“How are we going to get my mom out of the hospital?”

“You are still thinking in a limited manner,” explained Sherlock patiently. “Everyone saw you carrying her from the fire and not me. That’s how we’re going to do it.”

“Magic?”

Sherlock gave a bit of a groan. “What is magic if not advanced technology to someone who has never experienced it.”

“Faery magic is advanced technology?”

“It works both ways. Ancient things, lost lore, can seem as advanced to us now, as the things we might create in the next hundred years. The creatures of Faery once inhabited this earth before our ancestors drove them, so to speak, underground. They did some really fantastic things.”

I tried to wrap my mind around a land populated by Cliodhnas and I gave an involuntary shiver.

Sherlock must have read my mind. “Not all Faery creatures of the female sex are like Cliodhna…some are much worse.”

“Thanks for that little bit of information. So, what do we do, wave our arms about, say some incantation, do three turns…”

Sherlock gave me a look of sadness. “Firstly, it would help if you took this a little more seriously.”

The rebuke stung. “Sorry.”

“Good.” Sherlock took his cell phone out of his pocket and began to text.

“You’re going to make magic using your cell phone?”

“No, it’s time to call in your aunts.”

“I don’t have any aunts…” I began and then realized that just a little time ago, I was just Will, good old Will, destined to flunk out of his last year of High School. Now, I was – I really didn’t know what I was. “I have aunts?”

“Two of them, your father’s sisters.”

“Why haven’t I heard about them before?”

“Too dangerous.”

I was waiting for more, but he seemed too busy texting. Now I understood why teachers abhorred cell phones in class. ‘Yes, students it’s time for quadratic equations, Johnny, can you text me the answer, since you’re on your cell phone.’

“What do you mean too dangerous?”

“When they get here, they’ll explain things, as much as they can, besides, they trained you.”

“Trained me? You mean potty trained, right?” That would explain why I didn’t remember them. I was too young.

“No,” Sherlock said abruptly. “They trained you how to fight – or at least, how to move unseen – a skill you have obviously let slide.”

“How could I let something slide, when I don’t even remember it, which is really strange, because I remember everything.”

I must have been shouting again because he put his fingers to his lips. “Do you? Do you really? What’s your earliest memory?”

“I don’t know, when I was eight, I suppose…”

“Don’t you find it odd that before that time you don’t remember anything. Have you seen any pictures? Where did you live? Any birthday’s any celebrations?”

He did have a point. For someone who was supposed to have such a wonderful memory, I had one gaping hole. Nobody remembers being a baby, those memories are made up by stories passed on by adults: ‘remember when little Willy nearly died when his runaway stroller went careening down the hill into traffic…’ I didn’t even have that. Nothing.

“So, you’re telling me these aunts of mine have something to do with my childhood that I don’t remember?”

“They were your childhood, and their names are Bovmall and Lia Luachra, and they’re druids.”

I just knew it. They weren’t just my aunts, but they were druids. “All right, I’ll bite, what’s a druid?”

“The holders of knowledge and wisdom of the ancient world.”

“And they trained me, what, to be a druid?”

“No…” his cell phone vibrated. He glanced at his screen and then back up at me. “I’ll let them explain it to you. They’re here.”

“In the hospital?”

A voice sound at the door. “Yes, behind you.”

I expected…I don’t know what I expected, but Aunties Bovmall and Lia Luachra couldn’t have been more different. Both seemed to be ageless, caught beyond youth and before old age. One was short, stalky and soft, while the other was tall, lanky and severe. They were both dressed, like you would expect a druid to be dressed, in dark, deep hooded cloaks.

The short one fixed Sherlock with a withering glare. “It certainly took you long enough for you to text us.”

The taller one, who turned out to be Bovmall, floated over to us. Embarrassingly, she pulled me into her arms and crushed me to her chest. She was a good head taller than I was, and I was over six feet.

“You poor thing,” she cooed. Then she saw my mom in the bed and went to her side. “Poor, poor Muirne. You should have called us,” she chastised Sherlock.

“In my defence,” grumbled Sherlock, “we don’t have inter-dimensional cell phones. It’s hard to text into Faerie.”

Both were now focused on my mom and ignoring Sherlock.

“I had to wait until you were back from your holidays.”

Lia Luachra turned on him again her curly red hair seeming to flame about her round face. “That’s no excuse. You should have found a way.”

With that a heavy silence settled on the room. Then Lia Luachra turned on Sherlock again. “Well?”

“Well?” he said absent minded, and then an expression of surprise filled his face, followed by immediate disappointment. “No, he hasn’t.”

I was pretty sure that the ‘he’ he was talking about was me.

Bovmall looked confused. She fixed all the compassion her large eyes held on me. “He should have remembered by now.”

“Of course he should have remembered; we put the glamour on him ourselves. How old are you, boy?”

