A Legacy Divided

by Holley Trent

  “I’ll get the tablet,” Mrs. Callahan said. She hurried away and returned a minute later with a tablet computer showing some sort of video on the screen.

  Realizing the buffering image was of Lora, Jody snatched it from her. She looked okay. Her hair was mussed, clothes a bit more wrinkled than she tended to prefer, and her posture less rigid than usual, but that was definitely her.

  She was pacing in front of a staircase, occasionally looking up the steps toward a closed door.

  “This is downstairs? In this house?”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Callahan perched on the arm of a chair and sighed. “She didn’t want to be down there when I offered, but she may as well stay put now since her memory’s coming back.”

  “What does one thing have to do with the other? What do you gain from her not having her memory?”

  “We don’t gain anything,” Shea said. “She needed her memory wiped so that—” She looked to her father.

  He nodded, apparently content to let his daughter do the talking for him.

  “She needed her memory wiped so that any information that she had about your people couldn’t get gleaned by someone who’s been trying to destroy you for years.”

  “Who? Who the hell is it? Dan Petersen? Is this where he’s been coming all those times he’s disappeared from Norseton for conferences that didn’t exist?”

  Shea scrunched her nose and shook her head. “I don’t know anything about him. The man I’m talking about is Lora’s father.”

  “Her father?” Nadia murmured.

  “But not really her father. Just a guy who shows up on some buried paperwork. We don’t actually know who her real biological father is.”

  “Neither do we,” Jody said through clenched teeth.

  Shea grimaced. “Yeah. Well, the timeline is pretty convoluted. We may never know the full story, but that guy was the reason Lora ended up a ward of the state, and eventually adopted by the Mollers.”

  “He’s bad news,” Mrs. Callahan said, crooking her thumb toward her husband. “Trust him. He knows the whole messy story. The parts of it that anyone could possibly know, anyway. I think maybe you should sit down to hear it.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Jody

  “Fuck the story,” Jody spat. “I want to speak to Lora. Now.”

  “I know you do, dear,” Mrs. Callahan said, “but let me tell you some things to put all this mess in context. Trust me, trying to muster up a story that makes any semblance of sense on the fly is harder than you think when family drama comes into play.”

  “As though we don’t have any of that?” Nadia asked.

  “It’s your family, honey.”

  “What?”

  “Claude, get the book. The book.”

  With a grunt, Claude moved across the room to a bookcase. He extracted a key ring from his pocket, pushed one key into a hidden slot at the side of the wooden unit, and the bookcase pivoted inward.

  Immediately, Jody, Nadia, and Simone stood and reached for their respective weapons. They’d been around the block enough times to be suspicious of secret passages—Simone especially, given her ability to construct them out of thin air.

  “Oh boy!” Mrs. Callahan hurried over and threw her body in front of the bookcase, jumping and spread-eagling as though she were going to take a bullet for her husband. “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

  They kept knives and guns leveled at her until Shea, cool as a cucumber, sighed and said, “It’s only four feet deep and there’s no ventilation. Nothing larger than a cockroach could survive for long. He keeps books in there that he doesn’t want to expose to much light.”

  They lowered their weapons, pointing them toward the floor.

  “When’d you buy a gun, Simone?” Jody asked, keeping his gaze on Claude Callahan.

  “I didn’t. Nadia bought it. Heath said I either carry that or get better with the dagger. I hate using the dagger. I don’t like getting blood in the sparkly bits on the handle.”

  “What the hell have we gotten ourselves into?” Shea muttered.

  Mrs. Callahan put her hands down and got out of her husband’s way.

  After ensuring that there was indeed nothing in the space behind the shelves, Jody nodded to Nadia and Simone. They put their pieces away.

  Claude opened the book onto the table and looked at his wife.

  “Oh! Okay. Shea, why don’t you make us some tea and maybe bring out that pie if you even left us any of it.” Mrs. Callahan pressed her fingertips to her temples and rubbed. “Lemme think. Oh, this is so messy.”

