by Holley Trent
Marion had had to adapt, and fast. Hard, though, when people like Ariel and Mark’s boss Agatha loomed nearby, staring at her like she were a State Fair sow, pondering her quirks. Agatha usually grunted and strolled off with her tea, saying nothing. She never did anything, and Ariel said that was typical for the old girl. She was a neutral rogue and wasn’t allowed to take sides. She’d even let Gulielmus kidnap Ariel from work once, but she and Ariel were cool about it now.
Weirdos.
“I’ve got three dozen here,” Clarissa said. “I think I’ll have two left to sell.”
“Who the hell is going to eat a dozen eggs?” Marion asked, already reaching for the mixing bowl.
John could really put ’em away, but that was an excessive amount even for him.
“Oh. Charles is here. He was parking the car in the barn when I left the coop. Looks like a new car. Shiny, and has thirty-day tags. Wonder what that means. Hmm.”
Marion shifted her weight and ground her teeth. The first words out of his mouth had better be, “Happy belated birthday. Sorry to bring you here and then leave you here like a pile of dirty laundry.”
She couldn’t believe how wrong her gut had been about that guy. Slimeball.
“You keep cracking those eggs, little girl,” Clarissa scolded. She rooted through John’s sack and pulled out a couple of pounds of country bacon. “Y’all are going to have to cope. You’re grown-ups. Act like it.”
“But—”
“Nope. Don’t care.” She set the heavy cast-iron skillet on the stovetop and began the artful arrangement of bacon slices within. “Y’all may be on the outs, but these boys are the closest things to grandsons I’m ever going to get. Play nice.”
“I’m holding out for a DNA test, because I really can’t believe if I’m your granddaughter, you’d really choose them over me.”
“Hi, I’m still in here,” John said from the coffeemaker.
Clarissa fisted her hands on her hips and narrowed her eyes at her. “There’s no choice. I’m an old lady. I don’t have to choose. I get whatever I want.”
“I don’t think it works that way,” Charles said as he entered from the deck. He heeled off his boots and set a couple of canvas bags near the end of the counter. “If so, I would be drowning in good favor right now. I’ve got you by, what, fifty, sixty years?”
“Let’s not do that math.”
Fifty years? Marion nearly smashed the egg she was cracking onto the counter. That would make him at least a hundred and fifteen.
She cut her gaze toward him bending over the bags and pulling out package after package of pastries. How long did cambions live? John, she knew for a fact, was the age he looked—not quite thirty. Claude was over two hundred. Why hadn’t she given any thought to Charles’s age? He was old enough to be her great-great-great-grandfather.
What a weird dynamic. No one couldn’t say that Clarissa didn’t have the grandmother thing down pat, but the fact she was technically younger than her adopted grandchildren made Marion’s head swim.
“Oh, God,” Marion said, stomach churning with distress. She was going to need another bottle of that chalky antacid soon, at the rate she was going.
“Any news from Big Daddy G?” John asked.
“Well …” Charles reached past Marion for the breadbasket, narrowly avoiding skimming her arm, but seeming not to pay much attention to her besides that.
Rude. Stomach concerns aside, she reached for the whisk. Two could play the you’re-nothing-to-me game.
He’d been playing it for a week, after all.
“No. I really thought one of us would hear from him by now since we pulled Krista out of the compound.”
“Refresh my memory, John,” Momma said. “Which one is Krista?”
“My second-oldest sister. The order goes Me, Julia, Krista, and then there’s Molly, who’s two. Krista was the most pressing concern. She just turned eighteen, and she’s so sweet. Would hate for G to get his hands on her. She hasn’t demonstrated any powers as of yet.”
“Where’d you put her?”
John grinned and rocked back on his heels. “In a convent down in New Orleans. It was Claude’s idea. She’ll be okay there for a while, but those nuns are expecting a hell of a payback. I wonder how many exorcisms he’ll have to perform for them. His mother used to do it for them back in the day. They’re tuned into the supernatural shit.”
