Chapter 14
“Tessa? Tessa, wake up,” said a voice in my dream that sounded annoyingly like Dolores.
Get out of my dream, Dolores.
The nerve of my tall aunt to actually haunt my dreams. Wait.
What was I dreaming about again? I knew it was something bad.
Something wrong. But I couldn’t remember.
I was dreaming, I was in my dream, but there was just…
nothing. Blackness. The kind of empty dream space that felt suspiciously unfinished, like my brain had forgotten to load the scenery.
Weird.
Slowly, it all came back to me just as I felt myself waking up.
Or the hard slap of a very large hand across my face.
“Ow!” I sat up, glaring at Dolores because, let’s face it, she’s the only one who could hit hard like that. “You hit me?” My cheek throbbed.
Dolores slowly got to her feet. “It worked. Didn’t it? We can’t have you faint. We need you fully functional.”
Faint… crap. It was all coming back to me.
Darian.
Forgetting my sore cheek, I pushed to my feet, spun around, and spotted my son. Not the toddler, but the ten-year-old one.
He was all smiles, eating a muffin next to Ruth and Beverly.
Ronin was eyeing him like he’d just found his next hobby.
And I swear I saw Iris steal a strand of beautiful dark hair from my son’s head.
Darian didn’t seem bothered by any of it.
He sat there swinging his legs beneath the chair while happily demolishing the muffin like suddenly aging a decade was the most normal thing in the world.
I rushed over to him and grabbed his face with both hands.
“Darian. Are you okay? Are you hurt?” It was weird staring at the face of your son who just spontaneously grew, skipping ten years in a matter of seconds.
His jaw was a little stronger. His nose slightly different.
His hands bigger. Everything familiar yet unfamiliar all at once.
My brain kept trying to reconcile the little boy sitting in front of me with the toddler who still needed help pulling on his pants this morning.
Darian shook his head. “I’m fine.” He shoved a piece of muffin in his mouth. Crumbs landed on his shirt.
Okay. Good. Still my kid. Apparently even magical age acceleration couldn’t cure messy eating.
I let go of his face and started to check him.
His arms. Hands. Legs even his feet. He had the same beauty mark on the back of his right leg, just bigger.
The same little scar on his knee from when he tried to ride Hildo like a horse.
The same stubborn expression every time I fussed over him.
The same gray eyes. Just older. Way older.
My blood pressure rose as I kept checking my kid.
I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Traces of a hex or a curse.
Something that would tell me my son would shrink back to his toddler self.
But there was nothing. No strange marks or magical symbols that I could see.
No weird glowing skin. Nothing except a perfectly healthy tween who should not yet exist.
My eyes burned as I turned around before Darian saw me crying.
A flutter of gold, and I saw Tinker Bell land next to Hildo on the dining room table, looking sad, her eyes filled with tears.
The cat’s tail was swatting back and forth in irritation.
Even Hildo looked upset. Or maybe annoyed.
With Hildo the line was blurry. His expression generally ranged between judgmental and extremely judgmental.
“You okay?” said Iris, coming to stand next to me, her face full of concern.
“How can she be okay?” said Beverly. “Her son just aged ten years. That’s enough to freak out any parent.” Beverly lowered her wine glass slightly, and for once there wasn’t a flirtatious joke attached to the statement. Just sympathy. It made everything feel more real.
I wiped my eyes, my fingers trembling. “Addison stole years from me.” Her name burned on my lips.
Oh… did I ever hate her now. No. It was more than hate.
I couldn’t explain it. All I saw was red.
Birthdays. Christmas mornings. Years of bedtime stories.
Years of scraped knees. Maybe that wasn’t logical.
Maybe Darian was still Darian. But standing there looking at the child who should have still been climbing into my lap for story time, it felt like something had been taken from me.
“You sure?” Ronin observed Darian, who seemed oblivious to our conversation.
“I mean, technically he should still be a baby. But your kid grew to look like a four-year-old in a few months. Maybe this is just his natural growing process.” He rubbed the back of his neck.
