Heirs of Grace

by Tim Pratt

  “It’s been almost two weeks since you drove her off,” he said. “Maybe you made your point, and she’s gone for good.”

  “We live in hope. I am, almost, starting to relax. Why, last night I didn’t even wake up convinced someone was in the house trying to murder me.”

  “That’s great progress. Since you’re feeling so relaxed…any interest in a second date?”

  You know what? I was interested. Nobody had tried to kill me in two weeks, so I was ready to think about the future. Maybe not ready to get serious, but at least ready to seriously consider the possibility.

  It was more fun to make him work for it, though. “You mean a second date with you?”

  “I didn’t realize you had other suitors.”

  I snorted, the look on his face priceless—a mix of boy-who-lost-his-puppy and anyone-who-wants-to-date-you-will-have-to-go-through-me. It’s nice to be wanted. “You’ve been here every other day, Trey. If I had other suitors you would have tripped over them. You sure you haven’t gotten sick of me yet?”

  “Presence makes my heart grow fonder. Plus, the days out here have been heavy on sorting piles of junk, stirring up dust, and the occasional magical experimentation—but woefully short on making out. I—”

  I slid the wristwatch off my hand while he was talking—sensation rushing back into my fingers and palm—and then reached over and touched his cheek before kissing him. It was a good kiss. Long, lingering, slow, deep, and returned with obvious but not sloppy enthusiasm. He pulled back and said, “Bekah, you make me feel so—”

  I interrupted him with another kiss, and when we paused he tried to talk again, saying, “You’re just so—”

  I stopped him again, the same way, since it had worked so well the first time.

  I knew at some point we’d have to talk about where we stood, what we meant to one another, figure out our expectations and assumptions and aspirations—but that meant I’d have to figure out what I wanted, and I hadn’t done that yet. I knew I wanted to kiss him right now, though, and see where that led us.

  I could feel him drawing breath to speak again, so I paused just long enough to murmur, “Trey, it’s hard to make out when you keep trying to talk about your feelings. It makes your tongue all wiggly.”

  He got the point, and focused on the task at hand—and the task his hands suddenly found for themselves. After a while I suggested we move inside to the couch, since there’s only so much you can do in the way of snuggling and groping when sitting side by side on a pair of hard wooden chairs. Once he was settled on the couch I climbed into his lap and put my arms around his neck and we spent a pleasant fifteen or twenty minutes engaged in a thorough exploration of how we each liked to be kissed.

  Making out is underrated. Too often it’s just foreplay, something to get through before you rush into the the bits that involve more nakedness and gasping. But a good makeout session is a work of art on its own merits, and a great way to learn a new person’s rhythms and responses…and also to figure out how well you mesh.

  Trey and I meshed pretty well.

  “So about that second date,” he said, when we’d slowed down to occasional kisses.

  “About that. Unless you’re totally sick of my house, would you mind having it here? I was thinking, you’ve cooked so often for me, it’s about time I made dinner for you.”

  “You can cook?”

  “I can do anything, Trey. You’ll learn that about me.”

  “I look forward to the education. So…you’re still not comfortable leaving the house for the night, then?”

  I shook my head. “Nah, that’s not it. For our next date I just thought we might benefit from proximity to my bedroom.”

  He leaned his head against the back of the couch and regarded me. “You’re getting a little ahead of yourself, Ms. Lull. I don’t know what makes you think I’m the sort of guy who puts out on the second date.”

  “My humblest apologies.” I made a show of getting off his lap. “I shouldn’t have presumed. Or else I thought all the days you’ve spent in my house counted as partial credit, a half date here, a quarter date there. By my count this’ll be more like our fifth date.”

  He pulled me back against him. “Hmm. I could conceivably put out on our fifth date and keep my dignity intact. But I’ll wait and see how good dinner is before I commit.”

  “Always wise to reserve final judgment.”

  “So this dinner.” He wiggled a little and resituated me on his lap; don’t think I didn’t notice. “When were you thinking? Because I’m plenty hungry now.”

