Hunted Dreams (3 page)

The battle was brief and intense. Reed and Shane both fought well and with a silent desperation, but they were outnumbered and their bare fists and arms met the sharp kiss of knife blades. Ten minutes after the fighting began, the amateur gang backed away, a couple, including the wild-eyed girl, giggling. Only one was pale and silent. They fled from the alleyway where they’d herded the boys.

Reed and his friend lay bleeding, bruised, both nursing one or more broken bones. He lay in silence for a while, until the reality of his friend’s moaning reached his ears.

“You okay?” Reed gasped, and Shane continued moaning. Reed crawled to his friend and grabbed his bloody arm.

“I’m okay,” his friend rasped with some difficulty. “You all right?”

Reed clutched his arm for a long time, shivering. Several seconds later, he jerked away, eyes glassy. He lurched to his feet. “I’ll get help,” he rasped, and fled the alleyway.

That was over half a lifetime ago. He lapsed into silence now, staring down at the light brown, stone floor.

“His fear, his pain fed you,” Maricruz said softly, and her hand, the color of well-creamed coffee, smoothed over his. “Once you connected with him, you felt yourself getting stronger, finally easing that hunger you always feel gnashing at your insides.”

Reed looked up sharply, his teeth clenched, his nostrils flared. He couldn’t find it in himself to show politeness right now.

“And let me guess. You healed from your wounds in a day, while it took your friend weeks, right?” Alberto asked. He patted the bandage around his own forearm.

“I heal fast.”

“You probably got into lots of fights after that,” Quina said quietly. She poured more coffee from a fancy china carafe and into his delicate cup.

Reed stared at her a moment. “I found opportunities to get each one of the boys alone. Later, I spent some time in the military.”

Quina was nodding and smiling, the picture of the gracious hostess. “A lot of us spend time fighting wars,” she said. “We seem uniquely suited to it.”

He squirmed, just a little, at her use of “we.” He didn’t feel like a “we.” He wasn’t sure he
wanted
to feel like a “we.”

“Why didn’t you hurt the fifth gang member, the girl?” Mari asked softly.

He looked at her. She was sitting near him on the enormous beige couch while her family members occupied large chairs tossed artfully throughout the rest of the room.

“It’s wrong,” he said.

She smiled at him, her cheeks aglow with muted lamplight. “You have a lot to learn,” she said.

The Broschi, Quina had told him twenty minutes ago, smiling tightly, had been around for hundreds of years at least. Based on various historical accounts, some of their scholars speculated thousands of years. However, it wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that one of their kind had begun organizing them into Families. Her name was Josephina Progress (appropriate last name, Quina commented, inviting him into her tiny joke with a professorial smile), and she was the wife of a White Southern plantation owner. Her husband had been far too busy selling tobacco and raping slave women to pay much attention to his spouse. She used his money to establish “schools” for gifted children, all White, a very thin cover for bringing together as many of their kind as possible.

(“It’s not all White anymore, of course,” Paul interrupted, tossing a fond grin at Berto and his sister. Reed did not smile.)

Since then, the well-schooled and -connected Broschi had flourished. Their numbers had expanded slightly over the past two centuries, but since the incidence of their genetic differences were so low, they remained a relatively small group. They existed as a kind of secret society, living together in Families formed through design rather than love and marriage. A network of Families existed, each contributing its talents and finances to the greater whole. Five existed in L.A. County alone.

“Who are you?” Reed asked.

“We are the Broschi,” Quina said quietly. “We’re a collection of people drawn together by genes that endow us with some interesting gifts.”

The Broschi were stronger than the average person. Heartier. They healed much faster. Their metabolisms ran at a much higher level, which meant, for starters, running warmer and eating more. Most of all, they seemed to have some kind of mental ability to feed off the feelings of others.

“What do you mean ‘feed’?” Reed asked. His face remained impassive, but his fingers drummed on his knee.

“Exactly what the dictionary says,” Quina drawled. “Consume. Eat. Derive sustenance from. It fuels our raging metabolism in a way regular food never can.”

