Chapter 53: Deception’s End
It couldn’t last, now could it?
“Wash thith!” Norm insisted, lurching to his feet.
Sitting on the patio with us, taking a break from swimming to digest the barbecue, he’d gotten a bit sauced, then started trying to get us to accept his claim that he could do a backflip off the diving board into the pool. I mean, he’s in reasonably good shape, but he’s gotta be something like fifty now, and they’ve only got one of those low sorts of diving boards, one without even a single step to get up onto it, not one properly suited to stunt diving, with the ladder and all. We’d all decided it was the alcohol talking, but our telling him so — repeatedly! — just made him belligerent.
We should’ve stopped him when we saw that his line from the patio chair to the pool wasn’t quite straight, but we all just smiled tolerantly, some of us jeering good-naturedly, egging him on.
“Go on!”
“No way!”
“You’re a nut!”
We should’ve stopped him when he wiggled his foot uncertainly on the base of the diving board.
We should’ve stopped him when we saw him unsteadily lift his body with that foot, teetering as he tried to do that while balancing on the other.
But it took the backward bend of his ankle as he got only the ball of his other foot up onto the board, the wheeling arms, the fall, the smack!…for us to realize our mistake.
There was a good two seconds of silence after that as we all stared uncomprehendingly at what’d just happened.
I don’t remember any of the intervening time, but Kaitlyn and I found ourselves by his side as if we’d teleported there, joined shortly by Molly.
“Norm!” she shouted. “Norm, babe, are you all right‽”
This had to be reflexive, because it was crystal clear he wasn’t all right, not to judge by the spreading pool of blood around his unmoving head.
Without a thought, I began healing his cracked skull and the brain insult behind it.
Kaitlyn joined in with me, the pair of us working as a bonded singleton, splitting the work as naturally as a pianist does with her hands on the ivories.
Two seconds after starting work, his eyes were opening again as if just from a wince, rather than unconsciousness.
And a second later, we’d mended his split scalp.
And a second afterward, we’d turned the pool of blood into a whiff of dust and vapor.
It was the last that did it, of course. We could’ve sold the rest as just Norman being uncommonly thick-skulled, that he’d bounced rather than broken, but Molly was there, and she saw.
And understood.
“Sh!” my wife told her, eyes demanding instant obedience.
I covered, calling out to the others, “He’s fine, everyone, just a bit stunned!”
Kaitlyn joined in, adopting a battlefield medic’s commanding tone, “Miki! Help us move him to a chair!”
Miki barked back, “No! Don’t move him!” She came anyway, but when she got to his side, she began giving him a concussion checkup.
“What’s your name?…What’s your birthday?…What city were you born in?…Where are we now?” And on and on like that until she was reasonably satisfied that he was coherent.
“Get me a light!” she demanded of no one in particular.
While we waited for that, Kaitlyn and I evaporated Norman’s inebriation.
“Woah,” he muttered, wonderingly.
We didn’t need to ask why: he’d just felt something absolutely novel, the sensation of a good alcoholic buzz dissipating like a puff of smoke, nothing left but the memory of it wrapping his psyche in a warm glow moments before, now gone, leaving him stone cold sober.
A hand proffered a flashlight about then, by which time Miki’d performed several more tests, checking for sound sensitivity, memory loss, uneven pupil dilation and who knows what else.
“All right, I think we can safely move him now,” Miki finally said, once she’d performed the light sensitivity tests.
His wife, Kaitlyn and I helped her lift him, the two of us mages on the torso and head, the others just taking his legs. I suppose they attributed our smooth static lift to our muscle power, but Kaitlyn and I tapped into Gaia for some of that, just to keep our movements steady.
And it was easy, though we were under no illusions as to the why of it: the three principals all happened to be naked at the time, in a near analog to raw nature, and in close proximity. Any one of those three wasn’t true, Norman Alexander would be dead.
Molly knew enough to be brimming with questions, but we managed to keep them bottled up inside her until the others went off to resume the games they’d paused for dinner, back in the study. Getting rid of Miki was the hardest, but once it was clear Norman was going to be fine, she eventually rejoined the others.
Kaitlyn put a hand on Molly’s forearm and asked, “Are all the back yard security cameras still turned off?”
That’d been a precondition of attending a clothes-free party for some of the guests. The Alexanders are trustworthy; we weren’t concerned they’d distribute the footage, but still it remained: irrational fears are a party dampener, so they’d agreed to cut the cams, showing us the blacked-out monitors to soothe those feeling ooky about these unfounded worries.
Molly misunderstood, asking, “Why? I don’t want to see that horrible fall again!”
