watched as his father caught his mother against the wall and kissed her. Adin
could see her struggling to get away but knew that she was only pretending.
Her laughter was low and filled with something he didn’t understand. It
wasn’t anger; he’d never heard his parents angry. They’d argued, certainly,
especially about taking more jobs outside the U.S. His mother believed things
were changing around the world, and wanted to go back home where she felt
more comfortable. His father was a bit of an adventurer and enjoyed travel.
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41
Everyone knew they disagreed. They just didn’t let it get angry.
Right now his mother had her arms wrapped around his father, and she
lifted her legs up, locking them behind his back. Something about it made
Adin smile—like playing piggy back—but it also felt like something he
shouldn’t be watching. Their kisses were turning more…frantic, he could see,
and his father gripped his mother’s butt in the palms of his hands where nice
people didn’t normally touch one another.
It looked hungry, and it felt desperate to Adin, as though they couldn’t
get enough of each other, as though they devoured each other, breathing each
other in like the smoke from water pipes he’d seen in the marketplace in
Egypt. Men drew the smoke in and kept it in their lungs as long as they
could. His father inhaled his mother the same way.
A hand gripped his arm and pulled him away from the window and
Yasmina’s voice washed over him as she took him to task for skulking
around.
“Don’t spy,” she hissed at him as she pulled him far away from the
window. She held his baby sister Deana in one arm and dragged him toward
the back of the house to the kitchen. “Adults need private time.”
“My dad had his hands on my mom’s butt,” Adin told her, wide eyed.
Yasmina shrugged at him, worldly at thirteen where he was only five.
“Adults do that. It’s disgusting, but someday, oddball, you’ll understand.”
Adin had private reservations about that but gave Yasmina the benefit
of the doubt. “Don’t call me that.”
“Oddball,” Yasmina swatted at him. “Your mother told me it says
Oddball on your birth certificate but the doctor told your parents you’d need a
nickname so you wouldn’t grow up with a psychological complex. This is why
you are called Adin.” He could see the teasing light in her eyes and forgave
her but he knew it was his parents’s joke and it would haunt him forever.
“Deana’s name rhymes with beans because mom says she gave her gas...”
“True, but she’s more than made up for that by being such a sweet and
beautiful child, and you are a monster!”
“Am not!” Adin wrenched his hand from her grasp, waiting to see
whether she’d chase him, and then ran from her through the open courtyard
and past the kitchen. Yasmina called to him to slow down in Urdu, to be
42 Z.A. Maxfield
mindful that she couldn’t run with a baby in her arms, and he complied.
Eventually Yasmina had to return to the cooking, but she left him feeling well
looked after and richer by a special ball shaped pastry filled with pistachios
and sugar, called a Laddu.
The boys returned and play continued until the afternoon sun found its
way to the horizon. After that, when Adin thought it seemed very late at
night, Adin ate a meal with his family outside. A billion stars hung overhead
while they enjoyed the drop in temperature and the fading of the desert light.
They sat in the courtyard on a bench. His father had one arm around him
and one around his mother as she held the baby in her arms and sipped her
spicy tea. The way his father looked at his mother seemed to make everyone
present smile, his mother most of all.
She looked the way she did when she’d figured out the best place to hide
Adin’s Christmas gifts.
Adin heard a clanking noise and opened his eyes to see Bran
sitting on the side of the tub. He grabbed for a washcloth and
covered what he could of himself, then shot Bran a killing look.
“
Bran
. Generally people like to bathe alone.”
“Don’t worry. You’ve got nothing I haven’t seen before.”
Adin rolled his eyes, still feeling odd. At first, his heart had
hurt to be wrenched from that dream. It had been a long time
since he’d really thought about his family and how much he’d
loved—and been loved by—his parents in return. While he’d
dreamed, he’d felt it like a drug, seeping with the heat of the
water into his bones. Now the dream still pulled at him, as if the
warmth of it dragged him under.
The wetness on Adin’s cheeks had nothing to do with the
sweat beading on his forehead. He didn’t bother to hide the sob
that escaped him. Bran sat placidly while Adin wept, one finger
stirring Adin’s bathwater, the other hand holding his chains up
so they wouldn’t get wet. When he had no more tears left Bran
handed him a small, thick towel and he dried his face with it.
“Thanks.” Adin handed it back and began the effort of
soaping himself up and rinsing off, determined that if it didn’t
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43
seem unusual for the boy to be in the bathroom with him, he
wasn’t going to go out of his way to make it weirder than it had
to be. Bran remained silent, and when Adin looked up Bran’s eyes
shimmered with unshed tears. “What?”
“Beautiful family,” Bran said in perfect Urdu. “Much love.”
Adin’s breath caught. “What are you?”
Bran smiled faintly. “Yes.
Exactly
.”
Adin fell into bed and slept. If it was uneventful for most
of the night, dream-wise, it more than made up for that in the
seconds before he woke, when hundreds of images, mostly faces,
flickered like paparazzi flashbulbs going off in his head,
pop
,
pop
,
pop
.
It was as if everyone he’d ever known, every person he’d
ever seen, was displayed before him in a lightening round. A
PowerPoint presentation slideshow of old love and painful loss,
of things that were frightening, and people best forgotten.
“Stop,” Adin ground out when he realized he had no control
over what he was seeing. Adin heard a noise near him that might
have been a sigh, and might have been a smothered laugh.
Adin threw the sheet off his body and swung his feet over the
side of his bed. Silk sleep pants clung damply to his sweaty legs.
