The Progeny

by Tosca Lee

  “Turn!” I yell as we hit the bend. My savior/captor/whoever he is jerks the wheel, sending us sliding, and for a moment I think I’m going to die here after all, thrown into a tree. And then we’re blowing backward onto a mile of gravel, with me shouting directions as Luka’s headlights fill the windshield.

  We get to the edge of Lily Bay Road and I think for sure Luka’s going to ram us right into oncoming traffic. In the end it doesn’t matter because the guy with me doesn’t even stop, hitting the pavement with a sharp back turn that throws me into the console. The dead stop is terrifying; Luka’s headlights are two seconds from drilling us straight into the ditch, and for that split instant I wonder if my faked car-accident death is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  The guy throws the Pathfinder into gear. Tires squeal on pavement, and then we’re speeding north up the road.

  “You okay?” he says.

  I’m shaking, but I nod and then realize he can’t see me. “Yeah.” It takes me three tries to lock my seat belt.

  His gaze snaps between the rearview mirror and the road in front of us, which is only mostly straight. The needle inches toward 90 as we pass two cars, and I pray to God there are no moose out tonight.

  “Where’d you learn to punch like that?”

  I don’t answer. I don’t know.

  “Who are you?” I demand.

  “Rolan. Vasilescu,” he says, eyes on the road.

  “There’s a turn coming up. There—” I say. It’s followed seconds later by a far sharper left. We go another mile in tense silence, pass two more cars, one of which honks loudly as we whiz by. Luka’s headlights never leave the rearview mirror. He’s alternating between speeding closer and dropping back, but only by a matter of feet.

  Twenty minutes ago I was actually looking forward to a night of frozen pizza and the last two episodes of Roswell, season one. Debating whether or not to attempt to sleep in the bedroom like a normal person. I’d even considered leaving a coating of flour by the front door just so I’d know by morning whether I wandered out in the middle of the night. Now I’m in a car with a complete stranger who knows more about my past than I do, fleeing a murderer I ate lunch with two days ago. I glance at Rolan. His expression is grim.

  “Once we get to Kokadjo, we run out of pavement,” I say. I know because Clare and I once drove to the northern outpost, where the trees thin around the open expanse of river that runs through a hunting and fishing hub so small the population is listed as “not many” on the sign.

  With one hand on the wheel, he reaches into his jacket, and for a second I wonder if he’s going to pull out a gun. He produces a phone instead, unlocks it with his thumb, and flips it at me.

  “Pull up the map. Look for the next good bend.”

  I do my best, but the map twitches and zooms beneath the involuntary tremor of my fingers, refusing to refresh, the signal lost.

  “Hurry.”

  I close my eyes, retrace the drive that day with Clare. “Another mile—maybe two,” I say.

  “One mile or two?” he snaps.

  “Two. The road goes left, south of Kokadjo at a fork. A dirt road goes right along the south edge of the pond.”

  I open my eyes and he glances at me, but he doesn’t question me, either.

  Lily Bay Road has by now turned into generic Main Street, briefly straightening out before us. Rolan guns it. The speedometer hovers around 97. The headlights in the rearview mirror fade around the last bend as we come up on a car, ride its bumper, unable to see oncoming traffic.

  Rolan flashes his lights, but the driver ahead gives a distinct bird high against his rearview mirror, refusing to pull to the side and let us pass.

  The sign for First Roach Pond rushes at us, the fork ahead divided by a tiny grass island with an electrical pole smack in the middle, a gravel outlook over the valley to the right.

  The car hugs the line. The instant I realize Rolan means to break right—sending us careening into the pole or skidding off the outlook into the valley—I catch sight of a row of mailboxes along the main road, the hint of a drive in the trees ten yards beyond. “There!” I shout, pointing ahead. He follows the car and breaks hard, killing the lights as we pull into the trees.

  Not two seconds later, the Cherokee flashes around the bend in pursuit of the taillights in front of it. I close my eyes, and listen for the angry screech of tires, the stillness like torture. 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . .

