Mikko Lawrence

The knock was immediately followed by the sound of a woman cursing.

Mikko closed and locked the back door, heading back to the front of the house.  He looked out the window in the living room to see who was at the door.

A black Civic sat idling in the driveway, a man behind the wheel, looking toward the woman at the front door.

She had corn silk blonde hair bound in a French braid, revealing a soft jawline and small ears.  She was a little over average height, maybe five-nine or five-ten. 

She wore a  navy blue dress that went to her knees with textured white swirls swooping over it.  The skirt was pleated, and she wore flats that matched the blue.  She held a white cane at her side, a connecting piece of leather looped around her wrist.

Mikko’s brow furrowed, but he went to answer the door.  If she was dangerous, the wards would protect him.

“Hello?” he said when he opened the door.

The woman’s aquamarine eyes were on his chest.  She didn’t look up as she said, “Hi, is this Mira’s house?”

“It is,” he said cautiously.  “She’s not here . . .”

“Oh, I know.  You needed someone to reinforce your wards?”

In the turmoil of discovering the man in his backyard, Mikko had completely forgotten about the mage again.  The whole entire reason he had stayed behind.  Right.

“Yes, yes,” he nodded, relieved.  “Right, sorry.  I’m Mikko.”

“Mikko,” she nodded, eyes still at his chest.  “My name is Saorla.”

“Nice to meet you.”  He was the only one in the house who ever said that pleasantry.  Everyone else found it inane, but he didn’t care.  He would be polite.

“You, as well.  Why are the wards activated?”

“I found someone trying to break in through the back door,” he said. 

“Oh, wow.  That’s not good.”

Mikko moved to kick out the door but he hesitated.  He knew he was expecting a mage to come work on the house but he had also just caught someone trying to break in.

“Would you like to verify that I am who I say I am?” Saorla asked when his hesitation went for too long.

Mikko grimaced.  “Yeah.”

“My contractor number is 242546.  I can wait.  I understand that my timing is suspect.” 

He left the door open a crack and called Mira.

“Hello?”  Mira’s voice was hushed, like she was around other people.

“Hey,” Mikko said.  He didn’t want to freak Mira out, so he didn’t tell her about the would-be intruder.  “It’s a long story, but is there any way you can confirm that the mage that’s supposed to come is named Saorla?  Contractor number 242546?”

“Yeah, I’m actually with the queen.  Hold on.”  He didn’t hear anything for a second and then Mira asked, “Is she blind?”

“Yes.”

“That’s her.”

“Oh good, thanks.”

“Why are you calling to ask?”  Mira sounded suspicious.

“Tell you later.”  He hung up before she could argue.

Mikko went back to the door, opening it and kicking out of the threshold, avoiding hitting Saorla.  Moving from inside of the house to the outside breached the wards, turning them off.  He heard the pop of them powering down.  “Got confirmation,” he said.

“Excellent.”  She smiled.  “I’m going to beef up your wards, and I’m going to add some to the windows to keep them from being broken again

“Brick-proof windows?” he asked.

“Yup!  When they’re closed. But, if you open them, then things can still come through them unless the wards are active.  But they can’t be opened from the outside by anyone that isn’t one of the people who lives here, and no one can come through them unless invited in.”  She held her hand out towards the car and made a come here movement with her fingers.  “Cayden here is going to change the locks on the door.  They’re infused with silver and gold to tie the wards more tightly to the house.”

Mikko shrugged.  “Okay.  I don’t know a lot about magic.”

“That’s why I’m here,” she smiled brightly.  “Can you bring me to each of the windows?”

“Uh, yeah, sure.  Come in.  Watch your step . . .”  He watched her push her cane until it hit the weather strip between the front steps and the house.  Mikko stepped back and let her pass so he could follow her. 

“To your left,” he said, watching her swipe her cane across the floor.  The cane hit the open air into the dining room, and she turned, avoiding the wall and disappearing behind the arch.

The man from the car, Cayden, stepped up the stairs.  He was taller than Mikko, maybe six-and-a-half feet, with short dark hair shaved at the sides close to his head.  He was beautiful, jaw sharply angled, nose straight and thin.  His shoulders were broad and made Mikko feel very, very small in comparison.  He held a tool kit in one hand.

