Cursefell (6 page)

CURSEFELL

CHAPTER SEVEN

     By the time Anna dropped me off at home we were done apologizing to each other.  Fast friends once again, although I had promised to spill all the details about Galead and I in the morning as part of the deal.
     Anna drove away before I reached the front door.  I was glad she was gone because there was something wrong.  My mother's car sat in the driveway, but all the lights were out, even the porch light.  She never turned off that light no matter if it was day or night.  My hand was trembling as I approached.  It moved in slow creeping inches closer to the brass door handle.  Hovering a mere hairsbreadth above the mechanism, I snatched it back as the neighbor's dog started whimpering.  Old Duke was a German Shepherd.  He might bark, but he never whined.  My unease was taken to the next level.
     Turning around without entering, I meant to run across the street to the neighboring house.  They were friendly enough, especially Mr. and Mrs. Murphy, the elderly couple on the corner.  They would let me stay awhile or come back with me if I asked.  But it seemed so foolish.  If mom was home she might have just fallen asleep early.  Or she might have gone for a walk.  The porch light could have finally burnt itself out.
     I debated all this to myself as I stood beside her car.  The heat from the engine radiated through the car's hood.  It had recently been running.  I was sure she had to be home, and yet it all seemed so still inside.  How silly I am being, I scolded myself, just go see.  Resolving to go inside my home, I reasoned that I was probably overhyped by the kiss or the assertions Galead had made before we parted.  Besides, my leg was still faintly throbbing.  It might be that I had overdone it with all the walking and I didn't want it to seize up outside or anything for everyone to see.  I just wanted to get inside and soak it for a good long time in our oversized claw foot tub.  Maybe throw in some soothing bubbles.
     As soon as I walked in I knew it was a mistake.
     The smell of burnt oil and incense was overwhelming me.  It clogged my nose and even stuck to the back of my throat in an immediate assault on my senses.  And underlying it, the odor of salt and sea.  Pushing back the fear that threatened to send me running right back out, I edged along the wall in quest of the light switch.  Nearing the spot I knew I should find it, I stumbled over a hard wooden obstacle.  When my fingers probed it they came away pricked and scratched on what used to be a chair's smooth edge, now jagged and dangerous.  I bit back a curse as the air stirred only a few feet behind me.
     "Come out, come out wherever you are.  No?  Well then, I should say welcome home at least, shouldn't I, Nathera.  Or do you prefer Thera?  It's such a cute nickname."
     It was a young woman's mocking voice that spoke from the shadows.  The high pitched words floated softly through the dark despite their cool tone.
     "Who are you?  What do you want?"
     A halting, deep throated laugh echoed throughout our home.  A muffled voice was followed by the hollow tap formed from footfalls over wooden floors.  The muffled, desperately straining voice sounded like my mother.
     "You're not doing it right, dear.  That is two questions in one.  If I were a Djinn you would be denied your wishes and take my place inside a lamp.  Lucky for you I'm not," the woman taunted.  "I am your long lost cousin.  I've come to fetch you home."
     Sarcasm dripped from each word.  No attempt was made to conceal the menace carried in that voice.  Pacing footsteps followed her as she spoke.  By the sound of it, she was drawing closer.
     "I invited this woman who calls herself your mother to join us, but as for that, she has refused."
     "If you hurt her," I said, visions of my father suddenly flashing before my vision.  I had lost one, I would not lose the other.
     "Please spare us your threats." Us, I thought, and my heart dropped.  "Just agree to come with us without causing trouble so we can get this over with."
     "You are a liar.  I don't have a cousin.  Show yourself!"
     It was bold.  Possibly foolish.  But I couldn't fight what I could not see.  Doing all I could in the stillness, awaiting her response, my hand swept over a sharp shard of splinted wood.  Too short to reach the spot I gauged the light switch to be, it could serve as a weapon however.  It could hurt them enough to give me a chance to run for help.  If they didn't have my mother.  If she wasn't worse than hurt.  Biting down hard on my lip, I managed not to scream out the fear so freely flowing within me.
