Staying in a motel in my own hometown was strange. I supposed I’d still thought of my hometown as, well, home. It was where I’d always lived before Skolala Refujeyo, and it’s where my friends lived, so for the holidays it made more sense for my parents to come back there and meet me rather than for me o go to my parents in their new house, in a new town, full of people I didn’t know.

I didn’t live there any more. I’d never seen my parents’ current house, so I supposed I didn’t live with my parents any more. It was an odd feeling.

My first morning waking up in the motel, I got up earlier than my parents to inspect my face carefully in the bathroom mirror, checking for beard hairs. Yeah, I know how cliché that sounds, a teenage boy checking for his first beard hairs, but unlike most teenagers, I was quite relieved not to find any yet. I didn’t want to have to explain to my parents that I was on testosterone until it was impossible to hide; no matter how supportive they were, I didn’t think that they’d take me taking hormones three years before Australian law would allow it as particularly good news. The closer I was to eighteen before that conversation became inevitable, the better.

Then I double-checked that the long sleeves of my shirt couldn’t ride up. I didn’t want then to see the toothy scar on my left arm, and I most definitely didn’t want them to see the familiarity runes on my right. If I came back from my first semester as a wizard with scary scars, magic tattoos and biological masculinity… it had been hard enough to convince them to let me go in the first place. Convincing them not to pull me out of school at something like that would be difficult, and if I couldn’t convince them then they and the school would get into a fight where the school would have all the legal cards and my parents would have all the PR cards and while I was Kylie’s familiar, no side would back down. Better not to let things get messy in the first place.

I was supposed to meet Melissa and Chelsea at around nine, but I wanted to be out of the motel by eight. By the time I was satisfied that I would look normal to my parents, Dad was bustling around the tiny kitchenette making breakfast while Mum tapped at her laptop, probably getting a head start on work.

“Can you make the tea, K?” Dad asked.

I froze. How long had it been since I’d made tea? When I’d lived with my parents (still a weird thing to think of in the past tense), I’d made it all the time. It had kind of been my job, a sign of trust and a gentle reminder, giving the cursed kid the symbolic purification rite. I was probably reading too much into that; everyone learned how to make the tea, cursed or not. But I’d fallen out of the habit a long time ago.

How long had it been since I’d drunk tea? I vaguely recalled people making it for me occasionally, but did I ever drink it? I must have grown out of the taste.

I shrugged. There was no reason to refuse, so I got on it. It felt like a lifetime since I’d prepared tea for my parents, but it wasn’t a difficult task, or one anyone forgets how to do. I poured, Dad dished out scrambled eggs, Mum put her laptop away.

“So,” Mum said, “it must be good to be home, right?”

“Y-yeah.” I gave her a weak smile. We’d all been tired last night, and hadn’t had much chance to actually catch up. “How have things been with you guys? With the new house?”

“Still getting used to it,” Mum shrugged. “You live in one place for fifteen years, then…”

“Never mind that,” Dad cut in. “How’s the school? Are you learning lots of magic? We haven’t heard from you very much.”

“I’m sure a teenager has more exciting things to do than constantly write letters to his parents,” Mum said, rolling her eyes.

Yeah. ‘Exciting’ was one word for it. “Pretty good. I’m learning how to make potions these days.”

“Oh!” Mum’s eyes lit up. Potions were something my parents would be able to understand. They sounded a lot safer to make than any other theatrics she might associate with magic, and a few of them were even available to nemagisti to buy, although too expensive for most people to bother with. “How’s that going?”

“Not too bad,” I shrugged. “I mean, I’m okay at it, there’s just a lot of catching up to do, you know?”

“If you work hard I’m sure you’ll be amazing at it and get excellent grades,” Mum said with all the confidence of somebody who had no idea how low a priority grades were for me right now. Hell, I fully expected the school to start sabotaging my grades the moment I got anywhere near graduation. Still wasn’t sure what to do about that. “Anything else? Can you do that blue hologram thing that Mr Cooper did at your trial?”

“Um, no.” Should I explain how spells and casting worked? No point. “That’s kind of his speciality. It’s a lot harder than it looks. My surve – uh, there’s this one mage I work with, who’s a famous magical scientist. I’m hoping to pick up some tricks from her.” Tricks to not get killed by Kylie’s spell, mostly, although it still seemed to be behaving itself.

“Oh! That’s nice.”

I managed to get through breakfast without upsetting anyone, explained that I needed to meet up with Chelsea and Melissa, and get out. I didn’t have to meet them for awhile, though. I had other places to be.

Dr Marley’s receptionist wasn’t in yet when I arrived at his little clinic. Technically, they didn’t open for another twenty minutes. He let me in himself.

“It’s been a while, Kayden. How have you been?”

“Well, y’know.” I shrugged. “Same old. Nearly died a couple of times, broke some public property…”

I hadn’t seen Dr Marley since he’d spoken in my defense at my trial six months ago, but his little smile was the same old smile he’d always given. “Yes, that sounds typical. You’re fifteen now, correct?”

“Yeah.” My birthday had been a couple of weeks ago, and Magista had been very grumpy about not being able to have a proper party for someone in the medical wing.

“And you’re on hormone replacement therapy, according to these records?”

“Is that a problem?”

