Chapter 11
After everyone had left and gone to bed, I marched over to our basement door and flung it open.
“Dad!” I called out to the darkness. “I need to speak to you. It’s important.”
“He might be sleeping at your mother’s place,” said Marcus, watching me from the kitchen sink. “It’s late.”
“Maybe. But I have a feeling he can still hear me wherever he is.” I had no idea how, but I was going with my gut.
The basement door creaked, and a moment later, my father emerged, tall and fit.
His silver eyes moved around the room, taking in everything with steady focus.
Gray threaded through his neatly trimmed hair and beard, and his expensive dark suit somehow looked effortless on him, sharp without trying too hard.
I led him into the kitchen where Marcus was leaning against the counter, his arms crossed.
“Marcus.” Obiryn gave him a nod.
“Obiryn,” greeted Marcus.
Obiryn’s gaze landed on Darian, still sound asleep on the couch in the living room. The demon’s serious expression softened into a smile. “Still growing I see.” His voice held something like pride.
“Yes, but something’s happening to him,” I said, “and we don’t know what.”
Obiryn’s face darkened. “What do you mean? What’s happening?”
I glanced over to my kid. “He couldn’t settle.
His shifting kept switching back from human to gorilla, like he couldn’t stop.
Ruth gave him a tonic that finally seemed to help him stay in his human form.
But something’s definitely not right.” I looked at my father.
“I don’t want to wake him now that he’s asleep. ”
A part of me feared that once he woke, he’d start shifting uncontrollably again.
“But I think he was poisoned.” By that Gorilla Barbie 2.
0 bitch. “Iris is working on a reverse magical engineering something that will tell us what Addison used. I’m hoping after that we can make some sort of antidote.
” Because I couldn’t think about the alternative if we couldn’t.
My eyes drifted back toward the living room.
Darian hadn’t moved—still asleep, still peaceful.
One little arm hung halfway off the couch cushion while soft snores filled the cottage.
Normal. He looked normal. But just a few hours ago dark fur had flickered unevenly across his skin while his tiny body shifted helplessly back and forth like something inside him couldn’t decide what he was supposed to be.
Human. Gorilla. Human again. Over and over until I thought I was going to lose my damn mind watching it.
My fingers curled tighter against my jeans. No one talked about this part. No one told you that watching your kid hurt felt worse than anything you could ever imagine.
Marcus stood near the kitchen counter, his arms folded tightly across his chest—quiet, still, watching. His eyes kept shifting back toward Darian every few seconds even while we talked, checking him, making sure he was still breathing, still sleeping. Still okay.
Protective gorilla dad mode. It made my chest hurt because Marcus worried quietly, like some giant emotionally repressed mountain carrying everything by himself.
“I thought maybe it was growing pains,” I admitted quietly. “Or because he’s… different.” My throat tightened slightly around the word. “But this doesn’t feel like that.” My voice came out quieter this time. “This feels wrong.” Because it did. Wrong and ugly and intentional.
Everything kept circling back to Addison. Her showing up. Her blaming me. Allison dying. Darian getting sick. The timing sat badly inside me, too neat, too convenient, too planned.
My father watched me a moment. “I don’t know who this Addison is or what her part of this story is, but I get the feeling there’s more to this?”
I sighed and rubbed both hands down my jeans. “Because there is. And I need your help.”
“What’s going on, Tessa?” asked my father, worry etched across his face.
I took a breath and unloaded it all. Addison showing up in Hollow Cove. Allison being dead. Grimway. The prison. The guards lying. Addison lying. Darian getting sick. The poison theory. The hair Iris collected from Allison’s old cell. Then finally, the portal.
That part felt especially ridiculous saying out loud.
“I opened it,” I said. “Accidentally. Inside Grimway. Which apparently is something I can do now. Good to know. Helpful information. Would have loved receiving that memo earlier, dad.”
Obiryn had gone unusually quiet. Never a good sign. “Portal?” he repeated carefully.
“Yes. Portal.” I folded my arms tighter. “Big. Red and black. Reality tearing itself open in front of me portal. Iris and I jumped through it because we’re crazy like that.”
“You jumped into it?” asked Obiryn.
“Yes,” I answered. “It’s not like we had a choice. It was either jump through the creepy new portal I just made, which may or may not kill, us or let the prison guards kill us.”
My father slowly pulled out a chair and sat.
“Dad?” I pressed.
My demon father scratched his beard in thought. “Tell me exactly what it looked like.”
I explained everything. The shifting colors. The strange warmth. The feeling of recognition. The way Grimway weakened around it. The way my Nexari magic responded differently than ley line magic. The way it somehow felt familiar, way too familiar.