  Rolan throws the car into reverse, backs onto the road, and then accelerates south.

  “Find us a road,” he says. “He’ll be on us in thirty seconds.”

  We go two miles before I get the signal back. “Nothing east through the mountains. West we’re in the lake. This is it.”

  We pass three cars in silence. Nothing in the rearview mirror.

  “You know you can’t go back,” he says.

  “There’s a police station in Greenville—”

  “No.” He shakes his head.

  “If he’s trying to kill me, we have to go to the cops!”

  He tears his eyes from the road long enough to look at me as though I’ve lost my mind. “Cops? The cops can’t help you!”

  “What do you mean? Of course they can!”

  “Do you think you would’ve gone to the lengths you did if the police could help? You don’t get it, Audra. He won’t stop! He’ll never stop until he kills you. If not today or this week, then next month, next year. One day when your guard is down, he’ll find you. Like he has now, like he did before. And next time, he’ll kill you.” He pounds the steering wheel and shouts, “Why’d you do it?”

  “Do what?” I shout back.

  “Go in and—” He gestures to his head. “Erase everything!”

  “I don’t know,” I say. Except that I had a reason. It’s all I know and trust in this world. “I don’t know,” I say again, quietly. “So you better start talking.”

  He shakes his head a little, and a few seconds later he chuckles. And then he’s laughing. I don’t know what’s more alarming: this man, this complete and utter stranger, telling me someone wants me dead . . . the fact that I have no idea what’s going on except that we nearly just died on a two-lane road . . . or the fact that he apparently finds this hysterical.

  “You’ve always been smart—smarter than you know.” He shakes his head again, eyes on the road. But the lines are deeper across his forehead than before. “And you’ve always had moxie.”

  “I’m sorry, do I know you?” I hiss, less sharply than I mean to. Now that the only cars following us are those traveling well within the speed limit, drifting back farther and farther each time we pass one of them, I can feel the fingers of panic at last. With the initial shock wearing thin, I am terrified in a way I have not been in the month since I arrived.

  I am also far more alive. Speeding down the road past Beaver Cove, I swear I can smell the pine wafting from the shore of the lake. Can see by the moonlight more sharply than before.

  And don’t you know it—there’s a moose standing in the trees off the corner of Scammon Ridge Road.

  “I’m sorry,” Rolan says a moment later. We’re nearing town. “Navigate us out of here. And then I’ll tell you everything.”

  6

  * * *

  Highway 2 is winding and unlit, flanked by trees and telephone lines, the occasional New England farmhouse. We’ve deliberately gone west, away from Bangor and Interstate 95, which would have taken us to Portland and south along the coast, opting for New Hampshire instead.

  We stop in Skowhegan just long enough to fill the tank, grab water, coffee for Rolan. And then we’re back in the car with nothing but road and an unknown destination in front of us.

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  “That depends on you.”

  Great. I had one safe haven in this world, and it’s sixty miles behind us.

  I fiddle with the cap of the water bottle, stare out at the sky. It’s starry, the moon sharp as mottled silver. That is to sa
y, far too normal and therefore deceptive.

  I take a swig of the water. “So tell me,” I say. The last hour of driving the limit, even in the dark, feels painfully slow. Between that and the questions swarming through my mind—questions I’m not even sure I want answers to—I am ready to claw my skin off.

  He offers me his coffee. I shake my head.

  “It’ll calm you.”

  He obviously isn’t aware how caffeine works.

  Rolan is silent for a minute. “This isn’t a story I’m used to telling,” he says at last.

  “I only need you to tell it once.”

  “How are you at history?”

  “I suck at history.” My own, especially.

  He lets out a slow breath. “You . . . are not a normal person.”

  “I think I have that figured out.”

  “No. You’re very different. Your mother was, too.”

  Hearing the word mother sets off an inexplicable ache in me. Try as I might to summon a face, there is nothing. “Do you know her?”

