Page 78 of Fatality on the Field

We’ve been chatting for an hour when I slip away to the kitchen to get the coffee machine going. I choose the industrial-sized monster that Slade picked out, following the instructions he gave me when it came. We aren’t quite at the ‘no more’ stage yet, but it’s getting close and I’d like to have some on-hand for coaxing the mage when he’s burned off the fury. While the pot gurgles to life, I lean against the counter and listen for the sound of anyone else coming, but nothing happens.

Damn. They’re gonna miss something pretty amazing.

I chuckle to myself, hearing the thing start-up and then pushing off the counter to join Iggy in our clubhouse again. As I enter, I realize he never stopped talking the entire time I was gone. That’s pretty hilarious, but I just drop into my spot again, nodding as the magic man keeps ranting.

“—thirty-two years, Wolfberg, and not one fucking time did anyone in that family sit me down and say, ‘oh, by the way, Ignatius, you might want to keep an eye out for secret siblings. Your father’s cock has invaded more territories than the Society, and by now there are so many of us that we could field an entire wizard sport league’. But as always, this shit was left for me to find out by accident. Do you know how many times I’ve had to explain to a crying half-sister why she can never, ever see me again? Do you know what it’s like to pause before you take someone to bed to check if you might be related to the person you’re trying to fuck, because the entire family tree is a hedge maze? Well, I have, and even drunk, I know I didn’t do it!”

He’s getting louder, which means he’s getting to the real meat of his anger, which somehow isn’t even tied to what he was supposed to ask his dad. I honestly have no idea what the hell he’s talking about.

“—and then,” he thunders, “then you find out you’ve been wearing a goddamn detection spell since you were eighteen, because your own grandmother doesn’t trust you to keep it in your pants. As if I’m the liability! The humiliation, Lucas, the fucking humiliation. All of it because my father lies as easily as he breathes, and his women are either complicit or too broken to fight back. You try growing up in that and see how it shapes you.”

I snort, which makes Iggy pause just long enough for me to arch a brow. “Dude, both of my parents sleep with everything that moves. Nana put one of those detector things on me as a present on my eighth birthday. Seriously, I shit you not. She was terrified of this kind of crap because the bio-donors are always glazed on snowy alps of narcotics. Why are you so angry about it? At least she cared enough to do it.”

Iggy mimics the posture of a man who’s been run over by a snow plow and then backed over for good measure as he flops on the couch again. His eyes are rimmed red as he stares at me for a minute. “I didn’t think about how shitty your parents were until now. We’re birds of a feather, I suppose.”

“That’s why I’m not judging,” I say with a grin. “My family isn’t less of a shitshow, man.”

The professor snorts, but the sound is softer now, less defensive. “At least you had your Nana. I had to depend on the nannies that disappeared after my father did his thing and myself. That spell was the only thing my grandmother did that could be considered rebellious in that regard.”

I grin as I think about the woman who definitely shaped me into a better man than my folks would have. “Nana realized she’d been both too soft and too hard with my dad. Her parenting strategy with me was preemptive damage control. Before I hit puberty, she had me so thoroughly briefed on every possible problem and stunt the bio douches had ever been involved in and why it worked out badly. I understood why she did everything she did to help me grow up without becoming a strung-out rich waste case. I don’t know if it was the best method, but it worked despite my folks’ occasional best efforts to corrupt me.”

Iggy looks at me sidelong, then up and down my arm. “You have one, too, don’t you?”

He means the tattoo from the detector. I roll up my sleeve, exposing the inside of my left forearm. There, in among the rest of my ink, is a tiny, neat knotwork band. It’s faded, the lines not quite as sharp as they used to be, but it stands out because it’s not like the others—no hockey sticks, no runes, and no flourishes. It’s just a simple circle with a single, unbroken line, drawn running around and around over the painful brand beneath.

“She sat me down, told me it would hurt, and then had the family witch do them both. I was tagged before I even had a chance to know why. Once it was done and bandaged up, she explained why it had to be done as early as possible so I wouldn’t hide something from her as boys do and then have to carry that burden forever.”

The scotch bottle pauses at his lips. For a second, he looks through me, then he actually meets my eyes. “Did being honest help that young?” he asks. “I often wonder if I’d be less damaged by this shit if they’d told me when I wasn’t mid-adulthood.”

“Not really,” I snort. “It made it impossible for me to fuck an unknown half-sib at hockey camp, drunken parties, and whatever else. That was the purpose, so it worked, but the knowledge? That wasn’t easy to swallow, but neither was anything Nana told me young. I don’t know if it damaged me more or less, truth be told. It might have made me more suspicious of everyone I met, I suppose.”

He leans back with his eyes closed and lets my words settle. “I’ll bet Morgana will love your Nana. They seem like peas in a pod in some ways. Not so easy on my side.”

“She will,” I say, and I mean it. “But that’s not happening yet, nor is she meeting your asshat family. No need to fret over it now.”

Ignatius laughs, a short, sharp bark, but it’s more alive than the rage from earlier. “Do you know what the worst part is, Wolfberg?”

I shake my head, unsure where he’s going with this.

“It’s not the embarrassment. It’s knowing that even now, even when I’m supposed to be a grown-ass man with my own life, I’m still cleaning up the old man’s messes. My whole life, I’ve always been cleaning, hiding, and fixing what he couldn’t be bothered to own. I thought I’d be free of it by now, but here I am—in my thirties and still unspooling more bullshit.”

I look at the coffee table and then back at him. “Maybe the trick,” I say, “is to just stop fixing things, dude.”

He looks like I slapped him. “And let my family burn?”

I shrug. “That, or let someone else sort it out. You don’t see Morgana running around patching up the old Dean’s legacy, do you? She’s building her own rep, her own story, and tossing out the shit she doesn’t want to fuck with. You should do that, too. Not like you have to worry about being cut-off anymore; you’ve got everything you need here with us.”

My eyes narrow as he ponders this, and for a second it looks like he might say something cutting, but instead he pours us both another scotch. “You think you’re clever, don’t you?” he mutters.

“Nah. I just don’t think it makes sense to hold back right now. You’re too sloshed to coddle, you know?” Winking at him, I take my ridiculous cup and shrug. “I don’t know if that’s your hesitation, but if it is, it’s taken care of.”

We sit for a few minutes, not talking, just letting the scotch and silence do their work. Iggy has that look, like he wants to rewind the last hour and staple his own mouth shut, but I don’t give him an inch to squirm away. Eventually, I set my mug down, and angle myself toward him as I lean my forearms on my knees.

“Let’s trade,” I say, rolling up the sleeve on my other arm. “You go, then I go. Like a tennis match, but with childhood trauma instead of balls.”

The drunken mage gives me a sidelong glance, then nods, his mouth quirking up at the corner. “Fine. Since I’ve already made a fool of myself… My grandmother used to read fortunes for all the kids in the family. ‘You’ll be powerful, you’ll be clever, you’ll be the one who finally doesn’t screw it all up’. It was a performance, not a prophecy, of course. But for me, she always said, ‘You’ll end up just like your father, but you’ll be the one who’s sorry about it’. I spent my whole childhood terrified I’d end up exactly like him, so I overcompensated. I made myself valuable by building my entire fucking persona around never letting the family down. Guess how well that worked out.”

Oh, he has no idea, but he’s going to now.