Child of Twilight

by Margaret L. Carter

  “Of course. I stayed inside his mind until the last possible moment. I withdrew, naturally, an instant before the impact.” She briefly closed her eyes as if to shut out some intolerable image. “Never let yourself experience their death. Remember that.”

  Gillian nodded. At the thought of facing something that frightened this bold woman, the hair prickled at the nape of Gillian’s neck.

  “After I was certain it must be over, I reached for his mind again. Nothing. So he’s most definitely dead. Dismiss him from your thoughts.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Gillian. She strove to shield her emotions, for she didn’t want Camille to suspect how much this killing disturbed her. Gillian was developing a tentative appreciation for Volnar, who always recommended solutions short of death. If bonding was as cataclysmic an experience as Claude and Roger made it appear, how could Camille bring herself to destroy a bond-mate? Even one she regarded only as a tool?

  With an ironic smile Camille said, “Watch your language. I don’t expect you to treat me like an elder.” She scooped Gillian’s dirty clothes off the floor. “I saw laundry equipment down the hall. After I’ve washed and dried these, we’ll go out to obtain a more varied wardrobe for you.”

  “But clothing stores aren’t open this late.”

  Camille shook her head in mock despair. “You do have a lot to learn.”

  An hour later, luxuriating in clean clothes, Gillian watched Camille maneuver along the four-lane highway, busy despite the late hour. “Saturday night,” Camille remarked. “Good time to catch a victim at a nightclub or a movie theater. But that’s not what we’re after just now.” She seemed to have shed the grim mood induced by the confrontation with Greer. She sang an interminable song called “This Land Is Your Land” and taught Gillian a few verses.

  After a while she turned at a stoplight into a strip shopping center. Driving behind the stores, Camille waited several minutes in the back lot with motor and lights off before getting out of the car. “The coast looks clear. Prepare boarding party.” She grinned as if excited by the risk. Gillian followed her to the rear door of a boutique called Beyond 2000. “Since they probably have a silent alarm, we must act quickly. I assume you know your sizes?” Gillian nodded. “Then once you’re inside, grab an armful and run.”

  At the moment Camille’s hand gripped the massive metal latch, headlights shined around the corner of the last building in the row. “Vanish!” Camille said in Gillian’s ear.

  Calming her heartbeat and drawing upon the memory of her practice with Claude, Gillian veiled herself. She felt Camille’s hand on her shoulder but saw nothing except a pale blur of an aura outlining the space where the woman should be. Around the building crept a police car. It rolled to a stop next to the car they’d arrived in. The officer opened his window and aimed a flashlight at Camille’s stolen vehicle. When no movement responded to the light, he switched it off and drove away.

  Camille oozed back into solidity. “Routine check. You can be visible now. After I’ve opened the door for you, I’ll fade again and wait for you by the car.” Both of her hands closed around the latch. With no appearance of strain, she twisted it. The lock popped open. “Now hurry,” she whispered.

  Gillian darted inside. From the corner of her eye, she glimpsed Camille’s image thinning to a wisp of light. After emerging from the stockroom to which the back door led, Gillian surveyed the store display in the darkness that was a pastel landscape to her eyes. She dashed for the underwear counter and snatched up a package of briefs and two pairs of socks in her size, then ran across the room to a rack marked 14 Long. In the distance a siren wailed. Unable to tell whether the noise signaled a response to the alarm Camille had predicted, Gillian rushed anyway. After grabbing three pairs of jeans and four shirts, hangers and all, she raced out the door, slamming it behind her.

  The car was already running—with, to a superficial glance, no one at the wheel—and the passenger door opened just as Gillian reached it. The ululation of the siren pierced her ears. She tossed her booty into the back seat, dived for the floor, and gathered her psychic veil around her quaking body.

  Her vision misted from the effort of making herself look insubstantial, she vaguely saw Camille’s form waver into focus. The car moved—not at top speed, as Gillian expected. Instead, Camille drove no more than a block and pulled in behind a closed, deserted gas station.

  “The last thing we want to look like is a pair of criminals fleeing the scene of a burglary,” said Camille before smoothly vanishing again.

