Return of the Trickster Read online

  “Amen!” his dad said, nodding.

  Jared immediately wanted to text his mom. She’d really appreciate this turn of events. But he’d dropped his phone in the alley where he’d shed his clothes, after her psychopath ex-boyfriend, David, tried to set him on fire after dumping booze all over him. And then his life had gone full Trickster, all weird and deadly. Jared’s snark went untexted and he felt alone. More alone. As alone as you could feel sitting on the couch beside the guy who’d raised you, who had suddenly morphed into someone new.

  Maybe this was how his mom had felt when Jared joined Alcoholics Anonymous at the end of grade ten. As though the person you’d known all your life had been taken over by aliens and what you were left with was the physical shell that looked like the person you knew but the insides were all strange.

  “If you need to rest,” his dad said, “you can sleep in Destiny’s old room.”

  “Thanks,” Jared said.

  “I owe you so much, and not just the money. You were there in my darkest hour. Love you, son.” His dad pulled him in for a hug.

  Jared gripped him back, fighting the emotional crap.

  The front door opened and Jared pulled away from his dad, who patted him on the shoulder. Jared’s stepmother, Shirley, came in with a small bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and two boxes of fries. She plunked them on the coffee table and handed them packets of ketchup. What had annoyed his mom more than anything about their breakup was that Phil had left her for someone so mousy, tiny and plain. Early in their relationship, when Shirley was half-cut, she’d drunk-dial with threats of calling the police if his mom didn’t stop being such a fucking psycho ex. He wasn’t sure what his mom had done, but Shirley held a grudge and included him in the festivities like a gift-with-purchase.

  “Jared,” she said.

  He nodded at her. “Shirley.”

  His dad started praying, thanking God for the food. Shirley’s expression was one of a person who’d just found a hair in her meal. She caught Jared’s gaze. “Bullshit for idiots who can’t think for themselves.”

  “God bless you, Shirl,” his dad said.

  “Keep it in your pants, Phil,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  Jared lay in the tub listening to Phil and Shirley arguing downstairs. The water was going cold, so he turned the hot tap on with his foot. He stared at his missing toe, chewed off by the river otters. He supposed he could grow one back now. The thought made him slightly nauseous. His foot stayed the same.

  He didn’t feel inhuman. Unhuman. Non-human. Whatever the term was for being not the same kind of human as everyone else. He still felt like himself, more or less. A little hungover from universe-hopping and then dying and coming back to life, but still Jared-ish.

  Glass broke downstairs, something small, like a bottle or a cup. A long, uneasy silence and then a door slammed.

  He should phone Mave. He lived in his aunt’s spare bedroom in Vancouver and she’d be worried. But how would he explain that he’d ended up five hundred miles north in the basement of his mother’s newly sold house in Kitimat and that some moving men had found him wholly nude, beaten up and babbling nonsense, and called an ambulance?

  Because of Georgina. The thing that had called itself Georgina.

  He couldn’t quite catch his breath. He unplugged the tub, dried himself off and pulled on his borrowed clothes. His thoughts were not things he wanted to spend time with. His memories of the last few days were not safe. His face in the mirror hid all the insanity behind an ordinary mug—aside from the ring of bruises around his neck where Georgina had last throttled him, calling him a brainless chicken. He needed to fix that. Make it less obvious, at least. Heal, he told himself. But that made his heart speed up and his palms clammy. He was still Jared. He was human. He didn’t want to be some freak like his biological father. Although his hospital-bathroom organ roundup screamed of the weirdness that could only be caused by a Trickster.

  God. He also didn’t want to talk to his mom. Maggie would know he’d changed, know it right away. She hated Wee’git. Loathed the Trickster. Was gleefully responsible for Wee’git’s last death. Jared could lie to her. Not say anything. Or just grab some balls. Hey, Mom, guess what? I took after the sperm donor after all.

