by Holley Trent
Why do you think they’d care? a little voice inside her said. They would want you to be happy again, just like you wanted them to be.
Mallory had never been one to argue with her conscience. Her world was so loud and chaotic that she could rarely hear it speaking.
“All right, then,” Tess said cheerily. “Let’s see if magic happens.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Jody
Where are you going?
Jody paused at the mansion’s back door and drew in a breath as he considered Lora’s text.
She was probably streaming the video feeds from around the executive mansion on her laptop and was at that moment likely sitting in the library watching him depart without notice.
Slowly, he turned to the camera mounted in the wooden trim work, tipped the brim of his hat back, and waved at his woman.
A moment later, another text message flashed across his phone’s screen: ANSWER ME.
Grunting, he hovered his thumbs over the glass and considered his words. He could make up a white lie to keep her from stressing unnecessarily.
JOSEPH.
White lies didn’t work on Lora. She was too much a cynic.
“Fine,” he muttered and tapped, Didn’t want you to worry. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Shea is here.
Shea? Why?
She hand-carried some information her father thought we could use.
And you didn’t want me at the meeting?
Jody dragged a hand down his face and, remembering that she could still see him, moved out of range of that particular camera. He typed back, This is my bailiwick.
Seems like I may have some involvement in it.
YOU’RE SAFER HERE.
Yes, like Contessa was safe all those years ago when she got taken?
Low blow. Lora would have known that.
Disregarding the cameras, he stormed out of the building and turned off his phone.
Lora was sensitive, he understood that, and perhaps she had the right to be, but he had a job to do. They hadn’t been efficient at securing themselves from outsiders decades ago, but they learned their lessons. His job was to ensure that and to ensure that she was safe. She was irreplaceable.
Jody had gotten barely ten yards on the path toward the town center when Asher jogged over, waving. Normally, he looked young and naïve, but at that moment, the tension in his features hinted at his true age and origin.
“What’s wrong?” Jody asked with wariness.
“Mrs. Petersen is in holding right now. Do you have any idea where Dan is? Has he tried to come into work?”
“You have her? Loop me in quick. What’d she say?” Jody turned back to the mansion, thinking he’d check the badge logs, but thought better of it. Taking a deep breath, he turned his phone back on. While it booted up, Asher said, “She confessed she was involved in the Fallon adoption scheme. She claims to not know much else about Dan’s other activities. Keith believes her, I guess, but obviously, we need to ask her some follow-up questions once we pull research about dates and trips.”
Three incensed text messages from Lora popped onto Jody’s phone screen. He dismissed them and called her.
“Before you say anything,” he told her, “Ellen Petersen is in custody.”
“There’s a couple of wolves there at the prison with her now,” Asher said loudly enough for Lora to hear.
Jody grunted. “Do you have any idea of where Dan is?” he asked Lora. “Has he tried to access the building in the past couple of hours?”
No response.
She was going to make it hard for him.
“Lora, please.”
“So, you want my assistance now?”
He chose not to answer. That was a trap. There was no good answer. Anything he said, she’d commit to memory and remind him of later.
After a minute, she said tightly, “The logs show that he has not tried to use his badge to enter the building today.”
“Was he scheduled to work?”
“He would have thought he was, but obviously, we’ve already replaced him with less troublesome staff.”
“What time was he supposed to clock in?”
“Well, he was meant to be here at around three to start dinner.”
Jody glanced at the time. “Damn near ten now,” he murmured.
“Can you sense him on the web?” Asher asked. “Keith couldn’t, but he doesn’t know Dan personally.” He shrugged. “I can’t fathom how you do what you do.”
“I can’t specifically home in on Dan. That kind of hyper-focus on unrelated people is a skill that only a few people in my family have. Nan can do it, and Tess, and certainly Ótama, but I can’t process that much psychic information on the level they can. Is he here in Norseton right now? I seriously don’t know.”
“Shall I locate Contessa and ask her?” Lora asked.
Jody relayed the question to Asher.
“I don’t think it’s necessary. Keith probably is doing that right now, but since I can’t do the psychic thing…” He shrugged again, jerkily. “I have to resort to old-fashioned communication methods. I told him I’d go ask since he had a headache, but knowing him, he’s doing it away.”
“He had a headache?” Jody furrowed his brow. Oddly, he wasn’t reading any physical distress or otherwise off his brother, and he should have. He could sense him there on the web as though he were standing right next to him, but his mind was closed off. “Ah. He’s shielding. Not gonna bother him.”
He put his phone on speaker and said to Lora, “Keith’s probably indisposed right now. I’ll go check on him in a bit, but if you can locate Tess and see if she can get a reading on Dan, that’d be great.”
“Are you asking me to assist, Joseph?”
Jody ground his teeth and looked away from the implied question mark in Asher’s cocked eyebrow. “Yes,” he said tightly. “Your coordination assistance would be greatly appreciated.”
“Very well.” She disconnected.
Jody stared silently at his phone screen.
“Did I…accidentally kick a hornet’s nest?” Asher asked with hesitation.
“Something like that. But don’t worry. If not you, someone else would have. Are you heading back to the holding cells now? Is my uncle there? No one’s told me anything.”
