Heavy Metal (A Goddesses Rising Novel) (Entangled Select)

by Natalie J. Damschroder

  “Don’t be silly. I’m not doing much.” She typed furiously for a couple of minutes, hit send, and pulled up another program.

  “You’re doing a lot.” Riley was acutely aware of that and very grateful. “So what are we looking for?”

  “Well, I already looked up your mother’s maiden and married names in the database and searched the archives. There’s no mention of her. What was your grandmother’s name?”

  Riley thought hard. “When you looked for my mother’s last name, would my grandmother have come up in the search?”

  “She should have, if she was part of the Society under that name. She didn’t, though.”

  “So we have to look up my grandmother’s maiden name. God, that’s…” She put a hand over her eyes and went deep, struggling to remember a name she’d never had any reason to store. It popped into her head. “Freeman?” She looked up. “Yes! Nessie Freeman. I guess that would be short for Vanessa or something.”

  Marley typed in the name. “We’ve been digitizing old records for a few years. They go back centuries, so it’s going to take us forever, but we’ve processed beyond a few decades, at least. It’s not all organized, though. I have to dig in a few different places.”

  It took a while for Marley to search in the main archives database, then use the references to locate various files and the relevant documents within them. Finally, they had it all compiled for the three names the search had given them: Henrietta, Nessarina, and Beatrice Freeman. After clicking several documents open, Marley whistled. “Wow. There’s a lot here. Mostly meeting attendance records, though. Let me print some of it.” She clicked another link, and Riley skimmed the page with her. It looked like a genealogy breakdown.

  “So Nessarina was my grandmother, and Henrietta was her mother, Beatrice her sister. I never knew about Beatrice. Not really.” The page displayed a date of death before Riley was born. She remembered her grandmother mentioning a sister, now that she thought about it, but not very often.

  Marley handed her a sheaf of pages. After shuffling them into what appeared to be chronological order, Riley read while Marley kept working on the computer.

  Her great-grandmother, Henrietta, had been married to a man named Earl, owner of a company she recognized as part of a huge conglomerate now. He’d sold it before he died, apparently not willing to leave it to his daughters or their husbands. Back then, goddesses probably weren’t as open about their existence or as interested in using their abilities commercially. Witch burning had peaked centuries before, but its effects had lasted a long time.

  A membership roster listed rock and soil as the source for both Nessie and Beatrice, but Henrietta’s listing was odd. Hers was wood, with a notation of “depleted” after it, and a date when Henrietta would have been… Riley did a quick calculation. About fifty years old. Five years before her husband died. She’d followed within a year.

  “What does depleted mean?” she asked Marley.

  “Depleted?” The color drained from Marley’s face. “You mean like leeched?”

  “Maybe.” Riley grimaced. “Sorry.”

  “No, it’s fine. What does it say?”

  “Just a notation next to my great-grandmother’s source. Wood. Both her daughters had rock and soil. Is it weird that neither one has their mother’s source?”

  Marley shrugged and took the page from her. “Weirder that they had the same one. There’s no genetic component to source affinity. They might have misrepresented their powers to the Society—that could explain disassociation. Let me see if I can find something about the depletion.”

  Riley kept reading. Birth notices for her grandmother and great-aunt, then nothing until they each got married, one at age eighteen, the other at nineteen. Nessie hit twenty-one a year before Beatrice, and Henrietta reported their power sources within a month of their birthdays. But after that, letters repeatedly requested that both girls attend a Society meeting or come to Boston to demonstrate their abilities for the official record. The letters got more forceful until one said their continued membership in the Society was contingent upon such demonstration.

  The last letter was short and to the point. It revoked both of their memberships.

  Marley was right. Someone, whether Riley’s grandmother and great-aunt or their mother, had lied about their abilities. Maybe they’d hoped the Society would take them at their word, but they obviously hadn’t. What had happened?

