by Holley Trent
A LEGACY DIVIDED
In this penultimate installment of The Afótama Legacy, a prodigal son returns, an adopted daughter goes missing, and an ancient witch grows restless.
The community of Norseton has been in a state of disorder since the young princess Tess was kidnapped more than two decades ago. Her return to the long-secluded tribe of psychics should have marked a return to the tranquility they knew in their first centuries in America, but there’s still work to be done. She needs her older brothers’ help to root out traitors and track the mastermind behind the plot to unravel the community.
One brother chases a mate who’s vanished under mysterious circumstances. The other is embroiled in a testy trio with the daughter of the man who tops Norseton’s public enemy list and the fairy who’s only ever seen him at his worst. Can the Dahl men be the emissaries the Afótama need when the heightened urgency for them to secure their mates distracts them from their missions?
And as the fount of their wild magic, Ótama, takes a more hands-on approach to community threats, will the peaceable culture of the clan change as they all know it?
CHAPTER ONE
Norseton, New Mexico
Mallory
Undisciplined psychic that she was, Mallory Petersen-Marin was used to having some seriously fucked up dreams. By the time she’d turned eighteen, she’d become an expert at rousing herself from them at the first sign that her brain was veering toward the deranged and disturbed.
Sometimes, though, they went morbid and surreal too quickly for her to react, and her waking mechanism experienced critical failure.
Shit.
She lay in her bed, trapped in a sleep-paralyzed body, dreaming with her eyes wide open. The scene playing out in her head wouldn’t end. The past had taught her that the images wouldn’t fade until the story reached a conclusion. Drawing in a deep breath, she closed her eyes, and allowed her consciousness to slide fully into the dream.
The sooner I do, the sooner it’ll be over.
In the eerie scene, the dreamscape version of Mallory held her hand out to the manicurist across from her who assessed her fingertips in silence. As she squinted at Mallory’s nails, her lips turned down into a perfect U of a scowl. Tut-tutting, she reached for a bottle of polish.
Dream-Mallory tried to pull her hand away. She didn’t need her nails painted, just filed and perhaps buffed. No matter what kind of lacquer that lady painted on, it was only going to peel off within a couple of days. The constant hand-washing necessary for her nursing job was hard on her nails. “Thank you, but I don’t need polish,” Mallory told her.
The ghostly manicurist pinned Mallory’s hand down and grunted. She opened the bottle of siren-red polish with her molars and pulled out the brush. She muttered quietly to herself, drawing tidy stripes onto alternating fingernails while Mallory squirmed in her seat.
All of a sudden, she seemed to be glued to the hard plastic salon chair, but upon realizing that, it was no longer a chair, but a tree stump, and she was no longer in a salon.
The woods sprang up around her and, in a warranted state of panic, she looked at the manicurist to see if she noticed it as well.
But the manicurist had no eyes.
There were no eyes in her fucking head, and yet there she was, painting red strokes onto Mallory’s nails—three on one hand, two on the other.
Suddenly she stood, but before Mallory could think to flee, another woman took her place. She had eyes, but no mouth, and she was shaking a bottle of silver lacquer.
Just let it end. Just let it end.
Mallory could sort out the oddness of the imagery once she was awake and had the lights turned on. She needed to keep her heart rate down and to not let her brain meander to darker and more surreal places. Muriel would sense her alarm and would swoop in and try to psychically massage Mallory back into a more level state. Mallory would have rather have streaked through the village in nothing but a thong and a Viking helmet at midday than to have Muriel paying that much attention to her.
As doting and kind as the former clan queen was, Mallory’s survival instinct said that she should avoid psychic entanglements of any sort with any descendants of the ancient witch Ótama. That meant Muriel, her son Joe, and her four grandchildren—Keith, Jody, Tess, and Nadia. They played their cards close to their chests and few people in the isolated New Mexican village of Norseton really knew what they were capable of.
That was bad news for Mallory since the Hall family employed her as Keith’s nurse.
Really, she just wanted to do her job, keep her head down, and not make any waves while she adjusted to her new life. She’d uprooted her kids from Tallahassee less than six months ago to integrate into the ancestral clan of Viking-descended telepaths she hadn’t even known existed, but not without some bumps.
It was her father’s clan.
He didn’t want her or her sister Marty there. After all, they were bastards and he lived there with his wife.
Queen Tess had insisted that they belonged there, anyway. She made them feel welcome. Afótama people thrived better within their community, and Mallory had always had a yearning for “home” that she didn’t really understand until her arrival in Norseton.
But the problem with being looped into the community and woven into its psychic web was that dreams often became contaminated by the thoughts and fears of neighbors, and Mallory couldn’t always tell when that was happening. It was possible that Mallory was processing someone else’s psychic trauma. She’d been negligent in doing the mental exercises that would have strengthened her mind against the barrage. Having the bulk of her days devoted to caring for a paraplegic clan prince, she hadn’t had the time.
Make the damn time, chick. This is ridiculous.
Silver, red, silver, red.
