Brittany Bends Read online

  Copyright Information

  Brittany Bends

  Copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover and Layout copyright © 2015 by WMG Publishing

  Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing

  Cover art copyright © Jsheldon86/Dreamstime, Leeloomultipass/Dreamstime, Valuavitaly/Dreamstime

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

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  About the Author

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  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The Interim Fates books have been in the works for a long time. I’m sure my husband Dean Wesley Smith got tired of hearing about them. But I greatly appreciate all the help and support he gave me over the years.

  Thanks to Allyson Longueira for shepherding the books through the various processes, and to Colleen Kuehne for her enthusiasm.

  Thanks also go to Greg Vose, Robert James, and the Facebook Brain Trust for answering an important question so very fast and so very well.

  Mostly, though, thanks to the fans who’ve been asking about the Interim Fates for a very long time now. I greatly appreciate your support.

  ONE

  AS MY STEPBROTHER Eric pulls his car into the nearly empty parking lot behind the Burger King, he keeps one finger on the door lock, frowns at me, and asks, “Do you want my coat?”

  Eric’s totally nice to me, and he doesn’t have to be. We’re not related, and he thinks I’m pretty weird. He’s heard of me, of course. Everyone in the Johnson family had heard of me before I moved in. I was Mom’s “mistake,” a cautionary tale for all the girls, because if they “do it” just because they “lose their head,” they might end up pregnant and alone and faced with lots of tough choices.

  Tough choices doesn’t even begin to describe the complicated stuff that happened around my birth, and tough choices doesn’t even begin to describe what’s been happening since July, when I finally moved in with Mom.

  Besides, I don’t like to think about Mom “losing her head” and “doing it” with my dad. Like, shudder.

  And that’s the kind of stuff I say that makes Eric cringe. Not the mom and dad stuff, which is bad enough. But what he calls Outdated Valley Girl Speak. He says it makes me sound totally stupid, but then I tell him that his accent makes him sound totally stupid, and he says I don’t know anything about Northern Wisconsin, which is true. I don’t.

  I don’t know much about anything in the Greater World, which is where I live now, without magic, and without any real support.

  Mom tries, but she doesn’t know what to do with me. I’m her oldest biological kid, but not the oldest in the Johnson Family, which is how the brood I’ve found myself attached to now describes itself.

  Eric is the oldest kid, and he goes off to college next year. He says he can hardly wait.

  He’s holding out his coat to me. It’s a tweedy plaid thing that hasn’t been in style maybe ever, but he’s really not asking about coats. In the month that I’ve lived with the Johnson Family, I have learned sideways speak that they all use. Or at least, I think I’ve learned it. And I’m pretty sure that Eric’s coat offer is sideways speak.

  “What’s the real problem?” I ask, groping for the door handle. I hate being seen in this car. I’m not from this town, and even I know the car’s a piece of junk. The outside isn’t painted and the inside smells of mothballs.

  Karl, my stepdad, says that the upholstery has to be removed, because Eric had it steam cleaned and that only made the smell worse. Plus, now that he turned on the heater, little white pieces of something that looks like paper keep floating out of the ducts or whatever they’re called.

  It seems that before Eric bought this thing (long before I moved in), some mice had nested under the hood. They chewed through wiring and stuff, and Eric’s really proud of himself for fixing that.

  I think if he fixed wiring and stuff, he could’ve taken a little extra time and fixed the leftover mouse nests too.

  “What’s really going on?” Eric repeats. “Pretty simple, Brit. You’re walking. You’ll freeze.”

  He calls me Brit. Everyone here calls me Brit. I guess Brittany is too big a word for them. (And okay, that’s mean, but sometimes, all this nicey-nicey stuff the Johnson Family does makes me want to be mean.)

  I look at him. He actually seems concerned.

  I frown.

  Eric looks like his father, all brown hair and square-jawed handsomeness. His head brushes the car’s ceiling, and his wrists stick out of almost every shirt he wears. The Johnsons are big and bony.

  I take after Mom, mostly. She’s willowy and blonde. Pale blonde. So blonde that her hair almost looks white. She says she always thought she was the whitest person on the planet until she met me. I’m even fairer skinned than she is, which wasn’t a problem until July.

  Then I learned what sunburn really is.

  Now I’m going to learn what “cold” really is. Or at least everyone says that’s what’ll happen. Apparently, I live in the coldest place in the world—well, maybe not the world, but the United States, anyway. (And yes, I’m just learning what the United States is.)

  I now live in the Midwest or, more specifically, Wisconsin, or even more specifically, a place that calls itself Superior, even though I have no idea how it can be superior when there’s an even better place (Duluth, in something called Minnesota) across a giant inland sea from here.

  The giant inland sea, which everyone insists on calling a lake (even though they try to cover up their mistake by calling it a great lake), is also called Superior and it is superior because it’s bigger than all the other inland seas (I mean Great Lakes) combined.

  The inland sea—I mean lake—has an effect. So it’s colder here in the summer and even colder in the winter.