  “I’ll do it.” Claude’s voice was a disconcerting rasp, like claws being dragged across a wall.

  Damaged?

  He cleared his throat twice and fixed his stare on Jody. “Your mother…and grandmother,” he said slowly, carefully, “and all the women in line before them were targets because of people like Magnus Anders.”

  “And who is he?” Jody asked.

  Claude shook his head. “Crazy man. Consumed by jealousy. Angry at how the Fates sorted the family tree and at him being in the wrong branch.”

  “You said something about him being labeled somehow as Lora’s father,” Nadia said. “How?”

  “Cult stuff.” He gave his throat another frustrated clearing. “Later.”

  Jody understood. Some details, though explosive, wouldn’t change their actions going forward. Dwelling on them would be a waste of time and time was precious.

  “The grudge has been going back for ages,” Shea called out from the kitchen. “I think it got worse and worse over time until the person with the perfect personality for sociopathy inherited it.”

  “And that’s Magnus?” Simone asked.

  “Yes,” Claude said. He cleared his throat again and tapped the page of the open book. “My family tree. I’m Magnus’s cousin, and thus yours, but very distant. Not from Alfarinn’s lines like you and him, but from one of Alfarinn’s brothers’ lines. My family was part of the clan yours left behind in Iceland.”

  “They were content to stay there, too,” Mrs. Callahan said.

  “But?” Jody asked.

  “But after a few hundred years, word got back that your folks had settled in America.” Shea leaned against the doorway between the living room and kitchen. “Everyone knew the lore of Ótama and her husband and the crew that went with them. There was also another story about her sister Astrid being so cruelly jealous that she decided to get a boat, too, and set out after her so she could tell everyone in the new place what Ótama was. Because she got left behind, she didn’t want Ótama to ever have any peace. That’s the long and short of it, but over time, the story got twisted in some accounts. In certain ones, there’s a myth that Ótama had harmed her in some way and had taken magic away from her. No one knows for sure what happened to Astrid, but there was a pretty bad storm the night they set out. Chances are good they had to turn back. Maybe they tried again. I don’t know. What I do know is that her descendants and their friends who set out in search of Ótama’s clan in America were going for the revenge they thought Astrid deserved. Yngvild, too.”

  “So, Magnus is descended from Astrid?” Jody asked.

  “Yes,” Claude said.

  Ótama’s focus on her sister had apparently been spot-on.

  “So, what happened?”

  “When the cult of Astrid got here in the early nineteenth century, there was a slaughter,” Shea said. “They turned on each other. I guess many who’d gone along had changed their minds about who the real victim was sometime during the trip. Dad’s great-great-great…” She squinted. “Eh. Anyway, his many-times great-grandfather led the posse that did away with the closest supporters of the mastermind, but the mastermind himself got away.”

  “Let me guess. A guy with the last name of Anders.”

  “Yes,” Claude said.

  “Because he got away, Dad’s folks had been trying their best to keep up with not only the Afótama but of the Anders crew, too. It was hard, even af
ter our family relocated to the U.S. to be closer to the problem. They felt being here to act as stabilizers was critical and that if only folks had been more cooperative in Alfarinn’s time, things wouldn’t have escalated in such an unnecessary manner. The Afótama were very secretive, but we managed to find you by infiltrating the knuckleheads in Fallon. They had much looser lips.”

  Nadia snorted. “I have a boyfriend who would agree with that. Fallonites are a special breed. They brag without regard to the fact that they’re giving up secrets that they shouldn’t.”

  “Why didn’t your people say anything to whoever the queen was at the time?” Simone asked, brow furrowed.

  “Didn’t want to interfere that closely,” Claude said. “Didn’t want them to think they wanted anything from them.” He shrugged. “No way of knowing now. All the same, my bunch of folks have been trying to keep Astrid’s folks from dirtying up the works. We slipped up, though. About thirty years ago. Didn’t realize what was happening with your kids until too late. Been scrambling to fix things, but the scheme escalated too fast. When they yanked Contessa, we didn’t think we’d ever catch up. We had to resort to a different strategy. I think it worked, but not without some pain on your end. Glad you found her on your own.”

