by Tim Pratt
Heirs of Grace
By Tim Pratt
Antiquities and Tangibles & Other Stories
Briarpatch
The Nex
Hart & Boot & Other Stories
The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl
Little Gods
Heirs of Grace
Tim Pratt
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2014 by Tim Pratt
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
eISBN: 9781477823644
For Amily
Table of Contents
Episode 1
Mirror
Episode 2
Sword
Episode 3
Spoon
Episode 4
Book
Episode 5
Egg
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Kindle Serials
Episode 1
Mirror
My new life was off to a bumpy start even before Trey got eaten by the mirror.
I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. Before my world entered impossible territory, it was just profoundly weird, and before that, it was merely annoying, so let me ease you into things.
Here’s how my new life as heiress to an impossible estate began: Driving eleven hours straight from Chicago to the mountains of North Carolina in an old Honda that wheezed and coughed and made a noise like a broken coffee grinder on the steep uphills. Arriving to the nightmare of trying to find parking right by the local university in downtown Boone, on a day when they were apparently having some kind of alumni reunion weekend or on-campus bluegrass festival or something, so the streets were crowded and every parking place occupied, even the implausible spots of questionable legality. Finally parking about five blocks away from the lawyer’s office, halfway up a hill so precipitous that if I’d lost my footing I would have tumbled down like a one-woman avalanche.
When I finally got to the office, exhausted and rumpled and probably smelling like all the hours I’d spent on the road, a tiny, sweet-faced white lady of the TV-grandma-looking variety sitting in the waiting room smiled at me and said, “Oh, now, what are you, exactly?”
I just blinked at her. I don’t usually talk to random strangers in waiting rooms, even nice, homey waiting rooms with lots of dark wooden furniture like this one, but everybody’s got different boundaries. I looked in vain for a receptionist so I could drop the old lady a mildly confused smile and get on with my business, but the front desk was unstaffed and the two doors leading deeper into the office were closed. I put on a polite face and said, “I don’t know what you mean.”
The old woman gestured vaguely at me. She was wearing white gloves, which fit her general level of dress, but seemed better suited to high tea or church than general sitting around. She clarified: “Are you me kind of Mexican?”
That was a new one. Sometimes on forms I check “Other” and sometimes I check “Pacific Islander” and often other people mark me down as “Black” (which my adoptive parents are, and almost certainly some of my biological ancestors, too), but I’d never been self- or other-identified as “some kind of Mexican.”
Welcome to the South, I guess. I hadn’t spent much time in this part of the country, and the first person I spoke to in my temporary new home wasn’t making me look forward to future human interactions.
“Sure,” I said. “Some kind of Mexican. Buenos días and vete a la chingada.”
“Such an interesting language.” She showed off teeth so straight and white they had to be store-bought.
The door on the left opened and an old white-haired guy in a gray suit poked his head out and said, “June, could you—now where did she go?” He looked briefly at me, then past me, to the old lady, and said, “Doris, I’ll be with you in just a minute, sorry to leave you sitting out here. I don’t know where that girl went.” He swiveled his head back in my direction, still not stepping out from behind the door. “Can I help you, Miss…?”
“Rebekah Lull. I’ve got an appointment—”
Just then a slender young woman in a pale-green dress came in from the hallway, eyes widening as she looked around the room. She actually squeaked “Oh!” before she hurried to the desk and began flipping through a printed-on-paper appointment book. “Sorry, sorry, I was just…” She blushed so hard her ears turned pink. It would’ve been cute if she hadn’t looked so terrified. She had to be twenty-one or twenty-two, not much younger than me, but she seemed like she’d wandered in from junior high. She glanced at the old guy, who nodded, then looked up at Doris and said, “You can go right in—Mr. Howard will see you now.”
So the old guy was Mr. Howard, the lawyer I’d come all this way to see, and screw him for double-booking the slot for my appointment. I’d burned up rubber and road to get here on time after leaving Chicago a day later than I’d planned—the most common gift at a going-away party is a hangover, and I’d needed yesterday to recover—and racist grandma got to jump the line?
Doris took her time gathering her handbag and rising from the chair, then went past me to the door—the old guy was holding it open all chivalrously-slash-patronizingly, which maybe Doris appreciated. As she passed me she whispered, “I just love mariachi music,” and left me with that useful bit of information—along with watering eyes from the intensity of her personal cloud of lavender perfume.
Then Doris and old man Howard disappeared into the office, door clicking closed after them. I marched up to June’s desk, and even though I should have felt some kinship with her as a fellow woman working as best she could against the constraints of the kyriarchy and all that, I just gave her the dead-eyed death stare I learned from my mom and said, “I’m Rebekah Lull. I have an appointment with Mr. Howard. Right now.”
She looked alarmed—actually she looked like a rabbit watching the approach of a justifiably confident fox—and flipped through the appointment book, then visibly relaxed. “You mean Trey. Just a minute.” She went to the other door, the one to the right of her desk, and tapped on the glass. “Trey, I mean, Mr. Howard, your four thirty is here.”
