A Legacy Divided

by Holley Trent

  She won’t laugh at me.

  “Mallory…”

  “Hmm?”

  “What is…” Swallowing, he opened his palm, hissing as his sticky, heavy appendage fell to his thigh. “What is in my hand?”

  Smoothing her hands down his chest before removing them from his shirt, she moved around him, gaze carefully directed over his waist.

  He wished she didn’t feel she had to be so cautious. He wanted to know what she thought of him—if he was normal, or if he fell short in yet another area of his life.

  “That’s the product of sex, Asher. Your ejaculate. Cum, some guys call it.”

  He closed his fingers over the liquid that threatened to seep off his hand and held the mess beneath running water in the sink. “What does it do?”

  As he scrubbed his hands, Mallory drew small, soothing circles at the base of his back. Her touch felt nice. He didn’t know if it was because he’d just had a release, if her Afótama nature was affecting him, or if he was simply projecting and hoping for there to be more happening than there really was.

  “No one’s ever taught you this?” she asked softly. “Really?”

  He shook his head. “As I said, my father never had an opportunity to, and I imagine my mother would have been too embarrassed to say such things. She was quite reserved.”

  He couldn’t imagine his mother having ever touched his father in such a way, but she must have done something or else there wouldn’t be an Asher.

  Shrugging, he dried his hands on one of the scratchy towels and then bent to grab his briefs. “I imagine I have more to learn. I know that women have different parts.”

  “Yeah, we do.”

  “I hope you’re not ashamed to be around me now.”

  She let out a quiet laugh and reached up to notch his hair behind his ears. “If you’d been anyone else, maybe I would have been.” Her expression was soft and so tender. “But you’re Asher. You’re honest to a fault, and I should know to never doubt your intentions.” She pushed up onto her tiptoes and pressed a kiss on him as high up as she could reach—the side of his neck—before leaving the bathroom.

  He didn’t know what that meant—“If you’d been anyone else”—but the words didn’t sit right with him, no matter how sweetly she’d said them. He got the distinct feeling that while she considered him to be special in a way, it wasn’t in the right way.

  He didn’t know what the right way was, but wanted to figure it out soon.

  Perhaps she needed to provide him with another lesson on the things his body could do and look at him thoroughly while she did it.

  He found himself nodding.

  Yes, she needed to look at him and touch him, too, and perhaps then, she’d let him touch her back and teach him the things that women’s bodies did, as well.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Executive Mansion, Norseton

  Jody

  Nadia caught up to Jody in the back hallway of the mansion and followed him into the corridor that led to his old suite.

  “Don’t talk until we’re in the quiet room,” she said.

  “Mm-hmm.” He knew the deal. The walls had ears.

  Ever since Tess had hooked up with Ollie and Harvey, Jody hadn’t needed to be on-site full time. Although he spent the majority of his downtime in his fully equipped apartment, he kept a little fixer-upper about a block away from the mansion. It was a work in progress. Lora had once said in passing that she’d admired the house, and so he’d bought it the moment the last owners had decided they needed something larger.

  She’d been stunned by the purchase, in her cautiously restrained way, but he could tell she was pleased. If she hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have spent so many hours exploring the nooks and crannies of the craftsman style home. She knew that damn house better than he did, and that told him to go look.

  Apparently, she hadn’t rushed so quickly out of Norseton that she couldn’t handle business.

  She’d been at his house before she’d left, and he’d found her figurative fingerprint in a cubbyhole of his built-in bookcases. There was a small statue there that hadn’t been there before—a little Viking warrior with sword raised high. He’d had a piece of paper taped to the back of his shield. Two inches by two inches—just enough room for her to have written:

  Joseph, I won’t remember.

  Using his legal name was significant in a way that only she would have known. He’d been Jody since he was born. People called him that to easily differentiate him from his uncle, who’d devised the nickname. Jody was, really, “Joe. D.” with the D standing for Dahl.

  Everyone knew him as Jody and called him that, except for Lora when they were in public. When she was speaking to Tess, he was always, “your brother.” When speaking with Nan, he was “your grandson.” If she had to address him directly, he was generally, “Mr. Dahl.”

  In private, he was Joseph, because that was the name his parents had given him, and she thought names were important.

  The moment he and his cousin had stepped into the library and latched the door behind them, Nan—at the desk—waved him over. Crowded behind the desk with her were Maggie, Will, and Ótama.

  “You’re disquieted,” Nan said. “What happened?”

  He shrugged off the strap of the duffel bag he’d hastily packed at his apartment and then pressed his hands against the desk’s edge. “Lora left me a second note. I just found it at my house on a little Viking statue. It said she wouldn’t remember. I don’t know what she meant. Remember what?”

  Or who? Me? All of us?

  Nan grimaced. “I wonder if she wasn’t supposed to tell you.”

  “Given the care she took in hiding the message, I think it’s safe to say she wasn’t supposed to share that information. Tell me you have a lead to go on so I can hit the road. I know the Mollers were a dead end.” They’d been too stunned to even speak. Lora hadn’t visited them for a week before she’d left, and that wasn’t like her. He’d decided not to broach the subject of her pregnancy. It seemed to him that if she’d wanted them to know, certainly she would have told them. Whatever her reveal plan was, he wasn’t going to sabotage it yet. He knew he might not have a choice if they ran out of leads.

