Malus

Chapter Twenty-Five

Melissa had left the room on the first night, and only at the healer's insistence. Last night, she fell asleep before anyone could nudge her out. Now she sat in a padded wooden chair, a hot mug of espresso in her hands.

An older woman had brought it by under the thinly veiled pretense of returning the twins' backpack. Jonathan wasn't in the room, so she had no way of knowing what the circumstances were.

"Good morning, Ms. Marland. I trust you've been holding up?" asked the woman. She had introduced herself as Errol Osred, and Melissa still hadn't gotten past the question of whether or not the name was unisex.

"Considering that we're having this conversation over my comatose daughter, no," she answered flatly. Osred mumbled an awkward, "Right."

She cleared her throat. "About your children," she stammered. "I understand that you chose not to take Perry when he was born, but had no reservations with Bronte. Did you have any ideas about their heritage?"

"You're asking me if I knew that I'd given birth to magicians? You hide yourselves too well," she replied, shaking her head. "These are better questions for Jon. He's the one who finally explained it all. If I remember right, there were demons essentially stalking me during my pregnancy. They made me hallucinate, and I blamed it on the boy I saw in nightmares. I thought that it was one of my babies, but I was mistaken."

"So you never knew about magic before Perry arrived at your home?"

Melissa nodded in confirmation.

"Bronte never showed signs of being gifted? She didn't claim to see spirits, or ghosts? Dream of things she couldn't know?" Osred was steadily leaning in, and Melissa wanted very much to shove her away.

"A lot of kids do. My mother told me that I thought I was psychic when I was little," she explained, letting out a faint smile. "I told Bronte she was being silly and to ignore it, and it didn't come up again."

The woman looked overly intrigued at this statement. "Did you see things as a child?"

Melissa's smile fell. With each question, her opinion of the woman leaned more and more towards utterly daft. She was about to correct her, but was cut short by Jonathan's entry.

His mood appeared to have greatly improved since he left. Then he saw who was hovering at the end of his daughter's sickbed and any cheerfulness he had dropped dead.

The older woman warmly greeted him in attempt to get herself out of the danger zone. In response to her salutation, Jonathan fumed.

"Get the hell away from my family," he said at a near shout, dropping the brown bag in his arms. He hadn't been thinking too highly of the woman since Warren told him what he knew about his children's endeavor.

"Wizard Arval—"

"Don't even try, Osred. You had every reason to believe Perry was possessed. And you shrugged it off because one man told you everything checked out, without consulting the exorcist he was supposed to have seen. I guess you forgot that a demon can possess more than one person at once, right? Bloody brilliant of you, Errol," Jonathan ridiculed with a sarcastic hiss. He went on with his rant, flinging a hand into the air. "Then you sent the same man into battle against the demon that was controlling him. Do you know how many people are blaming Warren for sabotage and treason?"

"I understand your anger," Osred said carefully, "but I'm not the only one to blame here. We were all fooled by the demon. How long did it take you to realize your son was possessed?"

"About two seconds, when I interrupted the summoning!" Jonathan retorted. "The only real warning I got was a minute before it started. As for the haunting, the symptoms are a bit too similar to the behavior of an average teenager. At least I have a legitimate excuse for—"