A Legacy Divided

by Holley Trent

  “Seems Lora wasn’t the only person in Norseton who was damned good at stealth activities,” Nadia said.

  “How did we not catch that?” Tess asked her.

  Nadia shrugged. “Probably because she’s not Afótama. She was off your radar. Would have been the same as him boffing someone from outside the community.”

  “Wait.” Nan pinched the bridge of her nose and put up a hand in a stilling gesture. “Are you telling me that—”

  “Yep.” Tess handed the note to Nadia, who folded it and tucked it into a pocket of her tight jeans.

  He growled. There was no way in hell was he going to get that note back. The two of them were going to use it for leverage somehow in the future. It wasn’t an issue of if, but when.

  “How long?” Nan twined her fingers atop her lap and gave Jody a lie-and-you’ll-die look.

  Jody didn’t doubt his grandmother was capable of making him hurt. He’d never actually seen her use any of her magic to punish people, but there were stories of some of her “accidents” from when she’d been a much younger woman. There was one man who still had scars from the accidental electrocution.

  “About five years,” Jody confessed.

  She made a sound that could almost be categorized as a gasp, but everyone knew Muriel Hall was made of stuff too stern for gasping. “Casually?”

  He grimaced. “I wouldn’t call it that.” There were far too many sparks flying between him and Lora to call what they had “casual.” Perhaps they’d started off expecting nothing to come of their infrequent rendezvous, but it had turned out that they couldn’t stay away from each other. He didn’t want to stay away from her. She was the only woman who’d ever been able to take him down a peg, and yet she’d still wanted him in spite of the fact that she’d had to.

  “Then why was it a secret?” Nan asked.

  “Yeah,” Tess said and rubbed her closed eyes with the heels of her palms. “Why? Nobody would have cared if you two were a couple. Everyone in Norseton knows and trusts Lora, and they adore her adoptive parents. Her parents really care about this community. Her being with you, especially since she’d been working with Nan for so long before I came in, wouldn’t have ruffled any feathers.”

  “She had her reasons,” Jody murmured.

  And he’d had no choice but to respect them. He would have told the whole world that they were together if it’d been up to him. They would have been married already, living together.

  But Lora was always so conscientious, so careful to not disrupt things.

  If only he’d convinced her sooner…

  “I thought she hated you.” Nadia pitched a thick swath of her red hair over her shoulder. She and Keith had been the only two Hall grandchildren to inherit Nan’s red. If not for hair color and curl pattern, and slight differences in build, Nadia and Tess might have been indistinguishable from a distance. “All the guys give her a hard time because she’s so strait-laced. I’ve never seen her have a conversation with you, Dad, Ollie, Harvey, Jeff, or any of the fairy men when they visit that doesn’t leave her completely frustrated. She’s so logical, and you guys are nothing if not irksome.”

  Jody didn’t have the energy to argue with her, even if she was being purposefully provocative. It wasn’t like she was wrong, anyway. “Not to say we didn’t squabble on occasion, but we understood each other. Or at least, I thought we did.”

  “Does she want to be found?” Ótama, silent up to that point, asked. She stood in front of the cold fireplace, straightening tchotchkes on the mantel. As was her standard, she was wearing her long dark hair pinned back and was in another floor-length dress and a hooded cloak that swept the floor when she moved. She had a hard time getting warm since her departure from her afterlife realm. Perhaps she wasn’t entirely used to being back in a corporeal body. The family doctor had given her a full examination and deemed all five feet of her physically sound. He assumed her body temperatures would regulate eventually, but he couldn’t say for sure. Medicine was logical. Magic wasn’t.

  “Hard to read between the lines of that note,” Tess murmured.

  Nadia nodded in agreement. “Lora was good at that—sending texts and e-mails that were completely stripped of emotion or judgment. She may not have any magic like the rest of us, but brevity and professionalism are definitely her superpowers.”

  Brevity and professionalism.

  Such emotionless words.

  Jody suppressed a scoff.

