Caleb 14 - The Showdown

Authors note.

As always, my thanks to Neurparenthetical, whose untiring vigilance makes my illegible scribble readable. Any residual errors are left there purposely in order to give you guys something to do.

Enjoy. - and please, whatever you feel about the story feedback is always appreciated. I can't improve if I don't know where I am going wrong.

Caleb 14 - The Showdown

Saturday morning, I got up at four. Everyone else seemed to be having a lie-in. I did a couple of hours of martial arts and then decided to go out for a run. The dogs came with me, and I had a lot of fun running with four hounds loping along beside me or dashing off to investigate something or other before catching up to me again.

Breakfast was over by the time I got back, but Cheryl had saved me a plate - well, more of a tray - of food. My appetite seemed to have gone into overdrive since I'd ramped up my TK usage. That was another reason it had felt so wrong to accept money from Dean for the work I was doing. I must have been eating them out of house and home.

Having showered and eaten, I was just about to join the rest of the family on the deck when my phone rang. It was my mother. For a moment, my finger hovered over the 'Reject Call' button, but I figured I would have to speak to her at some point. With a sigh, I answered.

"Hello?" I said.

"Caleb?" she asked.

I toyed with several sarcastic responses but decided against. "Yes?"

"Where have you been?" she asked. "I have tried and tried calling you and you haven't returned any of my calls."

"I wasn't in the mood for any more lies," I said without heat.

"Lies?" she sounded genuinely puzzled. "What lies?"

"Oh, I don't know," I said, "let's start with twenty years of lies about who I was. Of my power, of my family, of being manipulated into becoming another pawn of a living ancestor I never even knew existed."

"You don't understand, Caleb," she said, "We had to..."

"No," I interrupted her. "You didn't. Your job was to prepare me to take on a massive responsibility, not to lie to me for my entire life and then present me to them on my twentieth birthday, a literal virgin sacrifice."

"But we didn't know," she argued. "It was only when the amulet came off that we knew that you had any power at all."

"More lies," I said. I was getting angrier but managing to hold a measured tone. "Maggie already told me that she saw me when I was three days old, and even then, she knew that I was the most powerful user she had ever seen. There is no way that you didn't know I had power, and that one day I would be faced with dealing with them, with zero warning or preparation.

"Don't tell me that she didn't tell you," I continued, "because I won't believe you. Not unless we are face to face and I can see you when you tell me. You know I'll see the truth then, so if there is nothing else you would like to lie to me about, then I have things to do."

"Caleb," she repeated. She was full-on crying. "You don't understand. We had to..."

"You already said that," I interrupted her again. "You had to follow their instruction? By what law? By what right did they decree that you had to put your child in so much danger? You may as well have sat me in a room full of loaded guns and just hoped I didn't figure out how to pull a trigger. I could have seriously hurt someone, killed someone even, and whose fault would it have been?

"Even if - and it's a big if - I didn't get into legal trouble, I would have had to live with what I had done for the rest of my life. All because you were too weak or stupid to put the needs of your own child before the edicts of 'The Matriarch.' So much for maternal instinct.

"So, if there's nothing else, Mother, I have things I need to be doing." I ended the call. I was surprised to find that I had tears streaming down my face. I couldn't decide whether they were tears of rage or sadness.

I looked at my phone. The picture of Angela holding her shirt up to show me her ass was on the screen and I wondered. What if? What could have happened? How easy would it have been for me to make her come back to me, peel those painted-on jeans down and...

My phone's screen shattered as it hit the wall.

I should have been told, warned, and better prepared. I could have done anything, hurt anyone.

I felt arms encircle me, pulling me into a motherly embrace. Cheryl was holding me, talking softly and assuring me that things would be okay. Gently, she led me into the living room, and sat me on the couch, taking a seat beside me and holding my hand.

"Caleb," she said quietly, "let me help. Tell me what hurts."

"I don't know how to explain," I said.

"Just say what you are feeling," she responded. "I promise, I'm not here to criticize or judge you. I just want to help you find your way."

