Even without the psychic shit, Chris would have been able to tell that Marty was overwhelmed and entertaining thoughts of bolting at her first opportunity. Naturally, he wasn’t going to let that happen. He was already prepared to take a few days off from work to help her get her and Shani’s rental home packed up. He’d follow them down to Florida and help them box every tchotchke and every piece of lint, and then he’d see them both onto a plane back to New Mexico.
He understood why she was anxious. Anyone would have been in her situation, and she lacked her sister’s optimism. His job was to make sure Marty, in spite of her hesitation, got to where she was supposed to be.
Queen Tess moved slowly from the dining room door to Marty’s side.
The gravid queen pulled back the chair beside her, lowered herself into the seat while sighing pitifully, and then slid a bottle of Excedrin to Marty.
Marty pushed her sunglasses up her nose and her eyebrows darted up. “Can everyone tell?”
Queen Tess shrugged and rested her hands atop her belly. “Nan can. That’s her job, remember? To be everyone’s grandma? She can’t do shit for my aching back, but she can tell me who to sling pills at.”
“I think the headache is getting worse.” Marty put her head down on the table.
Reflexively, Chris rubbed the back of her neck, hating that she was in pain and that he was sort of the cause.
“Take the pills,” Queen Tess said. “Then have a nice cup of coffee and something salty.”
Marty lifted her head. “Trust me. Nothing is saltier than I am right now.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“No, not especially. I don’t understand how Erin and Mallory can just…walk around here like…like him being nearby isn’t a big deal. As if they don’t know that he knows that they suspect what he’s been up to. That takes some mental gymnastics I’m not sure I’m capable of, to be perfectly honest. How do they…” She scoffed and flicked open the lid of the Excedrin. “How do they fucking do that?”
“I felt a psychic nudge like someone was talking about me.” Mallory settled into the chair across from Marty.
She was so much like her sister, but so different. There was always a smile in her eyes, and her optimism seemed, to Chris, infectious. Marty didn’t appear to be affected by her sister’s charms one way or another, though. She may have become immune to them after thirty years of the sisters being joined at the hip.
“Hmm,” Tess started. “We were just discussing your gleeful nonchalance regarding a certain blood relative.”
Mallory rolled her eyes. “Look, I’ve been doing the ‘fake it till I make it’ song and dance since my husband was killed. If this seems easy for me, remember that I have more to gain than I have to lose by being here. My kids are happy. They’re fitting in and making friends. I like my job. I’m not stressed out about the commute to work anymore, even if I do have to take the back stairway into the mansion on occasion so I don’t walk past the kitchen when Dan’s there. I refuse to bear the punishment for the shitty things he did. That’s not fair to us, Marty, and that’s not fair for the kids.”
“And when shit hits the fan, then what?” Marty asked. “Are we going to act like what he did won’t impact us? People are going to form judgments, and they’re entitled to. I mean, come on, hon. Put Pollyanna in the closet for a moment and really think this through.”
“You think I haven’t already? You think I haven’t considered time and time again that people look at me and think, ‘Well, shit, what rock has she been hidden under all these years?’ and ‘Why did she come out now?’”
“I don’t tolerate those kinds of questions,” Queen Tess said. “I invited you here. I remind people of that whenever your name is dragged into a conversation, and they get right off the subject.”
“Of course they’re not going to question you,” Marty said. “That would be reckless.”
“They can question me all they want to, but I’m not going to allow people to malign the characters of women they don’t know anything about. Everyone I’ve spoken with agrees that your place is here.”
“Because they don’t know what my father did yet. If anything, they only know that he cheated.”
“And by the time shit hits the fan, the lines will be firmly drawn. He’ll be standing in the pile of shit of his own making, and everyone will think of you separate of his mess.”
“You can’t possibly know that.”
“You’re right.” The queen shrugged. “But I’m hopeful. And trust me, Marty, hopeful isn’t my baseline temperature. I work hard at being that way with a lot of help from my chieftains. They have a knack for keeping me tuned in to what matters, and they make me push the rest of the silliness aside.” She grabbed Marty’s hand and squeezed. “Don’t be afraid to draw on Chris for help.”