“I’ll be eighteen on Wednesday.” I have no idea why I told them about my uneventful birthday. It was something I valued as much as an old pair of shoes. I’ve always prided myself on nobody knowing my birthday, except me and my mom.

“The glamour doesn’t give until his eighteenth birthday,” stated Bovmall.

Lia Luachra seemed even more perturbed. “We can’t wait for Woden’s Day. He’ll probably be dead by then.” She thrust her hand into a big purse she had swinging from her shoulder and pulled out something that looked like sticks. Their ends had been paired away and some rune like characters had been written on them.

“Aren’t we supposed to be thinking about a way to get my mom over to the library?”

I was hoping for an answer, but all I got was a chubby, but imposing, finger, summoning authority from the heavens. Auntie Lia luachra had effectively silenced everyone. She held the wands in front of her, closed her eyes and started to mumble something. When she was finished she threw the wands up into the air. All but one fell to the floor.  One floated in the air.

Aunt Bovmall reached up and snatched it down. She examined it and passed it to Lia Luachra. Both of them turned their disturbingly delving eyes at me. Bovmall held the stick out for me to take.

A stick with some strange rune painted on the end, just what I wanted for my birthday. Actually, the only thing I cared about getting for my birthday was a cake. Mom was no great cook, but she was able to manage to bake a cake. Often they were sad affairs, containing craters that were filled in with copious amounts of bright green, or blue icing.

I took the wand.

It was like being hit with a wall of warm water, forcing me to close my eyes. When I opened them I was watching the strangest scene. Aunt Lia was cutting a bunch of willow branches from a tree. Each one she tested, slashing at the air. Unsatisfied she discarded them until she had one that made a particular whistling sound as it sang through the air.

“Fionn,” she shouted.

I expected myself and wasn’t disappointed. I had never seen  pictures of my younger self, so when I stepped out of a clump of vegetation with twigs and leaves sticking out of my hair, I was shocked by my own familiarity. I was me, but was not me.

I went up to Aunt Lia warily, eyeing the willow whip.

“We’re going to play a game. It’s called…” I didn’t like how she was looking at me, and neither did my eight year old self. “Whip Fionn.”

“I don’t think I like that game,” I said rather soberly.

“Well, the rule is this, I chase you, and try to whip you.”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

“I don’t like being whipped.”

Poor kid, I thought.

Aunt Lia smiled. “If I don’t catch you, then you can avoid that.”

And with that, she pounced, swinging the whip with all her strength.

I dodged, ducked, leaped.  For someone as round as Aunt Lia was, she certainly was fast. It was a good bit of information for me to tuck away, especially if I had to run from her. She caught me once, when I fell, laying the whip against my rump. I swear I could feel it.

“Hey,” I shouted, “that’s not fair. I fell.”

“You think the sons of Morna will care if you fall? They want you to fall, and when you are down…”

I watched Auntie Lia lay into my younger self with a triplet of vicious blows on my back side.  If this was the past, then I was really feeling it. ‘Get up,’ I thought to myself, ‘run.’ I did manage to regain my feet and run. I practically ran up a tree to get out of the reach of my nimble aunt.

Why was the woman smiling up at me? Was she laughing?

“All right, well done. Now it’s your turn.”

What did she mean ‘it was my turn?’ It was my turn for what? Then I realized we had played this game before, and this part, by the big grin on my face, I was looking forward to. Surprisingly, Aunt Lia handed me the willow whip. I gave the air a few vicious slashes, and then I was after her. I understood that it was my turn to beat her.

If it had been that easy, then I would have paid her back blow for blow, but Aunt Lia was a druid and every time I got close to her, close enough to strike, a root would trip me, or a branch would wrap me on the head.

“You’re using magic,” I bellowed, “that’s not fair!”

Aunt Lia chuckled a taunt. “And why should I not use magic, I’m a Druid. You can use magic, if you want.”

“I’m not a Druid.”

She just smiled at that.

Then I had a thought. I wondered since I was somehow witnessing the past, could I effect the it? I could feel pain in my dream with Cliodhna when I pinched myself. I stepped towards my aunt who was backing away from my younger self and stuck out my leg. Aunt Lia tripped and fell backward. The magic that had been protecting her burst like a bubble. As my aunt crawled away, her amble buttocks jiggling, I laid into her with the willow whipping back and forth.

“Enough!” Shouted Aunt Lia back in the hospital room holding onto her behind and staring at me murderously. “That was not supposed to happen!”

I noticed that Sherlock was grinning.

“No, no, this is good,” said Aunt Bovmall in an ethereal voice. “The boy used magic. This is good, very good, Fionn.”

Aunt Lia huffed at me and begrudgingly said, “Perhaps.”

