Sunshine

Strong magic-handling genes and even a weak unmanifested-for-generations magic-operating demon gene in the same person gives you about a ninety percent chance of being criminally insane. It might be as high as ninety-five percent. There are asylums specially built to hold these people, who tend to be extremely hard to hold.

Important magic-handling families for obvious reasons therefore become kind of inbred. Although this isn’t an ideal solution either, because over the generations you start getting more…third cousins who can maybe write a ward sign that almost works…say. And usually fewer children total. In one way this is a relief. Someone whose human magic-handling DNA isn’t up to more than a ward sign that almost works is in little if any danger from a big thor demon-blooded great-great-grandmother on the other side even if her magic genes have played very neat hopscotch over the intervening generations and come through nearly intact. (That’s actually another tale. Yes, there are stories, at least one or two of them impressively documented, about strong doers in apparently on-the-skids magic-handling families whose magic turns out to be demonic in origin. But all of those stories—all the ones with happy endings anyway—are about families whose magic handling has been moribund for generations. People with fathers under even the suspicion of being sorcerers need not apply.) On the other hand, important magic-handling families need to go on handling magic to remain important magic-handling families.

The Blaises’ name still casts a long shadow. But even I knew they’d hit their peak a while back, and that there weren’t many of them—us—around any more. There didn’t seem to be any at all left since the Wars. I hadn’t thought about this. It might have been an issue if I had wanted to be a magic handler, but I didn’t. It’s pretty amazing what you can not think about. To the extent that I thought about it at all, I missed my gran, but it was a lot simpler to be Charlie Seddon’s stepdaughter.

Outcrosses in a magic-handling family on the decline…like me…are viewed with mixed feelings. We may be salvation. We may be catastrophe. It depends on the bloodline on the other side.

Dubious outcrosses are often exiled or repudiated by the family. It’s easier if the alien parent is the mother too, because then they can claim she was fooling around. Paternity tests applied to bad-magic crosses are notoriously unreliable.

No. There was no whisper of demon blood in my mother’s family.

Would I know? My mother’s sisters were both several sandwiches short of a picnic in terms of common sense. They were not the kind of people who would be entrusted with dark family secrets. And I didn’t have to waste any time wondering if my mother would have told me. “Overprotective” is my mom’s middle name. She wouldn’t have told me.

My mother’s parents had been dead against the marriage. They hadn’t spoken to her since she refused to give my dad up. She’d been very young, and in love, and I could guess that even in those days she didn’t take direction well. Maybe they didn’t tell her. Just booted her out: never darken our door again, etc. They’d never made any attempt to meet me, their first grandchild, either. Maybe my mother found out later, somehow, after I was born. Maybe it was my dad who’d found it out…

I’d never seen my father again after my mother left him, nor any of the rest of his family. Only my gran. Who was maybe choosing to see me privately and alone not in deference to my mother’s feelings but because her own family had ordered her to have nothing to do with me.

Maybe my gran had some other reason for believing I was okay. Or maybe she didn’t know why my mom had left. Maybe she thought it was my dad’s business associates. Magic-handling families can be pretty conceited about their talent, and pretty offended by commoners feeling they have any rights to inconvenient opinions. Maybe my gran thought her family were just being arrogant.

If you were in the ninety percent, it showed up early. Usually. If you weren’t born with a precocious ability to hoist yourself out of your crib and get into really repulsive mischief, the next likeliest time for you to begin running amok was in the preteen years, when magic-handling kids are apprenticed for their first serious magic-handling training. When my gran taught me to transmute.

The sane five or ten percent most often have personalities that are uninterested in magic. One of the recommendations, for someone who finds out they’re in the high-risk category, is not to do magic, even the most inconsequential. My mother would never have let me have all those meetings with my gran if there’d been any chance…