“Yes, they were both there when I left, and no, I was going to wait for Lora and see what she said about Dan. We want to corral him before he notices that his wife has fallen off the web.”
“I’ve got to go to a meeting,” Jody said, already walking backward toward downtown. “Keep me updated?” He added in a mutter, “In case Lora doesn’t.”
“Yeah. I’ll send you a text.”
Asher was always so conceding. It was a rare trait in Norseton. It was a wonder no witch had snapped him up yet.
*
Shea sat in a cozy corner of the bakery guzzling a second cup of hot chocolate and earnestly sawing a frosted strawberry pastry into quarters. She’d driven all day to get to Norseton, and Jody figured the least he could do was give the woman time to shovel food into her belly.
Mrs. Holst had locked the doors and drew the black curtains shut over the bakery’s plate glass windows to afford the conference some privacy. Elliott was there, too, happy to be somewhat less cooped up, and chatting amiably with Marty.
“Okay.” Shea swallowed her mouthful of pastry and dabbed her napkin over her lips. “I was hoping to get to meet Contessa. My mother was going gaga at the idea.”
“I can arrange for that,” Jody said. “Tess is mostly busy lately trying to fetch her baby back from Ótama.”
“Sweet. And how’s Lora?”
“Like a squirrel in a cage.”
Shea grimaced. “Hopefully not for long.”
Jody turned his hands over. He’d once thought that he understood Lora, but she’d disabused him of that notion.
“Right after you left Idylton, our scouts pulled up a bit of intel about some names of potential infiltrat
ors here who’ve entered the community in the past few decades. Some, like Lora, were planted in the foster care system. And some married into the community.”
Jody rubbed his chin, pondering. “And do these people know they’re infiltrators? Are they plain human, or what?”
“My hunch is that some know, some don’t. We have no way of confirming that until we collect a few of them and squeeze out their confessions.”
Jody lifted a brow. “We?”
“Yes, we. From now until this mess gets tidied up, I’m the ambassador on the ground here. My father told me not to come home until it’s resolved.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because folks want to come home,” Elliott said.
Marty gave his hand an affectionate squeeze.
“Yeah,” Shea said, sighing. “There was a meeting. Our ragtag group of the lost, missing, and searching has long been committed to thriving independently as a safe refuge, and we still want that.”
“But?” Jody nudged.
“But it’s hard,” she said. “Out in the middle of nowhere, trying to keep the mysterious parts of your background protected from outsiders. You have to close a lot of folks out. It makes for some tensions, you know?”
“We know.” Most of the attacks from outsiders on Norseton had died down in recent months, but they weren’t so comfortable to think that the trend would hold up. They’d never rest on their laurels when safety was at stake.
“We took a vote of everyone in town who isn’t one of your people waiting to come back,” Shea said. “There were more Idylton residents wanting to leave than there were those who wanted to keep things the way they are.”
“Why such a sudden change, though?”
“I don’t know the answer to that. I’m just here to do what I’m told. Maybe they just all want to be a part of a bigger thing, and no one’s better established than you guys.”
“They want to be near the magic,” Elliott said, staring up at the ceiling. “It’s…important to many of them. Not just the ones of clan blood. The others, too. The cult kids and the outsiders.”
“How is it important?” Jody asked. Often, Elliott seemed to be grabbing messages out of thin air and relaying them without consideration. Though strange, he hadn’t been wrong yet.
“I don’t know,” Elliott murmured. “Probably because they don’t, either.”
“Maybe it’s a drive to stitch a strong group together to repair the rift that happened back in Iceland. Who knows what we’d all be if Ótama hadn’t left?” Shrugging, Shea pushed a little leather notebook forward and opened it to the marked page. “That’s the list my dad organized.”
Jody scanned down it. He felt like ice was forming in his gut as he noted each name. He knew them all by sight, of course, but a couple floored him. There was a parent of someone he’d gone to school with. Also, the woman who used to cut kids’ hair at the barbershop. And many more, but the last one practically aerated his heart. “Are you…sure about that one?” He tapped the name and looked up in time to see Shea grimace. “But she must be one of the ones who doesn’t know.”
“She knows. We know that with certainty. She knows.”
“Connect some dots for me,” Marty said. She leaned forward and peered at the page.
Shea’s finger went to the line in question.
Marty’s jaw dropped.
Jody sat back and folded his arms over his chest, shaking his head. He refused to believe it. He refused to believe that anyone with the surname Moller had been tangled up in the mess.
“I’m sorry,” Shea said softly. “We tossed the idea of redacting some names on the list to make this easier, but we’d only be shooting ourselves in the foot.”
“It’s impossible. How could Lora’s mother be a willing participant in the scheme? The Mollers had a child taken just like my parents did. Shelly mother worked for my grandmother, for fuck’s sake.”
“Yeah.” Shea pulled in a deep breath and let it out. “The reason we know,” she started slowly, “that they know is because we’ve identified their missing child. She’s no orphan. My friend tracked Eleanor to San Diego and followed her to a club. Bought her a few drinks and loosened up her tongue. She knows for sure who her parents are, what they look like, and where they live. She was coy about why she wasn’t raised with them, but my friend managed to put all the pieces together in spite of that.”
