I was given a compass. It pointed toward my nemesis. That was how Beau had known which direction to go. If I compared it to the map in my tabs, I could see that it pointed vaguely toward Siff. My stomach sank. Some poor person that I was stupid enough to hate enough for the engine to target had just been plopped into this world without a clue. They were seven days away from me. I’d done it, just like Beau had said I would. I stared at the compass for only another self-indulgent moment of pity and then put it in my inventory.
“I’m so sorry,” Kat told me, and I knew she wasn’t sorry that I’d said yes to the quest. She was sorry that they’d used her to get me to fold.
“It’s not your fault,” I stuck my chin out and blinked away tears. “I’d have capitulated eventually anyway. We know it. I just wanted some space between quests. I wanted to believe, for just a moment that I wouldn’t do it.”
Silence hung between us. Sammi disappeared from the well as the cottage appeared before us. I couldn’t watch. Kat took a little time to take a better look around. Terra rubbed against the side of my leg as Kat walked toward the fence beside the stable.
“What are these things supposed to be?” Kat asked me, leaning on the fence.
“From what I can tell, they call them pigs,” I shrugged, joining her as Terra trotted along beside me. “It’s probably more likely that some language filter is translating all this somehow.”
“That would make more sense,” Kat smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. Her eyes were haunted in a way I’d never wanted my daughter to feel. She leaned back against the railing to face me. “Those are not pigs.”
“That’s what I said,” I laughed at my own joke, but even Terra didn’t snicker. Some of them I did just for me.
“I have an idea,” Terra popped into my head cheerfully. “Let’s name one of them Joey.”
I relayed Terra’s message to Kat.
“You can talk?” Kat asked Terra.
“Can you hear her?” I asked, just as Terra asked the same.
“I can hear you,” Kat told me, but shook her head at Terra. “But not her. She talks to you now?”
“Yeah,” I grinned.
“Now I’m even more jealous,” Kat groused, but she was smiling, if only slightly. “Not only did you get to spend all this time in a magical world, but you got your cat. All I got was…”
Our eyes met, the sorrow in mine causing her to turn back to the pigs. We knew each other so well. Her shame tore my heart. What had happened in the four days I’d been gone from her life to put that look in her eyes? Terra rubbed up against Kat’s leg, trying to comfort her.
“A little nuts?” I asked, trying to break the ice gently.
Kat and Joey had been a first-love kind of romance. They’d been together a year, texting constantly. I knew it was built on sticks and held together by each of them making excuses to overlook how many differences they really had. He lived a whole two hundred miles away. They met on a cruise we’d done as a family vacation. I’d thought it would burn itself out in a week or two, but they’d both been drowning in that glow of first love, when the idea of love is more important than the person you’re with.
“I showed up on his doorstep,” she admitted, ducking her head.
I winced. Joey was a kid. He lived with his family, and they were pretty straight folks. They were open-minded for the most part, but they did things straight. Our family was complicated and looped around circles that could make a trapeze artist dizzy. I’d done crazier things in my youth, sneaking out of windows to meet Beau in the park because that was the only time my mom wasn’t on my case about something or other.
“Yeah,” she kicked at the fencing, and I quickly cast a repair spell at it so it wouldn’t fall over. “That didn’t go over well.”
Kat had grown up hearing the stories I told of my youth. I could imagine that once I was gone, she’d compared her life to mine and tried to relive my youth. Her dad loved her, but he’d left her to me. He was slow to emotional displays and fast to heavy sighs and snappy comebacks. I was their buffer. I didn’t want to imagine how it had gone without me there. Cliff would have tried to be a buffer, but even he got lost in his own emotions before helping others.
I lived with my daughter, my husband, and my best friend who had also been my previous husband before I’d met and fallen in love with Kat’s dad. I was the glue that held together a teenaged girl, a CSI-loving necromancer, and a conspiracy-loving paladin. The common denominator was that we were all on the autism spectrum. Of course, we hadn’t known that until more recently, but once Kat and I had been diagnosed, it became clear that we all were.
“Poor thing,” Terra told me, though I didn’t think it was a good time to translate. I nodded to Kat. I just wanted to be supportive. She knew I was always on her side. I also gave her perspective when I felt she could handle it, but most of the time, she was on top of that herself.
“They called Dad,” she muttered. I could picture her dad picking her up, wracked with worry he wouldn’t dare show. “I sat there for five hours in the gutter outside their house. Joey didn’t even come out. I could hear him fighting with his siblings.”
“I don’t remember much of my younger days,” Terra tried to commiserate. “But I do remember the toms being very demanding until they got what they wanted, and then they tossed me away like an old rag.”