Eyes twinkling with mirth, the second manicurist held up Mallory’s hand in a Do you like it? gesture.
Mallory nodded on a delay. She was ambivalent about the nails, but afraid to escalate the mess. She still couldn’t wake. Still couldn’t move away from that uncomfortable tree stump.
More women swarmed around, all deformed in some way. They were missing eyes, mouths, noses, ears. Some lacked one hand or both. Some moved as though they lacked muscle and bone.
They were incomplete impersonations of women, she realized. Not quite congealed—just enough to get the point across.
But Mallory still wasn’t quite sure what the point was.
“What do you want from me?” she asked, for this wasn’t a dream. She suddenly understood that.
Dreams let go. Psychic disturbances didn’t.
“What do you want?”
No response, except a lot of stares. A lot of wordless twittering and vocalizations.
“What do you want?” she repeated again and again until finally one of the women took her right hand and held it in front of Mallory’s face. She pointed to all the nails, one after the other.
“I don’t understand.”
She pointed again. Red, silver, red, silver, red.
“I don’t understand!” she shouted, and they all faded away, staring at her as they did. At least, the ones who had eyes stared.
She emerged from the vision sweating and panting, and with her right hand throbbing from being squeezed in a wicked restraint.
Her eyes were slow in adjusting to the light, but she could clearly see there was no one in her bedroom with her. Swallowing hard, she shook the cramp from her hand and moved to the edge of her bed.
“Damn,” she whispered.
Three AM.
Somehow, she’d have to get back to sleep. She was supposed to be on the clock at seven, tending to Keith Dahl and pretending that her job was anything more than well-paid babysitting.
&nbs
p; Keith Dahl didn’t want a nurse. He wanted someone to yell at. He wanted someone to feel worse than he did, and Mallory was convenient.
She sighed and picked up her phone. Her friend Asher always had a new suggestion to help her get back to sleep. She called them “fairy magic tricks,” but he insisted it was just logic.
Can’t sleep, she texted. Having some kind of psychic meltdown. Wired now.
Of course, he responded quickly. Asher slept lightly and evidently didn’t need much rest—a perk of being fae, apparently. Okay. Try this one. Mentally sort the names of everyone you know into alphabetical order.
She snorted and settled back down onto her pillow. It had already gone cold.
That’s a lot of people, Asher.
Good problem to have! Until I was ten, I could count everyone I knew on one hand.
Mallory grimaced and checked her phone alarm before setting the device on the nightstand. Asher had a way of making her remember that no matter how stressful her problems were, there were some people who had things worse. People might have side-eyed her for showing up out of the blue looking too much like her philandering father, but at least she had her three gorgeous children, her mother, and her sister in Norseton, putting on a united front because they belonged there as much as anyone else descended from the passengers of Ótama’s long-ago voyage.
Asher didn’t have anyone anymore.
She closed her eyes, visualized her family and friends in the community, and started to sort names.
Asher was first on the list. That made her smile.
CHAPTER TWO
The Next Morning in an Unknown Location
???
She woke from what must have been uneasy oblivion, with eyelids crusted and swollen and head throbbing.
As her gauzy vision cleared and her eyelashes detangled from each other, she determined that immediately in front of her was a peach wall. The paint was scuffed, and pale phantom rectangles highlighted where photos must have once been. They were taken away. Only shadows and dust remained, and she couldn’t remember what had hung there before. Couldn’t even begin to speculate. Her mind was a blank. She didn’t know if the room was hers or someone else’s.
Groaning, she blinked and lifted one heavy, prickling arm to rub her eyes.
“What happened?” she whispered.
She felt outside of herself, as though her brain and body weren’t in one accord, or as though she was still paralyzed by sleep.
“I…have to get up.”
There was something she needed to do.
What was it?
Something important—something that had been last on her mind before she’d fallen asleep on that bed with all its bulbous protrusions poking her legs and ribs.
She couldn’t remember.
But she should have. She knew that much—she was supposed to remember things and the fact she couldn’t made her belly pitch with perturbation.
“What was it?” she asked herself with her agitation mounting. “What is happening?”
Was she at home? Was she even safe?
Rolling onto her back, she rubbed her eyes again and blinked at the ceiling. There were sparkles on it, and those little plaster lumps made the surface look like space rock. They had something to do with acoustics, she thought. She couldn’t remember enough. Her brain didn’t seem to be efficiently processing information. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was supposed to know things but the information was tucked away out of grasp from her, no matter how much she reached.
Her head throbbed.
“Ugh.”
Carefully, she braced one forearm behind her and then the other, sitting herself more upright. She caught a glimpse of the top of her head in the wide dresser mirror opposite of the bed and negotiated with her body to sit up more. Slight movements instead of the fast ones she wanted to make. She didn’t have the energy. Her back ached and abdomen burned with every provocation.
And her head…
She closed her eyes until the swimming sensation stopped—until the room stopped going topsy-turvy, and she could hold her head up straight again.
“Damn,” she croaked.