  I’m braced for it, kinda sorta, but what my stepbrother Eric is referring to is that for that first two months I was here (July and August), I kept asking if the fifty-something degree nighttime temperatures (in this scale that everyone adds the word “Fahrenheit” to as if they expect me to know some other scale) were the “really cold” temperatures I had heard of.

  That made my step and half siblings laugh so hard my mother would shush them for being rude. To be fair, she’s their mother too, even though she didn’t give birth to some of them. My step siblings lost their real mother to cancer. (I’ve seen the movies; I know what cancer is [again, kinda sorta, but I understand enough of it to know it’s a real tragedy and it makes even the strongest people cry].) Mom married Karl about a year after I was born, not that it matters, because by then my father was raising me.

  Well, my father wasn’t raising me. He’d assigned me to some wood nymphs at first, and that was when I “met” my sisters Tiffany and Crystal, who also have the same dad but different moms. Tiff, Crystal, and I were Interim Fates together, which is a long story. But we’ve been each other’s best friends and close family before we became Interim Fates. We’ve known each other since Tiff and Crystal got assigned to the same nymphs I had back when we were all babies. Of course, none of us remember this because we were preverbal, even if we did have our magic by then.

  Magic, which is now gone.

  “I am not going to freeze,” I say to Eric archly. I’m good at archly. If there’s one thing I learned from my Greek family, it’s how to be arch when I need to, espe
cially with mere mortals.

  “Brit, I know you,” Eric says, even though he doesn’t, not really, because Mom won’t let me tell any of my eight half and step siblings the truth about who I am and who my dad is and who my other half siblings are. “You’ll start shivering the minute you get out of this car. It’s nearly freezing out there.”

  I square my shoulders. I hate this part of my new life, the way that everyone takes care of me or makes fun of me, and I can’t tell which it is just from the tone.

  “You’re just saying that.” I gather up my denim purse, which is the most embarrassing thing I own, but I can’t get rid of it or trade it away because Mom accented it with this thing she has called a BeDazzler, and the purse has all these rhinestones and fake jewels all over it, and tons of fringe underneath. It looks like the 1970s vomited all over the purse, which I muttered one day to my half sister Anna, and she said archly (maybe the whole family is good at arch), That stuff is back in style, Brit, and Mom worked hard on that purse. Be nice.

  Be nice. Be nice. That’s all they ever say to me here. I have no idea how to be nice. We weren’t nice back at Mount Olympus, which is where I’m from (kinda sorta because I was actually born here in Superior, believe it or not). And the Mount Olympus I’m referring to isn’t the Mount Olympus that shows up on Google maps. I mean the Mount Olympus that people here call “mythical” because they think it doesn’t exist, just because they’re not magical enough to get there.

  Yeah, I’m a snob. My half and step siblings accuse me of that all the time. When they’re not berating me for failing to be nice.

  Eric shakes his ugly plaid coat at me.

  “I am not just saying that you’ll freeze to be mean. It’s barely forty degrees and there’s a wind. Let me drive you to the store. Mom’ll be mad if I don’t.” Eric has this tone that he uses when he’s frustrated. It’s kinda nasal, but kinda not.

  Everyone in this town speaks with a sing-song accent that I’ve never heard before, except in the movie Fargo, which everyone here says makes fun of the people of the real Fargo (and I don’t even know where that is. I didn’t even know there was a real Fargo until I moved here). Besides, everyone says real Fargo is far away, and they all claim that no one here sounds like anyone in the movie, although they do sound like that all the time.

  Heck, I’m beginning to even sound like that, like using the word “heck” and stuff, although my half brother Leif says I’ll never sound like I’m part of the Johnson Family because I have this snotty accent. And by snotty, he means British, but really, my accent isn’t British.

  I speak English with a mixture of accents. I mostly learned English from American movies, but I also had tutors from what Crystal’s mother calls The Continent (it took forever for me to figure out that she meant Europe), and yes, a few British teachers as well. Plus, the base-line accent is Greek. Not modern Greek, but Ancient Greek, because, you know, my family invented it.

  My dad invented it. Or part of it. Or at least he helped coin a few terms.

  It’s hard to tell with my dad, because he lies all the time, except when he’s telling the truth. And usually the truth is harder to believe.

  Like who my dad really is.

  My dad is Zeus. Around here, they call him the Greek God Zeus, like there’s some other Zeus in the world.

  There is only one Zeus. He’s my dad, and he’s a real pain in the rear most of the time, although when I said that to Mom shortly after arriving here, she pursed her lips together (which I would learn is something she does a lot when she disapproves) and reminded me that no matter what he does, he’s my father so I should show him some respect.

  Yeah, whatever.

  “You want me to drive you or not?” Eric asks. “Because if you sit here much longer, you’re going to be late.”

  I sigh and open the car door, and this blast of totally frosty air hits me. I didn’t even have to get out to start shivering. I hate it that Eric’s right. I’m not sure how I can walk the six blocks to the shopping plaza without turning into some kind of gigantic blue ice cube.

  I mean, it’s not like I’m dressed for this. I’m dressed for success, or at least, I’m dressed for success Johnson Family style.

