A Legacy Divided

by Holley Trent

  “Nah. Just every unattached Afótama female of childbearing age. You hadn’t responded to any of their advances, so I assumed you didn’t like women.”

  “I hadn’t noticed any advances. And I’m fae. There would never be an issue of me liking or not liking a particular gender. We’re not especially discriminating that way.”

  “I see.” Normally, she wouldn’t have found a lack of choosiness to be refreshing, but given the circumstances, she didn’t mind so much.

  “Good. Now get some sleep,” he said. “I’m certain your brother will be growing anxious if you’re too long parted, and we must determine the best course of action in explaining to the children who he is.”

  “You’re right. I guess that’ll be easier to figure out when I’m not delirious.”

  “I’m sure many things will be,” he said inscrutably and notched his chin into her messy hair.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Idylton

  Lora

  “How is that working out for you? Are you just going to sit there for the rest of your life staring at me whenever you’re not fiddling with your phone?” Lora wrung water out of her freshly shampooed hair and scowled at the man seated on the other side of the coffee table.

  He was relaxed with his socked feet up on the surface, legs crossed at the ankles. At some point during her purposefully long shower, he’d apparently given up on trying to keep his hat down and had gathered what he could of his thick, wavy hair into a ponytail. From that angle, the fluorescent light in the cellar made his hair take on the brilliant maroon of the leaves of certain ornamental trees.

  Canting her head, she squinted at him, hands frozen against her hair.

  Red trees?

  The memory flickered in her mind like a light bulb that needed to be tightened. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to hold onto it.

  Those trees—all lined up in a row in black plastic containers.

  “A nursery?” she whispered.

  Jody’s chair creaked, and she heard the soft thump of his feet hitting the floor.

  She didn’t open her eyes, though. She was afraid she’d lose the thread. Pounding her fist against her thigh, she muttered to herself, “Come on, come on. Where was that? The trees and…”

  There it was.

  She vocalized an energetic yip of satisfaction and opened her eyes. “Greenhouse.”

  Jody lifted one of his thick eyebrows. “What greenhouse?”

  He always did that—annoyed the hell out of her. For two days, much of the same. Whenever memories floated to the forefront, he’d watch her in that curious way, never once lending credence to anything she had to say. He’d only probed her and pissed her the hell off because she could never add anything to supplement what she’d previously blurted.

  This time, she could, though. She cocked her chin with triumph and snatched the comb off the table. “Actually, there’s more than one greenhouse. I think they grow different things. Fruits and vegetables. Landscaping plants, too. They had some small trees with jewel-colored leaves.”

  And she remembered why she’d been there. The man who oversaw the greenhouse production needed some instructions from someone and Lora had delivered them.

  As she batted the comb through her tangled hair, she squinted as if the note were in front of her but slightly too far back to read.

  If I really try, maybe I can remember…

  “Something about lettuce…” she whispered. “And…tomatoes. Different kinds of tomatoes. And eggplant. And jalapeño peppers.”

  There was a name at the bottom of the note.

  “M…” She narrowed her eyes even more and set the comb down on the sofa as she sat. “M… L. Something in the middle. What’s in the middle?”

  “What are you remembering, Lora?”

  She put up a hand and shushed him. He was too distracting, and if he interrupted, she worried she would never be able to get back the train of thought.

  “There’s was an R in there. Muh-r-something-l.” She snapped her fingers and thrummed with glee. “Muriel.”

  That made Jody spring to his feet, and instinctively, she did the same, hands up to keep him back, heedless to the fact that the towel she’d cinched around her torso was slipping.

  “No, no, no! Stay away. Don’t touch me. I…”

  Muriel…

  “Shit.” She pounded her thighs and paced. “I’m supposed to be at work. I never miss work. Even when I’m sick, I…” She stopped and glowered at him, momentarily stunned by the concern etched in his sleep-deprived face. She had yet to figure out why the hell he was even there, except to annoy her and to stir up more old memories about how cruel he’d been to her when she was a child, and…

  That had stopped. She couldn’t quite make out when. But there was some point when he’d stopped bothering her, and she’d stopped fearing passing him on the street. There was something else there she wasn’t quite getting, but he was connected to Muriel some way.

  Muriel had always been kind to her. When Lora was a young girl, she’d taken her under her wing and showed her the secrets of the great big mansion where she lived. There was a private library there, stuffed to the gills with ancient books and artifacts. Muriel had given her cookies and patiently explained how the wonders in that room were organized and what they were used for. She’d shown Lora how to look up the answers to her innumerable questions about the Afótama, and if she couldn’t find an answer, she had Lora write them down in a little journal that Lora always carried in her purse.

  Lora sprinted across the cellar to her purse, fell to her knees, and rifled through it.

  She’d had numerous journals since that one. She’d fill one, index it, tab the most burning questions with sticky notes, and line the little book with the others up on a bookshelf in her apartment. Every so often, she’d pull them all and see what questions she could answer that she hadn’t been able to before.

