Page 71 of Heart of Mischief

“Yeah. A little one, not one of those commercial behemoths. A family farm. The main house was two stories, then we had a garden, a chicken coop, a field for corn and squash, and a barn for the goats and pigs. Every morning, my sister Olive and I would run out of the house in our pajamas to collect eggs from the coop and bring them to our mom to scramble or fry.” He smiled, a soft curl of the lips. A look of wistfulness that Charlie had never seen on his face before.

“You, Olive,andBanana, right?” she asked. “The husky?”

Elias’s eyes lit up. “You remember.”

Of course, I do. I remember everything about you.

That was what she didn’t say.

Instead, she shrugged, cheeks warming. “Sure. You only told me a few weeks ago.”

He raised his eyebrows, but didn’t press the issue.

“We had the run of the neighborhood,” he said, going on. “Lots of trees and cornfields, as you can probably imagine. Endless space. We had an old tetherball pole and trampoline in our backyard, and you should haveseenthe way Olive would laugh when I’d double-bounce Banana.”

Charlie let out a surprised laugh, imagining a husky flying through the air over a trampoline.

Elias grinned back, the expression warm and genuine. “Mostly we’d play alone, but our friends would sometimes come in from town to visit. My parents were out of town for work a lot, as I think I told you already, and Aunt Sheila, who babysat us, wouldn’t have noticed if a truck ran through the front door. So, naturally, the other kids loved hanging at our place.”

“Naturally.” Charlie couldn’t help but grin back.

Elias’s eyes brightened. “Every time you smile, I’m shocked,”he said. “I never thought I’d see it again. Not directed toward me, anyway.”

She rolled her eyes, but the smile stayed in place. “Don’t let it get to your head.”

“Too late.” He winked. “What else do you want to know?”

Looking down at her half-eaten sandwich, Charlie considered what to ask next. She didn’t want to raise his suspicions. “You never told me what they did,” she said. “Your parents. What kept them away for weeks at a time.”

“Well, the story was that they were traveling doctors.” He picked at the crust of his sandwich, tearing off soft flakes of bread and rolling them between his fingers. “Some doctors travel to third-world countries, but my parents said they were what you’d call locum tenens: travel doctors who work around the US, going from hospital to hospital, usually in underfunded areas that need more help. When I was a kid, I bought that story without question. It wasn’t until after they were murdered that I began to ask questions like:If they were really doctors, why did they work less in the winter, when it was cold outside? Hospitals are indoors, and they need support year-round.”

Charlie’s heart squeezed.After they were murdered.She wanted answers, but if she was being entirely truthful with herself, she didn’t want to make him talk about this. The worst thing that ever happened to him. She didn’t enjoy making people relive painful memories. Not even Elias.

“So, what happened?” she asked softly.

He looked out over the treetops. “I had to clean out the house. After everything. Aunt Sheila came over to help because I was supposed to move in with her, but she spent the whole day bawling on the phone to her friends. So I had to pack up the boxes by myself.”

Charlie’s heart gave a painful twist. She could imagine it: little Elias, who had just lost his whole family at once, standing inside a home that once felt so full of love but now held only ghosts. She knewthe feeling too well; it was how she’d felt living in their shared bedroom after Sophie had “died.”

What she couldn’t imagine was how painful it must have been to empty out his childhood home all by himself. To pick up those ghosts and seal them away in cardboard boxes, one by one by one.

“It was then that I first noticed something was off,” he went on. “I packed up every room in the house: the living room, the kitchen, the basement, the bedrooms… and nowhere—not in any drawer or closet or storage box—was there any doctor’s equipment. Nothing. Not even a stethoscope.”

A chill swept down Charlie’s spine. “That’s…”

“Creepy?” Elias finished. “Yeah. I know. I mean, what kind of doctor keepsnomedical gear at home? Not even an AED or an EpiPen, the stuff you have around for emergencies. All we had was a standard first aid kit sitting under the kitchen sink. It didn’t add up. And it got me to thinking.”

“If they lied about their real jobs to protect you and Olive?”

“Exactly. And if they did, it wasn’t too much of a leap to connect that to their untimely end.”

“Were they somehow connected to Asgard?” Charlie asked. “Is that how you found out it existed?”

“They were,” said Elias, crumpling his sandwich wrapper up and stuffing it into the empty paper bag. “But that’s a story for another time. We need to get back to work.”

Her heart sank. She had come so close. So, so close to getting the information she needed. Ofcoursehe decided to end lunch there.

But, she realized, he hadn’t shut her down entirely. He’d called it “a story for another time,” so he would tell her eventually. Her fingertips tingled with excitement at the possibility.