“I still can’t thank you enough for being able to step in like this,” Lincoln Chambers announced while heaving a large suitcase into the back of his car. “I mean, I know you’ve always been available to watch her, but those were only for afternoons. This is a bit above and beyond the call of duty.“

The slim, black woman he was talking to, whom Lincoln knew as Sonia Elecourt, offered a casual shrug. “Honestly, it’s not that big of a deal. The kid practically watches herself. All I’ve gotta do is make sure she doesn’t get in over her head.”

Lincoln snorted at that. “I think you’re forgetting that I happen to know just what a big job that actually is. My daughter is pretty good at a lot of things, but staying out of trouble isn’t one of them. Sometimes I think that’s what we should’ve named her, when we--” He trailed off, glancing away with a frown at the memory of his wife for a moment before shaking that off. “Anyway, this is a pretty big deal. So thanks again. Let me go say goodbye and then I’ll head out.”

With that, the man headed back into the house, leaving ‘Sonia’ standing there by the car. The woman, whose real name was Charmeine, watched him go while laying a hand on the side of the primitive vehicle. With the Chambers man leaving for a few days to help his parents with something in California, maybe she could actually get some real work done. There was still a lot to do, even a full year after she had moved into the house next door and begun to make herself available to Chambers for all his babysitting and tutoring needs.

That was a thought that made the woman stop and smirk to herself briefly. How different she had been only one year earlier. A pittance in the grand scheme of things considering how old she actually was. And yet, that single year might as well have been a full Seosten lifetime. She had originally put herself in this position in order to find out exactly why the Chambers girl was immune to being possessed, determined to get real answers. And get answers she had, though they hadn’t been anywhere near what she had expected. Now, after a year of that, Charmeine was nowhere near the same person she had been when this… assignment began.

She might have thought more about that and what it meant, but her musings were interrupted as the front door of the house banged open once more and Felicity Chambers, all of twelve years old, came bounding through. She was carrying a grocery sack full of books, straining to lift the weight while calling over her shoulder. “We’ll be okay, don’t worry, Dad! Just go help Popser and Grandmaria!” Turning a bit while she was saying that, the girl failed to notice how close her leading foot was getting to the slightly raised crack in the sidewalk. In the next moment, she hit it and started to pitch over backward with a yelp.

But Charmeine was there. In what would have looked like a blur of motion too fast to be human, the woman left her spot by the car and ended up right behind the flailing girl. One hand caught her by the shoulder before she could finish crashing, and the other snapped down to stop the falling bag full of books.

Practically hanging backward against the woman’s strong grip, Felicity grinned up at her. “Thanks, Sonia! You have super-good reflexes.”

“So I’ve been told,” Charmeine replied flatly, before giving the girl a little push to straighten her up. She lifted the bag, squinting that way. “What’s all this?”

It was Lincoln who answered as he came back out. “Those are the library books she needs to return today if she doesn’t want to get hit with late fees.” He paused before grimacing. “Ah, sorry to throw that on your plate too. We meant to get that done before I left, but uhh…”

Eyes rolling pointedly, Charmeine gestured toward the car. “Go, Chambers. I am relatively certain the two of us can handle a mission as complicated as returning books to the library, if we buckle down and really focus.”

Felicity, for her part, giggled a little. “Yeah, Dad, we can do it. Even if we have to crawl under barbed wire and avoid enemy snipers in the trees! Sonia’ll protect me from the bad guys.”

Oh boy did that make a weird feeling run down Charmeine’s spine. Her mouth opened, but she stopped herself from actually saying anything. Not that she had any idea what she would have said anyway. Once again, things were so much more complicated now than they had been before all this started.

So, she just stood there while the girl gave her father one more tight hug. He promised to call a couple times a day, especially before she went to bed. Then he gave ‘Sonia’ a few last second reminders and suggestions, while also taking the time to quintuple-check that they had each other’s phone numbers. A completely pointless gesture since they had called and texted one another many times over the past year, and those numbers hadn’t changed. But it seemed to make him feel better, so she held her tongue rather than point out how unnecessary it was.

Finally, the man got in his car, leaned out once more to give his daughter a kiss on the forehead while she groaned theatrically, then pulled out and headed off. Since Laramie Falls didn’t have their own airport, he would be driving to the nearest city that did. Charmeine had offered to take the man herself and drop him off, but he had declined and said that long drives like that helped him settle his own thoughts before a flight. She wasn’t sure exactly how that worked, but whatever suited him. It wasn’t as though she was all that eager to sit in a primitive fossil fuel vehicle for a couple hours anyway.

