I kept going up the steps. “Why did you bring me? You wouldn’t even let me do the big water slide at Raging Waters alone until I was almost twelve.”

  She was silent for a long moment. “I had to. The stag said it was required. That I’d need you. I didn’t want to, but the alternative.... The stag said you’d be safe.”

  “Did the stag say to take any other person, or to take me, specifically?”

  She hesitated. “Why does it matter?”

  “Just curious about whether I have a magical destiny or whatever.”

  “You make your own destiny, Lee.” Her voice was low and ferocious. “Grace doesn’t have anything to do with you. You’re my son.”

  Oh, shit. “Mom. Is Mr. Grace my father?”

  “Ugh. I never had sex with Mr. Grace, Lee. He was my boss. It wasn’t like that. He was a thousand years old. Literally.”

  “Well, okay, but what about, I don’t know, artificial insemination then? It’s weird how you never told me anything about my dad.”

  “I’m not sure now is the time to have this conversation, kid, but let me assure you, I did not make a baby in any way with Archibald Grace.”

  “Truly true?” I said. Our ancient formula, our sacred trust.

  “Truly true,” she said.

  Then we were there: the top of the tower. There was a wooden door, banded with heavy iron, like something from a video game about knights and dragons. “You have to open it, Lee,” Mom said. “Or so the stag told me. Maybe I’m too old, or it’s a sexist door, or something.”

  There was no handle, or keyhole, or anything, so I just put my hand on the door, and my hand glowed, or else the door glowed under it? The door shimmered and disappeared like it was a hologram, and there was a cave on the other side. My head hurt, because we were up in the sky, but we were on the threshold of being underground, and I was having trouble reconciling my senses.

  Mom said, “Go on in,” gently, and when I stepped through, my ears popped like I’d just landed in an airplane. I looked at my hand, but it wasn’t glowing anymore.

  The cavern was cool, dripping with water, and Mom stepped in and around me, taking the lead. Three tunnels led off from the central room, and Mom sighed. “A map would be nice.” She reached into the bag and pulled something out—and it clattered on the ground when she flung it away.

  I bent and picked it up before she could stop me: it was a dagger, with a silver blade, and a brassy hilt shaped like a scorpion.

  “It’s alive, it tried to climb up my arm!” she said.

  I showed her the inert knife. “Seems okay now.” I turned toward the tunnels, and the right edge of the dagger glowed. I pointed it at the rightmost passage, and the whole blade shone like moonlight. “No map. But a compass.”

  “I’m going first.”

  She went into the passage, and it was low and tight, barely clearing our heads. There were lots of braches in the tunnel, and the dagger showed us the way every time, sometimes left, sometimes right. It would have been impossible for anyone else to find their way, but after fifteen minutes or so we emerged into....

  One time we went to Hearst Castle, down into the Roman Pool, all arches and marble and tile and frescoes, and this room was like that, except the decorations on the walls here had a lot more tentacles and teeth and waves and nautilus shells, and the waters in the long pool were black and viscous—

  Something broke the surface of the slime, a long serpentine shape the color of mud, but instead of fins or scales it was covered with spines, like a cactus. Mom grabbed me and pulled me close to her, with her back to the wall. “Guardians.”

  Then Mom screamed and jerked away from me and I spun just in time to see tentacles emerging from the wall wrapping her up and pulling her in, like the wall was no more solid than yogurt. Except when I slammed my fists against it, the wall hurt like stone. I stabbed the wall with the dagger, because, well—magic dagger—but it didn’t help. The blade didn’t break, but neither did the wall.

  Then I saw Mom’s bag on the floor at my feet, where she must have dropped it, and tore it open. It gives you what you need, so—

  The bag was empty. Not even magically empty, like a bottomless pit or darkness full of stars, just bare canvas, without even a speck of lint inside.

