Chapter Two

Leaving Burlingame

When I left the hospital, I went to my new home with Damien. Mrs. Morley decided that Curtis and I were the only dangers in the household, so Bruce and Roslyn were spared being uprooted and thrown to the mercy of the system. Damien is convinced that the only reason Mom and Poppa escaped being charged with criminal neglect is that magic was involved, but the authorities were watching. In fact, Mrs. Morley accompanied us back to Burlingame when we went to pick up my things. Bruce sat in the living room with the adults while Roz sneaked off to help me pack my stuff.

My bed was one of those space-saver styles with built in drawers. My little sister watched with interest while I checked that there was no one in the hallway to see before I closed the door and pulled out one of the drawers to half climb, half crawl into the open space behind it. It was the safest place I could find to hide my most precious possession, my special quilt, and now that I was leaving I wanted Roz to see it again. That and the space was such a nifty hiding spot with room enough that both she and I could have squished in there and hidden. Living with Curtis made it especially necessary to have a place to hide stuff away because he took such delight in destruction.

Mom tried to toss out my quilt at least once a year until I turned seven. That year, when I found it, I hid it from her. That meant hiding it from the rest of my family, too, especially Curtis – he would have loved to be able to destroy something that I had to pretend wasn't gone. As a prepubescent child, I wanted to grow up so badly. It wasn't just that age would solve the problem of living with Curtis, but that the more I grew up, the less that Mom would be in my things and so the less likely that she would be to try to take my quilt from me. It was the only material object during my childhood that I would not give up. My brothers had their "oh, holey" clothes, Roz had her Bare-Bear and I had my quilt.

Roz "ou"ed over my quilt and laid her finger tips on it as if she couldn't resist. She looked up at me, her eyes asking permission and I nodded. We are both very sensual creatures, and the quilt appeals on so many levels. The texture feels as if the person who made this quilt took all the most wonderful qualities of suede, velvet and satin and then refined them in the cloth pieces they used. It folds up small, but just shake it out once and it puffs up nicely, adding to the plush, encompassing feeling of the material. The overall color is this rich cross between royal blue and deep turquoise on top, with a green that flowed from evergreen to emerald on the bottom. The abstract patterns of the quilted pieces hide an amazingly complex, interlocking spiral design, hand stitched around and through the joinings. Even during the worst of my sicknesses, when the rest of my room stank of sweat, snot, and puke, the quilt always had this fresh scent to it, somewhat like sandalwood, eucalyptus, sage, and powdered roses. Roslyn's eyes rolled up in bliss and a smile curved her lips as she rubbed her cheeks into the quilt, inhaling deeply.

I've had my quilt for as long as I can remember, but it is way too big to have been a baby blanket. I never felt the need to drag it around like I did to my stuffed animals, so it isn't quite as shocking as it could be that the quilt survived the wear and tear of childhood. All that aside, it was my comfort quilt. When I got sick, I had to have my quilt. When my feelings were bruised, the quilt came out. When I was scared, just touching the quilt calmed me. It appeared to have that affect on Ros, too, drying the tears that had been shimmering in her eyes when we began.

I checked the door again and draped the quilt around her shoulders. It reminded me of the last night I had openly owned my quilt. I was curled up on the couch with it when Roz bounced up beside me. We snuggled in it and watched a PBS Special, part of their fairy tales series. Mom had given my quilt "the look" and I knew she was thinking dirty thoughts about it. The next day it was nowhere to be found in the house. I said nothing, just waited until night fell to sneak out and pull it out of our neighbor's garbage can. After a few quick snaps to throw off the smell of garbage and any clinging ickies, it was as good as new. I decided that hiding the quilt was the safest choice from then on.

