Author: Heather Marie Adkins
Category: Literature
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/heather-marie-adkins/page,13,478501-relics_and_s_anthology.html
Years of friendship, and I’d never shared this with her? Though, maybe it made sense. My father was part of a life before Lila and the SEB.
“The Res is so close to the Rim, you learn early to guard yourself against the darkness,” I told my rapt audience of two. “Most of my clan can do the same. The ones with strong wills and strong magick, anyway. My dad taught me how to build a metaphysical wall against the darkness.” I smiled at Senka and traced a square on my chest. “Brick by brick.”
“So she can’t get through your magickal barrier. Interesting.” Lila paced the floor across from us, her hands worrying at the folds in her dress. “Maybe for the time being, she would be safer on the reservation. Close enough to the core, but not as far as the encampments.”
“I said most can protect themselves. Not everybody.” Like Mai, who had lived most of her life without our father. For the first time, I berated myself for never teaching her how to build the wall.
“Send those who can’t protect themselves into the city. We'll find somewhere to put them up for the time being.”
“Without Senka to gather the darkness, the city will be in danger.”
“I don’t know what else to do!” Lila snapped, losing her perfectly affected cool. “We can’t have her killing everybody around her.”
Nesbitt blanched and took a step back. Senka whimpered.
“Stop, Lila. This isn’t helping.” I’d never seen my Reina in this state of half-hysterics. Not over anything unrelated to her faltering marriage.
Senka’s hand was smooth and cool in mine. I stared into her endless black eyes. “She’s so full of darkness. We have to get that out of her.”
“And get her back in the ground,” Lila added.
Senka leapt to her feet and threw her chair again. This time, she aimed for Lila. Lila easily defected the blow with a flip of her fingers and magick. Nesbitt didn’t draw his gun this time, which seemed an interesting window into his thoughts. Lila's callousness towards Senka had clearly made him more likely to protect the wall over the reina.
I put my arms around Senka and squeezed until her shoulders slumped and she loosened. I guided her into a different chair.
Lila sighed. “Why does she keep doing that?”
“She’s been alone underground for a hundred years. This is her first human contact - first contact with the world - for a century. I wouldn’t want to go back either.”
“She doesn’t have a choice. It’s her destiny as Rasha’s daughter.”
“Nobody should be destined for something they don’t want to do,” I murmured.
Senka gazed up at me. Emotion had started to return to her face. Right now, she looked on the edges of fearful. And sad.
Senka was just like me; bound for a life of serving her clan because her mother said so.
21
I sent word ahead to the Res via a uniformed SEA officer, explaining to my mother what had happened and instructing her to get everyone out who couldn’t protect themselves against Senka.
Whether or not she would listen to me was anybody’s guess.
Lila disappeared into the council’s meeting room for yet another oh-fuck-what-do-we-do meeting that would likely degrade into eleven geriatrics shouting at one another and end with still no plan set in place. I felt for her, but she wasn’t the one babysitting the Queen of Darkness.
“So you get to meet my mom,” I told Senka as I pushed the button to call the elevator.
Senka’s mouth worked into an O shape as she tested the word. “Mom.”
I grinned. “Before long, you’ll be talking. Then I’ll teach you how to fire a gun.” I patted my new Taurus.
Senka returned my smile.
That smile fled fast when the elevator doors opened. Her dark gaze shifted wildly around the small, metal box. She shrank away with a tiny moan.
“No, no. Princess.” I reached for her hands, twisting our fingers together. “This is just an elevator. It’s going to take us to the surface. Above. Not below.”
She shook her head and tugged at my hands. She held a worrying amount of strength in her slight, angular form.
I dug my heels into the floor and pulled her into my arms. Her electrified hair sparked and waved in my face as I murmured, “You’re safe. I’m with you.”
The stiffness in her body eased. Her arms wrapped around my waist and she returned my embrace. “Safe,” she whispered, drawing the sound out.
“Safe,” I promised.
