Page 19 of Strange Familiar

Gabriel glanced back and forth between Nic and Alise, able to sense the powerful magic being held at bay like an avalanche stopped in time, but without the necessary expertise to know what it meant. It was a mark, of what a very different wizard Gabriel was that he followed Nic’s lead with perfect trust and no questions.

“I will not allow this,” he informed Elal, silver daggers manifesting in the air to surround the older wizard. He tucked the disconsolate Bria against his chest, muscular arms wrapped in a firm shield around her.

“Then I take custody of the child,” Elal crowed with sparkling delight.

“That remains to be seen,” Gabriel replied with such eerie menace that Alise didn’t know how her father withstood it. “In the meanwhile, I can take your other eye, and then begin carving off pieces until there’s nothing left of you. I defeated you before, Elal, and I will do it again.” The daggers spun silently, several aimed at Lord Elal’s remaining eye.

“I’m in the prime of health this time,” Piers replied with easy confidence, “and in the fullness of magical reserves. And I have nothing and no one to protect while you have…” He made a show of looking around the ballroom. “Why, I suspect that every soul that matters at all to you is in this room right now. How many of them are you willing to sacrifice? Perhaps I should start with your sweet mother.”

Daisy screamed and it was all Alise could do not to look. Gabriel visibly shuddered with holding himself in place.

“Stop this,” Nic shouted, the order lashing out, garnering her father’s immediate attention. Daisy stopped screaming, though Bria still wailed against her father’s chest.

“Excuse me,” Lord Elal said, giving Nic a blank, polite smile. “Do I know you?”

Nic’s upper lip curled in contempt. “You just love to disown your children, don’t you, Papa? It’s the last bit of your crumbling control you try to exercise and it just kills you that it doesn’t work. That you have to resort to this horrific charade.”

“It’s no game,” he warned her in kind. “I will see this through. I will win.”

“Is that all that matters to you?” she asked, almost wistfully.

“It’s all that matters, period,” he answered with conviction. “You’ll learn that someday.”

She shook her head. “No, I used to believe that—because you taught it to me, to us,” she added, glancing at Alise. “But I’ve learned better. You could have been invited here, could have had contact with your grandchild, been part of her life, by simply being human. But that’s beyond your ability isn’t it? You have to control everything and everyone.”

“I’m a wizard, not a human,” he spat at her. “If you hadn’t utterly failed to become the wizard you were meant to be, you’d understand that.”

“I am a wizard,” Alise inserted, surprising herself—and having to straighten her spine when her father’s ire turned on her. “And I don’t understand why you’re such a monster. How could you summon a malevolent spirit to fasten onto your granddaughter like that? You would ruin her life before it even began.”

“True,” he replied thoughtfully. Too mildly. Something very bad was coming, verified by her father’s spreading smile. “Because you’ve raised such a salient point, Daughter, I’m willing to entertain a third option. I’ll withhold my gift in exchange for a favor. My daughter—my wizard daughter—will return to House Elal with me, to be trained as my heir.”

A stunned, fraught silence thickened the already dense air of the now stuffy ballroom, pierced only by Bria’s increasingly frantic wails.

Then: “No,” Gabriel and Nic said in unison.

Alise had known they would because they were just that good. And because they were, she knew her own answer had to be just as easy, firm, and nearly as fast.

“Yes,” she said.

And her father smiled in such triumph that she knew this, too, had been part of his plan all along.

~ 10 ~

Days flowed by seamlessly while Cillian devoted his entire attention to untangling the folded archive. Though he still smarted at the personal sacrifice asked of him by his house and family, he was ultimately grateful to be the one to do this investigative work.

Though he’d never admit as much to his grandmother.

Not that she inquired or seemed to care. Appearing satisfied that he’d meekly knuckled under, that he was making no attempts to even bend the limits she’d set, that he was not even so much as mentioning Alise in passing, Lady Harahel went about her usual business. Which meant that most of the time, she assumed her persona of doting grandmother, clucking over her seedlings in the greenhouse and her grandchildren equally. The only difference, really, was that Cillian recognized the persona for what it was. It was particularly diabolical in that her cheerful grandmotherly ways were absolutely sincere and authentic. They simply masked the ruthlessness she generally disguised.

So, on the surface, House Harahel returned to the quiet, scholarly peace that he’d known all his life. Like his grandmother’s layered persona, that gentle rhythm of days spent reading, writing, and contemplating was real. None of it was a lie. But it concealed other realities like a gilded mask. Cillian learned his lesson from it all, and showed only his own surface persona: dutiful, scholarly, content to be in the bosom of his house, entirely focused on the academic problem set before him.

Learning from his grandmother’s example, he disguised the raging beast Alise had brought to life within him. Though he longed for her with such profound need that he felt as if part of him starved into nothingness, he never said her name or truly allowed himself to give her much thought. Only at night, when he lay in his childhood bed under the quilts his grandmother had made by hand, did he allow himself to embrace the aching loneliness her absence created.

He craved her sexually, of course, fantasizing that her hands and mouth pleasured him, evoking memories of their intimate times together so often that the moments grew thin and tattered, like pages rubbed too many times between eager fingers, blurring the type and fraying the paper to transparency, eventually ripping holes in the text. He began handling those precious memories like rare manuscripts, touching only the edges and saving the best parts for when he most needed them. He also found the House Harahel copy of The Saga of Sylus and Lyndella, reading that to soothe his aching heart, finding over time that he read it less and less for research and more for the sheer romantic escapism.

Thus he partitioned his nights and days, his private and public selves. By night, a bereft lover, beset by unrequited longing and heart-rending doubt. By day, he conducted himself with calm certainty, unraveling the web of enchantments binding the archives, picking apart the strands with meticulous tenacity. In both cases, he remained almost entirely alone. Lady Harahel determined that the twisty enchantments binding the folded space to be a potential danger to House Harahel, decreeing that Cillian would be the only one to work with it and only in a room shielded for that purpose. When Cillian had arrived unconscious, carrying the immense and invisible burden of the folded archive, the other wizards of House Harahel had been able to take it from him and place it in a shielded salon, but no one had been sure what it was, so they’d isolated and left it. Now, with the door warded and keyed only to himself and Lady Harahel, Cillian spent his days alone.

He supposed he was fortunate his grandmother hadn’t made him live and work in a barn.

---