AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Yeah. Sorry. He’s a real jerk. Which is why we need to bring him down. You’re sure you don’t want to see if James and Gloria know anything?”
He shook his head. “No. And I’d better come up with a better plan, right away.” He began pulling papers together and stacking books.
“Maybe you’d think better with some food and rest,” I suggested.
“I don’t need another mother,” he snapped. “I think I’ve more than met my quota of mothers.”
I stood up and put my ball cap back on as I fought to control my temper. “Excuse me for caring about your well-being. How insensitive of me,” I said, forcing my voice not to quaver.
I made it all the way to the door before he called after me, “Sorry about that. I’m just—well, I’m not good company at the moment.”
“Yeah, I noticed.” I turned to give him a faint smile. “I’ll check on you later.”
As I headed down the stairs, it occurred to me that Owen wasn’t the only one who could talk to James and Gloria. Facing Gloria would be only slightly less scary than going alone into the dragons’ lair, but even if getting the information didn’t prove to be the key to beating Ramsay, I thought Owen needed the answers about his past before he could move forward.
Chapter Sixteen
I went home to change into some nicer clothes, fix my hair, and freshen my makeup. Gloria wasn’t the sort of person I wanted to face at anything other than my best. I checked the train schedule on Marcia’s computer, then took the subway to Grand Central and caught the Hudson line. The little town where I got off the train looked different from when I’d last seen it. I’d been there for Christmas, when there was snow on the ground. In summer, the lawns were lush and green, with brightly colored flower beds.
I hadn’t called ahead, so there was no one to meet me at the station, and there were no cabs in sight, but it wasn’t too far, just up a steep hill, so I set off walking to the home where Owen had grown up.
The town was a magical enclave, populated with magical people of all kinds, so it wasn’t odd to see fairies running errands and gnomes working in gardens. I couldn’t help but wonder what these people thought of the rumors about Owen. When I’d been here for Christmas, they’d all adored him. Did they regard him with suspicion now?
My feet had spawned a blister or two and I was slightly out of breath by the time I reached James and Gloria Eaton’s home, a brick gingerbread-like concoction on a hill over the town. The house didn’t look quite as magical as it had with an icing of snow on the peaked and turreted roof, but the flowers in the garden made up for that. I was tempted to check to see if they were made of gumdrops.
It took a few minutes after I knocked on the door before James came to open it, his elderly black dog at his side. His appearance took my breath away. He seemed to have aged a dozen years since I’d seen him last, and I’d have bet that most of that had come since yesterday. He’d already been white-haired, but his skin stretched tighter across his cheekbones, his eyes looked hollow, and his shoulders were stooped. “Katie! This is a surprise,” he said.
“I’m sorry, I probably should have called first, but I need to talk to you.”
“Yes, we should talk. Do come inside.”
James was being cordial enough, but then he was the easier of Owen’s foster parents. Gloria would be another story, I was sure. She was the only person I’d seen really able to scare Owen. There was something about her that made me want to stand at attention whenever I was near her.
That made what I saw next so shocking that I couldn’t believe my eyes. Gloria, who was tall, stiff, and quite formidable, lay slumped on the sofa, looking even older and more frail than James did. Her eyes were puffy and red-rimmed, like she’d been crying for days. She may have scared me, but my heart went out to her.
When she saw me, she struggled to sit up. “How is he?” she demanded, only a trace of her usual starch in her voice.
I hesitated, not sure how to answer. Did she want to be reassured, or did she want the truth? Oh, who was I kidding? This was Gloria. She’d want the truth. “I honestly don’t know. He’s being weird. And stubborn.”
“I wonder where he learned that?” James muttered, and I had to fight not to laugh.
“I think it’s getting to him, but it’s taking a while to sink in,” I said. Even though I hadn’t been invited to do so, and Gloria was someone who took that sort of thing seriously, I sat on the chair across from the sofa. “The big question is, is it true? If it is, who really knew? Right now, Owen doesn’t seem to want to even think about it, but I believe it’s important to get to the bottom of this. What did you know?”
James sat next to Gloria on the sofa and said, “The situation is, as you may imagine, complicated. We didn’t know who he was, but we did know he was a special case because his abilities were unusually strong in someone that age and because of the difficulties he’d already gone through. That can be a recipe for disaster if the child isn’t properly trained.”
“The Council wanted us to train and monitor him,” Gloria continued. “But we were not supposed to become emotionally involved. Doting, overly permissive parents have been the downfall of many a powerful child. In the nonmagical world we had the rights of foster parents, but within the magical world, guardianship rested with the Council, and they could take him away at any time. We had to remain neutral so we could objectively observe his progress.” Her voice cracked. “It was a difficult situation—if we showed signs of loving him too much, we would lose him, and yet we soon came to love him too much to bear the thought of losing him. Our inexperience as parents probably meant we weren’t able to strike quite the right balance, and we erred on the side of duty.”
“We had always wanted children of our own, but we were not blessed in that way,” James said, placing a hand over his wife’s. That simple gesture brought tears to my eyes.
Gloria gave a crooked smile. “And then one day they brought us this little boy. He was so small—he was rather sickly at first. He hadn’t been taken care of very well. He was so quiet, and we later learned his vision was weak. I was expected to treat him as though he was a pupil at a single-student boarding school, and I was his matron. If I ever seemed too attached to him, then I would have been deemed unfit for my job.”
Tears spilled from her eyes, and I was pretty sure my own cheeks had become wet. “That must have been awful for you.”
“It was wonderful and awful, all at the same time.”
“We were very proud of him,” James added.
“It was only much later when we heard the rumors that Mina Morgan had been pregnant and noticed the timing,” Gloria said. “Then we figured it out.”
