by Cate Tiernan
My surprise must have shown on my face because Reyn turned away again and a flush stained his cheeks. “Anyway. I thought you’d like to see the puppies.”
“Do I really seem like a puppy kind of gal to you?” Having changed so much over the past couple months, I had no idea how I came off to people now.
Reyn rubbed a hand over the day’s stubble on his chin. “No,” he said finally. “No. Not puppies, not bunnies, not babies. But—you don’t have to give that up, you know.”
Okay, time for me to leave this conversation. I reached for my doorknob. Reyn’s hard, warm hand stopped me. “Most of us are reluctant to have that,” he said, his voice low in the half-lit hallway. “Reluctant to have lovers, children, horses. Homes. Because we’ve lost so many. But to give all that up means time has beaten you down—that time has won. I think… I might be ready to battle time again. Might be strong enough to take a chance.”
Reyn was a man of few, terse words. That had been almost a whole paragraph. And it had been so self-revealing. Had he been drinking? I couldn’t detect it.
My brain processed thoughts rapidly, skirting around all the possible meanings of his words. I was terrified of what he might be saying.
“So… you’re going to get a puppy, then?” I asked, choosing the least scary interpretation.
He looked tired. Meeting his eyes was almost physically painful, but I refused to be the one who blinked first. His hand came up, and I kept myself from flinching. With one finger he traced a line down my face from temple to chin, the same way River had touched the runt puppy.
“Good night,” he said.
CHAPTER 3
The people in the town of West Lowing (population 5,031) think that River’s Edge is a small, family-run organic farm. Which is even true, to a point. The fact that we’re all immortals and most of us are trying to get over meaningless lives of dark endlessness, or endless darkness, is something we don’t advertise to outsiders. In fact, we hide it. But if someone were to drop by, they would just see regular-looking people weeding gardens, tilling fields, feeding chickens, chopping wood, and mucking stables.
You would think all that wholesome outdoor living would be enough for anyone, but some of us (mostly me) were required to have jobs out in the real world as well. Asher had explained the whole reasoning behind it, but my mind had blanked after a few key words like job and minimum wage. After he suggested something like shelving books at the local library, I had started to cry inside.
Much to everyone’s surprise, however, I’d been gainfully employed for almost six weeks at MacIntyre’s Drugs on Main Street in West Lowing. The “downtown” part of Main Street was four blocks long and included five empty, abandoned stores, a shut-down gas station, a feed store, a grocery, a diner, a hot-dog shop (literally nothing but hot dogs), and in West Lowing’s nod to international cuisine, a combo falafel/Chinese food joint.
So… stocking shelves at a CVS in Manhattan would be bad enough. I was stocking shelves at MacIntyre’s Drugs in freaking West Lowing, Massachusetts. And to improve this rosy picture, my boss was an angry, bitter old guy. He was hateful to me and constantly screamed at my coworker, his daughter. I couldn’t even think about what he might be like to her at home.
But it was all part of my rehab: learning to work and play well with others.
When I pushed through the front door of the store one minute before my shift started, Meriwether MacIntyre was already cleaning the front counter with spray and a rag.
“Are you still on Christmas break?” I asked, walking past her to hang up my coat.
“Yeah. Two more days,” she said. Meriwether was a senior in the town’s only high school. She was at least five inches taller than me, maybe five foot eight, and was one of the most colorless people I’d ever met. Her hair, skin, and eyes were all basically the same pale shade of ash brown, and her whole persona was that of an abused rabbit. I blamed her horrible dad.
Old Mac, as I called him, glared balefully at me as I skipped to the time clock and punched my card in with fifteen seconds to spare. I gave him a blithe smile and headed out front, where Meriwether and I had been trying to yank the store into at least the twentieth century, if not the twenty-first.
“Okay, so, we’ve got a couple of bins to put out,” she said, pointing to the blue plastic bins full of products that needed shelving. We’d been slowly reorganizing the store, grouping stuff together in a more logical way instead of the way it had made sense to Old Mac’s grandfather back in 1924. It was funny to think that if I had been through here in 1924, which I hadn’t, I could have seen Old Mac’s grandfather and his shiny new store.
