by SM Reine
“She’s a witch hunter!” Ashley tried to claw past him, but Lincoln barred her.
“Sophie?” he asked.
The Historian was studying the charms on her bracelet. “Yes, it would be…this one. It did indeed belong to a witch hunter. Well spotted! An impressive show of obscure knowledge.” Sophie pointed to the offending charm, arm lifted so that Lincoln could see a little green bead with wire wrapped around it so that it looked like a half-closed eye.
“What’s a witch hunter?” Lincoln asked.
“Super-strong men who go around killing harmless witches,” Ashley said.
“Another term for kopides,” Sophie explained. “Calling them witch hunters is an archaic regional term, though. It originates from early colonial New England when kopides began hunting covens in this region. The debate as to whether they had justification is actually quite fascinating, but—”
“This is neither the time nor the place for a history lesson, Miss Keyes,” he said.
“Oh, very well.” Sophie shivered with the effort it took to keep quiet. “This charm was among the gifts my guardians gave to me for protection. I don’t have any intent of activating it, I assure you.”
“Let me at her!” Ashley threw herself at Lincoln again, and it took actual effort to hold her back.
“This woman’s not a witch hunter,” Lincoln said. “She’s not anything.”
“I am a few things,” Sophie said.
“My guest,” he said louder, trying to drown her out. “Sophie Keyes is my guest. And this is Ashley Marshall, my cousin.” He shifted his grip on Ashley so that it was more like an arm around her shoulders, and slightly less threatening. “My cousin who should not be practicing infernal magic.”
“I’m not practicing,” Ashley said. She flicked her fingers, and the light vanished. “I swear, Lincoln. I got away from all of that. But would you expect me to go without self-defense completely?”
“If you’re gonna attack my guests, yeah,” Lincoln said. “If I see another spark of magic from you—”
“You won’t,” she said. “That’s not going to be the issue.” She folded her arms and gave him a look so much like Aunt Bee’s—one eyebrow lifted, mouth bowed into a frown, chin crinkled. A perfect expression of female disapproval. “You didn’t warn me. Didn’t tell anybody that you would be bringing a guest.”
“I didn’t even know I’d be coming until today,” Lincoln said. “If not for the respect for my father, I wouldn’t be caught back in town while you and my mom are here at all.”
“Just because I’ve got a tiny smidge of demon blood, just like you?”
“Because I gave up my whole life to protect you and you keep practicing anyway,” he shot back.
Ashley’s hair whipped around her as a plane took off behind them, roaring off of the air strip. “I told you I’m not practicing!”
Lincoln didn’t know if others were listening, but he knew Sophie was. She was so much more interested in the conversation than he liked. “Get in the pickup,” Lincoln told Sophie. “Take the edge of the bench furthest from the wheel. I’ll sit in the middle.”
To his surprise, she shed her bags and followed instructions. Ashley followed Lincoln to the tailgate as he loaded the bed of the pickup. “Where is she going to sleep?” Ashley asked, folding her arms.
Lincoln tossed the last of her bags into place. “Aunt Bee better have cleared my old bedroom for me to stay there, and there’s plenty of room for Sophie.”
Ashley’s jaw dropped. “You’re fixing to share a room? With a lady who socializes with witch hunters?”
Lincoln hadn’t had time to think of an explanation for Sophie’s presence. He couldn’t tell the truth. The more he talked about the Historian, the likelier it was that enemies would find her, and it wouldn’t make any sense to his family anyway.
“Same room is fine,” Lincoln said. He could sleep on the sofa downstairs if his floor got too uncomfortable.
“Aunt Susannah is not going to like this,” Ashley said. “I don’t think anybody is going to like this.”
“As long as you don’t tell anyone that Miss Keyes has previously associated with ‘witch hunters,’ nobody’s gonna know or care.”
“Not about that.” She picked at the edge of one of her pink acrylics, and it gave angry little clicks with every dig. “It’s not like you. Having a black girlfriend.”
