Free Thirteen Orphans by Jane Lindskold

appetizers for the table. They needed time to talk, and she felt more at ease here than she did in the sterility of a hotel suite.

    When the waiter walked away, Gaheris took over.

    “Brenda, our family came pretty close to being one of the ‘lost’ lines. My dad, your grandad, was one of those who resented the tutoring his father had forced him to accept. My grandfather, the Exile Rat, lived until I was eight, and when he died my dad found himself in a real bind. Basically, according to the terms of his father’s will, he couldn’t inherit his father’s estate—and it was a good one—unless he filled me in on what it meant to be the Rat. Moreover, Dad had to pass this information on in front of witnesses, one of whom was Auntie Pearl. Now, your grandad may have wanted to deny he was a Rat, but he shared the rattish love for gain. He gave in, just as his father had known he would.”

    Pearl felt a bitter smile rise unbidden as she remembered how the Rat had been beaten by his own nature. “Gaheris’s discovery of our shared heritage was not a pretty scene. And at the end of his recitation of family history, your grandfather shoved the mah-jong box at Gaheris and said, ‘The damned thing is yours now. May it do you as much good as it ever did me.’ Or something like that.”

    “Pretty close,” Gaheris said. “My head was spinning with fairy tales of emperors and magical lore, and then I had this box in my hands with a rat looking up at me from the lid. I’d never even played mah-jong. My dad had been determined that we were going to be the all-American family. We played poker, Go Fish, and Old Maid but I don’t think there was as much as a box of dominoes in the house. Auntie Pearl tutored me in what I needed to know, and my dad never stopped resenting that. I think that ate him up. He was a sour man, older than his years, when that heart attack finally got him.”

    Brenda looked at him. “You decided a middle ground for me, then, right? No sudden revelations, but no childhood indoctrination either.”

    Gaheris shrugged, and Pearl saw all over again the little boy who had held that heavy box of tiles in his hands and stared up at his father in disbelief.

    Brenda seemed to see something, too, because she said softly, “Not too bad, Dad. Not too bad.”

    Pearl decided they’d better return to the subject of the Dog. This family bonding was lovely, but she wanted Brenda to have more than Gaheris’s point of view.

    “Not all the Orphans were as fortunate or as conniving as the Rat,” Pearl said. “The current Dog is a young man several years older than you are. His father was a soldier, and died before he could tell his son about his heritage. Albert has periodically talked about the need to seek out and educate this young man—Charles is his name—as to his inheritance, but Albert has always shied away from actually acting.”

    “It wouldn’t be an easy thing to do, would it?” Brenda said. “I mean, I’m having a hard enough time accepting this, and my dad is here, and I’ve known you for as long as I can remember.”

    “And,” Gaheris added, “Albert might have been an egocentric, self-opinionated, pompous ass, but he wasn’t one to disrupt someone else’s life without reason. The Orphans had sought to pass their abilities on with the direct intention of someday returning to what they thought of as ‘home.’ However, over a century has gone by. Is there a home for any of us to return to? Perhaps the time for the return home the Thirteen Orphans dreamed of is forever over. What remains is a curious family heritage, but nothing else.”

    “So I might have agreed,” Pearl said, “until now. Someone is hunting the Thirteen Orphans. Someone sees a value in the heritage the Orphans retained. I, for one, have no desire to lose any part of my memory—and I am greatly apprehensive as to what else this stalker might want from us. Will he stop with memories, or will there come a time