GODDESS OF THE MOON (A Diana Racine Psychic Suspense)

by Polly Iyer

  “Good. You’re not completely oblivious to his manipulations.” He pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolded it, letting her see what was written on it. “I found this stuck in your door when I came looking for you.” Drawn on the paper was a crescent moon and the printed words, “A crescent moon is near.”

  Diana read it, held it in her hands and closed her eyes for a long minute. “No vibes,” she said when she opened her eyes.

  “Nothing we can trace either,” Lucier said.

  “What the hell does it mean?”

  “It means on the day of the crescent moon I’m not letting you out of my sight, even if I have to lock one of those GPS tracking devices on your ankle, and even if you never speak to me again.”

  “When is the night of the crescent moon?”

  “The new moon is in a few days. A crescent moon is a couple of days after that. I checked.”

  “Weird things are supposed to happen on the full moon, not a crescent one.”

  “The crescent moon is the symbol of the goddess Diana, or have you forgotten?”

  “No, I haven’t. I wish now I were back in the days when they called me Diana, Goddess of the Hunt. At least no one was sending me scary notes.”

  “From the new moon on, and with your permission, madam, I will stick to you like glue.” He nudged his way next to her and studied the pad of paper she was doodling on. “Now, do you mind telling me what you’re doing?”

  “Check this out. Brigid and Nona’s last name.

  FULCERI CERIFUL FURLICE LICUREF LUCIFER

  “Jesus,” Lucier said. “Remove one letter and it spells my name too, straight out.”

  “I didn’t notice that,” she said, “but you’re right.”

  Chapter Twenty- Nine

  Irresistible Magnetism

  When Maia arrived at the compound from New Orleans, Nona and Brigid were already there. She hadn’t seen her half-sisters in a couple of years. She remembered their transition into young womanhood. Brigid had developed early, and Maia remembered how the young girl relished the attention and flaunted her attributes with no inhibitions, as her mother taught her. Now, as Maia sat in the nursery watching them nurse the babies, she realized how perverted the group’s ambitious project was. She’d spent the last two days kicking herself for carrying out the pitiful act of revenge against her father instead of going to Lieutenant Lucier and exposing the whole operation.

  Instead, she’d been reprimanded and escorted to one of the Compton planes, flown to the compound, and confined.

  Do not pass go. Go directly to jail.

  She’d been allowed to see her half-sisters, but nothing she said to them countered the lifetime of programming they’d sustained.

  Maia marveled at their startling beauty. Phillip and Cybele Crane’s sons and daughters produced perfect, brilliant, and beautiful offspring, exactly as Maia had. What she saw now was different. Her half-sisters were nursing not their own children, but babies stolen from the warmth of their birth mothers’ arms.

  Brigid was pregnant, and not for the first time. A baby bump swelled under her clothes, her figure fuller, breasts heavier. Maia remembered the feeling well. Although she was well endowed, she couldn’t compare to Selene’s obedient daughters. Raw sexuality comprised part of their genetic makeup, inherited from a great beauty and taught by the best of all teachers. Maia didn’t realize until now, looking at the two women, that Silas was nothing more than a pimp with a stratospheric intelligence, and that all his children were nothing more than pawns in the group’s egotistical ambition to populate their fantasy world with their genes.

  She pulled up a chair to face the two women. “You know what you’re doing is wrong.”

  Brigid switched the hungry child from one breast to another. “How can this be wrong, Maia? Look at them. They’re beautiful.”

  “But they were kidnapped―taken from their natural parents who are grieving. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “This is for a greater cause,” Nona said, cradling her infant. “We love doing this. Father says we’re giving these babies part of us. We want to please him.”

  “He’s using you,” Maia said. “You’re nothing more than sexual objects to him.” Both women stopped, frowned at Maia, and the worst feeling she ever had in her life shuddered through her. Bile rose to her throat, and she pushed the obscene thought from her mind, unwilling to think the unthinkable.

