by David Wright
Karen McKenna’s memories were no different.
Flooded with horrible recall of her father’s violent verbal abuse, a million images hatched from their shells in the depths of Karen’s earliest memories; the horrible names, telling her she was a worthless accident; that she was a disappointment compared to her brother.
Jesus. Stop it!
The flow of memories, once started, could rarely be stopped. While John had said they could be controlled with practice, Abigail had yet to master the flow, and it wasn’t as if John was around to instruct her. Abigail was forced to bear witness to all the misery of Karen’s life as it unspooled in her mind like an open pit filled with rotting bodies.
Abigail let go of Karen, sending her burnt, and now empty, body falling back to the floor. Abigail stumbled backward, barely aware of her surroundings, a prisoner of memories spilling in front of her.
Just a few more minutes. It’ll be over soon, she told herself.
The knot at the back of Abigail’s neck eased in a rare moment of happiness — a light in the darkness, as memory turned to the birth of Karen’s son, Kyle.
Sure, he was an accident with her scumbag boyfriend Marcus but her heart melted the moment she saw him, and was a puddle as she held his eight pounds and two ounces in her arm’s cradle. Karen fell … in love; felt true love for the first time ever. The unfeigned, unmitigated love of parent for child. A pure love, unlike anything her parents had ever given to her.
Karen was, for the first time in her life, happy.
In that moment, Abigail felt the woman’s joy, and wanted to slow the memories of Karen and her baby boy so she could live in them longer. But the sun was quick to set on Karen McKenna’s flickering joy.
It started with Marcus. Karen thought she could make something of a “normal” life with him, scumbag or no. But other than her beautiful baby boy, Marcus only brought misery, mostly through drugs — painkillers first, meth later — and too many lies. Marcus wanted nothing to do with Kyle, seeing his son only as a burden, no different from how her own father saw her.
One day, a full darkness eclipsed her sun, then held its black forever in place. Karen was passed out from a night of too much partying with Marcus. When she woke, Kyle was in his bed, blue and dead.
She had no idea what happened. Her father sent some men in suits over, said they’d take care of everything. They took Kyle away, reassuring her that all would be OK. How the hell can it ever be OK? Kyle, the only good thing in her life, the only good thing she’d ever done, was dead.
Her father suspected Marcus — who had left early that morning, a rarity for him to be awake, let alone gone before noon — had killed Kyle. Marcus disappeared, and the police immediately turned their attention to Karen.
She spun into the deepest depression, sick with the knowledge that she was responsible for her son’s death. Once arrested, Karen hoped for death. But her father would never allow it. He bought off everyone he could to ensure his daughter would never see the inside a prison.
But Daddy hadn’t been able to keep her out of the prison of her own making, and she descended into drugs, partying, and bad relationships, all trying to fill a void which could never be filled.
Now, her pain was finally over.
Memory crashed into the present and left Abigail shaking in brutal sobs on the floor. She was fed, and her body again whole. But everything else felt wrong.
Larry moved toward her, his hands landing softly on her shoulders as he scooped her up from the floor. “Come on, Abi, I’ll take you home.”
He carried her from the house like a rag doll.
“We were wrong, Larry,” Abigail wept, “We were wrong.”
**
Abigail said nothing on the long ride back to Washington, sitting in the front seat, trying not to see the occasional flash of memories she’d stolen along with Karen’s life. Larry tried talking to her, tried to apologize, tried to comfort her, but every time he opened his mouth, it felt like an icy blade beneath her overheated skin.
“Please,” she said, retreating into a fetal ball in the front seat.
Abigail wished she could sit in the back, but that’s where “the body” was, and Larry had yet to dump it. Karen’s life had been mostly pain, with a rare spark of joy. Now she was a battery of memory in a thief’s head, with nothing left of who she was, except for the charred remains that would soon be buried in the woods never to be found, much less identified.
