Jody
The woman with the gray hair tried to slam the door shut in Jody’s face before he could get a word out, but Nadia shoved her foot into the gap and wedged it open.
“That’s not very hospitable of you,” Nadia said.
“Gods.” The woman rolled her eyes and took a step back from the door. “Of course this thing wouldn’t happen by the books. That would be too easy, wouldn’t it?”
“I’m looking for Claude Callahan,” Jody said, holding the screen door open. “Can you tell me where to find him?”
“My mother went out to fetch him about five minutes ago.” The woman furrowed her brow and looked around Jody toward the driveway. “How’d you get here? Where’d you park?”
“Not important.”
After three missed landings, putting them in other Idylton locations, he’d hoped they’d hit the jackpot with Simone’s last transport of them. The princess was exhausted, and if they had to go anywhere else immediately, they’d have to go on foot. For some reason, the vibe he was getting from the town wasn’t that the place was completely open to outsiders.
Nadia drummed her fingers on the house siding and squinted at Jody at the same time the lady with the gray hair said, “How’d you find us?”
Her question could wait.
To Nadia, he asked, “What?”
“You getting those murmurs? Either there are some really shitty telepaths in the area or I’m having a stroke.”
He grimaced. He’d been hearing them, too, but he was always careful not to assume they were encountering people like them. More than once, he’d made that mistake and had merrily approached people, thinking he’d found a lost clansperson only to learn that they were some other type of psychic completely unrelated to them. The Afótama tried hard to keep their existence under wraps. The community’s secrecy pact kept them all safer from potential outside threats. They had enough threats from within.
“I hear them,” he said.
“They’re on the web.” Scowling, she rubbed a temple. “At least some of them are. I can’t be sure about the rest. Tess would probably be able to tell.” She turned to the woman just across the threshold. “You have anything you want to confess? Normally, I’d put you in a chokehold first and ask questions later, but I made a New Year’s resolution to be less impulsive.”
The woman opened her mouth.
“If you’re not going to tell the truth, I wouldn’t bother saying anything,” Simone said wearily. “She means it.”
“I wasn’t going to lie,” the lady said. “I may omit details on occasion, but I make a concerted effort not to lie. Folks around here don’t do that.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
She shrugged. “Code of conduct. Been in place since around the 1820s when folks finally gave this community a name. We don’t lie, we don’t hurt people, and we try to help where and when we can if doing so doesn’t put any of our community at risk.”
“Well, maybe you can help me with this.” He held his phone up to the lady’s face and showed a picture of Lora taken two weeks prior. “A lady who looked just like you was seen in our community’s surveillance footage with this woman. Was that you?”
She swallowed. Nodded.
“Did you take her?”
She grimaced. “I didn’t take her. She…went with me.”
“Under duress?”
“Not physical.”
“Did you blackmail her?”
“No!” Her eyes went round at the insinuation. “Absolutely not. I didn’t threaten her in any way. It wasn’t like that.”
“Then what did you want with her?”
“I can’t tell you that. I don’t have permission to talk about anyone else’s troubles. Ask my father to tell you when he gets here. He’s the only one who has permission to talk about why folks come here.”
“Where is she?”
The woman notched her teeth into her lower lip and stared at a little tattoo on her arm.
Nadia took her hand and turned her wrist over. “Why do you have that? That’s a—” She closed her mouth abruptly, and Jody could guess why.
That little Viking longship with its red and white sail was a common emblem in Norseton. It was the unofficial symbol of the Afótama.
“It’s for my boyfriend.” The woman pulled her wrist back in and pressed her thumb to the tiny tat. “He’s got one for me, too. It’s a little ear of corn, ’cause I’m boring and don’t have much else going on in my life. Grilled cheese sandwiches and acres of corn.” She snorted. “That’s all.”
“Your boyfriend is Afótama?” Nadia asked.
The lady pulled her bottom lip in between her teeth again and stared at the porch slats. Jody didn’t think she was going to answer, but she nodded.