Marion ceased her violent whisking, and really paid attention now. “Demons can walk into holy places?” she asked with a tinge of incredulity.
“Depends on their intent,” Charles answered.
She rolled her eyes up to the ceiling and wouldn’t look at him. They were doing so well. Why’d he have to go and address her directly? That made things awkward.
“Marion,” he said, and sighed. “You’re being childish.”
She lowed her gaze to him and raised an eyebrow. “Oh, I’m sure you think so, Father Time.”
“There’s no reason we can’t have a civilized discourse.”
“We should have had that discourse a week ago before we bumped uglies.”
John whistled low and made a not-so-stealthy retreat from the kitchen.
Charles huffed. “You really want to go there right now?”
“How ’bout you don’t?” Clarissa said, standing between the two of them.
Marion got on tiptoes and peered at her—her whatever he was over the top of her grandmother’s head. “Yeah, I do want to go there. I so want to go there, Charles. Let’s talk about that and what you did to me.”
“What I did to you?” His voice took on an extra-low rumble and his face flushed red.
“That’s right. I’m not convinced we would have had sex if there wasn’t magic in play.”
Clarissa sputtered her lips, plugged her ears, and shuffled toward the living room with Claude on her heels.
Charles blinked.
“No response to that, huh? Point proven, I guess.”
“You’ve proven nothing.” He took one long step closer and leaned in close so the hairs on her ear stood on end with his proximity.
She turned, putting her back to him. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Making a point, since you failed to. Tell me something. Do you want to fuck me right now?”
“What?” She wheezed, and she patted blindly for the egg bowl in front of her.
“Simple question. Do you?”
Finding the whisk, she wrapped her fingers around the wooden handle and pulled the bowl closer. “N-no. I actually don’t.”
“I don’t believe you. I think you’re sad I can’t touch you.” He shifted behind her, and now leaned in to her other ear. “You like it because I know what you want, even if you don’t, isn’t that right?”
“You’re insane.” He was raising all sorts of panic alarms in her body, and his proximity kept sending uncomfortable shivers down her spine.
She needed to move away from him, out of his field of gravity where breathing was so damn hard. “What difference does it make?”
“It makes a difference and you know it. You want me, and it’s not because I’m making you want me.”
“You should think about bottling some of that ego and selling it. You’d make a mint.” The words had come out of her mouth, but she wasn’t sure she believed them herself. Sure, he had a hell of a lot of swagger, but hubris?
No. She hadn’t seen that yet.
“It’s not ego, Marion. It’s simple psychology. There’s no magic involved here, although it pleases me to know you think it was that good.”
Suddenly, she found concentrating very difficult. Of course it was that good. “Please move.”
“Why?”
“Because—” Her reflex was to tell him Because I fucking said so, but she needed him to understand that she wasn’t just some petty, vengeful female. He needed to own up for what he did; or at least, what she thought he did. She drew in a deep breath. “Because you being so close makes me uncomfortable.
”
“That’s interesting, because if I had bound you up in magic last week, you wouldn’t be trying so hard to resist me. There’d be no discomfort. You’d just lay yourself down for the slaughter.”
“That doesn’t mean you’re not doing it now.”
He scoffed. “I imagine you’re immune to my ever-so-charming aura, or else we wouldn’t be having this discussion. You wouldn’t know your own name, your age, or the current host of America’s Most Wanted. Isn’t that perfectly serendipitous?”
“America’s Most Wanted is off the air. What is it with you boys and that show? And how is my lucidity a serendipitous thing?”
He stepped away and all that luscious heat on her neck receded. She spun around and watched him walk to the table. He pulled out the chair he’d formerly occupied and sank into it.
“Answer me!”
He pulled that knavish grin and tented his fingers as Clarissa, Claude, and John filed back into the kitchen.
She growled and attacked the eggs with gusto.
“Y’all gonna behave now?” Clarissa asked.