“And look.” Meriwether knelt and showed me several new boxes: homeopathic medicines. I’d been after the old man to stock some of these because people had kept asking me for them.
I clasped my hands together and pretended to swoon, and Meriwether grinned.
“If you gals wouldn’t mind getting some work done instead of just gabbing, you might be worth your wages!” Mr. MacIntyre shouted at us from down the aisle.
I picked up a box of homeopathic echinacea gels and gave him a huge smile and a thumbs-up. He narrowed his eyes at me and stomped into the back pharmacy area, where he filled people’s prescriptions.
“How do you do that?” Meriwether whispered a few minutes later as we shifted some Ace bandages to make room for the new stuff.
“What?” I whispered back. “Hey, we should probably do this alphabetically, right?”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “You know, not freak out when my dad yells at you.”
Well, over the years I’d been at the mercy of northern raiders, not to mention Viking berserkers and Cossacks. As long as Old Mac wasn’t splitting my neighbor’s head open with an axe right in front of me, I could handle what he dished out.
But I couldn’t say that.
“Maybe ’cause he’s not my dad,” I said quietly. “It’s always worse when it’s your own dad.” I’d lost my dad when I was ten, so I was guessing here. But it seemed like it would be true. “So, got big plans for New Year’s Eve?”
Meriwether smiled, and I blinked, taken aback at how it transformed her. She nodded. “There’s a school dance,” she murmured. “And my dad actually said I could go. For once. I’m going to my friend’s house and we’ll get dressed up together.”
That sounded like fingernails down a chalkboard to me, but she looked happy and I was glad she was escaping her dad for a while.
“No boyfriend?” I asked.
She made a face. “No one will ask me out. They’re too scared of my dad. But I’m hoping this guy named Lowell is there.” She let out a deep breath. “What about you?” she asked. “Do you have plans?”
I nodded. “Nothing too big.” Just a special magick circle with a bunch of immortals. Same old, same old. “Just some friends getting together. I’ll try to make it to midnight.” Since I got up before dawn these days, my head usually hit the pillow before ten. It was… embarrassing. I used to feel so much cooler. But, of course, that coolness had gone hand in hand with feeling half crazy and worthless. So I guess I didn’t miss it that much.
Someone came in and Meriwether left me to go wait on them. She was back in a few minutes, carrying some poster-board signs that she and I had made to advertise our new products. I have zero artistic talent, but Meriwether had done a great job, drawing little figures finding things with happy expressions. I left what I was doing and together she and I started hanging the signs with heavy double-sided tape. “What’s your dad like?” Meriwether asked suddenly as I held up a corner so she could tape it.
I hesitated. No one had asked me that in… ages. A really long time. I quickly compared my dad, who had been a dark, power-hungry king in medieval Iceland, with Old Mac. Not too much in common.
“Well, he’s dead,” I said, and Meriwether winced.
“Sorry,” she whispered.
“It’s okay. It was a long time ago.” Ha ha, you have no idea. Anyhoo, I let o
ut a deep breath, allowing myself to think about my father, remember him for a few moments. Something I don’t usually do. “I… remember him as being kind of forbidding,” I said slowly. “My mother was with us more. He seemed like a stern character.”
“Did he travel, for work?” She pressed a strip of tape into place, then stepped back to admire our colorful sign, my carefully lettered words arching over the stick figures’ heads.
Why yes, it’s hard to loot and raid and subjugate other villages from one’s armchair. My father had been a king in the way that powerful men were kings over smaller territories, a long time ago. He’d increased lands under his rule by four times during the first ten years of my life. I nodded. “He taught us stuff sometimes,” I went on, not even knowing why I was bothering. “He was, um, in the military. He wanted us all to be brave and tough. My older brother adored him.” Sigmundur had tried to be just like Faðir in every way. He’d been sixteen when he died, but already hardened and skilled with weapons.
