Cursing

by Lynne Murray

  “Seekers, sometimes known as Truth Seekers, are famously nomadic. Their descendants are rarely found on Earth because they specialize in secret knowledge, and frankly, there’s never been the slightest rumor of anything here that would interest them on Earth.”

  The words “secret knowledge” had such a powerful effect on me the Guardian fell silent to stare at me. No one said anything for a moment.

  “During the thousands of years when this planet was a popular tourist attraction. I’ve never heard of Seeker DNA on Earth,” Sariel continued. “Seekers usually travel alone, but one might have followed another tourist with valuable information here and stopped to dally with a local woman long enough to contribute some genetic material. Her memory was sealed by Seeker, and only a Seeker could unseal it. All speculation on my part, of course.”

  “I’ll escort you to the main portal,” Kirby told Sariel. I got the feeling he was as irritated as I was to hear all the aliens sneering at Earth’s unimportance and status as a primitive backwater. “I need to see with my own eyes that the Death Dealer is off my station. Angie, please wait for me in my office.”

  Sariel stopped in front of me to say, “Your talent is significant, but right now you only have two settings—zero and fatal. Look for ways to guide your reaction.”

  “I want to learn that. Let me know if you hear of any way to do that, but only if they don’t involve getting kidnapped by these bozos.”

  Wade chuckled.

  Sariel didn’t blink an eye at my joke. “We don’t provide such services,” he said.

  Wade peeled my glasses case off his sleeve and handed it to me. His face was serious but his expression was kind.

  Mr. Kirby, Wade and Sariel headed off toward the main portal. I went in the opposite direction toward the small offices. I was starting to learn my way around the station.

  I crossed the main floor where Star and Mia were back at their terminals.

  Mia shot me a questioning look.

  “Can’t talk now.” I headed for the corridor. The door to Kirby’s office was open. I guessed it would take him a while to send off Vole and the Guardians. I sank into a chair and stared at the wall, trying not to think about what just happened. The wall behind Kirby’s desk was bare. In fact, he had only a neat stack of folders on the desk and a photo in a framed stand facing his chair behind the desk. I stood and peered around to look at the photo. Wife and kids. Wow, lots of kids. I counted them—five. I went back to staring at the wall. I felt as if I’d run a long distance and my legs wouldn’t have tolerated much more.

  Kirby came in the door and shut it behind him. He sat down behind the desk and looked at me. He couldn’t have been as shocked as I was, but he looked shaken.

  We both spoke at once.

  I said, “I’m trying not to kill—”

  He said, “We’re closing down some of the parts of the station—”

  “Go ahead, Angie, I am so sorry that we put you in this situation. It was ignorance on our part but that’s no excuse for accepting Vole’s offer without more investigation, even with the Guardians’ endorsement. We put you in danger, I hope you can forgive us.”

  I was too much in shock [DP6]to be angry, but I didn’t feel like forgiving them either. I couldn’t give up on the ETPA, they were my only hope. “Mr. Kirby, one of the reasons I joined with your group was to keep from killing anyone, and I’ve taken three more lives in the past week.”

  “And brought one back,” Kirby said.

  “Yeah, okay, but that’s not something I want to experiment around with.” I realized I was about to cry. “I can’t live like this. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Maybe we should all take a step back and look at what we can do to make things better,” Kirby said.

  His calm tone helped.[DP7] A[DP8] little. I didn’t cry. “Everything I saw today indicated you don’t know what to do either.” I regretted saying that immediately, but I had to say what I felt and I couldn’t pretend otherwise.

  “You have a point.” He didn’t seem offended. “We’ve never encountered anyone with your sort of gift. We’re still learning too. The Guardians—” His voice was tense. He paused taking a breath and continued in a more even tone. “The Guardians have very little information to offer on your sort of skill.” His tone suggested that he suspected the Guardians of withholding information. The Death Dealers have proven they’re a threat and what happened with Vole today showed some flaws in our defenses. So we have to change strategies at this point in time. We’re moving out the people who have been staying here to other safe locations for a few days while we reinforce our security here. We don’t want anyone falling into the hands of the reptiles.”