     "I think that would not be advisable, dear cousin.  Reveal yourself, Nathera.  Your true self if you please." I had no idea what she meant, so I kept kneeling and silent.  "No?  Perhaps your mother spoke the truth.  Very well."
  I heard someone moving through the darkness on my left.  The kitchen.  There were some big knives in there.  I tensed, ready to defend myself if they came at me.  The soft click of a switch being thrown thundered through the silence.  It was followed by the flickering illumination from a fluorescent bulb.
     Broken chairs and china shattered into countless scattered pieces lay strewn before my reborn sight.  Streaks of charred and bubbled paint ran in frozen rivers along the walls.  My mother stumbled into view from the still dark living room, her feet grinding the small ruined dishes into fine grained dust.  Hands bound before her, my mother shook her head when she saw me.
     The broad shouldered man that followed gripped her arm in an ungentle hand.  I imagined he was responsible for the swollen bruise under her eye, the angry scratch that ran down her arm's length.  Even as his partner, a slender man sporting a scraggly peppered beard stepped out from the kitchen, I only had eyes for the odd shaped blade being pressed against my mother's waist.
     "Mom."
     Her eyes flickered back to the living room where a woman stood silhouetted in the moonlight.  She stood with her feet spread wide, the natural curve of her hips stretched to sleekness.  Confident, haughty, in control her stance said.
     "Let her go.  I will come with you if you let my mom go."
     That low chuckle echoed once again as she moved slowly, swaying, to stand between my mother and I under the light.  My gasp escaped without a struggle.  She was strong and vibrant in all the ways only a woman can be.  Only she wasn't a woman.  She was a high school student named Isabel.
     "Oh close your mouth, Thera, before you swallow a bug." She eyed me with a cold curiosity.  "How cruelly raised you have been, cousin.  I didn't expect you to have manifested yet, but of course there was always that chance.  But to not know?  Your mother, your father even, did not tell you?"
     "Tell me what?"
     "The truth," Isabel clucked her tongue, turning to my mother.  "Really, Diana, is the truth so easily discarded?  You broke the rules you know.  Maybe that is why you are so weak."
     "There was no need to tell her.  She showed no signs that she was turning.  She would have if she was going to."
     "Diana, it has been so long since the last one appeared how is anyone to know?  Why would you take that chance?"
     The tendons in my legs were burning from being bunched while they were talking.  Their words were not making any sense, so I ignored them to plan an escape.  Isabel was distracted, her back turned.  I still held my wooden stake.  Filling my lungs with a long draw of sour air, I held it and sprang at Isabel.
     Her hand shot out faster than I could believe possible.  It caught me about the collar without her ever having turned around to face me.  The hand was silvery white, nearly translucent.  Nails grown wickedly pointed cut and punctured the fabric as she twisted the wool into a strangling trap.  My hands shot up, dropping the stake reflexively, prying at the hand with all my strength.
     Isabel craned her neck about to glare with eyes gone completely black.  The tears swelling before my sight as my eyes began to bulge made her eyes seem like ripples on the deep dark sea.
     "Do not try that again," her voice rumbled.  She released her hold, dropping me painfully to my knees and gasping for air.
     "You," I coughed out.  "tried to drown me.  You are the mermaid."
     One of Isabel's dark eyebrows rose up to form a point.  She did not expect me to know her.  Good.  If she could be surprised once then there was still a chance to surprise her again, and maybe get out of this.
     "If it had been me you would not have gotten away.  But yes, I am a mermaid.  I wonder how you came to that conclusion without your mother's help.  It doesn't matter I suppose," she said, lifting me up, running one sharp nail along my jaw with a bemused smirk on her pouty lips.  "You know who I am, but not who you are, do you?  That doesn't seem fair, does it Diana?"
     "Don't.  Don't do this," my mother whispered with a hoarse desperation.  "Please."
     "Thera, we are cousins, distant but bound by old blood.  You are special though.  For your blood runs from the Source.  Your blood carries the lineage of the first gorgon."
     "Gorgon?" I didn't understand, but somewhere deep within my psyche there was a faint tickle as if in recognition.
     "Run Thera!"
