A Legacy Divided

by Holley Trent

  He visualized Ellen restrained with great straps around her body and her head fastened in place to a board. He thought of blinders attached to her face and her eyes being pinned open so she could only look forward. More importantly, he imagined stuffing a rag into her mouth to cork her words until she could decide to choose truth.

  The version of her that was living flesh went gray as a storm cloud as blood drained from her face and her body went rigid.

  The movement of his chair rolling slowly toward her made the hardwood floor creak ominously. He took his time positioning himself directly in front of her. Then fixing his shirt button that had come loose. Scrubbing his untidy beard with his palm. Closing his eyes, because his head hurt like hell and the entire circumstance was making him nauseated.

  “Dan’s preoccupied,” he said low so as not to further escalate the throbbing behind his temples. “Don’t bother trying to call out to him telepathically. I’m the big asshole throttling any psychic bullshit you put off. I’m going to tell you to do one thing, and one thing only. If you do that thing, depending on what you say and whether or not I decide you’re lying, when the council convenes to decide on a suitable punishment for you, I may support leniency. If you fucking lie to me…” He opened his eyes and forced her to look at him.

  She was starting to sweat.

  Good.

  He wanted her to wallow in discomfort. Mere discomfort was too good a thing for her, though, especially after so many years having suffered no consequences for what she and Dan had done.

  Keith was tired of them having to bide their time. That needed to end.

  “Do you know about the others?” Keith asked. The time for gentleness was over. “Dan’s children.”

  She tried to shake her head but got hung up on the lie.

  Keith sighed. “Let’s try that again. Did you know about Dan’s other children?”

  A much easier nod. Moisture pooled at the corners of her eyes.

  Keith swatted away the gag in his mind. “How much do you know?”

  “Not much.”

  Before Keith could chastise her for wasting his time, she gave her head a hard shake and said, “I swear, I don’t know much. Did I know about them? Yes, but not because he’s told me. I had my suspicions, but I could never find proof short of following him and seeing with my own eyes what he was doing.”

  “But you stayed with him anyway?” Asher queried. The look of confusion on his face was worthy of memorialization. It was a mask of perfect naiveté.

  But Asher wasn’t so innocent anymore.

  Keith gritted his teeth and squeezed his armrests. He needed to stay focused or that headache was going to pound him for days.

  “He knows too much about what I did,” Ellen said.

  “Ah,” Keith said. “So, you confront him, he throws you under the bus?”

  “It was all his idea!”

  Keith didn’t want to believe her, but unfortunately, he didn’t sense that she was lying. She was exceedingly uncomfortable but being honest…for the moment.

  “What was all his idea?” Asher asked.

  “He said he had to do it all because of me.”

  Keith loosened the psychic clamps around her so she could relax a bit from the stiff posture he’d forced her into. She immediately slumped, hung her head, and laced her fingers.

  “I’ve done bad things,” she said. “I’m not going to deny that. I’m tired of constantly having to get ahead of the accusations I know are going to come. I’m tired of digging deeper holes for myself and hoping that I won’t ever get discovered.”

  “So, you know you’re going to get punished?” Asher asked.

  A clipped nod. “I’ll take my chances with the council when it convenes. Just keep me away from Dan in the interim.”

  “We can certainly accommodate you on that.” Keith quickly considered his options. He wanted another pair of ears catching that confession. No one was close enough. Not Jody. Not Uncle Joe. Not Nan. Tess was preoccupied with her baby.

  He let out a slow exhalation and gave Nan a mental nudge. “Step in if you can. Confession imminent.”

  “One moment.” A few seconds later, Nan’s huge psychic presence nudged Keith’s aside in his own head, and she settled in to listen. He was dizzy and confused but tried to keep up.

  “I had a surgery when I was young,” Ellen said. “I told him I might not be able to have children. He got angry. I didn’t understand why. When we were courting, he’d never expressed much interest in growing a family. His home life hadn’t been so stable.”

  “His parents were cold people,” Nan whispered into Keith’s head.

  He grunted.

  “I told him that we should try, and if nothing came of it, we could consider adoption. So many people were adopting then because of having lost their children to the kidnappings. He was adamant that we have a child who was…like us, though.” She scoffed. “I didn’t see where it mattered. We didn’t have magic then. No one did, really, except for Muriel.”

  “So you made arrangements in Fallon,” Asher nudged.

  “Arrangements is a kind way to put it. It was just supposed to be the one child. We strong-armed that couple to get Erin when she was a newborn. She was such a pretty little thing, and I was over the moon. I was deluded, and at that point, I would have believed anything he said and I would have done anything for him because I thought our family was complete. He saw an opportunity. A chance to make some money before the well dried up, and he figured that operating way out there, Muriel wouldn’t catch wind of what he was doing.”

  Nan had nothing to say about that, though he didn’t doubt that she would say plenty later. When she was silent, she was contemplating. In Keith’s experience, all women were dangerous when they were silent.

  “Yes, I assisted him. I also made numerous contacts on my own and coordinated meetings without his guidance. It became like just another job to me.”