Abigail let tears wash her cheeks, believing at first she was crying for Karen. And though she was, there was something else there, too. The little girl who could never grow older was also crying for yet one more piece of herself — forever lost to the creeping darkness.
* * * *
CHAPTER 3 — Larry
Larry woke an hour before the sun was due to go down.
Being on Abigail’s schedule meant he only had a few hours in the morning and another few in the early evening to himself. He’d always been a night person, so the adjustment to sleeping through daylight wasn’t too difficult. While their house was large enough — three bedrooms, one for each of them plus space for his office — living with a perpetual preteen girl, and the frequent moodiness that came with it, made his alone time all the more precious.
He grabbed an ice-cold Mountain Dew from the fridge and sat in the middle of his three monitors, scrolling through his many alerts to see if anything worthwhile had surfaced while he’d slept.
Abigail was good for at least two weeks, without feeding, but Larry liked to search ahead of time for someone who met their criteria so they had enough time for all the requisite research, thereby ensuring they had someone truly deserving of death. He’d blown it last night with Karen McKenna, and Abigail gave him the silent treatment the entire trip home, then added to the onslaught even once they were back. She went to bed without saying a word, which meant she’d probably be extra annoying today.
Seeing nobody even close to local that they should or could go after, Larry started sifting through his email looking for word from John.
Nothing.
It had been a few months since he’d last heard from his old friend, and more than a year since he’d seen him.
Their communication was limited to the rare email from one of John’s many aliases. The e-mails were always the same — photos with encrypted data buried inside. John’s last message was asking Larry if he had found Hope yet.
“No, nothing yet,” Larry sent back in the form of an encrypted message.
As far as anyone in Larry’s network could confirm, Hope was a ghost. He had considered hiring a Tracker to find her, but John insisted that he involve only the most trusted people he knew. There were scant few people Larry or John fully trusted, particularly since John was working on behalf of the Guardians and Omega, kidnapping or killing, depending which rumors you believed, a steady stream of Otherworlders. It would have been one thing if they’d only been rounding up Harbinger, the group which had been helping Jacob. But now innocents were being targeted — Otherworlders, hybrids and humans alike, none of whom had taken a side in the war.
Larry still had friends in the community of aliens along with those humans, like himself, who’d come to learn from the aliens, but there was nobody he trusted who was also able to track Hope. Adam would have been able to help, but Larry burned that bridge when he killed him.
When it came to people they saw on a daily basis, Larry and Abigail had only one another.
Larry didn’t mind so much — he’d always been a loner. But he could tell the loneliness was heavily weighing on Abigail. She didn’t have John, the man who turned her and thus forged her soul’s deepest bond, but she also had no friends or family, things most girls her age desperately needed. She and Larry got along reasonably well, but Larry felt that Abigail needed someone either closer in age, or with less twig and berries between their legs to rain a more positive, as well as a decidedly more female, influence onto her life.
Larry turned his at
tention to the usual stream of news feeds and saw a mention of Karen McKenna’s disappearance right at the top. Her bodyguard was facing all sorts of questions, and “experts” were already wondering if Ms. McKenna had fled the country.
Yeah, keep thinking that.
A minute later, Larry was checking for updates on the newly opened portal. Of course, there was no real news. Nor was anyone calling it a portal, since few knew what they were looking at, and those who did weren’t saying shit. Larry had known what he was looking at the second he saw the footage on a video leak website.
The portal was exactly like the one Jacob forced his brothers to help him open the year before.
Hearing nothing from John made Larry nervous. Surely he would be working on this case — unless he had somehow gone over. Larry certainly hoped he hadn’t, though it was impossible for him to be sure. While he’d once been able to connect with John telepathically, their connection hadn’t been the same since John insisted on getting wiped and buried. There was a time he would have felt John nearby. Now, proximity meant nothing. John could be near, far or possibly dead, though Larry believed he would’ve sensed something if his best friend had died.
