A Legacy Divided

by Holley Trent

  She’d gone out for a salad and had been intercepted by Shea, who appeared in front of her in a floral-print shirt and a company hat, bearing flowers.

  Lora’s memory after that was sketchy. Her ignorance was disconcerting and like some physical thing invading her body, squelching her breathing. She didn’t like not knowing what was happening to her and around her—especially if she’d done it to herself.

  A Smart Car puttered past her, brake lights flashing as the car came to a fast, hard stop.

  Rolling her eyes, Lora kept walking.

  Shea backed up and rolled down the window. “Ugh, Lora. What are you doing?”

  “Looking for your father. If you know where he is, I’d appreciate you telling me.” Lora wiped sweat from her brow and took a sip of water from the bottle she carried. “He’s not in the fields, so I’m checking the house.”

  “Can’t you just wait a little while longer? I’m sure he has a good reason for not seeing you yet.”

  “No. My last name is Moller, by the way.” Lora took another bite of the apple and snapped her fingers. “Popped into my head just like that.”

  Shea grimaced. “Remember anything else?”

  “No, but give me five minutes. I’m sure I’ll think of something.”

  Shea eased her car up a bit more, staring ahead and drumming her fingertips on the steering wheel as she went. “You may as well get in.”

  “Why, so you can drive me in the opposite direction? I don’t know if you’ve ever been pregnant before, but walking on grass like this is a lot more work than I anticipated. My hips are going to be killing me tonight, probably.”

  “I’m not going to drive you in the opposite direction. I stand by my word because it’s the most valuable thing I have. I’ll take you to my parents’ place.”

  Lora wadded her napkin and shoved it into her bag.

  “Seriously. I will.”

  “Fine.” If Lora’s feet had been even slightly less sore, she would have kept walking. That sort of rebellion seemed like something she would do, though she couldn’t be sure, given her spotty memory.

  She folded herself into the car, shut the door, and welcomed the blast of cold air coming from the air conditioner vents. “I didn’t realize these toy cars had air conditioners.”

  “Ha ha.” Shea put the car in gear and her hands at ten and two on the steering wheel. “It’s actually my boyfriend’s car. My truck’s in the shop.”

  “Your boyfriend drives a Smart Car?”

  Shea shrugged. “Barely fits into it. He’s super tall. This sucker doesn’t accelerate very fast on highways, but it gets awesome gas mileage and that’s what’s important when he’s driving around in the boonies and there’s no fuel station within forty miles.”

  Shea turned down the long driveway in front of the plain, two-story, white farmhouse and parked behind her mother’s pickup. A couple of grizzled old hounds bounded off the porch and swarmed the car. Lora clutched her tote to her chest and scowled at Shea, who was opening her door.

  “Oh, they won’t hurt you,” she said, waving a dismissive hand. “One of them doesn’t even have a full set of teeth.”

  “I’m not sure I like dogs.”

  Of course, she couldn’t remember why that would have been the case, only that the distrust of the animals felt like an honest one.

  “Hmm.” Shea blew a loud whistle through her fingers and shouted, “Run!”

  The dogs bounded off toward the field at the left, likely looking for quarry that would never materialize.

  Lora went directly to the front door and opened it without waiting for Shea. “Hello?” she called into the house. “Is anyone home?”

  “Lora?” came Faye’s exasperated response, followed by a muttered, “Oh, Lord.”

  She sounded like she was in the back of the house, so Lora headed that way. “Is your husband home? I want to talk to him.”

  There came a metallic slam, followed by a duller one, and then footsteps.

  When Lora stepped into the home’s sunny kitchen, Faye was stepping away from what appeared to be a cellar door and wearing a smile that twitched at the corners of her lips.

  Epically suspicious.

  Sighing, Faye sidled around Lora and went to the counter where pies of some sort were resting on a rack.

  “Apple?” Shea asked her mother.

