by Jen Ponce
SLIP SONG
Jen Ponce
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
About the Author
More Books From This Author
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Jennifer Ponce
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U. S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Visit Jen's website at www.JenniferPonce.com
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Dedication
I thank my lucky stars I got to know you, Jim. The world’s a little less magnificent without you in it, though.
To Sue. I hope that this story brightens your day. As they say, “There are other worlds than these.”
-ONE-
Langham Park was an alien landscape, blanketed in white from the ground to the tips of the trees. My breath puffed from my mouth as Liam, Bethy, and I trudged up the hill, our sleds tracing slug trails in the snow behind us. I tugged at my collar where icy trickles of melted flakes slithered into my shirt. My thighs were chunks of frozen grocery store hams, stung with frost and past the sell by date.
Liam stomped ahead, ignoring Bethy’s chatter. He hadn’t talked since asking me to go sledding. He’d wanted to go on his own, trudging to the park to meet his friends. He didn’t understand my need to keep him in my sight.
That’s all right. No mother had killed her kids by paying them too much attention.
“Right Mom?”
“Er. Sure?”
Bethy huffed, her breath pluming. “Liam needs to wait for me this time. You said.”
“Why do I have to wait for you? Huh? You’re slow.”
“Guys, don’t fight, okay? This is supposed to be fun.” Yeah, right. Like cavorting in a freaking freezer could ever be fun. I smiled, my cheeks protesting the movement. See? Fun. “Why don’t you two race? Or better yet, why don’t we do a three-way race?”
Liam rolled his eyes. “Or not.”
Some are worth more as food than offspring.
I eyed my son, the contemptuous look on his face, the slight sneer letting me know my frostbitten efforts to make our outing enjoyable had failed miserably. ‘Too skinny,’ I told the spider assassin inside my head and she chittered her laughter, making my scalp itch.
I dropped my old blue racer—a throwback from the days when I’d actually enjoyed snow—into the lineup with my kids’ newer models. There were a lot of things I’d wished I’d saved from my childhood. My mother’s necklace from her first date she’d given me when I was Bethy’s age. I’d broken it two years later. Why hadn’t I taken better care of that?
But I had my sled.
“Demon Muncher will kick your butts,” I announced, remembering the sled’s name but not why I’d named it that. I planted my feet on either side and sat down, the snow grumbling as my weight packed It tight under the slick blue surface. “You guys ready?”
Although he wanted to look annoyed, Liam had a gleam in his eye as he got onto his disc and Bethy hers.
“Set?” I planted my fists in the snow, pulling the sled back and forth, prepping my start so I wouldn’t get bogged down. “Go!”
Bethy shrieked and took off, rocketing down the hill. I don’t know if it was her lighter weight or what, but she smoked Liam and I both, her sled streaking down the hill like a pink, gas-powered go kart.
She plowed to a stop halfway across the field. I hit a mogul and Demon Muncher canted violently to the left, tipping me out into the snow. As if I weren’t cold enough.
Liam laughed―maybe before he remembered he was mad at me—he looked so startled at the sound. That set me off, my laughter chasing away the chill. Even better, Liam let himself laugh with me, the first spontaneous act of fun he’d allowed since his dad had moved out of the house.
I didn’t want it to end.
The grey-white sky was dazzling despite the clouds blocking all evidence the sun existed. Maybe that’s why I didn’t notice the silent figures standing at the parking lot edge until Liam’s laughter cut off mid-chuckle.
I rolled, my eyes drawn straight to the stark black-robed group that stood out from the snow like a cancerous growth. A sharp, fierce spike of fear that had lodged itself behind my collarbone the afternoon I’d come home to find my children taken―and had never, ever, not really gone away―roared into life. Pitching my voice low, I said, “Bethy, come over here. Right. Now.”
Still dancing with her victory, her back to our visitors, she tipped her head. “Come on! I won. Oh yeah, I’m amazing, I am awesome—”
“Bethy.” Liam’s voice, still balanced on the precipice between childhood and puberty, didn’t break as he snapped out her name. It also startled my daughter enough she stopped her dancing and glanced over her shoulder.
There were fifteen or twenty of them. Not one of them spoke.
I pulled my kids to me, the muscles in my arms and legs juddering, useless. The hook pulsed inside me, waking in response to the adrenaline flooding my system but I knew it would be less than useless. I’d tried working even the most basic of magics but hadn’t been able to get anything to focus for me. I hadn’t known how much Arsinua had helped work the magic until I’d pushed her from me into Lucy’s body.
I could easily make a Hook to the Slip. But that was a different magic, and one I wouldn’t let anywhere near my kids unless there wasn’t another choice.
My kids? In the Slip?
I shuddered.