  Sometime in the past minute or so, the siren had cut off. “They’ll be searching the store and the parking lot now. Wish I could see their faces when they examine that lock,” said Camille in a murmur like a breeze rustling distant pine boughs. “Calm yourself, concentrate, and lend me your strength.”

  Gillian forced her taut muscles to loosen and her pounding heart to slow almost to immobility. She extended tendrils of psychic energy to Camille. For a while, she felt as if she floated in one of those sensory deprivation tanks she’d read about. She didn’t know how long it was before Camille said, “Wake up. It’s safe to leave now. They drove past and didn’t notice us.”

  Unfolding from her crouch on the floorboards, Gillian massaged the kinks out of her legs. “Didn’t even notice the car? How could that be? Surely you can’t make the car invisible, too?”

  “No.” Camille chuckled. “However, I can divert their attention from it. I projected a suggestion that nothing of importance was in this spot, that they ought to look in the other direction and feel absolutely no interest in this car. Unless they were questioned directly on the point, they’d hardly even be aware they saw a vehicle.”

  Gillian fell silent with admiration for a few blocks. But she couldn’t help thinking this kind of escapade could become hazardous. “Wouldn’t it be simpler and safer to use money?”

  “True. But I’m running low on cash, and places like that don’t sell their merchandise cheap. Tomorrow night, we’ll replenish our wallets.”

  “How?”

  Camille flashed her a smile as they drove at scrupulously legal speed toward the motel. “Our hypnotic power is good for more than ensuring an easy meal. I know you’ve already engaged in a little casual robbery yourself.” Gillian had told Camille the high points of her adventures while fleeing from Volnar.

  “Yes, but to make a habit of it—that goes against what I’ve been taught.” While she didn’t want to annoy Camille with petty arguments, she felt impelled to air her misgivings. “Is it wise to use ephemerals that way constantly?”

  “What else are they good for? They’re put on earth for our convenience—tools, toys, and food.” Camille made the pronouncement with casual assurance, as an unquestionable fact.

  “Like Professor Greer? When he wasn’t a useful tool anymore—” She hesitated, not wanting to goad Camille into the forbidding mood she’d displayed earlier.

  “I disposed of him, yes.” Camille showed no anger now.

  “But are they all good for nothing else? Aren’t there exceptions?”

  Camille gave her a sidelong look. “Such as?”

  “Roger’s bond-mate and his brother Claude’s wife. Roger and Claude seemed to treat them as friends—equals.”

  Camille’s lips twitched in a snarl of disdain. “No superior being can accept an inferior as equal. Roger and Claude may want their pets to believe in that phantom equality. They’re simply using those women for their own gratification, though. It has to be that way. Otherwise, if you seriously tried such an impossible relationship, you would be yielding yourself into an inferior’s power. Never forget that.”

  Gillian nodded, raising her mental shield to hide the confusion she no longer wished to lay bare to her strange new mentor. Maybe she’s right. But when I saw Britt and Eloise, it didn’t look that way at all.

  ON THIS EXCURSION, Roger drove his roomy Citroen. They had no special reason to avoid bystanders’ notice this time. What mattered was separati
ng Gillian from Camille long enough to let the girl make an unfettered choice.

  Riding with his window open, enjoying the wind that would have left a human passenger numb with cold, Claude started to light a cigarette. Roger’s glare changed his mind. “So if she wants to stay with Camille, you won’t force her to come with us?”

  “What good would that do?” Roger said. “You wouldn’t forcibly override Eloise’s will. I certainly can’t see doing it to one of our own kind.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.” Claude’s fingers clenched and unclenched on his knees, a movement he seemed unaware of. “Yet it’s a tempting shortcut—if I could just get deep into Eloise’s mind for a minute or two, she’d realize my sincerity. But it’s her doubt of my feelings that makes her keep the gates barred.”

  “You can’t be certain a telepathic merging would satisfy her doubts, anyway. In her present state of mind, she might fear that even the communion was a lie.”