  They thought Lora didn’t feel anything, but she did. The fact she chose not to burden everyone else with the things she found annoying or troubling didn’t mean she didn’t feel as deeply as everyone else. It had taken him a long time to figure her out, but he thought he knew her even better than her parents did. He’d thought he knew every part of her, inside and out.

  Lora didn’t want to share her misery. She behaved as though keeping it all to herself was the least she could do, in spite of the fact that no one else would have minded if she’d complained every now and then. It would have made her seem that much more assessable.

  Her private personality seemed too intimate a thing to discuss with them, who didn’t really know her. She hadn’t been able to let them in the way she had Jody, and he respected her secrets. Lora was an intensely personal woman, but she loved him.

  Supposedly.

  She’d told him so, and he didn’t have a choice but to believe her—to believe that she loved him but that she couldn’t be with him in the way he wanted. She said it wouldn’t be right for her to claim one of Ótama’s own. She’d insisted there was someone else out there for him.

  He could tell them that much. He didn’t want to, but knew he had to.

  He took a deep breath and leaned his forearms onto his knees. “She’d always told me that I should be more assertive about finding a partner born of the clan. She didn’t think me marrying her would be appropriate because she didn’t have gifts like mine.”

  “Few people have gifts like yours,” Nadia said. “Most people in Norseton have very little magic at all, aside from the ability to communicate telepathically with their families.”

  “I agree with you, and I told her that. I’m telling you what the situation was. Magic was one of the few things she was sensitive about. I imagine that if I’d been any other man in Norseton, she wouldn’t have been so rigid about her boundaries.”

  “Yeah, she’d dated Afótama guys before you. She was pretty serious with one guy in tenth and eleventh grades.”

  “Oh yeah?” Jody cracked his knuckles. Of course, he knew about that guy, though not that their relationship had been more intense than he’d thought. Carter still called Lora on occasion, and because Jody and Lora were on the down low, Jody couldn’t say shit to him. He suspected his tongue would get much looser in the near future, once Lora came back.

  And she would come back. At the very least, she owed him a proper explanation.

  “I think if we put clues together and make an educated guess,” Nadia said, “we’d conclude that she’s not expressly forbidding us from looking for her. She said in her resignation letter that there are circumstances beyond her control. And in Jody’s note—”

  “Nadia, I will—”

  “Simmer down.” Nadia put up her hands, placating him before he could get the threat out. “I’m just going to paraphrase the less personal stuff. Shit, have you forgotten I have a brain?”

  Grunting, he made a get-on-with-it gesture. He hadn’t forgotten about her brain. He happened to know exactly how dangerous it was.

  “In the note to Jody, she said she was sorry she had to leave like this. To me, that implies that if she’d had a choice, she wouldn’t have gone. So it seems to me, we not only need to find her but learn what chased her off in the first place.”

  “I agree,” Jody muttered.

  “Thing is, I don’t know if either would be so easy.” Nadia sucked some air in through her teeth and drummed her fingers atop the back of the sofa. “She’s way too smart. I gu
ess she has to be, working around us. She doesn’t have magic, so she has to compensate with brainpower.”

  “That may be so, but we’re going to try,” Tess said. “We’ll put our heads together and figure this out, not only because she keeps this place running, but I—” Sliding her gaze to Jody, she sighed dramatically, and then said, glibly, “I guess bringing her back would make Jody happy, too.”

  “If you weren’t pregnant and slower than a two-legged hippo, I’d make it rain on you,” he said flatly. He wasn’t in the mood for jokes, but he still believed in fair fights. Picking on a tiny pregnant person who seemed likely to gestate past her due date was just too easy.

  Tess shrugged. “And if I felt like mustering up the energy, I’d electrocute you. Who’d recover first?”

  They stared at each other for a long while, probably pondering the answer. Their magic was similar in a lot of ways. Tess could wield static and discharge it when necessary. Thunder and lightning were two of her newest toys. Jody didn’t experiment too much with that component of his magic, though when he got angry or stressed, it rained in Norseton—hard—and the thunder he caused was usually loud enough to rattle the entire community’s windows.