While Roz snuggled into my quilt, I finished packing, just tossing all my underwear and my favorite clothes in the smaller of the two new suitcases Damien had provided. In the larger, I packed my Black Stallion books, my electric keyboard, my art supplies and my picture albums. I looked around for anything else that I wanted to take with me and saw my stuffed toy collection. I chose a few that particularly appealed to me. Living with Curtis had cured me of forming new emotional attachments to material objects. On top of that, Damien had already said that he planned to let me make most of the choices about what would go in my new room, so there wasn't much to take with me.

I put my hygiene and overnight stuff in my duffel bag and there was just the quilt to pack. Roz reluctantly relinquished it and then ran from the room with a "Wait a sec" thrown over her shoulder. I folded up the quilt and put it in the duffel. I was zipping up the bag when she came back with her Bare-Bear.

"You might be lonely in your new home. Bare-Bear, he's good at keeping the lonelies away," she explained as she thrust her special toy at me. Gods Above, I love my sister. She's one of the most generous people I know.

I reached out and pulled her into a tight hug. "I love you, Rozzie! But I think Bare-Bear's gonna do more good keeping you safe and your lonelies away. I have my quilt to comfort me and I have pictures of us to plaster all over my new room. I'm not going away for good. I won't let that happen. I'm not gonna let you grow up without your big sister! I couldn't stand it!"

We stayed that way for a bit longer, just holding each other before it was time to go. Out on the front porch, we cried all over each other again, clinging through the last goodbye before it was time to go and face my new life. Bruce gave me a great big bear hug, guilt and regret filling his eyes and making him more affectionate than I had ever seen him. Mom squeezed me, hard and fast, almost throwing me out of her arms before turning into Bruce to start sobbing. Poppa lifted me up for my hug, kissed my head, and set me down. He watched with troubled eyes as Damien took my duffel from me and led the way to his SUV.

The day I went home with Damien was the first of November, All Saint's Day. I've never quite understood why that seems significant to me, but it does.

The drive into Sac County

"You don't have to call me 'Dad' unless you want to. If your grandmother gives you any flack about it, I'll deal with it, okay? Social mores were a lot different when she was born and sometimes folks who've been around for a bit find changes difficult." Damien was keeping up a stream of words as he drove us east on I-80 from the Bay Area into Sacramento County. I was leaving my life behind to start a new one with this stranger who scared my mother while comforting me.

That first day in the hospital, there was shock upon shock to keep me from thinking too much about the revelation that the man I thought was my father, wasn't. Rick Burquet has always been a steady man, solid and dependable, if a bit staid. He's an active church volunteer and a carpenter, like the one he idolizes. His sandy blond hair is always neatly trimmed, no more than three inches on top and buzzed up the sides. His warm, brown eyes crinkle at the edges when he smiles, and he always looks startled when he laughs. He was never as openly affectionate to me as he was to Roz and the boys, but, as I look back, I doubt that I ever really encouraged spontaneous affection in that household.

Though I never really doubted his love for me, there was always a reserve, some strange line that neither of us ever felt we could cross. There were times when we puzzled each other. Mom, for all that she wants to believe, is more of a soap-box Christian. There's this frantic need in her to believe, as if belief in Christ alone will keep the Dark at bay and so she scrambles at every chance to prove her faith. Poppa's faith has always been as solid as he, himself, is. His faith is a fact of his life, like the sun rising in the East and fog rolling in from the Bay. I'm not sure why I always doubted, but there is something in Christianity, something I can't explain, that feels so close and yet so far to the Truths I perceive. We could agree on every point in a discussion about his faith and still disagree on the outcome.

For all that I had just met Damien Pierce the only reserve between us was a lack of experience with each other. On some deep, subliminal level he resonated as my father. I didn't know what to think about that and I was trying really hard not to think, but I was feeling caught between guilt and betrayal. On one hand, Rick Burquet was my Poppa. On the other hand, neither he nor Mom ever told me that I had another family, another father and grandmother. They lied to me by omission and a very big omission at that. But they were my family and I felt closer to Damien than to the parents who raised me. I so didn't want to be thinking about it right then.

"Feeling pretty rough, huh?" Damien's voice cut through the circle of my thoughts.