“Did your father yell?” Meriwether picked up the last sign and looked around for a good place to put it. I pointed to the front of the checkout counter, and she nodded. We headed over there and knelt to stick the sign up.
“When he yelled, it seemed like the whole… house shook,” I said. “People who worked for him were afraid of him.” I hadn’t even realized that until just now.
“Like my dad.” Meriwether carefully peeled off a piece of tape and stuck it in place.
“Yeah.” In a bizarre, completely inexplicable way.
“My dad’s always worse during the winter holidays,” Meriwether said. We heard Old Mac leave his pharmacy and come our way, and we quickly shut up and separated, busily concentrating on our different tasks. Slowly we drifted back toward each other and continued putting boxes and bottles on shelves.
“You said it was around this time that your mom…” I’m not a delicate or sensitive person, and stomping on other people’s feelings is usually not a problem for me. But I liked Meriwether, and Lord knew she’d been through enough without me making it worse.
“Yeah.” Meriwether concentrated on aligning each small box just so. “We were on our way back from a Christmas party and it was icy. My dad wasn’t with us.”
“You were in the same car?” Oh, jeez. That had happened to me, too; in fact, it was how I had first met River back in 1929, in France. But the person who had died had been practically a stranger, and her death had barely made a ripple in my consciousness. Things like that hadn’t really affected me—until the cabbie, two months ago. Part of what they were teaching me at River’s Edge was how to actually feel things with appropriate weight.
Meriwether nodded without looking at me. Instantly I got it: She felt guilty for surviving. And her dad couldn’t look at her without remembering that his wife and only son had died. And she hadn’t.
“I’m really sorry,” I said—maybe the second time in my life those words had ever come out of my mouth. But I did feel sorry for her—there was no way for her to win in this situation.
I remembered when I’d lived in a small village outside Naples, in Italy, in the 1650s. One of the last waves of the plague came through, and bodies were piling up. Later I read that half the people of Naples had died in that one outbreak. Half the people of a whole city. Half of them.
My little village was hard-hit. My neighbors died; their children died; the local priest died. People who had been genuinely good and kind, to me and to one another, all died within a matter of days. On Tuesday your neighbor would be working in her garden, and on Friday you’d walk past her body piled on top of other bodies in the street.
Not me. So many people, so much better than me, had died, and I was left standing to go on my merry way, because, hey, that town had become a big bummer. I kept surviving. Over and over and over.
Next to me, Meriwether sighed, then glanced back at the pharmacy.
“It just—should have been me, you know? It would have been so much better for everyone.” She got up and took the empty cartons out to throw them into the recycle bin.
I sat back on my heels, struck by that. Not a new thought—I’d seen it in countless movies, read it in books. Now I knew that Meriwether felt that way, for real, in her real life.
What about me? Had I ever felt that I should have died that night, 450 years ago? That maybe my older brother should have lived? He wouldn’t have run away, like I had. He might have seized the family’s power, found some followers, and gone after Reyn and his father to avenge our family.
Or one of my sisters? My oldest sister, Tinna, had been so smart and brave. My father’s face had lit up when she came into a room. I remembered her and my mother working in the kitchen—we had cooks and servants, but every Oestara—Easter—my mother would make her special egg bread. She and Tinna would knead the dough side by side, laughing and talking.
My next-oldest sister, Eydís, had been the family beauty and my most constant companion. Her hair was long, wavy, and a brilliant strawberry blond, like the sun when it first peeks over the horizon. Her eyes were clear and gray. Even as an eleven-year-old, she’d been known for her beauty, and basically everyone was waiting for her to be four years older so they could see how really beautiful she would be as an adult. She and I had done everything together, made up all kinds of games, studied together, slept in the same room.
Then there was my little brother, Háakon. He’d been thin and pale, almost delicate. I’d seen my father looking at him sometimes with a bemused expression, as if wondering how this boy had come from the same union that produced all the rest of us. But Háakon had been sweet, not a tattler, and a faithful follower of me and Eydís as we marched around with sticks on our shoulders or practiced our rock throwing.