Lincoln would have laughed if he’d found any of this amusing. Ashley had whispered the words “black girlfriend” like it was some kind of great taboo. “I’m in town to see Dad. You lost the right to know what’s going on in my life when you threw me to the White Ash Coven’s wolves. So don’t give me any bullshit. All right?”
“It’s not my bullshit. You’re the one tacky enough to bring this shit around when one of the men who raised me is about to die,” Ashley spat. She stormed around the pickup and got into the driver’s seat.
Sophie was sitting with her knees out of the pickup, watching Lincoln as he walked up. Her brows met in the center. “Is everything all right, Mr. Marshall?”
Lincoln rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “I think we’re in for one hell of a week.”
Chapter 8
Ashley had to drive through Northgate to reach Mortise, and Lincoln spent the drive staring out the window, even though he had every inch of the place memorized. Northgate was a postcard town. Tidy whitewashed buildings were occupied by artisan cafes, a consignment shop, and two vacation real estate agencies. Anyone in Grove County who earned real money lived there too, out in the ranch houses where a cult had once grown like mildew on river rocks.
They passed through downtown, briefly. Lincoln was surprised to see carefully manicured bushes, delicate rock work, and even a few fountains.
Awful nice for so soon after the end of the world.
Then they drove thirty minutes of endless forest road to reach Mortise.
If Northgate was a holiday postcard, then Mortise was a caution sign hung on an electrified fence. There were more mobile homes than houses. One motel serviced millworkers who passed out drunk after twelve-hour shifts. There were no fountains downtown. Or a downtown, for that matter.
The only part of Mortise that looked like civilization was three blocks wide—a cluster of creaky old buildings that somehow hadn’t collapsed under harsh Appalachian winters. Essential services had been crammed uncomfortably into tiny historic buildings. The only gas station was charging more than twenty dollars a gallon. The county hospital was under a sheared-off mountain ridge so that it was shadowed most of the time.
Ashley parked behind the hospital. The hospice was in a house that used to be occupied by a dentist’s office, giving it a look simultaneously homelike and clinical.
“Aren’t we going to the house?” Lincoln asked. He said it like a title: The House. There was only one house the Marshalls ever talked about in Mortise. It was a house their grandpa had ordered out of a Sears catalog and assembled by hand. He’d liked it so much that he’d kept ordering new buildings and tacking them onto the first, up until they stopped selling catalog houses. Now it could sleep half the family at once, and that was exactly what it had done in every generation since.
“You gotta go talk to Uncle John before we do anything else,” Ashley said. “The doctors are saying he could go any day now.” She took a deep breath. “And he can’t die until you get some information from him.”
“Damn it, Ashley. Are you serious right now?”
“I was going through Uncle John’s stuff in the attic and found a picture of him holding a baby,” she hurried on. “Back in 1983. There was a lock of hair in there, and a sock. Seemed weird for him to keep that stuff for someone else’s baby, since our family didn’t have any births that year. I asked Aunt Susannah about it.”
“I don’t wanna hear this,” Lincoln said.
Ashley talked right over him. “He had a baby with someone else. Your parents were already separated then—not a huge shock. But Mom said the kid w
ent up for adoption immediately.” She reached for Lincoln’s hand on his knee. “You’ve got a half-brother.”
He jerked away from her. “Susannah lied to you. Dad would have told me about that.”
“I pray he will,” Ashley said. “Our family’s broken, Linc. You don’t wanna be around us. Abigail and Noah moved to Northgate. Uncle John’s about to die, and my parents’ health ain’t exactly what it used to be. It’s getting lonely at the house—real lonely.”
“You want to find this rumored half-brother of mine to occupy a bedroom?”
“I wanna take care of him,” she said. “I wanna know him, and I want him to know me.”
Lincoln scowled. He was painfully aware of Sophie’s quiet at his right, where she was keeping her head down and pretending she couldn’t hear the conversation. “Sure you don’t just want to find this guy so he can sacrifice his life for you?”
Ashley slammed a hand on the wheel. “Dammit, Lincoln. Will you just talk to Uncle John about it?”