“How do you—”
“I can tell when the web has reconfigured—when the links have changed. I’m the queen, remember?”
“Easy to forget,” Marty whispered.
Queen Tess shrugged. “That seems to be the general consensus. But, listen, don’t let pride get in the way of peace. That’s a habit I happen to own, too, so I recognize the tendency when I see it.”
“You’re asking me to take a huge leap of faith.”
“What’s the leap?” Chris asked.
He hadn’t wanted to interrupt Marty’s conversation with the queen—no one was better at putting people at ease than Queen Tess—but if there was something Marty was clinging to that she needed to let go of before she could move on, he would help. He saw that as part of his job, and his was a job any person of Afótama descent would be honored to have. The Viking gods didn’t give men their matches without equipping them with the tools to care for them, and Chris was ready, and had been ready for ten months.
Marty tossed a couple of pills into her mouth and pulled her glass of water closer. “There’s this saying my mother used to repeat—”
“That people should sweep around their own front doors,” Mallory finished. “Yeah. I never understood what that meant until I was around twenty.”
“Call me naïve, but what does it mean?” Chris asked.
“Dr. Naïve.” Grimacing, Queen Tess put her spine against the chair back. “It means she can’t concern herself with anyone else’s problems when she has so many of her own. She sees her problems as disqualifiers—that she can’t get involved with the ones here because she can’t fix her own.”
“What problems, Marty?”
“You were in my head, Chris. You should know every one.”
“Perhaps our views are out of sync, and we’re not agreeing on what’s actually a problem.”
She nodded and slowly pulled off her sunglasses. Her eyes were still a little red, but at least they’d lost the wateriness they’d had earlier in the morning. “And you don’t see that in and of itself as a problem?”
“You’re creating problems that don’t exist so you can come up with some convincing—to you—reason not to get yourself too entwined here.”
She furrowed her brow and opened her mouth as if to rebut, but he wasn’t going to let her get a word out until he’d said his piece.
“You’re looking for reasons to check out. For any reason to cling to your own life, which wasn’t all that great, but was at the very least predictable, right? You need things to be predictable don’t you?”
“Don’t lie, Marty,” Mallory said softly.
Marty cut her sister an incendiary side-eyed glare and then fixed her gaze back on Chris.
“That probably works on a bunch of folks,” he said flatly. “The hard look. You shutting them down in that harsh way and making them feel like you don’t give a shit about them or what they’re saying. Might even work on your ex-husband.”
“Don’t you dare—”
He pressed his thumb gently over her lips. “Don’t what? Don’t evoke his name and remind you of what a loser he is? Because he is.”
She leaned away from his hand, but he pulled her chair closer.
“You want me to diagnose you like you’re one of my patients?”
“No.”
“You sure? My advice is free for you, so I’ll give it to you anyway. You’re so close to digesting something substantial, but you don’t like the feeling of it because it’s too heavy or too filling, so you’re trying to vomit it out. Maybe other men are afraid of you, but I’m not.”
Her eyebrows crept up and her cheeks darkened, but it was Chris’s heart that stuttered with an ache.
“That still surprises you?” He took both of her hands and squeezed them tight. “Do I need to touch you constantly until you understand how this works?”
“Maybe,” she whispered.
“Marty, I’m not judging your circumstances using secondhand information. I’m judging them based on your memories and the feelings you had when they were made. I’m judging them based on the things you’re hiding from me. Maybe I can’t tell specifically what they are, but they reek of him, and I hate him.”
“You haven’t even met him.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Tess said softly.
“Obviously, I’m not some idiot teenager who doesn’t understand biases and that situations are colored by the past experiences of the participants. But I can be objective enough to put the pieces together the right way. You think I’m going to be just like them, right? Your ex? Your father? You think I’m in this scheme to sweep you off your feet for a little while—just until you become an inconvenience. And you think then I’ll start to lie. Little lies at first, and then bigger and bigger ones so I can cover my ass. You’ll be suspicious but you won’t say anything because you don’t have proof, right? And then you’ll realize that the proof doesn’t matter because I’ve already broken your trust and that I’ll never get it back.”
Her jaw might have been tense and lips set in a hard line, but her watery eyes gave away her hurt.
