Count On Me

by Abigail Graham

  “They’re looking for you.”

  “Call them and tell them I’m here. Now.”

  He gapes at me.

  “Do it.”

  “Roxanne, you don’t have to do this,” he protests. “I have a little cash.”

  “I know, and you’re going to need it. Make the call.”

  I step out of the office and go to Conrad.

  “There’s a room upstairs. It’s mine, you’ll know it when you see it. Take the kids up there.”

  “I’m not leaving you to do this alone.”

  “I need you to,” I say, touching his arm. “You know I’m going to be fine.”

  He leads them upstairs. I watch, make sure they’re gone, and return to the office just as my father sets his phone in his lap.

  “They’re on their way.”

  “Come on, let’s go see them.”

  He wheels himself out to the parlor. I sit on one of the antique couches and wait, one leg propped over another, fighting the urge to bite my nails.

  Half an hour later, they arrive. The door is already open. The younger man pushes inside. Sharkskin Suit follows him, and behind him, two more. Wide, heavy men with heavy hands who have done heavy things. They all look at me and Sharkskin Suit smirks.

  “So you found ’er,” he says. “Good. We’ll be taking our payment now. Debt’s settled. Hope this is a lesson to you.”

  “I don’t think so,” I say casually. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  The younger man with the slicked-back hair pulls his arm to backhand me. Before his knuckles land on my chin, I flick my hand out, my fingers curled into a certain sign.

  A wave of concussive force lifts him off his feet and slams him into the wall so hard it cracks the plaster. He slides down and goes still, blood trickling from his nose and mouth.

  Sharkskin Suit steps back, horrified.

  “Strega,” he breathes. “Witch!”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  His goons pull guns from under their jackets. A little whisper and a wave of my hand and the metal goes red hot and falls from their hands to hiss on the floor. I stand up and stalk toward him.

  “Witch,” I repeat. “Strega, whatever you want to call me.”

  He hisses, making some protective sign at me with his hands. I laugh and give him a just a little flick of willpower, enough to slam his creaky knees into the parquet floor as I bring him to kneel. Something pops in his leg and he cries out.

  “Bitch,” he says, “you have to sleep sometime.”

  “You asshole,” I snap. “I just squashed a fifty-billion-year-old bug monster back down into the sixth circle of hell. You think I’m scared of some lame Don Corleone routine?”

  I tuck my nail under his chin and tilt him up to look at me.

  “Let’s get something straight, right now, you leathery old pile of shit. This is my turf. You and your thugs stay out of my town, understand?”

  He glares at me, his resolve hardening.

  I wave my hand in front of his eyes and whisper a word. He looks through me, into the distance, then jerks around, eyes darting in every direction. I release my hold on him and allow him to stand.

  He can’t see me. I’m not letting him.

  I step next to his ear. “Because if you don’t… I’ll be there. You can’t hide from me anywhere. Not even in an empty room. Now run along home.”

  I step back. He pulls himself to his feet, and his goons pick up his son, I think he is. Sharkskin Suit gives my father one last terrified look and they run from the house, disappearing into a sedan.

  You know, this is kind of fun.

  I lift the glamour that rendered me invisible to mortal eyes and turn to my father. I rest my hands on his knees.

  My power would allow me to heal him without pain. I heal him with it, a petty little thing but I do it anyway. He howls as bones knit and muscle rebuilds itself. I take his hand and do the same, straightening what Sharkskin Suit left crooked.

  A wave of my hand crumbles his casts to dust. He stands, shaky.

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” he babbles. “Baby, how?”

  “Don’t call me that. It makes more sense than selling your own daughter. How could you do that to me?”

  “They were going to kill us both, I had no choice!”

  “You had the choice not to gamble my inheritance away!” I scream at him. “It doesn’t matter now. You’re healed. You have twenty minutes to get what you can carry and get out of my house. If you don’t, I will be very angry, and you haven’t seen what I can do when I’m angry.”

  Quivering, he runs off. I stand in the parlor and wait until less than twenty minutes later he passes without a word, suitcases tucked under both arms. I’m sure he stole whatever would have any value, but as he flees from the house and my life, I can’t bring myself to care.

  Ten minutes later, after scouring the kitchen, I walk upstairs and take my kids and my husband a tray of peanut butter sandwiches and lemonade. I find them in my old room.

  “Nina, this will be your room,” I say. “Adrian, I’ll need some help cleaning up yours. Conrad, we’ll take the master.”

  “There are many bedrooms,” he says.

  “Perfect for children,” I glance at Adrian, “and grandchildren, when the time comes. I just hope that will be a while after I get you enrolled in school.”

  “School?” Adrian says.

  “Yes, both of you.”

  Conrad stands up and takes a sip from the glass I offer him. He makes an intrigued sound.

  The look on his face when he eats his first peanut butter and jelly sandwich is almost worth seven hundred years of torment. It really is.

  I sit next to them and we eat our dinner. I’ll get some real food. We’ll get the kids in school. Things will work out. The world will make sense.