  Ótama chuckled quietly by the fireplace. “So much like my siblings and I.” She crinkled her nose. “Well. Somewhat. My magic wasn’t anything like yours. Yours is a throwback from further back in the lineage than I can remember offhand.”

  “Huh. You don’t talk much about your siblings,” Jody said.

  Ótama skimmed her index finger along the edge of the mantle as worry creased her brow. He rarely saw that look on her. She usually spoke her worries rather than holding them in. “No, I imagine I…don’t, much. The environment was a bit unsettled and unstable before I left the clan. Mostly, my family protected me from the viciousness and all the rumors. I was different, even amongst our kind, and everyone knew. My magic made me unpredictable, and they got weary of rallying around me, I suppose.” Her narrow shoulders bobbed gracefully. “I imagine anyone would have.”

  “I can’t believe that,” Tess said. “That would be like saying that one day, Jody and Keith will get tired of dealing with me and will eventually throw me to the wolves.”

  No way in hell was that going to happen. If Keith had possessed the physical capacity to throw himself in front of a bullet meant for Tess, he’d do it again and again. That morbid motherfucker had said so numerous times. He blamed himself for Tess’s kidnapping, but it hadn’t been anyone’s fault but the perpetrator’s. Jody had finally convinced himself of that, too.

  Jody’s personal strategy for ensuring the queen’s preservation was to try to prevent Tess from getting shot at in the first place. The siblings annoyed the ever-loving shit out of each other, but Jody didn’t really want to think about what life would be like without his little sister in it again. She kept him from taking himself too seriously, and everyone needed someone like that around them.

  Especially Lora.

  She’d been laughing so much more since Tess’s return, though in private. She saved all her giggles for after work. She bottled them up, took them home, and let them out when no one but Jody could hear.

  His reflexive smile waned as quickly as he wore it when he realized Nan was staring at him with pointed concern from across the room. She was too sensitive, and he was sitting too close to her. If he was upset, she would sense his hurt and try to heal him. That was her job as the clan’s matriarch—soothing them all. He didn’t want her wasting her finite energy on him, though. There were people in the clan who needed the psychic support far more than he did.

  “My family wasn’t like yours,” Ótama said after a minute of thoughtful silence. “The times were different then. I suppose the urge for self-preservation was much higher, with circumstances being what they were. The group was wise to try to cloister when they landed in the Americas. They wouldn’t have survived otherwise.”

  “This is all fascinating, but we need a plan,” alpha wolf Adam said. In the absence of the clan chieftains, he was always the person compelled to keep discussions on track. He probably had other shit he could be doing besides getting enmeshed in brand new witch family drama. “Tell me what my part is in it, and I’ll pick a crew and make shit happen.”

  “Get your team to check all the video from the past couple of days, just in case,” Jody said. “Get footage from the main exit, the staff gate at the back of the community, and also the camera nearest her apartment.” He dragged a hand through his hair and let out a breath. “Maybe have someone check her cabin, too. She’s currently got tenants in it, but maybe they’ve seen her come by to pick up rent money or something.”

  “If you really thought there was a chance they did,” Nadia said, “you’d go yourself.”

  He grunted. His cousin knew him too well. “Still, it’s someplace to start. I’m going to go search her apartment and see if anything’s out of place. With Lora being so meticulous in general, I don’t expect her to have left any clues behind, but she’s surprised me before.”

  Leaving him without so much as a whispered good-bye was a pretty fucking big surprise, for one.

  “I’ll go with you, if you’d like,” came Ótama’s quiet voice from the hearth. “To give a feminine perspective.”

  For a minute, he concentrated on rubbing his left palm with his right thumb. He’d wanted to go alone so he could search in his own way without having to slow down and explain his strategies, but Lora was too important a person to him for him to let pride get in the way. He wasn’t going to win any prizes for doing it all by himself. If anything, the search would be slower and the chances of her disappearing for good would skyrocket.