Cayden stopped at the door, waiting for Mikko to invite him in.  “I’ll handle the lock,” he said as he entered with Mikko’s permission.  “You can work with her.”

“Right.” 

Mikko found her standing next to the dining room table, waiting for him.

“Sorry,” he said.  He didn’t really know why he was saying sorry.  Sorry for making her wait?  He didn’t know. 

“Not a problem.  I’m sure finding someone trying to break in while you’re home is unnerving.  I heard about your problem with the local shifters.”

“Yeah,” he grimaced.

“Well, we can do some extra stuff to protect your house.  Let’s get to work.”

The first time they’d had the wards on their house done, it had taken half a day, and done by two mages.  Neither of which were Saorla.

“Are you like . . . a really good mage?” Mikko asked her as she finished off the last window in the bathroom upstairs with a quick swipe of her hand across the glass.  “It’s only been twenty minutes?”

“Well, the framework for the wards were already laid.  That’s why it took hours the first time.”  She pulled her hand away from the window.  “Done.”

“I still feel like you’re probably really good?” he pressed as they walked into the hallway.

“She is.”  Cayden stood at the top of the stairs.  “One of the best mages in the last millennium.”

“I don’t know if I would say that,” she protested.

“I would.”  He ignored her continued protests, stepping to Mikko.  “The locks have been changed.”  He handed Mikko a set of two keys on a key ring.  They were all silver with red edging the perimeter, like his previous key.  The keys were specifically spelled in the red ink to open the door.  They couldn’t be copied.  “Here you go.  Throw out your old keys.  They won’t open the door and the door may zap you for trying to use an incorrect key.”

Mikko nodded, taking the keys.  “Will the door still zap me if I knock too hard?”

He wasn’t quite sure, but he thought he saw a flit of annoyance move across Saorla’s face.  He felt his shoulders tense almost automatically.  Was she annoyed with him?

“It shouldn’t have done that before,” she said.  “I noticed some of the wards on the door weren’t as neat as I would have wanted.  I righted those.  Your blood is tied into the spells on the house, along with the other residents.  The door should only zap people who don’t live here and knock too hard or too long.”

He’d never heard someone so politely say that other people fucked up.  The tension disappeared from his shoulders.  “And we don’t have to bleed for the spells again?”  They had each had to spill blood on the threshold.

“Nope,” she shook her head.  “I just strengthened things.  Everything else is still intact.”

Good.  He hadn’t enjoyed having to cut himself for the wards. 

“I know you have six people who live here full time.  I’ll be making four more keys, and we’ll drop by once they’re done.  I just wanted to make sure we had you covered as soon as possible.”

“Thanks.”

She smiled at him.  Her eyes were at his chest again.  “I beefed up the wards so that anyone who hasn’t been invited in before cannot come through the door at all.  And, as you did before, if you smear your blood on the door, it won’t allow in anyone who isn’t already keyed to the house.  Doesn’t matter if they’ve been invited before.”

He nodded quietly, looking down at the keys.  “Okay.”

“You should be all set.  If something comes up and the wards fail or something strange happens, you can reach out to me directly.” 

As she said that, Cayden was already handing him a business card.  Mikko took it from him without looking at it.

Saorla continued.  “You can, of course, go through Hazel and her people, but since I live in this city anyway, it’s easier.”

Mikko frowned.  “Would that mean we owe you a favor or money—going directly through you?”

“If it’s to fix the wards or anything the Ruaidhrí family is providing you—no.  I would bill it to them.”

Mikko looked down at the business card and blanched.  He looked up, eyes wide.  “Praecantrix?”  He couldn’t keep the surprise out of his voice.

She smiled, but it was the smile of someone who was also surprised.  “Yes.  Sorry—I assumed the vampires had told you.”

“It was relayed thirdhand,” he said.  Annie was going to lose her shit.

“Ah.  Yes, I’m Saorla Praecantrix, the eldest of the Praecantrix sisters.  I live just outside of Phoenix, which is why I gave you my card.  I’m local.”

He had known that some of Praecantrix family lived in the Phoenix area.  There were a lot of members of that family, though.  He didn’t know enough about any of them to know who was who.

“Thanks,” he said. 

“No problem,” she smiled brightly.  “In that case, I’ll be on my way.”  She turned away from him, sweeping her cane in front of her until it hit the stairs to go to the first floor.  She reached out for the handrail, hand probing for the smooth wood.  When she found it, she started down.  Cayden followed her.

