Viola changeling, p.1
Viola Changeling, page 1
Viola Changeling
Dayna Mortimore
Copyright © 2021 Dayna Mortimore
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the express written permission of the author.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
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
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
Prologue
Viola Livingstone woke on the morning of her twenty-first birthday, surprised she was alive.
Her feet made soft sounds on the carpet as she crept along the quiet of the hallway. Her brother’s door, already open a crack— always ready for a quick escape— gave easily under the touch of her hand as she craned her neck to see inside. Relief, hot and sudden as fire, surged in her gut, and she let out a breath she hadn’t realized she had been holding. Matty was still here. Her brother, safe and sleeping in his bed. His curls were strikingly dark against the white of his pillow, the corners of his face lit up with slivers of sickly yellow morning light. He hadn’t left. He hadn’t been taken or killed.
He was still here, and still hers.
She shut the door as softly as she could and crept back down the hall.
Matty wasn’t supposed to make it to his eighteenth birthday. By extension, she— his protector, his shadow, and the last barrier between him and any creature intending harm— shouldn’t have made it to her twenty-first. But here she was, standing alone and barefooted in their cramped kitchen, each breath a tidal wave of struggling to hold on.
The smell of frying butter roused him. She heard the patter of his feet, considerably lighter than hers, as he made his way to the kitchen and sat down behind her. She stuck a single candle onto his plate and slid it in front of him. It was a joke they shared from childhood.
“Happy birthday,” she said.
Matty hid his smile behind his fist. “Happy birthday.”
She sat.
They split the pancakes in silence, Viola’s jaw working automatically as she considered their next move. They had been in this town for a little over a year now, which was too long. A part of her had never expected to make it this far. If she played her cards right, they might be able to stay for a few weeks longer. Magic tended to hold as long as you were able to keep your nerve. Just a few weeks until they had to find a new place to hide, settle down, construct a new false life that their mother might have approved of. She wouldn’t have approved of any of this.
“You look like you woke up in a bad mood.”
Viola didn’t dignify him with a response. “Eat your pancakes.”
To Matty’s credit, he obeyed. “So,” he said around a mouthful of food, “how does it feel to be twenty-one?”
Viola thought. “No different from being twenty. How does it feel to be eighteen?”
“No different from being seventeen,” teased Matty. There was something about the way he smiled that reminded Viola of herself. A certain edge to her brother’s expression was perpetually calculating, courtesy of so many years on the road with their mother. Back when they lived in the van, he had been a small child, light on his feet— too light to be human— and gradually learning the art of distrust. The result was this. Even now as they ate breakfast, she knew his eyes were on the calendar, the windows. Counting all the taps and hiding places.
“Vi,” he murmured, finally cutting the thick coil of tension in the room. “You can relax. I’m not going anywhere.”
She forced a breath between clamped teeth. “I know that.”
“But you’re surprised anyway. That I’m still here.”
It went unspoken that her surprise extended past the simple fact that nobody had taken him. “I guess I didn’t expect you to stick around once you no longer needed me to buy your plane tickets.”
She expected a joke about how he could have technically already done that, or about how she earned all the money. Matty’s gaze, fixed and steady, held her own. “I’m not going to leave you. I wouldn’t.”
She dropped eye contact. She hated eye contact.
Viola was only going through the perfunctory motions with her breakfast: cut, stab, chew. “Mom would kill you, anyway.”
“Mom’s not here. That’s not why I stay and you know it.”
“You have nowhere better to be.” It was an echo of their old life, an inside joke they shared from whenever they’d had to split up with their mother in public and planned to meet later. Let’s meet on this street corner at noon if you have nowhere better to be. Years later, Viola still had nowhere better to be than here, protecting her Changeling brother.
Matty joined her in the kitchen to clean dishes after breakfast. He looked wan and bedraggled in that hazy way of his, hair a mess. Were it not for Matty’s curls, Viola always thought they might be mistaken for twins. They had both inherited their Japanese mother’s sharp features, her angular chin. They had the same dark and calculating eyes. In a family portrait, the absence of either of their fathers may not have even mattered, so much were they the spitting images of Rena Livingstone. It was just his curls that gave them away. That, and his eyes shone in the dark.
Matty was still blinking sleep out of his eyes. “Crap. I have no idea why I’m still so tired.”
Viola didn’t look at him, just at the corner of the dishwasher as she stacked it. “Think it has something to do with your moon sickness?”
She saw him shake his head in her peripheral. “No. I mean, probably not, right? It’s still another couple weeks before that’s due.”
She had no response. She wasn’t exactly comfortable talking about his less than human afflictions.
Matty sighed. “You shouldn’t have to work on your birthday. That’s so unfair.”
“I don’t have to work today. I asked to. We need the money.”
His voice became soft. “I could get a job.”