I held her hand all the way to the lobby.
I knew how to drive a car; I just didn’t prefer it. But in deference to the fact that three people would not fit on my Ducati, I glamoured the bike to hide it from prying eyes and led my ragtag band of shadow touched misfits to an unmarked patrol car.
Seeing Warren emerge from the elevator to join us had done things inside me I couldn’t explain. His hair was clean and styled into a point, and he wore clean, borrowed blue jeans that rested low on his hips beneath a plain white t-shirt.
He grinned at me as he drew near. Not just the wolfish grin he flashed around – this smile said he knew the most intimate places of my body, and he had every intention of knowing them again.
He hadn’t seemed overly concerned at being introduced to Senka, as if he had already known. It wouldn’t have surprised me in the least if he had.
Like most cars in the Hollow, the sleek, black SEB Charger ran on fairy dust and prayers, and looked a little worse for the wear. I guess a hundred years could do that to a hunk of metal and human engineering, no matter how many times it was magicked to keep running. I tapped the security code into the keypad on the door, and the locks released.
Warren opened the front door and gestured for Senka to get in. “After you, Princess.”
Senka eyed the interior warily.
I slid behind the wheel and patted the passenger seat. “You get to sit right next to me.”
“Do you remember cars?” Warren asked.
Senka shook her head but the motion held no conviction. She traced her fingers over the door, as if trying to recall memory by touch. I thought maybe the memories were there, right beneath the surface, so close she could feel them, but so far she couldn’t find them.
Warren offered Senka a hand, and before I could tell him not to touch her, she accepted his gentlemanly gesture, her small, pale hand alighting on his. I held my breath and tried to not envision him mummified as he helped Senka into the car and buckled her seatbelt.
But nothing happened. Senka patted his cheek with a thankful smile, which he returned in a boyish grin that made my hormones stand up and sing. Fucking ridiculous, considering I’d satisfied my urges early this morning. I’d never in my life been so ruled by my body over my brain.
But nothing happened. She didn’t hurt him. How?
Because he was already shadow touched?
Warren folded his lanky form into the backseat, I magicked the car to life, and we left the Bureau garage into brilliant morning sunshine.
Senka pressed her face to the glass the moment we passed into the outside world. I couldn’t see her expression, but she made little moues of excitement and pointed at things that interested her so Warren could explain. She remained that way the entire ride, rediscovering the world she’d left behind one hundred years ago.
When we arrived, the Res was a ghost town.
On the short stretch from Old Reservation Road down the dirt road to my mother’s, I usually passed a hub of activity. Men and women worked the fields on either side, growing vegetables on segregated family plots they’d sell to the residents of the Hollow to make a living. Familiar faces gathered on porches and around front doors, lifting hands in welcome to me on my bike – their Chieftess's prodigal daughter.
But today, not a person could be found. The fields lay empty beneath the sunshine. All of the Res houses were locked up tight—shutters closed, doors locked, yards cleared of children’s toys. The lack of movement and color gave me the creeps.
Ma
had done exactly what I’d asked of her. Shocking.
I parked in the dust outside my mother’s home. By the time I cut the engine, she stood in the open doorway: tall, lithe, her beautiful face hardened by sun and time. She stood barefoot, wearing cut-off denims that frayed around her muscular thighs, her shoulders bare and her tank top smudged with dirt. If an artist could paint her soul, this would be the finished masterpiece.
Warren helped Senka from the car—and again, didn’t turn into a mummy—and the three of us linked up to meet Mama at the door.
I paused, waiting for my mother’s reaction. Haseya Nez was not the type of woman to bow to another, even the princess of Senka Hollow.
Mama studied Senka, her dark cocoa gaze missing nothing. She took one step forward, over the threshold, and offered both hands to Senka with a hundred-watt smile that nearly glowed from her face. “You are welcome in my home, Princess.”
With Senka well-cared for while my mother cooked us a feast for dinner, I escaped into the desert.