  “Anticipation is the best spice, counselor. Besides, you have to give me time to go shopping. It would be gauche to cook you the same food you bought and put in my kitchen.”

  “We wouldn’t want to be gauche. Tomorrow night I’ve got family dinner. Believe me, I’d rather be here, but in the ongoing war that is my family, I have to pick my battles.”

  “So let’s make it Monday night. No time like the immediate future.” I slid off him, onto the other half of the couch. “Consider me sitting in your lap just then an appetizer, though. Because I will probably be too lazy to prepare a literal appetizer.”

  “I like metaphors better than petit fours anyway.”

  I stared at him for a moment. “I…that was terrible, Trey. That was not a good joke. Puns are the E. coli of humor, but that wasn’t even a pun. That was just a rhyme. Barely even a rhyme.”

  “You expect me to use my good jokes tonight? This isn’t even a date. Monday works for me. I don’t need to be up early Tuesday, either.”

  “What makes you think I’ll keep you up late? Who’s the presumptuous one now?”

  He leaned over, gave me a kiss not quite deep enough to get us both going again, and stood up. “I’ve got some errands to run, so I’ll leave you to plan your menu. No more than eight courses, please, I’d hate to get overfull.”

  “You like Italian food?”

  “Sure. I guess if we both have garlic breath it cancels out.”

  “Yeah, well, bring a toothbrush.”

  “That’s the sexiest sentence I’ve ever heard in my life, Bekah.” He grinned and showed himself out, leaving me to sprawl on the couch, looking up at the ceiling. I took a few moments to just lie there and feel happy, a kind of effervescent sea welling up inside me, all my considerable worries and concerns floating up to a distant surface and bobbing away out of sight. My lips still tingled from all that kissing, I was warm from Trey’s body against mine, and even breathing in and out felt good.

  I decided to prolong the good feeling with a glass of wine and a hot bath. The bathroom upstairs had the kind of big old-fashioned tub that was palatial for one person and would have fit two pretty easily if they didn’t mind being cozy. “House, I’m going to take a bath. Don’t let any bad guys in.”

  The house didn’t answer, which was fine. I still wondered if the ancestral manse was somehow self-aware (like a servant) or just reacting to my wishes (like a machine with controls so responsive I could operate it with my mind). However it worked, it worked.

  I got a big fluffy towel and my robe and went into the bathroom. There was water splashed on the floor around the toilet, and the sword cane was leaning against the tub. I grunted. Had Hannah come up through the commode? If so…ew. More convenient than coming up through the well in the yard, I supposed, but still…ew. It was a shame she hadn’t stopped to say hello, or least me know how things went with her mom. But then again, if she’d arrived in the recent past she might have peeked over the railing and seen Trey and me, deep in our contemplation of one another’s affections, and decided not to bother us.

  I picked up the cane and slid a bit of the blade out. Just as sharp and shiny as ever. I wondered if Hannah had renounced her claim, if the magic belonged to me again, and gently pressed the ball of my thumb against the blade. No blood, and no cut, and if I’d had any physical complaints I suspected they would have been cured promptly.

  I felt better havin
g the blade in my possession again. With my broom, my iron fist, and my healing sword, I felt pretty much invincible, ready to take on anything the Firstborn or the world in general could throw at me. Plus, I was going to get laid in a couple of days, and the prospect of sex with someone new and cute is always one that makes me cheerful. I was dancing on top of the world.

  Of course the problem with dancing on top of anything is, you’re pretty much certain to fall off at some point.

  I drew the bath, making it as hot as I could stand, filling the room with billows of steam, then slid into the water with one of the many books Grace had crammed on his shelves—a paperback mystery by John Dickson Carr set in a big old weird house full of secrets.

  I was eating it up.

