For a moment, my emotions cartwheeled with such intensity that it felt like I was falling. He knew who my parents were, and he’d never told me. All the hopes and dreams that I’d bottled up so long ago burst free. Parents were such a basic fact of most people’s lives and such an empty void in mine. I had no memories of them. No flickering images of a mother or father to lull me to sleep when I’d been alone and afraid. There was just a hole in my head where all that love was supposed to live. I eventually realized that I was sitting on the floor. Bill was staring down at me, one hand outstretched as if he’d meant to catch me.

“Yeah,” said Bill. “I know who you really are. I know your real name.”

“You. Knew.” If those words had been hammers, Bill would have died where he stood. “You knew and never said a word.”

Bill seemed to be choosing his words with great care. His furrowed brow told me he was thinking very hard about something. In the end, he just said, “Yes.”

“How long?”

“I tracked them down about eight years ago.”

“You kept the most important thing about me secret for eight years. You, you,” I stammered.

“Bastard,” he supplied. “Fucker. Shitbag.”

I started screaming. “Do you think this is funny!”

Bill held up a hand and his dark eyes bored into me. “No, Jericho, I don’t think it’s funny at all. So, the question you should be asking yourself if you’ve got even an ounce of sense left beneath that anger, is what on God’s green earth could compel me to keep that from you?”

I sneered up at him. “Gran told you not to and you heeled to that lying old fraud. Just like a good dog.”

Fury contorted Bill’s face and his hands balled into reflexive fists. He took a step toward me like he meant to make good on the promise of those fists before he got control of himself.

“You ungrateful little shit. She saved your life, just like she saved mine. Now, stop acting like a child and use your goddamn brain for a second. Do you really think Gran would have kept you here if you had parents that were actually looking for you? Do you think I ever would have stood for that? Even for her?”

Bill closed the distance between us, grabbed my shirt, and hauled me to my feet. I slapped his hands away.

“Don’t touch me,” I snarled. “Why should I believe a thing you have to say? You or her? You both lied to me for years!”

“You aren’t this stupid. Sometimes you keep things to yourself to protect the people you love. You aren’t some charity case, or a trained monkey, or whatever the hell it is you think has been happening here. You’re family. So, yeah, we lied. We did it to protect you.”

“Protect me from what? The truth?”

“Yes,” he said in a voice so flat and absent of emotion that I took an involuntary step back.

“Why?”

“Because the truth is so fucking ugly that I wish I could burn it out of my head.”

Even with my anger at full boil, that brought me up short. Bill never flinched from anything, no matter how painful or unsavory it might prove. He’d seen the worst that humanity and the decidedly inhuman had to offer. He’d never complained or looked away. He banked it as some kind of dark investment that would yield dividends in righteous vengeance. Yet, this seemingly simple thing, the identity of my parents, the truth about who I was, made him flinch. Could it really be that bad? The meaning of his words over the last few minutes started seeping into my consciousness, sneaking past the anger blockade that had protected me from rational thought. The meaning of those words hurt.

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“But they’re my parents,” I said.

“Maybe in the biological sense,” said Bill. “There’s a hell of a lot more to being a parent than donating some genetic material. That’s what they did. That’s all they did.”

The statements and implications piled up on me and it got very hard to breathe. That’s all they did, he’d said. I could draw the line. They might have given me life, but they didn’t want me. They didn’t look for me. I’d been living on the streets, and they left me there to fight for myself.

I glared at Bill. “That’s not enough to make you look the other way.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“So, they didn’t just abandon me?”

“Let this go, Jericho. You don’t want to know. Everything we kept from you had exactly one goal. To limit the ways your parents might find you if they decided to look.”

“And what if I want to find them?”

Bill shook his head. “You don’t. You don’t ever want to find them and, God above, you aren’t ready to find them.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because, if you ever did meet them, you’d have to kill them. You couldn’t do it.”

I blinked stupidly at Bill for a few seconds. “I don’t understand.”

“I know you don’t. I’m glad you don’t. Please, don’t pursue this.”

I didn’t know what to think, let alone what to feel. Bill had been a street kid in his day. He didn’t know who his parents were or hadn’t told me if he did find them. Still, he knew the pain that ignorance created. I tried to imagine the man I knew making a conscious choice not to tell me that he’d found my parents. I tried to imagine what would make me keep that kind of secret. The reason would have to be ugly, ugly, and even more ugly. It would need to be something so unspeakable, so appalling that I genuinely believed the other person was better off never learning the truth.

I thought it through before I spoke. “Answer me one more question and I’ll let it go for now.”

Bill hesitated, then nodded. “Ask.”

“Why would I need to kill them?”

He closed his eyes for a moment, and it seemed to me that he had to force the words out. “If they ever found out for sure that you were alive, you wouldn’t have a choice. If you didn’t kill them, they would kill you. They’ve tried before.”

I started to ask another question, but it never managed to become words. I didn’t need to ask. I could guess all the answers. I was still furious at Bill and at Gran for keeping secrets from me. Yet, it wasn’t the white-hot hatred it had been before. It was the fact of the secret itself that bothered me. Even I could understand why they’d kept the information hidden if I was being honest with myself. A part of me wished that I’d never learned any of it. There was no upside to the knowledge. My parents tried to murder me at some point. Those weren’t people you wanted to know. There would never be a joyful reunion or even a conversation. It’d be a pit fight because you don’t come into my kind of magical talent without some mystical heritage behind you. One or both of them had to have some serious magical chops. Plus, they’d have a couple of decades of experience on me. Experience wasn’t everything, but it wasn’t something to ignore either.

I considered Bill for a long time as I tried to work out what came next. It was possible the whole story was a lie, but that didn’t fit. There were easier lies to tell. He could have made up any story he wanted to on the spot. One with fewer ramifications that would be easier for me to swallow. The story he told me was more apt to start a fistfight or get me to walk away from him and Gran. Bill met my eyes without shame. He’d done what he thought was right, or necessary, and wasn’t about to apologize for it. If that meant a throwdown or a goodbye, he was prepared for it.

“Are there any other secrets about me that you’re keeping back?” I asked.

“Nothing that I know for fact,” said Bill. “I’ve only got suspicions.”

“Dammit, Bill!”

“I don’t know anything for sure. Like that young woman said, you can do things you shouldn’t be able to do. At least, you do them with a lot less effort than it should take. That doesn’t mean anything by itself. Maybe you’re wired a little bit different, or maybe,” he trailed off.

“Or maybe what?”

“Or maybe something intervened with you.”

“Like what?”

“I honestly don’t know. A god, a demon, an alien, it could have been anything.”

I shook my head. “That’s stupid. I’m as human as anyone else.”

“How would we know? How could anyone know? It’s not like there’s a club tattoo when someone gets interfered with.”

I waved it off. “Not a today kind of problem. So that’s it? No other secrets?”

Bill shrugged. “I don’t like green beans.”

“But,” I stammered, unbalanced by the abrupt shift. “I make that green bean casserole every freaking Thanksgiving because you made such a big deal out of it.”

“Gran told me to be encouraging,” offered Bill.

“I think I hate you.”

“Welcome to adulthood, Jericho.”