Charles made a conceding bow. “I apologize for my behavior. I can’t speak for Marion, but I’m sure she’s equally repentant.”
Marion turned her back so no one could see her baring her teeth.
“Charles,” Claude asked, “is Papa still keeping that redhead?”
“Yeah. I went by the coffee shop where she worked when I was in Idaho locking up the house. She’s enraptured, just like they always are. She was basically a robot. I’m certain she’ll tell him she saw me, and he’ll go and shake you-know-who out of his hiding hole to crack the whip on me.”
Who was you-know-who? She looked to Clarissa for clarification, but Clarissa shrugged.
“He does like them dumb, doesn’t he?” John asked.
Marion turned around and cocked an eyebrow at her soon-to-be brother-in-law. “But your mother—mothers—”
John grinned, and nice as it was, it wasn’t a grin that did anything for her. It certainly didn’t wake up her girl parts and make her ponder whether she was all that keen on going to heaven after all. Nope. There was only one grin that did that. “My mother isn’t dumb so much as a wee bit addlebrained. Generally, she knows what’s going on, but she has a condition Claude lovingly refers to as Angel Brain Rot. He did a bit of research, and found out it’s somewhat common for folks with distant angel lineage to not be as tuned in as they should be. Brains are working on too many frequencies.”
“You seem to be firing on all cylinders.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know if Ariel would agree with that. But, really, Gulielmus does make mistakes. Claude’s mother was a big one, although in that case I’m not sure how much he could resist her, and Charles’s mother—”
“So, Clarissa, I made some inquiries,” Charles cut in, narrowing his eyes at John.
John’s grin broadened.
Well, well. Secrets abound.
Clarissa didn’t turn around. She was busy poking the pork. “About what?”
“A certain offspring of yours. She’s been spotted.”
Now she turned, clutching her big fork, and eyes wide. “Lottie? Where?”
“Up in the Wyoming Rockies. A Fury I used to hang out with has a ranch up there. Spotted her and Mr. Thomas at the local tavern. She recognized him, but not her, and then made the connection.”
Elation sped Marion’s heart rate, accelerated further by the panic that settled in immediately after. Her parents? She hadn’t given much thought to them since arriving in North Carolina, even knowing they were alive. They weren’t much more than phantoms in her mind, occupying little space because she assumed she’d never cross paths with them. She was used to being an orphan, and perhaps the prospect of having so much living family overwhelmed her a touch. She would love them just like she was beginning to love Ariel and Clarissa, wouldn’t she?
Pulling her suddenly tight collar down, she swallowed. “What’s a Fury and why would one recognize my father?”
“A type of avenging goddess, and probably one in hiding like so many others,” Clarissa responded. “Your father is just an average guy, more or less, but some families are just more tuned in to what happens in the hidden world than others. Mine is one. His family migrated here before World War II. They were Romani and feared they were going to get caught up in the purging. Ran while they could, and settled in the Appalachians. Thomas is an Anglicized name. The original family name is barely pronounceable by human tongues. Anyhow, lots of seers and psychics in his lines. Sometimes people see too much. Know too much. Boogeymen don’t particularly like when humans shine spotlights on them.” She turned to Charles again. “Well, how were they? Did they look well? Did she talk to them? Know where they were headed?”
“She didn’t talk to them. She didn’t think it’d be prudent for them to be seen with a known supernatural entity. She did question the waitress, though. Didn’t know where they were going, but they didn’t plan on being in town long. Said they seemed well enough, if a bit tired.”
“Who wouldn’t be tired? They’ve been on the run for twenty-five years.” Clarissa sighed, shook her head, and turned back to the bacon. “Maybe one day they can rest.”
“Well, why can’t they?” Marion carried her bowl of beaten eggs to the stove and propped her hip against the kitchen counter. “If I’m safe here, why wouldn’t they be?”
“You’re safe here because no one knows to look for you here. When you stepped foot on this property, you were basically a non-entity. Then you turned twenty-five, and now the world, more or less, acknowledges your presence.”
