Fall

by Katherine Rhodes

  “You have the absolute worst clients, Bas,” Lincoln took a drink from his bottle. “Just the worst. Do you attract the nuts?”

  “I don’t know.” He sighed. “But if this guy is lying to me about the randomness, I have to do something.”

  Nodding, I opened another box of pizza and pulled out a slice. “I think I have a situation too.”

  “What’s yours?” Lincoln asked.

  “I had a client, who I dismissed because she wasn’t cooperating,” I explained. “Well, she was seeking. I don’t do that. I—”

  “Seeking?” Bastian asked.

  “Pill seeking. They don’t want to work on their problems like they do with you and Wren. They want a pill, and the problem gone. Those are the less annoying ones. The bad ones are seeking to sell. Those, I call the cops on.”

  “I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never experienced it,” Bastian said.

  “The joys of being able to legally prescribe narcotics.” I sighed. “So, this patient has come crawling back and I accepted her as long as she complied with the routine we set. I even brought her daughter in on it. And it’s working. Except…”

  Bastian and Lincoln both stalled with the beer bottles halfway to their lips. I let out another sigh.

  “Pretty sure she’s still banging the pool boy and giving him diseases on the regular. I’m also pretty sure this isn’t the first time she’s cheated on her husband, and possibly in a swinger’s group without him.”

  Bastian turned his lip up. “Gross.”

  “The problem is that the whispers I heard were how she was planning on sleeping with him again, even though he said no more.”

  “She’s raping him?”

  “I can’t say that yet, but she’s definitely assaulting him.”

  “Can you do anything?” Lincoln asked. “Tell someone? Get the police out there?”

  Shaking his head, Bastian swallowed his bite of pizza. “And tell them what? Hey, officer, I hear voices in my head telling me that this woman is abusing her pool boy. No, it’s a regular occurrence because I’m one of the Seven Sins.” Bastian toasted us and took a swig of beer. “Yep. We’ll be hauling you out to Horsham.”

  “Lily?” Lincoln asked.

  “Her hands are full with other stuff,” I said, shaking my head.

  Lincoln ran a hand over his chin, and a moment later his eyes narrowed in thought. “What if… This is going to sound a little insane, but hell. We’re all sleeping with the Devil’s twin sister. So. What if this is our job? Side hustle?”

  My eyebrow lifted of its own accord. “Do what now?”

  “Fisch, you’re supposedly sloth, right? Before you met Wren, you were terrible at doing anything that was more than the minimum required.”

  I nodded. The guilt still weighed on me for all the people I could have helped if I had just gotten my head out of my ass. “I was.”

  “And when you met Wren, you realized what you were doing. Being a jackass about a lot of stuff. You’re still slothful, but you laugh about it and it’s really mostly just lazy now.”

  I squinted at him. “I don’t know if you just insulted me.”

  “I did, please try to keep up.” Lincoln grinned. “And when I met Wren, I started to realize that all the rules I had weren’t much of anything because my greed was nothing compare to the greed of some of the people who were using me. So, I started to employ different tactics to keep the truly greedy from benefiting from my talent.”

  Bastian raised his hand. “I was in a monogamous relationship since age nineteen. And if I’m Lust, then that kind of screws the dynamic, doesn’t it?”

  Lincoln slumped a bit and twisted his lips. “Huh.”

  “No, wait.” I, leaned forward. “It still works. We were the personification of the negative traits, right? He was the personification of positive ones. Wren’s name is Temperance. With Lust, it would be controlling your appetites, not locking them down.” I flicked a finger between them. “You two, and you and Wren. You’re still pan, but this arrangement keeps you in check without denial.”

  “I loved Victoria—”

  “No one saying otherwise,” I said, cutting him off. The deaths of his wife and children were still raw. All of us had found him crumbled in tears in corners or on a chair. We all knew it was going to be a long time before he could really process it and settle it in whatever way he needed to deal with the grief. “That’s not what I was going to suggest at all. What I was thinking was that because you were monogamous, maybe that was the problem. You needed to not be so…single minded.”

