.
I couldn't bring myself to respond to either, unable to conjure the words of pretending.