  The monsters will stay in the dark corners of the Earth where they belong, and out here in the light, we can be happy.

  Afterword

  Thank you for reading Count On Me.

  I sincerely hope you enjoyed it. This was a more personal book than I’ve written in a good long while and it was simultaneously enjoyable and very exhausting to write. I don’t think I’ve poured as much raw energy into anything I’ve published since His Princess, maybe even since Paradise Falls.

  After touching on some Saturday morning-style science fiction with His Princess I decided I wanted to try my hand at the supernatural again.

  I didn’t want to write a typical vampire romance. I still wouldn’t call Count On Me a vampire book. It just happens to have one in it, and neither the heroine nor hero are vampires themselves.

  My intention with this one was to write a stealth sequel to His Princess and Thrall. It turned out to be more of the latter than the former. I had planned a cameo appearance for Prince Kristoff and Penny, but after much wrestling with this story I decided I could either have my cameo or have a proper ending and I decided to conclude it in a way that made sense for Roxanne and Conrad, which meant no cameo. The only references to His Princess wound up being a brief mention of the neighboring country where that book takes place.

  I wanted this book to be a total standalone, but have connections to the rest of my books, as I usually do. It’s not absolutely necessary to read Thrall to understand this book, but I think reading it would enhance the experience a bit, so I’ve included both Thrall and His Princess as companion books, following this afterword.

  I have books on the drawing board to explore the supernatural corner of my world some more. I didn’t know there witches until Roxanne came along. Now I have to find out more about how they work. I think you’ll be seeing her again.

  Don’t worry, though. Other than a few little hints here and there I won’t be crossing over the paranormal with the other parts of my world, so you don’t have to worry about picking up a quirky small town romance like Benched and finding a vampire walking on stage halfway through.

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  Thanks again for reading, and enjoy the companion volumes. :)

  I

  His Princess

  1

  Yes, I am really named Persephone. My parents are hippies. Especially cruel hippies.

  Sometimes, in my darker moments, I have wondered if that’s why he chose me: because I was named for the queen of Hell.

  “Penny?”

  Melissa’s voice shakes me out of my daydream. It was a pleasant daydream, the meandering kind where you drift through nothing in particular. I was thinking about ice cream. It’s been six months since I’ve had ice cream. I’ve been living on military-surplus MREs for the entire time I’ve been here. It’s a point of honor for me. I eat the same food that the settlers do.

  I was thinking about ice cream less for the taste and more for the cold. It’s hot. Solkovia is one of those places that’s like a time-share sales pitch from hell: Freezing cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and in between a constant rain and chill that makes your bones sore.

  Barely bigger than Massachusetts, landlocked Solkovia sits in a vast historical crossroads. Every big-name invading army has passed through here at one point or another. Romans, Huns, Mongols, Turks. It was occupied by the Nazis during World War II and bitterly clenched in Moscow’s fist until the Berlin Wall fell.

  Now, after all that squeezing by iron fists, this little land has been thrown away. There’s no oil here, no strategic reserves, no uranium or coal or bauxite to make into aluminum. The land isn’t dead but isn’t very fertile either. Since the only interest the Soviets had in this territory was passing through it, they never developed any kind of industry here. It’s too far from anywhere to make a useful manufacturing hub.

  Solkovia hides her bloody history beneath a blanket of green. The land is beautiful. To the east, the plains stretch out in rolling waves to the Nevet river. Far to the west, barely visible, like distant clouds, the Carpathian Mountains loom with ominous mystery. It looks like something out of a fairy tale.

  Dusty wind whips the flap of my tent. The prefab houses are coming along, but, like the other volunteers, I’m roughing it and living off the land with the settlers. When the rains come hard, the tent roofs buckle and spill water through badly patched seams. Dust storms from the south sometimes blanket us with a fine layer of silt that gets everywhere, clinging to my hair and every fold in my skin for days no matter how much I scour myself clean.

  There’s just enough international aid to get some farms going. The tractors lined up along the road are fifty years old, but their owners have cherished them until they look new. As I step outside, the smell of freshly turned earth fills my nostrils as I breathe deep of unspoiled air.

  It’s not a bad place. It’s not a bad place at all.

  The bad place is to the west. Along a disputed border, Solkovia’s neighbor, the Principality of Kosztyla, eyes these lands and people. Kosztyla resisted the Germans and they resisted fought the Soviets, and they did it without Western aid. Sitting on gold mines and the only oil reserves in this part of the world, Kosztyla is one of the wealthiest small nations on the planet.

  Barely bigger than Solkovia, it has over a thousand times the gross domestic product, though ninety-nine percent of the wealth is controlled by the ruling family, headed by one of the last crown princes in the world. Just last year the crown prince announced that his country had just discovered massive deposits of rare earth metals, further increasing their wealth.

  It’s hard to take a deep breath here when you have that looming behind your back. War could break out anytime. With no allies and no real value to the international community, Solkovia would end up as nothing more than a Twitter hashtag if Kosztyla decided to cross the border. The States wouldn’t even bother dropping a bomb or sending a cruise missile. Kosztyla is too important.