  “What do you know of his other associations?” Keith asked. He could sense Nan holding her breath, wherever she was.

  Ellen’s brow creased. “What other associations?”

  “The ones that have to do with children from here disappearing in the first place.”

  Her mouth opened wide in horror, then closed on a stammer. “I… I…”

  “She doesn’t know,” Nan said.

  Keith hated to admit she was right.

  “What did he do?” Ellen demanded, squirming in her seat.

  Keith released the remaining psychic bonds he had on her.

  She sprang to her feet and rushed over to him. “What did he do?”

  “Easy.” Asher moved between the two of them and carefully nudged her back to her chair. “Just be easy and tell us what you know.”

  “I don’t know anything! Search the house, if you’d like. Take the computers and…and….” She rooted her phone out of her pocket and thrust it at Asher. “Take that, if you want. You can pull all the records. I promise you, whatever other sin you think he’s guilty of, I have nothing to do with it.”

  “I must be off. I’ll call Joe and ask him to escort her to a holding cell,” Nan told Keith. “Give her time to gather a few possessions and amusements. If she continues to cooperate, perhaps she’ll have served out her punishment before she is too feeble to enjoy whatever life she has left.” She departed.

  Keith dragged a hand down his weary face. “My uncle is going to collect you. We’re going to move you to a secured location. Pack a bag. Get whatever you need to be comfortable. You’re going to be there for a while.” Decades, probably. The last time their council had convened representatives from all the American groups, the members had been so frustrated by needing to be there at all that they handed down overly severe punishments.

  The council members from Fallon weren’t going to feel especially lenient where the Petersens were concerned. To them, they were child thieves and they thought the Afótama had supported them in their actions. There was no way they’d be fair, bu
t whatever the group decided, Tess would have to let stand. She’d have no choice if she truly wanted to prove that she was invested in everyone’s wellbeing and in reuniting the groups.

  “Get a pad and pen, too,” Asher told her as she padded away. “We’ll need names of everyone in Norseton who you facilitated adoptions for. Keep in mind that we’re already aware of some of those children because they self-identified to Erin thanks to the whisper network. She’s been working with us since finding out where she came from. It’d be in your best interest to be truthful.”

  “I understand,” Ellen said weakly. The child she’d raised from birth had betrayed her, but deep down, she had to know she deserved the scorn. She’d ruined people’s families and made young Fallonite couples think that Nan would destroy them if they didn’t quietly go along with the thefts. They’d believed Nan was really that monstrous and that the Afótama were all like that.

  There was no to measure how far back Dan and Ellen had set back relations between the two groups. There was no way to know if the rift between them would ever be fixable. Being half Afótama and half Fallonite, their cavalier treason made Keith hot with rage. Of course he wanted them to reconnect and be one community. He was a child of Ótama and was wired to prefer unity.

  Ellen padded down the hall.

  For a long, torturous moment, Keith and Asher’s gazes met.

  Keith drummed his fingers atop his armrests.

  “I…”

  Save it, Asher. Just save it.

  Keith wasn’t one to rehash shit that didn’t matter. He didn’t want to hear the platitudes and get the kid-gloves treatment.

  Asher closed his mouth and followed Ellen down the hall.

  Smart on a number of fronts. Keith could probably make a list of Asher’s flaws that were as long as his arm, but he could admit the man was a fast learner. He adapted to his surroundings and never made the same mistake twice.

  He probably considered Keith to be one of those things.

  And for some reason, all of a sudden, that made Keith sad.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Mallory

  “Stop right there.”

  Mallory paused in her hunched-over state, closed her eyes, and sighed. She was used to neighbors always taking to the great outdoors at the exact same time she stepped outside to fetch her newspaper or mail. She’d developed the perfect conversational bob-and-weave strategy to keep their nosy ramblings brisk and light.

  But she couldn’t scramble away from a conversation with Tess. The woman would hunt Mallory like a fox on a hare and Mallory knew better than to run.

  She grabbed the newspaper and straightened up as Tess slowly made her way up the cracked walkway. Nadia was at her side, as always, and April was secured snugly in a wrap at Tess’s front.

  “If you’re both here at once, my kids are going to think something bad has happened,” Mallory informed them. “There’s a legend around here that where you both go, bad news follows.”

  “Hush,” Tess said. Her eyes were tired but her grin was mega-watt.

  Oh, hell.

  “Is this about me putting in my notice?”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Tess said, “but I imagine I know why you did.”

  “Are you here to apologize on his behalf? I know he’s your brother, but…” Mallory shifted her weight and scanned around her in search of prying neighbors. For the moment, they all seemed to be minding their own business. “Let’s not make this awkward.”

  “I despise awkwardness,” Nadia said with a shudder.

  “Really,” Tess said. “We don’t want that either. With circumstances being as tenuous as they are, we don’t have time for any additional messiness.”

  Mallory lifted a brow. “And I’m the mess?”

  “No. You’re just a part of one. I’d like to make a proposal.”

  “What sort of proposal?”

  “Locking you, Keith, and Asher in one room and seeing what happens.”

  Shit.