  After a while I happened to glance at the fogged-up mirror above the sink and saw, written in clumsy finger letters that showed up in the steam, the words “THANK YOU MOTHER OK.” Hannah had left me a message after all. That made me smile. I wished I had a way to communicate with her, as she was my favorite half sibling by a score of infinity against zero. Unfortunately I couldn’t send a letter care of “black caves beneath the sea, not entirely in this dimension,” and she probably didn’t have an email address (unless she kept an iPad in a plastic bag under the waves). But she was half-god, so there could be some magical way to get a message to her. Prayer? Or did she only hear the prayers of, I don’t know, fish and cetaceans? Maybe yelling into the well would work. Crouching in the dirt and shouting into a damp hole in the ground seemed like behavior a mentally unwell person might exhibit, but my property was remote enough that no one was likely to notice me doing it. If I needed Hannah, I’d give it a try.

  After I was in the tub so long the water turned cool, I got out and padded downstairs, ate some leftover pasta salad Trey had made for us, and then went to work in the studio. I had a couple of small canvases more or less done, and another in progress. The first two were elaborations on a couple of the sketches I’d made: the lawyer with the head of a lion and the man with the head like a sun.

  I had vague plans to turn at least a couple of the other sketches into paintings at some point, maybe the fish-headed diver and the jackal-headed Statue of Liberty, but in the past week I’d gotten distracted. I’d started painting without doing any preparatory work first, even though past experience told me that was a recipe for unbalanced and cluttered compositions. I figured, screw it—I had enough money just then to waste a canvas or two on experimentation.

  I was painting a house, and it was a weird sort of house: almost photorealistic in the center, an old wooden place with a busted-up porch and a front door hanging askew. But as the painting approached the edges of the canvas on either side, the straight lines softened into curves and the angles twisted slightly out of true, like the sides of the house were being viewed through a distorting lens—as if the house were melting, or turning into mist, or transforming into some organic form.

  In the theater of my mind, which has always been a place where I could conjure wonders, I could see walls upon walls holding painting after painting, variations on this same theme. A melting house; a disappearing house; a sublimating house; a shifting house; a witch’s house; a house that isn’t a house at all, but a dream of a house, only someone lives inside it anyway; a beast pretending to be a house; a house of secret spirits; a house where all the windows only open onto night.

  Summoning up the images in my imagination was easy. Getting them out of my head and onto the canvas was harder. The hardest thing.

  Sometimes, I thought, the impossible thing.

  Often, I thought, the only worthwhile thing.

  I spent the rest of that night doing my best to do it. You can have your magic glasses revealing the night sky, your magic bells ringing in the truth, your magic brooms sweeping away whatever frightens you. I’ll admit they’re miracles. But taking something that exists only in the mind and turning it into something other people can see, can touch, can take in and be changed by—that’s always felt like the greatest possible magic to me.

  #

  The next day, as I kicked back on the couch with my laptop and uploaded a bunch of photos, someone knocked at the door. I put down the computer, slipped on the wristwatch, picked up the broom, and went to the door.

  I peered through the window set high up in the door, and saw that nobody was there. The knock came again, and I realized the house was making the noise, somehow. “What the actual fuck?”

  Once again, the house didn’t answer.

  If someone knocks, I guess you open the door, so I did…and saw a strange car trundling up the driveway toward my house, a dark sedan that was way too shiny for such a dusty track. Was it the same car I’d seen disappearing down the driveway in the night two weeks before? I’d told the house to warn me if that car came back—did that explain the knock? I couldn’t be sure. Oh, for a magical talking house.

  “I appreciate the early-warning system,” I said anyway. “Keep that up, would you? It’s nice to know when someone’s coming.”

  I stepped onto the porch, pulled the door shut behind me, and waited, the broom in my hand.

  A thin man unfolded himself from the car, and it was like watching a stork crossed with an extension ladder—he was easily over six feet tall, wearing skinny jeans, thrift-store flannel, and chunky black glasses, but with the kind of expensive haircut that’s meant to look like you just rolled out of bed. If he’d been younger he could have passed for a college radio station DJ, but I figured he was pushing forty at least. He raised a hand and gave me an easy smile as he walked toward the front steps. “Hello, miss. Is Mr. Grace at home?”