"Huh?"

"You've had a lot hit you in the past couple of days. It's perfectly normal to feel overwhelmed. Your mom and I, we've had our differences, but I know she loves you and she has tried to do what she thinks is in your best interest. Sometimes, what parents think is in their children's best interest, isn't."

There was silence in the vehicle for a moment. Taken off the guilt/betrayal loop, my brain latched onto a different concept. Like I said, I knew I was magic long before my parents admitted it. Sometimes, knowing the magic was in me, a part of me like my eyes or my laughter, made me feel outcast and different. Sometimes it was my strength, but there was always this awareness that for all that I could do things, bend the magic to my Will, I didn't have complete control over it.

"Mom said she didn't want you to make me a witch and you said you don't want to see me become one. I thought witch was another name for a Wiccan?"

Damien chuckled, shooting me an amused glance. "You know how to ask the hard questions, now don't ya? The short answer is that 'witch' means different things to different people.

"The long answer is that the word 'witch' carries with it a negative association. A lot of Wiccans are trying to change that by trying to make it a religious title, but it isn't there yet. It probably won't be there before I die.

"In the old sense, a witch is someone with a strong supernatural power that is out of their control. Christianity came around and tried to label all magi as either witch or saint, their magic either demonic or divine. It confused the issue and now you have people running around, claiming they're rebuilding the 'old ways' and in general adding to the confusion.

"Your grandmother raised me old school. The Wiccans out there adding to the confusion are not old school. Most old school magi consider being called a 'witch' along the same lines as being called a 'piss-ant, snot-nose, good-for-nothing, low-life scum'. It's a really bad way to get turned into a frog," he finished, flashing me a grin.

I giggled, "There's a good way to get turned into a frog?"

"Kinda hard to imagine, huh? … So what else you got for me?"

"What do you mean?"

"What more do you want to know? We're half way to home, a little over an hour to go."

I took a deep breath and I asked the question that scared me the most. "Why didn't you want me?"

Damien flinched. "Yep, you ask the hard ones." He took a deep breath, too, and continued, giving me the best eye contact he could while paying attention to his driving.

"First off, honey, I have always wanted you. The hardest thing I ever did was let your mother take you out of my life. It was harder than watching her go and for a quite a while there I thought the sun rose and set with her smile." A pause to wet his lips, to reach over and squeeze my thigh before returning his hand to the wheel. "My profession is not a very safe one or a stable one. I am a state sanctioned preternatural executioner: I hunt and kill preternatural killers. Most of the preeters I hunt are at least minimally rational. They may not all be smart, but they can learn and they can understand consequence. No matter what some idiots in the legislature may believe, they are more than animals.

"And then there are the preternaturals that started out human. Hunting vampires and shifters is somewhat like hunting a thug on PCP – smart, tougher and stronger than a human, and nowhere near human-sane."

He took a moment, gearing up for the next part. "You weren't even a year old when I got an assignment to take out a rogue vamp. He was born Nathan Langston before he decided that vampirism looked better than living. Living, he racked up the kind of rap sheet that was leading straight to the gas chamber. Death didn't make him any better of a person.

"Most vamps try to fly under the radar. They do what they can to avoid drawing attention to themselves, preferring that humans think of them as creatures of lore, fantasy, not real. They cloud their victims' minds to steal the blood they need to survive, only killing when it's a matter of their survival. Rogues are blood-hungry killers, more dangerous than a revenant. Revenants lose all sense of humanity and simply become the blood-hunger. It strips them of the ability to think, to reason, and reduces them to something close to an animal. Rogues ride the blood-hunger, keeping their reason." Another pause.

"I found his lair and I went after him, but I missed. I guess he'd gotten caught too far away too close to dawn. I don't know how he traced me, but the next night he showed up at our house. Evelyn was supposed to be visiting her family, but she decided to come home early. You were staying with my mother while I was on the hunt. Langston tricked your mother into opening the wards and he … he toyed with her. By the time I got home, he had hurt her badly and he left her to die. Mama healed her physical wounds, but she was too terrified inside to stay and I was scared of what might happen to the both of you.