He’d found a soft spot and poked at it on purpose in a way he was uniquely qualified to do. He hated having to hurt her, because he felt the hurt he inflicted barreling right back at him, but she seemed to need the reminder that he was digging in his heels for a long ride. He was keeping her.
“Not going any-fuckin’-where,” he said. “You know that. Don’t disrespect me by sweeping me into the same dustbin you have your father and ex-husband in.”
“That’s a cocky thing to say.”
“And that’s all you have to say?”
Marty let out a strained titter, squeezed her hands together hard enough to make the knuckles go white, and locked her stare on Queen Tess. “He’s an asshole.” She let out that dry laugh again. “My father, I mean. He…I don’t know what I can say. Mallory’s probably already told you everything worth saying, and our experiences were mostly identical. She just had a couple of extra years of them. He…” Her brows knit and she blinked rapidly several times before he realized she was trying to force back tears.
She didn’t have to keep them in. No one at that table would have faulted her for crying. Being in the company of so many psychics often made regulating emotions more difficult, and Marty was still at the beginning of the learning curve.
He put his hand over her clenched ones under the table and squeezed them. “It’s all right. Speak your mind and don’t back away from the words.”
She freed one hand to pinch the bridge of her nose and ground her teeth some more. “I… Probably the only thing I never told Mallory about was of this one time he visited. I was fifteen, I guess.”
Chris didn’t know the memory she was recounting. He’d only seen the highlight reel of her life—the most important traumas, but not all the smaller slights. A multitude of paper cuts could hurt just as much as a single deep slice, and she’d likely had countless emotional paper cuts she ignored just to be able to function.
“Marty, what happened?” Mallory asked.
“I don’t know where you were. Maybe you’d gone out to work or something. This was the summer between your junior year and senior year, and I remember that because that was the year I had that really short and spiky haircut. He was there on one of his increasingly infrequent visits, and the first thing he’d said when he’d walked in was that with the way I looked, I would never fit in where he was from.”
“What the hell was that supposed to mean?” Queen Tess asked.
Marty rolled her eyes, and that small act yanked the stopper on the waterworks. She swiped away the tears before they could reach her cheeks, though.
Under the table, he squeezed her knee. “Digest it.”
She nodded jerkily. “I thought I knew once what he meant. He made himself out to be some sort of colorblind crusader who didn’t care what the world thought, and he wasn’t going to let the bigots back here get in the way of love.”
Her laugh was borderline crazed, and Chris wanted to pull her close and squeeze her until the tears stopped, but if he did, she’d stop talking.
She needed to talk.
“He always knew the right things to say, until he slipped up. He’d say something so unbelievably nasty, but in a passive-aggressive way so you didn’t realize how demeaning the words were until later. Anyhow, that was the summer he stopped promising to take us to where he was from. That was the summer he told our mother that things weren’t going to work out and that he wasn’t going to marry her after all.”
“I wasn’t there for that,” Mallory said. “I came home and she was crying and you were gone.”
“Yeah, I was sitting under the school bleachers for the longest time, just watching the landscaper cut grass and watching joggers on the track run mile after mile. I didn’t cry then. I was too numb, I guess, but I wanted to. Just couldn’t.”
“And that was fourteen or fifteen years ago?” Queen Tess asked.
Marty nodded and dragged her forearm across her wet cheeks.
Queen Tess waved her aide Lora over. She relayed a range of dates to her and asked her to check into Dan’s travel logs from around that time. “Find out if that’s a bogus work trip Nan reimbursed him for. If we can nail him on the funny money stuff, we can terminate his employment and get him out of the mansion without him being suspicious about the other investigations.”
Chris pressed his hand against the back of Marty’s neck again and massaged the tightness with his thumb. “Feeling conflicted?”
“Like a fucking traitor.” She sniffled and stared across the table to Mallory, whose usual gentle smile had wilted and whose gaze had gone just as misty as her sister’s.
“What’s history going to say about us, Queenie?” Mallory asked. “A century from now, are we going to be remembered as the women who tore the clan apart?”
