The Viking's Witch

by Holley Trent

“Paul’s a doctor, too.”

  “I was hot but now I’m cold.”

  “Sorry about that. Might be the medication.”

  “How?”

  “Shani,” Marty warned.

  “Hey, that’s okay,” he said. “Questions are good, and I don’t mind answering.” He really didn’t mind, but he wasn’t entirely sure he could put a whole lot of clinical mumbo jumbo into words digestible by a six-year-old. He wanted to try, though.

  “Some medicines that we take for pain,” he said, “work by making other parts of our bodies either calm down or work harder. When your body is trying to keep you from feeling pain, sometimes you’ll feel cold because maybe your heart isn’t beating as fast. Sometimes you’ll feel hot because it’s beating too fast. Sometimes, you’ll feel both, one after the other. After a while, your body figures out what’s what and you feel like your normal self.”

  “Probably doesn’t help that there’s a down cover on that bed,” Erin said.

  “Probably also doesn’t help that we’re Afótama, and we just run a little hotter than average humans when we’re ill,” Paul said.

  Will leaned forward to see Paul around Erin. “Is that a clinical observation? I’ve never made that connection.”

  Paul grunted and chewed off an end of garlic bread.

  “Consistently?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s not in any of the literature.”

  “You should research that, then, so there’s some literature.”

  “Or you could. You have access to the patients. It wouldn’t be such an inconvenience to have your receptionist ask folks to sign off on some study forms. I don’t think most folks would mind you recording very basic information about illness type and their temperature at the time of intake.”

  Paul kept chewing and stared at the numbers geek.

  “Just something to think about,” Will said.

  “Well, I tell you what. If I ever get a competent nurse who can remind me to track that data, I’ll be sure to collect it for you.”

  “What happened to your last nurse?” Chris asked. “You had one last night when I got to work.”

  Paul flicked his hair out of his eyes and ripped off a huge corner of bread. After he’d chewed and swallowed, he said, “We had a difference of opinion. One that shouldn’t be mentioned in the vicinity of someone with young ears.”

  Chris looked at Shani.

  Shani’s eyelids were half-mast and her jaw was drooping a bit.

  Chris wouldn’t have bet money, but he got a sneaking suspicion that Shani wouldn’t have noticed if a Klingon warship had docked at the kitchen table.

  “I’ll go put her to bed.” Marty pushed back her chair.

  “Nah.” Chris waved her down. “Just give her here. Finish your food. I don’t know if Shani’s typical, but Afótama kids can be manipulative to their parents when they want to be. It’s probably just a self-preservation tactic, but they can be very good at derailing plans. You’ll take her to bed, and the next thing you know, she’ll ask you in that sweet little voice, ‘When are you coming to bed, Mommy?’ and even though it’ll be seven o’clock, you won’t want to tell her ‘later’ because she’s got a broken arm and probably has her bottom lip poked out.”

  Shani’s head lolled back over Marty’s forearm and she muttered in sleep, “Don’t make that face at me, swing set. I’ll get you back next time.”

  While the other adults at the table were trying admirably, but failing, to suppress snorts, Marty sighed.

  “We also tend to have really interesting dreams,” Paul said in an undertone.

  Marty bobbed her eyebrows and stared down at her daughter’s stubborn expression. “Well, I can vouch for that,” she said.

  “That so?” Chris said.

  She shrugged.

  He needed more than a shrug. He needed to hear, “I’ve been dreaming of you, Chris,” but he wasn’t about to hold his breath waiting.

  He held out his arms and said softly, “Hand her over. You can put her in bed when you’ve had enough to eat.”

  She looked from him down to Shani and passed her fingertips over the child’s damp forehead.

  “It’s okay,” he projected. And maybe that was cheating, getting into her head like that in a way only she could hear, but he had to use the tools he had at his disposal. She had designs on heading back to Florida with Shani, and every cell in his body screamed out, “No. No fucking way.”

