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My little sister reached up and moved a mass of hair from her face. “Zo-Zo, your liquor cabinet is stupid, and I think... I think I’m drunk.”
If she got into my stash.... “Oh gods.” I knelt next to her, ensured the safety was on, and laid my gun on the hardwood floor. “Sera, smelling whiskey makes you tipsy. Why the hell would you drink it?”
I turned her face to look at me; her eyes shone wide and glassy. “How much have you had to drink?”
“Allofit.” The words mushed and mangled into a single slur of sound.
“All of it?”
She gave me a thumbs-up. “Yup, all of it.”
Well, shit. “Sera, there were ten bottles in there. Ten mostly full bottles. You probably have alcohol poisoning, dammit.” I crawled to the threshold and looked in. Three emptied silhouettes sat on the counter, and the other seven remained untouched on the top of the pantry. For small favors, I sent silent prayers of gratitude skyward.
She rolled onto her back.
I turned her on her side, facing me—no sense in risking her passing out and choking on her own vomit. I got up to make her something to drink. I pulled open the fridge and offered a silent hooray for the electrolyte goodness hidden behind the almond milk.
“You were gone a really long time.” Her voice sounded so small.
“When?” I poured her a tumbler full of the bright blue liquid and grabbed a straw.
“Today. Tonight. And then you came in angry. I didn’t....”
Sera, for all her insistence otherwise, was an empath, absorbing other people’s emotional output like a giant sponge trapped in a five-foot-tall mold. Her denial had unfortunately kept her from learning how to put up shields—the kind I’d clearly let slip at my entrance. After all, only “freaks” like me needed to learn such things.
Did we have issues? Oh, did we ever.
This wasn’t the time. With Sera, it never was. So I did what I always did and played the role of best big sister. I set the glass down, bent the straw, and got her to drink. “I wasn’t mad at you. I didn’t even know you were in my house. If you had called I would’ve come straight home.”
“I would’ve, but....” She drew her knees up, arms pulling them into her chest.
“But what?”
She played with the straw between her fingers, intent on that round, striped plastic. “You know that part in the movies where the bad guy tells the good guy that he better not say anything?”
My heart dropped. “Yes?”
“That if he says a word, something bad will happen?”
I took her face in my hands. “Sera, what are you talking about? What happened?”
She turned her head, dark eyes bright with tears. “Edward took Esther.”
“Wait, what do you mean he ‘took’ her?”
Sera shrugged and curled into a ball. “He took her. Came over with some of these thugs from his new church and took her.”
I stared at her and shook my head. This made no sense. No way in the world would my baby sister allow her idiot of a husband to walk into their house and take their daughter, even if he had threatened her. No, my Sera would’ve had the cops on the phone, screaming at the invader that he’d take her baby over her dead body. Not this. She was hiding something from me.
“What did they tell you would happen if you went to the cops?”
She mumbled something beneath the tangle of arms and hair.
“Sera.”
She screamed into the floor and crawled away from me until she sat against the back of my couch. “They said they’d kill her, okay? If I went to the cops, if I told anyone, if I didn’t let them take her, they would kill my daughter, goddammit! What am I supposed to do with that?”
She kicked a leg out and knocked over the glass, spilling a pond of neon blue across the cream-colored carpet. “So I let them. I stood there and let them take my kid, because I would rather have her alive and well and without me, than dead before her first birthday. Is that what you wanted to hear? Huh?”
I reached for her, but she cringed. “I would’ve done the same thing.”
“No, you wouldn’t have, Zoë. You would’ve fought back. You would’ve forced them to leave without taking her. You would’ve saved her.”
Her words tore at me. I wanted to believe I was this person she’d fashioned in her head, but who knows what I would have done if the roles were reversed.
No matter. I knew what I could do now. “Let’s go and get her.”
Sera spared me a glance that was half hopeful and half you’re-an-idiot. “Zoë, no. You heard what they said.”
“Come on. That’s why you came here, Sera.”
“What? No!” She dropped her eyes to her hands. “That’s not why I’m here. It’s not.”
“Maybe Edward is stupider than we thought. Maybe he forgot who your sister is, who I’m connected to, but he had to know you’d come and see me. After all, I am your go-to family member in times of crisis, right?”
She nodded, and the gears in her head were starting to spin. “You’re not a cop, so I can tell you.”
“Hell, I’m not even dating a cop anymore.” I waved off her confusion. “Later, okay? I’ll explain after we get Esther away from her bastard of a father and his goons. You’re right, I’m not a cop, and if he hurts her because you told me, then he was going to hurt her anyway. But as big an idiot as he may be, Edward wouldn’t be dumb enough to hurt his own kid.” I didn’t give her time to tell me I was wrong. “So tell me about this church.”
Sera grimaced, her hands finding the knocked-over cup and righting it as she contemplated her words. “Edward joined a new church, the Church of Holy Light. He heard about it through the Internet. They have their headquarters here in Baltimore.” She shook her head. “He was so happy! He started working shorter hours and spending more time with me and the baby.
