Estranged

“Ken, get up here!” shouted one of the men that had gone upstairs to Avalyn’s apartment. “She’s not going down the fire escape, she’s going up!”

Ken rushed into the rundown apartment, and ran up 5 flights of dirty stairs. He tripped over garbage in the hallway. As he stumbled, he tried to get his balance without touching the stained walls. God only knows what made those stains, but if he had to guess, he’d say some sort of bodily fluids.

He found the open apartment door and walked in and over to the open window. He climbed out onto the fire escape and started the three-floor ascent to the roof. Once there, he met the other two men who were standing looking across the buildings around them for some sign of the girl. She was gone without even a hint of what direction she had gone. They only knew she couldn’t have gone south, on the side they came up where there was too much space between buildings to jump.

“We need to split up,” said Ken. “Mike, you go north. Jim, you go west. I’ll go east. Check in if you catch her or meet back here in an hour.”

They split up and started their search. This girl had been nothing but trouble for them for the last 8 years. Ever since Stevens had sent them to retrieve her from her home and they brought her in. She had nothing but luck thereafter. She was always just barely escaping them, and their boss was insistent that she had to be found. Preferably alive, but not required. Ken knew exactly what he planned to do once he could get her close enough. Capturing alive was not likely to happen, and he could shoot her from far away where she might not see him. She just hadn’t stayed in sight long enough to land a shot, and they were under strict orders not to bring any attention to themselves that could lead authorities back to Dr. Stevens. So they couldn’t get sloppy then bail. Stevens would find them; there was no hiding. Eventually he will find you. Avalyn Murray was a special case. She is the girl who gets away; the invisible girl; always slipping through their fingers, and Stevens didn’t know where to find her like he knew where everyone else was. There was something special about her. Ken wanted to find out what, but not enough to risk her slipping away from them again.

When she was little, it was easier to find her, but never easy to keep her. The first time they were sent to retrieve her, they at least had a starting point. No one knew that Drogan and Analyse, under the guise of Charles and Madelyn Murray, had a child. They’d been missing for almost a decade with no sign of them until they slipped up and Dr. Stevens was able to bring them in, but the child didn’t respond to the call. She must have been shielded or had a power stronger than even Dr Stevens. She didn’t even know she was a hybrid and not a human. She hadn’t even known the existence of anything other than human until that night they had captured her and brought her in, but she’d escaped before she could be told who and what she is.

***

They had come in the light of day. Shortly after Dr. Stevens left the voicemail for Avalyn to call him back, he immediately rung up Ken, Mike and Jim and gave them the address he was able to obtain from Analyse’s mind while he’d had her in stasis. It was to be a quick job. Go to the address, get the girl, bring her in. Use her parents to lure her in, use force if necessary.

They’d shown up at the residence an hour later. The front door was locked with heavy bolts, but the metal shutters outside the windows weren’t closed, and it was a matter of minutes before they had the window open. As silent as they’d been, a dog started barking and scratching the door of a room in the back of the house.

“Judd, quiet! Okay, I’ll take you out again, no need to bark so much,” came a young girl’s voice. They rounded the corner to the back hallway where the bedrooms were as a small girl with dark hair and amber eyes walked through a bedroom door half asleep as a golden retriever burst through the door to defend its person. It bit down on Jim’s forearm. Jim gave out a shout as he slammed the dog to the ground with a yelp, and the girl started screaming. Her eyes turned ice blue and the room started shaking like there was an earthquake. Ken slapped the girl unconscious and slung his arm around her waist, hoisting her over his shoulder, while Jim gave a big kick to the dog and the dog stilled and went silent.

“You didn’t have to kill the dog Jim,” said Mike. He’d always been the weaker of the three serving only out of fear and not out of loyalty or for money.

“Just get a move on you pathetic sap,” said Jim, “we don’t have time for you to be such a damn wuss. We drop off the girl, we get paid, and we go to the pub.”

At the van they blind folded and tied the girl up, Ken sitting in the back with a syringe in case she woke up. The other two hopped in the front seats, and Jim turned the key and took off.

On the bumpy ride in the back of the van, Ken kept a close watch on the girl. Only once did she stir, and he had to inject her with a tranquilizer to keep her unconscious for the remainder of the drive. Once back to the doctor’s office, they drove around back to the unmarked lab entrance. Jim parked the van, hopped out and opened the back of the van so Ken could hop out and drag Avalyn back over his shoulder, and Mike closed the doors behind him. They walked down the 12 steps to the back steel door and punched in a code on a pad next to the door. A temporary access code no doubt since the code was never the same for each job they had been sent on. The lock disengaged and they walked in.