Queen Tess closed her eyes and rubbed the lids. “Your father is doing that. I appreciate that you’re in a tough place right now—that both of you are. Family bonds mean everything to our clan. Loyalty and trust make up our lifeblood. But sometimes, you’ve got to do the moral thing and screw loyalty. He doesn’t deserve your devotion, or Erin’s, either.”
Chris tried to keep his thoughts to himself—tried not to inadvertently project his frustration to Marty so as not to sway her opinion. Naturally, he had his opinion, but she needed to come to a conclusion on her own. He might have pictured Marty and Shani as Holsts who were completely separated from the Petersen ripples in the web, but she had to cut those ties, not him.
“Don’t let him run you away, Marty,” Mallory said. “Don’t let the thought of him or his wife make you anxious. This is a small place. We’re going to run into them here until they’re gone, but we have more of a right to be here than they do. I’m not going anywhere.”
Tess set her elbows onto the tabletop and gave Marty a sideways look. “I’m not a lady who begs. You’ve probably already figured that out about me.”
Marty finally cracked a smile, and Chris pulled her closer and tucked her head beneath his chin.
“You know where this is going,” he projected.
“I’m so scared.”
“I know, honey, but you’ve got a lot of folks on your side. No Holst is going to let anything happen to you girls.”
“You can’t promise that. You can’t possibly know what acts a desperate man will resort to when he starts to believe he’s losing his foothold.”
“You’re right. I can’t know, but I can know this transition is going to be difficult for everyone. If you want to hide out for a while, fine, but I don’t think Shani’s going to go for that.”
Marty laughed and rubbed her eyes as she straightened up. “I guess my life would be easier if I weren’t a Petersen, huh? History will forget me if I lose the name again.”
“I already offered you a new one,” Chris said. “I was serious.”
“We’ll see. Shani may have some opinions about the matter.”
Mallory rolled her eyes and snickered. “Good luck getting Shani to leave, if that was your plan. She’s the most psychically sensitive out of all the kids. Moving her out would be like trying to rip a suction cup off a shower wall.”
“Apt metaphor,” Chris said. “She’s young. She’s sticking to the web more than being knitted into it.”
“I’ve got a life back in Tallahassee,” Marty reminded them.
Mallory sucked her teeth. “Nobody’s forgotten that. You need to pack up? Then go. Leave Shani here with me. She’ll be okay for a few days.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“Yes, you can. Screw the guilt, lady. You’ve been that child’s primary caretaker for six years. Your face is the one she has seared into her brain. A few days of her being in someone else’s hands won’t break you.”
“Feels that way sometimes. She’s all I’ve got.”
Chris and Mallory made simultaneous rude noises, though certainly for different reasons.
“Stop. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” Chris said. “You believed that Shani was the only thing in your life no one could take away from you. Well, sweetheart, no one’s going to take me from you, either. You have so many more people now who care about both of you.”
“There are tons of people here who’d fight for you ladies in whatever ways they could.” Queen Tess leaned back and cradled her belly. “You and Chris can go down to Florida and tie off all your loose ends. Shani can stay with Mallory, and I’m sure Mallory will work on your mother from a distance.”
Mallory made a dismissive wave of her hand. “I’ve been talking to her about this. She doesn’t want to be anywhere near our father, but she’s been entertaining some thoughts of getting rid of the house and mortgage, and doing the travel nurse thing for a while. If we’re both gone, she won’t feel so tied to one particular place.”
“That’d be good for her,” Marty said. “She’s never been anywhere.”
Queen Tess tapped her chin contemplatively. “Maybe when all is said and done and she’s ready to retire, Dan’ll be gone and she can settle here with her daughters and grandchildren.”
“She’d love this place,” Mallory said wistfully. “She’d love being able to walk to everything she needs, and all the parks and hiking trails. She likes being outside.”
Chris gave Marty’s ponytail a swat. “We can talk to her about it when we’re down there.”
“We, huh?”
“You gonna keep me hidden? That’s not cool.”
“I…I mean…” Marty sputtered her lips and put her sunglasses back on. “Feel free to brainstorm some ways to explain to my non-psychic mother that we’ve exchanged memories the way horny teenagers swap spit, and that we’re a fated pair. I don’t think that she’s going to buy that story, but you’re more than welcome to try telling it.”
