Life with Red in the house was pretty normal and quiet through the end of the summer. He had shown himself to be a rather private person, and some days I was worried that, like Oliver, he would only sequester himself away more and more as time went on. Fortunately, each time I started to worry about him, he would show up for a meal, agree to join me in grocery shopping, or something like that. I guess I shouldn't have worried about it in the first place, since Oliver was far worse than he was, but I couldn't help but worry about Red when I saw him shutting himself in his room and only emerging for the bathroom and work.
Once the semester started in late summer, he would occasionally fall into deep discussions with Rick over writing style and grammar, discussions I would sometime join in on simply out of the thrill of having someone else to talk language with. I found out during one of these discussions that Red was bilingual, having been raised speaking both English and language that I had never heard of before. Apparently it was a language in danger of becoming extinct with him, since the number of native speakers of it left on the planet could be counted on one hand and consisted only of members of his family. This, of course, sparked my curiosity, being a lover of languages of all sorts. He became even more interesting simply by the fact that he fluently spoke a language that I had never even heard of, let alone considered learning myself.
The true excitement happened a few weeks into fall, around the beginning of October. I had a deadline coming up, so I had been holing myself up in my own room working furiously to finish on time. Usually I wasn't quite so behind in my work, but this time... I'm not quite sure what had happened, just that I was behind and trying desperately to catch up. Rick, Yuki, and Ben were all busy with school, and I don't think any of us had seen Red for a week or so except in passing in the mornings and evenings when he was going to and from work.
Then, one night, I was jolted awake by one of the alarm lines that I had strung around the house. My first thought, as it always was when the alarm lines went off, was that another assassin was trying to break into the basement to get at Oliver. It had happened a handful of times since I took over the running of the house, and by then I was starting to get used to it. That is, I thought that until I noticed that the alarm was coming from the upper floor of the house, not the basement, which made it either Rick and Yuki's room or Red's room.
Had it been Oliver's room, I probably wouldn't have hurried to the scene of the disturbance. Oliver had his own way of dealing with intruders that I usually didn't want to know about. So I waited until the alarm had calmed or he summoned me down, knowing that he would calm the alarm after he had dealt with the problem, or that he would summon me for backup if he actually needed it. But in this case, the alarm wasn't from his room, so I decided that I needed to go check it out right away.
A closer look at the web of alarm lines indicated that it was from Red's room. That surprised me, but at the same time it didn't. I had had the alarms go off for all of the other residents at least once in the past... for reasons that they usually didn't want to go into. So it wouldn't have been that surprising for it to have been because of Rick or Yuki. But, by that same logic, the fact that Red found the house on his own was enough of a reason for me to expect it from him as well.
A few minutes later, I was up outside of Red's door, knocking as hard as I could while still trying not to disturb Rick and Yuki too much. No answer came from behind the door after I had knocked several times, so I tried the doorknob. I was worried about Red, since usually when the alarms went off it was because of someone trying to come after the person in that room. His silence indicated to me that he was in trouble.
The moment my hand touched the knob, I received a nasty shock. Someone had warded the door. That shouldn't have been possible; the alarms should have gone off the moment the warding spell was cast over the door. Then I realized that it might be a new ward, and that that exact spell might have been the one that set off the alarms in Red's room. Still, I couldn't be sure of that, so I grabbed the knob again, ignoring the subsequent shock, and pushed at the ward until it gave way. It was quite a bit more difficult than breaking wards usually was for me, but it did eventually break under my pressure, and I burst into the room as quickly as I could.
Here I had thought that was an intruder who had set off the alarms, since that was how it had always been before. This time... This time I realized the moment I got the door open that there was no intruder. See, Red was sitting in the far corner of the room, huddled up against the wall with a glazed look on his face. I recognized that look. It came from a feeling that I had experienced before, the first time I was brought to the house while my father was still in charge. He had told me of the complex net of defenses that he had set up around the house, and of course I, cocky ten-year-old that I was at the time, had had to test out the strength of those defenses. I had been knocked silly, and the look on my face had most likely been exactly the same as the one on Red's face when I entered his room.
He was dressed in casual clothing, just an old t-shirt and a pair of lounge pants, both of which had seen far better days. This was significant only that it told me that whatever sort of magic he had been doing that had set off the defenses of the house, it hadn't been ritual based, which was by far the most common form of "casual" magic. Ritual magic just does not get done in common clothing, since most rituals require very specific types of garments so as not to foul up the energies of the spell. It's a load of bull, but the emo and/or weird kids that discover the ritual spells eat it up like crazy. No, the magic that Red had been doing was natural magic, and from the looks of his state, it had been magery rather than wizardry.
Which meant that I was in deep shit with Oliver, since I had sworn to him several years earlier that I would warn him if I ever brought another mage into the building, whether permanently as a resident or just for a chat. Unless there was some really screwy set of extenuating circumstances that made it possible for Red to be in his current state and not a mage, I had just unknowingly broken my oath to Oliver. Oliver did not take lightly to oath-breakers.
And, knowing him, he would be up to investigate the commotion any moment.
First things first, I went into the room and knelt down beside Red. He was only semi-conscious, dazed by the strength of the reaction from the defenses. His hand, most likely unconsciously, was stroking a fuzzy wristband that he had on his left wrist, an accessory that I had never seen before. If I had to guess what it was made out of, I would have said that it was real fur that matched the color of his hair perfectly. I doubted that was the case, but still...
"You okay?" I asked, and he started to come back to reality with my words to ground him. He stared up at me, blinking a few times, before he realized that I was really close. Then he gave a sudden shout and scooted back, only to bump against the wall almost immediately.
"Getting blasted by the watch lines hurts, doesn't it?" I said, trying to sound as pleasant as I could. "I've done it before too, so I know what it's like. Still, you should have told me you were a magic user, so I could have warned you. As it is, Oliver's gonna have my hide for bringing in another mage without telling him first."
I heard the thundering of feet coming up the stairs at full speed. That would be Oliver, and from his haste, he was angrier than I had expected. I sighed, knowing that the entire house was going to know about this incident by the time it was over, and then turned back to Red.
"Here he comes," I said. "Do you think you can stand up yet? It would probably be more pleasant to face him upright, since he can be... intimidating even when you are at your best."
"I..." he said, his voice still slightly dazed.
"Here, I'll help," I said, grabbing his arm and slinging it over my shoulder. He gave a squeak of protest, but by then I was already standing, hauling him to his feet at the same time. He wobbled, but clung to me for support, and by the time Oliver actually came to the open doorway, we were both on our feet and facing it.