He wondered if Abigail had sensed anything. If so, she hadn’t said so. Then again, her psychic link to John had been broken for a year. Larry wasn’t sure, but he suspected John had blocked Abigail from his mind to make the separation easier on the child.
Things weren’t easy for Abigail, and though Larry was supposed to be a father figure, he felt like a worse father than Homer Simpson, and not much better than that dipshit on the news who left his kid in the hot car while he went into a strip club to get shit-faced while watching titties bounce.
A girl Abigail’s age needed structure, but what sort of structure or normal life could a child vampire ever hope to have? It wasn’t like she could go to school or make friends.
A sudden idea swelled Larry’s mood.
Friends. School.
He thought of Katya, the cute, young au pair who worked for the Radley family across the street. He’d spoken with her briefly once a few months back when she accidentally locked herself out of the house and needed help getting back inside before the family’s 2-year-old girl started crying. Larry helped her inside, and was impressed by how well she handled the sobbing child once back behind the unlocked door. She seemed like a genuinely pleasant, honest person, and someone who loved kids.
And as luck would have it, the Radleys were moving to Connecticut soon.
Larry rose from his seat and was about to race out the door when he caught his reflection in the living room mirror. He looked like a slob.
Larry raced upstairs and found a decent button down white shirt — wrinkled, but acceptable. He wasn’t getting the iron. He threw on a pair of jeans to replace his sweatpants, ran a brush through his thick mop of hair, wiped his thick black-framed glasses clean, then raced outside and across the street. He rang the doorbell of the beautifully landscaped two-story house, while stealing a glance back at his rental. Though Larry’s house was large, and perfectly nice, it was nowhere near as well-kept as the Radleys’. You could tell they cared about their home, whereas Larry did just enough to keep the assholes in the Rosewood Homeowners Association from kicking him out of the gated community.
Katya appeared in the window beside the door, smiling as she recognized him.
“Hi,” she said in a barely-there Russian accent as she opened the door. Her long blonde hair and blue eyes reminded Larry of a Swedish model he once knew, and he made sure to mute his natural inclination to flirt. First, she was too young — in her early 20s, while Larry was 37, and lately feeling 47. Second, he wanted to hire her, not date her. Plus, she seemed like a good girl, not at all the sort to tolerate his shit.
“Hi, Katya, how’s it going?”
“Good, and you?”
“Good, good,” Larry said, “Listen, I’m wondering if you’ve got a job lined up after the Radleys move.”
“Why? Do you have a child?”
“Not exactly,” Larry said, suddenly realizing that Katya had never seen Abigail. Worse, he hadn’t thought of a way to explain Abigail’s relation to him. It wasn’t like he could tell the truth — that she was sold by her uncle to a pedophile monster who kept her in a closet until John came along and killed the fucker, saved the girl then turned her into a vampire after she’d been shot, accidentally by Larry, during a shootout with a squad of soldiers, all of them working for an alien. He imagined the door slamming in his face 10 words in.
Yet, he couldn’t call Abi his adopted daughter.
Can I?
Larry wasn’t sure, and in that moment of uncertainty that inflated the pause way too long, he was afraid Katya would grow suspicious.
“Well, it’s sort of complicated,” he shrugged. “I’m taking care of her, for a relative who can’t. But she’s a super sweet kid. She’s 11, and I just need someone who can maybe look after her when I work at night, maybe tutor her? Do you tutor?”
“Well, I’m not a tutor, no, but I could help her study if you have coursework or something. Wait a second,” she raised her eyebrows. “You said look after her at night? How late?”
Larry gave Katya his widest smile, “Yeah, about that … she’s got a rare medical condition where she sleeps during the day and is up all night.”
Katya stared at Larry as if she were standing inches from bullshit. He held his smile, frozen on his feet, waiting for the door to close on him. “I don’t need you to stay up all night, just a few hours, maybe, from like seven to eleven or so. Just to keep her company, and let me finish a few extra hours of work.”
