Family Secrets

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Family Secrets Page 22

by Thomas F Monteleone


  “I don’t know, but we wouldn’t be in this mess if not for you. And another thing–”

  “Emma, child,” Polonius said, looking at her. “Is that b-blood on your shirt?”

  Emma looked down and gasped. Yes… dark, reddish brown stains on the lower right of her shirt, near her beltline.

  “Em!” Ryan cried. “Did something bite you?”

  She lifted her shirt and gasped again when she saw a bloody bandage. Gingerly, she lifted a corner of the bandage and looked beneath. A one-inch slice ran down her appendectomy scar. Thin little strips of tape held the edges together.

  “I’ve been cut! And bandaged up again!”

  “You mean somebody operated on you?” Ryan said, leaning forward for a look.

  She pushed him back. “Don’t look. I don’t want you hurling on me.”

  “Operated?” he repeated. “Really?”

  “Yes! Right where my appendix was removed!”

  Ryan shook his head. “That’s crazy!”

  “As I recall,” Dr. Polonius said, “you both had appendicitis at the s-same time, didn’t you? I remember hearing the story from Telly.”

  Emma nodded.

  Five years ago on a family camping trip they’d both come down with terrible belly pain. Mom and Dad thought it was some sort of food poisoning. Lucky for them a doctor – a surgeon – had been camping nearby. He made the diagnosis, rushed them to his clinic, and operated on both of them. He told them their appendices had ruptured and if they’d waited much longer, they would have developed peritonitis – whatever that was – and might have died.

  “And you say s-someone cut into the scar?”

  “Yes!” Emma said. “I can see that it’s very shallow – doesn’t go all the way through. Why would somebody do that?”

  “Most unusual. I c-can’t imagine any reason.”

  Ryan said, “You’re assuming whoever did this is sane. Would a nossie or a necro have any reason to do something like that?”

  Polonius shook his head. “Not being either, I couldn’t possibly say.”

  “More likely it was a pluriban,” Cal said.

  Polonius glanced at him. “Why do you s-say that?”

  “Well, they’re always cutting people up for parts.”

  “But Emma still has all her p-parts.”

  Cal threw up his hands. “Well, then, I don’t know.”

  Emma pulled her shirt down and leaned back. She’d been kidnapped and someone had cut into an old scar. It totally scared her and creeped her out. What else had they done to her while she was unconscious?

  And then she remembered something…

  “Did anything bad happen today?”

  Ryan and Cal looked at each other. “We had a bad run-in with the Uberalls. And then–”

  “No, I mean big bad – like a cataclysm.”

  “How do you mean?” Dr. Polonius said.

  How could she explain this? “After I woke up I started walking. I didn’t know where I was or where I was going but I knew I had to move. I hadn’t been walking long when I was knocked clear off my feet by this… feeling.”

  “‘Feeling’?” Polonius said.

  Ryan cleared his throat. “Emma gets ‘feelings’ about things that are going to happen.”

  “This wasn’t going to happen – I could almost feel it happening right then.”

  “That is called clairvoyance,” said Polonius.

  Emma continued to stare off as if experiencing it again. “It felt… far away… something awful. Hasn’t anything been on the news?”

  “We were too busy looking for you,” Ryan said. “But there’s a radio in the dash. Let’s see.”

  They didn’t have to wait for the news. It seemed all everyone was talking about was the explosive obliteration of Mount Evers in The H’malya mountain range at the northern end of the Yeti-Rakshasa Commonwealth. The damage was so extensive that no one had been able yet to assess it in any credible way.

  Dr. Polonius reached out, turned it off. He looked shaken. “It’s happening.”

  “What?” Ryan said.

  “The end.”

  “End of what?”

  “Everything – if the rest of The H’malyas go at once.”

  “He’s right,” Emma said. “More of the same ahead, all over Nocturnia.”

  “A ‘feeling?’” Ryan said.

  She nodded. “A very bad feeling.”

  Among the million questions buzzing through her head – especially about what Dr. Polonius was doing in Nocturnia – Telly kept popping up.

  “Does Telly know I was missing?”

  “Yeah,” Ryan said. “His last words to me were ‘find Emma.’”

