Marty drifted in and out of the conversation, distracted from worrying that Shani would wake and that she’d have to put her to bed and sleep along with her, just like Chris had said. He’d been right. Shani was very good at tugging at her mother’s heartstrings, and Marty would feel so guilty—so selfish—if she told her, “No, not right now.”
Since her divorce, Marty had wanted to tell Shani yes as much as she could…for better or for worse. Occasionally, that parenting decision backfired on her. She didn’t know if she could undo the damage, or know if she wanted to just yet. Shani had been the only good thing to come out of the marriage, and Marty didn’t want her daughter to feel like she was unwanted. Her ex already did enough of that, and Marty would never want the child to experience what she had with her own father.
Fathers should want the children they make.
Shani was in that deep, deep sleep that Marty knew from experience there’d be no waking her from, and Chris held her on his lap like a feather-light accessory. He did everything one-handed. His plate was empty, and his beer bottle drained. He was drawing out some kind of diagram for Will on the back of a paper restaurant menu. She bet he could even juggle swords at the same time without breaking a sweat.
“Do you want some more of this, or should I put it away?” Will pointed to the lasagna pan. There were two squares left, and the way the cheese had browned on that corner one made Marty’s mouth water…and her stomach lurch.
She put up her hands, and whispered, “Ugh, I can’t eat another bite.”
Across the table, Erin sighed. “When I moved in with Will, I gained five pounds in two weeks. Being this close to all the restaurants in Norseton has been a test of my self-restraint.”
“I think you deserve to splurge a little, sweetheart,” Will said. Looking to Marty, he added, “She used to sneak food from the mansion kitchen when her…your father wasn’t there.” He swore under his breath.
Marty did, too, but probably for a different reason. “He’s the main cook there, right?”
Erin nodded. “For now. He’s got to be getting suspicious that people are giving him the cold shoulder. He’s as knit into the psychic web as anyone here, and there’s only so long he’ll be oblivious to people’s hesitance. He’s going to start snooping soon.”
“He doesn’t suspect anything.” Marty shook her head and pushed back her chair. Everyone had finished their beers, and she needed to do something with her hands.
She had one mind to sabotage the gathering by carrying Shani off to the guest room and then making the excuse that Shani couldn’t sleep without her. There was nothing wrong with Shani staying where she was. Marty had simply become terrified of adult conversations sometime following the dissolution of her parents’ “relationship” and her own divorce. Staying engaged for too long with anyone except Mallory caused Marty immitigable stress.
She grabbed five more beers from the case in the fridge and, after taking a deep breath, carried them to the table. She popped the cap on hers, then Chris’s since he only had the one free hand, and then passed the opener around.
He nodded his thanks and she stared at him for too long, unable to recall the proper response for a statement of gratitude.
He’d been so nice to her and to Shani, and nice people always made her suspicious. She had to be suspicious, even if her instincts were at war with her social drive.
I should take Shani.
She didn’t have to let him be nice. That way, she wouldn’t have to keep saying, “Thank you” or “You’re welcome” at just the right times.
Right. You’re welcome. Say that.
She said it, and extended her arms to take Shani from him, but he didn’t even look at them.
He reached forward and took his beer. “How do you know your father doesn’t suspect anything?”
Damn.
She dragged a hand down her face and perched on the edge of her seat. “I don’t know how I know. He’s my father, and that’s all I can say.”
“Ah.” Will took a long draw on his beer and stared at the ceiling. “I keep forgetting that you know him in a different way than Erin does. They may have lived together for twenty-three years, but you have a biological connection with him. You and Mallory can read thoughts and intentions off him even when he’s not nearby.”
“You have to understand that I don’t really know him as well as…well, I don’t know who really knows him. I was going to say that Erin knows him better, but given the twenty-three-year lie about her origin, that obviously isn’t true. The person that he was when he visited my mother in Florida for all those years isn’t the person you all know.”
She fixed her gaze on Shani’s twitching lips and scratched at the corner of her beer bottle’s label. Shani was still asleep and oblivious. Already, the child knew too much about things she wasn’t supposed to be aware of. Marty was sure of that. Shani may not have repeated everything she heard, but she was always listening. Marty didn’t doubt that for one moment.