Mikko followed them out to the front door.  “Thanks,” he said again as she headed to the passenger door.

“Of course,” she said, eyes looking past him.  “Goodbye!”

“Bye.”

He waited until they had pulled out of the driveway to close the door.

“I still can’t believe you met Saorla Praecantrix,” Annie was saying as they locked up the house.  It was a couple days after the attempted break-in and subsequent ward beef-up.

“How do you even know her, anyway?” Mikko asked.  He followed Annie down the steps to the car.  It was time to pick-up Lina from her last day of school before Christmas.

“I don’t know her,” she shook her head, climbing into the driver’s seat.  Mikko’s ribs were still sore, and he didn’t feel comfortable driving.  “Not her, anyway.  My mom did, but I only met her twins, Kendra and Levana.”

The Praecantrix sisters were a set of nine sisters, three sets of identical triplets.

Something prickled along Mikko’s neck.  That same sense he’d been feeling that someone was watching him.  He looked up but didn’t see anything.

As Annie turned the car on, under the rumble of the engine, she said, “Yeah, I feel it, too.”

Mikko bit his lip uncertainly while Annie pulled out of the driveway.

They had been feeling more and more uneasy—like someone was watching them.  And while they had tried to see if they could find the source, they never could.

Mikko chose not to talk about it.  They’d talked it to death the past couple days.  “Did you know them well?”

“Who?”

“The sisters.”

She shrugged.  “I never really knew why, but Levana and Kendra owed my mama and Daoine’s mama.  Our mamas were both pure shifters with a little bit of magic to them.  My mama could do healing magic.  Lucy could do some special type of neuromancy.”  Neuromancy was magic involving the mind.  “A couple times, I think the sisters . . . babysat me?”  She frowned.  “That would be weird though.  Had to have been something else.” 

Mikko leaned his forehead against the cool glass of the car window.  He made a noncommittal noise.

“How are your ribs?” she asked.

“Fine,” he replied.  He resisted the urge to shrug because he knew it would hurt.  “Hey, you told Bell that packs don’t exist?”  Mikko had been thinking about that on and off since the other day.

“Yeah.  They don’t.”

“I’ve definitely heard of them though?”

She nodded.  “They were a thing for a long time.  Basically, just another way for men to control women and children.  They started off as families—the dad was the head of the pack and the boys would go and start them own family packs, and the girl would get married off to the men making family packs.  But over time, it just got real bad.  Especially out in the country—there would be packs of thirty or forty shapeshifters.  Usually they was all family, but sometimes it was just shifter families that settled in an area, and one family decided they was in charge.”

“What happened to them?”

“You know that bullshit about alphas?”

“I know about the idea of them but nothing else.”

“Well, that ‘concept’”—she took her hands off the air to do finger quotes—“came from bad research on wolves in captivity starting in the 40s.  Men grabbed onto that and used it to justify they packs even more.  Not long after the Civil Rights movements and the Stonewall Riots, shifters started they own rebellions in they homes and packs.  A lot of female shifters died because they husbands didn’t take too kindly to being told what to do.”

Mikko had never known any of that.

“There’s a lot more history—women and children escaping they husbands and fathers and making they own homes with other women and children escaping the same thing.  It got so bad that the courts got involved in the eighties, not too long before I was born.  They made real strict laws around packs now.  They still exist, but they not allowed to conscript and coerce people like they used to.”

“How do you know all that?” he asked.  He had never heard her talk about any of that before.

“My mom used to tell me about it.  And Timber told me stories, too.  She even had a book on it that she let me read.”

Timber had once made a comment that black women always hold the history.  “I’m gonna guess the whole pack thing was racist as shit, too?”

Annie smiled tightly.  “It was a way to isolate halfshifters.  They wasn’t allowed in.  And of course, there was even more shit if you wasn’t white or straight.  And the courts were just as bad with that shit.  The only reason they even got involved last time was cuz white women were being killed by they husbands.”

“So, is it a problem that Bell is part of one?” he asked.

She wrinkled her nose.  “It’s not always bad . . . but it usually is.”  She shrugged.  “I don’t know.  Sloane trusts them.  Granted, they was gone for two years so I guess things could have changed.”

He nodded, watching out the window as they pulled up into the pick-up line.

