Page 13 of Spellbound
“He wasnine?” My mind was reeling. I tried to put myself in Richard MacGregor’s place, and I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t even imagine how he must have felt.
“They kept trying to probe Asher’s mind, but they didn’t have any luck. They brought in a child therapist and even a hypnotist to try to figure out exactly what happened. Asher just kept saying that it was his power that had caused her death, but that was all he’d say. No one wanted to admit it was possible for a child to deliberately kill his own mother, and one or two of the magistrates from other districts wanted him punished in some way. Some blamed my son Richard and thought he should have known something was wrong with Asher and intervened before it was too late. A few even called for Asher to be...”
“Be what?”
Her face crumpled.“Put to death,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Executed for the crime of killing a mortal.”
“But that’s not right,” Rosalyn exclaimed. “He was a child. How could they think that was any kind of justice?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think they tried to justify it. He had so much power inside him and no idea of how to use it properly. It frightened them. He didn’t seem to have a real sense of right and wrong. Opal never spent much time with him, and my son had been gone so often. A practitioner who goes off the rails has to be stopped, no matter what. Even I knew that.If he’d been an adult who had refused to answer questions and didn’t provide any kind of excuse…who refused to say why it had happened… that person would have been locked up and more than likely, they would have been killed. There would have been no question. But no one had any real appetite for doing that to a young child. They finally compromised and agreed to bind his power and wipe his memory of the event and then reassess things when he was older.”
Rosalyn shook her head. “It still seems ridiculous to me. A nine-year-old child? He was clearly in shock. There are so many variables. So many questions.”
I shook my head. “I’m sure they did the best they could. I can’t imagine that anyone wanted to imprison him or…even worse.”
“No, a few of the magistrates did. They said they felt very sorry about it, but they thought it was the only way to be sure it never happened again. The ones who advocated for it said committing murder for gain or revenge was warlockry and it could behabit forming. They said he might grow to like it too much and become irredeemable, and that maybe something was wrong inside him—inside his brain. It was like they thought he was a bad seed, because for them it was unnatural to kill your own mother, no matter how old you were.
I’d seen the reports. His behavior had been erratic. And he had so much power it was frightening to all of them, I think. He showed absolutely no remorse at all at times, and then it was like someone flipped a switch, and he’d start crying and asking for his mother. Sometimes it would happen within the same hour. They said they had to find a solution that would ensure he’d never do anything like that again. And still, it took two of them to control him when they bound him.”
“And there was no sign that anyone else had been in the house recently? Someone he might have known?”
Rosalyn broke in, frowning at me. “She’s already said no. Don’t you think you’ve asked enough questions, Ben?”
“No,” I replied coldly. “Janet, do you feel like going on? I only have one more question.”
She nodded. “Yes, go ahead.”
“Did he ever mention his mother again to you after that day?”
“No. Not that I remember. My son did bring in child therapists, who never seemed to help him.”
Janet fell quiet for a while. She had told the story calmly enough, but I could see that her hands were trembling now, and the retelling had taken a toll. “My son was devastated,” she said. “Almost destroyed by what happened. He agreed to do the binding and held Asher in his arms while it happened. And he never mentioned even so much as the idea of magic to the child again. He sent him to me in Atlanta to get him away from that house. As for Asher, it’s not anything he ever talks about now. By the time he reached his teens, and his friends would talk about Harry Potter, Asher would say it was all foolishness and not real. He started saying that magic was nothing but a lot of…well, he’d cuss and say terrible things.”
She dabbed at her eyes with the back of her hand and sighed. “My son rarely came around anymore. I’ve always thought he never really recovered from what happened. I think that may have been why he made such a careless mistake a few years later and got himself killed.” She shook her head. “Everything about the story was tragic.”