A woman stepped away from the group. Not far, only a few feet. I recognized her though I only saw her once and she’d been pregnant at the time. I knew her by the hate pouring off her body in almost visible waves. Was it magic that seeped such oily black smoke from her pores or had I slipped again into what I’d been dubbing ‘Magic Eye’? It was something I could do without Arsinua and I found myself practicing a lot, fascinated by the intricate network of lines that connected me to unseen, unknown Skriven. Demons. My spawn, were Tytan to be believed. More than that, I could detect the faintest auras of magic on some of the most mundane objects. Our world wasn’t totally devoid of magic. It could be found if you had a way to see it.
“Mom?” Liam’s voice was low and tight, holding back his fear. “What do they want?”
“Maybe they’re just here to sled?”
“They don’t have sleds, stupid.”
“Shh,” I said, hushing the furious whispers of my children as if by keeping them quiet I could keep them f
rom harm.
Wasn’t that the one lesson I’d learned from everything that had happened months ago? That no matter how much power I had, there wasn’t a darn thing I could do to truly keep my kids safe? Hoping my voice wouldn’t shake, I asked, “What the hell do you want?” Stupid question. I knew what they wanted. What she wanted, she of the oily, black hate.
She wanted revenge.
Still, no answer. But as if she’d given a signal, the group parted and another mystery in black dragged someone forward, someone I’d known for over fifteen years.
“Daddy?” Bethy’s scream pierced the silence of the snow-blanketed park. I yanked her to me, hard, Liam too. Shoved both of their faces into my shoulders, though Liam fought me.
Tom struggled against the person holding him. The white of his shirt was stained with great slashes of red. I heard his ragged breathing in my ear even though that was impossible, he was too far away.
“What are they doing to him? Stop it Mom. Call the police!” Liam thrashed at me, his bony frame strong but no match for my spider-fueled strength. Neutria pumped her power into me, chasing away the fear-born weakness and keeping Liam and Bethy turned away from the scene in front of us.
Scene. As if it could be reduced to something so mundane.
“A husband for a husband. Do you think that’s fair?”
They forced Tom to his knees in the snow.
“Call 911 Liam, call now.” I shoved him behind me. “Please don’t look. Please.” Our eyes connected, his glittery with anger and terror. Bethy’s breathing was high pitched and fast as she clung to me, her face still pressed against my collarbone.
“Please don’t hurt him. Please don’t kill him,” she chanted.
I tried to gather up the magic inside me but it fell apart like wet spaghetti, slippery and elusive. “Neutria. Help me.” I said it aloud. I didn’t care. She couldn’t help, not unless I let her change.
The woman didn’t turn, didn’t glance back. “Do it.”
Tom screamed, tried to push his captor away. Behind me Liam yelled into his phone. I pushed Bethy from me, bounded through the snow, beyond rational thought. “Run as far and fast as you can,” I told them, the whole moment feeling like one of those dreams when no matter how fast you run you never get anywhere.
I yanked at the magic again, trying to force it from my body to do some good.
Another black-robed shadow joined the first. I didn’t see the knife, just the silver flash of it.
I did see Tom’s eyes. They widened. That was all he had time for. Thank god he didn’t suffer.
Of course he suffered. “No! Please.”
He pitched forward into the snow.
I stopped, gracelessly, my legs no longer a functioning part of my body. My kids would never be the same. I heard Bethy. Knew she’d looked though I’d told her not to. Liam was sobbing.
Tom lay motionless in the snow. He only had on his shirt. No coat. He must be so cold.
“Now you understand.” Her pale skin stretched tight over her face, dark slashes of color under her eyes and in the hollows of her cheekbones told me she hadn’t had it easy since last I saw her.
‘But my husband never killed anyone,’ I wanted to say. ‘Not like yours.’
Yours deserved to die.
As one, the black mass of them pooled together and disappeared―whether over the hill or into another world, I had no idea. My eyes settled back on Tom’s unmoving form, his white shirt fluttering in the slight breeze but for the bits stuck to his back with drying blood.
I shivered. Spun. My kids were unharmed, alone, holding each other in their grief. Liam had one arm around his sister, his other hand pressed to his ear as he talked to the police.
How many times in my anger, had I wished Tom would die?
Acid burned its way upward from my stomach, threatening to eject itself violently. I fought the urge, forcing myself to turn back to Tom. He might be alive. Maybe the killer missed. Maybe only nicked him, made him pass out. He could be suffocating in the snow.
My tired muscles went back to work as I stumbled to him, tripping the last few feet to land with a jarring abruptness at his head. I reached out a tentative hand. “Tom?” My voice snagged like a sweater on a jagged piece of glass.
That’s when my brain caught up with what my eyes were seeing. A lurid red staining the snow around his head like a bloody halo. I shut my eyes. As in near-death experiences, our lives together flashed before me. First date, first sex, wedding, birth. Each moment served to drive the splinters of a shattered marriage deeper into my guts. We could have made it work. I should have forgiven him.
Why had I shut him out?