  “No wonder my grandmother hated the Society,” Riley said, staring at the revocation letter. The words looked stark black on white in a way the original typewritten page probably hadn’t. “They kicked her out.”

  “Oh, my God.” Marley hit a few keys and the printer hummed. “That’s not all. You’ve got to read this.”

  Riley swapped pages with her and skimmed the old, cramped handwriting. She gasped and went back to start over, reading slowly. The words were stilted, the formal written language of several generations ago, and the paper had been old and worn when it was scanned. Fold creases made some lines hard to read, and a tear along one of them created a blank. But Riley got the gist. Whoever wrote this letter accused her great-grandmother, Henrietta, of letting her husband repeatedly drain her abilities for his own use.

  “How is that possible?” Riley felt sick to her stomach. The old woman’s description made it sound like abuse, but it wasn’t any kind of abuse Riley had ever heard of. “Have you ever—”

  Marley shook her head sadly. “It makes a lot of sense, though, you know?”

  “How?” Riley cried, looking up from the page and setting it hard on the desk before she crumpled the paper further. “I don’t understand any of this!”

  Marley glanced at the half-closed hall door and kept her voice low. “Remember how Anson got started?”

  It took Riley a few seconds to shift gears. She shook her head impatiently. “Something about giving him ability to draw power.”

  “Right. I bestowed some of my power on him. But it doesn’t last.” She leaned forward. “For us, as long as we have our source to channel the energy, we can access it. But when we take some of that capacity, some of what’s inside us” —she clenched her fist around her shirt and pressed it into her breastbone— “and put it into a willing receptacle, they can use only the energy we give them. Then it’s gone. I could have given Anson more, but it was limited and he was greedy. So he took it from other goddesses. All of it. It broke them, and changed him.”

  Riley blinked against tears of anger and shame that didn’t belong to her, but to a woman she’d never met. “So you think my great-grandfather was a leech? But instead of attacking other goddesses, he just kept drawing on his wife’s power? Depleting her to nothing? That’s sick!”

  Marley nodded. “I think he must have drained her very low before conception. Maybe kept her drained during the pregnancy. But that could explain why your grandmother and great-aunt didn’t have the power they claimed. So then they didn’t have it to pass on to your mother, either.”

  “That makes no sense,” Riley argued. “How could I have it if my mother didn’t?”

  Marley shrugged. “I’m not a geneticist, and what we are defies science. But maybe you’re a throwback in the purest sense? Like someone who becomes a piano prodigy ‘just like Grandpa Joe’ or something even though their parents have no musical talent.”

  Riley took a deep breath, uncertain why she was so angry about all of this. She’d never know if her great-grandfather had been greedy, if he’d forcibly taken what he wanted, or if Henrietta had given it willingly. With her grandmother and mother gone, she couldn’t find out if Nessie and Beatrice had been born without power, or if he’d taken theirs, too. Had they understood why and how they’d been robbed of their legacies? Probably not, since Nessie, at least, had blamed the Society. And she’d passed on the hatred to her daughter.

  A powerful longing for her mother overcame her. Her anger faded, and she understood it wasn’t anger for Henrietta, but anger at her. She’d taken away s
omething so vital and intrinsic from all of them, even Riley.

  “Is there any more?” Her voice came out raspy and half its normal strength. She pushed the pages across the desktop.

  Marley took them and stacked them neatly in a folder that she left on the desk, clearly available if Riley wanted it back. “No,” she said gently. “That’s it.”

  “How…I mean…” Riley cleared her throat. “Has anything like this happened before?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. And I think they’d have told me. There are some members who would have been very happy to connect me with people like that. Or kick me out of the Society, if they knew it had been done before.”

  “Okay.” Riley took a deep breath and tried to shake off the weight of this information. She checked the time. The offices would be closing soon. “We should get going.”

