rest of you to get hurt. I’m sure you’ll be mad about it, but try not to do anything stupid. If something does happen to me…I love all of you so much. I don’t want to dwell on it. I haven’t even expressed all my feelings yet, but they’re there. —Helena
Jake was making English muffins in the toaster oven for our breakfast while Jasper was looking over some plans for the addition-in-progress when I came charging down the hallway from the bedrooms flapping the piece of paper.
“Helena and Byron are gone.”
“Gone?” Jasper grabbed the note right out of my hand and read it aloud.
“Fuck,” he said.
“We need to do something stupid immediately,” Jake said.
“Absolutely, because Hel did something stupid first,” Jasper agreed.
“She went to go fight her cousin?” Billie interjected. “Is that what she did?”
“It can’t be good, whatever she did…”
“Isn’t she somewhat correct that your fighting skills are not up to par?” Gaston said.
“Shut up, Gaston,” Jake said.
“Don’t tell him to shut up when he’s right.” Billie crossed her arms. “You’ll get yourselves killed, and Helena will feel awful about it, and that won’t do anyone good. Jake, all you can do is turn into a wolf. And Jasper, you can heal a little. And Graham, you could probably do something, but you ain’t got any training and you still act like a human.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Excuse me for acting like the thing I always thought I was. But I can’t just sit here doing absolutely nothing when the woman I love might be dying.”
“Absolutely,” Jasper said, and in that moment, we were all perfectly in synch.
Something had to be done.
“I’ll talk to the familiars,” I said. “Maybe they would help.”
“Did she leave her phone?” Jake said. “Maybe we should also tell her brother. She didn’t want him involved, but so what?”
“Because he’s a dad!” Billie said.
“See, I’m liking the idea of having four dads more all the time,” Jake said. “I could go get myself killed and I wouldn’t even have to feel that guilty about it. From what Hel has said about her brother, he’s a better warlock than she is a witch and she probably should have gotten him more involved. She’s just proud, really. I can’t blame her for that. But the time for pride is over.”
“Okay, you call Harris, you talk to the familiars, and I’ll pack some tools and provisions,” Jasper said.
“All right,” Billie said. “We’re coming too. I said I wasn’t afraid to die—”
“We are?” Gaston said.
“Yes, we are! If you get killed, you’ve had a good run.”
We all went our separate ways. I went out the back door where all the familiars were living in the garden. They were all huddling together already, murmuring, in the dewy morning under the citrus trees.
It’s weird how quickly I’ve gotten used to talking to a crowd of animals every morning, like I’m frickin’ Snow White or something. Although I knew they all had human forms, I had rarely seen them, so in my mind, a bird was just a bird. A talking bird. And after a few days of talking to birds and rodents and lizards and so on, I was starting to think of them as my people. That if I had one job right now, it was to encourage and mobilize this bedraggled group of people who had not been paid attention to in a long time. I was in my element, but I also knew how much work was ahead.
I had also never dealt with anything like this before. It was common to have to deal with people who worked against their own best interests because they were loyal to an employer or a religion or something their dad always said, or because change just freaked them out and they didn’t trust me. But my constituents were never actually magically bound.
Even in the midst of their brave rebellion, they knew that they might be forced back into obedience at any second. They lived in constant fear.
“What’s wrong, guys?” I asked, as some of the little familiars shot me anxious looks when they heard my footsteps coming. “Or am I interrupting a private meeting?”
“It’s Lina,” said a small male cat familiar named Horus.
“The brown rabbit?” I asked.
“She got called back just a few minutes ago. The wizards are doing something to force us back to them, and they’ll pick us off one by one! She was sobbing and we couldn’t stop it,” Horus said. “I should never have left. It will