by Holley Trent
From what Chris had heard from another doctor on staff, Keith was a nightmare of a patient. Chris had been glad he hadn’t been tapped for the job.
“So…anything interesting about her?” Chris asked.
“Plenty.”
“Don’t play this game with me, Will. I’m averaging five hours of sleep per day and probably even have a calorie deficit right now. Don’t fuck with me.”
“What’s got you so pissy? That’s not like you.”
“Not feeling very much like myself right now.”
“Tell me what you want to know, and I’ll give you the information you’re digging for. I’m a researcher, so if you want specific answers, you’ve got to ask pointed, specific questions or I’ll talk unfettered for twenty minutes about nothing in particular.”
“Okay. Shit. I’m not sure how to phrase this, but…the nurse, she’s…not quite Viking?”
“Nope.”
“Who’s she related to? She’s not one of the adoptees, is she?”
“No. And if you tell anyone this, I’ll rip your tongue out.”
“You making threats now? Maybe you’ve been hanging out with the chieftains too much.”
“Strong possibility of that.”
The Afótama clan had been matrilineal and woman-dominated since the moment their ancestors had washed ashore in Canada almost a thousand years prior. Women ever since tended to have stronger magic, but that was changing with Oliver and Harvey. They weren’t like the passive, agreeable chieftains of the past. To be with a hardheaded woman like Queenie, they couldn’t possibly be.
“What am I stepping into, Will?”
“You don’t have to step into anything.”
“I think I already have. I need to know.”
“Why?”
“Because I believe her sister is at the hospital right now. Her little girl might have broken her arm.”
“Shani?”
“You know Shani?”
Will chuckled. “Shani is a very easy person to know. She’s not exactly shy.”
“Just tell me what I need to know. Can the damn suspense.”
“Fine. But like I said, you need to be discreet with this information, and you’ll understand why when I get to the end.”
Chris widened his stance again to brace himself. “Come on. Come on.”
“So, the new nurse here, right? Mallory?” Will said, “Well, she and her sister—whom you’ve just met, I take it—are Dan Petersen’s daughters.”
If there hadn’t been a rolling chair right behind him, Chris’s ass would have hit the floor. “Actually, shut the fuck up.”
“Chris, I’m dead serious. Now you understand the rip-your-tongue-out threat. When Queen Tess was down in Florida looking for Keith last month, she sort of stumbled into Mallory and Marty.”
“Marty…”
“Martina, actually. Goes by Marty. She and Shani still live in Tallahassee. They came out to bring Mallory some of the stuff she’d left at their house. Just a short visit.”
“You seem to know a lot about them. But, I guess you would, given the Petersen angle.”
“Yeah, can’t help but to.”
Dan Petersen happened to be the father of Will’s girlfriend Erin. Erin had been adopted, and hadn’t known. She’d only recently discovered that she’d been basically bought as a baby, and that Dan and his wife hadn’t been able to have children of their own.
Obviously, that last part turned out to be a lie, too. Dan had gotten around.
“As far as we know, as of now Mrs. Petersen has no awareness of Mallory and Marty,” Will said.
“But they know about her?”
“Yeah. Mallory’s been avoiding her father, but by now, he knows she’s here and he’s been avoiding her, too.”
“Seems to me that shit’s gonna hit the fan soon.”
“If it does, Queen Tess’ll be spared some hassle. She’d been wanting to expel Dan and his wife, anyway, for their hand in facilitating those questionably legal adoptions from the group in Fallon. Mallory wasn’t going to stay away just because he was here. Just like the rest of us, she felt the pull to be near the clan. Marty wasn’t going to come at all, but Mallory needed her stuff, and Shani misses her cousins.”
“Got it. How does Erin feel about them being here?”
“She’s happy they’re here. Maybe they’re not blood relatives, but they are sisters and they all share a general dislike of their father.”
“‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’ kind of shit.”
“Exactly. How’s Shani?”
