by Holley Trent
Erin cringed. “I guess that’d be a fringe benefit.” She leaned in and whispered, “Who knows how long they’ll be here, anyway?”
“Or what they’ll do to retaliate if or when they’re asked to leave.”
“I go to sleep every night worrying about that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.”
Erin pulled away and closed up the bread bag. “I got a text from Will when I was rooting around for the binder. He asked if he should bring home dinner. I told him yes. Hope you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind at all. Less walking around means less chance of bumping into certain people.” Certain Petersens. Rolling her eyes, Marty twisted the lid off Shani’s bottle of pills and shook one out.
“Will said he’d be here by five-thirty. He’ll probably swing by the Italian place down the street and pick up a pan of lasagna or something.”
“Maybe text him back and see if I should make a salad.”
“I’ll do that now.” Erin pulled her phone out of the back pocket of her tight jeans and worked her thumbs over the screen.
Marty handed a pill to Shani, and then opened the refrigerator for the milk.
“He says no,” Erin said. “He said Chris and Paul will bring stuff up.”
“Who are they?”
“They live in the apartment beneath us. I guess you haven’t seen them yet. They’ve been pretty busy lately. They’ve only been back in Norseton a few months themselves.”
“Oh. Full-blooded?”
“Yeah. Went away for college like a lot of folks do, and couldn’t ignore the pull to come back.”
“I see.”
Erin put her phone away and then handed Marty a cup for the milk. “It’s not a big deal, you know.”
“You think you know what I’m thinking?”
Erin cringed again. “You’re forgetting that I’m a Fallonite. I’m a little more empathic than most folks in this community. Maybe I don’t know the exact words running through your head at the moment, but I know how you feel. And I can guess what’s making you feel that way.”
Marty cut her gaze to Shani, who was trying to force the pill down her throat with a lot of dramatic faux gagging and sputtering, and then back to Erin.
“I keep forgetting that I’m amongst weirdoes now,” Marty said to her sister. “Stuff like that didn’t happen back in Florida.”
“Except between you and Mallory, right? Don’t you like knowing that you two weren’t the abominations you thought you were? And that you were descended from people who could do the things you can do?”
“I’m still not entirely sure of what I’m supposed to be able to do.”
Erin turned her hands over and shrugged. “Neither am I, but I was always supposed to be on the fringes. I never really integrated fully here until I hooked up with Will.”
“Because he’s Afótama.”
“Right. He’s the reason I’m knitted into the psychic framework the way I am now. He’s the one who helped me figured out why I wasn’t meshing in the first place. I don’t have the same sorts of abilities he has because Fallonites are just different. The Afótama got all the good magic stuff, and most of the power is with the royals. Will got lucky, though. He can move stuff around just by thinking. Has a few other weird witchy tricks, too.”
Marty wrung her hands and moved her gaze to her daughter.
Yeah, weird witchy tricks.
Shani had always had an unusual knack for knowing the sex of babies that were still in-utero—from the time she’d known there was a difference between little boys and little girls and was able to articulate the nuances. Marty had thought Shani was just lucky with her guesses and that eventually she’d get one wrong, but deep down, Marty knew she wouldn’t.
Shani wasn’t the only weird one in their little family. She was just the most recent. Mallory and Marty had always had a freakish telepathic link. Until Mallory had started elementary school, they’d thought all siblings could do that. Mallory had very quickly stopped asking about the skill once she learned that wasn’t the case. Other children had always looked at her strangely, so she’d acted like she’d been joking. Their mother didn’t believe them until their father explained that their gift was his fault and that Mallory and Marty were like what his people were.
And that had led to other revelations—about his legal family in New Mexico.
He’d never intended to marry her mother. He’d lied.
So many lies.
“I’m so glad you’re here, Marty.” Erin gave Shani’s shoulders a squeeze and then walked toward the sound of keys jangling at the front door. Will had obviously returned.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she’d said, and she’d sounded like she’d honestly, truthfully meant the words.
Marty hoped that one day, she could believe people when they told her that, but she had to undo her conditioning first.
Her father had never responded when her mother had spoken similar words to him, but Marty wasn’t like him. She couldn’t treat people the way he did, even if revealing pieces of her emotions had become so hard for her.
She turned fast and called after Erin, “Thank you for asking us to stay with you.”
“You’re welcome!” Erin sang.
Their father had always said that Marty and Mallory wouldn’t be welcome in Norseton.
Marty was starting to suspect that’d been yet another lie.
CHAPTER THREE
“You’re Chris?” Marty’s face was an adorable configuration of furrowed brow and curled upper lip that made Chris chuckle.
Afótama women did incredulity better than anyone.
“Yep,” he said. “I’m Chris.” He turned from the dining room table toward the kitchen doorway where Marty was standing with her hands tucked into the pockets of her sweatshirt.