  He had to do what he could to convince her to stay. Or at least, to come back to him so they could see what shook out of their collision of magic.

  “I’m trained in these sorts of things,” he added.

  “She’s my daughter.”

  “Did you think I needed the reminder?”

  She sighed. “I just mean that…I don’t want people doing me any favors.”

  “Eat,” he scolded.

  Marty gave Shani one last, long look and then passed her limp body over to him.

  He settled Shani against the crook of his left arm so her mother could see her face.

  Shani’s head lolled back yet again, and her brow furrowed. “You stay out of this, slide,” she said, “or I’m gonna come for you next.”

  The others snorted again.

  Marty grimaced and picked up her fork. “She always does that,” she said quietly. “Sometimes I sit beside her bed with my phone and record her. One day, I’ll patch some of the audio together and play it back for her. Does that make me a bad person?”

  “Nah.” Chris reached for his beer. “Just means you can find humor in things.”

  “Gotta find humor somewhere, I guess. Sometimes, it’s really hard to find.”

  He nodded, but he didn’t really know the feeling. He’d always been good at laughing at things to make himself feel better, but he wasn’t so ignorant to not know that he’d had a pretty charmed life. Finding things funny had probably been a lot easier for him. He’d had hope to bolster him.

  And what does Marty have?

  Marty had bags under her eyes and gaunt cheeks. She had hands that shook a little too much whenever he thought to look down at them.

  He didn’t imagine she laughed very much.

  He could fix that, just like he’d fixed Shani’s arm. He just needed some time. A day wasn’t nearly enough.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Marty drifted in and out of the conversation, distracted from worrying that Shani would wake and that she’d have to put her to bed and sleep along with her, just like Chris had said. He’d been right. Shani was very good at tugging at her mother’s heartstrings, and Marty would feel so guilty—so selfish—if she told her, “No, not right now.”

  Since her divorce, Marty had wanted to tell Shani yes as much as she could…for better or for worse. Occasionally, that parenting decision backfired on her. She didn’t know if she could undo the damage, or know if she wanted to just yet. Shani had been the only good thing to come out of the marriage, and Marty didn’t want her daughter to feel like she was unwanted. Her ex already did enough of that, and Marty would never want the child to experience what she had with her own father.

  Fathers should want the children they make.

  Shani was in that deep, deep sleep that Marty knew from experience there’d be no waking her from, and Chris held her on his lap like a feather-light accessory. He did everything one-handed. His plate was empty, and his beer bottle drained. He was drawing out some kind of diagram for Will on the back of a paper restaurant menu. She bet he could even juggle swords at the same time without breaking a sweat.

  “Do you want some more of this, or should I put it away?” Will pointed to the lasagna pan. There were two squares left, and the way the cheese had browned on that corner one made Marty’s mouth water…and her stomach lurch.

  She put up her hands, and whispered, “Ugh, I can’t eat another bite.”

  Across the table, Erin sighed. “When I moved in with Will, I gained five pounds in two weeks. Being this close to all the
restaurants in Norseton has been a test of my self-restraint.”

  “I think you deserve to splurge a little, sweetheart,” Will said. Looking to Marty, he added, “She used to sneak food from the mansion kitchen when her…your father wasn’t there.” He swore under his breath.

  Marty did, too, but probably for a different reason. “He’s the main cook there, right?”

  Erin nodded. “For now. He’s got to be getting suspicious that people are giving him the cold shoulder. He’s as knit into the psychic web as anyone here, and there’s only so long he’ll be oblivious to people’s hesitance. He’s going to start snooping soon.”

  “He doesn’t suspect anything.” Marty shook her head and pushed back her chair. Everyone had finished their beers, and she needed to do something with her hands.