“I’m about to go check out the X-ray now. Listen. Do you know if Marty…”
Again, Chris didn’t know how to phrase the question delicately, but then he remembered he didn’t have to be delicate. Will, of all people, wouldn’t have expected such caution from him.
“Is she with anyone? She’s not wearing rings, but I have to know.”
“Are you seriously trawling for a date right now?”
“Absolutely not. Is she single? She has the daughter, and I need to make sure the dad’s out of the picture.”
“Why?”
Will and his fucking questions.
Chris gave the desktop a little pound and pulled some air into his lungs. “I’ve been dreaming of that woman for ten damn months, man.”
“Seriously? You got dreams? Hardly anyone gets those.”
“That’s why I didn’t think they were real for the longest time. If she has a husband, that makes shit for me exponentially more complicated.”
Will whistled low. “Damn. Now you’ve got my attention piqued. There’s always a reason people get matched, so there’s gotta be something in your magic that fits with hers. I didn’t think she had any.”
“Are you kidding me? It’s foul, man. Damn near knocked me off my feet.”
“I’m being dead serious. I would have noticed, so maybe it’s just you. Maybe that’s not unusual. And Marty’s divorced, by the way. She and the ex aren’t friends.”
“I shouldn’t be happy about that, but what’s one more thing to go to hell for?”
“She’s actually heading back to Florida tomorrow. So, do with that info as you see fit.”
“No fucking way.”
“What are you gonna do? Hold her here against her will?”
The thought had crossed Chris’s mind, though fleetingly.
Of course he couldn’t hold Marty there. He needed her to be with him of her own volition. He needed her to realize who he was to her without him feeding her the information, or she’d never know for herself that the match was blessed. He needed her to know that, and he needed her to crave him the same way he craved her or she’d have too much power over him. Like magic, love needed equilibrium. There couldn’t be too much on one side and not enough on the other.
Chris fondled an earpiece of his stethoscope and then woke up the computer on the desk to see if Shani had made her way down to radiology. “It’d be mighty hard to fly back to Florida if Shani’s wearing a big cast and has a throbbing arm.”
“Do no harm, physician.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t hurt the little sweetheart. I’ll just play on her mother’s maternal instincts a bit. Certainly, them hanging out for a few days until Shani’s feeling a little better makes sense, don’t you think?”
“Uh-huh. And so you can schedule a bunch of unnecessary follow-up appointments, right?”
“I don’t need to do that. Apparently, you live with one of Shani’s aunts, so you’re going to facilitate a get-together. Maybe for tonight? I’m off tonight.”
“I really can’t say no, can I? Once Erin finds out you two are linked, she’s going to make me do it anyway.”
“Yep. You really can’t say no. I do appreciate your cooperation, though. Do me this favor, and I’ll make sure Paul stops complaining about all the noise your bed makes in the middle of the night. His bedroom is right beneath yours.”
Will muttered something incomprehensible under his bre
ath and then hissed. “All right, man. You’ve got a deal.”
“May the gods bless where you put your feet, my man.”
Grinning like a shark, Chris grabbed a probably-expired granola bar from the desk drawer and clutched the wall all the way down to radiology.
CHAPTER TWO
Marty had barely had a chance to close the apartment door when Erin streaked out of her bedroom wearing the frantic expression that seemed to have been sewn onto her face in the past few days.
She slid in socked feet all the way from the sofa to Shani’s feet, and knelt, hugging the child’s waist. “Aww, pudding, do you hurt?”
Shani nodded and laid her head atop her aunt’s.
Adoptive aunt, technically, but Marty wasn’t going to get caught up in technicalities. In the short week of their acquaintance, they’d bonded over their sincere disgust of the man who called himself their father. Marty and Mallory were the products of a long-running affair. Erin had more or less been blackmailed away from her young parents at birth.