  The water, or slime, splashed, and I spun around, brandishing the knife, but a long appendage as thick as my arm and covered in spines snaked around the blade. One of the spines poked me in the forearm, making a drop of blood well up. It didn’t hurt, but I shrieked and slashed with the knife. Too slow. The spiny limb avoided me easily and vanished back into the slime... which then shimmered, and sank, the level dropping until the pool was entirely drained, all ten feet of depth. I didn’t see any drains, but within seconds the pool was totally dry, without so much as a puddle of slime, and certainly no spiny monster, inside.

  There were steps on one edge of the pool, leading down, and that seemed like a trap... but the dagger glowed when I pointed it in that direction, and that knife was the closest thing I had to a guide.

  “I want my mother back,” I shouted. My voice didn’t echo. That was so weird. Monsters, walls that eat people, magic knives, okay, that’s all fine, but that’s all extra, impossible things added to the normal. The lack of an echo was something normal being taken away.

  I went down the steps, expecting the waters to close over me, but the knife glowed my way to the far end of the pool... and then a doorway opened, an arch of stone shimmered and vanishing. There was a cell beyond that, no bigger than five feet by ten, and something knelt in the center, all chained up. At first I thought it was a person in a cloak, but then the blade of the dagger brightened, casting hard shadows, and I recoiled when I realized the cloak was alive, a moving garment made of black-bodied insects.

  The prisoner lifted its head, and five eyes of different sizes and colors regarded me, some with round pupils, some with slits, all drifting slowly around in a dark featureless face, like croutons floating in soup. “Come to kill me, blood of Grace?” Its voice was hisses and growls and chirps forced into a semblance of words.

  “What?”

  The thing tried to stand up, but because of all the chains, it only made it to its knees—only they weren’t knees. Its body, revealed by a gap of the insect cloak, was a mass of fur, scales, slimy slickness, and leathery skin, like a quilt made of dead animals. Some kind of horrible flesh golem, stitched together from smaller creatures? It smelled like dead animals, too. “Go ahead, then. Strike. No bargain holds me now, and it is only a matter of time before I escape.”

  “Listen, I don’t understand what’s happening here. Who, what, are you?”

  “I am the safeguard,” it said. “I owed Grace my life, and this is how he chose to use it. He kept me here, a weapon to use against his enemies, a perpetual threat. If they broke their bargains, I would be released, and hunt them, with fang, and claw, and venom, and all my many arts.” It slumped. “But none ever did. They feared Grace—they feared me—too much. And now Grace is dead, else you would not be here, and my life is forfeit. You hold the blade that can end me. Go ahead.”

  I took a step back. “I don’t want to kill anybody.”

  “I have no purpose,” it said. “A creature like me, with no purpose, is too dangerous to let live, boy.” It shuddered and spat, and its spit was living crawling things, that skittered back and rejoined its body. “I speak truth to you, for I have no choice. I cannot lie to the blood of Grace, even to save my own life.”

  Blood of Grace. Did that mean... but Mom said he wasn’t my father, she’d said “truly true,” she never lied when it counted, that was bedrock between us. Wasn’t it? “Do you mean Mr. Grace is my father?”

  “You entered this place and you stand before me, do you not? Kill me. I grow weary of captivity. Kill me, or else, direct me. Imbue me with your purpose.”

  “Wait. I can tell you what to do?”

  “The blood of Grace can make a new covenant. I require a duty.”

  I thought of the games I’d played: Dungeons & Dragons, Magic, countless video games where you could summon fearsome beasts to fight for you. But who did I need to fight with a weapon like this? “What kind of purpose?”

  “I hunt. I kill. Do you have enemies, boy?”

  “Uh.” Define enemies. What, like Kamal, the kid who usually kicked my ass at tournaments? Or dirtbag Kurt at school who’d been giving me shit from third grade on up to ninth and showed no sign of stopping? I couldn’t imagine sending this thing after them. But, wait— “Can you hunt, but not kill? Just find someone, without hurting them?”

  “I can.”