  Jody settled into a seat near the coffee table and stared at the open book. “Break this down for me. What was Magnus’s family’s goal and what did he do?”

  “Hard to know their motives for sure, but what we suspect is that they wanted to either get in and destroy the Afótama—to knock out your queen and leave you adrift—or to try to integrate into them. I don’t think the latter worked the way they wanted.”

  “Knock out our queen? You don’t mean…”

  Nadia grabbed his wrist.

  Claude pulled in a deep breath and nodded cautiously. “We don’t have proof, but when we heard your parents got killed, we suspected they had something to do with it. It was a shame. She was so young.”

  “I’ll kill him.” Jody had never felt such rage. After his parents died, he’d been numb. When Tess had gone missing, he’d been helplessly confused.

  But this…this was apparently what he was holding back all his anger for. Death was always a last resort for the Afótama. They were thinkers, not killers. But half of what Jody was came from a much more ruthless legacy. They didn’t swing their swords unless they meant to harm, and he was ready to come out swinging.

  Claude put up his hands. “I’m not going to try to be your conscience on that. It’s a tricky mess with a lot of moving parts. You take out one thing, and you risk gumming up the works of the rest. We did what we could. We managed to intercept a few of your kidnapped kids and bring them here because we had one of the cult folks defect. They gave us intel we needed.”

  “So, that’s why we’re hearing them on our web now,” Nadia said, turning her ear toward the fields beyond.

  “Yes. They’re around.”

  “And they know what they are?”

  “Well, they know where they’re from,” Shea said. “Are they aware of everything that’s happened in Norseton in the past twenty or so years? No. They choose to be ignorant so they can’t be used to hurt you. Also, you guys are usually pretty good at keeping your most secret news locked down, except for what leaks out to Fallon. That’s where we pick up the juiciest morsels.” She snickered. “They’re waiting to go home as soon as Magnus and his cronies are dealt with. My boyfriend really wants to get back to his parents. They were up there in years when he was a kid and he wants time with them before it’s too late.”

  “What’s stopping them from going?” Jody demanded. “Their families are worried sick about them.”

  “We may not have abilities like yours,” Claude said. “No psychic stuff whatsoever, but that doesn’t mean that folks like Magnus aren’t creative. He uses other kinds of psychics to track down yours, and you better believe he’s got no ethical qualms about invading their privacy that way. He sics his special gang of contractors on them, bulldozes their minds, and makes them give up whatever information they have about you. I guess he thought taking Tess was a coup, but then she turned out not to have any abilities at all. He’d assumed he snatched the wrong girl and tossed her back into the foster care system.”

  Nadia snickered.

  The fact that Afótama queens had evolved to not have any special abilities until they’d found their mates wasn’t widely known. Nadia hadn’t even known that about Tess until she’d returned home to Norseton, and Nadia had been trained to be her shadow.

  “Explain to us where Lora comes into play in this mess,” Simone said. “Is she a spy?”

  “I’ll be honest. She was probably meant to be. Like we said, her paperwork was all gummed up. Her mother might have had the state do a paternity test through social services and Magnus’s folks found out about her that way. Thought she might have had some potential. She isn’t the only one the cult took interest in, but she was the only one who got placed in Norseton.”

  “Placed?” Jody wrested his arm from Nadia and scrambled to his feet. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  Claude put up his hands. “Easy. You’re skeptical? I get that. I would be, too, but trust me. You can’t blame her for any of this. The scheme Magnus rolled out was crazy enough to almost work. He knew that with your community being so insular and small, if you started losing your kids, some of your folks were going to try to fill out their families in other ways. He put his cult kids into the system hoping you folks would adopt them. But I’m sure your Tess could tell you how kids have a way of not staying put once they enter foster care. Many were too far away from Norseton by the time your folks started looking, or they got taken in by outsider families who thought they blended in well with the rest of their kids and who had their minds on adoption. Lora was an outlier.”

  “She was too brown,” Simone murmured.

