The Ever After

by Amanda Hocking

  Pan let out a low whistle as he admired the space—the leather bench, the vulture statue made from upcycled metal, a potted avocado plant growing in the corner. “This place seems pretty hip.”

  “The only places I could find for rent were this place and the palace,” Bryn said. “And not only do I have bad memories of staying at the palace, but it was outlandishly pricy.”

  “There is actually one other place,” the clerk behind the desk chirped. She was cute and chubby, closer to Elof’s height than mine, and behind her horn-rimmed glasses, her green eyes were noticeably different sizes. Her dark curls were pulled back into short pigtails, and the name on her cheery yellow polo read Margarit. “But I wouldn’t really recommend it.”

  “Why not?” Elof asked.

  “I shouldn’t talk ill of competitors,” Margarit said, so she leaned forward and lowered her voice. “It’s just two water-damaged trailer homes at the edge of the swamp, converted to have six rooms stacked with bunk beds, hostel style.”

  “I think we’ll stay here,” Bryn said.

  “You definitely made the right choice,” Margarit said with a smile. “All right, I’ve got you set with two rooms, each with two single beds, and you’re planning to stay three nights.” She grabbed two keys from under the desk, each one attached to a room-number keychain. “Who gets the keys?”

  Bryn took one right away, and Pan shared a look with me—brief, uncertain, a little hopeful—but Elof spoke up before either of us could say anything.

  “Pan and I made fine roommates before,” Elof said as he reached for the key. “I suppose we can manage here.”

  Margarit told us where the rooms were, but the hotel wasn’t big enough to get lost. We went to the hall to the left of the small lobby, and through the open breezeway that connected the three trees together. And there were our rooms—201 across from 202.

  Bryn unlocked the door, and I gave Pan one last look over my shoulder before going into the room after her. It was small, styled nearly identical to the lobby, and it was clean. The three-piece washroom was about the size of ones I’d seen in motorhomes, and we had a teeny balcony through sliding glass doors that overlooked the swamp.

  I grimaced at the beds. Not because they were narrow and hard—although they were. It was the duvet made of velvet the color of burnt sugar. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why the Omte insist on combining their moist climate with tons of plush velvet.

  “What’s the plan from here?” I asked, lying back on the bed. It was really more of a cot than a true mattress, but it felt good to stretch out after a long day of traveling.

  “Well, I need to contact Bekk.” Brynn was taking her clothes out of her bag and hanging them up in the mirrored wardrobe, and she glanced at the flip clock on the nightstand. “Oh, shit. It’s after six. I told her I’d call her by now.”

  “After you call her, then what?”

  “Well, it depends—” she began, but her phone started ringing, and she pulled it out of her pocket. “It’s Bekk.” She answered and talked for a few minutes, but most of the conversation on her end was monosyllabic until just before she hung up and said the name of the hotel.

  “So?” I asked when she hung up.

  “Bekk will be here in about twenty minutes,” Bryn said. “And we’ll talk then.”

  27

  Roots

  “Are you sure it’s safe for the baby?” Bekk asked again.

  We were in the waiting room of the Omte clinic. It was a surprisingly modern little building sitting on top of a hill. The exterior walls were beige and overgrown with flowering vines. Inside, it was bright, clean, and almost cozy, reminding me of a country vet clinic I had been to once.

  After Bekk called, she’d shown up exactly eighteen minutes later, and everyone had piled into our room to have a cramped conversation. Bekk was due in a matter of weeks, and with her belly, she sat awkwardly on my bed. I’d stepped out on the balcony, preferring the muggy fresh air to the claustrophobia of the five of us crammed in one small room (six if counting the baby).

  Bryn and Elof explained the whole situation to Bekk, and he assured her that it was a safe, simple blood draw that he could use to confirm that her baby and Bryn were siblings. Bekk was hesitant at first, but Elof eventually persuaded her by telling her it could also be used to learn things about the baby, including possible genetic issues.