  “I need you to find my mother. I lost her, and—”

  The thing lowered its head again, and its whole body shuddered. “Your mother is dead, blood of Grace.”

  I stared. “I—no, I just lost her, she’s—”

  “She is dead. Killed by the hive-men.”

  I dropped the knife, wobbled, and sat down hard on my ass. I hugged my knees to my chest and started shaking. My heart wanted to crawl out of my body and die. I was falling apart, but part of me was standing apart, some cold cut-off portion of my mind watching, calm. “Kill them,” that far away part of me said, using my mouth to do it. “Kill whoever killed my mom.”

  The creature stood up, the chains snapping like strands of hair. “Ah. I see. You tease me with the promise of a new mission, only to bring me to this end. You are cruel. I should not be surprised. You are the blood of Grace.” The monster reached down with clawed hands, snatched up the knife I’d dropped, and drove the blade into its body, wrenching the dagger back and forth, up and down. The blade blazed with light, and the creature collapsed, reduced to a pile of dead animal parts and unmoving bugs.

  I scrambled away—the stink was worse now—and threw up in a corner of the pool, then crawled up the steps and collapsed on the tile, my face pressed against the coolness. I didn’t understand. The monster said my mother had been killed by the hive-men, and when I told it to seek vengeance, it killed itself, what did that mean—

  “Lee!” My mom’s voice, and the sound of running feet.

  I rolled over, hope and disbelief and fear all bubbling in my unsettled guts, and Mom was there, dropping to her knees beside me, clutching me, checking me for injuries, kissing my forehead, crying all over me—

  “You’re alive?” I said.

  “I’m so sorry, the wall pulled me in, and then I was in this hallway, and I couldn’t get back to you, but there were all these buttons to push and levers to pull and candles to blow out and threads to snap and glass balls to crush, just like the stag told me, so I started doing what I was told, and finally a passageway opened up, and here you are—

  “You’re alive.” I sat up and pushed her away. “Then you’re not my mother.”

  “Lee. What are you talking about?”

  “I know I’m Mr. Grace’s son,” I said. “The... that thing... told me.” I pointed at the rotting pile in the pool, and my mom stared at it. “You said you didn’t make a baby with Grace. And that thing told me my mother was dead. You’re here, alive, so it must have meant somebody else. My birth mom.”

  “Lee, you can’t trust anything you hear in this place—”

  “Truly true, Mom,” I said, voice dead in my mouth.

  She slumped. “I am your mother, Lee. Not your birth mother, okay. But I’ve had you since you were a day old. I didn’t make you out of my body, but I’m still—”

  I scowled. “I know, Mom. Cousin Frankie is adopted. I know that doesn’t make him any less family. I know you’re my mom. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m pissed off you lied to me and I’m trying to understand what’s going on.”

  She reached out to take my hand, and I let her. “I didn’t lie to you, Lee. I left some things out, but... I didn’t know if Grace was your father or not. I wondered, but I never knew for sure.”

  “What, did he leave me in a basket on your doorstep or something?”

  She laughed, a little, tears streaking her face. “No. Fifteen years ago, I was lost, I was working and going on dates and coming home and reading books, but I just felt hollowed out and empty and pointless. I needed to change my life, to find a purpose, but I didn’t know what. One day I reached into that bag Mr. Grace gave me, and I felt something warm, and... it was you. A newborn baby, wrapped in a scrap of a curtain, ash smudged on your cheeks. You’d come from someplace terrible. From some tragedy.”

  An attack by hive-men. Monsters made of dead and broken creatures. One of the killers was kept alive, and forced into service in exchange for that mercy, only to kill itself years later when commanded to take vengeance for the deaths it had caused.