“He never told us where he was going,” Erin said, likely more for the benefit of Chris, Paul, and Will than for Marty. She’d already told Marty that. “When he left here for a week or two at a time, I mean. He used to feed me and my mother vague excuses about Muriel sending him to a convention, or he’d tell us that he had to go negotiate with a vendor for bulk orders or something. Muriel says that was never the case. He was never in charge of acquiring anything for the mansion, and though there were a few conferences and food service conventions she sent him to, none were in Florida.”
“Why the hell did he even go down there?” Chris asked.
“I asked my mother.” Marty refused to look at him. If she looked, she’d want to reach for Shani again. She’d want to grab the girl and go, and then she’d be ashamed because she’d know he’d watched the coward run away.
“After all these revelations came to light, I asked her,” she said. “My parents actually met for the first time in San Antonio. My mother is a hospital social worker, and she’d gone there for a while to work at a sister hospital in the corporation after it’d been brought into the system. She was there for about a year, and Mallory was born right after she moved back to Florida.”
She looked up in time to see Will fondling a corner of his paper napkin and furrowing his brow at Marty.
“What?”
“Didn’t Queen Tess live in San Antonio for a while when she was in foster care?” he asked.
Marty shrugged. “I have no idea. I’m not up to speed on the Afótama clan’s history. I only know that at some point, Queen Tess was kidnapped as a child, and that when she was finally found at age twenty-eight, she’d been living in New Orleans.”
“Probably doesn’t mean anything that he was there,” Will said. “I can’t help but to try to make connections when I hear them.”
“You should follow up on that lead anyway,” Erin said.
“Because you’re so eager to get your father in even more trouble?”
Erin closed her eyes and gave her ponytail and frustrated twist. “Look, I just need some resolution. I don’t want to make waves. If there’s a connection there at all—if my father was in San Antonio or any other place the same time as Tess when she was missing—then folks should know that. He’s never going to come out and confess what he did or didn’t do. No way in hell.”
“I agree,” Marty said quietly.
He’d never admitted wrongdoing to anything. He’d even made his affair with her mother seem like his participation had been Mama’s fault.
“By the time anyone can get enough information out of him about what happened or didn’t happen, he may be hip to people knowing he’s not on the up-and-up,” Erin said. “He may try to leave before Muriel can deal with him.”
“Would that be such a bad thing? If he just left and took his bullshit with him?”
“I think answers are important,” Chris said.
Marty had to look at him then.
Shani had curled against his chest like a caterpillar trying to cocoon itself. His arm had to be very numb, but he hadn’t complained once. He didn’t look uncomfortable. He looked perfectly natural, and for some reason, that made Marty want to grab Shani even more and go hide in the bedroom. She didn’t know what to do with niceness except to look for the attached strings and tug them.
“A lot of people were hurt by his actions, directly and indirectly,” he said. “They need closure. And if there’s any chance of us correcting some of the damages they endured, we—as a clan—need to fix them.”
“As…a clan.”
“Right. That’s why people like me and Paul and Will come home.”
“You miss being here.”
“And we need to be here. That neediness is wired into our biology. We need to be knit into this thing. Every connection in the community makes it stronger. When there are gaps in the network, we struggle to compensate. People can feel the holes, even if they don’t realize what they are. We try to take care of each other the best we can.”
Erin chuckled. “Ótama likes to say that we’re all in this boat together.”
Marty found irony in the fact Ótama would say that. She’d met her briefly soon after arriving. The jovial witch was the reason the clan existed in the first place. It had taken Marty three days to wrap her head around that.
Ótama looked to be around thirty, but she’d been born nearly a millennium prior. She’d died on a Viking longship during a failed voyage to Greenland and had her soul confined to a Purgatory-like realm by the Norse gods. Apparently, they hadn’t been done with her.
Their ship eventually arrived safely in the Americas at the end of that ill-fated trip with her lover and the newborn daughter who had to be the queen her mother wasn’t around to be.
The people in the Afótama clan were the descendants of half the people who’d journeyed on that boat. The splinter group in Fallon—where Erin had been born—were the descendants of the other half.