We stood there shoulder to shoulder staring at the not-pigs.
“A week later he started texting that he’d met someone else,” Kat admitted, the silent space I gave to her enough to help her let it out. “Apparently, it had been becoming a thing for a few weeks, but he hadn’t wanted to say anything while I was going through your disappearance. He was supposedly trying to be kind.”
“I was only gone four days,” I reached out to touch Kat’s shoulder, but she pulled away with a huff of air. She stared up at the unfamiliar sky.
“No, Mom,” she blew out a breath and lost her fight against the tears. “You were gone four weeks.”
“I wasn’t good with time, but it did seem to be a long time that you were gone before I came here,” Terra put in.
I pulled Kat into my arms, and we cried some more together. Terra hopped up on the railing and let Kat pet her as much as she wanted. Kat and I had never been apart for more than a week. I’d homeschooled her, not wanting her to be treated like I’d been treated in school. I’d stopped my life to raise her. I’d stayed home. Other than a date night with my husband a few times a month, Kat and I just didn’t go where the other wasn’t welcome. We’d been a team and I’d never regretted a moment of it. When I’d gotten her into college early, she’d refused to go without me. I hadn’t thought I could do it until she helped me. I’d missed her for four days. She’d missed me for four weeks. I held her tighter.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered into her hair.
She responded by taking my head in her hands and staring me down with her serious brown eyes. “Now, let’s get Dad here. He’s a mess without you.”
She was deflecting and I let her. She didn’t want to think of Joey and his newer, more stable girlfriend. She wanted her family all together. I wanted that too. It took a bit to reorient my mind toward the next step. I wanted to let myself bask in just this moment with Kat, but she was right. Sammi had started that damn timer again and the sooner I got to where my nemesis was, the sooner we’d have our family together.
“Yeah,” I looked around at this crazy world. I didn’t kid myself that I was the hero of this story. It was just that I wasn’t willing to give up my kid or my family.
“I’m just tired of crying all the time, Mom,” Kat flung her hands like she was shaking off water. “Can’t we just do something more than that?”
“What did you think my nemesis could be?” I capitulated by changing the subject.
“I was just thinking of all those assholes at the college,” Kat admitted, frustrated. “It has to be one of them. I was remembering how they made all those promises to help us and then made everything so much harder. Honestly, it could be any of them. Even if you don’t think you hate them, you do. You can’t help it.”
“Probably,” I admitted. It was still raw inside me. It was just the hypocrisy of it all. I’d known they were lying when they’d said they could deal with my disabilities. I’d told them, but they’d smiled their delusional smiles and told themselves that they were good people. Then the rules had crashed in on them. I wondered which of them would be my nemesis. Did they deserve to end up like Lily and Chester? Probably not. I’d just have to live with what it made me.
I had a hundred potions to make before I could leave to search out this new nemesis, and I didn’t have ingredients. What was I going to do? Could making potions be more important than getting my husband here sooner? I was arrogant enough to believe that I didn’t have to worry about any one of those college administrators getting powerful enough to defeat me even with an extra month to prepare. Even if I’d left right that night, it would be seven days of travel to reach this new foe but would that mean seven weeks for my husband. Now that Kat had disappeared too…
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“Mom,” Kat shook me a little. “Focus. What’s next?”
And that’s how she was a miracle I didn’t deserve. She knew exactly what to say to get me to focus on the most important thing first. Kat wasn’t an angel. She was demanding and spoiled in some ways. She was rough around the edges, and she didn’t take guff from anybody. When she was feeling, she let everyone know it. But, when push came to shove, Kat was my angel, and I didn’t care what else she did because she loved me, and I loved her, and we were partners against all those jerks in the world who came after us.
Even in college, we’d gone together, rebuffing claims of helicopter parenting and the shadows against our honor and integrity. We’d stood because we were together. If they’d known how much she propped me up instead of the other way around, what would they have done? We’d dropped professors that couldn’t understand our “unique situation.” I’d always thought that if it had been a less unique situation, more people would know their kids better than to believe the lies the schools told about them.
“I need sleep,” I temporized, letting her out of my arms, but keeping ahold of her hand. “It’s too much to think about tonight.”
Worlds were colliding in my mind. I was half in this one and half in my old world. I needed to hold Kat and rejoice in her being there, but I also worried terribly for the ones I’d left behind. What could my husband be going through? My best friend Cliff was perpetually hopeful, but this would test even his grasp on the brighter side. I could see them bickering at each other, spiraling into depression and grief. Worse, I could see the love of my life losing his mind. He’d always said that Kat and I were the only things that stopped him from discovering whether the CSI people of Las Vegas could catch him.
