Nanowrimo 2011 - Day 03

[MAGDA - CALL TO ADVENTURE/REFUSING THE CALL]

Magda and the Doctor sat. She took a few moments to adjust her dress, such as it was after having had a building fall on her. The doctor sat patiently. His stillness was uncanny. The man sat, looking at her, staring even and Magda suddenly felt transparent under his gaze. She wondered if this was what a lab-rat felt like.

“Where do I start?” she said, more as a filler than a real answer.

“At the begining” he said.

“Ok. I was born to a privilaged family. The power and reach of the old families in Italy was unparallelled in general society, but there were other groups with a power higher than any the Families. I remember my parents telling me great stories - feuding houses, blood feuds that lasted centuries, marriages and alliances. I was born in an age where those stories had faded: the houses had moved into the corporate world, and international finance and politics. My father, for example, had a position of influence in a brokerage in Rome when I was born.

As I heard the story they were met by a doctor only minutes after my birth. He was flanked by a pretty looking nurse - short, young and blond haired in contrast to the doctor’s balding head and bifocals, and the rest of us with dark hair. Oh, didnt I mention? I was born with a lovely tousled head of dark hair. When the doctor entered their private room he closed the door behind him - the first sign of trouble. Rosa, my mother, held me close and tried to comfort me as I started fussing - clearly picking up on the tension of the room.

“There was an anomoly in your daughter’s bio-scan…” the Doctor started.

“What kind of anomoly?” my father challenged, “We were assured all along the way that this pregnancy was on track and our daughter would be just fine.”

The doctor nodded, cleaned his glasses, then spoke, “Indeed. She is perfect within the limitations of a particular … ” he paused, “… particular gene pool. And it’s that gene pool that was flagged in our system.”

The nurse stepped forward. Her pace, her bearing, was anything but a downtrodden nurse from the wards. She was more direct to the point of confrontational. She swept past the doctor, and spoke to my father in a southern American accent, “Listen. We have about fifty eight minutes until representives of the Vatican arrive for your daughter. They are sending a priest with very particular skills, and a mandate that dates back centuries. Before driving here he will have armed himself and sworn a particular vow, as his order has done since the time of Charlemagne. He will not rest until he has offered last rites for your daughter in particular, and if you get in his way, both of you as well. Strike him down and two more members of his order will swear themselves to the cause. Once you are gone he will see to it that medical records are amended to show a still-birth.”

My father stepped toward the doctor, manacing, rage burning, “You and your staff betrayed us to the unholy Inquisition! I should kill you where you stand!”

The doctor flinched and stepped backward, “No! It’s hardcoded behaviour in the genetic scanner. Someone, somewhere wants your kind eliminated at birth, it seems.”

My father snarled, barely keeping himself in check.

The young woman, clearly not a nurse, stepped between the two men. With a deft swing of her long blond hair she bared the left side of her neck, tilting her head just-so to offer it to my father. She knew our people. Knew the old ways. My father tore his fiery gaze off the doctor and to the pristine skin of the woman’s bare throat. She waited, but not for long. His response was swift, even for one of our kind, his fangs sharp and true. Her life was in his grasp, but the blood offering sated his anger, and proved the fidelity of the staff. He satisfied himself with a sizable taste, but didnt drain the woman. As he stepped back, she pulled a gaze pad from her pocket and applied it to the wound.

“Now, we talk. You need a way out before the Inquisitor arrives. My employers are searching for candidates. They have long vision and deep pockets. They’re asking you, in your daughter’s stead, to trust them and accept their relocation package. In return they will employ you, grant you a new life in the United States as your daughter’s guardians, but when she comes of age you’ll release her into their employ.”

My father checked his watch, “We still have time, and the benefit of Family. I have no intention of leaving Italy, or of giving up my beloved daughter to you or your employers.”

He turned to my mother, “Can you stand?”

She nodded and held me close, a sleepy little bundle.

“Good.” he said, dialing his cellphone. A short conversation later we were moving, leaving the American “nurse” and the doctor behind.