  She had one mind to sabotage the gathering by carrying Shani off to the guest room and then making the excuse that Shani couldn’t sleep without her. There was nothing wrong with Shani staying where she was. Marty had simply become terrified of adult conversations sometime following the dissolution of her parents’ “relationship” and her own divorce. Staying engaged for too long with anyone except Mallory caused Marty immitigable stress.

  She grabbed five more beers from the case in the fridge and, after taking a deep breath, carried them to the table. She popped the cap on hers, then Chris’s since he only had the one free hand, and then passed the opener around.

  He nodded his thanks and she stared at him for too long, unable to recall the proper response for a statement of gratitude.

  He’d been so nice to her and to Shani, and nice people always made her suspicious. She had to be suspicious, even if her instincts were at war with her social drive.

  I should take Shani.

  She didn’t have to let him be nice. That way, she wouldn’t have to keep saying, “Thank you” or “You’re welcome” at just the right times.

  Right. You’re welcome. Say that.

  She said it, and extended her arms to take Shani from him, but he didn’t even look at them.

  He reached forward and took his beer. “How do you know your father doesn’t suspect anything?”

  Damn.

  She dragged a hand down her face and perched on the edge of her seat. “I don’t know how I know. He’s my father, and that’s all I can say.”

  “Ah.” Will took a long draw on his beer and stared at the ceiling. “I keep forgetting that you know him in a different way than Erin does. They may have lived together for twenty-three years, but you have a biological connection with him. You and Mallory can read thoughts and intentions off him even when he’s not nearby.”

  “You have to understand that I don’t really know him as well as…well, I don’t know who really knows him. I was going to say that Erin knows him better, but given the twenty-three-year lie about her origin, that obviously isn’t true. The person that he was when he visited my mother in Florida for all those years isn’t the person you all know.”

  She fixed her gaze on Shani’s twitching lips and scratched at the corner of her beer bottle’s label. Shani was still asleep and oblivious. Already, the child knew too much about things she wasn’t supposed to be aware of. Marty was sure of that. Shani may not have repeated everything she heard, but she was always listening. Marty didn’t doubt that for one moment.

  “He never told us where he was going,” Erin said, likely more for the benefit of Chris, Paul, and Will than for Marty. She’d already told Marty that. “When he left here for a week or two at a time, I mean. He used to feed me and my mother vague excuses about Muriel sending him to a convention, or he’d tell us that he had to go negotiate with a vendor for bulk orders or something. Muriel says that was never the case. He was never in charge of acquiring anything for the mansion, and though there were a few conferences and food service conventions she sent him to, none were in Florida.”

  “Why the hell did he even go down there?” Chris asked.

  “I asked my mother.” Marty refused to look at him. If she looked, she’d want to reach for Shani again. She’d want to grab the girl and go, and then she’d be ashamed because she’d know he’d watched the coward run away.

  “After all these revelations came to light, I asked her,” she said. “My parents actually met for the first time in San Antonio. My mother is a hospital social worker, and she’d gone there for a while to work at a sister hospital in the corporation after it’d been brought into the system. She was there for about a year, and Mallory was born right after she moved back to Florida.”

  She looked up in time to see Will fondling a corner of his paper napkin and furrowing his brow at Marty.

  “What?”

  “Didn’t Queen Tess live in San Antonio for a while when she was in foster care?” he asked.

  Marty shrugged. “I have no idea. I’m not up to speed on the Afótama clan’s history. I only know that at some point, Queen Tess was kidnapped as a child, and that when she was finally found at age twenty-eight, she’d been living in New Orleans.”

  “Probably doesn’t mean anything that he was there,” Will said. “I can’t help but to try to make connections when I hear them.”

  “You should follow up on that lead anyway,” Erin said.

  “Because you’re so eager to get your father in even more trouble?”

  Erin closed her eyes and gave her ponytail and frustrated twist. “Look, I just need some resolution. I don’t want to make waves. If there’s a connection there at all—if my father was in San Antonio or any other place the same time as Tess when she was missing—then folks should know that. He’s never going to come out and confess what he did or didn’t do. No way in hell.”

