by Holley Trent
“Absolutely! I told him that I was daily for more than twenty years.”
Twenty years.
Mallory was still trying to adapt to the fact that there were people around her who could throw around phrases like “twenty years” and yet who could look like they’d barely even seen twenty years. Fairies aged well in general, but Asher’s somewhat delicate features probably lent something to his boyishness. She didn’t know his exact age, but his prince—Heath—had once insinuated that he was over seventy.
“So, Keith,” she said, narrowing her eyes at him, not that he was looking. “Let’s chill with the passive-aggressiveness. You know Asher wouldn’t say anything to intentionally offend you, and in fact, I think he’s been bending over backward trying not to ruffle your feathers.”
“Thank you,” Asher murmured.
Keith made a grunt that was chock-full of “Whatever.”
“Look, I get it, a little,” she said. “Back when you were stuck on that island, you had no mobility. You two were confined to a small space and so Asher’s ability to move around didn’t impact you as much as it does now. Now it seems keener, but if you’re angry at him for his ability to walk, you’ve got to be pissed with the rest of us, too.”
Keith turned slowly toward her, pale blue eyes cold as always.
She was unmoved. She’d been nursing for almost eleven years, and she’d certainly dealt with far surlier characters than Keith Dahl.
“So, you’re pissed at me?” she asked him. “Oh well. What’s one more thing for you to be pissed about, right?”
“Why haven’t you gone away yet?”
“That’s rude,” Asher scolded him.
“It’s a fair question.”
“She has as much right to be here as you do. She’s Afótama, too.”
Keith closed his eyes and twined his gloved fingers atop his lap. “I know…exactly what she is. Who she is.”
“Oh yeah?” Mallory said levelly. “Who am I?”
He swallowed. With his eyes still closed, he said, “I was referring to your position, woman, not your genealogy. Don’t you have someone else to torture?”
“Honey, you haven’t even begun to see torture. If you want some, I’ll deal it out to you, and I don’t think you want that.”
As much as she could be, Mallory tried to be sensitive to her patients’ mental states. Keith had to have felt incredibly frustrated with the changes to his body. Instead of coming home a hero with a new place near the water for the Afótama to settle, he’d returned broken. He’d come home needing a nurse who’d had to help him bathe and get to the bathroom. She’d been there through all of that. Had seen everything. Done everything for him. He didn’t need her much anymore, but of course he was hostile because she had been there. She’d seen him like that and no one wanted to look into the face of the person who had to change their sheets because they couldn’t get out of bed fast enough to go piss.
Keith opened his eyes when Vic pulled open the driver’s door and climbed up into the seat. “All set?”
Mallory cleared her throat and turned to face the windshield. “All set.”
“Which way?”
“South,” Keith said under his breath.
Vic raised a brow at Mallory.
She nodded. South still seemed right.
As the desert raced past them, she said in the most cheerful voice she could manage, “Marty and I did some visualization exercises with your grandmother this morning, Keith.”
He grunted. “What kind?”
She caught a glimpse of him in the mirror. He had his eyes closed again. “She was telling us that for some people, it’s possible to see what their relatives are doing through their eyes.”
“That goes above and beyond telepathy,” Asher said.
“Telepathy is just the most common ability—the one that the vast majority of Afótama have. It was typical of about half the people in Ótama’s voyage, and of course, it wasn’t all that common in the larger tribe’s gene pool. That was part of the reason they decided to set out with Ótama in the first place. People thought they were suspicious.” She shrugged. “Anyway. Muriel took a special interest in the lineage tracing project where Marty and I were concerned because Dan is our father.”
“And because you have abilities he doesn’t?” Asher asked.
She nodded and turned to face him. Keith still had his eyes closed. She couldn’t tell for certain if he was listening, or if he’d tapped out of the conversation. Usually, when he took on that disinterested mien, he was catching every single word and just didn’t care to show people that he was.
Honestly, she didn’t care if he was or wasn’t. No skin off her teeth.
