Council of Elders Ch. 00

The Chief took the baby home with him that day. He didn't fill out any paperwork, no one asked him to. It was simply taken as read that the baby was the Chief's newborn son. His wife was thrilled and took it as a sign from God that a baby had dropped out of the sky and survived an explosion the likes of which no one had ever seen before.

They had to register the birth with the local council but thanks to a few pulled strings, no one could ever prove that the baby wasn't theirs. According to the legal records it had been a home birth without a Doctor.

The few witnesses who saw the baby in the bombsite either forgot or put it down to lack of sleep. After all, what baby could survive a nuke? Soon after the illicit adoption they moved away to London where nobody knew their names or had heard about the terrible "gas leak" that had led the deaths of 500 people and enormous damage to property, crops and livestock.

The Council of Elders had no paper trail to follow and simply assumed that the Summoner had been stopped before the Daemon child from their visions had been called forth. They covered up the whole mess and closed the matter then and there, but none of them ever knew peace again.

***

Years passed and as the baby grew into a young man the whole world came to accept him as the now retired Police Chief's son. He was told the story of his illegal adoption on his eleventh birthday, when his parents thought he was old enough not to tell everyone about it. He had always been a mature boy, wise beyond his years and cynical as an American college professor.

Somehow, he hadn't been shocked by the news he wasn't biologically theirs, it was as if he had always known. While he shared the brown hair and brown eyes of his Father, there had always been an "otherness" that set him apart from them. Close family had been the hardest to fool, but since the Chief's side were all dead and Elaine's were living in Australia, it wasn't too difficult to convince them that they had simply missed the signs of her pregnancy. They had had few friends in their old home in Greater Murton, so that hadn't been a problem. All in all, they were a very happy family and despite the whole sordid affair, they slept well at night.