Lure of the Night

by Bethany Knox

  “Yes, I am sorry. She has been with them since the beginning. She is one of them.”

  “Mom? That’s crazy.” But even as I said it, I remembered her pumping me for information, there was that strange light that came into her eyes at unguarded moments. Just like Father Ryan.

  “Oh, my God!” Oh, Mom, Oh, Jesus Christ. Not you!

  “Come on, we can discuss it later,” he swung aside a bookcase, there was a narrow door there that led out into a secluded part of the garden. We went through, he closed it and led me to one of the jeeps. Two of the guards were waiting for us, one started the engine and we got in and drove away.

  “The others will follow shortly, don’t worry.”

  We drove only a couple of hundred yards before the other jeep came roaring after us, I could see Dad and Megan with Ethan and Ulysses. Mom was not with them, of course. I wondered what would happen to her, in spite of everything I didn’t want her hurt.

  “Where are we headed?”

  “Straight to the beach, we’ll take the launch and get back to the mainland before they know we’ve even left.”

  It was a simple plan, a good plan, but like most plans, it had the inbuilt tendency to go wrong at the crucial stage. It went wrong, badly wrong, the Medusans were cleverer than they’d given them credit for. As we drove through the jungle we saw a group of Medusans racing out of the trees, obviously trying to stop us before we reached the boat, they had worked out what we were doing. I gripped Ethan’s hand and felt his reassuring squeeze.

  “What do we do now?”

  “We fight. One of the guards will stay with you, I’m going to help them.”

  “Ethan!”

  But he had already leapt out of the jeep with the other guard. Megan came over to stay with me but Dad and Ulysses joined Ethan and ran at the Medusans. They came together with a loud crash, fists flew, boots kicked out, it was like an ancient bout in the Roman arena, a bloody fight to the death without weapons but the combatants didn’t need them, they were so supernaturally powerful. The Amstrydae were incredibly strong, but the Medusans were strong too and had their peculiar power of thought reading, so that they seemed to anticipate every blow before it hit them. I reminded myself that the Amstrydae could not die, did that apply to the Ardethans as well? I hoped so. I was frightened for Dad.

  The fight was going badly for us, they outnumbered us massively, suddenly two of the Medusans broke away and ran at our jeep. I was frozen with indecision for a moment, should I fight or run, but then two shots rang out, almost deafening me. The whole beach froze, the fighters stopped and I looked around. Megan had found a pistol under the seat of the jeep and shot the two attackers. She was weeping, “I didn’t want to kill them but I had no choice, they would have taken you.”

  This time I took her in my arms. “It was a brave thing to do. I could have been taken by them, you stopped them. Thank you, Megan.”

  Then more Medusans poured out of the jungle, blocking the track between us and the boat. I saw Ulysses looking around, calculating. Then he came hurtling back to the jeep.

  “There’s a track at the side, we can get away from them. Come on, let’s go,” he shouted. They ran for the jeeps, the engines were started and we raced away along the track, the Medusans ran forward, their hands actually touched the bodywork, but we had escaped.

  The track was narrow, branches whipped at us as we drove, but they kept the jeeps moving at speed. We must have covered five miles before we stopped in the middle of a dense patch of jungle.

  “Why have we stopped?” I asked Ulysses.

  “Look,” he pointed ahead.

  I looked where he indicated, where the track should have continued, it was overgrown, blocked.

  “What do we do now?”

  “We find somewhere to hide and wait.”

  We got out of the jeeps and started to hike through the thick foliage. It was hard going, the path was narrow, almost non-existent in parts. Thorns constantly pricked at our clothes, my jeans were ripped, my arms and legs were scratched bloody. After we had covered a mile, we stopped.

  “This should be enough,” Ulysses said. “We’ll wait here until dark. It’s a long wait, we need to get some rest.”