  Shit would hit the fan. Matter would touch antimatter. Grenades would be placed in belts and AK-15s would be tenderly cleaned. His mom’s love was like a bridge with alternating lanes—sometimes everything flowed towards him and other times stampeded away. She’d kill for him, sure, but he had to pick her side or else. Like when she found out he was helping his stepdad pay the bills after Phil’s prescription for Oxy was cancelled and he kept blowing through his disability cheques to fund his new habit. That was a particularly long deep-freeze she put him in that only broke because of all the shit happening in his life—the otters, the talking raven who turned out to be Wee’git, the spooky things that happened when his ex, Sarah, and he put their minds to it. When he quit drinking and joined AA, his mom seemed to think he was judging her and they’d had a brittle relationship since.

  He emerged from the bathroom and went to his stepsister’s old room. She and her baby had finally moved out, but Destiny’s vision board was still tacked up over the bed, filled with happy families on picnics, at carnivals, on the beach. Italicized, glittery notecards: Family is wealth. Children are the greatest blessing. Her sheets were mint green with pink roses. A fluffy white rug by the bed. Nearby, an empty bassinet filled with the stuffies she’d left behind, all the off-brand and no-name generics.

  Jared didn’t have to go back to Vancouver. He could stay here. Phil would never kick him out. He could curl up on the rosy bed and put a pillow over his ears to drown out the renewed fight downstairs. And so he did.

  But he couldn’t close his eyes because, when he did, he had a flashback to the thing that had claimed to be his aunt Georgina, cracking his bones and sucking the marrow from them. And he didn’t want to think about what he did in response.

  Not a single person he knew was going to be happy about his shiny new shape-shifting ability. No one liked his biological father. Not his mom, not his grandmother, and not his new friend, Neeka, whose otter people had bad history with him. Certainly not the thing that had been claiming to be his aunt. Was she really? He hadn’t thought to ask, being in the middle of a kidnapping and then a torture session that had apparently only lasted a weekend but had felt like forever.

  Jared should have avoided Georgina. But that was the thing about being desperate for help, flailing in a strange new ocean. You grabbed on to anyone who reached out to you, hoping that the person lending you a hand was really a Good Samaritan even as you marked the exits and smiled.

  “Hey, kiddo,” his dad said, hesitating in the doorway. “Did you hear all that? Sorry.”

  “No worries,” Jared said, lifting the pillow off his ear.

  His dad came and sat on the edge of the flowery bed. His eyes drifted down to Jared’s neck. He hesitated and Jared could see he was dying to ask, but Phil said instead: “You’re welcome to stay as long as you want.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “I’ll dig out some better-fitting clothes for you tomorrow.” Phil patted Jared’s hand. “You want to call anyone? Feel free to use my phone.”

  “Maybe later.”

  His dad sighed. “Jared, don’t you think you should call your mom?”

  * * *

  —

  Can you dream if you’re in a dream? The TV downstairs was now tuned to a hockey game and someone was clattering dishes in the kitchen. The headlights from passing traffic punched rays of yellow light through the crocheted curtains as his eyes grew heavy.

  His dreaming mind showed him coy wolves, dying. A dusty, rocky field filled with writhing fur and teeth and claws, so many he stumbled around, bouncing off flanks and fending off bites. He could save th
em, but he didn’t. Some of the wolves were in human form, a child clinging to his mother. The unfamiliar stars burned above them while fireflies swirled in dense clouds. The thin air choked him and the wolves. They died ugly, contorted deaths, kicking up dust on the dry, hard ground. Their jaws clenched. Their moans faded. Then they went still.

  Your fault, his dreams told him.

  His mom accused him of having a tender heart, but that was a lie. If you’d done something terrible, did that make you terrible? All the good things he’d done, the people he’d tried to help, what did it mean? Did killing the pack blacken his entire life, a creeping mould that all the bleach in the world wouldn’t erase?

  They’d died there, he thought. He’d died too, but he came back, still Jared but not.

  He’d been afraid of monsters. Now he was one.