Lina stood outside.  When she spotted their car, she grinned and ran towards them.  She opened the door and jumped in the back seat, shouting, “No more school!”  She scrambled to get in her booster seat.

Mikko chuckled as Lina closed the door and buckled herself in.  “You know you still have to go back, right?  In January?”

“I know.”  Her tone told him she was scowling as she said it.  “But not for almost a whole month!”

Mikko smiled, shaking his head.   

Annie followed the cars in the pick-up line to get out of the school and headed home.

It was a Tuesday, a little over a week before Christmas.  The weather was cool, in the mid-sixties.  At night it would drop almost to freezing.  Mikko got cold easily—he always had a hoodie on in winter.  Annie was the same way.  She was currently wearing one of his hoodies.  He wasn’t a large person, but she was so slender that it was basically a dress on her.

Lina was the weirdo among the three of them that wore a short-sleeved shirt under her plaid school romper.  She wasn’t even wearing stockings.  Just her sneakers.  They had long since stopped trying to get her to wear a sweater.  They made sure she always went to school with one, but it was up to her whether to put it on or not.  She overheated easily as a baby, and they had learned early not to overdress her.

Annie hummed a short noise of confusion as she stopped at the end of the pick-up line, waiting for the red light.  Mikko looked at her, following her gaze across the street.

Lina’s school, Silo Roberts, had a new playground was built in the past decade on the same side of the street as the school campus.  It had been shiny, new, plastic, and more importantly, it risked less lawsuits than the old playground.

Before that, the playground had been across the street from the school.  It had been a huge metal thing with a geodome and a jungle gym with swings and slides.  Mikko and Annie used to sneak in after dark to hang out in there.  Sloane had never wanted to—it was where she had met Mickey and Bell.

And there Bell was, sitting on one of the swings, wide shoulders bracketed by the chains holding the seat.  He stared at the ground with a type of exhaustion that Mikko recognized.  It was the type of exhaustion that came from feeling lost.

“That’s one of those wolves,” Lina piped up from the back.  “He’s sad.” 

“Because he’s an idiot,” Annie muttered, shaking her head and stepping on the gas.

“Wait,” Mikko said.

Annie glanced at him, a quizzical expression on her face.

“I’m gonna talk to him.”

“Mikko, we shouldn’t be alone.”

“He’s the most powerful of any of us.  So, I won’t be alone.”

Annie frowned before she shrugged one shoulder.  “Fine.”

The light turned green and Mikko got out before Annie turned towards home.

Bell didn’t look up as Mikko made his way to the playground.  Mikko moved gingerly, being careful with his ribs.  They weren’t as painful as they had been, but they still ached if he moved too fast.

There was a broken bit of fence on the side furthest from the street.  It had been there for years.  Mikko actually thought that he or Annie had made it with wire cutters, but he didn’t remember for sure. 

It wasn’t until Mikko was inching through the opening that Bell finally looked up.  When he saw Mikko, his expression became unreadable.

Mikko moved to sit down on a swing next to him.  He wasn’t as broad as Bell, but the chains still dug into his shoulders.  He could only imagine how much they cut into Bell.  But Bell didn’t seem bothered.

Mikko didn’t say anything, just letting himself sit next to Bell.  He pressed the toe of his foot into the dirt below him and used it to move the swing back and forth in short movements but didn’t actually take his foot off the ground.

“Is it my fault that Sloane’s a vampire?”

Bell asked the question so quietly that Mikko almost missed it.  If his good ear hadn’t been facing Bell, he would have missed it entirely.

“Well, I guess it depends on who you ask,” Mikko answered.

Bell glanced over at him.  He had bags under his eyes, and his skin was dull.  “If I’m asking you?”

“If you’re asking me, I would say no.  I firmly believe that everyone makes their own choices.”  Mikko opened his mouth to continue before deciding against it.

Bell caught it.  “But?”

“But I believe what happened influenced it.”

“Did she tell you?”

“About you leaving?”

Bell nodded.

“Yeah.  After the Samhain festival, she stayed in town for a couple weeks.  She told me what she went through.  Why she left Washington.  How she became a vampire.  And after listening to that—I can see why she did what she did.”  He and Sloane had a lot of midnight walks while she was still here.  It was the time of night that had always connected them the most.  It had been the time of night when he told her everything his parents had done to him.  It had been the time of night when she had confessed to him about her rape.  The time of night when he made the decision never to do coke again, and she had agreed to go get tested for STDs.  It was their time of night.