“Lora’s going to be crushed,” Marty said. “I would be. I don’t envy her for being in this sort of family predicament.”
“Ours is bad enough,” Elliott muttered absently.
“If it helps at all, I do think the Mollers love Lora,” Shea said. “I don’t know if that mitigates their involvement. You’ll have to tell me once the details shake out.”
Jody didn’t know if it did or didn’t. He couldn’t think straight. They were reckoning with one shitty blow after another in a time that was supposed to be euphoric for Lora. She should have been looking forward to having her first baby and not worrying that the people who’d supported her for the first eighteen years of their lives had ulterior motives.
“Do you…want to hear the rest?” Shea asked softly.
“There’s more?”
She drew in a long breath. “Just out of curiosity, what sorts of background checks do you do on the potential spouses coming in from outside of the community?”
“Pretty rigorous ones now, actually. The wolves manage most of the legwork. Lora helps, as does our staff researcher, Will.”
“But in the past?”
“Well, I think we were less rigid. We didn’t know what we didn’t know, I guess, and we can’t exactly investigate those people retroactively. Why?”
“I’m used to being the bearer of bad news, but this is too much even for me.”
“Tell me!” he insisted. That icy feeling in his gut was only getting worse with Shea’s careful reveal. He wanted her to just go ahead and rip the bandage off in one swipe, and then they could figure out what they needed to do to move past it.
“She’s related to him, isn’t she?” Elliott asked.
They all turned to him.
He shrugged and picked at one of his nails. “That’s…what I do. I make conclusions. People hate me because I make conclusions no one else wants to say out loud.”
Jody looked to Shea, impatient. “Is it true? Is Mrs. Moller somehow related to Magnus Anders?”
She turned her engagement ring around her finger for a few seconds and then performed a brisk nod. “Yeah. They’re related. Second cousins, I think. That’s why I asked how you vetted spouses.”
Jody kept his gaze fixed on Shae. “Right under…our fucking noses.”
“Listen, if it makes things any easier, I don’t think Mr. Moller knows the deep shit he’s in. They volunteered to have their daughter taken in by the cult because apparently, Magnus assured them that if his plan worked out, they’d all be very important by the time all was said and done.”
“And that appealed to them?” Marty asked.
“More Mrs. Moller than her husband. Remember, this was during the time before your magic had returned. Maybe you didn’t know, but a lot of the clan was feeling like the group had become stagnant and they were frustrated. They didn’t know what was keeping them here and what good being under Muriel’s authority was. Quite a few considered leaving for good.”
Jody grimaced. He hadn’t known that, but he could understand a little. The grass was always greener on the other side.
“I also don’t believe the Mollers are aware that Anders has reconnected with Lora, so if they seemed surprised by her disappearance, it was genuine. Their intentions may have been deceptive at the start, but I’d wager that if they’d have to choose Lora over power in the clan now, they’d pick her every single time.”
Jody wanted to believe that, badly. He didn’t know if he could process the thought that the people he’d always known as being such ferocious protectors of Lora could be caught up in such a nas
ty deceit. He would even buy that Mrs. Moller had just fucked up. If she’d told him that, he’d believe her because he needed to hear that so badly.
“Believe it if you need to,” Elliott said in his usual obscure way.
A minute passed before Jody realized Elliott had been speaking to him. Elliott had been staring at the ceiling at not at Jody.
“This time, it’s…okay,” Elliott said, and he looked at him then, forehead creased with concentration. “You can. People just…fuck up. They think they know what they’re doing but don’t, really. That’s where my mom messed up. She believed what she shouldn’t have.”
“I think we’re all guilty of that sometimes,” Jody said quietly, and gratefully.
Elliott nodded.
“If I were you, I wouldn’t tell her,” Shea said as she looked from Elliott to Jody. “If I were you, I wouldn’t say one more word to Lora about this mess. Don’t get her tangled up in other people’s shitassery. She didn’t ask for any of it.”
“And now everyone here is…going to be looking at her as some kind of mole,” Marty said. “How could they not?”
“You could take her away,” Elliott suggested.
“No,” Jody and Shea said at the same time, though likely for different reasons.
“No,” he repeated with emphasis and put his head down on the tabletop.
Shit.
“Lora already tried that,” Shea explained. “She left and that only complicated things more. And with you Afótama being how you are with your loved ones, I think the worst possible thing would be taking Jody’s partner away from him again.”
“Plus, it’d make her look guilty,” Marty said. “That’s one of the reasons why Mallory and I came here. We deserved to be here, and we weren’t going to let anyone pile the blame that Dan deserved on top of us.”
“So tell her,” Elliott said. “Give Lora a chance to choose.”
“It’s different with Lora,” Jody said, straightening up. “When you came here, you knew you were going to have a hard go of it. You knew people would be suspicious of you. But Lora is someone who’s lived here nearly all her life and is probably more trustworthy than any of us. With all the good she’s done here, her reputation is going to crumble like this.” He snapped his fingers.