“Damn.”
“Uh-huh.”
Queen Tess eased back from the table, then pressed her hands to the edge and pushed an eyebrow up at Marty. “One more thing.”
“Oh God, what?”
“Mallory said she thought there might have been another—”
“Another Petersen bastard,” Mallory said. “You don’t have to say the word, because I will.”
Marty pinched the bridge of her nose again. “That was just psychic speculation on our parts, I think. We both thought there was someone else, but didn’t really have any evidence. I think we were reading that information off of Dan without any context.”
“If you were separately reading off of him a relationship with some unknown related party, that’s proof enough to me that the person exists,” the queen said. “Male or female?”
“Male,” the sisters said.
“Older, I think,” Mallory said. “That’s the limit of my knowledge.”
Queen Tess cracked her back and straightened up. “He probably doesn’t know what he is. If I concentrate hard enough, I could try to hone in on him through the web through your connection to your father, but my success would be predicated on whether your father has actually met him or if he simply knows he exists.”
“Could an Afótama father be aware of having a child without being told?” Chris asked.
“Oh, yeah. I’ve been studying the archives. There were lots of accounts of our men being away on raids or whatever and knowing the precise moment when their children were born.”
“Maybe the best thing is for the man not to know who his father is for the time being.”
“I’d say that’s a fair assessment.” The queen started padding away, then stopped. “Save room for dessert. Mrs. Carbone made some kind of apple fritter thing. Looks yummy.”
“Maybe we’ll leave some behind for Dan to find tomorrow,” Mallory murmured.
“Sneaky girl. I like you, Mal.”
Mallory bobbed her eyebrows, then leaned back in her chair, staring pensively at her sister.
Chris didn’t need to be inside Marty and Mallory’s heads to know what they were wondering. If he’d been in their shoes and with a sibling floating out in the wind, he would have been obsessively curious about him or her, too. But Marty already had enough on her plate, and he had no qualms about reminding her.
He rubbed his thumb across the back of her neck and cleared his throat. “Perhaps you, Mallory, and the queen can track him once you’re all settled in.”
“I know I shouldn’t be making that a priority right now, but the idea of him being out there niggles at the back of my mind.”
“You’re worrying about him and you don’t even know him.”
Mallory nodded. “How could we not? Maybe he had a harder go at childhood than we did. We had our mother, at least, and she was phenomenal at taking things in stride and making do with a little. What if he’s…” She pinched her eyes shut and gave her head a hard shake. “No. I’m projecting. Jumping to conclusions.”
Queen Tess backtracked to Marty’s side, and leaned her palms onto the table again. “Don’t discount what may seem like a leap of logic. No one knows the limits of our magic, and you’re talking about a half-sibling. Your awareness of him is going to be a bit more acute than anyone else’s except for Dan’s. What were you going to say?”
“She was going to say that this man is miserable,” Marty said.
Mallory opened her eyes and nodded. “You’re getting that too, right? I always thought that was you. Distressed, and kind of hopeless.”
“Thanks a lot, bitch.”
Mallory crossed her eyes. “You know what I mean. We both had a rough decade or so. I can tell now that’s not you. That’s a separate tug, and I don’t think anyone ever responds to him.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know he’s tugging,” Chris said.
“That poor guy,” Tess said. “I do think looking for him is important, not just to aid in our case against Dan, but if he’s holed up somewhere and miserable, we need to pull him in and help him the best we can. That’s what we do.”
“But when?” Chris asked.
“Not until after I have this baby. Right after she’s born, and once my chieftains release me from my Tess-can’t-leave lockdown, we can hit the road.”
“That should give Marty plenty of time to get Shani settled in.”
“But where?” Marty asked.
“Oh, fuck.” Chris rubbed his palms against his eyes. “Didn’t actually think that far ahead. Paul and I have eleven months left on our lease.”
“Worry about one thing at a time,” Tess said. “Just because you’ve turned your lives upside-down in a day doesn’t mean things have to be tidy just yet. Go slowly. There will be plenty of places for you to land when you’re ready.” She grinned in her troublemaking way. “Welcome to Norseton, Marty.”