Ladys children, p.1
Lady's Children, page 1
LADY’S CHILDREN
A Collection of Short Fiction from the World of SILVER
By Rhiannon Held
Copyright © 2018 by Rhiannon Held
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover design by Kate Marshall (katemarshalldesigns.com)
www.rhiannonheld.com
Other Books by Rhiannon Held
The Silver Series
SILVER
TARNISHED
REFLECTED
WOLFSBANE
DEATH-TOUCHED
Stand Alone
HOUND AND KEY
MIRROR BOUND
To Brandy, Eileen, Cyrena, Alicia, Kim, Michele, Amber, Yonara, Johonna, Erik, Kate S., Ross, Jessie, Bob, Lorelea, and Chris
And all the NWAA archaeology folks back in the day.
Table of Contents
Mistaken Captives
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Back a Winner
Temper
Lady Ceremony
Lead and Follow
Contested History
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Acknowledgments
Mistaken Captives
We begin with our archaeologist. This novella is set simultaneously with the first half of DEATH-TOUCHED, and features the first appearance of Faith and the return of Laurence. Laurence was introduced way back in SILVER, along with Rory, the former alpha who still looms large in his life.
Chapter 1
Faith’s GPS smugly announced that she’d reached her destination beside the state park’s impressive, carved sign, about a mile and a half of indifferently paved road before she actually found the venue. Fortunately, good old-fashioned road signs directed her the rest of the way to the hall. Half a gate was shut over her lane at one point, announcing the park was closed, but she followed her boss’s directions and drove around. The day was working up to be a hot one—in Seattle terms—but the sweep of shadows from the evergreen boughs overhanging the road made all the difference when she opened the car windows.
The hall was pretty obvious when she reached it. Blending into the landscape with the same weathered wood siding and dark green metal roof as the other park office buildings she’d passed along the way, it looked big enough to host a substantial crowd for whatever public classes, presentations, or other events the park wanted to put on. The parking lot was packed. When she’d gotten the details about this job, Faith had thought it was a weird place to hold a wedding, especially a summer one, but maybe the couple hadn’t had many choices with this many relatives. She’d bet it was less expensive than some ballroom downtown.
And had better ambiance, in her opinion. The forest was quiet and beautiful, especially since she wasn’t looking at it with all her gear on her back, wondering how many more shovel probes she could finish that day. She couldn’t see any empty parking spaces, so Faith turned the car down the service road leading to the back of the building and pulled off onto the shoulder.
A couple of guys were just heading inside from consultation with a third, who headed in her direction instead. Faith would have expected from their location that this would be the smokers’ huddle, but the air was clean and the guy coming up to her had empty hands.
She stepped out of her car, but stayed standing behind the open door. “Hey, I’m with the catering company.” Not that her bland black slacks and white shirt didn’t shout “server” already. A lock of black hair slipped out of her professional ponytail, and Faith shoved it quickly behind her ear. One of the perils of changing her mind between layered short and ponytail long: the growing out time was a pain in the ass.
“Can I park back here, do you know?” She didn’t see any of the company’s vehicles, but they usually encouraged the employees not to take spaces guests might want.
“We don’t need any servers. We already told your company that.” The snap to the man’s tone made Faith’s eyebrows go up. She looked him over again. He was a little small for what she expected of bouncers, but he looked well muscled despite his slim frame. Taller than her, but that really wasn’t hard. He was the kind of guy with such a washed-out blond coloring that he probably wouldn’t show a five-o’clock shadow for three days. What was his problem?
He seemed to read from her silence that he’d overstepped. “It’s a private party.” His voice warmed with a little embarrassment. “Maybe they didn’t remember to tell you? We already hashed out the miscommunication when they first showed to set up.”
Faith leaned back over to grab her purse from the passenger seat, and checked her phone. No new voicemails or texts. Then again, she was one of the most sporadic servers, picking up hours between field projects. She wouldn’t be shocked if her boss had run down the list of people she had to notify and forgotten about Faith. But she didn’t even know who this guy was. Why should she take his word for it?
“Let me call my boss.” Faith held up a finger while she listened to the line ring, and the guy subsided against the wall beside the door. No answer. Now what? She bit her lip. How much due diligence did she do before blowing off the stupid wedding she hadn’t really wanted to work anyway?
A happy kid laugh dopplered toward her from somewhere inside. A six-year-old boy sprinted through the doorway and launched himself off the threshold like a superhero who could clear the concrete step down from the door in a single bound. He smashed into Faith’s knees and then fell back on his butt. His face creased for half a second with the quintessentially kid expression of trying to figure out not how hurt he was, but whether it was worth bursting into tears about it. Apparently he liked his audience, so he did.
Faith slipped her phone into her pocket and lifted the boy gently with a grip under his arms. “Sorry, kid. You’ve got to look before you leap. Where’re your parents?”
