2. Brakkus
Brakkus
The Texas sun was already hot, streaming in through the big kitchen windows at seven in the morning. Otto had screamed himself awake fifteen minutes ago. I’d rushed to his nursery with a knot of panic in my chest. Most mornings started like this, especially since the drama with the last nanny.
I’d changed him and brought him to the kitchen, sitting him in his high chair at the table.
I collapsed beside him, watching the bowl of oatmeal with bananas go cold on his tray.
He held the spoon in his tiny green fist, but he wasn’t eating.
His gaze was focused past me, past the table, lingering on the middle distance.
“Don’t you want to eat, buddy?” I took the spoon and scooped up a bite. I slid the food into his mouth, and he just kind of spit it out. I grimaced. This used to be his favorite meal.
I wiped off his mouth with his bib, wishing he’d tell me what he wanted. But Otto didn’t speak anymore. Not that he’d ever really started. His first word had been Mama. But after we’d lost her, he didn’t even say that anymore.
Deciding oatmeal wasn’t going to cut it this morning, I searched through the cabinets for something else.
Dolores Cantú, my housekeeper and cook, who went by Lola, did the grocery shopping and kept the cabinets stocked.
I was grateful that at least one staff member was working out for me today.
I grabbed a baby food jar of mashed pears from the pantry and opened it as I sat back down next to my son.
“Here comes the airplane,” I said, making the engine noises as I moved the spoon around in the air before angling it toward his mouth. “Open the hangar.”
My heart hammered as I brought it closer.
Otto blinked and parted his lips just enough to let me scoop the pears into his mouth.
He winced like he might spit it out. My eyes widened.
Sweat broke out on my brow. Then he swallowed.
I let out a sigh of relief and did the same routine to get him to eat the rest of the jar.
When he was done, I tried to feed him some yogurt.
One jar of pears didn’t seem like enough for a growing eighteen-month-old orc.
But he pushed it off his tray onto the floor without a sound.
I stared at the mess on the floor and then at my son, feeling the life drain out of me.
I, Brakkus “The Brute” Drakkar, was failing at the most basic life tasks.
I’d been failing since that fateful winter night, when Otto’s mother got in the car during a snowstorm and never made it home.
My phone rang as I was cleaning it up. I stood with a paper towel full of goo and pulled the phone out of my back pocket.
It was my cousin, Trey Okafor. Trey started sweeping floors at my first gym when he was barely out of his teens and worked his way up to being my assistant.
He fielded calls, handled logistics, and kept a thousand things off my desk until one of them needed my name on it.
“This better be important,” I said, tossing the yogurt-covered paper towel in the trash.
“The Costco people came back,” Trey said. “They’ll take Brute Fuel in every warehouse, but they want a Costco-only pack. A thirty-six count nobody else can carry, and they want two years locked in.”
“Two years is fine.”
“Legal flagged the exclusive. Says it boxes us out of running a multipack with anyone else.”
“We don’t need anyone else. Costco moves more units than all of them combined. Sign it.”
Otto stared blankly at me from his high chair, then shoved his hand into his mouth and started to scream. “Trey, I’ve got to go.”
“Wait. I need to ask about the foam tusk merch. Brakkus…”
I hung up and scooped my son out of his high chair. “Hey, buddy. What’s wrong?” I asked, trying to soothe him the way a father should.
I took him to the nursery and changed his diaper.
The whole time, he kept shoving his hand into his mouth and wailing.
In the nursery bathroom, I turned on the shower and let the steam fill the room.
It was a trick Nadia had used when he had a bad cough as an infant.
I shooshed him and bounced him on my hip, trying to get him to calm down.
The sound of a little orc’s wail right up next to my ear was deafening. I was a man who’d broken hundreds of men in the M.A.U.L. fighting rings. I’d become a showman millions adored. I’d built an empire based on my own image with my bare hands, but I could not soothe my own son.
Otto worked his gums with his fist. He was drooling, so I wiped his chin with a washcloth, totally clueless what to do. Finally, he cried himself out, and I was able to get him down for a morning nap. By the time I collapsed in my office chair, I was completely exhausted.
I jiggled the mouse and woke up my computer. The security camera feeds came up on my screen. I peeled back my lips, growling at the sight. It brought up all the anger and fury I felt for the last nanny.
Her name was Brielle. She’d had a decent resume and even had experience with orc children.
In her interview, she’d been sunny and warm, saying all the right things at the right moments.
I needed help. I needed a professional. Otto had been withdrawn since his mother passed, regressing in his development, and impossible for me to reach.
It started off well at first. She’d been good with Otto.