“What kind of work do you do at that hour?”
“I’m a private eye, but I mostly handle one client, a super wealthy guy, who pays me well to run his security, do background checks on employees, stuff like that. Most of the work I’m able to do from home during the day, but some things I need to tend to at night. That requires me leaving the house, but I can’t leave an 11-year-old girl at home alone, ya know. Too many creepy people out there.”
Katya held his eyes, peering deeper as if trying to figure out exactly how full of shit Larry actually was. She seemed like a smart girl who would be able to notice the scent of his obvious lies. Just when he thought Katya was going to turn him away, she said, “What’s her condition?”
“Um, I forget what they call it. But between you and me, I think most of it’s in her head, a psychological thing. She’s been through a lot, and I don’t want to make her feel bad about it, so I try not to pry or bring it up. I just deal with her as she is.”
Katya smiled. “It’s later than I’m used to working. How many nights do you think you would need me?”
“You give me five nights, a few hours a night, or at least four, and I’ll match whatever the Radleys are paying.”
“Match? For less hours?” Katya said, her eyebrows raised.
“Yes,” Larry nodded. “I’m desperate to find someone soon, and I can tell you’re a good person — I can trust you. I can trust you, right? You’re not a serial killer, or worse, an actress from some MTV show?”
Katya laughed, a sweet chirp full of genuine mirth. Larry couldn’t help but love it, mostly because it sounded both pure and true, and given how many fake laughs he’d heard from girls, Katya’s sounded like a promise.
Try not to flirt. Try not to flirt.
“No,” Katya said with mock shock, “I could never be an actress.”
Larry laughed, “I dunno, you’ve got the looks.”
Dumb ass! Dumb ass! Stop it!
Larry quickly changed the subject before awkward silence stretched far enough to snap. “When could you start?”
“Tomorrow is my last day here, so I could start tomorrow night if you like, but first, I have to meet, um, what’s her name?”
“Abi, short for Abigail.”
“That’s a pretty name,” Katya said, again sounding like she meant it. “I’d like to meet Abi first.
I’d hate to say yes and have us not mesh. Girls at that age can be … ”
She trailed off as if trying to think of the least offensive word.
Larry added, “Bitchy?”
Katya laughed, “I was thinking sensitive.”
“Yeah,” Larry said. “That’s what I meant, too. She’s a great kid, really. So, would you like to swing by tonight some time and meet Abi?”
“I’d love that,” Katya nodded.
The Radleys’ small daughter suddenly appeared behind Katya, looking up at Larry while sucking on a purple pacifier.
“Hi,” Larry said, waving from behind with a giant grin.
The little girl’s eyes doubled their size, then she spun around and ran off into another room.
Katya laughed, “Gabi,” she called after the girl. Katya turned from the girl’s back to Larry and said, “I’m sorry. She’s shy.”
“No, it’s OK. I have that effect on most women, no matter their age. Hey, Gabi and Abi, what a coincidence.”
Katya laughed again, and Larry resisted the urge to pile the charm any more than he already had, but the only way he could manage that was to force himself from the Radleys’ porch and head back home.
“OK,” Larry said. “Swing by any time tonight after sundown.”
Katya’s nose wrinkled, maybe curious about his use of the word, “sundown,” but he didn’t stick around to pull his foot out of his mouth. Larry simply said goodbye, then headed back home.
* * * *
CHAPTER 4 — Abigail
Abigail couldn’t wake slowly because she smelled someone else in the house.
Her first instinct was to jump from her bed and run downstairs, hoping it was John. But she could immediately sense it wasn’t him. It wasn’t even a man. It was a girl, or woman, with a light scent of flowery shampoo or body wash.
Did Larry bring a date back to the house?
Abigail wondered if she should stay put. She’d hate to ruin his date. Then again, Larry should’ve told her if he was planning to bring someone home, given her notice so she could’ve made plans for a night of movies and games in her bedroom or something.