  Claude said with a despairing headshake, “Granted, I’ve played roles for her benefit. But it was never a lie—all I’ve tried to become for her, I’ve done because her happiness is the most important thing in my life.”

  “You don’t have to convince me,” said Roger. “I know.” He thought of the potential routes to happiness Britt had denied herself for him. Could any male of their race be everything a human woman needed? Britt insisted he was all she wanted, yet how could she know what she had missed? Roger cut off that line of thought. Claude’s mood must be infecting me. “And yet touching Greer again made you hungry,” he observed. “Good thing Eloise wasn’t there to notice.”

  “Damn straight it did.” Claude’s tongue skimmed his bared teeth. “I’ve tasted him once—unsatisfying as it was. The flavor of his emotions naturally stirred my appetite. Purely physical and involuntary. Eloise would understand.”

  Normally she would, Roger thought. He didn’t want to aggravate Claude’s depression by discussion Eloise’s abnormal state of mind any further.

  Claude, however, wasn’t ready to let the subject drop. “I wonder if Eloise knows—or Britt, for that matter—can any of our human lovers really fathom what we need them for? Through her, I experience a vast range of human sensations and emotions I would never taste without her. Maybe that doesn’t apply so much to you. You’re half human.”

  “I do know what you mean,” Roger said. Without Britt’s flesh and senses to mediate for him, most foods would remain no more than insipid or nauseating lumps of matter he couldn’t digest, the sun and salt air on a beach at high noon only a blinding torture.

  “And my pleasure in that experience isn’t merely a mask I wear to please her. I need it.” Claude’s fingernails scored parallel gashes in the leather of his armrest. Startled out of his passionate abstraction, he ruefully examined the damage. “Oh, damn, I’m sorry. I’ll pay for the repair.”

  Roger waved away the apology. Better a few rips that could be fixed than cigarette smoke, which would’ve clung to the upholstery for months.

  After a silence of several miles, Claude said, “I’ve been waiting for a chance to mention this—if you comprehend something of how I feel, if you can see that even that idiot professor—attracts me, you must realize what a temptation Britt could become.” Roger involuntarily tensed. “Yes, you see what I mean,” said his brother. “She’d appeal to me anyway, because she’s not only been fed from innumerable times, she’s undergone it willingly. On top of all that, she nourished me when I was desperate. Powerful combination, that. I could easily transfer my fixation to her.”

  Roger struggled to control his breathing. His fingers, clamped on the wheel, ached. “Why are you belaboring the obvious? I’m not worried. You never trespass.”

  “Not worried, eh? Then why are you an inch away from strangling me? I’m asking you to warn Britt—make her keep her distance. If that generosity of hers overwhelmed her better judgment, and she caught me alone—well, I’m not sure I could resist.”

  Roger reminded himself that Claude was not threatening to seduce Britt. On the contrary, Claude’s insistence on spelling out the danger proved his honorable intentions. “All right, I’ll caution her.” Claude’s perception of Britt’s extravagant generosity was all too accurate. “Now, haven’t we discussed this enough?” He turned on the cassette of Handel’s “Messiah” to fill the silence. Then he remembered Claude’s religious phobia. “You don’t mind, I hope?”

  “Like you and cigarettes?” Claude forced a smile. “No, it’s all right. Hearing the oratorio performed in a church by a full choir would bring me to my knees in agony, but fortunately, I can enjoy the recording with no trouble.”

  To Roger’s relief, the music displaced further conversation until they arrived at the motel in Bowie, Maryland, where Greer had telepathically seen Camille and Gillian. To begin with, Roger made a sketchy survey of the parking lot. While he didn’t come across a car he could definitely identify as the one Camille had driven, he didn’t let that negative fact discourage him. Since Greer had seen the vehicle only from inside, in brief glimpses, Roger couldn’t have made a positive identification anyway. He knew it was a light-colored hatchback, and that was about all. He parked the Citroen in a remote corner of the lot.

  This area had been efficiently cleared, leaving no ice patches to hinder them. Claude led the way in a tightly controlled stride like a compressed steam valve ready to blow. Roger decided to handle any necessary questioning himself.