  “Yep. I didn’t taste them.” She patted her hips. “Weight Watchers again. You’ll have to tell me if they’re any good.”

  “I always do.” Shea got herself a slice and then cut a second, which she set onto the table along with a fork. To Lora, she said, “Since you’re here.”

  “You’re trying to distract me.”

  “No, I’m just trying to feed you.”

  “Fattening me up for the slaughter?”

  Shea snorted and fell gracefully into a chair without molesting a single crumb of her pie. “I assure you, if anyone ends up being slaughtered as a result of this situation, I’d probably be at the front of the line.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” Lora said to Faye. “To find out the nature of my situation.”

  Faye put on that manic smile again.

  “And what were you doing down there?” Lora pointed to the cellar door.

  “Oh, just straightening up. Spring cleaning.”

  “It’s August.”

  Faye shrugged. “A lady gets behind sometimes. I’m not as organized as you.”

  Shea shoved pie into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully while looking from Faye to Lora and back again. After swallowing, she said, “You’d best go find Daddy. She remembered her last name.”

  Faye shook her head and trudged to the back door as though she was being marched off to the gallows. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes. Don’t get into any trouble. And stay out of the cellar!”

  As soon as the door had slammed shut, Shea put down her fork and walked to the cellar entrance. “You’ve got to see the cellar. It’s ridiculous.”

  Lora narrowed her eyes in warning. “Your mother just told you to stay out of it.”

  “Because she knows I’m going to tease her about it. She spends a ridiculous amount of time down there working on her doomsday hoard.”

  “Her what?”

  “Seriously. Come look. Mom’s a prepper. I think she caught the bug watching those shows on Discovery Channel or something. She’s got a room full of nonperishable food that’s shelved by expiration date and then type.”

  Curious, Lora hitched her tote strap up higher and followed Shea through the open door.

  “Oh. Wait. Gotta turn on the light from out here. Let me just…” Shea reached around Lora and patted the wall outside the doorframe. “Damn, I can never find it. Hold on.” She stepped back out, said, “Ah.”

  Lora waited for illumination on the stairs.

  Instead, she got a door slammed in her face and the echo of a lock click sounding down the stairwell.

  “What the hell?” Lora banged the meat of her fists against the door and the contact barely made a sound. The door was solid metal and there wasn’t a bit of reverberation going through it. “Shea!” she shouted, and then again, louder. Pulling on the door handle yielded no results. She was stuck.

  A dim fluorescent light buzzed on overhead and there came a click and a burst of aural static from near the top of the door. Lora noticed the speaker mounted there.

  “I’m so sorry,” came Shea’s frazzled appeal through it. “I didn’t know what else to do. I’m sure they’ll let you out as soon as they get back. I couldn’t risk you leaving before you knew the whole truth. This isn’t the way you wanted to do this.”

  “So this is my choice? Is that really what you’re saying?” Lora balled her hands into fists at her sides and took a deep breath. She was getting lightheaded from rage and sat down on the top step. The lights were also on downstairs, and she could see the start of pale gray indoor-outdoor carpet and a wicker basket containing magazines. They looked relatively new.

 
“Your choice was to wait it out on your own without your memory. Dad thought that would be risky, and told you so.”

  “What exactly am I waiting out?”

  More crackling and static from the speaker. “Someone’s at the door. I’ll be right back.”

  “Don’t—”

  The little red light that had been flashing at the bottom of the speaker turned off and the crackling stopped.

  “Shea?” Lora shouted.

  No response.

  “Damn it.” She pounded the top of the steps and took a deep breath.

  She wasn’t going to panic. Not yet. Panicking didn’t seem like something she did.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Jody

  The woman with the gray hair tried to slam the door shut in Jody’s face before he could get a word out, but Nadia shoved her foot into the gap and wedged it open.

  “That’s not very hospitable of you,” Nadia said.