  Since we’d flown, Elof had decided to leave the more nefarious-looking parts of his equipment—namely syringes—at home, for fear of issues with humans’ security. He had brought along his machine—a hefty cylinder that reminded me of a clunky food dehydrator. But for the actual procedure and analyzation, he needed better facilities.

  That’s where Pan came in. He’d called Rikky, who worked as a nursing assistant. She put Elof in contact with her supervisor, and he used his charm and credentials to secure the access and equipment he needed at the clinic and arranged for us to meet there at eight A.M.

  So the next morning, after a complimentary breakfast of avocado toast and tea, we all ended up in the clinic waiting room. Elof was taking blood from Bryn, Bekk, and myself to compare them, and Pan had come along as a sort of emissary with Rikky.

  “It’s all perfectly safe,” Elof reassured Bekk again. He sat across from us on a vinyl sofa, the analyzer machine resting beside him in a duffel bag. “I’ll draw some blood and the baby won’t feel a thing.”

  Bekk nodded, her eyes looking down at her belly stretching her T-shirt taut. Her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail braid. Her face was puffier than when I’d seen her last, and the circles under her eyes darkened her olive skin.

  She hadn’t said much, mostly just nodding along and listening with a bit of a blank expression, not unlike a deer caught in headlights. When I told her that I’d gone to see Indu, she hadn’t even reacted or asked about him.

  “Hey, guys!” Rikky said cheerily as she strode through the swinging double doors at the far side of the waiting room. She looked lovely, even in her peach-colored scrubs. Her dark auburn hair was over her shoulder in a fishtail braid.

  Pan had been sitting beside me, but he jumped to his feet to greet her. She threw her arms around him, hugging him tightly to her as if she hadn’t seen him in years, instead of the reality that we’d visited her at the beginning of the summer.

  She was also his ex-girlfriend, but that wasn’t quite as defined as I’d liked, since she had kissed him the last night we stayed with her. And he’d kissed her back. For a second. He’d told me he only thought of her as a friend, but she made it fairly obvious she still had feelings for him.

  “Thanks for helping us, Rikky,” Pan said when she released him.

  “No problem,” she said with her easy smile, and she finally looked over at me. “Nice to see you, Ulla.”

  “Yeah, you too,” I said.

  Pan did brief introductions, since she hadn’t met Elof or Bryn before. Then she offered to take Elof back to set up his makeshift lab, and Pan went with him, carrying the heavy analyzer and lending a hand where Elof needed it.

  Rikky led the guys back through the swinging doors, while Bryn, Bekk, and I continued to wait in the stiff vinyl chairs. A nurse sat at the front desk to check patients in, but right now we were the only ones there. In the corner, a fish tank bubbled, and the air conditioner keeping the clinic pleasantly cool hummed loudly.

  “I only did this because I wanted a baby,” Bekk said softly, and the way she was looking down at her belly, I thought she was talking to the baby at first.

  “You mean you were only with Indu because you wanted a baby?” I asked.

  “I’d tried with other men, ones I actually cared about. I tried with Omte men, and when I lived in Doldastam for a summer years ago, I tried with Kanin men. But I couldn’t get pregnant.” She shook her head. “Indu fathered other babies. I knew one had died, but I didn’t realize how many. Not until later. After I was already pregnant.

  “I’d never do anything to hurt her,” Bekk sai
d emphatically. “Her name is Juno Bera. I named her months ago, when I found out I was having a girl. Indu told me he knew she’d be a girl, that he only has daughters, because he took alvaroot every time before he tried conceiving.”

  “Alvaroot?” I whispered, but neither Bekk nor Bryn seemed to notice.

  “And then I found out the other babies died. I asked my midwife if it…” She went on, but I barely even heard her.

  My mind was back on something I had read a while back when I was working in the archives of the Mimirin for Calder. I had put away a book called Country Food Recipes of the Kanin, but before I had, I’d skimmed through it for anything useful.

  One of the recipes was titled “Tea Cakes with Alvaroot,” and the introduction explained that alvaroot mixes with our blood in powerful ways, helping to manifest the wishes of whoever ate it. The Kanin had once called it the “luck root.”