  Lincoln nodded. “That makes sense in the context we’re talking about here.”

  “So, maybe this is our side hustle,” I said. “We’re supposed to take what our…uh…”

  “Powers?” Sebastian asked.

  “Natures,” Lincoln offered, and I pointed at him.

  “What our natures give us for information and solve the problems. Balance things. Temper it, if you will.”

  “Like a Scooby Sin Sleuth gang or something?” Lincoln asked.

  “Let’s see who’s really behind this!” Bastian crowed, and mimicked pulling off a mask. “Why, it’s our brother-in-law, Lucifer!”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Guys, I don’t think that it works quite like that. We’re the sins, not Lucifer.”

  “And is he really our brother-in-law?” Lincoln asked.

  We were all silent.

  Was he? It implied we were all going to marry Wren and that was logically, legally, impossible.

  “I’m not going to lie,” I finally said. “I would very much like to marry her. But I don’t know how that works. Not in this day and age. Because I don’t want to exclude the rest of you.”

  Bastian put up a hand. “We’re far from that right now. I know we all are. Let’s try to get through all of what’s going on around us before we talk about anything like marriage at all.”

  “So Scooby Gang?” Lincoln asked.

  I rolled my eyes.

  Wren

  “You know Lincoln completely forgot that we were going to be out tonight,” Ellie said.

  “Yes, of course,” I answered. “How many pizzas did he bring home?”

  “Oh, ten. At least.”

  “You know there won’t be any left when we get home tonight, right?”

  Ellie laughed hard. “Of course, there won’t. And we’ll find Lincoln asleep on the couch, Bastian asleep in front of his computer on the love seat, and Fischer passed out in the recliner.”

  “With Sons of Anarchy streaming on the television,” Lily said.

  “Good call,” Ellie managed to gasp between gales of laughter. “They all mean so well, but they’re just so…”

  “Male,” Lily and I chorused.

  That made Ellie laugh even harder and had Miriam and Laxmi making faces as they walked up to the table. Eventually, Ellie was able to calm down and say hello to the newcomers properly, but she still had to dab her face with a napkin to wipe the tears of laughter away.

  “Who’s being typical male?” Laxmi asked.

  “You even have to ask?” I tipped my head.

  “You know,” Miriam said, “it’s not too late to change your mind. You could always come back and play for our team again. At least I know that Laxmi isn’t pissing on the tiles in the middle of the night.”

  “You don’t know that,” Laxmi said.

  “Well the seat is always down at least.”

  “No midnight plunges?” Ellie asked. “How do I get on this team?”

  I looked at her. “I thought you were…”

  “Exploring? Yeah. I’m done. The cave of wonders has given up its secret and I wasn’t enchanted.”

  Miriam stared at her. “I don’t think you got enough metaphors in there.”

  “What do you want me to say? That I stuck my—”

  I slapped my hand over her mouth. “Darling daughter, we must have a discussion about your use of crude language in public.” She licked my palm a
nd I jerked my hand away. “Damn it, Ellie!”

  She chuckled and took a drink of her soda. “Your hand tasted like sanitizer.”

  “Shocking, since I just used it and you saw me.”

  “Ptooey,” she teased.

  Lily let out a sigh and leaned forward. “So, I just thought you might all like to know there has been no bail allowance for any of the Pipeliners that have cropped up and started singing about the others. The only thing their singing does is get them out of a death sentence, which we don’t carry out anyway.

  “We’ve found ten other compounds with kids in cages. We’ve found them all full, so the kids have all been returned. The FBI has found a lot of paperwork—can you believe they were that dumb?—that’s led to a lot of the compounds and stables and the locations of more kids. I’m pretty sure they are going to call Wren and Bastian in on this to help or even lead a task force for the kids to be reassimilated.”

  Ellie cleared her throat. “What about the ones…what about the kids who were like me at first? Or the ones like the twins? The ones who aren’t wanted back? Whose parents gave them up or will give them up?”

  Lily folded her hands. “I talked to the regional director and I recommended that he work with Paige and her organization, and to tap Miriam for more help.”

