“Do you ever eat?” Unrepentant, I stabbed the topmost piece of French toast on his plate and crammed it in my mouth before reaching for the milk. “Or drink?”
“Yes.”
I waited for him to expound on his dietary requirements, but he appeared absorbed in his lesson plans. “When?”
“Does it matter?” He kept skimming, writing notes in the margin.
“Yes.” I stole another wedge from him while he wasn’t looking and decimated it in two bites. Maple syrup stuck one corner to my cheek, but I didn’t let that slow the fork-to-mouth action. “Is this another side effect of bonding with a wraith?”
Call me paranoid, but I was starting to think that was his go-to excuse when he wanted a topic dropped.
“More or less.” His gaze lifted to mine, and his eyes sparkled, a rich navy blue in this light. “Do you need a wet cloth?”
“No.” Heat tingled in my cheeks, which were goopy with syrup. “I can get it.” I poked the corner of toast glued to my face into my mouth with my pinky—like a lady—then turned up my glass of milk to wash it all down. “My compliments to the chef.”
The chef in question stood, the blades of his sharp cheekbones ruddy beneath his freckles, and he padded to the sink where he wet a dish towel.
“Here.” He returned to me, bending low to dab my cheek and jaw. “Let me get that.”
“Have you ever considered teaching elementary school instead of college?”
“No.” The rag, and his focus, slipped over my bottom lip. “Why do you ask?”
“You’re a nurturer.” I took the cloth from him, the fabric warmer than his chilly fingers. “You’re good at taking care of people.”
The praise stunned him into silence for a beat. “Caring for someone because you want to is a different beast than caring for someone because it’s your job.”
“Ah,” I said eloquently while stinging heat crept across my chest like a spreading sunburn. The idea he might actually like having me around was…nice. “Can I ask you a question?”
A crinkle pleated his forehead into neat rows. “Yes.”
I steeled myself for his response while scrubbing the sticky residue off my hands. “Have you met any Marchands?”
“No.” He straightened at last and reclaimed his seat. “Mother and Evangeline weren’t close. Mother was the stereotypical annoying little sister. She idolized Maud, but she wasn’t allowed in her big sister’s inner circle.” He considered me. “She probably hadn’t thought about your mother in years until Evangeline returned to Savannah. She can be…”
“Self-centered?”
“I was going to say career-oriented.” He twisted his mouth like it might squeeze off the laugh twitching in his shoulders. “Why do you ask?”
“Eloise Marchand showed up on my doorstep tonight.”
“That’s…unexpected.”
Black devoured his eyes from corner to corner while he conferred with Cletus. The wraith didn’t update Linus in real time unless I was in danger. Clearly Linus wasn’t willing to wait for the full report at dawn.
“Yes and…no.” I fessed up before he put two and two together. “I might have asked Odette to call Dame Marchand.”
“You’re searching for your father.” The statement came out with the slightest edge.
“Yeah.” I ducked my head. “I thought it might help to know how he fits into all this.”
This being the goddess-touched freak of nature that was his daughter.
“There was a reason your mother kept him out of your lives.”
“What reason?” I braced my elbow on the table and rested my chin on my palm. “No one knows.”
Eloise’s arrival had sparked a new possibility, one I had never considered, and I couldn’t ditch the idea.
Linus was shaking his head. “Your mother—”
“What if she never told him about me?” I tapped my bottom lip with my pinky. “What if he doesn’t know he has a daughter?”
“What if she was afraid to tell him?” he countered. “What if their relationship wasn’t…?”
The implication turned my stomach, but it made sense. “You think she might have been his mistress.”
Divorce was taboo within the Society. Affairs were of no consequence…unless you got caught.
Having a love child smacked of incontrovertible proof to me. And yet, Mom had kept me.
“The theory fits with her leaving him after she learned of her condition. If the Marchands suspected, and after she refused to abort, it would explain why her family disowned her.” He reached across the table, his cool pointer tapping my forearm. “The only truth to be found at this table, in this moment, is that we simply don’t know.”
“We moved around so much.” I stared at the elegant bend of his fingers where they curled on the table, flexing as though comfort were a butterfly he feared crushing in his hand before gifting it to me. “Mom made no secret about our gifts. She never taught me, but she let me watch when she performed resuscitations.”