  “Those are the lizard men who have been abducting and experimenting on Mia and the others.”

  “Yes, the Rutbans.”

  “So I might as well go home,” I said wearily.

  “Don’t give up on changing this, Angie. I’m going to ask Wade, Sophie, Chad and Grandmother Spider to keep an eye on you. After the break-in at your apartment, we don’t want to take any chances.”

  “Grandmother kind of scares me.”

  “She won’t hurt you. But she did scare the burglars away before.”

  “Do you think the people who broke into my place were the Rutban?”

  “We can’t be sure. But Grandmother is a very effective deterrent.”

  [DP9]

  I went home, commuting through the portal to Brannan Street and taking the bus home. I found Grandmother standing in front of my building. She was weaving a web of fine filaments around the door to my apartment. I looked up to see that they extended up to cover my front windows. I pushed the glasses down on my nose and the web disappeared.

  “Hello, Grandmother, what have you been spinning?”

  “Energy traps to protect you from the creatures who broke in.”

  “Um, it looks like I would get caught in the web if I tried to go in.”

  “No, the strands are energy, not matter. You and anyone with an amulet will be able to step through the strands. Others will be stopped by the web. I can’t be here all the time, and you seem to attract predators.”

  “I want to ask a question, but I do not wish to offend you.”

  The spider’s face was impassive. “You are still a nestling. Some latitude is acceptable. You may ask.”

  “I just wondered how you got the strands all the way up to the windows,” I said, trying to be tactful. I managed not to ask if she had swarmed up the front of the building the way she had walked on the wall in my apartment.

  “Easily demonstrated.” She raised her foreleg to her mouth and pulled a thread out of her mandible. In one smooth motion, she tossed it up. It stuck on the window frame twenty feet above the street.

  “Wow, thank you for showing me. The strands look so thin, I couldn’t have thought they could be accurately thrown so far up.”

  “As I said, they are energy, not matter.” grandmother observed. “Your untutored powers of observation make it seem like magic, but it is a common strategic defense in my kind.”

  “Angie!” Sophie called out as she and Chad rounded the corner.

  “Mr. Kirby said you’d be here,” Chad said. He waved two bags he carried. “I hope you like Chinese. As they got closer I could smell fried rice and spring rolls. “I brought enough for all of us and extra meat for you, Grandmother, if you would like to join us.”

  “I don’t know.”

  I slid my glasses down to see Grandmother in her elderly lady disguise, lean after a couple walking past on Fulton, wheeling a baby carriage. “My goodness, your baby is so cute,” she said to them.

  The couple seemed to sense a threat. “Thanks,” the man said, moving between Grandmother and the baby.

  She leaned around them to peek at the infant. “Those chubby little cheeks! Couldn’t you just eat him up?”

  The couple cast anxious looks at sharp-eyed woman in black staring hungrily at their child. They stepped up thei
r pace, pushing the baby carriage away at an earnest jog.

  “Grandmother!” Sophie whispered fiercely. She stepped up to the spider woman, who was slightly drooling. “Remember your manners!

  “Oh, yes of course.” Grandmother reluctantly turned away. “Such a tasty fresh morsel, with all the scent of meat in the air, I quite forgot myself.” She cast a last look at the retreating couple with the baby carriage.

  Sophie said, “Let’s go inside.”

  “I got two orders of barbequed ribs just for you. Grandmother.” Chad waved one of the bags enticingly. “I remembered you liked the marrow last time.”

  “In that case, I’ll join you.”

  “Don’t worry,” Chad said, as he came up the steps. “I got stuffed tofu, chicken, beef and veggies for the rest of us and a bunch of rice dishes too.”

  It felt odd having strangers in my house, but at least Grandmother would scare away any intruders.

  Or so I hoped.

  I opened the door and we walked through Grandmother’s web. I half expected the strands to cling to me, but the web opened to let us in and closed behind us.

