Holly looked from Clea to the man approaching them and back again in confusion. Wasn’t Clea’s father dead? Holly distinctly remembered Elizabeth telling her that Clea had tried to bond with her over the fact that they both had dead dads, to get her to join their little interdimensional adventure. And by “bond”, she had meant “manipulate”, à la Agatha Harkness, which Holly had found profoundly disappointing.
The man was bald, but wore a full gray beard and mustache. He was shirtless, and his pecs, abs, and biceps belied everything above his neck, everything below it seemingly belonging to a much younger man. A man who went to the gym regularly and wanted everyone to know it.
He must look like Clea’s father – what was his name? Olini? Orini? – but Clea had said that Dormammu had vaporized her dad right in front of her, so this couldn’t really be him. Could it?
Holly wondered for a moment if this was another of the Dreamqueen’s hallucinations, but dismissed the idea almost as quickly as she thought it. She didn’t know if the Dreamqueen did nightmare packages for two, but even if the demoness did, Orini meant nothing to Holly, so why include her? There was no shock value in it for her, so why waste the energy?
No, whoever this Orini clone was, he was real. Which was worse, because Holly was pretty sure she could have talked Clea out of accepting a hallucinatory miraculously resurrected father. But a living, breathing lookalike that Clea could actually touch, actually hug? Holly had a feeling that was going to be a lot harder.
A premonition borne out when the Orini clone spoke.
“Daughter?”
Clea rushed forward, throwing her arms around the man she believed was Orini. And maybe he was. There were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in Horatio’s philosophy, or hers. Holly’s own mentor was a ghost. Who was she to judge?
“Oh, Father!” Clea exclaimed, embracing Maybe-Orini, who, after a moment of apparent shock, returned the hug stiffly.
Clea released her resurrected father and stepped back to study him, while Holly hovered anxiously behind her. Something seemed off, but the pink-haired witch couldn’t put her finger on what exactly was bothering her. Aside from the whole Clea’s-father-might-be-a-zombie thing, that was. Holly quietly prepared a repulsion spell, just in case he started to look bitey.
“You’re looking surprisingly well, all things considered,” Clea said, her words careful and measured. From her tone, Holly could tell her friend now had some suspicions of her own.
That realization wasn’t particularly helpful, however, as Holly had no idea what the sorceress’s play was. She wondered if she should have a defensive or offensive spell at the ready instead of the repulsion one, but then decided her repelling spell would suffice. Basically the cartoon physics version of the target touching a high-voltage electric fence and being blown back an improbable distance, sans sound effects, it combined the best aspects of both spell types.
“As are you,” Probably-Not-Orini replied, his tone mirroring Clea’s. That was when Holly realized that this was not, in fact, a living person in front of them, but a magical construct that someone had fashioned to look like Clea’s father and programmed to do little more than parrot back what was said to it.
Holly didn’t need a full hand of fingers to guess who that someone was.
But why? According to Clea, there was no love lost between her parents. In fact, Umar had given Orini the one-night-stand treatment, sweet-talking him until she got what she wanted, then kicking him to the curb after she realized the experience wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. And she’d allowed Dormammu to exile him and ultimately kill him. So why would she want constructs walking around that looked like him? Surely she didn’t… miss him?
Holly almost laughed out loud at the sheer ridiculousness of that idea.
It was far more likely that Umar got some perverse kick out of torturing the man who had saddled her with Clea and the human form she could not escape. Or maybe she’d made him on the off chance Clea would run into him and be fooled. Or maybe not even to fool her. To hurt her. Maybe there were dozens of Not-Orinis wandering around the palace at this very moment, their continued existence predicated on a random encounter with a silver-haired sorceress.
“You’re not really my father, are you?” Clea asked the construct, her voice betraying only the tiniest bit of the sadness those words must cost her.
“Are you truly my daughter?” the construct countered. “Does it matter?”
That was when Holly saw the knife stuck in the false Orini’s waistband, at the small of his well-muscled back. She opened her mouth to warn Clea, but she never got the chance.
“I’m afraid it does,” Clea said, lifting one hand and making a gesture in the air too swift for Holly to follow. “Goodbye,” she whispered, before raising her voice in chant.
“By the light of Agamotto and in the name of the Vishanti,
Return this creature to its substance true. Begone now; you are free.”
The construct had been in mid-movement as Clea started to speak, but now it seized up and began to melt away into a soft, formless clay and then sink in between the floor’s flagstones and disappear. But before its face could dissolve completely, Holly thought she saw a look of gratitude cross its features. She was probably just imagining it, though.
She released her repulsion spell and then laid a comforting hand on Clea’s shoulder.
“I can’t even fathom how hard that must have been for you,” Holly said. She paused, then added, a little guiltily, “I only hope you casting that spell hasn’t alerted Umar to our presence.”
Clea didn’t respond for a moment, and Holly didn’t press, giving the other woman time to compose herself.
“It won’t have registered. She doesn’t pay attention to low-level magic. If she did, she’d be sending guards to the kitchens every time they burned something and tried to hide the fact. Burnt offerings can be a death sentence here, depending on Umar’s mood.” Clea turned to her with a hard smile. She looked pale. Paler than usual, at any rate, which Holly supposed wasn’t saying much for someone who had grown up in the literal Dark Dimension. “My mother has a lot to answer for.”
“No arguments there,” Holly replied, though secretly she thought Clea might be giving her mother too much credit. If she understood the story correctly, Umar hadn’t actually made Orini disown his daughter. The deadbeat had done that all on his own.
But Clea didn’t need to be reminded of that. She’d no doubt been hurt enough by what had just happened.
A thought which turned out to be truer than Holly knew.
Clea had been holding her hand against her stomach since banishing the construct. Holly hadn’t thought anything of it. Family tended to tie your guts in knots, in good ways and bad.
But when Clea removed her hand, Holly was horrified to see it was covered with blood. The construct had knifed the silver-haired sorceress right before she banished him, and he’d done a good job of it, too. If the amount of red staining Clea’s bodysuit was any indication, he’d at least nicked something vital.
Holly looked from the wound to Clea’s ashen face, panicked. She didn’t know what to do.
“So much for being Daddy’s little girl,” Clea quipped weakly.
And then she collapsed.