Page 106 of Strange Familiars
Harry. She called me Harry.
All my anger bleeds out of me as I slump into the chair, completely shell-shocked. There’s only one person who has called me Harry. Ever.
When I next speak, my voice tremors. I hardly dare ask. “Whoareyou?”
Pudding is quiet for so long that I can almost hear static buzzing inside my head. But then she speaks, and when she does, all she says are three words. Her name.
Theodora Finlay-Briggs.
Everything inside me freezes.
At first, I’m unable to talk. Unable to wrap my head around it. A shudder runs through me, so violent I almost convulse. And then I choke out, in an almost inaudible whisper, “Mother?”
Oh, darling.Pudding—my mother—is talking to me, but I barely register. Her voice is just a droning noise whirring inside my mind.I wanted to tell you so many times, I really did, but if you’d known, it would’ve put you at risk…
Fury expands, tearing through my chest, and I explode. “You. Pudding. Are mymother?”
“She’s not just your mum, Briggs.” Danny rubs at the back of his neck, his face all red. “She’s the leader of the MLO.”
“She…she what?” I sag, folding into myself. Feeling small. Feeling four years old again. I shake my head. “No.No!”
I’d learned about it all, of course, during history lessons at school. About how, around twenty-five years ago, a series of high-profile murders targeting civilian witches had rocked the magical community. At the time, the media and the general public had pinned the blame on the MLO. A media frenzy had ensued, and some underhanded political maneuverings led to the MLO being classified as a terrorist organization—even though none of the murders could be directly traced to the MLO itself.
Under duress, and in response to public pressure, the Ministry had formed an Anti-Terrorist Task Force, headed up by a group of particularly vocal anti-MLO individuals—one of whom was my own father. The task force, in conjunction with the British Magical Police Force, had been dispatched to round up all of the MLO leaders and get them arrested, tried, and summarily executed, or else thrown into jail.
Over the ensuing years, the task force had rooted out most of the main suspects—all except one. The big boss, the anonymous head honcho, who had gone into hiding and never been found…
And Danny expects me to believe that’s mymother?
My heart beats out an erratic rhythm, the pain like a brand in my chest.
I was four when my mother disappeared.
I was four when I got Pudding.
And I’d never put the two together.
“Mum.” My voice cracks on the word. I slump forward, weak against my bindings. “Come in here. Let me see you. I need to see you.”
I can’t, Harrisford, Pudding says gently.I’m acting as the tether, on the other side.
The space behind my eyes has grown hot, so I squeeze my eyelids shut. “Father made you a tether too?”
No, Harry. Your father never got to me. I’ve been in hiding for twenty-one years.Am I imagining it, or is my mother’s voice sounding choked?But…you’re my son. I volunteered to do this. I swallowed some Source so I could be here for you.
My familiar—my own mother—became a tether to what…kidnap me? And even worse: Sheliedto me. For twenty-one fucking years.
“So you could be here for me?” I spit the words out. “That is…dragonshit.” I try, and fail, to clutch my head, my arms still bound to the chair. “Iprotectedyou!”
I’d stopped Gwendolynne from going to the police to prevent her from becoming a target, yes. But it was also because my mother’s disappearance had given me a healthy hatred for the police. I still remember being a kid, clutching Pudding in my lap, glaring at the officers who returned day after day to question me about my mum. At the time, I’d regarded them suspiciously. I haddespisedthem. I was four years old, barely out of nappies, saddled with responsibilities no child of that age should have to deal with.
“Your mum has been working behind the scenes this whole time, Briggs, trying to take down Magecorp,” Danny says defensively. “It was them, not us, who were behind those deaths.”
Harry, my mother says.I’m sorry it had to come to this. But your father—
“Father is in a coma,” I grit out. In a coma, and, like me, completely oblivious to the fact that his wife—and my mother—leads the very organization he’d been ordered to hunt down. “This is…highlyunnecessary.” The revelation hits me: Barnabus the centaur had been telling the truth. The person I most care about—my mother—has betrayed me.
Looking back, did I ever have the slightest inkling? That Pudding was my mother? Even just a tiny bit? Perhaps…perhaps the thoughthad flitted through my mind once or twice: the times when Pudding seemed to know more about me and my past than I even knew myself.
