Nadia's Children

by Steven E Wedel

  “Yeah.”

  “I heard my name at the end,” Jenny said. “What did Kelley say about me?”

  “Oh, well, you know, she said to tell you hi.”

  Jenny laughed at him. “You’re a horrible liar. What did she really say?”

  “She told me to kiss you for her,” he confessed.

  She laughed some more, then her hand squeezed his. “So?”

  “What?”

  “Aren’t you going to do it?” she asked.

  He looked into her eyes, and remembered how they’d captured him so long ago and how he hadn’t known then what he wanted and he’d bitten her. “Okay,” he said.

  Her lips were soft and smelled like the bubble gum lip balm she was wearing. It was a short kiss, but when he broke it off, her hand moved to his neck and held him close. Her eyes, her beautiful brown eyes were so open and filled with him.

  “One more?” Joey breathed. “For me this time?”

  She leaned in and opened her lips to him, and it was so much better than the illicit, purely physical encounters he’d had with Kiona.

  With the woman who was dead now.

  He pushed the thought away and focused instead on tasting the girl he’d wanted since kindergarten.

  Shara

  There were no cops at the house. Only ghosts and memories, and repairs that needed to be made. Shara parked the used four-wheel-drive Ford truck she’d just bought in the driveway of her old home outside of Bozeman, Montana, and just stared at the ranch house for a while. She hadn’t seen it in over eight years, since just after Joey ran away that day after biting Jenny Brown. Chris, too, had fled in a hurry, so the shutters had never been closed, and most of the windows were broken out now, probably by angry townspeople retaliating for Fenris’s attack on the hospital when he kidnapped Jenny.

  Time would not have softened feelings about that event and Shara knew she couldn’t linger here. She drove the truck to the back of the house, where it was out of sight from the road, and got out. The pre-dawn air was a little cooler than she’d expected, but she knew that would soon be remedied. She took a shovel from the back of the truck and made for the big tree where she and Chris had exchanged wedding vows.

  It had only been the two of them. No official had overseen it. The marriage hadn’t been blessed by the state of Montana or any religion.

  Maybe I was never really married to Chris at all.

  No, that wasn’t true. She’d made her vows.

  And broken them.

  But I thought he was dead.

  She didn’t know if that mattered.

  It mattered, and yet it didn’t. She was Thomas’s wife now. And Chris was with Cerdwyn. Joey … Joey was pretty much an adult now.

  She jammed the point of the spade into the hard ground, threw dirt aside and went back for more. It took almost an hour to unearth the metal Army surplus box. It was no bigger than a toaster, and she’d misjudged the distance from the tree at first and had to dig wide, but eventually she hit the lid and, soon after, pulled the box from the ground.

  She was tempted to open it and inspect the contents, but there would be time for that later. Traffic on the road would be picking up soon and she didn’t want anyone to see her leaving the house. She put the box into the truck of the cab and started to get in, then hesitated. She considered it a moment, then went to the back porch and felt along the second row of bricks from the bottom, just to the left of the porch. She found the loose one and pulled it out. The key was still hidden there.

  Shara let herself in through the back door. Her nose was immediately filled with the ammonia-rich scent of rat feces. She was in the laundry room. Her old washing machine and dryer were still there, covered in dust. The deep freeze was there, too, but the door was open and all the food that had been inside was gone.

  The kitchen was bare, silent, empty of the sounds she remembered. She went on to the living room. The furniture was torn, some overturned, vandalized. Torn bits of the books she’d kept in the living room were charred in the fireplace. There had been a photograph over the mantle of her and Chris and Joey when he was three years old. That was gone. She turned to the stairs, and suddenly remembered fighting with and finally killing Tony Weismann on those stairs when Joey was just a baby. She had killed him the same way she’d killed Kiona Brokentooth, though he hadn’t been nearly as easy.

  Photographs that had hung on the wall along the stairs were gone. Some were smashed on the stairs, others were just missing. More light was creeping into the house. Shara pushed away memories and hurried her steps.