  “I knew of her, your birth mother.”

  Birth mother.

  “She’s gone, Audra,” he says.

  I stare out at the dark line of trees. I’ve studied Rolan intermittently for the last hour, searching for anything in the lines of his face or set of his jaw that might tell me what I’m doing leaving the state with a stranger in the middle of the night with nothing but the clothes on my back and the cash in my pocket. But suddenly I can’t look at him.

  He lets out a slow, audible breath. “You, your mother, your grandmother, her mother before her, for four hundred years . . . You’re all descended from a Hungarian noble named Elizabeth Bathory. The Blood Countess. The most prolific female serial killer of all time.”

  I slowly turn to look at him.

  “And you’ve all been hunted by people like Luka.”

  Serial killer. Hunted. “I don’t understand. Blood . . . Countess?”

  “According to legend, she tortured and killed over six hundred servant girls in her lifetime. She bit, whipped, and starved young female servants before killing them. Poured water on naked girls in the winter until they froze. Burned them, stuck them with needles, ate their flesh . . .”

  I lift my hand. “Okay, wait a minute . . .”

  “After her husband died she continued to move between her estates. Bodies showed up wherever she went. Outside city walls, in gardens, even under beds.”

  “I said stop!”

  “You want to know? I’m telling you!” he says. “The servant girls were peasants. Their families had no recourse. But when Elizabeth started an etiquette school and several young noblewomen disappeared, the Hungarian king opened an investigation. After more than three hundred testimonies, Elizabeth’s accomplices were burned at the stake. Elizabeth, though, was the widow of a national war hero, niece to the former king of Poland, cousin to the prince of Transylvania, and richer than the crown, which owed her money. She never faced trial. Instead, she was walled up in a room in one of her castles, where she lived three years until she died, in 1614. The name Bathory has been a curse ever since. That is the short version.”

  I stare at him, realizing I have placed my life in the hands of a raving lunatic.

  He glances at me. “I’m not telling you anything you can’t look up on your own.”

  “Okay . . . but even if that’s true, so what? It’s the twenty-first century. This has nothing to do with me.”

  “It has everything to do with you.”

  “How?” I demand.

  “The crown’s debt was canceled and the king confiscated her remaining land when he banished her descendants from Hungary. But the peasant families of her victims received nothing—justice least of all. And so the Scions of the Dispossessed was founded nearly thirty years later, as her descendants began to return from Poland. And they have carried out retribution against her progeny ever since, hunting and killing without mercy.”

  “You’re insinuating a whole family has been systematically murdered for four hundred years.”

  “I’m not just insinuating.”

  “I don’t believe in”—I gesture wildly—“vampires or monsters.”

  “Vampires don’t exist. But monsters most certainly do.”

  “Then why hasn’t anyone stopped them? And how is there anyone left to kill?”

  “They don’t get caught, Audra,” he says quietly. “They’ve become powerful through the centuries. No one’s going to convict them. And there are descendants left to kill.” He looks pointedly at me.

  This time it’s my turn to laugh. It’s a brittle sound, tightly exhaled with an incredulous gaze at the ceiling. “I don’t believe this.”

  “Whether you believe it or not doesn’t change the fact that it’s true.”

  “And this . . . is why I did what I did? Because I’m being hunted by a guy from the Food Mart?”

  But even as I say it I recall the way Luka stared. The weird desperation to see me again. The accent. Eastern European.

  “Why have I never heard about this League of Medieval Justice? Why haven’t I read about it somewhere?”

  “You probably have and didn’t know it,” Rolan says. “A man dies in a car accident on a deserted highway. A woman jumps off a bridge. They’re ruled suicides, accidents, random acts of violence. They’re not. Their hunters are precise, highly secretive, and they don’t get caught—or if they do, they admit no affiliation. Each of them receives orders from a source known only as the Historian. Because of that, one hunter wouldn’t know another if he passed him or her on the street.”