  They, like all the young women here, had been brainwashed by lessons taught from birth. Little girls were created to be goddesses of fertility, boys their gods, and pleasure their destiny. For the longest time, she and Dione did what Silas expected of them―yes, to please him―but they lived different lives than the others. As daughters of one of the world’s richest men, they couldn’t be hidden away and trained as courtesans, like the rest of the women born of the group. They maintained important positions within their father’s companies. They were written about, photographed, admired. Their trips to attend Compton business were covers for the time they spent at the compound to give birth. They nursed their babies, held them, and loved them. Then Maia and Dione returned home to carry on with their lives, leaving their babies to be raised by others. Home to Silas and Selene, the queen bitch―or witch. She was both, but one thing she was not and never would be―she wasn’t their mother.

  Maia and Dione saw their children when Silas allowed. By then, the babies had bonded with others who lived at the compound, teaching and indoctrinating them. They’d bonded with her half-sisters, Maia knew, and it caused a jumble of emotions, none good.

  Sure, Maia thought sardonically, let’s keep it in the family. Now their babies had grown into toddlers and kindergartners and school age, and Maia and Dione hardly knew them.

  The only sister their children didn’t bond with was Anat, Selene’s first daughter. They didn’t because Anat rejected Selene’s teachings, refused to be a wet nurse, scorned the Crane god, and turned her back on the growing community of sexual hedonists. Anat was here somewhere, segregated. Maia didn’t know where, but she would find her.

  The babies suckling at the breasts of Nona and Brigid weren’t family. They were stolen to enrich the genetic pool of the group and nursed by strangers.

  She had learned about the kidnappings only a few days ago and couldn’t comprehend the impossible. Whatever she’d been taught―all her indoctrination―paled to what she now knew.

  This must stop.

  How long could her father explain her absence? He could say she died overseas and keep her here forever. Then they would force her to bear other children. No lack of willing sons. One especially. She would fail to reproduce, but they didn’t know that.

  No one in the outside world knew about Selene’s three daughters. Anat had always been a thorn in the side of her parents. Now, with the twisted turn of kidnapped babies, Maia could only imagine Anat’s rebellion.

  Maia needed to find a way out of the compound. She had a vague idea, but the area was huge, bordered by rivers, mountains, and barriers of trees and guarded by men who were paid to keep everyone inside. The only way out was by air, difficult without the children, hopeless with them.

  Her father never invited outsiders to his home. Diana Racine was not an ordinary person susceptible to group tactics. What was the group planning?

  She heard the key turn in the door, locked only to keep her inside. She hadn’t seen him in a while, and as hard as she tried to rein in her reaction, her heart pounded when he entered the room. Still handsome, even with fine lines etched around his eyes and mouth. Still with the sexiest, self-confident smile.

  “You’re a foolish woman, Maia. What were you thinking?” he said, locking the door behind him.

  “Hello, Seth. Or have you changed your name? Maybe to Apollo or Adonis, perhaps?”

  His smile broadened, as if he found her taunt amusing. “Since we’ve been intimate, you can call me Seth. I find name changing pretentious.”

  Maia’s full-throated,
cynical laugh woke one of the babies.

  “Now see what you’ve done?” Brigid said. “He was in dreamland and you’ve awakened him.”

  Seth exchanged the baby sleeping peacefully in Brigid’s arms with the crying baby in the crib. Brigid cooed and cuddled the infant, and she quickly found peace at her breast. Seth stooped in front of the sisters. “You shouldn’t have gone to the mission,” he said. “What if someone was watching?”

  “They weren’t,” Nona said. “We checked.”

  “If the police had that place under surveillance, you wouldn’t have seen them. Now you have to stay here. It’s too dangerous for you to leave. You could expose everything. Whatever the cops suspect, they can’t prove a thing.” He curled his index finger under Brigid’s chin and lifted her head. “Do you understand?” he said in a knife-thin whisper. “No more.”