The door opened, and a man stood there smiling at me, wearing a white shirt with suspenders—first time I’d seen suspenders worn nonironically by anyone under age forty, probably—and neatly pressed black slacks. I suddenly felt even more rumpled than I had before, and wished I’d found a moment to change out of the jeans and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago sweatshirt I’d driven in. I can take or leave boys, but when they look like my new lawyer did, taking them starts to seem a lot more appealing. He was clearly some relative to the elder Mr. Howard, either a late-in-life son or a grandson, and looked old enough to be a grad student, maybe. He was cute, in a blond and rugged ex-jock kind of way. Considering my complaints about random waiting room racism I shouldn’t admit this, but I’m just as prone to bad assumptions as anyone, and at first glance I resisted my attraction on the grounds that he was probably a grown-up frat guy, the larval stage of the old-boy-network type, on the cusp of full metamorphosis. I’m a sucker for broad shoulders, but they have to be attached to the right kind of guy.
“Ms. Lull.” He opened his door wider and stepped aside. “Please, come into my office.”
“Thank you,
June,” I said to the receptionist, and she looked startled—probably not used to anything but being ignored or abused—before she nodded and went back to her desk, taking one more not-so-surreptitious peek behind her. I wondered if Mr. Howard the Younger noticed how she looked at him? With all the reverence and wonder of a caveman staring at a fire.
He was clearly her type. My own reservations aside, I could see her point.
I went into the office, which was small and dominated by a wooden desk older than the elder Mr. Howard, the walls lined with bookshelves holding the expected leather-bound tomes of legalese. There were a few personal touches, though, and they weren’t signed footballs or photos of Republican politicians. Rather, Trey had a row of miniature canopic jars lined up on the edge of his desk, tiny vessels topped with the heads of eagles and jackals. He must have noticed me looking, because he grinned. “You’re from Chicago, right? I got those at the Field Museum a few years back, when they had an Egypt exhibit.”
“I saw that.” I settled down in the wood-and-leather chair he pointed at, and he flopped down in the big chair behind the desk. “I went to college at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, just down the street from the museum.”
“Oof,” he said with what seemed like genuine concern. “Most of the art galleries around here specialize in selling pictures of mountains to tourists. You might get a little culture-starved. Did you come here straight from Chicago?”
I nodded. “Got on the road first thing this morning.”
He whistled. “Long drive. You want coffee? Water?”
“No, I’m okay.” I stifled a yawn. “If you don’t mind…”
“Right, absolutely. To business. I’m Stacy Howard the Third, but since the other two lawyers here are also Stacy Howard, you can call me Trey…if you want to call me anything at all. I’ve got a check and the keys to the Grace house for you, and I’ll take you up there right away if you want, but first, ah…” He winced. Damn it. He even winced cute. “Like I said in the letter I sent you, there’s this thing we have to do before you get the inheritance.”
“A test.”
“I did call it a test. But I don’t know if that’s what it is, exactly. Mr. Grace left some instructions, is all, and I’m supposed to follow them before I hand over anything. You could probably challenge that in court, because weird conditions on inheritances don’t stand up as often in real life as they do in the movies, but it might be pretty simple, so if you want to give it a try, that might be easiest.”
“I’m not sure how I’m supposed to pass any kind of test. I never heard of Archibald Grace until I got your letter.”
He nodded. “You were adopted? Don’t know anything about your biological family at all?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. I was a foundling. Literally, I was left in a basket outside a hospital when I was a newborn.” I’d gotten lucky, been adopted by Mom and Dad before I hit my first birthday, and never felt like anything but their very own child. I never spared much thought for the assholes who birthed and abandoned me, either.
That is until someone who claimed to be part of my biological family died and left me his house and everything in it…and enough money for me to take a year or two off from reality to figure out where I wanted to steer my life.
Trey nodded. “Well, here’s what I’m supposed to do.” He pulled a piece of paper—nice creamy letterhead—from a desk drawer, and began to scribble on it with a ballpoint. When he was done, he pushed the paper across to me.
On the top, in barely legible handwriting, it said, “Ask three questions.” And under that, a circled number one, two, and three, each on its own line.
“What, just…anything? Any question? Does a dog have the Buddha nature? How do you make love stay?”
He grinned. “Those are good. I wish I had advice for you, but my instructions were just to tell you to write down three questions.”
What a weird test. What would some long-lost relative want me to ask, in exchange for handing over the keys to the kingdom, such as it was? I thought about Doris and her racist ass, then bent my head and wrote.
What am I, exactly?
Why did my parents give me away?
Why did you wait until you were dead to get in touch with me, asshole?
I shoved the paper back across to Trey, who scanned it briefly, then snorted. He tapped the page. “What am I, exactly?”
“It’s what the old lady in the waiting room asked me. Then she guessed, ‘Some kind of Mexican.’ ”
He winced again. It was still cute. “Doris. Sorry about that. She’s…well. I’d say she’s from a different generation, but plenty of people from her generation manage to do better than she does. We’re not all like Doris around here, Ms. Lull. I hope you stay long enough to find that out.”
