5

"William…" Gwen looked in on her brother. "Are you okay?" Since he had returned from Manhattan, Justin had been laying on his bed depressed. Who was he? Was he Justin Russo of Waverly Place, or was he William Troy of Collinwood, Maine? He had skipped lunch, he skipped dinner and as he looked behind to Gwen at the door from his bed, he had long streaks of tears running down his face to his pillow. Gwen gasped to see him hurting. When his heart broke, her heart broke. After their mother, she had practically raised him all his life. She was his favorite sister and except for maybe Sara, the only one he was the most close to. Entering his room, Gwen sat close to him and pulled him up to her, hugging him and draping his head to her shoulder.

"Sara said some girl named Alex broke your heart." She whispered to him delicately.

"Alex Russo isn't…" Justin stopped. "She's nothing…"

"Was she really worth it?"

"It wasn't about her…" Justin felt familial bonding he'd never felt before in his other life. "It was about… something I think I wanted. Something… I thought was better than this life…."

"What are you talking about?" Gwen tried wiping away his tears.

"I…" Justin choked on his feelings and struggled with them. He tried to decide what to say, but his thoughts and feelings were in turmoil as he struggled to understand them. "Who am I?" He finally asked.

"You're William Troy…" Gwen's eyes filled with tears as she saw the little boy in her brother's face and smiled lightly to him. "The greatest little brother any girl could ever have…" She tried fixing his hair. She'd been sort of his nanny since he was five years old at a time in her life that the sisters were scattered and living across the world without their mother around to watch them. It was only until a few years ago that they all started to try and live under this house. She peered into her brother's face and palmed his head in her hand as she tried smoothing out his hair sticking up from the pillow. "How about an ice cream sundae like I used to make you when you were little…."

"Sundae…" Justin realized there was a lot more right about this family than wrong with it. "With nuts and chocolate syrup?"

"How else do I make them?" She looked back with a maternal bearing, suggesting she was possibly a mom at some point in her life. Her arm draped around her brother as they turned for the hallway, Justin's feet just barely scuffling along on the carpet as they headed toward the front gallery and the main staircase. As they descended down into the front hall, Alicia was coming down the opposing stairway from the North Wing, but she looked different this time. She seemed taller, her hair was much longer and the front of her dress was more… filled out than usual. She looked more like Kristy or Jessica in build. Justin's eyes rounded in surprise to see her more bosomy and even more shapely. Gwen draped her hand down over his eyes.

"You've got to be kidding me…" Gwen spoke barely surprised. Alicia was not the first sister to affect her own appearance with magic to attract a potential new boyfriend. "What are you doing with Jessica's body?"

"I really want this new guy to like me." She posed a bit getting used to her new curves. "This… will do it."

"What kind of standard are you setting for our little brother?" Gwen responded rationally as Justin peeked between her fingers. "You're the one always complaining about how guys don't appreciate you for having a brain."

"I see it like this…" Alicia moved Gwen's hand from Justin's face. "I'm fighting the war from both sides. I'm teaching him to never underestimate women, and besides, Jessica would kill for this body. God knows her brain is not exactly reaching the top floor!" She tucked her sunglasses on and tilted her head upward into a pose. "I'm off to Paris for dinner!" She announced as if she was going off to war and strutted defiantly across the parquet on her way out the front entrance floor with her heels tapping out a message and a warning for all guys in her future. The only thing Gwen could do was sigh, lower her head defeatedly with her forefingers to the center of her forehead and lightly shake her head defeatedly.

"Do me a favor…" She spoke to Justin tiredly. "Marry Ally, move out, travel far away from here and take me with you."

"What a family…" Justin mumbled as he realized his place in it. Gwen placed her right arm around his shoulder and guided him down the main downstairs gallery under the family portrait. "Wait…Paris?" Justin reacted looking back to her. "There's no way the plane's going to get her to Paris in time for dinner!"

"Who said she's taking the plane?" Gwen looked to him distractedly. Outside the mansion, something shot overhead with the sound of a bullet cutting through the sky toward the east and out over the Atlantic Ocean. Alarmed and worriedly distraught, Justin made a face that again challenged his existence in this house. Were these people wizards or something else? They knew magic, they spoke about spells and they talked matter-of-factly about enchantments as if it was no big deal, and yet, they seemed far younger than they appeared and mastered powers beyond his understanding of wizardry. Gwen grinned to him like a loving sister as they passed the side arch into their mother's study. Illuminated by sunlight through the windows of the garden, she stood in the center of the room, several books gliding through the air toward her, pausing for her eyes and returning to the shelves. It was as if she was surrounded by several invisible servants carrying books to her as her hands and gestures controlled their traffic. She guided them, controlled them and mentally influenced seven to eight books revolving around her as they shared their pages.