A new man arrived in the open door and gave the kid an exasperated look. “Just inside,” he told Faith. He was tall and striking, almost intimidatingly so in a celebrity sort of way, though she didn’t recognize him. Maybe an actor, with those two white locks of hair at his temples.
A hand lightly on his back, Faith ushered the boy up onto the step, and the bouncer guy made a strangled noise of protest. Now she could see inside a little, through the open door, oh no! Faith really didn’t understand the problem—so it was a private party. What made this wedding so super secret? If they were pinching pennies by refusing servers, she doubted they had the money to employ bouncers, even short, clean-cut ones.
Now her curiosity was aroused, and she angled herself to get the best view inside she could. The decorations did look more inexpensive than many weddings she’d seen in the months since she’d picked up the second job with the caterers, but Faith liked them better for it. Small discs of cut glass had been hung in all the windows to catch the sun. The only tables were the banquet tables around the edges, so apparently everyone was going to stand to eat—and for the ceremony as well. Faith didn’t see any chairs for that. The banquet tables had white cloths, which picked up the rainbows nicely. Small strings of crystal beads were strung along the edge of the tables, alternating circles and half circles.
The guy in the doorway smoothed the boy’s hair, then turned to guide him firmly into the hall. “Edmond, you’ve got to stay inside, all right? Go find your father.” The kid resisted for a moment, wanting to stare at Faith, but finally he gave in and bounded off.
He slipped into a crowd that was fairly informal to match the decorations. Most of the women were in blouses and skirts rather than dresses. It made one woman stand out at the edge of the crowd, though Faith supposed up close her hair was probably platinum blonde, not actually white. Her dress was very elegant, with a long skirt of fabric light enough to waft around her ankles, dark blue with points of white and gold embroidery like stars. She had her hand stuffed into a pocket on one hip that completely spoiled the line of the dress, but Faith supposed some women just didn’t know what to do with their hands.
The crowd was also very diverse, much more than she would have expected when most weddings had such large contingents from the same families. Everyone also seemed somehow really energetic or graceful or something. Maybe one or other of the couple was a sports star, with teammates past and present attending. Soccer, maybe? Some of the men looked bulky enough for football.
The guy in the doorway shifted to block it, and Faith settled her weight back before her curiosity could get rude. “I’m—I’m one of the servers. This guy said there was a mix-up and you don’t need anyone?” She tipped her head to the bouncer guy. Maybe it was also a little rude not to take his word for it, but all of this just seemed slightly weird somehow. “I mean, they didn’t leave me a voicemail or anything, but I don’t work as many events as everyone else, so I guess it’s not that surprising. So it’s
The guy in the doorway relaxed a little, like he finally understood what she was worried about. Maybe he’d worked in the service sector before himself. “Yeah, Laurence is right. We told them that when they arrived to drop off the food. I’m sorry it didn’t make it to you.” He got out his wallet and pulled out and offered a couple bills. “For lost tips.”
Faith brightened. “Thanks, I appreciate it.” At least the drive out here wasn’t a total loss. On her way past where Laurence was propping up the wall, she offered him an apologetic smile. She hoped he could go in soon and enjoy himself.
Instead, he pushed off the wall to trail after her at a polite distance. “You do many weddings?” His voice was awkward, and Faith suddenly wondered if he was hanging around to hit on her. That was...well, really flattering, actually. He was pretty good looking, and she’d been using her variable schedule at work as an excuse not to bother dating for too long. He’d been an ass at first, but right now he seemed faintly apologetic. He’d probably just been following his boss’s directions. She flicked her eyes down. No wedding ring.
She checked her phone’s clock while she decided whether to plead urgent chores at home to let the guy down easy. But she found she liked the idea of chatting for a bit, so she slid the phone away again rather than use the excuse. “Nah, I just pick up hours when I’m not out in the field for my main job.” She braced herself. This guy looked like the bullwhip-joke type. Which was preferable to the serious-questions-about-dinosaurs type, at least. “I’m an archaeologist, actually.”
Laurence shoved his hands into his pockets. “That sounds cool.” Faith waited for his next comment long enough that he started to look uncomfortable. “I’m, uh, kind of between jobs at the moment myself.”
Faith dipped her head in a quick apology. “No, sorry. I just couldn’t believe you didn’t make an Indiana Jones joke. Or ask if I’d ever been to Egypt.” She laughed. “You kinda just won yourself major points with that, by the way.” And she’d better hope he didn’t have a girlfriend because she’d let herself in for awkwardness now if she’d misread his initial comment.
“Oh. Uh, good.” Laurence looked at his feet. He seemed pleased in his awkwardness at least.
Faith decided to change the subject. “You here for the bride or the groom?”
“I’ve known him longer.” Laurence pulled a face and rolled his shoulders like maybe he didn’t care for the groom, then tried to turn the gesture into a shrug. “Sorry if he was a bit intense. He’s like that.” He looked back at the hall.
