Quietly we ascended to the third floor, past a series of moon photographs on our way up that had caught my mom’s attention on our first walk through our potential new home. The owner turned out to be a previous NASA employee, and boom, we had signed the lease in under ten minutes.
The door to 303 was wide open. Through the gap, an overturned coffee table, scattered NASA newsletters, and smudged footprints told me all that I needed to know. The incubi had come after my mother, and they had killed her mercilessly. Tears fell, and I made no move to wipe them away. So what if Egret realized I was too invested in this stranger? My mother was dead, and her murder was my fault.
“Should we go in?” Egret whispered. All of her confidence had evaporated, and now she looked as terrified as I felt.
“We have to,” I said with a shaking voice. An image of my mother in a pool of blood flooded my mind. “I need to see her.”
I crept through the door into the living room, then past the sofa and entertainment system—no TV, but we did have an antique record player that we listened to every night before bed—to the hallway. I braced myself for a gruesome sight, but my room, the first on the right, was empty. The walls displayed their usual constellation and planet posters, and my NASA comforter was still tucked into the space between the twin bed and the wall. Someone had rooted through my drawers and closet, but all they’d done was throw my clothes into a pile in the middle of the room.
“Typical Luke,” Egret said with a smile as she looked around the room. “That kid is more astronomer than student, and that was before he heard about Dramanians. Of course his room would look like the other end of a telescope.”
Then she remembered what might have happened to Luke in our absence, and her face fell.
The master bedroom, undecorated except for the expansive oak desk that took up one whole wall and the telescope standing next to it, was empty too. I checked the walk-in closet, but no signs of a scuffle or bloody battle appeared. The closet smelled like my mom, specifically like the chemistry lab where she spent hours working with her analysts.
“Weird.” Egret peered in next to me. “It’s like someone wrecked the house and then disappeared.”
A noise came from the living room, and then the front door slammed. Egret inhaled sharply, but I covered her mouth to keep her from making any other noises. Then I pulled her into the closet, between a gap in winter coats and button-down sweaters organized by red and blue and all stamped with an old-school NASA logo, and waited to see who had returned to the scene of the crime.
“Luke?” a woman’s voice called.
“Is that Helen?” Egret asked.
“How should I know?” I responded, though of course I knew my mom’s voice when I heard it. Finally, I could breathe a sigh of relief. “But we can’t hide in this closet all day, can we?”
“No, we can’t.”
Egret left the closet, and I followed close behind her. My heart pounded, and I prayed the woman we would meet in the other room was my mother and not some hypnotized slave to the incubi cause. More importantly, I prayed that she still had all of her limbs.
“Mrs. Hawthorne? I mean you no harm. My name is Egret, and I’m a friend of your son’s.”
My mother came into view, framed by the kitchen light at the end of the hall. Her usual ponytail held back her straight brown hair with its stripes of “NASA gray,” as all of the other employees called the stress stripes every new worker acquired in their first year on the job. Nothing about her outfit was unusual either. Fridays were always khaki pants and NASA polo, and today was no exception.
“Nice to meet you, Egret.” My mother, always polite, extended her hand. “I’m sorry that the house is such a wreck. You see, I’ve lost my—”
“No need to lie to me, Mrs. Hawthorne,” Egret assured her. “I know all about the incubi.”
“Incubi?” My mom tilted her head to the side. “Oh, yes, I forgot that’s what you call them.”
“You?” Now she had caught Egret off guard. “Who is ‘you’?”
“Oh, you know. Wizards, Igreefee, whoever is trying to catch demons like a modern-day George. You know, from the 1985 horror classic Demons?”
Egret stared at her blankly.
“Never mind. My son would understand the reference.”
And I did. Though we rarely watched TV, my mom had always had an obsession with demon movies, especially the classics. Even after I found out about the real-life incubi, I had never put two and two together. She did remember my father, whoever he was, and her interest in her attacker had grown stronger instead of faded.
“So did the incubi do this?”
“One of them did. He seemed quite distraught about not being able to find something he’d left with me a long time ago.”
“Like a baby?” Egret asked incredulously. “You do know that incubi get their strength from eating their young, right?”
“Trust me, dear, if eating their young was the only way for an incubus to gain strength, the species would have died out long ago.”
What was going on? Why was my mom so calm, and why was she talking about demons as though they were friendly uncles instead of child-eating killers?
“Perhaps it’s better if he explains himself. Wess, won’t you come out and explain to these girls what you’re doing here?”
My hands became fists as my nails bit into my palms. Was I about to face my father in a battle alone, a day before the great battle was to take place?
Wess slid out from the wall as easily as emerging from a pool of water, just stepped out and approached us with a friendly smile on his face. At first he looked translucent, but the longer he stayed out of the wall, the more color he gained. In just a minute, he looked like a normal man, buzz cut and muscular build aside. All I could do was stare, shocked, at the man from the photograph. I’d assumed that man was a boyfriend, fiancé even, who had left my mother after she’d been impregnated by a demon; I’d never suspected that man to be the demon himself.