She couldn’t know that Kaitlyn was tapping into an aspect of her animal magic, the truth-telling skill she’d begun to develop once she’d realized that humans are animals, too. When she’s bare and in direct contact with another person in the same state, she’d become an infallible lie detector. It wasn’t mind reading, as such, more a melding with the subject’s emotions to allow her to discern sincerity from mendacity. We’d tested it on Vin and Jess back at Ali’s wedding, and they couldn’t get anything past her.
I wasn’t as good, this being Kaitlyn’s affinity, not mine, but I had enough facility with the technique by now that I was sure I’d know the truth once I heard it while bonded with her, sharing her skill.
My wife quietly insisted, “Yes or no, Molly.”
“Of course they’re still off, Kaitlyn! Now I need some answers! Stop with this nonsense!”
Norman had been largely passive to this point, but he jumped in, saying, “I agree. I get the sense that you’re hiding something, you two. I think I have every right to insist on some answers.”
Of course he did. Not only was he the victim, he’s our host and co-owner of this estate.
Kaitlyn didn’t have to ask me what I thought we should do. In our bonded state, we’d already decided to come clean now that we were reasonably certain we weren’t being recorded. The trick was deciding precisely how to tell him the truth he had every right to demand.
I sighed deeply, then placed my hand on Norman’s, beginning gently, “There’s a perfectly rational reason for what’s happened here tonight. Do both of you believe me?”
Norman looked straight in my eyes for a time, then nodded, but Molly looked skeptical. She’d been the one to see the pool of blood disappear, after all, so I wasn’t surprised that she required more than my say-so.
Kaitlyn spoke next. “What we’re about to tell you… We kept the truth from you to protect such a Brobdingnagian secret that we’ve only been giving you, some of our closest friends, little peeks from time to time. Will you help us to keep that secret?”
Norman nodded rapidly.
“Swear it, Norman,” she whispered.
“By all I hold holy, I will keep your secret, Kaitlyn.”
Together, we thought, «No lie. He means it.»
Thus assured, Kaitlyn turned to Molly and asked, “And will you also help us keep our secret?”
Molly’s eyes narrowed a bit, our animal magic picking up a rising annoyance radiating from her. Exasperatedly, she asked, “It isn’t anything illegal, is it?”
“Not even immoral, by our lights,” I replied. “Now will you also swear to keep our secret? It’s not a bad thing, just something with implications so huge that we have to be circumspect about who we tell.”
“I will, Davie. By my aged mother’s eyelids, I will! Now spill!”
Through the bond, I could tell Kaitlyn detected not a smidgen of equivocation in Molly’s answer via her direct contact, nor indirectly in Norman through me.
With that reassurance, we finally admitted the truth to the Alexanders, speaking in unison: “We’re mages.”
Then, having agreed on the best demonstration we could think of without risking that an onlooker would catch an eyeful, requiring that we widen the circle still further, the two of us tapped a finger next to each small mole on their forearms, healing it away, nothing but clear skin left behind at the tip of our fingernail.
Several taps into this sequence, the pattern becoming clear, the Alexanders’ jaws dropped open, speechless.
By the time we reached their shoulders, they believed, bone-deep.
There followed a good hour-long discussion up in the Alexanders’ bedroom, fueled by orders up from the kitchen, cold summer drinks all around. We held our colloquy on their huge bed, the four of us sitting cross-legged in a rough circle. We were under Dr. Miki’s orders not to use the hot tub nor to give Norm any caffeine.
Our discussion centered on how many things our revelation explained. Our off-the-charts massage and sexual skills. The athletics we exhibited at the last Halloween party. Most especially, Norman’s rescue from certain death.
They were both annoyed with us for keeping the secret from them, though they readily understood our reasons.
Predictably, the biggest sticking point came down to money. Specifically, their matching contribution to the rising charity auction bill, $500 per orgasm at last year’s big parties, fifteen of them delivered on New Year’s Eve alone. As word got around about what it was like to win that auction, competition to be that winner increased, and there were only so many orgasms that could be pledged in the fixed time available; our skills were plateauing.
The Alexanders therefore had two choices. One: keep their contribution the same, leaving matching funds on the table, depriving their favored charity fund of potential donations. Or two: increase their contribution to draw the maximum matching funds, commensurate with the competition to win that auction. It was Market Dynamics 101, and the Alexanders are neither niggardly nor nincompoops.
Yet these auctions were getting expensive, even on the scale these Internet Bubble lottery winners operated on.
“First,” I said, “you can afford it. Second, it’s for a good cause. And third…”
Without another word, Kaitlyn and I proceeded to punt the Alexanders over the moon, not being even a little bit careful to keep the overspill from our magical workings confined to the house’s master suite.
Next morning, there were a lot of broad smiles around the breakfast table.
And not a stitch of clothing.