He meant the man with the white locks of hair, Faith realized. That was the groom? He’d been wearing a sport coat, not a tux. “Was the bride the woman in blue, then?” She’d been the most formal of those inside, without similar dresses anywhere to mark bridesmaids. But the bride should have been in the back somewhere, before the ceremony, shouldn’t she? But Laurence nodded. Huh. “It’s interesting they’re not going too traditional. Not even a pastel color.”
Laurence wandered a few steps closer, in a casual pacing way. “Pastel? What are you talking about?”
As she tried to puzzle out his confusion, Faith suddenly realized her mistake. This was obviously a reception. Her boss had miscommunicated that as well. “I thought this was the ceremony, so I was surprised she wasn’t wearing white.” That didn’t seem to help. Faith didn’t expect him to know all the ins and outs of the garter and something blue, but she’d have thought white wedding dresses were pretty pervasive, if he’d been part of Western culture long enough to have accentless English.
More awkward silence fell for a beat. “So, archaeology, huh?” Laurence said finally.
Faith leaned a hip against the car. “Not like you’re thinking. I’m a shovelbum. When the government or a developer has some big construction project, it’s the job of the company I work for to check the land first, to make sure they’re not going to destroy any archaeological resources when they start digging. Or hurt any historical buildings either.” She gestured off into the trees. “So mostly it means a lot of tromping around and digging test holes without finding anything in them.”
Laurence’s gaze followed her gesture. “Is there a lot of stuff to find around here?”
“Pre-contact, there’s a ton—Native American before contact with Europeans, that means. Prime real estate is prime real estate, so most places we want to build now, like on the waterfront, were places where people used to like to live. And there’s more historic resources than people might think. The remains of early cities under the foundations of modern buildings, and things like homesteads and logging railroad grades. It’s not as old as on the East Coast, but there’s certainly stuff to find.”
Someone moved on the trails among the trees to their side. Laurence turned as two men stepped out onto the gravel of the access road behind him, one black-haired like a Native himself, Inuit maybe, and the other with darker skin. The Native guy raised a hand in vague greeting and Laurence gave an “ugh, you again” grimace and pointedly looked away again, back to Faith. A couple other guests, clearly.
“What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever found?” Laurence asked her.
Faith laughed, and rubbed at her lip as she stalled. She hated that question. There were a lot of cool things that she’d found—and a lot of things that didn’t seem cool on the surface, but were scientifically important. And a lot of garbage with no scientific value. She never quite knew how to convey that middle category to laypeople.
Since her car was taking up a good portion of the gravel, the two new men had to thread past the two of them on their way to the main parking lot and presumably the front entrance. She leaned into her car to give the first one a bit more room as he passed.
But rather than following, the second guy stopped behind Laurence. Faster than Faith could process, he had one hand around Laurence’s mouth. In the other he had a knife he slashed diagonally up Laurence’s abdomen so blood spattered as far as her and a shiny red mass bulged out of the cut and Laurence struggled but the man was much taller and had a good grip on him.
Faith could hardly—think, but she couldn’t just stand there stunned; she had to scream, to run for help. She drew a breath, but there was the other man, the one she’d forgotten, and he was behind her. He got something over her mouth, and when she tried to breathe, the world spun and then fuzzed out.
Chapter 2
Faith’s cheek was smashed against something unyielding and chill. She was lying on something hard. That much came to her in a half-awake haze, and then adrenaline burst through her body. Her heart pounded as her eyes snapped open. Those men. They’d killed Laurence and kidnapped her.
She was lying on industrial tile and staring at an industrial table leg bolted to the floor. Beyond it, there were floor-level cabinets under a counter at the edge of the room. Everything was lit with the slightly harsh wash of cheap fluorescent light banks, though with a hole of dimness in the center of the room like a single bank had burned out. Faith sat up, swiping at her mouth and nose, though of course there was nothing there now, and the weird lingering chemical-y scent in every breath was just her imagination.
Everything was silent, but she peered into every corner anyway. Nothing moved, no sign of the kidnappers, though there was a person-sized lump on the floor on the other side of the table. Faith’s pounding heart made her peer into every corner a second time, before she moved. God, if that was Laurence’s body she’d probably puke or something, but she absolutely had to know.
He still had a cloth over his mouth and nose, slid slightly off center, so maybe the chemical smell wasn’t her imagination after all. Faith yanked it off and tossed it as far as she could. He was breathing. She could see that even before she took his pulse. It felt strong enough, but she didn’t have much basis for comparison, especially since her hands were shaking so hard she wasn’t sure she had her fingers placed exactly right on his neck. He was flat on his back, though his arms were flopped, one on his chest, one up near his head, like someone had dragged him in by the ankles and not worried about how his arms knocked around.
His shirt was completely soaked with blood from chest to hem, the fabric bunched up around the jagged tear crossing it. The top of his jeans was black and damp, though it looked like the denim hadn’t wicked as far. Reminded of the splatter, she looked down at her own shirt, but the brown dots there seemed so polite in comparison.
