“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.”
She could blame the Society for not keeping track of her family, for assuming once the power was gone, it would never come back. But what good would that do? These women weren’t the ones who’d made that decision. They weren’t even aware of it. Riley just had to accept it for what it was.
“Where’s John?” Marley stopped at his dark office. “I thought he said he’d take us back to the apartment.”
Disgruntled and depressed, Riley resented feeling like a child who couldn’t set foot outside without adult supervision. After training today, it seemed ridiculous to have to rely on a powerless man to protect her. And in the mood she was in, she dared anyone to try anything.
“It’s only a few blocks,” she said. “We can walk it okay.” She wouldn’t plow ahead unprepared, though. She needed metal, more than the handful of nuts and bolts in her pocket. She thought of the tire iron in the training room and decided to go get it. So what if she’d look foolish carrying it? It would probably ward off more than Millinger stalkers.
“Why don’t you call John’s cell?” she suggested. “I’ll be right back.” She hurried to the end of the beige-carpeted hallway to the stairwell, clattered down one flight, and pushed through the fire door into the big room now illuminated by two security lights on the wall. She grabbed the tire iron from its spot on the shelf and ran back to Marley, who was putting her phone away.
“He and Jeannine had another meeting on the other side of the city. He’s pissed. He was supposed to be back here by now, but he’s stuck on the highway. Overturned fuel truck. They’re apparently turning cars around to go back to the last exit, but he figures he’s got at least an hour before he gets back here.”
Riley really didn’t want to hang around, and part of her didn’t want to see him after what she’d overheard today. “Did you tell him we’d be okay?”
“Yeah.” Marley smiled. “He didn’t like it, but he didn’t have any other solution. He said to tell you to get the tire—Yeah, that.” She laughed as Riley hefted it. “Okay, then. What do you want to eat?”
They discussed takeout options as they headed out into the waning twilight and walked toward the apartment.