---

The shabby doctor looked closely at Magda, then asked “You mentioned old families, being brought up in the old ways…”

She nodded, “Blood and bone, milk and marrow. My mother believed the old superstition that thats what you feed a newborn if you want her to grow to her full potential. She didnt believe in genetics or expression of genes. She believed it was on her to feed me, bring me up right …” Magda tailed off.

The doctor nodded, “Something significant in there, right?”

“Yeah, could say that. While it didnt change the gifts I’d been given, it did cause me to experience them from an early age. I was everything she had hoped I would be, and credited her motherly talents for it.”

“For what?” the doctor asked.

“I’m a reader.” Magda said.

“So you’re telling me…?”

“Yeah, adult vocabulary before I entered kindergarten, and I can picture that blond doctor as clearly in my mind today as I am sure my mother could having seen her in the first place…”

“…and passed on to you in the blood!” the doctor said, grinning.

“Yes. The blood, the marrow, one of them, both of them, who knows. All I know is that I inherited a gift through the bloodline of my parents.”

The doctor stood, “Can I get you anything - I have a variety of herbal teas.”

Magda shook her head, “No thanks.”

For a few moments she sat in silence while the doctor bustled about making himself a tea, and then entered something into a small computer terminal. As he sat down again he said, “Things seem to circle that blond doctor. Tell me about her.”

Magda shrugged, and stayed silent. It was clear she was processing something internally so the doctor waited. Finally she broke the silence that was hanging, “I blame her. No-one else believed me but its the only explanation.”

“What? Why blame?” he asked.

“Dont you see - we dont get sick like baseline humans, you demonstrated it for me tonight …” she held up her hand and flashed him the finger, “… hale and healthy, just like the leg that I regrew earlier this evening. That’s one hell of an immune system. So why on earth would my father get cancer? It makes no sense and the only thing I can imagine was that she did it.”

“Cancer?” the doctor said, looking surprised.

“Yeah. After the hospital, my parents fled immediately to their family estate in Palermo, Sicily. My mother’s sister - Rosa - was Matriarch of the household and we were welcomed in with open arms. The summers there were glorious. Aunt Rosa ran a strict house according to the older family traditions. I remember the thrill of the hunt, with my cousins, on the land there. Where Rome would have been about high fashion, about status and which of the noble houses was in ascendance, the estate in Palermo afforded freedom for us youngsters to do what we pleased in those early years.” Magda paused, smiling.

“I remember swimming in the ocean, with Noemi, a young girl from Spain. She confided in me that she’d run away from home and planned to continue travelling as long as she could before her parents caught up with her. She was my first.” Magda looked at the doctor with a glint in her eyes, “On Family land we were untouchable so long as we adhered to Mama Rosa’s rules. She and the local Families were connected with police and other authorities. So yes, my first. I was the one who took her back to meet the family, to meet my cousins. I was the one who went walking with her in the woods that night. When we were separated the hunt began in earnest, two of my cousins chasing her this way, and that. Noemi ran as best she could but those boys knew what they were doing, a scratch here, trip and fall there. By the time she ran into my waiting embrace she was largely incoherent with fear. Her eyes were … wild … she could barely suck air into her lungs they had run her ragged. On a cliff top overlooking the ocean I was afforded the honor of first blood.”

The doctor smiled, and asked, “How was that?”

“Intoxicating. My gift only amplified what my other senses were telling me. I could smell her fear, taste it, and as I drank the rich emotion of it filled me. No other kill has been quite like that one. I do sometime fantasize though…” she trailed off as she thought for a moment, “Seriously, if I had ever run into that American nurse again. I blame her for everything. I think the flavor of revenge would add a sweetness, even above that of raw unbridled terror.”

“You really hate her!”

“She caused the downfall of it all. My father took ill the winter after my first hunt. Cancer. No-one understood it. Mama Rosa reached out through the Family network and there wasnt a single story of it happening anywhere. And yet there he was, proud to the last, while it ate him from the inside out. It took him a year to die, a year we spent watching, waiting and hoping things would turn around. He wasted away. His appetite was gone. Finally we scattered his ashes near the shrine to Saint Rosalina.”

Magda looked at the doctor, pain now clouding her features, “Can I get some of that tea?”

