The Progeny (13 page)

Outside the Trieste airport, which seems downright tiny compared to the ant farms of Amsterdam and Rome, Luka catches me by the hand.

“Quickly,” he says, hailing a cab ahead of the line. I slide across the seat as Luka leans forward to say something to the driver. All I catch is “autobus” and what I assume to be something like “hurry.” He passes the man a fifty-dollar bill, and the car takes off with a screech.

Luka glances back. I follow his gaze to the broad terminal doors in time to see someone rush through a clot of passengers, knocking the luggage from several hands.

Luka talks to the driver, who nods abruptly several times, and eventually—after some lengthier explanation from Luka—gives in to a chuckle.

When Luka sits back and winds his fingers around mine, I say, “What was that all about?”

“I was watching you through the airport. Or rather, watching someone watch you.” He pinches the bridge of his nose, and I wonder if he slept on the last flight at all. “I might be wrong. I can’t tell.”

“Why was the driver laughing?”

“I told him we were running away together, and that I’d pay him double to help us get away from your husband.”

“You speak Italian,” I say belatedly, realizing that he’s back on his home continent—something he doesn’t look particularly pleased about at the moment.

“A little,” he says.

“More than I do.”

“You know what they say,” he says.

“No, what?”

“If you speak three languages, you’re trilingual. Two, you’re bilingual. One . . . you’re American.”

“Sad but true.”

We ride in silence, looking out at Trieste’s crowded streets filled with eateries, shops, banks, and offices with modern signs set in limestone buildings that look no less than hundreds of years old. We catch glimpses of the Adriatic. In another life, I’d want to walk, go down to the beach, take in the medieval charm of this place, along with some pizza.

For all I know, I’ve done that.

But more than that, I am aware of the gravity of him, of the air, heavy between us, filled with images of the flight before. The way he pulled back and touched my mouth where it was swollen yesterday, before kissing me again more slowly as my fingers tangled in his hair. This, from the man once charged with killing me. I am haunted, heady, at odds with the surreal fabric that has become my life.

We arrive at the bus station and Luka pays the driver—this time in euros.

“Where’d you get the euros?” I say, berating myself for not having thought of exchanging money.

“Left over from when we were here,” he says, getting out and reaching back for me.

And just like that I am revisited by the echo of a past I no longer own.

At the station he buys two tickets for the Autotrans bus just beginning to board, and we hurry down the stairs of the terminal. I climb on first and slide into one side of a bus only half full, next to the window. To my surprise, Luka sits beside me.

We say little as we travel east along the coast. When I start to droop against him, Luka draws me into his shoulder. The steady heart rate I enjoyed for the last leg of our trip spikes and never quite settles. Now that we’re here, the danger of my life
before
seems far more immediate and real.

“Luka . . .” I whisper.

“Hmm?”

“Do you know anything about my father?”

He tilts his head toward me. “Only that he was like you. Your mother was said to keep to her own kind.”

“Rolan basically called her a whore.”

“If that’s true, it’s news to me,” Luka says, and somehow I’m genuinely happy to hear that. Not that I’m into slut shaming, but all this time I was picturing some Sarah Connor
Terminator
fanatic sleeping with whoever would put her up or help her out.

“Take anything you hear about your mother with—how do you say it—”

“Grave offense?”

“A grain of salt,” he says wryly. “There was a lot said about her, but from what I’ve heard, she moved in a very tight circle.”

“Are any of them still alive?”

“I don’t know. I was only given information pertaining to you.” I practically hear him grimace as he says it. “Another Progeny could get on this bus right now and I wouldn’t even know it, let alone anything about them.”

“Did you know Rolan before this?”

He shakes his head. “I’ve never known another hunter, other than my grandfather, who’s dead. Makes it impossible to implicate anyone but ourselves if we’re caught. Even if one of us tried to talk, what would we say? We’d be written off as conspiracy theorists at best, delusional murderers at worst.” He hesitates. “Audra . . .”

“What?”

“You can’t tell anyone like you what I am. Was. If they guess, for even a minute, they may or may not kill me, but one thing is sure: They won’t trust you. And you need them right now.”

