Page 41 of Search for the Lost

Crispin hesitated before speaking. He was chewing on his lip, which was distinctly un-Crispinlike. And it meant that Leo was going to have a gnawed face, if he ever got his own body back.

Finally, in a tiny voice, Crispin said, “You’re one of the queen’s Shadow-Puppets.”

“Yes,” said the woman sadly.

“Great Krurlagg’s horns, she is not supposed to— Nobody is supposed to, not even her. It’s not— This is—” Crispin devolved into a twist of sputtering and obscure oaths. His face had gone red—not a good look on him, Leo noted—and he waved his hands as if some part of him was on fire but he wasn’t sure which one.

The woman got up and hurried to the kitchen. When she returned seconds later, she held a plastic tray containing a plate of chocolate chip cookies and two glasses of something that looked like grape juice but smelled like rum. “Fog brew,” Crispin said appreciatively and downed it in one long swallow. Then he drank half of the other. By the time he set the glass on the coffee table beside the cookies, his face had returned to a healthier hue. He blinked a few times, slowly toppled sideways against Leo’s shoulder, and started to snore.

“Is he okay?” Leo put a protective arm around Crispin.

“He’s fine. He shouldn’t have drunk so much in your body, but he’ll sleep it off.” She sat down again and pointed at the cookies. “They’re your favorites, a little underbaked and with extra chocolate chips. Have one.”

Those were his favorites. His mom used to make them when he needed cheering up. He took a bite; it was still warm and tasted exactly as he remembered. “What’s going on?” he asked plaintively before finishing off the cookie. It was a question that pretty much encompassed his existence over the past few days. And every time he thought he might have an answer, more weirdness erupted.

“You don’t have to do that,” said the woman. Shadow-Puppet. Whatever.

Leo realized that he’d been picking up tiny cookie crumbs from the cushion and dropping them onto the plate. He stopped and sat on his free hand instead. “Shadow-Puppet?” he prompted.

She sighed again. “Right. Well, I don’t know how much you know about your very early history.”

“I was sort of imprisoned in Chaos jail. I mean the whole Chaos entity was, and I was part of it. Kind of.” Honestly, he was still slightly fuzzy on the details and didn’t really want them clarified. They made him uneasy. “When Crispin was a kid, he opened the door and some of the Chaos escaped. That was me. And I guess I was dangerous. But it was too risky to open the door again, so Crispin’s mom sent me to Earth. She figured I wouldn’t do too much damage there.”

The woman nodded. “For your own safety and everyone else’s, you were disguised as an ordinary human. To be frank, I’m not certain how concerned the Fae Queen was in protecting you.” She made a rocking motion with her arms as if cradling a baby. “You were alone and vulnerable—but also potentially hazardous. She wanted to make sure that you were, well, guarded.”

Leo’s hand had escaped and was smoothing the pleat on his pants. He sat on it again. “Ordinary adoptive parents wouldn’t do, huh?”

“With your tendencies, they wouldn’t have survived long. And they certainly wouldn’t have understood why you are the way you are.”

Crispin leaned even more heavily against Leo. He was drooling a little, but at least he was momentarily at peace.

“So what did the queen do?” asked Leo, not sure he truly wanted to know.

The woman sat up very straight and laced her hands in her lap. “She created parents for you.”

He frowned. “What does that mean?”

“You enjoy watching television, right?”

Leo blinked at what seemed to be a non sequitur. “Yeah, but what does that⁠—”

“The fae court has similar entertainments sometimes. But instead of using actors, the queen creates the characters in whatever form the roles require. When the performance ends, those characters cease to exist.”

“When the—” Oh. Leo felt as if he’d been punched hard in the gut and then stomped on by one of Fromlith the giant’s non-vegan relatives. “My parents were AI?” he shouted. He would have jumped to his feet if Crispin hadn’t been so heavily attached to him.

“The court calls us Shadow-Puppets,” she said calmly. “And they were excellent parents, weren’t they? They were literally made to be your father and mother.”

“But….” Oh gods, now his throat was tight. Aside from Crispin, they had been the only two people in any universe who had loved him, and now he knew they weren’t real. None of it was real.

The woman-puppet stood and walked over, her face tight with concern. But that’s just an act, right? Because she’s not real either.

She crouched in front of him, reached forward as if to touch him, then drew back. “They loved you, honey. Yes, they were made for exactly that purpose, but we have feelings, and they are as genuine to us as yours are to you. I never met them—I didn’t exist until a few days ago, actually—but I can assure you that they loved you.”

Leo was crying now. He couldn’t help it, and he couldn’t even get to the stupid handkerchief. “Th-the camels,” he stuttered.

This time she did touch him, just a light brush of her fingers through his hair. His mom—the mom-puppet, that was—used to do that. “The camels. Darling, they knew quite well that they wouldn’t have many years with a son of Chaos. But they lived much longer than if they’d simply been performers in one of the court’s plays, and they spent those years very happy.”

“How do you know? You’re not her.” Okay, that came out nasty, and Leo felt ashamed. Also his nose was running.