I continued to reassess my first impression of him. Maybe he wasn’t so bad. “Glad to hear it. So, you’ve got my questions. What happens now?”
“Now I open this.” He reached into his pocket, took out a key ring, and unlocked the top drawer of his desk. He drew out a yellowed envelope and turned it over, revealing a signature scrawled across the sealed flap. “I know it’s hard to read, but that says ‘Archibald Grace,’ your long-lost…whatever. He never said what the relationship was, at least not to me.” Trey took a letter opener and slit open the envelope, removing a folded piece of onionskin paper. He consulted it, grunted, and said, “Good enough.”
“What’s good enough? Good enough for what?”
“I was just supposed to confirm that the answers on this piece of paper are reasonable responses to the questions you wrote down. And no, I have no idea why an old recluse like Mr. Grace wanted to stage a Las Vegas mentalist act from beyond the grave, but he did, and it worked fine. Unless he sent you the right questions at some point, like a code, to prove you’re the right person.” I shook my head, raising an eyebrow. “No? Huh. Well. Want to read the answers?”
I nodded, and he passed over the page. I read:
A broad question, but I know what you mean. Your mother was Polynesian. Your father was complicated, but let’s say “Mostly European.”
For your own protection.
See answer number 2. Also, shame.
I sat back. “I guess it’s good I didn’t ask ‘What’s your favorite color?’ How long has this envelope been in that desk?”
“Oh, just the past couple of weeks. Before that it was in a safe. Mr. Grace gave it to my grandfather almost twenty-five years ago, or so I’m told. I was too busy playing with toy trucks at the time to confirm the story personally.”
“I’m twenty-four,” I said.
“I’d have to ask Mr. Howard the First for the exact date,” Trey said, “but I’d guess it was around the time you were born, yeah.”
“I know he didn’t say, but…do you think Archibald Grace was my father?” I’d always known I had a father—a sperm donor, rather; my dad was my father—but it wasn’t something I’d thought about much.
Except now I might be inheriting the sperm donor’s house and a bunch of his money.
Trey shrugged. “I’m sorry, but I really couldn’t say. We can help you find out, if you like. Maybe there’s a brush with some strands of hair in his house—your house, I should say—and we can get the DNA tested. He was an old guy, even twenty-five years ago he would’ve been pretty old, but that doesn’t mean much. Maybe he’s an uncle, a grandfather…” He shook his head. “Anyway, this is yours.” He passed me an envelope of much newer vintage than the last one he’d held.
I peeked inside and saw a cashier’s check with a goodly number of zeros on it. Not “set for life” money, but “set for a year, maybe two” money, easy. The original letter that had pulled me from Chicago had told me how much I was getting, but holding the check in my hands was different; apparently this wasn’t an elaborate practical joke. “Wow. Thanks.”
“That’s the simple part of the inheritance,” Trey said. “You can just spend it. Now for the part that’s more
complicated to deal with. Want to see the house?”
He gave me the address, but warned me my GPS would probably just laugh in my face when we got close, and suggested I follow his car in mine. I agreed, and as I walked with him outside, I expected to see either a high-end luxury car or a shitkicker pickup truck. Instead, he had a little green Toyota that looked like a cousin to my own college economy model. I guessed that either he didn’t make the big bucks lawyering in a mountain college town, or he spent the money on other things.
I’d spent most of my life in Chicago, where the terrain tends toward flattish and urban, and driving in the mountains was new and strange and intermittently terrifying. I couldn’t entirely comprehend the landscape—there was a lot more land than I was used to, folded and crumpled up in a much smaller space than it should have occupied, but once we got outside of town, there was barely any sign of human habitation for miles at a stretch, and the roads went from pine trees all around to sudden open vistas that offered views of blue-hazed mountains. Those views were often accompanied by narrow shoulders next to sheer drops, and the local road builders had taken a pretty haphazard approach to guardrails. Combined with my exhaustion, those facts gave the trip a certain sense of epic danger in parts. The place was beautiful, though, the mountains soft-edged and worn-down, like watercolors of themselves.
There was almost no traffic, so it was easy enough to stay on Trey’s tail as he led me down various winding, poorly marked roads. My GPS kept up for a little while, confirming his every turn, until we rattled over a one-lane wooden bridge; then the friendly robot voice said “recalculating” a few times before falling into a silence that seemed almost contemplative.
Trey signaled for a left turn where I didn’t see a road at all, and his car disappeared between a couple of rhododendrons so vast that “hedges” didn’t seem the right word for them at all. There was a road there, though—an entirely unmarked dirt track, sufficiently narrowed by overgrowth that the hedges scraped at either side of my car when I squeezed through. It crossed my mind that maybe I was being led to Trey’s sadistic murder lair—could be he sent letters to fresh-out-of-college girls all over the country telling them they’d inherited a house and some money, luring the really credulous ones (like me) to their messy deaths. Sure, he seemed nice enough—but every girl who’s had a date with a charming guy who turned monster when things didn’t go the way he’d fantasized knows that seeming nice doesn’t mean a damn thing.