  I sat down on the ground. The jungle stank, it was a smell of rotting foliage and vegetation. And fear. We were terribly exposed. If they came upon us on foot, their superior numbers would be enough to finish us. I went to speak to Ethan, but he shushed me to silence. In the distance, I could hear the sound of breaking twigs and low voices. They were hunting us. We sat quietly but none came near. All through the afternoon we were quiet, Megan dozed, her head in Dad’s lap for a pillow. I wanted Ethan to put his head in my lap, I wanted to stroke his thick, rich hair, but he was standing sentry duty at the edge of the tiny clearing in which we hid.

  It got dark, and very cold. I felt tired, numb with Mom’s betrayal.

  “It’s time to move,” Ulysses said, getting to his feet.

  “How will we see to get through the jungle?” I asked him.

  “We’re Amstrydae,” he said. I remembered Ethan’s uncanny night vision when I’d met him in the woods.

  “Will you help me, I can’t see a thing?”

  Ethan came beside me. “Try opening your eyes, Claire.”

  “I have got them open.”

  “No, forget your normal instinct that you can’t see in the dark. Look through the darkness, see it with your inner mind.”

  It sounded like some mysterious crap to me, like ‘use the force, young Luke Skywalker’, but I tried to do as he said. And there was something, I realized that I could see vague shapes around me. I tried again and they resolved themselves into definite objects. Then they focused, wow, I could see. I told them, hardly believing it myself.

  “That’s good, your powers are coming to you and developing. We expected that.”

  “So what else will I be able to do?”

  In the pitch dark I saw him smile. “You’ll become very strong, you may develop the ability to communicate over long distances, in dreams. And if you drink blood, you’ll find you can live for many lifetimes.”

  “Drink blood? Oh, that’s awful.”

  “But you eat meat, don’t you?”

  “Well, yes, of course,” I replied.

  “So what’s the difference with drinking blood, the meat you eat contains blood. You will develop a thirst for it.”

  Yuck! “Do you mean human blood?”

  He laughed. “Not at all. Human blood is best, it is the purest, we try and source it from blood banks, don’t worry, we pay for donations. But animal blood is better than nothing.”

  “It sounds disgusting.”

  “It won’t taste that way when you start to crave it,” he laughed. “It tastes like fine wine.”

  Yeah, you go ahead, I’ll stay with diet soda.

  We made our way back to the beach, threading through the trees and avoiding the track. The launch was lying at anchor, Ethan swam out and started the engines and brought it to shore so that we could get aboard. Then Ulysses took the wheel and set course for the mainland. We were going home, wherever that is. As we were speeding away from the beach, I saw with my newly developed night vision the Medusans massing on the beach. Whatever had happened to them here with the radiation, I knew in my heart that this was not going to work, they would not just give up, they’d want payback. I didn’t need any mysterious powers to work that one out. Maybe it had been worth a try, maybe it would work in the long run, but right now they were just like school bullies, they could knock you around but if anyone kicked back at them they went crazy with this revenge thing. I watched the island recede into the distance, then I turned and went into the cabin.

  “Where are we going now?” I asked them.

  “Back to New Orleans,” Dad said. “I’ve got a place there where we can rest up until we know how successful we’ve been.”

  “Do you think the Medusans will still come after us?” Megan asked him.

&nb
sp; I interrupted. “Wouldn’t you?” I said tiredly.

  She nodded. “Yeah, I guess I would.”

  It wasn’t over yet and I thought that maybe we had miscalculated. Even if it had worked, they would be pretty pissed for a while. I’d have thought it was obvious, this was a long term plan. In the short term, we had stirred up a hornet’s nest.

  Chapter 9

  We spent a day and a half returning to the USA and then to New Orleans by way of a roundabout route. I asked Dad if it would keep them away from us.

  “Not for long, honey. They are very cunning and very skilful, very powerful. They will track us there, sooner or later. But what we need is time to get our defenses in place, so that when they do come, we’ll be ready for them. What we’re hoping is that they will eventually give up if and when they realize they are infertile.”

  Well, yeah, that’s right. That was it, the big ‘If’ and ‘When’. I hesitated, but I had to say the thing that was on my mind.

  “It would be easier for all of you if I was dead, wouldn’t it?”