“You’re a real see-you-next-Tuesday sometimes, Ash,” Lincoln said. “Miss Keyes, stay here. Don’t get outta the truck unless you can’t avoid it. Give me five minutes.”
“Take as long as you need,” Sophie said.
Ashley got out of the truck so Lincoln could too. She didn’t get back in once he was free. She slammed the door, shutting Sophie inside with the engine grumbling so that the ancient air conditioning could wheeze slightly cooled air in her face. That suited Lincoln just fine. The less Sophie was alone with any member of his family, the better.
“Think about it,” Ashley said. “Another brother. He’s out there.”
“We’ll see about that,” Lincoln muttered.
He trudged into the hospice. It was a sterile, yellowed place with uneven floors and one tired-looking nurse at the desk. She directed Lincoln to the back.
Lincoln passed a half-dozen quiet rooms. Standard hospital beds stood inside, flanked by beeping equipment. Shriveled, aging figures lay in the middle of it all.
Up until the moment he reached his dad’s door, it was impossible for Lincoln to imagine his dad somewhere with so many dead people.
But there he was.
John Marshall’s lips were blue around the edges. Bruising made his eyelids look frightfully purple. His cheeks were sunken.
Lincoln stood over his father and cleared his throat. “Dad?” John didn’t react. He tried again, louder. “Dad?”
“He’s been like this a lot lately,” Ashley said from the doorway behind him. “It takes a lot of medicine to manage his pain, and he can’t stay awake through it. He wakes up about an hour before his next dose.”
John was so painfully quiet.
Lincoln’s mouth had dried out. “When’s his next dose?”
“Ninety minutes out,” Ashley said, pointing to the whiteboard on the wall. The nurse had written a pain management schedule there. It was a shocking number of drugs, administered at shocking doses.
Lincoln didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know if he should wait, or if he should find a nurse, or… His hands felt awkward and useless dangling at his sides.
There was a chair by the bed. Lincoln sat down.
“Feels weird seeing him like that, doesn’t it?” Ashley asked. She popped open a bag of chips, which she must have grabbed from the vending machine in the hall. Lincoln hadn’t heard her.
He took a chip, forcing himself to chew and swallow. His anger at Ashley seemed to have vanished the moment he’d set foot in the room. “How did this happen?”
“The doctors said they don’t got an explanation, but Mom and I think it was Genesis,” Ashley said. “All these people coming back funny—must have scrambled Uncle John up instead of spitting him out as a superhero.”
“That’s not how it works,” Lincoln said. “Genesis didn’t make anyone sick.”
Ashley snorted. “Like you’re the expert?”
He knew a hell of a lot more about it than his family. He knew that it was Elise Kavanagh’s fault. The exorcist who represented Lincoln’s only hope of being separated from Inanna was behind everything.
And he’d been one of the first human men in the Middle Worlds. He knew exactly how scrambled up some people had gotten.
“It just doesn’t work like that,” he said again.
“But he was fine before Genesis—the same Uncle John he’s always been. He’d started replacing the roof on the family house during the Breaking, even while the country was burning down. Climbing up and down off the third story like a freaking spider monkey. And then, boom, Day Zero hits, and Uncle John’s suddenly sick. Starts sweating a lot more, sleeping a lot more. He actually said that his stomach was bothering him.”
Lincoln let loose a low whistle. His dad had once broken his leg in three places, with one of the fractures on his femur, and still drove himself to the emergency room. Nobody had even known that he was injured until he came home in a cast.
“Once his stomach started hurting, it didn’t stop. We thought it might be a heart attack at first. You remember what happened to Grandpa.” Ashley shivered. The kids had been around for the holidays when their grandpa suffered his fatal heart attack. Like all Marshall men, Grandpa had been rugged and immortal—up until the moment he suddenly hadn’t been.
The kids hadn’t seen their grandfather die. They hadn’t even been allowed to visit him in the hospital. Now that Lincoln gazed upon his father’s unconscious form, he could easily imagine what Grandpa must’ve looked like before breathing his last breath in the hospital.
