A Legacy Divided

by Holley Trent

  “How odd.”

  She rolled the little action figure bag decoration in her palm. It was a masked, sneering woman who wore a spandex suit and high-heeled boots. The little lady was shooting blue sparks out of her hands.

  Turning it over in her hand, she squinted at the detailing. The figure wasn’t particularly well made. The paint job wasn’t crisp and the superheroine’s eyes looked crossed behind her mask, but the placement seemed intentional. It was firmly tethered to the strap’s metal ring with a bit of soft pink yarn.

  Perhaps it’d meant something to her, but she couldn’t speculate on what that might have been. She still hadn’t ascertained if the bag was even hers.

  She let the figurine fall back where it’d been and noticed that behind the bag was a small cardboard box of fresh apples, bananas, and pears.

  Famished, she reached for a piece of fruit without thinking. After picking up a banana, she noticed a slip of paper protruding through the gaps in the box. Thinking it was a receipt or some other scrap to be thrown away, she wriggled it out.

  The slip was marked READ ME on the front.

  “Who, me?” She opened the folded page that obviously wasn’t a receipt.

  Unfolding the fine linen notepaper atop the table as she took tentative nibbles of banana, she noted cramped lines handwritten in neat print. Then she started reading.

  1. You can’t remember, but your name is Lora.

  Something hot bloomed in her chest, like ice being thawed from the inside out. That name seemed right, somehow.

  Lora.

  She tried the name in her mouth, whispered it to see if it felt familiar, but nothing did. She just knew it was right.

  2. You can’t remember because you had to forget.

  As that statement meant absolutely nothing to her, she read on for more clues.

  3. For right now, you don’t need to remember. Try to believe that. I know that’s hard for you to swallow. Mr. Callahan knows everything. He’ll give you information as necessary.

  “But who the hell is Mr. Callahan?” Scrunching her nose with annoyance, she took another bite of banana and scanned the next item.

  4. There’s no need to leave the house today. Rest. Recover. Unpack. You don’t like messes.

  That seemed to be true. Her brain was in conflict between wanting to order the space and for her to just lie on the cold floor until her persistent nausea went away.

  5. You’re not hungover.

  “That’s good to know.” She was able to laugh a little at that, but that made her head hurt more. “Ugh.”

  The way you’re feeling is due in part to what you drank to forget.

  “What did I drink?” She’d heard absinthe and Everclear could make people forget things, but she’d already told herself she wasn’t hungover. She didn’t know what else it could be.

  6. People will be looking for you. Some of them have no desire to hurt you, but could unwittingly put you in danger if they find you. But worse—you’d put them in danger if you go home now. They’re whom you want to go back to once the big mess is sorted. Others want to use you against them. You’re useless to them without your memory, and that was why you chose to lose it.

  Apparently, she’d left her home—wherever that was—for the safety of everyone around her. That seemed noble, though she couldn’t say for sure. Her brain couldn’t provide any context for what was happening, so every opinion was little better than a guess.

  7. Mr. Callahan will prove to you who he is. For now, don’t trust anyone else. Be wary of people who insist you know them. The ones who you trusted before will bide their time and approach carefully. They’ll be persistent. They’ll know specifics. There may be many who know a great deal of superficial details about you, but almost no one knows you deeply. Wait.

  “Just stay here and wait?” Shaking her head, she scoffed and smoothed the paper some more. “That’s all?”

  Waiting around didn’t seem like something she’d do. Her body screamed for her to be moving, to be doing things.

  She was a doer, not a waiter, and she’d probably been wired that way since the day she was born…whenever that was.

  “Maybe there’s an ID card in that bag.”

  Before she could reach for it, she had to put a palm against her burning sternum and thumped as she tried to swallow down the precipitous upheaval seizing her digestive tract.

  Oh no.

  She tossed the half-eaten banana into the unlined trashcan and grabbed the paper before propelling herself to the sink. She got her head over the drain just as her stomach erupted.

  Banana and bile.

  After a minute of unproductive heaving, her body gave up the rebellion, all except her head. That still throbbed.

  She wet a paper towel and dabbed her face, and then slid against the cabinets down to the floor.

  With her eyes closed, she took deep, sobering breaths and gripped the paper against her lap. She counted to ten and talked herself into opening her eyes to read the rest of the note.

  8. You may feel better later, but the rest of what’s making you feel sick won’t ebb anytime soon.

  You’re pregnant.

  “What? No. No, I’m not—” The thought brought her up short, because why not? She was female. That was one of the things most female creatures were built to do. “Oh my God,” she whispered.

  She was going to have someone’s baby, and she didn’t know whom that someone was or even who she was.

  “Oh my God,” she repeated as sweat beaded on her brow.

  If you refrigerate the bananas, she’d written to herself, they won’t smell as much. You can only eat them cold.

  She pulled her knees up and put her forehead against them, breathing through her open mouth. She counted inhalations and exhalations and balled her trembling hands into fists. No matter how hard she squeezed, they kept shaking anyway.

