My mother was tall, even compared to other swedish woman. She had inherited what most would consider the perfect heritage of northern looks: beauty was a weak word to describe her. Even the practical training clothes she was almost always wearing couldn't hide that fact.

At fourty years old past, she still looked thirty.

Still, most men steered away from her. It was her way of being, her "aura". She didn't seem attractive, instead she felt dangerous.

As I looked at her I felt that danger once again. But right now, she was way more than just her normal "dangerous".

I only sensed her that lethal once before.

A day that had been a turning point in my life.

How fitting to see her the same way today.

"Sias. Is that you?" She looked at me, unable to hide her shock.

"Well, how many dumbasses do you think run at the guy with the gun?" I answered with a weak laugh.

She sighed.

"Are you sure you're not a long lost sister or something?"

"Well, I think you're in the best position to answer that question? Do I have lost siblings mom? I thought I was an only child!"

She laughed.

"Come here child." She brought me to her arms, hugging me tightly. "Oh my god Sias, you've got tits."

"MOM! Please, not now."

She studied me for a moment.

"We've got two minutes to leave the airport, that's how much I could get. The building's security has been compromised, obviously." She said while looking at the inert corpse she had launched through the terminal. "We need to get you to a safe house right now."

Without waiting for my opinion, she began to move. Away from the exit.

"Erm, mom, exits are not..."

"I've got a plane, now stop dilly dallying and follow me. Did the boobs replace your brain?"

That hurt. I closed my mouth and followed the ogre/mother.

Most of the crowd had fled, but some stragglers remained. One particularly courageous teen had filmed the whole scene from behind one of the fountains in the middle of the terminal.

My mother passed next to him without a glance.

I caught up to her.

"Won't that be a problem?"

"No. In fact It'll be definite proof I acted to save you."

"Is the guard...?"

"Not important. He's out of the picture and that's all."

I looked at her, a sad look in my eyes. She was still a few centimeters taller than I, but that I had gotten used to. Her sometimes coldheartedness, not so much. That was one of the reasons I decided to study human minds.

She catched me glaring at her.

"Sias, you know..." She began.

"STOP!" a voice shouted.

We both turned around.

A few security guards were looking at us, clearly misunderstanding the situation.

One of them stepped forward. He looked like the security chief.

"Sir, M'am" He tried to explain in a stammering english. "Exit other way, incident is say be here. Danger."

Hailey examined them.

"I expect four of them to be normal law-abiding citizens, one of them should be a sleeping agent. Sias, which one is it? Do your magic." Ordered my mother.

Almost six months without training with her, but I had not forgotten that tone of voice.

"Yes sir."

"This one is the spy." I immediately added in japanese, pointing at a random guard.

No-one moved.

Four japanese security guards looked at me, puzzled. One of them didn't seem puzzled. Not the one I pointed at, but that had been a bluff. I just wanted to see who would be grinning at my failure.

"Le plus à gauche." I informed my mother in french. The one who had smiled for a fraction of a second did not react in time. My mother's knee impacted on his nose. The moment his head hit the floor, she doubled up with a kick to the temple.

"Nani!?" shouted the other security guards. But before they could do anything, my mom had gotten a gun out of the hidden holster of the downed assassin.

She removed the magazine and popped the bullet in the chamber out. She handed the unarmed gun to the head of the security detail.

He looked, perplexed, between the gun and his employee.

We just left.

A private jet was waiting for us on the tarmac.

I seriously underestimated my mother again...

"Erik, we've got five minutes before the army intervenes. Are we ready to leave?" My mother asked the familiar blonde man who was waiting in front of the plane.

"Sure Hail, who's that with you, weren't we looking for... wait... Sias?"

"Since when can you pilot jets cousin" I asked instead of answering.

He looked at me, then at my mom.

She sighed.

"We have no time for this, yes it's my son, and you.." She pointed at me "You haven't met my side of the family for five years, Erik's changed plenty since then. Now stop wasting my time, we're leaving."

I didn't try to argue, and just climbed up the plane.

Erik wasn't so wise.

"But he, she's a gi..."

Stolen story; please report.