  “I agree,” Marty said quietly.

  He’d never admitted wrongdoing to anything. He’d even made his affair with her mother seem like his participation had been Mama’s fault.

  “By the time anyone can get enough information out of him about what happened or didn’t happen, he may be hip to people knowing he’s not on the up-and-up,” Erin said. “He may try to leave before Muriel can deal with him.”

  “Would that be such a bad thing? If he just left and took his bullshit with him?”

  “I think answers are important,” Chris said.

  Marty had to look at him then.

  Shani had curled against his chest like a caterpillar trying to cocoon itself. His arm had to be very numb, but he hadn’t complained once. He didn’t look uncomfortable. He looked perfectly natural, and for some reason, that made Marty want to grab Shani even more and go hide in the bedroom. She didn’t know what to do with niceness except to look for the attached strings and tug them.

  “A lot of people were hurt by his actions, directly and indirectly,” he said. “They need closure. And if there’s any chance of us correcting some of the damages they endured, we—as a clan—need to fix them.”

  “As…a clan.”

  “Right. That’s why people like me and Paul and Will come home.”

  “You miss being here.”

  “And we need to be here. That neediness is wired into our biology. We need to be knit into this thing. Every connection in the community makes it stronger. When there are gaps in the network, we struggle to compensate. People can feel the holes, even if they don’t realize what they are. We try to take care of each other the best we can.”

  Erin chuckled. “Ótama likes to say that we’re all in this boat together.”

  Marty found irony in the fact Ótama would say that. She’d met her briefly soon after arriving. The jovial witch was the reason the clan existed in the first place. It had taken Marty three days to wrap her head around that.

  Ótama looked to be around thirty, but she’d been born nearly a millennium prior. She’d died on a Viking longship during a failed voyage to Greenland and had her soul confined to a Purgatory-like realm by the Norse gods. Apparently, they hadn’t been done with her.

  Their ship eventually arrived safely in the Americas at the end o
f that ill-fated trip with her lover and the newborn daughter who had to be the queen her mother wasn’t around to be.

  The people in the Afótama clan were the descendants of half the people who’d journeyed on that boat. The splinter group in Fallon—where Erin had been born—were the descendants of the other half.

  And Ótama…she was back. Not as queen—Tess had settled into that role—but as the machine, of sorts, who psychically linked them all.

  Being in Norseton, Marty could feel Ótama’s psychic pulse. Her kindness, and unvarnished enthusiasm about the world she could finally be a part of again.

  Of course they all want to come home to that.

  Marty swigged some beer and, setting the bottle on the table, glanced around the room.

  All eyes, save for Shani’s, were on her. Marty felt that she needed to say something profound, or at the very least useful, but she had no words.

  She pushed her chair back from the table and brushed some breadcrumbs off her shirt and onto her plate. “I’m going to put Shani back to bed.”

  “Don’t hurry away,” Paul said. “This is the point in the soiree where we usually start planning shenanigans.”

  “Shenanigans are how I ended up with Shani.” And a shit stain of an ex-husband. Marty felt that went without saying.

  “Sounds to me like you got a prize for your bad behavior, then,” Chris said.

  Marty held out her arms to take Shani, but he shook his head and backed his own chair away from the table carefully. “I got her.”

  Oh God.

  Marty performed a weak nod, and then led him back to the room. She fixed the covers Shani had mussed, and found that Shani’s spot on the bed was damp from sweat.

  “Put her on the other side,” she whispered, and pulled the sheets back.

  He laid her down carefully and propped her bum arm atop a pillow.

  Marty pulled up the sheet and folded the comforter down to the foot of the bed.

  She looked to Chris, who had his hand on Shani’s forehead, and was trying admirably to stifle a laugh. Shani was muttering in her sleep about dancing pepperonis and salami swords.

  “I don’t try to understand any of it,” Marty whispered.