“It’s a diagnostic complication. A lot of the things that I’m going to measure today are influenced by testosterone. But we were going to have to deal with the symptoms of puberty either way, I suppose. Your arm, please?”

I held out my right arm for him to affix the blood pressure cuff. His eyes lingered on my forearm, although there was nothing there to see but sleeve.

I grinned. “You wanna see it?”

Dr Marley tried to hide his own grin. “Well, I…”

I pulled up my sleeve to show him the runes. His eyes widened. He inspected my arm closely while the blood pressure monitor did its thin, before saying with a touch of disappointment, “It looks like a standard familiarity mark. Except for the cancellation attempt.”

“Sure does,” I said.

“Then… how?”

I shrugged. “If you have any ideas, me and basically everyone else at Refujeyo would be fascinated to hear them.”

“Well. Your blood pressure’s normal, at any rate.” He went through the rest of the basic inspections that I was familiar with from my years of him monitoring my curse; temperature, breathing, all the normal stuff. He drew some blood for the normal gamut of blood tests and I asked, “is that even going to be useful? I mean, by the time you get the results for blood, it’ll be nearly time to go back to Refujeyo anyway.”

“I still think you shouldn’t have left. The kuracar can provide far better monitoring of your condition, and emergency treatment for any problems, than anybody out here could. Being out here is incredibly dangerous.”

“Could be incredibly dangerous. We don’t know.”

“‘Could be’ should be enough.”

“Yeah, well, my curse could have been incredibly dangerous for the nearly fourteen years I carried it out here because certain doctors never mentioned the very place that you’ve suddenly decided it’s too dangerous for me to leave,” I snapped.

“Kayden – ”

“I know, I know. The whole age law thing. I know.”

“Well, the legislative changes on that are well underway, so – ”

“Oh, the ones that Malas decided to turn my trial into a publicity piece for instead of telling what he knew six months earlier so the damn thing never had to happen in the first place?”

Dr Marley didn’t have anything to say to that. “Any unusual symptoms? Physical weakness, fatigue, low mood or mood swings?”

“No.” That wasn’t entirely true. The stress of everything recently had left me feeling kind of weak and thinned out, like too little of me was taking up too much space, and I honestly didn’t know what counted as low mood or mood swings – I’d spent most of my life trying to avoid extreme emotions and had no idea what my ‘normal’ was. Anyway, if I was experiencing anything like that, it was probably because of the testosterone, and that wasn’t Dr Marley’s problem. I already had a specialist for that.

“All seems normal,” he announced after several more minutes of tests. “At least, everything I can easily test here seems normal. We’ll have your bloodwork back in a few days.”

“Thanks,” I said, getting up. “You won’t tell my parents about any of this?”

“I already promised I wouldn’t. Although I have no idea how you plan to hide being a familiar from them.”

I shrugged. “It’s not like they’re privy to mage gossip. I was just going to wear long sleeves. It’s winter.”

“And next holiday, when it’s summer?”

I shrugged again.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Kayden.”

“That’s never stopped me before. See you Wednesday?”

“Of course. And if you develop any unusual symptoms before then; any fever, and strong nausea – ”

“I have your number. Same as when we were worried about my curse.” I nodded. “Thanks. For everything.”

“Please be careful.”

An impossible request, so I brushed it off and bid him goodbye.

The sky was cloudy outside, but it didn’t look like rain. I was still a bit early early to meet the girls, so I dropped into a deli to grab a snack – I wasn’t hungry, having barely finished breakfast, but Chelsea probably would be. Ms. Hannity, a bony woman who liked to wear outrageously patterned blouses, had owned the deli since before I was born and was at the counter when I slipped through the mistletoe-hung door. She looked somewhat surprised to see me.

“Kayden?”

“Hi, Ms. Hannity.”

“Are you alright?”

“… Yes?”

“It doesn’t hurt?”

I was about to ask what she was talking about when her eyes flicked up to the mistletoe above her door. Oh, right. Everyone knew about the curse now. I had to deal with this, now.

“Ms. Hannity, you’ve always had mistletoe above your door. When has it ever hurt me?”

“Right.” She swallowed nervously while I tried to select some pretzels in the most nonthreatening manner possible. I reminded myself that she had every right to be afraid of my curse, and tried not to take it personally when she didn’t quite manage to hide her desire to flinch back as I took them to the counter. “So how’s school going?”

“Fine. Learning some magic.”

“You’re a mage now, right?”

“In training.”

“So how’s that working with… did they manage to help with the…?” Her question broke off awkwardly, and she just gestured awkwardly at me instead.

I considered the question carefully, balanced honesty with a desire to not spend the next thirty minutes explaining basic magical theory to a random commonfolk woman, and settled on, “The Haven is really good with magic. The only magic I have in me now is mage magic.”

Instantly, the tension drained out of her, and she gave me a bright, relieved smile. “That’s great news! I knew you could defeat it! Keeping that thing under control for fourteen whole years, even when that awful boy attacked you and everyone blamed you… I knew you’d be strong enough to beat it. And now you’re going to be a mage, too… I’m so proud of you.”

“… Yeah. Thanks.” My last conversation with Ms. Hannity had been over a year ago when she’d been yelling at me for breaking her window box trying to climb onto her roof. I paid for my pretzels, bid her goodbye and got out of there.