  “I’d like that,” he said, standing.

  He was going to find her, and when he did, he was going to pin that woman down and make her marry him.

  Enough was enough.

  The only person who gave a damn about her lack of magic was her.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Jody

  Jody unlocked the door of Lora’s apartment and paused in the doorway to scan the living room. There was no sign of struggle. The dwelling was as immaculate as the woman. Clean and dust-free. Every book, every magazine, every piece of electronics equipment perfectly placed and organized. She’d once told him that she couldn’t prevent chaos in the wider world, but she could wrestle her living space into submission, and that soothed her.

  She had a few poorly formed memories of her time before being fostered and then adopted by a family in Norseton, but what she remembered most keenly about her early childhood was the uncertainty. That was one of the reasons she couldn’t handle a public romance with Jody—she assumed circumstances would change for the worse, and she’d be left out in the cold and have to pick herself back up alone.

  That wouldn’t have happened. He’d tried to tell her. He wasn’t the kind of psychic who could predict the future, but some of their kind had instinctive magic that said, “They’re it for you. That’s who you get.” Jody had always felt that way, from her first day of work at the mansion. She’d made some subversively cutting remark to him, and when he’d later found her arranging her office, he’d cornered her—literally. She’d blinked up at him in her stoic way and told him to either make the invasion of her space worth her while or to get the hell out of her office.

  So, he’d kissed her. She hadn’t kissed back, but she rarely did early on. There were aspects of her personality that were quieter than others, and where intimacy was concerned, she tended to wait for him to do the work. Fortunately, he didn’t mind.

  “Looks as it usually does from here, but let me check the back before you come in.”

  Ótama nodded.

  Her usual guard, Lachlann, waited quietly near the neighboring apartment’s door and fidgeted with his belt loop. Apparently, he was still getting used to not wearing a sword on that side. He was a refugee from the fairy realm—one of a handful in Norseton.

  He also happened to believe Ótama was
his mate. If she knew, she didn’t let on, and he hadn’t made any moves. At over a thousand years old, the man would have best known when to bide his time. Norseton was in upheaval on multiple levels. There were traitors to boot out and missing people to find, and Ótama hadn’t even been there for a year yet. Obviously, he wasn’t going to wait forever for his woman, but he certainly wasn’t going to come on too strongly, especially given Ótama’s less than cheerful memories of the fae. His queen had been one of her enemies once.

  Jody did a quick search of the bedroom, the spare room Lora used as her office, and also the dining area before waving both Ótama and Lachlann in.

  Lachlann shut and locked the door, then moved into the corner near the windows, clasping his hands in front of him. He’d watch and wait and stay the hell out of the way, as always.

  Ótama moved directly to the bookcase at the side of the archway between the front room and dining area and peered at the photographs on the shelves. “Only one of these has people. The rest are just pictures of the desert.”

  Jody grimaced. “Yeah. The Mollers. Those are her parents and her brother.”

  “Have you spoken to them?” Lachlann asked.

  “No. Nan went to talk to them. Nan was one of the people who wrote them a reference letter when they were trying to get a child out of the foster care system. Shelly used to be the accountant at the mansion before she got pregnant with Theo, but she and Nan were still close after she left. Nan tends to get attached to her staff.”

  “With one notable exception.”

  “Yeah. Dan.”

  Dan Petersen was a problem. Everyone in the mansion knew except him that he was on the way out just as soon as they could figure out the exact depths of his treachery. He’d been the cook at the mansion since right before Tess was born. It turned out that he’d been coordinating illicit adoptions out of the Afótama’s estranged sister group in Fallon, Nevada. The people complicit in the scheme had wanted children more like them—with some extra-human abilities—but the Fallonites’ abilities weren’t like Afótama ones. Dan and his wife had lied about where the children had originated or else claimed they didn’t know. Dan had set himself up as a “special helper” for the matter, and people had trusted him.