T. Grey - The Fallen King

She went to the kitchen, picked up the phone, and dialed the numbers she called many times a week. Her mother answered on the second ring.

“Hey, baby. How you doin’?”

She could hear the sounds of people chattering in the background. The soft Celtic music her mother always listened to playing gently. She was at work.

“I got a strange letter in the mail.”

Silence. Abby’s gut feeling came roaring back to life. She gripped the counter in her hand, squeezing tight to the surface until her knuckles locked and blanched. Her eyes fixed on some indescript point on the white stucco wall of her kitchen.

“Mom?”

“I think we need to talk,” her mother said gently. She heard her mother’s voice break. The sound crushed her heart as if a fist gripped it. She could never stand the sound of her mother crying without feeling the same emotional pull inside her.

Abby’s fist clenched tighter around the lip of the counter. “About what?” she managed to ask over her own clogged throat.

“It’s about your father.”

It was then that Abbigail Krenshaw’s life changed.

By the time Abbigail arrived at her mother’s magic shop aptly named Magic Shoppe , her mother had cleared out all guests, sent the employees home, and closed shop. This left the parking lot completely empty except for her mother’s green Volkswagen Bug parked off to the side. The shop didn’t have many employees, and mom had two coworkers under her. Both were witches who practiced magic in the same circle as her.

Her mom even managed to pull in a decent amount of profit from her shop. Abbigail thought the idea was hilarious when her mom first told her some eleven years ago that she’d be opening a “new age” store. She stopped laughing when her mom sold her fifty-year old home with bad plumbing and shoddy insolation and upgraded to a brand new two-story house in the suburbs. It was far from a mansion but wasn’t close to being a dump either.

She’d done well because of the “new age” fad that had come and gone but wasn’t really gone. Her brand and business had stuck around well enough in Fort Collins even among the local humans.

Humans knew about magic, though some still didn’t believe in it. Some even knew about demons, shapeshifters, and the vampires of the world. Most ignored it because if they didn’t then they’d have to accept something most weren’t ready to. So most humans stayed out of the paranormal business, except for the fundamentalists. Whenever they got involved, things always got bloody. A slain vampire here, a dead shapeshifter there. Abbigail knew all about it. ‘Course it went both ways when humans wind up dead, but that wasn’t the area Abbigail worked. It didn’t help that she got to see it more often than other folks.

Abbigail stepped inside her mother’s shop and stopped. She didn’t want to do this, but she needed to. Her stomach twisted with nerves, and her hands fidgeted no matter how hard she tried to still them. Even her legs felt weak like she could fall down at any moment. The music was off leaving the shop quiet except for the soft whirr of the A/C unit. The A/C was a bit of a strange thing in the North of Colorado. Usually by now, the temperature had dropped and people were preparing for the cold wet weather to come with winter. Instead they’d had a surprising amount of heat that still lingered in the air.

“Abby, is that you?” her mother called from the back of the store.

This is it. She couldn’t turn back now. All those years of never knowing who her father was, of asking her mother repeatedly for answers only to get shut down time and again, this was her chance. She’d never told her mother, but that was the reason she’d shunned her mother’s craft. It was petty, she thought, looking back on it, but no matter. That’s just how it turned out.

Her mother was a practicing grey witch which meant she could dabble in magic that could heal or hurt. Abby had the same power in her blood, but it seemed that each year that passed growing up, each new birthday she had, each holiday that came and swept away without knowledge of her father, she pushed her mother further and further away. Until now, she only saw her mother on those holidays and birthdays, and only talked to her on the phone a few days a week. Even the phone calls they shared didn’t last long—Abby made sure of that. She just couldn’t stand to be around her.

And now she knew who her father was. What she didn’t know was how to feel about it or how to feel towards her mother. Her mother’s soft footsteps came out of the office and Abby closed her eyes. Anger, she certainly felt some anger but that wasn’t the overriding emotion surprisingly. No, she wasn’t very angry with her mother.

“Abby, is everything all right?” her mother asked, her voice closer, wary.

Abby kept her eyes closed and focused on just herself and the emotions scattering and darting around inside her as if they too didn’t want to be figured out yet. As if something terrible might happen if she did figure it out—something awful maybe. Abby felt as if she was swimming through her own heavy emotions, searching to figure out which one she was feeling. Her breath caught as she found it. It wasn’t anger, surprise, or confusion she felt. It was pain. Pure and not very simple, pain.

The words came to the tip of her tongue, laden with every ounce of emotion riding her. Abby spoke before she lost them. “After all this time, I needed to know. I had to know and you couldn’t tell me. Not once. Not after all the begging and the tears and the pleading.” Her voice cracked, tears slipped out of her tightly squeezed eyes, but still she went on. “And now that he’s found me and I’ve found him, he’s dead. I know who he is and I can still never know him. And I can never talk to him, never hug him, never know him.”

Abbigail wanted to drop to her knees and curl up in her bed and let her numb body find itself again. She wouldn’t do it, and her pride wouldn’t let her. She only let one sob escape before she clamped her lips shut, slammed her eyes closed, and just rocked on her feet with arms wrapped around her waist. He’d wanted her to know about him. He hadn’t wanted her mother, which hurt on a level of its own.

“I wish he wouldn’t have even sent the stupid letter,” Abby said, slowing her rocking. Her mother was oddly quiet, all things considered. “You know, mom, it feels like there’s a knife in my heart that hadn’t been there before. It’s like I’m being taunted. ‘Oh by the way, I love you and would have loved to be in your life. Too bad I’m dead now.’ And the stuff he said about you. I don’t know if I hate him or…”

Finally her mother spoke. “Let me see the letter, honey.”

Long engrained to answer her mother’s commands, Abby pulled the letter out of her back pocket and handed it over. She kept her eyes averted unable to meet her mother’s sad eyes.

A few minutes passed while Abbigail listened to her mother’s breath catch and tears clog her throat as she tried to control it.

“I’ll tell you everything,” her mother said.

Anger started to poke its head up. Now you’ll tell me , Abbigail’s inner conscious yelled. Now, after it’s too late to do anything about it! Isn’t that fucking convenient for you, mother. But she didn’t say any of those things that she was thinking. Instead she got up, her back muscles feeling stiff like they hadn’t been used in a while and went to her mother’s office to take a seat in front of the desk. Her mother followed and sat behind her beat up wooden desk that was covered in a disarray of pamphlets advertising the store, eschewed paperwork, pens without the caps on, pencils with broken points, three cups of coffee that were probably days old, and God knows what else.