Heavy Metal (A Goddesses Rising Novel) (Entangled Select) (11 page)

Chapter Seven

The greatest of power is built not accompanied by fanfare and spotlights, but quietly, with a constant eye on long-term growth. Power and influence, invested properly, is its own return.

—
Numina manifesto
, revised

Riley felt better after she’d showered, but only physically. Knowing Sam was gone created a hole that was completely illogical, given how short a time he’d been in her life. But that life had irrevocably changed in the last few days, and he was an intrinsic part of the change. She missed him, and he’d been gone about half an hour.

She was about to leave the shower room when she heard raised voices and hesitated. John was in the hall talking to a woman Riley had briefly met this morning—Jeannine, the president of the board.

“This is the absolute worst time for us to lose you,” she said.

“It’s not like I’d be disappearing into the jungle. I’ll be around. But you knew when I first came in here it was temporary. This isn’t my thing, riding a desk.”

“And you think Nick Jarrett is any better suited to it?” There was bitterness as well as argument in her voice.

“I think he’ll be on the road a lot. But he’s younger, smarter, less resistant to change. I’m not talking about doing this tomorrow.” An edge had entered his voice. “Nick will come in to head recruitment, and I’ll train him to replace me in a year or so.”

Jeannine lowered her voice. “And what about Numina? I thought we agreed not to bring anyone else in on this until we had a better handle on what we’re dealing with.”

Numina? Riley had never heard the word, but the context gave it a sinister essence.

“The bigger it gets, the less comfortable I am keeping it to ourselves.” John had lowered his voice, too, and the combination of what they were saying and the hushed-but-urgent way they were saying it sent shivers of apprehension through Riley. “Others will have to be involved before too long.”

“Probably. But I won’t let you walk away.” Footsteps came closer. Riley hoped there wasn’t steam seeping through the crack in the door.

The steps halted suddenly. “Make no mistake, Jeannine. You have no say in this. I may work in this building, but the Protectorate is and always will be a separate entity. I know you don’t like that I’m not under your thumb, but I refuse to let you try to put me there, even now. If I want Nick to take over, Nick will take over.”

Riley could almost feel the fury radiating through the hall. “It’s not up to you, either. Nick has to agree. He might not.”

“Then I’ll find someone else. But you won’t resist this.”

“Whatever. Be ready in five minutes.”

And with that, the woman stalked down the hall. Riley only had a glimpse of beige flashing past the skinny gap in the doorway. She waited, hearing nothing from John. He’d probably gone back into his office, which was in the opposite direction.

Riley bit her lip. She had only been part of the Society for a couple of days, but she already knew tension between it and the Protectorate was a bad thing. John was upset that they were keeping things from…whom? Everyone? It sounded like Numina was new to everyone, not just her. Old fears and suspicions reared up, and for a second she was ready to run again, but the feeling was short lived. Stronger was the urge to learn more, to join in the fight.

John and Jeannine knew more about what was going on than they’d told Sam. Whatever Numina was, it must connect to Millinger and Anson’s plans.

Maybe Jeannine’s secrecy should feed Riley’s reservations about the Society, but everyone had been welcoming and helpful to her so far, and now she was torn between old fears and new loyalties. She couldn’t just walk away and leave Sam and Marley and anyone else to be affected or harmed by this whole thing, especially when she seemed to be part of it. She had to do more.

Since she had no idea what, however, she’d start with the original plan and see what they could come up with in the archives about her family. Maybe tonight she’d be able to talk to Sam and tell him what she’d heard. He did say he’d call. She smiled at the thought.

Marley looked up from her computer when Riley reached her office. “Oh, crap, I lost track of time. Come on in. I just need to finish this e-mail real quick.”

Riley pulled the guest chair around to sit next to Marley behind the desk. She had to lift the chair up and over, since there wasn’t room to slide it past. “Thanks again for doing this. And for everything else.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m not doing much.” She typed furiously for a couple of minutes, hit
send
, and pulled up another program.