I reached over to lay a hand over the one still clenched in her lap. “Yes, it is, and I’m sorry I had to ask you to retell it, but I wanted to understand. The power inside him has become unstable after being bound for so long, and it’s fighting to get out. Something has to be done soon, or I think it’s going to start leaking out of him, whether he wants it to or not, or it might evenburst out unexpectedly. I can’t let this slide, Janet. I feel as if something is going to happen soon, and when it does, he’ll need some help navigating things. That’s where I come in, because I won’t let him go through this alone. If it’s the last thing I do, I need to find out from him exactly what happened to him when he was a child.”
Chapter Five
“I know of witches who whistle at different pitches, calling things that don’t have names.”
~ Helen Oyeyemi,White is for Witching
When I went back upstairs, I couldn’t stop myself from looking in on him to make sure he was all right. He was lying sprawled on his back, with one foot, a small one for a man, hooked around the quilt on the bed. I walked closer to him and let my hand fall to it, turning it toward the light from the hall to make sure of what I thought I’d seen—blue nail polish on the nails of those cute little toes.
I had only realized I liked men as well as women when I reached my late teens, and it took me a while to come to terms with the idea of being bisexual. Asher, on the other hand, was openly gay.
He had painted his damn toenails, for fuck’s sake, and I knew that after seeing them, those dark blue toenails would probably feature in some of my fantasies for a while.
A memory came to me out of nowhere, unbidden and unwelcome. Years ago, not long after Rosalyn had taken me in when my father passed away, was when I’d first seen Asher MacGregor. I’d almost forgotten it until just now. It had been the fourth of July, and Rosalyn had people over to celebrate. The house was full of her friends and family all weekend, and one of those people had been her older sister, Janet, who had brought along her grandson, a boy of around seventeen. They had come for the all-day picnic and wouldn’t be staying long. I’d been down at the swimming hole, at a nearby creek at theback of Rosalyn’s property with Rosalyn’s youngest son, Alex. The women were putting out the fried chicken and potato salad and deviled eggs on picnic tables nearby, while some of the men were grilling hamburgers and hot dogs and making ice cream in an old-fashioned ice cream churn that you had to crank by hand. Some of the boys and little girls were playing and splashing in the creek.
Asher had been wearing cutoff jeans with nothing on underneath them. Everyone knew that because the damn things had a big hole in the crotch, showing off things it shouldn’t have. His cousin Alex had just laughed and shook his head and didn’t seem to think too much of it, because there were only other boys swimming there. As for me, I had a hard time looking away, and my face had flamed up bright red when I saw him. He mostly stayed in the water, but after a while, he’d crawled out on a flat rock to sun himself, facedown, thankfully, though he was showing the plump curve of his little ass. Finally, his grandmother came to spread a towel over his bottom, and she whispered something in his ear that made him sit up and wrap the towel around his slim waist.
I’d almost forgotten that day. I sure tried to put it out of my mind, because he was likeseventeen, and I was twenty-one or so, way too old in my mind to be thinking about some teenager. They’d left soon after that and I hadn’t seen either of them again until earlier tonight on the road. In fact, I’d forgotten about it until just now. He’d had hot pink toenails that day, I remembered, and I’d been both fascinated and appalled by them.
Soon after, I started the project to remodel my dad’s old house, doing most all the work myself. It came along pretty well, but slowly, because I had my real job to take care of too. I had just started as a magistrate and I was busy learning and studying the laws of the Council, and the language of magic spells, anarchaic, obscure language only known to practitioners. I was going to some classes taught by the Council as well. Anyway, between the two, I didn’t have a lot of time left over to worry about pretty little boys that were way too provocative for their age and who needed to learn how to put some damn clothes on. I just realized I’d put that incident completely out of my mind.
I left him sleeping and went back into the room I used on the nights I decided to stay at Rosalyn’s. I still kept a few things in my old bedroom, in case Rosalyn was having a bad day, and I might need to stay. About an hour later, after playing around on my phone, I took a shower, turned off the light and went to bed. I had the windows open for a breeze and the sound of rain on the metal roof soon soothed me to sleep. Lightning was flashing outside the windows and the old window frames rattled with the thunder of a pop-up storm, and the rain pelted down. It wasn’t long until I was deeply asleep and dreaming about him.
