Lure of the Night Read online

  One moment we were enjoying the evening, I was dancing in Hal’s arms, Dad and Megan were sat at the table, sipping their drinks. Then the room descended into chaotic hell. Within seconds fire was licking at the furnishings, a curtain went up in flames and the whole room was in danger of being totally engulfed. The guy behind the bar pulled out a fire extinguisher and started to spray the flames and then Dad pulled me off the dance floor and started towards the door with Megan. The room was in uproar and he had to shout to make himself heard.

  “We need to get out now, don’t stop for anything, just go!”

  He pushed us towards the door, we were choking and spluttering with smoke. My throat hurt, my eyes were streaming and I could hear the cries and screams of the people trying to escape from the club. We managed to get out onto the street and turned to look at the blaze. People were still streaming out, women crying, men shouting at them to get clear. In the distance, I could hear the sirens of the emergency services as they got nearer, the strident sounds at odds with the gentle sway of the jazz that drenched the city centre in soulful rhythm. Then I saw them disappearing around the corner, Father Ryan and Olivia Constable. Had they thrown the Molotov cocktail, the gas bomb that had torched the club? I doubted there would be any evidence, but it seemed a no-brainer to me.

  “We’d better get home fast,” Dad said. “There’s no way of knowing where the next attack will come from. Besides, we all stink of smoke and gas, let’s get going. I guess we’ve got some thinking to do, this is not a problem we’ve experienced before, they’ve obviously escalated their attacks.”

  The thought occurred to me that they had clearly experienced some kind of problem before, but what was that about attacks? And why?

  We walked back to my Dad and Megan’s place. The crowds were surging towards the fire, so we found the streets half empty. As we walked, I told Dad about seeing Ryan and Constable near the club.

  “Yeah, it wouldn’t surprise me, Ben Ryan, he’s a total fanatic, capable of anything. He seems to want to start a war.”

  I didn’t say anything else, I felt cold and pretty fed up. I mean, more than usual, I’d been enjoying the night out in the French Quarter, Dad and Megan were great and Hal had been good to be with, just a normal boy, at least it seemed he was. When we got back, I asked Dad why they would have attacked the club. Before he could answer, Megan spoke to me. “Obviously because it’s a place where the Amstrydae and Ardethans meet, I expect you’d guessed that.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, something like that.”

  “If he’d thrown the gas bomb later when the club was really packed with people it could have been a massacre, at least to the some of us, especially the Ardethans.”

  “What do you mean, especially the Ardethans? That’s you two, right?”

  “Yes, with the…”

  Dad gave her a meaningful look but she shook him off. “No, Guy, she’s got a right to know.”

  He shrugged. “Ok, if you think so.”

  “I do.” Megan said firmly.

  “Right, well, we are Ardethans, as you know. We are not as powerful as the Amstrydae, we could be killed by fire, or at least severely injured. Amstrydae would be better protected.”

  “But I’m not either of these, Ardethans or Amstrydae or whatever, am I?” I protested.

  Dad looked at me guiltily. “Er, that’s not strictly true, honey. You have my blood running in your veins, I’m afraid that makes you one of us. One of my ancestors was Amstrydae and I think that’s what you are. Yes, you are almost certainly Amstrydae.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “This is just crazy, Dad. I mean, how in hell would these people recognize if someone was one of these weird Amstrydae thingies or whatever?”

  “They can smell you, that’s the first way they can tell. Then there are other ways too, I’ll explain it all later.”

  They could smell me. I remembered that time in the woods when Ethan had found me in the pitch-black darkness. He’d said that he could smell me. But of course, Ethan Andros was a vampire too wasn’t he, an Amstrydae?”

  I went to the window and looked out, not so much to see if Father Loony and his assistant were running around outside. But because I needed time to think. I was still looking and thinking when there was the sound of the door buzzer. Megan went to the entry phone. “Yes?”

  “It’s Ulysses.”

  She buzzed him in, he walked up and Megan opened the apartment door. So he was the owner of the club, now burnt out. He was a strongly built man, well muscled and very good looking, like all of these people seemed to be. The disaster of the fire didn’t seem to have affected him one little bit. He had the usual black hair, beautifully styled and combed, dark, soulful eyes and pale, smooth skin. No, he wasn’t just very good looking, he was like an older, much bigger, more powerful version of Ethan, he was beautiful. He looked at me.

  “So you are Guy’s daughter, Claire?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, that’s me. Sorry about your club, that was terrible. Do the police know who might have done it?”

  “No, no, they don’t.”

  I told him about Father Ryan and his assistant. “Yes, we know about those two,” he said.

  “Why not tell the police about them?”

  He smiled. “It’s more complicated than that.”

  “Ok, look, if you want to talk to Dad and Megan, I’ll make myself scarce, but they have told me all about this vampire stuff.”

  “I see, that’s fine. Anyway, this concerns you too.”

  That took me by surprise. How the hell could it concern me?

  He sat down and we listened as he explained about the night’s events.