He put his elbows on his knees and rested his head in his hands.
The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was Bran, who
lay curled on the floor around a pillow like a cat.
Adin watched the boy for a minute and realized he was
pretending to be asleep.
“I can see you’re awake.” Adin drew his feet back up into
the bed, as if the boy was going to chew off a toe or something.
“There’s no point in pretending. And stop rummaging around in
my head, Bran.”
“But I haven’t gotten to the best bits yet.” With a heavy metal
scraping noise Bran unfurled himself and sat up. “To look at you
a bloke would think that you’ve never had a moment of anxiety
in your life, that it was all pricey and painless—”
“I don’t appreciate you fooling around with my memories.”
Adin leaned back against the well-crafted mahogany headboard.
When Bran would have joined him on the bed Adin pushed him
back. “Get a chair.”
46 Z.A. Maxfield
Bran tugged one of the leather chairs to the spot where he’d
been sleeping next to the bed and sat in it. He slid back and
lifted his legs to rest his feet next to Adin’s. His eyebrow rose in
defiance, daring Adin to complain.
“Is that why Harwiche wants you? Because you can get inside
of people’s minds?” Adin asked.
“I don’t know why Harwiche wants me.”
Adin frowned in disbelief.
“
No
. It’s true! I don’t know why he wants me. I don’t know
what anyone would want with me.”
“That’s probably true,” Boaz spoke from the doorway. He
entered the room holding a tray of coffee, carefully setting it
down between Adin and Bran and then climbing onto the bed.
“He doesn’t know.”
“Make yourself at home.” Adin grumbled.
“I am home.” Boaz smiled. He handed Adin a cup of coffee
then offered one to Bran, who shook his head. “Bran was probably
kidnapped for something random. Perhaps someone saw you do
something unusual and they put two and two together, yes?”
“For the love of heaven, Boaz. Just tell me what he is.”
“That’s part of the problem. If I’m not mistaken, Bran isn’t
any one thing.” To Bran directly, he said, “Am I right?”
Bran stayed silent.
“Look.” Boaz turned back to Adin. “You have to trust me
when I say if I knew more, I would tell you.”
“Like you’ve always done in the past,” Adin replied sourly.
Boaz frowned. “Here’s the thing. Every culture in the world
has a variation on the theme of the changeling, am I right?”
“He’s a
changeling
?” Adin chuckled. “A fairy baby switched at
birth with a human?”
“Yes, and no. You’re so disrespectful, and it ill becomes a
man of intelligence. Put aside Disney for right now. A changeling
child is believed—in most cultures—to be a magical being that is
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47
switched with a human child at birth. Whether it’s hell tithes, or
mischief, or a way to prevent magical inbreeding. The point is, no
one really catches on in most cases.”
“Right.” Adin sipped his coffee. “And no one has considered
the possibility that the entire genesis of these tales is a way for
superstitious or hyper-religious people to explain away children
with illnesses or birth defects or autism.”
Boaz’s mouth dropped open. “You
have
studied this.”
“I’m a professor of literature, and I vet old documents
and manuscripts all the time. Fairy tales are some of the most
profound and interesting things people have ever written. Of
course I have.”
“All right, all right.” Boaz winked at Bran. “I told you there
would be puffery involved.”
Adin sputtered, “I beg your—”
“The point is, even Bran can’t tell you what he is, because he
doesn’t know.”
Adin digested this and frowned at Bran. “How the hell can
you not know what you are?”
Bran sucked in a breath and held absolutely still for a single
second, then burst into tears and ran from the room. Adin heard
the nearly obscene
clank
sound of his manacles as he slammed
the connecting door between their rooms.
“If you can be any more insensitive, this might be a good
time, Adin. After all, I don’t completely despise you yet and even
though Santos never liked you in the first place he could probably
like you less.” Boaz got up and then removed the tray from the
bed. He reached out and pulled Adin’s half-finished coffee from
his hand.
“
Boaz
.”
“Think about it,” Boaz ordered Adin sternly. “Think about
how you know who
you
are and then come down for breakfast.”
Adin thought of all the memories Bran had accessed. He
thought of his mother and father and their stories of
their
parents.
48 Z.A. Maxfield
If he didn’t have that…if he didn’t remember that, he’d have no
idea what he was either. “
Boaz
.”
Boaz had gotten to the door, but he turned abruptly. He could
be at least as impatient as Donte. “There is folklore suggesting
that a changeling child becomes a human child over a period of
time. It’s a process. At some point, the child in the process of
becoming
is neither one thing nor another. Santos speculates that if
the process was interrupted, someone like Bran might be… Well.
Certainly he’d be outside the norm.”
Adin frowned. “How outside?”
Boaz measured his words more carefully than Adin had ever
seen him do, “Entirely new. He’s neither. He’s not
something
.”
“Boaz. Of course he’s something. He eats. He stirred my
bathwater. He cried.”
“He stirred your
bathwater
?”
“It’s a long story. The point is he’s entirely corporeal. He’s
very much a human boy.”
“Yes.” Boaz chewed his lip thoughtfully.
“He couldn’t be held in chains if he weren’t.”
“There is some speculation that iron weakens him.”
“It’s all conjecture?” Adin entertained the idea that he’d
purchased boy who was some sort of magical being with mental
Houdini fu.
“I’m making eggs.”
“Quel surprise.”
Once the door slammed behind Boaz, Adin cursed and ran
his hands through his hair. He knew he should get up and put
on clothes, clean his teeth, and leave. He should take his luggage