  Marley clicked to shut down the computer and hit the monitor’s power button. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. I just feel…adrift, I guess.” She stood while Marley shoved some files into her messenger bag. “It’s frustrating. I want to run to my mother and demand to know why she didn’t tell me any of this. Why she let me find out the hard way. She probably had no idea it would happen, but this whole thing makes me feel even more distant from my family.”

  “I get that.” The computer screen went dark. Marley switched off the wireless mouse and stood, stretching a little. “You said you have some cousins and stuff, right? Anyone you can talk to?”

  “No, they’re all on my dad’s side.” She went out into the hall and waited while Marley locked the door. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. There’s no point. At least I understand things better than I did before.”

  She could blame the Society for not keeping track of her family, for assuming once the power was gone, it would never come back. But what good would that do? These women weren’t the ones who’d made that decision. They weren’t even aware of it. Riley just had to accept it for what it was.

  “Where’s John?” Marley stopped at his dark office. “I thought he said he’d take us back to the apartment.”

  Disgruntled and depressed, Riley resented feeling like a child who couldn’t set foot outside without adult supervision. After training today, it seemed ridiculous to have to rely on a powerless man to protect her. And in the mood she was in, she dared anyone to try anything.

  “It’s only a few blocks,” she said. “We can walk it okay.” She wouldn’t plow ahead unprepared, though. She needed metal, more than the handful of nuts and bolts in her pocket. She thought of the tire iron in the training room and decided to go get it. So what if she’d look foolish carrying it? It would probably ward off more than Millinger stalkers.

  “Why don’t you call John’s cell?” she suggested. “I’ll be right back.” She hurried to the end of the beige-carpeted hallway to the stairwell, clattered down one flight, and pushed through the fire door into the big room now illuminated by two security lights on the wall. She grabbed the tire iron from its spot on the shelf and ran back to Marley, who was putting her phone away.

  “He and Jeannine had another meeting on the other side of the city. He’s pissed. He was supposed to be back here by now, but he’s stuck on the highway. Overturned fuel truck. They’re apparently turning cars around to go back to the last exit, but he figures he’s got at least an hour before he gets back here.”

  Riley really didn’t want to hang around, and part of her didn’t want to see him after what she’d overheard today. “Did you tell him we’d be okay?”

  “Yeah.” Marley smiled. “He didn’t like it, but he didn’t have any other solution. He said to tell you to get the tire—Yeah, that.” She laughed as Riley hefted it. “Okay, then. What do you want to eat?”

  They discussed takeout options as they headed out into the waning twilight and walked toward the apartment.

  “We have some chicken and pork in the freezer,” Marley mused. “Do you eat meat?” They paused at an alley to make sure the way was clear. “I have a recipe I’ve been wanting to try, for this pork chop glaze.”

  Riley stopped walking. A stone had worked its way into her shoe, and she bent to slip it off and dump the stone. Marley didn’t notice and stepped out to cross the alley. An engine roared, and Riley looked down the alley to see a motorcycle zooming straight at her roommate.

  She didn’t have time to think. She dropped her shoe and, with her left hand clenched hard around the tire iron, shot her other hand out. Power flooded her body and zipped through her. She realized then that the cyclist wasn’t trying to hit Marley. He drove one-handed and seemed to be reaching for the satchel draped across her body.

  Riley’s surge hit him at the same time his hand curled around the strap. Marley spun, but the bike tilted when it hit the dip where alley met street. He fell sideways, and Marley shrieked and jumped back, tripping over the curb and landing hard on the sidewalk.

  Tiny, hard fragments dug into her shoeless foot as Riley ran and awkwardly leapt over the cycle to land straddling the driver. He was young, his face shaved smooth, his brown hair trimmed short. He lay on his back, the shoulder of his long-sleeved shirt torn. Riley crouched and grabbed the shirt, pulling him up toward her. His eyes rolled, unfocused, as if he’d banged his helmetless head when he fell. One hand scrabbled at her fist.

  “Who are you?” She brandished the tire iron, concentrating on drawing energy to boost her strength again, and shook the guy a little. All the anger at her family’s lies manifested in a raging desperation for answers. “Who are you? Who do you work for?”

