The Shadowmagic Trilogy

ONE

AUNT NIEVE

‘How come you never told me I had an aunt?’ That was the first thing I said. I know, my first question should have been, ‘Are you alright, Dad?’ He didn’t look alright. The light was awful, but I could see blood on the side of his face. I’m amazed I didn’t say, ‘What is that smell?’ because it sure stank in there. I’m not talking about a whiffy locker room smell, but the kind of stench that can make it possible to see your breakfast a second time around. Or most obviously I guess I should have asked, ‘Where are we?’ or, ‘Why are we chained to a wall?’ But instead, the first question I asked when I regained consciousness was about genealogy.

‘Well, Conor,’ Dad croaked, not even looking at me, ‘the first time you met her, she tried to kill you.’

She had, too.

I was sitting in the living room watching crappy morning television. I was dressed, shaved and ready to go. You had to be with my father. It wasn’t unusual for me to run out of the house two minutes behind him and find that he had left without me.

‘Are you ready?’ he called from the bedroom – in almost Modern Greek.

That was a good sign. It was a simple matter to gauge my father’s moods – the older the language, the worse his frame of mind. Greek wasn’t too bad. I shouted back, in the same language, ‘Born ready!’ I had learned a long time ago that I had to speak in the language of the day, or else he would ignore me completely.

He came out of his bedroom in a white shirt with a tie hanging around his neck. ‘Could you do this for me?’

‘Sure,’ I said.

Tie tying was one of the very few things that Pop found impossible to do with just one hand. Most of the time I didn’t think of Dad as having a handicap at all – I know a lot of two-handed men much less dexterous than him, and anyway, I was happy to do him a favour. I was just about to hit him up for a bit of cash, so that tonight I could take Sally to a nice restaurant, as opposed to the usual crummy pizza joint.

‘What’s with the tie?’ I asked.

‘The dean wants me to smarten up a bit. There is some famous ancient languages professor visiting who wants to talk about my theories of pronunciation. As if I don’t have anything better to do than babysit some idiot.’

That question was a mistake on my part. He said that last sentence in Ancient Gaelic. That was the language he used when he was annoyed or really meant business – it was almost as if it was his mother tongue. I’m not talking about Gaelic, the language of the Irish, I’m talking about Ancient Gaelic, a language found only on crumbling parchments and in my house.

‘Aw c’mon, Pop,’ I said as chirpily as I could, ‘maybe this professor is a beautiful she idiot, and I can finally have a mom.’

He gave me a dirty look, but not one of his more serious ones, and tucked the bottom of his tie into his shirt.