Obiryn stayed quiet long enough that my stomach started doing unpleasant things.
“You know what this is. Don’t you?” I said. “You’ve known all along that I could do this? That I had portal mojo?”
My father glanced at me, a smile forming. “Portal mojo?”
I smiled back. “I made that up.”
Obiryn beamed. “I like it.”
“Me too.”
Marcus uncrossed his arms and made an annoyed grump.
Right. Back to business. “Dad. Did you know?”
My father raised a brow. “Possibly.”
“Dad.”
“Tessa…”
“No.” I pointed at him. “No mysterious ancient father nonsense. We are not doing cryptic wisdom today. I ripped a hole through reality. You’re explaining. Right now.”
A tiny smile touched the corner of his mouth. “Portals aren’t common Nexari abilities,” Obiryn said carefully.
I nodded. “Okay. I get that.”
“They’re rare. Very rare.”
“Okay.”
“Extremely rare.”
“Dad.”
His silver eyes moved toward me calmly. “You created one in Grimway Citadel,” he said quietly.
I pressed my hands to my hips. “I was trying to call up a ley line actually. And that obviously didn’t work. But then the portal showed up.” The thought of it still had excitement wash through me.
“Inside suppression wards,” said my father, staring at a spot on the wall.
“Yes.”
“Without training.”
“Yes.”
“Interesting.”
“Interesting?” I repeated. “Interesting? I nearly vomited through another dimension.”
“Portals aren’t just transportation,” he said quietly. “Not Nexari portals.”
Something cold moved slowly down my spine. “What do you mean?”
“They connect,” he added. “To places, to people, and most of all… to magic.”
My lips parted. “To Nexari magic.”
My father nodded. “Precisely. To things Nexari power recognizes. You.”
I felt Marcus’s gaze snap to me, but I kept my focus on my father. “Me? Can we cut the Obi-Wan Kenobi crap. We’re not doing vague wisdom right now. You’re explaining this in words normal people understand.”
Obiryn folded his hands together on the table. “Nexari magic evolves,” he said quietly.
“I’m aware.”
“Nexari magic adapts,” he continued. “Changes. Grows with experience. Emotion. Need. Fear. Protection.”
Marcus shifted slightly beside the counter. I could see his shoulders were tight with tension.
“When Nexari abilities first appear,” Obiryn continued, “they often manifest in simpler ways. Raw power. Instinctive power. Survival power. Like what you’ve experienced.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
“But as Nexari matures… Your magic becomes more aware. More powerful.”
I frowned at him. “That somehow sounds creepy.”
My father gave a shrug. “It becomes more connected to you, which translates to different abilities.”
I glanced over to Marcus who hadn’t joined the conversation yet. He didn’t have to speak. I recognized what that frown meant. He hated anything new, anything he didn’t plan. So these new abilities of mine, my new portal mojo, was unsettling him.
I pulled my attention back to my father. “You knew. You knew this would happen and you didn’t think to tell me?”
“I suspected,” answered my father. “I wasn’t certain.”
“You knew enough.”
Silver eyes held mine. “I suspected portal development was possible.”
I shook my head, irritation rising. “You absolutely should have mentioned the possibility that I could accidentally rip open reality.”
My father shook his head. “I couldn’t have known. You hadn’t shown signs before. It’s possible these portal creation abilities would have never manifested.”
“I literally opened a dimensional doorway in a magical prison,” I pressed, trying to keep my voice down but failing. My father sat calmly in his chair, looking entirely too relaxed for a man who had apparently omitted several reality-threatening details from the family history.
“Yes,” answered my father with an infuriatingly reasonable nod.
“I could have died.” I threw my hands into the air because, apparently, I was now forced to provide visual aids to accompany the conversation.
“You didn’t,” he replied.
“Dad.” I stared at him.
“You didn’t,” he repeated, still maddeningly calm, as though surviving catastrophic magical accidents somehow erased the catastrophic part.
“You left out important information,” I continued, leaning forward. There were family secrets, and then there was forgetting to mention that your bloodline occasionally opened holes between dimensions.
“I left out unconfirmed information,” he said carefully.
“Portal information feels important.” It felt extremely important. The sort of thing that should maybe come up before birthdays and holiday dinner plans.
“Yes,” he agreed.
“Reality-tearing information feels very important.”
“Yes,” he agreed again.
“Ancient family magical disaster information…” I continued, feeling my blood pressure steadily climb toward impressive new heights.
“Yes,” he interrupted with another small nod.