"She asked for a divorce and I didn't stand in her way. When she asked that I give up visitation rights, she justified it by saying it was for your safety. We both thought she was right. I had already pissed off a lot of preternaturals; I didn't think it mattered much to keeping you safe whether I stopped hunting them or not.

"I sent you letters every month, gift cards for your birthday and Christmases. Never have been good at getting gifts and I wanted you to enjoy them. Your mother sent back notes telling me how you were growing.

"I thought you knew. I thought that she had explained it all. I thought that you were scared of me, too, or ashamed, and that was why you didn't write me back. I thought you had a good family, and that you didn't need me in there messing things up for you."

Damien took a deep, shuddering breath, his eyes bright and sparkly with unshed tears. "Gods Above, baby, when I got the call that you were hurt and in the hospital, my world just about crashed! I don't really remember getting there, to the hospital. I called your grandmother on the way over and she was in the Bay so she hightailed it over to you, looked you over. I didn't realize how scared I still was until she said you were out of it mostly because of the magic riding you and that you just needed the rest and you'd wake up when your body was ready."

I think we sat in silence, each thinking our own thoughts, for somewhere near ten, fifteen minutes.

"How come your mother didn't stay?"

Damien looked at me again and he had himself back under control. "Mama and your mother never have gotten along well. Even before Evie found religion, she was scared of your grandmother. I think the magic is just icing on the cake, so to speak. Mama's … she can be an intimidating woman. Evie's gotten a lot more confident in herself, I guess, since marrying Burquet, but it hasn't helped much where Mama's concerned. After she made sure you were going to be ok, she tried to fade out of the scene to keep Evie from going all out ballistic. It was more for your sake than your mother's, though. Now, finding out what you've been through, I think she also wanted to make sure the house was ready for you."

"Oh." This new grandmother wasn't sounding like such a good thing. In fact, she was sounding just a bit scary. It must have shown, too.

"The most important thing to remember here, Rhi, is that we love you. We want you to be happy. You have already proven you're made of sterner stuff than you mother was and that was their big problem … As much as I ever loved your mother, Evie has never been a fighter and she never learned how to take life on the chin and keep going. What you did, standing up to your step brother, taking the beatings and not letting that destroy your life, she couldn't have done that. Your mother wouldn't have survived it.

"Mama … she recognized that, and she knew what my life was like back then, what it's still like now. I think she guessed that Evie wouldn't stick and she's like any mom, doesn't want to see her child hurt. She's not always an easy woman to get along with, but Mama's pretty strong on family. She's a feisty old lady and you'll do well to stand your ground with her. No back talking, mind you, and give her the respect due your elders, but don't let her 'bull in the china shop' attitude back you up."

He took in a deep breath, eyes scanning the road. "It's gonna take a while, and I expect things will be a bit rocky to start with. Neither of us really knows the other and we've got to find our footing. I don't ever want you to feel like you have to choose either your mother and the family she's built with you and the Burquets or me and the family I want to build with you. You don't have to give up people you love in order to love more people.

"Your mother and I have both made our mistakes with you. I'm not sure if letting you go in the first place was one – the danger was, is, a very real possibility, and it's one that I've done all I can to reduce since then – but not insisting that we get the chance to know each other sooner, that's a mistake I don't think I'll ever live down."

We left each other to our thoughts for the rest of the drive.

Meet the Grandmamma

Damien lived out toward Folsom, in the county east of Sacramento proper, and along Highway 50. He had a five-acre spread, a forty-five minute commute to the capital and enough room not to involve the neighbors should the manure hit the proverbial fan. The house was a one-story affair with the core of it, the kitchen, dating from the Gold Rush. The rest of the house had been added on at varies times, but everything inside – with the exception of the original wood burning stove and some antique furniture – was modern. There was even a second glass-top range.