  But a handwritten message scrawled in the margin had said: WARNING! Do not ingest alvaroot! It is a potent root with attraction properties, but it causes severe birth defects in the offspring of both men and women who have ingested it. A small defect to the heart that grows worse over time and usually causes death in infants within the first two years of life.

  My stomach turned. Indu’s hubris—his unwavering belief that he could control everything around him, that he could breed an army to ensure that everyone followed his will—was what had damned so many of his children to a young death.

  I don’t know if he knew about the risks of the alvaroot or not, since Bekk didn’t seem to be aware of them, but I wouldn’t be surprised either way. Indu had already proved that he put the needs of his daughters behind his own wants.

  Bekk took a deep breath. “But I’m going to try anyway.”

  Bryn reached over and put her hand over Bekk’s. “This is a step in the right direction. Elof is checking for abnormalities, and the sooner you know what’s going on, the more prepared you can be.”

  “I hope so,” Bekk said, and then she turned to me. “Did Indu hurt you?”

  I’d been deliberately vague about my time with Indu and the Älvolk, mostly glossing over it all except the part where he said Bryn and Juno were sisters. Last night, when we’d been explaining it all to her, I hadn’t been entirely sure where her loyalties lay. After all, she was carrying his child, and she had let him know that we were looking for him when we went to Isarna.

  But with her looking at me now, worried for herself and her child, I thought she deserved the truth.

  “He did, yes,” I said.

  She blinked and looked away from me again. “I’m sorry. He’s a worse man than I thought.”

  “I’m sorry too,” I said.

  “But he has other daughters,” Bekk said, sounding hopeful. “Grown healthy daughters.”

  “He claimed Noomi and Bryn, and they both seem okay,” I said.

  “Thanks,” Bryn said dryly.

  “Indu told you he took the alvaroot?” I asked Bekk carefully, but the doors swung open and cut me off.

  Pan came out through the wooden doors and hooked his thumb back the way he’d come. “Elof’s ready for you if you wanna go on back.”

  28

  Daughters

  The blood draw went smoothly, and although I got light-headed, I didn’t faint. Once we were done, Elof didn’t really need us all to wait around while he did his lab work, and Rikky offered to lend him a hand since she knew her way around the clinic.

  Bryn, Pan, and I went back to the hotel. Pan said he hadn’t slept well the night before—which made sense since the beds were horrible—and he went to his room to take a nap. Waiting made Bryn restless, and the room had little space to work out. She pushed her bed up against mine, and then she used the emptied space to do push-ups, crunches, and various other stationary exercises to burn off her anxious energy.

  I stole the pillows from her bed and wadded them up to get halfway comfortable, and I settled in to read the Kendare Blake book I’d bought at the airport yesterday. Bryn’s panting and banging around were rather distracting, and we would’ve been in serious trouble if we had downstairs neighbors. I didn’t complain, because it seemed to be a healthy way to deal with the stress and confusion I knew she had to be feeling.

  So if it took me ten minutes to read a page because I kept losing my place, well, so be it.

  A strange ringing sound came from my bag, which I’d slid under the bed to save floor space. It was unzipped to allow for my laptop cord to wind out and into the outlet behind my nightstand. Last night, I’d plugged it in so Bryn and I could watch cartoons about “trolls” on Netflix to unwind and laugh at all the things they got wrong and marvel at the occasional thing they got right.

  “I wish I could get my hair that pink or blue,” I’d said, pining over the neon shades of the cartoon character’s hair.

  “Tell me about it!” Bryn chimed in, happy to complain about our difficult troll hair. “My hair is so light blond, if I were human, I’d be able to dye it any color of the rainbow. But I’ve dyed it black before, and it’s literally dark for a matter of hours before fading to gray within a week. Our hair actively rejects dye.”

  After I’d finally been tired enough to sleep on the cot-bed with velvet covers, I had shoved my laptop under my bed and promptly forgotten about it.

  Until it started ringing—an odd da-da-da sound—and Bryn popped from where she was planking on the floor. “What was that?”