Instead, she stood there and watched the car disappear around the corner before turning her attention back to the young girl in front of her. Felicity stared after the vehicle with a slightly more worried expression than she had showed her father while trying to make him feel okay about leaving her for a few days. It was obvious that she was less of a fan of that idea than she had let on. Probably something to do with the fact that her own mother had supposedly abandoned her family.

Of course that whole situation was far more complicated than the girl could possibly understand. But it wasn’t as though Charmeine could explain that much, even if she was inclined to. To be fair, a part of her had grown to feel a little bad about what the kid thought about her own mother, which was weird. It wasn’t as though the woman had some great relationship with her own birth parents, or really anything to compare it to. She, like most Seosten, had essentially grown up in what the humans would know as an orphanage. She met her birth parents a few times throughout her life in quite formal affairs. Neither of them had any real relationship with one another, and had simply contributed their genetic material to make a child as part of their duty to keep the species going. They were genetically compatible and that was about it.

Shaking off that bit of uncertainty within, Charmeine glanced toward the house she had moved into when this whole thing started, before turning back to Felicity. “You said you need to take those books back to the library? Bring them, we’ll do that and then get some lunch.”

Given the choice, she would have ordered Felicity’s passenger to put her host to sleep for the next few days so they could have uninterrupted time together. But the girl, Tabbris, had made it very clear ever since Charmeine had discovered her, that she would not do something like that. Charmeine, upon realizing that this Seosten child was from Sariel, had to know everything about her and where she came from. The proper move in that situation, of course, would have been to take the host girl in, explain the situation, and let Manakel and others figure out what to do with both of them. And she would have done just that, but it was Sariel’s daughter. She had to find out what had happened to her and how she had a child here on Rysthael, hiding inside the daughter of Joselyn Atherby.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

So, she had waited and, against her better judgment, agreed to only speak with Tabbris at night when Felicity was asleep. They used magic to ensure both father and daughter stayed that way, while having long discussions about exactly where Sariel was and what had happened to her.

And that answer, that… realization of just what had happened to the woman Charmeine considered to be a sort of friend, was what had led to… this. What she had originally intended as only a month or so of placating the child by playing nice with the Chambers girl had turned into a full year of pretending to be an average neighbor next door, becoming… friendly with Lincoln Chambers and generally just acting like an ordinary… human. Which she had a great number of complicated feelings about. Complicated because they weren’t all negative, a fact that complicated those feelings even more.

For this past year, she had told her superiors that she was in deep cover to discover what secret group or person was protecting the girl from possession. She gave them story after story about clandestine meetings and how she had barely avoided detection repeatedly in order to maintain her cover. There was some talk about simply taking the girl in, as she should’ve done in the first place, but she convinced them to hold off. The human wasn’t an immediate threat in any way, shape, or form. What was far more important was identifying who was protecting her and how. If this anti-possession defense was something that could spread to others, they had to play it safe and make certain they didn’t spook the people responsible into completely disappearing again. The Chambers girl was their only lead, after all.

In some ways, Charmeine surprised herself in how easily she lied to Manakel and the others. Especially about something this important. But this was about getting all the information she could about Sariel’s situation, who knew about it, where this facility was, how she could… how she could…

Get her out. That was what Charmeine wanted to do. She was going to get Sariel out of that place, somehow. She just wasn’t sure of the specifics just yet. This was the sort of thing that took time.

So focused was she on thinking about that whole situation while walking down this random sidewalk, with the blonde child trotting beside her with that heavy bag of books weighing her down, that Charmeine almost didn’t notice the problem until it was too late. An ordinary-looking pickup truck, the same as thousands of others, had slowed down on its way past. From the corner of her eye, she saw the barrel of a weapon emerge. But it wasn’t just any weapon. This wasn’t some primitive human firearm. It was a laser weapon, and it was aimed at the Chambers girl, who hadn’t noticed anything.

In that instant, the woman moved even faster than she had when she’d gone from the car to the front steps to catch the stumbling Felicity. Her body was a complete blur, hand snapping up into the path of the incoming laser while she blurted the command to activate one of the protection spells she had already prepared.

The forcefield came into being, but it was almost too late. The shield had barely started to form as the blast struck her outstretched hand. It protected Charmeine somewhat, but some of the damage still got through. A deep, semi-cauterized cut appeared across her palm, blood and small bits of bone spraying out in every direction. But, at the very least, she had prevented the shot from hitting Felicity.

Without waiting another second, Charmeine was off and running straight at the truck. It immediately peeled out before its occupants could try again, while shouts of surprise filled the air. Clearly, they had not been expecting their target’s babysitter to be able to intervene like that.

She would have continued chasing them, but a familiar shout filled the air. “Charmeine!”