Viola didn’t have a response for him that wouldn’t lead to an argument. What would their mother have said, she wondered, about Matty growing up, leaning into his dreams, garnering ambition— wanting to protect her, too?
She would have yelled at you, Viola’s brain supplied. Then hit you upside your stupid head for good measure.
She glanced at Matty from the side of her eye, and thought, one year since we moved to this town. Two years since our last incident. Five years since we left our mother. Eighteen years since we found Matty in his crib.
“We’ll talk about it later,” she settled on eventually, when it became clear that he was waiting for an answer. It was what she always said.
Chapter 1
Viola got dressed in the quiet of the bathroom and thought about birthdays.
Their mother had always said that Matty wouldn’t make it to eighteen. Viola had never decided how much of it was prophecy and how much was superstition: Rena’s paranoia had never known bounds to begin with. Viola had been raised with the knowledge that he was not supposed to reach his adult years under their care, but that it was Viola’s responsibility— her duty as her mother’s daughter— to get him there anyway.
She thought about those nights on the drive through Rhode Island down to the Florida coast, how their mother would stop the van and sit and wait for the sound of Matty’s breathing to even out. She had said that the monsters would come for him before then: that the fae would not allow them to keep him for so long. She had only been young; she remembered smelling salt when she slept. Beaches, unlike lakes, were safer: she just wasn’t allowed near the water. Viola remembered the way the Summer air had settled on their skins and she had felt something changing, shifting beneath the surface. She had been morphing into a different skeleton, one tasked bone-deep with keeping her family safe. Her mother had not looked her in the eye when she made her swear to keep Matty alive.
They’d been in Pipe Valley for almost a year now. It had been quiet for so long that Viola could barely remember what it was like to run from a creature with bad intentions. Everyone here was so ordinary and unassuming. She’d take a boring townie over the fae any day. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had to load her gun or slip out of a window or take Matty’s hand and disappear. Possibly not since their mother last opened her eyes. Viola had been sixteen.
Relief was a flimsy second skin that threatened to split at any given moment. Seeing yesterday roll into today had not been enough to reassure her. The fact that she could hear him down the hall, humming an unfamiliar song under his breath, eighteen and alive and still her brother, was not enough. Some part of her still believed that one day she would wake to find him gone. She would be nothing.
Short hair slipped through her fingers as she skillfully pulled it up without the aid of a mirror. She didn’t feel twenty-one. She felt either ten or a hundred, the helpless child she was to all of this decades-old responsibility. She flexed her fingers in front of her face, expression neutral. There was never any place to go except forward. It had been working for eighteen years, hadn’t it?
On her way out of the bathroom she spared a glance at the only mirror they owned, at a pale, drawn face with a locked jaw, at the thin line of her mouth and her eyes, hard and dark. She barely recognized the sight at all.
She buttoned up her blue polo shirt on her way back into the kitchen. The uniform always smelled of tequila and seafood no matter how many times she washed it.
“I’ll be home after six,” she reminded Matty, pausing in front of him. “You have my number, and the number for Siren’s is on the refrigerator next to Kayla’s and Chuck’s. You have your phone?”
“As always.” He tipped it in his hand, looking amused.
“Call me if anything happens today. Anything.”
“Bear attack, home invasion, got it.”
“Anything, Matty.”
His expression sobered. “I’ll call you even if it’s just a stomach ache.”
Viola slung her bag over her shoulder and triple checked the lock on the way out. For extra measure, she always left a piece of black tourmaline in the potted plant outside their door, charmed to let her know if anyone came in or out. It was a morsel of magic that sent a sick shiver up her spine, but a necessary one. With the fae hunting them down, she and her mother had learned to get by.
It felt wrong to leave him on their birthday. The number on the calendar had looked so threatening for so long. She had to talk herself into calming down long enough to climb into her car, and again to get the key in the ignition. Matty would be fine. He was an adult, as much as the idea startled her. He had a phone, he had working legs, and he was smart enough to run if anyone so much as came knocking.
It had been more than two years since they ran into anybody dangerous, and more than three since they’d gotten into a real fight. He was fine. They were both fine.
She had to turn the key three times before the damn thing rumbled to life beneath her. It was a 2001 grey Corolla on its last leg that she affectionately named Hunk of Shit when she bought it at the used dealership four years ago, but despite all its rattles and sputtering, it still ran. The car was— second only to her brother— the most reliable thing in Viola’s life. She needed reliable. Reliable was good when you were being chased by evil fae criminals.
Fae. That was what her mother called them, and as far as Viola knew, what they called themselves. Viola hated the word faerie. She thought that it was at best a misconception, and at worst a massive understatement. It wasn’t just that the fae she knew preferred the word as a singular as well as a plural, or even that they didn’t look like faeries: they had no wings, nor were they the mischievous creatures of whimsy from storybooks. They looked nearly identical to humans, actually, save for the fact that their eyes shone in the dark like a cat’s. No, Viola hated the word faerie because of this: in the stories, they were not nearly so monstrous as reality.