  Sophie saw my expression of dread. “It helps to take the glasses off when you’re dealing with species that push your buttons.”

  She was right, Grandmother was much less scary as an old lady. “How do you do it, Sophie? You don’t need glasses to see behind the disguises, can you turn that off?”

  “Don’t need to, I’ve been seeing past the masks my whole life, I’m used to it.”

  We went into the kitchen and Chad set the bag on the table and started pulling containers out while I got plates and silverware.

  “I just got back from Bakersfield when I heard you were home,” Chad said.

  “How is Isabel?” I asked. “I never met the others who were stashed in the Harvester ship.”

  “Frank’s relatives were glad to see him, but the other Harvester’s victims kept trying to figure out why they were so desperate to go to Bakersfield. None of them had ever been there before and they couldn’t come up with any names of relatives or friends there. It took me three days to convince them that they were victims of a delusion. Fortunately, they didn’t remember the Harvester, so we didn’t have to mess with their minds.”

  I made a mental note to ask Chad how he would have done that.

  “Do you have tea?” Sophie asked.

  “I’ve got black tea and green tea,” I said, fetching boxes of teabags and cups.

  Sophie found the kettle and lit the burner on the stove.

  “Sugar?” Grandmother asked.

  “I’ll get it for you,” I said.

  “Good, so many people on this planet don’t keep it.”

  When I had the tea brewing, I put the pot and cups on the table with the take-out and the sugar bowl next to Grandmother. I tried not to flinch getting so close to her in her true form as she deftly maneuvered the ribs through the headpiece she wore. I felt relieved and infinitely safer that she didn’t take it off. I wasn’t going to take her to a restaurant anytime soon—maybe, never.

  Sitting around the kitchen table I folded my glasses and stowed them in the little carrier Grandmother had for me. Even seeing Grandmother as a frail old woman, the eager way she gnawed on the barbequed ribs and earnestly sucked out the marrow made me a little uneasy.

  As we sat around the table, full of Chinese food and contemplating the fortune cookies, Grandmother contentedly sipped hot water sweetened with a half cup or so of sugar. I gathered up my courage to ask. “Grandmother, I don’t mean to offend, but I have to ask, you seem so protective of nestlings, why—”

  “Angie,” Sophie took my arm urgently. “A word, please.”

  “I’m curious too, Grandmother,” Chad said, turning on the full weight of his charm on the old lady. “Do you mind discussing nestling issues, or is it too private?”

  “What do you want to know? Grandmother asked.

  I didn’t hear Chad’s response as Sophie pulled me into the hallway. “Don’t go there.”

  “Will she be offended?”

  “No, she’ll answer your question in detail. But believe me, you don’t want to hear it.”

  Grandmother continued to speak to Chad, but Sophie kept talking so I couldn’t make out the words.

  “You’re better off not hearing some things. Trust me on this one.”

  “Okay.”

  We returned to the kitchen where Grandmother was still talking. “...But only during a bad winter and never all of them,” she concluded.

  The building began to shake so violently that I grabbed the kitchen counter to keep from being thrown to the floor.

  “Earthquake,” was my first thought, “Door frames are solid,” I said, making my way, hand over hand holding the counter as I headed for the back door. The shaking continued.

  “Damn that feels like at least seven points on the Richter Scale,” Chad said.

  Grandmother didn’t move. “Not quake. Ekrot,” she said. “Look outside.”

  I threw open the back door and saw the enormous eye looking down from a cloud in the sky. It had been serenely open, now it was narrowed with strong emotion. I stepped out onto the wooden landing, grabbing the railing that was rocking back and forth.

  Larry’s voice filtered down from the back door landing above me. “Do you see that?”

  “Yeah,” I made it a point not to look up at him. I kept my focus on the eye above us, glaring down. “Hey, you! Ekrot, stop that!” I yelled.

  The shaking stopped. The eye focused on me.

  “You know what it is?” Larry asked.

  “Kinda,” I said, glancing up. Larry was in his at-home-attire, black jeans, black t-shirt and biker boots. “I’m surprised you could see it.”