“Egret, this is Wess. And I’m sorry, dear,” my mother looked at me, “but I don’t think I caught your name.”
“Lumi.” I waited for my mother to recognize my voice, but she just looked back at Wess with puppy eyes.
“Wess, won’t you tell them why you’re here so they can stop worrying?”
“We know why you’re here,” Egret said, and her voice sounded braver than she probably felt when faced with a demon. “And the only way you’ll get to Luke is through Lumi and me.”
Wess chuckled, and with every laugh his brown eyes flashed a dangerous red. “Get him? Green girl, if I had wanted to eat my son, I would have done it the minute he walked into this apartment.”
“What are you talking about?” Egret asked, looking between Wess and my mom. “Luke has been here?”
“He has?” Helen turned to Wess questioningly. “When?”
“Oh, Helen, what am I always saying about looking beyond the obvious. Are you really telling me that after all of these years, you don’t recognize your own son? Or daughter now, perhaps—let’s ask her to clarify.”
Since I was the only other person in the room, everyone turned to stare at me.
“No, I think you’ve misunderstood. That’s Lumi—” Egret explained.
“See, Wess, you’re mistaken—” my mother said at the same time.
Wess gave me a look that seemed to say Look at these amateurs. Then he actually did say it, though the voice was in my head. Apparently, demons could think-speak all the time, even without their demon form—or at least they could do it with their children. Or maybe Artists could hear all thoughts, even nondemon ones.
I’m not going to eat you. Trust me, I want to—the blood of our children is like Thanksgiving dinner to us—but I no longer feed on humans. He stretched out his arms. See my pale color? If I’d been feeding on human blood, my skin would be as red as what’s flowing in your veins. So relax, Lumi. Take all that stress you’re holding in your arms and just let it go, like a
paper boat on a river much too wide and long for you to follow.
And strangely enough, I did relax. My shoulders released their strained hunch, and my fists bloomed into fingers. Maybe it was because he called me Lumi, or maybe it was because he was my father and I’d dreamed about meeting him for my entire life, but he had me tamed like a housecat.
Much better. Now why don’t you help your mother do the same? She’s a good woman, even if she doesn’t act like it for the next few minutes.
You don’t need to tell me about my mother, I said, my anger sending me into thought-speech before I even realized it. While you were off doing whatever it is human-demons do, I was here, filling the hole that you left behind.
You’re right.
Egret and my mother were still trying to figure out if I really was Luke, so they had not even noticed the intense eye contact and emotional expressions between my father and me.
“Mom, I was Luke. Now I’m Lumi. But that doesn’t mean I’m not still your son or whatever you want to call me. I love you, and I hope you can accept me this way, because this is who I am—who I’ve always been.”
“Luke?” My mom stepped closer to me and put on her reading glasses. Then she put her hand to my face and felt for the boy she wanted to find under my artwork.
Egret seemed just as stunned.
“Space Boy?” she asked as my mom continued her search. “But how… why… I don’t get it.”
“These eyes.” My mom pressed her thumbs on the skin under my eyebrows and pushed up. “These are Luke’s eyes.”
“Of course they are,” my father said.
“Mom, listen, I know you wanted me to hide who I am, but—”
“Is that what you think? Luke—sorry, I mean Lumi, I’ll get used to this—I just wanted you to be happy. I thought that if everyone knew, they would be….”
My father put his arm around my mother. “Now I think we should sit down somewhere and talk all of this through, don’t you? Somewhere that’s not the exact place the incubi will come as soon as they wake up?”
“Right.” My usually eloquent mother looked around helplessly. “Um….”
“How about the diner down the street?”
“The one on the corner of Line Street and Elm?” The diner where my mother and I had gone every weekend since we moved, the diner that was our special place, but I didn’t say any of that, and neither did my mother. Most likely, she didn’t even remember. She seemed equal parts scared by me and enamored by my father, and the incoherent, emotional woman trailing after her incubus lover was someone I did not recognize. How far away those mornings of short stacks and waffles seemed, even though we had just gone the week before.
“That’s the one. You can all ride with me—if you don’t mind taking a ride in a vintage sports car from before the twenty-first century.”
“Mind? That’s one of my dreams,” Egret said. “I have a vintage van, but a sports car is a totally different experience. Can you imagine a time when no one had self-driving cars and everyone on the road controlled the wheel? Though I do love messing with those self-driving sensors….”
“I can do more than imagine it,” my father said. “I was there.”
“You were?”
Egret followed my father out the door as he droned on about how demons have a lifespan of centuries, even without offspring blood. With it, they could live forever, breeding and feeding and breeding again. My stomach turned at the thought of incubi sucking the life out of a son or daughter like a vampire, though more likely the incubus turned demon and swallowed the person whole.
“So then how have you lived so long?” Egret asked as we approached the Italian Racing Red 2015 Jaguar XFR-S. Though I’d never been interested in modern cars, old cars had caught my attention in my early teens, more for the historical element than the craft of the vehicle. For a month when I was thirteen, my favorite book had been A Car Collector’s Guide: 1950-2050, and I’d memorized every stat before returning the book to the online library.