"Erik." My mother interrupted. "NOW."

"Yes M'am."

The plane was empty except for us. The three of us went to the cockpit.

"Aircraft V55678 an incident has occured, you are not authoris..." Erik cut off the radio.

"This could get fun." He said while looking at us with a smile.

Fucking Vikings, almost ten centuries later, and still bloodcrazy. The genes were also flowing inside me, but I never felt the need to rape and pillage.

"Get us out of here Erik."

"To France!" He sang.

Nothing stopped us from leaving the country. I half expected fighter jets to come hunt us down, but no.

Erik looked disappointed.

Once outside japanese air, my mother visibly relaxed.

Erik was still inside the cockpit. I think air safety measures says that there has to be two people in the cockpit at all times, but following rules wasn't on our top priority list right now.

The jet was luxurious, the things you expect rock stars to travel with. I was currently enjoying a rather big leather seat. I almost fell asleep but my mom got a bottle of wine out of a cubboard and sat in front of me.

"You hate alcohol."

As to prove me wrong she poured herself a glass and drank it in one go. She looked disgusted.

"That's not how you drink wine."

"Shut up you french aristocrat."

"I'm not french, I'm a..."

"Jourdin. I know, and no you're not, not since long ago, that name is dead."

She stared at me.

I felt uncomfortable. I knew what she was looking at.

I hadn't looked at myself since the bathroom trip in the airport, and I had barely seen my face.

I could feel my chest pressing tighter on the fabric of my T-shirt. And something felt wrong in my boxers.

"We almost lost you." Said my mom. Cutting my thoughts short.

"What?"

"I had information about what was given to you. It should have killed you."

"How could you know anything about...?"

"It's linked with Jean-Paul."

That was my grandfather's name.

"You know what you have done Sias. She's dead. How does it feel to be the one...?"

"He's dead. You said it yourself, the Jourdin's reign is over." I stated matter of factly.

"His heritage isn't."

"That's ridiculous, Dad was the only male heir and the Jourdin's name is the only thing he kept. I'm obviously not elegible. And aunt Helena would refuse it, even if we payed her to take it."

"Legal procedures finished five years ago. The Jourdin estate and everything else is going to be given out to a Japanese businessman."

"What?" I almost shouted, dumbfounded. This was ridiculous.

"We weren't aware of it, without any heirs Luc thought it would be given out to the french government and sold, so he forgot about it." She sounded slightly angry about it. Beeing careless was one of my father's trait, but when it was about the Jourdin, he had never made a single mistake. She was angry at him because she believed he was lying to her.

I thought so too.

"When things started to go south for you, I asked a few friends of mine what they had heard."

She grabbed a file. She took out a few documents and pushed them in front of me.

"Jean-Paul prepared a will in secret, in case something happened to him. I don't know how he managed to hide it from us, but you can trust your grand-father to be a pain in our ass even dead."

I looked at the will. If he dissapeared in a violent fashion, this will would be distributed to some of his old partners, no member of the family could be involved. If those partners accepted this contract, they would obtain everything.

"This is crazy. What are the specifics of the contract?" I asked as the file wouldn't say.

"I know two things about that. Most certainly there are a lot of other clauses. But those are the one I am sure of. First you need to be out of the picture, and apparently only you, Luc and Helena are safe. And the second part is even weirder, you need to be given a specific drug before your... death." She didn't like saying it.

"The thing I got given at the club." I guessed.

"Without much of a doubt. Thing is, they were sure the drug was there to kill you. Jean-Paul's way of revenge, a gruesome end etc... Sias, they tested that thing before giving it to you. It was..."

My mother looked disturbed. Skröskind are not easily disturbed.

I didn't let her finish, I understood.

"And instead of that, I'm getting the ultimate relooking. I don't know what's best."

"Sias, don't say that. I'm lucky to have you here."

Tenderness showed on her face. She took my hand.

"Thanks kaa-san."

Her face got serious again.

"That businessman, he's a big shot. Same level as Jean-Paul was, bigger even."

I gulped.

"And he wants the Jourdin's assets, for whatever reason. Probably to get even fatter, even richer, you know those people better than I do."