When the raiders broke down the door to my father’s study, where we’d been barricaded in, I was clinging to my mother’s skirts in terror. Reyn’s father—the aptly named Erik the Bloodletter—had lunged forward with a roar, and I’d felt the swift jerk of my mother’s body as he’d severed her head. She’d fallen backward right on top of me, and I’d lain, covered by the wide skirts of her wool robe, until it was all silent less than five minutes later.
Should I have died that night? Yes. Reyn’s father had shouted that none should be left alive. My siblings had all had swords or daggers in their hands, children standing up to an unbeatable foe. I’d been cowering behind my mother. Which had saved me.
Why? I’d accepted the stunning reality that I was still alive, that my family was dead. I’d never questioned why that was or if it should be that way. Until now.
“I don’t pay you to sit around!” Old Mac’s roar startled me and I was yanked back to the present day, where my boss was standing in the aisle, cheeks red with anger. Behind him Meriwether made an unhappy face. “And what’s all this junk?” He gestured angrily to a couple of our new signs. “No one said you could put this crap up!”
Meriwether’s face flushed, and then Old Mac ripped down our signs and threw them to the floor. I clenched my teeth shut so I wouldn’t start shrieking in fury.
“Dad!” Meriwether said, her face crumpling. “We worked hard on those!”
He whirled on her as if she were a grass snake and he was a mongoose. “Nobody asked you to! I don’t need your stupid, ugly posters around!”
Meriwether’s eyes flashed. “They aren’t stupid—” she began, but suddenly Old Mac grabbed a small plastic jar of vitamin-C capsules and hurled it. It all happened so fast—her eyes went wide, her voice choked, and before I knew what was happening, my hand snapped up, I hissed something, and the jar took a small, crazy zigzag away from Meriwether at the last second. It hit the wall beside her and cracked, then dropped to the ground. The lid popped off and gelcaps rolled everywhere.
We all stood still in the shocking silence. Old Mac looked stunned—more than stunned. He looked kind of gray and he leaned to one side, unsteady on his feet.
“I… I didn’t mean—” he said in a shaking voice
.
Then I realized: I had made magick quickly, without thinking. Something in me had reached deep into my ancient subconscious and come up with goddess-knew-what spell to deflect the jar.
But I wasn’t skilled at white magick. I didn’t know enough. So the magick that had come out had been the magick a Terävä would make, which I was: I’d taken energy from Old Mac to do it.
If I said anything, I would no doubt make this situation much, much worse. So Meriwether and I watched as Old Mac shook his head, as if in disbelief that he had done such a thing. Then he turned awkwardly and made his way down the aisle to the back room, trailing a hand along a shelf to help himself balance.
What had I done? Oh God. But what had my options been? Let Meriwether get hit by that jar? It was plastic and not that big, but it still would have really hurt.
Meriwether stood silently, tears running down her face.
“Does he do stuff like this? Throw stuff? Does he hit you?” Because I’d have to go kill him, if he did.
Meriwether shook her head. “He’s never done anything like this before.”
“He looked pretty sorry,” I admitted. “You said he’s just—super unhappy right now. Plus, you know, he’s a butt.” Inside I was shrieking about the harm I might have done with my spell.
“Tell you what,” I said in a low voice. “You go to the bathroom, wash your face, try to get a grip. I’ll clean up this mess.” I gestured to the shiny, honey-colored gelcaps that had scattered in a surprisingly large radius. “If he tries to stop you, knee him in the balls.”
That got the barest flicker of less misery on Meriwether’s face. She nodded and headed off, then paused and looked back at me. “How did you do that?” Her voice was horribly clear and soft.
A big fist seemed to squeeze my insides. “Do what?”
“You moved your hand, and the jar jumped to one side.” Her voice was quiet and solemn, her eyes locked on mine. “I saw it. It would have hit me right in the chest. I was frozen—couldn’t move.”