Page 63 of The Fantastic Fluke

That little flush on his cheeks, that odd stance that was so deeply un-Gideon... that was shame. And that could not be allowed to stand. “You jumped to conclusions based on his personality, and if you’d been wrong, believe me, he’d have shouted it from the rooftops. My father never, ever would have allowed someone to malign him for something he didn’t do. And it’s not like he’s gotten nicer in death.”

I put the regular salt down with my growing group of ingredients and returned the other to the cabinet, then went in search of a bowl. When I had it in hand, I realized I was panting like I’d been running or casting the spell to make Gideon corporeal. I bent over at the waist, one hand braced on a thigh, and tried to get my breathing under control.

I looked up to find him standing next to me, eyes soft and concerned. “Sage.”

“We don’t need to read my dad’s notebook,” I told him. It was exactly what I wanted to say. What I didn’t want to say was the next part. “Because I know right where my mother’s murderer is, and I can talk to him.”

* * *

Alan Brahms had beenmy father from the moment of my birth until I was twelve years old. He’d never been on my birth certificate, but he’d been the guy to make hamburgers for my birthday and sing the insufferable song with mom and Beez. The one who helped me with my math homework and tried to answer my plethora of kid questions like “why is the sky blue?”.

As such, it was next to impossible to put those memories next to the ones of the man who had stabbed my mother to death in cold blood. It was impossible for my brain to compute those images as the same, but there Gideon and I were, in the very room where it had happened.

I glanced over at the island I’d had installed in that spot, because I didn’t want to ever stand there. It was easy to imagine Alan, standing right there, laughing, telling me to give the candles on my birthday cake another blow, because the first one was just for practice. And it was equally easy to imagine Alan covered in blood, eyes empty of emotion, standing over where I was plastered against my dying mother’s body, trying to keep him away.

My breath came faster just remembering, like it had that night. I could taste the bile and blood and my own tears, and struggled to catch my breath. What could I say to him? To the man who had been my father? All I had come up with at the time, in my vast childish wisdom, had been, “Why?”

“It has to be done,” he’d told me, voice flat and blank. “You couldn’t understand.”

There hadn’t been a real trial, because he’d pled guilty on every count against him. First degree murder, aggravated assault on a minor... I looked down at the scars on my hands, flexing them and feeling the lines tighten with the motion.

He had hesitated to murder me. It didn’t make what he’d done better—in fact, it only made it harder to reconcile. He hadn’t been out of his mind, or beyond reason. He hadn’t wanted to kill me, so he hadn’t.

I turned back to find Gideon right in my space. “No. You’re not talking to that monster.”

“You don’t think he knows more than my father?” That was odd. Gideon was right there, almost tangible, but my own voice was faraway and faint.

“I don’t give a flying fuck what he knows.”

Heh. Flying fuck. Where had he learned a phrase like that? Surely it wasn’t from his era. Meredith, maybe. I wished I’d had a chance to know her—

“Sage.”

“Huh?”

His mouth tightened and he shook his head. “You forget about that. We’re not going there. I’ll handle the cypher. You make those pancakes. Okay?”

I nodded, or I thought I did. I must have, because a moment later he was gone, and I was alone with my bowl and my baking supplies. The flour was for cakes, and the sugar was some kind of unbleached whatever, but it hardly mattered. I found a recipe, and I made do.

That was the McKinley way.

Well, no.

It wasn’t the McKinley way at all. The McKinley way was a giant table with only two people at it, and tuxedos and “the theater” on Saturday nights. The Bradford way was metallic plates so shiny you could see your face in them, and silent sterile apartments.

It wasn’t even how my mother had taught me. She’d been gone from my life so long that I’d had to figure out how to keep going on my own.

It was the Sage way, I supposed. Use the things you had, do the best you could, and move forward because dwelling in the past didn’t do any good.

And hell, I thought as I flipped the first ugly pancake onto a plate—mine, not Fluke’s—I had more to work with now than I ever had before. I had Fluke, friend and familiar. Gideon, friend and... more. Beez, friend and partner. Iris, arguably the first real family I’d had since I was twelve.

It was so much more than I’d had two weeks before. Why was that frightening?

I shivered at the realization. Because two weeks ago, I’d had so little to lose. Now, I had everything, and it was going to destroy me when I inevitably lost it.

Fluke nosed at the back of my knee, and when I looked down, he whined tentatively, questioningly.

“I don’t know, buddy. I think he went to do something. I hope he’s not bothering Iris.” There weren’t a lot of people he could talk to, and she was the main one who came to mind.

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