He smiled and resumed his work of peeling plastic wrap off a garden salad. He hadn’t made it. One of the benefits of living near his parents again was being able to call home and ask his mother to throw something together for him to pick up. Although she’d been about to leave for work, Mom hadn’t minded but him having insinuated that he’d found his fated match probably helped incentivize her. If Chris didn’t check in with her within the next twenty minutes, however, Mom was likely going to attempt to reach through the Afótama web and strangle him until he gave up the woman’s name. Fortunately, the only people capable of such a feat would be Queen Tess, Muriel, or one of the other powerful higher-ups, but if there were a way for his mother to try, she’d do it. She was a professional meddler.
“I didn’t make the connection,” Marty said. “I feel stupid now. Shani’s prescription bottle does say that the drug was prescribed by Chris Holst.”
He wadded the plastic wrap into his fist and shrugged. “I’m sure you had a lot on your mind. How is she, anyway?”
“Oh. She, uh…” Marty squeezed her eyes closed tight as if to think. She might not have known how typical doing such a thing was for the Afótama. Often, too much visual stimulus made comprehending even their native language difficult. Their peers in college had teased Chris and Paul endlessly about their shared proclivity to forget words.
“Damn. Uh…” She crooked her thumb toward the rear of the apartment. “She’s in bed in the guest room. Erin set her up with an iPad and logged her into Netflix. She fell asleep in five minutes.”
“Medicated, I guess.”
Marty opened her eyes and nodded.
“Good. Hopefully she won’t wake up in the middle of the night screaming with pain. The break wasn’t a bad one, but she’s a squirmy kid, huh? She’s going to have a hard time training herself to not move that arm.”
“Squirmy is an understatement. She’s constantly moving. She drove her teacher nuts last year. I didn’t know what to tell the lady. Squirmy is Shani in a nutshell.”
“A lot of our kids are overly energetic before puberty. There’s nothing to be done about it.”
“What do you mean
?”
He pulled out the chair nearest the doorway and gestured to the seat.
She stared at it for so long that he worried if he’d somehow offended her, or if she was truly forgetting English. But, then she sat, slowly, eying him as though he had some ulterior motive.
He had one, of course. He wanted her very close to him and as much as possible. In the hours since he’d left work, he hadn’t been able to think about anything else but her. The only other thing he’d ever obsessed so much about had been his board certification exam, and dreams about that had never given him a raging hard-on.
“Honestly, we as a people never worry much about the tendency,” he said. “The common sentiment around here is usually something along the lines of Vikings will be Vikings, as if there’s the expectation that we can’t be bridled. Is there any chance that you and Mallory had a bit of that energy as kids?”
Marty’s flinch was so quick that if he’d blinked, he would have missed it.
He laughed. “You were, weren’t you? I bet you were both troublemakers.”
She pulled in a long inhalation and leaned back as Will set a beer on the placemat in front of her. She wrapped her hands around the bottle and fixed a poignant gaze on Chris.
“I’ll take that to be a yes.”
“We didn’t get in trouble or anything. We were always just…scheming. And whenever the two of us were together, there always seemed to be little accidents.”
“What sorts of accidents?” Will asked in that curious researcher tone that hinted to Chris that the guy would likely be running to fetch one of those damned questionnaires of his soon.
Chris had submitted to the third degree, as had Paul and nearly everyone else in the building. Part of Will’s job was to help trace the Afótama magic lineages and, in the process, help clanspeople articulate their capabilities.
“Just little freak things,” she said. “For instance, people around us seem to trip or walk into walls a lot when we’re together. That happens frequently enough that we’re pretty sure the occurrences aren’t due to random chance.”
Will leaned back to get out of the way of Erin, who carried a bubbling hot pan of lasagna.
She set it on a trivet in the middle of the table and muttered something about serving utensils.
As she swished away, Paul strode in carrying a couple of baskets of bread.
“Does anything like that happen when your father’s around?” Will asked.
Marty flinched again.
Chris squeezed her shoulder and projected privately, “He’ll back off if you don’t answer. He’s not a shit-stirrer.”
Her shoulder tensed under his unbidden touch. He was going to pull his hand away, but doing so seemed contrary to his body’s needs. He’d touched her, and the natural thing was for him to keep touching her, and to touch her more intimately, if she’d allowed him to.
The connection felt, to Chris, proper and good. Their auras’ slight merging was a cool drink of water at the end of a long run, or a feeling of coming home after a long trip.
The feeling was…possessive, and not in a one-sided way, either.
Does she get it?
Her muscles unclenched, her posture relaxed, and her next breath was a soft one. Still, there was a slight mental pushback. A sort of how’d you get in here?
“I’m Afótama,” he projected.
“Uh.” Yet again she cringed. “I’m not used to this.” She brought her beer to her lips and nodded at Erin in front of her.
Erin was holding up a spatula, so she must have asked if Marty wanted a serving of lasagna.
Chris took the seat beside Marty, sliding his hand down her arm as he sat so as not to break the touch. He didn’t want to loom over her like some kind of ill-mannered marauder, even if that was where his sensibilities were at the moment.
He kept his fingers looped loosely around Marty’s wrist, and considered the fact she hadn’t knocked them away a good sign.