“Wow. Glad to have some validation. I always felt like a nobody growing up in foster care.”
“Stop it. You know what I meant. In here, you’re safe because this house and the land it’s on are warded with spells. There’s old magic from before you were born, and new tweaks Claude has added since John came to us. It’s like you’re in a supernatural bubble. Folks can’t pop in or out of this house without a welcome, and if they’ve never been here before, it’s not so easy to find. Your parents aren’t dumb enough to come close because they don’t want to lead people here unwittingly.”
“I guess there’s a definite perk to living in the boonies where no one can find you.”
“Not just that. Most supernatural types don’t navigate with roadmaps, honey. The guideposts they use to find people and places have nothing to do with Cartesian ordinates.”
“So, what does that mean for me? That I’m trapped here forever? Forever’s a long time.”
“No kidding,” Charles murmured from the doorway he’d walked to.
“Ignore him,” Clarissa said. “He’s got a death wish for some reason. I don’t know about you, but if I were damn near immortal, I’d be a bit more thankful.”
“The difference between you and me, Clarissa, is that you have goals and motivations,” Charles said. “You know where you’re going when you leave Earth. Me? What the fuck do I have? I wake up every day with a goddamned demon breathing down my neck nagging me about quotas. With the exception of one short period, I haven’t been truly happy in a hundred years, I’m in a hellish bureaucratic merry-go-round, and everyone I know from before Pop brought this shit online—”
He held up a palm and some unreadable glyph beneath his skin flashed blue.
Marion closed her eyes and put up a hand to cover her face, feeling the sear from mere proximity. What the hell was that?
“—is dead,” Charles finished. “So, yeah. Some days, I wonder, why bother? The moment I think I can have something for myself that’ll bring me even a modicum of joy …” He let his voice trail off, but his gaze flitted over to Marion.
Clarissa looked from Charles to Marion, and turned back to the stove.
“I’m sorry for both of you. Really. I love you both, and don’t want either of you miserable, but I’m the kind of selfish old broad who’d rather you be miserable and alive so I can have you, than you
being reckless and dead.” She dropped a second pan onto a burner and cranked up the heat. “So suck it up, buttercups.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“I swear this isn’t a ploy for me to leave the property and explore. I’m pretty sure I’m dying. Call an ambulance.” Marion pulled the sofa pillow closer and jammed it over her head. Her head hurt. Eyes hurt. Gut roiled. “No. Call the coroner. That’s where I’m headed.”
She knew this feeling well. She’d been on a bender or two in her life, and had woken up feeling like she’d walked through Hell and her body still bore reminders of it. But she hadn’t had anything stronger than French Market coffee in two weeks. Before that, she’d had a couple of glasses of wine on her birthday, and then there were a few beers with John and Claude.
Certainly, at no point in her recent memory, had she purposefully consumed mass quantities of Hellfire.
“I’m sure it’s just a little bug,” Ariel said from the end of the sofa. She kneaded Marion’s arches and massaged her ankles. She muttered something about pressure points, and Marion had to admit she felt a little less queasy with her sister’s careful touch.
Her sister. Her actual sister. Clarissa hadn’t seen the point of it, but one day Ariel had come home after work with a couple of swabs in test tubes. “Swish that against your cheek,” she’d said, indicating one swab. Marion didn’t know how much it’d cost her, but the results came back fast and conclusive.
“Told you so,” Clarissa had muttered.
“There’s been a lot of bodies traveling in and out of this house lately,” Ariel said. “Could have picked something up from one of them. I’d imagine your immune system is nowhere near as keyed up as mine since you’ve spent so much time alone in your truck.
“Maybe you’re right,” Marion said into the sofa crease. “But still. I need a doctor to tell me I’m not dying or I won’t believe it.”
The deck door creaked open, and banged closed, and Marion sighed beneath her pillow. “Which of the cambion giants is it this time? God forbid I have a single afternoon to watch television in peace.”