We look out at the blue waters of the sea practically below us. The view is gorgeous, and I think if I’m going to die without family, at least I’ll do it in a beautiful place.

Assuming, of course, that Luka, with his heady gaze, doesn’t do the job himself.

His story’s been perfect so far. And I’m tired of triple- and quadruple-thinking everything. He’s telling either a very intricate lie, or the simple truth.

The problem is I don’t know which. And right now I need him.

15

C
afé Abbazia is a hole in the wall, boasting no more than eight tables in its dim interior. I take a seat near the back and apologetically explain that I don’t speak Croatian when a man I assume to be the owner comes to greet me. Even with the door propped open to let in the fall air and Luka watching the café from somewhere across the street, I feel both cornered and exposed in this cavelike place.

That’s not all I feel. There’s a strange buzz here—not from the speaker over the bar, which is silent, or from the floor, which vibrates with the jackhammer at work in the street outside . . . but from something in the air.

“Vino?” the man says, which still isn’t English, but is at least something I understand.

“Coffee,” I say, though I really want a glass of wine—something Luka warned me against. “Alcohol jacks your persuasion,” he said before he exited the bus ahead of me. “Better to be nervous and amped in case you need it.”

No worries there. My heart is drumming so hard I actually felt dizzy the minute I stepped inside.

My gaze lingers on a couple seated near the front window, their hands twined atop the table. They’re all European chic—he, in skinny black pants and a fedora, she with her thin sweater dress, sunglasses perched on her head. There’s an older man sitting at a table against the wall, a paper folded in front of him. He taps away at a phone, glasses low across his nose. They’re the only guests other than myself.

I glance at my phone. Three minutes past. I try not to bounce my knee or drum my fingers on the table. I’d shoved my hat in my backpack after I sat down, so I settle for obsessively smoothing the hair over my scrubby patch until the owner comes back with an espresso-size cup of coffee. He sets it in front of me with a small glass of water. I drink the water right away, shot-style, my mouth drier than I thought possible.

The fact is, I’m not just nervous to meet this person I don’t remember. I’m desperate to lay eyes on someone else like me. To hear, firsthand, what it means to be what I am. To get some answers.

Just as I start to doctor up the coffee, I find myself glancing at the open door as though a horn has just sounded from that direction. But there was no horn. A couple of teenagers pass by the café door, one laughing and jabbing the other in the shoulder. A dog barks somewhere outside. And then I feel the café itself fade into my periphery and fall away. There is only the door and the street beyond.

An instant later a lanky form fills the frame, blocking out the afternoon light. He steps into the café and unwinds a scarf from his neck, the end of which was draped over his head as though he has come in not from the September sun but from the desert. He’s scraggly from the hair on his head to his beard, wearing work pants and a long-sleeved shirt, messenger bag slung across his chest. I am hyperaware of him, as though he exists more than the rest of the patrons combined.

He walks directly to my table as the owner greets him with a barely perceptible nod. Taking me by the arm, he says, “Come, hurry.” And I know by his voice this is Ivan. Behind him, the couple rise from their seats, move toward us in his wake. They are no longer holding hands.

I grab my backpack as Ivan leads me past a curtain to the rear of the restaurant, through the kitchen and a grungy back door. Despite my nerves, I note, if slightly hysterically, that I’ve done this trick before.

We move down the crooked alley behind the café. It’s narrow and who knows how old, open windows overhead gossip length apart, the occasional clothesline bridging the gap between them. I glance back to see that the woman has put on her sunglasses, that the pair follow wordlessly as we turn past a grotto chapel. We stop at a wooden door, a crest of some kind carved into the stone above it. Ivan pulls a key from his pocket, glances past us as he unlocks and then holds the door open just enough for the couple to usher me inside.

The minute he locks the door behind him, the dizziness is back, and this time I know it isn’t my overloaded adrenal glands but
them
. Ivan in particular. I feel his presence like a wave—not the kind of surge that knocks you over but the eddy that buoys and surrounds.

