Raising a Hero

Chapter 34

Blessed Fall. Glorious Fall. I could go on and on in praises. So many great things came, I couldn't stop counting them.

First, no more passing out from heat for me! Second, food! Oh gawl, the food was great. The harvest festival was all about food, and then it just kept going. Fresh off the vine, home grown produce beat whatever I could buy in a store hands down. Third, business cooled down, so I wasn't running around like a maniac from sun up to sun down to keep up with everything (Hal assured me he hadn't had to deal with as much before I'd came—pretty faces really did bring in more business. That is, before me and after his wife had died). Fourth, I could sleep with Gus again!

Or, I did for one night, then Gus announced he was sleeping with Hal. Milly and Gus had somehow found an old bedframe from the attic, riddled with termite lines, to Hal's horror. While Milly and I restored the frame, he spent the entire day deep cleaning and sanitizing the attic, finding all sorts of long forgotten trophies in the process. Milly managed to scrounge up a second-hand mattress from a neighbor due to Hal's preoccupation.

"I'm certain it doesn't have bed bugs," she said. "The lady is a distant cousin of ours and has the same water magic, but Dad doesn't think that means anything."

Milly would be taking the new bed in my room.

While I was happy to have my girlfriend as a roommate, I didn't find out until that night that the feel of a warm body next to me to hug left me awake for hours, despite having twice the work that day due to losing Hal to the attic.

The dreams I had that night didn't help. Because I had lied when I said I didn't dream about my ex. I did, and in worse ways than just seeing him moving on without me or doing terrible things to me. No. The worse dreams were the ones when he acted like he had when he had been warm and in love with me.

But I wasn't about to complain. Gus was fifteen, after all, and he had started to look like a teenager too. It wouldn't do to have him sleeping in the same bed as me, especially since he refused to see me as his mother.

Gus caught me dozing behind the bar during a lull in work. The regulars made a soothing hum of background music that had tempted the already exhausted and heart-heavy me.

He brought me back by flicking my arm.

"Ow!" I glared.

He frowned, as though he'd been the one flicked. "Something's wrong."

"Yeah, I'm tired, and my kid's got attitude."

"I'm not your—ugh. No. Something besides you being tired."

I yawned, eyeing his ruby eyes and puckered frown. This felt weird. I hadn't been acting any different today besides tired, so how did he know that?

"Are you...somehow using your magic from a distance?" I asked just above a whisper, wondering why it didn't bother me more that he could be potentially reading my mind.

"I've been able to read emotions since I was baby," he said sourly. "This is nothing new. I just don't know what's causing it, so whatever bad thing in your head is making you like this, stop it."

"I can't just stop thinking."

"Then pretend you have a little you in your head with an ax chopping up whatever's making you sad."

"Oo, that's dark." But I smiled and leaned forward, lowering my voice even further. "Why not do that for me?"

I had come to enjoy our practices with his mind magics, as we often fell into games of vision where he gave me images and I, in turn, imagined things for him to read. I'd learned in the beginning how to block things I didn't want him seeing, and it surprised me how easy it was. Or, perhaps, it was simply because he respected the blocks when he saw them. I had urged him to break one down before and he'd done it easily, which unsettled him even as it pleased me. I enjoyed seeing him grow. I knew there were things in my head he shouldn't see, for his sake, but I didn't see the need to keep everything else from him. Gus had called me shameless and foolish for that, but to me, if opening my mind helped him learn how to navigate the entirety of one's brain, then it was a happy sacrifice.