Page 17 of Aberrant Monsters
It didn’t work on me either. I was bound to the fucker.
The door closed behind us and Elina slipped past, pulling her ratty dressing gown tighter around her scrawny frame and soothing back wisps of her graying hair as she led us down the narrow, brown-carpeted hallway crowded with stuff. Boxes were piled against the wall along with stacks of magazines and newspapers, rendering a spacious hallway one barely large enough for a single person to traverse.
The woman was obviously a hoarder. And it got worse the farther into the house we went. I wasn’t a claustrophobic person, but boy did it feel harder to breathe all of a sudden.
Telarion’s presence at my back added to the oppressive feeling of being penned in. I glanced over my shoulder to find him stretched tall and thin to fit down the hall. It would have been a comical sight if not for the fact that he could bite my face off in a heartbeat. He was an otherworld predator, lethal and dangerous, something I needed to remember even though most of the time I no longer considered him a threat.
We stood in the living room, a space that was barely five-by-six due to the furniture and piles of books that inhabited it. A single armchair, a small coffee table, and a TV sat in the center. Elina’s domain, no doubt.
“Well. Let me look at you.” She pursed her lips and studied me from behind thick spectacles she’d donned without me noticing. “Hmmm. Yes, you’ve grown into a fine young woman. Last time I saw you, you were making mud cakes in the garden.”
“You know me?”
“Of course I know you.” She frowned. “Wait, didn’t Frederick send you?” Her frown melted into an “o” of revelation. “He doesn’t know you’re here, does he?”
“No. He doesn’t. I’m confused. How do you know me?”
She clasped her hands together. “Oh, sweetheart, I was your mother’s handler for years.”
“Handler?” My pulse raced as the implications of that word bloomed in my mind. Because only one type of being I knew of had handlers. “Are you saying…Are you saying my mother was a rift walker?”
“One of the best.” She beamed with pride. “Oh, the adventures we had.”
This wasn’t right. My mother had been a checkout assistant at the local supermarket. An unremarkable woman, tired but always ready with a smile for me. She’d make me macaroni and cheese from scratch and tell me bedtimes stories. A melody filled my head. My melody. The one that allowed me to open rifts. Had she had a melody too?
“Amy retired after she had you, though. Gave it up. Honestly, it came as a shock.” Elina sighed. “I didn’t take it too well. I mean, they let her go. They just allowed her to walk away? How could they do that?” She looked up at me as if expecting me to answer.
“I don’t know.” My mind was reeling. “I don’t understand why he never told me.”
She waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, Frederick hated Amy’s rift walking. Dangerous and risky, he called it. They had a huge row over it. I’m not sure of the details, Amy never told me. But they stopped speaking after that. You were three when she left the Order.” She rolled her eyes upward. “Well,leftis the wrong word. She was given a sabbatical to last until you were of age, at which point she’d have to come back. Me, on the other hand, they let go.” Elina pressed her lips together. “Two decades of service and they forced me into early retirement. I begged Amy to reconsider, to come back part-time, but she wouldn’t agree to it.” Her eyes flinched. “You don’t remember me at all?”
A strange buzz filled my head and a hollow sensation opened in my mind, but it was fleeting. “No, I don’t.”
She clasped her hands together and her eyes lit up. “Well, it seems fate has brought you to me.” She waited, blinking up at me expectantly.
This was the moment I asked for her help, but my gut twinged with warning.
Telarion made my decision for me by dropping his glamour.
Elina let out a shriek, hand going to her throat as she backed away and fell into her armchair. “What…Oh, lord. What…” She blinked at him slowly for several seconds, then her hand dropped from her throat. “An aberration. I’ve seen illustrations of your kind. Oh my.” Her gaze snapped to me. “Oh dear. You brought it here, didn’t you?”
Aberration? Is that what they called his kind?
“Him,” Telarion corrected. “Broughthim.”
“What’s an aberration?” I needed to know, to understand, and the manner in which Telarion had gone still and silent at my question told me he felt the same way.
Elina blinked rapidly and shook her head. “That’s an aberration.” She nodded in Telarion’s direction. “That…thing, and you’re bound to it, aren’t you? Frederick knows?”
I wanted to press her on the nature of an aberration, but my gut told me she was clueless. So instead, I nodded in response to her question. “Yes. Uncle Fred knows I’m bound to him.”
She sat up in her seat. “He must be frantic. Hiding you. Trying to find a solution.” Was that a ghost of a smile on her lips? “Amy made a deal, you know. With the Order. You were to be left alone. No rift walker servitude for her precious darling.”
The snide edge to her tone had my hackles rising. “That pissed you off?”
She made amehface. “I admit, it was a bad time. An uncertain time. Rift walkers are rare. To allow one to escape her duty felt unfair to the others forced to remain. But your mother was special. Her skill unapparelled. They needed her and that gave her power. They signed the blood contract saying they’d leave you be.”
All this time my uncle had acted as if he was hiding me from the Order, protecting me, when there’d been a contract in place shielding me. He’d hidden the fact that my mother had been a rift walker and made me believe my abilities were a surprise to him.