  “We’ve been trailing Ryan and the girl for some time, we didn’t expect him to do something like that. Otherwise we would have taken steps to prevent it.”

  “He should be removed from this earth,” said Megan passionately. “He’s vermin, he pollutes everything he comes into contact with.”

  I was shocked. Kill him? “Hey, hang on there, you can’t go around saying things like that about a Catholic priest.”

  Dad smiled. “Maybe not, but he’s not a real priest, honey.”

  “Of course he is, he even says mass in the local Catholic Church.” Everyone knew Father Ryan, no way was he a total impostor. They looked at me sympathetically.

  “He’s a Medusan, honey,” Dad said. “The cover of him being a priest is useful to them, it gives them a lot of credibility. Oh, he’s an ordained priest, of course, that part is true. But it’s just a cover.”

  Now I was really lost. “A Medusan?”

  “Yes. Look, you’ll have to know sooner or later. Our line can be traced back to the oldest of Greek history, what people call Greek myths these days. We are directly descended from Perseus, who is thought of as one of the Greek Gods.”

  “So does that make me a Goddess?” I asked him, I guess a bit tongue in cheek. I saw Ulysses stir when I asked that. Ok, you can laugh, buster, I guess with your place burnt out you were entitled to more than a few laughs.

  “Not funny, Claire, no, of course you are not a Goddess. But Perseus was real, the God bit was the myth. We were part of a powerful Greek tribe who dabbled in sorcery, herbalism, primitive formulas, I guess you’d call it witchcraft nowadays.”

  “So I’m a witch then?”

  “No. In Greek myth, Perseus cut off the head of the Goddess Medusa, well, that part is true, except that she wasn’t a Goddess. It started a battle that has gone on for thousands of years they called themselves the Medusans to honor Medusa, fighting us, the Amstrydae and the Ardethans. Early on, we learned the power of lengthening our lives through drinking blood and taking certain herbs and undergoing magic rituals. We developed other important powers afterwards, we had to in order to survive the Medusan onslaught. The Medusans initially wanted revenge, there were many more of them and for a long time it looked as if they would beat us, wipe us out completely. They spread the rumors of us being vampires, sucking the blood out of peo
ple, turning them into zombie-like slaves and other stories like that. It’s not true. They are truly evil, all we want is to live in peace. When the Medusans found out the secrets we had discovered, they made greater efforts to destroy us to steal our power.

  And so the battle goes on, each side is too powerful to be destroyed but not powerful enough to wipe out the other side.”

  “You’re serious about all this, aren’t you?”

  They all nodded. “Yes, Claire, everything you are being told is true,” Megan said softly.

  If it wasn’t for the firebomb it would all have sounded like total bullshit to me. In many ways it still did. I guess I’d thought that for once these people didn’t have some alternative agenda, that Dad just wanted me here because I was his daughter. That Megan was just being friendly, even Ulysses, although I had only just met him. But as usual, Claire Winter was the fall guy for one of their crazy schemes. I felt my anger rising, this was some kind of New Orleans voodoo crap, or something like that.

  “Well, look, I hear what you say, but the answer is no, I don’t want to be one of these Ardethans or Amstrydae or Medusans, I just want to go home. Tomorrow, Dad, I want you to get me a ticket so I can get back.”

  He inclined his head. “If that’s what you want, honey, then that’s what we’ll do. You can go home tomorrow.”

  “No, she can’t,” Ulysses said.

  “Excuse me?” I asked him. “And it’s your business since when?”

  “Since I found out what the Medusans are really after. It’s you.”

  Dad went pale. “Tell me about this, what did you find out?”

  “She’s The Carrier, Guy.”

  The room went quiet. They all looked at me as if I had ten pounds of radioactive isotopes hidden in my underwear.

  “Are you absolutely certain?” Dad asked him quietly. He nodded emphatically.

  “Ok, what’s all this Carrier stuff? Someone tell me, you’re worrying me now!”

  “I’ll tell you everything, Claire, is that ok, Guy?” Ulysses said.

  Dad nodded. “Go ahead, she has to know.”

  “When our people found out the old truths like immortality, or at least, a very, very long life, as well as some of the other powers like the ability to see in the pitch dark, the Medusans discovered that we were becoming too strong for them to defeat. For some reason, they are unable to do many of the things we can, it’s in their genetic make-up. Then they found out that very ,very rarely, perhaps only once in every thousand years, a female Ardethan or Amstrydae would be born with the ability to mate with a Medusan to produce Medusan offspring that would be able possess the kinds of powers we have, to combine them with their own existing powers. These offspring would be the first of a new breed of Medusans with a unique property. For the first time, they would have the ability to destroy us and become the most powerful creatures on earth, with the means to enslave the whole of the human race. That female is known as The Carrier. They believe it is you, Claire. For some reason your powers are late in developing and they have only recently discovered it, but now they want you and will do anything to get you.”

  I sat there silently, my mind reeling.

  “So I can’t just go home, is that what you’re saying?” Dad came and sat next to me.