  “Riley.” Marley sounded confused. “He’s a mugger.”

  He could be, but Riley didn’t believe it. A mugger would have hidden his face and been on foot. Who mugged people on a motorcycle?

  “Who?” she demanded again, and the guy reached for his back pocket. She released him to knock his hand out of the way and pulled out his wallet, flipping it open. On the left, in the plastic window, was his driver’s license. The photo matched, but the edge of the window blocked his name. On the right, she spotted the top of a familiar-looking business card. Millinger’s logo. She didn’t recognize the name printed on it.

  Marley murmured something behind her. Riley caught the words “security team” and realized she had called someone, probably John or a member of the Society board or Protectorate instead of the police.

  Riley wasn’t waiting for them. She dropped the wallet and grabbed his shirt again. “Tell me what Millinger wants with us.”

  “I don’t know,” the guy croaked out. He tilted his head back and looked pleadingly at Marley. She held her palm toward him, and he squirmed in panic, his heels digging into the asphalt. He twisted back to Riley. “Please, don’t magic me.”

  “We don’t do magic,” she scoffed. “Just tell us.”

  “They told me to swipe the bag and bring the contents to the office, that’s all.”

  “What’s your job there?”

  “I’m a consultant.”

  “Aren’t you all.” Riley shoved him away in disgust. “Who’s your boss?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t have one. I get my instructions from the owner.”

  “And he is?” She stood but didn’t move away from him. “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know!” he insisted. He wiggled backward until she brandished her weapon. “Honest! I don’t even know if it’s a guy!”

  “Why would you work in a job like that?” she asked.

  “It pays a lot of money. But not enough for this!” He’d played her with his frightened weenie act, or just got desperate and then lucky. Either way, Riley wasn’t ready for him to lash out. His fist struck her in the side of the head. Lights flashed, and she staggered back, gasping in pain when something, probably a foot, hit her wrist and made her drop the tire iron. Seconds later, the small bike roared to life. Riley’s vision cleared in time to see the “mugger” skidding around the next corner and out of their sight.

  Riley curse
d loudly. Her head swam when she bent to pick up the tire iron. Only Marley’s grip on her elbow kept her from toppling over.

  “Are you okay?” Marley thumbed her phone again. “You need an ambulance.”

  “Don’t bother. I’m fine.” She rubbed her temple. “Who did you call?”

  “John. He’s alerting the security team. I should have called the police instead,” she fretted.

  “It’s fine. Don’t second guess yourself.” Riley was going to have a headache, but her vision wasn’t blurred and the lightheadedness had passed, so hopefully no concussion. “See if you can have them meet us at the apartment. I don’t think we should hang around here.”

  They hurried down the street while Marley called again, John’s anger coming through to Riley even though he didn’t shout. They got safely into the apartment a few minutes later, and Riley immediately went to take a painkiller.

  “You didn’t know him, did you?” she asked when she came back to the living room. Marley shook her head. Her eyes were too wide, though, and her grip on the satchel too tight, despite being locked inside now.

  “You know something, though,” she encouraged. “He said something familiar to you. Was it Millinger? You know Millinger?” She wasn’t sure, but maybe they’d never said the company name in front of Marley.

  Tears filled the other woman’s eyes. She dropped the satchel on the coffee table, sat on the couch, and covered her face. “It’s Anson.”

  Riley pulled her sleeves down over suddenly cold hands and wrapped her arms around herself. “You think that’s who sent this guy?”

  Marley shrugged a shoulder. “I don’t know, but it’s an awfully big coincidence.”

  “What is?”

  “He was an orphan. His mother died in childbirth, and he said his grandmother let them put him in foster care but stayed in contact with him. I’m pretty sure her last name was Millinger.”

  Everything she’d been told about Anson paraded through Riley’s head. He’d gone through a lot to get power the first time. How far would he go now?