The Petersens didn’t know yet that the folks at the mansion were clued in to what had happened in Fallon—that the Petersens and so many other childless families from Norseton had used the competing group as a convenient baby mill. They’d lied, cheated, and stolen their way to nuclear families. They’d told those frightened young couples in Fallon that the Afótama queen at the time—Muriel—had condoned their actions, and that if they were wise, they wouldn’t push back.
So, the folks in Fallon had been quiet. They were afraid of Muriel, who back then had supposedly been a frightening magic user.
Even Marty with her limited experience with the Afótama suspected that the folks in Fallon didn’t really know Muriel. Muriel would have never condoned families being torn apart, not even in the splinter group that had been so hostile to the Afótama in the past. Muriel just didn’t roll like that. She was, figuratively, everyone’s grandma. According to Mallory, that was why Muriel was called the Matriarch. She’d retired from her role as clan queen, but she still had a job. She was the group’s boo-boo mender. When someone in the clan was hurting—physically or otherwise—she psychically honed in on him or her and did what she could to pick that person up.
Erin scooped Shani up into her arms and gave her a gentle squeeze. “They prescribe anything?”
“Yeah.” Marty gave the bottle of pills in her purse a little shake. “She needs to eat something first. A piece of bread at the very least, and maybe have some milk.”
“I actually bought some milk today,” Erin said. “I’m winning for once at this adulting thing.”
“You don’t drink milk normally?”
“Will is lactose intolerant, and I only use it in cereal. My philosophy has always been ‘why eat cereal when you can have chocolate croissants?’”
Marty gave her sister’s lean body an assessing scan. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on the waif. She scoffed. “Yeah, why eat nutritious cereal when you can have carbs and sugar? You can afford the calories.”
Erin stuck out her tongue and continued on toward the kitchen with Shani. “You’ve seen my parents. They’re thin as reeds. So is my little sister. She’s super willowy.”
Marty followed Erin into the galley kitchen and watched her perch Shani on the stool near the wall. “Have they decided whether or not they’re going to stay in the cabin they’d been renting from Lora?”
“I don’t think they will.” Erin put together a simple ham and cheese sandwich, cut the square in half, and handed one triangle to Shani. “Lora will probably miss them as renters, though. Everyone else she’s rented to left property damage.”
Lora was the queen’s primary aide and the lady who handled most of the operations duties at the Norseton mansion. Like Erin, she’d been adopted from outside the community. But unlike Erin, she wasn’t a witchy weirdo. She was plain-old human and had been adopted from New Mexican foster care by a family who’d had a child kidnapped. And that was another mess of Afótama drama Marty didn’t completely understand. While some folks in Norseton had children disappear by a still unknown entity, infertile others were stealing children from the splinter group in Fallon. Queen Tess was trying to untangle the mess and draw in the people on the fringes.
“Lots more people coming back into the community, though, right?” Marty asked. “She’ll probably find a good renter if she tries.”
“I’d say so. Lots of halfsies moving in with parents who’d moved away decades ago for college or work and are just now returning.”
“Halfsies like me and Mal,” Marty muttered.
Marty and her sister had been on the fringes of the Afótama psychic web until a month prior. They were down in their Florida hometown when Queen Tess, her cousin Nadia, and a fairy friend to the Afótama named Simone showed up and knocked on the door of the house the sisters shared.
Tess hadn’t been looking for them. She’d been looking for her brother Keith, but she’d sensed them. As queen, she was supposedly driven to herd Afótama clanspeople back toward the group. Marty had never been a part of the group, though. Like Mallory, she was a bastard outsider, and one with a father who was very likely going to be expelled soon. Mallory had decided to pull up her stakes and move to Norseton with her kids anyway. She’d craved being a part of the Afótama link. She’d had the innate drive to connect.
Marty didn’t. Not really.
She missed her big sister and her niece and nephews, though, and she felt guilty for keeping Shani away from them.
Marty just couldn’t stay there. She didn’t belong there with all those strangers.