  She passed Joey’s old bedroom where she had locked them away from Chris that horrible day when she’d first injected them with the serum that suppressed the lycanthropy. She’d nearly forgotten about the serum she had worked years to create.

  Was I really so naïve that I thought I could suppress the beast?

  Her own bedroom furniture was in no better shape than the living room had been. The nightstand beside the bed was overturned and the top drawer flung across the room. The photo album, though, was there, kicked under the bed, but intact. Inside there were pictures from Joey’s birth until just a couple of weeks before he ran away. She clutched it to her chest, ignoring the marks of rat teeth, and fled back down the stairs and out to her truck. She locked the door, but kept the key, throwing it into the truck’s glove compartment.

  Shara started the truck, eased around to the corner of the house and looked for headlights moving on the road. One pickup truck whizzed by, then nothing. She gunned her truck’s engine and roared out of the driveway and onto the road, heading east, toward Minnesota.

  Toward Morrigan.

  And Holle.

  Shara dropped south, into Wyoming, then turned east again to ease the cramp in her stomach. She could go no further than Gillette, however, before her eyes began to close. She found a small, sleazy looking motel and checked herself in for the rest of the day and night. In the room, she pushed the metal Army box under the bed, stripped to her underwear and crawled under the blankets. The last thing she did before going to sleep was set the alarm on her cell phone to wake her up in five hours. She checked her missed calls and ignored them, then slept.

  She only slept two hours before the phone woke her up. She answered it without thinking, without remembering she was ignoring her calls. Her voice was groggy and sleep-filled.

  “Hello?”

  “Mom?” A male voice. She couldn’t place it. Wrong number?

  “What?”

  “Mom, it’s Joey.”

  “Joey.”

  “Are you okay? Mom, are you there?”

  “Joey? Yeah, I’m here. I was asleep. Joey. What’s wrong?”

  “I’m supposed to ask you that,” he said, his voice losing some of the concern it’d had. “Where are you?”

  “Wyoming.”

  “What are you doing there?”

  “I had to go by our old house. Do you remember it? The house in Montana?” Shara rubbed at her face. She was still so sleepy. The room was dim. At least the drapes were heavy enough to keep out the sunlight.

  “I remember it. Mom, did you kill Kiona?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Shara thought about it. “She said some horrible things about you and your father. That was the last straw.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Don’t worry about it.” She wanted to ask if what the woman had said was true. Had her son slept with that woman? No, she wouldn’t ask. She would just assume it was a lie.

  “What are you doing next? We’re all worried about you, Mom.”

  “I can’t do it, Joey. I can’t work with Fenris. It was all I could do to be in the room with him and not kill him. I just can’t. I’m going after Morrigan myself. She’ll be missing me by now. She’ll come with me.”

  “No, Mom, you can’t do that.”

  “I have to, Joey. I ran into the woods after you once. I didn’t have a coat or a gun, I just ran after you
. I didn’t find you, and it was horrible. I can’t leave your sister with those people any longer. I have to get her out.”

  “You can’t do it alone, Mom,” Joey argued. “We’re on our way north now. Dad’s driving. Kelley and the rest are flying in. We’re meeting in Duluth. Will you meet us there?”

  “I can’t, Joey. Not with Fenris as part of the group. He wants to kill Morrigan.”

  “Mom, if you go in alone, they’ll kill you. I don’t want to lose you again. It would be forever this time. Please, Mom.”

  Shara hesitated, unsure.

  “Mom? Are you still there?”

  “I’m here, Joey.”

  “Please don’t go by yourself. Meet us. For me?”

  “Let me think about it,” she said. “I don’t want to lose you, either, Joey. I missed you so much for so long. But this is so dangerous. I don’t want you to have to fight them. I don’t want you anywhere near them.”

  “It’s too late for that, Mom. We’ve all been called. Kelley told me about the sickness you all had when you went the opposite direction. There’s no choice. I have to go in, either fighting or surrendering.”

  Shara had no answer to that.