  His face dropped, his concern etched into the lines that stretched across his face, his eyes deep and full of love for me.

  “Honey, that wouldn’t easier at all. Apart from breaking my heart as well as Megan’s heart, she has become very fond of you, all it would do is put them off until the next Carrier is born. We would spend centuries looking over our shoulders and wondering when the next crisis would happen. No, we have done that too many times before. You were right, you know. This time, we have to try and finish it, once and for all.”

  We arrived in the hallway of the town house that he owned in the city, I learned that he had many properties here for his various ventures. A part of me hoped that we could stay there, it was so elegant, so beautiful, furnished with art and antiques. But I wanted to go home, too, but that would bring up a huge problem. Mom. I needed to ask what had happened to her, if they knew, but I had held off so far, I think I didn’t want to know the answer.

  I hadn’t seen Ethan either since yesterday, I asked Dad where he was.

  “He went to sort out some personal business, honey. He never said where he was going.”

  “Oh, he didn’t say goodbye, I didn’t know.”

  “You’re fond of him, aren’t you?”

  Yeah, just a little bit. “I guess.”

  “Yes. Well, maybe when you’re older, you two might make a go of things.”

  “I’m almost sixteen, Dad. Give me some credit.”

  He looked puzzled. I shouldn’t exactly have to tell him that Ethan and I weren’t about to elope. But I felt so lonely. “Dad, what about Mom, have you heard anything?”

  He nodded. “Yes, she went home.”

  “Home? So I could call her if I wanted?”

  He hesitated. “Would you want to call her? She betrayed you to those people, it was a dreadful thing.”

  “But if she is a Medusan, she thought she was doing the right thing.”

  He snorted at that. “The right thing? She married me under false pretences, you were born under false pretences and then she tried to sell you out to those Medusan animals, how is that doing the right thing?”

  “If you were asked to infiltrate the Medusans, would you do it for the Amstrydae?”

  He thought about that for a moment. “Well, yes, I would, but it’s different.”

  Yeah, it was always different on the other side. That had been the biggest problem of my life, people never saw things from the other side.

  “I do want to talk to Mom.”

  He sighed. “Ok, honey. We’ve got an untraceable cell phone you can use to call her. But don’t tell her where we are, will you?”

  I gave him a look that I hoped carried the right message. A message that said, ‘exactly how stupid have you brought your daughter up to be?’

  At least he had the grace to say, “Sorry.”

  I took the cell phone that he gave me and called Mom. At first she was silent, astonished that I’d called.

  “Claire? I thought you’d never want to speak to me again.”

  “No. I thought about it, but after all, you are my mom.”

  “And you’re my daughter.”

  “Well, yes.” About time you realized that, Mom.

  “I’m just so sorry it happened, I’ve been stupid. Can we patch things up?”

  “I want to talk to you about that.”

  “What can I do to make up for what I did? Can I see you, where are you?”

  “Mom!”

  “Yes, of course, I shouldn’t have asked. I’m not working for them anymore.”

  “So you say.”

  “Right. Can we meet sometime?”

  I thought for a moment. “Look, I’ll call you when things are settled. Take care, Mom.”

  I cut the connection. It was a miserable conversation. I couldn’t tell her where I was, what I was doing, anything, and she was my Mom. She was also the woman who’d tried to sell me out. Would I ever see her again? I couldn’t be certain.

  I saw Dad looking through the doorway he came into the room. “All ok, honey?”

  I nodded. “She was fine. I’d like to see her, but I know it may be impossible.”

  Ulysses came in and looked at Dad. “We’re ok, no attempt at tracing.”

  I glanced from one to the other. “What do you mean?”

  “We checked the call, honey, just to make sure they weren’t trying to track our location. If they were, we could have cut it straight away.”

  I felt cold in my stomach, the constant distrust and threats of betrayal. But I knew it was necessary. “So Mom can be trusted then, is she ok now?”

  “No, not entirely. We must always remember who she is and what she is capable of. But maybe, just maybe, she’s changed. Time will tell.”