“But the doctors don’t think it’s a heart attack?” Lincoln asked.
“They said it’s like everything’s just shutting down.”
The tension building along his spine hurt. “They don’t care about having no diagnosis? They’re just giving up trying to make him better?”
“You haven’t been here, Linc,” Ashley said. “You aren’t waking up when he cries out at night because it hurts so much. You don’t know what it took to get here, to this quiet place where he gets to sleep instead of suffering. Do you think that any of us would let the doctors give up on him if we thought that there was anything left to try?”
“All I know is that you’ll sacrifice family to save your hide, and you’ve been whispering with Susannah while he’s on his goddamn death bed.” Lincoln couldn’t sit there anymore, watching his father’s chest twitch with labored breaths. He stood. “I’m not waiting for him to wake up. I’ll try again tomorrow.”
“But you’re—”
“I’ve got a guest in the pickup who needs to unpack. I’m taking her to the house. You coming?”
Ashley had almost the exact same stance as Lincoln. Balled fists, shoulders hunched like she was about to go all linebacker. “I’m going to wait here so Uncle John’s not alone when he wakes up. I’m not giving up on finding your brother, even if you are.”
He jerked the keys out of her back pocket. “It’s not a problem for you to walk home.” Statement, not a question. Home wasn’t even three blocks away.
It was surprisingly hot outside, and Lincoln felt like he was suffocating on the wind. His collar was too snug around his throat. Running a finger underneath it didn’t stretch out the elastic enough.
The handle on his dad’s pickup was hot under his hand. The leather seat that engulfed him was flatter and more faded than the last time he’d sat in it. Sophie was hunched over her journal, trying to translate the ritual in Sumerian, though she ventured a smile of greeting for Lincoln. The sun bouncing off the white papers limned Sophie’s jaw with gold.
“We’re going,” he said.
Lincoln slammed the pickup’s door. Metal and glass rattled. He pretended that he didn’t see Ashley emerging from the hospice as they pulled away. She waved as if to ask for a ride. He pulled out onto the road anyway.
Sophie closed her journal and put the pen away.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Lincoln said.
“I wasn’t going to offer,�
�� she said.
“Good.” He nodded. “Right.”
The house was back in the trees a distance, at the end of a long driveway made of packed dirt and lined by wild celery and aster. The mail-order Frankenstein house had been painted uniform white. Grandpa Marshall had built a wraparound porch for the whole thing, which Aunt Bee looked to be shading with scalloped curtains. She put them out every morning in the summers and brought them down every night. They were immaculate as always.
A dozen cars were clustered around the detached garage, back near the pond. The smoker was belching gray clouds behind the house. As soon as Lincoln turned off the truck, he heard familiar voices on a breeze that smelled like wisteria, and he felt home hitting him like a gut punch.
Sophie tucked her journal into her bag. “I hope you know that I will talk with you if you decide you want to.”
“Take your bags inside,” Lincoln said. “I’ll get the ones out of the truck bed and be right there.”
Sophie shut the door and failed to swing it hard enough to trigger the latch. She climbed the stairs to the house, and as miserably numb as Lincoln felt, he marked the hesitation in her steps. She was afraid to go in first. After Ashley greeted her with flames, who could blame her?
He leaned across the pickup’s bench to pull the passenger door shut the rest of the way.
The door ripped out of his hand.
Shocked, Lincoln jerked back, reaching for the gun he wasn’t carrying. A looming male figure stood on the opposite side of the pickup, his face shadowed.
A pair of big hands grabbed Lincoln by the collar, slammed his face into the steering wheel, and sent him diving into the black depths of oblivion.
Chapter 9
The Marshall family house seemed so old as to have taken on a life of its own. The stairs creaked softly under Sophie’s feet, shifting with her weight, and the screen door whined softly when she stepped inside. A breeze whispered through the kitchen. A soft inhale, a sighing exhale. The oven ticked as its walls expanded within the slow-beating heart of the house’s east wing.