“Okay. My sordid tale.” Marley dropped a handful of paper napkins on the cheap particleboard coffee table and sank onto her own cushion at the short end of the table. “Has Sam told you about the leech?”
Riley shook her head.
“Hadn’t gotten around to it.” Sam eyed Marley thoughtfully. “I thought you didn’t like to talk about it.”
Marley shrugged. “It doesn’t bother me anymore. Much.”
Sam didn’t look like he believed her, and Riley wouldn’t have, either. Marley’s tone was too sharp, like she was trying too hard to act like it was no big deal.
“I can tell her,” Sam offered. “It was my fault.”
Marley snorted. “Hardly.” She turned away from Sam and directed her next words to Riley. “To understand what happened to me, you have to understand us. Since your mother was dormant, how much do you know about goddesses?”
“Not much. Just what I could get from your website and the street.” She cringed a little at the words that separated her from them. “I’m a complete newb.” She picked up a piece of broccoli and watched it drip soy sauce so she didn’t have to see Marley’s expression.
“Well, you know how people talk about connected life force? An energy that’s created by all the life on earth and stuff like that?”
“Sure.”
“That’s essentially true. Energy is the core of our existence. Science has proved that, even though it doesn’t really deal with what most people call magic. And it’s fed by a lot more than life force. Okay, here’s an analogy.” Marley’s enthusiasm and warmth revved up, drawing Riley in. “You know how certain things conduct electricity better than others, and in different ways? Wires carry it into our homes, right? If lightning strikes a body of water, the electricity travels across it, but if power is generated in a power plant and directed through specific conductors, it comes into our homes and businesses to do different things. Run appliances, turn on lights, etc.”
“I get it.” The concept wasn’t difficult. She applied Marley’s analogy to what she’d done that afternoon with the forklift. “The source of the power is a conduit, connecting us to the main pool of energy. How we use it is based on how we’re created or something. Like someone has a talent for painting or singing. I use mine as a force. You—” She cut herself off. She’d gotten carried away and forgotten the story they were leading up to.
Marley forced a smile. “My sister can heal, among other things. Some goddesses are more specialized than others, but most can do a broad range of things, only limited by what they try. We’ll get you into some training and testing, see how broad your application is.”
Riley nodded again and waited while Marley toyed with her fried rice, deep in thought.
“Have you ever been in love?” Marley finally asked, looking up at Riley.
Sam’s dimples flashed in the back of her mind. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his head lift slightly. She flushed. “Not really.”
“I was. Big mistake. I guess he was using me, and he got what he wanted. I gave him the ability to draw power, and it turned him into a leech.”
Riley raised her eyebrows. She had to sort through the details of that short sentence to decide what to ask first. She went with the part that seemed least personal to Marley. “We can do that? Give someone else the powers we have?”
Marley’s shoulders dropped half an inch, and her hand relaxed on the chopsticks. “Only under very certain conditions. It takes a goddess with the capability and the son of a goddess with similar capabilities. But he’s not a natural vessel with an energy source, so once he uses what he’s initially given, it’s gone. He has to constantly reacquire power in some way.” She gave up the pretense of eating and dropped her chopsticks, slumping over her plate. “Anson was greedy. What I was willing to share wasn’t enough. He used what I’d given him to drain another goddess of all of her power. That’s permanent, and made him far stronger. In total, he drained four other goddesses. And then, when we tried to stop him, he drained me.”
Riley wasn’t sure what to say. Poor Marley, to be so utterly betrayed by someone she loved. But in the back of her mind, part of her was ranting, demanding to know if that was why Sharla and Vern were after her. Funny how this power thing had caused her so many problems, but the realization that it could be taken from her turned her fingers to ice.
“Is that why your eyes…” she began tentatively.
“Yep.” Marley brushed a hand over them before picking up the chopsticks again. “All of us have abnormally light eyes now. Freaky, huh?”
“What happened to the leech? Is he still out there?”
“Somewhere. Quinn, my sister, defeated him and sucked all the power back out of him.” She dug in the takeout bag for a wax-paper-wrapped egg roll and a packet of duck sauce. “He was in jail for a little while, but the normal authorities didn’t have much on him, so he’s free again. But powerless.”
Riley’s appetite had left her. She drew a leg up and rested her chin on her knee. “What happened to the other leeched goddesses?”
Sam cleared his throat and poked at a piece of chicken. “One died of complications from diabetes last year, unrelated. The other three, Jennifer, Tanda, and Chloe, are okay. Normal. But—”
“But not really,” Riley finished. “How could they be?”
The reality of their loss sat heavy in the silence for several moments.
“What about the power she pulled from him?” Riley asked when she couldn’t hold her curiosity in any longer. “Is it gone?”
“No, Quinn has it.” Marley’s tone cooled but not toward Riley. More like she wanted to be done with the conversation. “She says she’s working on a way to return the power to the leeched goddesses, but I’m a broken vessel, since I ignored all the fairy tales and warnings about bestowing power in the first place. I created the monster that did so much damage, so my punishment—besides my own leeching, which they deemed poetic justice—was to start the educational program that will hopefully prevent it from happening again. Among other things.”
Sam shifted on the couch, stretching one long leg under the table and bouncing the other knee. “Anson’s back,” he said, his jaw flexing.
Marley gaped at him. “What?”
“I think I saw him in Connecticut. He was following you,” he told Riley. “I wasn’t sure, I only caught a glimpse, but the more we talk the less likely I think it is that one party has been harassing you and someone completely different is approaching other goddesses.” He told them what he’d learned from John earlier that afternoon. “I have to figure out what he’s up to.”
Riley’s head spun with everything she’d learned tonight. “Why do you have to do it? Isn’t there some kind of authority in charge of that? The Protectorate?”
“We have a security team,” Marley explained. “But they don’t have to do much. We’re a pretty quiet community. They weren’t very useful last time.”
“And the Protectorate doesn’t investigate.” Sam stood and carried his dishes and some of the food containers to the kitchen area. “But it’s my responsibility anyway.”
“Oh, it is not.” Marley got up and followed him, and Riley scrambled to her feet, too.
“Anson was my college roommate,” Sam told Riley. A weight seemed to have settled on him, but one too heavy for what he was saying.
“So?”
“Everything he learned about goddesses, he learned from me.”
Marley made an exasperated sound. “That’s not true. You didn’t even know about leeching, and he made all his own choices. Like I did,” she added, as if used to holding up her own culpability before anyone else could. “All that’s over. He can’t leech anymore, Quinn assured us of that. So why does this have to be on your shoulders?”