  “What the hell have I gotten myself into?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Jody

  After returning from a long trip, Jody Dahl had been inside his underutilized apartment in Norseton for all of five minutes before finding his girlfriend’s note and emitting a growl that could have woken the long dead. He went ripping back out. He ignored the greeting of his neighbor as he plowed past him and into the stairwell, and called ahead telepathically to his sister, Tess, as he moved. “Is Lora at the mansion?”

  Gods, please be there.

  Lora worked at the community’s executive mansion where much of his family happened to reside. His little sister was the queen of the Afótama clan. He hadn’t wanted to bother Tess for a while. She had apparently entered the stage of pregnancy where even a glance in her direction could make her moody, and a moody Afótama queen was a bad deal for everyone in the community.

  The Afótama people were all linked psychically through the royal family, and Tess was smack-dab in the middle of the web connecting them. Hers was a job she was born to have and that he had to admit she did well, but she was nothing like the queens of the past. She was impulsive and often reckless—like so many of their Viking ancestors were—and occasionally was petty as fuck where at least one of her brothers was concerned. She had a generous heart, though.

  Most of the time.

  Jody had to take the risk of consulting her because some things were far too important to be discreet about.

  Lora was important, and he had a bad feeling that she was gone.

  He was on the street, pounding the pavement before Tess responded with a surly, “Oh, you mean my ex-assistant?”

  Jody stopped short, heart stuttering with fear as he glanced around. The streets were quiet and looked so idyllic in the all-American town center that just happened to be populated by Vikings. Outsiders didn’t even know they were there. “What do you mean, ex?” he asked his sister and got moving again. He was still better off heading to the mansion and trying to brainstorm with the inner circle than staying at his place, pacing, and pounding his head against the walls with frustr
ation.

  “She left me a very sparsely worded resignation note,” Tess projected. “No details except that she had to leave due to circumstances beyond her control.”

  “What could that mean?” He picked up speed as he crossed the park, ignoring the greetings from his friends Paul and Chris as he went. He’d have to come up with some kind of explanation for them later. It wasn’t every day that a man’s girlfriend disappeared and left behind impersonal notes as though they hadn’t been intimate for the better part of five years.

  That wasn’t like Lora. She wasn’t timid. She’d never been afraid to confront him before, even with the heavy shit.

  “I don’t know when she left, and no one in the mansion seems to know, either,” Tess said. “No one was paying her any attention. She’s so efficient that she’s like a ghost sometimes. She’s there when you need her, but otherwise doesn’t lurk. Why are you asking? Do you know more than we do?”

  He grimaced and waved at the werewolf standing guard at the mansion’s front door as he ran up.

  Wisely, Colt got out of his way. “Everything all right?” He called after Jody.

  “No. I’ll catch you up later.”

  “Understood.”

  Jody streaked past the security desk, manned by yet another wolf whom he didn’t bother looking at the face of, ran through the atrium and into the hall that divided the executive part of the mansion from the living space.

  Because he and Tess were so closely related, and because being direct descendants from the fount of their magic meant they had a greater parcel of power than many in their small community, he could pinpoint his sister’s location to within a two-room area. She was either in the library or in the neighboring family room.

  “Answer me,” Tess demanded.

  “I’ll tell you when I get up there. Pointless wasting the energy to communicate like this when we can talk in person.”

  There was always a cost in using telepathy or magic, be it small or large. As one of the community’s sentries, Jody preferred to conserve his energy for emergencies. His purview included attacks from hostile fairy assassins, antagonism from their peers in Fallon, Nevada, general kidnapping threats, and so on.

  He slapped his hand over the palm reader beside the staircase leading up to the private second floor, waited for the click, and then yanked the door open. He idled in the stairwell just long enough to ensure that the door closed and locked behind him and then hauled ass. The closer to the top of the stairs he got, the more evident it was that Tess was in the family room. Nan was with her and their ancestress, Ótama—an ancient Viking princess in a young woman’s body. After dying in childbirth during her escape from mounting tensions in her clan, she’d been trapped in a purgatory-like realm for almost a thousand years. She’d endured the heartache of having to watch her descendants without being able to live amongst them.

  When Tess had been thrust into the queen’s role in the absence of her, Jody, and their brother Keith’s prematurely departed mother, the Old Norse gods had taken pity on Ótama…or maybe on Tess. They released Ótama back to her family to live out the rest of her life. If she found it odd living amongst descendants of varying ages ranging from twenty-nine to around seventy while appearing to be only around thirty herself, she didn’t act like she was bothered.

  Jody was pretty sure his only cousin Nadia was upstairs as well. She was Tess’s shadow and pseudo-bodyguard, and the two were rarely seen without the other during working hours.

  Sure enough, he could hear the distinct voices of all of them as he opened the door at the landing and bounded down the hall.

  “How is it that no one saw her leave?” Tess yelled. “We have guards at every exit of this community, and I seriously doubt she decided to trek through the desert. She may be able to run an eight-minute mile, but come on. She’s not built for extreme hiking.”

  Tess was right. Lora wasn’t built for endurance. She was slim and compact—built for speed, not power.

  Where the hell did she go?