  Nine kids, all under the age of eighteen, two parents and only one with a full-time job. Even though Karl works as some kind of major project manager and has something called an engineering degree and gets paid pretty darn good (whatever that means), it doesn’t cover the cost of housing and feeding and dealing with all of us. Mom works part time in an accounting office (full time at tax season, whatever that means), but that doesn’t bring in enough to “make up the difference,” whatever that means.

  Since I added a strain to their budget (and I do know what that means), I have to get a part-time job so I can start saving for school (whatever that means, since I’m already in school, not that I’m very good at it, because my education at Mount Olympus is nothing like my education here).

  Which is all a long way of saying that what I’m wearing is a hand-me-down dress from my stepsister Lise (and the dang thing, while it’s a lovely sky blue, is one size too big for me) and panty hose that are all my own (and what a joy those things are [and Lise says no self-respecting teenager wears them, so I guess I’m not a self-respecting teenager]) and the only pair of dressy high heels that fit me (not that they really fit me; they’re one size too small because they’re my half sister Anna’s, which means they hurt like a son of a gun, as Karl would say).

  “Last offer,” Eric says, “because I’m starting to get cold now.”

  I look at him, and can’t really decide what the heck to do. Karl says you have to show up for a job interview looking like you don’t need the job, and Eric’s car screams I need money (at least, that’s what my half brother Ivan says). You can hear the car from miles away because it needs a muffler, and it needs a bumper and it needs—well, a lot of stuff. But Eric is giving it some TLC, which I don’t entirely understand but take to mean he’s trying to fix it, and—

  “Screw it,” he says, and puts the car in drive. He starts to pull out, and I have to yank the door to close it, which is hard because there really is a wind, and it’s turning the door into a sail.

  “Hey!” I say, because really, I can’t say much more given that I’m fighting with the door and something’s beeping and thank heavens I still have my seatbelt on.

  “You don’t get a vote,” he says. “I’m driving you. You dithered.”

  He has to stop before he pulls onto Caitlin Avenue, which is when I finally get the car door closed. I want to glare at him, but I’m still shivering and I think he might’ve saved my butt, since these heels aren’t that stable either.

  He pulls onto Caitlin and I peer at the red brick buildings of the University of Wisconsin-Superior (which always look nice unlike the rest of the town, which needs paint) and then he turns onto Belknap Street and heads the few blocks toward the store.

  It’s in this old plaza. There’s a grocery store “anchoring” it, at least that’s what Mom says, and a liquor store that’s been there “forever” (even though I don’t know how long forever could be since this town didn’t even exist until 1854, which certainly isn’t forever ago [and I know how old the town is because I had a stupid “forever” argument with Ivan, who’s ten and thinks he knows everything about everything, which I’m beginning to realize he doesn’t]).

  There’s an AT&T store, which I keep wanting to go into, ever since my sister Crystal bought me and Tiff iPhones that our mothers made us give back, and a pizza place and a Subway across the parking lot, and a couple of other retail stores. One of them went out of business and a new one is opening, and it’s pretty easy to tell which one that is because it’s got a big sign on its only window that says, Now Hiring. Apply Online, which is exactly what I did (with Eric’s help).

  The store is some kind of chain bargain store, at least that’s what Eric says, and he says they’re putting a toe into Superior to see if they want to
open a big box store outside the city limits. I have no idea why a place that sells a little bit of everything wants to open a store outside of town that sells only large boxes, but hey, I don’t understand most things about this world I find myself in.

  Eric seems to know that I’m nervous and he also seems to know that I don’t want anyone to see the car, so he parks behind Subway.

  “Walk on over,” he says. “I’m getting a snack.” Then he smirks at me. “And don’t freeze.”

  Sometimes he’s really nice, and sometimes he’s a real jerk, and sometimes he’s both at once.

  Can you tell that I’m confused by just about everything? Including everyone in this town, I swear to God (as Anna always says before Mom tells her to stop swearing to anyone).

  I get out and totter my way across the parking lot. Now I regret not having Eric’s coat no matter how terrible it would look. Every part of me is cold. And the wind reaches under my skirt like it works for my nephew Pan (who is waaaaaaay older than me, by the way, like by centuries).

  I clutch the purse to my side, and the stupid bedazzled fake jewels are turning cold under my palm, which means that my hands are as cold as I think they are, which is just not a good thing.

  I get to the sidewalk and almost trip climbing up the curb. Up close, the store looks dark and creepy and empty, but as I wonder if I should turn around, a woman opens the door.

  “Are you Brittany Johnson?” she asks. I can barely see her through the gloom.

  “Um, yeah,” I say, even though technically, I’m not a Johnson. Mom just decided to give me Karl’s last name to avoid the confusion. Because my birth certificate calls me Lundquist, which is Mom’s old last name, and Mom doesn’t want me explaining to everyone why all her other kids are Johnson and she has one Lundquist because no one in town, apparently, knows she gave birth “out of wedlock,” which is, I guess, something totally frowned on here.