  Claude grunted. “I don’t think he expected that she’d be the one who’d make it in.”

  “Where are all of those children’s mothers?”

  Of course Simone would be levelheaded enough to ask the obvious questions. Jody was too busy reeling at all the information being tossed at him—of subterfuge and such remarkable disregard for the sovereignty of a people who simply wanted to be safe and not judged by outsiders.

  “Don’t know about all of them,” Mrs. Callahan said. “But I can tell you for certain that Lora’s mother is dead.” She swallowed hard and stared at out her hands. “Blunt force trauma about six months after Lora was born. Police found her in a ransacked motel room in Oklahoma City.”

  Shea sidled over and looped her arms around her mother’s neck. “Hey. That’s not your fault. You didn’t know what was happening back then.”

  “Just hurts…to be a mother to think that could have been my baby taken away like that and that it could have been me dead on the floor, used for my body and thrown away.”

  “Are there others who turned up dead?” Nadia asked. She was rubbing the back of Simone’s neck, perhaps trying to prevent the fairy princess from spiraling into one of the blind furies she sometimes lost hours to. Simone was hard to infuriate, but when she was triggered, she became dangerous. Heath would probably flip his lid if she ended up in a tussle.

  Jody needed to send her—and Nadia—home. If there was a shit storm brewing, he didn’t want either of them near it. He’d handle things. He’d get Lora out of there and make sure no one ever tried to use her again. He’d failed to keep her safe from the mysterious Magnus Anders, but Jody never made the same mistake twice.

  “The best we can tell,” Claude said, “there have been at least three others. You have to understand, those kids like Lora are hard to keep up with. We can’t pull birth records about the ones we don’t know about.”

  “I want Lora’s birth certificate,” Jody said. “The real one. The one she has is a delayed one with sketchy information about her parents. Now I understand why.”

  Claude nodded. “We’ve got a copy
in our archives. We knew how to request it because her mother had the foresight to drop her copy of the application in the mail to us the day she got killed. We’d been trying to get our operatives to extract her because she was showing all the signs that she didn’t want to be there. She was scared to make a move. Magnus had pulled her into his little cult right after she started child support proceedings on the father. The real father’s name got fridged from the documents. Magnus put his pseudonym on the new docs so he could control Lora’s movements. He must have had a dozen or more helpers on the inside of the agencies pulling strings for him.”

  “Someone should pull every damned social services file he’s listed on and see how many of those children disappeared,” Nadia said.

  “We did,” Shea said. “We’ve got tabs on all the kids we can, but you’ve got to keep in mind that there are probably others he wasn’t listed on or where he may have used other aliases. We nabbed a few who’d done those spit tests through genetic genealogy companies and who’d made their information public. We had them pull those suckers down fast.”

  “Where are they?” Jody asked.

  “They’re around. Some here. Some elsewhere. They all know the score now. They try to help us as they can, and they let us know whenever he tries to contact one of them. They pretend they don’t know anything, and I guess he mostly believes them because they’re not valuable to him anymore. They’re too old. He doesn’t use any of his psychic resources on them.”

  “They don’t have any weird magic?” Simone asked. “Any abilities surfacing?”

  “Only one person out of all the ones we know of,” Shea said. “But he’s one of your Afótama. Not one of the hypnotized time bombs like Lora. That’s what he did to her.”

  “I want to see Lora,” Jody demanded. “Now.”

  “Fine.” Claude laced his fingers together and grimaced. “You gotta understand that we’re almost always one step behind Magnus. He found her some months back. Reached out to her and claimed to be her father. While she was trying to make sense of what he wanted, we sent Shea and my wife in to extract her. We brought her here because we know how to keep those kids off Magnus’s radar once he targets them. She’s not going to remember you because she had to give up her memory to temporarily suppress the suggestion he planted in her. She’s been carrying his programming probably since she was old enough to understand words, and he nurtured her allegiances every time he made contact with her. Hypnotism. He’s a stone-cold manipulator. The only alternative we had was to keep her in a space psychic suggestion can’t permeate.”