  “Are you incapable of reading a ‘No Trespassing’ sign?” I called back. “There’s one posted at the start of the driveway. Maybe you should go back and read it again.”

  He stopped approaching then, gave a little shrug, and said, “I tried to call first, to remind Mr. Grace about our appointment, but the number I had for the house didn’t ring.”

  That was plausible. I hadn’t bothered getting the landline activated, any more than I’d hired a milkman or subscribed to Buggy Whip Monthly. “If you had called, what would you have said?”

  “I’m sorry if I’m interrupting you.” He spoke in a stiff, “I’m offended” sort of voice. “My name is Ken Tenzil. I’m an appraiser—I deal in antiques, mostly, but I do all right with art, and I know enough about books and stamps and coins to know if you should bother to hire someone better qualified than I am to look things over. Archibald Grace made arrangements with me to assess his collection today.” He shrugged. “Here I am. If you’ll just let him know—”

  I wished I had the bell of truth with me—I should put it on a string and hang it around my neck—but I didn’t think this was the Firstborn in disguise. Hard to be sure, though. “When were these arrangements made?”

  He waved his hand like an insect was buzzing around him. “Many months ago. My schedule is quite full. I work out of Providence, Rhode Island, but I knew I’d be in the area for an auction, so I agreed to come here while I was in the neighborhood.”

  “Mr. Grace is unavailable.”

  “I do wish he’d let me know in advance, it was a long drive—”

  I decided to give the guy a break. “Mr. Grace passed away. I’m Rebekah, his daughter. I’m here taking care of things.”

  His whole expression changed, from annoyed but smug to apologetic and sympathetic. “Oh, I’m so sorry for your loss, I had no idea. I didn’t know Mr. Grace, we only spoke on the phone, but he struck me as a fine man. Do forgive me for intruding in your time of grief.”

  “No problem. Sorry you had to come all the way out here for nothing.”

  “Ah, well, as to that—it doesn’t have to be for nothing. Mr. Grace already sent me a generous check to cover the appraisal fee. If you’d like me to come in, I can take a look and give you a sense of what you’ve inherited. He told me he had many interesting pieces, but of course it’s impossible to say how much th
ey might be worth until I can look them over in person.”

  Maybe the guy was legit, but I wasn’t about to invite a stranger into my house. “No, thanks. If you want to leave a card, I’ll put you on the list if I decide I want anything appraised.”

  He sighed. “Miss Grace, I’m already here, and I’m unlikely to be in this part of the country again for a while. I have a hotel room booked for three days, which I hope will be sufficient to do a thorough inventory—”

  “I’m not asking for the money back. Take it with my blessing. Consider it an inconvenience fee.”

  Tenzil shifted from foot to foot. “Money is always welcome, but I’m more interested in the collection. Mr. Grace said he had antiquities from all over the world, and if half of what he suggested is true, I’d pay you for a chance to look over some of those items.”

  I shook my head. “Listen. I have no idea who you are. I’ve never heard of you before this moment. You’re probably exactly who you claim to be—or, alternately, you’re not, and you’ve got a trunk full of body parts and a bone saw in your glove compartment. You’re not coming into my house. I get that you went to some trouble to come out here, and it’s not your fault—but it’s not my fault, either. People die and things get messed up. I’m sorry about that.”

  He took a step closer, and there was something wolfish and hungry in his face—the look of a collector of rare old shit who sensed a vulnerable inheritance he might be able to snap up on the cheap?

  Or something more sinister?

  Having your sorcerer half sister try to murder your friend in your house tends to instill a certain amount of caution, but the line between caution and paranoid hypervigilance is a fuzzy one. Either way, I kept a grip on the broom, prepared to flip him ass-over-hipster-haircut if he came much closer.