  “Thank god, you see it too. I thought it might be my mother acting from beyond the grave—sending the big guy in the size 45 sandals to give me a scare.”

  The house violently shook back and forth a few times like hapless prey in the jaws of a predator. Bad metaphor.

  I stared up at it “You have my full attention, Ekrot. What do you want?”

  This time the shaking hit me. A thunderous rumble filled my head and resolved itself into deep vibrations, so deep I felt them in my bones. No words. Images surfaced in my mind. An Ekrot’s eye view of Dennis standing on his patio staring up. Wade stood beside him. Both of them were bathed in a reddish glow and began to float up into the air. The angle changed as the Ekrot observed the two men being pushed into a circular vehicle parked on the roof of the building next door. The creatures shoving Wade and Dennis into the vehicle were dressed in ill-fitting pants and shirt, but they clearly had lizard-scaly skin and round staring eyes.

  Wrong!

  The word thundered through my head like a bass drum roll.

  Fix!

  “I will, I’ll bring them back, I promise,” I told the Ekrot.

  I staggered back as it seemed to let go of me. Or at any rate, it stopped shaking me. The giant eye opened a little wider.

  “Okay, I can’t do it on my own. I need to get help.”

  The giant eye blinked out,[DP10] but opened again to glare at me.”

  “I’m going to do that now,” I told it.

  Sophie and Chad crowded out onto the landing behind me, staring up at the Ekrot.

  Larry waved at them from above and they waved back.

  “Did you get all that?” I asked.

  “Get what?” Chad asked.

  Leaning on the landing above, Larry shrugged in bewilderment. “I got nothing.”

  “It sent images. I guess it was telepathic.”

  “The Ekrot communicated with you? That’s amazing,” Chad said.

  “Unheard of,” Sophie said.

  “Wade and Dennis have been abducted.”

  “The Ekrot kidnapped them? Sophie said skeptically.

  I glanced up at Larry and lowered my voice. “No, the Rutban have them. The Ekrot showed me Dennis and Wade being taken from Dennis’s patio. It
witnessed the lizard men pulled them up into an alien ship and came to tell me to bring them back.”

  “Perhaps I can track them,” Grandmother said. “The reptiles have a particular smell.”

  Chad had his phone out already. “I’m calling Kirby.”

  I looked up at Larry. “We can take it from here. We’ll fix it.”

  “If you’re sure.” Larry cast an uneasy glance at the Ekrot, which continued to glare down at us. “It’s not going to damage the house?”

  “I think it just wanted to get our attention. You and the house are safe,” I said, desperately hoping that was true. “We know what it wants and we’re going to go get that.” I finished.

  “I’ll leave you to it then. It’s vodka therapy time for me.”

  Chapter 16

  Chad ended his call to Kirby. “He’s sending a car. Let’s go I’m also calling Feeney. He monitors all the portals in the C[DP11]ity, legal and illegal.”

  Somehow I never thought of Feeney as being in the phone book. In fact, Chad tapped his amulet to reach him. A moment later Chad’s phone rang.

  I locked the back door and we went down the hall to the front steps.

  Chad finished his call to Feeney. “He was monitoring it. The Rutban ship is in a portal near here, waiting for clearance to leave. It’s pre-programmed and Feeney says he can’t delay it.”

  While we waited for the car, Grandmother fussed with her web.

  “My landlord could see the Ekrot,” I told Sophie and Chad.

  “A surprising number of humans have enough of the right alien DNA to see Ekrots—a gift from horny alien tourists over the centuries,” Chad said.

  Sophie punched him lightly on the arm.

  “Ow!” he rubbed his arm. “You know that’s what happened.”

  Sophie cleared her throat. “Anyway, recorded sightings of Ekrots are usually called religious experiences.”

  “Now that we’ve entered the age of camera phones, we keep expecting people to post Ekrot videos on social media,” Chad added. “But Ekrots just don’t visit often and usually in remote locations, so no one’s posted footage and people who have seen them are simply considered crackpots.”