She sat silent in her pain. Occasionally she wiped a tear from one eye or the other. When the doctor returned with her tea she composed herself. She sipped. She nursed the cup for minutes, silently rocking back and forth wrapped in a sudden grief.

“The summer after my Father passed away, a new priest arrived in the local Catholic church in Palermo. The old priest was a close friend of Mama Rosa and said that he prayed for us all, and thanked her for her regular contributions to the upkeep of the church building. The new priest was young, fresh from training at the Vatican, and he knew nothing of Rosa, the Families or local traditions. Oh, but he had his own traditions. The nurse had been right - these priests took their vow seriously - and he was the third in line to take up the vow to track my parents down. Had it really been that long? The years on Mama Rosa’s estate were a blur, and we were largely cut off from outside distractions. She ran the household with a timeless ease. I suppose too that our lifespan, especially when we hunt and feed, is so greatly extended. Still the priest had taken a vow. Third generation, handed down from one spiritual confessor to the next, a tale of failure and the promise of redemption and advancement in their order should he succeed. Indeed he had already succeeded when others had failed. He had pieced together a trail that was decades old, and followed us from Rome to Palermo.”

Magda finished the tea and continued to nurse the empty cup, “So, this priest, passionate and strong in his belief. He entertained Mama Rosa, sought to gain her confidence like his predecessor had done. She was wary but eventually it worked. Took him years. Finally he found what he’d sought: on the eve of Saint Rosalina’s holy day, he caught sight of my mother walking alone in the market. He murdered her, and left the remains in a side-street as though a common mugging had gone wrong. We knew it was him though. Who else would extract canine teeth as trophies?”

I fled. I’d been living under Mama Rosa’s roof so long it felt natural to take her name - De Rosa - as my own. I didnt feel safe in Italy, or Europe for that matter. I wanted to flee beyond the reach of the Vatican, so I travelled like Noemi had said she wanted to do. Young girl, I guess I looked to be late teens at that point in time, travelling along through North Africa. I had plenty of attention from the wrong people, and left my own trail of bodies in dark alleys. They deserved it of course. I finally settled in Marrakesh. Oh it was glorious - the crossroads of cultures - I absorbed it for as long as I could, until the government instigated Shariah law. I took a slow boat north into Portugal - still far too Catholic for my tastes - and then across to America. I guess part of me wished that the American Nurse was still alive there. I wanted the thrill of the hunt, but settled instead for the glitz and glamor of New York. I connected quickly into the Family network there, and followed it to Boston where the old money was located. It was home in a way. I settled into college - studying Anthropology and Sociology. Grad school followed.”

“Everything came apart when I was at the mall. I’d not hunted in years at that point. Something about the American culture made me feel … squeamish … about the old ways. My professors were so politically correct about things. I lived the old ways, grew up under Mama Rosa, and here professors were analysing and academically looking down their noses at the experiences I treasured. I thought all that was behind me, a different life, until I was at the mall one spring day. I noticed a pair of monks at each of the mall entrances with plain wooden bowls - collecting alms for a local charity - but inside the mall others were circulating. I counted eight. I was spotted coming out of a Victoria’s Secret. He didnt think I noticed him speaking into a small radio handset but that was the tip-off. Monks at the entrances in pairs. The others started a sweep that I could see, with a hunter’s viewpoint, would net me eventually. I was in a giant glass cage with nowhere to run. I backed into the first doorway, starting to feel a sense of panic I’d never known. How was it that predator at the pinnacle of the food chain, connected deeply into the local Family network with their people at every branch of local law enforcement, could suddenly find herself prey?”

Magda handed her empty, and now cold, cup back to the doctor.

“I found myself in the recruiting office of the newly formed Scout and Exploration Service. I knew their reputation - join to forget - they ask no questions of your former life. The officer in charge of the recruiting office happily explained that they had a shuttle waiting - straight through the back door of the office, up the stairs and on the roof - that was heading into orbit. It was pickup day for recruits. I glanced at the net that was closing outside the office - four of the monks were on the same level of the mall as the recruiting office now - and the choice seemed obvious really. I signed up and left the mall via a shuttle into orbit.”