  “Surely if the Medusans have all been neutralized with the radiation, I mean, won’t they give up? I mean, I know they will be bitter at first, but surely they’ll calm down in the end? When they’re not hunting me any more I can go and see Mom.”

  “But we don’t yet know they will respond, or even if it worked,” Ulysses said. “Until we do, we must assume that they are still coming after you. And, even if the radiation did work, they’ll probably want revenge. No, we need to keep our defenses up, for a long time to come, anyway. It was a good plan, Claire, but it’s not going to get them off our back in the short term, so we need to be careful.”

  “What do you call the short term?”

  “Oh, maybe twenty or thirty years or so,” he said.

  Was that a joke? “I could be dead in thirty years.”

  “No, you could not. You are Amstrydae. Make that about five hundred years.”

  Oh, my God!

  Forget the hundreds of years, after a few days I began to feel like I was a prisoner. I asked them if it would be safe to go out. They still hadn’t had any word about the Medusans, where they were or what they were planning. I insisted, told them I had to leave the house if I wasn’t to lose my mind, I even worked up a bit of a tantrum. In the end, they gave in.

  “You’ll need an escort, Dad said. “I’ll go with you, Megan will want to come too.”

  “Yeah, ok, that would be fine.” I was quite happy to have some company, besides, the last thing I wanted was to be spirited off some New Orleans sidewalk by a Medusan hit squad.

  After lunch, we set out to walk around the city centre. They were very protective, Dad one side of me and Megan the other. As we walked along I caught sight of two of our people following a short distance behind, I saw their reflections in the window of a store. They were being very careful to stay close and I couldn’t blame them. We checked out a display in a high tech store that sold computers and IPods when Dad said, “Why don’t we go in and look them all over?”

  We went in and I spent a happy half hour playing with the electronic toys. A laptop was connected to the internet and I surfed for a bit. A sales guy came up and asked me if I was planning to buy. I was about to say no,
but Dad interrupted.

  “Would you like that one, honey? We’ve got a local WiFi access point at the house if you needed to connect to the net.”

  Would I? What a question. I came out of the store with a brand new laptop in a dark blue leather case. At least I’d be able to start living again and find out what was going on in the world. I was working out my to-do list, Facebook, email, messenger software, maybe even a webcam connection to have face to face chats with my old friends from home. Did Mom have a computer at home, I wondered? Of course she did, my old computer was still there, she could use that. All of a sudden, I was getting my life back together, at least in part. The sun was shining, I was walking around what was probably the most fascinating city in the US, with a brand new laptop. At last, the terrible things that had happened were fading into the past. I couldn’t wait for Ethan to get back so that I could share it all with him, I pictured the two of us surfing together, maybe we could even have a joint Facebook account. Or was that a bit pushy? I’d have to think about it. I felt Dad grip my arm tightly.

  “What’s up, Dad.”

  “Medusans. They’ve found us.”

  They swung me around and we started walking back. As we had turned I’d caught a glimpse of a group of people staring at us, eyes blazing, smoldering, there were eight of them and we’d nearly walked straight into them. Of course, they could just have been eight men of Middle Eastern appearance with eyes like burning coals that happened to be strolling in the New Orleans sunshine, but it was unlikely. They hurried me along, the two guards keeping pace close behind us. Were they following? I turned my head, yes, they were no more than ten paces behind us.

  “We need to lead them away from the house,” Dad said. “We’ve got an alternative way in, we’d better get there quickly before they call for reinforcements.”

  We walked hurriedly through a maze of narrow streets and arcades, then turned a corner and ducked into a store labeled ‘Pet Supplies’. The clerk, who was probably the owner, looked up, recognized Dad and looked away. We rushed through a side door which led down into a basement. Once again, I found myself in a New Orleans tunnel. At least it was lit this time, I had no time to try seeing in the dark, a line of bulbs showed the way along the damp passageway, walls dripping with water, puddles on the ground. We moved quickly along the tunnel until we came to a set of stairs, we went up and through a door. We were home, in the hallway of the house where we were staying.