  “I think I have a call,” I said uncertainly, and I pulled the laptop out and sat on my bed. I flipped it open to see a green phone icon flashing on the screen, and when I clicked on it, a video chat opened so my whole screen became Hanna’s face.

  “You answered!” She was all smiles and freckles, framed by her dark curls.

  Behind her, I saw Mia holding one of the twins—I couldn’t tell which from the angle—and she waved at me and said, “Hello, Ulla.”

  “Ulla!” Liam suddenly appeared in the frame, practically pushing his older sister out of the way to shove his face as close to the camera as he could get. He pointed to the fresh gap in his wide smile. “I lost a tooth yesterday!”

  “That’s awesome,” I said as Hanna pushed him away.

  “Mom, Liam’s butting into my chat!” Hanna yelled, and somewhere in the background, I heard a baby crying—Lissa, it sounded like to me.

  At the sound of the kids arguing and babies crying, Bryn stood up and excused herself to go shower.

  “You don’t own Ulla!” Liam pouted. “I can talk to her too!”

  “I have something important to talk to her about!” Hanna argued, then she looked back over her shoulder. “Mom! I need privacy!”

  “Liam, kids, come on,” Mia said. There was some whining, but she herded the kids out quickly, and the sound of Lissa crying faded until I couldn’t hear it at all.

  Hanna let out a dramatic sigh. “Finally I get to talk to you. You’re usually so hard to reach when you’re gone.”

  “The Omte kingdom has great reception actually,” I said. “The hotel even has Wi-Fi.”

  “Nice,” she said, and looked impressed.

  “How are you doing?” I asked. “How is everything at home?”

  “We’re all fine.” She waved it off. “That’s not why I called.”

  I heard someone mumble my name, and two chubby tan hands reached up for Hanna. She kept looking at me—well, the camera—but she reached down and pulled Niko onto her lap. He was nearly four years old, but he was small for his age, making his big brown eyes appear even larger under his mop of dark curls.

  “Ulla!” he said, more clearly this time, and waved at me.

  I waved back. “Hey, buddy.”

  “I have to talk to Ulla, so if you want to stay, you can’t interrupt,” Hanna warned him, and he nodded dutifully before making faces and watching himself in the corner of the screen.

  “So what’s up?” I asked.

  “We’re gonna do a three-way call with my grandparents.” She wasn’t l
ooking at me then; instead her eyes searched the screen as her hands went to her mouse and keyboard.

  “What?” I asked, feeling self-conscious. I ran my fingers through my tangles of hair and hoped that my eyeliner hadn’t smudged too much since I put it on that morning.

  Hanna was already calling—I heard the da-da-da of the ringing—and I glanced back at the blankets and pillows I’d mashed up behind me. I wondered if there was time to straighten up, but then there they were.

  The video changed, becoming a split screen with Hanna and little Niko on the right side, and her bewildered but smiling grandparents on the left. The box where I could see myself got slightly smaller, tucked away in the corner.

  Johan looked older than his wife; his thick hair and beard were only slightly blacker than they were silver. Sarina had long, fine hair in a rich maple color, and she was slender with intense dark eyes, giving her a brittle edge. Her smile was so tentative and fragile, like a bubble about to pop. The low resolution and Johan’s beard made his smattering of freckles on his tawny skin hard to make out, but they were there, the one noticeable feature he shared with both his late son Nikolas and Hanna.

  “Oh, there you are!” Sarina sounded delighted as her smile deepened.

  “I told you it wasn’t that hard,” Hanna teased.

  “We managed it,” Johan said with a low rumble of laughter.

  “Who is that little guy?” Sarina asked, and she wagged her fingers at Niko after he waved. “Liam?”

  “Niko,” Hanna said.

  Sarina’s smile went tight when she said, “They grow so fast.”

  “I talked to Grandma after we talked before.” Johan put his hand on his wife’s arm and gave her an encouraging smile. “She remembered more than I did.”

  “Johan’s always struggled with recollections of his youth,” she clarified sadly. “He doesn’t have any memories of the time before Nikolas was born.”