She looked like a hitchhiker on the highway to hell. Black hair falling sloppily from a clip. Face creased by sheets and pillow. Eyes red and crusted. Brown skin splotched and dry-looking.
Forcing a swallow down her tight, parched throat, she touched her cheek idly and slowly turned her legs toward the edge of the bed. She thought cold water might help, both to drink and to splash onto her face. That could help reboot her brain from whatever dysfunction it’d cycled into, be it illness or hangover or otherwise.
She didn’t think she was much of a drinker, but again, she couldn’t remember.
She couldn’t remember anything.
Propping herself against the footboard, then the dresser, and then the doorframe, she looked around her, trying to make sense of anything at all. From the bedroom doorway, she could see she was at the end of a short hall. Across from her must have been another bedroom and farther down, a bathroom. At the opening at the end of the hall was a kitchen. Boxes and canvas tote bags were stacked on and around the small table, and there looked to be a monogram on one of the canvas bags.
Water could wait.
She moved slowly toward the kitchen, clutching her throbbing head between her hands as she went as though doing so would stop it from falling off her neck. Her head felt so heavy and so useless. Whatever was wrong with her, she needed to fix it immediately, if it was even fixable.
She paused briefly to consider that.
What if it isn’t?
She shook her head, refusing to believe that. If she believed that was her normal state, she’d give up, and she wasn’t ready to do that yet. She needed to know who she was. Having an identity was a very human instinct, and hers was powerful.
The script monogram appeared to read LJM, when accounting for the traditional letter order. The M, flanked by the L and J, was large and flowery, and she had no idea what the letters stood for, or if the bag was even hers.
Her head began to race as it dawned on her that there was a possibility she wasn’t the only one there. There had appeared to be a second bedroom. What if she wasn’t alone?
“H-hello?” she shouted, then clapped a hand to her neck and winced at the immediate shearing of pain through her throat. She’d either eaten a pincushion or swallowed lighter fluid and chased it down with a lit match. There was no other reasonable explanation for her body to feel that way.
She swallowed tentatively, and when no renewed surge of agony came, she let out a relieved breath. Each swallow actually felt a modicum better. She wouldn’t be doing any more shouting in the near future, though—not until her body was on the mend from what ailed her.
Picking up one heavy foot and then the other, she retreated down the hall to the second door. She scratched on the cheap particleboard door and then knocked. When no response came following the hollow rapping, she called out as loudly as she dared, “Hello?”
Again, there was no response.
The knob yielded with a turn. Unlocked. She pushed the door open with caution and waited for her eyes to focus in the dim light.
Empty. Just faded pink carpet, lavender-pink walls decorated with butterfly stickers halfheartedly peeled off, and a lot of cobwebs. The curtains on the single window opposite her were faded by sun and age, but she could tell that the geometric pattern was old. 1960s or 70s. She didn’t know why she knew that, only that she did.
She walked to the window and, parting the curtains slowly to give her eyes time to adjust to the changing light, she peered out.
That unsettled feeling coalesced in her gut once more because she was looking at another thing that didn’t make sense without her knowing why it didn’t.
There was a vast field less than ten yards from the side of the house and a large green tractor in the distance. The sun was rising beyond the endless rows of budding corn stalks.
One thing made sense—that she was awake. It was her hour. She knew that.
What didn’t make sense was the farm. Somehow, that place didn’t seem right, and she certainly wasn’t dressed for farming. Instead of pajamas, she’d fallen asleep in slim black pants that had been hemmed precisely to her ankles. She’d left them unbuttoned. She also wore a white, button-up shirt that had odd cufflinks shaped like storm clouds. With their mother-of-pearl inlays, they looked expensive and stood out in odd contrast to the suspicious splatters on the front of her wrinkled shirt. Brown and bilious.
Vomit?
She groaned and rubbed her eyes. “What did I do?” She put her slow fingers to work to undo the shirt buttons. Just looking at the stains made her stomach threaten to expel its contents, and that couldn’t have been much. She felt hollowed-out. Empty of both mind and body.
Wresting the stained shirt from her body, she moved to the hall again, and then into the kitchen. In a wide closet that had a curtain where a door should have been, she found a practically ancient washing machine. Twenty years old, perhaps. Top-loading and with enough rust on the enamel that the device probably stained as much clothing as it cleaned.
She tried the knob, anyway, and reddish water streamed into the basin. She held her breath until the water ran clear, and then set the cycle.
“So, I’ve got electricity and…water.” She rubbed her throbbing temples, hoping that having basic utilities was a good thing. Electric service could have been a clue that she wasn’t someplace that was off the grid and away from civilization. There had to be other people around.
She left the shirt in the washer basin and looked around the kitchen as she unzipped the pants that may as well have been sausage casing for the way her body felt. So sensitive and bloated.
When the pants had joined the shirt in the wash, she padded to the table and to the black leather purse on top of it.
Mine?
The bag seemed familiar somehow. Expensive, designer, and for some reason, with an incongruous kid’s meal toy affixed to the strap.