T'was kind of my job to know after all. Narcissistic perverts are really interesting, and are really great to study some aspects of the human psyche.

"Do you know more about him?" I asked.

"Yes, that's the second file. He's pretty discrete. And honestly, he scares me."

That didn't bode well.

I looked at the second document.

Younger than what I expected, the fifty year old looking japanese man gave out a jovial smile.

Kakeshi Takehiro.

Takehiro.

That second guy at the club, his name was Mahasashi Takehiro. I finally remembered.

"His grandson, maybe his son, I met him at the club."

My mom nodded, and wrote it down on a blank sheet of paper.

"I'll ask my contacts."

"Can I know who those are?"

"Oh, an old hacker who I met when he tried to get into my computer to get nudes, the CEO of an old company your dad owned and a friend of mine teaching karate classes."

I immediately blanked out at that first statement. I wanted to know nothing about that.

"Dad owned a company?" I changed the subject.

"Of course, you can't get into the CERN easily you know."

"How is that related."

Her only answer was a shrug.

I knew my family was mental, but this was getting out of this world. And how was a karate teacher even involved in all this? Whatever.

"I'm too tired for all this shit."

"Yup, you skipped training too much."

"Wha, I barely slept in those last 48h, I ran through half of Japan, got drugged, attacked twice, and the reason I'm tired is 'cause lack of training?" I mumbled, annoyed.

She shrugged again.

"I hate you."

"You love your mother Sias."

I didn't retort anything, she was right after all. I read a bit more, the document was pretty short. Fifty-five years old, a few nicknames, information about his eductation, his family. A traditional one, with ties to the Yakuza. He took the head of the family at barely thirty-two. His father and grand-father, the two previous family heads disappeared that same year. Police found their bodies two years later, deep in the Tokyo Canal.

Another terrifying fact was that he was the last individual participating at my grand-father's contract "game".

All of them began to mysteriously vanish five years ago. The last one died of a heart attack one month ago.

I knew what that meant. Why this was happening now.

His competition dead, he could finally concentrate on the big prize.

My head.

Still, he may be powerful, but that didn't explain how he found me. How he found the clinic, how the assassins found me not once, but twice, with knowledge about my impossible physical changes.

I read his file again.

Something felt wrong, the usual feeling of my instincts prickled my stomach.

"His nickname..." I said out loud, shuddering.

"You mean the Mage?" Guessed my mom. "He's got plenty others, but yeah, this and Onmyouji, pretty creepy."

Mahoutsukai.

"It's not possible right?"

"Sias, you may be a scientist first and foremost, like your dad, but you know it's not the only truth of this world. I believe this Kakeshi isn't entirely human."

"You can't be serious."

Her eyes were dead serious. She changed the subject.

"Try to get some sleep, we've got ten hours of flight ahead of us."

I dropped the file on the table, seeing the wisdom in her words. Nothing to gain worrying about it.

"Yup, viva my noise-cancelling headphones."

"They survived all this?"

"Of course, and my computer is fine too."

She pinched her nose.

"You dragged your computer all the way from Kyoto?"

"Well yeah... I thought it could be useful."

"Well I'm happy your physical changes didn't disturb anything important. Like your sense of priorities."

"Ey!" I shouted, a smile betraying my apparent indignation.

"Get some sleep Sias."

But the comment about my physical changes still perturbed me.

"Maybe I should check myself in the bathroom first."

I tried to stand up but my mother held me down, a hand on my shoulder.

"Sleep first, we'll face that new aspect of yourself together. We'll ask Fanny to help when everything settles down. Whether you are a manly boy or a really feminine one, it's not important."

"I've got the feeling it's doing more than just changing me externally mom." That feeling had been constantly nagging the back of my mind. I said it for the first time, and I could sense how it felt like the truth. It made me scared shitless.

"Sias." My mother held my shoulder tighter. "It doesn't matter, you know that. It doesn't change who you are."

I looked in her eyes.

"Yes. Of course I know that. It's just... a lot."

"I can't imagine. But for now, sleep." She ordered.

And that time, finally, I did.