A woman in jeans and a quilted flannel jacket, wearing white sneakers, stepped out of the house as Damien pulled up. She looked old to my young eyes, maybe even mid thirties. Gray had yet to touch her hair, and the only lines on her face were the faint lines of frowns and smiles, but even sitting in Damien's SUV, the force of her personality touched me.

Damien made a wry sound when he saw her, somewhere between a sigh and a snort. "Didn't figure she'd let any grass grow once she saw you."

"Who is she?" I asked, but Damien was already out of his seat and going to open the rear door to get my things carried in. The woman might have been old, maybe Damien's age, but she couldn't be old enough to be his very intimidating mother, right? I thought about trying to hide here in the seat, but that would be foolish. I got out, almost falling the last bit of the way. Damien drove a Chevy Suburban and I've never been a tall person.

I decided that the best course of action was to let Damien introduce me or not as he chose, so I went back to help grab my gear. With the duffel holding my special quilt over one shoulder, I followed my father to the house.

"Mama, look who I brought home!" Damien grinned up at the woman from the bottom steps, setting the larger of my suit cases down to place his hand between my shoulders. It was more a gesture of comfort than a push, but it kept me from hiding behind him. I stilled for a moment looking up into the eyes of Lucille Pierce for the first time.

My grandmother is one bad-ass chick. Just because I had been sheltered the last nine years of my life didn't mean I couldn't recognize in that one look that you do not piss her off without expecting T-R-O-U-B-L-E. Grandmamma has this quality of "been there, done that, ate the dragon" to her, which can be a bit off-putting to those who only skim her surface. There was a challenge in her eyes, as if she sought in me whatever it was in my mother that made her run screaming from the Dark.

I looked up into Grandmamma's eyes and said the first thing that popped into my mind. "What took you so long?"

Damien went very still beside me. Grandmamma raised one eyebrow and asked, "What do you mean?" I don't know if it was my nerves, but the tension in her voice seemed menacing.

"What took you so long to lay eyes on me? You aren't looking at your grandchild when you look at me. You're looking for something else, I'm not sure what, but it doesn't feel like a family thing. And you feel like you've been forced to wait when you're not used to waiting for much."

The look in her eyes went from challenge to a more intense interest. "And how would you know that I don't like to wait?"

"Momma says you're a witch, Damien says she's got the wrong words, but both of them say you know magic. Maybe you can tell me why I see things that I don't really see and know things I don't know how I know; like that you don't wait for much if you can help it."

"See things you don't really see?"

"Yeah, it's like colors that are all around people and things and stuff, but it's like I'm not seeing them with my eyes. The colors, they don't change what I see as much as it's like those transparencies at school, laying over everything." It wasn't the best answer, but it was the best answer I could figure out.

"Those colors are called auras and you, my dear, are the only witch here. But don't worry. I won't let that stand for long.

"You backed down from your step brother for quite a while." She laid in the non-sequitor, her eyes keen on mine.

I rolled the words around in my head, tasting the texture of her delivery. I decided she wasn't blaming me, wasn't pushing for answers, but that she wanted to know why and wanted me to know why. So I thought about it for a moment, searched for the words to answer her bald statement.

"Refusing to fight was a way to fight him. Curtis wanted me to struggle. He wanted me to fight back so that when he beat me, he could see that I knew I couldn't stop it. I knew I was marking time. It couldn't go on forever because sooner or later we'd be growing up and moving out. I didn't back down. I gave up on losing and I looked for another way to win, even if it meant putting up with him until he was gone."

"You're scared of me."

I paused before answering, testing the truth of her words. "Yeah … and no."

She quirked an eyebrow at that answer.

"You're scary and Damien's been worried about our meeting, so that's not helping, but I don't think you'll beat on me and not just 'cause Damien won't let you. I haven't decided if you'd care if you hurt my feelings."

"You sure are brash for a scared little thing," she said, and I thought I could see a hint of a smile at the corner of her lips.