“She found something interesting, and I just learned this a couple of days ago.”
“Ah,” Asher said, raising his chin. “I was about to ask if you’d thought I didn’t want to know anymore.” He’d been following the drama with great interest. He found human relationships fascinating, especially seeing as how what little bit of family he had left was all trapped in the fairy realm. He seemed to crave interactions. He watched Mallory’s kids’ squabbles like a tennis umpire. At twelve, eleven, and nine, they were always squabbling about something. “What’d she find out?”
“I don’t think anyone would have ever found out if it weren’t for having recently acquired the family book, but she’s pretty sure that at some point in the nineteenth century, the Afótama in Norseton absorbed a few families from outside the clan. The families were descendants of the voyagers who’d had split off from the main group after they’d arrived in the Americas. The group that became the Fallonites went their own way, and there were a few other splinter groups that weren’t necessarily hostile but that choose not to go forward for other reasons.”
“Are you saying that Dan’s lineage is part Fallonite?” Keith asked.
Ha! So he’s listening.
She turned back around. “Muriel’s first suspicion was that the groups they absorbed then were from the smaller splinters who were ready to get pulled into the safety of a bigger clan, but now she’s pretty sure they were from Fallon.”
“Why would that be important?” Vic asked.
“Apparently, that was a time of very high hostility between the groups. I mean, they’re far enough away that they couldn’t get to each other very easily, but that didn’t stop them from lobbing threats to each other whenever they could. Of course, with so many generations in between then and now, Dan is—for the most part—psychically indistinguishable from the typical Afótama clansperson. Where things start to get funny is with Marty and me, because our abilities are more in line with further back in the lineage than the people who ended up in Fallon.”
“It skipped everyone during the magic drought and fell back to you two,” Keith murmured.
“Yeah. Muriel found that interesting because the woman we seem to have inherited our quirks from was a skeptic of the split. She went with them anyway to stay with her family, but her last words before the Fallonites parted was that splitting was going to fuck everyone over down the line. I’m paraphrasing, but she truly believed that. Of course, no one knew what she was talking about. They all thought she was crazy.”
“Is right now down the line?” Asher asked.
“Muriel thinks so. Anyway. I don’t think my father is aware of that lady or if he’d even respect her at all. I’m just meandering from Point A to Point Z. Point Z is that I did some visualization with Muriel, and I was able to catch a few glimpses of my brother’s situation.”
“And?” Keith asked.
“He was on a bus and it passed a sign that said El Paso. That was all I got, but Marty was able to get a little more later. By then, he was going through Las Cruces.”
“Heading right for you,” Keith said, opening his eyes.
“I think he heard us call him, and he’s coming,” she said. “I wonder sometimes if all of those weird sensations I had as a kid when I felt like someone was trying to talk
to me was him.”
“Him talking to himself, more likely.”
“You’re probably right. I don’t think he knows what he is any more than Marty and I knew what we were back when we were still in Florida.”
“Do you think there are others?” Asher ferreted a hair elastic out of his bag and gathered his loose locks into a ponytail. “Other children of Dan, I mean.”
Mallory shrugged and faced the road. “I don’t think so, but I could be wrong. For all I know, one day, someone else will hit my radar.”
“Not likely,” Keith murmured. He’d closed his eyes and put his head against the window.
She didn’t especially feel like engaging him when he was in the sort of mood he was obviously in, but her mother had always taught her to be the bigger person. “What do you mean?” she asked him.
He grimaced. His Adam’s apple rose and fell with a labored swallow.
Asher dug a bottle of water out of the cooler between them and nudged Keith’s arm with it.
He took the bottle without opening his eyes, and said, “Even when I was living in the rock and unwell…” Again, he grimaced. “More unwell, anyway. I still could feel the people who belonged to me. I knew exactly when Tess took her partners because she suddenly showed up in my thoughts one day like a lighthouse beacon, just as she should be. I knew when my parents’ lights went dim. I could find my grandmother on the web when I tried, as well as my cousin Nadia and my uncle.”