It was Tabbris. What was she doing out? Turning that way, Charmeine saw the tiny child crouched next to… next to Felicity. What the--Without another thought, the woman abandoned her pursuit of the truck and raced back that way, dropping to her knees next to the fallen human girl. The laser had been deflected, so what in the deepest void was--

Her neck. There was something in her neck, a small hole that was bleeding profusely. What--a piece of bone. A piece of Charmeine’s bone. She had almost forgotten about that, despite the pain in her hand. When that shot struck her, a piece of her blood-covered bone had flown right into Felicity’s neck!

Seeing that, the woman immediately grabbed a tube of medical sealant and stopped the bleeding. The quiet neighborhood street was still empty considering most people were at work, but that wouldn’t last forever. So, as soon as the kid wasn’t actively bleeding out, Charmeine picked her up in both arms and spoke to Tabbris. “Grab those books and come on. She’ll be fine.”

“S-Sonia…” That was Felicity herself, limp in the woman’s grip. “You… you’re like a superhero… how… how did you move so fast?”

What? How did the kid even… blood. Her blood. Charmeine realized the truth almost immediately. Her blood was in Felicity. She had… she had…

Oh void.

******

“Move, move, faster! Pick up those feet, you can make it!” Standing in a little-used corner of a local park two months later, Charmeine watched as the twelve-year-old Flick raced through the makeshift obstacle course they had set up. Tires, cones, blocks of wood, crisscrossing chains, and more were arranged in specific patterns to force the girl to jump over, run around, slide beneath, or otherwise maneuver her way through.

Charmeine had tracked down the people responsible for that attack. They turned out to simply be a pair of goons for hire who had been sent by some enemy of Fossor’s who wanted to make Joselyn pay for something the Necromancer had made her do. Stupid, but they wouldn’t be a problem anymore. Not since she had tracked down the person who did the hiring and made certain there wouldn’t be any more attacks.

That had been easy enough. On the other hand, explaining the truth to the kid herself had taken most of the few days they had alone with her father gone. Convincing her that she couldn’t tell her dad the truth was a large part of that, though not as large as explaining who her mother was and that she hadn’t actually abandoned them. Of course, Flick had wanted to go save her mom immediately, but Charmeine convinced her that going up against Fossor wasn’t something to be done in a day. She needed training, a lot of it.

And that was what they were doing here. Flick was bonded to her. She had Charmeine’s powers. Not just the possession abilities and general Seosten enhancements, but her Tartarus gifts as well. Charmeine’s power, making her stronger, faster, and the like the more she cared about the person she was protecting or hated the person she was fighting, was a part of Flick now as well.

Charmeine should have reported that, to say the least. She had gone so far off book and out of bounds by this point that there was no real way for her to justify it to herself. And yet, she refused to say anything. These past couple of months spent getting to know the child who was bonded to her even better than she already had over the previous year had… they had changed things. Flick was her responsibility now. She knew the truth about the Seosten, and about all of it. She even knew about her passenger, along with everything the kid had done to protect her. The two of them talked openly now, while Tabbris continued to possess her.

Most of all, Flick knew there was a much bigger universe out there than she ever could have conceived, along with uncountable dangers. She wanted to be able to find her mother someday, and protect her father. Not to mention help Tabbris. Now that she knew who her little passenger was and that whole story, Flick wanted to help save Sariel as well.

But none of that was going to happen for quite awhile. They had a lot of work to do if Charmeine was going to prepare both these kids to actually do what needed to be done. Tabbris was barely more than a toddler at this point, and Flick was… well, she was still a child as well, even if she did have a head start of sorts with her Olympian bond. That was the only thing that would give her even a chance at the things she wanted to do. They still had a long way to go.

A Heretic. That was what the girl really needed. The bond with Charmeine would help, but if she was going to stand the slightest chance of saving both her mother and Tabbris’s, they had to get her into Crossroads or Eden’s Garden. Charmeine had a few thoughts on that subject, but they would have to tread carefully. She needed to convince Manakel that it was in their best interests to send the girl to one of those schools and let her become a Heretic.

That was going to take some work. But for now, she would focus on making the girl as strong and capable as she could on her own. Which included teaching both her and Tabbris to work together as partners. First in this obstacle course, and later… well, later she had some other ideas.

Smirking to herself, Charmeine focused on Flick and Tabbris. The latter had hopped out of the older girl as soon as they made it through the obstacle course and both of them were hopping up and down, squealing with delight about their success.

“Yeah yeah, good job,” she allowed while walking that way. From her pocket, she pulled out a bandana. “Now get back inside her, Tabbris. I hope you were both paying attention to where all those obstacles were.

“Because this time you’re going to do it blindfolded.”