Feed. Off other people’s feelings, their personhood. Reed stood up slowly, wiping his hands on his creased, faded jeans, on which Alberto’s blood still dried. “This”—he spread his arms to encompass the house, the topic, all of them—“is fucked up.” Nonetheless, he didn’t walk to the door. “I don’t eat people.”

Mari laughed. “We’re not cannibals, Reed. We feed off energy, not flesh. No one gets hurt, no one minds, no one even
knows
. Is it really different than eating solid food, which is just another form of energy? I know this all sounds new and strange, but we’re not evil. We’re just people trying to make it through life, just like everyone else.”

“Think of it like a psychic pizza,” Berto said, grinning. At a look from Quina, he slouched back into his chair.

“We’re just people,” Quina said, echoing Maricruz’s words. “Our genes have a few extra quirks, but that’s why we stay together and try to help one another. Better to know who you are than to wonder for the rest of your life, don’t you think? It feels pretty good to finally be with people who understand, who don’t judge, who understand we merely want to live our lives in peace.

“Please sit down, Reed. And tell us when you first knew you were different.”

More than an hour later, Alberto and Mari showed Reed around the majestic house in hopes of seducing him into staying. At the end of their earlier conversation, Quina had stood, stretched, and flatly announced that Reed would henceforth stay in one of the house’s unused bedrooms.

Reed had simply said, “No.”

Smiling indulgently, Quina told him of course, of course. Naturally, it was all his decision. This was merely an option. Meanwhile, why didn’t Mari and Berto show him around?

Only mildly worried she would have his truck towed while he did so, Reed finally agreed to a tour.

The house was huge. It included more than a dozen bedrooms, a gym, an outdoor pool, and several rooms for which Reed had no names. All the rooms were spacious and well lit, albeit with artificial lights. Oddly, every window featured the same view: the springs, whirls, and coils of ivy. They liked their privacy, this family. Or Family.

As Mari murmured her way through an expansive hallway, telling them all about the piece of messy, abstract art hanging from one of the walls, Reed finally asked, “How many of your kind are there?”

“Our kind,” Mari corrected. “No one knows precisely, but some of us who are scientists estimate we compose about one-half of one percent of the national population.”

“Is everyone a, um, member? I don’t get how you organize yourselves or know each other when you meet.”

Mari pointed to the left, at some room filled with a large-screen television, all manner of speakers, and a couple of leather sofas. “This is our TV room,” she said, unnecessarily. “We consider all the members of Broschi our family, but we subdivide into smaller Families, such as ours, the Daleths. As for identifying others, it’s difficult, as you can tell from what we all had to go through to figure you out.” Her lips smoothed into one of her sunny smiles.

“‘Broschi’? I remember Quina using that word,” Reed said, staring at the enormous TV and thinking it could have paid next month’s rent on his apartment.

Alberto poured past him and grabbed a packet of sour candies from a crystal bowl atop the room’s glass coffee table. After popping one in his mouth, he happily explained, “It means ‘eater of the life force.’ Pretty cool, right? Always makes me think of
Star Wars
.”

Reed did not respond. After a brief glance at her brother, Mari hastened to explain they didn’t really suck others’ life force; they simply fed off the incredible energy generated by pain, fear, fury, and other intense emotions.

“What about happiness, surprise, love?” Reed asked. “Those are strong feelings.”

Mari shrugged, and her silky blouse puffed and shimmered about her. “We don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with psychic frequencies or something. But the strong negative emotions seem to be the ones that satiate us.”

They entered the room opposite the TV room. Before anyone could start extolling the virtues of Persian rugs, Reed asked how they fed.

“Mostly on solid food, just like . . . everybody else,” Mari said. “We just need to supplement it psychically.”

“Like taking a kiddy vitamin,” Alberto remarked, grinning. He popped another candy into his mouth for emphasis.

“How often, and how do you do it?” Reed asked.

“These are questions you can discuss with Quina,” Mari said smoothly. “Not everyone has the same needs.”

“Is she the leader?”

“Boy howdy!” Alberto said. “She’s our Family’s big mama.”