What the hell did principles matter when life was so goddamned short? Jesus. The last thing I’d said to him was, “Grow up, Tom.”
“I’m so sorry.” I looked away from him, angry at myself for even daring to cry. I didn’t deserve to sorrow, did I? When it was my fault he was dead?
I stayed there in the snow, close to him but not touching, staring over at my kids who had, miracles of miracles, not come any closer. Maybe they knew they wouldn’t ever forget the look of their father lying dead in the snow. Even when I was with them they weren’t safe. I brought danger to me like sharks to blood.
But even for their own good I couldn’t leave them. Selfish or not, I had to figure out how to use the power inside me so I could keep them close and keep them safe.
A noise caught my attention. I turned to see a sparkling, golden light ascend from Tom’s body. Awed, I watched as it coalesced into the vague shape of the man I once loved. An expression of happiness suffused the shape of his face then joy turned to confusion. His upward movement halted, then he began drifting toward me, the golden light sweeping into me as if blown by a stark wind. I gasped as he touched me, filled me, and the Heart inside me sang with power as I gobbled up the shining remainder of what was once my husband.
I wrapped my arms around my belly, trying to deny the surge of energy that thrummed within. What had I done? Oh god, what had I done?
Hours, days, eons later, the first sirens sounded in the distance, muffled by the blanketing, alien snow.
-TWO-
We were sitting in the warmth of a patrol car, our arms wrapped around each other as the police did their thing outside. Someone had covered Tom, though I still couldn’t help but worry he was too cold out there in the snow.
I kept forgetting he was dead.
“Why did they do it?”
I smoothed my hand over Bethy’s hair, wild and crackling from taking off her stocking hat. “I don’t know.” I’d been saying the same to the police and I tried to make myself believe it too. I wasn’t at fault for their actions. Isn’t that what I told the victims who I worked with at the Caring Shelter? No matter what you said, no matter what you did, you didn’t deserve to be hit, or kicked, or pinched, or slapped or any of the other ways abusers liked to control their victim. Still, it felt like a lie when I said it and Officer Perrit’s ivy-green eyes slid over to her partner as if to say, ‘See? Right there. She’s lying. I just don’t know why.’
“I’m going to find them and kill them all,” Liam said in a choked voice.
“No baby. Please don’t think that way. It’ll just eat you up inside.” That also felt like a lie. Because I wanted to do the same. Find them. Kill them. Or perhaps not kill them, but drop them somewhere to let nature take care of them. The North Pole. Deep ocean.
But first I’d have to learn how to use the Heart without Arsinua inside me.
They loaded Tom into the ambulance. It drove past us with a finality worse than the sight of him lying in his own blood. I buried my head in Bethy’s hair.
Eventually the door opened and Officer Perrit stuck her head inside the car. “Mrs. Miller? I think you can get your kids home. I’ll get in touch with you later today to talk more about what happened.”
I nodded. Eased the kids out of the back. We trudged to the car, the snow no longer a pure, undiluted w
hite after all the vehicles in and out of the lot. After I got the kids in to the car, I shut the door and turned. “Where did they go? The ones who killed Tom? Did they leave tracks?”
Officer Perrit, halfway back to her car, turned. “When you said they disappeared from sight, you weren’t far wrong. We followed the group’s tracks about fifty feet over that rise and then they just disappear.”
My heart stuttered in my chest.
“It’s like they vanished into thin air. Which, of course, is impossible.” She shifted, her hand resting on the overloaded utility belt around her waist. “You wouldn’t happen to have any insight about how they made it look like they disappeared?”
I shook my head. I had every idea. I just couldn’t tell her.
She knew. Her lips thinned.
I slid into my car before she could say anything else or ask more questions I couldn’t answer.
“Mom? Are they going to catch them?”
I glanced in the rear view at Bethy, her cheeks bright red from cold and her eyes from crying. “They are going to try really hard.”
“But you don’t think they’ll catch them, do you?”
I must have looked startled. Bethy leaned in, hooking her arm on the front of Liam’s seat. I knew he was upset; he didn’t even yell at her like he normally would, just sat staring stony-eyed out the window. “I hope they do.”
“There’s something you aren’t telling us. A big thing. Cuz you’re different and it’s not just Daddy moving out.” Her voice gave a watery hitch. “He can’t be dead.”
I held her as best I could, awkward though it was. Liam sagged into us too. In my head the image of Tom lying in the snow with his halo of red came back to me. An icy anger gripped me. I murmured comforting words, trying to get thoughts of revenge out of my head.
When Bethy shivered, I leaned away. “Let’s go home and get warm.”
Liam turned back to the window. Bethy did the same. I fastened my belt and started the car, looking up to see Officer Perrit still hadn’t left. Making sure we got home safe, I supposed. Or the bad guys wouldn’t come back. I didn’t think they would. Not to bother me.