  “Oh, come on. That many accidents and suicides in the same family have to get suspicious after a while.”

  He shakes his head. “Progeny are rarely raised by their birth parents—at least those aware of who and what they are. For that reason, the Scions might go decades without a kill. But they are nothing if not devoted to their cause. Few Progeny survive beyond the age of thirty.”

  “So you’re saying Luka killed my mother.”

  “No. I’m saying someone like him did. Luka himself is singly and wholly dedicated to one murder. Yours.”

  I can’t help it; the hair rises on my arms.

  This is so not the mob involvement I was expecting.

  “If I’m adopted, how did he find me?”

  “Two years ago you went looking for your birth mother.”

  “You’re not saying . . . that I was the reason she—”

  “No,” he says quietly. “She was already gone by then. And it isn’t as hard as you’d think to find others like you. Anyone wanting to know where they come from can get a DNA kit, upload the results to a genealogy site. The Scions have fingers in all of them. Most Progeny who know what they are stay away from computers, are careful to leave no digital imprint. Those who don’t end up dead. I’m assuming you don’t even own a computer or a cell phone.”

  Keep your face off the Web.

  “No,” I say, as the indifferent landscape slides by. But now my mind is roiling. “So what you’re saying about Luka . . .”

  Rolan picks up his phone, unlocks it. With one hand on the wheel, he begins to scroll through his photos.

  “This was taken last year.” He turns it toward me.

  It’s a picture of me. I’m in a café somewhere, talking on a phone.

  Sitting three tables away is Luka.

  “Where is this?” I whisper.

  “Trieste, Italy.”

  He takes the phone from me and thumbs to another photo, holds it out. Also me, crossing a street. I scan the pixelated image. Farther down, standing near a street vendor, is Luka.

  “He’s probably been hunting you for years.”

  My throat is dry.

  “Then why am I not dead? And why would I erase my memory if I knew I was being followed?” I can’t bring myself to say the word hunted. “If I needed to know that to stay alive?”

  He clicks the phone off, shifts in the driver’s seat. “Whe
n I said you were different, I meant that there are things that set you apart. Things you can do that normal people can’t.”

  This is not news to me. I’ve always seen the world differently, in snapshots and shapes and symbols. Shuffling them, repeating them in my mind like an obsessive counting steps. Despite the procedure, this has not gone away. I’ve noted the curve of Rolan’s ear no fewer than eleven times in the last forty-five minutes, overlaying it with the image of a conch shell I collected once at some beach, and then each of the eggs in the refrigerator of the cabin, one by one, until I found the one that matched most closely. I’ve always been weird.

  “Hunters are different, too,” he says. “Namely in their ability to retrieve key aspects of a Progeny’s memory in the moment of his or her death—assuming they’re close enough to touch their victims and haven’t blown the brain to bits.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “No, it’s not. Hunters are sensitive to the last burst of activity in a dying Progeny brain, which has tremendous capability to project thought. Hence your ability to plant suggestions in the minds of others or demand their attention without speaking.”

  “What?”

  But even as he says it, I picture the faces turned toward me at the Mad Moose and the Dropfly. I had assumed something about me screamed “outsider” at the end of tourist season. Now I see the distracted interest in their eyes. But lots of people wonder about strangers, where they came from, what they do. Right?

  “Something came down through the ages with you. Call it the sins of the father—or mother, in this case—a curse, or Bathory’s last gift to her descendants. It’s really just epigenetics. On steroids, maybe.”

  “I don’t know what that is. The epigenetics, not the steroids.”

  “It means external factors have changed how your cells read your genes. The genes haven’t changed. Just the way they’re expressed. They said Bathory bathed in the blood of her victims to stay young and beautiful—a legend to explain the fact that she was striking. They called her “witch” because she was extremely persuasive and highly intelligent. Those same qualities are in you in unusual quantity. The next time you’re in a crowd or really want something from someone, notice what happens.”