“You like it?” my father asked me, blowing off Egret’s question.
“Supercharged V-8 engine with eight-speed automatic transmission and a manual shifting option that gets to sixty miles per hour in just a few seconds? The historical value is—”
“Just like your mother.” Wess unlocked the car and slid into the driver’s seat.
Egret and I took the back, while my mom sunk into the passenger’s seat and put her head in her hands. Poor Helen; she was having a rough day.
“So, Wess, you were going to tell me how you’ve stayed alive so long without offspring blood,” Egret pushed.
“Was I?” Wess started the car and turned onto Line Street, which in under two minutes would take us to the diner. “I guess there’s no better time. After the portal was sealed last time, I stayed alive by taking flights into deep space. Advanced technology already had ways to freeze the body, so I agreed to go on long missions to other planets in order to guarantee that I’d get unlimited use of those methods for personal use. That’s how I met Helen—at NASA.”
“But you must be starving now, right?”
“That’s the strange thing about demons. The longer we go without human or offspring meat, the more human we get. The more human we get, the more we derive sustenance from normal food—pancakes, for example.” Wess turned into the diner parking lot. “But it’s hard, almost impossible, to quit. Think of demons as rabid dogs, and then try to imagine a rabid dog transitioning into a refined gentleman. Without love, such changes rarely happen.”
“And you found love? With Helen?”
My mother looked down at her hands.
“Yes, but I’ll admit she was not my first. Just my greatest.”
Wess led us into the diner, where the familiar smell of griddle-cooked bread, bacon, and eggs made my stomach growl. We asked for a table for four, and like a patchwork family, we sat in the metal diner chairs with turquoise plastic cushions and examined the menu as though it held every answer to the problems facing us that day. My dad ordered coffee, black, just the way I liked it, and then we both ordered waffles with whole strawberries and blueberry sauce on the side.
“Weird.” Egret looked between us.
“They get too soggy when they put—”
“—the sauce on top,” my dad finished for me. “And blueberry and strawberry mixed create—”
“—the perfect combination of fresh and stewed berries,” I added.
My mother looked like she might faint.
After the waitress brought our meals—whole grain pancakes for mom and chocolate chip for Egret—Wess told us the rest of his story. He had first fallen in love with a woman back in the 1800s and had a daughter, the first of his offspring, soon after meeting her. Convinced that he could help the rest of the incubi see the errors of their ways, Wess returned through the portal to tell them about his new family, only to meet fierce resistance from the leader of the incubi clan, Eads. Eads imprisoned Wess in an impenetrable cell, and then all of the incubi were sealed back in when the portal was closed by an Artist on the outside.
“We call the times when the incubi break out Outbreaks,” Wess said. “Every century or so there’s another one, usually started by a curious son or daughter who wants to find the father they never had. They find their fathers all right, but that’s the last thing they ever do.”
“So how did you escape?” Egret asked. She seemed eager to hear the story, though all the talk of eating offspring had turned my stomach, and my mom didn’t look too pleased either.
“Members of the resistance freed me. They live in the incubi realm, but they secretly plot ways to change Eads’s mind about eating offspring—or to kill him, if convincing him doesn’t work.”
“And when would they lead such an attack?”
Wess shrugged. “We’re incubi. As long as we stay fed, we have the rest of eternity to act. They could do it tomorrow… they could go it a thousand years from now.”
“Well, we don’t
have a century,” I said softly. “We don’t even have a day.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” I didn’t know if I could trust my father with the Council’s secret; I didn’t even know if I could trust myself to follow through on my promise.
But despite my silence, my father figured it out anyway.
“They’re planning an attack, aren’t they?” My father’s mouth became a thin line. “The Council wants to seal up the portal, and you’re the lock.”
“You are?” Egret turned to me, a piece of pancake half-chewed in her mouth. “What does that mean?”
“Death.” My father sawed violently at his waffle. “And a pointless one too. With Eads alive, locking the portal will only delay the inevitable.”
“Death?” Egret screamed, her silverware clattering to the floor. “They want you to die to seal the portal, and you weren’t going to tell me?”
“I’m sorry.” I looked down at my plate. “I just thought it would be easier if you didn’t know.”
“Well, it wouldn’t be. There must be another way. Wess, can’t you think of something we can do?”
My father stopped his sawing. “Maybe. But we would need the resistance on our side, and to convince them that acting now is the only option.”
“How do we do that? How do we find them?” I was willing to die for Earth, but if there was a way out, I would take it.
“I’ll try to find them tonight. Do you two need to get back to the Council before that?”
“The ball.” I had forgotten all about it until that moment. “It starts in an hour, and if we’re not present, both the Council and Igreefee will suspect something.”
“Very well. You two go to the ball, but at 2:00 a.m., sneak out and meet me on the edge of the Mansion grounds. Egret, you fly Lumi off the side on my signal and follow me, no matter where I go. Understood?”
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