     My mother's voice rang out as she swung her hands at the brute holding the knife beside her.  The solid smack from her blow reverberated off his temple, ringing in my ears.  My mother flashed a crazy eyed gaze Isabel's way.  It was the look I had seen on my father's face once or twice before.
     "No!" Isabel shouted.  At first I thought she yelled it at my mother, but later I would come to realize it was meant for the hawkish, slender companion of the man my mother had felled with her fists.
     But it came too late.  The man with the peppered beard that looked like it was overdue to be washed and groomed, grabbed my mother.  Her defiant look slid from fury to pain as the knife he had taken sunk into the soft skin below her ribs.  Brackish dark fluid, brilliant in its richness, flowed free.  My mother screamed.  So did I.
     I'm not sure what I was screaming or at whom.  I just knew I wouldn't be left without a single parent.  I would not.  It broke something locked inside me, a gate holding back all the secrets a person walls away from their waking self.  All that tainting toxicity that forms a part of everyone, and for me, something else that had been coiled there my entire life.
     An emerald green haze filmed around the edges of my sight in an instant.  A cold flame burned about my eyes.  This time there was no tickle running up my back, just an electric pulse fused within the spine.  Isabel faced me with those nightmarish hands reaching for my throat.
     The man my mother had struck rose up with his curious bladed knife poised to throw at me.  As our gazes met his eyes widened in surprise.  The man's motion slowed so noticeably that I could hear every bone creak and every sinew stretch beneath his skin.  He struggled to move as an ashen sheen began to displace the bronzed skin, the dark clothes he wore faded into gray even as his movements froze in place.
     I flicked a look at the other intruder.  The one who had harmed my mother.  His slender arm tried to shield his sight, but it was too late.  Why did he do that?  A demented chuckle answered inside my head while he too ceased to move.  His body was swept up under my gaze, his flesh transformed to stone.
     The distraction from those two men cost me in my struggle with Isabel.  I reached up instinctively to tear away the hands that closed firmly in a circle around my neck.  Isabel was supernaturally strong, but as she squeezed, my neck began to harden.  I could feel the skin changing, hundreds or perhaps thousands of tiny nerves pinching and flaring out, but changing into what exactly I could not say.
     Even with the defenses my body was independently making, Isabel was still slowly choking me into unconsciousness.  Her eyes refused to look at me, tightly shut against my gaze.
     "It's sad to see how weak your line has become.  Well, we can't choose our parents can we?" she sounded genuinely disappointed as she continued, "I expected more from the descendent of Medusa."
     Medusa.  The very word she thought to use to taunt and break the last reserves giving me strength of spirit snapped the final chain restricting an inner power.  My head became a beacon demanding that foreign reserve of strength crawl into its cavernous housing.  My hair stood up and out as if charged by a static shot.  Blonde strands wrapped around each other, undulating in hypnotic rhythms until the strands of silken vipers flailed out from my head.  They roiled, swayed, and snapped their pointy formed ends wildly, seeking the only warm skinned target close enough to be a threat.  Isabel shouted in terror when the first strike fell.
     The fibrous serpents lashed the mermaid's hands, arms, and face.  Two thick bodied strands hacked and stabbed at the hands holding onto me.  She flinched with each biting sting from those tips.  But her hold barely loosened.  Hurry, I urged them, feeling my knees going all wobbly, my green tinged vision starting to fade.
     Even as I noted a long red mark etched beneath her left eye, a fat spherical drop of blood forming in its corners, I felt my time was up.  My legs numbed with weakness and she let me fall.  A dull thud rang inside my ears, leaving me to wonder what it was until I dimly recognized it as the sound of my own head bouncing off the hardwood floor.  I vaguely noticed my mother, laying scant feet away and unmoving, before Isabel knelt in front of me.  Without the tint filtering my sight, without the claws or eyes of a deep sea creature, she was once more just a normal, unthreatening girl.  It was a lie, of course, but I was drifting beyond rallying a care about that.
     Isabel didn't turn or move, but something blurred with movement behind her flaming head.  She fell instantly, crashing sideways to lie beside me.  Her eyes, so like mine, fluttered but for a moment before closing shut.