feast.
“The Ward is broken,” the woman’s voice intoned. “Now you will know your true nature! You will live among the People of Metal no more. You shall come to the Fair Folk!”
Brendan spun around to find Deirdre standing in the hallway behind him. She was tall and dire, filling the doorway. Her face radiated an aura of strength and authority. She spoke, and her voice was as irresistible as a hurricane, as inevitable as an earthquake. “The People await you. Your true family awaits you. You will return to us! You must be prepared before it is too late. There are those who wish to harm you. They will try to turn you to a dark purpose.” She reached for him.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Brendan shouted. “I’m with my family! Who wants to harm me? You’re the one with the crazy vines and the creepy little, scar-eating thing! Why should I listen to you?”
“You must listen,” Deirdre demanded. “I don’t wish to frighten you. I wish you to understand!”
“No,” Brendan whimpered. “Leave me alone.” He backed away, tripping over a snarl of vines. He had to escape. “Mum! Dad! Help me! Don’t let her take me!”
Scrabbling against the clutching vines, Brendan hauled himself hand over hand into the kitchen. He pulled free of the clinging tendrils with a final heave. He grabbed the edge of the kitchen table and pulled himself to his feet. He gasped in horror.
His mother and father sat at the table with a pot of tea and a plate of biscuits between them. The vines had completely engulfed his parents. His father’s head lay on the table, his mouth open. Leafy fingers clawed down his throat. His mother sat with her head thrown back, a mass of crawling leaves engulfing her. The only part of her that was recognizable was her left hand, where her wedding ring glinted in the silvery light.
“No!” Brendan screamed. “No! Let them go! Let them go!”
A thick root twined around his foot and jerked him off balance. He crashed to the tile floor of the kitchen as vines swarmed hungrily over him, enveloping him, pinning his limbs uselessly to his sides. The vines wormed their way up over his shoulders…
“Let me go! What do you want from me?” he shrieked, writhing desperately.
“You are one of us,” Deirdre whispered. “You must join with us or be overwhelmed. The darkness is coming for you. You must join us. It’s your only hope of survival!”
At last he could stand it no longer. “Nooooooo!” he screamed. His open mouth filled with vine, choking him, strangling him.
“Brendan!” He was being shaken. “Brendan! Wake up!”
His father’s voice was calling.
Brendan opened his eyes and looked up into the faces of his parents. Their eyes were filled with concern. He sat up and saw he was in the kitchen. His pyjamas were soaked with sweat, lying cold and damp against his skin. He shivered.
“Brendan, are you okay?”
“Huh? The woman…” Brendan croaked. His throat felt raw. “She’s going to hurt you. She’s trying to get me.”
His parents exchanged a worried look. Brendan blinked away the sting of sweat and looked around him. The vines were gone. Tea dripped from the tabletop where two cups lay overturned. His mother’s favourite china teapot was shattered on the floor beside him. Brendan looked up at his parents again.
“You’re all right,” he said softly. “You’re okay.”
“We’re fine.” Brendan’s mum bent down and pulled his head to her chest. “We’re just fine.”
“It was a dream, son.” His father ruffled his hair, reassuring him. “Everyone’s okay.”
^39 Umpteen no longer exists as a proper number. In ancient times, it was used by uneducated people who couldn’t count past nineteen and so they would refer to anything over nineteen as “umpteen.” The word still lingers on as an idiom that describes a number that is basically uncountable.
^40 The People of Metal is the Faerie name for Humans. Humans have a love for iron, steel, tools, and machines that pound the world into shapes of their choosing. Faeries prefer to use less invasive methods, choosing to manipulate the inner energies of nature to achieve their goals.
^41 Fell in this instance is not the past tense of fall but an adjective meaning dark and dangerous. It wouldn’t make much sense if she suddenly fell down in the middle of a menacing sentence, would it. That would be silly.
^42 And by relish, I mean enjoyment, not the condiment.
A REVELATION
Brendan looked around the kitchen, blinking stupidly. “But… how did I get here?”
“You were sleepwalking, Dorklord,” Delia’s acid voice sneered. “And screaming like a little girl.”
She was leaning against the kitchen doorframe, her dressing gown wrapped around her. Her hair stood out like a tatty halo.
Brendan shook his head. It had all seemed so real… more than real. He still felt the grip of the terror and the sound of the otherworldly music.
His mother released him and stood up. “I’ll get this mess swept up, then we’ll put on some hot milk.”
“Give it to him in a baby bottle, too,” Delia said, rolling her eyes. She left the doorway and went back up the stairs.
Brendan let his father help him to his feet. He still felt shaky.
“I should probably just get to bed, Dad.”
“Sit.”
Brendan looked at his father’s face and saw there was no escape. He pulled out his chair at the table and sat down as he watched his father fetch the milk from the fridge and his mother clean up the mess he’d made.
It seemed so real, Brendan thought. But it couldn’t have been. It was a dream. He winced as the fabric of the T-shirt brushed against his chest. When his parents weren’t looking, he surreptitiously 43 pulled the collar of his T- shirt down and looked at the space over his heart. Where his scar had been for all the years of his life, there was now a patch of reddened, irritated skin. The odd spiral scar was gone. He quickly covered up the mark again before anyone saw.
His father took a seat opposite him as his mother heated the milk in a pan. “We’re worried about you, Brendan,” his father began seriously.
“Dad, I’m fine! It was just a bad dream like you said,” Brendan insisted.
“I don’t know,” his dad said. There was worry plain on his face. “We’ve had a couple of calls from the school nurse. You had some kind of confrontation with a bully at school and you hit your head…”
“It’s nothing,” Brendan groaned, secretly cursing the kindly Mrs. Barsoomian. “I got tagged in the face in Murderball. And I banged my head on a door. Really. I’m just clumsy. You know that.”
His mother sat down, putting a cup of hot milk in front of him. Ever since he was a child, his mother had made him hot milk when he was sick or upset. He picked up the cup and blew gently on the surface of the milk, watching a skin form on the top. When he looked up, both his parents were looking at him with sober expressions on their faces.
“Oh.” Brendan suddenly understood. “Oh, no way! I’m not on drugs or anything. It’s not like that. Besides… how could I afford drugs on my allowance? Huh? Ha!” They didn’t find his joke funny either.
“What are we supposed to think?” his mother asked. “You’ve been behaving so strangely. And your father said you had some kind of episode at the concert tonight.”
“Episode? No! It wasn’t an episode,” he said hurriedly. “I was just… tired and… I don’t know.” He thought back to the concert and how he must have looked. If he’d been watching himself, he would have thought the same thing as his parents. “I was just getting into the music. Really. It’s nothing to worry about. I’m a teenager. I’m supposed to do weird stuff.”
“But we do worry,” Brendan’s father said. “It’s a dangerous world and we want you kids to be safe. You have to be careful.”
“I am, Dad.”