  2

  REGRET TASTES LIKE DIET SODA

  Phil slid scrambled eggs onto Jared’s untouched plate of bacon and toast. Jared grabbed some ketchup and mushed the food around. His dad studied him.

  “Destiny just called to say there’s Missing posters of you on the Facebooks,” he said.

  Phil still had a flip phone and he said this seriously. Jared suspected his dad didn’t know the difference between any of the social media. His stepsister had switched over to Instagram because of the drama on her Facebook wall with the baby daddy, his angry wife and the wife’s swarming friends.

  “I’d know if I was missing,” Jared said.

  “Maybe you should tell your mother you’re okay.”

  Jared poked the eggs. He didn’t have a great relationship with his mother, but he still had one. When she found out he was a Trickster, maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe she’d think he’d been playing her. Maybe she’d stop considering him her son.

  “I think I’m a monster,” Jared admitted to his dad.

  “Everyone relapses,” Phil said. “You made it a year on your first go. That’s not nothing.”

  He turned back to the stove and cracked a couple more eggs into the cast iron pan. Jared wondered what Phil would do if he saw Jared turn into a raven. Remembered the blue-black feathers poking through his skin, remembered soaring in a multicoloured sky. He willed away his memories of flight, the thrilling caress of wind.

  Philip Martin, the man Jared considered his only real father, sat across from him and they ate like normal human beings, even if one of them was a fraud.

  Fake it till you make it, Jared thought.

  * * *

  —

  Face the music, he told himself. Start dealing.

  Jared sat at the kitchen table and stared out the window at his dad, who was mowing the lawn one last time, mulching the fallen leaves with the grass instead of blowing them around, pausing once in a while to empty the mixture into large brown-paper lawn bags. When he finished, he mowed the lawns of the adjoining townhouses, stopping to chat with a neighbour who brought him a half-dozen brownies as a thank you. His dad shut off the motor. Shirley drained the water from the boiled potatoes and ladled out some half-smoked salmon for supper. She brought Jared a small plate. He said thank you and she side-eyed him. The mower started up again. Shirley left a plate for Phil and then took her own plate to her bedroom. Jared could hear her deadbolt click. Her TV blared to life. He picked up his dad’s flip phone.

  Phil had given him his mom’s number. Apparently they had a better relationship now she’d moved to Winnipeg with her boyfriend and there were fifteen hundred miles between them. Jared could phone his mom and say he was alive and leave it at that. He got up and started a new pot of coffee. Maybe it was better to just get it over with instead of dreading it all day and worrying about it all night.

  The phone rang and rang. Jared waited to record a message, but before he could, his call was disconnected. He poured himself another coffee and tried to remember Mave’s number, but they’d mostly texted. He hadn’t called her land line, ever. Maybe Shirley had a more modern phone and he could ask to borrow it to check the online phone books.

  His dad’s phone vibrated. The display showed “HER” in glowing lights.

  “I’m busy, Phil,” his mom said when Jared picked up. “Keep it short.”

  He cleared his throat. “Hey.”

  Maggie cried. She wept on the phone and Jared found himself staring at a cobweb in the corner, waiting for her to stop. Alternate universe, he thought. This version of Maggie was more emotional. Kind of hard to listen to. Kind of hard not to react, hearing her broken.

  “Phil?” Mave said suddenly into his ear. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s me,” Jared said.

  “Jared! Where are you?”

  “At Dad’s place.”

  “Oh, thank God.” And then, muffled, “It’s Jared. He’s at Phil’s.”

  He could hear his mom in the background, still crying. He hadn’t heard her cry like that since Phil left them and she had no idea how she was going to pay the mortgage.

  “Jared?” Mave said. “I can book you a plane ticket if your dad can drive you to the airport.”

  “I don’t have any ID,” Jared said.

  “Damn. I forgot—the police have your wallet.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Give me the phone,” he heard his mom say. “Jared, stay where you are. I’ll drive up to get you.”