  Ellie and I let out the same exact sigh. Miriam shook her head.

  “She’s arrogant,” Lily agreed with our unspoken comments. “And I get that she can be annoying—but she is absolutely dedicated to helping displaced children. You’ve never ever had issue with her on that. Don’t start now.”

  “I’m not going to start now. I don’t have to. She’s always annoyed me.” I held up my hand to stop Lily. “I know how good she is. There’s a reason why every children’s ward in a fifty mile radius puts up with her. She’s good at her job. And, she found Ben.”

  “How is Ben?” Lily asked.

  I heard my daughter swallow hard next to me, and I grabbed her hand before answering, “He’s not doing well. He was good when we first got him home, but now he’s…acting out. Violently. Ellie is a good influence on him, and we do our best to get her there to see him as often as possible…”

  Lily canted her head and considered me, then gave a glance to Ellie. “Have you considered having his father come in?”

  “No,” Ellie snapped.

  I agreed with her, “No. We thought about it, but he never wanted an active role in Benjamin’s life. He left Ellie’s mother pregnant and trying to support a nine year old.”

  “He used her,” she whispered.

  “We had him sign away his parental rights.” My brain supplied the images of a raging Fischer going apeshit on Matthias Sheehan in his fancy office-complete-with-buffet. “We did it months ago, when Ellie first came to us.”

  “You terminated Matthias Sheehan’s rights?” Lily looked impressed.

  “Yes. He’s not the only influential person in this city.” I leaned forward. “Fischer flipped his shit on the man when we went to request it. There was flaming sterno on the carpet.”

  “Oh, literally flipped his shit.” Scratching her head, Lily looked impressed. “So, Doctor Fischer Skillman didn’t have his ass handed to him about that. Impressive, considering how the asshole holds the police over a barrel.”

  “How? He’s like a t-rex.” Ellie pulled her arms in close to her body and waved her hands around. “Philly’s own Jabba the Hutt. He can barely get the doughnut to his mouth.”

  Lily managed to get the napkin over her mouth before she spit the drink everywhere. Miriam and Laxmi were leaning against each other, laughing so hard they couldn’t catch their breath. I was desperately trying not to laugh—I shouldn’t laugh because she was making fun of someone, but at the same time, Matthias Sheehan was grotesquely overweight, and a rotten human being.

  I gave in and laughed. “Ellie, you’re not supposed to do that. You can’t mock people.”

  She turned to me, blank faced, then pulled her arms in and flapped her hands again.

  The laughter just escaped. I didn’t bother hiding it.

  Once we all calmed, Lily leaned forward, her arms on the table. “Okay. So, Sheehan is not an option for Ben. What is?”

  “Fischer, Bastian, and I are working on it. We’ve started some experimental therapies, but he’s strong and determined,” I said.

  “He’s scared,” Laxmi said.

  Wrinkling my brow, I nodded. “Of course, he is.”

  She held her finger up and shook her head. “He’s not scared of you, or of anyone in particular. Ellie, how old was he when you were taken for the stable?”

  “Five. He’d just turned five.”

  “And for the two years before that you did what you had to, to keep him fed and clothed.” Laxmi presented that as softly as she could. She’d also picked up on the fact that Ellie hated those years more than her years in the stable because while she’d had her choice taken away then, the two years she’s spent as a prostitute were her choice.

  None of us brought it up if we could. Not unless she wanted to talk about it. So, Laxmi had to have a serious, salient point.

  “Before that, he’d had a very sick mother who left him at just four. Before that, he’d been a part of a family that struggled. How many times did you have to move, after Sheehan abandoned your mother.”

  Ellie picked at her napkin. “We were being evicted about every six months or so. Sheehan had—” Swallowing, she bit her lip. “My father left us a comfortable amount of money, and a paid-for double wide trailer. We could have stayed there for years. Mom was proud of her home. It might have been a trailer, but she cleaned and maintained it.