“But they couldn’t find you,” Asher said.
“To them, I was a light under a barrel, only occasionally connecting.”
“You wanted that,” Asher accused. “You didn’t want them to find you at that point.”
“Shut up.”
“No.” Asher knit his brows and vehemently shook his head. He’d been growing into a more assertive posture when dealing with Keith in recent weeks, but Mallory wondered if there wasn’t something else going on with them—if the two actually were beginning to truly dislike each other.
“Look,” she said, turning. “We don’t need to hash that out right now. I trust that Keith can give me the information I need to find my brother and that we can get back to Norseton soon to pitch in and find Lora. That’s what matters right now.”
“I’m sorry,” Asher said to her. “I’ll behave.” He twined his fingers atop his lap and gave her what seemed to be a contrite look. Coming from Asher, that was as good as a second apology. She wanted to unfasten her seatbelt and give him a squeeze of thankfulness. Instead, she just chuckled and pinched the bridge of her nose.
“Darius was telling me at the gate that the guys had almost finished reviewing the security footage from the days around Lora’s disappearance,” Vic said. “They only had a few hours left to review.”
“I really hope she comes back. I know it’s trite to say, but she was such a hard worker. I didn’t have the easiest time connecting with her on a personal level, but I think that was by design on her part.” Mallory settled lower in her seat and rubbed her closed eyes with her fingertips. Her sleep in the past few nights had been fitful. There’d been the odd visions and then the worrying about her kids when she learned she’d be leaving to track her brother. They’d be fine with her mother, of course. Also, she’d been worrying some nights about work. She was as stable as she’d ever been. Working for the Afótama royal family was, for the moment, a full-time job, but at some point, Keith wasn’t going to need a nurse anymore, and she’d have to find work elsewhere.
Logically, she knew that the hospital or clinic would probably hire her and if not, there were certainly opportunities within driving distance of Norseton. Still, she couldn’t help but worry about becoming unemployable when the other shoe dropped—when her father was finally ousted from the community that so rarely gave up its own. The last time she’d had to worry about work, she’d been a young newlywed, pregnant with her oldest child and about to graduate from nursing school. Her husband had been about to get deployed overseas for the first time, too. They were constantly worried about money. She missed her beloved rock Vann terribly, but she didn’t miss that unquenchable fear of things going sideways in those early years.
“You ever feel like you’re just meant to be friends with someone?” Mallory asked no one in particular. “That probably sounds silly.”
“I can’t say I know what that feels like,” Asher said softly. “But I tended to avoid people back in the fairy realm. I couldn’t trust anyone because I didn’t know what people’s allegiances were or if they’d try to hurt me. I guess I was what Prince Heath would call a ‘disadvantaged subject.’ I don’t have any notable magic and politically, I’m very much persona non grata. Truly, I believe I would have been dead decades ago if I hadn’t gotten the hell out of there.”
“You didn’t have friends before coming here?”
His brow creased again. “No. I guess I didn’t.”
Asher wasn’t looking at him, so he didn’t see the enraged flash of Keith’s teeth. Perhaps he’d misunderstood the nature of their relationship.
Or maybe Asher had misspoken.
Either way, Keith wasn’t thrilled.
Distract. Distract.
Half Mallory’s job seemed to be redirecting Keith before he could offend someone with his words.
“Keith, who were your friends before you left Norseton looking for a new settling place for the clan?” she asked him. “Are they still around?”
He straightened up a bit and looked at her. “I was the firstborn son of the queen’s daughter. I was sheltered, as was my mother then. She was quite young and still needed coddling. Even after I started school, I can’t say I ever had friends. I had peers. Age cohorts.”
“But some have come to visit you,” Asher said.
Keith rolled his eyes.
“They seemed nice in my opinion,” Asher said, looking to Mallory. “But maybe I’m wrong. Sometimes I’m wrong.”
Mallory didn’t think he was wrong. She thought Keith was just being a dick as always.