  “If you do, honey, they’ll take you. You will become nothing more than a breeding machine for their new line of Medusans. Then when they’ve finished with you, well, you can imagine the rest.”

  “Dad, you’ll have to talk to Mom, she’ll go crazy, she’ll never believe any of this.”

  “Of course, honey. She knows a lot of the history of my family, it won’t be total gibberish to her.”

  “So she knows about the vampire thing?”

  He nodded.

  “Does she know about the connection with the Andros family?”

  He nodded again. So that explained a lot. I guess I could not blame Mom for trying to shield me from this weirdness. But maybe if she’d come clean about it before, I could have made my own decisions about the way I lived my life. I was truly fed up, Claire Winter, everybody’s pawn.

  They talked to me about strange people and strange lands while I sat there, feeling even more isolated and alone that even before and not really absorbing any of it. I mean, it was my life, everyone always seemed to be inflicting their own views on me, so that I was never just left alone. Maybe I should tell these people I was gay, that way they might think again. Maybe not. While they were preoccupied with making plans, I wandered back to the window and looked out onto the teeming streets of New Orleans. I felt a nasty pain knife through my stomach, I got up to walk around and relieve it. When I looked out of the window, Father Ryan was there with Olivia Constable. They no longer looked like a pious priest and a prim academic. The air of respectability had fallen from them, there was now an aura of evil that seemed to surround them. Or was it my imagination, Christ, they were all getting to me.

  “They’re out there, you know,” I said to Dad and the others.

  They all nodded. “We know,” Megan said. “Don’t worry, we can feel them, it’s a very uncomfortable feeling, almost like feeling sick.”

  “I felt it too,” I told them.

  Megan smiled. “That’s normal, Claire. Your senses are developing, it’s the Amstrydae strain starting to predominate, a legacy from my ancestors, well, your ancestors too.”

  I wished they could have kept their legacy to themselves, right there and then I could have done without it. They talked on late into the night. Their main preoccupation was finding somewhere safe for me to hide. It all sounded ok in theory, until I thought their schemes through.

  “So, you are telling me that I would have to hide away from these people for the rest of my life?”

  Ulysses looked up at me. “I’m sorry, Claire, but yes, you’d have to hide until you were past childbearing age at least, another thirty, maybe forty years.”

  I was thinking about Ethan, would that mean I would never see him again? I realized that Dad was talking to me.

  “We think that Canada would be a good place, there are a great number of remote forests where we could use our natural powers to keep you safe. It is a beautiful country, Claire, the scenery is magnificent and we could live by the side of a lake, we have a large timber house there with all of the modern luxuries, satellite television, computers and the internet through a satellite system. I would be there with you, Megan too. We could even have the odd trip into the nearby town, provided we were careful. It could be a wonderful life. The neighbors are great, you’d get on well with them, they are all Native Canadians, lovely people.”

  “Yes, think about it,” Megan said enthusiastically. “You and I would be like sisters, you’d never feel lonely. Shelves full of books, why, we’d always have something new and interesting to look at.”

  I got up and looked out of the window again. The feeling in my stomach had changed, I thought that maybe the watchers might have left. They were still there, though, looking very agitated, even panic stricken. Father Ryan was right underneath a street lamp and I could see his strange eyes reflected in its light, they were wide and panicky. Olivia ran to the corner, looked along the street and then ran back to speak to the priest. Then she ran all the way to the opposite end of the street and peered around the corner, than came back to the priest. What on earth had spooked them? Yes, of course, I saw it now. Then I made my decision.

  “Look, I’m not going to Canada. If you think I’m going to live my life hiding away like a fugitive, you’re wrong.”

  Dad was horrified. “Claire, what are you planning to do?”

  “I’m going to fight them, Dad and with your help and the rest of your people, we should be able to come up with a plan to beat them.”

  “You can’t just make a decision like that on your own, Claire, what you suggest could lead to disaster for all of us.”

  “I’m not going to take that decision entirely on my own, I’m going to get advice first.”
r />   “Advice? From whom?”

  Then the door buzzer sounded. “From Ethan. That will be him now at the door, the watchers saw him coming or maybe they sensed him, but they disappeared in a panic. He’ll know what to do.”

  They were still open mouthed when Megan opened the apartment door and Ethan stood there. My Ethan. We smiled at each other, then I flew into his arms.

  After we had disentangled ourselves from each other, he sat down and started to explain.

  “After the earthquake we had a lot to do, digging out our people and helping lots of the islanders who were hurt during the disaster. Despite what they said, there were a large number of survivors, they were trapped under the rock falls. We only got word two days ago about Claire, our people had been keeping a permanent watch on the Medusans for a sign that they might have found The Carrier. When I heard that they had found her and that it was Claire, I came straight back. We need to decide on a course of action to stop the enemy from getting to her.”

  “I was just suggesting to Claire that we could live in Canada, somewhere remote where we could use our powers to stay hidden from them,” Dad said.

  “What do you think?” Ethan asked me. “It sounds pretty extreme, but it could be the safest course of action.”