  “Will you meet us?” he asked again.

  “I’ll think about it. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

  “Do you promise?”

  “I promise, Joey.”

  “Okay.”

  “Joey?”

  “Yeah, Mom?”

  “I love you.”

  His response wasn’t immediate, but it came. “I love you, too, Mom.”

  “Bye.” She hung up and dropped the phone onto the bed.

  There was no use trying to sleep now. I don’t want to lose you again. It would be forever this time. Please, Mom. The words repeated themselves over and over in her mind. Shara threw the covers off and sat up on the bed. She sat there for a moment, then got up, pulled out the metal box and went to the small round table in the room and turned on a lamp.

  Inside the box she found everything she had hidden away so long ago. Two plastic bags, one containing five thousand dollars in cash, the other a 9mm pistol and three clips, all packed in Vaseline. The bottom of the box held one hundred silver-tipped bullets and the cleaning kit she’d need to make the gun ready for use.

  Using motel towels, Shara spent two hours cleaning the gun of the petroleum jelly, taking it apart, oiling it, then reassembling it, cleaning and loading all three clips. When she was done, she put everything back in the box and returned it to its place under her bed. She turned off her phone alarm and went back to sleep.

  Chris

  Chris fought fatigue as the sun finally peaked over the eastern horizon. They were somewhere in Iowa, south of Des Moines, and he’d been at the wheel for about eight hours while Most of the others slept or tried to sleep. Cheryl was slumped against the passenger door beside him, her breathing deep and regular. As regular as the hum of the highway beneath the tires.

  Chris shook his head, realizing his eyes were closing again.

  He checked the rearview mirror. Behind him, Joey slept with Jenny snuggled against him. Kelley dozed beside them, raising her head in jerks, but not really opening her eyes. In the rear seat, Skandar sat awake beside Merin, who was now in his cycle and out of Chris’s sight, probably lying asleep in the seat.

  Cerdwyn, Fenris, Thomas, Janice, and Alex followed in another car. Alex Draper had protested about riding with Fenris, but the white-haired man had promised not to harm him, and Thomas had promised his protection, too.

  Fortunately, one of the many gun shows that passed through Oklahoma City had been in full swing at the fairgrounds, so they’d stocked up on as many guns as they could get without waiting for background checks. Everyone had a rifle and a handgun. Most of the rifles were simple .22s since the size of the slug didn’t matter as much as having it tipped with silver. Besides the lower caliber rifles, they’d purchased one Vietnam-era M40 sniper rifle. And lots of ammunition for all the weapons.

  They’d also bought a lot of sterling silver jewelry and a smelting kit. The plan was to melt the silver in Duluth and fill the hollow point rounds with the deadly precious metal. With all of them working together, the process shouldn’t take too long.

  Chris felt his eyelids drooping again. The big Hummer veered off course. He shook himself awake once more, then angled onto the shoulder of the interstate. Kelley woke up at the change in the sound of the tires.

  “You want to drive for a while?” he asked. “I’ve gone as far as I can. I keep falling asleep at the wheel.”

  “Okay.” She opened her door and got out.

  Chris got out the driver’s side. Behind them, Fenris pulled up close, lowered his window and asked what was wrong. “Changing drivers,” Chris called back. He slid onto the middle seat, where Kelley had been, and buckled up as she eased back onto the highway.

  Chris sat watching his son and the girl, Jennifer Brown, as they slept together. It was funny, he thought, how they’d come so far separately and were joined now. He nestled himself into the seat as best he could and closed his eyes.

  Sleep didn’t come immediately, though. His thoughts ran to Shara. She had gone to their old home in Montana. He remembered the two gun caches they’d hidden on the property, but with the law probably still looking for them in Montana he thought she’d been overly bold to go back there for a gun she could have gotten elsewhere. Maybe there had been something else she wanted.

  She killed Kiona.