“But she still had you guys,” he murmured.

Mikko gave him a half-hearted smile.  “Yeah, us.  Annie wouldn’t even speak to her after you adopted Sloane.  Genie and Frankie were also gone, on with their new family.  We were probably just . . . more reminders of everything she missed.”

Bell didn’t say anything, gaze on the ground.  He was similarly using one foot to push the swing back and forth without letting his foot leave the ground.

“Annie and I used to come here, when we were kids.  Like thirteen or fourteen.”  Mikko looked over to the geodome.  “Used to climb that all the time.  It was a bit of free fun for some kids who didn’t have nothing.  But Sloane would never even look at this playground.  She never came with us.”

“We met here.”  Bell’s voice was even, but there was a hollow quality to it. 

“I know.”

Silence settled like a blanket over them.  Mikko continued to rock gently back and forth.  He was no stranger to silence.  He couldn’t hear well as it was, and he preferred when the air wasn’t filled with noise.  It was a heavy blanket, but it was one that he found comfort in all the same.

“How do I fix this?” Bell finally asked.

Mikko shrugged one shoulder.  “I don’t know if you really can.”

“We just wanted her to be safe.”

“And she was safe.  You did what you thought was best at the time.”

“But she’s dead now.”

“I prefer to think of it as being reborn.”

Bell looked up at him, eyes knitted together in confusion.  “Reborn?”

“She made a new life for herself.  That kind of feels like rebirth.”

“Do you . . . do you think she has space for us in her new life?”

“Yeah,” Mikko said.  “She loves you more than she hates you.”

“How do you know?”

“She told me as much.  Her relief is obvious.  A two-year-long nightmare is over.”

Bell kicked at the dirt he had been digging his shoe into.

“But that nightmare left wounds.  Wounds leave scars.  Things knit back together, but they don’t always work how they used to.  You have to find a new way of existing.  Have to figure out how to work around the scar tissue.”

Bell huffed a sigh out of his nose.  “I have to do more than say sorry.”

“You can’t just say sorry.  You have to do sorry.  And honestly—she may never understand why you did it.  It might take a long time for forgiveness.  Trying to move on from that anger and betrayal of trust is hard.  It could take years.  But I know she wants you in her life, and she doesn’t want you to stop trying.”

Bell looked miserable, shoulders hunched.  He wasn’t crying, but his eyes did seem to be red.  He had stopped fidgeting, the swing still.  He looked at the ground as if searching it for an answer.

“Sloane said that you don’t like things undone.”  That had been another one of their late-night conversations.  “That you try to fix things fast.”

Bell didn’t say anything, but Mikko knew he had hit the nail on the head.

“Sloane’s whole life has been a constant state of flux.  Nothing has ever really been concrete for her.  Not until she was with you.  And then the concrete crumbled when you left.  She went back into flux.  Trying to move fast with her won’t get you anywhere.  To continue the metaphor—you have to help her move the crumbled concrete before trying to repour it.”

Bell mumbled something.

“What was that?”

“How are you so good with words?”

Mikko smiled.  He hadn’t thought it was particularly good.  He felt like he could have used something better than ‘move the crumbled concrete’ but it still made sense, so he left it.  “I read a lot.  I like metaphors.”

Bell nodded.  “Why are you helping me?”

Mikko’s brow furrowed.  “What?”

“After what happened the other day—I really fucked up in your house.  I still don’t really get what Annie means by ‘shifter culture’ but it doesn’t really matter.  Why are you being nice to me?”

“I’m trying to piece my family back together,” Mikko shrugged.  “After everything that’s happened in the past few months, it’s hard.  And Sloane and I have been through a lot together.  You mean a lot to her.  If I can help her feel whole again—I’m going to try.”

Bell looked up at him, a tentative half-smile on his lips.  “You’re a good friend.”

“I know.”

Bell chuckled. 

Mikko looked up at the sky.  The sun was getting close to the horizon, the sky already fading from blue to orange.  The sun went down fast these days.  The chill was already beginning to settle in.

“Alright.” Mikko stood up.  “I have given you my sage advice.  The least you can do is walk me home.”

Bell chuckled again.  “Sure.”