  Lora found an orange leather book in her tote and thrust it up as though it were a trophy. She’d ignored the little tome when she’d woken up at the Callahans’ guesthouse and had assumed it was unused. The spine had been too perfect and the pages seemed too crisp at the edges. All of her books were that way. She babied them. “A piece of me,” she said to no one in particular and thumbed through it.

  Blessedly, all the pages were intact. No one had taken it from her, and she hadn’t hidden it from herself.

  The first page was blank but at the top of the second page was a query about Dan Petersen.

  She knew who he was. Knew he’d need to have an escort out of the building when he was fired, and that they’d need to scoop up his wife first so he didn’t get suspicious. She’d been working on arranging that before she’d left—before her memory had fled.

  She whipped around and ran to Jody with a hand extended. “Give me the phone. What did you do with the landline phone?”

  “Who are you calling?”

  “I left some work undone. I need to call Muriel.”

  Jody tilted his head to one side and folded his arms over his chest. “And…who is Muriel?”

  “She’s the Afótama matriarch. The queen’s grandmother. She knows everything about everything. I work for them.”

  He nodded slowly—the only confirmation he’d given her about her revelations in two days. “And do you know who else she is?”

  “I’m not sure what you’re asking.”

  He grunted and for a while, just stared at her. Crystal blue eyes that were entirely too familiar somehow, as though she’d stared at them up close and personal and had had good reason to commit their striations to memory.

  Reflexively, she moved closer, tilting her face up for a better look at him.

  He stood still as a statue as she got her fill of him, giving off no hint that her proximity affected him at all except for the increased speed of his breathing.

  His eyes were like Muriel’s.

  “Hall eyes,” Lora whispered.

  Letting out a ragged bre
ath, he closed and rubbed them. “So what’s that mean?”

  “You’re her grandson. The qu—Tess. Her name is Tess. You’re Tess’s brother.”

  “Yes.”

  “They sent you to find me?”

  “I would have come anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “If you don’t know, sweetheart, you need to keep rooting around in that chaotic mind of yours for the answer.”

  “Why can’t you tell me?”

  “Because I’m certain that if you can’t remember on your own, everything you’ve attached to those memories will stay buried. I don’t want to give you facts that you may not believe. I want you to know and to feel what you did before you came here.”

  “What am I supposed to feel?”

  He didn’t respond. He retreated to the recliner and sat. “What do you need the phone for? If it’s a good enough reason, I’ll let you have it after breakfast.”

  “I don’t actually need to negotiate my every move with you.”

  “I’m helping you help yourself. You’ve been grazing for two days. You need more calories.”

  “Hard to have an appetite with circumstances being what they are.”

  He raised his eyebrows and let them fall. “Are you going to tell me or not? I’m certain Faye is waiting to see that we’re awake so she can send down breakfast.”

  Lora put a hand over her growling belly and then cringed at the ensuing flutter from her uterine hitchhiker. “Okay,” she whispered to the child. To Jody, she said, “Breakfast, then.”

  He nodded and reached into his pants. After some rummaging, he extracted the phone. He must have had it wedged in his underwear.

  “Charming.” Shuddering with revulsion, she rolled her eyes and walked back to the table. She needed to finish detangling her hair or she was going to have a mess of knots on her hands.

  “Morning, Faye,” he said into the phone. “Yep. We’re both still alive. No mortal wounds yet, though I think I was dangerously close to earning one last night. Opened my eyes and found Lora standing over me looking like she wanted to shove a knife into my heart.”

  “You were snoring,” Lora spat.

  Jody covered the phone’s mic with his thumb. “Possibly because I was sleeping upright. I can think of six women off the top of my head who can vouch for the fact that I don’t snore when I’m horizontal.”

  She’d kill them.

  Or at the very least, make them cry.

  Lora had no idea why that seemed a reasonable response, or why she even cared, but she felt it strongly.

  Perhaps it was simply because an ogre like him deserved to be alone and anyone who didn’t see that needed to be removed from the gene pool.

  “You all right?” Jody asked, furrowing his brow. “Your face just went really red.” He straightened up and leaned forward as if to stand. “You need to lie down, or—”

  Shaking her head she dragged her tongue across her lips.

  “You sure?”

  “Fine.”

  “Okay.” Into the phone, he said, “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to talk to my uncle via video today. Did he say when he was coming back from town?”

  His uncle.

  Lora twined her hair into a quick bun and set it in place with the only hair elastic she could find in her purse. The thing was dangerously close to snapping, and she hoped she’d be freed from the cellar before it did.

  “Your uncle…” she mused as she padded to the bathroom to change her clothes. “Joseph?” She peeked around the doorframe in time to see him nod.

  “That’s right.” Jody disconnected the call and slid the phone onto the table. “Helped raise me. Did most of the heavy lifting, I guess. Nan was so busy.”

  “Yes, Muriel must be working very hard now.” Unless she replaced me.

  Lora dressed quickly. When she stepped out again, Jody was pulling food from the dumbwaiter.

  Something about the way he stood triggered her to move. Perhaps it was his posture or maybe the clothing he wore was familiar. But she moved to his back, lifted his sagging jeans to his waist where they belonged, and fastened the button.