  “Then we’ve got to let him know. He’ll be worried sick.”

  “I’m sure he is,” Cal said. “But he’s got other things to occupy his mind at the moment.”

  “Like what?” She looked at Cal, whose expression was unreadable.

  Ryan squeezed her hand and that scared her. He never squeezed her hand. “What, Ryan?”

  “Telly’s a lycan.”

  “What?!”

  Emma listened in mute shock as Ryan told her – and Cal confirmed – what had happened to Telly among the Uberalls.

  “But…but that can’t be!” she said when they were finished.

  “Exactly what we said,” Cal told her, “but seeing is believing.”

  What was happening to her life – to all their lives? Trapped in this nightmare world where someone had knocked her out and cut her, where her brother had become a werewolf, a world that was going to blow itself apart before too long.

  “Someone tell me this is all a bad dream and I’ll wake up soon!”

  But no one said anything.

  Because this was no dream.

  end of

  Book Two

  Coming soon, the last of the trilogy:

  The Silent Ones

  also by Thomas F. Monteleone

  Novels

  Submerged

  Serpentine

  The Eyes of the Virgin

  The Reckoning

  Night of Broken Souls

  The Resurrectionist

  The Blood of the Lamb

  Fantasma

  Dragonstar Destiny

  The Magnificent Gallery

  Crooked House

  Lyrica

  Terminal Road

  Night of the Dragonstar

  Night Train

  Day of the Dragonstar

  Ozymandias

  Night Things

  Guardian

  The Secret Sea

  The Time-Swept City

  The Time Connection

  Seeds of Change

  Nocturnia

  Definitely Not Kansas (with F. Paul Wilson)

  Family Secrets (with F. Paul Wilson)

  Short Story Collections

  Dark Arts

  Fearful Symmetries

  The Little Brown Book of Bizarre Stories

  Rough Beasts & Other Mutations

  Dark Stars and Other Illuminations

  Non-Fiction

  The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing a Novel

  The Mothers and Fathers Italian Association

  Anthologies (as editor)

  Borderlands 5

  Borderlands 4

  Borderlands 3

  Borderlands 2

  Borderlands 1

  Random Access Messages

  The Arts and Beyond

  also by F. Paul Wilson

  The Adversary Cycle

  The Keep

  Reborn

  The Tomb

  The Touch

  Reprisal

  Nightworld

  Repairman Jack

  The Tomb

  Legacies

  Conspiracies

  All the Rage

  Hosts

  The Haunted Air

  Gateways

  Crisscross

  Infernal

  Harbingers

 
Bloodline

  By the Sword

  Ground Zero

  Fatal Error

  The Dark at the End

  Nightworld

  Quick Fixes – Tales of Repairman Jack

  The Teen Trilogy

  Jack: Secret Histories

  Jack: Secret Circles

  Jack: Secret Vengeance

  The Early Years Trilogy

  Cold City

  Dark City

  Fear City

  The LaNague Federation Series

  An Enemy of the State

  Healer

  Wheels Within Wheels

  Dydeetown World

  The Tery

  Other Novels

  Black Wind

  Sibs

  The Select

  Virgin

  Implant

  Deep as the Marrow

  Nightkill (with Steven Spruill)

  Mirage (with Matthew J. Costello)

  DNA Wars (formerly Masque with Matthew J. Costello)

  Sims

  The Fifth Harmonic

  Midnight Mass

  The Proteus Cure (with Tracy L. Carbone)

  A Necessary End (with Sarah Pinborough)

  Definitely Not Kansas (with Tom Monteleone)

  Draculas (with Crouch, Kilborn, Strand)

  Panacea

  Short Fiction

  Soft & Others

  The Barrens & Others

  Aftershock & Others

  The Peabody-Ozymandias Traveling Circus & Oddity Emporium

  Quick Fixes – Tales of Repairman Jack

  Sex Slaves of the Dragon Tong

  The Christmas Thingy

  Editor

  Freak Show

  Diagnosis: Terminal

  The Hogben Chronicles (with Pierce Watters)

  Omnibus Editions

  The Complete LaNague

  Calling Dr. Death (3 medical thrillers)

  (back to contents)

 

 

 


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