Book One: PROTEA

Chapter Eight: Conspiracy

 

 

 

                The delicate sound of piano music, airy yet sharp like the chill of a spring breeze, exuded from David Abernathy’s stereo system as he stood in his basement in front of a large table covered with various laboratory equipment.  He carefully filled a series of glass bottles with a pale green crystalline powder he had just scraped from a tray in the past hour.  The powder had a strong smell to it, like copper with a hint of perfume.  Once he was done filling the bottles, he opened up a large safe in the corner of the room and placed them on the shelves inside.  With a daunted sigh, he turned back around to face the lab table.  He grabbed a handful of empty test tubes, some of which were stained with blood, and took them into the bathroom – a small, ancillary bathroom painted pale yellow-green with an ink painting of a maple tree on the wall and a small plastic tree in the corner.  He put the test tubes down on a hand towel on top of the toilet and set to rinsing them out in the sink, two by two.  The residues in the glass reacted with the water from the sink in an unusual way; the residue from the clear tubes turned an uncanny shade of teal that shimmered slightly, and the residue from the red-stained tubes turned bluish-purple.  David watched these colors run down the drain, frowning a bit when he noticed the glass was now streaked with them.

                Before he could do anything about it, he felt his phone vibrating inside of his pocket.  He set the now festively-colored tubes down next to the unwashed glass and answered the phone.  The caller was a young man by the name of Derek Langley.

“What do you want?  I told you what I just sold you is the last I’d have for a while,” David said gruffly, not bothering with any formalities.

“Ah, yeah, uh, I was just wanting to ask, ‘cause my friend I got it for, she’s asking me what’s it made out of, heh.  She studies chemistry, she’s curious, you know,” the young man stammered, taken aback by David’s abrupt manner.

“Listen, I’m kind of busy right now, I’m expecting company. I don’t really have the time to help you impress girls.  Besides, I don’t think it’s all that smart to explain that sort of thing over the phone.  Maybe we can meet up sometime and chat about it.  I’ll call you back later.”

“Okay, man, fine,” Derek said somewhat defensively, before hanging up.

                David pushed his phone back into the pocket of his black pants and opened the cabinet under the sink, pulling out a container of bleach.  He stopped up the sink, put all the test tubes inside, and poured bleach on top of them, letting them soak in it.  As soon as he put the container away, he heard the doorbell ringing from upstairs.  He ran up the stairs, trying to move quickly but not too loudly, and answered the door.  A woman in her early twenties, tall and willowy but with crooked and apathetic posture stood on David’s front steps.  She had wavy blonde hair down to the middle of her long neck, and she wore a loose blue dress and big, round sunglasses even though the sun was setting.  Most notably, however, she held a laptop computer with cables wrapped around it across her chest.

“Hey, come in,” David muttered.

The woman, whose name was Lucy, tucked the laptop under one arm and removed her sunglasses as she walked into the house, sticking them in the small purse that she wore over her shoulder.  Her eyelids hung heavily over her blue eyes.  “Can I just put this down anywhere?” She asked clearly, yet sluggishly.  David shook his head and pointed at a wide glass coffee table in the living room.  Lucy nodded and placed it on top.

“You did install your software on it, right?” David asked.

Lucy smirked.  “Yep.  Anything your Ukrainian friend does on here, e-mails, browsing, passwords, whatever - I’ll be able to see it.  She sounds like a Luddite, though, from what you were telling me.  I don’t even know if she’ll use it enough to be worth all this, but hey,” she said, nudging David playfully and looking him in the eyes.  “No way I could refuse a gig like this, not with what you offered me.”  She laughed softly and walked over to the small bar in David’s kitchen to fix a drink for herself – a simple vodka with club soda and lemon juice.

“Well, even if she doesn’t use it, Meredith will use it, that’s a guarantee.  In many ways, she’s a typical teenager, she’s into spilling her guts on social media,” David called over to her, sitting down on the sofa.

“And that’ll probably be turned up to eleven, with her cooped up in Bumfuck like that,” Lucy said as she made her way back to the living room and sat down next to him on the sofa with her drink, sipping it gracefully.

David paused.  “Right, exactly.”

The blonde sighed and smiled.  “So what is it you’re looking out for exactly, or do you just want me to keep tabs in general?  Is there anything in particular I should watch for, I mean.”

“Well, I’m worried that the two of them might conspire against the Salva Family.  Meredith turned out to be more than what we bargained for in more ways than we bargained for, and Alina has some pretty serious differences with Richard.  The two of them living under the same roof is potentially disastrous, and yet it’s currently the only choice we have.  Go figure.”

Lucy frowned, arching an eyebrow. “But I thought you said you trained yourself to do whatever it is she does.”

David closed his eyes and ran a hand through his thick, black hair.  “I have.  Years before he even brought that filthy idiot over here, even, and I’ve only become stronger with time.”

Lucy tilted her head.  “So, why doesn’t he just pawn his magical delinquent daughter off on you?”

David rested a cheek on his hand. “The discipline of Mediation didn’t exactly come naturally to me.  I’m too calculated for it.  I could keep her brain waves from interfering with mine, sure, but to assist in a metamorphosis, especially for that of a being of as high a vibration as Meredith’s, well, that takes a certain temperament that I just don’t have.  I’m not the kind of person who can just effortlessly glide between worlds, you see,” he explained.

Lucy drank deeply from her glass.  “Uh-huh…”

“Sorry, all this must sound like crazy talk to you.”

“Nah, I’m used to it.  I’ve even seen psychic stuff in action; I thought I’d be moved somehow but it just doesn’t mean anything to me beyond the fact that the world is just a little weirder than I originally thought. Probably just a side effect of growing up spoiled and jaded,” Lucy mused, running her bubblegum-pink painted nails across the palm of her free hand.

“So you know the option of ascending to a higher vibration is, or will be, available to you, and you don’t care?”

The blonde giggled and finished her drink. “Hmm, no, not really.  Doesn’t mean I’m not willing to help you and Richard in any way I can, though,” she said, ruffling David’s hair, much to his non-amusement.  “Speaking of which,” she mumbled, pulling her wallet out of her purse and extracting a wad of cash.  “Here’s what I made selling that stuff for you over at Penn.”

“Thanks,” David said, nodding and counting the money.  He handed her back a bit less than half of it, which she immediately put back into her wallet with a grin.  “How are your classes going?”

Lucy snorted.  “Fine, as always.  I can’t imagine you actually care about that, though. I mean, look at what you’ve got going on.”

“Just trying to be polite.”

“Don’t.  It looks silly on you.” She paused.  “Anyway, I should head out.”

“All right, then.  Take care.”

Lucy bit her lip.  “I will if you do.”

“Right.  Bye.”

“See ya.”  Lucy walked out the door, leaving the glass she drank from on the coffee table with the laptop.