Viola associated the fae with a few abstract thoughts. A dark blue sliver of shadow disappearing beneath a doorway. The sharp spell of iron. An unnaturally graceful gait. A wry smile that meant death.
Faeries, she had always thought, were tricksters. The fae were out for blood.
Traffic was a breeze at this time of day, but it usually was in Pipe Valley. It was a nowhere town dead in the middle of Minnesota and bordered by a lush and mostly abandoned wilderness. It was also nearly two hours away from any major city. Siren’s, the place she worked, was a restaurant near the edge of town and the only place for miles that had a bar. Chuck Gibbons had been paying her under the table since they moved here. He’d be miserable to learn that it was her birthday if it meant he’d have to start paying her a legal wage. Viola was more than happy to have a few dollars skimmed here and there if it meant avoiding a paper trail, though. Magic worked better if you didn’t leave a mark.
She arrived at work at quarter to nine and found her coworkers loitering near the entrance.
“Hey, Kayla,” she greeted, unlocking the double set of doors and heading straight for the bar. Kayla was a middle-aged bombshell who Viola had befriended against her will during her first week at Siren’s. Viola didn’t think she had ever seen Kayla without makeup, despite a sleep schedule that had to conflict with the hours she worked and the amount of partying she did. Her immaculate braids bobbed in half-asleep acknowledgment as she followed Viola inside. Chuck was nowhere to be seen, but Butch materialized before she had even finished tying her apron.
He held out a small brown package. Viola stared at it, uncomprehending, until Butch sheepishly placed it on the bench between them. “I, uh, heard a rumor it’s your birthday today. You don’t really seem like the kind of person who likes gifts, but I couldn’t help myself.”
Across the restaurant, Viola tried to shoot Kayla a panicked look, but she was suddenly busy moving chairs around. It took a great effort to tear her eyes back to Butch. He looked so helpless that it made her stomach ache.
“Thanks,” she mumbled. She put the parcel in her bag.
“Oh.” Butch quickly replaced his disappointed expression with a smile. “I mean, yeah, of course you don’t wanna open it at work. Ha-ha.” His hand hovered mid-air like he was debating touching her, which she sincerely hoped he wouldn’t. He gave up after a moment and stuck it in his apron pocket instead. “I can’t believe you’re working on your birthday. Man, Chuck must have it out for you.”
“I asked to work today.”
Butch looked like he didn’t know how to respond, so she spun around to start on the juicer.
“Well…” He regained his senses enough to follow her around the other side of the bar. “If you ever need a shift covered, just know that, like, I’m here. I’m pretty laid back, so I don’t mind. Or you can just make Kayla do it and we can ditch to go see a movie.”
Viola gave up and looked at him. She would have had to eventually, one way or another. His smile seemed genuine. She didn’t doubt that he meant what he said. Butch was cute in a dorky kind of way, with big hands and shaggy hair and a crooked smile. She fought hard to return it with one of her own, but she had never been very skilled at interacting with boys who weren’t her brother. She knew what flirting was the same way she knew what decapitation was: she just wasn’t very good at executing either on the fly. Nor did she know how to let Butch down without breaking his heart. She managed to hold what had to be the world’s most awkward, no-eye-contact smile for a few moments longer before her cheeks started to hurt. Their boss chose that moment to burst through the doors, anyway, and they abruptly split up. It wasn’t much later when Kayla finally woke up enough to come and say good morning.
“I didn’t get you anything,” she said in place of hello.
“Good morning to you, too. Did you see a bed last night?”
“Oh, I saw a bed.” Kayla wiggled her eyebrows. “Didn’t get much sleep, though.”
“Lucky you. Good thing you don’t have to stick around and close tonight.”
“Sounds like that’s some other poor idiot’s job,” she snarked. Viola fought not to roll her eyes and tried to look busy in case Chuck was watching.
“So, Butch,” began Kayla.
“Don’t bother.”
“Hey, I didn’t out you about the birthday thing.” Kayla held her hands up defensively, but there was an edge of evil in her eyes as she stared at Viola through fake lashes. “That was Chuck, believe it or not. He was asking us whether we thought you’d want some sort of pay review. You know, now that it’s actually legal for you to work the bar here.”
“Of course he was.”
“I said no, in case you’re wondering. Didn’t wanna make you seem desperate. He said he’d think about it anyway. Said you were a valuable part of the team.”
“He meant that you’re the only one who shows up for work on time,” Butch added on his way past. When Viola looked at him, he shot her a sheepish grin.
Both she and Kayla waited until he was out of earshot before resuming their conversation.
“He’s so into you, y’know.”
“Yeah.”
“So?” Kayla pressed. When Viola just stared back blankly, she got a groan in response. “Are you gonna actually do anything about it?”