And Ótama…she was back. Not as queen—Tess had settled into that role—but as the machine, of sorts, who psychically linked them all.
Being in Norseton, Marty could feel Ótama’s psychic pulse. Her kindness, and unvarnished enthusiasm about the world she could finally be a part of again.
Of course they all want to come home to that.
Marty swigged some beer and, setting the bottle on the table, glanced around the room.
All eyes, save for Shani’s, were on her. Marty felt that she needed to say something profound, or at the very least useful, but she had no words.
She pushed her chair back from the table and brushed some breadcrumbs off her shirt and onto her plate. “I’m going to put Shani back to bed.”
“Don’t hurry away,” Paul said. “This is the point in the soiree where we usually start planning shenanigans.”
“Shenanigans are how I ended up with Shani.” And a shit stain of an ex-husband. Marty felt that went without saying.
“Sounds to me like you got a prize for your bad behavior, then,” Chris said.
Marty held out her arms to take Shani, but he shook his head and backed his own chair away from the table carefully. “I got her.”
Oh God.
Marty performed a weak nod, and then led him back to the room. She fixed the covers Shani had mussed, and found that Shani’s spot on the bed was damp from sweat.
“Put her on the other side,” she whispered, and pulled the sheets back.
He laid her down carefully and propped her bum arm atop a pillow.
Marty pulled up the sheet and folded the comforter down to the foot of the bed.
She looked to Chris, who had his hand on Shani’s forehead, and was trying admirably to stifle a laugh. Shani was muttering in her sleep about dancing pepperonis and salami swords.
“I don’t try to understand any of it,” Marty whispered.
“I bet she dreams in neon colors,” he said.
“That doesn’t sound too far off-base.”
She expected him to wave goodbye, and that she’d thank him and see him to the door, but instead, Chris stood at the bedside, dark blue eyes locked at her face.
There was nothing shy or hesitant about him. Normally, that would have repulsed her—made her run—but she stared back because she couldn’t not stare. She was captivated, or perhaps magically ensnared.
And afraid.
Always afraid.
“Come on,” he whispered and tilted his head toward the open door. He hooked his thumbs into the belt loop of his jeans and tipped his head toward the door again when she didn’t move. “Let’s go,” he projected. “Let her sleep.”
“I…” She clamped her lips and tried again telepathically. “I should stay with her.”
She wasn’t used to talking to anyone but Mallory like that and she kept forgetting that in Norseton, most people could. Most people were like her, and she’d need time to adjust to the environment.
“It’s eight-thirty, Marty.”
“I should be here if she wakes.”
“I would never presume to tell you how to parent, but she’s six, and I think if she wakes up, she knows well enough to go looking for you. She’s in a safe place.”
Marty passed her tongue across her dry lips and pinned her gaze on the floor. The rug beside the bed was pretty. Navajo design. Probably expensive, not that Marty had any expertise in such things. She wasn’t used to people around her being so well off.
“How about a walk?” Chris asked. “Have you seen Norseton at night?”
She shook her head and raised her eyes.
He was moving around the bed toward her.
Instinctively, she took a step forward rather than away, then she realized what she’d done, and backed up.
“Let her sleep,” he projected. “We won’t go far.”
“I don’t know. I…”
“You’ll feel guilty?” He stopped in the doorway and looked over at the bed.
Shani’s body had relaxed, and her head had lolled to the side. Her mouth hung open to let out her tiny snores.
Marty wasn’t going to lie. She didn’t see the point of lying, so she nodded.
She hadn’t spent much time with any man, socially, since her divorce, and that had been finalized three years prior. She’d always been able to come up with a good excuse for not having to connect with anyone, and never quite the truth.
“Please.” Chris held out his hand. “Do this for me.”
“Do what for you?”
“Walk with me. Let me get to know you.”
“Why?”
She suspected it was an unintelligent question—a copout, really. She was putting herself on the defensive so he’d back down and say “Never mind.”
He held his hand out even farther and raised his chin in a dare.
He wasn’t going to let her wriggle off the hook without a better reason, apparently.