"There're two things you can do with fear. You can accept it and move on, do what needs doing, or you can hide in the corner and pray the bad things leave you alone and move on themselves. I know the bad things like the corner-huggers better, like they're tastier food. I ain't food for the fear-eaters." I felt the tears building in the back of my eyes, but I was damned if they were going to fall. I held my breath and held my eyes wide, fighting them off.

The next thing I knew, Grandmamma had picked me up and was hugging me. "Welcome to the Hovel, mageling! Well come and well met!" It was that bit too much and I was crying again. Her hands turned from exuberant to comforting and she crooned in my ear, "It's okay to cry, mageling. You've been through a lot, but you're safe now. You're not just family, child, you're Blood, and I don't let anything hurt my Blood. Tears are good, now that the danger's past. Let it out, mageling. We're here for you."

The first November

Grandmamma maintained her own residence despite practically living with us, especially over that first winter. She claimed most of my days, home schooling me for the rest of my fourth grade year. Damien took the night watch. His work for the state was more of an emergency on-call job for which the State of California paid him a less than decent retainer and an acceptable bonus upon call up. His primary income came from speaking engagements and two associate faculty positions with CSU Sacramento and UC Davis. His specialties include preternatural biology, behaviors, and history. Go figure, heh?

Most of November passed by with getting settled in. Damien took me shopping for new clothes, but Grandmamma took me out to find my first bra. We all went to Gibraldi's Fine Furniture to pick out my bedroom set. I got the princess bed I drooled over, a solid queen sized affair stained to look like teak, with rungs to hold draperies and rails across the top so I could canopy the bed if I so chose. Neither Grandmamma nor Damien batted an eye at my choices, though Grandmamma steered me towards more feminine pieces. I've kept my bedroom set to this day, especially the bed. The mattress is now a TempurPedic, but I still love sleeping with the drapes closed. I have a closet full of draperies and canopies that Grandmamma and I made for it.

From there we went off to Mimi's Fabrics and More. Grandmamma is a big crafter and she also has this minor celebrity status. Mimi herself came out to steer us towards the more 'choice' bolts, of which we selected the materials for my first quilting project. I was a little young to grasp it then and by the time I understood what a big deal was being made of Grandmamma I had grown to expect it.

Grandmamma in the public eye

Born magic users gained legality in 1972 with the US Supreme Court ruling in the case of Theodore W. Truitt vs. the State of Georgia. It was deemed unconstitutional to decree an automatic death sentence based upon the genetics a human is born with. Grandmamma was outted a few years later.

James Donovan Heinrich, aka Jimmy the Stake, was the state preternatural executioner at the time of the Quon murders. The long and the short of it is that Jimmy went around one bend too many and decided that the Quon family were all vampires, and master vamps at that because they were more than modestly well off and walking around in the daylight. Now, admittedly, there are some vampires that can walk in the daylight. I know of two, but they are both over three thousand years old. Did I mention they are the only vampires I know over a thousand?

Anyhow, the Quons did have preternatural connections. At the tender age of twelve, their son was attacked by a rogue shifter and contracted therianthropy – lycanthropy to be more precise. It's the most common form of therianthropy simply because wolves and humans have the most compatible social dynamics of all the animal forms among the spectrum of were-strains. It makes it easier to blend in when you don't have to fight your nature at every turn.

Jack Quon was barely old enough to be vulnerable to the bite since the curse that perpetuates the disease rarely affects immature souls. That's one of the reasons you don't see many shifters with Down's syndrome. The other reason is much bloodier, though getting less so as shifters get used to being legal.

Shifters, as a whole, pay particular attention to the reports of animal attacks. The proportion of survivors to volunteers may have decreased considerably since therianthropy was legally recognized as a disease[1], but they still watch for survivors. At the time, mundanes still put shifters in the "exterminate on sight" category, so the local pack waited until little Jackie's first moon, for his parents to see that he wasn't fully human anymore, before they intervened. It was considered safer for everyone involved.