He’d been eating, sleeping through the night, and he even seemed to be focusing on things more than usual.
She’d been attentive to me in a way that I now knew was calculated.
Touching my arm at dinner, batting her eyelashes, compliments about what an amazing father I was.
I let my guard down. I let myself be seduced by her bubbly nature and feminine warmth.
But one day I was checking the security cameras after the alarm went off because of movement on the front drive. When I flipped through the feeds, I saw her taking photos of Otto with her phone.
It wasn’t just one casual snapshot from an affectionate nanny.
It looked like she was doing a full-on photo shoot.
She angled his face to the light. Messed up his clothes and hair.
Took shots of him to emphasize his most withdrawn stares.
At first, I couldn’t admit to myself what she was doing.
But I watched her through the nanny cam over three consecutive days when she was alone with Otto in the nursery. Same thing every time.
That’s when I did some digging. I got Trey to find an IT guy to scour the internet for shots of Otto. It didn’t take long for him to find Brielle’s paparazzi account. Apparently, candid shots of The Brute’s motherless son were worth money to the tabloids.
I fired her that day and changed the security codes on the gates.
It took me a week to decide to put in a new request for a nanny.
But I’d reached my limit and accepted that I couldn’t take care of him on my own.
I went with a totally different agency this time.
The interview I had booked for tomorrow was with an RN with seven years of experience.
I hoped I wasn’t making the same mistake I’d made last time.
I closed the security feed and opened my inbox. The details about the merch issue were in an email from Trey. The foam tusks came back from the factory with the wrong green. They were too bright and looked radioactive.
I sighed and rubbed my temples. The fact that I was even selling orc tusk merch to humans still blew my mind sometimes.
I was a young orc living in the Breakstone orc enclave when it all started.
Back then, I thought I’d spend the rest of my life mining limestone and pretending to be human.
The mask had been good enough that we’d fooled humans for thousands of years.
I thought some of the old-timers actually got a kick out of it.
But you couldn’t fool blood tests, gene swabs, or hospital scanners.
When a monster shifted, the form was solid and tangible, but the being underneath still wasn’t human.
Our shifted form no longer worked in a world that documented every birth, every blood type, and every scan.
And our babies couldn’t hold human form until they were older.
Which meant they needed to be hidden for the first years of their lives.
The older generations wanted to keep faking it, keep hiding the kids. They wanted to grit their teeth through every new advancement in technology that made our disguises harder to hold. They were set in their ways and attached to the lives they’d built around their masks.
But the young people of my generation couldn’t take it anymore.
We were done wearing the mask. Done refusing to live our truth so the elders could save face.
Besides, we could see the writing on the wall.
Humans were going to expose us eventually unless we exposed ourselves first. Better to control the narrative than let the masses tell our story for us.
So, we rebelled. We started going out in our true forms. It was a collective effort, and I happened to be one of the first to walk human streets as an orc. It was very punk rock.
But humans panicked. It was a serious mess for a few years. Eventually, the elders from many species came together and made a public statement.
Honestly, most humans were relieved. The mysterious cryptid in the forest was more terrifying than your werewolf neighbor Stanley.
Plenty of them had known all along anyway.
We’d only gone into hiding because superstitious humans had demonized monsters a long time ago.
But those days were over. The time for integration had long since passed.
In the last twenty years, new laws had been passed, schools had been mixed, and doctors now learned about us in medical school. Human kids born after the reveal wouldn’t even remember a time when monsters weren’t a fact of life.
A few years after the elders made their statement, M.A.U.L., the Monster Apex Unleashed League, was formed. It was a way for us to poke fun at ourselves. A cross between WWE wrestling and no-holds-barred gladiator games.
I became The Brute. That was the character I created for myself in the M.A.U.L.
pits. Over the years, I climbed the ranks and became a number-one-rated champion.
I opened a franchise of gyms called The Brute Squad, which turned into a line of merch, protein powder, energy drinks, supplements, and even costumes.
I knew it was tacky. I knew it was slightly disrespectful to my roots. But I was an orc from a limestone mining town in rural Texas who had worn a mask my entire life. I did what I had to do to make it in the new world.
And the one person whose opinion had ever really mattered to me, my late mate Nadia, cheered me on the whole way.
The thought of her always sent me into a dark spiral.
Part of me still blamed myself as much as her parents did.
If she hadn’t been rushing to the airport after I’d been injured in a fight, she never would have gotten in that car wreck.
But I couldn’t take it back. I couldn’t make it right. I quit fighting after that to focus on my business and my son. Even after pulling back from the ring, I was barely holding on. A new nanny was coming to interview tomorrow. I just hoped she wasn’t a repeat of the last one.