She raised an arm, tentatively, and glanced over her shoulder at Shani.
Still asleep, and snoring more quietly.
Tentatively, she put her hand in Chris’s, and let him lead her into the hall.
He closed the bedroom door softly behind them and marched her past the dining room, where he’d barely paused except to say, “We’ll be back in a bit. Going out for some air.”
They moved too quickly for Marty to see their expressions or field any queries—too quickly for Marty’s defensiveness to ramp up and for her to call a halt to the field trip.
He didn’t say anything even when they were down on the sidewalk and walking at a steady pace toward the park.
She glanced back at the building—up to the second floor and to the window she thought was the guest bedroom at Will and Erin’s—but the light didn’t come on. No sad little face appeared on the other side of the glass. Marty shouldn’t have expected there to be. She had no experience of seeing Shani watch her walk away. Since the divorce, Marty hadn’t gone out.
And I’m not really going out now. This is just a walk.
Chris pressed his hand to the palm of her back as they stepped off the curb and into the street.
Her reflexes had her moving closer to him as if there were some sort of string around them, pulling them taut, and she was stretching its constraints.
She fell into step with him, her side brushing his, his energy prickling over her flesh. Her skin felt as if it were glowing with a low-simmering heat, and her lips…
I’m smiling. Why the hell am I smiling?
“This gazebo has been here forever.” Chris guided her down the path, past Shani’s nemesis playground, and toward the white, octagonal structure with the dark violet roof and the mosaic floor.
Marty had admired that floor as she’d sat in the gazebo, supervising Shani at play. The tiles created a picture and the scene had been ripped out of an epic. A Viking longboat. A storm. A missed port.
“Do you know the story?” Chris asked quietly.
Marty had no idea how long she’d been standing near the step staring at tiles, but minutes must have passed. The configuration of cars parked at the curb in front of the shops across the street was different.
And Chris was sitting.
He sat on the other side of the gazebo with his forearms leaned onto his knees, his smile soft.
Sighing, she crossed the structure and took one of the benches adjacent to him. “How long was I standing there like that?”
He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”
“I disagree. Usually when people zone out for minutes at a time, the people who notice try to rouse them.”
“But we’re not normal people.”
“Excuse me?”
“Not normal people, Marty. We’re Afótama.”
“I’m…half that.” Whatever that means. “And you say that as if being Afótama excuses my behavior.”
“You’re Afótama. Half. Whole. Whatever. We don’t really keep count.”
“Bullshit. Everyone counts amounts. Counting and ensuring sameness is a natural human response. People accept what’s familiar and predictable.”
Chris laced his fingers and lowered his gaze to the tiny tiles. “Ótama…she wasn’t, isn’t, a woman who keeps count. Her husband wasn’t like her. He was an outsider. He wasn’t the man her parents would have had her marry. He had no power, no magic, and yet she gave up everything to be with him because he was right for her.”
“That man got her killed. Their love got her killed. So, what’s that tell you?”
Chris didn’t respond. He turned his face slightly, seeming to look at a different spot on the picture on the floor—in the general vicinity of the stylized storm. It was a large section of tiny gray X’s impeding the ship’s passage.
But for the first time since arriving, she noticed hidden symbols. In the middle of that panel of X’s were four gray tiles that had white hearts. As many times as Marty had been in that gazebo in the past week and had stared at that floor, she hadn’t noticed the hearts.
“They say that there’s a purpose to every partnership,” Chris said. “And that there are no mistakes with matches. Not even Ótama’s, in spite of how that voyage ended.”
“She’s an outlier.” Marty’s argument seemed weak, even to her, but she’d had to make that one point. Ótama had been, and was, a powerful witch who’d been granted a second chance at life, and among her descendants, at that. Marty wouldn’t dare compare herself to a woman of Ótama’s legacy.
Chris moved closer, abandoning his bench for hers, and slinging his arm along the bench back behind her. “So are you.”
“In my case, that’s not a good thing.” She sat ramrod straight, gripping her thighs tightly, and looking anywhere but at Chris, but she couldn’t escape his gaze. Not really. She could feel it on her—assessing her.