I was suddenly startled by the possibility that I was indeed Fionn, but then again I may have been him, but I wasn’t now, no matter what everyone seemed to think. “Call me Will.”

Aunt Lia arched her eyebrows in what seemed like a sudden rise of esteem towards me. She huffed but nodded. “So, Will, do you have any idea how we’re going to get your mom out of here?”

“Me?” I said in surprise. “You two are supposed to be the cavalry. That’s why Sherlock gave you a call, wasn’t it?”

Aunt Lia gave me a warning look and stuck her hand back into her bag and started to fumble for another wand. “Boy, we brought you up to be a leader, now lead or I’ll have to get another one of your memories out.”

I held up my hand. “No, no, I prefer to remember all on my own.”

“So,” said Sherlock, “what do you want us to do?”

I was in it now. My mom’s life was on the line. Strangely enough I was as calm as a summer’s day. “If we’re going to take her out of here, we need someone who looks like mom in the bed…” I looked at my aunts. “Can you do that?”

Bovmal’s sharp angular face split in a rather frightening smile. She cracked her knuckles. “Not only can we do that, but we can do better.”

Aunt Lia nodded knowingly. “Reverse Glamour, you think?”

Sherlock nodded. “Absolutely, I should have thought of that.”

Aunt Lia patted Sherlock patronizingly on his cheek. “No you wouldn’t have. You just provide the eye candy, lover boy.”

I gave an involuntary shiver. She actually thought Sherlock was handsome? I suppose under the white hair and beard, and beyond the aged wrinkles he must have been, at one time, handsome.

“What’s a Reverse Glamour?” I asked.

Aunt Lia rolled up her sleeves. “Watch and learn, laddie, watch and learn.”

I watched, and if I knew what was happening, perhaps I would have learned, but I was totally clueless. They stood on either side of my mom, joined hands and started singing something. It sounded like ‘hickery, dickery dock,’ but after that it lost its similarity. A shimmering light descended from their arms, falling about my mom like a blue iridescent shield. The sudden light became so brilliant it forced me to close my eyes, and when I opened them there were two versions of my mom.

“You’ll want to stand away from her,” cautioned Sherlock.

Suddenly two responders appeared at my mother’s bed side with a gurney. They gently removed her from the bed and slid her onto it. Then they backed out of the room. When I say backed out, I mean they walked backwards. I watched them leave pulling, or pushing my mom in reverse.

“And we best leave with them,” said Sherlock. “We need to make sure we get into the ambulance, so we can reroute them by the Library, or else they’ll take her back to the fire.”

I noticed that my aunties weren’t following. “Aren’t you two coming?”

Aunt Lia looked at me as though I had caught some terrible contagious disease. “Heavens, no, we have…”

“Other things to be doing,” finished Aunt Bovmall.

Sherlock and I left them in the hospital room as we followed the responders out into the lift.

“What do they have to do that’s so important?” I asked.

Sherlock looked a bit awkward. “Don’t ask. The less we know about Druids the better.”

We followed the first responders out and climbed into the back of the ambulance. I looked at the fellow who was sitting with my mom, and waved my hand in front of his face.

“He doesn’t seem to mind us being here.”

“To him, we’re not. Brace yourself.”

I was wondering why he had said that, when the ambulance lurched backwards, catching me off balance. I wasn’t ready for the vehicle to go backwards. The siren wailed and we sped away. We were soon closing in on the library.

“Hold on, I have to change paradigm,” said Sherlock moving his hands through the air, which became thick. His fingers were leaving marks, rune marks, much like the writings on the wands. The ambulance slowed down and came to a stop.

“I thought you said you weren’t a Druid,” I said.

“I’m not, but when you’ve been around as long as I have, you pick up a few tricks. Grab the end of the gurney. We have to take it from here.”

I opened up the doors behind me and started to pull my mom out of the ambulance. The gurney’s wheels fell to the pavement and locked into place. I bumped the gurney hard against the pavement.

“Sorry, mom.” She continued to sleep. The first responder in the back continued to stare at the place where my mom had just been. “Won’t he know she’s missing?”

Sherlock grunted lifting his end of the gurney down onto the pavement.  “No, to them she will still be here.” He shut the door and slapped the side of the vehicle which started to move, this time in the right direction.

“That’s really awesome,” I said sincerely. “You think you can teach me?”

Sherlock gave me a strange look. “Your aunts already taught you magic, amongst other things.”

“And I’ve forgotten?”

“No, you just don’t remember.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“No,” he tapped his temple with a long index finger, “It’s all up there. In a way it’s good that you don’t remember.”

We ran mom up the drive way to the library’s front doors. “How do you figure?”

“Well, if you remembered everything, all at once, it would probably kill you.”

“But won’t I remember on Wednesday when I turn eighteen?”

“Yes, but then, you’ll be eighteen.”