“But lately he’s been preoccupied, always at church functions. It was always, ‘Jareth this’ and ‘Jareth that’. Jareth, Jareth, Jareth!” She beat her fists on her thighs.
I had never heard the name before. “Have you met this guy?”
“Yeah, once.” She frowned. “He came to the house when Edward first joined the congregation. He seemed nice enough, but there was something underneath that smooth exterior, something that rubbed me the wrong way. Does that make sense?”
I nodded. Her denial of her gifts amazed me. “He never came back?”
“Hell no!” She smiled for a moment. “I told Edward that Jareth made me uncomfortable, that I didn’t want him in our house again. He agreed.” The smile waned. “In the beginning, he felt it too. He talked about leaving and finding another church, but it never happened.
“When he began taking a serious interest in me and Esther, I forgot about it. Maybe I should have pressed the issue.”
I touched her leg softly. “There is no going back. The past cannot be undone. All you have left is the future, to move forward.”
“Is that a Wiccan thing?”
“No.” I smiled, the first genuine one of the night. “No, it’s a Zoë thing.”
She grazed my hand with her fingertips, a silent show of thanks that we had shared since childhood. “I should....” She paused and closed her eyes, as if she couldn’t decide what words to use, and when she opened them again, she wasn’t looking at me. “I should tell you the rest.”
She raised her shirt to reveal a deep purpling stripe across her torso. I opened my mouth, but she raised a hand to stop me and shook her head.
“He came home with five other members of that congregation, Zo-Zo. Five of the burliest, thug-looking men I have ever seen. You know me—I’m not one to judge, but everything about these guys spelled violence. They stood behind him like bodyguards, arms all crossed, faces all serious, and for a second I didn’t get it. I mean, why were they in my house? Why were they standing there like that? Why in the hell did Edward have that smug-ass smile on his face?
“Then he told me he was taking Esther, and I told him he’d do it over my dead body. Then one of the guys not-so-quietly said... like... that could be arranged. Zoë, I started to freak the fuck out!” She grabbed my hands. “This guy was talking like he was ready to hurt me, and the man who was supposed to love and protect me wasn’t doing a damn thing except talking about Esther needing a better place to be. He said her soul would be in danger if he let her continue the path we were walking.
“I wasn’t about to listen to that shit anymore. We are good, solid church-going Unitarians. Like hell are our souls in danger! And then....” She slapped both hands over her mouth, eyes wide and bright.
“Sera....”
“Zo-Zo,” she whispered through her fingers. “That guy grabbed me, threw me to the ground and snatched Esther out of her playpen so hard she started crying. Edward’s face crumbled a little, and I thought maybe he’d help us now, but that guy shoved Esther at him, told him to get her things and wait for them downstairs, that he and his God Squad—can you believe that? ‘God Squad’? As if Jesus would ever condone this insanity?—would take care of his wife.”
She dropped her hands. “‘Take care of your wife.’ I thought they were going to kill me. I mean, Edward did as he was told, leaving me in that room with those men. I just started throwing everything I could get my hands on, but they kept coming. One of them grabbed me, and another one hit me with a belt. Who does that? Who goes to someone’s house to beat them with a belt? So I kicked him in the balls!”
Sera crowed, and with the laughter came tears, and with those tears came that not-so-quiet trauma-induced sobriety. “They backed off for a second.” She wiped her face with a sleeve. “Like they thought, I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t going to be as easy to beat down. I didn’t wait. I ran through the back of the house and out the door, and I just kept running—didn’t look back until I couldn’t move anymore—and I found myself here.”
“Oh, Sera....” I pulled her into the circle of my arms and just held her.
“Your key was right where you’d told me it would be, so I let myself in.” She leaned back to look at me. “Your neighbors probably think you’re crazy, as much yelling and screaming as I’ve done. And I did almost call you, like a half-dozen times, but then I saw the pictures of you and your guys, and I was all ‘Why crush her happy?’ I was even planning to leave before you got back.” She smiled, a little embarrassed, and glanced over my shoulder.
“Then you found my alcohol.”
“Yeah. That.”
We sat there for a while, and it was almost like being kids again. I missed that part of our relationship. While Sera was my biggest cheerleader when it came to why I left home and my estranged relationship with our mother, we had our own baggage. Losing a father strains sibling relations, even when you’re both holding onto each other for dear life. Losing Dad tragically, and then pretty much losing our mother to grief, broke two little girls in ways that we still hadn’t recovered from as adults.
I sighed and kissed my sister on the forehead. I would have to sort this out later, when I actually had time to think about something other than the mess in my lap.
“Do you really think we can get her back?”
I pushed some of that mussed, wavy hair from her face and smiled. “Have you met us?”
She rubbed her eyes and leaned back. “So where do we start?”