***

Upon entrance, the lab looked like it could be a chemlab for anything, but the doctor had very specific experiments at work. Most involved genetic testing between human and Fae DNA. Doctor Stevens had been trying to make a hybrid in the lab for years and suddenly, out of pure luck and one phone call, he’d stumbled upon a living organic sample.

Avalyn Murray was everything he’d been hoping for, but he would need to tread carefully because of her father’s heritage. However, seeing that no one knew she existed, there was no reason to let that cat out of the bag. He’d had the men store her in a secure room without windows in the back of the lab until he was done attending to actual human patients. After all, a business front only works if people aren’t suspicious of you. And being there was an underground portal 20 stories below ground, he couldn’t exactly just pick up and move his business elsewhere under a new name if things went sideways.

He ran an airtight operation, with only beings from the other side or humans who’d been to the other side long enough to darken their humanity. Any of the humans who didn’t see eye to eye upon their return (if they survived), they just killed and sent a cleanup crew to dispose of any evidence of their existence. They’d glamour anyone who may have started asking questions. Humans were easy to glamour. They had weak wills, and as long as the story was simple and along the lines of something pleasant to answer their questions, the glamour would take effect and few inquiries would be made thereafter.

Dr. Stevens thought himself superior to other humans. He’d been the first human to visit the other side, endured the longest stay to date, survived the return, and became very powerful as a result. Most humans would use the word wizard to describe him and his abilities if they had only known. He considered himself superior even to many of the minor Dark Fae as they had weaker abilities. He liked to think of himself as second rank only to the King of the Dark Fae on the other side, and he was just biding his time before he’d let the rest of the world know it.

He laughed to think how he started out 30 years ago as an archaeogeneticist graduate student, one of the first in his field, on a dig in New York outside of the city. The team was a subset of the team working on the Old Town of Flushing Burial Ground dig in 1996. As the team had been digging, they were picking up some interesting feedback on their equipment, and Stevens along with a group of 24 others were approved to look into it.

It took more than a year of digging due to the New York winter slowing down progress, when they found the portal. After losing some equipment through the portal, Dr. Stevens had been the only team member brave enough, or desperate enough to stand out, to go through. He spent 6 months on the other side and returned in what equated to an hour on earth, drunk on power with greed beyond belief. A few minor fae he’d come into league with followed him through and they killed anyone else involved in the dig at this site, and the fae glamoured anyone else who knew of it. Memories were changed, and records were altered until no one remembered Dr Stevens was an archaeogeneticist, and any time anyone thought they might remember about the site would suddenly become distracted and forget what they’d been thinking about a moment before. That happened a lot with ungifted humans.

Now, all these years later, he had built an empire. Using glamour, a sprinkle of actual counseling, a few successful day traders he’d come to trust that he’d taken to the portal now helping build his fortune, he had everything he needed to continue his experiments and hone his abilities.

The girl was going to be the key to unlocking the mysteries of combining fae genetics with that of a human. If he could find a way to successfully combine and stabilize them, he may be able to inject himself to increase his own power tenfold.

***

Dr Stevens had been waiting eight years patiently waiting for his men to catch Avalyn Murray. Unfortunately, his most competent hired hands kept letting her slip through their fingers as well. The girl seemed to have natural abilities of which it seemed she wasn’t cognizant. There weren’t any spells or tricks to locate her as easily as it had been with her parents. It was like she was cloaked to his senses. She escaped humans and fae alike, though he couldn’t risk sending out any fae. The penalty for one dying would bring down the wrath of the Dark Fae King upon him and his whole operation would fall apart. Ken, Jim and Mike were a few of the only goons he hadn’t lost while trying to track down the hybrid. She seemed to be more powerful the older she got, and he needed to get his hands on her.

***

After an hour of searching, Jim and Mike met back at the apartment that Avalyn had been most recently squatting.

“Not a damn sign of her,” said Jim, more than irritated.

“Nothing on my end either,” added Mike, “where’s Ken?”

At the mention of his name, there was a chirp from their comms, “Guys, I’m about 5 miles eastbound, found a few traces of her, but no sign of what direction she went from here. Come out this way. We can ask around to see if anyone has seen someone of her description to get an idea what direction to head next.”

[Read on in Estranged: Avalyn Murray Chapter 3]