  “I don’t know if I’d call it a lead, but pieces are definitely starting to come together.”

  “Let’s zip back to the beginning,” Nadia said, efficient as always. She was probably eager to return to Tess. She tended to get uncomfortable the longer she was away from her charge, which only meant that the cousins were bonded the way they were supposed to be—the way his daughter would be with April. “Jody’s only been getting information in dribs and drabs about the Petersen situation.”

  He put up a hand. “Wait. Did you get any information from Mallory last night?”

  “Yeah, actually. Last I heard, she and the boys were on a direct intercept path with her brother. We were able to find out his name because he was at a gas station and got carded for beer. I happened to be in Mallory’s head at the moment, so I took a chance and was able to bounce into his. Glad to know I’m able to do that.”

  “You hadn’t been able to before?”

  “No. I’ve never jumped from another person’s sleeping consciousness into that of the third party I’m tracking. He’s of clan blood for sure, though I can’t guess what else he might be. His name is Elliott Booker. We got a couple of wolves working on investigating his background with Dad. We don’t have a whole lot of information to go on as far as where he’s from, but having his birthdate helped. Dad was going to try to some DMV searches and stuff. Anyway, I imagine Mallory will be checking in soon.”

  “And Keith?”

  Nadia grimaced. “Mallory was being coy, but I think he was being an asshole as always.”

  Jody groaned. His brother didn’t use to be that way. Before he’d left on his quixotic journey to find a place by the sea for the Afótama, he’d been social and collegial, and he’d told the best jokes. Jody wasn’t even sure Keith kne
w any jokes anymore. “I’ll call his cell.”

  “Can’t hurt. Sometimes he needs to be redirected, and I guess it’s your turn. I was the hapless volunteer last time. Okay. Now, back to the issue of Lora.” She pointed to the confab behind the desk. “Take it away.”

  “We found something interesting,” Will said, pushing his glasses up his nose.

  “What?” Jody asked.

  “We pulled some hair out the brush Lora keeps in her office bathroom. We wanted to grab a DNA profile on her in case anything should happen.”

  In case she turned up dead, he meant.

  Jody dug his nails into the meat of his palms and held his tongue. He didn’t want to think about his woman being dead. He didn’t want to think about a single hair on her head being harmed, but whether he wanted to or not, that was a possibility. He needed to be ready for all things.

  “And?” he asked through clenched teeth.

  “And you know how no one, including Lora, knows what she is?”

  “Ethnically, you mean.”

  Will turned his hands over to concede the point. “Well, we have a better idea now. About half of what she is the same kind of Nordic we are. We’re talking about the kind that goes way back to Denmark before the Vikings migrated to Iceland.”

  “What?” He didn’t know why he was surprised. Coincidences were bound to happen occasionally. Sometimes, he thought they didn’t happen enough in Norseton.

  “She’s got to get that from her father. The haplogroup she inherited from her mother suggests that branch of her family tree originates elsewhere. Whatever her mother was—which I’m still not a hundred percent certain of yet because the group’s pretty rare—she must have been more or less ethnically homogenous and not similar to us in that way. We can’t get any more information about Lora’s father without her having a brother or a paternal uncle to give us a DNA sample, but that’s not a major concern right now. What we do know is that, as far as we can tell, she’s not related to anyone here in Norseton and likely not in Fallon, either. He was probably just some plain-old human guy. But—” He gestured for Jody to bend closer to the books he was leaning over. He pointed to a short strip of yellow highlighting on what must have been Lora’s DNA readout.

  “What are you showing me?”

  “This is a very specific genetic defect that doesn’t exist in many population groups outside of Ótama’s tribe. Almost everyone in Norseton has it. We suspect it’s the gene that makes our psychic and possibly our magic abilities possible. Other people in the world have it, but like Lora, they’re likely just carriers for the trait. Anyway, we’re spitballing here. Lora might be interesting to some people because of that defect.”

  “Interesting to the same kind of people who’d kidnap a future Afótama queen,” Nadia said.

  “Wait.” Jody pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. “Is this somehow relevant to the mess we’re in or is it potentially a new mess?”

  “Hard to know, isn’t it?” Maggie said. “I guess this would have been easier to figure out before now if she’d had any magic at all or any psychic inclination whatsoever.”

  “Curious that you would say that,” Ótama mused. “As next in line to lead the clan, I was the only one of my parents’ children with abilities far outside the ordinary. The psychic intuitions our fighters had developed over the ages had become normal enough in our group as did the telepathy others of us had within our family groups. Within our household, gifts amongst the women were more unusual. For instance, we could easily find our kin and connect to them from far away. Naturally, that made many of our allies suspicious of us.”

  Jody could see where that would be the case. Fallonites had long been wary of the Afótama for similar reasons.