  “We would never say anything,” Nona said.

  He alternated his attention between the two women, his tone firmer. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Seth,” they said in robotic unison.

  “Besides,” Brigid said, “Father told us we’d be here for a while.”

  “True,” Seth said. “There’s plenty for you to do here.” He patted Brigid’s stomach and smiled, then rose and took Maia’s arm. “Come with me.”

  She looked back at her half-sisters, cooing over their charges, and shook her head. They were nothing but automatons. What will happen to them when this compound comes to the attention of the authorities? Where would they go?

  Maia followed Seth, noticing he didn’t lock the door after him. Why should he? Brigid and Nona weren’t being held here against their wills. “Where are you taking me?”

  Seth stopped, fixed his black eyes on her. “You haven’t eaten anything since you arrived late last night. You’re hungry, aren’t you?”

  He must have heard the rumblings in her stomach. “Yes.”

  “I thought I’d have the cook prepare you something to eat.”

  “As long as you taste it first.”

  “Maia, Maia, don’t you trust me?” Seth’s patronizing tone always infuriated her, but she needed to be smarter now than in times past.

  “Not long ago my food contained something that knocked me out. Nine months later I gave birth to a bouncing baby boy.”

  “That’s because the third time you were difficult. You left me no choice.”

  So it was Seth. Part of her breathed a sigh of relief; the other part felt sick. “There’s always a choice.”

  “I’m the father of all your children,” he said, “but making love is much better when it’s consensual.” He opened another door and held it.

  When she started through, he blocked her way, coming so close she breathed in his scent, the same spicy fragrance she remembered, filling her senses. He cupped his hands over her breasts and massaged them. She felt them tighten, nipples protruding hard in his hungry fingers. She stared at him as if his contact meant nothing, even though her body quivered inside. She didn’t remove his hand. It had been a long time since he’d touched her intimately, and he still wielded the same sensual power over her.

  “Don’t fight it, Maia. We were meant for each other.” He nuzzled into her neck and murmured in her ear. “You’re still the most beautiful, you know, and at your peak of childbearing years.” He drew back, smiling. “Admit it, you wanted me as much as I wanted you, and from what I’m feeling under your blouse, you still do.”

  She brushed his hand aside. “You wish.”

  She’d loved Seth Crane, then and now, and he knew it. She remembered that summer after the end of her home schooling. Her father consented, with a hundred caveats, to her wish to attend the fall semester at Tulane. First, however, she must spend the summer at the compound.

  When barely a teenager, and she first set eyes on Seth, she felt an inexplicable pull. She tried to ignore the attraction because he was Selene’s younger brother, and she hated Selene. But his olive skin and black eyes mesmerized her. His strong muscled arms held her, hands stroking her body, while his mouth covered every inch of her skin, giving her pleasure she’d only dreamed about. He teased her, played with her for hours, bringing her to the height of excitement. When he entered her, the world exploded in unimaginable ecstasy.

  The summer turned into more than a year when she got pregnant, which was the group’s plan all along. She put college on hold to have Seth’s baby. Such a beautiful baby boy, with Seth’s dark skin and her bright blue eyes. After a few months, they took the baby from her and she went back to school. A repeat performance the summer before her junior year produced a daughter. She couldn’t resist Seth’s magnetism.

  “I want to see our children.”

  “They’re beautiful,” he said, “especially the girl. She looks like you.”

  He moved into her, so close his hardness pushed against her. “Come here to stay, Maia. I’ve missed you.”

  The words were empty platitudes, but he made them sound believable. She had loved her babies and had loved Seth in earnest, not realizing at the time that to him she was just another incubator for the new generation.

  One of his many incubators.

  Chapter Thirty

  Gods and Goddesses

  “You asked for a rundown on the progeny,” Jason said when he called Lucier back, “but first, you asked about the college the group’s children attended.”

  “Give,” Lucier said, grabbing a pencil from atop his desk and readying a pad of paper. “I’m taking notes.”

