Bloodfire: Other Realm, Frost Family Series Book 2

Burn 20

Brennan Doyle stared at his father in shock. "W-wait...you're saying that the...the Lord of Winter wants to meet me?"

Cormac nodded. "Yes, Bren. We have been summoned to come Saturday morning. And...well, it's very important that this meeting go perfectly. I fear for you, son..." he sighed wearily. "How many times this week have we had the skeleton of a human left at our door?"

Bren swallowed, trying to fight back his fear. "Five..." he answered glumly. "One for every day of the week I have to go to school and interact with the Other kids in the area..."

Before all of this, he had gone to a smaller school for sea-based Others that had been quite far from where they lived. But with the 'incident', Bren was stuck as a human. As such, he could no longer keep going to the underwater school. Now, for the past month, he had been attending the nearest middle school that land and air-based Others attended. His father had been forced to basically get on his knees and beg the principal of the school to accept Bren in. It had been at that moment, standing behind his father, head lowered to hide the rage that was building in his thin frame, that he realized just how much his life had been ruined.

He was eleven and he knew he was supposed to be careful. It had been the neighborhood bullies who had gotten a hold of him. It was a really sunny day and he had decided to actually go out in human form. But he took his seal skin with him, despite all his father's warnings to always leave it in a safe place. Bren didn't feel comfortable without it nearby. He liked to have it on him, in case he got sick of human legs and arms, that way he could change.

It was on that day that he got cornered, wondering around the neighborhood, into a back alley. Iggy Grale, the leader of the bullies and a fire salamander, had torn Bren's backpack off his back and engulfed it in flames. The very same backpack he had been using to carry his seal skin, water bottles, a few snacks, and his library book. All of it gone in a puff of smoke and ash, in a matter of one minute. The results of that one fatal mistake had been the end of his life as an Other.

Yet, still, he wasn't able to see himself as a human either. His entire life until now he had been a selkie, had lived in this world. Now though, he was suppose to just lie down and accept that he would never be so again; that he would be stuck as one of the lesser beings who had technically been the reason for his existence? Bren didn't know how to do that. The once cheerful and happy boy had swiftly transformed into a bitter, angry, sarcastic preteen.

Cormac looked ready to cry, his hazel eyes shinning with suppressed tears. "This isn't what I had ever planned for you, son...At this point; it's a matter of your safety."

Bren rubbed at his arms, feeling a sudden chill. "But, Dad...You've been threatened at the factory too, right? Iggy's dad's friends keep hurting you, don't they?"

His father paled. "H-how do you...?"

Eyes falling to the floor, Bren ground his teeth together. "Iggy's made sure to tell me about it. He says his dad boasts about it at dinner. About how 'weak, meek, little Doyle' will never say a word about what his son did...About how I deserve what I got, for being some moronic seal without a brain. How, one of these days, the wendigos are going to eat me. How it'll just take one wrong misstep and I'll be consumed."

Bren knew that his father couldn't afford a lawyer or to even try to go to the authorities to get justice for what Iggy had done to him. That cost money, lots of it, and his dad had already had to spend a very large amount of his life savings on refurbishing and rebuilding their small house. Before, it had been equipped for them as selkies, only donning their human forms to leave their house to go to somewhere besides the factory or the school Bren had attended originally. Now though, Bren was always in human form and his father only put on his seal skin at work, where he was required to. His job was using what water manipulation skills he had as a selkie to help the other similar Others turn the water-powered turbines at the factory.