  “Gods.” The woman rolled her eyes and took a step back from the door. “Of course this thing wouldn’t happen by the books. That would be too easy, wouldn’t it?”

  “I’m looking for Claude Callahan,” Jody said, holding the screen door open. “Can you tell me where to find him?”

  “My mother went out to fetch him about five minutes ago.” The woman furrowed her brow and looked around Jody toward the driveway. “How’d you get here? Where’d you park?”

  “Not important.”

  After three missed landings, putting them in other Idylton locations, he’d hoped they’d hit the jackpot with Simone’s last transport of them. The princess was exhausted, and if they had to go anywhere else immediately, they’d have to go on foot. For some reason, the vibe he was getting from the town wasn’t that the place was completely open to outsiders.

  Nadia drummed her fingers on the house siding and squinted at Jody at the same time the lady with the gray hair said, “How’d you find us?”

  Her question could wait.

  To Nadia, he asked, “What?”

  “You getting those murmurs? Either there are some really shitty telepaths in the area or I’m having a stroke.”

  He grimaced. He’d been hearing them, too, but he was always careful not to assume they were encountering people like them. More than once, he’d made that mistake and had merrily approached people, thinking he’d found a lost clansperson only to learn that they were some other type of psychic completely unrelated to them. The Afótama tried hard to keep their existence under wraps. The community’s secrecy pact kept them all safer from potential outside threats. They had enough threats from within.

  “I hear them,” he said.

  “They’re on the web.” Scowling, she rubbed a temple. “At least some of them are. I can’t be sure about the rest. Tess would probably be able to tell.” She turned to the woman just across the threshold. “You have anything you want to confess? Normally, I’d put you in a chokehold first and ask questions later, but I made a New Year’s resolution to be less impulsive.”

  The woman opened her mouth.

  “If you’re not going to tell the truth, I wouldn’t bother saying anything,” Simone said wearily. “She means it.”

  “I wasn’t going to lie,” the lady said. “I may omit details on occasion, but I make a concerted effort not to lie. Folks around here don’t do that.”

  “Oh? Why’s that?”

  She shrugged. “Code of conduct. Been in place since around the 1820s when folks finally gave this community a name. We don’t lie, we don’t hurt people, and we try to help where and when we can if doing so doesn’t put any of our community at risk.”

  “Well, maybe you can help me with this.” He held his phone up to the lady’s face and showed a picture of Lora taken two weeks prior. “A lady who looked just like you was seen in our community’s surveillance footage with this woman. Was that you?”

  She swallowed. Nodded.

  “Did you take her?”

  She grimaced. “I didn’t take her. She…went with me.”

  “Under duress?”

  “Not physical.”

  “Did you blackmail her?”

  “No!” Her eyes went round at the insinuation. “Absolutely not. I didn’t threaten her in any way. It wasn’t like that.”

  “Then what did you want with her?”

  “I can’t tell you that. I don’t have permission to talk about anyone else’s troubles. Ask my father to tell you when he gets here. He’s the only one who has permission to talk about why folks come here.”

  “Where is she?”

  The woman notched her teeth into her lower lip and stared at a little tattoo on her arm.

  Nadia took her hand and turned her wrist over. “Why do you have that? That’s a—” She closed her mouth abruptly, and Jody could guess why.

  That little Viking longship with its red and white sail was a common emblem in Norseton. It was the unofficial symbol of the Afótama.

  “It’s for my boyfriend.” The woman pulled her wrist back in and pressed her thumb to the tiny tat. “He’s got one for me, too. It’s a little ear of corn, ’cause I’m boring and don’t have much else going on in my life. Grilled cheese sandwiches and acres of corn.” She snorted. “That’s all.”

  “Your boyfriend is Afótama?” Nadia asked.

  The lady pulled her bottom lip in between her teeth again and stared at the porch slats. Jody didn’t think she was going to answer, but she nodded.

  “Is he here?” he asked.