  Mom was still talking. “I always assumed your birth parents were dead, but that Grace saved you, and delivered you into my arms—or else it was the bag, knowing I needed, and didn’t have anything to do with Grace at all. The strangest part was... no one was surprised. People remembered me being pregnant, even though I never was. My friends remembered throwing me a baby shower. Arguing with me about whether it was a good idea to have a home birth. My friend Rachel, the doula, remembers being at your birth.” She brushed hair out of my eyes. “You were the purpose I needed. A family. A child. I felt like kind of a bad feminist, but whether it’s nature or society or just me, having a baby made everything click. It made the other things I did in my life seem more meaningful in context. It’s not like that for everybody, but it was for me.”

  I lay down on my back and looked at the elaborate frescoes on the ceiling. Coiling tentacles and waves and teeth. “I’m the secret son of a wizard?”

  “I know. It’s very fantasy novel.”

  “You said Mr. Grace had lots of kids?”

  “Yeah, apparently. He was alive for centuries, I guess. It’s weird. It’s not like he had to have children—the magic he could do, it would have made birth control pretty easy. He must have wanted kids, but he barely took care of them.” She sighed. “Maybe they were more experiments. Sources of power. Organ donors. Or maybe he just wanted to keep the family line going. Who knows. He’s dead now.”

  “What did he leave me?” I asked. “You said he gave his kids powers. Gifts. Protections. What did he leave me?”

  “He left you me, Lee. He put you into the loving arms of someone who would raise you in safety, far away from whatever horror took your birth mom.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”

  She gritted her teeth. “But, as his executor, I have to tell you... he did leave you something else in his will. I was supposed to give it to you after we finished here, and I think we’re finished. I don’t really understand the point of it.” She rose and retrieved her bag, then reached inside, feeling around. She pulled out a tarot card, old and creased and folded. It depicted a gauntleted fist holding a long sword, the blade topped with a crown and a leafy wreath, all hovering over a mountain range at the bottom of the card. “It’s the Ace of Swords,” she said. “It’s been a long time since I did tarot, but from what I remember it’s a card about intellect and mental power, strength and fortitude, overcoming obstacles, and seeking justice and truth. Maybe it’s, I don’t know, fatherly advice, from beyond the grave? Or maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Like I said, he was losing his mind a little at the end, the dementia of living hundreds of years, maybe.”

  I took the card, and turned it over in my hand. The words “Blood of Grace” were written on the back in what looked like grease pencil, and the words smudged out under my thumb. “Weird.” I remembered the thing in the pool, the way it had needle-pricked me, and drawn a drop of blood—a test, I thought now, to see if I was allowed to enter the pool. If I was a Grace.

  I reached up, squeezed my arm hard, and welled up a drop of blood from the tiny hole. I dipped my finger in the drop, then brushed the blood across the card—

  My mom scrambled away. I held a sword in my fist, heavy and solid, as real as anything. There was a weight on my head—a crown of bright metal, I somehow knew—but when I turned my head, it changed to a wreath of leaves and fines, trailing down my face.

  “Oh, Lee.” My mother’s voice was all dismay, but she was just worried. Of course she worried. She was my mom.

  I flicked my wrist, and the sword and wreath vanished, replaced by the card in my hand again. They only needed a drop of my blood to come back, I knew. “It’s okay, Mom. I don’t have any problems that can be solved by a sword and a crown right now. They won’t help me with my Algebra II homework or getting up the guts to ask Patrick Melrose to the prom.” But someday... someday there might be problems the sword and crown and wreath could help me solve. Obstacles it could help me over come, truths it could reveal, justice it could bring. Justice, and truth. That sounded better than flame and plague. That sounded a lot like a purpose.

  I slipped the card into my back pocket, and reached out my hand to my mom, to help her up. “Come on. There’s still more stuff left on the to-do list from beyond the grave, right?”

  Mom rose, looking at me steadily. “Lee,” she said. “You’re mine, still, aren’t you?”

  “I’ll always be yours,” I said. But more and more, I thought, I was going to be my own, too. And I knew, as scared as she might be at the idea, my mom would approve. “Truly true.”

  Table of Contents

  Death of Grace

 

 

  Tim Pratt, The Death of Grace

 

 

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