Jack was still a teenager when his mother, father, and baby brother were murdered. He had been on a retreat with the handful of other teenaged shifters in the community when Jimmy Heinrich came to his conclusion that the Quons were vampires. Jack and his pack mates hunted Heinrich down and they were not neat about it. He was meeting with one of his contacts in the preternatural community, who happened to be Grandmamma. They were having lunch at a public café.

Jack Quon lost it and I mean he straight up lost it. His Beast took over and made a direct line for Heinrich's throat. Jack was too young to be a dominant so he shouldn't have been able to flow from human into were-form while moving. The change should have dropped him, spilled him across the floor, but it didn't. His pack mates had no chance to stop him. He went through an innocent couple in his charge to destroy the man who murdered his family. The woman was pregnant and Quon's claws grew in about the time he was shoving her out of his way. He ripped into her side, leaving bloody furrows across her distended belly.

Heinrich died in a shower of blood, gore, and viscera. Grandmamma was able to disarm Quon by interrupting the magical root of his curse. He shrank back to human form and collapsed in the midst of the gore, naked from the change and unconscious.

About that time, the man who had accompanied the pregnant woman began calling for help. Grandmamma did the only thing she could live with. She called her magic and went to work saving the baby and its mother. It was pure dumb luck that a reporter and his photographer had stopped by a neighboring deli to grab a bite to eat and witnessed the events. The photographer snapped his pictures and the reporter did his job.

The police arrived within a minute; the Federal Courthouse was only two blocks over. They didn't interfere with Grandmamma's healing. By the time the ambulance arrived, the baby was safe. At first, the paramedics didn't believe how much trauma the woman had sustained, but the magic was still working through her and they saw firsthand the way she was healing. They freaked and refused to touch her after that. Grandmamma says they thought she was a shifter and didn't want to risk becoming one. It doesn't really matter, because it meant Grandmamma decided to finish healing the woman when they refused to go near her.

By that time, a TV news crew arrived. The story got national coverage and, thanks to the decency laws, Grandmamma got the center stage. If you were in the news agencies and had to choose between a family photo, driver's license pictures, or the photo of a comely, glowing woman healing a pregnant woman to place on your front cover, which would you choose?

Some of the more determined and desperate individuals who saw the newscast began petitioning Grandmamma for her healing expertise after that. She recognized that the only options were to open up shop, get blitzed trying to ignore the pleas for help, or make a run for it. Running meant leaving behind her children, and she didn't really think ignoring the new found fame was an option, so she began her holistic healing business. Within months, she had to hire more help.

Thanks in large part to her highly visible success, the number of frauds involving magic or its promise went through the roof as more and more mundanes began to see magic as a potentially beneficial tool instead of a highly dangerous weapon. Pretty soon, the Legislature found itself drafting and implementing the Magical Malfeasance laws, which became the template for the federal version of the same.

By the time I came to live with Damien, Grandmamma had recruited seven other healer mages, some of them licensed doctors, to her practice in addition to assorted herbalists, nutritionists, physical therapists, acupuncturists, chiropractors, and so on. All the recruitment gave Grandmamma the ability to step out of the day-to-day grind without sacrificing much in the way of her business. She had already become more of the figurehead, deliberately drawing the attention to her self in order to afford her partners a greater deal of anonymity.

Home schooling

So, back from the sidetrack, November was mostly shopping, settling in, and Grandmamma assessing just where I was, academically speaking. We met with the school I would be transferring into come next fall and I found myself on the elevated courses. They weren't ready to suggest skipping grades, but they did say that I would be eligible for GATE classes if I were actually attending the school. I was surprised by their assessment, considering I spent as much time as I could out and doing, instead of studying in the house, where Curtis could get to me.