  He opened his eyes and turned to look out the window, mulling that thought over. It was a little disturbing, and probably bad timing, but it didn’t really surprise him. Shara and Kiona hated each other. Chris knew there had been a jealousy issue between them over Ulrik. And, of course, over Joey. He wondered for a moment if jealousy over him had played any role in their final fight. Details of the scene hadn’t been discussed much in the flurry of activity necessary before hitting the road. Chris leaned forward in his seat.

  “Kelley, tell me what happened between Shara and Kiona,” he asked quietly.

  Kelley pulled in a deep breath and held it for a moment, then let it escape slowly. “We shouldn’t have taken Shara,” she said. “We knew where she stood on this alliance, but, I guess, as the Mother, we felt we owed it to her if she wanted to go. She was bitter the whole time. Bitter and cranky.”

  “I imagine Kiona took full advantage of that,” Chris mused.

  “Oh yes. They traded glares most of the meeting, after Shara made a scene in the lobby when she realized Kiona was with Fenris’s party,” Kelley continued. “The final straw came as the meeting was breaking up. Kiona …” Kelley hesitated and turned to look at Chris for just a second before turning her attention back to the road. “Well, she insulted your lovemaking ability and praised Joey’s potential, let’s say. Of course, she was a little more graphic. Then Shara just went off on her. She jumped over the corner of the table, changing shape faster than I’ve ever seen anyone do it, knocked Kiona out of her chair and basically just tore her head off. Literally tore her head right off her neck.”

  Chris pressed his forehead into the back of the seat in front of him. “She’s been like that since we got together. I don’t think she was like that in college, but I barely knew her then. When we were together, she always had an agenda she wouldn’t share, and you could never tell what would set her off. She’s usually pretty nice, but she can have a short temper when she’s stressed.”

  “I wish she hadn’t done that, though,” Kelley said. “But, based on the little I know about their history, it was just a matter of time before one of them killed the other. I’d rather have Shara than Kiona.”

  “Yeah,” Chris agreed, though it wasn’t as enthusiastic as he thought it maybe should have been. Kiona had been a bitch, but she had been a cold, calculating, ruthless bitch, and that would be more valuable to them now than an emotional loose cannon. But then, it was Shara’s kid they were going to rescue. Maybe they should step back a
little and let her do it her way.

  “You still resent her going to Thomas, don’t you?” Kelley asked.

  Chris sighed. “Yes. I can’t help it. I busted my butt escaping that house you all had me in, then tracking her down. Just to find out she was with another man. And then to find out she was already pregnant by him.”

  “Chris, we arranged your escape from that house in Salt Lake City,” Kelley said, sparing him another glance and a quick smile. “The bucket handle you used to dig into the wall? We deliberately left it on the bucket so you could do that. We tracked you, knowing you had a better chance of finding Shara and Joey than we did. And you led us to her when you called your house in Stillwater.”

  Stunned, Chris sat back in his seat and stared out the window. “What would you have done if you’d gotten to Joey then?” he asked at last.

  “My game with Fenris would have ended then,” Kelley said. “I would have taken Joey to Cerdwyn. I promise you, I would not have let any harm come to him.”

  Chris shook his head. Sleep was creeping up on him again. “And here we all are together, going after another one of Shara’s stolen children. I never would have guessed I’d be working with you and him. Fenris.”

  “Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat,” Kelley quoted.

  “Shakespeare?” Chris asked.

  She laughed. “No, Elizabeth Bowen. She was an Irish writer who died in 1973.”

  “It’s a good quote. Fitting.” He yawned.

  “Go to sleep,” Kelley advised. “We’ll stop for food soon.”

  The sound of the tires lulled him out of consciousness. Chris dreamed of Shara. They were running and running and running from a giant rat. Finally, they turned to fight it as they stood under the tree where they’d said their wedding vows. The rat tore her away from him and ran away, and he tried to chase after them, but something held him back. He looked down and saw Joey, as a baby, hanging onto his ankle, but dream-Joey weighed a ton and Chris couldn’t get away from him. He looked away from Joey and the rat was gone.

  He woke up to the smell of coffee and sausage.