  “No need. I’ll fax you everything when this call is finished.”

  “Better,” Lucier said.

  “Middlebridge’s endowment is huge, and the biggest benefactors are Crane Corporation and Compton International. It has a small student body and promotes a basic liberal arts curriculum, and I do mean liberal.”

  “Explain please.”

  “You wanted to know if it was a religious college. I didn’t find any courses in religion, but the curriculum covers just about everything else―literature, art, mythology, world cultures, even erotica. The tuition is double the top private colleges, which keeps the elite enrollment small. Besides the group’s offspring, children of others in the same financial stratosphere as Crane and Compton’s go there. Excellent avant-garde and progressive professors in the artsy subjects, and only one has a direct connection to our man. He used to teach an abstract reasoning course at Oklahoma, where Compton went to school. He’s old now but still considered a giant in his field. The sons and daughters of our subjects graduated with very high GPAs.”

  “I would have thought there’d be a right-wing lean, but it doesn’t seem that way.”

  “Not so sure,” Jason said. “The political science professors tend to be Libertarian and Conservative, but, as I said, the other courses lean socially left. Go figure.”

  “Interesting but not surprising. What happens when they graduate?”

  “Here’s where it gets strange, because I haven’t been able to fill in the blanks.”

  “What do you mean?” Lucier asked.

  “Some of the sons and daughters are supposedly off doing humanitarian work overseas for the family foundations. They’ve filed IRS forms, but their income is listed as stock dividends or interest from inheritances, and their addresses are the same as their parents. They have no records of employment, credit cards with no charges, and are without debt. Nothing more I can track.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “Of the six progeny of Phillip Crane, Seth is the only one I can’t account for. He’s one of the out-of-the-country people. You know about the Crane women, and the oldest son, David, runs Crane Corporation. He’s married, has three children, all grown, oldest in the business; the other two are in the missing column. The other families follow the same pattern. Martin Easley’s son Cal is the only other child of a first marriage I can’t account for.”

  “What the hell’s going on?”

  “I’m just the messenger, Lieutenant,”
Jason said. “I’m curious about the answers myself. My fax will contain an exact breakdown of the family trees, their history, et cetera. But the only second marriage with no traceable children is Silas and Selene Compton.”

  “Which makes Selene an oddity of the group.”

  “Yeah. An article about Jeremy Haynesworth said his son and daughter were off doing humanitarian work overseas. That’s the same story the others say when asked.”

  “Damn, I’d love to get my hands on their passports. See whether they’ve really left the country. I doubt they have.”

  “Why? Where do you think they are?”

  “Damned if I know, but my gut instinct says they’re not where they’re saying they are. I’ve used up my supply of hunches lately.” He tapped his pen on the empty pad of paper. “Is that it?”

  “For now. I’ll let you know if I find out anything else.”

  “Hey, thanks a lot. Great work. I’m just not sure what to do with it.”

  “Can’t help you there. You’re the cop. I’ll fax this to Diana so it doesn’t go through your office. Is that all right?”

  “Perfect.”

  “Tell her I love her.”

  “Wait in line, buddy.”

  “As a friend, Lieutenant. Wish I were competition.”

  Lucier laughed and hung up. He leaned back in his chair and scratched his head. What the hell.

  * * * * *

  By the time he arrived at Diana’s that evening, Jason had faxed his report and Diana had read it.

  “This is major strange,” she said, “especially about the name changes. Which got me thinking.” She handed Lucier the pad of paper she had in front of her.

  “More crosswords?”

  “No, research. Look at these names. Cybele, Selene, Maia and Dione. I went online and typed in the names. Are you ready? Cebele―a fertility goddess, mother of the gods; Selene―moon goddess, known for her countless love affairs; Maia―impregnated by Zeus in the dead of night while all the other gods slept; Dione―the mother of Aphrodite by the big guy again, Zeus. These women are all named for mythological figures.”