  “No. He’s probably at his office. He works for the town. I try not to bother him during the day.”

  “Who is he?” Nadia asked.

  “Not really important right now. I don’t think he’s got much to do with who you came here about.”

  “And you know damn well who we came here about.”

  Letting out a ragged exhalation, the woman moved away from the doorframe and gestured to the inside of the house. “Might as well wait for my parents inside. It’s muggy out there.”

  “Keep your hands where I can see them,” Nadia said.

  “Jeez. Come on. I’m not the violent sort.”

  “Maybe not, but you’ve got a brain in your head and for right now, that makes you dangerous in my esteem.” Nadia canted her head toward the inside of the house. “Go ahead. We’ll follow.”

  The lady sighed and moved farther into the living room.

  Jody didn’t know what kind of weapons Nadia was carrying. He preferred to utilize a sort of selective memory when it came to her collection of guns and blades, but traveling with Simone in tow, she would have likely been armed to her teeth. Heath wouldn’t have let her take Simone anywhere unless he’d been convinced Nadia could protect his wife.

  Not that Simone especially needed the help. As a fairy, she had a killer self-defense reflex and she wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty in hand-to-hand combat. Heath preferred that she come out of most tussles unscathed, however. With his own partner being in unspecified danger at the moment, Jody understood his worry deeply.

  The lady took a seat on the sofa.

  Jody, Nadia, and Simone took seats in chairs scattered throughout the room. They stared at each other in the silence.

  The lady rubbed her palms against her thighs and bobbed her knee nervously.

  Jody leaned his forearms onto his knees and gritted his teeth.

  He didn’t know how long they’d been sitting in that tense face-off but was nearly orgasmic with relief when he heard tires crunching on the gravel outside.

  “Don’t get up,” Nadia said preemptively to her. She went to the door. “A blonde and a guy with gray hair. Those your parents?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s carrying some kind of case.” Nadia slid her hand to the small of her back carefully, likely considering pulling the weapon she had there. “What’s in it?”

  “Lora’s stuff.”

  “What do you mean, her stuff?” Jody asked.

  The lady grimaced. “Just artifacts she gave
him to hold onto. Nothing morbid.”

  “Come on in, folks.” Nadia got out of the way of the door and gestured into the house.

  Jody stood as the man, who must have been Claude Callahan, stepped inside. His steely gaze flitted from the redhead at the door farther into the room.

  His daughter stood. “They showed up right after Mom left.”

  Her mother stepped inside, eyes wide with worry. “Oh, my. Well, Jeez, Shea, where’d she go? Did she run off? That’s not safe with her memory being what it was. What if he finds her?”

  “What do you mean, her memory?” Jody asked. In her note, Lora had said that she wouldn’t remember, and he needed to know what those people had to do with the state. “And who’s the he you’re talking about? Because I’m not going to hurt her. Fuck you for even thinking it.”

  Shea waved off his queries and turned to her mother. “I thought you were shooting me hints to put her in the cellar. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  Mrs. Callahan’s eyes went even wider. “No, I was serious about you staying out of there. One of the locks is sticking, and I didn’t want you to get trapped down there with no way for anyone up here to hear you.”

  “She’s in your cellar?” Jody moved his gaze rapidly around the house’s square downstairs in search of the door. “Get her out. Now.”

  “Okay, now wait.” Mrs. Callahan put up her hands. “There are some things you need to understand first. We know why you’re here. We know who you are, and you’ll just have to trust that we’re not enemies.”

  Shea cleared her throat and pointed to her little longship tattoo. “Definitely not enemies.”

  “That can mean anything,” Simone said. “Trust me that I know what I’m talking about. My ilk has some of the most perversely codependent relationships on the planet.”

  Mr. Callahan put the little wooden box down on the coffee table and pulled himself upright. He shoved his hands into the back pockets of his work pants. Then he grunted and stared mutely at Jody.

  Jody raised a brow.