“You’re doing a lot.” Riley was acutely aware of that and very grateful. “So what are we looking for?”

“Well, I already looked up your mother’s maiden and married names in the database and searched the archives. There’s no mention of her. What was your grandmother’s name?”

Riley thought hard. “When you looked for my mother’s last name, would my grandmother have come up in the search?”

“She should have, if she was part of the Society under that name. She didn’t, though.”

“So we have to look up my grandmother’s maiden name. God, that’s…” She put a hand over her eyes and went deep, struggling to remember a name she’d never had any reason to store. It popped into her head. “Freeman?” She looked up. “Yes! Nessie Freeman. I guess that would be short for Vanessa or something.”

Marley typed in the name. “We’ve been digitizing old records for a few years. They go back centuries, so it’s going to take us forever, but we’ve processed beyond a few decades, at least. It’s not all organized, though. I have to dig in a few different places.”

It took a while for Marley to search in the main archives database, then use the references to locate various files and the relevant documents within them. Finally, they had it all compiled for the three names the search had given them: Henrietta, Nessarina, and Beatrice Freeman. After clicking several documents open, Marley whistled. “Wow. There’s a lot here. Mostly meeting attendance records, though. Let me print some of it.” She clicked another link, and Riley skimmed the page with her. It looked like a genealogy breakdown.

“So Nessarina was my grandmother, and Henrietta was her mother, Beatrice her sister. I never knew about Beatrice. Not really.” The page displayed a date of death before Riley was born. She remembered her grandmother mentioning a sister, now that she thought about it, but not very often.

Marley handed her a sheaf of pages. After shuffling them into what appeared to be chronological order, Riley read while Marley kept working on the computer.

Her great-grandmother, Henrietta, had been married to a man named Earl, owner of a company she recognized as part of a huge conglomerate now. He’d sold it before he died, apparently not willing to leave it to his daughters or their husbands. Back then, goddesses probably weren’t as open about their existence or as interested in using their abilities commercially. Witch burning had peaked centuries before, but its effects had lasted a long time.

A membership roster listed rock and soil as the source for both Nessie and Beatrice, but Henrietta’s listing was odd. Hers was wood, with a notation of “depleted” after it, and a date when Henrietta would have been… Riley did a quick calculation. About fifty years old. Five years before her husband died. She’d followed within a year.

“What does depleted mean?” she asked Marley.

“Depleted?” The color drained from Marley’s face. “You mean like leeched?”

“Maybe.” Riley grimaced. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s fine. What does it say?”

“Just a notation next to my great-grandmother’s source. Wood. Both her daughters had rock and soil. Is it weird that neither one has their mother’s source?”

Marley shrugged and took the page from her. “Weirder that they had the same one. There’s no genetic component to source affinity. They might have misrepresented their powers to the Society—that could explain disassociation. Let me see if I can find something about the depletion.”

Riley kept reading. Birth notices for her grandmother and great-aunt, then nothing until they each got married, one at age eighteen, the other at nineteen. Nessie hit twenty-one a year before Beatrice, and Henrietta reported their power sources within a month of their birthdays. But after that, letters repeatedly requested that both girls attend a Society meeting or come to Boston to demonstrate their abilities for the official record. The letters got more forceful until one said their continued membership in the Society was contingent upon such demonstration.

The last letter was short and to the point. It revoked both of their memberships.

Marley was right. Someone, whether Riley’s grandmother and great-aunt or their mother, had lied about their abilities. Maybe they’d hoped the Society would take them at their word, but they obviously hadn’t. What had happened?

“No wonder my grandmother hated the Society,” Riley said, staring at the revocation letter. The words looked stark black on white in a way the original typewritten page probably hadn’t. “They kicked her out.”

“Oh, my God.” Marley hit a few keys and the printer hummed. “That’s not all. You’ve got to read this.”