And she wanted to know what he thought when he looked at her like that. She’d spent so much of the past five years maintaining that she didn’t care what any man thought, but he’d flipped the script somehow. She didn’t understand. She just knew it was true.
Magic?
“The school here,” he said, just as quietly as before, “is a good one.”
She still couldn’t look at him. She settled her gaze at the red and white stripes of the ship’s sail—the community’s unofficial pattern, she’d noticed. Many of the shop awnings and porch flags bore those colors.
“Shani would fit in well. She’s outgoing and curious. Her cousins are already there, and I don’t imagine she’d have any problems making friends.”
Shani had never had her mother’s problem with that.
Marty patted down the curly bump in front of her ponytail and risked a glance at Chris.
He was staring at her dead-on, his expression serious and expectant.
She pulled her gaze back to the floor and to her sneakers that were still stained on the sides from the red desert soil she’d tromped through during a recent hike with Shani and the other kids. They’d been so happy. They’d been relaxed and confident. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her niece and nephews laughing so much. Being in Norseton was obviously good for them. Mallory kept saying the same would be true for Shani, but Marty had never been as optimistic in her risk-taking as her sister. Since their father’s deception, she’d been even less likely to take risks.
“Shani always lands on her feet,” Marty mused, mostly to herself, but also because she needed some control of the conversation that she didn’t know the direction of. Further, she needed something to distract her from Chris. Moving a couple of feet might have been a good first step to clearing her mind, but she didn’t want to move. She wanted to stay in his prickling proximity even if he were making her stomach knot and her mouth dry because that nervous feeling was still a far cry better than anything she’d felt in longer than she cared to remember.
“She’s a brave and resilient little girl,” he said. “And what about you?” His fingertips glided across the skin over her neckband, across her spine to her opposite shoulder.
His touch titillated, made her muscles contract and lungs constrict. It made her heart race and blood pool in her breasts and lower down.
She squeezed her thighs together even tighter and forced a swallow down her constricted throat. “Wh-what about me?”
“Are you brave enough to see if you’ll land on your feet, too?”
“No.” She didn’t even have to think about the answer, and the ease with which she’d spoken her truth frightened her. Only Mallory had been privy to Marty’s fears in the past five years, and not even she knew all of them.
Chris cupped her chin and tipped her face toward him.
Everything about him was warm. His hands, his expression, and his eyes—in spite of the blueness of them.
She leaned into the touch, closing her eyes and letting herself pull in a deep breath, finally.
“My job is to see to it that you do.”
His words were in her head and yet he hadn’t spoken aloud. He could do that—that weird psychic shit she’d always thought made her and Mallory so unique. They weren’t unique. They were just parts of a bigger thing.
Marty needed desperately to understand that thing.
“How is it your job?” she asked him, opening her eyes in time to see him gave his head a brief, eloquent shake.
“You’re acting like I’m supposed to know,” she projected.
“Because I think this is obvious to you, and that you don’t want to try to digest it.”
“Maybe the knowledge isn’t so obvious, then.”
“Maybe not. You weren’t raised here. Maybe you don’t know what’s possible, but you should still be feeling what I do. You’re Afótama. You should recognize me.”
“I’ve never seen you before today.”
“Do you recognize me, Marty? Don’t think about it. Yes or no.”
“I don’t understand why you’d ask that. Of course I recognize you. You were at the hospital earlier.”
“No, I mean on a deeper level than that. Are you drawn to me? Do I make you feel safe?”
“Yes, but—”
“Marty. Please. Don’t try to explain it away. Stop trying to tamp down what your instincts should be telling you.”
“My instincts don’t make sense,” she said aloud. “How could I possibly trust anything when—”
Chris didn’t let her finish. His mouth was on hers. He ate her words. His tongue silenced the objection she would have spoken. His hands, one moving down her back and the other twining around her ponytail, extinguished her body’s tiny resistance.
“You being here now isn’t a random occurrence. You had to come home. You belong here, just like I do. I’ll help you.”
“You’ll…help me?” She gave herself over to him, her lips, her body, her will, and just…let things be for once.
The fact it felt so good scared the hell out of her.