"Hi, babies…" She grinned to her son and daughter and guided another book back to its place.

"I'll be there in a minute…" Justin looked to Gwen as she good-naturedly pinched the back of his neck, lit up with a bright grin and turned onward for the kitchen. Standing unsure at first, Justin took a light breath once and again and stood at the threshold of the study. Donna Troy was psychokinetically returning more of the books floating in the air near her to their places on the shelves. She scowled at one, gestured another away with one finger and pointed at another to come gliding toward her.

"Your grandmother is so frustrating…" She posed with fingertips to her forehead, one hand on her hip and perused the lines in a large parchment covered journal before scoffing annoyingly and returning that one with a spell to the shell. "She leaves me her spell book of recipes, and I have no idea what I did with the silly thing. She wants me to make her favorite dish, and I can't make it by memory! I need her book. I'm thinking it could be mixed in with the books in your library upstairs." She tilted her head effervescently to her only son. "Did you want something, sweetheart?"

"You know…mom…" Justin was not used to saying that to her yet. "I was thinking... I was thinking about my… wizard training." He looked to see how she reacted, but she just glanced at him and levitated another book to the shelf and turned round to her desk.

"Wizard training?" She said it matter-of-factly. "That's what you chose to go into?" She sat at her chair behind her Queen Anne desk, extended her legs under it then curled beneath her chair with the presence of a powerful businesswoman and leaned back in her seat, her chin nearly touching her chest as she took a breath. Her eyes blinked a few times as she looked her son over. "Are you sure you want to study wizardry? It would limit you to spells only accomplished by a wand."

"There are others?" Justin reacted. This woman was not a stranger to the magic world.

"If that's what you want, sweetheart, I can get you into Alexandria or Hogwarts…" Donna Troy posed sideways in her chair then chuckled secretly. "Old Dumbledore would have a conniption of he knew how many of us were passing through his school."

"Yes, one of us…" Justin pretended to understand.

"I know where I left that book." Donna rose regally with the austere presence of a monarch and glided past the windows to the garden outside. "Darling…" She pulled Justin close and kissed his head. "Let me make some calls and I'll get back to you." She entered the alcove into the gallery and glided onward to the kitchen leaving Justin behind still confused and wanting for answers.

"What kind of family did I wish myself into?" Justin was still not ready to accept his life as one William Troy. He sighed, ran his fingers distraught and anxious through his hair and dropped to the big easy chair by the suit of armor in the room. As he looked up to that Old Saxon conversation piece, his eyes gazed the books on the shelf by his side and lifted his gaze higher to the albums. One was titled "England 1930 to 1950" and other was chronicled "Maison Troia – Construction," but it was the emerald book with the gold lettering that caught his interest. It read: "Our Family History."

"Well, I am a member of the family now." Justin smirked, stood and pulled the album down, then dropped back into the chair. One leg up to brace the book, his fingers paraded over the green leather covering. It was almost two inch thick and fourteen inches high and another twelve inches in size. It looked more like an old grimoire in age, but it had a very modern gold clasp sealing it. His fingers flipped the latch sideways and slipped up the belt to open it, light and puffs of smoke coming from it as the cover and pages parted.

Justin's brown eyes widened in shock to see the opening images coming alive for him. It was a photo of the front of the estate, but the clouds were moving, the trees were swaying and images of deer were scampering across the isolated Maine estate. Leaves churned through the image, one leaf blowing out of the book and becoming three dimensional and actual in the real world. He quickly closed the album. The leaf flowed up through the center of the room and then lightly descended upon the carpet in the middle of the room.

"What kind of family is this?" Justin asked himself and tried again. He opened the cover again and lightly turned the first pages over to the dedication: "To our ancestors who are always among us."

Forcing himself to push forward, Justin both feared and wanted to know what was on the next page. There was one blank page and then another page with one sentence: "This is our family…"

His hand was shaking as the edge of the page slid down his fore finger. Once those pages parted, more smoke started billowing from the book. It was coming from a grand photo across two pages, the image of a powerful white-bearded figure in dark blue and white-speckled robes and his wife, a beautiful brunette woman of incredible stature and great beauty wearing flowers in her hair and flowing green robes. They were posed as a loving couple, looking at each other and out from the book in that moving image, emblazoned on the pages for their descendants to see them again. In a white strip across around the border of the living three-dimensional image, it read the following words.

"Our ancestors were named Atum and Gaea, they were the parents of the first fifteen families of Earth to guide mortal man out of the Stone Age. They taught humanity civilization, created thought and were the first great kings. They were the first spirits of heaven and earth from whom everything came forward. Everything we have came from them, and for this we are grateful."

