Breaking Magic

Chapter 16: Adam

The hotel Felix booked isn't really a hotel at all, at least not what I think of when I hear the word "hotel". It's more like a Bed-and-Breakfast, this little cottage type house made of brick with climbing plants growing all over the front. It's owned by a couple and when we walk in, there's hardly anyone else there apart from the owners. They give Felix and me a key each and show us to a room down the hall, one with a window that looks out over a meticulously landscaped backyard.

"It's... nice," I say, standing awkwardly in the middle of the room as the owner closes the door behind her, leaving us alone.

He gives me a look with one of his eyebrows raised as he tosses his backpack onto one of the two twin beds.
 I flush in response. Well, what the fuck am I supposed to say? I can't think of a damn thing to actually talk to Felix about, not conversationally. I could pull my weight in a discussion about trying to find the staff or how much as an ass he could be, but casual small talk is outside of my skill set with him.
 Besides, it is a nice place.
 I throw my duffel bag onto the other bed and then drop onto it myself, staring up at the ceiling.

"All right then, what now?"

 Felix unzips his backpack and pulls out this huge white binder, laying it out in front of him. "Now I tell you where we're going to start looking first thing tomorrow," he says.

"What about dinner?"

"You just cleaned out a Starbucks less than an hour ago."

"Yeah, but that was an hour ago."

Felix rolls his eyes so hard I'm surprised they don't get stuck in the back of his skull. "Fine. I'll order delivery or something. You're going to owe me a shit ton of money after all of this is over."

"I don't have any money."

"I'll accept an IOU, but there will be interest."

I can't tell if he's serious or joking.

He scrolls through his phone for a few minutes, until he finds a pizza chain that lets him make an order completely online. I begin to suspect his French might not actually be that fluent after all, despite how good he had made it sound in the taxi.

"Okay," he says, tossing his phone down, "it'll be here in twenty. Satisfied? Now can we get started on figuring out how we're going to keep you from becoming a victim of the public good?"

I grunt. He takes it affirmatively.

"Okay, so not much is known about the details of Merlin's actual life," he begins, flipping through the pages in the binder. "A lot of it has become warped and corrupted through time, and a lot of the stories about him appear to have been combined with legends about other magicians around the same general time frame. The Merlin you hear written about in the 10th to 15th centuries is more like a semi-mythical amalgamation of dozens of unnamed magicians. But since the late 1700s, scholars have been able to do a decent job of piecing the reality of his life back together."

I'm interested, and I can't really see what Felix is looking at from all the way over on my own bed. I hesitate, but then get up and go sit next to him, leaving a couple of feet of space between us, but giving me a much better view of the contents of the binder.

"But we don't really care about his life," Felix continues. "It's his death that concerns us; specifically, his final resting place." He turns a few pages, until he comes to what looks like a photocopy of a family tree, hand drawn and filled out in a tight, illegible cursive scrawl. The date on the bottom is from the mid-1800s. 

"Now, whether or not Merlin himself actually had any heirs is uncertain. There are some references after his death that he definitely did, but these are from people who never actually met Merlin himself, just quoting what Merlin's surviving contemporaries had told them. It is known that he had a sister, and she was married off to some powerful, wealthy non-magical landowner. Because of her status in the mundane world, family records of her and her children and her children's children have all been recorded. Her husband died soon after they married, but not before she had two children by him. Her husband must have had a little magic in him too at some point in his own ancestry, because at least one of her daughters was a magician as well. She married that daughter off to another magician, and re-incorporated the family line into pure magical blood. That line can be followed all the way down to about 1862," he traces the family tree with a finger from the very top, down the the final name crammed into the bottom of the page, "when the last surviving direct descendant of Merlin's sister dies, childless. There are indirect descendant's, of course. Most magicians are related in one way or another to this line, making us all great-great-great-etcetera grandnieces and grandnephews and second cousins twice removed from Merlin and his family."