  “Some of my abilities are due to birth order inheritance,” Ótama said. “I was the oldest girl and our magic as always been more completely inherited by our girl children. For whatever reason, as time and generations progressed, the first girl got the bulk, and if there was no girl, the magic seemed to get held back more and more over time. Sort of like going into a savings account no one could draw on.”

  “Until Tess,” Jody said. He let his hand fall and opened his eyes.

  Ótama nodded. “I suppose the gods knew what they were doing. Anyhow, as I was saying, only I got the magical capability you children are rapidly developing now, but one of my siblings didn’t even have any psychic proclivity at all. We tried to include her in everything we did, but I think she couldn’t help but feel left out or less loved. Of course, we loved her very much. Still, I’d be curious to see what Astrid’s lineage looks like now in comparison to mine or my brother’s or my other sisters’.”

  Will drummed his fingertips atop the table and knit his brows. “I’ll see who I can get in touch with in Iceland who might have some insight on the genealogies from around that time. If your clan was more literate than most, there may be some information passed down through oral history and recorded somewhere. So, I’ll ask specifically about Alfarinn and go from there. It’s hard to find information about women unless they were in major battles or were wives or mothers of important men, but maybe we’ll luck out.”

  Jody nodded. “And if you can find the living line…”

  “I’ll find out if anyone from it would be willing to take a DNA test. If there are mutations similar to Lora’s, we might be able to find some people with Icelandic and Danish roots who have similar constitutions. And we can find out if there’s any social connection between them at all.”

  “We’ll have answers and a lot more questions.” Nan passed a hand down her face and rolled back her shoulders as she straightened up. “Well. We never promised to be a laidback little clan, did we?”

  Ótama giggled. “I’m not entirely certain expecting such from Vikings is wise.”

  Nadia sat on the edge of the desk and folded her arms over her chest. “So, Dad did some tracking on the flower delivery company whose van came in.”

  “Anything sketchy?” Jody asked.

  “No, they’re legit. Our vendor logs say they’ve been delivering here for two years with no issue. They do good work, and sometimes swing by the greenhouses to see if our gardeners have anything they want to offload.”

  “What do we know about the people who own it?”

  “They’ve got a local address about thirty miles from here, but on Adam’s urging, Dad dug deeper into the name they incorporated under. They’re actually not registered as a New Mexico business, but a Nebraskan one with a New Mexico DBA.”

  “Huh?”

  Nadia gave a slow nod. “A business called CFC Farm Ventures.”

  “What do we know about it?”

  “Principals are listed as Claude Callahan and a couple of others I can’t remember. Did a bit of searching on Claude. If our info is right, he’s the mayor of a small farming town in a place called Idylton. There isn’t much on the Internet about him beyond that. No YouTube videos, and no personal Facebook presence that I can find.”

  “Might be findable only by friends of friends.”

  “I thought the same. We did find his picture on the town’s government page, though, and there was a little profile about him. Seems to be a well-liked guy.”

  “Did anyone here call him?”

  “Yeah. I called from Thom’s cell since the number is untraceable and asked who I could talk to about farm questions. They referred me to the guy’s secretary, who is apparently also his wife. Super bubbly lady, but kinda cagey, you know?”

  “What do you think?”

  Nadia studied her blood red nails. “Well, since Tess is the one with the magical gut, I asked her an hour ago.”

  “And what did my little sister’s magical gut tell you about the Callahans?”

  “Said to go to Nebraska.”

  Jody grabbed his bag and started walking to the door.

  “Uh. Don’t you need directions or…a team, or something?” Nadia called after him.

  “I need to fi
nd a way to Nebraska.”

  “I’ll organize the team while you sort that out.”

  “Please.”

  “I’ll go,” Ótama said with a surprising tone of eagerness that made Jody stop in his tracks. The woman never left the community.

  There was a murmured chorus of “no” as Jody turned to face her, and one of those voices was distinctively Lachlann’s.

  “Believe it or not, I can take care of myself,” she said.

  Lachlann gave his head a dire shake.

  Unfortunately, Ótama saw him. There was a momentary quiver in the web. She was getting angry.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” she demanded.

  “Whatever you’d like it to mean, my lady. Whatever soothes your confidence.”

  “You’re condescending to me.”

  “I am merely seeking to avoid heightening your stress.”

  “Such pretty doublespeak, fairy. Did you learn that in Rhiannon’s court? Is that how you’ve stayed alive for so many centuries?”

  Jody couldn’t be entirely certain from where he stood, but he was pretty sure the ancient fairy rolled his eyes.

  “I can be useful,” Ótama said. “I can do things.”

  “You’ve been sheltered here for many months, and your last residence was in a realm with a population of one. You need time to reacclimatize to this world.”

  “You think I’m silly? You think I’ll canter off and do something foolish or reckless? Or that I can’t tell when people wish to do me harm? I’m not so naive as you all believe. I know there are still people who’d wish to hurt me. The queens have always been the most vulnerable in our clan. My parents drilled that into my head from the time I was old enough to understand that it wouldn’t be my brother stepping into their roles when my parents died, but me. My father was the last of the chieftains for a reason. Our women held the clan together. Always did.”