I thought my life had grown complicated enough when I found Rice dead on his bedroom floor. I needed to breathe clean air, be alone, try to figure out where I went from here.
Because fuck – I had no home. The council was falling apart. Lila had lost her damn mind. And Senka was sitting at my mother’s kitchen table with a cup of tea.
I thought I wanted to be alone until Warren joined me.
He folded his body into the dirt beside me, a clove cigarette dangling from his lips. He cupped a hand around it and lit the tip, squinting into the sunlight as he took a long drag.
“Mind if I join you?” He grinned, exhaling a plume of smoke that smelled like sex.
“Looks like you already have.”
He tapped the cigarette over the desert floor. “You okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Fair enough.”
Then he didn’t say anything else. He sat beside me, leisurely enjoying his cigarette. We stared into a horizon that shimmered with heat. I couldn’t help but think of my dream the night before, and watching the darkness billow in thick clouds over my father’s wall.
The possibility seemed too real.
I liked my solitude. The only person I had ever easily shared my space with had been Rice, which I chalked up to leftover womb closeness. But most everyone else got too close, talked too much, tried too hard, and I needed a break from that.
Warren wasn’t ant of that. I barely even heard the whoosh of his exhalation. The exotic scent of his ridiculously expensive cigarettes wrapped around me. He didn’t push me to talk or catch my eye.
We just… were.
And gods, I wanted him. I needed the release he could give me, and I wanted it now.
I touched his shoulder. He glanced over and smiled.
I leaned in and kissed him.
There was nothing gentle in me, and he responded in kind. I straddled his hips, kissing him so hard it hurt, his fingers digging into my breast.
I reached between us and unbuttoned his blue jeans. He broke the kiss and grabbed my hands.
“We probably shouldn’t do this here.” He laughed. “Snakes. Scorpions. Desert shit.”
I tugged my tank top off and threw it in the dust. The sight of my naked torso made his eyes glaze over. I reveled in the power I held over him.
I reached again for his blue jeans. This time, he didn’t stop me.
22
When I walked in from my desert sojourn with dust all over me and red marks on my neck and chest from Warren giving as good as he got, my mother side-eyed me knowingly.
“Gonna shower,” I said. I touched Senka’s bare shoulder and gave her a smile of greeting.
“Alone?” Mama asked pointedly.
I returned her side-eye. Identical, because I was her daughter, after all. “Don’t start, Mama. I don’t have the patience for your judgment today.”
“Do you care to hear the details of your brother’s funeral?”
I turned around and planted my ass in the chair beside Senka. “Please tell me it’s not tomorrow. My hands are a little full.”
“It is not tomorrow.”
Warren sauntered in, hands casually shoved in his pockets and covered in more dirt than me. He grinned as if he hadn’t a care in the world. “What’s up, ladies?”
My mother eyed him, and then looked at me. “I don’t know about the eyes, but at least he’s charming.”
I sighed. “You can have the shower first,” I told him. “Straight down the hallway.”
After the door shut behind him, my mother spoke. “Due to current events, I am postponing Maurice's funeral. I consulted with the elders this morning, and we have come to the conclusion that now is not an auspicious time in which to bury him.”
“Fair enough,” I agreed.
Senka looked between us, her brow furrowed. I hadn’t figured out how much she could follow verbally, and my mother and I weren’t exactly talking things Senka would know.
“What of the investigation?” Mama asked.
“Not much to tell. He was involved in some shit. The shit got him killed. They’re working on it.”
“I wish you had never left us. If you had stayed, he would have stayed…” She trailed off, as if realizing how callous her words sounded.
“So you think it’s my fault he's dead?” I struggled to maintain my cool, but inside, I was seething.
“No, shich’é’é. I didn’t mean-“
“But you did,” I cut her off, standing so abruptly my chair clattered to the floor. Senka whimpered. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to take a shower. Even if Warren isn’t out yet.”
And I left her, mouth agape, to wash the desert off my skin.