Justin scowled confusingly and looked around the room worried he could get in trouble with this book. He turned the heavy parchment-like paper to another page with a vast image full of Greek and Roman architecture and incredible living plants. Their leaves poked with life out of the book and around them faeries and elves danced and ran around in the photo. A figure waving a hammer illuminated the skies casting lightning, beautiful girls basked around a grand fountain and waved hello to Justin from the borders. Through the image casually walked Atum and Gaea from the left side to the right side of the page. Around the margin in Old Greek lettering was more history.

"Atum and Gaea had many children who lived apart distantly and culturally, but at the end of the Roman Empire, many of the great sky-gods decided to break ties with mortal man. They had stopped believing in gods, and this was good; the immortals of Earth did not want to be gods. It was time for our mortal children to live without us. They were discovering science and exploring the world, creating inventions and reaching to other worlds. Most of the other Immortals of Earth rather than live apart in their separate realms began living on Earth in mortal roles, taking mortal identities. Around 1000 AD, the son of Odin, Balder of Asgard, courted Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus, and they had six daughters who married mortal men. This was the start of the Odinson-Reason-Troy family tree…."

"I can't believe this…" Justin started hastening ahead to individual family member pages with biographies and family trees. "They're demigods… They're all demigods!" He then realized the greater truth. "I'm a demigod now!" He stopped on his page. Across the top was the name, William Balder Troy – Collinwood, Maine.

"William Balder Troy, born 1987, is the last child and only son of Peter Bradford Troy, grandson of Hercules of Olympus and Brigid of Avalon, and Donna Louise Reason, daughter of Apollo of Olympus and Marilyn Jean Reason, daughter of Thor and Aphrodite. Possible magic involves his birth one year after his father's death, an incident that left his mother mentally incapable of rearing him for the first years of his life. Reared by demigoddess Emma Samuelson and tutored by Samantha Stoddard of Lauperville, California, he actually platonically dated three of his sisters before his true identity was revealed. Well-known for posing as a historian and adventurer…"

"This… this… This is me? I'm a demigod now?" Justin squirmed a bit uncomfortable with the revelation. "This can't be me. This can't be me!" When he met Sara for the first time, she had remarked, "she could not go back there." Was that in reference to this accidental relationship? Who were the other sisters? He thumbed backward several pages trying to find their bios in the book. Gwen had been a singer during Prohibition, Alicia was photographed near Mahatma Gandhi, Sara had worked backstage on "The Wizard Of Oz," Jessica had been in the French Resistance during World War Two and both Lisa and Tricia had posed as high school students through the Late Fifties to the Late Eighties. The book fell open on a face he knew very well…

"Marilyn Elizabeth Jean Odinson, daughter of Thor of Asgard and Aphrodite of Olympus, born 1037 AD, also known as Lady Marilyn of Britain, Countess Mary Jean of Burgundy, Mary Lynn Reason, Jean Monroe, Mary Kate Reason and Norma Jean Baker. Known to the public as actress/model Marilyn Monroe who faked her death in 1962…"

"No way!" Justin was shaking his head. "No way! This… This is grandma? I can't believe this! I can't believe this!"

"William…" Kristy was another one of the elder sisters, younger than Gwen and Lizzie and the twin of Jessica, but older than Sara, Alicia, Tricia and Lisa. She entered the library from the front hallway wearing a long overcoat and surprised Justin. "I need your opinion on something. How does this look?" She opened her overcoat and allowed to it to slide to the floor and reveal she was barely wearing a scanty dark blue bikini with over the shoulder spaghetti straps holding it together. She posed with her hands on her hips and a big giggling grin knowing how her brother would scream and run from the room every time they tried to be sexy, but this was not her brother before her. It was one Justin Russo, and the young wizard could only gaze upon her in surprise to have this impossibly beautiful woman posing for him. Kristy stood for about thirty seconds waiting for the usual screams and cries of shock-induced blindness.

"It looks…" Justin cleared his throat loudly. "Hot…"

"Oh…" Kristy started feeling awkward for some reason, and turned her back to her brother to pick up the overcoat. Pulling it back on, she looked at the person she thought was her brother, pulled her long blonde locks free and cleared her throat herself. "Okay… that was a bit… uncomfortable. Excuse me…" She headed back through the long hall in her bare feet toward the main hall. Stepping through the archway, she immediately noticed Sara daintily hopping her way down the staircase; her blonde locks bobbing on her dark blouse as Kristy met her at the bottom threshold. Kristy placed her hand to Sara's shoulder.

"Something weird happened." Kristy spoke first. "I showed our brother my new bikini…" She flashed it to Sara modestly. "And for once, he didn't run screaming out of the room from hysterical blindness." She paused out of confusion. "If I didn't know better… I'd think he was drooling."

"Well…" Sara thought about it. "Either he's found a new way to mess with us… or he's not really our brother."