  “No, sweetie,” Mave said quietly. “Maggie, you’re not in any shape to drive. I’ll see if Kota or Hank is free.”

  “That’s okay,” Jared said. “I’ll take the bus.”

  “Don’t leave Phil’s place!” His mom had grabbed her phone back. “You hear me? Or I’ll reach down your goddamn throat and yank your nuts so high you’ll sing like a motherfucking canary.”

  Maybe it still was his universe because that was totally something his mom would say. “Okay, Hallmark.”

  She blew her nose. “I thought you were dead, Shithead.”

  “Your Shithead is alive.”

  “How’d you end up in Kitimat?”

  “Jared!” Mave called in the background. “Kota is driving up to get you. He says it should be around sixteen hours.”

  “Take my Glock!” his mom shouted. “Ammo’s in the glove compartment.”

  “Oh, let’s not bring guns into this,” Mave said.

  “David’s not playing around,” his mom said. “And neither am I.”

  Jared heard his cousin Kota’s voice rumbling but couldn’t make out the words. Were they all at Mave’s?

  “Call us when you get there!” he heard Mave say to Kota.

  “Mave gave me some Ativan,” his mom said to Jared. “I’m really dizzy.”

  “Here, shh, give the phone to me,” Mave said. “Jared? I’m going to put your mom to bed. We’ve been very worried about you. Call us again in the morning, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  Neither of them hung up. Jared could hear her breathing. His mom started crying again, and then the cellphone clicked off. He took a deep, wobbly breath.

  Maybe it was a mistake, but he wanted to go back to Mave’s place. The ghosts and spirits were gone, eaten by the thing that had claimed to be his aunt Georgina. His friend Neeka was one of the only magical beings left in his life. And hopefully Huey, the flying head, was still around too. David was his big worry. His mother’s ex needed control, but had given up trying to intimidate his mother, landing on Jared as a stand-in for everything he wanted to do to Maggie. And the possibility that the coy wolves he’d killed had family, friends or allies still around. Jared had no idea what it all meant. But none of it mattered—his mom had cried and she rarely cried. She’d missed him. Maybe she’d be okay with the new Jared.

  * * *

  —

  After dinner, they played crib at the kitchen table. His dad reached over and rifle
d through Jared’s cards. Jared made a face as his dad showed him all the possibilities he’d missed.

  “Not enough brainpower,” Jared said.

  “Maybe it’s time to hit the hay,” his dad said.

  His dad packed up the crib board and put it away. Jared absently listened to the news coming from the TV in the living room.

  His dad came back and patted Jared on the shoulder. “The offer to stay here is open.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” Jared said. “I want to get back to school, though.”

  “Maybe you should take a break. Absorb things. Get back on track, you know?”

  “I want my life back,” Jared said.

  “Your mother is worried about David. Why didn’t you tell anyone he was bothering you?”

  Jared was surprised his mother had talked to Phil. “David doesn’t matter anymore. He’s done his worst.”

  “Let’s not test that little theory, okay, kiddo?”

  Jared hadn’t seen this part of Phil in a long time. Concerned. Focused on something outside himself. Dad-like, instead of kid-like and depending on Jared to fix things. “I won’t.”

  “I can’t stop you from staying with Mave,” Phil said. “But you need to realize that you’re putting her in danger too. David will punish you through other people the way he tried to punish your mom that time he broke your ribs.”

  “I don’t want to put you in the crosshairs either,” Jared said.

  Phil looked down, and then at a point past Jared’s shoulder. “I wish I could take back the last few years.”

  Jared shrugged. “It’s all in the past.”

  “Don’t get yourself killed.”

  Practice makes perfect, a part of his brain said. Snark on autopilot. But there was nothing more he could explain to Phil without sounding certifiable. He’d died five times this last weekend. The thing that called herself Georgina Smith had raised him only to kill him repeatedly and sucked the marrow from his bones, then nibbled on his organs as if they were bonbons. “Mom’s there.”