  A fragrance of pine and gingerbread met them in the lobby. The Christmas tree near the registration desk was decorated with real cookies. Approaching the counter, Roger began to weave his spell even before he spoke.

  The clerk, a trim woman of about thirty with a spray-lacquered cap of brown hair, faced him with a heavy-lidded gaze. Waiting until a couple across the lobby had entered the elevator, he held the woman’s eyes while his fingers grazed the back of her hand, lying slack on the counter. “Good evening, Marian,” he said, reading her name tag. “I want you to tell me about a guest who registered here tonight or possibly last night or this morning.”

  The clerk nodded. Otherwise she remained still. The combination of her sex, relaxed mood, and ignorance about his nature made her completely receptive.

  “A tall, pale, dark-haired woman who may call herself Camille. She has a twelve-year-old girl with her.”

  Marian nodded again. “I’ve seen them.” Her breath came softly through parted lips. Though Claude stood motionless, his face composed, beside Roger, Roger heard his heartbeat accelerate.

  “Tell me their room number,” Roger said.

  “They aren’t here. They checked out an hour ago.”

  Careful to remain outwardly calm, Roger said, “Are you sure?”

  “I was on duty. I saw her pay and leave.”

  “How did she pay?” Claude asked.

  The clerk turned her head sluggishly toward him. “Cash.” For a second she blinked, stirring from the trance, but Claude captured her attention. “Computer said she paid for one day this morning when she checked in, so we charged her for tonight when she checked out. Funny.”

  “Describe her car,” said Claude.

  “I didn’t really look at it.”

  “You must have glanced out the front door at some time during the transaction. The doors are plate glass. Did you see this woman get out of or into a car in the breezeway?” He reinforced the mental pressure by stroking her forearm.

  Though uneasy about letting Claude take over the interrogation, Roger didn’t interfere. Claude seemed to be getting results.

  “Yes. The girl stayed in the car, and the woman came in to pay for the room. It was a hatchback.”

  “What color?”

  “Hard to tell in that light—medium blue, I guess.”

  “Now place yourself back in that moment. Did you watch the vehicle drive away?”

  “Yes,” the clerk said in a dreamy voice. Her pulse quickened in response to Claude’s touch. “We weren’t busy, and I thought it was strange,
them leaving at this time of night.”

  “Look at the rear bumper of the car. Do you see the license plate?”

  Marian nodded.

  “Read me the number.” Marian recited it. “Excellent. We’re going now. Forget what you’ve told us. We asked about a friend, and she wasn’t here. Now you can get back to work.”

  As Claude and Roger walked out, the clerk was drifting over to the computer keyboard like a swimmer treading water.

  Roger felt Claude’s agitation like lava simmering under a thin crust. He’d been looking forward eagerly to a clash with Camille, Roger suspected, and sucking energy from the motel clerk to fortify himself. In the car, Roger waited for Claude to cool down before speaking. “We’ve confirmed that Gillian was with her.”

  “And willingly,” said Claude as they reentered the traffic stream. “Otherwise she wouldn’t have been left alone in the car. Missed them by an hour, damn it to hell!”

  Though equally frustrated, Roger pointed out, “Clearly we never had a chance. Camille fled immediately after we talked to Greer. She must have sensed his probing of her mind.”

  “Logical deduction. Et maintenant?”

  “We do have another vehicle description—thank you for thinking of that, by the way. I’ll pass it on to Captain Hayes, though there’s a limit to the extent of payback for past favors we can claim.”

  “You may have to invent a story for him,” Claude said. “Runaway patient or something of the sort.”

  Roger began to speculate whether he shouldn’t, after all, take the risk of telling the county detective that his illegitimate daughter was missing. If he rendered a convincing imitation of an embarrassed professional desperate for confidential help—Could be worth a try.

  After they reached Annapolis and Claude returned to his convention, Roger discussed the fresh information with Britt. “Lord, that’s frustrating!” she said. “If Gillian’s hopping all over the county with Camille, it couldn’t be against her will. If she wanted to get away, wouldn’t she have tried to reach you by now?”