By sunset, my temper had cooled. We gathered around the table over my mother’s feast, Warren wide-eyed and salivating, and Senka visibly intrigued.
My mother and I had perfected ignoring our problems over the years. For me, at least, it was the only way I could exist in the same house with her and not scream every time she spoke.
I didn’t think she was the problem in the equation. But I didn’t think I was either. We simply hadn’t found enough common ground yet to carry a conversation that didn’t end with someone upset.
Warren made pleasant small talk with my mother about her bathroom, while I helped Senka navigate the woolly world of holding a fork. Though she looked worlds better than she had when I pulled her out of the crevasse, she still had mobility issues, as if her fingers had yet to catch up.
“We should ask the Spirits,” Mama suggested, startling me out of spooning potatoes onto Senka’s plate.
I returned the spatula to the glass dish. “Ask the spirits what?”
Mama pointed her fork at Senka. “What is to be done to help the princess and restore the Hollow.”
Senka smiled prettily at Mama, potatoes dribbling from her mouth.
I eyed Warren as I helped Senka clean her chin. “A minute ago, you were talking about Mai's collection of rubber duckies. How did we get here?”
“Your mother talks in circles.” He shrugged, grinning as he tore off a hunk of bread.
“She does that,” I agreed. I looked at Mama. “How are we going to ask the Spirits if the Elders are gone?”
“Many remained.”
I eyeballed her. “Mama.”
“Oh, sure, go ahead and tell Grandmother Doba to leave the Reservation, Maurelle. See how that works out for you.”
My mother didn’t have a penchant for sarcasm, which led me to assume she had tried to get Doba to evacuate. Never let it be said my mother isn’t solid as a rock.
“Who else is still here?”
“Chooli, Tsintah, Niyol, and Yas.”
I rolled my eyes. “None of the elders left.”
“The Reservation is our responsibility, Maurelle. We remain to preserve and protect it.”
“And what would happen if all the elders and the chieftess died?”
“The clan would face a new dawn. I
t would not be the first time.” She looked to Senka. “Would it, Princess?”
Senka placed a hand over Mama's heart with an understanding smile. “Strong. Inside.”
The dead of night is a saying I’d never given much thought.
Dead because the world is still and silent? Dead because spirits are said to roam the earth between midnight and three a.m.?
Dead because it’s dark as a tomb?
Whatever the reason, a ghost crew gathered at the community bonfire in the dead of night. The waning moon rode high, a face to bear witness to our magick. Fingers of flame licked a desert sky blanketed in stars.
Our circle was small tonight, without my mother’s council or the rest of our clan. But to call the ancestors, all we required were the elders and my mother: the spirits and the soul of our nation.
Between my mother and me, Senka’s pale face shone in the light of the fire. Flickering shadow cast her eyes into unfathomable darkness, as if her face were set with perfect onyx stones.
Stoic Yas, his aged face a canvas of folds and crevices painted by a lifetime beneath the sun, began to beat his drum.
A dozen years ago, I had attended every circle with my mother and the elders in preparation of my duties to the clan. Yas's steady, rhythmic beat opened pathways inside me that had been long closed. Each beat jarred, spiked through me, shoved me in sync with the tribe, until I could no longer sense the difference between Yas's beat and my own heart.
Beside my mother, Doba began to chant. Her raspy song was smoke personified and full of power. If Yas's drum was the heartbeat of our people, Doba's song was our voice. And then the elders began to move, staffs and feet stomping in time to the drum as they circled the fire.
I remembered this feeling: this slow burn to intensity, the magick rising with the tempo, the fire billowing smoke so that the entire scene seemed surreal.
I remained seated beside Senka, but my soul circled and chanted with my elders.
Senka, unsurprisingly, surveyed the scene with obvious fascination. I couldn’t read her half-expression well enough to know how she felt. I doubt Rasha's daughter had ever seen a Res before, much less participated in a ritual to the ancestors. But she was a fae princess, which meant she was no stranger to magick.