Home schooling was a blast. Grandmamma believes very strongly that children need structure, so schooling was on a schedule, which she posted on the refrigerator. The times changed a bit, but the order of the lessons was pretty consistent. We started around seven in the morning with yoga for half an hour and then meditated for "as long as we needed", which started at about fifteen minutes and worked up to an hour within a few months. I would go get dressed and then we studied History. "A good dose of tragedy sets the proper tone for torture," she'd tease, wiggling her eyebrows and bringing a giggle to my lips. Sometimes tickle-fights delayed the course, but not by much. There were some texts that we were required to cover, but Grandmamma also threw in a biography a week. After History came breakfast, or "Home Economics Part I" as Grandmamma called it.

"Numbers should never be approached on an empty stomach" was one of her favorite statements, so after breakfast came Mathematics. Fractions were a breeze when Grandmamma explained them and we were working on beginning algebra by the time Christmas came around. From Math we segued into Sciences. "Knowing yourself is all well and good, child, but learning the world around you will get you farther." I loved learning how to make solid wood turn into liquid smoke. Grandmamma hovered the most during the Science lessons, often reaching out just when my skin started to twitch or my heart to speed.

I asked her about it and she told me, "These are signs of the magic wanting to come out. Physical Science is one of the most difficult subjects for magi to learn simply because we intuit it too much. It's like the kid who can tell you off the top of his head what the product of the square roots of 64 and 256 is, but doesn't know how to write it down. Magic, especially moving magic - the magic borne in the Blood - are manifestations of an innate comprehension of the physical world. To make it a bit simpler, your magic thinks it doesn't have much to learn, so it gets bored and it wants to speed things up. My magic is bigger and tells your magic to sit down and pay attention when I touch you."

After Science lessons came "Home Economics Part II", or cleaning around the house and fixing lunch. After lunch was "Creative" time, during which we would go for walks or work on crafting projects, like sewing or beading or making solar systems out of papier-mâché, newsprint and laundry soap. Another meditation session led into literature lessons. Despite Grandmamma's best efforts, I never did memorize all the differing grammatical components. We read through a wide variety of literature, from classics to marketing materials, throwing in a dash of poetry and propaganda to help with the comprehension of rhetoric. Each week, we wrote a ten-page paper focusing on any subject under the sun, the moon, or the stars above. It got much easier when Damien suggested we use a computer.

Despite Grandmamma's youthful appearance, she did not grow up in an era of such extreme change as her son did. Sometimes it took some prompting for her to remember that there were newer ways of doing things, like using a computer to aide in schoolwork. However, she and Damien decided that he needed to supervise our forays on the Internet after Grandmamma and I downloaded an "educational" program and she couldn't figure out how to get rid of the pornographic screensaver.

That's not to say that Grandmamma was adverse to change. She bought an Apple IIe to use from home about the time she stopped spending sunup to sundown at the office. She has it to this day and it works. The old cliché about "not making things like they used to" becomes very suspect when I watch the way Grandmamma cares for her possessions. I have yet to learn such care, but give me a few more decades and I might have so delicate a touch. I'm working on it.

With English fresh upon my mind, Grandmamma began to teach me Latin. "While this is not Europe, the American languages do originate there and so you will learn the basics first. It will make learning Spanish and French so much the easier." When I complained that there was only one American language, geography was added to my lessons because, "Obviously, you never bothered to look at a map. Canada and Mexico share the northern continent and the southern continent adds Portuguese to the mix of languages. The United States of America is not the entirety of the Americas."

To end our school days, we had one more round of meditation, after which Grandmamma would make dinner and I would be "set free" to explore my father's spread.

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[1] The Center for Disease Control officially recognized the therianthropic family of virus on May 5, 1988. My brand-new high school history texts used that date as the official end to therian persecution. Don't try to tell that to the therians, though. As far as too large a number of mundanes are still concerned, therianthropy is the mark of a demonic nature. Every couple of years or so, there are reports of "concerned" parents trying to burn the devil out of their teenage shifter. The Catholic Church has made noises about how "tragic" and "heart rending" the practice is, but I have yet to hear any stringent denunciations.