“Did she adopt you?” Intimate question, but he figured they owed him some answers right now.

“Nope. Like Quina said, we got us an organizational system just like any big business. The big bosses decide who can be Family leaders, and then they assign them their Family members. Mari and me are real, true brother and sister, but we’re not related by blood to Quina or Paul. But don’t you forget what Quina said earlier, man. Our Families are a lot tighter than anything they got in the human world.”

Reed breathed out. The human world. Alberto had said it so easily, so naturally. Not even Maricruz, the more observant of the two, had noticed the slip. The goddamn human world.

They put on a good show for him, these Broschi, painting themselves as humans with a few extra needs. Not psychic vampires—gosh, no! But not human. Separate from the source of their sustenance.

If he were smart, he’d turn and run. He’d lock himself inside his truck and drive until he ran out of gas money.

Where did he have to go?

Moments later, at the end of a particularly narrow hallway, they reached a closed door. Feeling, or maybe imagining, a new heaviness enter the air, Reed stepped briskly forward and turned the knob. It was, of course, locked.

“It leads to the basement,” Mari said smoothly, and he turned to her.

He flattened his palm against the varnished wood. “What’s in the basement?”

“Basement stuff,” Alberto snapped. “Come on, Reed.” He waved his bandaged arm. “You haven’t even seen the library.”

The door dwindled in his vision as they sauntered down the hallway.

In the end, Quina convinced him to stay one night. After all, she reasoned, their house had plenty of spare bedrooms. It would please them all, especially Alberto, to have him stay one more day. He could put off all decisions tomorrow and, if he wanted, go back to—her eyes flicked in the direction of his ancient truck—his
home
.

“One night,” he growled, his bravado as thin as goddamn rice paper. She nodded graciously, demurely. Reed imagined it was one of the few times she would acquiesce to anything he said.

Reed grabbed his duffel bag from his truck. After urging him to help himself to food when he awakened, Alberto showed him to his new room. It wasn’t fancy, frilly, or even very big. He felt much better in a room as plain as him. However, he wasn’t too proud not to appreciate the large bathroom connected to the room. He gathered his duffel bag from his truck and retreated to his room without exchanging a single syllable with anyone. His mother would have popped him upside his head for his rudeness, but he had a lot to think about.

A few minutes later, a light knock startled him upright from the bed. “Reed,” Maricruz called in her quiet voice. “Please leave your dirty clothes outside the door, and we’ll do your laundry.”

“Thanks,” he muttered, but if she was anything like him, her excellent hearing would pick it up. His dirty clothes? That was the only kind he had right now, including the bloodied ones on his back. He stripped out of his clothes, grabbed a couple of boxers from his bag, and, after poking his head to make sure no one lingered outside, piled everything outside the door. Proud he might be, but there was no use letting an offer of clean laundry go to waste.

Three minutes later, he stood immobile under a cascade of steaming water. God, it felt good. He was quite tall, but the shower head perched a good six inches above his head. After a few minutes, he leaned his head against the shower wall and let fat droplets slip down his face.

What the hell was he going to do?

“Eater of the life force,” huh? It kind of said it all to him. Cannibals? Maybe not. He could even understand their point about just trying to make it in the world, this group that slurped up sorrow and pain like Cheerios for breakfast. Just as he hadn’t had any say in being a man, in being mixed race, in having a large and intimidating frame, neither had these . . . these
Broschi
done anything except be born with fairy tale eating preferences.

Yet, here he was, sleeping in the same house with beings who didn’t even consider themselves human, beings with superhuman healing and psychic feeding powers. Beings just like him.

What the hell was he doing?

With a grimace, he stopped dilly dallying and got down to the serious work of bathing. Southern Californian he was, he’d had the lesson of water conservation knocked into his skull since he was a toddler.

If nothing else, this whole mess was worth it just for that shower.

Unlike a fairy tale, no mice waited with a fluffy clean robe after his shower. After toweling off, Reed dropped, naked, atop the bedspread. Running warm the way he always had, he almost never used sheets or blankets.