  Apparently, the word was already out. Mallory shouldn’t have been surprised. It’d been a day since she’d walked in on Keith and Asher. That gossip spreading to Tess overnight was hardly record-speed in Norseton.

  Mallory gave her a long blink. “Who could that possibly benefit?”

  “In theory, all of you,” Nadia said.

  “In what way?”

  “Don’t be coy,” Tess said. “You didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. You know how complicated connections become when there’s magic in play.”

  Mallory tossed the newspaper to the stoop and turned back to the Vikings on the path.

  In moments like that, she was always in awe of the fact that she belonged in that place with them. She was so different, but at the same time, like them, supposedly.

  “And you think there’s some sort of complicated connection between me and those men?” Mallory asked.

  “Yes,” they said in unison.

  “I doubt that.”

  “Why?” Tess asked.

  “Keith tolerates me. That’s not romance.”

  “Keith has an ego with no boundaries,” Tess said. “It’s hard to know when he’s feeling vulnerable, but I have my suspicions that he behaves the way he does because he doesn’t want to feel like that third wheel.”

  Nadia nodded. “Think about it. He sees you and Asher developing this fondness for each other, and he’s on the outside of it. He’s probably wondering where he fits in now, or if he even does.”

  “Well, that’s silly. Of course he does,” Mallory said, indignant.

  The cousins smirked knowingly at her.

  Mallory let out a quiet groan and ground her weary eyes with her fists. “Why,” she whispered, “does everything in my life have to be complicated? Even with my father being in Norseton, I thought things would become less sticky for me once I moved into the community. I thought things would be easier if I didn’t have to pretend all the time not to be the weirdo I am.”

  “And maybe they’ll be less complicated in time,” Tess said, “but this is something you have to deal with now. If you want to, I mean.”

  “Do you want to?” Nadia asked.

  “No. I’ve got three kids who are either in or close to puberty who notice too much and ask too many smart questions.”

  “So did Ollie,” Tess said. “Matt was seventeen when he and Lyman moved here. They adapted.”

  “Matt and Lyman are part fae. Of course they adapted. They’re biologically wired to adapt to whatever the magic needs to do. But me? I’m just half-whatever. There’s nothing interesting about me, and my kids might not ever grow into any magic of their own.”

  “But your magic is enough,” Tess said emphatically. The smirk she’d been wearing had fallen off. Her expression was all seriousness. “Whatever you have is enough to have made Keith a certain kind of uncomfortable. Don’t you want to know what that means?”

  Of course Mallory wanted to know.

  Every little girl grew up thinking she could marry a prince. Some of the little girls might have even come from the “wrong” families or had magic that wasn’t quite like everyone else’s in the realm. But in none of those prince reckonings was it likely that there was a second party vying for the prince’s affections…and who happened to be a man.

  “It’s messy,” Tess admitted. “Listen. I get it. But I’ve found that things get surprisingly less complicated when you don’t try to smoosh them into containers they don’t fit in.”

  “Is this your way of telling me to loosen up, Queenie?”

  Tess shrugged. “I’m telling you that you should figure out if the fates are nudging the three of you into a unit. The question from there wouldn’t be why, but what are you going to do about it?”

  “How do you suggest I figure that out?”

  “Obviously, you need to be in a space with both of them at the same time,” Nadia said. “No distractions. No interruptions.”

  “It’ll be a war,” Mallory said.r />
  Both cousins grunted.

  “This doesn’t sound productive. Especially not with all the business happening right now with my father and my brother being here and—”

  “Let us worry about that,” Nadia said. “One night won’t break anything. I just got word. We’re in a holding pattern tonight, waiting on your father to take the bait.”

  “Yeah. Adam called me about Ellen a few minutes ago. He thought Marty and I should know what was happening so we could be prepared.” She hadn’t even told her mother yet. Mallory shifted her weight, suddenly weary. Shit was hitting the fan from too many directions all at once. She was having a tough time compartmentalizing everything, and she’d always been good at that.

  There was Dan to be concerned about. And sweet Elliott. Also, her too-curious children.

  And those two frustrating men.

  Mallory gave her head a clearing shake. The motion didn’t help.

  “Do it so you don’t have to wonder,” Tess said. “Trust me. I was plenty worried when I thought I had to pick between Ollie and Harvey. I was relieved that didn’t have to.”

  The sort of relief Tess hinted at was something Mallory craved. She was tired of things being unnecessarily complicated. Tired of having to sort things into strict categories. Tired of having to choose just one thing when, in truth, one wasn’t enough.

  “Just drop by the mansion in the morning,” Tess said.

  “Keith will probably be around and I’m sure Asher will be there,” Nadia added. “It’s just a matter of coordination. What do you say?”

  It sounded like a recipe for disaster.

  It sounded like Mallory was already standing in the long line for a thrill ride and though she was terrified, she was too nervous to step out of the queue because she’d been waiting for an experience just like that for far too long.

  Why not see what could happen? Why not see if you have to choose at all?

  If things didn’t work out, at least she would know to move on. She’d have a resolution—a closure on at least one thing.

  She looked down at her feet and nodded.

  She would never be able to explain the situation to Marty or her mother.