Those had been off the books, a means of earning money to feed us, but I hadn’t known that until I turned Woolly upside down in search of clues. Mom had kept a ledger with notations in the margin, in case she ever got caught, and it was packed away with her belongings in the attic. Sifting through those fragments of her life hurt too much. Tears in my eyes, I had folded the box shut and hadn’t returned since.
“We changed cities so often, I couldn’t get a familiar. She told me about them, and I wanted a kitten so badly, but there was no guarantee the next place we lived would allow pets.” I blasted out a sigh. “I was so young when she died.” Five years old and an orphan. “I don’t remember much about her, just bits and pieces of our life together. I’m afraid…” I bit my lip, “…that what I do recall isn’t real. Maud told me so many stories. I can’t tell them from memory anymore.”
The chair legs scraped as Linus stood. The cold of his touch bit through the thin fabric of my shirt when his palm came to rest on my shoulder, but I covered his hand with mine anyway.
“I have to know,” I confessed. “Not only what I am, but who I am too.”
“I understand better than you might think.”
“There’s no question of your paternity, buddy.” I patted his hand. “You’re one-part Woolworth to one-part Lawson. Mixed vigorously.” I tasted bile in my mouth. “Scratch that last part. I really don’t want to know if you were shaken or stirred into existence.”
“No.” His hand eased away. “I’m not.”
“What?” I toppled my chair in a rush to stand and face him. “Are you…? Were you…?”
Adoption would explain how Linus could be both a decent guy and related to the Grande Dame. Admittedly, by eliminating the “related to the Grande Dame” part, but still.
“Don’t get too excited,” he teased. “Clarice Lawson is my biological mother.”
Oh, well. No one was perfect. “And your biological father?”
“He was a donor, my father’s cousin twice removed, to keep the bloodline pure. I was carried via surrogate because of Mother’s advanced age, so no one was the wiser.”
Surrogacy was common among necromancers due to a propensity for females to undergo menopause around three hundred years of age. Sperm donors weren’t uncommon, either. Necromancers weren’t the most fertile bunch. That’s how we ended up with a Low Society in the first place. They were interbred with humans in a bid to increase fertility rates, and it worked, but they sacrificed magic in the bargain.
Actually, now that I thought about it, as a Woolworth seeking a financially and socially superior match rather than a genetic one, the Society would likely applaud the Grande Dame’s choice to engineer her ideal heir.
“Advanced age,” I echoed. “Maybe never retell this story within your mother’s hearing if you want to hold on to your favored-son status.”
Clarice Lawson was a lot of things, and vain was chief among them.
“This information is, as I’m sure you can imagine, sensitive.” He studied the glossy tips of his dress shoes. “I would appreciate it if you kept this between us.”
“You keep my secrets.” Oscar, my ghostly ward, came to mind. “Keeping yours is the least I can do.”
That earned me the tiniest smile, and my lips twitched to return his confidence.
“There’s nothing more natural than to wonder, Grier.”
“Speaking from experience?” A hungry mind like his wouldn’t have let a mystery as compelling as his paternity go unraveled, confidentiality clause or not. “What do you know about the donor?”
“His name is Timothy Mercer.” Linus tucked his hands into his pockets. “He lives in Montana with his wife and their daughters.”
“You have half--sisters.” A trill of curiosity shot through me. “Have you met him? Or them?”
“I met him once,” he admitted. “He lived in Savannah at the time, so it was easy enough for me to take a bus to the Lyceum and confront him.” He shrugged like it didn’t matter when it must have for little Linus to brave public transportation alone. “Mr. Mercer was polite about the whole thing. He told me I was the spitting image of his grandfather.” That memory earned a faint smile. “He called Mother, and she came to collect me. That was the last time I saw him. I went back once, years later, but he had already moved out west by then. Given their arrangement, it didn’t feel right to pursue the connection further, even with sisters to consider.”
Most likely, Mercer had been pink-slipped the night he met his son. “Thank you for telling me this.”
All kids with question marks for parents longed for a link to their roots. A connection to their past. An understanding of who they came from that might shape who they became. I got lucky. I grew up hearing stories about Mom from Maud and Odette and flipping through the scrapbooks of their lives. My father might have been a blank page, but the others overflowed with proof I had been so very loved.