“Is he here?” he asked.
“No. He’s probably at his office. He works for the town. I try not to bother him during the day.”
“Who is he?” Nadia asked.
“Not really important right now. I don’t think he’s got much to do with who you came here about.”
“And you know damn well who we came here about.”
Letting out a ragged exhalation, the woman moved away from the doorframe and gestured to the inside of the house. “Might as well wait for my parents inside. It’s muggy out there.”
“Keep your hands where I can see them,” Nadia said.
“Jeez. Come on. I’m not the violent sort.”
“Maybe not, but you’ve got a brain in your head and for right now, that makes you dangerous in my esteem.” Nadia canted her head toward the inside of the house. “Go ahead. We’ll follow.”
The lady sighed and moved farther into the living room.
Jody didn’t know what kind of weapons Nadia was carrying. He preferred to utilize a sort of selective memory when it came to her collection of guns and blades, but traveling with Simone in tow, she would have likely been armed to her teeth. Heath wouldn’t have let her take Simone anywhere unless he’d been convinced Nadia could protect his wife.
Not that Simone especially needed the help. As a fairy, she had a killer self-defense reflex and she wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty in hand-to-hand combat. Heath preferred that she come out of most tussles unscathed, however. With his own partner being in unspecified danger at the moment, Jody understood his worry deeply.
The lady took a seat on the sofa.
Jody, Nadia, and Simone took seats in chairs scattered throughout the room. They stared at each other in the silence.
The lady rubbed her palms against her thighs and bobbed her knee nervously.
Jody leaned his forearms onto his knees and gritted his teeth.
He didn’t know how long they’d been sitting in that tense face-off but was nearly orgasmic with relief when he heard tires crunching on the gravel outside.
“Don’t get up,” Nadia said preemptively to her. She went to the door. “A blonde and a guy with gray hair. Those your parents?”
“Yes.”
“He’s carrying some kind of case.” Nadia slid her hand to the small of her back carefully, likely considering pulling the weapon she had there. “What’s in it?”
“Lora’s stuff.”
“What do you mean, her stuff?” Jody asked.
The lady grimaced. “Just artifacts she gave him to hold onto. Nothing morbid.”
“Come on in, folks.” Nadia got out of the way of the door and gestured into the house.
Jody stood as the man, who must have been Claude Callahan, stepped inside. His steely gaze flitted from the redhead at the door farther into the room.
His daughter stood. “They showed up right after Mom left.”
Her mother stepped inside, eyes wide with worry. “Oh, my. Well, Jeez, Shea, where’d she go? Did she run off? That’s not safe with her memory being what it was. What if he finds her?”
“What do you mean, her memory?” Jody asked. In her note, Lora had said that she wouldn’t remember, and he needed to know what those people had to do with the state. “And who’s the he you’re talking about? Because I’m not going to hurt her. Fuck you for even thinking it.”
Shea waved off his queries and turned to her mother. “I thought you were shooting me hints to put her in the cellar. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Mrs. Callahan’s eyes went even wider. “No, I was serious about you staying out of there. One of the locks is sticking, and I didn’t want you to get trapped down there with no way for anyone up here to hear you.”
“She’s in your cellar?” Jody moved his gaze rapidly around the house’s square downstairs in search of the door. “Get her out. Now.”
“Okay, now wait.” Mrs. Callahan put up her hands. “There are some things you need to understand first. We know why you’re here. We know who you are, and you’ll just have to trust that we’re not enemies.”
Shea cleared her throat and pointed to her little longship tattoo. “Definitely not enemies.”
“That can mean anything,” Simone said. “Trust me that I know what I’m talking about. My ilk has some of the most perversely codependent relationships on the planet.”
Mr. Callahan put the little wooden box down on the coffee table and pulled himself upright. He shoved his hands into the back pockets of his work pants. Then he grunted and stared mutely at Jody.
Jody raised a brow.
“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.”