"I just feel so alone," I said. "I know that sounds stupid. I have three wonderful girlfriends, so how can I be alone? But everyone I thought I could rely on has lied to me my entire life. When you can't trust your own parents - who raised you - to be honest, and responsible, and tell the truth, and then you find out your entire childhood has been some macabre parody of The Truman Show... how can you trust anyone after that?"

"What about the twins?" she asked gently.

"I love them," I said, "I really do. But they are so free with their power; it's like a drug. They use it to pep me up or settle me down, to get me to sleep at night. Just sometimes, I long for a night I can't sleep. Sometimes I can't tell if what I'm feeling is real or just something manufactured by them.

"When I was a kid, we used to get ice cream with sprinkles on, and I could never get enough sprinkles. So when I went to University and I could buy what I wanted, I got myself a whole bowl of sprinkles and ate them. I made myself sick, and now I can't even look at the things.

"It's kind of like that. There are too many sprinkles. I need some normalcy."

"And Jules?" she asked. Strangely, there was no edge to her voice. I would have thought she'd have felt defensive on her daughter's behalf. If she did, she hid it very well.

"...is the one person I am certain of," I said. "But that puts so much pressure on her. It's not fair. She is a beautiful young woman with enough of her own issues, without her having to take on mine."

"I am prepared to bet," Cheryl said, "that your parents love you too."

"Then how could they lie to me all this time," I asked, anguish in my voice, "and leave me so woefully unprepared?"

"Did they?" she asked. "Did they leave you unprepared?"

"They didn't tell me about my powers," I said, getting angry but trying not to raise my voice. I knew I wasn't angry at her.

"Caleb," she said softly, "I saw that picture, of that girl on your phone. She is very attractive. You had power. Once you realized that, why did you not just make her come to you, take off her clothes, and have sex with you?"

"What?" I was astounded she would even ask me that. "That would be rape. I could never do that to anyone."

"Why not?" she asked. "I'm sure you could even make her feel like she wanted it in the first place - that it was her idea, even. So, where's the harm? Who would care?"

"I would care!" my voice was starting to get an edge to it now.

"Why?" she asked.

"Because..."

"Because?"

"Because I was brought up to..." I tailed off.

She took my hand.

"Do your parents have power?" she asked.

I shook my head. "Not so you'd notice, no."

"So, they had no way of controlling you," she said, "or resisting your powers, even as a child. All they could do was bring you up to be the best person you could be. It looks to me like they did a pretty good job. The fact that you didn't go out and force yourself on any good-looking person you could find speaks volumes not only about your personality but also about your upbringing. They prepared you as best they could with the tools they had.

"They had to defer to others with more power and experience regarding your powers. In hindsight, it may not have been the best course of action, but, as they say, hindsight is twenty-twenty. I can tell you this as a parent: there is no way that you could have turned out as well as you did, without a solid, loving family behind you."

I sat, my hand still in hers, starting to feel a little ashamed about the way I had spoken to my mother. I had been angry and thought I had a right to be, and I possibly did to some extent, but I knew that Cheryl was right. Neither of my parents had any significant power, and they couldn't have gone against the mighty Eversons and their edicts for keeping children in ignorance - especially since their own matriarch, Maggie Forbes, subscribed to that practice as well.

I swore then, that no child of mine would be touched by an amulet. They would be brought up with the full knowledge of their powers, and prepared for when they had to go out into the world and make their own way.

"Why don't I see if your parents would like to come up here for a couple of days?" she asked. "They could meet Jules and get to know us, and maybe give you a chance to talk. Neutral ground."

"Neutral?" I asked, and she smiled.

"Well," she said. "They don't need to know it's your home turf, do they?"

I was touched by that, and by that point, I really had started to think of the farm as my home. It wasn't the place, though; it was the people. I thought back to Dean's half-joking offer of employment and knew for a fact I could do a lot worse.

"If you think that would be okay with Dean," I said.

She huffed. "I'll tell him it's okay with him," she said, then grinned. "I choose his skivvies too."

I laughed.

Jules came into the living room and sat on the other side of me. "Here," she said, handing me my phone.

"It's a good thing we have the same phone," she said. "I had a couple of spare screens."