  His mind swirled at the possibility that she’d left because of him, but he didn’t want to believe that. She’d been in a perfectly cheerful mood before he’d left for his Afótama business trip. Or as cheerful as Lora ever was, anyway. She tended to be one of those “smiling on the inside” sorts.

  Nothing had seemed amiss. In fact, they’d had a glorious evening that had started with him on his knees and quickly progressed to her sitting on his face.

  Jody arrived at the doorway right as Adam, the Norseton wolfpack alpha and the man in charge of most of the community’s security force, opened his mouth.

  Jody waved him on and dropped into the empty seat beside his grandmother. “Go ahead. I want to hear the answer to that, too.”

  Adam let out a breath and dragged a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. “You all know I’m not one to be making excuses. If I fuck up or if anyone on my crew fucks up, we own up to the error and try to fix what we broke. But you’ve got to admit, Lora knew the ins and outs of this community better than anyone. Every single one of the schedules went past her eyes. She signed off on all the logs. Even if I didn’t know where one of my wolves was,she did. If there was even the tiniest gap in the schedule at a station, she could have exploited it. I suspect she left during shift change.”

  “Aren’t there cameras recording every vehicle that passes through the gatehouse barrier?” Tess had her swollen feet atop the coffee table and her head tilted against the sofa back. She looked like hell. For most of her pregnancy, she’d been moving around well enough, in spite of her chronic back pain. The closer she got to her due date, though, she looked more like a husk of her former vibrant, troublemaking self.

  There was speculation that her exhaustion had more to do with what her child was than with any failures of Tess’s body. The child’s father was half fae. Ollie’s first wife hadn’t had the same issues due to the suppressed nature of his magic at the time, so no one could predict how her body would respond to the aggressive gestational demands. Tess was just lucky.

  Or unlucky. One of those.

  Either way, Jody couldn’t wait for her to have that kid. Not only because the baby would be his first niece and the clan’s future queen, but because Tess’s discomfort leached into the web and especially to the people most closely related to her. Nan tried to filter out as much as she could. Ollie and Tess’s other lover, Harvey, buffered a good portion of the rest, but Tess was obviously miserable. Her pain was psychically evident to anyone who got near her.

  “Believe it or not,” Adam said drolly, “there was a power shortage twice on the day she was last seen. She could have left during either of those times.”

  Jody slid his hand into his shirt pocket and fondled the edge of the letter Lora had left under his apartment key and on top of his counter. He wasn’t ready to share that yet—he wasn’t ready to delve into the nature of their long relationship unless he truly had to. Above all else, Lora had valued her privacy. So had he. He didn’t want to be confronted with the inevitable batch of questions that would come once the truth came to light. He didn’t have answers for all of them yet.

  He didn’t know if he ever would.

  “What did her resignation letter say?” He let out a ragged exhalation. He just couldn’t wrap his head around her leaving like that. They didn’t keep secrets.

  “Like I told you,” Tess muttered, staring at the ceiling. “Due to circumstances beyond her control, she needed to leave.” Furrowing her brow, she tilted her head upright. “Wait a minute. I didn’t call you. How’d you know something was wrong?”

  He took a deep breath and slid the note from his pocket. For a few seconds, he held it pressed between his hands. The letter was the last thing she’d given to him, though it could hardly be called a gift. Sighing, he pressed the note across the table. “Do me a favor and don’t share that around, okay?”

  Naturally, Nadia leaned in and read as Tess did. Jody couldn’t get too upset. He already knew that any
secret he told Tess would get filtered to Nadia. The woman was unimpeachable. She knew how to keep her mouth shut.

  He could tell precisely what they were reading by how their expressions shifted. Tess and Nadia spent so much time together that they’d started swapping traits without knowing. Generally, Nadia—having been raised mostly in Norseton and groomed from the time she was young to be Tess’s shadow—was the more leveling influence of the two of them. Tess was basically a hot mess, but everyone loved her in spite of it.

  She, along with many other Afótama children, had been abducted by still-unknown agitators as a child and had been missing for more than twenty years. When she’d been found at twenty-eight, having few memories of her early childhood, she had no idea who she was or the position she was supposed to hold. With her installed to her rightful position and having the benefit of her unique tracking magic, they’d found many of the other missing clanspeople. Unfortunately, like Tess, none of them knew who took them or why. Their abductions remained a mystery they were still trying to solve. That kind of ignorance could ultimately topple the safety of their community.

  The reason they’d hired the werewolf guards was that people kept trying to make assassination attempts at Tess and Nan. Most of the hit attempts were anonymous—like the kidnappings—and Nan didn’t take unnecessary risks. She’d already lost the daughter who should have been queen. It should have been her there holding the community together, not Tess. Compared to previous clan leaders, Tess was too young to be a queen, but she was doing the best she could with what wisdom she had.

  Tess looked at him over the top of the letter, hazel eyes challenging him. “I’m going to kill you.”

  “What did he do?” Nan asked, glowering at him.

  Jody’s teeth clenched reflexively. “Why do you automatically assume I did anything wrong?”

  “I’m not assuming. I’m just trying to find out what she’s accusing you of. Never at any point did I say that perceptions equaled reality.”