  Our mission here isn’t supported either. I’m on my own.

  My best friend in camp is Melissa Greene. Her parents weren’t hippies. She wears her cross around her neck prominently, prays three times a day, and preaches her evangelical faith to the motley assortment of Solkovian faithful. There are Christians, both Catholic and Orthodox, a small number of Jews and Muslims, and an even smaller number of keepers of what they call the old faith, a kind of folk magic.

  Melissa is tall, breezy, has natural blonde hair and freckles, and all of the village boys are enamored of her, and a fair share of the men as well. Her modest ways and demure dress only seem to make her more enchanting to them.

  “Break’s over,” she sighs.

  She’s talking about my planning period. I’m a teacher here, educating the children of the village in our Western ways. Other volunteers aid in the construction efforts, the farming. The hope here is to turn a tent city in the wilderness into a thriving community. If we can get this place in shape, we’ll be connected to the power grid next year. The well is almost done and soon we won’t have to ration water.

  I hope so, because I need a shower. Badly.

  The school is a prefab building, basically a big shed, or so it looks from the outside. Next to it, a diesel generator chugs to power the computers and lights while a big satellite dish brings us glorious one-megabit-per-second Internet, which is a miracle out here. It’s the only way I can keep in touch with my family, other than my weekly turn on the satellite phone.

  If you’re thinking that I’m out here because I wanted to go to the edge of the world and hide, you’re mostly right. No Facebook, no smart phones, no Twitter or Tumblr or blogging or social media or anything of any kind. Simple stuff. I teach from books using old-school methods, and my kids mostly work from a library of donated volumes that grows by five or ten books every time a shipment comes in from the church.

  The classroom—there’s just the one—is one of the only structures in the camp that has air-conditioning, and it drops from ninety-five degrees and high humidity outside to a glorious eight-five degrees inside. Any cooler and the generator will blow. We tried that once and sweltered in here for six weeks until replacement parts arrived from the capital.

  The kids light up when they see me. They range in age from six to fourteen. Eventually we’ll divide them into two classes but right now there’s no point. We’re teaching all of them the basics. When Melissa and I first arrived, only two of the forty-six children could read.

  There are no older children in the school. They’re out working with their parents. They “graduate” when they turn fifteen, so I’m going to lose some. The classes will grow soon. The crèche where three of my colleagues watch the younger children and toddlers while their parents build their new lives has over a hundred kids in it. Most of them are young. Most of the teenagers, two thirds, are girls.

  There was a war, and around here they don’t turn you down if you can carry a rifle. There are a lot of old men and young boys here. Even though they’re surrounded by their peers, the boys can’t get enough of me and Melissa. I dress a little more casually than she does, though I still conform to the standards set by the church. That means a sundress. Being treated like a pinup model was flattering for a while but now it’s just tiresome. I have so much to teach them and so little time.

  I handle the older kids.

  For the most part they speak good English. They started learning when they started school. We’re hoping that by picking up the international lingua franca they’ll be able to find a competitive place in the world. It’s the little things that lift a whole country.

  When you’re teaching thirteen-year-olds
who can barely read and still can’t handle basic arithmetic, it’s hard to swallow that line of thinking. I want them to succeed so badly, but it’s like staring up the slope of a tall mountain that you have to climb. Nominally the kids are divided by age, but the six-year-olds and the fourteen-year-olds have the same skill level, so Melissa and I end up teaching the class together.

  More esoteric subjects like history will have to wait until everyone can read the books. The younger kids are picking it up easier than the older ones. It’s strange to watch them as we break them into groups to read from the English texts we’ve been supplied by the church. You’d think the older kids, especially the boys, would be annoyed with their younger peers, but they submit themselves to tutoring with kids half their age without a second thought, sounding out the words and struggling to pick up what their cousins and younger siblings are doing with ease.

  There’s an extra chair at every table. Melissa and I rotate through the room, helping the students with difficult words or just flat-out reading passages to them as they scan along. The little kids eventually give up and listen to the stories. I spend an hour reading Charlotte’s Web to a group of six students, four girls and two boys.

  It’s strange how pliant and attentive they are. I don’t mean to knock the students I worked with back home, but when I was an intern doing pretty much the same thing, it was like pulling teeth. I had to hear lectures from twelve-year-olds about why the book was dumb, I was dumb, school was dumb, and the world was dumb.

  It’s probably been the same through the ages, but something about them bothered me. I used to think that kids were growing up too fast, too interested in taking on the trappings of adulthood. Twelve-year-olds got into these fights over boys and dated and they all had smart phones that they’d constantly be checking in class, in flagrant violation of the school rules.

  Sitting here with these kids, I realize what growing up too fast really means. I don’t have to hear the stories, and they don’t like to tell them. You can read it in their eyes. When you’re ten and you see your sister step on a land mine, or soldiers drag your mother away, it leaves a mark on your soul.