I shook that thought out of my mind. It was thoughts like that that would have made me capitulate to Sammi’s demands eventually. I’d have justified it to myself by lying to myself and saying that he’d have gone to live with his mom instead of letting loose his dark side. I’d have denied his darkness. I’d have… I couldn’t think that way. I just needed to hurry and get on with what I could do. What I needed was to plan. A lot. And my mind kept stumbling over what it all meant.
I started toward the tavern, just trying to get to a familiar bed, but Kat gave me a tug. I cocked my head at her, but she just raised her eyebrows and nodded her head toward our new house. There it was, solid as anything in this world. I blinked a few times to clear my eyes of blurriness. Fatigue and the strain of the day was catching up to me, especially as the adrenaline of the fight finally began to fade. I felt my mind slog.
I was slow to respond, so Kat tugged me toward the front door. It was straight out of my dreams, maybe childhood ones. A little cottage with an arched wooden door. The roof was made of sod so that it almost blended into the woods. There were climbing vines of what looked like pansies and bushes of purple flowers as big as bird of paradise blooms. As I stumbled along the stone path that now led to our cottage, I noted the smells were closer to jasmine and gardenia. The stones of the path were worn and the surrounding grass just a little overgrown as if the cottage had been there for decades. Terra padded before us to the front door.
“A white picket fence?” Kat gave me a disdainful look. “Sammi seems fond of the clichés.”
I had to agree with a half chuckle. There was even a garden. Windowsills were lined with wooden boxes of live herbs. Little lines of squash-like vines ended in little pops of those small bean-like tomatoes. There were bushes of berries and of blooms. Walls were a stucco-like construction that made the tavern look shabbier even in the moonlight.
The fact that Sammi had done all this meant something, but my mind was whirling with so much I couldn’t hold that thought. The Nemesis Engine was the epitome of an evil genie game in that just as you wished for your loved ones, it would throw you a curveball of misery to go with it. I’d always hated that kind of story. Why mess up perfectly good wishes with horrible side effects? It was the thing that made good stories, not good lives. If Sammi had given me a dreamy cottage, there was something fishy in it somewhere.
The door opened on a simple latch but locked behind us with a solid-looking beam. The main room was open and large, the floor made of tightly fitted stones and the far wall was filled with a hearth complete with a fire. The walls were lined with dried herbs hanging in clumps. There was a sink area, and while it didn’t have a faucet, it did have a water pump. It was more modern than I should have expected from what I’d seen of this world so far. If those clumps of herbs were potion ingredients, I was even more suspicious of our supposed good fortune.
Kat explored the two little doors off the main room, but only briefly. She dragged me along behind her, but only because I wouldn’t let go of her hand and she was too kind to shake me off. Terra leapt from shelf to shelf, nimbly working her way around jars and the tools of a potion maker. I wanted to believe that Sammi had done all this because I’d deserved it, but it smacked of desperate bribery more than honor or simple gratitude. One door led to a pantry and another to a working bathroom, as promised. The workings were crude, but functional. The water provided wasn’t warm, or I’d have been tempted to dive into that stone bathtub for the rest of the night.
The bedrooms were a set of three lofts, two of which had single beds and round windows rimmed with shelves. The shelves were sparsely populated with a few books here and there. The final room had a bed big enough for two, and a skylight that let us look up into the stars overhead. That was as far as we got. Terra had found her own way up to the lofts, though I didn’t think she used the ladders that reminded me of the ones used on bunk beds.
I couldn’t help but think it was a very elaborate bribe to make me accept yet another quest and another until my house was as full as the graveyard that came with it. It was true that I didn’t have to kill people, but if the losers ended up like Lily and Chester, was the alternative worse? I hated myself for the moral battles in my mind. I just wanted to be a good person. I wanted to stand up for the little guy, but more often than not I was the littlest person in the room. I thought about my healed body and realized that maybe that wasn’t the case anymore. I thought about my magic and had a spark of hope. Just that filled me with dread.
“There is no need for a cat box,” Terra informed me, batting at a bit of material that hung from a curtain. “There is a small door for me that lets out into the garden. You needn’t worry.” I tried not to feel bad for having forgotten both that and food for Terra. “You needn’t worry, I tell you,” she admonished me with a purr. “I had my fill of rabbit pot pie in the tavern. The patrons were generous with their spillage.”