While Cheryl and I had been talking, she had repaired the phone I had smashed.

"Did you have to use that hot air thingummy?" I asked, knowing she had been dying to try it out.

She shook her head. "Not this time." She looked into my eyes. "Caleb, do you remember Point One?" She was referring to the conversation from the diner.

I nodded, feeling even more ashamed, but despite what had happened in the diner, there was still some lingering uncertainty in my mind regarding the twins' feelings.

"It's okay to be scared," she said, "and I understand that when you're scared you get angry, and that's okay too. But you can't lose sight of the facts. I love you; Mary loves you; Amanda loves you. Ness loves you; Mom loves you, and your Sugar Daddy loves you too." That raised a chuckle. "Your parents also love you. They made mistakes, sure, but they were not the ones manipulating you. They were being manipulated too.

"You can't be angry at the entire world," she went on. "You need someone on your side, and if not your parents and us, then who? At least speak to them, face to face, and then see how you feel."

I nodded.

Cheryl held her hand out for my phone. "May I?" she asked.

I unlocked my phone and handed it to her. She looked at my recent calls, found my mother's number, and called her. Jules took my hand and led me out of the room, while her mother spoke to mine.

The twins were out on the deck, and they both came over and enveloped me in a hug. I was expecting to be wrapped in feelings of love and trust, but there was nothing. I caught a fleeting thought from Amanda - 'No sprinkles' - and I realized. They were deliberately not using their powers. They must have overheard our conversation.

"Your parents will be here in the morning," Cheryl said as she came out onto the deck and handed my phone back to me.

"But they live in..." I began.

"Dean is sending the jet for them," she said, walking back into the house.

My jaw dropped and my eyes bugged out of my head.

I looked at Jules, and she shrugged. "Well, it's a long drive," she said as if that explained everything.

+++++

I was in the barn an hour later, training my TK. I was picking up bales of hay and moving them side to side. I had started with just one, and although it moved easily enough, I had wanted to start off gently. Now I was moving them twenty at a time. It wasn't exactly uncomfortable, but I could feel that it was starting to become a little difficult. I guessed each bale weighed in at about six hundred pounds, so I was moving twelve thousand pounds back and forward. I had been doing that for about an hour and was starting to get tired.

I heard the door open behind me, and Mary's voice. "Caleb."

I turned to her, holding my arms out. She came and hugged me. She was a little stiff though, and I wondered why. I soon found out.

"Grandmother just called," she said. "She is asking if she can come up with your parents."

"That's not really for me to say," I said. "It's not my jet, nor my house. You need to ask Cheryl."

"I spoke to Cheryl and Dean," she replied. "They both say it's up to you. They are okay with her coming if you are, but if you say no, then it's no."

I was touched by their consideration, but I'd been hoping that the decision wouldn't fall to me. I didn't want to deny the twins access to their grandmother - they missed her - but I didn't know if I was ready to see her yet. My ideas about how she might redeem herself had felt great when they'd just been ideas. The possibility of them becoming a reality shook my certainty. I also had worries about what she might get up to with access to the twins. I doubted very much that her manipulations were over. I really wanted to say no but knew that wasn't realistic. If I didn't let her come up, then the twins would likely want to go to hers at some point, and that would be worse.

I figured that if worse came to worst, I could probably hide in one corner of the Steadmans' grand manor and barely even detect her presence.

"I don't know that I'm ready to talk to her yet," I said, "but I won't object to her coming up. You and Amanda have missed her and should get the chance to see her. As long as she doesn't try to corner me, I can be polite to her. Maybe when we meet face to face, I might feel different about talking to her."

"Thank you," she said and left the barn. I turned back toward the bales of hay and realized that during that whole conversation, the hay had been floating mid-air, waiting for me to direct it to its destination. I stacked it neatly back in position, feeling the true meaning of having a weight lifted from my mind as I set it down.

As I entered the kitchen, Ness came to me with a tray, holding several sandwiches and a drink.

"Here," she said. "You get hungry when you have been training, and it's at least a couple of hours until dinner."

"You'll make someone a lovely wife someday," I quipped at her, and she smiled.