“The feeling you experienced with Lora,” Keith said through barely-moving lips, “is normal for Afótama, or so I’m told.” He put his head back against the window. “I’m not normal.”
“You’re being overdramatic,” Asher said.
“Fuck you.”
“All right, then. Thanks for letting me know where we stand.”
Vic took his eyes off the road briefly and cut Mallory an understanding look, and she wished he had the Afótama gift of telepathy. The things she could vent about were numbering in multitudes.
She settled even lower in her seat, crossed her arms, and put her gaze forward.
It was probably better if they just didn’t talk.
CHAPTER TEN
Somewhere South of Norseton
Asher
Asher was glad when Mallory’s tentative connection to her half-brother fell off about six hours into their trip because she was pushing herself too hard. Her exhaustion was evident, and that was saying something, given the fact that she was acclimatized to working brutally long hours.
She needed to rest, and he needed to get out of slapping distance of Keith. He had no idea what had changed in Keith as of late, but if he wanted to distance himself, Asher would give him the space to do so. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t try to support him all he could—just that he wouldn’t be quite as enthusiastic about it.
He walked across the motel parking lot carrying a heavy Chinese food takeout bag on each arm. He handed one to Vic as he stepped onto the sidewalk.
“You can take my room if you want it.” Vic canted his head toward the open room door. “Usually, I just toss my shit inside and stay wherever I can get a good view of the people I’m supposed to be protecting.”
“You can’t sleep in the van. That sounds awful.”
Vic snorted. “I spent almost twenty years sleeping in a van far more uncomfortable than that one. To be honest, I’ll probably shift into my wolf form and hang out in the shadows somewher
e. I rest more efficiently when I’m shifted.”
“Are you sure? I don’t want to put you out. Like you, I’m very used to sleeping in cramped spaces. I spent more than twenty years in a magically-hollowed rock, after all.”
Vic laughed. “Yeah, I’m sure. I wouldn’t volunteer unless I meant it. I’m not especially generous. The wolfpack can vouch for that.” He rapped his fingertips against Mallory’s closed door.
She opened it less than ten seconds later, eyes widening at the sight of the food bags.
That made Asher smile. Little things could improve Mallory’s mood in huge ways. Apparently, there was a word for people like her—optimists. They were in short supply in the fairy realm, and he liked the energy she had about her. If that made him weak, he didn’t care. What was one more thing to make him that way?
“Any news?” she asked, gaze flitting to Vic.
He grunted and headed toward Keith’s room—and apparently Asher’s former room. “Give me a minute,” Vic said.
Asher followed so he could get his things out of the room.
Keith was sitting near the dresser, remote control in hand. The television was off.
“Not sure which bag his is in.” Asher set his food bag on the table and scanned the hand-labeled containers for Keith’s broccoli beef. He didn’t see it. “Must be in yours, Vic. Look for the broccoli beef and the egg rolls.”
“Found ’em.” Vic deposited the parcels onto the table along with napkins, utensils, and a bottle of water. “I think what’s left here is mine, so everything else in your bag must be yours and Mallory’s.”
“Mm-hmm.” Asher confirmed with another quick poke through the bag.
“I need to go swap info with Mallory, so I’ll head over there.”
“I’ll go with you,” Asher said in perhaps too much of a rush. He edged past Vic and through the door before Keith could say anything or shoot him another of those withering glares. Asher didn’t understand the man anymore, and he was considering giving up on trying. He’d have more constructive interactions with walls.
Mallory had left her door open and was at the small table with one knee propped atop a chair and her cell phone against her ear. She held up a hand in a wait gesture and said into the phone, “Yeah, I thought the same. It was like he’d suddenly fallen off the planet, right? Logical that he’d just stopped moving for a bit, so it’s smart that you’re checking the bus timetables. Give me a call back if you find out anything, even if you think I’m asleep. I expect to sleep lightly tonight. I doubt I’ll be able to get into a deep sleep. I’m so worried he’ll get up and move, and we’ll lose track of him when we’re so close.”