“Oliver made my parents a much better offer than a rental cottage,” Erin said. “Hold on. Let me see if I can find that plot map. Will left it around here somewhere.”
Erin zipped past Marty, her blond ponytail bouncing, and Marty turned her attention to her rigidly upright daughter. Her little body was tense, her posture stiff as she nibbled the sandwich. She was probably afraid that moving her arm with its cast in the slightest bit would make the rest of her body hurt.
Marty sighed. As badly as she wanted to say “Told you so” to the child for having jumped off that swing the way she had, she just didn’t have the heart. Shani had been having so much fun with her cousins and those happy, smiling Afótama children at the playground up until the incident happened. She was an outgoing child in general, but around those kids, she seemed to have bloomed. She’d been more upset at the fact she’d had to end her playtime prematurely than at the fact the she’d hurt herself. Adrenaline was a hell of a hormone.
“You like it here, don’t you?” Marty asked.
“Everyone’s nice to me.”
“Who wouldn’t be nice to you? You make people laugh.” Even when doing so was entirely inappropriate.
Marty had given up on trying to temper Shani’s energy. To say the child was spunky would have been a laughable understatement, and Marty still wasn’t sure who Shani used as her sunshine role model. Not Marty. Marty could hardly tell a knock-knock joke anymore.
And certainly not one of the Quans.
Marty had never met a more repressed bunch.
Maybe Mama?
Mama had always maintained that infectious joie de vivre, up until she’d found out that Dan Petersen was a two-timing liar. She and her daughters had learned that hard lesson ten years prior. She smiled a lot, especially around the kids, but Mama still hadn’t quite recovered from the betrayal. He’d never intended to marry her at all, but hanging on wasn’t all Mama’s fault. Of the many things Marty could say about her father, the item at the top of the list would have been that he was an excellent liar. He had to have been if even the Afótama matriarch hadn’t caught on to his scheming. He worked right under her nose in the mansion kitchen, and if anyone should have caught him, she would have been the most likely individual.
“I don’t want to go back to Tallahassee,” Shani said after a moment of chewing. “I want to stay here.”
Marty leaned against the
counter and rubbed her eyes. Shit. “Baby girl, I explained to you why we can’t stay here. Remember what I said? I’ve got a job back in Florida. I told you before we came here that this was just going to be a little vacation. I’ve got to go back to work on Monday.”
“Why can’t you find a job here? Auntie did.”
Yep. Right in the inner circle.
That was typical Mal. Mallory had always had a knack for taking all the right risks. Marty envied her for her prescience.
Marty dropped her hand and pulled in a bracing breath. “I’m not sure there’s a huge market for property managers here.”
And even if there were, Marty wasn’t convinced that’d be enough to make her stay. Mallory had an excellent ability to step out on faith, but between their father’s duplicity and Marty’s ex-husband’s detachment after their divorce, Marty had a much harder time indulging in risk-taking. She wasn’t ready for any new blows to her ego.
Erin returned to the kitchen and set a binder on the counter in front of the much-used coffee machine. She waved Marty over.
“This is a pretty simple map of Norseton’s boundaries.” Erin ran an index finger across the mountain range that ran a few miles behind the inhabited area and made a box around the community itself. Much of the community property was unoccupied desert.
“Right here.” She pointed to a spot about a quarter mile from the compound where the community’s werewolves lived. “This is the approximate limit of water, sewer, and electric service. The chieftain Harvey has been the one planning out the community expansion, and he’s had to take into consideration the needs of the longtime residents, of the ones returning, and also any folks that we take in. He doesn’t want to segregate folks, but he gets that some people have special needs and may need a little more distance from the town center. He and Oliver have been discussing granting my birth parents a parcel out here for them to build on. They’re used to being a bit off the grid, so that would suit them, and the walk is still short enough for my sister to get to school with few problems.”
“And they’d be far away from the Petersens,” Marty muttered.