"One day," she said, "I'm going to remind you that you said that." She left me to my snack.

The mood wasn't exactly somber for the rest of the day, but everyone seemed a little subdued. As we sat on the deck in the evening after dinner, I thought about my parents coming up the next day, and what I was going to say. When I went to bed, I lay staring at the ceiling for a long time. I was still awake when the girls came to bed a few hours later, and later still when they were all asleep. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.

I dragged myself out of bed at four, feeling both restless and tired. I supposed I must have slept some, but it had been one of those nights where you'd see every hour in. I decided to give up on the idea of getting any more sleep.

I knew I was in the wrong frame of mind to do martial arts, so I decided to run. The dogs were happy to come along and before I knew it, I was out in the fields. I hadn't really had a destination in mind, but I found myself in the north field, near the site of Jonas's accident.

I went over to where the tractor was still lying, upside-down in the ditch. The ground around it had been churned up where they had tried to get a backhoe to pull the fifteen-thousand-pound machine out of the mud. They had not been successful because the backhoe didn't have the brute force required to pull it free. Dean had inquired about getting heavy lifting gear, and someone was coming Monday to survey the site.

I looked at the tractor. I had been training my TK, lifting twelve thousand pounds of hay for an hour at a time. I looked around before setting my mind to pulling the machine out of the mud.

It was heavy. It felt much heavier than the hay. I guessed that as well as its own weight, there was still water in the cab, and it was also kind of stuck in the mud. I tried rocking it backward and forwards to break the seal and it made some rather disgusting noises as it came free.

I pulled again and the tractor started to move. I wouldn't try to lift it into the air, just slide it further up until the side of the machine was further onto solid ground, then tilt it up once there was enough room, such that the roof would no longer snag on the opposite wall of the ditch.

I did feel my nose start to bleed again, and I wiped the blood away as I pushed harder. There was no pain, though. I decided I would stop if I got the pain again. Finally, I thought that the tractor was far enough up that I could rotate it back onto its wheels. For some reason that was actually easier. I wasn't trying to lift the entire machine, just rotate it against the lip of the ditch. The lip did give way some, but I held the tractor from sliding back, and within a few minutes, I had it on its wheels. I pushed it a good ten feet from the ditch.

I heaved a sigh of relief. "That's another weight off my mind," I quipped to myself, grinning. After checking my nose had stopped bleeding, I started my run back toward the house. I was starting to feel more than a little hungry.

I felt cold wash over my back almost as soon as I got into the shower, and I turned to find Jules, naked, behind me.

"Here," she said, "let me help."

She began to wash me, top to toe.

"You have blood on your face," she said. "What happened?"

"Just got a little carried away training," I said. "I was fine; it didn't hurt at all."

"You need to be careful," she said. "At least have someone with you when you try stuff like that. What would have happened if you'd passed out again?"

"I had someone with me," I said. "I had all four dogs with me. It would have been like an episode of Lassie."

She smiled. "Still," she said. "Please, if you are going to do something you haven't done before, at least let us know what you are doing."

I nodded.

She completed my wash, head to toe, including all my 'important little places.' I thought back to something she had said a few weeks ago: that my body would stop reacting to her once it figured out it wasn't worth wasting the resources. She had been right. Even though she had washed me everywhere, I had not become aroused at all. It was just pleasant, loving attention.

I returned the favor, and when we were both clean, we went down for breakfast. I cleared my plate for a second time.

"Wow!" said Ness. "Hungry much?" She smiled at me. Both she and Cheryl were used to my much-increased appetite by then, and so made allowances. I must have been a very expensive guest to feed.

Dean's phone rang, and Cheryl shot him a look. She wasn't a fan of phones at the table. He tilted it to her to show her the caller ID: Billy.

"Hey Billy," he said, connecting the call. "What's up?"

"You were where?" he asked. "It's out?" He glanced at me.

"Yes, sorry," he said. "An old pal of mine showed up with some gear and helped me out yesterday. I meant to tell you. No, just get it towed to the shed. Let's see if it is salvageable. Okay, yeah, sorry again. Can you call them and tell them we don't need it now? Okay, thanks."