I put out my arm to steady myself, and the guy in the fedora catches me by the shoulder. We are standing in a side room lit through a lattice by what looks like construction work lights. Some kind of restoration has been halted on the other side, and I realize as I take in a stack of hymnals that this is an annex to the chapel.

The woman removes her glasses and studies me coolly as Ivan moves to peer through the lattice. Seeming satisfied that we are alone, he finally turns to me.

“Audra. It’s really you,” he says, as though he had not fully believed it until now. He is not in his forties, as I first thought, but younger, grizzled less by age than by weather or choice. He is not striking, though who knows what a haircut and shave might do for him. Nor is he tall, though the instant he stepped into the doorway of the café, I would have sworn he was over six feet. And while I find some of this weirdly disappointing, he has an energy that makes me dizzy, as though I had had that glass of wine.

The woman is silent, looks me up and down. She’s like one of those pouty models from a magazine. The kind of person you instantly don’t like on meeting, but stare at anyway just because you’re jealous.

“Returned from the dead,” Ivan whispers, eyeing me as though I were some kind of living apparition. His brows lift. “You changed your hair.”

“Yeah,” I say. It’s weird feeling like your own impostor. Before I can reach up to touch the scrubby patch behind my ear, he tugs me into a tight embrace.

“A daring move, Audra. From the bravest woman I know,” he murmurs in my ear.

“Thanks,” I say, stupidly.

He holds me away to look at me, and then lets go with a shake of his head. “I never knew what happened after you disappeared.”

“Well, I guess you know now,” I say with a levity I don’t really feel.

“I mean the first time.”

I hesitate. “The first time?”

“Six months ago. It was March. We were in Zagreb. One night, you simply vanished. Gone, the clumsy American who left her traces everywhere.” He lifts his palms. “You became a ghost. And then, just weeks ago, I received an alert that you had died in the U.S.” He’s looking right at me, and it’s awkward feeling like you’re being asked a question no one expects an answer to. Though it doesn’t seem he’s waiting for an apology, either.

I glance at the woman, who has crossed her arms.

“Ah, forgive me,” Ivan says. “This is Claudia, and her sibling, Piotrek.”

“It is an honor,” Piotrek says, in an accent different from Ivan’s as he sweeps in to buss me on both cheeks. Claudia, who has not moved, says something to him in another language and he ignores her. When he moves away, his eyes sparkle with the kind of look that isn’t shy about liking what he sees.

“I
felt
you when I walked into the café,” I say, and then look at Ivan. “And you, before I even saw you.”

“Naturally,” Claudia says. Her accent, I note, is different from her brother’s.

“My parents were both of the blood,” Ivan says. “Unlike Claudia and Piotrek, whose mothers were, but fathers were not. The legacy is passed through the women.” He lays his hand over his chest. “But I have become something of a hermit. The charisma weakens when the Utod are seen by so few, as it does with age. But you, you always could tell.” Is that admiration in his eyes?

“The Utod . . . ?”

“Hungarian,” he says. “It means Progeny.”

Piotrek studies me as though I am the most fascinating creature on earth. “You really
don’t
remember anything, do you?”

“No,” I say. “Which is why I was hoping you could give me some answers. Like why I did this.”

“You’re asking us?” Claudia snaps.

“The answer is simple,” Ivan says, ignoring her. “You were protecting something of great value.”

It’s nearly the same thing Rolan said.

“Like what?”

Ivan takes a seat on a column of stacked hymnals, folds his hands between his knees. “Something too important for you to say. Or for me to ask. That is the way it is for us. To speak is to put your life and that of any other Utod you know in the hands of another’s fate. It is a great show of faith that Claudia and Piotrek have come here with me today.”

Faith is the last thing Claudia looks like she has in me. “I notice I had no choice in the matter,” I say.

“Thanks to your so-called Watcher friend, the Scions already know of your resurrection,” he says. “Rest assured, the risk is solely ours. If you are killed, they will harvest your memory. They will know where you saw us. What we look like. Anything we told you. If
we
are killed, they will learn only that you are here, and that you remember nothing.”