At the sight of a real bed, I flopped back onto it and grabbed pillows that felt like clouds. Kat laughingly fell next to me, and we stared up at the stars. If I had to consider my best and worst traits, they were the same. I could find the best possible way out of the worst situations. The catch was that I imagined the worst situations and results of every path in front of me. I had a lot of time to sit and think, considering it took an hour to recover from a trip to the bathroom.
The bed was soft as if it was filled with the softest feathers I’d ever felt. I sank down into it with a sigh. My mind spun into scenarios, knowing that whatever I planned for likely wouldn’t happen. If I planned for an ex-boyfriend, I would face something that even my imagination couldn’t have contemplated. Terra nestled between our heads and curled up. I envied how fast she fell asleep.
“So, no more Joey?” I asked Kat tenderly, softly stroking back a strand of her hair.
“Any guy who will leave me on the doorstep crying isn’t worth my time,” she professed, but I could tell the wound still hurt. “For two weeks, I poured my heart out to him about my worry for you and my loneliness. He kept saying he wished he could be there for me.”
“Guys are bums,” I commiserated unreservedly.
“Daddy and I were fighting all the time,” her tone turned guilty, but I didn’t blame her. “It wasn’t his fault, but he put up with it.”
“He’s good at absorbing female tempers,” I told her, running a hand over her hair.
“Joey had said he wanted to comfort me, but I wasn’t listening to what he was really saying,” Kat pushed into my stroking hand just like Terra would have and I smiled to myself, letting her very presence calm me. “I talked and he seemed to be listening, but he was texting her. I just didn’t notice because all I could see were my own problems.”
“You had a pretty big problem to worry about,” I reassured her only to have her sit up abruptly.
“Right?” she spat out. “I thought he and I were it. We were going to run off and get married. He texted supportive stuff while we were so far apart and yet when he was three yards away, he wouldn’t walk out the door to put an arm around me. The moment I was on their doorstep, I was a problem instead of a person they’d claimed to love like family.”
“I’m really sorry,” I said, petting her gently.
“His mom freaked out,” Kat explained, her face contorted in anger, and I still didn’t see anything wrong with her. “She told me she was calling the police first, but then his dad said he’d call Dad. I don’t know which was worse. Her freaking out, or his dad being so reasonable. It was humiliating. Joey didn’t even come to the door.”
“His parents probably didn’t let him,” I reasoned softly, but not in disagreement.
“You think Daddy let me drive all the way across two state lines to go see my boyfriend?” she beat her thighs with fists. “I did it because it was supposed to be for love. I risked everything just to see Joey and he wouldn’t even risk climbing out a window for me.”
“Your dad came to get you,” I pushed the story forward.
“Daddy was Daddy,” she rolled her eyes and flung herself back on the bed. “He let me make him into the bad guy. I yelled and then I got mad because he just wouldn’t fight back! I was awful. I know I was awful, but all I felt was hurt and…”
“Betrayal and loneliness?” I sympathized.
“You’d have been proud of Daddy, though,” Kat admitted reluctantly. “No matter how I raged, he never got mad at me. It’s just… I could tell that he was getting frayed at the edges. I wanted to be strong for him, but I wasn’t. I was stupid and I’m sorry and…”
“You didn’t get to tell him that,” I tried.
“It’s just that we’ve got to bring him over here,” she grabbed my hands and sat up on her knees. “He’s about to lose it. You know him. And… and the last thing I said to him was that this time he’d never find me.”
“Oh,” I worried in a quiet way. We already had so much to worry about.
He’d be sick with worry, but worse than that, my husband was a dangerous man held in check because he had too much to lose if he lost it. Images slashed through my mind. We had to remind him that Criminal Minds was not an instruction manual. I was imagining carnage, but I said, “I’m sure he’ll hold on.”
Kat gave me a look that said she didn’t believe that any more than I did. We knew him. My husband looked kind and patient but had the heart of Dexter. How long would he wait until he gave up? And if he gave up, would he? I didn’t want to think about it.
“Cliff’ll keep him sane,” I grasped at straws. “For a little while…”
It would take a bit for it all to sink in, but how long. Would he give up and suicide? Would he give up and kill everyone before he suicided? Or would he give up and go live with his mom, turning off all his emotions forever. I felt an urgency to get him here, but also a helplessness. I thought about Beau’s cheat. Could I make enough coins to do the same? I wouldn’t kill the person… well unless they… Ugh! What was I thinking? Was it a choice between dead bodies at home because my husband lost his mind and dead bodies here of people some machine thought I hated? There had to be a better choice than that. I was smart, but my mind was crowded with those worst-case scenarios.