The Progeny (6 page)

“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. “When 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.”

I feel like people are staring.

It’s because you’re pretty.

But I have never been a “pretty girl.” And I have never been mistaken for beautiful. Strange, perhaps. Different, always. From my fractured attention span to my horrible grades despite being labeled “gifted” at a young age.

I prop my elbow against the window, trying to process, not having ruled out the raving lunatic theory.

The sky has clouded over, a thin layer of gauze blurring the stars. A few minutes later it starts to rain, tiny droplets lighting up the windshield like dull glitter.

“This doesn’t make sense. How can an assassin kill any of us if we have mind control?”

“It isn’t control. It’s suggestion. Except for the powerful and passive moment of your death, they are immune to active persuasion—endowed with ‘righteous armor’ against the wiles of your bloodline,” he says wryly.

“A veritable tinfoil hat.”

“More or less.”

I may sound glib, but my hands are cold. I help myself to his coffee. Take a long slug, nearly emptying it.

“This doesn’t explain why I did it. Wiped my memory.”

We slow through the tiny town of Rumford, and he’s quiet for a minute before he says, “I know why. I don’t agree with it and I can’t begin to understand your logic, but I know.”

“Then tell me!”

“Because you’re protecting something or someone—or some
ones
—you know. Because at some point you realized you were being hunted and thought you might end up dead. And the only way to keep that knowledge from passing, ultimately, to the Historian was to have it deleted from your memory altogether.”

Your life depends on it. Others’ lives depend on it.

Rolan’s crazy must be contagious.

“Who are you in all of this, anyway? One of them—us? Please don’t tell me you’re my uncle Rolan.”

“There are those of us committed to protecting the lives of Bathory’s direct descendants. Since the day four centuries ago we concealed the whereabouts of her illegitimate first child, taken away in secret before she married. We are an old order who watch and intervene only when we must.”

I almost take comfort, hearing that. But something’s bothering me.

“I
saw
you. Talking to Luka behind the Dropfly.”

“I was. I told him everything.”

“What?”

“He followed you to Maine. He obviously knows you’re living under an assumed name. So I told him I was your stepbrother, that I’d been looking for you, had seen the two of you together at lunch. That you went through some unknown trauma back at home you refused to talk about, erased part of your memory, and faked your own death.”

“Why would you tell him that?”

“I needed him to know killing you now would get him no information. I told him I was the only family member who knew you were alive, and that I was worried about your mental state. He acted upset, made up some story about how often you seemed forgetful since you started dating, and said he wanted to talk.”

“We weren’t dating.”

“I told him to let me talk to you first. That I’d bring you by his place tomorrow so we could stage an intervention or some such thing. But he was suspicious. And then I saw him following me on the way to your place and knew you were out of time.”

“Why didn’t he kill me in Europe? Because you were there?”

“A hunter will follow, even toy with a mark for years. Insinuate himself into her life if necessary, give her time to discover who she is, to find others like her—all to gain as much information as possible on her death.”

I lean back and cover my eyes. I feel sick. Fifty questions are careening through my skull, but one takes precedence over them all.

“Who am I trying to protect?”

“It doesn’t matter.
You’re
my priority.”

“It matters to me!”

He sighs. “Friends. Other Progeny you met in Europe, your adoptive parents . . .” I glance at him sharply, and he hesitates before saying, “It isn’t unheard of for a hunter to threaten a non-Progeny family member to gain what he wants.”

Family. The parents who took me in and raised me as their own. And now I don’t even know who or where they are.

“How long have you been following me?” I ask suddenly.

“Almost a year.”

“Then you know where they are.” I grab his phone. “Tell me where they are!”

“Audra.” He shakes his head, lays a hand on the phone. “You returned less than two months ago from Europe. I’ve never seen you go home.”

The air leaves my lungs.

What have I done?

“My last name. Ellison . . .” But even I know that by the time I search the slew of Ellisons in the United States, they could be dead. If they’re not already.

As though reading my train of thought, he glances at me. “If you were trying to protect them, maybe you have.”

And maybe I haven’t.

“Why didn’t you stop me?” I say angrily.

“It isn’t up to me to intervene except to save your life. The decision was yours. That, and you disappeared several months beforehand. We lost track of you until you showed up in an obscure headline, dead. Except the Audra I knew was too smart to die.”

“How did you find me?”

“By tracing Luka. He abruptly disappeared from Europe five weeks ago.”

My heart won’t stop pounding.

I tilt my head back, press my palms to my eyes, sifting through the remnant of my memory. There are pieces, like the shards of a cherished, broken thing: the garnet ring given me by my mother, an afternoon fishing with my father, my first, clumsily tied fly. Hugs, stories about Mickey Mouse. But their faces, like their first names, are gone. And you can’t remember what is no longer there.

“I can get you to a safe house,” Rolan says. “But unless you have something more to go on, there’s nothing we can do for them.”

I may not remember names or faces. But I am the same person I was. Dealing with the consequences of my own actions is one thing. Putting faceless, even forgotten others in danger is something else.

I grab the phone, begin to map a route. “I know where we need to go.”

7

I
nterstate 65 through Lebanon, Indiana, is an unremarkable, even homely, stretch of road surrounded by brown cornfields on impossibly flat earth. But I have never seen a more comforting sight than those six divided lanes.

It is 3:30 on Monday afternoon, and I am at the wheel. After two days of catching a couple hours’ sleep at a time in a Walmart or motel parking lot, eating whatever we can grab at the usual cluster of fast-food restaurants just off the exits, and otherwise driving nearly nonstop, I should be exhausted. And I am. But less than an hour away from Lafayette, Indiana, adrenaline has electrified my veins and brought me to wired life.

Rolan, not so much. He drowses against the window, having done the majority of the driving with only brief breaks from the wheel and none at all from my incessant questions.

“Can you tell a Progeny by looking at them?” I had asked him that first night, thinking I sounded insane to even my own ears.

“No, though when we do find out that an actress, model, or rock star is Progeny, it makes a lot of sense.”

“Rock stars . . . Do the ones who are Progeny know what they are?”

“Often not until it’s too late. Those that do may go into hiding to avoid dying in a plane or car crash, of a drug overdose, so-called suicide, a gunshot . . .”

“Can a hunter take a normal person’s memory?”

“No.”

“Can a Progeny
persuade
another Progeny?”

“No. But they can sense them, when they’re near enough.”

“How?”

“You’ll know it when it happens.”

After a while I said, “What are you called?”

He hesitated then. “You can call us Watchers.”

I was strangely disappointed at that, thinking they really needed some better branding in the name department. As though following my line of thought, he quietly recited, “ ‘I saw in the visions of my head . . . and behold, a Watcher, a Holy One, came down from heaven.’ The Book of Daniel.”

“Like an angel.”

“Perhaps.”

“Your accent . . .”

“Romanian.”

It was a while before I finally worked up the courage to say: “Tell me about my birth mother.”

“Her name was Amerie Szabo. Though she lived under the name Barbara Bocz.”

Amerie. I said her name to myself again and again. It seemed exotic and beautiful. And though I never knew her, I thought it fit. I tried to imagine what she looked like. Did she have my eyes, was her hair the same color as mine? The pout of my lower lip—was that hers, or my nameless father’s? Did she know who had adopted me, where I had been living all these years? Had she ever come looking for me?

“She was killed three years ago,” Rolan said. “Which is probably how the Historian first knew to search for you, if not how to find you. Your mother would not have allowed herself to learn that, knowing her memory was at risk of harvest.”