“A weird natural growing process. Like mutant gorilla puberty on fast-forward. Which is a sentence I never thought I’d say. ”
“It’s not,” I seethed, sniffing. “He stabilized a month ago. This is her. She did this.” And the more I thought about that laboratory, the syringes, the things Addison had said, the more certain I became. Nothing about any of this felt accidental. Nothing about it felt natural.
“I don’t know how she did it,” I continued.
“But it’s her. And I know it has something to do with her sister and that lab.
I just don’t know what.” My brain kept replaying the laboratory over and over.
The metal tables. The restraints. The syringes.
The smell. Every time I thought about it, my stomach tightened again.
Nothing about that place felt like someone trying to help people.
It felt like the kind of place that ended up featured in magical true-crime documentaries narrated by overly serious witches.
Ronin moved over to the fridge, pulled out a beer, twisted the top, and took a long sip.
“Allison was a nut job. But it looks like her sister is worse.” He leaned against the counter, watching Darian carefully now.
“Impressive. Usually when someone is the evil twin, they’re at least trying to compete.
This feels like she skipped straight to the finals. ”
Gathering myself as best as I could, I turned back around.
Darian was humming a tune and shoved the last of the muffin into his mouth.
At least that hadn’t changed. Crumbs still covered half his face, his attention span still lasted roughly twelve seconds, and judging from the way he was eyeing Ruth’s muffin tray, his stomach apparently hadn’t changed either. Thank the goddess for small mercies.
Ronin stepped next to Darian. “Dude. You got big.” He said it with the same tone someone might use after discovering a puppy suddenly turned into a horse.
Darian shrugged, like this was no big deal. “I know. Can I have another muffin?” he asked Ruth, who beamed at him and brought him another banana muffin.
My throat tightened at the voice that was coming out of Darian.
It wasn’t the cute toddler lingo, it was an articulate ten-year-old voice.
Every word sounded older, smarter, more confident.
Like years had slipped through my fingers while I wasn’t looking.
I hated it. I hated how much I hated it because logically he was still my son.
Emotionally, however, logic was currently losing by a landslide.
“It’s too soon,” I whispered. “It’s not fair.”
“Here, drink this,” said Ruth who suddenly appeared by my side. “It’ll calm your nerves.” She offered the glass with the confidence of someone who had never once questioned whether forcing strange liquids on family members was appropriate.
I glanced at the glass with green liquid in Ruth’s hands.
It looked like a kale smoothie. I hated those, but I’d be stupid not to take anything from Ruth.
Statistically speaking, ninety percent of the time her concoctions worked beautifully.
The other ten percent involved temporary side effects and stories she told years later with alarming fondness.
I took the glass, sniffed, and then grimaced. “Smells like cat litter.” Which was somehow worse than kale.
“Hey,” interjected Hildo. “I’ll have you know that my cat litter smells like lavender, thank you.” The cat looked offended by the comparison.
“It does,” added Tinker Bell. “I’ve smelled it.” She nodded earnestly like this was valuable testimony.
Yeah. I didn’t want to know about that. There were entire follow-up conversations hidden behind those statements, and I wanted no part of them.
Still, I pinched my nose, making Darian laugh, and gulped the glass in one go. I smacked my lips. “Tasted like cat litter.” Which unfortunately suggested I’d somehow developed an opinion on the subject.
Ruth giggled. “I know.” She raised her eyebrows suggestively.
Yeah, I didn’t want to know about that either. Some mysteries deserved to remain mysteries. Humanity had survived thousands of years without understanding Ruth’s recipes. We could continue that tradition.
Just as the green liquid poured down into my stomach, I started to feel better.
Less stressed and the anxiety softened too.
My concerns were still there, but I suspected I wouldn’t have a breakdown in front of my kid.
The knot in my chest loosened slightly, and for the first time all morning, I could actually take a full breath without feeling like my lungs were being squeezed by invisible hands.
A thought occurred to me. I glanced at my aunts. “Does Marcus know?” The thought of how my husband would react at seeing his newly grown son had my insides twist. Marcus worried quietly. Deeply. The kind of quiet worry that somehow felt heavier than yelling.
Ruth looked over to her sisters before answering. “I didn’t see him at the festival. And after Darian… grew… I brought him here.” Her voice softened slightly on the word grew, like she still wasn’t entirely convinced it had actually happened.