Real by Amy Bellows
H
The phone rings three times before Felicity answers.
“Hi, H. What’s up?” Felicity and I have been working together for a long time. She’s one of the few people I’ve spent time with outside of work besides my brothers. She and her mate have had me over for dinner several times.
“Hey, Felicity. I hear you requested to be removed from Buddy’s case.”
There’s a pause on the other end of the line. “Yeah. I don’t think I’m a good fit for it.”
“Why? I think you’d be great.”
She sighs. “Buddy brings back a few memories I’d rather forget.”
That isn’t the response I was expecting. “What do you mean?”
“He’s too much like Gepetto’s children.”
I’ve heard that name before. There was a warlock in the nineteenth century who animated marionettes with magic and put on elaborate shows that people traveled from all around the world to see. I thought he had used some form of magical telekinesis or something. Buddy is very different.
“I’m still not following,” I say.
“My sister died of leukemia when she was five years old. I was eight at the time. My omega mother never got over it. A few months after my sister’s death, this woman with scarlet-red hair showed up at our house with a box. Inside it was a doll that looked identical to my sister. She even had a chip in her front tooth. I was taken away from the house for a while, and when I came back, the doll was walking around and talking exactly like my sister. Honestly? It was terrifying. It still is. Even after all these years, my mother tucks it into bed every night and reads it bedtime stories.”
I shudder. Felicity has to be thirty-five years old.
“When I got older, I did a bit of research and discovered there’s a warlock named Red who has reimagined a bit of old Italian magic. It enables her to recreate a dead child in exactly the same state they were before they died. It’s a messy process. Sometimes their memories get jumbled up or their muscle memory is slightly off. There’s a plastic child in Canada who twists his head a full one hundred eighty degrees when he wants to see something behind him, and a wooden kid in Brazil whose reactions are delayed by thirty seconds. But Red has no shortage of customers. A parents’ grief over their children can be immeasurably deep, and she takes advantage of it. I understand Buddy’s very endearing. If I didn’t know better, I’d want to help him too. But he isn’t human, H. He’s just an echo of someone Dorian Gray used to love.”
It makes a horrible kind of sense. Dorian must hate Buddy because he isn’t close enough to the man he wanted Buddy to be. The deep price he probably paid for the spell that created Buddy makes sense too. If Dorian was grieving, he might have been willing to pay anything to get the person he loved back.
I’m not real, though. So it’s different.
Buddy tried to tell me. I simply didn’t want to listen.
“So we just give Buddy back to Dorian?” Even if Buddy is one of Gepetto’s children, that doesn’t seem right. “Buddy is terrified of him.”
“Buddy isn’t a person. He can’t feel terrified. He can’t feel anything. He can just look like he’s feeling things. Red can’t create new people. She only revives small bits of people who are already dead. That’s what you’re seeing right now. You have to let it go.”
I peer into the den where Buddy is watching TV. The way he approached the couch, terrified of what I might do if he sat down beside me, was just an echo of a man who’s already dead. The way he cuddled close to me was too. I got emotional over a ghost.
Except… that doesn’t quite make sense.
“Candlewick doesn’t know Buddy’s real name. That means Candlewick didn’t know the person Buddy was modeled after,” I say.
“So what?”
“Buddy is deeply attached to Candlewick. If he’s nothing but an echo of someone Dorian used to love, then that wouldn’t be possible, right?”
Felicity doesn’t say anything for a few moments. “Maybe Candlewick looks like someone from his past.”
“Wouldn’t he call him something else then? And why would Dorian bother to create someone who wanted to run away from him?”
“Grief is complicated.”
“So is magic,” I remind her. “Buddy has a nightly heat. Did you know that? No shifters have heats that often. Maybe the warlock meant to recreate someone for Dorian, but he requested a few changes, and those changes messed up the magic.”
“So… you’re saying Red created an entirely new person by accident?”
“I have no idea. I just don’t think we should give up on Buddy unless we’re absolutely certain he’s not a person.”
She swears under her breath. “I don’t have time for this. I have a case list a mile long—”
“He has to go to court tomorrow. Just give me twenty-four hours. That’s all I’m asking. Will you please help me?”
There’s a long pause before she says, “For the record, I still think we’re going to lose, but fine. I need to do some things here first, but I can come up tomorrow morning.” I hear the clacking of computer keys and the rustle of paper on the other line. “When we talked with Buddy, he didn’t mention a heat.”
“Candlewick warned Steppe about it.”
“Buddy’s heats will be a problem for us. They separate him from human or shifter omegas and make him seem more like a sex doll. Is he comfortable with you? Do you think you could ask him about them? Maybe if we understood them better, we could reframe them for the judge in a way that would help Buddy be more relatable. Also, we need to figure out who Buddy was created to imitate. If we can highlight the differences between Buddy and the person Dorian was grieving, we might be able to convince the judge he’s more than an echo. I’ll get my paralegal on it and have her contact you when she has some information.”
Felicity and I have prepared countless patients for adoption hearings together. Her thorough, analytical side is a force to be reckoned with.
Sometimes taking care of someone is finding the right person to advocate for them. Sometimes it means trying to understand them better. For the next twenty-four hours, I’ll do everything I can to take care of Buddy.
I hope it’s enough. If Buddy has to go back to Dorian, I don’t know what I’ll do.