“Being around people who can hear my thoughts is so odd,” she projected. “People other than Mallory, I mean. There seems to be more chatter in my head with each passing day that I’m here. I hear more and more distinct voices when I’m in public.”
“The more people you meet and touch, the better knit into the web you are. You’ll start to pick up on more personalities. Most people are pretty good at quieting their thoughts, so you’re likely to only pick up trivial things—things people would say if they’d been talking to themselves aloud.”
“One guy nodded at me today when I was walking out of the pharmacy. I distinctly heard him say ‘hello,’ but his lips didn’t move. That freaked me the hell out.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
“I’m not sure I want to.”
“Why not?”
She pulled her hand away and pressed down the frizzy hair over her ears.
“Marty?” He had no way of knowing if she could hear him if he didn’t touch her. Theoretically, she should have been able to—especially if she were picking up on the frequencies of strangers. Chris wasn’t meant to be a stranger. He should have been able to communicate with her better than anyone, and not simply because of their proximity at the moment.
“The way he…looked at me after he said hello.” She cut her gaze over to Will and shook her head at him. “Oh, no. Italian dressing is fine if all the ranch is gone.”
Will handed her the bottle.
She took off the cap and, silently, drizzled a bit of dressing over the salad in her bowl.
“Marty?” Chris nudged.
She dragged her tongue across her lips and slid the bottle across the table to Paul. “Can…they hear me when I talk to you like this?”
He realized that she couldn’t have understood the nuances of communicating the way they were. If she’d only ever used the ability with Mallory, the two of them had probably never thought to try to shield their thoughts.
Chris glanced around the table and found Paul, Will, and Erin engaged in a rousing discussion about running shoe soles. The three of them were training for the First Annual Norseton Half Marathon. It was a charity event. Paul had already raised five thousand dollars in donations through the Viking Bachelor blog his mother shamelessly maintained on his behalf. He wanted nothing to do with the site, but accepted that the money would be put to good use helping some of the indigent families in Fallon get fresh starts. Many didn’t want to accept charity from the Afótama, and the royals weren’t in the business of helping people who didn’t want to be helped. There were plenty who did, though, and even if they didn’t want to relocate to Norseton where they could be a part of a larger community, the Afótama could still help them make ends meet until they could get on their feet on their own.
To Marty, Chris projected, “They may be catching scraps of our conversation. Bits and pieces, unless you’re working to actively shield them. Most Afótama are polite enough to push the noise to the backs of their minds so they don’t eavesdrop. We work on the skill from the time puberty starts. We get pretty good at staying out of each other’s conversations, although occasionally, people overhear. Imagine you’re having a discussion with someone at a coffee shop. Sometimes, the folks at the tables near yours catch a word here and there even if they’re not actively listing.”
Marty looked at the trio, staring as if to confirm what Chris had said.
He gave the back of her arm a gentle bump. “Try thinking Paul’s name at him and see what happens.”
She furrowed her brow and looked at Chris’s longtime roommate. “Hey, Paul?”
He stopped talking to Will and turned to her. “Huh?”
“Um. Never mind. I was just trying something.”
“Oh.” He shrugged and picked back up on his previous discourse about flexible soles.
Marty turned to Chris, wide-eyed.
“You’ll get a knack for it quickly enough,” he projected. “But…you said you didn’t want get used to this. Do you have something you’d like to get off your
chest?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s not that big of a deal. I just…don’t know if this is for me. I don’t like the way I feel or the skepticism I’m reading off folks. I get a lot of double takes. I think they all know who I am.”
“Maybe they do. Maybe they don’t. Either way, you shouldn’t let how you perceive people to feel about you impact whether or not you’ll stay. They’re not hostile, are they?”
She picked up her fork and sliced off a corner of her lasagna. “I don’t know. I don’t see how they wouldn’t be, given the circumstances.”
“I’m not convinced so many people know your circumstances. I didn’t know who you were when I first encountered you.”
She said nothing in response to that. She pushed some food between her lips, chewed, and stared across the table at the still-animated conversation of the runners.
He took a cue from her and focused on his meal as well.
“Mommy?”
At the sound of Shani’s tremulous voice, they all turned toward the hallway door. She stood in the entryway in a sparkly blue princess nightgown, clutching a pink stuffed cat beneath her good arm.
Marty started to stand, but Shani was at her side before Marty could get her chair fully pushed back. Shani climbed awkwardly onto her lap, hauled the cat up to the table, and put her head on her mother’s shoulder. “I’m hot.”
Marty stared down at the child’s head for a moment, and then let out a choked laugh. “I don’t think being on my lap is going to help you. Body heat’ll make you even hotter. My, you’re all sweaty.”
Shani, facing Chris, blinked at him several times.
“Hi,” he said.
“Why are you here?”
Marty sighed. “Don’t be rude, Shani.”
“She’s just curious, right, Shani?”
He could hardly take offense. He might have been, too, if the doctor who’d diagnosed his broken arm had shown up at the place where she was staying and tried to cozy up with his mother.
“I live downstairs,” he told her. “With my roommate over there.”
He canted his head toward Paul, who gave Shani a finger wave.