  “When Sheehan came along, he basically defrauded her out of the money dad had left. We had to sell the trailer, and that held us for a few months. Then Ben was coming, and she tried to get Matthias to pay for him—but all he did was offer an abortion, and then paid the hospital bill. Never talked to her again.

  “She got sick and that took the rest of the money we had. Then she died, and I…had to make decisions at twelve.”

  I pursed my lips, and slipped my hand out next to hers. I didn’t want to touch her if she wasn’t ready, but she was and she grabbed my hand.

  “So, to say that Ben hasn’t had a steady stable life would be a bit of an understatement. Then add the Pipeline in, and what they had done to start breaking him…he’s traumatized to a whole new level.” Laxmi took a sip of her beer. “He sees you all caring, but he’s trying to not get attached. He knows, in his short little life, that none of this is going to last, so why get used to it?”

  She was dead on. This poor seven year old didn’t want to have his heart broken again. I drummed my fingers on the table. “We need to figure out a way to convince him that we’re here for good. That he’s not just going to have his sister—and that explains why he behaves for you—but all of us.”

  Ellie perked up. “The adoption—”

  “It’s papers and scribbles to him. We need something big, something a boy of seven would really get.”

  “A party,” Miriam said. “A big fat welcome party. With as many of your friends and relatives as you can scare up.”

  “With his favorite theme,” Lily offered.

  “He loves Lightning McQueen,” I chorused with Ellie. I went on alone after a laugh. “But we have to get him home first.”

  “We’ll work on that,” Ellie said. “Get the papers signed and we’ll throw a huge Gotcha Day party for him.”

  Smiling, I dropped a kiss on her forehead. “Perfect.” I turned to Laxmi. “I’d kiss you too, but you’re across the table and your wife is likely to run me through with her flameblade.”

  “That I am.” Miriam smiled, lifting an eyebrow. She was totally teasing me.

  Laxmi shook her head and looked at Ellie sitting there. “How is school going?”

  Ellie lifted a shoulder. “Eh. Good. We’re gearing up for SATs and I found out that they take juniors around to a few colleges. If you kno
w you’re not going to that one, you can opt out to visit the college of your choice. We’re going to Villanova, Rowan, Rutgers, Princeton, and I’m going to opt out of West Chester, St. Joe’s, Upenn, Rider, and LaSalle.”

  “Why those?” Miriam asked.

  “Well, I practically live at the UPenn campus, thanks to Fischer, I didn’t see the programs I wanted at West Chester, Rider or LaSalle, and Mason is already on the legacy admit for St. Joe’s.”

  Lily glanced over at her. “Don’t let Mason determine your career…”

  “He’s not. I just think that it’s better if I’m away from him. I’ll do better in school.”

  “What are you thinking?” Miriam asked.

  “Engineering, maybe pre-med. Princeton’s is brand new, but the others are established. I also want to check out UVA, Georgetown, MIT, and Rensselaer.”

  “Ow, ow!” I gasped and twisted in the seat.

  “What? What?” Ellie was wide eyed.

  “My pocket! It’s burning up from the money flying out of it!”

  She punched my arm. “You are so awful. You and Fischer could put me through anything without breaking a sweat.”

  Narrowing my eyes at her, I wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her in close. “Get the grades, we’ll foot the bill. Wherever.”

  “Thank you,” she answered.

  Two phones alerts went off at the table. Lily and I pulled out our phones, and I glanced at the message there.

  PPD: Request on scene, multiple fatalities. Shining Bright Daycare.

  I jerked up and looked at Lily. “No…”

  “Fuck me,” she breathed.

  There was just a moment of hesitation before she grabbed her purse and darted out of the booth. I pushed Ellie after her, and grabbed my own bag.

  “Go with Miriam and Laxmi. Go.”

  Ellie shook her head. “No. I’m going with you.”

  “You can’t—”

  She grabbed my arm and pulled me to a halt. “This isn’t a request, Mom.” I saw the barest hint of wings flicker behind her. She was getting good with that.

  “Okay, let’s go, but you’re not going to like this.”

  “Good?” Miriam called.