Riley swapped pages with her and skimmed the old, cramped handwriting. She gasped and went back to start over, reading slowly. The words were stilted, the formal written language of several generations ago, and the paper had been old and worn when it was scanned. Fold creases made some lines hard to read, and a tear along one of them created a blank. But Riley got the gist. Whoever wrote this letter accused her great-grandmother, Henrietta, of letting her husband repeatedly drain her abilities for his own use.

“How is that possible?” Riley felt sick to her stomach. The old woman’s description made it sound like abuse, but it wasn’t any kind of abuse Riley had ever heard of. “Have you ever—”

Marley shook her head sadly. “It makes a lot of sense, though, you know?”

“How?” Riley cried, looking up from the page and setting it hard on the desk before she crumpled the paper further. “I don’t understand any of this!”

Marley glanced at the half-closed hall door and kept her voice low. “Remember how Anson got started?”

It took Riley a few seconds to shift gears. She shook her head impatiently. “Something about giving him ability to draw power.”

“Right. I bestowed some of my power on him. But it doesn’t last.” She leaned forward. “For us, as long as we have our source to channel the energy, we can access it. But when we take some of that capacity, some of what’s inside us” —she clenched her fist around her shirt and pressed it into her breastbone— “and put it into a willing receptacle, they can use only the energy we give them. Then it’s gone. I could have given Anson more, but it was limited and he was greedy. So he took it from other goddesses.
All
of it. It broke them, and changed him.”

Riley blinked against tears of anger and shame that didn’t belong to her, but to a woman she’d never met. “So you think my great-grandfather was a leech? But instead of attacking other goddesses, he just kept drawing on his wife’s power? Depleting her to nothing? That’s sick!”

Marley nodded. “I think he must have drained her very low before conception. Maybe kept her drained during the pregnancy. But that could explain why your grandmother and great-aunt didn’t have the power they claimed. So then they didn’t have it to pass on to your mother, either.”

“That makes no sense,” Riley argued. “How could I have it if my mother didn’t?”

Marley shrugged. “I’m not a geneticist, and what we are defies science. But maybe you’re a throwback in the purest sense? Like someone who becomes a piano prodigy ‘just like Grandpa Joe’ or something even though their parents have no musical talent.”

Riley took a deep breath, uncertain why she was so angry about all of this. She’d never know if her great-grandfather had been greedy, if he’d forcibly taken what he wanted, or if Henrietta had given it willingly. With her grandmother and mother gone, she couldn’t find out if Nessie and Beatrice had been born without power, or if he’d taken theirs, too. Had they understood why and how they’d been robbed of their legacies? Probably not, since Nessie, at least, had blamed the Society. And she’d passed on the hatred to her daughter.

A powerful longing for her mother overcame her. Her anger faded, and she understood it wasn’t anger for Henrietta, but anger
at
her. She’d taken away something so vital and intrinsic from all of them, even Riley.

“Is there any more?” Her voice came out raspy and half its normal strength. She pushed the pages across the desktop.

Marley took them and stacked them neatly in a folder that she left on the desk, clearly available if Riley wanted it back. “No,” she said gently. “That’s it.”

“How…I mean…” Riley cleared her throat. “Has anything like this happened before?”

“Not that I’m aware of. And I think they’d have told me. There are some members who would have been
very
happy to connect me with people like that. Or kick me out of the Society, if they knew it had been done before.”

“Okay.” Riley took a deep breath and tried to shake off the weight of this information. She checked the time. The offices would be closing soon. “We should get going.”

Marley clicked to shut down the computer and hit the monitor’s power button. “You okay?”

“Yeah. I just feel…adrift, I guess.” She stood while Marley shoved some files into her messenger bag. “It’s frustrating. I want to run to my mother and demand to know why she didn’t tell me any of this. Why she let me find out the hard way. She probably had no idea it would happen, but this whole thing makes me feel even more distant from my family.”

“I get that.” The computer screen went dark. Marley switched off the wireless mouse and stood, stretching a little. “You said you have some cousins and stuff, right? Anyone you can talk to?”

“No, they’re all on my dad’s side.” She went out into the hall and waited while Marley locked the door. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. There’s no point. At least I understand things better than I did before.”