  He stood rigid as a statue, gripping the tray.

  She stood there with her arms around his waist, scowling at his back.

  I’ve done this before. Why have I done this?

  She knew those jeans. Knew the exact way to tilt the button so it slid into the hole without resistance. Knew that the zipper pull sometimes got stuck at the bottom of the fly.

  She didn’t mess around with his fly, though.

  Dropping her arms, she took a step back, and then another.

  He looked over his shoulder at her with what seemed to be expectancy, but she didn’t know what she was supposed to be giving him.

  Am I supposed to be giving him something?

  He closed the dumbwaiter and carried the food to the coffee table. “Sent you another cold banana. Go ahead and eat. I’ll leave you alone and go shower.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Jody

  “It’s so wonderful to know that a portion of our missing has been found,” Nan communicated to Jody via dream later that evening. He would have preferred to sleep, having had so little rest of decent quality in recent days, but Nan was an opportunist. The moment he’d entered REM sleep, she’d jumped into his head.

  “I’m sure they’re thrilled at the idea of finally getting to go home once this mess is cleared up.” Jody’s body shifted uncomfortably in the recliner, threatening to wake and toss Nan out of his head. He was probably going to get desperate enough to start sleeping on the floor soon. Firm flat carpet would probably be a hell of a lot more gentle on his back than the unnatural incline of the recliner. “So, what’s the plan?” he projected to her. “They stay here until we’ve dealt with this Anders guy and we don’t tell their families?”

  “I think that’s probably for the best, especially since we still don’t know where the rest are. I think there are fifteen more of our clanspeople still in the wind, if Claude’s list was accurate.”

  “What did Lora tell you earlier? I gave her the phone and then she holed up in the bathroom with it.”

  Nan didn’t respond.

  “Was she sensible?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Yes, she was sensible. She said some worrying things about Dan, and it’s hard to act on anything right now with both you and Joseph being away, and with Tess’s chieftains being preoccupied.”

  “What did she tell you?” he asked, agitated. Nan was unflappable. If she was worried, he couldn’t help but be the same. “She’s not communicating with me much, which tells me she still doesn’t know who I am. Even before, when she was using absolute discretion with issues, I’d still have some general idea of what she was working on.”

  “She found out that Dan knew your father was from Fallon. That was a secret to all but the family. When April turned up pregnant and we brought him in, folks just assumed he was a plain-old human outsider.”

  “How did Dan find out?”

  “Don’t know. Eavesdropping, perhaps. The mansion didn’t have the same security features a few decades ago that it has now. Anyhow, Lora remembered that she spoke with Mary Nissen about whether it was possible Dan had been in Fallon in the time around Keith was born.”

  Mary worked as a paralegal in Norseton’s law office. She and her boyfriend Andreas were recent refugees from Fallon, and her late father had been a private investigator who’d stockpiled all sorts of rare and arcane books about Viking magic and the people who’d eventually become the Afótama. The books had been safely relocated to the mansion’s library and had been a huge help in tracing some of the more obscure lineages.

  “What did Mary say?” Jody asked.

  “She consulted her father’s journals for that year, and he actually made a reference to a strange visitor from Norseton who called himself ‘Dale.’”

  “Most Fallonites who are at minimally psychically competent can intuit lies.�
��

  “Yep. It was probably Dan. He’d been going around town asking questions about the Dahl family. Mr. Nissen thought that was odd. Your father was more or less an orphan. Nobody there was keeping tabs on him or anyone named Dahl. You and your brother and a few others are the only ones left with the name.”

  “Interesting. But, what did he want? Trying to dig up dirt about our family so he’d have some leverage?”

  “That’s my best guess. If Dan hadn’t been our cook, he wouldn’t be on my radar so much.”

  “What do you think he found out?”

  “Probably nothing. We know some things about your father now because we were able to piece together his family line with the help of Mr. Nissen’s books, but Dan would have known none of those things. Even if they were, they wouldn’t have been important. We hadn’t gotten our magic back then so it wouldn’t have mattered what the Dahls could or couldn’t do.”

  “And so while he was there, he, what, got the idea to snatch Fallonite children?”

  “No, I think that came later. Likely, soon after our children were stolen. Opportunism on his part. Maybe he thought that since we accepted your father so readily that we wouldn’t notice if—”

  The connection broke, and immediately, his brain flew into its panic response, assuming something had happened to Nan.

  He was trying to compel his body to shake off the psychic paralysis it was in so that he could grab the phone and call Norseton, but the lingering dream state wasn’t the only thing holding him down.

  There was a weight on his lap and soft, warm hands pressing against his cheeks.

  He opened his eyes and it took a minute for them to focus in the dim cellar.

  “Joseph,” Lora whispered, gliding her thumbs across his cheekbones.

  “Lora?”

  “I don’t…want him to know about the baby. That it’s your baby.”

  “You remember?” He grabbed her wrists gently and pulled her hands away from his face to kiss the backs of them.

  She nodded. “I had a dream, and the dream had a puzzle piece I needed.”